Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

316
Revolutionary Apocalypse: IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM Luciano Pellicani PRAEGER

Transcript of Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Page 1: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

RevolutionaryApocalypse:

IDEOLOGICAL ROOTSOF TERRORISM

Luciano Pellicani

PRAEGER

Page 2: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Page 3: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 4: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

RevolutionaryApocalypse

IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM

Luciano Pellicani

Page 5: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pellicani, Luciano, 1939–Revolutionary apocalypse : ideological roots of terrorism / Luciano Pellicani.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0–275–98145–2 (alk. paper)1. Revolutions. 2. Terrorism. 3. Revolutionaries. I. Title.

HM876.P445 2003303.6�4—dc21 2003045761

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright � 2003 by ETAS, R.C.S. Libri S.p.A., Milan, Italy

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may bereproduced, by any process or technique, without theexpress written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003045761ISBN: 0–275–98145–2

First published in 2003

Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.www.praeger.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with thePermanent Paper Standard issued by the NationalInformation Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Page 6: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The human spirit completely lost its sense of balance with the FrenchRevolution and the simultaneous collapse of religious and civil laws.It had nothing to hold onto, no limits. In this period there came intobeing revolutionaries of a new species, never seen before. They drovetheir daring to utmost folly, did not hesitate before anything new,suffered no scruples, showed no hesitation before any design. Norshould it be thought that these new beings were the creation of oneephemeral summer, destined to disappear immediately. Theygenerated a species that perpetuated itself and spread in all civilisedregions of the world. Wherever, they retained the same expression,the same passions, the same nature. We find that species in the workswhen we are born: it is still before our eyes.

Tocqueville

Socialism concerns not only the working class issue or the issue ofthe so-called fourth state but, above all, that of atheism, namely theproblem of how to realise contemporary atheism, the problem of theTower of Babel, that is built without God, not to reach from earth toheaven but to lower heaven to earth.

Dostoevsky

Page 7: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 8: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction xi

Chapter 1 Intellectuals as a Class 1

Chapter 2 The Apocalypse Fanatics 11

Chapter 3 The Jacobin Experiment 29

Chapter 4 God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 59

Chapter 5 Waiting the Reign 77

Chapter 6 The Jesuits of Revolution 99

Chapter 7 The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 115

Chapter 8 The Revolutionary Gnosis 149

Chapter 9 Utopia in Power 171

Chapter 10 The Proletarian Church 195

Chapter 11 Building the New World 221

Chapter 12 The Cultural War between West and East 241

Chapter 13 The Annihilators of the World 261

A Conclusion? 285

Index 289

Page 9: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 10: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Preface

This book is concerned with tragic events that were dominated by one of themost extraordinary anthropological “types” that has ever existed in the historyof humanity: the professional revolutionary, generated by the cultural catas-trophe provoked by the uncontrollable advance of modernity. The profes-sional revolutionary is an individual who embraces revolution as a Beruf, anindividual who craves the absolute. His disenchantment with the world makesof him “an orphan of God,” dominated by a nostalgia for the totally other.Incapable of accepting reality, he aspires to build a completely new world inthe light of a soteriological doctrine—dialectical gnosis—that he proclaims tobe the “solved enigma of History.” At last everything will comply with desire,and God’s scepter will be in the hands of humanity. The professional revo-lutionary’s goal is the creation of an evangelical community, based on equalityand planetary brotherhood. To do this, he is prepared to wage a war of de-struction against those who have surrendered to mammon and allowed thedomination of the law of universal trade that all-profanes and all-degrades.Hence, the destructive calling of gnostic revolution: not a single stone of thecorrupt and corrupting world shall remain standing; hence, also, the inevitabledestructive and self-destroying outcome of the revolutionary project to purifythe existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation.

Page 11: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 12: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Introduction

The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substitutedtranscendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless andstateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical/culturalphenomenon of the secular age.

Such chiliasm was dominated by one idea/passion: that permanent revo-lution, conceived as the overturning of the overturned world, could realizethe absolutes of philosophy, by means of permanent revolution. AnatolyLunacharsky describes the profound inspiration of the revolutionary under-taking thus: “the world will be purified, re-created” so that all the “cursedquestions” are solved for once and for all and the structure of being made tocomply with desire. Which is like saying that the elimination of the conflictbetween the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality, promised by thereligions of redemption in the next world, can, indeed must, be achieved onearth, through a revolutionary call to arms to destroy the evil powers thatconspire against human happiness. The project can be qualified as “gnostic”because it is animated by the belief that there exists a speculative knowledge—dialectical science—that is capable of indicating the method for eradicatingalienation and changing the ontological nature of reality. It presents itself asthe last avatar of the savior-saved myth, in which the desire for self-redemption of the ancient gnosis combines with expectation of a rupture withthe past, which is so radical that it is capable of putting an end to the pre-history of humanity and restoring the great universal harmony destroyed bythe desire for profit.

Revolutionary gnosticism achieved its most spectacular successes in Russiaand in China; thanks to its formidable power of mobilization and existential

Page 13: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

xii Introduction

involvement, it was a major spiritual force of the modern age. In concrete terms,following the traumas generated in traditional societies by the violent impactof the capitalist mode of production, groups of alienated intellectuals assumeda major historical role and appointed themselves bearers of a catastrophic-palingenetic conception of revolution. They proclaimed for all to hear thatthe event—the annihilation of the old world and the Promethean constructionof the new world—was nigh. The logical corrolary of this new, shatteringconception of politics as a soteriological practice was the birth of a singular,anthropological “type”: the professional revolutionary, the “permanent neg-ative” of society, a concentration of moral energy, aesthetically dedicated tothe destruction of the civilization that generated him.

Now, if the policy of alienated intellectuals in the last five centuries, let ussay from Thomas Muntzer on (it is no coincidence that Engels and ErnstBloch considered him to be the first martyr of the communist revolution) waseffectively a gnostic policy and the gnostic policy, the policy of alienated in-tellectuals, before analyzing the internal structure and development of revo-lution as such, it may be useful to take a closer look at the nature and the roleof the specialists of symbolic production.

Page 14: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 1

Intellectuals as a Class

1. The tendency to consider the specialists of symbolic production a “con-templative class,”1 having no libido dominandi, whose only desire was to ac-cumulate and socialize knowledge, has eclipsed the political role ofintellectuals in the class wars that accompanied the dramatic process of for-mation and development of the modern age. Karl Mannheim, probably themost influential supporter of this approach, writes: “Although they are toodifferentiated to be considered one class, there is nonetheless a sociologicallink between the various groups of intellectuals; to a large extent, educationis precisely what unites them. The fact that they enjoy the same educationtends to eliminate differences of birth, civil status, profession and wealth andunite these groups.”2 This makes them “an anchorless group, relatively freeof the classes”;3 that is to say, a freischwebende Intelligenz consisting essentiallyof “outsiders who have abandoned their parental stratum,”4 and can for thisvery reason freely decide to affiliate themselves to any one of the classes fight-ing for power and fulfill what they believe to be their “natural” mission,namely act as “advocates whose mission is to safeguard the spiritual interestsof humanity at large.”5

This prescriptive rather than descriptive idea of the intelligentsia was moreor less explicitly accepted by most social scientists and philosophers, whorefused to consider the group to which they belonged as a class with interestsdistinct from those of other classes. The problem of course is that in thisparticular case, subject and object of analysis coincided and the interpretationwas inevitably subjective. This would also explain the particularly edifyingimage the intelligentsia painted (of themselves). Theirs was a pure and dis-interested elite, at the “service of humanity,”6 whose sole goal was the pursuit

Page 15: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

2 Revolutionary Apocalypse

of truth and good. Their refusal to regard themselves as a class also surrep-titiously spread the idea that they alone had escaped being conditioned bysociety. They took great pride in being a sociological exception and belongingto a “separate” society resembling no other. Only they had “liberated” them-selves from the prejudices and accepted standards of the time with their criticaluse of the faculty of reason.

Not surprisingly, Mannheim’s ideas sparked considerable controversy.Friedrich Hayek considers entirely “gratuitous”7 the claim that intellectualswere not influenced by class interests in their political decisions. Robert Mer-ton highlights the paralogistic nature of the concept of freischwebende Intelli-genz. Mannheim—he observes—tried to solve the “intellectual anarchy”underlying his theory of the existential and social conditioning of thought, byendowing intellectuals with the same mysterious faculty that Hegel had at-tributed to the “general class” and Marx to the “proletariate fur sich”; a facultythat enabled them to be disinterested, objective observers of society and itsproblems. This clearly unsustainable theory is mindful—Merton ironicallyremarks—“of the Baron of Munchhausen and his attempt to pull himself outof a marsh by his whiskers.”8 Joseph Schumpeter expresses a similar view.Mannheim believed “everyone was a victim of ideological illusions, with theexception of the modern radical intellectual, who was without doubt firmlyseated on the rock of truth, an impartial judge of all things human. Now, itis more than obvious that the intellectual is a bundle of prejudices, frequentlystated with the vehemence deriving from sincere conviction. That aside, wecannot follow Mannheim in his escape through the emergency exit, becausewe firmly believe that ideological prejudice is ubiquitous and consider theconviction of certain groups to be free of such prejudice a particularly frightfulaspect of their own system of illusions.”9

Werner Stark is even more adamant and accuses Mannheim of ideologicalself-illusion; of confusing the ideal for the real. “The intelligentsia is not afree class but, like every other class, has a particular social position, vision ofthe world and area of interest.”10

In effect, for those with a more realistic conception of social classes, theidea of the specialists of symbolic production being a group without classinterests is unacceptable. According to historical materialism, the specific roleplayed by a social group in the sphere of production and reproduction ofmaterial life, and its relationship with the means of production, is the fun-damental criterion for identifying classes within a given society: the groupthat possesses the means of production is the ruling class—the entrepreneurialbourgeoisie in capitalist society—the group that does not is the ruled class.

In fact, Marx’s “bourgeois ideologues” belonged to neither, although ad-mittedly Marx was particularly ambiguous in this regard. They did not possessthe tools of production and therefore were not part of the entrepreneurialbourgeoisie, yet they were not without possessions, since their highly qualifiedknowledge placed them above the direct producers; above all, their remark-

Page 16: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Intellectuals as a Class 3

able capacity to manipulate symbols meant they were “naturally” destined toexercise leadership in workers’ organizations and battles and protest move-ments. This knowledge and this capacity constituted an “occult capital.”Stark’s radical theory is that “alongside all the other battles on the contem-porary arena, there was also a definite class war between the intellectualsseeking power and the captains of industry who were determined not to loseit. To claim that the intellectuals remained to one side without being influ-enced, detached onlookers predestined to acting as umpires in the arena ofpolitical manoeuvring, is to live in Utopia, not in England, France or theUnited States.”11

The most devastating attack against the notion of intellectuals as a nonclasscomes from Alvin Gouldner. In an essay with the eloquent title The Future ofIntellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner suggests that, by graduallyextending the sphere of those enjoying knowledge, the Industrial Revolutionhad allowed the formation of a huge “cultural bourgeoisie that quietly tookover the advantages of a cultural capital produced historically and collec-tively.”12 This cultural bourgeoisie—composed of whoever had access to theparticular form of capital constituted by knowledge—was the new class, whoseeconomic basis was precisely that “cultural capital” that it monopolized andspent as a strategic resource to maximize power and privilege. According toGouldner, this process was achieved by means of two fundamental strategies:the welfare state and the socialist state. The historical-political significance ofthe two strategies was not the emancipation of workers from the dominationof capital—as the active ideologues of the new class liked to claim—but thetransformation of the cultural bourgeoisie into the ruling class. Gyorgy Kon-rad and Ivan Szelenyi suggest the same hypotheses with respect to the so-called “popular democracies” in their monograph describing the “march ofintellectuals toward power” where they describe the strategy implemented bythe intelligentsia—first and foremost the elimination of market laws—with aview to transforming their monopoly of knowledge into a monopoly ofpower.13

2. In light of the above, it is hard not to conclude that the intellectuals area class characterized by specific social functions, namely the processing andtransmission of knowledge; the spiritual guidance of the masses, and so on;and by specific interests, despite their claim that they have always been theone and only group representing the general interest. Gramsci rightly queriedthe truth of this clearly ideological claim.14 No one can deny that some in-tellectuals have dedicated part of their existence to defending interests thattranscended those of their own class, but to claim that that was the onlyactivity of the “specialists of symbolic production” is to ignore reality. Thelofty demiurgic project of remodeling society according to the dictates ofscience was simply an attempt to “rationalize” a definite class interest: the

Page 17: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

4 Revolutionary Apocalypse

interests of an alienated intelligentsia aspiring to take over political leadershipand become the ruling class.

The origins of the modern intellectual class supports this theory. In Alfredvon Martin’s sociological analysis of renaissance civilization we learn that,between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the economic and culturalchanges produced in European society by the expansion of capitalism led tothe emergence of two new classes: men of letters and merchants. Both feltthey were superior to the “common folk” whom they despised and had nodesire to frequent; both were very much opposed to the classes who held thepower at the time: the aristocracy and high clergy. Although the two newclasses shared the same aversions, they were hardly allies, because they hadcompletely different values and capital. For intellectuals, knowledge and vir-tus—spiritual education—were the supreme value; for the merchants, wealth,because they considered that personally accumulated riches were the onlycriterion for judging people and things. This profound difference explainswhy the two “chosen” classes tended to despise each other and, worse still,why the intelligentsia “who believed they were endowed with a spiritual mis-sion because they represented the elite of their class, insisted on the otherclass appointing it to act as its spiritual representative.”15 Of course this couldnever be, for the merchants’ only value was to maximize profit and accumulatewealth. The outcome was inevitable. “A sensation of inner resentment againstthe middle class at large and traders and merchants especially among thebourgeois intelligentsia, composed of individuals who were proud of theirindividuality. People whose only capital was mental and whose aspiration wasto live on that capital could only exist within a bourgeoisie, yet they feltconfined to a position of inferiority and resented the attitude of a class thathad accumulated wealth and, in so doing, had become powerful, in both eco-nomic and political terms.”16

Von Martin’s analysis is particularly useful in terms of understanding why,especially in the last two centuries, intellectuals have tended to support anti-capitalist movements.17 In their view, a capitalist society is structurally inca-pable of achieving the supreme values they claim to incarnate. In effect, incapitalist societies, material values prevail “over all other values, with the con-sequence that the economy leaves its mark on every field of society and cul-ture.”18 The sensation of profound alienation and impotence experienced byintellectuals19 derives therefore from the incompatibility between the role ofspiritual leadership they aspire to fulfill and the specific nature of the socialorder that revolves around values and forces that are completely foreign tothem. In this material world, pervaded by material values, intellectuals feellike aliens, who are unable to leave a mark on society. Their natural vocationis to guide consciences, indicate goals, transform the public ethos. The factthat modern society is dominated by economic issues, is impervious to theirmessages, and refuses to recognize their role of spiritual leadership offendsthem deeply.20

Page 18: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Intellectuals as a Class 5

In fact intellectuals probably tend to underestimate their influence on so-ciety. In the short term, it may be superficial and even insignificant, but inthe long run, this is certainly not the case: “sooner or later, ideas, not estab-lished interests are the danger, for better and for worse.”21 People pursue theirmaterial and spiritual interests on the basis of what they believe to be reality;that is to say, on the basis of the images of the world that they have absorbedduring the process of socialization and that have become common sense. Asintellectuals are the specialists who process those images, it is in their mentallaboratories that “the point of view on the basis of which society will act inthe not too distant future” is built.22 Or, in the words of Ortega y Gasset,“Beliefs in the squares of tomorrow depend on what the intellectual startsthinking today.”23 Of course this is providing there are suitable channels ofcommunication that permit the transmission and widespread diffusion of mes-sages.

In conclusion, intellectuals have a profound impact on society’s reality, but“indirectly, and in the long term, with their ideas: by modifying our way ofassessing and interpreting the world, by building our visions of the world.”24

The problem is that the power in the hands of the specialists of spiritualproduction—the power of ideas—is not a direct power: “Between the intel-lectual and his potential public there are technical, economic and social struc-tures, that are possessed and manoeuvred by others.”25 Moreover, if ideas areto acquire validity, they must cease being ideas and become beliefs, dogmas,intellectual and moral standards: in other words, deeply rooted ways of feelingand thinking.26 This is a process that takes time: an idea doesn’t become anaccepted standard overnight. The psychological consequences of this timelapse are particularly severe in the case of intellectuals: no matter how muchprestige they enjoy, the fact that new ideas take so long to become commonusage leaves them with the sensation of living in a desert of indifference andeven hostility. Words are their tools of action, yet words barely seem to touchthe surface of reality, leaving no mark. This naturally generates a sense offrustration. Taken to the extreme, it transforms the intellectual into a “re-sentful person” or, worse, a neurotic.27

3. It is often argued that intellectuals cannot possibly constitute a classbecause they offer their services impartially to all parties and social classes.This argument—upheld with particular vehemence by Robert Michels28—isby no means conclusive. No one has ever denied that workers constitute aclass with interests distinct from those of other classes, yet in no country havethey ever been identified with one party. Depending on historical circum-stances, they have always fluctuated between the extreme left and the extremeright. To say that intellectuals constitute a class does not mean they are alwaysunited nor less that their political behavior is constantly oriented in one di-rection. It simply means to use a structural variable—the class situation—toexplain the tendency of intellectuals to oppose the capitalist-bourgeois order

Page 19: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

6 Revolutionary Apocalypse

and advocate the advent of a new type of social organization in which thevalues of culture—and the people incarnating those values—will at last prevail.

The argument that intellectuals do not constitute a class per se was probablyalso fuelled by Marx’s image of class and of class wars, whose impact was sostrong that it eclipsed important historical facts. Marx conceived classes asclosed, impervious entities, with a compact and united stand on all funda-mental issues of political life, the principle being that “it is not the conscienceof men that determines their being; on the contrary, it is their social beingthat determines their conscience.”29 According to Marx, the class war betweenthe bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a dominant theme of capitalist society,was the one theme that absorbed all other conflicts of interest. Undeniablythe conflict between capital and labor is a dominant theme of the modern age:indeed, it is innate to a system, centered on a pluralistic/market democracy,which generates almost physiologically what Raymond Aron has called a stateof “constant agitation,”30 that is fuelled by those who have no economic re-source other than their labor force. But to argue that the conflict between thehaves and the have-nots is the only conflict of interest in capitalist societiesis unrealistic. Moreover, Marx’s theory is clearly ideological—that is to say,an “objective mystification,” to use an expression he coined himself—in thatit permits certain forms of protest of plutocratic bureaucracy to be presentedas a fight of, and for, the proletariat, whereas the real actors, and those in-volved in a direct conflict with capitalism, are usually the more marginal ele-ments of the modern intellectual class.

Max Nomad has done some excellent work on this point.31 He makesexplicit reference to the Polish revolutionary Jan Waclaw Machajski,32 whocontinued Bakunin’s33 devastating and prophetical critique of Marxism, sug-gesting that the hypertrophic development of the intellectual class was one ofthe most important social and political events of modern society. It was burst-ing over with frustrated, alienated semi-intellectuals, who were radically op-posed to capitalism and presented themselves on the political arena as thedisinterested advocates of the working classes. The socialist movement cameinto being as a result of the combination of two factors: the birth of an in-dustrial proletariat, gradually, and with great sacrifice, gaining self awareness,and the presence of increasing numbers of declasses intellectuals who hadplaced themselves in the front line in the fight against capitalism, in an effortto avoid proletarization. In addition to its role as the workers’ protest orga-nization, the socialist movement was used as a tool by the marginal elementsof European intelligentsia to “colonize” the industrial proletariat and gainsocial and political power.34

At the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave le Bon also suggested thatthe increasing frustration of growing numbers of intellectuals, due to the lossof their monopoly of specialized knowledge following the extension of highereducation, was a source of permanent tension: “Since the chosen are few [weread in the famous Psychology of Crowds] discontent is per force immense.

Page 20: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Intellectuals as a Class 7

Those who are discontented are ready for any revolution, whoever the leadersand whatever the objectives. With the acquisition of knowledge he can’t use,man will always become a rebel.”35

In effect, industrial capitalism seems to have an innate capacity to generatea subclass of intellectuals within the “contemplative class,” who can but beprofoundly dissatisfied with the society in which they live, since that societyis incapable of guaranteeing them a modus vivendi that meets their high ex-pectations. The imbalance between status and legitimate expectations gen-erates the phenomenon of relative deprivation, which inevitably leads to thesecession of the declassed intelligentsia. Excluded from what they consider tobe their “natural” place, they become a group of outsiders, strongly opposedto the existing order and its basic values. A chain series of psychological pro-cesses eventually leads to what Giovanni Sartori describes as the “political-revolutionary exit of the intellectual from the original platform” and theconsequent formation of a radical intelligentsia, “typically intolerant of theirtime and in revolt against their own world, a compact group committed totaking the reins of history and forcefully leading it towards solutions of societyof reason.”36

The revolutionary secession of the intelligentsia was certainly not an ex-clusively Russian phenomenon, although in Russia it took on specific con-notations. Indeed, for the reasons indicated above, it accompanied theIndustrial Revolution like a shadow, contributing significantly to creating that“atmosphere of almost universal hostility” vis-a-vis the capitalist-bourgeoissociety, so expertly analyzed by Schumpeter, who believed it to be the mainsource of the revolutionary nature of the class war between the haves and thehave-nots.37

In conclusion, everything seems to indicate that, while reformism was thespontaneous reaction of the working class to the trauma generated by theuncontrolled accumulation of capital, revolutionarism was a solution proposedby alienated intellectuals. In no way can it be considered a proletarian solution,the only possible response to the real interests of the proletariat, as revolu-tionaries like to claim against all evidence.

NOTES

1. The definition is in Considerations on the Spiritual Power on Social Philosophy (Lon-don: Routledge, 1911), p. 270.

2. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 138.

3. Ibid., p. 137.4. K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge, 1967),

p. 143.5. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 140.

Page 21: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

8 Revolutionary Apocalypse

6. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: AnIntroduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1970).

7. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Macmillan,1967), p. 182.

8. R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged ed. (New York: FreePress, 1968), p. 561.

9. J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 12th ed. (London: Allen & Unwin,1986), p. 37.

10. W. Stark, Sociologia della conoscenza (Milan: Comunita, 1963), p. 389.11. Ibid., p. 392.12. A. W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 19.13. G. Konrad and I. Szelenyi, La marche au pouvoir des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil,

1979).14. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Law-

rence & Wishart, 1971).15. A. von Martin, Sociologia del Renacimiento (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ-

omica, 1946), p. 67.16. Ibid., p. 68.17. It is odd that though trained in the Karl Mannheim school, von Martin never

examined the role of the declassed clergy, who forged the spiritual arms of the mil-lenarian protest movements and took over political leadership.

18. W. Sombart, II socialismo tedesco (Padua: Il Corallo, 1981), p. 13.19. On this point, see C. Wilson, The Outsider (London: Gollancz, 1967).20. Cf. G. P. Prandstraller, L’intellettuale-tecnico (Milan: Comunita, 1969), pp. 26–27.21. J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London:

Macmillan, 1936), p. 384.22. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 182.23. J. Ortega y Gasset, Il tema del nostro tempo (Milan: SugarCo, 1985), p. 85.24. G. Sartori, “Per una definizione della scienza politica,” in G. Sartori (a cura di),

Antologia di scienza politica (Bologna: II Mulino, 1970), p. 21.25. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills

(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 296.26. On the distinction between ideas-inventions and beliefs-institutions of funda-

mental importance, see Ortega y Gasset’s essay, “Idee e credenze,” in Aurora dellaragione storica (Milan: SugarCo, 1983).

27. Sartre was the most typical example of an intellectual who, although enjoyingprestige and international repute, lived in a state of permanent impotence and frustra-tion: “For a long time,” he confessed, “I used my pen as a sword: now I know we areimpotent” (Les mots [Paris: Gallimard, 1964], p. 211). This explains his admiration forTogliatti, whom he considered the prototype of the intellectual/politician, who, likePlato, the philosopher/governor, was capable of having a direct impact on reality andguiding the masses toward the goals indicated by philosophy. It also explains, at least inpart, the blinding fascination that the communist project to remodel the present on thebasis of Marxism exercised on the author of Nausee (see L. Pellicani, “II marxismo im-maginario di Sartre,” in AA. VV, Lo storicismo come tradizione [Messina: Perna, 1994]).

28. R. Michels, “Intellectuals,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8 (New York:Macmillan, 1932), p. 119.

Page 22: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Intellectuals as a Class 9

29. K. Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Marx andEngels on Economy, Politics, and Society, ed. by John E. Elliot (Santa Monica: Goodyear,1981), p. 4.

30. R. Aron, La lutte des classes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 227.31. M. Nomad, Aspects of Revolt (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961) and Apostles

of Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1961). For a critical examination of Nomad’sthesis, see P. Mattick, Ribelli e rinnegati (Turin: Musolini, 1976), p. 45 et seq.

32. Machajski’s works are contained in an anthology entitled Le socialisme des intel-lectuelles (Paris: Seuil, 1979) with a long introduction by Alexandre Skirda.

33. Bakunin considered the declasses intellectuals infesting the European socialistmovements as “doctrinaire revolutionaries who had taken upon themselves the missionof destroying existing power and order to create their own dictatorships on its ruins”(Statism and Anarchy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]) and indicatedthat Marxism was the philosophy best suited to giving legitimacy to that mission andpreventing the workers from perceiving its real class connotations.

34. Georges Sorel had a similar theory: “The real vocation of intellectuals is toexploit politics; they want to convince the workers that it is in their interest to takethem to power and accept the hierarchy of skills that places workers under the directionof politicians” (Materiaux d’une theorie du proletariat, vol. 1 [Paris: Riviere, 1929], p. 98).

35. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Unwin, 1896).36. G. Sartori, “Intellettuali e intelligentzia,” in Studi Politici, nos. 1–2 (1953), p. 30.37. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th ed. (London: Allen &

Unwin, 1976), pp. 145–155.

Page 23: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 24: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 2

The Apocalypse Fanatics

1. The history of revolutionary gnosticism and of the proletarianized intelli-gentsia has much in common, at least in the sense that the plan to alter theontological status of reality, by destroying the old world and building a newone on its ruins, found its most natural interpreter and ardent activist in thedeclassed “proletaratised intellectual.”

The prophetae of the millenarian movements of the Low Middle Ages andthe professional revolutionaries of the twentieth century were in society butnot of society. For that very reason both were consumed by a passionate desireto overturn the macrocosm in which they existed as aliens. They longed forthe unity of the past, rejected the existing order, and abhorred money and itsadulators and a world that exuded injustice from its every pore. They sharedthe same Weltanschauung: reality was perceived as an immense battlefield dom-inated by a conflict of cosmic-historic significance between the forces of goodand of evil, which inevitably concluded with the victory of good and the de-finitive renovatio mundi.1

It is no coincidence that the first signs of the extraordinary events accom-panying revolutionary movements should have emerged with the introductionof capitalism in European society. Wherever the formidable creative-destructive force of the self-regulated market successfully broke its way intosociety, it generated masses of uprooted individuals forced to live “on themargin of society, in a state of chronic insecurity.”2 The reason is obvious: byextending the radius of ratio beyond all proportion, capitalism tended to trans-form Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft, eroding community bonds and substitut-ing them with impersonal, utilitarian, temporary ties. The closed, oppressive(but protective) “community world” was substituted by an open, dynamic one,

Page 25: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

12 Revolutionary Apocalypse

ruled by the laws of competition and profit; a world in which solidarity wasunknown and anyone not in a position to participate successfully was consid-ered an outcast. This also explains why capitalism has always generated anomyand alienation or, to cite Karl Polanyi, “cultural catastrophes.”3

An understanding of these cultural catastrophes is essential for identifyingthe elements that led to the eruption of mass millenarian movements, basedon “the radical denial of the existing world.”4 These movements were the“response” of the victims of the cultural catastrophes generated by the pen-etration of self-regulated markets in traditional societies, the desperate at-tempt of the “internal proletariat” of Western civilization to oppose theimpersonal, heartless mechanism that condemned them to living as outsiders.

Arnold Toynbee rightly claims that the distinguishing feature of the pro-letariat “was not poverty or humble birth, but the awareness—and the re-sentment that this awareness produced—of having lost one’s ancestral placein society.”5 The internal proletariat was therefore “a psychological group”composed of individuals of different social backgrounds, upon whom the dis-solution of Gemeinschaft had had a particularly negative impact. Being mar-ginalized from community life, they felt they were no longer an integral partof their macrocosm or bound by those moral and affective ties that once gavemeaning and direction to their existence. Hence their receptivity to new mes-sages, especially those favoring a radical overturning of the existing order thatthey hated and resented. Hence their search for a new group in the hope ofrecovering lost solidarity. At this point they became a “class of outsiders,” inconflict with everyone and everything: people, behavior, values, institutions.The scene was set for the revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat, not—this should be clear—to be confused with Jacquerie. The history of most civili-zations is marked by revolts of the oppressed against cruel, heartless oppressors.The objective of these revolts is to suppress abuses, not uses. “Dominated bythe omnipotence of custom,”6 the rebels aspire to restore the previous, over-turned order, not to create a new one.

Instead in Europe in the Low Middle Ages a radically new sociologicalphenomenon appeared on the scene: the violent eruption, in successive waves,of movements in direct conflict with the dominant system of values, based onan interpretation of the Holy Scripture, aiming to recover the original chili-astic pathos and enlightened by eschatological doctrines announcing the im-minent restoration of the Kingdom of God.7

Only the leaders of these movements could manipulate the symbols. Onlythey had the cognitive skills necessary to draw up a counterideology and aprogram for restructuring society. Being excluded from knowledge, the masseshad only their anger and destructive energy to fall back on. According to arigidly hierarchic division of labor, in the new revolutionary army the masseswere the shock troops.

Although the millenarian movements professed themselves in favor of thesuppression of inequality, they could not avoid what Max Weber called the

Page 26: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 13

“law of the small numbers.”8 Decisions were always made by a small minority,generally individuals “from the lower strata of the intelligentsia.”9 In the spe-cific dynamics of the revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat, wefind two actors, linked in a typically charismatic relationship: the “plebeianproletariat” (the mobilized workers) and the “aristocratic proletariat” (the de-classed intellectuals). They had nothing in common but their resentmentagainst a society that had alienated them and the belief that liberation was athand, providing all available energy was directed toward overturning the richand powerful in what was conceived as the “last of the holy wars.” No matterhow strong the alliance between the “plebeian proletariat” and the “aristo-cratic proletariat,” leadership remained exclusively in the hands of the intel-lectual elite. The “prophet” and his most direct assistants were alwaysintellectuals upon whose action in every field—education, protest, organiza-tion, strategy—depended the particular connotation of each millenarianmovement.

2. In a broad sense, millenarianism “is faith in a future age, profane yetsacred, terrestrial yet celestial; all wrongs will be righted, all injustices reme-died; illness and death will be abolished.”10 This faith, in which religious andsociopolitical change and renewal are presented as one and the same thing,was first revived by the prophetae of the Middle Ages. They formulated a wholeschool of apocalyptic doctrines taken from a variety of sources—the Book ofDaniel, the Apocalypse of John, the speculations of Gioacchino da Fiore onthe Third Kingdom11—to which they added their own reinterpretation ofgnostic cosmologies, especially the Manichean doctrine, translated in a lan-guage readily accessible to the people, to whom at last they offered the pros-pect of imminent liberation.

It was the diffusion of these doctrines that fomented the revival of the anti-institutional radicalism that had prevailed in the early Christian communities,dominated by the expectation of the Second Coming, seen as a palingenesis“in which all profane values would be overturned and the humble and thesuffering would find their apotheosis as supreme reparation for the injusticessuffered.”12

Taken to its logical extreme, this “refusal of the world” should have inducedChristians to believe that their first duty was to destroy an empire contami-nated by a religion and a civilization condemned by Christ. And this extremeconclusion was effectively reached by the circuncellioni, “Christ’s militants” forwhom donatism was the theological justification for their claim that the onlyway to save the rich was to massacre them.13

Although the vast majority of Christians harbored less extreme thoughts,their doctrine was undoubtedly animated by a burning hatred for Rome, con-sidered to be “the new Babylon,”14 and a strong spirit of anarchy. “It rejecteda system of rules codified and legitimated by secular support”15 and was there-fore a force of division and dissolution. Why should Christians worry about

Page 27: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

14 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the future of society, if this was simply a regnum perditionis, destined to beswept away by the “breath of our Lord”?16 All they had to do was wait for the“end of the world” and not allow themselves to be contaminated by the moralmiasma around them,17 in the knowledge that “human wisdom is foolishnessbefore God.”18

In fact, Christians led a kind of “underground, non-violent war”19 againstinstitutions: “Nothing is more foreign to us than the State.”20 On the surface,they were good citizens of the empire; underneath, they refused its basicvalues because they considered them meaningless, or even negative, in lightof the second coming of Christ.21 Non-Christians understandably resentedthis attitude: “whilst the happiness and glory of a temporal reign were prom-ised to the disciples of Christ, the most dreadful calamities were denouncedagainst an unbelieving world.”22 Thus, relations between Christians and non-Christians were poisoned at the root since “the truth of one was but a lie forthe other”23 and “every city, every home was split by civil war.”24 In short,according to Jean Guitton, “in the Roman Empire the Christian was a con-spirer of Jesus” and his ardent proselytization.25

Things changed dramatically with the Edict of Milan (313). Once Con-stantine made Christianity a state-protected religion, in a desperate attemptto increase the spiritual foundations of the empire, the church was, in a sense,obliged to take its distance from chiliasm—despite the words of the mission-aries and apologists of the evangelical message26—and present the Kingdomof God as a purely spiritual revolution, a renovatio in interiore homine with nospecific political or social content. The church tried to reduce the anti-institutional spirit of what Tertullian called the “contempt for the Age,”27

which had transformed Christians into outsiders, who cared nothing for thefate of the civilization in which they lived.

It is often claimed that the transformation of Christianity from religion ofprotest to religion of legitimation of the existing order occurred when theempire took the church under its protective wing. At that point, the churchbecame an agency for recruiting a “new class” of individuals, interested inretaining command and therefore wary of the “enthusiasts” who threatenedthe established order with their eschatological impatience.28

This is undoubtedly true but, once the second coming of Christ ceasedbeing the dominant issue, it was inevitable that Christians should have feltbound to concern themselves with the fate of a world that was falling apartbefore their eyes. The only solution, in their view, was to introduce “an in-tellectual discipline of iron, an absolute and unquestionable doctrine of life,able to withstand the assault of interests and passions.”29 This essentially iswhy the 413 Council of Ephesus used Saint Augustine’s interpretation of theHoly Scripture (an interpretation that barred the way to any chiliasticthoughts)30 to condemn the belief in the millennium as a superstition. In thisway it solemnly, and officially, reconciled the church with the present, re-

Page 28: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 15

moving all legitimacy from the subversive charge that had been the authenticand original inspiration of Christianity.31

The church could not continue to be a school of anarchy, radically hostileto anything tasting of order and hierarchy, when the institutions of societywere falling apart and souls were filled with anguish. Once it had acceptedthat “celestial Jerusalem would never come,”32 the only realistic approach wasto read the book of Revelation as an immense spiritual allegory, to move thesoul saving event to another world, to accept to live in, and adapt to, the oldworld. This produced what P. Wendland has called “the triumph of theChurch over Christianity”;33 a triumph that was possible precisely because“the Kingdom of God that was to descend from the sky to the earth, wasplaced in heaven.”34

It was not an absolute triumph, however. The flame of expectation of mes-sianic deliverance continued to smolder beneath the ashes and fire spirits everytime it became necessary to break away from the oppressive hold of reality.This occurred whenever the impersonal forces of market, competition, andcapital set off a mechanism of social mobilization, whereby the uprootedmasses, already prepared by Christian socialization for the advent of the Re-deemer, heeded the words of those preaching the imminent advent of themillennium. The soteriological message of the prophetae had much in commonwith the messianic tradition that the church had never managed to eliminatealtogether, because that tradition was an element constituting its depositumfidei: “unhappiness, misfortune then salvation.”35 The material and moral suf-fering of the poor and underprivileged was presented as the antechamber ofredemption: a completely terrestrial redemption, since the prophetae revivedthe original message of the Bible, with the advent here and now of the Mes-siah, the bearer of peace and justice.36

In this sociopsychological environment, to some extent, the revival of thegnostic Manichean tradition was a natural outcome. It had failed before be-cause it had preached radical anti-institutionalism, rejection of secular laws,and delegitimation of existing forms of life. For this same reason there was akind of elective affinity between its teachings and the feelings of the disin-herited masses. With its insistence on the radically evil nature of the worldand on the figure of savior-saved, the gnosis of Mani offered a therapy foralienation. Its “project for a fantastic overturning of the real world”37 pointedto the prospect of an immediate renovatio mundi, which is why the gnostic-Manichean heresy, which the Catholic Church believed it had defeated, reap-peared in a transfigured form in many heretical movements.38 The Patarine,Cathar, Flagellant, Lollard, Taborite, and Anabaptists movements all con-tained gnostic-Manichean elements.39 They all challenged the political andreligious authorities, protested the legitimacy of the Christianity of thechurch, and condemned the greed of usurers and private property in the nameof evangelical communism. They defied the existing order; they criticized theabuses of those with power and money and the very concept of hierarchy.

Page 29: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

16 Revolutionary Apocalypse

They proposed a transfigured world, in which equality and universal broth-erhood would at last prevail.

Thus it was that rejection of the old world and belief in the advent of a newone led chiliasm and gnosticism to join forces and present themselves as onespiritual force and confer the role of savior upon the propheta. As such, theleader was charismatic, the circumstances in which he operated extraordinary,and extraordinary the mission and the message he addressed to the outcastgroup: a message of hope, based on the expectation of the eschatologicalevent, that was to be typically both terrible and liberating: an apocalypticcatastrophe from which would arise a regenerated and purified macrocosm.

One can imagine the enthusiastic response to the propheta’s every word andthe charisma of his followers. The eschatological myth of the end of generalcorruption intimately connected to the prospect of imminent renovatio firedthe “plebeian proletariat” already mobilized to dare all, in the blind convictionthat nothing could stop them. After all, had the propheta not proclaimed that,once the evil, the powerful, and the rich had been eliminated, the doors ofcelestial Jerusalem would magically open?

3. These very same elements—the propheta, the plebs pauperorum, belief ina millenium in which all would be equal, war among classes, and so on—werepresent in the movements led by Tanchel and Eudes de l’Etoile, in the firsthalf of the twelfth century. However, John Ball and Wat Tyler’s uprising(1381) was the first mass revolutionary movement to constitute a seriousthreat to established order. Little is known of the words used by John Ball tostir the masses. For sure they were based on an egalitarian interpretation ofthe Holy Scripture40 and violently accused the gentry and the clergy of be-traying the evangelical message. The reaction was immediate: Richard IImarched against the rebels and had them dispersed and their leaders executed.Yet, “for generations the upper classes lived in fear of a popular rising.”41 The“poor preachers, the real missionaries of [Wyclif’s] new message”42 continuedto gain followers among the more humble classes and to fire their faith in anearthly renovatio.

The sparks that fell on Bohemia were to become the fire of revolution.John Hus, an ardent admirer of Wyclif, eliminated the local element fromthe Lollard doctrine and transformed it in a message applying to all Chris-tianity. In 1420, Hussite agitators produced an overpowering state of chiliasticeuphoria in Bohemia, which was to lead to a war among classes. Although“the popular heresy presented an irenic face,”43 the Taborites, the extremistwing of the Hussite movement, proclaimed that the massacre of the wickedwould smooth the way for the millenium. Once the original anarchic-egalitarian communism had been revived, the evil institutions of class societywould have no reason to exist. There would be no authority, no money, noprivate property. In a Tractatus contra errores on the “extermination of the evil,”by one of the intellectual leaders of the Taborite movement, the powerful and

Page 30: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 17

the rich are said to represent evil. There was no alternative but to annihilatethe privileged, in order to restore the Kingdom of God. “Whoever did notjoin them in ‘liberating truth’ and destroying sinners was himself a memberof the hosts of Satan and Anti-Christ and therefore fit only for annihilation.”44

This meant murdering whoever did not identify with the chosen charismaticcommunity, regardless of social status. The logic of millenarianism and theimperatives of a class war soon transformed the community into a theocraticsociety with a rigid hierarchy and a strong martial spirit. Of course the peas-ants were the ones who paid the price for this transformation. Since the Ta-borites were fighting on their behalf—or so they claimed—they had no choicebut to tolerate every kind of extortion from the “men of God’s law”: “If youdisobey, with God’s help we will force you to follow our orders, using everymeans we have, especially fire.”

The Taborite army was defeated in the Battle of Lipan in 1434. The armywas defeated, but not the eschatological doctrine that had animated it. Onecentury later, with much more vigor and in a much more favorable climate,45

Luther was to revive the Hussite preaching against the Church.46

“Antagonism between the feudal system and the capitalist system”47 was atthe origin of the Reformation. In other words: “capitalism, being constitutedon commercial bases, tries to dominate the labour market; a fledgling prole-tariat no longer disposes, or can dispose, of the tools of its labour; betweenthem, something that already resembles a class war.”48

The social and psychological consequences were particularly acute in “areaswhere the population was rapidly increasing . . . [and] the areas of rapid socialchange.”49 The “growing importance of capital, of the market and of competitionrendered insecure, isolated and full of anxiety”50 not only the existence of theproletarized working masses, but also that of the marginal strata of the intel-ligentsia who found themselves as if thrown into a hostile, incomprehensibleworld, governed by impersonal forces beyond their control. It is not surprisingthat the declassed intellectuals should have “constituted the avant-garde ofthe Reform.”51 Contrary to an interpretation that is as widespread as it isarbitrary, the Reformation was an anticapitalist movement.

For the entrepreneurs, the practice of indulgences had transformed rela-tions with the church into a reassuring kind of bookkeeping exercise: “If youcan buy paradise, then God must tolerate and encourage wealth and not behostile to profit.”52 In criticizing this attitude, the Protestant preachers laidthe foundations “for a new critique of capitalism as the work of the Devil, acritique that went deep, because the accusation was against capitalism itselfand not the abuses indicated by Catholicism.”53 It brought the mercatores be-fore the court of the Holy Scripture and condemned them as men who hadsurrendered to mammon, corrupting Christianity with their lust for wealthand profit.

The most appropriate response would have been to revive the original evan-gelical message and violently expel the mercatores from the temple. Luther

Page 31: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

18 Revolutionary Apocalypse

did not go so far.54 Being a radical pessimist, he thought that the corruptionof Christianity would never be eradicated manu militari and that the onlysolution was for the faithful to avoid being infected by the spirit of profit andto continue to work “obediently in the pre-ordered social conditions.”55

This solution failed to satisfy the peasants, besieged by hunger, the plague,taxes, and usury; and the artisans, who had fallen under the control of capitaland were forced to work for greedy, insensitive masters. Luther’s devastatingcritique of the Church and of capitalism had raised much higher hopes amongthis internal proletariat for “an autumn of the middle ages.” Predictably, theybegan to look for a solution elsewhere.

They found what they were seeking in Thomas Muntzer, “the revolutiontheologian”—Ernst Bloch’s definition56—“[who] fanned hatred against theruling classes, he stimulated the wildest passions, and used only the forcefullanguage that the religious and nationalist delirium had put into mouths ofthe Old Testament prophet.”57 He liked to present himself as a paraclete,whose soteriological mission was to “combat the enemies of faith”58 in orderto overturn an overturned world and free the oppressed and the exploitedfrom the rule of priests, the powerful, and the rich. His revolutionary agenda“demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth,of the prophesied millennium, by restoring the church to its original statusand abolishing all the institutions that conflicted with the purportedly earlyChristian but in fact very novel church. By the kingdom of God Muntzermeant a society with no class differences, no private property and no stateauthority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society.”59

Understandably, Muntzer’s vision of the imminent advent of a communistmillennium aroused people treated “like society’s beasts of burden.”60 Peas-ants, miners, and artisans rushed to listen to Muntzer and Pfeifer, his assis-tant.61 The content of their speeches was always the same: those in commandhad no right to exercise power; power should pass into the hands of the chosencommunity; the priests had betrayed the evangelical message and thereforeshould be expelled from Christianity; the rich would never save their soulsbecause they had surrendered to mammon; everything had to be shared; thevery distinction between meum and tuum was contrary to God’s will.

Revolutionary effervescence reached its peak in 1525. Gangs of peasants,invariably led by priests who had abandoned their cassocks to act as agitatorsand activists, spread like wildfire all through Germany. At the very timeMuntzer had become the Sire of Muhlhausen and was reorganizing the cityaccording to the principles of evangelical communism (though not disdainingto preach the methodical use of “Gideon’s sword”). “The sword”—he said—“is necessary to exterminate them. And so that it shall be done honestly andproperly, our dear fathers the princes must do it, who confess Christ with us.But if they don’t do it, the sword shall be taken from them. . . . If they resist,let them be slaughtered without mercy. . . . At the harvest-time one mustpluck the weeds out of God’s vineyard. . . . But the angels who are sharpening

Page 32: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 19

their sickles for that work are no other than the earnest servants of God. . . .For the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allowthem.”62

The Mulhausen experiment lasted but a few months. In vain Muntzer dis-patched messengers to spread the fire of revolution in other German cities.The Anabaptist movement was isolated. Its army of badly armed and worsetrained peasants was defeated in the battle of Frankenhausen. As always, therevenge of the ruling classes was immediate and horrific. The prophet whohad dared to incite the masses against exploitation and injustice was barbari-cally tortured and put to death.

Yet, less than 10 years later, the Anabaptists again challenged establishedorder, with the same fury, the same eschatological vision, the same purpose:to destroy the old world and build a new Jerusalem in its place.

This time the revolutionary movement was led first by Jan Mattys and,after his death, by Jan Bockelson, better known as John of Leiden. Munsterwas the city chosen by “the predestined community” for conducting the sacredexperiment of bringing about a metamorphosis of the human condition,through the abolition of money, usury, and private property. The tool fordoing this: a “bloody prophetocracy”63 endowed with authority “in all matters,public and private, spiritual and material, and power of life and death over allinhabitants of the town.”64 After expelling the bad and the evil—that is to say“any citizen who did not heed the lessons of the prophets”65—Bockelson pro-claimed Munster the new Jerusalem. He tried, as Muntzer had 10 years earlier,to extend the revolutionary flame. Agitators were sent wherever there wasdiscontent to announce that the communist millennium was already underwayin the Holy City of the Anabaptists and that soon its jurisdiction would extendto all Christianity. Yet again, the ruling classes prevailed. On July 25, 1535,Munster fell, after a siege lasting months. The usual bloodbath followed. TheAnabaptist heresy was mercilessly suffocated and with it any hope the masseshad of freeing themselves from the oppressive yoke of their masters.

4. After hibernating for a century, the revolutionary spirit raised its headyet again, but this time in England.66 The Great Rebellion was, not as Engelsclaimed, “the second great uprising of the bourgeoisie,”67 but the violent re-action of the social classes proletarized by the spread of capitalism. It is nocoincidence that the Puritan revolutionary movement was led by gentlemenfrom the declining gentry,68 small landowners and propagandists recruitedfrom the growing sub-intelligentsia. The latter gave the protest against thecourt its extremist flavor and directed it toward the goal of overturning theexisting order and building a society conceived in their chiliastic imaginationas the new Jerusalem.

In his excellent study on the anomalous social and existential condition ofthe intellectuals who became permanent agitators in the Puritan movement,Michael Walzer concludes that their role in the dynamics of the Great Re-

Page 33: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

20 Revolutionary Apocalypse

bellion was so important that the rebellion could be defined a “revolt of thethird clerical state.”69 The intellectuals were tormented, insecure, dissatisfiedindividuals, humiliated not only by their poverty but also by their precariousstatus. They represented the nation’s spiritual aristocracy and felt unfairlymarginalized. This filled them with resentment and hostility for the existingorder, in which they felt they occupied a place not corresponding to theirmerits or to their spiritual mission. In short, they were typical declassed in-tellectuals, naturally drawn to more radical ideas. By embracing the cause,they attained the “good conscience” and gratifying conviction of being the“children of Israel”70 and therefore the moral avant-garde of society.

The alienation and resentment of individuals condemned to living in so-ciety like an “exiled social group” was fueled by the preaching of John Knox,a typical ideologue of the proletarianized intelligentsia, who had transformedthe “Calvinist concept of saint in an ideal around which men without estab-lished social interests could gather”71 and recognize themselves as an “elite”separate from society and in conflict with its dominant institutions and values.On the other hand, Calvin had explicitly supported the theory that “the gospelwas a dynamic force that always tended to reform established order, to trans-form it in a just order.”72 His program is conveyed in the slogan, “To establishthe Kingdom of God on earth.”73 The Puritans radicalized Calvinist activismand elevated politics to the rank of collective salvation, by identifying it withthe methodical reshaping of the existing order according to a design that wasintelligible only to the chosen few: the “saints.” Therefore “the saints—notmedieval man—were responsible for the world, and responsible above all forits unceasing transformation,”74 culminating in the creation of a kind of“Christian Sparta”: a compact, ascetic, intolerant society based on a “piousdiscipline against the religion of trade,”75 in other words, a society that hadnothing in common with the bourgeois-capitalist society; a society from whichwere banished trade and usury, the source of all the evils and vices afflictingChristianity; a society of brotherhood in the real faith guided by “a divineelite called by providential decree to govern and achieve the Reform in theworld and in the motherland.”76

With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into Westerncivilisation:77 (revolutionary) politics as fulfillment of God’s will, with the objectiveof consciously building “a new human community, that could substitute thelost Eden”78 and produce a prodigious “change in human nature.”79 For cen-turies, politics had been conceived as a “cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a tech-nique for the accumulation of power (Machiavelli). From the Puritan culturalrevolution on, politics was conceived as a soteriological practice, dominated byan eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore as a calling,whose methodical objective was to overturn the world in order to purify it.80

The slogan originally used by the Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived:“Permanent warfare against the existing, in the name of the New World.”

If we are to understand why a pressing need to rebuild society on radically

Page 34: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 21

new foundations emerged at that particular time, the “sociological earth-quake” produced by the transition from a feudal to a capitalist society mustbe our starting point. As prosperity and the number of “nouveaux riches”increased, “many gentry were declining while others were rising, and . . .many of the poorer gentry were only just managing to maintain their statusand position.”81 This led to a widespread sense of frustration and resentmentin a social group that had always been a pillar of the monarchy, to which wasadded the discontent of the graduates churned out by the university “in num-bers well in excess of the capacity of the church to absorb them,”82 who alsofelt the threat of an imminent loss of status. Meanwhile, the massive move-ment of wealth generated by the introduction of a market economy had hada visible impact on the power and influence of the feudal aristocracy. This inturn had eroded the base (material and moral) supporting the monarchy.83

The outcome was a profound change in the power relations among the varioussocial forces, followed by a rapid weakening of the spirit of loyalty and tra-dition, especially among the proletarianized intellectuals, always particularlysensitive to moral disorder and prone to transforming their specific existentialdifficulties into general problems.

At the beginning, the Puritan sects that came into being in this situationof anomy were simply an attempt to recreate artificially, almost in vitro, thecommunity bonds that had been torn apart by the advance of the market.84

The spiritual leaders were uprooted intellectuals, disoriented by all the thingsthat were going on around them. As “anomic individuals” they reacted againstthe cultural tradition in which they had been socialized in a heterodox fashion.They sensed that the axiological heritage handed down to them from previousgenerations could no longer perform its function of regulating behavior orsatisfy their specific requirements. Hence, the emotional withdrawal fromtradition, followed by an attempt to reinterpret it completely; hence, also, thesearch for a “credo” that could alleviate their anxiety and legitimate theirresentment and aggression.

In this situation, the Calvinist version of the Christian message understand-ably exercised an irresistible attraction on alienated and disoriented intellec-tuals in the unstable social structure of England, in the first half of theseventeenth century. It provided them with a political-religious doctrine theydesperately needed: an answer, expressed in commandments, to their prob-lems as morally deprived individuals, forced to seek a new sense of directionin a society they considered inconsistent and unfair. Above all, the idea thatthey were among the “chosen,” the impersonal purveyors of God’s will, gavethem the proud awareness of being privileged actors in a “cosmic drama”85

and satisfied their psychological need to get their revenge on the ruling classes.In addition to this, Calvin and Knox’s preachings contained the mysteriousvirtue of all the great religions of salvation: they transfigured the believer,regenerated him morally, instilling in him the conviction that it was his duty

Page 35: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

22 Revolutionary Apocalypse

to prepare himself methodically and ascetically to fulfill the existential missionfor which he had been called.86

It is therefore legitimate to consider the Puritan doctrine a typical “tran-sition ideology,” but not—as Marxists and Weberians claim—because it wasfunctional to the process of economic modernization, giving legitimacy to theclass interests of the bourgeois entrepreneurs and transforming the individ-ualistic acquisitive instinct into an ethical-religious calling. With its rigor andrevolutionary call to arms, in fact, the Puritan doctrine reshaped the person-ality of the proletarianized intellectuals, transforming them into intrepid ac-tivists, willing to dare all, convinced as they were that God was on their side.The many agencies of resocialization of the Puritan doctrine “modeled” theraw material constituted by the intellectual proletariat into a sui generis an-thropological “type,” to which it entrusted the mission of regenerating En-glish society.

This new anthropological “type” was the “saint in arms” that Tazney, Voe-gelin, Walzer, and Mathieu correctly consider to be the spiritual ancestor ofthe Jacobites and Bolsheviks:87 an “intramundane” aesthete, in the sense spec-ified by Weber, with a psychological and moral armor, devoted body and soulto the sacred cause of “destruction of the anti-Christ”88 and exalted by thecertainty of being part of an important eschatological undertaking—“God’scause against that of the devil.”89 Hence, the institutionalization of a modelof political action—perfected over the centuries to the point that it becameone of the main agents of social transformation of the age of secularization—whose salient features had been described in great detail by a scholar who hadobserved the precise strategy adopted by the Puritan preachers to create amass revolutionary movement.90

The strategy, consisting of five separate stages, initiated with the holy rev-olutionary expressing deploration and permanent indignation, and thus givingthe impression of being an individual of such lofty moral sentiments as to beconstantly offended by the evils afflicting the world, at the same time creatingin the multitudes a strongly critical attitude, a situation that was exacerbatedin the second stage of the strategy, with the demonization of institutions, theculpabilization of the ruling classes, and the obsessive repetition that theywere to blame for all the ills afflicting the population. Step three was thelogical consequence of the previous two: incitement to revolt and invitationto join the battle to establish a completely new form of government as theonly remedy to corruption. In other words, the “kingdom of saints” was theonly cure for the pathological situation of society. The fourth move of Puritanrhetoric was to present the postrevolutionary society as a dream situation, inperfect harmony with the most profound aspirations of men. Whoever wasopposed to the change was considered an agent contrary to Christ. Step fivereinforced the previous moves and was of fundamental strategic value: anyobjection to the Puritan solution was labeled as an example of the old men-tality, which was destined to disappear with the advent of the new Jerusalem.

Page 36: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 23

The Puritan strategy proved extraordinarily effective. Wherever those re-ferred to by Richard Baxter as the “devoted”—that is to say the “permanentpersuaders and professional agitators of the Puritan movement—managed toconvey their fiery message, popular discontent increased and extended visi-bly.91 Acting as veritable agitprop of the revolution,92 they successfully “pen-etrate(d)” vast sectors of society and eroded the consensus on which theabsolute monarchy rested. As a result, England witnessed a class war thatconcluded with the dictatorship of the “saints in arms.”93

For the first time in history, a sect of activists, composed of 20,000 fanaticalsoldiers indoctrinated by the “devoted,” was responsible for the fate of anentire population with the declared objective of reshaping society on the basisof the doctrine of salvation for which it had declared war on the existing order.

The “holy experiment” proved to be a failure. The government of saintsthat “manifested itself to the mass of the nation . . . in the form of numberlessand miserable petty tyrannies, . . . thus became hated as no Government hasever been hated in England before or since”94 for its insistence on forcing thepopulation to “eat religion with their bread.”95

In the same period, Cromwell put together an army of nouveaux richessoldiers who jealously guarded their prerogatives96 and soon transformed thedictatorship into a tool for marginalizing whoever considered the “purifica-tion” of the state and the church as the first step for achieving a free and equalsociety.97 This put an end to the “hopes of the millenarians”98—the Levellersand the Diggers—and, before the century was through, was followed by thetriumph of possessive individualism.99 The interests of the privileged, newand old, prevailed over the aspirations of the working classes, whose mostpassionate and energetic representatives were John Lilburne and, especially,Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated the reorganization of society on rigor-ously communist foundations and the suppression of “buying and selling,”the source of “all oppression and tyranny on earth.”100 After the Restoration,the English elites did everything in their power to eliminate every trace ofthe revolutionary experiment.101 The collectivistic version of Puritanism wassubstituted with the individualistic version that, far from “establish on eartha ‘Kingdom of Christ,’” instead instituted “an ideal of personal character andconduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and privateduties.”102

It took a good 150 years for the idea of permanent revolution to reemergeas a means to establish a kingdom of justice and regenerate human nature.From the fall of the Bastille, this strong, infectious spiritual force marked thestart of the “era of hope in revolution.”

NOTES

1. See M. J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1976), pp. 21–22.

2. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval

Page 37: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

24 Revolutionary Apocalypse

and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2nd ed. (NewYork: Harper, 1961), p. 28.

3. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Gower Beacon Press, 1957).4. W. Muhlmann, Messianismes revolutionnaires du Tiers Monde (Paris: Gallimard,

1968), p. 179.5. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5 (London: Cambridge University Press,

1964), p. 63.6. R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth Century France, Russia, and China

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1971).7. See G. Volpe, Movimenti religiosi e sette ereticali nella societa medievale italiana

(Florence: Sansoni, 1971); T. Manteuffel, Nascita dell’eresia (Florence: Sansoni, 1975);F. Tocco, Storia dell’eresia nel Medioevo (Genoa: Melita, 1989); G. Forquin, The Anatomyof Popular Rebellion in The Middle Ages (Oxford: North-Holland, 1978).

8. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. G. Rothand C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 952.

9. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 70.10. I. Pereira de Queiroz, Riforma e rivoluzione nelle societa tradizionali (Milan: Jaca

Book, 1968), p. 23.11. The Jacomite doctrine was a turning point in the history of Christianity. By

challenging the Augustinian interpretation of the Holy Scripture it paved the way forthe reeschatologisation of the evangelical message and provided a powerful theologicalargument to movements directed toward the “introduction of a state of perfectionalready during earthly history” (A. Tagliapietra, “Introduzione to Gioacchino da Fiore,”Sull’Apocalisse [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994], p. 42).

12. P. Gentile, Storia del cristianesimo dalle origini a Teodosio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975),p. 300.

13. See R. A. Knox, Illuminati e carismatici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1970), p. 73 et seq.14. G. Boissier, La fine del mondo pagano (Milan: SugarCo, 1989), p. 294.15. R. Ruggiero, La follia dei cristiani (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992), p. 157.16. S. Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World (London: Faber, 1966).17. See A. G. Hamman, La vita quotidiana dei primi cristiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993),

p. 146 et seq.18. Celso, Contro i cristiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 201.19. R. Campa, Il profetismo laico (Padua: Marsilio, 1971), p. 72.20. Quoted from L. Storoni Mazzolani, Sant’Agostino e i pagani (Palermo: Sellerio,

1987), p. 33.21. See F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World and The Beginning of the Middle-Ages

(New York: Harper and Row, 1961).22. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (Lon-

don: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), p. 564.23. M. Stirner, L’Unico e la sua proprieta (Milan: Mursia, 1990).24. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious

Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1965).

25. J. Guitton, Il puro e l’impuro (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1994), p. 26.26. Despite considering the millenarian interpretation of the evangelical message

a “misunderstanding,” Alois Dempf does acknowledge that it was “justified by thefluctuations of the biblical texts themselves” (Sacrum Imperium [Le Lettere: Florence,

Page 38: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 25

1988], p. 2). It is hard to deny that from its origins Christianity suffered an intimatedualism that led it to fluctuate between sacralizing existing institutions and rejectingthe world insofar as civitas diaboli. It is essential to go back to this original dualism inorder to understand the proliferation of an impressive number of heresies—many ofwhich were driven by an intense revolutionary pathos—in the bimillenarian history ofChristianity (See T. Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy [Lanham: University Pressof America, 1990]).

27. “May we willingly lose the things of the earth and look at the things of heaven.Let the world collapse in ruins, as long as I am enriched with patience” (Tertulliano,in G. Barbero, ed., Il pensiero politico cristiano, vol. 1 [Turin: UTET, 1962], p. 221).

28. On this point, see the detailed analysis of G. Puente Ojea, La formacion delcristianismo como fenomeno ideologico (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1984), pp. 294–305.

29. G. Ferrero, La rovina della civilta antica (Milan: SugarCo, 1988), pp. 137–138.30. Agostino, La Citta di Dio (Milan: Rusconi, 1984), pp. 1000 et seq. See E. Gilson,

La citta di Dio e i suoi problemi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1959) and S. Cotta, La cittapolitica di Sant’Agostino (Milan: Comunita, 1960).

31. See F. Belo, Una lettura politica del Vangelo (Turin: Claudiana, 1975) and G.Girardet, Il vangelo della liberazione (Turin: Claudiana, 1975).

32. A. Loisy, Le origini del cristianesimo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1974), p. 483.33. Quoted from W. Muhlmann, Messianismes revolutionnaires du Tiers Monde,

p. 297. Nietzsche’s opinion is even more drastic: “The Church is precisely what Jesuspreached against—what he taught his disciples to fight against . . . The Church is notonly a caricature of Christianity, but a war organised against Christianity” (The Will toPower: The Complete Works, ed. by Oscar Levy [London: Edinburg, 1909]).

34. K. Kautsky, L’origine del cristianesimo (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1970), p. 369.35. M. Weber, Sociologia della religione, vol. 2 (Milan: Comunita, 1982), p. 664.36. Erich Fromm has remarked that the Bible contains two visions of salvation:

one “horizontal,” of the prophetical world and the other “vertical,” of the apocalypticworld (Voi sarete come Dei [Rome: Ubaldini, 1970], pp. 91–92). The prophetae combinedthe two, giving formidable revolutionary impulse to their preaching.

37. E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Champaign-Urbana: The Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 1974).

38. One of the most significant aspects of Mani’s gnosis was its extraordinary ca-pacity to reappear on the scene in the most diverse forms, permeating other traditionsof thought, without losing its fundamental connotations. In this way, at least in part,the history of medieval heretical movements is also the history of the metamorphosesof Manicheanism and its repeated challenges to the Christianity of the Church (see S.Runciman, Le manicheisme medieval (Paris: Payot, 1972]).

39. See F. Tocco, Storia dell’eresia nel Medioevo (Genoa: Melita, 1989).40. The chronicles of the time inform us that Ball liked to write his sermons before

the rebels commenting on the following rhyme: “While Adam was digging and Evawas spinning, where was the nobleman hidden?” Interestingly, we find the same rhymesome centuries later in the sermons of the Levellers and Diggers (see C. Hill, TheWorld Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution [London: TempleSmith, 1978], p. 86ff).

41. W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4th ed., vol. 1: TheBirth of Britain (London: Cassell, 1957) p. 294f.

42. R. Marx, L’Angleterre des revolutions (Paris: Colin, 1971), p. 73.

Page 39: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

26 Revolutionary Apocalypse

43. J. Macek, The Hussite Movement in Bohemia, 2nd ed. (Prague: Orbis, 1958).44. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 225.45. The press played a decisive role. Thanks to the press, Luther and his followers

successfully “infected” the countries of Europe not subject to the domination of theSpanish Empire, which had undertaken to eradicate heresies by vigilating over thethoughts and actions of the faithful by means of the Inquisition. Hence, books arecorrectly considered to have been the “ammunition” of the Reform (see H. A. Ob-erman, Masters of the Reformation: the Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

46. In a letter written by Luther in 1529 we read: “I realize that up until now Ihave been teaching and sustaining all Hus’s theories without knowing it; . . . we areall hussites without knowing it. I don’t know how to express my surprise.” (Quotedfrom M. Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli, Wyclif: il comunismo dei predestinati [Florence:Sansoni, 1975], p. 3.)

47. P. Blicke, La Riforma luterana e la guerra dei contadini (Bologna: Il Mulino,1981), p. 19.

48. H. Hauser and A. Renaudet, L’eta del Rinascimento e della Riforma (Turin: Ei-naudi, 1970), pp. 418–419. On the methods by which capitalism took over production,degrading artisans to the level of workers subject to orders of the entrepreneur, seeespecially A. Labriola, Capitalismo (Naples: Morano, 1926), p. 101 et seq.

49. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 22.50. E. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Kegan Paul, 1942).51. E. Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 123.52. P. Miguel, Le guerre di religione (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), p. 40.53. N. O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Mid-

dletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1966).54. In truth, in the early period of his activity Luther did not hesitate to preach

the elimination “with arms” of “the evil people that were infecting the world.” How-ever, when he saw the dramatic consequences produced by his words, he grew nervousand embraced the cause of order, inciting the princes to have no scruples in killingthe “creatures of the devil” who were among Muntzer’s followers (Revelation and Rev-olution: Basic Writings of Thomas Muntzer [Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press,1993]).

55. E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. II (London:University of Chicago Press, 1981).

56. E. Block, Thomas Muntzer, theologien de la revolution (Paris: Julliard, 1964).57. F. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Complete

Works, vol. 10, p. 471.58. T. Muntzer, Scritti Politici (Torino: Claudiana, 1972), p. 86.59. F. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” p. 422.60. G. Ritter, La formazione dell’Europa moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1976), p. 183.61. See T. La Rocca, Es Ist Zeit: Apocalisse e Storia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1988), p. 129

et seq.62. Quoted from N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 256ff. When Muntzer

advocated killing the wicked he was simply giving a literal interpretation to the terriblephrase in the Gospel of Luke: “These enemies of mine who did not want me to lordover them, bring them here and kill them before me.”

63. R. P. Reck-Malleczewen, Il re degli anabattisti (Milan: Rusconi, 1971), p. 23.

Page 40: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Fanatics 27

64. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 292.65. I. Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).66. In the first half of the seventeenth century, France was also repeatedly shaken

by protest movements. Having no counter-ideology, these movements were not of arevolutionary nature (See B. Porchenev, Les soulevements populaires en France au XVIIsiecle [Paris: Flammarion, 1972]).

67. F. Engels, L’evoluzione del socialismo dall’utopia alla scienza (Milan: EdizioniAvanti!, 1961), p. 50.

68. On this point, see H. Trevor Roper’s fundamental essay, “The Gentry” in TheEconomic History. Supplements, 1953.

69. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 115.This thesis is anticipated in the pages where Hobbes analyzed the role of universitiesin the legitimation and diffusion of the “spirit of sedition” (“Behemoth: The Historyof the Causes of the Civil War of England” in The English Collected Works, ed. by W.Molesworth, vol. 6 [Aalen: Scientia, 1966], pp. 212–215, 233–236).

70. M. Prestwich, “Introduction,” in M. Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 11.

71. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 67.72. A. Belier, La pensee economique et sociale de Calvin (Geneva: Georg, 1961), p. 264.73. D. E. Holwerda, “Eschatology and History,” in E. D. Holwerda, ed., Exploring

the Heritage of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1976), p. 138.74. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 42.75. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 1938), p. 173.76. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (London: Cresset

Press, 1961).77. Strictly speaking, it was not so much a new element as the development of an

idea that already existed within the Anabaptist movement: the purpose of politics wasthe revolutionary transformation of the existing in the light of the Holy Scripture. Onthe basis of this, Mannheim writes that with the Anabaptist movement “politics in themodern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or lessconscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundanepurpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of controlfrom ‘above’” (Ideology and Utopia, p. 191).

78. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 28.79. E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1952).80. On the eve of the revolution, Samuel Harlib, the author of Macaria, was full

of eschatological hope in the imminent “reform of the entire world.” He indicatedthat Parliament should lay the “first stone of happiness in the world.” Jeremy Bur-roughs delivered a stirring speech in the House of Commons entitled “The Joy ofSion.” The main theme of the speech was the “resurrection of Church and State.”Equally imbibed with messianic hope was the language used by Thomas Case: “Ref-ormation must be universal . . . Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not plantedshall be rooted up.” Finally, a gentleman from Yorkshire wrote to a friend that timeswere ripe to “build a new world” (quoted in L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revo-lution 1529–1642 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972], p. 52ff). The chiliasticpathos of the Levellers and Diggers was even stronger: they envisaged a return to the

Page 41: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

28 Revolutionary Apocalypse

original state of equality, uncontaminated by the principle of authority and selfishpassions (see C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down).

81. L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, p. 74.82. Ibid., p. 113.83. See L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (London: Oxford University Press,

1967).84. See Chr. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London:

Panther Book, 1969), p. 267 et seq.85. P. Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1982), p. 167.86. See B. Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 60

et seq.87. Gramsci considered Cromwell’s round heads to be “English Jacobines” (Selec-

tions from the Prison Notebooks), thus indicating a line of research that Marxist historians,Christopher Hill up front, chose to ignore in deference to the Engelsian myth of theGreat Rebellion as a bourgeois revolution.

88. H. Peters, “Le opere di Dio e il dovere degli uomini,” in U. Bonanate, ed., Ipuritani (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 103.

89. Chr. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Panther Book, 1969), p. 130.90. The scholar is Hooker. His penetrating analysis of Puritan psychology and

strategy was brought once more to the attention of scholars by Eric Voegelin (TheNew Science of Politics).

91. See B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution 1640–1649 (Lon-don: Heinemann, 1976), p. 251ff.

92. See H. Holorenshaw, “I livellatori,” in Chr. Hill, ed., Saggi sulla Rivoluzioneinglese del 1640 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957), p. 153 et seq.

93. L. F. Solt, Saints in Arms (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959).94. W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. II: The New World

(London: Cassell, 1956), p. 249.95. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to

Queen Victoria, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1946), p. 255.96. G. Walter, La Rivoluzione inglese (Novara: De Agostini, 1972), p. 94.97. See E. Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (London: Cass, 1966), p. 132 et

seq.98. Chr. Hill, L’Anticristo nel Seicento inglese (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990), p. 89.99. See C. B. Macpherson, Liberta e proprieta alle origini del pensiero borghese (Milan:

ISEDI, 1973), p. 156 et seq.100. G. Winstanley, La terra a chi la lavora (Bologna: Guaraldi, 1974), pp. 206–207.101. They did this not only to defend their privileges, but also because they had

learned the lesson: Revolution, whatever the initial intentions, tends irresistibly towardmilitary despotism or ideological tyranny. In other words, the Puritan experimentimmunized English society against any extremist temptation and transformed Britishhistory into a sort of “manual on how to avoid revolution” (C. Tilly, The EuropeanRevolutions: 1492–1992 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994]).

102. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 211.

Page 42: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 3

The Jacobin Experiment

1. Guglielmo Ferrero’s course held in the early thirties at the University ofGeneva was published after his death with the significant title Les deux Revo-lutions francaises. At the time it was generally accepted that there could be onlyone spirit behind a revolution, including the Great Revolution. As Clemen-ceau put it: “Revolution is one block.”1 Ferrero disagreed. He suggested thatthe French Revolution had been like a two-headed Janus: initially the drivingforce had been liberalism but, due to a series of unexpected events, it had asif “gone mad” and totalitarianism and terrorism had taken over.2

“The hardest problem is to explain how the principles of the Revolutionproduced such a completely unexpected result.”3 The Revolution had pro-claimed the rights of man and of the citizen, but these rights were systemat-ically denied. Betrayal, inconsistency, the work of the devil? By no means.The Revolution became a “walking paralogism,” beyond the control of itsorganizers and developing according to its own internal objective and irresis-tible logic. The reason? Fear. A fear that rapidly became hysteria, transformingthe thoughts, feelings, and behavior of both the elites and the masses. In theend, no one was able to control the Revolution; it became autonomous; some-thing “other” than originally intended.4

In trying to decipher the paradox of the French Revolution—the paradoxof all revolutions, formulated by William Godwin as follows: “Revolution iscaused by indignation against a tyranny, yet it is always itself impregnatedwith tyranny”5—Ferrero refers explicitly to Constant and, in particular, to hisconcept of usurpation.6 The revolutionaries could not govern according to theprinciples they themselves had proclaimed, because they were “usurpers”: inthe eyes of public opinion there was nothing that legitimated their power.

Page 43: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

30 Revolutionary Apocalypse

This would explain the pathological diffidence and insecurity of the revolu-tionaries and their need to exercise a police-like control on the masses, onwhose behalf they claimed to be governing, but whom in fact they feared. Inshort, they were dominated by fear and had no alternative but to use fear toretain power.

In effect, the Revolution started with what historians refer to as the “GreatFear.” “For the disconcerted contemporaries this was somewhat a mystery”7

and could only be understood by accepting the conspiracy theory. “July 14[Hubert Methivier rightly claims] was none other than the shock producedby a multiplicity of fears.”8 The bourgeoisie feared bankruptcy and unrest;the peasants, famine; the army, the dimensions of the popular revolt; thearistocracy, the hostility of the entire nation exasperated by their privilegesand parasitism.9 For six weeks, as the news of events in Paris swept across thenation “the entire population—the peasants, the workers, the lower middle-class, the executives and the upper classes—refused obedience, as if at anagreed signal, some kind of secret password. The immediate and irresistiblecorrelation: the masses revolted because they sensed that authority was par-alysed: the authorities took no action, because they felt they had lost controlof the masses.”10

The sudden and spontaneous collapse of the ancien regime was followedby a situation of impotent omnipotence of the Constitutive Assembly, de-scribed by Ferrero in these terms: “The Assembly was nervous. It was nervousbecause of the malcontent that its reforms had aroused in the ancien regime,the Court, the clergy, the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie. The new revolu-tionary policy inevitably stepped upon a variety of interests and made manypeople nervous, especially as concrete steps were taken to introduce the re-forms. There was no great drive in the discontent of the upper classes. Theythemselves were scared and disorganized and their opposition virtually use-less. Yet, the Assembly was nervous. Its origins were still too recent and itsright to make laws too uncertain, for it to feel confident; moreover, it feltisolated in the midst of general anarchy and without an armed force to defendit. It was worried about the rising discontent of the upper classes as more andmore reforms were introduced. In this situation what developed was a stateof mutual fear. The Court, the nobility and the clergy were afraid of theAssembly, and the Assembly trusted neither Court, nor nobility nor clergy.Every act, even the most innocent, was interpreted by either side as evidenceof hostile intentions; imaginary plots were seen everywhere. On its part thenational Assembly was nervous of the masses who were becoming increasinglyagitated in the cities and especially in Paris. The masses were suffering froma veritable persecution mania and attributed all their woes to mysterious plotsof the Court and high clergy.”11

In this situation of complete anarchy, the Assembly, whose intentions hadbeen reformist and basically moderate, was forced to play a revolutionary rolefor which it was not in any way equipped.12 Not only was it forced to impro-

Page 44: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 31

vise, it was forced to do so in fear, besieged by all sorts of enemies, real orimaginary, and without legitimacy, the only element that might have restoredits confidence. Despite the widespread support of the masses, its power wasthe expression of a principle of legitimacy—popular sovereignty—that wasirreconcilable with the principle of legitimacy under the ancien regime—based on an alliance between the throne and the altar (i.e., on the divine rightof the sovereign)—that still survived in the hearts of millions of French peo-ple. Added to this, Louis XVI tried to break away from the control of theAssembly. Varennes prevented any possibility of compromise between theAssembly and the Court. The Representatives of the Third Estate did nottrust a king who had violated the Constitution at the first opportunity. Theironly alternative was to radicalize the Revolution, to make it a war of patri-otism, to use nationalistic exaltation and general mobilization to unite theFrench population. In short, “they reached the point of theorising a worldrevolution because they felt unsafe in their own country.”13 Brissot not onlyproclaimed a “holy war” against reactionary Europe for the “renewal of theface of the world,”14 he also declared that the Revolution “was in need of greatbetrayals.”15 And massacres—added Danton—so that a “river of blood”16

would flow between the republicans and the emigres. From then on, a per-verse logic took possession of French society: the logic of fear, conspiracy,suspicion; in a word: the logic of a state of siege.

Of course it is senseless to talk of liberty, of democracy, of tolerance, of therights of the minorities in a society that sees itself as a “besieged fort.” Theonly objective becomes to destroy the enemies of the Revolution, whereverthey may be. And this can only be done by means of state terrorism. Therevolutionary movement cannot limit itself to exterminating the reactionaryforces but is condemned by the very logic of its situation to mistrust itself, tofear that “enemies of the people” are hidden within its very own breast, withthe result that revolutionary terror has to act on two fronts: externally, againstthe declared enemies, and internally, against its supposed enemies. Even thelukewarm constitute a threat. Any call for moderation is interpreted as a dan-gerous sign of surrender, an “objective betrayal.” “All the French people [de-clared Saint-Just at the height of the Terror] are urged to expose thesupporters of tyranny, conspiring foreigners, scoundrels, criminal plots againstthe rights of the people.”17 Even Danton—who had boasted that he had in-stigated the September massacres—was guillotined for the “wicked offence ofinvoking clemency.”18 Such an invocation “could only be a ruse of the internalenemy . . . most probably the result of a plot organized from without.”19

The huge contradiction between the principles proclaimed and the meth-ods adopted had incalculable consequences. On June 2, 1793, when the Jac-obins took over the Convention with a coup de main and “liquidated” theGirondist party, a supposedly liberal government was forced by circumstanceto tread upon every form of liberty and become overtly illiberal. Until then,the war had been between revolutionary France and the ancien regime. Now

Page 45: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

32 Revolutionary Apocalypse

it was also within the revolutionary movement itself. By suppressing the Gi-rondist party, essentially the Jacobin party denied the right of opposition tothe revolutionaries as well, starting a revolution within the Revolution, anti-thetic to the earlier 1789 uprising. This second revolution did not hesitate touse terror to eliminate its enemies, real or imaginary, and subjected Franceto a terrifying inquisition against everyone and everything.

2. As early as 1792, Danton explained why the Convention had been forcedto use terror in enforcing the principle of popular sovereignty: “The repub-licans are a minute minority; the rest of the population is attached to themonarchy; it is necessary to terrify the monarchists,”20 in other words, thevast majority of the French population. After the 1793 coup d’etat ( June 2),the modus operandi of the revolutionary government became even more par-adoxical: not only was it obliged to terrorize the monarchists but also thoserevolutionaries who refused to accept its program. Although the Jacobinsclaimed they were in favor of universal suffrage, they were nervous about thejudgment of the people and feared any form of opposition precisely becausethey themselves had taken possession of power with violence. Enforcementof the principle of popular sovereignty was postponed indefinitely and a dic-tatorship set up. This dictatorship behaved as if it were an “oligarchy of in-vaders that establishes and preserves itself in an occupied nation,”21 butnonetheless proclaims itself the one and only interpreter of the will of thenation. This is a truly singular paradox, which we find during the Puritandictatorship in Great Britain and later in Bolshevik Russia.

This point cannot be stressed enough: the Jacobin dictatorship was domi-nated by fear. For this very reason it had no other solution but to use terrorin order not to be overthrown by the masses on whose behalf it claimed togovern. It was dominated by fear because it was an illegitimate governmentin form and in substance: in form, because it came into being illegally; insubstance, because it did not have the support of the vast majority of theFrench population—the monarchists, the Girondists, the feuillants, the indif-ferent—and indeed was even perceived as an usurper. The only solution wouldhave been to hold universal suffrage elections and grant the right of opposi-tion. But this would have been suicide. The Jacobins therefore opted forrevolutionary extremism and used every means they had to retain power andsave their lives. They proclaimed that “it was the will of the people that Terrorshould be the norm,” until the complete triumph of the Revolution and theelimination of all the “enemies of the people.”22

But who were these enemies of the people? Practically every single Frenchcitizen. Besieged by fear, the 12 members of the Committee of Public Safetysaw conspirators everywhere. The only way to calm their terrified spirits wasto eliminate every imaginable enemy. “All factions must perish at the sametime,” declared Robespierre on March 15, 1794. The result: even the mostenergetic and determined enemies of the ancien regime were suspected of

Page 46: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 33

plotting against the people. After the “mass extermination of the counter-revolutionaries and of the naive corrupt,” 23 the guillotine immediately fell onthe heads of the revolutionaries themselves. In rapid succession, Danton, Des-moulins, Herbert, Roux, and so on were accused of being traitors andbeheaded.

Saint-Just knew that his party had given birth to a monstrosity—“it is aterrible thing to torment the people”24—but couldn’t stop the infernal circleof fear, the mechanism that forced the Jacobins to violate the principle ofpopular sovereignty, based on universal suffrage and the institutionalizationof the right of opposition. The Revolution had gone mad; it was uncontrol-lable. The Jacobins had to use terror to the bitter end, “tormenting the peo-ple” and suspecting everyone and everything.25 In other words, “overthrowingthe principle of democratic legitimacy and building on its ruins the dictator-ship of the Committee of Public Safety, as conceived by their terror: bloodyidol, insatiable Moloch to which they sacrificed the majority, rights and op-position, beheading, drowning, riddling thousands of victims with shots.”26

Yet, the Jacobins were not the bloodthirsty monsters described in the re-actionary pamphlets. They used terror because they were terrified; they ma-nipulated the masses, because they knew they did not have their support; theydestroyed every form of opposition, because they feared for their own lives.The Jacobin dictatorship was the typical revolutionary dictatorship, a nervousillegal regime, which could only survive by using terror and becoming a to-talitarian regime that enveloped and controlled the whole of society. It triedto gain the support it needed by mobilizing the nation against the “enemiesof the people” and drugging it with massive doses of ideology.

3. According to Ferrero, the 1793 golpe was “a revolution in the revolution”and antithetic to the 1789 Revolution. Terror was the inevitable consequenceof the state of siege of the revolutionary government in a society that hadbeen turned into a battlefield, with the denial of all legality.

Ferrero’s analysis is undoubtedly enlightening and useful for gaining a bet-ter understanding of the paradox of the French Revolution: a revolution thatcame into being to extend liberty and, according to the young Marx, endedup introducing the “most horrendous terrorism and a jurisdiction of suspicion.”27

Yet, Ferrero’s interpretation eclipses the ideological dimensions of the Jac-obin revolution. Ferrero considers the role of Rousseau’s theory of generalinterest in the dynamics of the French Revolution, but his excessive emphasison fear leads him to identify the totalitarian logic with lack of legitimacy. Hefails to perceive the huge difference between the Robespierre and the Na-poleon dictatorships. The former was undoubtedly the product of circum-stance; but, unlike the latter, it was also an almost paradigmatic expression ofa metapolitical conception of revolution: this was the apocalyptic event, bothterrible and sublime, that would put an end to an age of lies and corruption.

Our thesis is that the Jacobin experiment was the consequence of the com-

Page 47: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

34 Revolutionary Apocalypse

bination of the terrible crisis of anomy into which France precipitated im-mediately after the fall of the Bastille and a particular forma mentis developedby the passionate preachings of a group of penseurs in favor of the emanci-pation of workers and the regeneration of human nature. We must go backto the words of these men—Jean Meslier, Baron Lahontan, Abbaye Mably,Morelly, Dom Deschamps, Restif de la Bretonne, Linguet, and, naturally,Rousseau—if we are to get to the heart of the second revolution, which wasantithetic to the 1789 Revolution, for reasons that were, of course, of circum-stance but also, and especially, ideological.

We can accept Talmon’s definition of the Jacobin revolution as an “impro-visation,” as long as we remember that the philosophical foundations of this“improvisation” are to be sought in the political culture of eighteenth-centuryFrance. The catastrophic collapse of the ancien regime created a situationfavorable to the ideas of the philosophes. A new spiritual force—political gnos-ticism—made its appearance in the European arena, launching a historicalprocess that was to lead, by successive steps, to the institutionalization of theprofessional revolutionary,28 devoted body and soul to the sacred cause ofoverturning the overturned world.

We have already seen that both the Judeo-Christian and the Manicheantradition had never ceased “preparing” the European conscience to interprethistory along apocalyptic-palingenetic lines. According to a widely acceptedthesis, the French Revolution was the “outcome of the Enlightenment.” Itsspecific spirit was the consequence of the destructive critique of theeighteenth-century philosophes: a critique that spared nothing and no one andconsisted essentially in bringing the entire Western tradition before the “courtof Reason.”

Throughout the eighteenth century, European intelligentsia was driven bya powerful idea-force: “hope in a new kingdom: the kingdom of Reason.”29

Hence the “will to look at the future rather than at the past, to free oneselfof the past while making use of it.”30 A typically modern sensitivity developedfrom this new attitude. In traditional society, traditio is the undisputed normaagendi and the source of legitimation of institutions and authority. With thephilosophes, traditio comes under constant public scrutiny. The heritage of thepast is no longer accepted uncritically and “acquired ideas must be subject tomethodical doubt and even tested.”31 Traditio is no longer what legitimatesthe present, but it must itself be legitimated by an instance that is externaland recognizes no authority other than itself; an instance that presents itselfas the supreme court and even as the only orderer of reality. Hence the ten-dency of the philosophes to “fight in every field against the force of custom,against tradition and authority.”32 And especially against religion that—unlessthey are atheists—they intend to free from dogma and superstition and trans-form into a “natural religion” that is both tolerant and open. As a result,throughout the eighteenth century we witness the “progress of incredulity in

Page 48: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 35

cultivated circles.”33 And with the progress of incredulity, we also witness theprogressive delegitimation of established order and its official representatives.

Bossuet correctly claimed that the belief that kings “were God’s ministersand his lieutenants on earth”34 had been the pillar of the ancien regime. Itwas the right of sovereigns to command and the duty of subjects to obey.Admittedly there were limits: limits established by laws, by customs, and es-pecially by the presence of counter-powers. Which is why the so-called Eu-ropean absolutism was so different from Asian despotism, where subjects weretotally subordinate to the will of the sovereign. Nonetheless, rulers and po-litical institutions enjoyed an extremely “strong” legitimation35 that derivedfrom the fact that in European society the “temporal and the spiritual wereclosely associated.”36 Institutions were deconsecrated as soon as positive re-ligion came under the scrutiny of reason and was accused of harboring su-perstitions, dogmas, and hidden interests. Public opinion became increasinglyskeptical and accused those in command of usurping power. They began toassess men and things with criteria that had nothing to do with tradition. Inother words, since the absolutism of the monarchy relied on the organic al-liance between throne and altar, the “ideological defences of the ancien re-gime”37 were inevitably weakened by the devastating critique of Christianity.

The lower classes remained impervious to the message of enlightenment.In the absence of adequate means of communication and structures of politicalresocialization, such as modern political parties, the process of reappraisinginstitutions and ideas was inevitably restricted to the educated elites. More-over, it was generally felt that “the cultivation of Reason should be the pre-rogative of a sect of intellectuals, while society as a whole, people and rulers,should remain in the orthodox faith.”38 This produced an intolerable situa-tion. The elites considered unfounded the claim that in the absolute state,rulers ruled by divine right. The spirit of enlightenment had pervaded theirwhole being. They tended to “repudiate tradition and the past . . . in anattempt to rebuild society on entirely new foundations . . . with the soleguidance of Reason.”39 They supported a process of “permanent reform” andrepeated concepts such as: “No country in the world has a good code. Forthe obvious reason that laws are written progressively, in relation to time,place, events, needs, and so forth. They are written one after the other, bychance, irregularly, in the same way as cities are built.”40 “Many countrieshave laws which are more uniform, but there is probably no one country thatis not in need of a reform. And once this reform has been completed, it willbe necessary to have another . . . Once we succeed in having a law that istolerable, a war will come along and break down all the limits and ruin ev-erything; and we will have to start all over again like ants, whose home hasbeen destroyed.”41

Thus, criticism of tradition produced a kind of permanent state of disen-chanted reformism. There was no illusion that a definitive political orderwould ever be possible, which is why it is not possible to accept Hayek’s

Page 49: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

36 Revolutionary Apocalypse

theory42 that the philosophes of the Enlightenment, with their constructivisticrationalism, were the spiritual fathers of revolutionary totalitarianism. Al-though the philosophes conceived rational politics as a grandiose work of in-stitutional engineering, there is no evidence they ever accepted the idea thatis typical of all totalitarian regimes: that people could be forced to accept thedictates of an illuminated minority.43 Holbach’s recommendations confirmthis: “No, the wounds of the people will not be healed by means of dangerousshocks, not by means of battles, murders and useless crimes. The cure isalways more cruel than the evil they wish to heal. The voice of reason isneither seditious nor bloody. The reforms it proposes are gradual; but, forthis reason, all the safer.”44

Nor is it true—as is sometimes claimed—that, being dominated by a per-fectionist ideal, the Enlightenment generated consequences that it could nei-ther foresee or control. Perfectionism is absolutely foreign “to the methodicaland literary ideals of the philosophes, to the cult of common sense and reason-ableness, to the rejection of metaphysical claims, to scientific and lay inspi-ration, to the sense of history and human progress.”45 Certainly the philosophes’critique of religion deconsecrated the ancien regime and rendered it vulner-able to the attacks of public opinion. To the extent to which it delegitimatedinstitutions, it created the cultural conditions that Ferrero referred to as the“war between the invisible genii of the City.” But, essentially, this was fortu-itous. The original intention of the majority of representatives of the thirdestate was not to conduct a war against the thrones and Altars of Europe butto search for a reasonable compromise between the monarchic principle andthe liberal principle, so that the educated bourgeoisie—the officiers, the law-yers, the intellectuals, and the like—could participate in the political leader-ship of the country, according to the rules of a representative regime.46 Theirdesire was that France should achieve what Great Britain had achieved withthe Glorious Revolution: a constitutional monarchy, based on an accord be-tween the traditional ruling elites and the new elites who had proliferatedwith the advent of capitalism. In this sense—but only in this sense—theirswas a bourgeois revolution.47

4. For the reasons we have already seen, the moderate policy failed andleadership of the revolutionary movement passed into the hands of the Jac-obins. Their intellectual compass was the Social Contract,48 whose spirit wasso removed from the culture of enlightenment that Cassirer spoke of “abyssfrom Rousseau and his century.”49 In his fundamental essay on this topic,Cassirer stresses that the amazing originality of Rousseau’s philosophy lay inthe transposition of the issue of bad from the field of theodicy to that ofpolitics.50 To perform this transposition, Rousseau invalidated the Christianconception of man as a sinful being, dominated from birth by negative pas-sions. When asked, “Where does radical evil come from?” he answered with-

Page 50: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 37

out hesitation: “Man is good by nature and only our institutions have madehim bad.”51

This answer denies—and herein lies the “revolutionary” nature of theRousseau anthropology—that evil is due “to an obscure wish of God or to apresumed original sin of man” and places the blame “entirely on society.”52

Consequently, evil can be uprooted, if the “corruptness” of institutions iseliminated and suitable political steps taken to remodel society. Therefore“radical evil”—that is to say, the existence of a “depraved tendency” that isexpressed as “cold wickedness”53—is not part of human nature but is externaland can be banished from the world, providing society is completely rebuilt.The moral: “salvation”—liberation from evil—is no longer a religious issue;it is a political issue or, more precisely, an issue that (revolutionary) politics iscalled to solve; indeed, implicitly it is the calling of revolutionary politics toextirpate the roots of alienation.

Given these metaphysical premises, it should not be surprising that an in-tellectual and moral void soon developed between Rousseau and the philo-sophes. For the latter, institutions could be improved—although institutionalengineering would never completely expel evil—whereas Rousseau believedthat the “defects” of society could, and indeed should, be eliminated, by com-pletely revolutionizing what existed. In the very moment in which Rousseaurejected “modernity as such, considering it, in its globality, as the realm ofthe degeneration of man and of a non-authentic existence,”54 he glimpsed thepossibility of reconquering paradise lost. A purified “new world” could becreated, providing society was completely remodeled and humanity returnedto its original state of innocence.55

History became a process of progressive moral degradation, when privateproperty made its disastrous appearance on the scene, bringing “driving am-bition, hunger for money . . . competition and rivalry, as well as the underlyingintention of pursuing one’s own advantage at the expense of others”;56 and so“the most horrible state of war”57 became the normal condition of humankind.This was a state of war sanctioned by laws whose specific function was thatof “placing new obstacles in the way of the poor and procuring new powerfor the rich, irremediably destroying natural liberty, establishing the rule ofproperty and inequality and subjecting the whole of humanity to labour, slav-ery and misery to the advantage of the ambitious few.”58

It is easy to imagine the extent to which Rousseau’s vision of history clashedwith a capitalist society, based on private property and competition amongmen, driven exclusively by the rational calculation of personal gain. Capitalismwas labeled as a system contrary to nature in which perverse passions degradinghumanity triumphed each day. Capitalism must be substituted with a radicallydifferent system in which the rich no longer rule and exploit the poor.

We are but a step from communism.59 Admittedly, in the Draft Constitutionfor Corsica, Rousseau explicitly states that it is not his intention “to destroyprivate property completely, because that is impossible.”60 However, imme-

Page 51: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

38 Revolutionary Apocalypse

diately afterward he explains that his objective is “to confine it within verynarrow limits, to give it a measure and a rule, to curb and guide and channelit, so that it is constantly subordinate to the public good.” In this way, “publicproperty is great and strong and that of citizens shall remain, as far as possible,small and weak.”61 Rousseau also describes the power deriving from wealth as“illegal”62 and declares that the ideal would be for the State “to own everythingand for everyone to have only the portion of the common good that corre-sponds to his needs.”63

Although lamenting the fact that “a handful of men was bursting over withsuperfluous things and the hungry multitudes lacked the essential,”64 Rousseaunever actually concludes that the only way to eliminate evil is to abolish privateproperty and that communism therefore is the only form of social organiza-tion that can put an end to the rabid war in which civilization had precipitatedthe human family. However, Rousseau’s works contain all the ingredients forlegitimating a political program that was hostile to capitalism and its maininstitutions: the market, private property, representative democracy, liberty,privacy. They outline “a policy whereby, in accordance with the principles ofancient liberty, citizens are to be totally submissive because the nation is sov-ereign and the individual, slave, in order for the people to be free.”65 Rous-seau’s ideal democracy is a system in which “sovereign power will have noneed to provide its subjects with guarantees, because it will be impossible forthe body to want to harm all its limbs.”66 It will be dominated by the generalwill—that is to say, by the will based on the principles of morality, not to beconfused with the “will of all,” the mere sum of individual wills and for thatreason selfish—that “is always strong and tends always toward public good”67

and is hostile to “partial societies” and ready, where necessary, to force mento free themselves from their “unnatural” egoism. Hence, Rousseau’s gran-diose program for the refoundation of social order: “He who dares to takethe initiative to found a nation must feel he is capable of changing, so tospeak, human nature; he must be capable of transforming every individual, initself a perfect and isolated whole, into part of a greater whole, from whichthis individual in some way draws life and being; to change the constitutionof man to strengthen it; to substitute the physical and independent existencewe have all received from nature with a partial and moral existence. In short,he will remove from man the forces which are his own strength in order togive him other forces that are foreign to him and which he cannot use with-out the help of others. The more the natural forces are dead and eliminated,the greater and more lasting will be the acquired forces and the more insti-tutions will be solid and perfect. In this way, once every citizen is nothing andcan nothing, other than through all the others, and once the force acquiredfrom the whole is equal or superior to the sum of natural forces of all indi-viduals, then it can be said that legislation has reached the highest degree ofperfection.”68

Rousseau’s democracy is an illiberal democracy or, as de Jouvenel and Tal-

Page 52: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 39

mon call it, a “totalitarian” democracy,69 similar to the democracy of Sparta,absolutely contrary to any vestige of individuality and for this precise reasonconsidered by Rousseau preferable to the democracy of Athens, too close tomodern democracy.

The famous querelle on Sparta and Athens that divided French intellectualsthroughout the eighteenth century70 is useful for understanding the reasonsthat led the Great Revolution to split into two parts. These reasons werephilosophical as much as they were of circumstance. In that querelle, Athenssymbolized the bourgeois society, focusing on the market and modern liberty,as illustrated by Constant in what still remains the most lucid manifesto ofpossessive individualism.71 Those—like Rousseau or Mably—in favor ofSparta had in mind an antiindividualistic society driven by solidarity and pas-sion for the egalitarian ideal.

It was precisely this second ideal that inspired the Jacobins. Far from beingthe interpreters of the class interests of the economic bourgeoisie, as claimedby the Marxist vulgata, the Jacobins tried to destroy the empire of wealth andsuffocate possessive-competitive individualism. This is more than evident inthe words used by Dutard to describe the bitter conflict that opposed theMountain to the Gironde: “The Brissotiens want to establish an aristocracyof the rich, of merchants and proprietors, and refuse to see that these menare the scourge of humanity, that they only think of themselves, only live forthemselves and are ever ready to sacrifice all to their egoism and ambition. . . It is necessary to hold these greedy depraved men back . . . It is necessaryto place some barrier in their path.”72

5. Marxist historians would have us believe that the French Revolution wasa “necessary step in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.”73 By grantingmaximum freedom of action to individual enterprise, they claim that theFrench Revolution “gave impulse” to production and “accelerated the con-centration of enterprises,”74 thus permitting the bourgeoisie to triumph. Afterthe publication of Jean Jaures’s Storia socialista, they had to acknowledge thatfor some reason the French Revolution had been different from the GloriousRevolution and the American Revolution, but they chose the easy explanation:the former two revolutions had been “bourgeois and conservative,” whereasthe latter had been “largely bourgeois and democratic.”75

In fact, things were not as the Marxist historians imagined them to be atall. The second French Revolution—the one that started with the coup de mainof June 2, 1793—was explicitly antibourgeois from every point of view: socialcomposition, organization, ideology, and objectives. If the Jacobins had beensuccessful, French capitalism would have met with an untimely death.76

At this point, it must be said that following publication of Alfred Cobban’sessay The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, not even the capitalist-bourgeois nature of the 1789 Revolution can be taken for granted. Cobbanreveals, embarrassingly so for the Marxist interpretation of the Great Revo-

Page 53: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

40 Revolutionary Apocalypse

lution, that “the revolutionary bourgeoisie was mainly composed of the de-clining class of officiers, of men of law and other professionals and not byrepresentatives of trade and industry,”77 a point also particularly stressed byBurke and Saint-Simon78 to the extent that even an orthodox Marxist such asAlbert Soboul is forced to acknowledge that the “engine of the bourgeoisrevolutions can be traced back to the growth of small and medium producers,artisans and independent peasants; to the small and medium bourgeoisie,therefore, and not to the upper middle class, that had more or less coalescedwith the power of the absolutists, the state, the financiers, big traders, factoryowners, entrepreneurs etc.”79

Soboul adds: “In the bourgeois revolution, the fundamental class conflictexists between the democracy of the small and medium merchant producersand free farmers, on the one side, and the oligarchy of large feudal landowners,allies of the haute bourgeoisie, and of the monopolistic and privileged holdersof commercial capital, on the other.”80 To define the French Revolution, asMarxists generally do, as a conflict between a rising class—the entrepreneurialbourgeoisie—and a declining class—the feudal nobility—means to violate thetruth, to make it coincide at all costs with the Marxist philosophy of the historyof Marx.81 A fortiori it is absolutely arbitrary to see the Terror as the peak ofthe bourgeois revolution and the tool used by the entrepreneurial class toconsolidate its political power.82

To capture the absurdity of this interpretation of the Jacobin revolution,we need only remember that in his Carnets, Robespierre, mindful of the lessonof the “divine Jean-Jacques,” when asked “Where does Evil come from?”answered “From the bourgeois,”83 and that when the factions were beingannihilated in order to “purge the fatherland of its declared enemies,”84 Saint-Just stated that the objective of Terror was to “overturn the empire ofwealth.”85 This is certainly close to communism, so much so that one yearafter the Thermidor reaction—with which the bourgeois society freed itselffrom a regime that wanted “to sacrifice it to ancient political life”86—Babeufexpressed all his admiration for Robespierre’s “regenerating ideas”87 and pro-claimed loud and clear that it was necessary to suppress private property, tomaterialize the ideal of “pure equality,” and to purify men, corrupted by“greed and ambition.”88

The ideal of a completely socialist economy was foreign to the Jacobins.Nonetheless they “created an anti-capitalist dynamic and a system of socialrules that, throughout their enforcement, violently stifled growth, profit andthe accumulation of capital.”89 This should not come as too great a surprise,if we recall that throughout the eighteenth century the prevailing culture wasquite the opposite to the culture of the Enlightenment: being animated by astrong millenarian pathos, it was radically opposed to the present in its everyform.90

The dual nature of the Great Revolution is to be interpreted in the lightof the profound dualism that dominated—and still dominates—Western civ-

Page 54: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 41

ilization. For almost 2,000 years this civilization was torn between two in-stances: “Greek rationalism and Judaeo Israeli Messianism.”91 The origins ofthe spirit of the Enlightenment are to be sought in the former: that is to say,the culture of the secular city. In politics, this found its most typical expressionin liberal democracy and in the promise of social democracy; the origins ofthe latter are to be sought in a series of avatars, the revolutionary spirit thattends to transcend, to deny and to annihilate the existing order in view of atotally new order of things.

6. So the French Revolution was a dual revolution. It was a war of the“society of citizens” against the “society of subjects,” but it was also a warbetween two irreconcilable models of “society of citizens.” To the purely for-mal conception of equality, as expressed in the Le Chapelier law, by which“the imperialism of the bourgeois contract [had been extended] to the worldof labour,”92 the Jacobins opposed a conception of substance based on thefollowing reasoning. If the declaration of rights is not to be a farce for thepoor who are the vast majority of the population, the state must be organizedin such a way as to guarantee every citizen a supply of material goods, a job,and a certain level of education.93 On this condition only would liberationfrom absolutism mean liberation of the entire population, and not of oneparticular class, the plutocratic bourgeoisie, or in any event of the group ofsocial classes in a position to be competitive.94

Undoubtedly with Jacobinism we witness a “passage from a juridical andpolitical equality to an economic equality, a passage from equality of rights toequality of institutions.”95 In other words, the passage from a liberal concep-tion of justice, as free competition between citizens-proprietors, to a socialistconception—or at least a protosocialist—conception of justice, as substantialequality, which implies a new idea of the functions of the state. The role ofthe state is not limited to guaranteeing fair competition but intervenes toadjust the economic machinery, to ensure that every member of the com-munity enjoys citizenship rights. Hence the theorization of “a real right towork which society owes to all its members.”96

This in itself makes the Jacobins the spiritual fathers of modern democ-racy—based on universal citizenship rights (political, economic, and social)—and the welfare state. But the Jacobins were also the spiritual fathers of Bol-shevism. According to Albert Mathiez, Lenin was “a Robespierre who wassuccessful.” Indeed, this is a fitting definition that throws a clarifying light onthe true significance of the Jacobin movement, which was absolutely—thiscan never be stressed enough—anticapitalist and antibourgeois. It is true thatRobespierre, although acknowledging that “the extreme disproportion of for-tunes was the source of many evils and many crimes,” considered “equality ofpossessions . . . a chimera”97 and that he never placed the complete nation-alization of means of production on his revolutionary agenda. But it is equallytrue that Robespierre developed a theory of private property, as a social in-

Page 55: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

42 Revolutionary Apocalypse

stitution subordinate to the will of the legislator, that was in marked contrastwith the theory contained in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man andof the Citizen, whereby property was “an unviolable and sacred right.”98

It goes without saying that, if the Jacobins had limited themselves to op-posing a conception of substance to the formal conception of equality, wecould not consider them the spiritual fathers of Bolshevism. The fact is theywent the next step, which was to have immense consequences: in order toestablish “true liberty,” they declared that it was necessary to establish, albeitfor a limited period of time, a “despotism of liberty”99 and adopt the password“No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”100 The interests of the community,they claimed, must always prevail over the interests of the individual, implic-itly criminalizing the private sphere as such. And so the Jacobins embarkedupon totalitarian democracy. Their revolution was not an egalitarian adjust-ment of the liberal revolution but it became a revolution in the revolution aimedat the creation of a compact, closed, monolithic society, in which the individ-ual will would mystically amalgamate with Rousseau’s general will “ever con-stant, unalterable and pure”101 and “ever in favour of the most advantageoussolution for public interest.”102 In other words, when it came to decidingbetween Sparta and Athens, the Jacobins chose Sparta103 and in so doing wentagainst the spirit of modern civilization.

In addition to this, the Jacobins opposed a catastrophic-palingenetic con-cept of revolution to the enlightened concept of politics, as a technique forsettling the conflicts that inevitably arise in society by institutionalizing com-promise. With their revolutionary call to arms, Robespierre and Saint-Justintended to achieve the metastatic transfiguration of human nature and theregeneration of the political corps. “First great catastrophes [announcedSaint-Just in 1793] then universal happiness.”104 Equally catastrophic and pal-ingenetic was the point of view expressed by an obscure Jacobin in 1792:“Major crises are necessary to purify an organism infected by gangrene; it isnecessary to chop off limbs to save the body.” And, a year and a half later—“while heads were dropping like tiles”105—Fouquier-Tinville, public prose-cutor of the revolutionary Tribunal, in favor of permanent purge within theJacobin party, declared, “If we purge ourselves, it is to have the right to purgeFrance. We will leave no foreign body in the Republic: the enemies of libertymust tremble because the club is raised; the Convention will use it. Our en-emies are not as numerous as they would have us believe; soon they will berevealed and will appear on the theatre of the guillotine. They say we wantto destroy the Convention; no, it will remain intact; but we intend pruningthe dead branches of this great tree. The important provisions taken by usresemble the gusts of wind that make the rotten fruit fall from the tree andleave the good fruit on the tree; after, you will be able to pick the ones leftand they will be big, ripe and juicy; they will bring life to the Republic. Whatcare I that there be many branches, if they are rotten. It would be better there

Page 56: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 43

were fewer but green and vigorous.”106 Carrier was less eloquent: “We willmake a cemetery of France, rather than not re-generate it our way.”107

Clearly there was nothing liberal about this revolution, which was insteada metapolitical project, where revolutionary violence is used as a tool of puri-fication and regeneration of spirits contaminated by egoism and the acquisitivespirit. Saint-Just described it in these terms: “It is our duty to create an orderof things that is such as to create a universal inclination toward good.”108

Crane Brinton correctly states that the distinguishing feature of the Jacobinrevolution is the “attempt to achieve heaven on earth.”109 Equally correct isTalmon’s definition of Jacobinism as a political Messianism that aspired to createa “pre-ordered, harmonious, perfect order of things towards which men wouldbe irresistibly driven and which they must per force achieve.”110 Earlier, Car-lyle had interpreted the Jacobin revolution as “the supreme effort, after eigh-teen centuries of preparation, to realize the Christian Religion” according tothe principles expressed by the “Fifth and new Evangelist, Jean-Jacques, urg-ing each and everyone to amend the perverse existence of the entire world.”111

A typically gnostic-Manichean Weltanschauung underlies the palingeneticproject of the Jacobins. The basic idea is that the world exudes infinite horrorsfrom every pore and that these render the human condition intolerable. Butsuch horrors—poverty, violence, oppression, exploitation, selfishness, and soforth—are by no means physiological. They are the consequence of an event,both mysterious and decisive, that changed the natural order of things andperverted relations between men, as well as their feelings.112 Yet, salvation ispossible. The solution is to overturn the overturned world, purge society,restore human nature to its natural state, the state it was in before it wascorrupted by institutions, sanctioning lust for power and wealth. In a word,the solution is to light the revolutionary fire in order to purify the city andput the scandal of evil to an end, once and for all.

The consequence: man should not wait for salvation to come from God.He must take action and use all his physical and moral energy to save himself;he must abandon himself to the cause of equality and become a permanentmilitant revolutionary. The reason is that (revolutionary) policy is a soterio-logical practice that provides a global answer to “the cursed questions” thatsuffocate human nature. Thus it can be said that universal happiness dependson the success of the revolutionary project that, in any event, is written in the“code of nature” and will proceed until virtue reigns sovereign in every fieldand every corner of the Earth.

The problem is that redemption from radical evil is no easy matter, sincethe enemies of virtue hide everywhere, among the nobility and the clergy, asis to be expected, but also among the “partisans of the order of egoism, almostall disciples of Voltaire and of the encyclopaediaists.”113 Such characters haveno dignity since—as Lanot explained during the Terror—“those who are notJacobins are in no way virtuous.”114 The only solution is to annihilate them,so that the ideal of a “virtuous society” can gain substance, which implies that

Page 57: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

44 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the revolution must conduct a permanent war against the enemies of equality,until it has successfully re-made man un-made by history. This is an extremelydifficult undertaking, since the “virtuous” are a tiny minority, as the masseshave been intoxicated by centuries of ignorance and slavery and can no longerperceive that their interests and rights are daily trodden upon by the rich andthe powerful. This is why they need someone to stimulate their awareness,“inflaming them, enlightening them . . . and exalting the republican enthu-siasm, with every means.”115 The person who leads them toward the realm ofvirtue must be one of the “pure,” enlightened by revolutionary gnosis, andable to interpret the confused desire of emancipation of the victims of ex-ploitation and translate it in a precise strategy. Rousseau expressed this thesisvery clearly when he wrote: “How can a blind multitude, who often does notknow what it wants, because it rarely knows what is good for it, introducewithout help such a great, such a difficult undertaking, as a legislative system?People always want good but are not always able to see it alone. The generalwill is always honest but the judgement guiding it is not always enlightened.So it is necessary to show them objects, sometimes as they are, others as theyshould be, show them the right path to follow, protect them from the seduc-tion of particular desires, bring places and times to their eyes, offset the at-traction of immediate, concrete advantage with the danger of far-off, obscureevils. Individuals see the good they do not desire, the community wants thegood it does not see. All have an equal need of guidance. The former mustbe forced to make their will comply with reason; the latter must be taughtwhat it wants.”116

Thus the revolutionary elite, acting on the basis of the diagnosis-therapyof the evils of the world contained in the “true philosophy,” comes to take onthe typical role of the Paraclete in gnostic tradition: it alone knows what isfor the good of the city and how to achieve it; it must impose the general willon individual interests and force individuals to free themselves of their egoism;that is: institute the despotism of Virtue until men have not been regenerated.

The inevitable consequence is that “individuals as such are demonized andcriminalised,”117 society is conceived as an immense battlefield in which thereis total war “between the chosen and the damned”118 “in that there exist onlytwo factions, the faction of the corrupt and the faction of the virtuous.”119

The moral asymmetry between the two is absolute since—as Saint-Just wasto declare on April 14, 1794—“Upon the victory of the “virtuous” dependsthe passage from bad to good, from corruption to integrity.”120 So “the voiceof reason”—thus goes Marat’s sinister theorem—“can but command the cruelnecessity of massacring [the enemies of the revolution].”121 No less sinisterSaint-Just’s declarations of war against the “enemies of the people”: “Theincorrigible supporters of tyranny dream of nothing other than our defeat,and every day they create new enemies of liberty . . . Purge therefore thecountry of its declared enemy . . . as long as the enemy of liberty still breathes,there can be no hope in prosperity. You must punish not only traitors but also

Page 58: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 45

the indifferent; you must punish whoever in the Republic is passive and doesnothing for it; because following the expression of the will of the Frenchpeople, anything that goes against such will is outside the sovereign body andeverything that is outside the sovereign body is an enemy . . . those who cannotbe ruled with justice must be ruled with iron; tyrants must be oppressed.”122

In this situation, the only way for the Revolution to achieve its eschatolog-ical objective—“the passage from bad to good”—is clearly through the ho-locaust of its enemies, including those who are “lukewarm.”123 Death must be“bureaucratized” in order for it “to achieve its programme of virtue”: deathbecomes an “anonymous and generic death” to the point that it “embraces 90per cent of the male population over the age of fourteen.”124 There is noalternative to a state of permanent terror under the control of the “virtuousstate” until original perfection has been restored.125 Robespierre’s famous Re-port to the Convention of December 25, 1793, contains these crude words:“The revolution is a war of liberty against its enemies . . . The revolutionaryGovernment must act extraordinarily, precisely because it finds itself in a stateof war. In times of peace the force of popular government is Virtue; in timesof revolution, it is at the same time Virtue and Terror. Without virtue, Terroris deadly; without Terror, Virtue is impotent. Terror is none other than an im-mediate severe and inflexible justice. It is therefore an emanation of Virtue. It is farless a contingent principle than the consequence of the general principle ofdemocracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the country . . . the Gov-ernment of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”126

7. This concept of redemption of humanity requires a society organized asif it were a militarized convent. And, in effect, in the virtuous state created bythe Jacobins during the Terror “no intermediate autonomy was to restrain theimpulse from the centre”127 and no form of liberty was envisaged for citizens.They had to march in compact lines and identify themselves completely withthe objectives and values of the revolution.128 And they were obliged to do so,not only—as is often said—because there was a war to win, but also becausethe Jacobin ideology required “militarizing” the political battle, because itconceived revolution as the last holy war against the perverse powers con-spiring against human happiness, in order to establish “the rule of Reason.”129

“We [Robespierre had proclaimed on February 5, 1794] wish to realise thepromises of Nature, the fate of humanity, the promises of philosophy, andabsolve Providence from the long reign of crime and tyranny.”130 This was anunequivocal way of saying that the Revolution undertook to achieve in thisworld what Christianity promised to achieve in the next: to modify the on-tological status of reality and regenerate human nature.131

In a sense, the Jacobins had no alternative: their revolution “had to showthat its denial of an arbitrary religion, favouring the chosen few, was the affir-mation of a religion of justice the same for all citizens; that its denial of privilegedproperty was the affirmation of non-privileged property extended to all.”132 In other

Page 59: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

46 Revolutionary Apocalypse

words, in the conscience of the people, it had to present itself as the functionalequivalent of Christianity.133 Hence the cult of the Supreme Being; that is, ofdivinized humanity134—the new avatar of the gnostic myth of savior-saved—whose logical consequence was the claim of the Committee of Public Safetyto be “Church and Inquisition,”135 according to the typically totalitarian the-orem that “everything that was immoral was impolitic and everything thattended to corrupt was counter-revolutionary.”136 The Jacobins appointedthemselves the sacred custodians of the revolutionary verb—and in factProudhon referred to them as “the Jesuits of the revolution”—and acted withthe deliberate intention of destroying the institutions of pluralism in order tocreate a compact, homogeneous system, driven by a millenarian faith andorganized according to the principle of absolute centralization.

The Jacobin revolution had devastating consequences on the bourgeoisie.A major policy of the Terror had been the introduction of a completely neweconomic system. This involved a systematic limitation of the laws of themarket and the political-administrative management of processes of produc-tion and distribution. This new economic system—as documented by Guerin,Palmer, Aftalion, and Feher—was essentially a forerunner, albeit still imper-fect, of the future command economies.

“Opulence [stated Saint-Just] is an infamy.”137 The Jacobins were intimatelyconvinced that the only way to eliminate excessive wealth from society andguarantee means of subsistence to all workers was to eliminate competition inallocating the goods produced by the community. As its first formal act, thedictatorship of the Mountain passed a law, fixing maximum prices and salaries(September 11, 1793). This law was greeted by the sansculottes as a great victoryfor the needy masses. The results were disappointing: flour and bread disap-peared from the shops altogether and ended up on the black market because“the maximum price established was lower than the cost of production.”138 Invain, Albitte warned his comrades in arms to remember that “badly preparedgood does bad.”139 The Convention blamed the shortages on the conspiracy“of the counter-revolutionaries of the rich and of the merchant aristocracy,whose egoism it intended to punish.”140 It radicalized its economic policy, ratherthan correct it, and insisted that all essential foodstuffs be sold at the officialprices, established arbitrarily by the Convention. Moreover, to “encourage”compliance with the law, it recruited a “revolutionary army” whose specificfunction was to combat monopolies and the merchant aristocracy.

When the shortage of goods became increasingly dramatic and inflation hitthe urban proletariat, the Convention—pressured by the sansculottes, whowanted “to direct the Terror against commercial capital”141—found no bettersolution than to use the method of confiscation on the basis of the principle—formulated explicitly by Barere—that “all the products of the land are stateproperty and all property belongs to the State.”142 As a result, the Frencheconomy became a typical war economy: the revolutionary leaders “controlledthe near totality of production and distribution.”143

Page 60: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 47

The huge contradiction that was to emerge was repeated in all the revo-lutionary regimes of the twentieth century: the titanic effort of achievingequality via economic dirigisme forced the Committee of Public Safety to setup a “huge bureaucracy that invaded all and regulated all”;144 in the end, thissuffocated both democracy and production. Corruption thrived in the re-gional government departments because the officers responsible for confis-cations themselves hoarded the produce. Finally, the system produced theexact opposite of what Robespierre and Saint-Just had tirelessly advocated.

On the other hand, economic dirigisme offered many advantages to theJacobin party: first and foremost, its clubs became an organic part of stateadministration. “Thousands of plebeaians set themselves up in the many of-fices of revolutionary administration, mainly in the department of war andthe Interior, in supplies and in the various repressive corps etc. At the bottomof the scale, after September 12, 1793, the revolutionary committees had morethan 500,000 salaried members.”145 Despite its hyperdemocratic ideologicalformula, it was precisely due to its all pervasive nationalization that the rev-olutionary government was able to create that social support without whichit could not have survived without committing suicide. The dictatorship of aparty, exercised in favor of those elements of the lower intellectual middleclass, had “irremissibly linked their fate to that of the Revolution.”146

Of course, only a small minority of the Jacobin party were intellectuals.But—as confirmed by the data provided by Crane Brinton—at the top of theorganizational pyramid, the number of intellectuals increased.147 Its leaderswere composed of a few “deserters of the bourgeoisie”148—as Daniel Guerincalls them: in fact they were lawyers without clients, literati without a public—united above all by ideological and moral ties and by a gnostic pathos wherebythey considered themselves the conscious avant-garde of the French people,indeed of humanity, degraded by centuries of corruption and slavery. Theirstherefore was the typical revolution of “declassed” intellectuals. They electedthemselves “tribunes of the people” and became leaders of the protest move-ment against the ancien regime by manipulating public opinion in a mannerthat later was to be considered “exemplary.” They had been able to do sobecause they had learned to perfect the art of revolution already used by thePuritans and above all because of what Philip Selznick has called the “orga-nizational weapon.”149

Prior to the 1793 Revolution, the Jacobins already had an efficient electoralmechanism that enveloped all French society in a thick network of clubs inwhich no fewer than half a million members were indoctrinated and guidedby means of a system of circular letters sent out from the main central club.After they took over power, the Jacobins transformed the local clubs into“simple, passive wheels of the mechanism of the dictatorship.”150 The orga-nization took on the connotations of a proper army, conducting an ideologicalwar. Anyone not identifying with the Jacobin vision of the world was eo ipsoin favor of corruption and egoism and therefore an enemy to be exterminated.

Page 61: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

48 Revolutionary Apocalypse

In concrete, the clubs operated like “artificial cells” whose specific functionwas to isolate the militants culturally, until they were psychologically imper-vious to the messages of national society and, closed in their intellectual andmoral certitude, became the agitprop of the Jacobin party, driven by an intensemissionary zeal. The clubs were agencies of political resocialization that useda method of indoctrination to forge homo ideologicus and train him to be thegnostic activist of the permanent revolution, devoted body and soul to thesacred cause of destruction of what existed and the edification of the realm ofvirtue.151

Thanks to this particularly complex and tentacular organization—“machin-ery” as Francois Furet calls it152—the Jacobins were able to “penetrate thedisorganised French society and reintegrate the nation just when the old in-stitutions and social relations were falling apart.”153 In other words, they filleda void of power that had been generated by the sudden collapse of the ancienregime and mobilized the entire nation in the war that opposed revolutionaryFrance to the whole of Europe by “abolishing in practice any distinctionbetween soldier and citizen.”154

This may have saved the Revolution,155 but it changed its historical signif-icance. Civil society was not emancipated but became a slave to a tyrannical,ideological power that aspired to restore ancient liberty on the ruins of mod-ern liberty. And for this precise reason, after 14 months of “despotism ofliberty”—during which no Frenchman could live a normal life, free of fear—civil society rebelled against the ideocratic regime that had tried to force it tocomply with its ideal of collectivistic utopia and reconquered its freedom.Admittedly, the Thermidor reaction substituted a red terror with a whiteterror, but it dismantled the bureaucratic economy that was starving Franceand restored, albeit partially,156 the essential conditions for the Industrial Rev-olution: protection of private property and/or profit and free competition,albeit under the cloak of an authoritarian political regime.157

Thus, the Jacobin’s titanic enterprise of materializing Rousseau’s “generalwill” by uprooting every trace of bourgeois individualism ended in failure.Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their party fell because they had “exchanged arealistically democratic, ancient community, whose foundations were based onreal slavery with the modern representative spiritualistically democratic State basedon the emancipated slavery of civil society. What a huge illusion to be forced torecognise and sanction in the rights of man, modern civil society, the societyof industry, of general competition, of the free pursuit of private interests, ofanarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality, alienated from itself, and towant, at the same time, to annul in individuals the vital expression of this societyand model its political head in an ancient manner!”158

The Jacobins had tried to stop and overturn the spontaneous developmentof France, by destroying capitalism, a civil independent society, and modernliberty, and substituting the rule of the bourgeoisie with that of ideocraticbureaucracy. In short, they tried to substitute an “open society” with a “closed

Page 62: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 49

society,” liberalism with totalitarianism. It is for this very reason that theirexperiment inspired all the revolutionary movements of our time, in conflictwith modern civilization and its essential values.

Strictly speaking, the history of the revolutions of the twentieth century issimply a repeat of Jacobinism, the development of the project to “create anidentity between civil society and State, to unify by means of a dictatorshipthe elements constituting the State in an organic and broader sense (State assuch and civil society) in a desperate attempt to control the life of the nationand the people.159

NOTES

1. Quoted from E. Schmitt, Introduccion a la historia de la Revolucion francesa (Ma-drid: Catedra, 1980), p. 14.

2. Essentially, Francois Furet and Denis Richet represent Ferrero’s interpretation,stressing in particular the derapage of the Revolution (La Revolution francaise [Paris:Hachette, 1965]). It is surprising that Ferrero is only cited very marginally in theirwork and that the fear aspect is hardly touched.

3. G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi (Milan: SugarCo, 1986), pp. 15–16. It isinteresting that in his “comparative remarks” Alessandro Manzoni should have alreadyidentified with considerable precision the paradoxical effects of the ’89 Revolution:“oppression of the country, in the name of liberty; and the extreme difficulty of sub-stituting a Government in ruins with another Government endowed, naturally, withthe quality of being lasting” (Storia incompiuta della Rivoluzione francese [Milan: Bom-piani, 1985], p. 21).

4. Saint-Just was very aware of the paradoxical situation of the revolutionaries:“The force of things perhaps leads us to results which we never anticipated” (quotedfrom F. Furet and D. Richet, La Revolution francaise, p. 206). In other words, he sawwhat the reactionary De Maistre was to express three years later with his famousformula: “The revolution guides men more than men guide it” (Considerations sur laFrance [Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1988], p. 18).

5. W. Godwin, “Ricerca sulla giustizia politica e sull’influenza sulla morale e sullafelicita,” in G. M. Bravo, ed., Gli anarchici, vol. 1 (Turin: UTET, 1971), p. 202.

6. B. Constant, Conquista e usurpazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1983).7. G. Lefebvre, La Grande Paura del 1789 (Milan: Einaudi, 1973).8. H. Methivier, La fin de l’Ancien Regime (Paris: PUF, 1989), p. 100. The impact

on the French was so strong that it was common to say about someone born on the“Day of Fear” that he was born on the day of the taking of the Bastille (Cabanes e L.Nass, La nevrose revolutionnaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1924), p. 23.

9. Sieyes gave theoretical dignity to this feeling of exasperation: “If the privilegedorder were eliminated, the nation would not be something less but something more.What is the third state today? Everything, but an everything oppressed and hindered.What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything freeand flourishing . . . The worst organised of all states would be the one in which notonly individuals, but a whole class of citizens, took upon themselves the merit ofremaining immobile in the midst of general animation while consuming the best part

Page 63: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

50 Revolutionary Apocalypse

of the product, for which it had done nothing to contribute to its creation. Withoutdoubt such a class is for its ‘doing nothing’, cut off from the nation.” (What Is the ThirdEstate? [London: Pall Mall Press, 1963.])

10. G. Ferrero, Potere (Milan: SugarCo, 1981), pp. 93–94.11. G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, pp. 39–40.12. Martial Gueroult writes: “Before 1789 the practical reason was reformist. This

explains why the revolution came as a complete surprise, as an immense event thatsurprised its contemporaries; it was certainly not something of the spirit . . . The mindapproaches the revolution without having a clear idea of what it will achieve” (quotedfrom A. Gerard, La Rivoluzione francese [Mursia: Milan, 1972], p. 12). Michel Vovellepresents an identical thesis: “For most of the actors, the Revolution came as a surprisedespite the American precedent” (Ideologies and Mentalities [Cambridge: Polity, 1990]).

13. R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europeanand America 1760–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964).

14. Quoted from G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, p. 75.15. Quoted from H. Guillemin, Robespierre politico e mistico (Milan: Garzanti, 1989),

p. 87.16. N. Hampson, Danton (London: Duckworth, 1978).17. L.A.L de Saint-Just, Terrore e liberta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966), p. 207.18. N. Hampson, Danton.19. C. Barbagallo, Due rivoluzioni (Milan: Garzanti, 1945), p. 188.20. Quoted from G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, p. 88.21. H. Taine, Le origini della Francia contemporanea, vol. 4 (Milan: Treves, 1930),

p. 55.22. Danton spoke these words just a few months before being sentenced to death

for betraying the revolution.23. P. Kropotkin, The Great Revolution 1789–1793 (London: Elephant, 1986).24. H. Guillemin, Robespierre, p. 305.25. The infernal logic of suspicion was so prevalent that even the members of the

Committee of Public Safety mistrusted each other. On several occasions, Carnot ac-cused Robespierre and Saint-Just of wanting to set up a dictatorship; Robespierreretaliated, hissing “I’ll be there, waiting for your first defeat.” On his part, one dayBillaud-Varenne shouted to Robespierre: “You’re a counter-revolutionary.” Tainewrites, “The fatal figure that looms before them, the Fury for which they reigned,silently pronounced its oracle and every heart heard it: Whoever among us does notwish to be murderer is a conspirator and a counter-revolutionary” (Le origini dellaFrancia contemporanea, vol. 4, p. 228).

26. G. Ferrero, Potere, p. 212. Ferrero was probably inspired by what Desmoulinswrote against the excesses of the Terror: “Love you then this blood-thirsty goddesswhose high priests demand that a temple be built with the bones of three millioncitizens as in Mexico and repeat unceasingly to the Jacobins, to the Commune, to therevolutionaries, the words of the priestesses of Montezuma: The Gods are thirsty”(quoted in A. France, Gli Dei hanno sete [Milan: Garzanti, 1967]).

27. K. Marx, “Osservazioni sulle recenti istruzioni per la censura in Prussia,” in K.Marx and F. Engels, Opere Complete, vol. 1 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 116.

28. It is interesting that in his Carnets, Robespierre explains very clearly that it isnecessary to institutionalize the revolution, to make it permanent, creating a body of

Page 64: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 51

consecrated (leaders)” (see J. Ratinaud, Robespierre [Milan: Mondadori, 1963],pp. 109–110).

29. B. Groethuysen, La filosofia della Rivoluzione francese (Milan: Il Saggiatore,1967), p. 237.

30. P. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).31. J. Godechot, Le rivoluzioni (Milan: Mursia, 1975), p. 92.32. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).33. D. Mornet, Le origini intellettuali della Rivoluzione francese (Milan: Jaca Book,

1982), p. 71.34. Quoted from P. Goubert, The Ancien Regime: French Society 1600–1750 (Lon-

don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).35. On the concept of “strong” legitimation, see my essay, “La legittimazione del

Potere nella Citta secolare,” in G. Pecora, ed., Potere politico e legittimazione (Milan:SugarCo, 1987).

36. D. Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1998).

37. G. Rude, Revolutionary Europe 1783–1815 (London: Fontana, 1964).38. E. Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1975), pp. 29–30.39. A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, translated by Stuart

Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).40. Voltaire, Dizionario filosofico (Milan: Mondadori, 1962), p. 414 and 418.41. Voltaire, Saggio sui costumi e lo spirito delle nazioni, vol. 4 (Novara: De Agostini,

1967), p. 531.42. F. A. Hayek, The Counter Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason

(New York: Free Press, 1964) and New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and theHistory of Ideas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

43. Quoted from E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1963).

44. See J. Sole, La Revolution en questions (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 29.45. W. Bernardi, Utopia e socialismo nel ’700 francese (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), p. 4.46. On this point, see Domenico Settembrini’s excellent essay “Rivoluzione fran-

cese: il mito e la realta,” in Mondoperaio, no. 7 (1989).47. See F. Chabod, Alle origini della Rivoluzione francese (Florence: Passigli, 1990).48. The Social Contract had such a strong influence on the Jacobins that Edgard

Quinet wrote that “Rousseau fitted the Revolution in the same way as a bud fits aplant. He pre-represents and personifies it, to the extent that an individual can rep-resent a social system” (La Rivoluzione [Turin: Einaudi, 1953], p. 101).

49. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 359.50. E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 23.51. The phrase is contained in a letter Rousseau wrote to Malherbes on January

12, 1762 (quoted from W. Durant, Rousseau e la Rivoluzione [Milan: Mondadori, 1970],p. 24).

52. L. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (London: NLB,1972). Rousseau’s theory that the corruption of social institutions was responsible forevery evil inevitably became a convenient moral alibi. It therefore should not surpriseus that the philosopher’s cynical answer to Madame Francueil’s indignation about hisabandoning his children in an orphanage should have been: “Forgive me, madame,

Page 65: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

52 Revolutionary Apocalypse

but nature wants me to bring them into the world because the earth produces sufficientfood for all. But it is the class of the rich that steals the food from my children’s mouth”(quoted from F. Jonas, Storia della sociologia [Bari: Laterza, 1970], p. 198).

53. I. Kant, “La religione nei limiti della semplice ragione,” in Scritti di filosofiadella religione (Milan: Mursia, 1989), p. 87.

54. P. Rossi, “Introduzione” to J.J. Rousseau, Opere (Florence: Sansoni, 1988),p. XXXV.

55. Here it should be stressed that Rousseau never deluded himself that it waspossible to restore the “original transparency,” whereas the Jacobins considered theSocial Contract an “infallible” tool for the regeneration of human nature.

56. In J. J. Rousseau, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau C. E. Vaughan,ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

57. Ibid.58. Ibid.59. “Jean-Jacques [wrote Paul Janet] was without question the founder of modern

communism” (quoted from J.C. Petitfils, Les socialismes utopiques [Paris: PUF, 1977],p. 33).

60. J. J. Rousseau, “Progetto di Costituzione per la Corsica,” in Scritti politici,p. 1113.

61. Ibid., p. 1113.62. Ibid., p. 1121.63. Ibid., p. 1113.64. J. J. Rousseau, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 71.65. B. Constant, Principi di politica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 228.66. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Charles M. Sherover, ed. (New York:

Harper and Row, 1984).67. Ibid.68. Ibid.69. B. de Jouvenel, Il potere (Milan: SugarCo, 1991); J. L. Talmon, The Origins of

Totalitarian Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).70. See L. Guerci, La liberta degli antichi e la liberta dei moderni (Naples: Guida,

1979).71. B. Constant, “La liberta degli antichi paragonata a quella dei moderni,” in

Scritti politici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982).72. Quoted from C. Dawson, The Gods of Revolution (New York: New York Uni-

versity Press, 1972), p. 87.73. A. Soboul, Comprende La Revolution (Paris: Maspero, 1981).74. A. Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789–1799 (Berkeley, Lon-

don: University of California Press, 1977).75. A. Soboul, La civilization et la Revolution francaise (Paris: Arthaud, 1988), p. 376.76. That the intention of the Jacobin revolution was to suffocate capitalism is more

than evident in Robespierre’s statement: “Free trade of corn is incompatible with theexistence of our Republic” (in P. Kessel, Le gauchistes de 89 [Paris: Union generaled’Editions, 1969], p. 253).

77. A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1964).

78. “The general composition [of the representatives of the third estate] was ofobscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies,

Page 66: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 53

notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomentorsand conductors of the petty war of village vexation” (E. Burke, Reflections on the Rev-olution in France [Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 42). “Whenthe French Revolution appeared on the scene, it was no longer a question of changingthe feudal and theological system, for it had already lost almost all its real strength. Itwas a question of organising the industrial and scientific system that that phase ofcivilisation required in its place. Consequently it would have been the natural role ofindustrialists and scientists to occupy the political scene. Instead, the jurists put them-selves in command of the revolution and directed it with the metaphysical doctrines.There is no need to remind you of the deviations and troubles that derived from thisdecision and the troubles that derived from these deviations” (C. H. de Saint-Simon,“Il sistema industriale,” in Opere [Turin: UTET, 1975], pp. 590–591).

79. A. Soboul, “Alla luce della Rivoluzione” in AA. VV., la Rivoluzione francese:problemi storici e metodologici (Milan: Angeli, 1979), p. 103.

80. Ibid., p. 103.81. Massimo Terni suggests that the social consequences of ’89 were the following:

“A class of bureaucrats and professionals moved from minor to major positions withinthe government, pushing to one side the supporters of a court that was finished: thiswas the meaning of the bourgeois revolution. The peasants freed themselves fromtheir obligations vis-a-vis the seigneurs: This was the meaning of the end of feudalism.”(Il Mito della Rivoluzione Francese [Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1981], p. 54).

82. To keep the Marxist argument on its feet, Eric Hobsbawm managed to inventa “solid bourgeoisie that hid behind the Terror” (The Age of Revolution: Europe1789–1848 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962]). This imaginative theory hada strong influence on non-Marxist scholars too, among whom Barrington Moore, whotried to prove, against all evidence, that the Terror had been functional to the devel-opment of French society in a bourgeois and capitalist sense (Social Origins of Dicta-torship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World [London:Penguin, 1967]). Despite the fact that the Marxist historian Albert Mathiez had doc-umented in great detail that “Robespierre rose up against the bourgeoisie that hadtried to turn the revolution to its own advantage with the PLUTOCRATIC consti-tution of 1791, and fought with all his might” (Robespierre [Rome: Newton Compton,1976], p. 217).

83. Quoted from F. Furet and D. Richet, La Revolution francaise, p. 222.84. L.A.L. de Saint Just, Terrore e Liberta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966), p. 198.85. Quoted from J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy.86. K. Marx and F. Engels, “The Holy Family,” in Complete Works, vol. 4, p. 122.

Note that this judgment on the Terror and on the Thermidor coincides with the onemade by Constant in his essay “Des effets de la Terreur” (Paris: Flammarion, 1988)and is in marked contrast with the theory according to which the Jacobin dictatorshipwas functional to the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony (see F. Furet, Marx andthe French Revolution [Chicago: Chicago University Press”, 1988]).

87. F. N. Babeuf, Il Tribuno del Popolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), p. 252.88. Ibid., p. 241.89. F. Feher, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987).90. Dom Deschamps gives the best summary of the political agenda implicit in the

eighteenth century gnostic culture in a letter to Rousseau: “Il faut entierement nettoyer

Page 67: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

54 Revolutionary Apocalypse

la place” (quoted from B. Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of SocialProgress [New York: Paragon House, 1989]).

91. C. Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).92. L. Bergeron, F. Furet, and R. Koselleck, L’eta della rivoluzione europea (Milan:

Feltrinelli, 1970), p. 45.93. This is what we read in article 11 of the “Declarations of the rights of man

and of the citizen” proposed by Robespierre on April 24, 1793: “Society is obliged toprovide for the subsistence of all its members by procuring them a job, by ensuringmeans of subsistence to those who are unable to work” (La rivoluzione giacobina [Rome:Editori Riuniti, 1967], p. 123).

94. See M. Robespierre, I principi della democrazia (Sambuceto: Editrice Trimestre,1989).

95. F. P. Benoit, La democratie liberale (Paris: PUF, 1978), p. 53.96. F. P. Benoit, Les ideologues politiques modernes (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 47.97. Quoted from F. Crisafulli, Giustizia e furore (Cosenza: Giordano, 1989), p. 340.98. “Dichiarazione dei diritti dell’uomo e del cittadino,” in F. Battaglia, ed., Le

Carte dei diritti (Florence: Sansoni, 1946), p. 123.99. The formula was coined by Marat, but we find it also in Robespierre.

100. J. P. Marat, L’Amico del Popolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1968), p. 183.101. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, p. 66.102. J. J. Rousseau, Economia politica, p. 383.103. See M. Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 330 et seq.104. Quoted from M. Duverger, Les orangers du lac Balaton (Paris: Seuil, 1980),

p. 255.105. Quoted from A. Soboul, A Short History of the French of Revolution.106. Quoted from L. Trotsky, “Giacobinismo e socialdemocrazia,” in an appendix

to Lenin’s Che fare? (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 424.107. Quoted from H. Taine, Le origini della Francia contemporanea, vol. 4, p. 73.108. Quoted from A. Camus, The Rebel (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 92.109. Quoted from C. Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962),

p. 239.110. J. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. The Marxists disagreed with

Talmon’s thesis most adamantly, obviously forgetting that it had been formulated byGramsci earlier when he said, “Jacobinism draws from its messianic spirit, from itsfaith in revealed truth, the pretext of suppressing with violence every opposition, anywill that refuses to adhere to the social contract. And so falls into the contradictionthat is so typical of democratic regimes, the contradiction between the professions offaith that hail unlimited freedom and the practice of tyranny and brutal intolerance”(Selections from Political Writings (1910–20) [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977]).

111. T. Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, Book 5 (Oxford, New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1989), p. 332f.

112. Mably wrote this about the corrupting influence of private property: “Theinequality of fortunes and of conditions decomposes, so to speak, man and alters thenatural sentiments of his heart” (“Della legislazione ossia dei principi delle leggi,” inScritti politici, vol. 2 [Turin: UTET, 1965], p. 268).

113. A. Mathiez, Robespierre, p. 222.114. A. Cochin, L’esprit du jacobinisme (Paris: PUF, 1979), p. 123.

Page 68: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 55

115. As we read in Robespierre’s Carnets (quoted from J. Ratinaud, Robespierre,p. 110).

116. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, p. 67.117. V. Mathieu, Cancro in Occidente (Milano: Editoriale Nuova, 1980), p. 10.118. C. Brinton, A Decade of Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 159.

See also Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965).119. The thesis was formulated by Robespierre during the Jacobin session of May

8, 1793 (quoted from F. Diaz, “Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione,” in L. Firpo, ed.,Storia delle idee politiche, economiche e sociali, vol. 6, 2 [Turin: UTET, 1975], p. 625.

120. Quoted from J. Pirenne, Storia universale, vol. 3 (Florence: Sansoni, 1956),p. 387.

121. Quoted from R. Bodei, “Ragione e terrore,” in Il Centauro, no. 3 (1981), p. 42.122. L.A.L. De Saint-Just, Terrore e liberta, p. 198 and pp. 117–118.123. See J. Castelnau, Histoire de la Terreur (Paris: Perrin, 1970).124. R. Cobb, Reactions on the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press,

1972). There was a good deal of talk in the Jacobin clubs as to how many “corrupt”citizens had to be exterminated in order to purify society. For Dr. Bo, half the Frenchpopulation; for Antonelli and Guffroy, only 5 million were to be spared; nothingcompared to Catherine Theot, who claimed the world population should be reducedto 140 thousand souls! (See J. Servier, Le terrorisme [Paris: Gallimard, 1979],pp. 21–22.)

125. F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981).

126. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, pp. 147, 161, and 167.127. C. Schmitt, La dittatura (Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 174–175.128. See R. Cobb, The People’s Armies: The armees revolutionnaires: Instrument of the

Terror in the departments April 1793 to Floreal Year II (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1987), pp. 1–9.

129. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, p. 160.130. Ibid., p. 161.131. In January 1794 Gregoire declared, “The French people are superior to all

other peoples; but the hateful regime of whose remains we are now ridding ourselves,still keeps us at a great distance from Nature; there is still an abyss between what weare and what we might be. We should hasten to bridge that gap; let us reconstitutehuman nature and give it a new stamp” (quoted from L. Hunt, La Rivoluzione francese[Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989], p. 10).

132. J. Michelet, Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 4 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), p. 10.133. This emerges absolutely clearly from the following statement by Chaumette:

“The people said to the priests: you promise us miracles. We are about to do them”(quoted from J. Michelet, Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 5, p. 20).

134. The terminology used by the revolutionaries leaves us with no doubts: “Theday of revelation is upon us [proclaimed Fauchet before the Bastille]. We have reachedthe heart of time . . . the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.”Vergniaud and Cloots echoed his words: the former said he was certain that the “reignof ‘holy humanity’” was nigh; the latter announced the cult of “Our Lord the humanrace” (quoted from A. Camus, The Rebel, p. 87).

135. G. Maranini, Classe e Stato nella Rivoluzione francese (Florence: Vallecchi, 1964),p. 240. Here Maranini picks up Michelet’s well-known thesis according to which the

Page 69: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

56 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Revolution did not create a Church because “it was a Church itself ”; it was a churchbecause “it continued christianity and contradicted it. It was both heir and enemy atthe same time” (Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 1, p. 10). Tocqueville shared asimilar view. He believed that the French Revolution was “a political revolution thatacted like a religious revolution and in some respects took on some of its connotations”(The Old Regime and the French Revolution).

136. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, p. 163.137. Saint-Just, L’Esprit de la Revolution (Paris: Unione Generale d’Editions, 1963),

p. 155.138. D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press,

1986), p. 204.139. M. Bouloiseau, La Republique jacobine (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 118.140. F. Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1989).141. A. Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1964).142. Quoted from R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1969), p. 225.143. F. Aftalion, The French Revolution.144. G. Maranini, Classe e Stato nella Rivoluzione francese, p. 224.145. D. Guerin, Class Struggle in the First French Republic: Bourgeois and bras nus,

1793–95 (London: Pluto, 1977).146. G. Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793–1799 (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1964).147. C. Brinton, The Jacobins, pp. 150–151.148. D. Guerin, La Revolution francaise et nous (Paris: Maspero, 1976), p. 50.149. P. Selznick, The Organizational Weapon (New York: MacGraw Hill, 1952).150. F. Feher, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism, p. 181.151. The works of A. Cochin are fundamental on this point: Meccanica della rivo-

luzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1971) and L’esprit du Jacobinisme.152. F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution.153. F. Gross, The Revolutionary Party (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), p. 52.154. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution.155. It is widely believed that the Terror was functional to the victory of the Rev-

olution; whether this in fact corresponds to fact is debatable. According to Michelet,for example, revolutionary France “was saved despite the Terror” (Il popolo [Milan: Riz-zoli, 1989], p. 255). Quinet agreed: “The art of war, and not Terror, saved France” (LaRivoluzione, p. 597).

156. In fact, not even the Thermidor revolution accomplished what should be thehistorical function of bourgeois revolutions, according to the Marxist theory, namelyto accelerate the development of forces of production. From a purely economic pointof view, the consequences of the Great Revolution were negative, as documented ingreat detail by R. Sedillot (Le cout de la Revolution francaise [Paris: Perrin, 1987) and F.Crouzet (Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]).

157. Remember that “in the orientation of the economy as in conducting theircurrent affairs, bankers, shopkeepers and manufacturers were not the object of anyspecial encouragement for the fact that there interests were subdued to an overall

Page 70: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jacobin Experiment 57

foreign policy that obeyed its own logic. The representatives of major economic in-terests were among the sectors that gradually detached themselves from the regimebecause it failed to give them sufficient security” (L. Bergeron, France under Napoleon[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981]).

158. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, p. 122.159. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.

Page 71: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 72: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 4

God’s Orphans and theEarth’s Damned

1. Since the end of the eighteenth century, European awareness had beenshaken by three overturning events: the French Revolution, provoking the warbetween the invisible Great Minds of the City; the Industrial Revolution, sourceof universal reification; and the crisis of the sacred, an inevitable consequenceof the destructive criticism of Christianity during the Enlightenment.

The combination of these three events had created a particularly intensestate of anomie and strengthened the desire for a radically different order ofthings, which set forth what Talmon has called the “religion of Revolution.”1

The latter had been perceived from generation to generation as the universalremedy for the triple crisis being experienced by Europe—the crisis of legit-imization, the crisis of redistribution, and the crisis of secularization—thegreat surgical operation that would finally heal the structure of society. Hu-manity as a whole was on the brink of a huge upheaval on both the historicaland cosmic levels, which would destroy the roots of its unhappiness andlaunch a period of freedom, equality, and brotherhood.2 The change wouldbe extremely painful, but a new completely transformed world would ariseupon the ruins of the old one.3 Thus, the human odyssey was on the verge ofcoming to a happy ending. It was not a question of turning away from capi-talist bourgeoisie, for that had already been condemned by history. Instead, arevolutionary apocalypse was knocking at the door, announcing the imminentand much-awaited liberation from evil. With the violent overturning of theexisting state of things, what Christianity had promised—the death of the“old Adam” and the birth of the “new man”—was about to come true. Thiswas precisely Friedrich Schlegel’s intuition, when he pinpointed the “revo-

Page 73: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

60 Revolutionary Apocalypse

lutionary desire to create the Reign of God as the beginning of the ModernAge.”4

In order to understand the meaning of these words beholding one of thegreatest secrets of the last two centuries, it is important to analyze the colossalevent, whose consequences are still visible and final outcome is unknown. Thisepochal event was denominated by Hegel, before Nietzsche, as “death ofGod” and by Weber, following Schiller, as “disenchantment of the world.”

The two expressions are equivalent. They indicate the historical and cul-tural development that sociologists usually label as secularization. It is the lossof plausibility of the religious outlook on the world and the correspondingnarrowing of the sphere of the sacred. Such a phenomenon is strictly relatedto the transition from a “closed society” to an “open society”5—thus modern-ization—and it represents one of its most typical and meaningful features.

The closed society is distinguished by the fact that tradition not only rulesall human aspects of life but is as well influenced by the sacred: therefore thischaracteristic confers upon tradition an almost absolute authority and con-trolling disposition. In other words, tradition and religion appear to be one,or at least two objects closely linked. The individual in the closed societyinteracts within a system of symbols—beliefs, laws, values, myths—investedwith sacredness. Therefore, Howard Becker has rightly described the tradi-tional society as sacred.6 In fact, in the traditional society the sacred can ex-pand anywhere and penetrate anything; it works everywhere, it governs eventhe most basic aspects of daily life—food, hygiene, clothing, and so forth—and guarantees a strong intellectual and moral unity.

With the introduction of modern forces into the structure of traditionalsociety, one witnesses the progressive decay of the sacred aspect of tradition,the exclusion of hierocratic institutions and the “privatization” of religion.The consequences of this development were so destructive for tradition thatRene Guenon has described them as “satanic.”7 When exposed to a criticalanalysis, the religious view of the world, which attributes a moral and meta-physical meaning to the human condition, came to be seen as a huge deceptivemythology. Secularization is precisely that: the unfolding of the profane atthe expense of the sacred, the demystification of the religion of the ancestors,and the weakening of the controlling disposition of the standard model ofthinking, perceiving, and acting inherited from the forefathers. Moderniza-tion and secularization, therefore, developed simultaneously, the latter beingbut the shadow of the former.

Truly, wherever the “science of profanity” tries to undermine the “scienceof the sacred,” everything is questioned and translated before the “court ofreason” for ruthless examination. Thus starts the so-called “age of criticism,”according to the Critica della ragion pura. The outcome is that the past isprogressively transformed into a heap of superstitions, and the mandatoryinstitutions no longer justified by tradition come to be seen by the public asmere mechanisms of domination.

Page 74: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 61

It is not that the sacred vanishes completely. One is unaware of societiescompletely lacking hierocratic practices and institutions. Even in our post-industrial societies—the current philosophical trend quite arbitrarily likes todefine them as postmodern8—they continue to practice their typical functions.However, their parental power is diminished as soon as the controlling dis-position of specific religious values is weakened. As a result, religion has littleinfluence on the thoughts and actions of most individuals and appears to be“as if isolated from the other aspects of their lives.”9 The final outcome isthat, whereas in a traditional society atheism is an individual phenomenonand faith a collective one, in a modern society—or in the secular city, so calledby Harvey Cox10—“scepticism is part of an everyday reality,”11 and religion isa choice.12 Up until then, religion had always been a given reality, somethingan individual carried within himself forever and from which he was neverfreed. One was born Christian as one was born French or English, and therewas no possibility to cease being one or the other.

It is hardly necessary to underline that before the Industrial Revolution hadinvolved the subordinate classes in the Great Transformation, atheism hadonly concerned the European elites. In the eighteenth century, it expresseditself as an outstanding sociological event. Nothing about the religious tra-dition was spared the criticism of the enlightenment. In particular, reasonattacked the providential view of history, founded on the idea that “everythingconverges toward the same purpose”13 and accordingly humanity is a giganticcaravan marching toward a predetermined destination: the reign of God. TheAge of Enlightenment replaced this view with an image of a strictly machine-driven world, where there is no room for ultimate motives. The only con-cession is that religion is useful for the upkeep of social order in that it“controls” the working classes’ expectations, by making them submissive to-ward the established authorities, and that reason can coexist with a vaguedeism without doctrines and cult practices.

At first, the mechanistic concept of the world was welcomed as a remarkabletriumph of reason and as an exciting redemption from the yoke of superstitionthat had kept humanity in chains for millennia. By the end of the eighteenthcentury, the Romantic intellectuals were horrified to realize that the worldhad ceased to be a moral macrocosm animated by an immanent telos and hadbeen transformed into an indecipherable and uncontrollable machine. No onebetter than David Strauss has described the ontological anguish experiencedby the intellectuals when faced with the acknowledgement that “the Gods hadabandoned the world” (Hoelderlin): “The disappearance of a faith in God’sDivine Intervention is actually part of the more significant loss deriving fromthe detachment from Christianity. One pictures one’s self in the mighty ma-chine of the world with its dented gears that swirl around whirring, its heavyhammers and pistons plunging with deafening noise, never knowing if onewill be caught and cut up by a wheel for a careless gesture, or squashed by ahammer. At first, this feeling of impotence is frightening. One’s own

Page 75: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

62 Revolutionary Apocalypse

desire is not enough to change the world, in fact common sense tells one thatthe world effectively is such a device.”14

The transition from the Enlightenment’s Stimmung to the Romantic Stim-mung consists in this: the Enlightenment thinkers, with a certain superficiality,farewelled the loss of Christianity as a liberation, while Romantic theoristsexperienced it as a moral and metaphysical tragedy. They realized that the dis-illusioned individual was now alone, abandoned and powerless and forced towander in a universe deprived of an immanent telos and seemingly senselessand amoral. Hence, an absurd and intolerable reality where “every corner wasobstructed for the sacred.”15 The ultrasensitive world, the world of thoughtsand ideals—the metasystem from which stemmed the meaning of the struc-ture—that for centuries Western inhabitants had considered as the true world,was losing any real strength, and all the beliefs and convictions collapsed. Atthis moment, nihilism, “the most terrifying of guests,” entered the scene.While it was “scattering its shadows”16 all over Europe, a new anthropologicalspecies came into being: “the orphans of God”: those who, though abandonedby the faith of their ancestors, were dominated by the “nostalgia for the ab-solute Other.”17

How to escape the impasse created by the profane criticism of the philo-sophes? How to nourish hope in an environment conforming to the deepestdesires of the soul? If we ignore these questions, we will never be able tounderstand the meaning of Hegel’s titanic and speculative venture. His fun-damental plan was to render an objective explanation to reality, showing howit still had an intimate rationality, in spite of the disappearance of faith in God,which explains why Nietzsche has described Hegel as “the great non con-formist par excellence.” In fact, Hegel tried to delay the nihilistic conse-quences of God’s death, by demonstrating that thanks to a sixth sense—thehistorical sense—there was an immanent telos in universal history, which wasvisible as in filigree. Therefore, life ceased to be a crazy adventure and becamea progressive march toward freedom.

The accuracy of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Hegel’s historicism18 is con-firmed by the fact that Hegel himself introduces his philosophy as “a theodicy,a justification of God.”19 Aided by dialectics—which insofar as “self thinkingof the Logos”20 does not provide “knowledge of mundane affairs but knowl-edge of the non-mundane, of that which is eternal”21—theodicy demonstrateshow and why “the world’s history is none other than the plan of Providence.”22

Thus, Hegel’s theodicy consists of substituting the transcendental God of theJudaic and Christian tradition with an immanent God—the Spirit—and thebelief that even evil has a positive role in the subtle plan that dominates uni-versal history. In such a way, the world returns to its primordial state beforethe vanishing of Christianity and becomes a mechanism of redemption. Thenihilist threat—“the loss of every single value of the previous absolute prin-ciples”23 originating from the discovery that “being is unnecessary”24 and thatthere is no reliable answer to the terrible metaphysical question “Why in

Page 76: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 63

general does being exist and not nihility”25—is therefore removed from hu-man sight.

Hegel’s answer to God’s death is certainly brilliant but irremediably intel-lectual26 and thence constitutively incapable of indicating a strategy prone tohalting what Nietzsche was later to portray as the painful “rise of the desert.”27

The answer conceived by Marx had a totally different impact. He promptlyrealized that the Hegelian theodicy changed nothing. It did not eliminate evil;it limited itself to exorcising it and, in addition, by claiming to demonstratethat all that was real was rational, it ended up justifying it. It was necessary toovercome the Hegelian theodicy, maintaining, however, its positive side andprecisely the idea that one could assign a telos to reality, without having theGod of the Bible intervene. According to Marx, this was only possible byassigning to dialectics, besides the ability to foresee the ultimate purpose of hu-manity’s journey, also an absolute transforming faculty, changing the image of thephilosopher into an activist thrown heart and soul into a battle without bound-aries against the perverse powers that prevented self-fulfillment according tothe deep essence. Briefly, with Marx’s dialectic, gnosis changes from contem-plative to activist and for this reason becomes a belligerent and revolutionarycall, directed toward all “God’s orphans,” allowing them to become Prome-thean builders of the millenarian Kingdom of Liberty. This was an operationMarx improved by blending the “dilemma of salvation” with the “issue ofjustice” and consequently assigning a dual functional task to the communistrevolution: a soteriological one and an ethical political one. In other words,Marx proclaimed that the Revolution, by eradicating the roots of alienation,would end the scandal of human contingency, as well as the crime of exploi-tation. Such interpretation represented an exciting prospect for all the intel-lectuals who were experiencing God’s death as a tragedy: it gave them aredeeming mission; it bestowed a meaning upon existence and provided anescape from the desert of nihilism.

2. On the other hand, the “orphans of God”—the intellectuals with theprophetical-messianic calling of permanent revolution—were not alone in be-ing condemned by the capitalist bourgeoisie to unhappiness and alienation.The victims of the Great Transformation were millions. They were the “out-casts of the industrial society,” the “excluded” from property and thereforefrom the advantages of the civilization of wealth. Liberal emancipation hadresulted in the emancipation only of a small group of the privileged, the riseto social power of a class formed by all those whose abilities to negotiate—wealth, education, technical expertise, talent—had equipped them to partici-pate successfully in the catalytic game. Faced with this “new aristocracy”spontaneously assembled along with the growing process of marketing, thosewho had no other option but to sell their labor on the market representedthe “internal proletariat” in the civilisation of wealth: they were within societybut not part of society, condemned as they were to being “excluded from the

Page 77: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

64 Revolutionary Apocalypse

political and human city and rejected in the unreal capitalist city,”28 to theextent that even the conservative Disraeli could not refrain from noticing that“two nations” had formed within European society and that there were nosympathetic interactions between the two. They “reciprocally ignored eachother’s customs, thoughts and emotions, as if they were from different areasand distinct planets created by opposite developments, fed different foods,had different rules of behaviour and had not been governed by the same law.”29

The alarming phenomenon of the “two nations” was the disruptive con-sequence of the Industrial Revolution, which was spreading everywhere, thecatalytic logic generating “the rapid alienation of the working classes and thedowngrading of the majority of producers.”30 The division of labor from otheractivities and the generalization of contractual freedom activated a progressivecourse of annihilation of all organic forms of existence and substituted themwith a different atomistic and individualistic type of social organization. Inreality, this meant that the primary groups and noncontractual associations—neighborhood, family, corporation, religious cults, and so forth—were threat-ened by extinction, since they were incompatible with the recruiting and ex-ploitation of manual labor through the impersonal laws of the market. Theresult was the dissolution of the traditional communities where formerly in-dividuals lived and benefited from a guaranteed status and at least a minimumof solidarity. The general outcome was that “the majority of the rural popu-lation, organically brought up in an agricultural environment and tied to theearth, was uprooted and became as mobile as quicksand.”31 The factory systemacted as a strong magnet able to generate a gigantic mobilization of the popu-lation: an enormous number of peasants were taken away from their ancestralsocial-cultural habitat and thrown into the factory system, giving birth to anew historical subject: the industrial proletariat.

Social mobilization is an extremely complex event meticulously analyzedby Gino Germani, who divides it into six instances:32

1. a state of integration in a specific structural model;2. a phase of schism altering the actual level of familiarization, weakening the har-

monious structure of the system;3. a stage of dislocation of individuals and groups who are first “displaced” and then

“forced” into a new net of social relations;4. a reaction from the groups who were displaced and then alienated and who are

psychologically available to undertake new models of socialization and conduct;5. a constructive frame of time characterized by several answers proposed by the dis-

located groups in response to their existential dilemma; and6. a state of reintegration when the alienated groups discover new and more satisfactory

social and cultural ties.

The phase that is of particular interest for this study is the third, when themobilized social classes are diverged and thrown into a completely changed

Page 78: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 65

world. “Many important old social, economical and psychological bonds areeroded or broken”33 and the dislocated individuals find themselves in a typicalsituation of displacement that generates a “growing feeling of loneliness andinsecurity”34 in their souls. The “rootless” are those who, being fully attackedby the course of social mobilization, have lost their ancestry. Therefore, theyare forced to lived as “aliens” in a world they daily perceive as foreign andcareless toward their needs. In other words, the detachment from traditionalcommunity ties greatly isolates the dislocated masses, transforming them intoa crowd of aliens. Isolated, deprived of traditional groups of referral, aban-doned to themselves, each member of the mobilized group is condemned tolive full of resentment and anger, with a painful sense of exclusion.

The core of the matter is that one of an individual’s essential needs is to bepart of a group where he or she can receive moral and material expressionsof support in moments of extreme necessity. This concept has stimulatedSimone Weil to write, “Rooting is perhaps the soul’s most important andmisunderstood requisite. It is one of the most difficult to define. An individualhas roots thanks to his authentic active and natural participation in the life ofthe community which preserves certain treasures of the past and certain futureintuitions.”35 One can say that, when an individual has lost his feeling ofbelonging by being rejected from the ancestral community and thrown intoa foreign or even hostile cultural environment, he loses direction like a for-eigner not pressured by tradition. From that point he is a potential enemy ofsociety ready to contest the prevailing table of values and become a profes-sional demolisher of the established order.

All these phenomena—loss of community, alienation, resentment, and soon—can be summed up with the expression proletarianization. This not onlymeant the transformation of peasants and artisans into disciplined and de-personalized workers in the factory system, but most of all “a complete dis-placement”36 that stimulated, if not their material need,37 certainly theirspiritual one. In fact, the industrial proletariat simultaneously paying the costsof wild accumulation—exhausting work, a rigorous military discipline, terri-fying working conditions, and the like—found him or herself in the capitalistsociety as an “exile population” forced to live in a “new type of prison”—thefactory—being subordinate to the moral pressure of a “new jailer”—theclock.38 For this reason, Henri de Man has described the working conditionsof the nineteenth century as a true “crisis of abandonment.”39 In fact, every-thing happened in such a way that European society, having initiated the pathof laissez-faire, downgraded direct producers, turning them into a mere work-force, therefore goods among goods, and showed a total lack of interest intheir destiny. The result: the direct producers did not have any other solutionbut to reestablish through spontaneous association these community bondsthe self-regulating market tended ruthlessly to destroy. This gave birth toseveral social reinstatement institutions starting from unions, whose mainfunction was to give workers a new community of belonging.40

Page 79: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

66 Revolutionary Apocalypse

All this was a logical consequence: “wherever the market is abandoned toself-regulation, it recognizes only the dignity of the object instead of that ofthe individual, ignoring duties of brotherhood and compassion and the origi-nal human relations beheld by personal communities. These are obstacles forthe market’s free development; the specific interests of the market in turn area specific testing ground for all such relations. Rational interests stronglydetermine market development. The free market not tied up by ethical lawsand exploiting interests and a situation of monopoly together with its bar-gaining is considered by every ethics as unworthy of brothers. The marketplace, in contrast with all the other communities that always imply brother-hood in addition to kinship, is foreign to any form of fraternity.”41 This trans-lated into Toennies’s language means the market—where the social actorsthrough contracts exchange goods and services only based on mere lucrativecalculations, excluding by principle any form of solidarity except for the onedictated by convenience—tends to devour the typical ties of the Gemeinschaftand to substitute them with the typical relationships of the Gesellschaft, there-fore transforming “a durable and authentic cohabitation” into a “passing andsuperficial one.”42 As a consequence, the segregation of the social body occurswith the “dissolution” of all loving and moral elements between partners. Thesame word socius experiences a semantic alternation: no longer does it meana member of a community bonded by sympathetic ties; from now on—andwith the expansion of the catalytic logic—it indicates an individual who, hav-ing invested capital, will share the profits (and eventual losses) of a commercialcompany, therefore, a selfish person, exclusively driven by a utilitarian motiveand by a precise calculation of the expenses and the returns.

In fact, capitalism is justly described as an “organisation of selfish people”by both Marx and, significantly, the liberal Keynes.43 That is, an amoral, if notan immoral society, whose fundamental principle is self government of the econ-omy, namely the definite separation between the business world and every-thing that does not belong to the profit sphere. Rationality, interpreted in itsetymological meaning,44 must dominate uncontested the entire economy.Since “only a fraction of the needs of social existence can function withoutmaterial means of one type or another,”45 the separation between the mar-ketplace and the other domains tends to become the acquisitive and calculat-ing spirit’s invasion and colonization of the community. The consequence: themoral, religious, political principles, and the like are expunged from com-munity life or, anyway, “neutralized” so they are unable to restrain the logicof profit, upset economic calculation, and hold back the freedom embarkedupon. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his profound analyses, “Normallyeconomic order is simply a function of the social structure in which it iscontained.”46 With the development of capitalism—that is, with the “pro-gressive freeing of the economy from everything that does not represent econ-omy—a unique event occurs in the history of humanity: not only the radicalseparation of economic aspects from the social structure and their establish-

Page 80: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 67

ment in an independent domain,”47 but also the submission of human life tothe impersonal and amoral laws of the market place, while profit becomes the“great idol of the time, toward whom all strengths must be applied and alltalents must pay their respects.”48

3. So one should not be surprised that all during the twentieth century, theintroduction of the self-regulated market in European society created theprocess of destruction of institutions and traditional aspects of living denom-inated as “cultural disintegration” by Robert Nisbet.49 It broke traditional tiesof solidarity, atomized the social structure, disrupted intermediate commu-nities, and left dislocated workers alone, faced with a life without support andany kind of protection. These workers, aware of being abandoned, concludedthat society was hostile toward them or was guilty of indifference, since it didnot protect them or help them during their harsh autoplastic process of ad-aptation. More and more they detached themselves, until they more or lesswithdrew completely from society and lived as outcasts.

Hence, the process of proletarianization is mostly to be interpreted as aterrible cultural deracination that created an enormous army of aliens aban-doned to themselves. The factory system broke the protective sheath of tra-ditions that had surrounded workers and forced them to face absolutely newproblems they were not prepared for. Their “quiet vegetative life,” to use oneof Engel’s expressions,50 had been overturned by the methods of industrialproduction. The subsequent process of amalgamation, urbanization, and stan-dardization of workers gave birth to the particular existential condition Marxhas described in a masterly manner with the following words: “Within thecapitalist system, all the ways to increase the productive social strength occurat the expense of the worker as an individual. All the means of production aretransformed into means of domination and exploitation of the producer, thatmutilate the worker, making of him a partial human being, humiliating theworker as an insignificant appendix of a machine, and destroying the contentof his labour, the content of the actual product; the worker’s intellectualstrengths are estranged from the working process to the same extent as scienceis incorporated as an independent strength. The working conditions are de-formed; during labour the individual is subject to the worst hateful oppression,his very life is changed into labour time, wife and children are sentenced todeath under the Juggernaut wheel of capital.”51

The portrayal of the working class’s situation in an official document fromthe Prussian government is no less sinister: “Nothing could be expected fromthe factory owners, unless legal measures (vetoes and regulations) forced themto allow spare time for education. The factory owners were firmly convincedthat the State’s destiny relied on their factory’s performance. Their worstnightmare: a phaseout of even the smallest department in the factory, a fallin the sales and the need to lower the cost of products. They are used toconsidering workers as casual machine appendixes; all they have to do is en-

Page 81: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

68 Revolutionary Apocalypse

sure that their spirit is able to avoid the laziness of the body and purposelycontinue the conforming and appropriate movements.”52 Identical is the pic-ture Michelet was to draw 20 years later: the fanatics of production for pro-duction caught up in the awful gear of capitalist competition that did not leavethem in peace “obligated many people to amalgamate in the city and in thecountryside; these recruits of labour they compared to tireless machines. Itwas as if they were applying the great imperial principle to the factory system,sacrificing people in order to shorten the war. Work had to be done at thecharge, in haste; too bad for those who died.”53

In conclusion, “the relationship between the factory owners and the workerwas not a human one but merely economical”54; the former considered thelatter as a machine’s appendix to be used in the most opportunistic manner,ignoring its human nature and considering the worker only a means of pro-duction. Not that the working conditions in the ancien regime had ever beenidyllic, but at least the master had felt responsible for certain obligations to-ward his worker—protection, administration of justice, and so forth. Con-trarily, the capitalists, although expecting the workers to happily accept theirsubordinate position, did not believe they had any moral responsibility. Theonly goal was to exploit their labor according to the harsh principles of com-petition and ignore any worry related to their destiny. Tocqueville had fore-seen all this with his usual, extraordinary lucidity: “Although, by nature, theworkers did not have any interest in the aristocracy’s destiny [one reads inDemocracy in America] they did not feel less obligated to sacrifice themselvesfor their owners; and the latter, though believing they belonged to a differentrace from that of their slaves, still felt that duty and honour obligated themto protect those who lived on their land, at the expense of their own life.”55

The relationship between the new aristocracy of wealth—the capitalist bour-geoisie—and the modern working class was totally different, Tocqueville re-marked: “The aristocracy born from commerce never allocates itself amongstthe working population it rules; its aim is not to govern it, but to exploit it.Such an aristocracy cannot have a great influence on those it exploits. Eventhough it is able to keep them under oppression for some time, sooner orlater they will flee. This aristocracy is incapable of desiring and reacting. Thelanded aristocracy of the past centuries was legally obligated, or believed itselfforced by tradition, to help workers and reduce poverty. But today our manu-facturing aristocracy, after impoverishing and brutalising the people it uses,abandons them in times of trouble to public charity for nourishment. There-fore the interactions between workers and owners are frequent but there isnot a true friendship.”56

This concept pushes one to correct the vulgar interpretation of the deg-radation of workers in the capitalist society of the last century as being de-termined exclusively by exploitation. Economic exploitation in itself had notcaused the “proletarization of the souls”; this was caused by the “disruptionof the cultural environment,”57 the vanishing of any form of solidarity, since

Page 82: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 69

all social interactions—even those between owner and workers—can be eth-ically disciplined, except for industrial relations within a system based on aself-regulated market.58 Thus, behind the social protest that attacked the Eu-rope of the last century, one should perceive the “growing anxiety of beingthreatened by an increasing isolation of the individual in an atomised society,where the religion of the social traditional society did not have any functionand had not been replaced.”59

Simultaneously, the spreading of the idea of equality produced with varyingintensity and speed a transformation of relationships between owners andworkers, with the result that the entire system of expectations was restruc-tured. In our century, this cultural phenomenon referred to by sociologists as“the revolution of growing expectations” has lost its explosive aspect and be-come one of the constitutive elements of modern industrial societies. How-ever, when such revolution started, it predictably generated a general crisis insocial relations that Tocqueville has described in the following manner: “Dur-ing the transition from one social state to another, there is always a periodwhen the soul is undecided between the aristocratic concept of subordinationand the democratic notion of obedience. Compliance loses then its moralityin the eyes of the person who obeys, who no longer considers it to be somesort of divine obligation, but still does not look upon it from a purely humanperspective: it is neither sacred nor just; the person accepts obedience as some-thing degrading and utilitarian. In this situation, the workers perceive a con-fused and incomplete image of equality. At the time, they are unable todistinguish if this equality to which they are entitled exists also in the servilecondition or only outside of it. Deep in their hearts they rebel against a stateof inferiority they themselves comply with and from which they benefit. Theyagree to serve and are ashamed to obey. They love the advantages of slaverybut not their owner. Perhaps it is their right to be owners and they tend toconsider their ruler as an unjust encroacher of that right. At this point, thescene is sadly similar to that of present political society. It becomes the placeof a deaf and internal war between two ever suspicious and rival powers. Theowner is both spiteful and merciful; the worker malicious and willing. Theformer wants to use dishonest restrictions to avoid the duty of protecting andpaying, the latter of obeying. The reins of domestic administration wave be-tween them and both make every effort to catch them. The lines dividingauthority from tyranny, freedom from leave, right from fact, appear to beintricate and confused and no one knows exactly who or what one can orshould do. This state is not democratic, it is revolutionary.”60

In this case, it should not be surprising that the dominant classes of thetime—the aristocracy, which, in spite of the earthquake in ’89, still controlledcivil service61 and the bourgeoisie, who governed the productive process withmad and ruthless energy—perceived the industrial proletariat as a revolution-ary mass surrounding the city, similar to a besieging army, judging it as a“dangerous class”62 to fear. “The bourgeois individual [Michelet believed in

Page 83: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

70 Revolutionary Apocalypse

1846] is afraid, is shouting, is asking for protection. The old bourgeoisie wasat least consistent. It was glad of its privileges, it wanted to expand them andlooked to the future. The present one looks down; it sees the multitude ap-proaching behind its back, in the same way as it had done. It does not wantthat and withdraws and solidarises with power . . . The majority of govern-ments have speculated on this sad progression of fear that, in the long run,becomes moral death. They have thought that the dead can be better manip-ulated than the living. They have shown two medusa heads to the terrifiedbourgeoisie, in order to fill them with fear of the people: in the long run,these two heads, terrorism and communism, have turned them into stone.”63

The two medusa heads were not only capable of multiplying real dangers butmost of all were capable of creating imaginary dangers, inhabiting the bour-geois imagination with many kinds of phobias.

As an outcome, the European bourgeoisie lived in a state of siege and wasliterally terrified by the alarming presence of the internal proletariat and ofthe communist movement—“an excellent political machine for intimidatingthe owners,” Michelet’s definition is appropriate64—whose threatening warcry was “expropriate the expropriators.”

In addition, the workers, realizing the “bourgeoisie was not compassionatetoward their troubles,”65 started to organize themselves and create their spe-cific unions for disputes, protection, and reinstatement. The result: classstruggle became a permanent phenomenon and frequently a veritable “socialwar”66 between those who lived in a “poor condition without any hope”67 andfelt excluded from the bourgeois city and those who had barricaded them-selves in that city as advocates of civilization against barbarity.

Obviously, a society based on these weak foundations was an unwell society.Its components, instead of being oriented toward mutual goals, were in con-trast with each other and driven by feelings of mutual extraneousness andhostility.

One of the more typical and severe end results deriving from this patho-logical situation was the creation of a subclass of experts in symbolic produc-tion “having unique features and claiming to guide or shape consciences, tobe political educators and even protagonists of history.”68 These “intellectualoutcasts”—as a rule longing for absoluteness and dominated by Prometheanfantasies whose function was to offset their frustrations—would not cooperatewith the ruling classes—aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and the elevated clergy—and openly opposed them, in the name of a social ideal that was nothing butthe equivalent of the Christian utopia of universal brotherhood. With theirpedagogical and revolutionary action they sought to stimulate in the exploitedan awareness of the injustice they experienced daily, in order to mobilize themagainst what they considered to be the only cause of their material and moralsorrows: private property. United by the same feeling—the awareness of beingunderprivileged, without a community of belonging and therefore condemnedto alienation and misery—the radical intellectuals and displaced workers pre-

Page 84: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 71

dictably69 became allies in a deadly war against the civilization of possessions.The declared objective: to rebuild ab imis the social order according to theprinciples of justice that had been denied by capitalism in the last centurywhen it had chosen laissez-faire as its guiding principle. This is what led tothe revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat of Western society in aperiod of uncontrolled accumulation. It was an intellectual, moral, and emo-tional secession that took on the appearance of a socialist movement, incor-porating “certain eschatological elements of Christianity—its view of thedevelopment of history and redemption, the division of the City of mankindand the City of God.”70

In its numerous expressions, the socialist movement was the voice of a greatcollective resentment, a “cry of pain and sometimes of anger”—to use Durk-heim’s definition71—of the victims of the first Industrial Revolution and anamazing challenge against the “capitalist’s absolute and uncontrolled power,”72

whose productive fury was such that Sombart recognized something “diabol-ical” in its product.73 And in fact, to the “damned of the Earth”74 of the lastcentury, capitalism appeared to be an infernal mechanism, generator of anindecipherable and uncontrollable world, in which any form of solidarity hadvanished.

NOTES

1. Jacob L. Talmon, Political Messianism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960),p. 18.

2. See Edward Hyams, The Millennium Postponed (London: Secker and Warburg,1973), p. 3 et seq.

3. “The old world [wrote Richard Wagner in 1849] is in pieces and on its asheswill arise another, because a sublime god, the revolution, is descending and flutteringthe wings of storm . . . Everyone awaits the revolution . . . to free the world from itsafflictions and to create a new world capable of making everyone happy” (Scritti scelti[Parma: Guanda, 1988], pp. 101 and 104).

4. Max Stirner had an identical theory: “At the dawn of new times a Man-God isborn. . . . The Man has killed God in order to take his place as the only God thatreigns in the heavens” (The Ego and His Own).

5. The “closed society” and the “open society” are obviously two mental constructs,or, if one prefers to use Weberian terminology, two ideal types. They were madefamous by Popper, who first made systematic use of them in his famous work The OpenSociety and His Enemies. The most penetrating and useful analysis of the transition fromthe closed to the open society is, however, Ortega y Gasset’s posthumous work, Unainterpretacion de la historia universal (see Luciano Pellicani, La sociologia storica di Ortegay Gasset [Milan: SugarCo, 1987], p. 95 et seq.).

6. Howard Becker, Societa e valori (Milan: Comunita, 1963), p. 63.7. Rene Guenon, La crise du monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 157. Iden-

tical is the theory of Julius Evola: “Mechanical civilisation, sovereign economy andthe civilisation of production and consumption foster the exaltation of the future andof progress, of a vital and unlimited impetus—in short, the expression of the devil in

Page 85: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

72 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the modern world” (Rivolta contro il mondo moderno [Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee,1984], p. 407).

8. It is pointless to discuss the “end of the modern age” for the simple fact that asinhabitants of the secular city, we are up to our necks in it. The only solution is toreturn to the sacred-magic city. But of this there is no sign at all. (See Luciano Pellicani,Modernizzazione e secolarizzazione [Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997].)

9. Rene Guenon, Simboli della scienza sacra (Milan: Adelphi, 1990), p. 16.10. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Per-

spective (New York: S.C.M. Press, 1965).11. Julius Evola, Cavalcare la tigre (Milan: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1971), p. 22.12. See Lucien Febvre, Le probleme de l’incroyance au XVI siecle (Paris: Albin Michel,

1968), p. 307 et seq.13. J. B. Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966),

p. 428.14. Quoted from Friedrich Heer, Europe Mother of Revolutions (London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 1971).15. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertation of the German University” in The Heideg-

ger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT-Press, 1993).16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Vintage Books, 1974).17. Max Horkheimer, La nostalgia del totalmente Altro (Brescia: Queriniana, 1972),

p. 15.18. Benedetto Croce also considered Hegel’s historicism a godless theodicy. How

else should we understand his famous statement that Hegel’s greatness was to be soughtin the fact that he had “redeemed the world from evil” (Indagini su Hegel e schiarimentifilosofici [Bari: Laterza, 1954], p. 78). Nietzsche grasped the illusory aspect of Hegel’sexercise, while Croce considered it an answer at last to the tragedy of the death ofGod. It gave an objective meaning to history and therefore to the human condition.In short, for Croce the idea of history being a plan of Providence was the most effectivebarrier against the advance of nihilism and the only “philosophical strategy” for re-storing the sovereignty of the absolutes threatened by spreading skepticism.

19. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia,1967), p. 30.

20. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston,IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

21. G.W.F. Hegel, Filosofia della religione, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1983), pp. 28–29.22. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, vol. 1, p. 65.23. Martin Heidegger, Sentieri interrotti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968), p. 205.24. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology

(London: Methuen, 1969).25. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1959).26. As was Giovanni Gentile’s answer to the same question. According to actualism,

evil—alienation, nature, death, error, contingency—is unreal once man has under-stood, thanks to the idealistic philosophy, that everything is Spirit and that “the Spiritis the Messiah” who “must come, and does not come without uprooting the plant ofevil, that is nature, without destroying this world to establish the Kingdom of God”(Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, vol. 2 [Florence: Sansoni, 1942], p. 369).

Page 86: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 73

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ditirambi di Dionisio (Milan: Mondadori, 1977), p. 109.28. Francois Perroux, Alienation et societe industrielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 929. Quoted from Gino Germani, Marginality (New Brunswick: Transaction Books,

1980).30. Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 57.

See also P.N. Stearns, ed., The Impact of the Industrial Revolution (Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).

31. Werner Sombart, Il capitalismo moderno (Turin: UTET, 1967), p. 645.32. Gino Germani, Sociology of Modernization: Studies on its Historical and Theoretical

Aspects with Special Regard to the Latin American Case (New Brunswick: TransactionBooks, 1981).

33. Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilitation and Political Development” in HarryEckstein and David E. Apter, eds., Comparative Politics (New York: The Free Press,1968), p. 583.

34. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order andFreedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).

35. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Man-kind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

36. Max Pietsch, La revolution industrielle (Paris: Payot, 1963), p. 31.37. Recent studies have shown that the standard of living of workers improved,

albeit in an irregular manner and extremely slowly, also in the first phase of the In-dustrial Revolution (see F. A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians [London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1954] and Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985], pp. 124 et seq.

38. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and IndustrialDevelopment in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1960).

39. Henri De Man, Au dela du marxisme (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 59.40. In a letter to Engels, Marx remarked that workers like to participate in political

meetings. Oddly enough, he added that he didn’t know why. Yet, the reason is obvious:in the Socialist International the workers found those community ties and the solidaritythat had been more or less destroyed by the self-regulating economy. According toJulien Benda the workers’ movement “did not come into being because one day theproletarians experienced given economic needs, but because their educators had in-troduced a moral idea into their conscience and this was stronger than the economicrequirement: the idea of their solidarity, of the moral grandeur of their solidarity anda religious idea: the expectation of a better tomorrow, of a new parousia” (Discours ala nation europeene [Paris: Gallimard, 1979], p. 22).

41. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 636f.42. Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1955).43. “Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in

a pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state” (KarlMarx, On the Jewish Question, p. 172). “Modern capitalism is absolutely non-religious,lacking in internal unity, without public spirit and often, but not always, a mere con-glomeration of owners and parvenus” ( John M. Keynes, Esortazioni e profezie [Milan:Garzanti, 1975], p. 229).

44. “Ratio is the technical term for counting, calculation; . . . it is the act of counting

Page 87: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

74 Revolutionary Apocalypse

as it was concretely practised and in the written form” (Emile Benveniste, Il vocabolariodelle istituzioni indoeuropee, vol. 1 [Turin: Einaudi, 1976], p. 114).

45. Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

46. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.47. Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis (Milan: Adelphi, 1984), p. 21.48. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1967).49. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, p. 87.50. Friedrich Engels, “The Situation of the Working Class in England,” in Complete

Works, vol. IV, p. 311. See Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class(London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).

51. Karl Marx, The Capital, in Collected Works, vol. 35, p. 639.52. Quoted from Jurgen Kucynski, Nascita della classe operaia (Milan: Il Saggiatore,

1967), p. 41.53. Jules Michelet, Il popolo, p. 112.54. Friedrich Engels, The Situation of the Working Class in England, p. 563.55. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by J. P. Mayer and M. Lerner

(London: Fontana, 1968).56. Ibid., p. 287.57. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 172.58. The very specific nature of Japanese capitalism is confirmation of this. In Japan

the market was never allowed to regulate itself, because the managerial elite managedto introduce into companies those ties of hierarchic solidarity that are typical of thefeudal world. As a result, “work in Japan is not simply a contractual agreement toobtain a salary but a means of identification with a much wider entity—in other words,it gives a gratifying sense of belonging to something greater and more meaningful.For management and for workers there is the idea that a job should probably last untilthe normal retirement age. For both, this generates a sense of security and also a senseof pride and of loyalty toward the firm. There is little of the feeling that is so commonin the West of being an insignificant and replaceable cog of a great machine” (EdwinO. Reischauer, The Japanese [Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1981], p. 131). Thisexplains why the Japanese working class did not experience the crisis of abandonmentand therefore never felt the need to protest against the system.

59. George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Prae-ger, 1961), p. 25.

60. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.61. See A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (Lon-

don: Croon Holm, 1981).62. J. P. Rioux, La revolution industrielle (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 180.63. Jules Michelet, Il popolo, pp. 138–139.64. Ibid., p. 139.65. Felix Ponteil, Les classes bourgeoises et l’avenement de la democratie (Paris: Albin

Michel, 1968), p. 126.66. Friedrich Engels, The Situation of the Working Class, p. 329.67. Edourad Dolleans, Storia del movimento operaio, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1977),

p. 17.68. Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), p. 125.

Page 88: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 75

69. The possibility of a revolutionary alliance between “God’s orphans” and theworkers had been predicted with extraordinary lucidity by the Prussian minister Countvon Galen: “The old year concluded with a famine [we read in a letter dated January1847] the new one is starting with starvation. Spiritual and physical indigence isspreading across Europe in the most alarming manner: one without God, the otherwithout bread. There will be trouble if their hands meet!” (Quoted from Lewis B.Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals [London: Oxford University Press,1946]).

70. Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies (New York:The Free Press, 1978), p. 284.

71. Emile Durkheim, Le socialisme (Paris: PUF, 1971), p. 37.72. Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cape,

1928).73. Werner Sombart, Il socialismo tedesco (Padua: Editrice il Corallo, 1981), p. 15.74. This is the expression used by Robert Owen to define the “internal proletariat”

of industrial civilization. One hundred and fifty years later, Franz Fanon was to definethe “external proletariat.”

Page 89: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 90: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 5

Waiting the Reign

1. Socialism was much more than the display of the internal proletariat’s re-sentment of Western civilization and a system that claimed to expel any formof solidarity and any principle of justice from social life in the name of theimpersonal laws of economy. It was a therapeutic diagnosis of the intellectualand moral anarchy that Europe had fallen into, a diagnosis that, by showinga glimpse of opportunity to materialize the Christian dream of universal re-novatio,1 had contributed significantly to liberating the working classes fromwhat Edward Thompson has happily denominated “the millenarianism ofdespair.”2

In reality, one should talk not of one but of many socialisms, since theemergence of several cults is what characterized the historical existence ofEuropean society during the uncontrolled growth of capital. Many of thesesects had an eschatological vision of history that brought them to judge theexisting order “an overturned world” destined to be swept away to make roomfor an absolute new order.3 Among these cults, through an almost Darwinistprocess of assimilation and selection, in the last two decades of the centuryone in particular—the one founded by Marx and Engels—became that“Church built on the proletariat rock” foreseen and predicted by Lassalle, justbefore his premature death.

The rise of Marxism to the orthodox rank of the continental socialist move-ment4 occurred thanks to a harsh battle fought on two fronts. On one side, itwas able to keep alive the “spirit of opposition”5 among the working classesby contrasting any reformist temptation; on the other, it successfully curbedthe eschatological impatience of the extremists who believed they could de-molish the supremacy of capital with a sudden attack. Marx opposed both these

Page 91: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

78 Revolutionary Apocalypse

strategies with his strategy of controversial expectancy of “hour x.” This plan hadbeen elaborated by Marx and Engels when they became aware that the so-cialist movement was caught between the devil of reformism and the deepblue sea of extremism. To embrace the reform method meant to lose sight ofthe final goal—the millenary reign of freedom—identifying socialism with theimprovement of workers’ living conditions in the institutional setting of lib-eral civilization; but to undertake the strategy of frontal attack was equivalentto condemning the “party of revolution” to regular defeat by the “party ofconservation.” A totally different approach was therefore necessary in orderto be constantly ready for the predicted violent overturning of the existingorder without brainlessly throwing the revolutionary forces into campaignsthat had no chance of success.

Thus, war to knife against the capitalist bourgeois society was the messageof Marx. Not a party warfare as the extremists had predicted, but trench war-fare, aiming for the progressive spiritual dissolution of the “class enemy.” Marxand Engels had reached this conclusion when they were forced to acknowl-edge that the flame of revolution had died down and the reactionary forceswere going to prevail for a long period of time.

At the brink of the 1848 Revolution, their position had been no differentfrom that of most extremist cults. Like the “blanquistes,” they were neo-Jacobins, fanatically convinced that there existed objective conditions withinthe European society for launching the final attack against the fortress ofcapital. Already in the Manifesto they had proclaimed the “inevitable and im-minent fall of today’s bourgeois property.”6 When, on February 24, Paris hadrisen against Louis Philippe and the revolution had started to spread all overthe continent, Marx and Engels immediately predicted that the days of the“old spectral world”7 were numbered and that a “general fire was going toburn down the old European institutions, enlightening the winning nationstowards a free, happy and glorious future.”8

By logic, the evolutionary theory formulated in Ideologia tedesca of revolu-tion as the inevitable outlet for the process of industrialization should haveled them to conclude that the material preconditions for the emancipation ofthe workers were not yet mature and that, therefore, it was unrealistic toexpect the proletarian party to win. Besides, it only existed in their vivid imag-ination. Yet, with an astonishing non sequitur, they hoped for—rather, pre-dicted as imminent—a conflict of planetary dimensions that would crush theonly industrial country of the time—England—where, moreover, the crisis ofChartism had indicated how the class struggle was not oriented toward non-revolutionary solutions.9 “Europe’s redemption [we read in one of the manyarticles in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where Marx and Engels repeated theirconviction, all-pervaded by eschatological impatience, that the bourgeois rev-olution was the “prelude of the proletarian revolution”]10 both the oppressednationalities conquest of independence and the fall of feudal absolutism, de-pends on the victorious insurrection of the French working class. But in

Page 92: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 79

France every social uprising necessarily drowns before the English middleclasses, ie., before Great Britain’s industrial and commercial supremacy in theworld. In France, and in the European continent in general, any partial socialreform is, and will remain, a pious and empty desire with regards to its chancesof achieving permanent absoluteness. Old England will only be overturnedby a world war. That alone can provide the Chartist party and the organisedEnglish workers party with the conditions to conduct a triumphant revolutionagainst their great oppressors. Only with the Chartists at the head of theEnglish government will social revolution go from the reign of utopia to thereign of reality. Any European war in which England is involved will be a worldwar. It will be in Canada, as well as in Italy, in East India and in Prussia, inAfrica as well as on the banks of the Danube. The European war is the firstconsequence of the victory of the workers’ revolution in France. As in Na-poleon’s times, England will find herself at the head of the counter-revolutionary armies but, by that same war, will be thrown at the head of therevolutionary movement and will redeem its debt against the Revolution ofthe eighteenth century. The summary of 1849 is this: revolutionary insurrec-tion of the French working class, world war.”11

Underlying this prognosis (which is also an action plan instigating civilworld war) is the most irrational political passion; that is, law as pantoclasticpathos: “one openly supports the annulment with terror of entire populations,of those who do not have the common sense to submit to the cosmic plan oftotal and absolute civilisation, who, on the contrary, are so foolish to preventits achievement.”12 The following is an example of one of Engels’s most ter-rifying predictions: “The future world war will not only exterminate classesand reactionary dynasties but also entire reactionary populations. And this toois progress.”13

Until the writing of the Meeting of the Central Committee of the League of theCommunists, that is, until March 1850, Marx and Engels remained blindlyconvinced that humanity was very close to the great revolutionary overturningthat would end the supremacy of capital. After that, suddenly, and as if struckby a revelation, they launched a violent attack against the “alchemists of rev-olution” who shared “the ancient alchemists’ mental unbalance and obtusefixed ideas” and “plunged themselves in smart concepts which would createrevolutionary miracles.”14 In the following September, during the CommunistLeague’s Central Committee meeting, for the first time they exposed thestrategy of trench warfare, based on the idea that workers still had to “exceedfifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars in order to change present relationsand prepare themselves for taking over power.”15 The revolution ceased to bean event within reach and became a long-term option that was absolutely notto result in compromising with the bourgeoisie. The latter was still the “classenemy” to be destroyed with all means—including, if necessary, terror.16

Given the ease with which the reactionary forces had been able to suppressthe European revolutionary movement, it was necessary to prepare spiritually

Page 93: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

80 Revolutionary Apocalypse

for a long “crossing of the desert,” giving up senseless attacks that wouldprovide “the enemy with unnecessary opportunities to destroy the workers’organisations and deprive them of their managers with jail or exile.”17

So a reformist Marx never existed.18 Admittedly, after April 1850, he un-ceasingly disputed the “alchemists of revolution” but he always did so withina military vision of the class struggle. To the extent that during a conferenceon September 25, 1871, he confirmed the concept that “the working classwould conquer its right to self emancipation on the battle field” and thereforeit was imperative to form a “proletarian army” and, once victorious, to establisha “proletarian dictatorship.”19

Nor was Marx ever against statism or for autonomous forms of manage-ment. Or rather, if he was, it was only for l’espace d’un matin and for exquisitely“strategic” purposes. Thrown by events, though judging the Commune anexperiment far from the type of socialism he had in mind,20 Marx did nothesitate to welcome it as the finally discovered “political structure in whichthe economic emancipation of labour could occur.”21

As evidence of the instrumental aspect of this opinion, one need only readthe following page written by Franz Mehring:

However brilliant were in every detail the Commune’s accomplishments, they were insome contrast with the principles Marx and Engels had supported for a quarter of acentury and had already proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto. According to theirconcept, amongst the final consequences of the proletarian revolution, there truly wasthe abolishment of the political organisation called state, but only as a gradual sup-pression. The main purpose of this organisation has always been to assure throughmilitary forces the economic oppression of the majority of workers by a minorityconsisting exclusively of owners. With the disappearance of the latter vanishes also theneed for an oppressive armed power for the State. At the same time Marx and Engelsemphasised that, in order to achieve this and other far more important objectives forthe future revolution, the working class first of all had to seize the organised politicalpower of the State and use it to crush the resistance of the capitalist class and give anew organisation to society. This concept, exposed in the Communist Manifesto did notagree with the praise expressed in the International’s Address of the General Councilto the Commune of Paris for having started by eradicating the parasitic State from itsfoundations.22

In fact, the model of social organization the Communards had in mind, asexpressed in the Declaration of the Parisian Population drawn up by the proud-honian Pierre Louis, was based on federalism and mutualism, upon the con-sistent application of the principle of decentralisation,23 whereas Marx andEngels had always favored “an absolute centralization of power in the handsof the State,24 as well as the “centralisation of all the means of production.”25

One cannot say that after the Communard experiment Marx and Engels con-verted to proudhonism, since they continued on every occasion26 to questionmutualism, reconfirming that the key to the emancipation of the workers relied

Page 94: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 81

on “the national centralisation of the means of production”27 with the conse-quent substitution of the “anarchy of the market” with the “single plan.”28

2. From all this it is obvious that Marx and Engels were constantly faithfulto the fundamental principles of communism as they had developed them inthe 1840s—class struggle, violent revolution, terror, transitional dictatorship,integral state economy29—but, when they realized that the revolutionary drivehad exhausted itself, they rediscovered the principle of economic maturity,expressed in Ideologia tedesca but uninhibitedly put aside during the rising of1848. In such a way, besides explaining the unsuccessful proletarian revolutionas a logical consequence of an inadequate development of the productiveforces, they could continue to believe that the revolutionary break was in-scribed in the “ultimate, deep, essential but hidden fundamental structure”30 ofliberal civilization: all one had to do was wait for the Industrial Revolution toproduce its overturning effects and to create the material conditions pronefor the violent upsetting of the existing order. In conclusion, the destiny ofcapitalism was marked and nothing or no one could modify it. For this precisereason demobilization was not the solution; on the contrary, it was mandatoryto assemble all the available forces and be ready to launch the final attack, theinevitable day of settling accounts with the bourgeoisie.

Then it becomes clear what the function of The Capital was to be in Marx’smind. By “scientifically” demonstrating the inevitable catastrophic collapse ofcapitalism, it had to prevent the reformist temptation from prevailing amongthe proletarian masses during the “passage through the desert.” At the sametime, Marx had to dissuade workers from following the path indicated by theanarchists who, deceiving themselves and others, expected to defeat the bour-geois state before times were ripe for the final victory. Thus, everything de-pended on the theory of fall. Only if such theory became the worker’s guidewould it be possible to avoid the omnipresent danger of the workers becomingintegrated in the institutions of liberal civilization, as well as consuming revo-lutionary energies in hopeless frontal attacks against the fortress of the capital.

The fact that Marx, after the failure of the European revolution, dedicatedmost of his amazing intellectual and moral energies to fight any form of ex-tremism did not mean that he had abandoned the revolutionary domain toside with reformism.31 It only meant he believed that, before launching a finalattack, it was necessary to wait for the times to be mature. It was equallynecessary to ensure that revolutionary tension did not cease during the waitfor the final battle. Otherwise, what he most revealingly called the “bourgeoisinfection”32 would spread to the working class and, consequently, the prospectof social palingenesis would vanish from the sight of history.

The Capital was the solution Marx conceived to prevent the positive inte-gration of the proletariat in the structures of liberal civilization. He was able—precisely to the extent that he provided incontrovertible documentation thatcapitalism was marching “with the ineluctability of a natural process”33 toward its

Page 95: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

82 Revolutionary Apocalypse

self-destruction—to foster amongst the masses the messianic expectation of rev-olutionary parousia. The declared objective was to “fix” the workers’ alienationby instilling the idea that the civilization of Possessions was bound to precip-itate in a historical void. This is most evident in the letter Marx wrote toFerdinand Domela-Nieuwehuis on February 22, 1881: “The doctrinaire andnecessarily fantastic anticipation of the action plan for the future revolutionis only used as a distraction from the present battle. The dream of the im-minent end of the world inspired the early Christians during their struggleagainst the Roman Empire and gave them faith in their victory. The scientificunderstanding of the inevitable degradation before our eyes of the prevailingsocial order, and the increasing anger the masses are thrown into by the old,now almost spectral, government, while simultaneously one witnesses thepositive fact of the incredible progress of means of production—all this guar-antees that, at the time of the true proletarian revolutionary outbreak, alsothe conditions for its subsequent modus operandi will be given (even thoughthey certainly will not be idyllic).”34 In other words, capitalism is condemnedby history, it has no escape route, and for this reason awaiting an insurrectionis not an illusion; rather, it is absolutely rational. Therefore the workers’movement must readily await the final battle, which inevitably will end withthe annihilation of bourgeois property and its civilization.

Certainly, the extremists too believed capitalism to be irremediably con-demned. But they made the mistake of exchanging a sure event for an im-minent one. Besides, they were utopians who projected their wishes ontoreality and appealed to Sollen, while actually the advent of the reign of freedomwas a Mussen, a historical necessity. In conclusion, they abandoned themselvesto “fantastic descriptions of the future society”35 and claimed to draw theoutline of the “new Jerusalem,” while the task of science could not be the“prescription of recipes for the inns of the future”36 but the identification ofthe “rules . . . and of the trends operating and occurring with granite-like ne-cessity”37 that guaranteed that “the old society was coming to an end and thestructure of deception and prejudice was collapsing.”38

3. The advantages deriving from such an approach to the problem of erect-ing the New World were as numerous as they were substantial. For one thing,it solved the problem of having to specify the characteristics of the socialorganization that would replace the existing one. This aspect is not to beunderestimated, since it was impossible to describe communism in positiveterms. How does one portray a society lacking labor distribution, institutions,power relations, dilemmas, and conflicts of interests? The only thing to sayabout such a desire-image is that it would be the “denial of denial”:39 a mysticformula borrowed from the terminological arsenal of Hegelian theodicy,which, like all mystic formulas, could not be filled with any real content. But,for this precise reason, it was necessary to specifically forbid the asking ofquestions about the social organization to be founded upon the ruins of the

Page 96: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 83

existing one. This is exactly what Marx did, when he proclaimed that “who-ever presented a future plan was reactionary.”40

Second, and most important, insisting on the fact that “the decline of thebourgeoisie and the triumph of the proletariat were equally inevitable”41 meantinstilling in the “armed proletariat” certainty of final victory and therefore con-fidence even in the presence of the most unbearable defeats. Moreover, itmeant assigning the proletariat an exciting mission of cosmic-historical jus-tice: to accomplish the Weltgericht maxim.

The problem remained of how to immunize the workers from the “bour-geois infection.” It was necessary to demonstrate that their living conditionswithin the institutions of a capitalist society would never improve but indeedwere destined to deteriorate, despite all the unions’ efforts to wring wageincreases from their employer. Therefore, the method of reforms was decep-tive. At the most, this method could be used as “daily practice” to stimulatean uncompromising spirit of opposition.

To reconstruct Marx’s deduction on this specific matter, it is crucial to keepin mind Hegel’s theory of essence. In the Scienza della logica, Hegel states that“essence is the truth of being”42 and such truth coincides with what is containedin its concept. He also claims that any empirical existence tends to developand, in so doing, to adjust to its essence or initially hidden nature. If oneapplies this metaphysical notion to the capitalist method of production, onecan say that “it does not exist in its pure state, it does not correspond to itsconcept, and has not adjusted to itself.”43 This is proven by the fact that withinempirical capitalism there is one element—“an external demand for what theworker has made [the goods]”44—that is contrary to “capitalism according toits concept,” which can only accommodate two social classes: the entrepre-neurial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. In conclusion, once the em-pirical existence of capitalism corresponds to its hidden essence, it will beimpossible for goods to be absorbed by the economy, and, as a consequence,any means of profit will vanish. That is, as soon as the social classes betweencapital and labor disappear—something that will inevitably happen, since thecalling of every empirical existence must coincide with its concept—the en-gine of the capitalist machine will break down.

This explains why the bipolar class thesis has an extremely important rolein Marx’s theoretical system. The classes must be two and only two, since thisis the binding condition for the demise of capitalism. This is not only becausethe division of society into a rich and a poor minority renders highly probablethe development of “two great enemies”45 and hence the transformationof the class struggle into a real “class warfare,” but also and especially becausethe economy will lack the vital prerequisite for functioning: the existence ofa sufficient demand of goods and services, deriving exclusively from outsidethe working classes. In fact, if the sole demand for goods and services camefrom the workers, profit would be impossible, since, through the marketing

Page 97: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

84 Revolutionary Apocalypse

of their goods, the capitalists would make the exact amount they had put asidefor their wage fund.

Capitalism therefore represents an enigma. In reality it should not exist atall, since, in its essence, it is a method of production “that cannot function.”46

Yet, it exists; only because it has not become itself. Which means that its endis inscribed in its essence. It will occur, as soon as its dialectic self-movementbrings it to coincide with its concept. Besides, there is a law—defined by Marxas “the most important in political economy and the most essential for un-derstanding the most difficult relationships”47—that states that “to the extentto which productivity of labour increases, the rate of profit decreases,”48 since“maximum development of productivity combined with maximum growth ofexisting production coincides with the depreciation of capital and the degra-dation of the workers.”49

These being the facts, one can certainly say that capitalism is a “livingcontradiction,”50 since the following paradox is present within its logic of de-velopment: the growth of productive forces goes hand in hand with the in-creasing impoverishment of the working classes and the (tendential) declineof the rate of profit. Such a paradox will inevitably lead to “explosions, disas-ters, crises, where a temporary expansion of labour and the momentary de-struction of most of the capital will violently bring [capitalism] to a pointwhere it will not be able to continue to use its productive ability to the full,without committing suicide. Besides, the disasters occurring regularly will berepeated on a vaster scale and eventually lead to the violent fall of capital.”51

These words contain practically everything Marx was to try to demonstratethrough the complicated chain of circular arguments and tautologies that rep-resent The Capital. Using the pseudo-Hegelian logic, he will oppose to the“vulgar economists,” who mistook the empirical existence of capitalism for itsauthentic essence, the “crazy” idea that the bourgeoisie, though having builta phenomenal wealth-producing engine, was condemned to increasing work-ers’ material and moral poverty in an intolerable manner and destroying itsnourishment, namely profit. From this originated the famous prognosis—atruly catastrophic and palingenetic vision of the fate of humanity—that endsvolume one of The Capital:

Each capitalist launches a deadly attack on many others. Centralisation, namely theexpropriation of many capitalists by a few, is accompanied by a constant increase in thecooperative method of labour, the conscious technical application of science, the sys-tematic exploitation of the earth, the transformation of means of labour in ones onlyusable collectively, the economy of all the means of production through their use asmeans of production of combined social labour, while all populations are increasinglycaught in the net of the world market, thus developing increasingly the internationalcharacter of the capitalist regime. With the constant decrease of capital magnates, whoabuse and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, the massincreases in poverty, oppression, subordination, degeneration, exploitation, and the rebellion

Page 98: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 85

of the working class also increases and is regulated, united and organised by the samemechanism as the capitalist productive process. The monopoly of capital becomes a constrainton the method of production that developed with it and under its influence. The central-isation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach the point wherethey are incompatible with their capitalist cover. Which is broken. The capitalist privateproperty has its last hour. The expropriators are expropriated.52

Remembering this, one can absolutely say that the “transition of socialismfrom utopia to science” Marx believed had been accomplished in reality hadbeen the transition of socialism from utopia to theology. With his grandiose theo-retical construction, Marx gave a semblance of rationality to the messianicexpectation of revolutionary palingenesis. In order to subtract the communistalternative from any critical debate, he elaborated the pluri-logics theory em-phasizing the existence of two rationales, of which one, the “bourgeois” ra-tionale, was basically incapable of capturing the hidden essence of reality. Thishidden essence was clear only to those who had been able to escape the stu-pefying effects of the “false consciousness” undertaking the point of view ofthe actor—the revolutionary proletariat—to whom history had assigned thecalling of leading all humanity toward the millenary reign of freedom.

For over 20 years, Marx and Engels tried to impose their revolutionarytheology as the official doctrine of the European socialist movement, resort-ing, where necessary and without any moral scruples, to the art of manipu-lation.53 They failed, mainly due to the vital resistance of the anarchists whohad promptly predicted that the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”would lead to the establishment of a “prison like regime” based “internallyon slavery and externally on permanent war.”54

Although the criticism of the anarchists could not have been clearer or morepenetrating, the intellectual supporters of the French workers’ movement (forthe majority blanquistes and proudhonians) were defeated after Thiers’s brutalrepression of the Commune. Bakunin’s death deprived the anarchists of theircharismatic leader and a “wait-and-see policy” started to prevail on “volun-tarism.” Besides, everything seemed to point to the fact that emeutisme was aself-destructive strategy, only enabling the bourgeois governments to ruth-lessly attack workers’ associations and deprive them of their leaders. Therehad to be another alternative. In fact, Marxism provided a solid theoreticalframework for conceiving social revolution as an extended historical process,without losing an ounce of the palingenetic spirit, since the inevitable out-come of such a process would be the overturning of the existing state.

Aware of this, it is not surprising that within the European socialist move-ment of the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred a divisionthat repeated with incredible analogy, “the division between the CatholicChurch and the millenarian sects, in which were laid the foundations of thatmovement, with Marxism representing the ecclesiastic moment, ie., the re-alistic and organised aspect, and anarchism perpetuating the eschatological

Page 99: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

86 Revolutionary Apocalypse

impatience and revolutionary voluntarism of a chiliastic movement. This anal-ogy is valid both for the way of interpreting the route to be followed in orderto reach the Reign ( � Revolution) and of representing the future Millen-nium. Like the Church, the Marxist party strove to preserve the good tidingsuncorrupted in a hostile world until the coming of the Reign, relying first andforemost on the fatal dynamic of the system. Instead, the anarchists, like theheretics and the sectarian forefathers, actively tried to destroy the system, tomake way for the achieving of the ideal which they expected to come fromtheir efforts alone. Like the Church, the Marxists tended to identify the Reignwith the rule of their own party, but were induced by their own realism toportray everything else in a manner almost identical to the existing society—socialism: phase one of the palingenesis—postponing to some indefinite fu-ture, in a manner no different from how the Church interprets the end of theworld, the advent of a classless society—communism: second and final phaseof the palingenesis. Which has, within this concept, exactly the same com-forting function as the Christian paradise. Although the advent of the newJerusalem is awaited literally in time and in space, it is depicted with suchcharacteristics as to virtually disappear in a vanishing future and substantiallyis no more realistic than paradise.”55

4. The ecclesiastical conception of socialism, where chiliastic utopianismintertwined with the harshest political realism, needed a “scholastic” arrange-ment of its basic dogmas. This need was satisfied in a way many consideredexemplary by Engels when, between 1877 and 1878, he wrote the series ofarticles that were to become famous under the title Anti-Duhring. Their read-ings constituted a real “enlightenment” for the main Spd leaders—Lieb-knecht, Bebel, Kautsky, and the like—whose doubts as to the scientific natureof Marxism were immediately dissolved. From then on, they did everythingin their power to ensure that the fundamental ideas of Marxism penetratedthe party’s cadres and oriented their actions. So, what for decades had simplybeen the doctrine followed by one of the many cults that defined themselvesas socialist became something very similar to orthodox German democraticsocialism. In particular, it was conceived as such by Kautsky, who had dedi-cated all his life to fighting any attempt to avert the Spd from the path tracedby Marx and Engels. He was firmly convinced that, externally, socialism wouldlose its original sense of direction, degrading to a mere movement of socialreform, while its “historical calling” was to reestablish the whole of Westerncivilization on new foundations.

In reality, after the October Revolution, Kautsky was accused of alteringMarx and Engels’s message and transforming it surreptitiously into an “ideologyof integration”56 that was inclined to more or less consciously hide the non-revolutionary nature of Spd procedure behind a strictly verbal radicalism. Thiswas absolutely not true: far from being an “opportunistic” detour from genuineMarxist tradition, Kautskism represented “an essential moment [of that tradi-

Page 100: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 87

tion] without which the success of Leninism, at least in Europe but possiblyalso in Russia, would have continued to be absolutely incomprehensible.”57 Itconverted Marx’s philosophy into a widespread and deeply established way ofthinking and feeling and contributed significantly to keeping alive the hope ofrevolution in a period when the cycle of class struggles that had started in 1889seemed to have come to a close.

Certainly, Kautsky never missed an opportunity to attack whoever—blan-quistes, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists—aimed to relaunch a war of ac-tion, which they considered the only form of struggle able to foment “aburning feeling of rebellion” among the proletarian masses.58 However, hiscriticism was always firmly anchored to what was the pillar of the Marx-Hegelstrategy: the rejection of any reformist hypothesis, tied to the rigorously sci-entific belief that the destiny of capitalism was marked and could not bechanged by anyone or anything. From here, his definition of the Spd: “arevolutionary party and not a party conducting revolutions.” “We know [onereads in one of his successful pamphlets] that our goal can only be achievedby means of a revolution, but we also know that it will be as difficult for usto start this revolution as for our opponents to prevent it. Therefore we arenot even thinking about provoking or preparing a revolution. Being unableto initiate a rebellion when we choose, we cannot say anything about whenand in what circumstances and under which aspects the revolution will takeplace. We know the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariatwill not end until the latter acquire complete political power to build a socialistsociety. We know that this class struggle will extend and become stronger,that the proletariat is increasing in numbers, and as a moral and economicstrength, that therefore the defeat of capitalism and the triumph of the rev-olution are inevitable, but we can only give vague hypotheses as to when andhow the final crucial battles of this social war will be handled.”59

Marx and Engels added nothing new from the “turning point” of Septem-ber 1850, with the declared objective of preventing the integration of theworking class during the passage through the desert to the Promised Land.And, if it is true that Kautsky gave an ultralegalistic interpretation of Marxism,it is also true he laid the theoretical foundations for what, for a quarter of acentury, was to appear to the vast majority of European socialists—Leninincluded60—the “correct” attitude to adopt vis-a-vis the bourgeois-capitalistorder: an attitude that combined in a very delicate balance an extreme rejec-tion of such order and an apparent respect for its rules—obviously until theday in which the awaited total revolution exploded. It is precisely for thisreason—for having successfully combined radicalism and legalism, constantlyreferring to the authority of Marx and Engels—that Kautsky was consideredin and outside European democratic socialism the most uncompromising ad-vocate of the revolutionary purity of socialism,61 the man whose systematicpedagogical action had transformed Marxism into a cultural force able to havea significant impact on social reality.

Page 101: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

88 Revolutionary Apocalypse

It goes without saying that Kautsky would never have been able to trans-form Marxism into a mass counterculture had his voice not been amplified bythousands and thousands of “permanent repeaters” hired among those whomHayek called second- and third-hand “thought vendors” and organized ex-actly like the Prussian bureaucracy on a strictly professional basis.62 In fact,when Guglielmo Ferrero arrived in Germany at the end of 1894, he wasimmediately struck by the fact that the Spd was a kind of “state within thestate” with “magnificent ministries and majestic budgets” and with dozens ofpublications capable of producing the “daily intellectual nourishment dulyfermented with socialist leaven for millions of workers.”63 Such a huge or-ganization—simultaneously a counter-society of “true faithful” in partibus in-fidelium and a bureaucratic device managed by armies of activists for whomsocialism was a Beruf (in the dual sense of calling and profession) contributedsignificantly to perpetuating the “national polarisation” of Germany underWilhelm and actually intensified it, offering huge “masses of workers a wayof living considerably different from that of other groups and especially fromthat of those who specifically supported the prevailing political and socialsystem. This way of living was ensured through a rich network of political,economic and cultural organisations”64 all animated by the belief in the in-evitable fall of capitalism and the equally inevitable advent of socialism. Betterthan any other social democratic ideologist, Kautsky attributed to the awaitingthe final reign the semblance of a self-evident truth, tirelessly stressing theidea that the “capitalist society had closed shop,” so one could certainly saythat “its dissolution was only a matter of time” and that the “creation of anew form of society in the place of the present one was no longer simplysomething that was desirable but had become inevitable.”65

This was an exciting prospect for all those the Spd had managed to includein its community structures. In addition, Kautsky was pleased to represent the“goal-conscious militant proletariat” as the “avant-garde of all the exploitedand oppressed” upon whose “irresistible development” actually depended theestablishment of “eternal peace among all peoples.”66 This obviously contrib-uted to fostering among the Spd leadership the conviction, “a source ofboundless pride and of passionate devotion to their cause, that History wason their side”67 and they alone possessed a clear vision of the end of humanity’sdramatic odyssey. It also contributed to making the Spd a sui generis party,simultaneously family, native countryland, and religion, a party within societyand not of society, driven as it was by the messianic belief of being predestinedto building a “totally different” civilization from the one in which it operated.This rendered German democratic socialism a “world apart” that had delib-erately chosen self-imposed cultural isolation. Thus, substantially, it was a moralbody, which was alien to the national community, proud of being “different,”and therefore perceived as a dangerous subversive force by all those whoidentified with the prevailing order, ready when the right moment came alongto go from a trench warfare to a war of action.

Page 102: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 89

It is true the social democratic leaders missed no opportunity to stress theSpd’s legalism.68 But this was not enough to totally cancel the spiritual extra-neity of the counter-society they had patiently built, providing large masses ofworkers with a community of belonging, based upon concrete ties of solidar-ity, enlightened by a wonderful prospect—the revolutionary escape from capi-talism—where a gratifying role was predicted for all the underprivileged: thatof being nothing less than the Promethean builders of “Paradise on earth.”69

From this stems the almost idolatric cult of the working class and of therevolutionary party, which found in Kautsky its supreme priest, ready to theo-rize the absolute subordination of individuals to that collective subject—thesocialist movement—that, although being one section, aspired to become theabsolute. “Among the organised workers [we read in one of his most typicaland meaningful pages] communist instincts are almost as strong as among prim-itive people, naturally on a more elevated and international scale; which meansthat for organised workers the individual is insignificant, class is everything . . .What drives us toward the party, what keeps us within it, is not a lucrativeprospect but the prospect of fame and honour; not even the acknowledgementof, or a particular empathy for, party members. It is only and exclusively thecommunist instinct, the sense of duty, which tells us the class of the underprivilegedis entitled to all our personality, not only part of it, whose limits are imposed byindividual freedom. We belong to the party, body and soul, before it we haveonly duties, no rights, except for one: equality. We are obligated to sacrifice every-thing for the party, instead the party not even the smallest object for us.”70

The inevitable consequence: the socialist revolution, whose task was the “de-struction of the class State,” was not to seek its model in the “bourgeois de-mocracy” based upon individualism but “in the communities where completeequality reigned, in the primitive tribes,” which were founded not upon “prin-ciples of liberty, equality and fraternity, but only on equality and fraternity.”71

This was like saying that the Spd was a “cultural alteration” based on the re-jection of the freedom typical of the bourgeois Gesellschaft as conceived bymodernists and opposed by the Gemeinschaft’s solidarism and organicism.

It is evident that such a party—theorized, organized, and experienced as anecclesia militans, thus as a charismatic institution—could not integrate itselfpositively in the national society, in part because its basic values were verydifferent from those of the prevailing culture—all-pervaded with nationalismand militarism—in part because it conceived the struggle for socialism as “aprolonged civil war.”72 At the end of that war, “the expropriators would be-come the expropriated,” and the state and the commune, now owners of allthe production processes,73 would introduce “a conscious organisation of so-cial production in accordance with the pre-arranged plan.”74 This was a ver-itable declaration of war against the existing state, even though the socialdemocratic leaders, in accordance with Kautsky’s interpretation of Marxismendorsed by Engels,75 did not try to anticipate the moment of the final battlethat, instead, they tended to represent in peaceful and almost idyllic forms.76

Page 103: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

90 Revolutionary Apocalypse

6. To confidently await the revolution “while capitalism was digging its owngrave”77 and, in the meantime, extend the domain of influence of Marxism,consolidating the intellectual and moral barriers that separated the proletarianGemeinschaft from the bourgeois Gesellschaft: in synthesis this was the strategytheorized by Kautsky and systematically implemented by the Spd officers.

The successes the Spd achieved along the path designed by the “red pope”were so considerable that, from the foundation of the Second International,it became the “party model” looked upon by the great majority of continentalsocialists with a combination of admiration and envy. And not only for itsremarkable electoral success, but also and especially for the fact that it hadbeen able to organize the lives of thousands of workers in a community spiritand at the same time develop a majestic conception of the world where thesocialist movement was the charismatic actor destined to materialize a projectof cosmic and historical significance: to start “a new era for humanity.”78

Yet, before the century ended, this grandiose construction was shaken byan internal controversy that broke its spiritual foundations, a controversy thatconcerned the very nature of socialism and its long-term goals and, therefore,involved the entire Second International, which for years was torn by whatmost inappropriately was called the “revisionist debate.”

Ironically, the controversy was actually started by Eduard Bernstein, theman considered to be the executor of Engel’s will and one of the most ardentpromulgators of Marxism. After a long period of time spent in Great Britain,where he had been in direct contact with the English workers’ movement andFabian-socialism, Bernstein had been forced to admit that capitalist societywas not evolving according to Marx’s theory.79 Indeed, it seemed that everynotion of that theory was being invalidated. Bernstein first illustrated thisconcept in a series of articles published as of 1896 in the Neue Zeit; he laterformulated it explicitly in October 1898 in his address to the Spd conferencein Stuttgart. On that occasion he urged his fellow party members to acknowl-edge that “social relations had not deteriorated” as predicted in the Manifesto;that the “number of owners had increased rather than decreased” and the“intermediate strata of society were not disappearing from the social ladder.”80

The following year Bernstein published his I presupposti del socialismo e icompiti della social democrazia, which came to be known as the “Bible of revi-sionism.”81 In that text he used precise figures to demonstrate that Marx’spicture of modern industrial society was absolutely wrong. Albeit slowly, wel-fare was expanding. Thus, it was unreasonable to talk about the increasingimpoverishment of the working classes, just as it was unreasonable to talkabout the proletarianization of society. If anything, the opposite was true.Society was gradually becoming more bourgeois. Absolutely nothing sup-ported the theory of the catastrophic decline of capitalism, upon which de-pended the very meaning of the war conducted by the Spd and the certaintythat sooner or later the walls of the bourgeois stronghold would collapse.

That being so, it was time for the Spd to put aside its strategy of waiting and

Page 104: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 91

self-imposed isolation, as well as the revolutionary tradition, all-pervaded by athaumaturgical perception of the class struggle; a perception that even Marx,despite his insistence on the principle of economic maturity, had not been ableto free himself from. Hence, his “overestimation of the creative force of revo-lutionary violence, directed toward the social transformation of modern soci-ety.”82 This made Marxism an updated form of blanquisme, totally incapableof having a positive impact upon the development of democracy. As long as theworking class lacked strong, independent organizations of an economic natureand real political maturity through self-government, the so-called “proletariandictatorship” had inevitably to be the ideological tyranny of an elite of revo-lutionary intellectuals over the proletarian masses who had no notion of howto manage the state. Bernstein warned: “If from a social class, whose vast ma-jority lives in poverty, is poorly educated, badly paid and even that miserablewage is not sure, we cannot expect high intellectual and moral standards, whichare the pre-requisite for the establishment of a stable society, then let us noteven try to attribute this to it.”83

Bernstein also questioned the scientific nature of the theory of the “his-torical mission of the proletariat.” In Marx’s writings—this was the main pointof his criticism—the working class was a mere mental construction; it did notcorrespond to the working class as it really was, which showed no revolution-ary calling but a spontaneous reformist tendency that the Spd was obliged tofoster, operating as a political and social reform movement within the liberalstate, whose institutions were to be considered both as a “means of fightingfor socialism” and as “modes of its accomplishment.”84 Certainly such insti-tutions could not perform miracles; but equally certain was that they were themost precious resource the workers had to acquire full right of citizenship.

The overall sense of the struggles led by the parties making up the Inter-national—this was, according to Bernstein, the conclusion one was forced tomake on the basis of the evolution of European society in recent decades—was the “creation of situations and premises that enabled and guaranteed asmooth transition, without violent fractures, from the modern social order toa superior order”85 through a progressive widening of the liberal state’s bound-ary, yes, born bourgeois, but liable to becoming a cooperative association ofall social classes. This meant considering socialism the historical heir of lib-eralism; indeed, an “organising liberalism,”86 whose method was gradualismand whose aim the generalization of modern freedom. Hence, it was not amovement tending to overturn the existing order, but to improve it, by work-ing within the institutional framework.

7. Bernstein’s challenge irritated the caretakers of the “Marxist temple”enormously: Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Cunow, Mehring, Antonio Labriola,Rosa Luxemburg, and so on. Bernstein and his followers—Conrad Schuitt,Georg von Vollmar, Eduard David, Ludwig Frank, and the like—were accusedof wanting to introduce typically “bourgeois” ideas into the socialist move-

Page 105: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

92 Revolutionary Apocalypse

ment. With the assumption of correcting Marxism, they would undermine itsfoundations and eventually reinforce the “enemies of the working class.” So,during the conference in Lubeck in 1900, the Spd leaders officially declaredthemselves against revisionism, though Bebel was careful to specify that, de-spite his heretical ideas, Bernstein could not be considered a “bad comrade”nor less a “renegade,” as suggested by the most passionate champions of Marx-ist orthodoxy, for whom the ideological purity of the socialist movement wasan absolutely essential value.

Of course, there were precise reasons for such a violent reaction to the ideaof a critical revisitation of Marxism and of the social democratic strategy.Bernstein said too many things that explicitly contrasted with what had, bythen, become a way of thinking and feeling that was deeply rooted in theminds of the great majority of social militants; he challenged the idolatric cultof the working class, as well as the charismatic role of the revolutionary priests;he questioned dogmas that were essential for the spiritual unity of the pro-letarian Gemeinschaft: in other words, he questioned everything that definedthe socialist identity.

Adverse to the prevailing culture, which they considered condemned byHistory, the Spd leaders had been able to build a closed counter-society, drivenby a strong belief in the advent of the kingdom, thanks to the formidablemessianic charge of the Marxist Weltanschauung. This offered an “exaltingimage of a better future. It promised the final victory through the unity ofthe masses against the system that seemed inevitably destined to fall, due toits internal contradictions and the growth of the workers movement. It at-tributed a scientific meaning to the frustration and resentment of workers vis-a-vis society as a whole.”87 It therefore was the perfect counter-ideology forkeeping united all those who felt like outsiders within the national communityand reintegrating them in a new community of belonging. So it was impossibleto renounce Marxism, without the risk of precipitating the proletarian Ge-meinschaft into a general crisis of identity. Its internal cohesion depended uponthe belief in the scientific and moral superiority of the doctrine that had sostrongly contributed to drawing millions of underprivileged people under thesocialist banner, people who were obtaining too intense a gratification fromsuch belief to be willing to detach themselves from it.

The material interests of the members of the state—the officers of “bu-reaucratic socialism,” as Ferrero called them—were also at stake. For thesepeople the essential objective was not the materialization of the reformistaims, as indicated by Bernstein on the basis of the English socialist model,but the preservation of the “separation” of the counter-society, upon whichwas based their power and their prestige. They “had not been elected toarticulate the party’s policy within society but to create a new society”;88 andthis required that “the party should remain united no matter what, and func-tion as an absolutely compact organism of election and propaganda.”89 Hence,their absolute determination to oppose revisionism. By questioning the cer-

Page 106: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 93

tainties upon which the revolutionary counterculture had been created, re-visionism in fact threatened to crush the spiritual wall that separated the Spdfrom civil society. So, the very success of the ecclesiastic strategy had trans-formed the “body of the consecrated”—for whom socialism was not only abelief but a career and a unique source of intense psychological gratification—into a conservative force determined to keep its status quo.

To all this was added the fact that for moral and existential motives, manysocial democratic militants could not even entertain the thought of abandon-ing the idea of total revolution. They were restless souls, in search of a sub-stitute for the lost faith in the God of Judeo-Christian tradition.90 A purelysecular socialism that, instead of aiming at the regeneration of humanity, lim-ited itself to proposing a prosaic improvement of the existing state, wouldnever satisfy their yearning for the absolute. Thus, during the Bernstein De-batte, two “spiritual families” animated by opposing and incompatible valuesconfronted each other. The members of the orthodox tradition, dominatedby the “principle of desire,” denied the evidence and, deceiving themselvesand others, obstinately embraced a doctrine they believed to be scientific, butthat was nothing but a huge mythology.91 And the revisionists, who explicitlyreferred to the tradition of the Enlightenment, aimed, first and foremost, toverify the objective trends of capitalism, in order to then suitably adjust theaction of the workers’ parties. Theirs was a rational methodology, governedby the “principle of reality.” It is precisely for this reason that it was boundto clash with the psychological and moral resistance of all those for whom, ina world characterized by “the agony of God,”92 hope in revolution was theonly thing that could give a religious meaning to life.

NOTES

1. Antonio Labriola stated very clearly that socialism was nothing other than anattempt to materialize the messianic hope that had been infused by Christianity in theEuropean consciousness: “We socialists are going back to the Christian idea of societyas an institution of the poor: not providence in the next world but providence in thisworld. We socialists have the holy audacity to declare ourselves more Christian thanpriests, indeed the only Christians of the century. We are the true disciples of Jesus ofNazareth, of Jesus who announced the Kingdom of God who will come in peace andlove and will be made thanks to, and by virtue of, our sentiments.”

2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: PenguinBooks, 1968), p. 411.

3. “It is not a matter of mere improvement [we read in an article published in theTimes regarding the Brussels Congress of the First International] but of nothing shortof a regeneration, and not of one country but of all humanity. This is certainly thebroadest goal than any institution has ever given itself, except perhaps the Christianchurch” (quoted from Norman MacKenzie, Socialism: A Short History [London: Hutch-inson], 1966).

4. I use the word “continental” because British socialism was not greatly influenced

Page 107: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

94 Revolutionary Apocalypse

by Marxism and had a definite reformist vocation (see Gino Bianco, L’esperienza la-burista [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976]).

5. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 271.6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto del Partito comunista, in Opere complete,

vol. 6, p. 663.7. Karl Marx, “Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte,” in Opere complete, vol. 11,

p. 115.8. Friedrich Engels, “Letters from Germany,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 16.9. See Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London: Longman, 1959).

10. Ferdinando Claudin, Marx, Engels y la revolucion de 1848 (Madrid: Siglo Vein-tiuno, 1976), p. 297.

11. Karl Marx, “The Revolutionary Movement,” in Complete Works, vol. 8, p. 215.12. Domenico Settembrini, Due ipotesi per il socialismo in Marx ed Engels (Bari: La-

terza, 1974), p. 235.13. Friedrich Engels, “La lotta delle nazioni,” in Opere complete, vol. 8, p. 237.14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Reviews,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 318.15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Meeting of the Central Committee of the League

of the Communists on the 15 September 1850, in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 626.16. This is confirmed in a letter Engels wrote to Bebel in 1891. After praising ’93,

he confidently added, “If a war brings us to power prematurely, the technicians willbe our chief enemies; they will deceive and betray us wherever they can and we shallhave to use terror against them” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence1846–1895 [London: Martin Lawrence], 1934).

17. G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1954).18. Contrary to what has been claimed, among others, by Rodolfo Mondolfo (Uma-

nesimo di Marx [Turin: Einaudi, 1975]) and Shlomo Avineri (The Social and PoliticalThought of Karl Marx [Cambridge: CUP, 1968]).

19. Quoted from G. M. Bravo, Marx e la Prima Internazionale (Bari: Laterza, 1979),p. 69.

20. Marx stated this very clearly in a letter to Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis in1881: “The majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be. Witha bit of common sense it could however have made a compromise with Versailles thatwould have been useful for the mass of people.”

21. Karl Marx, “Civil War in France” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, CompleteWorks, vol. 17, p. 334.

22. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1968).23. See Vittorio Mancini, La Comune di Parigi (Rome: Savelli, 1975), p. 244 et seq.24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the

League,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 285.25. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 505.26. In his article “Indifference in Political Matters,” written in January 1873, Marx

stated: “To avoid any offence to this respectable class [the category of masters, entre-preneurs, and bourgeois], the good Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to thecoming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or com-petition, our only guarantee” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 18,p. 305).

27. Karl Marx, La nazionalizzazione della terra (Parma: Da Adam, 1969), p. 43.28. Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Duhring,” in Opere complete, vol. 25, p. 299.

Page 108: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 95

29. One point should be clear: Marx did not think of the transition dictatorship as “arelatively short period” (Riccardo Guastini, I due poteri [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982] p. 82);on the contrary, he was always convinced that “the class rule of the workers over thestrata of the old world who are struggling against them can only last as long as theeconomic basis of class society has not been destroyed.” (“Notes on Bakunin’s Statehoodand Anarchy,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 24, p. 521.)

30. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 3, 1 (Rome: Rinascita, 1956), p. 259.31. This is confirmed in a letter Marx wrote to Engels on October 8, 1853: “On

the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialistcharacter” (“Letters,” vol. 40, p. 347).

32. Letter from Marx to Engels on April 9, 1863, in Opere complete, vol. 41, p. 468.33. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 35, p. 751.34. Quoted from Domenico Settembrini, Il labirinto marxista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975),

p. 333.35. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 515.36. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 25.37. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 9.38. Karl Marx, “Discorso dell’Associazione di Cultura di Londra,” in Opere complete,

vol. 7, p. 619.39. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 751.40. Quoted from Edward H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (London: MacMillan,

1950).41. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 496.42. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. 1, Book 2, translated by W. H. Johnston et

al. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929), p. 15.43. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, vol. 2 (Flor-

ence: La Nuova Italia, 1970), p. 649.44. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 26.45. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 485.46. C. Napoleoni, “Introduzione” to C. Napoleoni, ed., La teoria dello sviluppo cap-

italistico (Turin: Boringhieri, 1972), p. XXVII.47. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali, vol. 2, p. 460.48. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 480.49. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 461.50. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 28.51. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 461.52. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 750.53. See Jean Elleinstein, Marx, p. 469 et seq.54. From a letter sent by Bakunin to the editors of Liberte, in G. Ribeill, ed., So-

cialisme autoritaire ou libertaire (Paris: Union Generale d’Editions, 1975), pp. 397–398.55. Domenico Settembrini, Anarchismo, marxismo e cristianesimo in Socialismo e ri-

voluzione dopo Marx (Naples: Guida, 1974), p. 101.56. Erich Matthias, Kautsky e il kautskismo (Bari: De Donato, 1971), p. 77.57. Domenico Settembrini, “Karl Kautsky e le basi teoriche della socialdemocrazia,”

in Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx, p. 153.58. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier Books, 1961).59. Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power (London: Pluto Press, 1990).60. This was contrary to the legend built by Communist historiography, until the

Page 109: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

96 Revolutionary Apocalypse

outbreak of the Great War. Lenin considered Kautsky a master of revolutionary Marx-ism (see Marek Waldenberg, Il Papa rosso [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980], p. 475 et seq.).Why accuse him of being a renegade, if he thought that he had always been a revisionistin disguise?

61. So intransigent that Georg von Vollmar scornfully referred to him as “a theoryfanatic, the man who had become the party’s German teacher, he who would ratherlet the world and, if necessary, even the party go, than change one syllable of his nicedoctrine” (quoted from Massimo L. Salvadori, Kautsky e la rivoluzione socialista [Milan:Feltrinelli, 1976], p. 75).

62. On this point, see Robert Michels’s classic, Political Parties: Sociological Study ofthe Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Dover, 1959).

63. Guglielmo Ferrero, L’Europa giovane (Treves: Milan, 1898), p. 65. On Ferrero’sacute analysis of German democratic socialism, it is well worth reading Massimo Bor-landi’s excellent essay, “Ferrero e il socialismo” in R. Baldi, ed., Guglielmo Ferrero frasocieta e politica (Genoa: ECIG, 1986), p. 71 et seq.

64. Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (New York: Arno Press,1979).

65. Karl Kautsky, Il programma di Erfurt (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1971), p. 123.66. Ibid., pp. 195, 200, and 201.67. P. J. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London: OUP, 1969).68. Typical is Bebel’s statement to the Reichstag in 1895: “Up to this very day, they

cannot attribute violently revolutionary aspirations to democratic socialism, or eventhe slightest attempt to achieve their objectives by means of a violently revolutionaryroute” (quoted from H. J. Steinberg, Il socialismo tedesco da Bebel a Kautsky [Rome:Editori Riuniti, 1979], p. 92.

69. Karl Marx, “Discorso sul congresso dell’Aia,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich En-gels, Critica dell’anarchismo, p. 99.

70. Quoted from Alessandro Panaccione, Kautsky e l’ideologia socialista (Milan: An-geli, 1987), p. 56.

71. Ibid., p. 56. It should be mentioned that Kautsky gradually modified his attitudetoward the modern concept of liberty to the point that he eventually considered it anessential value. This is obvious in the final pages of Agrarfrage where he exalted thefunction of capitalism: “By proclaiming permanent economic revolution,” it had trans-formed individualism “from an aristocratic phenomenon to a more democratic phe-nomenon”; he then added, “The trend toward the free expression of personality insocialist society must become even stronger” (The Agrarian Question [London: Zwan,1988]). Still more radical was his position in Origine del cristianesimo, where he evenexpressed the view that “if modern communism wished to meet the needs of mancreated by the modern mode of production, it had to guarantee the highest degree ofindividualism in consumption” (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1976), p. 171.

72. Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution (London: Black, 1903).73. Ibid.74. Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Marx (London: Black, 1925).75. This endorsement was officially expressed in the famous “Introduction” to the

reprint of Marx’s Lotte di classe in Francia, where Engels admitted that the Jacobin modelof class war had become obsolete and that the emancipation of the industrial proletariatcould only take place in the framework of the institutions of bourgeois democracy andby means of a gradual strategy. However his palinode was formulated so ambiguously

Page 110: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Waiting the Reign 97

that Otto Bauer stated, and not without reason, that “Engels in no way abandoned hisconviction that the final decision would come from a civil war between the classes” butlimited himself to advising “the workers parties to defer this final decision for as longas possible” (Fra due guerre mondiali? [Turin: Einaudi, 1979], p. 228).

76. Although on several occasions Kautsky distinguished the total revolution as heimagined it from the violent revolution, he never excluded that “the war might havebeen a means for accelerating the political evolution of the proletariat and taking it topower” (The Social Revolution). Thus he anticipated Lenin’s strategy, which was basedon the transformation of the war between bourgeois states into a revolutionary war.

77. Georges Rude, Ideology and Popular Protest (New York: Pantheon, 1980).78. Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Marx.79. In reaching this conclusion, Bernstein was influenced by the Fabian socialists

and by Francesco Saverio Merlino, whose critical essays on Marxism Bernstein haddiscussed at length on the “Neue Zeit” (see Nico Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino[Milan: Angeli, 1993]).

80. Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (Cambridge: CUP, 1993).81. See Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Collier Books,

1962) and U. Ranieri and U. Minopoli, Il movimento e tutto (Milan: SugarCo, 1993).82. Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism.83. Ibid.84. Ibid.85. Ibid.86. Ibid.87. Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany.88. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg.89. G.D.H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, vol. 3.90. In 1896, Bertrand Russell made the following observation: “Marx’s system is a

real religion and therefore it cannot be tolerant of other religions. Just like Christianity,democratic socialism tends to place itself against all existing faiths; if it did otherwise,it would end up losing much of that formidable emotional impact it owes to thecompleteness of its system” (La socialdemocrazia tedesca [Rome: Newton Compton,1971], p. 118).

91. Rosa Luxemburg’s participation in the Berstein Debatte is most interesting in thisregard: Not being able to accept the idea that socialism was not “objectively necessary,”at first she denied the evidence; that is to say, the figures Bernstein had presented tothe orthodox Marxists to induce them to review the strategy of social democracy.Realizing how inadequate her reaction had been (in Accumulation of Capital [London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951] she tried to demonstrate that those figures, thoughtrue, meant one thing only: that the final demise of capitalism would take longer thanMarx had anticipated and would only occur after the entire noncapitalist environmenthad been engulfed by capitalism. It was an ingenious solution, but had the defect ofpostponing the revolutionary break sine die, which explains the cold reception on thepart of the Bolshevists who had no intention of waiting for the whole world to becomecapitalist before launching the final attack against the bourgeoisie (see Nikolai Buk-harin, L’imperialismo e l’accumulazione del capitale [Bari: Laterza, 1972]).

92. Guglielmo Ferrero, Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto (Milan: Treves,1920), p. 293.

Page 111: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 112: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 6

The Jesuits of Revolution

1. In 1903, Franz Mering confidently announced that “revisionism was of nohistorical interest, except for the question of how it came into being in Ger-man social democracy.”1 In fact, only a blind faith in the scientific validity ofMarxism could have prevented it from being obvious that revisionism hadbeen generated by the gap between the prognosis made in The Capital andthe effective dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. This gap was sohuge that it should have been clear to all that, sooner or later, it would havebeen necessary to review the political strategy on which that prognosis hadbeen based. Instead, like “monks absorbed in the contemplation of sacredicons,”2 the orthodox Marxists either denied the issue existed, or tried toexorcise it, by banishing revisionism as if it were a dangerous heresy. As aresult, socialism continued along a path leading nowhere.

It certainly did not escape Lenin, a young militant of the Russian Social-Democratic party, destined to go down in history as the greatest revolutionaryof all time, that the response of the custodians of Marxist orthodoxy to Ber-stein’s challenge was based on an illusion. In public he never missed an op-portunity to express his theological scorn for those in favor of a “revision” ofMarx’s theoretical legacy,3 but in private he admitted that history had falsifiedthe Zusammenbruchstheorie. Bernstein believed that social democracy shouldforget revolution and transform itself into a movement of social reform similarto British socialism. Lenin, instead, developed his own original strategy basedon the idea that capitalism could still be overturned, once “Archimede’s lever”4

had been created; that such a huge undertaking was still possible, even thoughcommunism did not bear those lethal contradictions scientific socialismclaimed were necessary to make the “leap” into the reign of freedom. Lenin

Page 113: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

100 Revolutionary Apocalypse

considered revolution to be a categorical imperative, an absolute duty, to theextent that, if history did not move in the direction of communism, this couldonly mean that it was the duty of revolutionaries to deviate the spontaneouscourse of human affairs.5

Underlying this grandiose program was a conception of politics that hadnothing in common with the one formulated by Marx when he used his fa-mous obstetrician image.6 Lenin did not believe that the capitalist societycontained in embryo the communist society. Instead, the latter was somethingto be invented and created, even if this required the use of violence to preventsociety from evolving spontaneously. In other words, the economic-socialstructure is not what determines the political/ideological superstructure, butquite the contrary: (revolutionary) politics is the engine of (future) history, anengine fueled by that particular form of intellectual and moral energy char-acterizing the Marxist ideology, whose unique function is to enlighten revo-lutionaries so they are aware that their primary responsibility is to “combatspontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous,trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie.”7

With his usual clarity, Lenin explained why: “There could not have beenSocial-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to bebrought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that theworking class, exclusively left to their own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine inunions, to fight employers, and strive to compel the government pass neces-sary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of thephilosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated repre-sentatives of the proprieted classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, thefounders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves be-longed to the bourgeois intelligentsia.”8

This means that a revolutionary consciousness is not an automatic conse-quence of belonging to the working class, something that workers developspontaneously by participating in unions, but the outcome of a complex theo-retical exercise requiring specific skills. These skills are possessed by the spe-cialists of spiritual production; they alone can develop an alternative ideologycapable of challenging the existing order. It is an illusion to expect the workersto escape the reformist logic without the external assistance of radical intel-lectuals. Take the British labor movement: although it operated in a highlyindustrialized society, it never developed anything more than a trade unionstrategy. In Lenin’s eyes, this simply confirmed the fact that “without revo-lutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”9 and that revolu-tionary theory is the exclusive domain of intellectuals. The workers wouldnever be a vanguard movement: they worked hard, long hours and, anyway,lacked any theoretical knowledge. They hardly knew what their “immediateinterests” were. Instead, the objective of the revolution was in the “real in-

Page 114: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 101

terest” of the workers and could only be perceived by those who had a globalvision of the historical process.

So, Lenin explicitly advocated that the intelligentsia should substitute theworking class as bearers of the revolutionary project.10 Or, rather, he advo-cated transforming the scientific superiority of intellectuals into a politicalsuperiority. His attitude toward the workers was similar to the attitude anaristocrat might have for his soldiers: although acknowledging they possessmany virtues—courage, discipline, spirit of sacrifice, and the like—they willnever develop the intellectual skills necessary to elaborate a real strategy.11

Revolution was too serious a matter to be left in the hands of mere workers.Of course, they were an essential component in the war against the bour-geoisie, but only as troops, since they could not perceive the ultimate motivesof the revolution. To fight for socialism means to fight to change the destinyof humanity, and this requires the theoretical vision of individuals who haveassimilated an “only scientific conception of history.”12

Waclaw Machajski considered what he called the “Jesuit science of theMarxists” to be the ideology of the alienated intelligentsia, whose aspirationwas to sweep away the plutocratic bourgeoisie and create a new social hier-archy, based not on the hegemony of the “haves” over the “have-nots,” buton that of the “knows” over the “ know-nots.”13 Volodia Smirnov referred toLenin as “the ideologue of the intelligentsia.”14 In effect, every word of Lenin’stheory of the party as the “armed vanguard of the proletariat” is a legitimizationof the historical right of revolutionary intellectuals to monopolize existential repre-sentation. This right had to be exercised even against the will of the workers,if they were not able to perceive their “real interests.” This was inevitable,given Lenin’s conviction that to build socialism meant to oppose the spon-taneous tendencies of workers and make them bend to the imperatives of rev-olutionary theory, in other words, to impose upon reality the demiurgic will ofthose who had been enlightened by Marxism and had developed the “rightconsciousness.”

2. Lenin was rigorously and inexorably elitist. If reality moves in a directionopposite to the one envisaged and willed by scientific socialism, and if thebourgeois spirit is so strong that the working class is irremediably infected byit, then clearly, before embarking on the revolution, it is necessary to create(as in a laboratory) an artificial actor, driven by the categorical imperative offighting against history. This actor—a veritable deus ex machina—is the partyof professional revolutionaries conceived as a “consecrated body” bonded tothe working class by a whole set of intermediate structures, yet rigorouslyseparate from it.

In effect, it is a sui generis party, not really a party at all. According to Westernculture, a “party is part of a whole.”15 If it wins the elections, the party continuesto consider itself part of a whole. The party theorized by Lenin in What Is tobe Done? is a party whose right-duty is to become all, since it is only by insti-

Page 115: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

102 Revolutionary Apocalypse

tutionalizing a rigorous monopoly of decision making that it can dominate thespontaneous tendencies that “conspire,” so to speak, against revolution. Thevery nature of the undertaking means that it cannot coexist with other politicalactors, who are all an expression of a social organization—the civilization ofpossessions, by nature immoral insofar as it “compels the propertyless to sellthemselves to the rich”—to be eliminated from the face of the earth.16

Consequently, the revolutionary party must be conceived as “a centralised,militant organisation”17 committed to “stubbornly and relentlessly combat-ing”18 anything—ideas, institutions, customs, people, and so forth—that is inconflict with its strategic plan. The revolutionary party therefore is a warmachine at the service of a calling: “purification” of the existing state of things.On this point, Lenin is, as always, most explicit. Revolution—he says—is “along, tenacious desperate war between life and death”;19 as such, it must adopta military strategy. At that point the distinction between “stasiology” and“polemology” becomes senseless. As Lasswell and Kaplan put it, the “civilarena” must be converted into a “military arena”20 because the planetary prog-ress of revolution requires the annihilation of the bourgeoisie and its organicallies. Admittedly, an armistice with the “class enemy” is always possible, butbearing in mind that the socialist transformation of society requires creatinga situation in which it is unthinkable to “to roll back the wheel of history”;21

a situation, therefore, in which power is concentrated in the hands of thosewhose chosen calling is to do everything in their power to prevent the revivalof the acquisitive spirit.

Lenin imagines a scenario in which a war of planetary proportions is foughtbetween two “ideological armies”: one embodying the revolutionary spirit andthe other the all-corrupting and degrading bourgeois spirit. The moral destinyof all humanity depends on that “island of purity,” formed by those whosewhole existence is devoted to permanent war against capitalist-bourgeois cor-ruption. “We are marching [writes Lenin] in a compact group along a pre-cipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other in our hands. We aresurrounded on all sides by enemies, and we march advance almost constantlyunder their fire. We have joined forces by a freely adopted decision, for thepurpose of fighting our enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouringmarsh the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have accused us withseparated ourselves into forming a group and with having chosen the path ofstruggling rather of the path of conciliation. And now some among us startto cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, theyretort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us theliberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are freenot only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into themarsh. In fact, we think that the march is your proper place, and we areprepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands,don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are

Page 116: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 103

‘free’ to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but alsoagainst those who are turning towards the marsh.”22

Things being thus, clearly the revolutionary party not only had to be or-ganized as an army, but it had also to be structured in such a way that it couldnot be polluted by the moral miasma of the surrounding “bourgeois swamp.”The only solution was to distance revolutionary theory from the corrosiveacid of the critical spirit. Revisionism—which is a moral fact before being anintellectual one—must not be allowed to infect the revolutionary party andturn it into a reformist party. The function of absolute centralization andmilitary discipline is not only to guarantee the revolutionary party maximumefficiency, making of it a war machine ever ready to strike the enemies ofsocialism, but also to preserve the intellectual and moral purity of the “con-secrated bodies.” Rigorous centralization and military discipline are both sys-tems of protection whose specific objective is to prevent the putrid waters ofthe “bourgeois swamp” from penetrating the “oasis of purity.”

We find this obsession with purity in all millenarian sects whose calling isto “free humanity from evil.” It also explains the strategic function of theconstant purges.23 If the party is to preserve its identity and escape the per-manent threat of bourgeois infection, it must periodically channel the wasteit accumulates into the external environment and at the same time block theaccess of exogenous ideas, by definition corrupt and corrupting. Purity there-fore means orthodoxy and the defense at whatever price of scientific socialism,the only theory that can stop “spontaneity” from prevailing over “conscious-ness.” “This shows, that every submission to spontaneity of the working-classmovement [writes Lenin] every denigrating of the ‘role of the conscious ele-ment’, of the role of the Social-Democracy, means quite independently whetherit desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon theworkers.”24 In other words, submission is intellectual and moral “deviation,”unwillingness to fight capitalism, corruption; in a word: “opportunism.”

In a world that is a moral swamp, periodical purges are essential if therevolutionary party is to remain faithful to its calling. The party acts as a sectof “true believers” in partibus infidelium constantly opposing attempts to revisethe revolutionary theory—“to belittle the socialist ideology, in any way, to turnaside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology”25

warns an inquisitorial Lenin—periodically “it must free itself of all non assim-ilated or assimilable elements.”26 Otherwise, opportunism will raise its headin the name of “freedom of criticism,” producing the “perversion of the so-cialist consciousness of the working masses.” Contact with “the bourgeois andtheir ideas” would transform social democracy into a democratic party, inter-ested only in “miserable reforms.” At that point, humanity would not stand achance: nothing and no one could stop the spontaneous progress of the civ-ilization of possessions toward the “abyss of ignominy.”27

3. A party conceived along these lines belongs to the historical-sociologicalfamily of charisma-bearing groups, so masterfully described by Max Weber.

Page 117: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

104 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Actually, Weber devoted little attention to the grandiose Bolshevik undertak-ing and limited his comments to a few inadequate, superficial judgements.28

The fact remains that Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and Politic Als Beruf containthe most suitable categories for analyzing the Leninist party.

The concept of charisma did not so much concern the leader of the Leninistparty as it did the doctrine. Luciano Cavalli remarks that, if by charisma weunderstand “a power not accessible to the ordinary person,”29 Marx’s doc-trine—confidently proclaimed by Lenin to be “omnipotent because it istrue”30—can certainly be considered charismatic: only particularly qualifiedindividuals are allowed to come into close contact with it, to absorb it and betransfigured by it, but after a rigorous process of selection and technical/moraleducation. All the others—be they bourgeois or workers—are excluded, atleast until after the “great revolutionary transformation.” They are thereforecondemned to a lower level of consciousness. In this sense, Lenin can be saidto have conceived scientific socialism as the generator of a new “aristocracyof the spirit,” similar to the chosen minority in the Manichean Church. Being“the tangible embodiment of proletarian class-consciousness,”31 in the eyes ofthe unskilled masses this aristocracy must be endowed with a definite char-ismatic authority.

Added to this is the absolutely “extraordinary” nature—in the sense spec-ified by Weber—of the dialectic-revolutionary science: to free all humanityfrom capitalist-bourgeois corruption. This is only possible if it “in a revolu-tionary and sovereign manner . . . transforms all values and breaks all tradi-tional or rational norms.”32 Thus, it is a specifically revolutionary power,distinct from all other existing orders and, indeed, in open conflict with them,with the given that, whereas the revolutionary power of the ratio “works fromwithout: by altering the situations of life and hence its problems,”33 scientificsocialism “manifests its revolutionary power from within, from a centralmetanoia.”34

Whoever has been enlightened by the dialectical gnosis and, of his ownaccord, has become a member of the revolutionary party, undergoes “a com-plete psychological transubstantiation, a complete re-education of his person-ality in the spirit of Marxism.”35 Nothing will ever be the same again: notideas, feelings, or moral sensitivity. His soul will be as if overturned. Conver-sion will be experienced as an intellectual revelation and a moral regeneration.The outcome will be a “new man,” conscious of being part of a small minoritynot contaminated by the “bourgeois infection” and for this very fact destinedto perform a soteriological role. With this awareness, the “new man” is readyto be transformed into a professional revolutionary, to perform the difficulttasks and take the huge risks that such a decision implies, with one require-ment:36 he will not live of politics but also and above all for politics. Theprofessional revolutionary follows a calling; militancy “by the consciousnessthat his life has meaning in the service of a ‘cause.’”37 In brief, to be a pro-fessional revolutionary means to be “boundlessly devoted to the revolution”;38

Page 118: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 105

the party is the only reason for living and the only source of psychologicalgratification.

It also means submitting to rigorous discipline, even to the point of becom-ing an “ascetic.” Askesis—self-discipline—is what characterizes the specificway of being of the professional revolutionary.39 It is a typically intramundaneaskesis, since the revolution is conducted in the world and against the worldin a ceaseless struggle that will only end with the eradication of every symptomof the malignant bourgeois spirit that has perverted humanity. In this sense,the professional revolutionary is a crusader of permanent subversion, a monk-warrior engaged day and night in a war against other orders, all in varyingdegrees corrupt and corrupting. For this purpose he will eliminate from hislife everything—feelings, interests, passions, tastes—that might distract himfrom his calling. He will pursue a relentless process of self-purification untilhe can identify absolutely and completely with the cause and the institution—the revolutionary party—that embodies it. It is his “family, school, barracksand the rest of the world is left outside.” Everything else must “be destroyed”40

for it is a “filthy hell,” a veritable regnum perditionis.

4. These elements—“(a) absolute consensus; (b) absolute devotion and dis-cipline; (c) permanent conflict with other groups; (d) rigid leadership of themasses who would be incapable of realising their socialist destiny if left totheir own devices”41—make the professional revolutionaries’ party somethingfar more than a mere political organization. In trying to understand this “di-versity” (that all communist parties have proudly indicated as evidence of theirmoral superiority over bourgeois and reformist parties), it is useful to comparethe Leninist party with the Jesuit religious order, as has been done on manyan occasion.42 It is governed by the same principles: the Compagnie de Jesuswas conceived by its founder as a “war machine”43 at the service of redemp-tion.44 Although he never dared to confess his debt to Ignatius of Loyola,when Lenin started along the path indicated by Bakunin,45 he accepted thefundamental rule of the Jesuits: perinde ac cadaver.46 Upon that rule he builtthe institution that he believed would save humanity from moral ruin andfrom being drawn into the “bourgeois swamp.” The declared objective: max-imum intellectual and moral cohesion of the “consecrated body,” making itspiritually impervious.

Lenin christened his model of organization “democratic centralism.” Itsobjective was to guarantee the purity of the doctrine of scientific socialismand its impersonal rule on the thoughts and conduct of the revolutionariesthemselves. In theory, this model did not exclude discussion with the “chiefof state” of the revolutionary army, but established that “once the final deci-sion had been taken, this must be accepted by all and not only superficially.Consensus had to be total and it had to be sincere.”47 This was only possibleif those who had accepted to dedicate their lives to permanent revolution werealso willing to accept a “most rigorous and truly discipline”48 so that the spir-

Page 119: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

106 Revolutionary Apocalypse

itual unity of the “conscious vanguard” would prevail in every moment of theplanetary march of communism. Without this submission, communism wouldinevitably be contaminated by the spontaneous trend toward “opportunism,”“deviationism,” and “revisionism.” So, Lenin’s centralism not only guaranteedthe unity of the conscious and active elite through the practice of unanimous-ness49 but also acted as the institutional custodian of the purity of the charis-matic doctrine, as a cultural isolator therefore. Without this theoretical andpractical unity, the party’s communist identity would be in danger. If the mil-itants were allowed to criticize and organize protest,50 the party would beinvaded by bourgeois ideas and irremediably polluted.51

Rosa Luxemburg captured the essence of Lenin’s strategy when she de-scribed it as a “ruthless centralism” that introduced a “state of siege psychol-ogy”52 into the socialist movement. In effect, Lenin was horrified by the ideathat Marx’s doctrine could be adulterated or denied. The salvation of human-ity was at stake. The fact that even he who had been chosen by Engels asexecutor of the legacy had been infected by “the revisionist germ” was furtherevidence of the formidable power of the “bourgeois swamp.” The only wayto protect revolutionary consciousness from the constant threat of reformismwas to introduce complete and total censorship,53 centralism, military discipline,permanent purges, intensive indoctrination, and orthodoxy: their sole purposewas to render the core of professional revolutionaries psychologically andmorally impervious, spiritually isolated from the surrounding environment.In other words, it was simply a method for preventing the victory of spon-taneity. The socialist ideology—that is, Marxism—was conceived as a cate-gorical imperative; every person and thing had to submit to it. The party wassimply there to translate its impersonal commands. Every member of theconsecrated body had to rid his mind of the ideas, values, and feelings of thebourgeois culture and embrace the ideal of the “new man,” embodied byRakhmetov, the main character in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done?: anindividual who was “one with the system,”54 enclosed within it both intellec-tually and morally, and totally absorbed by the dual mission: “to re-educatehimself and to re-educate society according to the spirit of the new science.”55

In other words, a person truly determined to make permanent revolution hismission has to be transformed in a homo ideologicus, completely absorbed inthe spirit of Marxism and suspicious of the outside world and its spiritualproduct, which is by definition, corrupt and corrupting.

From this perspective, to be a professional revolutionary means not onlyto be willing to accept “any sacrifice . . . in order to carry on agitation andpropaganda systematically, perseveringly and patiently [in those institutions,societies, and associations] . . . in which proletarian or semi-proletarian massesare to be found”56 but also to act as the custodian of orthodoxy, vigilatingconstantly over self and comrades to prevent the contaminating and perversepower of the bourgeois ideology from prevailing over the values and the idealsof communism.

Page 120: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 107

5. A party structured as a cohort of charisma-bearers determined to reshapesociety ab imis through the impersonal dictatorship of scientific socialism canbe referred to as a polemical-hierocratic order. Bund (order) as conceptualizedby Herman Schmalenbach in his essay “Die soziologische Kategorie des Bun-des” is midway between Ferdinand Toennies’ Gemeinschaft (community) andGesellschaft (society). Toennies distinguished two forms of social cohabitation:one conceived as “a real and organic form” (community) and the other as “anideal and mechanical form” (society). You do not join the former, you belongto it a nativitate whether you like it or not. Family, motherland, ethnic groupare classic examples of a community that the individual does not choose, butfinds, and of which he is an integral part, over and beyond his specific attitude.By contrast, the second form is the type of association one chooses to joinand in which the members, though living side by side, “are essentially not tiedbut essentially separate. They remain distinct, despite the many ties, while inthe community they remain tied, despite the many separations.”57 To belongto the Bund is also a choice, but the bonds that are established among indi-viduals in the Bund and between individuals and the actual Bund are so inti-mate, profound, and strong that they produce what Schmalenbach calls“fusion.”58 This consists essentially in the extinction of individual will in thewill of the institution. Hence the “totalitarian passion that marks the Bund”59

is closely associated with the conviction that the calling of those making upthe Bund is of an absolutely extraordinary nature and requires absolute andunconditional devotion.

The Schmalenbach model demonstrates the absolute novelty of the pro-fessional revolutionaries’ party with respect to the mass socialist party. Thelatter is a Gemeinschaft; the new type of party ideated and constructed by Leninis a Bund, a religious order. Like all religious orders, it is made up of a narrowelite of individuals who “assemble as if truly regenerated”60 and are willing tosacrifice everything—family, career, personal happiness—to the sacred-divinecause with which they have identified. Such a party is driven by “the ideal ofthe ecclesia pura . . . , the visible community of saints, from whose midst theblack sheep are removed.”61 From a sociological point of view, Lenin’s partyis therefore a mechanism of selection separating the skilled from the unskilled.This selection is made on the basis of an ideological criterion: only those whocan prove they have absorbed the principles of revolutionary science and beencompletely reshaped can aspire to enter the narrow circle of those with theimmense privilege of being the “conscious vanguard” chosen to lead the pro-letarian masses to the Promised Land. Thence, in every way they are gnosticactivists who are convinced they know the method to uproot evil and live inand for action.

So the Leninist party is a hierocratic institution in the sense specified byNietzsche: “an edifice of domination that guarantees supremacy to the morespiritual and believes in the power of the spirit.”62 Within the institution, poweris concentrated in the hands of a minority that is intellectually and morally

Page 121: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

108 Revolutionary Apocalypse

superior to the masses. Unity of thought and action—a principle that Leninborrowed from Bakunin and Nechaev63—is guaranteed through the conces-sion or refusal of the supreme good: to be part of the institution that incarnatesthe Pravda,64 outside which there is only wrong and corruption.

A highly hierocratic institution is also a polemical institution (in the ety-mological sense of the term). The historical mission of the Leninist party isto ruthlessly oppose and destroy the existing order of things because it iscontaminated by the bourgeois spirit. This requires a veritable war of anni-hilation that will only cease once the civilization of possessions has been razedto the ground and humanity reunited under the banner of Marxism.

Like the founding fathers of scientific socialism, Lenin saw the world asone huge battlefield in which the “party of corruption” and the “party ofpurification” were involved in a fierce and bloody war. The organization des-tined to free humanity from the polluting presence of capitalism was con-ceived as a paramilitary organization “where stern orders were given andobeyed, where only a select few were admitted to the councils of the masterswhere the broad masses had to serve, theirs is not to question why; but onebond would unite these masses with their leaders, a common dogmatic faithenshrined in a series of holy books, with this difference, however, that theselect would know and interpret holy writ, while the outer world of the un-initiated would bow to their authoritative teaching.”65 In this sense, the Len-inist party was the most energetic and consistent attempt to fulfill the dreamof building the church of the future on the rock of the proletariat that somany revolutionaries, starting from Robespierre and Saint-Just, had so ar-dently desired.

Lenin acknowledged that his model of revolutionary organization was simplythe continuation of an undertaking initiated by the Jacobins, Proudhon’s “Jes-uits of the revolution.”66 The Jacobins had been the first to actually develop amethod for destroying the “empire of wealth” and creating a party that operatedlike a war machine and was led by “virtuosi” dedicated body and soul to per-manent revolution. Its one fundamental goal: the introduction of a “despotismof liberty,” a compulsory step in the transition to a purified society.

Countless attempts had been made in the nineteenth century—by Babeufand Buonarroti, Blanqui and Tkachev, Bakunin and Nechaev, Marx and En-gels67—to complete what had been started by Robespierre and Saint-Just. TheJacobin task remained unfinished, until Lenin developed an “organizationalweapon” to destroy the civilization of possessions that was used with passionby generations and generations of revolutionaries. Lenin’s extraordinary ca-pacity to combine a millenarian faith in the advent of the reign of liberty andan almost managerial conception of the “Undertaking” produced “specialistsin the art of revolution,”68 “engineers of history,” to use Jules Monnerot’s69

definition, specifically trained to conduct a war against capital. For the firsttime, revolution was no longer conceived as the outcome of spontaneous massaction, but as an art that required a specific know-how and the methodical

Page 122: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 109

use of “a sober and strictly objective appraisal of all the class forces.”70 Becauseof its nature, this art obviously had to be the exclusive heritage of a minority,qualified from the ideological and moral point of view, but also from thetechnical one. Lenin therefore conceived the revolutionary party as an agencyspecialized in the selection and professionalization of revolutionaries, essen-tially as the generator of a new type of technocratic elite. In this sense we cansay that, by “professionalizing” the figure of the revolutionary, Lenin placedinstrumental rationality at the service of the socialist idea and, in so doing,gave it a strength it had never had before.

The result: Lenin and his party marked the end of the romantic age ofrevolutions and the start of the technocratic age. Revolution ceased being adream of naive disarmed prophets and was converted into a “long term pro-cess, calculated, planned and executed with cold scientific precision”71 by acohort of technicians of permanent subversion, fanatically convinced that the“the future belongs to them”72 and therefore determined to make any sacrificefor the “victory of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat on aworld-wide scale.”73

NOTES

1. Franz Mehring, Storia della socialdemocrazia tedesca (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961),p. 702.

2. Georges Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1970),p. 381.

3. “We well know [Lenin used to say] what attempts at revision of Marxism leadto. We need only think of Bernstein and here at home of Bulgakov and Struve. Withhis revisionism Struve has got bogged down in the most abject liberalism; as for Bul-gakov, he’s gone even lower. Marxist doctrine is monolithic. There is no way it can bediluted or its nature changed with the addition of other elements. Of a person whocriticized Marxism, Plekhanov once said: Mark him with the ace of spades and thenwe’ll see. Well, in my view, anyone claiming to correct Marxism should be marked withthe ace of spades without delay. This is what a true revolutionary would say. If you comeacross a dead body you don’t have to touch it to know what it is and decide what todo. The stink is enough.” (Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, My Encounters with Lenin[London: Oxford University Press, 1968]).

4. Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to Lenin, Che fare? (Turin: Einaudi, 1971),p. XLIV. “Give us an organisation of revolutionaries and we will turn Russia upsidedown!” Lenin used this famous phrase to sum up his strategy.

5. On this point, which is fundamental for understanding the meaning of the com-munist revolution, C.S. Ingerflom’s interpretation of Leninist thought is most impor-tant (Le citoyen impossible [Paris: Payot, 1988]). However, Ingerflom missed the pointthat Lenin’s policy against spontaneity did not come into being as a remedy for thebackwardness of Russia but as an attempt to prevent the global victory of Westerncapitalism. In other words, Lenin’s policy was not, as Ingerflom believes, a responseto Russian underdevelopment but a reaction to Fabian’s reformism and Bernstein’srevisionism. Kautsky and Plekhanov opposed Bernstein’s challenge with academic ar-

Page 123: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

110 Revolutionary Apocalypse

guments, defending against all evidence Marx’s theory of catastrophic collapse; Leninwas more creative. He developed an alternative strategy that would lead “to revolution,despite the fact that the theory was false” (Domenico Settembrini, Socialismo e rivo-luzione dopo Marx, p. 296).

6. This does not mean that Marx does not have a voluntarist conception of politicalpractice. In his works—as shown masterfully by Settembrini in Due ipotesi per il soci-alismo in Marx and ed Engels—two theories of revolution coexist and intermingle: oneexpressing the spirit of enlightenment and seeing the growth of productive forces asthe decisive variable of historical progress; the other expressing a Romantic-Jacobinspirit, based on the exaltation of revolutionary violence as the “locomotive of history”(Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 122). Lenin was always faithful to the latter spirit and infact was accused of Jacobinism by Trotsky, Plekhanov, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg.They should have accused Marx of the same thing. On the eve of Forty Eight heproudly remarked that “there are surprising analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793is the Communist of today” (“Discorso sulla Polonia” in Opere complete, vol. 6, p. 557).

7. Lenin, What is to be done? in Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wis-hart, 1961), p. 384f.

8. Ibid., p. 375.9. Ibid., p. 369.

10. Plekhanov, Martov, and Trotsky accused Lenin of “substitutism.” They believedsome elements of his strategy were profoundly distant from Marxism. In fact, Leninsimply rendered exoteric what in Marx and Engels had been esoteric; that is to say,“class per se” (intellectuals) prevailed over “class in se” (workers).

11. A note in What is to be done? is usually overlooked, yet it expresses with brutalfrankness what Lenin thought of the intellectual capacities of workers. “I spent manyweeks ‘examining’ a worker who came often visit me, regarding every aspect of theconditions within the enormous factory at which he was employed. Admittedly he didsomehow manage to describe the place, but with what effort, but at the end of theinterview the worker dried the sweat from his brow, and said to me smilingly: It wouldbe much easier to work overtime than to answer your questions.” (What is to be done?,p. 491).

12. Lenin, “What Are the Friends of the People?” in Complete Works, vol. I, p. 142.13. J.W. Machajski, Le socialisme des intellectuels, p. 156 et seq.14. Quoted from Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (London: Ink Links, 1979).15. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1976), p. 2616. Lenin What is to be done?, p. 400.17. Ibid., p. 477.18. Ibid., p. 462.19. Ibid., p. 398.20. Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for

Political Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 494.22. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 355.23. Significantly, Lenin’s epigraph for What is to be Done? is Lassalle’s words: “Party

struggle gives the party strength and vitality; the greatest sign of weakness of a party is

Page 124: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 111

its dispersion and the disappearance of well-defined limits; by purging itself a partyis strengthened.”

24. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 382f.25. Ibid., p. 384.26. Vittorio Strada, “Dissenso e socialismo,” in Vittorio Strada, ed., Socialism e dis-

senso (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. XIV.27. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 354.28. See Massimo L. Salvadori, The Rise of Modern Communism (London: Hutchin-

son, 1953).29. Luciano Cavalli, Il capo carismatico (Bologna: il Mulino, 1981.)30. Lenin, “Three Sources and Parts of Marxism,” in Complete Works, vol. 14, p. 23.31. Giorgy Lukacs, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (London, New York:

Verso, 1997), p. 27. We should not be misled by Lukacs’s formula: the consciousnessLenin is referring to is not class consciousness but consciousness tout court. Lenin madeconstant use of the terms soznanie and soznatel’nost without any additions. Luckacs himselfconceives class consciousness according to Hegelian gnosis, meaning that it is the con-sciousness that the all has of self, therefore fundamentally the self-consciousness of hu-manity as it marches toward the reign of freedom. So, while the bourgeoisconsciousness effectively is a class consciousness—therefore partial, distorted, and dis-torting—the proletarian consciousness (of which the Communist Party has the mo-nopoly) is absolute consciousness, and, as such, the bearer of the objective meaning ofhistory.

32. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 1115.33. Ibid., p. 245.34. Ibid., p. 1117.35. Leon Trotsky, My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (London: Butterworth,

1930). No different is Luciano Gruppi’s description of the existential bond betweenthe militant and the party: “To belong to a party is not for a suitably trained Com-munist something extra in his life, but a profound transformation of self, another wayof being. At a certain point you realise that the reason why you join the party is tobecome one with it . . . so to abandon the party is in fact to abandon self ” (La teoriadel partito rivoluzionario [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980], p. 188).

36. The specification is necessary because the term “profession” does not cover thewhole semantic area of the Weberian Beruf, which, in addition to meaning “profes-sion,” also means “calling”: an intimate calling to fulfill, an existential calling felt tobe unrenounceable.

37. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. byH. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 84.

38. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 473.39. See Bruce Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic, p. 124 et seq.40. Ignazio Silone, Uscita di sicurezza (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), p. 82.41. R. H. McNeal, The Bolshevik Tradition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1965), p. 12.42. See Rene Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and the Face of Bolshevism (New York: Harper

and Row, 1962); Vittorio Zincone, Lo Stato totalitario (Faro: Rome, 1947), pp. 46–47;Karl W. Deutsch, Politics and Government (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1970),pp. 278–279; Alain Woodrow, Les Jesuites (Paris: Lattes, 1984), pp. 130–131.

43. Jules Michelet, I Gesuiti (Rome: Avanzini e Torraca, 1968), p. 45.

Page 125: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

112 Revolutionary Apocalypse

44. See W. V. Bangert Storia della Compagnia di Gesu (Genoa: Marietti, 1990),pp. 32–33; Jacques Lacouture, Jesuites (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 103 et seq.; ReneFueloep-Miller, Segreto e potenza dei Gesuiti (Varese: Dall’Oglio, 1974), pp. 29 et seq.

45. In a letter written in 1870, Bakunin states very clearly that the revolutionarymovement will only defeat the reactionary forces if it adopts the spirit and the formof organization of the Jesuits: “Have you ever thought about the main reason for thepower and the vitality of the Order of the Jesuits? I will tell you the reason. It consistsin the absolute extinction of the individual in the will and in the organisation of theCommunity. And I ask: can this be considered a sacrifice for a strong, empassionedand honest man? This further implies sacrificing appearances for reality, the futile haloto save real power, the word to save action. This is the sacrifice I ask of all our friends.I am ready to be the first to give the example. I do not wish to be I, I wish to be usOn this condition only, this I repeat a thousand times over, will our idea triumph. Thisvictory is my only passion” (quoted from Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution [NewYork: Collier Books, 1961], p. 184).

46. In an interview with Oriana Fallaci, Giancarlo Pajetta told an interesting an-ecdote. To a Jesuit who asked him what it meant to be Communist, he answered. “Tobe like you. Perinde ac cadaver. The Jesuit was irritated and probably didn’t believe me.He should have, because that is precisely what it is was like and still is today. To theCommunist Party, to this church called the Communist Party, I am tied like a deadbody, Perinde ac cadaver.”

47. A. G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Praeger, 1962).48. Lenin, “Left-Wing Radicalism as a Childhood Disease of Communism” in Com-

plete Works, vol. 31, p. 23.49. In a letter written by Gramsci to Togliatti we read: “Something the Executive

[of the Comintern] feels particularly strongly about is that voting should always beunanimous. This is not simply a formal issue. In the experience of the Russian Rev-olution lack of unanimity in major public voting has always had a definite impact onthe masses; the political opposition tends to polarise toward the minority, extendingand generalising their positions, secretly publishing their manifestos, programmes etc,possibly with the signature of the opposition or of a group of opposition supporters,and working to agitate the waters. All this can be most dangerous in a given moment.A protection against this type of behaviour is unanimous voting. To the public thisgives the impression of consensus and open unity” (quoted from Paolo Spriano, Storiadel partito comunista, vol. 1 [Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. 294).

50. “But from this it follows that the existence of factions is compatible neither withthe Party’s unity nor with its iron discipline. . . . The Party represents unity of will,which precludes all factionalism and division of authority in the Party.” Stalin, Problemsof Leninism (Foreign Language Publishing House: Moscow, 1954), p. 106.

51. This explains the obsession of communist parties for organization. A rigidlycentralized organization allows them to control the consciousness of militants andguarantee that ideological purity that is essential for a communist party.

52. Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings (London: Cape, 1972).53. Marxism lends itself to this function of censorship: Being a self-referential system,

it is based on the premise that any idea in disaccord with its dogmas is, by definition,“bourgeois” and therefore hostile to the emancipation of the proletariat. This explainswhy a Marxist party is a kind of cultural bunker, in which ideological convictions areimpervious to external messages, since truth and good can only exist within it.

Page 126: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Jesuits of Revolution 113

54. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be done? (London: Virago, 1982). This workmade an enormous impression on Lenin. It contained an outline of the “figure of therevolutionary . . . his tasks and . . . the rules of an exemplary life to achieve theobjective” (cited from Nikolay Valentinov, My Encounters with Lenin).

55. Alain Besancon, The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).56. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 53.57. Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Association.58. Hermann Schmalenbach, “Communaute et ligue,” in Pierre Birnbaum and

Francois Chazel, eds., Theorie sociologique, Paris: PUF, 1975), p. 159.59. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1964).60. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2.61. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 1204.62. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.63. In direct contrast with Bakunin and Nechaev, Marx and Engels believed that

“unity of thought and action simply means orthodoxy and blind obedience. Perinde accadaver. We are in the midst of a Company of Jesus” (“L’Alleanza della democraziasocialista e l’Associazione internationale dei lavoratori” in Karl Marx and FriedrichEngels, Critica dell’anarchismo, p. 118).

64. Pravda means both truth and justice. Like the pravda of the Orthodox Church,Lenin’s pravda is truth, dispenser of justice, not the axiologically neutral truth of sci-ence. Thus it is based on a moral option; rather, it is a moral option. So when aBolshevik said that something was true, he meant that it was right, that is it was incompliance with the interests of the proletariat, as these had been defined by the party,which alone was authorized to interpret the doctrine of scientific socialism.

65. Franz Borkenau, European Communism (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p. 26.66. In “One Step Forward and Two Steps Back,” the professional revolutionary,

elevated by Lenin to the rank of demiurgic agent of history, is defined: “A Jacobinwho wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat, a proletariatconscious of its class interests” (Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 383). Likewise, in “TwoTactics of the Social-Democracy,” reference is made to the Bolsheviks as “Jacobins ofcontemporary Social-Democracy . . . wish . . . to raise the revolutionary and republicanpetty bourgeoisie, and especially the peasantry to the level of the consistent democra-tism of the proletariat” (Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 59).

67. As documented in detail by Jean Elleinstein, the Marx-Engels concept of partyis not very different from Lenin’s. It contains the essential elements, albeit not fullydeveloped, of what will later be called “democratic centralism.” Marx (Paris: Fayard,1981), p. 473 et seq.

68. N. S. Timasheff, War and Revolution (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), p. 157.69. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo (Milan: Giuffre, 1970), p. 92.70. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 63.71. Sigmund Neumann, “Toward a Comparative Study of Political Parties” in Sig-

mund Neumann, ed., Modern Political Parties (Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress, 1967), p. 419.

72. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 101.73. Ibid., p. 103.

Page 127: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 128: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 7

The Intelligentsia and theRevolution

1. From the perspective of Russian revolutionary tradition, the party modelillustrated in What Is to Be Done? seems to be little more than a refined versionof the many secret societies of “new men” established by the more extremePopulist movements. The same basic elements are present: absolute centrali-zation, a military vision of the class struggle, Jesuit-type discipline, “amoralmoralism.” And, in fact, the more authoritative Russian Marxists consideredLenin’s strategic-organizational plan to be a form of unconscious populism,based typically on a Jacobin vision of the relationship between the elites andthe masses.1

“After driving socialism away from the masses and the masses away fromsocialism [wrote Plekhanov in 1904] Lenin declared that the socialist intellec-tuals were the demiurges of the socialist revolution and himself, and his devoteddocile followers, the socialist intellectuals par excellence, the ultra-intellectuals,so to speak. Whoever dissents he accuses of anarchy and individualism and, inthe struggle to oppose them, he appeals to the masses whose function, in histheory, is to act as inert matter.”2 Along the same lines, Martov’s criticism: Leninhas “imbibed to the marrow the psychology of the conspirator: a politicallypassive proletariat is the necessary foundation for him to develop his activerevolutionary role; cannon fodder that goes to battle under the command of asolid organisation of professional revolutionaries. Yet, he claims that it is hewho stimulates the workers to organise themselves, that he is defending theworkers by making sure that they are prone to the specific organisation hepreaches, and that he considers workers, not as the actors of a complete politicalactivity, but rather as the objects of the simplistic political action of the com-mittees of professional revolutionaries, as passive tools in the hands of these

Page 129: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

116 Revolutionary Apocalypse

committees.”3 Trotsky accused “Maximilien Lenin” of proposing a “flat cari-cature of the tragic Jacobin intolerance” that was absolutely “foreign to thespirit of Social Democracy” and would lead, not to the dictatorship of theproletariat, but to “dictatorship over the proletariat” by an oligarchy of crueland pure revolutionaries,4 with the inevitable result that “party organisationwould substitute the party, the central committee the party organisation, and,finally, the dictator, the central committee.”5

Plechanov, Martov, and Trotsky’s harsh words were an extraordinarily lucidprognosis of the liberticidal outcome of the type of revolution Lenin had inmind. Yet, the founder of Bolshevism was perfectly right when he stated thatthe only way to revive the original revolutionary charge of the Europeansocialist movement was to revive the Jacobin spirit of Marxism, which hadbeen diluted by the leaders of the Second International and had become ageneric democratism. Given that the workers’ class, despite the obsessive pro-paganda of the “modern tribunes of the plebs,” tended to integrate with thestructures of the capitalist society spontaneously and that, moreover, this so-ciety was obviously not moving toward the ineluctable self-destruction pre-dicted in Capital, the only way to destroy the bourgeoisie was to create apolitical actor willing to undertake the mammoth task of stopping and over-turning the course of history, which was an indirect way of saying thatTkachev’s solution was the revolutionaries’ only option.

Naturally, Lenin, being (or liking to think he was) an orthodox Marxist,could not publicly admit that his program was simply an updated version ofthe policy developed by the revolutionary accused by Engels of not evenknowing the “a b c of socialism”;6 nor could he explicitly declare that themanner in which capitalism had actually developed had pulled the groundfrom under the feet of the revolutionary movement, without going againstone of the essential theorems of Marxism and, above all, without making hisprogram pointlessly voluntarist.

The fact is that, if it is true that What is to Be Done? constituted the onlyrealistic response to the “Bernstein challenge,” it is also true that its successrelied on extremely unlikely circumstances. In other words, Lenin had noalternative but to hope for a miracle. On the basis of his diagnosis of thesituation of the revolutionary movement at the start of the twentieth century,it was obvious that the demise of capitalism was virtually impossible. This didnot escape the acute eye of Parvus, who rightly accused Lenin of uninhibitedidealism: his plan claimed nothing short of “changing the nature of the his-torical process.”7

Yet, Lenin’s appeal did not fall on empty ears, for the fundamental reasonthat the invasion of Western culture had generated in Russian society an“enormous mass of cultured, thinking people who were deprived of any status,any career, any prospects: the clergy, the offspring of small landowners andpetit bourgeois, the offspring of clerks and ruined nobles.”8 In other words,the plethora of proletarianized intellectuals who felt like foreigners in their

Page 130: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 117

own country and looked upon the official Russia with hatred and resentment.This “alienated class” was a natural “sociological reservoir” for recruiting whatBakunin called the “chief of staff of the revolutionary army.” Their situationof material and moral deprivation had rendered them “men of denial,” ob-sessed by the desire to destroy the perverse and degrading “rule of Baal.”9

Hence the importance of focusing our analysis on the Russian intelligentsia.Had it not existed in such massive proportions, it would be impossible to explainthe generation of a polemo-hierocratic order of professional revolutionaries,whose objective was to conquer the world and return it to a new life.

2. “To grasp the sources of Russian communism and render the true natureof the revolution intelligible [wrote Nikolai Berdiaev] it is necessary to knowwho represents that original Russian expression intelligentsiia.”10 The startingpoint for understanding the real nature of the intelligentsiia is the impact ofWestern civilization on Russian civilization. The intelligentsia was an inducedsocial phenomenon, the product of the coming together of two distinct civi-lizations—the European civilization and the Russian civilization. With its for-midable radioactive power, the former forced the latter to make constantautoplastic adjustments.

Contrary to a widespread but absolutely misleading opinion, Russia cameinto being not as a peripheral part of our civilisation11 “but (as part) of theByzantine sister civilisation, of the same Greek-Roman lineage as ours, butnonetheless distinct and different from ours.”12 This explains why Russianhistory, starting from the early eighteenth century, was the history of a processof “massive acculturation,”13 whose outcome was the formation of a sui generistype of civilization, within which the Byzantine spirit and the European spiritcoexisted in conflict with each other.14 This explains why Russia, in the lastthree centuries, has been the stage of a permanent cultural war. This permanentcultural war must be our starting point, if we are to understand the role ofthe intelligentsia and the historical significance of Bolshevism, which was oneof the more typical products of the intelligentsia.

Even a superficial glance at the Byzantine world—of which Russia, as of itsevangelization, was a politically independent but culturally tributary divi-sion—reveals that it has typically oriental features. Caesar-papism has alwaysprevailed; that is to say, spiritual power has always been subordinate to tem-poral power. The latter was considered sacred because the emperor was con-sidered to be “Anointed by the Lord, chosen from birth to fulfil God’s will.”15

In compliance with this hierocratic function, his authority “extended to theclergy,”16 which had no autonomy, not even on theological issues. On theother hand, autocracy was also a sort of royal priesthood and its summit—the Autokrator—the supreme priest “in direct relationship with God . . . andthe object of a special political-religious cult.”17 Consequently, the will ofBasileus was “final in both the spiritual and the temporal domain.”18 Nothingescaped his control, not even the sacred sphere, where it was considered ab-

Page 131: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

118 Revolutionary Apocalypse

solutely legitimate, indeed, his duty, to intervene for the precise reason thatthe Byzantines considered “religion and politics to be indissoluble”19 and the-ology to be a “State matter.”20 Hence the huge, disproportionate power con-centrated in the hands of the Basileus—a power before which not only themasses but even the governors had no means of defense. Even the privateproperty of the aristocracy was “precarious in the face of the eminent rightsof the Basileus, just as human life was precarious in the hands of God.”21 Soit came to pass that the emperor “ruled and actively supervised industry, . . .leaving no room at all for free labour or individual initiative and . . . enforcedeverywhere an iron regime of protectionism and inquisition.”22

Karl Wittfogel has rightly listed a civilization based on such institutionalfoundations among the “Asiatic societies.”23 It was as if imprisoned in the“steel cage” of a bureaucratic managerial state with the supreme chief exer-cising a “triple monopoly.”24 Conversely, from the fifth century, with the dis-integration of what remained of the Roman Empire, Europe had become a“stateless society.” The consequences of what has been referred to as “feudalanarchy” were to have an enormous impact on European society, which de-veloped in a manner that was structurally and culturally quite different fromthe Byzantine world. Precisely because the power of the state was far weaker,the Western sacerdotium escaped the fate of its Oriental equivalent (who wasa victim of the autocratic will of Basileus), acquiring complete autonomy andthe right to question the imperium, while the “aristocracy of the sword” be-came a hereditary nobility that the monarchs were never able to bend to theirwill completely. In the end, a huge network of autocephalic cities developed—the communes—that harbored the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and that spe-cific self-propulsive mode of production—capitalism—that it had created overthe centuries.

All these factors contributed to Europe becoming a civilization where di-alogue between the state and civil society was the distinctive feature, andessentially, therefore, the permanent conflict among the various social forces,none of whom ever managed to attain absolute rule. The state was never ableto model society at will. With rare exceptions—for example, the empire ofPhilip II in which there emerged strong Caesar-papist tendencies and theInquisition, which greatly reduced the autonomy of civil society—even in anage of so-called absolutism, the pluralistic-competitive logic prevailed in thehistorical existence of Western civilisation.25 Precisely because of its particularstructure, Western civilization was able to unleash a heterogenetic creativityand was free to conduct all sorts of experiments in all fields, from science toeconomy. As a result, Europe embarked upon a process of modernization andsecularization and became a dynamic and individualistic “open society,” whileByantium—caught in the vice of the bureaucratic managerial apparatus of astate that had successfully granted itself a sacred and virtually unlimited reg-ulatory jurisdiction—remained a rigorously traditionalistic society26 hostile tothe typical values of modernity, that were meanwhile germinating and grad-

Page 132: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 119

ually asserting themselves in what had been the pars occidentalis of the RomanEmpire.

In looking at the Russia of that period, one is immediately struck by “thealmost total symbiosis between the State and the Church . . . The tsar andhis subjects are defined by their belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church,whose precepts fulfil the function of an ideology in an extremely modernsense. Not surprisingly, discussions or conflicts concerning the rights and theprecepts of the Church had profound repercussions on the public and culturallife of the country and directly threatened the national identity and spiritualunity of society.”27 In other words, tsarism was simply a variation of the Byz-antine system, with which the Russian elites had been in contact since theconversion of Grand Duke Vladimir of Kiev. Not only did they try to shapethe institutions of their country according to those that existed in Constan-tinople, but “under the influence of the Greek Orthodox church, they grad-ually became accustomed to considering fundamentally heretical everythingfrom Western Europe and rejecting it as such.”28 The result was that theRussian civilization isolated itself from European civilization and for centuriesdid not participate in its political, economic, and cultural development. Itbecame a world apart. “Seen from Europe [it] looked Asian and seen fromAsia, European.”29

The “Asian” features prevailed over the European ones at least until theend of the seventeenth century, in part because, with the sole exception ofNovgorod and Pskov, Russia had been ruled by Mongolia, which had prac-tically nothing feudal about it and was based on the unconditional submissionof inferior to superior instances, and secondly because the functional imper-atives linked to the struggle for independence drove political centralizationto its extreme limit and led to the creation of an almighty state.30 The con-sequence: Russia reconquered its independence and became a great and pow-erful state, thanks to the autocratic power of the princes of Moscow, but atan exorbitant price: the “suffocation of anything free that existed within it.”31

The great trading cities that had managed to preserve numerous economicand cultural ties with Western Europe, even during the Mongolian rule, weresubject to the rule of the Muscovite State just when the hereditary nobility—the boyars—was being eliminated from the picture and substituted with aservice nobility (pomeshchiki) whose members were “nothing more than theservants, if not the slaves, of the sovereign.”32 The same fate befell the church,degraded to the “level of ideological apologist of the autocratic regime.”33

Ivan the Great was responsible for creating the preconditions for the uni-versal slavery of all citizens, including those holding the highest offices of thestate and the church. The process was completed by his grandson, Ivan theTerrible, who ruthlessly exterminated all social forces—landed gentry, entre-preneurial bourgeoisie, free communes—that might have successfully curbedthe power of the tsar. In compliance with the specific logic of despotism,Russian society was also completely sealed off from the rest of the world, to

Page 133: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

120 Revolutionary Apocalypse

prevent contamination of its traditional lifestyles. In the end it became a kindof “besieged fortress”34 in which every contact with the external world wasconsidered an act of high treason and punished as such.

The underlying philosophy of this monolithic, compact structure was thatthe Russians were the “custodians of an uncontaminated orthodoxy,”35 andthat for this reason Moscow was the Third Rome. “The Church of AncientRome fell due to its heresy; the doors of Second Rome, Constantinople, weredestroyed by the hatchets of the infidel Turks [wrote the monk Philotheus ina famous letter to Basileus III]; but the Church of Moscow, the new Rome,shines stronger than the sun over the whole universe. You are the ecumenicalsovereign; you must hold the reins of government in fear of God. Beware ofHe who has entrusted it to you. Two Romes have fallen, but the third willstand; there will be no fourth. Your Christian kingdom will never be given toany other sovereign.”36

If Russia’s grandiose soteriological mission was to protect the “real faith”from heresy and spread it all over the world, to save humanity from paganismand heresy, then Russia was a special land, and the Russians the “new chosenpeople.” Equally extraordinary was the authority of the man who had receivedthe reins of government from God in person. Like the land and the people,he too was sacred and therefore his word was final. If it was his charismaticmission to prevent orthodoxy from being contaminated,37 it was his duty tovigilate over everyone and everything so that the lifestyles inherited from thepast were in no way changed. The conclusion: citizens had no rights at allbefore the all powerful state, which could and indeed should “intervene alsoin the minor details of private life”38 to make sure that the “new chosen peo-ple” did not move away from unchangeable sacred tradition.

3. A society that was structured in this way was, by choice, an immobile,closed macrocosm, hostile to everything from without: men, ideas, values,institutions. It lived in the cult of a spiritual superiority confirmed each dayby loyalty to “pure and uncontaminated orthodoxy.”39 Not surprisingly, Eu-ropeans traveling to Russia discovered a civilization that was quite differentfrom their own civilization and more like the Islamic world than the Westernworld.40

They effectively were two distinct cultural worlds: Russian society wasantithetic to Western society. In the West, society was autonomous; it haddeveloped counterpowers that pursued an “experimental” policy in everydomain. Not only did it not fear the “new but it actively searched for it inevery sphere, endeavouring to end the inertia of tradition and questioning itssacredness and functionality.” In other words, it was a society that imbibedwhat Marx has called the “permanent capitalist revolution” that advanced inevery direction, generating major changes, through regular growth crises.Charismatic despotism instead had prevented society from evolving in Russia

Page 134: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 121

and kept it under an inquisition-type regime, cut off from the outside worldto avoid contamination from ideas and values foreign to orthodoxy.

Of course it was no easy matter for Russia to preserve its traditional lifestylewhen the radioactive power of Western civilization was increasing daily.Moreover, Western society had developed a method for the constant growthof technology, and the elites of Moscow inevitably felt a frustrating sense ofinferiority. It was obvious that Europe’s technological superiority constituteda permanent threat. If Holy Russia was to avoid the danger of becoming acolony of “heretical Europe,” it had to abandon the strategy of isolation.

The terms of the new relationship between Russia and Europe were ana-lyzed for the first time by Iury Krizhanich in his work Politika. Krizhanichwas a Croatian priest who had been appointed political counselor by TsarAlexis. He looked upon Russia “with the eyes of the first panslavist”:41 thoughacknowledging that Russia was enormously ignorant, corrupt, and inefficient,he praised it for its great spirituality, which was in contrast with the West’scrude materialism. The essence of Krizhanich’s message was this: Russia’sdestiny was to save the world; therefore it had to preserve its national tradi-tions. At the same time it had to become familiar with foreign arts and science.Thus, it should open to Europe, but only to steal the secret of its materialpower and not to borrow and adopt its lifestyles, which were spiritually in-ferior to the orthodox ones.

The tsar’s assistants were not at all keen on Krizhanich’s ideas. The moretraditional of them considered them a dangerous concession to a Europe thatwas currently pursuing a policy of skepticism, having already traveled the roadof heresy.42 Of course, the problem was how to prevent Western ideas fromfiltering through the crack in the door of Russian society along with tech-nology. And, if the ideas did manage to squeeze through, would it be possibleto preserve national Russian identity? Krizhanich was removed from the courtof Moscow and sent to Siberia like most other bearers of new and dangerousideas.

Yet Krizhanich’s one sin had been to illustrate Russia’s situation in facingthe Western challenge. The country had a dramatic but inevitable choice tomake: if it was to interpret its soteriological calling in a dynamic sense, it hadto eliminate the increasing technological gap that separated it from Europe.

We do not know whether Krizhanich’s ideas had an influence on Peter theGreat. However, parts of the revolution proposed by Peter were definitelybased on the suggestions of the Croatian priest. The new tsar ended theisolation of Russia and adopted an open-door policy, with the aim of assimi-lating superior Western knowhow.43

This strategy was not the caprice of a fatuous lover of foreign things (asthe traditionalists liked to claim) but an attempt to solve the problem of“the threat of economic colonisation.”44 Russia had to defend itself from thatthreat, if it was to preserve its political independence. Peter the Great’s rev-olution was a response to the challenge posed by Western capitalism. It set

Page 135: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

122 Revolutionary Apocalypse

in motion a process of Westernization of Russian civilization. If it was to avoidcolonization, Russia had no alternative but to embark upon a self-imposedcultural colonization.

The “superhuman move of Peter the Great—to open Russia to the West—completely unhinged the Empire,”45 sparking what the custodians of ortho-doxy interpreted as a denationalization of the Russian people. In reality, itsparked a cultural dualism that was to be a dramatic characteristic of Russia’shistorical existence. While the vast majority of the Russian people was hardlytouched by the process of acculturation, the power elites started to imitatethe Western lifestyle. The intellectual and moral void that developed betweenthe ruled and the rulers eventually became unbridgeable.46 Peter the Great’srevolution produced a schism in the Russian soul: from then on, it was as ifdrawn in two opposite and irreconcilable directions: to remain faithful to selfand to one’s special calling, or to be absorbed by Western civilization. In short,a process of partial “Europeanization” created an antithesis—between “old”and “new” Russia—that was unknown to previous generations and was totorment generations of Russian elites.47

Thanks to Peter the Great’s prompt and dynamic reaction to the Westernaggression, Russia became one of the great European powers without evercompletely Westernizing its internal organization. The essential features ofcharismatic despotism survived, thanks to a policy of selective acculturation.The intention was that acculturation should be material but not spiritual.Russia was forced to open to Western knowhow but not to Western ideas.48

A “table of ranks” (tabel o rangakh)—“a veritable statute of the serviceclass”49—was introduced so that Russian society could be organized like anarmy. Europeans visiting St. Petersburg recognized the Russia they had alwaysknown behind a thin superficial layer of Western culture: orthodoxy; hostilitytoward foreigners; disregard for the values of modern civilization, such astolerance, freedom of thought, civil rights; and so forth.50 For the foreigner,Russia was an enigma: not completely different from Europe but never com-pletely European, due to the obvious “Asiatic” elements. Russia was an in-decipherable, threatening sphinx.

The analysis conducted by the Enlightenment culture of the particular his-torical/cultural nature of Russia was not in any way ideological. Of course, therewere the typical prejudices of the time, and it was based on second-hand in-formation, but it identified the specific aspect of Russian society with unusualaccuracy: the fact that it was neither West nor East; or, better, it was the placewhere two mutually incompatible models of civilization came together. Whichof the two would survive? Would tradition expel the modern spirit or wouldthe latter “Europeanize” Russia and eliminate the “Asiatic” elements?51

The Russians addressed these same issues—albeit from a different per-spective, but with the difference that in the face of the cultural pressure ofthe West, they split into two spiritual families. On the one side were thosewho considered the revolution started by Peter the Great as the start of a

Page 136: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 123

process of total denationalization of the Russian people and in the name oforthodoxy rejected anything that came from outside. On the other were thosewho considered “Europeanization” to be inevitable and strove to continuePeter the Great’s policy of containing the foreign influence within very preciselimits, so that it would not impact on the core of Russian tradition, expressedin the famous triad: “Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Narodnost.”52

4. Peter the Great’s “herodian”-type opening to the outside world restedon a very precarious balance between traditionalism and modernism. Thisbalance broke when Russia, in trying to keep up with the dynamic Europeanconvoy, for the first time established the university institution as an agencyfor the production and socialization of knowhow. The inevitable consequence:material acculturation became spiritual acculturation and generated the layintelligentsia, a completely new class in Russian society. For the first time,there was an elite that operated not within, but outside (and often against)the civil service, an elite that, by its very nature, was beyond that autocraticcontrol that until then had contained within definite limits the process of self-imposed colonization. In addition, this elite was totally absorbed by “exoge-nous” ideas that were incompatible with the “sacred science” in the custodyof the clergy. Inevitably it was perceived as a sort of foreign body, an intruder,that would contaminate tradition.

The lay intelligentsia was the undesired side effect of the process of culturalcolonization allowed by the elites in power to foster technological progress.It was also an inevitable side effect insofar as “every community that tries tosolve the problem of how to adjust to the pace of an exotic civilisation needsa special class to act as the human equivalent of the transformer convertingelectrical current from one voltage to another.” In the case of Russia, thisspecial class was the intelligentsia. It was composed of “liaison officers whohad become familiar with the wily ways of the intruder civilisation; thanks tothem their community had been able to maintain a position in a social envi-ronment in which life itself was no longer in harmony with local traditionand increasingly followed a lifestyle imposed by the intruder civilisation.”53

The acculturated minority that comes into being in the society receivingthe radiations of an exotic civilization is condemned for that very reason tolive in two mutually repulsive spiritual worlds—the world of autochthonoustradition and that of exotic tradition—without identifying with either. Theintelligentsia is therefore a class destined to alienation and permanent unhap-piness. It cannot identify unreservedly with the “world of its fathers,” which itnow judges from the perspective of the exotic civilization, yet it cannot helpconsidering the cultural aggressor as an enemy of the original community.Alienated intellectuals are foreigners in their own country, but foreigners alsoin a world that is dominated by a civilization whose lifestyle it is forced toimitate, with a mixture of admiration and resentment.

In short, the acculturated intelligentsia corresponds for a twofold reason to

Page 137: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

124 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Toynbee’s concept of the “intellectual proletariat.” It has to fight on twofronts: against the society that generated it and with which it has strong emo-tional ties (in order to reshape it according to the new values that it absorbedduring the process of acculturation); and against the aggressor society (bywhich, however, it is attracted). Worse, it has to conduct this battle in a sit-uation of cultural displacement, since it belongs nowhere. The dilemma ofthe intelligentsia is as follows: should they march resolutely down the “her-odian” route until the country has been completely acculturated, or shouldthey opt for the “zealot” solution and assert the spiritual superiority of thenational traditions by which they were shaped during the process of primarysocialization?

The fact that they had absorbed exogenous ideas that were in open conflictwith the traditions of “old Russia” condemned the Russian intelligentsia to adifficult, indeed, often tragic, situation. They were mistrusted both by theauthorities and by the people who were intimately religious and thereforeattached to tradition. When the French Revolution made its belligerent andrevolutionary call against “Thrones and Altars,” this mistrust became suspi-cion, fear, open hostility. The relatively open and receptive mental dispositionof the Russian nobility vis-a-vis the Enlightenment philosophy was abandonedand the members of the intelligentsia were perceived as enemies of order andof religion; therefore, as individuals to be eliminated or rendered harmless.Worse still, they were presented to public opinion as a “diabolical force” atthe service of the “prince of the darkness” determined to “spiritually assault”all that was sacred that existed in the Russian land. The “prince of darkness,”of course, was Europe, which had used the diabolical “art of the printingpress” to spread the cult of “death and hell” all over. Therefore Holy Russiafound itself in the midst of a veritable war in which the Western siege wasaided by the internal guerrilla warfare conducted by the raznochintsy;54 theonly way for the country to win that war was to seal itself off from the othernations that were all, more or less, intoxicated by the “repugnant poison ofnon-belief ” and introduce a drastic reform of the education system so thatnot even a crack was left open for the “wave of atheism and corruption threat-ening all Europe.”55

In a state aspiring to play a primary role in a world dominated by capitalism,a policy of total isolation and purges could not in itself eliminate the diabolicalagents of the “prince of darkness.” European technology was equally essential,even though Russia loathed European ideology and considered it a lethal poi-son. So at least a tiny crack had to be left open for Western knowhow, whichinevitably implied permanent contamination of the “world of tradition.”

On the other hand, the ideological infection had already spread. Thousandsof Russians of every social class—nobility, bureaucracy, clergy, and so on—had drunk at the spring of the “profane science,” gone to European univer-sities, read and reread the classics of Western philosophy, establishedpermanent ties with the “world of the Great Transformation” that so attracted

Page 138: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 125

them. They already felt morally distant from the society in which they lived,which they now perceived with the “eyes of the Other.”

Russia’s social structure was extremely rudimentary, having been barelytouched by the capitalist revolution. There was no economically self-sufficientmiddle class, no class of professionals between the nobles and the peasants,no pressure groups. The entrepreneurial bourgeoisie was too small to countand anyway “was recruited almost exclusively among foreigners.”56 The statewas virtually the only employer. “Anyone who had studied and acquired someform of education, possibly knowledge of a foreign language, . . . had noalternative but to become a civil servant,”57 a humiliating prospect for peoplewho had absorbed Western ideas and inevitably felt a profound moral malaiseat the “idea of serving a system that was founded on injustice, oppression andpoverty.”58

So there came into being a “class of aliens,” of displaced intellectuals, wholived, materially and morally, on the edge of society and had nothing in com-mon with either the power elites or the people, because they were “contam-inated” by the exotic ideas of the increasingly secularized European culture.

By the early nineteenth century, the “herodian” strategy pursued by Peterthe Great and his successors had already produced what Martin Malia hascalled “a rootless internal emigration.”59 On the one hand, this fueled theprogressive delegitimation of the tsarist regime—which inevitably appearedto be a “barbarian kingdom” when judged from the perspective of the stan-dards of Western civilization—and on the other, made the alienation of theraznochintsy a permanent phenomenon.60

In these circumstances, any compromise between the power elites—theservice nobility, the bureaucracy, the army, and the clergy—and the intelli-gentsia was neither possible nor imaginable. They were condemned to a per-manent war, if only to survive. For the power elites, Westernized intellectualswere a “poison in the body of Russia”;61 for the Westernized intellectuals,precisely because acculturation had distanced them from traditional ways ofthinking and feeling, the surrounding environment had to be completely de-stroyed in order for it to be regenerated both materially and spiritually.

That the intelligentsia should have adopted revolution as their callingshould not therefore come as a surprise. In effect, what other option was there,other than the violent overturning of the existing order? What was the senseof moderation in a despotic state that denied its subjects the most elementaryrights? Would a policy of reform and gradual liberalization of public insti-tutions have achieved anything? Surely the very nature of tsarism obliged theintelligentsia to think that the only way for “civilization” to destroy “barbar-ity” was by means of a revolutionary and belligerent call to arms of the peoplewho were opposed to the autocracy and the social forces that sustained it.And, finally, what alternative other than the total destruction of official Russiadid history offer alienated intellectuals for making the social macrocosm andtheir microcosm compatible?

Page 139: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

126 Revolutionary Apocalypse

5. So, from the early nineteenth century, the raznochintsy were dominatedby a “hatred for official Russia”62 and adopted the features typical of “a sect,with its own, extremely rigorous morals, an imposed conception of the world,particular habits and customs, and even a physical detail by which memberscould be identified.”63 They were a kind of “lay clergy”64 in partibus infidelium,experiencing a painful identity crisis that led them to ask themselves over andover: Who are we and where are we going? What is our fate and the fate ofour country? How can we eliminate the abyss that exists between our micro-cosm and the macrocosm in which we are condemned to live as aliens?

As personal and public problems came to be seen as one and the same thing,it was inevitable that political commitment should be seen as a solution forindividual existential torment. Politics was conceived as something that wouldbring deliverance to those for whom it was a Beruf and to Russia as a whole.The objective of transforming the social macrocosm gave meaning and hopeto an otherwise empty existence—on one condition: that politics be inter-preted as a soteriological mission, as a means for bringing about the radicalregeneration of the existing order, from the perspective of the “world ofideas.” In other words, as a palingenesis.

Thus, individual and collective salvation came to coincide with the revolutionand the revolution with the epoch-making—rather, the apocalyptic—event thatwould guide the people toward the millenium. What Berdiaev was to call the“eschatological calling” of the Russian soul was spontaneously grafted on Jac-obin gnosticism.65 The intelligentsia idolized the revolution, considered therevolutionary activist as a kind of “lay saint” and the protest movement asrepresenting everything noble and worthy. And, since inevitably the first phaseof the revolution was exclusively negative—how can one regenerate the existingorder without first destroying its foundations?—the intelligentsia developed acult of destruction; that is, of nihilism, in accordance with the underlying meta-physical premises of the revolutionary program. “The passion for destructionis also a creative passion” wrote Bakunin in his famous article “Die Reaction inDeutschland,” confirming in Herzen’s eyes what he had told his friend Ogarevas early as 1833: “We feel that the world is awaiting renewal, that the Revolutionof 89 is over, but that it is necessary to create a new palingenetic time, that it isnecessary to lay new foundations for the societies of Europe, to give them morerights, more morality, more culture.”66

“All or nothing”67 was the battle cry of an elite that considered itself to bethe “vanguard of the revolution”68 in a country that refused to give up itsbackward ways and was incapable of understanding its message, an elite thatfantasized in total isolation about the palingenetic overturning of society thatwould end its own alienation and free the people from the oppression of thetsars.

There emerged a whole set of features considered to be typical of the ethosof the intelligentsia: “extremism, intolerance, maximalism, refusal of the ex-isting order, doctrinarian faith in theory, idealisation of violence, dedication

Page 140: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 127

to revolution, indifference as to the means used to attain its objectives.”69 Allwere in the framework of an apocalyptic vision of history in which revolutionwas the equivalent of “God’s judgment,” both terrible and redeeming.

The nihilists possessed all these characteristics in an undiluted state and intheir most extreme forms. They “prided themselves on being free, indepen-dent individuals, who were superior to the corrupt world around them.”70

They were like the members of Middle Age sects who, while awaiting theApocalypse, “withdrew from the world, the reign of Anti-Christ and went tolive in the remote North or in the steppes of the South.” The “great vaga-bonds of the Russian land,” as Dostoevsky called them, rebelled “against ahistory of injustice and a civilization of lies; they aspired for the end of timeand awaited the political and social palingenesis of the tsarist empire,”71—withone difference: having no faith in God, they gave an immanent interpretationto traditional Russian millenarianism. “Refusal of the world” was conceivedas a veritable declaration of war against the existing order and awaiting theApocalypse as the Promethean edification of the “Kingdom of God on earthwithout God.”72 The consequence: the nihilists entered the arena as activistsof permanent revolution, prepared to sacrifice everything—career, happiness,even their lives—to make their palingenetic dream come true. Herzen wasresponsible for laying the philosophical and moral premises of populism;Chernyshevsky, for sketching the figure of the lay ascete identifying totallywith the cause of liberating the people from oppression and poverty; the ni-hilists, for taking their lesson to its extreme consequences and proclaimingfor all to hear that times were ripe for spreading the new gospel—permanentrevolution—of which they felt themselves to be the only consequential inter-preters. By now everything was clear; everything had been said: the one taskof critical thinkers was “to devote themselves without delay to the sacred causeof exterminating evil, of purifying and cleansing the Russian land with ironand with sword, uniting in brotherhood with those who would do the sameall over Europe.”73

6. The nihilistic turning point was fundamental in the evolution of Russianrevolutionary tradition. It generated a new anthropological type—“the manof denial”74 who “lived for a great cause” and “refused to bow to any authorityother than reason.”75 Turgenev introduced this new individual to the wholeworld in his novel Fathers and Sons, a satire on the ideas and sentiments ofyoung radical intellectuals.76 The use of the term “nihilistic” to describe thespiritual attitude of people who in no way fit the description of “believing innothing” is debatable. The revolutionary intelligentsia demonstrated a “pas-sionate dedication, practically a fixation, for their beloved idea.” This explains“on the one side, their abnegation and willingness to make sacrifices and, onthe other, their monstrous distortion of reality and their determination todestroy every idea that did not fit in with the given idea.”77 Nonetheless, theterm “nihilism” came to be the political banner of the intelligentsia thanks to

Page 141: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

128 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Dmitry Pisarev, one of the maitres a penser of Russian youth. It was he whoclaimed that Turgenev had used his character (Bazarov) to illustrate the psy-chology and ethics of the “thought proletariat,” condemned by circumstancesnot to go beyond denouncing the evils of the world. On the other hand—explained Pisarev—“the obstacles in the path of the destruction of Russia wereso great, that even a purely negative calling was more than enough to fill theexistence of a generation.”78 Those aspiring for a better world had no troubleidentifying with the driving force of nihilism, namely that “there existed notone institution of contemporary life, family or social, that should not be totallyand fiercely denied.”79 To questions about the positive aspects of their pro-gram, they therefore had every right to answer as Bazarov had: “It is not forus to build . . . First we have to make room”; that is to say, “destroy all,”because there is not one institution that “should not be totally and fiercelydenied.”80

The intelligentsia greeted Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? even moreenthusiastically. It became “the breviary of every young Russian” (Kropotkin’sdefinition). Rakhmetov, the main character, was considered the prototype ofthe “new man,” an ascetic at the service of the people, willing to forego evenlove in order to remain loyal to the principles that he described in these terms:“We want men to have a life that is full of well being: we must thereforedemonstrate with our own lives that this we do not wish for selfish reasons,for we are not driven by the desire to satisfy our passions, that instead wework for man in general, that we talk on the basis of principles of convictionand duty.”81

Rakhmetov “embarked on a life of austerity. He continued to eat meat inorder to preserve his strength, but on everything else he saved down to thelast penny. Old bread, no sugar, no fruit. ‘I have no right,’ he said, ‘to throwmoney away on superfluous things. Whatever the poor classes cannot have, Ishall not touch either: to understand their life, it is necessary to live it.’ Hedressed simply, almost carelessly; he slept on the floor, without even the luxuryof a mattress; he was a spartan, a singular man, an exemplary of a very rarespecies”: The species of those who “are the pick of the chosen; the engine ofengines, the salt of the earth.”82

Chernyshevsky had described the “new man” as being “one with the sys-tem.” He was still not the professional revolutionary, totally shaped by ide-ology, and dedicated body and soul to the holy cause of destroying the existingorder, but he was definitely his moral predecessor. The young raznochintsysaw Rakhmetov as the “incarnation of the ideal revolutionary”:83 a pure anddisinterested individual, willing to sacrifice all for the emancipation (materialand moral) of the people. Although What Is to Be Done? circulated under-ground, it was extraordinarily successful and became the “bible of the radicalintelligentsia, of the raznochintsy, of generations of Russian youth. It inspiredtheir beliefs, their morals, their ideals. It instilled in them the idea that rev-olution was inevitable and educated the people who would realise it.”84

Page 142: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 129

In other words, What Is to Be Done? was a manual for alienated intellectuals“possessed” by an ardent desire to transform the world.85 Admittedly, it con-tained no action plan, but it did advocate—and this was an important aspectfor people in desperate need of spiritual guidance—an existence founded onascetism, personal sacrifice, and passionate devotion to a great and noblecause. Above all, it expressed the proud consciousness of the lofty calling ofthe “men of the future” as exclusive bearers of a “new science” that wouldenlighten and reshape the existence of the Russian people.

7. Circumstances prevented the generation of Chernyshevsky and Herzenfrom putting these principles into practice. Instead, for the youth who hadreceived their spiritual education from the pages of What is To Be Done? it wastime to put the theory into practice. The “new men” had been proliferatingat a dramatic rate ever since the tsarist regime had realized (at the end of theCrimean war) that there was no alternative but to end the isolation enforcedby Nicholas I to prevent Holy Russia from “being corrupted by the poisonousatmosphere of the West.”86 There was no alternative, because the technicalgap separating Russia from the great European powers was increasing dra-matically. The pendulum of the autocracy was moving in the direction of theWest: major reforms were launched—among which was the epochal abolitionof serfdom—access to higher education was fostered in a variety of ways, anduniversities were granted exemptions. As an inevitable consequence, the uni-versities became agencies of socialization and recruitment of the political-ideological members of the populist movement. Rather than diminishing,protest increased just when the authorities started a policy of liberalization.A tragic irony dominated the life of Russian society: the closer those Lavrovreferred to as “critically thinking people” came to the Western model, themore intolerable became the distance that separated them from Europe.Given that the regime continued to deny all opposition and did not even grantcitizens freedom of thought, conspiracy and underground protest were theonly tools available to the intelligentsia for having an impact on reality. Thismeant that the mobilization and the democratization of the Russian nationcould take place only through nondemocratic channels and the action of secretsocieties, whose members were intellectuals who were socially displaced andpolitically distant from public opinion.

The political arena was inevitably transformed into a military arena dom-inated by two parties: tsarist bureaucracy and revolutionary intelligentsia.Though they were divided on countless issues, their thoughts and actions werebased on the same military logic, which was absolutely incompatible with thelogic of liberal democracy.

Thus, it is easy to explain why the leaders of the revolutionary movementwere dominated by an obsession: to find the most effective method for de-stroying the “absolute enemy,” no matter what.87 This search was to lead, insubsequent steps, to Bolshevism. The first step was taken by Nikolai Ishutin,

Page 143: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

130 Revolutionary Apocalypse

a fanatical admirer of Chernyshevsky88 who, in 1865 in Moscow, founded asecret society he called “Hell.” The goal of the society was to destroy tsarismby means of the methodical use of terror. Chernyshevsky never actually de-veloped a theory explicitly advocating terror as a means for overturning theexisting order,89 but circumstances drove the young, ideologically extremistintelligentsia irresistibly toward political extremism. Their only option was totake Bazarov literally and “cleanse” the area of everything that preventedsocial palingenesis. This implied the transition from “the arms of criticism”to the “criticism of arms.” The issue ceased being one of protesting againstwhat they liked to call the “conventional lies of civilised humanity”90 andbecame one of destroying existing institutions and physically eliminating themen of “official Russia.”

Naturally, this strategy required a peculiar form of organization that couldshape a peculiar type of individual. Ishutin’s secret society was organized likea monastery and imposed an iron discipline on its members: “The membersof Hell will live under a false name and break family ties; they will not marry,will abandon their former friends and, in general, live with one exclusivepurpose: endless love and dedication to their country and to its well-being.For this, members will abandon all personal satisfaction and nurture hatredagainst hatred, evil against evil.”91

Ishutin conceived his secret society as an agency for the production of “newmen,” of professional revolutionaries therefore willing to sacrifice life—theirown and that of others—to realize the utopia. The same inspiration was be-hind Sergei Nechaev’s short but intense experiment. Like Ishutin, Nechaevsaw everything as a means to create as many “fanatics of destruction” as pos-sible in an organization conceived as a “war machine.” His Catechism of theRevolutionary,92 written in 1869, is essential for understanding the anthropo-logical “type” necessary for revolution.

The revolutionary is a man who is a loser from the start. He has no personal interests,private affairs, feelings, personal ties, property. He does not even have a name. Oneinterest absorbs him, to the exclusion of every other. One thought, one passion—revolution. In word and in fact he has broken every tie with the social order and withthe entire civilised world, with all the laws, the customs, the social conventions and itsmoral rules. The revolutionary is an implacable enemy and lives only to be morecertain of destroying . . . He knows one science only, the science of destruction . . .He despises public opinion. He despises and detests the morals of current society inits every motive and expression, for he is morally against anything that contributes totheir victory; everything that prevents him from acting is immoral and criminal. Therevolutionary is a lost man, he has no pity for the State or for educated society ingeneral; from it he therefore expects no mercy. Between him, on one side, and theState and society, on the other, there is a state of war. It may be visible or invisible,but permanent and implacable—a war down to death.93

One can’t help being struck by the absolute amorality of these words, wherethe author explicitly formulates a theorem that was to become an indisputable

Page 144: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 131

dogma in the framework of the communist culture: the legitimacy of everymeans, even the most terrifying, if functional to the sacred cause of the “ter-rible, total, general and ruthless destruction” of “rotten society.”94 This makesThe Catechism of the Revolutionary one of the first documents in which therevolutionaries solemnly and officially incorporated Machiavellianism and Je-suitism, as a means to achieve the “complete liberation of the people.”95

8. When the “Nechaev affair” exploded,96 Russian and European progres-sives immediately declared that the author of the Catechism of the Revolutionarywas a pathological case and certainly not representative of what the revolu-tionary world had meant for Russian society, where it had never been morethan a “catacomb culture.”97 Dostoevsky, however, considered Nechaev to bea typical expression of the spiritual phenomenon that had become an obses-sion for him, namely the diabolical aspiration to build a new “tower of Babel. . . without God, not to reach heaven from earth, but to lower heaven so thatit reached earth.”98 He abandoned the book he was writing at the time, Vitadi un grande peccatore, and started on an ideological novel, Besy, with the am-bitious objective of identifying the metaphysical and psychological essence ofrevolutionism.

The two main characters of Besy are Petr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stav-rogin: vile is the former, who obviously represents Nechaev,99 and tragic andsultry the latter. Shigalev, however, is the character Dostoevsky uses to illus-trate what he believes to be the core of the revolutionary program. Shigalevis a “fanatical philanthropist” who takes his egalitarian beliefs to absurd ex-tremes: “He starts with absolute freedom and ends with absolute despo-tism.”100 Shigalev’s “final solution” is the division of humanity into twounequal parts: “One-tenth is free and has unlimited rights. The other nine-tenths have no personality and are like a flock of sheep. Through blind obe-dience they experience a series of re-generations and attain primordialinnocence, something like a primordial paradise, albeit one in which it is stillnecessary to work.”101 In this type of social organization, each member“watches over the other and reports on his or her conduct. Every individualis the property of the others, and the others are the property of each individ-ual. They are all slaves and in slavery are equal. In extreme cases there maybe libel and murder, but above all there is equality. The first step of the processis to lower the level of scientific education and talent. Top levels are onlypossible for the gifted and people who are particularly gifted are people whoare unnecessary! They are despots; they corrupt more than they contribute;they will be exiled or suppressed. Cicero’s tongue cut out, Copernicus’ eyespulled out of their sockets, Shakespeare stoned . . . Slaves must be equal:without despotism there has never been liberty or equality.”102

Dostoevsky was convinced that the revolutionaries were aiming at this typeof social system, or at least that this was the type of system they would havebeen forced to create, had they pursued the logic of egalitarianism and athe-

Page 145: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

132 Revolutionary Apocalypse

ism. As for materializing a “terrestrial paradise,” Shigalevshchina imagined ahuge network enveloping all society, so that “each of the action divisionswould make proselytes and spread laterally ad infinitum, thus constantly un-dermining the systematic propaganda against them, the status of local au-thorities, encouraging the people to doubt, generating cynicism and scandals,and a complete lack of hope in a better situation or state and finally, at a giventime, resorting to gun fire, a popular means par excellence, to throw the nationinto a state of despair.”103

Reactions to I demoni were hostile. Dostoevsky was accused of distortingthe psychology of the nihilists and mistaking what was simply a monstrousphenomenon as the essence of revolutionism. Nechaev was certainly an ex-treme case, but he had been nourished by the classics of European revolu-tionary tradition and considered his strategic and organizational programnothing more than a tool for implementing the program illustrated in theManifesto of the Communist Party.104 He had also worked closely with Bakunin,undoubtedly one of the most influential figures of the international left. Inany event, Nechaev’s ideas cannot be said to have been distant from the rev-olutionary culture of his time.

A glance at Bakunin’s proclamation Agli ufficiali dell’esercito, written in thewinter of 1869, reveals that what liked to present itself as a program of anarchywas actually quite similar to the Shigalev model. For example, we read thefollowing:

In my Speech to Young Russian Brothers I said that the Stanka Razin leading the massesduring the obviously imminent destruction of the Russian Empire will no longer bean individual but a collective Stenka Razin. Anyone who is not stupid will know thatI was referring to a secret organisation that already existed, and that could alreadycount on the discipline, dedication and passionate abnegation of its members and onpassive obedience to all the directives of a single committee that knows all but is knownby no one. The members of this committee have completely given up self; this entitlesthem to expect every member of the organisation to do the same. They have given upeverything that is the object of the desire of proud, ambitious and power greedy men;by refusing for once and for all personal, public and official power, and in general allcelebrity in society, they have given themselves over to permanent obscurity, leavingto others the glory of appearing and fame, preserving for themselves, and always col-lectively, only the essence of the undertaking. Like Jesuits, each has given up his will,not out of submission, but for the emancipation of the people. Within the committee,indeed within the whole organisation, it is not the individual who thinks, wants andacts, but the collectivity . . . A serious member complies rigorously and unconditionallywith the orders and instructions from above without ever asking, without even wantingto know, the degree to which he contributes to the organisation. He knows that suchdiscipline is an essential guarantee of the relative impersonality of each member andthis in turn is the conditio sine qua non of common victory. He knows that only thistype of discipline will allow him to contribute to the formation of a true organisationand create a collective revolutionary force which, being based on the impersonal power

Page 146: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 133

of the people, will be successful vis a vis the formidable power of the organisation ofthe State . . . The current organisation . . . will outlive all governments and ceaseactivity only on the day in which the whole programme has become the daily life ofRussians and the life of the whole world.”105

In a letter to Nechaev ( June 2, 1870), Bakunin described exactly the samerevolutionary policy. “Our plan can be illustrated in a few words: total de-struction of the public-legalistic world and of the entire so-called bourgeoiscivilisation, through a spontaneous popular revolution, led not by an officialdictatorship but by an imperceptible and anonymous collective dictatorship ofthe partisans of total liberation of the people from every oppression, unitedin a secret Society, who act everywhere and always with the same scope and onthe basis of the same programme.”106 This secret organization composed ex-clusively of people who have “sincerely identified with the idea of being atthe service of the people”107 has a huge task before it. “In fact”—continuedBakunin—“try to imagine yourselves before a victory of the spontaneous rev-olution in Russia. The State and, with the State, the whole social and politicalsystem have been squashed. The population has uprisen, has taken what itneeds and eliminated whoever was in favour of the old regime and opposedthem. There is no law and no authority. A stormy ocean has broken all bar-riers. The masses—the Russian people—are far from homogeneous; they areextremely varied and extend over the immensity of the Russian Empire. Theycan now live and act independently, according to what really exists and not towhat they are ordered to be, each in his own way: the result is general anarchy.The murky mud that has gathered in enormous quantities in the depths ofthe people now comes to the surface; new, daring, intelligent, dishonest orambitious men emerge here and there; each in his own way tries to win thetrust of the people and use it to his personal advantage. These men face eachother, they fight and destroy each other. One might call it a terrible anarchy,and one for which there is no solution.”108

“Yet”—continued Bakunin—“there is a solution: the presence of the secretsociety that has spread its members all over the Empire organised in smallgroups and yet united and inspired by a common mentality, a common scope,pursued in accordance with circumstances and conditions. They act every-where, according to the same plan. These small groups, unknown as such, haveno officially recognised power. But they are strong because they can count ontheir own ideas, that express the very essence of instincts, of desires and popularneeds; they can count on men who fight without an ulterior motive, and withouta pre-established plan; they can count on the solidarity that unites all the ob-scure groups in an organically united whole; they can count on the intelligenceand energy of the members of their society who have successfully developed agroup of people who are more or less loyal to the same mentality and by naturesubmissive to their influence—these groups who desire nothing for themselves,no benefits, no honours, no power, will lead the popular movement against all

Page 147: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

134 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the disunited, ambitious people fighting among themselves, and lead them to-wards the most complete fulfilment of the social and economic ideal and to-wards the most complete organisation of popular liberty. This is what I call thecollective dictatorship of secret organisations.”109

Admittedly, in this letter Bakunin accused the anarchists of being “the de-clared enemies of all official power, including ultra-revolutionary power; en-emies of every publicly recognised dictatorship.”110 But this only made theparadox on which the program was based more obvious.111 It is a paradoxunderlying the policies developed by many revolutionary groups in Russiaand elsewhere in Europe: like the Shigalevshchina, they all claimed that theywould derive total liberty from total power.

9. The action plan prepared by Petr Tkachev confirms that the “Shigalevparadox” was not an invention of Dostoevsky, but the penetrating diagnosisof an intellectual and moral perversion that was common in the secret societiesfounded by the more extremist and consequential members of the intelli-gentsia of the time.112 Tkachev was one of the most typical and influentialmembers of the populist movement. His action was a mix of the most radical(but confused) anarchic egalitarianism and the most rigorous and consequen-tial Jacobin totalitarianism.

Tkachev—like Bakunin, Nechaev, and thousands of other professional rev-olutionaries—believed that the ultimate goal of the revolutionary movementwas the creation of a social order in which “all people will be unconditionallyequal . . . and between them will exist no difference, from the intellectual,moral and physical point of view.”113 On the basis of this given—according towhich the only equality the authentic revolutionary can and should envisageis “physiological, organic equality . . . resting firmly on the same education andidentical living conditions”114—Tkachev observed that this objective wouldnever be achieved via a gradual process of political and cultural evolution ofthe workers, since “taken as a whole, the masses did not believe, and couldnot believe, in their own strength. Of their own initiative they would neverhave started the struggle against the poverty that enveloped them.”115 To fulfillthe egalitarian principle it was necessary to make a radical change in human-ity’s very nature: something that could only be done “by people who under-stood this and sincerely aspired to find a solution; in other words by peoplewho were intellectually and morally educated, i.e., by a minority. And thisminority, because of their higher level of intellectual and moral education,would always hold intellectual and moral power over the majority.”116 There-fore, the initiative—Tkachev tirelessly repeated, thus anticipating what wouldbe the starting theorem of the Leninist conception of the party of professionalrevolutionaries—had to be taken by an actor who was external to the masses.This actor could only be the “thought proletariat”; that is to say, the intelli-gentsia—people who were morally alienated and suited, thanks to their ab-solute idealism, to place themselves at the head of the movement that would

Page 148: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 135

“use the destructive-revolutionary force of the people to destroy the enemiesof revolution.”117

Tkachev added that any strategy other than frontal conflict was unimag-inable given the political circumstances in Russia. The only way to end thediaspora of the intelligentsia was to create a highly centralized organizationwith a military-type discipline. The tsarist state was a war machine at theservice of permanent repression. It could only be destroyed by a party thatwas organized like an army. Tkachev did not deny the utility of political pro-paganda and of protest action among the people but considered this form ofstruggle useless without solving the fundamental issue: the creation of a rev-olutionary party whose organization was identical to that of the tsarist state.“We don’t need the phantom-like, impossible, fake organisation advocated bythe bourgeois and the anarchic revolutionaries, but a proper organisation, anorganisation that brings the scattered revolutionary elements together in onesingle living organism, that follows one general plan and obeys one generaldirection, an organisation founded on centralised power and decentralisedrevolutionary functions.”118

Essentially these ideas paraphrased blanquisme though Tkachev probablydeveloped them independently, following in the steps of Marxism.119 TheRussian revolutionary’s sociological analysis justifying his strategy was, how-ever, original. What strikes us most is his extraordinarily lucid perception ofthe significance and long-term consequences of the tsarist policy of “con-trolled modernization.” To the young people it had allowed to be educatedaccording to the Western model, tsarism said: “You are necessary to me andI will nourish you to do nothing. Your ideal principles do not correspond tothe interests that I have created for you, but this does not matter; for thedevelopment of my principles, I need agricultural entrepreneurs, technicians,industrialists, doctors, lawyers etc. To each of these, I am willing to offercomplete freedom in the domain of his specialty and nothing more. You musthelp me. Develop industry and commerce, make agriculture efficient, teachthe people to read, found banks, hospitals, build railway tracks etc; for all this,I will offer you a good, solid reward and I will endeavour to ensure that youractivity is not too onerous for you. I will create the conditions that meet yourcharacter and will also afford you a sense of satisfaction for your work, thusfreeing you of your sadness and melancholy. These are my conditions.”120

Unfortunately, they were conditions that were unacceptable for the radicalintelligentsia. They were in absolute contrast with the principles of individualswho aspired for something far grander than a convenient niche within theexisting order of things. The intelligentsia wanted absolute equality, not des-potism coated with a thin layer of liberalism and contaminated by the bour-geois spirit. Yet the tsarist proposal did express a rationale that, in the longterm, might have been fruitful, had it not been so energetically opposed. Bysetting in motion the engine of capitalism, the state created an excellent op-portunity for sweeping the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary

Page 149: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

136 Revolutionary Apocalypse

movement. Tkachev added, “albeit slowly and weakly, we too are moving inthe direction of economic growth and this growth is subject to the same lawsand is going in the same direction as the economic growth of the westernStates. The obshchina is starting to dissolve, the government is making everyeffort to annihilate it and destroy it for ever. In the peasant class, a class ofkulaki is developing, buyers and renters of peasant and noble lands, a peasantaristocracy. The free passage of land from one owner to another encountersfewer obstacles every day and agricultural income and monetary operationsincrease all the time, the pomesciki, volens nolens are in a situation where theyare forced to improve their agricultural system. This type of progress gen-erally goes hand in hand with industrial development and extends to the lifeof citizens. Therefore, here and now, there already exist all the conditions forthe formation, on the one hand, of a strong conservative class of peasants—owners and farmers—and on the other of a moneyed bourgeoisie of trade andindustry, in other words of capitalists. As these classes come into being andgain in strength, the situation of the people will inevitably deteriorate. Thechances of success of a violent overturning will become more complex. Whichis why we cannot wait. This we why we say that revolution right now in Russiais truly indispensable. We cannot wait. We cannot postpone it. Now, or maybesoon, never. Now the circumstances are in our favour. In ten or twenty years,they will be against us.”121

Franco Venturi has rightly observed that this “page is decisive for under-standing Tkachev’s position. A cold and realistic analysis of the situation, theresult of his reflections on Russian society, coupled with an impassioned willto save what was the core of the populist conception: the peasant obshchina.”122

But it is also a decisive page for understanding the paradoxical nature of therole played by the revolutionary intelligentsia. They claimed to introducedemocracy, but using antidemocratic methods; they opposed capitalism be-cause they feared it would generate an independent civil society with numer-ous counter-powers and therefore difficult for the revolutionary party to shapeand influence. So it came to pass that “two sworn enemies, the radical intel-ligentsia and the autocratic bureaucracy, were allies in their hostility for atruly civil society, a structure of Russian society that respected the principlesof pluralism, autonomous administration, civil law, and liberalism in the do-main of political opinions and cultural norms.”123

10. The fact that an independent civil society worried the revolutionarymovement as much as it did the tsarist bureaucracy should not come as asurprise. We know that the intelligentsia had a love-hate relationship withliberal civilization. They considered the existence of Western elements intheir society a cultural aggression that threatened the historical identity ofRussia. Admittedly, the populists did not believe that the European influencewould pollute Russian society and proclaimed that they would rebuild societyon the basis of the “German science.” They also refused the revealed religion

Page 150: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 137

of the orthodox Church and the edifying image of society prior to Peter theGreat, based on the sobornost that was so dear to the Slavophiles. Nonetheless,they had no intention of adopting the Western model124 and aspired to createsomething radically different from European civilization, which, to their hor-ror, was dominated by shopkeepers.125 So theirs was a very sui generis West-ernism. In the name of the values and principles of the “profane science,”they rejected “old Russia,” but their “new Russia” was not a copy of the liberalEurope they despised for its individualism and the excessive power of bour-geois money.126 They dreamt of a new type of Gemeinschaft and this led themto fight against both the traditional Gemeinschaft and the modern Gesellschaft.In this they were much closer to the Slavophiles than they imagined: thoughenemies, they shared the same determination to “face the powerful westernculture”127 and guarantee their country a fate that was different from that ofEurope.128

Herzen’s Lettere dalla Francia e dall’Italia (1847) is most enlightening in thisregard. The spiritual father of the “Westerners” “gave new meaning to theRussia-Europe antithesis. It was no longer a matter of being pro-West: to thebourgeois West Herzen counterposed the Russian people, as loyal custodiansof agricultural communes as yet untouched by the bourgeois spirit, uncon-taminated by Roman property law, in other words in a situation in whichthere was nothing to lose and everything to gain from a future revolution,”129

which was no longer conceived as a means for driving Russian society towardthe West but as a means for preventing the victory of capitalism, with theresult that Herzen refused precisely what was the economic basis of the pro-cess of modernization and secularization.130

That Herzen’s attitude spread rapidly among the populists is evident fromcountless documents, including Mikhail Mikhailov’s particularly enlighteningdeclaration Alla giovane generazione (1865). In direct contrast with the reform-ist policy of Alexander II, who “insisted on turning Russia into England,”Mikhailov declared: “No! We do not wish for English economic maturity . . .We not only can, but we must, do something different. There are principlesin our life that are completely unknown to the Europeans . . . We are abackward people and therein lies our salvation. We should be grateful thatfate has spared us the lifestyle of Europe. Its problems, its hopeless situationare a lesson for us. We do not want its proletariat, its aristocracy, its principlesof government, its imperial power . . . Europe does not understand, it cannotunderstand, our social aspirations. For this reason, Europe cannot be ourmaster in economic questions . . . Unlike western Europe, we are not afraidof the future: which is why we move boldly toward revolution, why we desireit. We believe in our energy, we believe we are destined to introduce newprinciples into history, to express something personal, not to repeat in a pe-destrian fashion the European past. Without this faith, there is no salvationand we have an immense faith in our strength.”131

These words convey a sensation of resentment and frustrating inferiority

Page 151: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

138 Revolutionary Apocalypse

vis-a-vis the dynamic and aggressive Western civilization—a resentment thatprovoked the typical reaction in such cases: the conviction that the last—thatis, the Russians—would eventually be the first. Precisely because fate hadchosen to keep the Russian population behind the others, their role was to bethe bearers of a new sense of history, of a message that was unknown andinaccessible to Europeans. In this situation, the Russian revolutionary wasmore nationalistic than he had ever been and was humiliated and offended bythe absolute material superiority of the European powers.132 The reaction wasto proclaim the spiritual superiority of the Russian people, drawing more orless consciously on the cultural heritage of its original community that har-bored an extraordinarily powerful idea-passion: the myth of “Moscow, thethird Rome.”

Thus, what was an old idea takes on the guise of something new and modernbut without losing an iota of its mythological nature. There is nothing newin this: “Every man of character and lively intelligence wants the social, cul-tural or natural community to which it is given to him to belong to be worthyof him. In general men like to think that, had they not been born there, theywould have liked to be born in that very community, which in turn meansthat they want their own particular group to stand out from the other groupsthat are known to them or with which they are often in competition. This isan aspiration that derives from the same desire of self-fulfillment that drivesmen, insofar as members of social groups within the national community orinsofar as individuals within their social classes. In fact no one is fulfilled innothing, and indeed each and everyone is fulfilled in a group or often in severalgroups and these are necessary to him, both as a stage and as an audience thatapproves and applauds. If the group to which this man belongs is in somewayinferior to the others, or is humiliated, strong tensions develop which generateintense and dramatic introspection, in a search for the most profound meaningof the group.”133

Martin Malia’s words help us to understand the particular psychology ofthe acculturated intellectuals of nonindustrialized countries, who are obligedto measure themselves against the forceful, invasive presence of the capitalisticWest. They are all more or less anxious to demonstrate that, despite every-thing, their national community is better than the countries that lead scien-tific, technological, and economic progress. Whether they are conservativesor revolutionaries is absolutely secondary, with respect to their deepest desire,which is precisely to prove to themselves, and to others, that their own countryhas something that renders it not only worthy of respect, but is the bearer ofa superior truth that cannot be measured with the parameters of industrialcivilization.

The Slavophiles believed that the secret of Russia’s superiority lay in Rus-sian tradition, prior to its being contaminated by the “rotten West.” Thepopulists believed that the socialist revolution was the secret of this superioritybecause it had eradicated the barbaric tsarist civilization and intended creating

Page 152: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 139

a “new civilization” that was infinitely better than the capitalistic-bourgeoisone. Though different, both attitudes attributed a potential primacy to Russiathat would be achieved in one of two ways: by pushing the country resolutelytoward the past, or toward the future.

In fact, neither solution had any realistic foundations. The “harmonious”pre-Peter society was simply a mythological construction of the Slavophilesand their romantic nostalgia for the past; equally mythological was the futurehomogeneous society dear to the populists. Both were an image-desire thatexpressed the intense need of Russian intellectuals to find something thatcould attenuate their frustration vis-a-vis Western civilization, whose com-plaisant arrogance inevitably provoked their resentment and desire for re-venge. Though mythological—or perhaps precisely because they weremythological—both solutions had the advantage of providing the intelligent-sia with a way out of the psychological impasse of having lost their self-esteembecause they belonged to a nation they inevitably considered to be barbaricand backward, following their encounter with the “profane science.”134 Inaddition, both solutions provided them with an action plan and an excitingprospect: the possibility of building a civilization superior to Western civili-zation, precisely because the starting point was the pitiful situation of theirnation. The alchemistic transformation of a state of backwardness into a pre-condition for an extraordinary future gave strength and spiritual drive to peo-ple in desperate need of an ethical-political message that would give them thecourage to live and to fight.

One can imagine the excitement of the Russian intellectuals—“Westerners”and Slavophiles—when they discovered the peasant obshchina.135 It was like areligious revelation: all of a sudden they had a radiant future before them.Russia was no longer condemned to being a “proletarian nation.” It had some-thing precious for the whole world. Russia alone had a positive answer for themany dramatic problems afflicting humanity.136 Europe was dominated bywhat Herzen, citing Blanqui, liked to call “elegant cannibalism”—that is tosay, “wild” capitalism: all competition, calculation, and greed. Russia harboredan institution—the obshchina—that would enable it to establish a civilizationbased on solidarity rather than on selfish passions, once the political super-structure of tsarist despotism had been disintegrated by the revolution. Thepopulists greeted the obshchina as a “sacred and redeeming institution” capableof “preventing a situation in which one social class sucks the blood ofanother.”137

All this explains why the populists read Marx’s works with such avidity andthe energy with which they spread his theories among all social classes.138

Admittedly, Marxism stressed that a period of capitalism was necessary formodern civilization. But it also stressed the horrors of an economic devel-opment focused exclusively on the market. And this was what interested thepopulists most. “They had been so deeply affected by Capital and the descrip-tion of the atrocities of primitive accumulation, that they had decided to use

Page 153: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

140 Revolutionary Apocalypse

every means to avoid the capitalistic development of Russia and therefore,through that conclusion, had become fully-fledged traditional Populists”139

driven by the idea that “by virtue of their temperament, their history, theirpopular traditions, the Russians were particularly suited to carrying out thesocialist ideas.”140 So they took the first step along the road that was to leadto the “Asianization” of Marxism and to its conversion into the most powerful“protest ideology” of nations that had been “proletarianized” by the planetaryexpansion of modern industrial civilisation.141

NOTES

1. See Giorgio Migliardi, Lenin e i menscevichi (Milan: La Pietra, 1979).2. Georgy V. Plekhanov, “La classe operaia e gli intellettuali socialdemocratici,”

in the appendix to Lenin’s What is to be done?, p. 381.3. Iury Martov, “Proletari e intellettuali nella socialdemocrazia russa,” in the ap-

pendix to Lenin’s What is to be done?, pp. 414–415.4. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (New York: New Park Publications, 1980).5. Quoted from Isaac Deutscher, Il Profeta Armato (Milan: Longanesi, 1983),

p. 494.6. Friedrich Engels, “Le condizioni sociali in Russia” in K. Marx and F. Engels,

India, China, Russia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1970), p. 281.7. Quoted from P. A. Zvetermich, Il grande Parvus (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), p. 75.8. Mikhail Bakunin, “Lettera a Necaev” in Michael Confino’s Il catechismo del

rivoluzionario (Milan: Adelphi, 1976), p. 97.9. Dostoevsky, expressing a feeling that was common among the Russian intel-

ligentsia, described the money-god that was idolized and given a prominent positionin the bourgeois society of his time in the following terms: “Baal reigns and does noteven require submission because of that he is certain. His self-esteem is unlimited:proud and tranquil he concedes organised charity just to get himself out of a difficultsituation and hence there is no way one can disturb this esteem. Baal does not hide tohimself . . . the existence of certain uncontrolled phenomena of existence that aremisleading and a source of concern. Poverty, pain, malcontent, despair do not worryhim at all. He allows all these misleading and unfortunate events to co-exist alongsidehis life, close to it, in the light of day” (Note invernali su impressioni estive [Rome: EditoriRiuniti, 1984], pp. 62–63).

10. Nikolai Berdiaev, Il senso e le premesse del comunismo russo (Rome: Edizioni Roma,1944), p. 23. Identical is the thesis of Tibor Szamuely: “The history of the Russianrevolutionary movement is the history of the intelligentsia. The two are inseparable.The Russian Revolution was the product of the intelligentsia and the revolution wasthe raison d’etre of the intelligentsia” (The Russian Tradition [London: Secker andWarburg, 1974], p. 143).

11. T. G. Masaryk has condensed this opinion in the phrase: “Russia is of the samespecies, of the same quality as Europe, Russia is what Europe was . . . ” (La Russia el’Europa, vol. 1 [Bologna: Boni, 1971], p. 5).

12. Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilisation on Trial (New York: OUP, 1948), p. 166.13. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilisations (New York: Lane, 1994).14. “The Russian people are not strictly European nor strictly Asiatic; Russia is

Page 154: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 141

one whole section of the world, an enormous East-West, it joins two universes. Twoprinciples, the eastern and the western, have always struggled within the Russian soul”(Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea [London: G. Bles, 1947]).

15. N. H. Bayens, Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilisation (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1948).

16. Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilisation (London: Arnold, 1933).17. G. Ostrogorsky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (Lon-

don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).18. Charles Diehl, La civilta bizantina (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), p. 26.19. F. G. Meier, L’Impero bizantino (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960), p. 36.20. Louis Brehier, Les institutions de l’Empire byzantin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1970),

p. 348.21. Alain Ducellier, Les byzantins (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), p. 136.22. Charles Diehl, La civilta bizantina (Milan: Garzanti, 1962), p. 87.23. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despostism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976).24. On this concept of triple monopoly, see Luciano Pellicani, Il mercato e i soci-

alismi (Milan: SugarCo, 1979), pp. 224–226.25. See Luciano Guerci, Le monarchie assolute (Turin: UTET, 1986), p. 266 et seq.26. Giovanni Damasceno described the rigorously traditional principles of the

Byzantine civilization thus: “Let the limits set by our fathers not change: we preservethe tradition we received. Therefore we pray the people of God, the faithful flock, tokeep the traditions of the church alive. The gradual disappearance of what has beenhanded down to us would end up undermining the very foundations and in a shorttime would provoke the collapse of the whole structure” (quoted from N. H. Baynes,Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilisation).

27. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar (Bari: Laterza, 1984), p. 4.28. Valentin Gitermann, Storia della Russia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia,

1980), p. 54.29. Aleksandr Herzen, Sviluppo delle idee rivoluzionarie in Russia (Rome: Editori

Riuniti, 1971), p. 47. This concept had already been formulated by Petr Chaadaev:“The fact is that we have never walked together with other peoples; we belong to noneof the great families of humankind; we are neither of the West nor of the East, andwe have the traditions of neither” (Lettere filosofiche [Bari: Laterza, 1950], p. 87).

30. See Boris Brutzkus, “The Historical Peculiarities of the Social and EconomicDevelopment of Russia,” in Reinhard, Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds., Class, Status,Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspectives, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press,1955), pp. 121–135.

31. Aleksandr Herzen, Sviluppo delle idee rivoluzionarie in Russia, p. 52.32. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 11.33. Manfred Hellman, Russia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), p. 116.34. “The Russian government is army like discipline substituting the city order,

the state of siege that has become the normal state of society” (Custine, La Russie en1939, vol. 1 [Paris: Solin, 1990], p. 164).

35. Nicholas Zernov, The Church of the Eastern Christians (London: Macmillan,New York, 1942).

36. According to the historian of Russian theology, G. Florovsky, the phrase “therewill be no fourth Rome” presumably means that the event that Philotheus expected

Page 155: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

142 Revolutionary Apocalypse

in the near future was the “end of the world.” From Ivan the Terrible on, the definition“Moscow, third Rome” was understood to mean that Russia was “the centre and thefulfilment of world history” (Dmitry Chizhevsky, Storia dello spirito russo [Florence:Sansoni, 1965], p. 120).

37. Typically the autocrats of Muscovy even justified their international policy as“a defence of the orthodox lands and people from the threat of Roman Catholicism”(R.O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy [London: Longman, 1987], p. 134).

38. Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

39. There is no need to comment on this formula by Avvakum, the charismaticleader of the raskol.

40. See Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza dell’Europa (Turin: Einaudi, 1980),pp. 13 et seq.

41. Lionel Kochan and R. Abraham, The Making of Modern Russia, 2nd ed. (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 99f.

42. Krizhanich actually made his position unsustainable mainly because of his con-cept of “moderate aristocracy as the principle defence against despotism” (AlexanderYanov, Le origini dell’autocrazia, p. 54).

43. See R. K. Massie, Pietro il Grande (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992).44. Rene Portal, Pierre le Grand (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1991), p. 291.45. A. Kolpinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa (Rome: La Voce, 1919), p. 48.46. The dimensions of this intellectual and moral void emerged very clearly during

the pugachevshchina, which was “a revolt against the europeanisation and modernisationof the elites and of the country much more than it was a revolt against serfdom” (MarcRaeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 85).

47. See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).48. Peter the Great explained the meaning of his “revolution” in these terms: “We

need Europe for a couple of decades, after that we will be able to turn our backs onher” (cited from Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 2nd ed. [London: Penguin,1995]).

49. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime.50. “If the Muscovite tsars who increased their power thanks to the involuntary

assistance of the Tartar Khans found themselves having to ‘mongolise’ Muscovy, Peterthe Great, in his determination to take advantage of the West, was obliged to euro-peanise Muscovy. When he took over the Baltic provinces he procured the tools heneeded for this purpose. Those regions not only provided him with diplomats, gen-erals—that is to say the brains that would see to the realisation of his political andmilitary designs—but also a mass of bureaucrats, primary school teachers and sergeantsdestined to give a smattering of civilisation to the Russian population, teaching themthe necessary technical notions, but preventing them from assimilating the progressiveideas of the West” (Karl Marx, Rivelazioni sulla storia diplomatic segreta del XVIII secolo[L’Milan: Erba Voglio, 1978], pp. 179–180).

51. See Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza dell’Europa.52. The formula was coined by Uvarov and became the “alpha and omega of of-

ficial political wisdom, the programme of Russia theocracy, which considered the willof the tsar to be divine revelation and referred politics and the administration of bu-reaucracy to this divine revelation” (T. G. Masaryk, La Russia e l’Europa, vol. 1, p. 97).

53. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5, p. 154.

Page 156: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 143

54. And in fact students were considered an “internal enemy” (quoted from Alek-sandr Blok, L’intelligencija e la rivoluzione [Milan: Adelphi, 1978], p. 70).

55. This black picture of the situation in Russia in the early nineteenth centurywas painted by M. L. Magnitisky, a typical inquisitorial agent of tsarist autocracy (seeValentin Gitermann, Storia della Russia, vol. 2, pp. 67–68).

56. Custine, La Russie en 1939, vol. 1, p. 191.57. N. A. Dobroliubov, “Gente dimenticata,” in G. Berti and M. L. Gallinaro, eds.,

Il pensiero democratico russo del XIX secolo (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), p. 299.58. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 147.59. Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” in Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian

Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 10.60. At the trial of the Nechaevtsy in 1871, one of the lawyers drew the following

sociological profile of the Russian intellectual proletariat: “No matter the income ofeach of the accused, collectively they belong to that part of the population who receivedthe best education, tasted the fruit of science and absorbed European ideas but wasunable to obtain a fitting position in life. They are in a situation where they can earnwhat they need to live, but they have no rights, no traditions, no security, and thereforenew ideas rapidly catch on and grow” (quoted from E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of Russiaof the Twentieth Century [London: Faber and Faber, 1971]).

61. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime.62. A. Kolpinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa, p. 75.63. Nikolai Berdiaev, Il senso e le premesse del comunismo russo, pp. 23–24.64. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 117.65. See Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1966), p. 157

et seq.66. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and

Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972),p. 10.

67. We find these words in a letter Bakunin wrote to his brothers and sisters in1845.

68. Joseph Roth, Il profeta muto (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), p. 84.69. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, pp. 178–179.70. N. V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (Oxford, New York: OUP, 1984).71. Paolo Angarano, “Introduzione” to M. Bakunin, Liberta e rivoluzione (Naples:

Avanzini e Torraca, 1968), p. 5. Interestingly, Chernyshevsky saw in the “religiousmadmen” of ancient Russia “a human quality not unlike what so many were to call his‘Nihilism’” (F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 131).

72. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Gli spiriti della Rivoluzione russa” in AA.VV., Dal profondo(Milan: Jaca Book, 1971), p. 81.

73. Mikhail Bakunin, “I principi della rivoluzione,” in Aleksandr Herzen, A unvecchio compagno (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 45.

74. Aleksandr Herzen, Dall’altra sponda (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), p. 198.75. Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Dover Publications,

1971), p. 23.76. Turgenev’s attitude toward the Nihilists was ambiguous, however. For example,

to a group of radical students from Heidelberg who asked him to explain the ideo-logical meaning of his book, he answered: “If the reader did not like Bazarov for what

Page 157: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

144 Revolutionary Apocalypse

he was—rough, insensitive, ruthlessly arid and abrupt— . . . it was his fault” (IsaiahBerlin, Russian Thinkers, p. 288).

77. S. L. Frank, “L’etica del nihilismo,” in AA.VV., Vechi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1970),p. 165.

78. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 327.79. I. S. Turgenev, Padri e figli (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), p. 53 and p. 57.80. Ibid., p. 53.81. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be done?: Tales about new People (London: Vi-

rago, 1982).82. Ibid., pp. ??83. Giovanni Piovesana, Storia del pensiero filosofico russo (Rome: Edizioni Paoline,

1992), p. 150.84. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 214.85. It was also a manual for the young Lenin, who confessed, “I was affected from

top to toe” (quoted from Nikolai Valentinov I miei colloqui con Lenin, p. 63).86. Words uttered in 1849 by Dubelt, the head of the infamous Third Division.87. See Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Pre-

revolutionary Russia (New York: Viking, 1977).88. Ishutin used to say: “There have been three great men in the world: Jesus

Christ, Paul the apostle and Chernyshevsky.”89. Chernyshevsky defended political freedom as a precondition for all social prog-

ress even against his own followers. This is obvious from his words to Stakhevich inthe Alexandrovsk prison: “You say that political freedom cannot give a hungry manfood. But, take air for example. If we ask ourselves, can air feed a man, the answer ofcourse is no. Yet, without food a man can survive for a few days; without air, he cannotstay alive for more than ten minutes. Just as air is necessary for the life of the humanbody, so political liberty is necessary for the normal functioning of society” (quotedfrom Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophyof the Russian Populists [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969]).

90. Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist.91. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 337.92. Nechaev (like Bakunin) always denied being the author of Catechismo. For sure

the work was written by one or both men.93. Sergei Nechaev, Catechism of the Revolutionist (New York: Violette Nozieres

Press, 1991), p. 160.94. Ibid., p. 161.95. Ibid., p. 161.96. The “Nachaev affair” shocked the public opinion of the time. It exploded in

the winter of 1869 with the discovery of the body of a certain Ivanov, a former memberof Nechaev’s Organisation. Police investigations and the subsequent trial led to theconclusion that Ivanov had been murdered by Nechaev in person with the complicityof a number of his followers and that the crime had been committed as a warning ofthe importance of revolutionary discipline. Ivanov had rebelled against that disciplineand had therefore been ruthlessly eliminated.

97. See Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to A. Herzen, A un vecchio compagno, pp. IVet seq.

98. Fedor Dostoevsky, I fratelli Karamazov (Milan: Sansoni, 1969), p. 64.

Page 158: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 145

99. And Petrasevsky, the head of the revolutionary sect of which Dostoevsky wasa member.

100. Fedor Dostoevsky, I demoni (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), p. 407.101. Ibid., p. 408.102. Ibid., p. 422.103. Ibid., p. 587.104. In his article, “I principali fondamenti del future regime sociale,” published in

winter 1870 of the Narodnaia Rasprava, Nechaev stated that “the end of the currentsocial order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can only beattained through the concentration of all the means of social existence in the hands of ourcommittee and the proclamation of compulsory manual labour for all.” After this he ac-knowledged that he was indebted to Marx and Engels when he wrote, “Those whowish to do so will find a detailed theoretical development of our ideas in the Manifestodel Partito comunista that was published by us; our intention is above all to clarify thepractical solutions for achieving it.” (Quoted from Michael Confino, Il catechismo delrivoluzionario, p. 57.)

105. Mikhail Bakunin, Agli ufficiali dell’esercito, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,Critica dell’anarchismo, pp. 210–213.

106. Mikhail Bakunin, “Lettera a Necaev,” in M. Confino, Il catechismo del rivolu-zionario, p. 137.

107. Ibid., p. 160.108. Ibid., p. 161.109. Ibid., p. 162.110. Ibid., p. 160.111. Bakunin’s schizophrenia becomes even more evident if we remember that, on

the one hand, he harshly criticized Nechaev’s “Jesuitism” and, on the other, expressedhimself along these lines: “Just as the Jesuits, who have built the best organised secretsocieties in the world, worked tirelessly and with determination for the destruction ofall liberty in the world, so we, who want liberty to triumph, have founded a long-termsociety that must outlive us and only be dismantled when the whole programme hasbeen put into practice” (quoted from Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” a Aleksandr Her-zen, A un vecchio compagno, p. XXXIII).

112. See Nikolai Berdiaev, La concezione di Dostojevskij (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); SergioHessen, Il bene e il male in Dostoevsky (Rome: Armando, 1980); Henri Troyat, Dostoievski(Paris: Fayrard, 1960), p. 305 et seq.

113. Quoted from Leon Poliakov, La causalite diabolique, vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985), p. 128.

114. Quoted from Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism.115. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 402.116. Quoted from Vittorio Strada, URSS-Russia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 237.117. Ibid., p. 237.118. Ibid., p. 238.119. While there is no proof of a direct influence of Blanqui on Tkachev, we know

for sure that he studied Marx’s works closely and was one of the first to circulateinformation about it. But this did not prevent him from taking a personal stand onthe problems of the revolution in his country (see Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” toLenin, What is to be done?, pp. XLI et seq.

120. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 411.

Page 159: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

146 Revolutionary Apocalypse

121. Ibid., p. 412.122. Ibid., p. 412f.123. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 163.124. Chernyshevsky used to say: “Given that Europe is no paradise, why should we

drink the same bitter beverage? We can make a better one.”125. No one better than Konstantin Leontiev has expressed the profound moral

aversion of the intelligentsia for the bourgeois civilization: “Would it not perhaps bea terrible thing, a disgrace, to think that Moses climbed Mount Sinai, the Greeks builttheir elegant acropolypses, the Romans fought the Punic wars, the clever handsomeAlexander with his plumed helmet crossed the Granicus and fought at Arbela, theApostles preached, the martyrs suffered, the poets sang, the painters painted, theknights shone at tournaments solely to permit a French or a German or a Russianbourgeois in his horribly comic gown to enjoy himself individually or collectively onthe ruins of all this past grandeur? It would be shameful for humanity if this vulgarideal of universal profit, of petty labour and ignominious prose were to triumph forever” (quoted from Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea).

126. Nor did they like the political liberty that existed in the West: they consideredit “bourgeois” and therefore “fraudulent” (Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy overCapitalism).

127. S.N. Bulgakov, Il prezzo del progresso (Casal Monferrato: Marietti, 1984), p. 176.128. In this they were all disciples of Chaadaev, who in his famous letter to Nicholas

I, had solemnly declared: “The Russian nation is great and must not imitate the others,but force the others to imitate it.”

129. Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy.130. Even in his latest works Herzen continued to express his conviction that “the

end of the absolute reign of capital and unconditional right to own property hadarrived” (A un vecchio compagno, p. 5). This was an indirect way of stressing that Russiashould not follow in the path of Europe. Yet, Botkin had explained to him on severaloccasions that freedom and democracy would never take on in the Russian land, thatit was not even imaginable without capitalism and a solid entrepreneurial bourgeoisie:without these two sociological phenomena Russia would never generate a truly civilsociety that was autonomous with respect to the state and capable of controlling itsdecisions (see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy).

131. Quoted from Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 230.132. “The Westerner is always self-satisfied and this arrogance offends us” (Alek-

sandr Herzen, Childhood, Youth, and Exile [Oxford: OUP, 1980]).133. Martin Malia, Alle origini del socialismo russo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972),

pp. 414–415.134. Nikolai Trubetskoi has remarked that “comparing themselves to the Roman-

Germanic populations, the europeanised populations will come to acknowledge thesuperiority of the former over the latter, and this awareness combined with the con-stant complaints about their stagnation and backwardness, will gradually lead to theresult that such populations will cease to have any self respect” (quoted from JaneBurbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 211).

135. See P. P. Poggio, Comune contadina e rivoluzione in Russia (Milan: Jaca Book,1976).

136. This idea had already been expressed in a letter Chaadaev wrote to A. I. Tur-genev: “Russia has a great spiritual future: one day it will be called to solve all the

Page 160: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 147

problems that are currently tormenting Europe.” It is most significant that a similarattitude existed also among the representatives of “official Russia” as is evident fromthe following statement by Benkendorf: “The future of Russia is over and beyondanything that even the most fertile imagination can envisage” (quoted from A. Kol-pinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa, p. 75).

137. Chernyshevsky’s definition had a strong influence on the populist movement(quoted from Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism).

138. They even went so far as to use Marx’s Capital “to convince the tsarist govern-ment that it was its duty to fight against Russian capitalism” (Andrzej Walicki, “So-cialismo russo e populismo” in AA.VV. Storia del marxismo, vol. 2 [Turin: Einaudi,1979], p. 363).

139. Andrzej Walicki, Socialismo russo e populismo, p. 360.140. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, p. 169.141. See N. F. Cantor, The Age of Protest (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969).

Page 161: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 162: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 8

The Revolutionary Gnosis

1. Before taking a closer look at the immense revolutionary experiment con-ducted by the party forged by Lenin, it seems essential to analyze the doctrinethat inspired that revolution. It was a doctrine animated by the profoundconviction that it had discovered the “laws and trends that acted and fulfilledthemselves with bronze-like necessity”1 and led, “with the ineluctability of anatural process,”2 to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of a worldwiderevolution of the proletariat. Marx and Engels announced to the whole worldthat, thanks to their theory, socialism was no longer a “utopia but . . . ascience”: socialism was no longer to be conceived as a Sollen, in sterile conflictwith the existing;3 it had become a hegelian more, a dialectical necessity, “theultimate form of social organisation of the human family.”4

The “inevitable transformation of capitalist society to socialist society(could be inferred they claimed) wholly and exclusively from the economiclaws governing the market in contemporary society.”5 This claim was basedon the confusion between the categories of being and of value that modernepistemology, having accepted “Hume’s laws”—which absolutely forbid de-ducing normative-valuative propositions from descriptive-explicative propo-sitions6—considers typical of animistic visions of the world. Fundamentally,animism projects objectives and values onto reality, in the belief that it ispossible to analyze reality “in the same way, and with the same laws, as sub-jective, conscious and projective human activity.”7 “By completely spiritualis-ing everything,”8 the animist establishes a profound “alliance” betweenhumans and the world, which allows one to consider the world as a whole,regulated by ethical principles. This undoubtedly satisfies basic existentialneeds, the edifying idea being that we live in a sensate universe that is not

Page 163: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

150 Revolutionary Apocalypse

completely indifferent to our innermost desires. The problem is that the pro-jection of “the needs of the soul” into reality—which is typical of the myth-poeic conscience—is precisely what is, in principle, incompatible withscientific knowledge. In fact, the latter “has no regard for ultimate purpose”9

and only became possible once man had lost his “enchanted” conscience andceased attributing “an intrinsic meaning” to being and to history.10 With En-lightenment, every teleological explanation of natural phenomena had beeneliminated and the inhabitants of the secular city had been forced to accept“the fundamental fact that destiny forces [them] to live in an age without Godand without prophets.”11

Clearly, from the point of view of the culture of the Enlightenment, a theoryclaiming to be at the same time descriptive-explicative and prescriptive-valuative knowledge, a science of cause and of purpose, could only be a logicalmonstrosity. “Scientific socialism” cannot exist because science cannot deducecategorical imperatives from its theorems. It can only derive hypothetical im-peratives; that is, precepts, whose scope is the attainment of objectives thatcannot be drawn from science by science. The scientific adventure startedwith the acknowledgement of the importance of making a rigorous distinctionbetween what we know and what we desire.12 To endow history with an ul-timate purpose—and one corresponding to humanity’s most ardent dream,the “end of alienation”13—means to fall head first into the pre-affective pre-logic of animism.14

This is precisely what Marx did when he chose to elude “Hume’s laws.”15

Not content to simply play with Hegelian terminology, he sought to applydialectical materialism to economic science, rethinking Ricardo’s On the Prin-ciples of Political Economy in light of The Science of Logic.16 While arguing ve-hemently against an idealistic interpretation of history, Marx “transferred thelogical contradictions of thinking to being . . . [so as to] interpret oppositeforces in nature or in history as logical contradictions.”17 Hegelian philosophyidentifies being with thought and hence this operation has at least some in-ternal coherence. In Marxian philosophy it is absolutely arbitrary given thatit declares itself to be materialistic. To accept reality as being intrinsicallycontradictory “means to consider real and logical contradictions, reality andthought as one and the same thing,”18 which is the equivalent of surreptitiouslyassuming the metaphysical presuppositions of idealism. Hence, Hans Kelsenrefers to historical materialism as a “tragic methodological syncretism”19 and,after a careful analysis of the logical-methodological structure of Capital,Henri Denis concludes that Marx “tried to conjugate water and fire, the He-gelian dialectic and Ricardo’s naive metaphysics.”20

This incredible synthesis of idealism and materialism made truly extraor-dinary claims. “Scientific socialism” does not simply announce that it knowsthe final outcome of the drama playing on the historical stage,21 it proclaimsto have actually found a method—permanent revolution—for uprootingalienation. It therefore is a “science of good and of bad,” in the strongest sense

Page 164: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 151

of the term, which explains why Marxism was interpreted not only as a formof animism in disguise, but also as a modern version of apocalyptic gnosticism.

2. Gnosticism is the tradition of soteriological thought that first developedin early Christianity22 and periodically reemerged in the subsoil of Westerncivilization like an underground stream. According to Ioan Couliano, the na-ture of gnosticism was such that, by following a simple “law of reproduction,”gnosticism developed “all the logical possibilities contained in its sequences,combining them almost always in an original fashion.”23 Hence, the existenceof one and several gnosticisms, always identical to self, albeit in the variety ofits many doctrinary expressions. In effect, we can identify a set of typicalcharacteristics that, when correlated, make up a specific and definite “gnosticsyndrome.”

1. Before being a doctrine, gnosticism is an existential disposition of the soul thatcovers every aspect of life: conduct, destiny, a person’s very being. The gnostic isdominated by a veritable horror of the existing that fills him with concern, nausea,and anguish. He sees the world as an absurd, unfeeling monstrosity, radicallyindifferent to his innermost psychological and moral needs. The gnostic is there-fore in the world but not of the world. He feels abandoned, lost, impotent; in aword, alienated. The world he sees is radically evil, dominated by extraneous andperverse unknown forces. The institutions of society and its prevailing values canonly be looked upon with suspicion.

2. The painful sensation of being abandoned in an absurd and threatening world fillsthe gnostic with anguish. He constantly asks fundamental metaphysical questionssuch as: “Who are we?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” or,“What is the cause of physical, metaphysical, and moral evil?” “What is responsiblefor the horrors of the world, the injustice, the violence, solitude, and sufferingthat make the human lot so difficult?” “What is the matrix of the alienation thattransforms men into halogens and condemns them to impotence and un-happiness?”

3. For the gnostic, the human condition is not only intolerable, it is abnormal. He isconvinced that an accident was responsible for overturning the natural order ofthings, leading to general confusion and corruption. He considers himself thetemporary victim of a cosmic-historic catastrophe: the fall that degraded the worldand perverted all things. Although desperately unhappy, the gnostic believes thathis true destiny is happiness, the complete realization of his calling. For this rea-son, he is dominated by a desperate nostalgia for a totally different world, which hehas never seen, but from which he feels unjustly exiled.

4. The material and moral misery of his condition does not prevent the gnostic frombelieving that the ontological condition can be completely overturned. It is pos-sible to eradicate the negative elements that have perverted the world and returnto the state of perfection and happiness destroyed by the fall. Life therefore is astate of permanent waiting for radical renewal, which is both resurrection and res-

Page 165: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

152 Revolutionary Apocalypse

toration. The original ontological status degraded by the fall can be reestablished,alienation suppressed, happiness fully achieved.

5. History is divided into three periods or aeons: (a) the aeon of perfection (theremote past), (b) the aeon of the fall and of alienation (the present) and (c) theaeon of the restoration of great universal harmony (the future). The present be-longs to the intermediate aeon—the age of general corruption—and must be tran-scended, dissolved, annihilated, to permit the passage to the final aeon in whichthere will be no sign of the alienation and evils that oppress humanity. History istherefore a soteriological drama of fall and redemption: it has as terminus a quo—original perfection—and as terminus ad quem—future perfection. The present isnone other than the spasmodic expectation of liberation from evil.

6. Gnostic pathos is characterized by the radical refusal of the world in all its perverseand intolerable manifestations and the conviction that there is a solution for es-caping from the present situation and regaining paradise lost. This convictionderives from the gnosis, which is a total complete knowledge (descriptive andnormative) and contains a diagnosis-therapy of human alienation. Thanks to thegnosis, the gnostic knows the matrix of the (temporary) unhappiness of man—thecatastrophe that overturned and degraded the world, filling it with horrors of allkinds—and the way to the Promised Land. In other words, those in possession ofthe gnosis know what humanity has been and has become because of the fall, aswell as when and how redemption will take place. This knowledge is therefore averitable soteriology, a liberating science, since, along with the awareness of deg-radation, it gives humanity the certainty of restoration of original being. Thisexplains why the gnosis produces a radical conversion of the human soul; it alsoexplains why it is counterposed to pistis, the vulgar knowledge that dulls people’ssenses, making them like sleepwalkers who wander aimlessly in a monstrous uni-verse, unaware of their unhappy lot and natural destiny.

7. In gnostic soteriologies, humanity is divided into three hierarchies or classes: thepneumatics (endowed with natural perfection), the psychics (able to attain salva-tion if suitably led), and the oaks ILICI (to be eliminated because lacking spiritand soul). The first class (the gnostics) is the only class in possession of the divineseed. Because they possess the right intuition, they alone have the calling. Thepsychics will find salvation provided they are not influenced by the oaks. Hence,gnostic soteriology is elitist: it assumes that salvation is at hand for a privilegedsegment of humanity and that it can be effectively attained only once gnosis hasreplaced pistis in human conscience, thus bringing an end to their blindness.

8. The science of the gnostic Paraclete—he who is in full possession of the knowledgenecessary for salvation—is absolute. It imposes itself on intelligence with a cer-tainty and an evidence superior to faith. It is a rational knowledge developed withpurely speculative means and, as such, appeals only to reason. As soon as manrecognizes the liberating truth, it imposes itself irresistibly. His state of false aware-ness comes to an end and he becomes an enlightened being, an individual whoknows and, precisely because he knows, has the duty-right to lead the blind massesfrom pistis to final liberation. He is therefore the Savior-Saved who performs hissoteriological function by stimulating awareness in the blind so that they too maybe regenerated.

Page 166: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 153

9. In Manicheism—which is the most elaborate and perfect form assumed by gnos-ticism prior to the advent of Marxism-Leninism—the intellectual and moral su-periority of those who possess the liberating truth is translated in the organizationof a church typically conceived as a tool of salvation. Centralization is extreme,everything is ordered from above and everything rests on the indisputable au-thority of a spiritual leader who dominates the church completely. He is both“master of masters” and master of the simple listener. His authority is markedlycharismatic in that he performs the function of priest and guardian of the messageof salvation. Consequently, his power is unlimited. The gnosis places the “masterof masters” outside and above common morality, making him the only source ofevery value and value judgment.

10. Alongside the three aeons—original perfection, fall, and restoration of perfec-tion—there are two further principles in Manicheism. The world is seen as animmense battlefield in which the “children of darkness and evil and the childrenof light and good” face each other. The latter inevitably win, with the death ofthe “old man” (corrupt and corrupting) and the birth of the “new man” or, moreprecisely, the rebirth of “primeval man.” After the final battle, the whole cosmoswill be overturned and reordered, and Great Universal Harmony will reignforever.24

3. Once “disenchantment with the world” had removed all plausibility frommythical-religious thought, gnosis—that permanent temptation of the humanspirit that derives from the ardent desire to possess a knowledge capable ofsolving every enigma and providing a method for ending the scandal of evil—was as if forced to take on cryptic forms.25 Those whom I call “God’s orphans”had to find a surrogate satisfaction of the metaphysical, left unsatisfied by thegradual withdrawal of the sacred from the scene. They did so by developingtheories in which humanity is like a degraded god, marching toward its origi-nal state of perfection.26 Essentially, the romantic reaction against Enlight-enment, from Rousseau to German idealism, was a desperate attempt toeliminate the frightful solitude of intellectuals who had been abandoned byfaith but had not lost the desire for the ancient alliance between humanityand the world. Gnosis reemerged in the form of philosophies of history.Thanks to the immanentization of the Judeo-Christian eschaton—the mille-nary Kingdom of God—these philosophies reproposed a “providentialistic”vision of reality, which led to the birth of “new religions often presented asquite the opposite of a religion.”27

Hegel in particular explicitly tried to edify a new theodicy. In his Lessons onthe Philosophy of History he defines his philosophy as “a theodicy, a justificationof God, such as had been attempted by Leibniz in his own fashion.”28 Hegelsubstituted the transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition with animmanent God and used a new logic, dialectics, to prove that reality wasdominated by a providential hidden plan.29 He opposed dialectical science,conceived as the self-awareness that the absolute had of itself,30 to the positivesciences, a typical product of the abstract intellect, which claimed to read the

Page 167: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

154 Revolutionary Apocalypse

great book of history without taking into consideration the end causes. Hegeldenied the reality of the finite31 and presented reason as “the substance andinfinite power of the world.” The task of real science could only be to “acquireawareness of the purpose of reason.”32 History is therefore a providentialunfolding of reason; it has an immanent telos; the world is no longer a machinewithout a purpose. Quite the contrary: a spiritual teleologically oriented re-ality reemerged against every form of materialism and ascended to the “su-preme good” through its autocontradictory movements.

In other words, Hegel revived an animistic vision of reality and, in so doing,deferred the tremendous moral consequences of “the death of God.”33 Hebuilt a “laicised Christian theology”34 whereby he was able to declare thatuniversal history was the “unfolding of the nature of God.”35 Dialectical logicwas elevated to the level of superior logic with respect to formal logic, whichbelonged to the sphere of abstract intellect. It was the “magic operator” bywhich Hegel successfully reintroduced the end causes into the heart of real-ity.36 In fact, dialectical logic went hand in hand with the theory of alienation,which in turn was but a variation of the myth of the fall and the redemption.Hegel’s philosophy of history acts in exactly the same way as the gnosticsoteriologies: humanity is conceived as a potential god, which, at the end ofa difficult pilgrimage, seeks to achieve its hidden divine essence.37

As Marx had placed the problem of alienation at the very heart of his theory,despite his declared materialism, he could hardly refute the fundamental prin-ciple of Hegelian idealism that “proclaimed the unity of reason and reality.”38

On the basis of this principle, it was possible to think of being as a totality,marching toward the kingdom of liberty, without resorting to a transcendentGod. You could be atheist but still conceive history as an ascendant processtoward the “natural destination” of humanity; or as an odyssey from originalunity (thesis) to alienation (antithesis) and then final reconciliation (synthesis).In this way, the “death of God” ceased being a metaphysical catastrophe: theworld went back to being what it had been in the Judeo-Christian tradition:a salvation-producing machine. Toynbee rightly wrote that “the elements whichmade the Marxian version of Hegelism an explosive force . . . carry on theirface their birth certificate from the atavic Western religious faith—a Chris-tianity which, three hundred years after Descartes’ challenge, was still themilk of every Western baby from birth and exhaled by every man and everywoman along with the air they breathed. The elements, which cannot betraced back to Christianity, can be attributed to Judaism, Christianity’s fos-silised parent, preserved by the Jewish Diaspora but lost with the opening ofthe ghettos and the emancipation of Western Jews in the generation of Marx’sgrandparents . . . Marx substituted Jahveh and made historical necessity hispowerful divinity. His chosen people were the inner proletariat of the Westernworld, rather than the Jews; his Messianic Kingdom, the dictatorship of theproletariat. Nonetheless it is still possible to recognise the salient features ofthe Jewish Apocalypse through this complex disguise.”39

Page 168: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 155

But let us proceed with order. Marx’s starting point is the idea that the veryfoundations of capitalist-bourgeois society are polluted, because it hadaroused the “furies of private interest.”40 It is a “desert populated by wildbeasts,”41 in which the bellum omnium contra omnes”42 dominates supreme. Itis the society of “selfish man, of man as member of civil society, namely ofthe totally self-centered individual, of the individual whose only interest ispersonal interest and arbritrium, of the individual cut off from the commu-nity.”43 And, since “the god of practical need and egoism is money, there canbe ‘no other god’ than money. Money is what mortifies the gods of man andturns them into goods. Money is the universal value, constituted per se of allthings. Hence it has stripped the whole world, the world of man and of nature,of their peculiar value. Money is the essence, extraneous to man, to his workand his existence, and this essence dominates him and he adores it.”44 It isobvious that in such a universe man can only feel lost, alienated from hisoriginal essence and therefore unhappy. He, the creator of the social world,becomes the victim of his own creatures, a slave to their perverse power.

The essence of money is not that property is alienated by it, but that, because of money,activity or the movement of mediation is extraneous. The human act, the social actthrough which the products of man integrate each other mutually is alienated and thequality of a material thing, external to man, becomes a quality of money. Insofar asman himself is responsible for alienating this mediating activity, in this activity he isactive only as a man having lost himself, as dehumanised man; even the relationshipbetween things, the operation of man on them, becomes the action of an entity thatis outside and above man. Through this extraneous intermediary—man should be theintermediary for man—man sees his will, his activity and his relationship with othersas a power independent of himself and others. His slavery therefore reaches its peak.45

There is then something malignant in the “external intermediaries”—firstand foremost money—that place men in contact with each other: they achievethe “complete domination of the extraneous thing over man. What used tobe the domination of people over things [is converted] into the universal domi-nation of things over people, of products over producers.”46

Capital, or “accumulated labor,” is also accused of generating human un-happiness in The Manuscripts of 1844: workers have been expropriated fromtheir product via a process of concentration of ownership of the means ofproduction. It is capital that transforms workers into objects—“the most mis-erable of goods”—and splits society “into two classes: proprietors and workerswithout property.”47 It is also responsible for “greed and for the war among thegreedy”48—that is to say, competition. Moreover, “the expropriation of theworker from his product”—a process from which capital derives and isfueled—“not only has the meaning that his work becomes an object, an ex-traneous existence but also that it exists outside him, independent, foreign tohim, as an independent power before him and that the life, by him given to

Page 169: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

156 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the object, looks at him, as if it were a stranger, a hostile enemy.”49 And thusit comes to pass that in capitalist society, things possess men, and that everysocial relationship is dominated by the law of market.50

Worse still, “the perversion and confusion of every human and natural thing[insists Marx] the conjunction of impossibility, the divine power of money,consists in its extraneous essence, the alienating generic essence (Gattungswesen)of men. It is the expropriated power of humanity. Money, as an existing andactive concept of value, confuses and mixes all things. It is thus the generalconfusion and inversion of all things, therefore an overturned world, the con-fusion and inversion of all natural and human qualities.”51

The human condition is therefore atrocious. Humans are condemned toliving in a radically evil world, infested by all sorts of horrors, in which prevailssovereign and implacable the law of alienation from which nothing and noone can escape. “We are reciprocally alienated to such an extent [writes Marx]that to us immediate language seems to be a violation of human dignity, andthe alienated language of thing-like values moral dignity, justified and selfconfident that recognises itself.”52 And the market society—based on privateproperty, egoism, and competition among the greedy—is the social organi-zation that has brought the intolerable and mortifying perversity of the worldto its peak. With its triumph starts the “time in which everything that menhad considered to be unalienable becomes object of barter, of trade and al-ienable; the time in which those very things that up until then had beencommunicated but never bartered, donated but never sold, acquired but neverpurchased—virtue, love, hope, science, knowledge etc—everything becomestrade; the time of general corruption, of mercenary values or, to use economicpolicy terminology, the time in which every moral and physical reality, havingbecome a mercenary value, is taken to the market to be evaluated for its properworth.”53 So we can say that the emancipation of civil society from the statein the form of autonomization and expansion of trade has produced “theseparation of man from his community nature, from himself and from othermen, from what it originally was.”54

This implies an exquisitely and irremediably romantic vision of the birthof the market society: division is bad and unity is good.55 It explains the radicaland absolute antiinstitutionalism of the Marxian philosophy. Every form ofmediation—money, law, private property, and so on—is conceived as an un-natural institution that has split what had been originally united; the existingis perceived as the perverse product of a fall, of a moral catastrophe of cosmic-historical proportions that has subverted and degraded the entire world.

Nor can it be said that, following the “epistemological fracture” referredto by Althusser,56 Marx was liberated from the ideological yoke of Feuerba-chian humanism and developed a rigorously scientific vision of society andhistory.57 Indeed, in Grundrisse once again we find the gnostic-valentinianscheme of the original unity that splits and generates the world of alienation.Marx writes: “It is not the unity of living and active men with the natural

Page 170: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 157

inorganic conditions of their natural material cycle that is in need of an ex-planation or the result of an historic process; it is the separation of these in-organic conditions of human existence from this active existence, a separationthat is only fully achieved in the relationship between salaried labour andcapital.”58 He also writes: “The historical process consisted in the separationof elements traditionally united—its result is not therefore the disappearanceof one of the elements, but the appearance of each of these in a negativerelationship with the other—the (potentially) free worker on the one side,capital (potentially) on the other. The separation of the objective conditionsat the extreme of the classes that have been transformed into free workersmust equally appear as an autonomisation of these same conditions at theopposite pole.”59

Engels shares the idea of the rupture of original unity following the fall:

The tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and unviolable, they were asuperior power granted by nature, to which the individual was unconditionally subject,in his feelings, in his thoughts and in his actions. Though the men of this age mayseem impotent to us, they still do not stand out from each other, they are still attached,to use Marx’s expression, to the umbilical cord of the natural community. The powerof this natural community was to be broken; and in fact it was. But it was broken byinfluences that, from the very start, appeared to be a degradation, a guilty fall from thesimple moral altitude of ancient noble society. The lowest interests—vulgar greed,brutal lust for pleasure, sordid avarice, selfish plundering of common property—in-augurated the new “civilised” society, the society of classes; the boldest means—theft,violence, treachery and betrayal—mine and ruin the ancient noble, classless society.In its two thousand-five hundred years of existence the new society has never beenother than the growth of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority of theexploited and the oppressed, now more than ever.60

4. So a gnosis is not simply a diagnosis of alienation but also and above alla therapy: it is an absolute knowledge that provides an etiology of humanmisery and a methodology for eradicating it. It is also a soteriological knowledge,since it claims to know how to liberate humanity from “radical evil.” This canbe done because the gnosis guarantees that alienation is by no means a naturalcondition of humanity but is the result of an accident, of the fall that producedthe degradation and overturning of the world. The gnosis knows how and whenthe world was invaded by evil; it knows how and when it will be purified.

This same dual claim is at the heart of “scientific socialism.” Marx does nothesitate to write that “communism is already known as the re-integration andthe return of man to himself, the suppression of human auto-alienation. It isthe positive suppression of private property as auto-alienation of man and,however, real appropriation of the human essence by man and for man; it isthe complete, conscious, accomplished return to the innermost wealth of his-torical development, of man per se as social man, i.e. of human man. Com-munism is this: insofar as accomplished naturalism, humanism and insofar as

Page 171: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

158 Revolutionary Apocalypse

accomplished humanism, naturalism. It is the genuine solution of the contrastbetween man and nature and between nature and man, the genuine solutionof the conflict between existence and essence, between objectivisation andsubjective affirmation, between liberty and necessity, between the individualand genre. It is the solved enigma of history and is known to be such.”61

Clearly, science is conceived not only as self-awareness of the absolute butalso as a knowledge that is capable of altering the ontological status of reality;revolutionary practice in the strongest sense of the term: that is to say, as theoverturning of the overturned world. The world is radically bad, becauseprivate property has produced the inversion, confusion, and alteration of everyphysical and moral thing; for this precise reason, it is imperative that therebe a revolutionary call to arms to combat the perverse institution responsiblefor universal corruption. And “scientific socialism” is precisely the absoluteknowledge that can indicate the strategy for annihilating the wicked forces ofevil, for restoring the natural order of things and, with it, primeval man.

Like the apocalyptic gnostic soteriologies, Marxism conceives universal his-tory as a chenotic process62 permeated by humanity’s fervent desire to recoverwhat has been lost—authentic essence, which is divine—when the originalstate of perfection was disturbed by the violent emergence of evil. Humanityfell into a world of need, of impotence, of alienation and moral corruptionbut will regain “paradise lost” thanks to the total revolution achieved whenGreat Universal Harmony overturns the existing. Once the revolution hascompleted its historic mission, at last humanity will recover “those powersfrom which he had had to alienate himself in the previous phase of the his-torical process”63 and will return to being what he was before the fall: theabsolute master of the world that is, God. According to Marcuse, the Marxianrevolution is “a moment of rift in the course of history, a leap into the King-dom of liberty, a total break . . . that marks the start of a new time”64 andleads to the “emergence of a new type of man, different by nature and byphysiology from the human actor of the class society.”65

The claim that the goal of the revolution is the divinization of humanity mayseem far-fetched; yet, when Marx writes that communism will eliminate theconflict between essence and existence, he is actually saying that it will ma-terialize the Human-God ideal,66 if it is true (as it is) that thomistic theologyteaches us that God is the being in which essence and existence coincideperfectly.67 On the other hand, Marx also declares that communist emanci-pation affects man’s innermost being since man “only considers himself to beindependent when he owes his existence to himself,” when his life “has nofoundation outside himself ” but is his “own creation.”68 Marx is convincedthat “that which is translated into existence by communism is the real foun-dation that renders impossible everything that exists independently of individuals.”69

Therefore, communism is proclaimed to be an immense anthropological rev-olution “founded on a process that can be defined as self-generating, that will

Page 172: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 159

destroy not religion, but the possibility of religion, freeing man from slaveryto God”70 and abolishing the principle of reality.

Therefore, it is quite legitimate to see Marxism as a religion of the species71

that claims to have found a method for successfully “shaping a new humanitywhere Christianity had failed.”72 The starting point is the idea that privateproperty is responsible not only for exploitation, but also for the ontologicaldegradation of humanity to dependent being, whose essence is outside selfand whose life is not self-generating. As a consequence, “communion ofgoods” has a metaphysical, indeed, an eschatological, meaning: its introduc-tion coincides with the Promethean construction of what Ernst Bloch likedto call “the Kingdom of god without God.”73

5. Marx’s historical gnosticism was a fundamental step in the long spiritualtravail that began when the human of the secular city first realized that “thesky was empty”74 and that therefore “supreme values [had] lost value.”75 Thisleft the door wide open for a “disquieting guest”—nihilism76—announcing“liberation in the nothing that substitutes Transcendence.”77 In effect, as Or-tega y Gasset correctly wrote, modernity is “life without sacred values,”78 thedisappearance of the absolutes that had ruled the historical existence of West-ern civilization for centuries and centuries, the loss of the normative powerof that “ultra sensitive world”—the world of ideas and of ideals—which, fromPlato on, had been conceived “as the true, authentically real world.”79 Thusit should not come as a surprise that the anguish of modern humanity shouldpresent itself as “anguish in the face of the abyss of a life which inevitablyappears to be absurd, once it is deprived of its purpose and values.”80 Equallypredictable is that “God’s orphans” should have searched for a functionalequivalent of the providential vision of the human adventure with which torevive hope in the advent of a new aeon that would fill the metaphysical voidgenerated by the “destruction of the religious illusion.”81

Marx’s revolutionary program—a veritable “re-eschatologisation of Chris-tianity”82—is part of this spasmodic search. It continues and develops thesoteriological argument started by protosocialists in the Enlightenment. Thisargument is based on denying the Christian concept of the fall—original sin—and promoting (revolutionary) politics to the rank of soul-saving practice insofaras its historical mission is to eradicate alienation on the basis of the followingtheorem: If man cannot be saved by God, then he will save himself, by abol-ishing everything that limits and degrades him, by means of the Prometheanoverturning of the existing.83 In this way, neognosticism transforms the classicproblems of theology and theodicy—contingency, evil, meaning of life anddeath, an so forth—into political problems, or problems that can be elimi-nated by (revolutionary) politics. This will effectively be, once “divine finalharmony” prevails.84

Engels’s youthful works confirm this interpretation of the communist rev-olution: “The question has always been: who is God? German philosophy

Page 173: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

160 Revolutionary Apocalypse

solves the problem thus: God is man. Man need only know himself, to ensurethat all the relations in his life are commensurate to himself; he must judgeaccording to his essence, organise the world in a truly human manner, ac-cording to the instances of his own nature; by so doing he will solve the enigmaof our age . . . The essence of man is far more splendid and sublime than theimaginary essence of any possible God, which is none other than a more orless confused and deformed mirror of man himself.”85

Unfortunately, man, that potentially divine being, makes a poor show ofhimself. He “has lost himself”:86 he has fallen into the world of moral corrup-tion, because private property and competition have generated a world dom-inated by the most sordid passions: the “world of Philistines” of themiddle-class bourgeois, completely absorbed in tendering their own pettyegoism and obtusely satisfied with their lot. The contrast between the “manof philosophy” and “the man of reality” could not be more brutal. However,since the present degradation is the product of an institution that can besuppressed—private property—man can recover himself and his true nature,changed by the bourgeois ethos. This will be possible, once he is consciousof the unnatural character of the capitalist way of life and has organized “arevolutionary army” to straighten what has been turned upside down. Thisawareness will come from dialectical science, “a powerful and unceasinglycreative force of thought, conscience of unity of pure thought, conscience ofthe universal and conscience of God.”87

Dialectical enlightenment will end the state of spiritual sleepwalking inwhich humanity fell after the original unity had been broken, and this in turnwill open the exciting prospect of revolutionary palingenesis. “We haveawoken [writes Engels in a state of mystic enthusiasm] the nightmare op-pressing our breast has vanished, we rub our eyes and look around in surprise.Everything is different. The world that was so estranged, and nature whosehidden forces terrified us like ghosts, are familiar to us now. The world thatappeared to us as a prison, now shows itself as it really is, a magnificent castle;evil, disorder, anguish, division have disappeared” thanks to the “new Grail,the self-awareness of unity.”88 “Our vocation is clear” writes Engels. We are“to be the Templars of this Grail, to gird our loins with the sword for its sake,and happily risk our life in the last holy war, to which will follow the millenarianKingdom of liberty.” Equally clear: “salvation, redemption” are nigh and inevi-table: “the day of the great decision is approaching, the battle of nations, andthe victory will certainly be ours.”89

With these gnostic-apocalyptic premises, of course Marx and Engels con-cluded that the age of religion was over. “The existence of religion is theexistence of a defect”:90 it is the most striking manifestation of the separationof man from his original essence. By its very presence, it reveals man’s im-potence, his contingency, his unhappiness, his material and moral wretched-ness; in a word: his alienation. “Religious wretchedness is both expression ofactual wretchedness and protest against it . . . It is the fantastic realisation of

Page 174: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 161

human essence” and, as such, “is the opium of people.”91 Once communismsuppresses private property and permanent revolution eliminates “the conflictof individual existence with the generic existence of man,”92 religion will au-tomatically be superfluous: it will disappear from the scene because “thedream of the unconditioned”93 will become a tangible reality. Therefore, whenthe communists demand “the abolition of all religions,”94 they do so becausethey want to substitute “people’s illusory happiness with real happiness.”95

Dialectical enlightenment has shown them that religion will be impossibleand even unthinkable in a world that respects the true human nature, sincethere will no longer be that “distorted reality”96—the world of alienation—ofwhich it is both expression and fantastic compensation.97 They know that theproletarian revolution will build a New World that is radically other than theexisting world “by suppressing the contingency of human existence.”98 At thatpoint, the design of the “astute spirit” will be accomplished and the goalindicated by Hegel—the Promised Land of final reconciliation—will beattained.

6. Capitalism is what prevents the human family from overcoming the “rad-ical evil of pre-history”99 and regaining its lost unity. Therefore, to fight capi-talism is an inescapable duty, a categorical imperative: it means to fight “for aholy and just cause—for the cause of the oppressed against the oppressors; . . .for truth against superstition, against lies.”100

Admittedly, Marx and Engels acknowledge that “without the unleashing ofthe acquisitive spirit, which in its most mature form becomes the capitalistpursuit of profit—an asocial desire and the source of all the asocial impulses,destined to manifest themselves in all their repellence in the capitalist age—humanity would be condemned to living in the squalor of primitive com-munism, men would support each other but lack comforts and culture, morelike beasts than the angels they must become.”101 In other words, they admitthat capitalism, despite its diabolical nature, “has had a highly revolutionaryfunction in history: . . . it has shown what human activity is capable of,”102 bybuilding and setting in motion the machinery for the development of forcesof production, without which the very concept of communist society as king-dom of abundance would never have been thought of.103 Capitalism is there-fore a historically necessary moment in the “dialectics of salvation that leadsto paradise on earth, to the reconciliation of man and society, to completedisalienation, to the disappearance of classes, to the end of the State”;104 butit is a moment that must be transcended so that humanity can recover itsoriginal nature, perverted by the spirit of profit. Marx writes:

There is a major fact of significance for this XIX century of ours that no one woulddare question: on the one hand, the coming into being of scientific and industrialforces, unimaginable in previous eras of human history; on the other, the emergenceof symptoms of decadence that are far worse than the horrors handed down to us

Page 175: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

162 Revolutionary Apocalypse

about the end of the Roman Empire. Everything seems to bear a contradiction withinitself. Machines having the marvellous power of reducing and enhancing human labourmake men die of hunger and overwork. A mysterious and fatal spell transforms thenew sources of wealth into sources of misery. The conquests of technology seem tobe obtained at the price of their very nature. It seems that man, to the extent to whichhe subdues, is in turn subjected to other men or to his own abjection. Even the purelight of science seems to shine only on the depths of ignorance. Our discoveries andprogress seem to give spiritual life to material forces, at the same time dulling humansenses and reducing men to a material existence. This antagonism between modernindustry and science, on the one hand, and modern wretchedness and chaos on theother; this antagonism between the forces of production and the social relations ofour age is a tangible, macroscopic and incontrovertible fact. Some may deplore it;others may wish to rid themselves of modern technology in order to rid themselvesof modern conflictuality, and might think that the great progress of industry needs tobe integrated and corrected by an equally great regression of politics. For our part,we do not deny the astute spirit that is expressed in all these contradictions. We knowthat, in order to make the new forces of society work, all we need are new men—thesenew men are the workers. They, like machinery, are an invention of the modern age.In the signs that confuse the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the petty prophets of re-gression we recognise . . . that old fast-digging mole, the great miner: the revolution.105

Capitalist society is permeated by an intolerable contradiction. On the oneside, having generated science and industry, it represents an enormous stepforward; on the other, everything within its breast is inverted and perverted.It must therefore be transcended. This cannot be done by means of partialreforms that eventually will produce a better society. There must be a “radicalbreak,”106 because the construction of the future city is a “leap forward,”107

not an evolutionary process. Nor could it be otherwise, since the distancebetween the bourgeois city and the proletarian city is infinite, as is the distancebetween present corruption and final perfection. The two cities are opposedto each other, just as evil is to good, darkness to light. The class war thereforewill inevitably be of cosmic-historic proportions or, to use Engels’s terminol-ogy, a “holy war” that will end with the elimination of capitalism and every-thing—rule of law, parliamentary democracy, autonomous civil society, andso forth—on which, and thanks to, it has developed, with the sole exceptionof the scientific and productive machinery, which instead communism willimprove and increase.

In short, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat incarnate two irreconcilableand mortally hostile principles. The motto of the revolution is inevitably “Youor Us.”108 “Heaven on earth”109 awaits humanity, but only when the Com-munist Party “will have emerged victorious” from “the last harsh battle”110

and the “great miner”—permanent revolution—completed its task and de-molished the civilization of the “haves.”

Clearly, despite its claim to be in accord with the scientific spirit, Marx andHegel’s socialism is a typical expression of a chiliastic mentality, which “is

Page 176: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 163

characterised by its particularly intense faith in the possibility of man’s com-plete liberation, a liberation radically opposed to the present state of slavery,to the point that between the two there can be no continuity or mediation.”111

When Marx urges the proletariat to “do away with the old spectral world,”112

he is simply reformulating the idea-passion that has always dominated theaction of “Apocalypse fanatics,” namely that salvation will come by negation“after a period of trials and terrible cataclysms” that will terminate with theannihilation of the “unjust, abominable, diabolical . . . world of History.”113

On the other hand, the will to destroy all in order to reconstruct all is whatdefines revolution. Its objective is the “perfect society”;114 that is to say, a trans-figured society, in which there is no trace of the negativities that render thehuman condition intolerable, starting from forced labor that makes life hell,and ending with the division of labor, which divides the human family intothose who are masters and those who are slaves. And, in fact, Marx and Engels’sclaim that “as soon as labour is divided, everyone has his particular sphere ofdetermined and exclusive activity, that is imposed upon him and from whichhe cannot escape: he is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critic, and so hemust remain, if he does not wish to lose the means to live,” is followed by theconfident statement that “in communist society where no one has a sphere ofexclusive activity but can choose whichever sphere he likes, society regulatesgeneral production and, in this way, allows me to do this thing today, this otherthing tomorrow, in the morning go hunting, in the afternoon fishing, in theevening raise animals and after dinner be a critic, just as I wish, without be-coming hunter, or fisherman, or shepherd or critic.”115

What strikes us especially in this typically “fantastic description of futuresociety,”116 to use the ironic words used in the Manifesto to refer to utopisticsocialism, is that the whole system of needs and constraints enveloping hu-manity from birth—poverty, division of labor, power relations, social and ju-ridical norms, and the like—is abolished as if by magic with the introductionof a communion of goods, on the basis of the absolutely arbitrary assumptionthat “division of labour and private property are identical expressions.”117

Marx and Engels were convinced that all one had to do was suppress privateproperty to abolish eo ipso the division of labor, and therefore classes, thereforeexploitation and alienation. No doubt this is an exhalting prospect, but it isalso irremediably mythological.118 The announced change is of such cosmic-historical magnitude that it can only be defined as alchemistic.119 In fact, com-munion of goods in the Marx-Engels Weltanschauung is “the means forredeeming humanity”120; that is to say, an agent of universal regeneration identicalto the philosopher’s stone. So much so, that Marx even claims that commu-nism is “the true resurrection of nature . . . and the complete emancipation ofevery human sense and every human quality.”121

Obviously, once the metastatic transfiguration of the existing has been ac-complished, the state and its parasitic, oppressive bureaucracy will extinguishitself and leave the way free for the “harmonious society.”122 Essentially, this

Page 177: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

164 Revolutionary Apocalypse

is none other than the “renaissance in a superior form of an archaic socialtype”:123 the tribal community. So humanity, after crossing the desert of asociety divided into classes, will be back where it started, and primitive com-munism will be transformed into the kingdom of abundance. Thanks to theprodigious development of forces of production achieved by the IndustrialRevolution, community life will be regulated by the Christian principle, “Toeach according to his needs.”124 At that point—as we read in an essay byLefebvre and Gutermann—“the complete Man will really be what the wordssuggest he is . . . The human being will arrive at the heart of nature, externaland internal, and will become master: nature will be his richness, he willovercome it and raise it to the level of Spirit. The unity of the individual andof the social dimension, possession by man of nature, and of his own nature,define the complete Man. Only he is the whole that possesses all nature andmakes it his richness. Human totality used to be dispersion, contradiction.Now it will achieve its unity, the truth of man, his fulfilled essence.”125

NOTES

1. Karl Marx, The Capital I, in Complete Works, vol. 35.2. Ibid., p. 751.3. Quite rightly Ernesto De Martino saw in the “Marxian mussen . . . a shameful

sollen” (La fine del mondo [Turin: Einaudi, 1977], p. 428), namely a moral necessitydisguised as an historical necessity. Hence the fact that Marxism presents itself as adisguised jus naturale (see C. Antoni, Considerazioni su Hegel e Marx [Naples: Ricciardi,1945]).

4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Associazione mondiale dei comunisti rivo-luzionari,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 617 (italics added).

5. Lenin, “Karl Marx,” in Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 75.6. Here an explanation may be necessary. In Hume there is no evidence of the

theory so dear to the Neopositivists that the kingdom of facts and the kingdom ofvalues are radically divided. He simply claims that “morality . . . consists not in anymatter of fact, which can be discovered by the understanding” . . . “the distinction ofvice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of object, nor is it perceived byreason” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III: Of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge [Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1896], pp. 468 and 470). This means that while it is complicated toconstruct a social science wertfrei, it is impossible to deduct a moral from a scientifictheory. Especially because the latter is always permeated by value judgments, andwhoever tries to found an axiological system scientifically ends up deducting what wasalready present in his theory.

7. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Mod-ern Biology (London: Collins, 1972).

8. Ernst Cassirer, Filosofia delle forme simboliche, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia,1964), p. 81.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human: A Book for free Spirits (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Page 178: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 165

10. Axel van den Berg, The Immanent Utopia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1988), p. 46.

11. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,p. 153.

12. See Filippo Albergamo, Fenomenologia della superstizione (Rome: Editori Riuniti,1967).

13. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 344.14. See Dario Antiseri, Teoria unificata del metodo (Padua: Liviana, 1981),

pp. 207–209.15. Eugenio Ripepe acutely observed that Marx “succeeded in the wondrous en-

terprise of finding a way around the law of Hume in the opposite sense, . . . that is tosay, in making being [per force] descend from having to be, and conjugating the sen-sations of utopia with the certainties of science” (“Socialismo reale” e marxismo realein Mondoperaio, no. 1 [1992], p. 95).

16. “From the logical point of view, Marx’s theory of value is Hegel � Ricardo; itis literally the fusion of the absolutism of the former with the unsolved problems ofthe latter” (Dante Argeri, La dialettica dissacrata [Milan: SugarCo, 1979], p. 111).

17. Hans Kelsen, The Communist Theory of Law (London: Stevens, 1955).18. Leo Apostel, “Logique et dialectique,” in J. Piaget, ed., Logique et connaissance

scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 365.19. Hans Kelsen, Socialismo e Stato (Bari: De Donato, 1978), p. 10.20. Henri Denis, L’economie de Marx (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 195. See also Vittorio

Mathieu, Dialettica della liberta (Naples: Guida, 1978); Lucio Colletti, Fra marxismo eno (Bari: Laterza, 1979); Marcello Pera “La seduzione del metodo scientifico di Marx,”in Mondoperaio, no. 1 (1982).

21. This claim is expressed with the utmost clarity by Marx: “The entire movementof history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis—the birth act of its empiricalexistence—is, therefore, also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and knownprocess of its becoming” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 297).

22. In reality, gnosticism preceded the Christian age, but its “explosion” only cameabout with the emergence of “the tragic sentiment of the failure of the Apocalypse”( Jean Danielou, L’eglise des premiers temps [Paris: Seuil, 1985], p. 108).

23. I. P. Couliano, I miti dei dualism occidentali (Milan: Jaca Book, 1989), p. 22.24. See C. H. Puech, En quete de la Gnose (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) and Sur le

manicheisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); J. Doresse and C. H. Puech, Gnosticismo emanicheismo (Bari: Laterza, 1977); Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (Oxford:Blackwell, 1990); Serge Hutin, Les gnostiques (Paris: PUF, 1963); Jacques Lecarriere,Les gnostiques; Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); ElainePagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); R. M. Grant, Gnosticismoe cristianesimo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976); H. Leisegang, La Gnose eternelle (Paris:Payot, 1963); Luigi Moraldi, ed., Testi gnostici (Turin: UTET, 1982); Ernesto Buo-naiuti, La Gnosi cristiana (Rome: Atanor, 1987); G. C. Benelli, La Gnosi, il volto oscurodella storia (Milan: Mondadori, 1991).

25. Mircea Eliade has remarked that “the disappearance of religions in no wayimplies the disappearance of religiousness; the secularisation of a religious value simplyconstitutes a religious phenomenon illustrating, in the final analysis, the law of uni-versal transformation of human values; the profane character of a former behaviourvis-a-vis the sacred does not presuppose a solution of continuity: the profane is simply

Page 179: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

166 Revolutionary Apocalypse

a new manifestation of the same constitutive structure of man which, prior to that,manifested itself through sacred expressions” (The Sacred and the Profane: The Natureof Religion [New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959]).

26. Andre Gide thus expressed this idea that waves its way in and out so much ofthe philosophy of the age of secularization—we need only think of Alexander, White-head, and Bergson: “If I were to formulate a confession of faith I would say: God isnot behind us; he is to come. We must not search for him at the beginning of evolutionbut at the end. He is terminal not initial. He is the supreme and final point towardwhich nature is projected over time” (quoted from Reinhold Niebuhr, Fede e Storia(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1966), p. 61.

27. Jean Brun, Philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Stock, 1990), p. 148.28. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia,

1967), p. 30.29. “The history of the world simply represents the plan of providence. God rules

the world: Universal history is the content of his rule and the execution of his plan”(G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966),vol. 1, p. 65.

30. Hegel’s definition of dialectical science is as follows: “Mind, which, when thusdeveloped, knows itself to be mind, is science” (Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., transl.by J. B. Baille [London: Allen & Unwin, 1949]).

31. “The finite disappears in the infinite, and what is, is only the infinite” (G.W.F.Hegel, The Science of Logic, vol. 1).

32. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, vol. 1, p. 9 and p. 14.33. It is most significant that at the end of the essay “Faith and Knowledge” (Al-

bany: State University of New York Press, 1977), written in 1802, Hegel should speakof the “sentiment on which rests the religion of the new era, the sentiment that Godis dead.”

34. A. Kojeve, La dialettica e l’idea della morte in Hegel (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 200.35. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla filosofia dela storia, vol. 1, p. 29.36. Lucio Colletti’s work on this point is fundamental, Il marxismo e Hegel (Bari:

Laterza, 1973).37. On the gnostic matrixes of Hegel’s dialectics, see Eric Voegelin, From Enlight-

enment to Revolution (Durham: Duke Press, 1975), pp. 255–270, and G. Hanratty,“Gnosticism and Modern Thought,” in Irish Theological Quarterly, no. 1 (1980),pp. 15–19. Remember also that Hegel himself acknowledged his debt to the gnostictradition by underlining the importance of the idea, formulated by Valentino, accord-ing to which “the active passage from one is constituted by the unfolding” (Lezionisulla storia della filosofia, vol. 2, 1 [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985], p. 26). So it shouldnot be a surprise to observe that even a thinker who moved in the path traced by Hegelshould have seen in Hegelism “a Gnosis, with the philosophy and the critique trans-formed into a cosmogonic vision and with the decadence of the aeon-Adam and of theIdea in nature and redemption thanks to the mercy of the man-Christ or rather of thespirit that leads to the mystic union with God” (Benedetto Croce, Il carattere dellafilosofia moderna [Bari: Laterza, 1943], p. 52).

38. Karl Loewith, Da Hegel a Nietzsche (Turin: Eimaudi, 1959), p. 151.39. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5, pp. 178–179.40. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 10.41. Karl Marx, “Peuchet: On Suicide,” in Complete Works, vol. 4, p. 604.

Page 180: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 167

42. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 155.43. Ibid., p. 164.44. Ibid., p. 172.45. Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill,” in Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 212.46. Ibid., p. 221.47. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 270.48. Ibid., p. 271.49. Ibid., p. 272.50. This typically gnostic motive is well-developed in the book by G. Barbiellini

Amidei and B. Bandini, Il re e un feticcio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976). Referring to the Marxiantheory of alienation the authors observe that “things that show are today our masters. . . things possess men” because capitalism has raised a “new golem”—utility—and inso doing has transformed society into a huge market system in which there are nolonger men but things. Hence, only in a universe without things would alienation notbe able to find expression and men at last would be themselves and masters of theirown destiny. This is undoubtedly true; but it is equally true that a world without thingsis literally unthinkable. But this does seem to have much of an impact on the gnosticmentality permeated by an existential pathos in which one can see the “fixation” of achildhood trauma experienced as an intolerable narcissistic wound: the discovery thatthere exists something other than self, that the ego is limited everywhere and in everydirection by surrounding objects.

51. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 325f.52. Ibid., p. 326.53. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 113.54. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 155.55. One of Hamann’s sentences went like this: “What is split is to be condemned,

from which we can deduct that only what is one is perfect” (quoted from Luigi Bon-omo, La prima formazione del pensiero di G. Gentile [Florence: Sansoni, 1972], p. 73).

56. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1979) and Louis Althusser andEtienne Balibard, Reading “Capital” (London: NLB, 1970).

57. In his last theoretical work Althusser wrote that this thesis was unsustainable(“Il marxismo oggi,” in Quel che deve cambiare nel Partito comunista [Milan: Garzanti,1978], p. 109).

58. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, vol. 2 (Flor-ence: La Nuova Italia, 1970), p. 114.

59. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 133.60. Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in

Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 204.61. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 296f.62. See Adam Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980).63. Augusto Del Noce, Il suicidio della rivoluzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1978), p. 5.64. Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” in David Cooper,

ed., The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 177. Despite this,Marcuse had no problem declaring that “the Marxian concept of revolution is neitherutopistic nor romantic” (“Un riesame del concetto di rivoluzione,” in Mario Spinella,ed., Marx vivo, vol. 1 [Milan: Mondadori, 1969], p. 187).

65. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).66. Jules Guesde captured the profound meaning of the Marxian program when

Page 181: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

168 Revolutionary Apocalypse

he wrote that “just as Christianity once made God man, so socialism will make manGod” (quoted from Robert Michels, La Sociologia del Partito Polıtico [Bologna: Il Mu-tino, 1968], p. 528).

67. Thomas Aquinas’s definition goes thus: “God is not only essence, but also Hisvery own essence” (The ‘Summa teologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas [London: Burns, Oatesand Washbound, 1929]).

68. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 304.69. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 81.70. Vittorio Strada, “La ricerca di Dio nel marxismo,” in Mondoperaio, no. 4 (1992),

p. 134.71. “Marx . . . connects with the Species the idea of redemption and, metaphori-

cally speaking, sees only in the Species the infant-God whose cradle is surrounded bythe obtuse snakes of the elementary forces of nature.” (Anatoly Lunacharsky, Religionee socialismo [Bologna: Guaraldi, 1973], p. 193).

72. Hugues Portelli, Gramsci e la questione religiosa (Milan: Mazzotta, 1976), p. 199.73. Ernst Bloch, L’esprit de l’Utopie (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 323. The last note

of this work is particularly enlightening. Block admits that Marxism is “a revolutionaryGnosis.” Even more enlightening is what Bloch wrote in a letter to Lukacs: afterdefining himself a “paraclete” interceding before God’s throne for the sinful world, heconcluded the letter: “the men to whom I have been sent, will understand and feelwithin them a God that returns” (quoted from Joachim Fest, Il sogno distrutto [Milan:Garzanti, 1992], p. 54).

74. J. P. Sartre, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 241.75. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Frammenti postumi” in The Twilight of the Idols, in Com-

plete Works, vol. 16, ed. by Oscar Levy (Edinburgh, London: Foulis, 1911).76. See Gianfranco Morra, ed., La scure del nulla (L’Aquila: Japadre, 1984); Giorgio

Penzo, Il nichilismo da Nietzsche a Sartre (Rome: Citta Nuova, 1976); F. Vercellone, Ilnichilismo (Bari: Laterza, 1992).

77. Ioan Couliano, I miti dei dualismi occidentali, p. 295.78. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Una interpretazione della storia universale, p. 142.79. Martin Heidegger, Sentieri interrotti, p. 198.80. Jean Granier, Nietzsche (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), p. 36.81. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.82. Henri Desroche, Sociologie de l’esperance (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1973), p. 176.83. See Eric Voegelin, Trascendenza e gnosticismo (Rome: Astra, 1979), and Caratteri

gnostici della moderna politica economica e sociale (Rome: Astra, 1980).84. O. K. Flechtheim, Storia e futurologia (Rome: Rumma, 1969), p. 87.85. Friedrich Engels, “The Condition of England,” in Opere complete, vol. 3,

p. 464f.86. Ibid., p. 465.87. Friedrich Engels, “Schelling and Revelation,” in Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 236.88. Ibid., p. 238 and p. 239. It is interesting to note that Giovanni Gentile, another

gnostic thinker of our time, has the same Stimmung, the same desire for the absoluteand for unity, the same horror for what is divided, split, the same aspiration to cancelalienation. This is particularly evident in the following passage: “The spirit is theMessiah. It must come and it will not come without eradicating the bad plant of evil,which is nature, without destroying this world, in order to establish the kingdom ofGod. The spirit acquires awareness of self by fulfilling itself: not to be fulfilled is this

Page 182: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Revolutionary Gnosis 169

nature that is before us and appears to be all, until we are redeemed and have freedourselves from the nightmare oppressing us, hour by hour threatening to suffocateus” (Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, vol. 2 [Florence: Sansoni, 1956], p. 369).As if to say: salvation is to gain awareness of the fact that alienation does not existbecause all is within the spirit and all is creation of the spirit.

89. Friedrich Engels, Schelling and Revelation, p. 239f.90. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 151.91. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 175.92. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 174.93. Ernst Bloch, Ateismo nel cristianesimo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), p. 331.94. Friedrich Engels, “Draft of a Communist confession of Faith,” in Collected

Works, vol. 6, p. 103.95. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 176.96. Karl Marx, “Lettera ad Arnold Ruge,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 414.97. Those who consider the Marx-Engels critique of religion to be directed toward

the shortcomings of hieratic institutions have completely misinterpreted scientific so-cialism. Once the latter believes that is has identified the method for annihilating“distorted reality,” it has no alternative but to be hostile to the religious spirit as such,if for no other reason than the fact that as long as humans feel the need for “religiousopium,” it will mean that the communist revolution has not achieved what it hadpromised; that is to say, total disalienation (See Gianfranco Morra, Marxismo e religione[Milan: Rusconi, 1976]).

98. Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1 (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1978).

99. Karl Loewith, Significato e fine della storia (Milan: Comunita, 1963), p. 63. Seealso M. Buber, Utopie et socialisme (Montaigne: Aubier, 1977).

100. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Introduzione a ‘Kommunistische Zeit-schrift’ ” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Moralismo e politica rivoluzionaria (Rome:Newton Compton, 1972), p. 156.

101. Domenico Settembrini, Il labirinto marxista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), p. 19.102. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 486–487.103. See Kostas Axelos, Marx pensatore della tecnica (Milan: SugarCo, 1963).104. Georges Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1962), p. 148.105. Karl Marx, Discorso per l’anniversario del People’s Paper, pp. 655–656.106. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 504.107. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, p. 505.108. Friedrich Engels, “La questione delle dieci ore,” in Opere complete, vol. 10,

p. 271.109. Karl Marx, “Discorso dell’Aia,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Contro

l’anarchismo, p. 99.110. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Introduzione a “Kummunistische Zeit-

schrift,” p. 161.111. Leszek Kolakowski, Lo spirito rivoluzionario (Milan: SugarCo, 1981), p. 8.112. Karl Marx, Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte, p. 115.113. Mircea Eliade, Mito e realta (Turin: Borla, 1966), p. 95.114. Ernesto Che Guevara, Questa grande umanita (Rome: Tindalo, 1968), p. 67.115. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 47.116. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 515.

Page 183: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

170 Revolutionary Apocalypse

117. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 46.118. See Manuel Garcia Pelayo, Miti e simboli politici (Turin: Borla, 1970), p. 42

et seq.119. “For the alchemist, man is creator: he regenerates nature and dominates time;

he perfects the divine creation” (Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l’alchimie [Paris: L’Herne,1990], p. 33).

120. We find this definition in Wilhelm Weitling, “L’umanita come e e come do-vrebbe essere”—in G.M. Bravo, ed., Il socialismo prima di Marx (Rome: Editori Riuniti,1970), p. 286—a work that exercised considerable influence on Marx and Engels (seeAuguste Cornu, Marx ed Engels, dal radicalismo al comunismo [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964]).

121. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 298 and 300. In perfectharmony with the spirit and interpretation of the Marxian message, Marcuse wrotethat “the radical transformation of nature becomes an integrating part of the radicaltransformation of society” (Counterrevolution and Revolt). Ernst Bloch expressed anidentical thesis in the philosophical interview “Mutare il mondo sino a renderlo ri-conoscibile” (in Marxismo e utopia [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984], pp. 118–119).

122. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Introduzione a ‘Kommunistische Zeit-schrift,’ ” p. 161.

123. Karl Marx, “Lettera a Vera Zasulic,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, India,Cina e Russia (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1970), p. 306.

124. The principle “To each according to his needs” is expressed in The Acts of theApostles. The fact that Marx should place it at the foundation of the highest and lastphase of the revolutionary transformation of society is additional evidence that heconceived communism as the materialization of the evangelical promise. This explainswhy so many scholars have seen Marxism as both the heir and the enemy of Christianity:heir insofar as it picks up the palingenetic program and adapts it to the spirit of thesecular city; enemy insofar as the program can only be achieved by rendering every“religious illusion” superfluous.

125. Quoted from Henri de Lubac, Alla ricerca dell’uomo nuovo (Turin: Borla, 1964),p. 57. Trotsky described the anthropological mutation to be accomplished in Com-munist society as follows: “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser and moreacute. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voicemore musical; the forms of being will acquire a dynamic representativity” (Letteratura,arte e liberta [Milan: Schwartz, 1958], p. 107).

Page 184: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 9

Utopia in Power

1. In 1898, I. S. Bloch, a far-sighted Warsaw banker, predicted “with absoluteclarity that a great conflict could not be deferred for much longer and ex-pressed the belief that, in the event of a major European war, the technologicaldevelopment of arms and the allocation by the major powers of political andeconomic resources for military purposes, would inevitably lead to a stalemateof the armed forces of the countries at war. The final outcome would be atremendous calamity for the civil population, with the winners suffering asmuch as the losers, and the final collapse of social organisation.”1 Just a fewyears later, Lenin reached exactly the same conclusion, but with the differencethat, while Bloch saw the situation from the point of view of its disastrousconsequences for Western civilization, Lenin saw it as a great, indeed, aunique, opportunity for his party to deviate the spontaneous course of historyand point it in the direction of communism.

The spread of communism clearly required an extraordinary event of somekind, given that capitalism was showing no signs of being on the verge ofcollapse and the working class obviously had a strong reformist calling. Suchan event would shake the foundations of the whole of Europe like a deus exmachina provoking the situation of general social disorder essential for thesuccess of the revolution and the taking of power. Without this extraordinaryevent, the Bolshevik Party would never break away from the vice that held it.In other words, war was to be the shattering force that Marx had claimedwould come from the laws of capitalist growth.2 In a letter Lenin wrote toGorky in 1913, we read: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a veryuseful thing for the revolution [throughout Eastern Europe], but it’s not veryprobable that Franz-Josef and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”3 Lenin was

Page 185: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

172 Revolutionary Apocalypse

obsessed by the idea of transforming a conflict between two states into aEuropean civil war,4 even though Europe was already involved in a war thatwould leave it traumatized in material and moral terms, as Bloch hadpredicted.

Civil war did not break out in Europe for the simple reason that patrioticsentiments proved to be much stronger than proletarian internationalism.However, the sudden collapse of the tsarist regime following a huge popularmutiny at the beginning of 1917 provided Lenin with the opportunity he hadbeen waiting for.5 Russia became a “powerless land.” It was an opportunity notto be missed. To do so would have been to commit a crime against history.6Admittedly, according to Second International Marxism, well-developed forcesof production and a large well-organized working class that was conscious ofits historical calling were essential for the success of the socialist revolution.But over the years Lenin had learned to consider the conquest of power as aunique and unrepeatable opportunity that had to be exploited with absolutedetermination and great daring, by “resorting to cunning with history” to usethe formula coined by the young Trotsky.7 The task of the Bolshevik Party wasto transform the February democratic-bourgeois revolution into a socialist rev-olution, directed toward the “conscious avant-garde” of the working class.8 Sucha strategy might well have been in open conflict with that of the proletarianrevolution illustrated in Capital, but it was in perfect harmony with the Indirizzodel 1850 in which Marx and Engels illustrated their strategy for the conquestof power. Neither Marx nor Engels ever linked that strategy to the situation ofthe forces of production; essentially it was an updated version of the Jacobinmodel.9 At least until the “turning point” of September 1850, Lenin quite le-gitimately presented himself as the most coherent interpreter of the theoriesof the founders of scientific socialism.

After April 1917, the combination of Lenin’s boundless voluntarism, fa-natical faith in communism, and political genius was to determine the destinyof Russia10 and launch a new era in world history: the era of the planetaryexpansion of revolutionary gnosticism.

Even his own followers were surprised when Lenin raised the banner ofcivil war, when he descended from the armored carriage placed at his disposalby the German government: no support for the provisional government, rad-icalization of the class struggle, passage from bourgeois revolution to prole-tarian revolution. The charismatic leader of Bolshevism broke the front ofthe democratic forces and proposed his party as the sole leader of Russiansociety. “I will never forget that resounding speech [wrote Sukhanov afterLenin’s first meeting with the leaders of the Bolshevik Party]. It came as asurprise not only to me, a heretic who was there by chance, but to all thefaithful. It was as if all the elements of universal destruction had come out ofhiding, overcome barriers, doubts, difficulties and personal considerations,and been let loose above the heads of the fascinated disciples in the rooms ofthe Kshesinskaya.”11 Josif Goldenberg was equally surprised by Lenin’s speech

Page 186: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 173

at the Tauride Palace the next day: “For many years, the great anarchist Ba-kunin had no worthy successor. His place has now been occupied. What wehave just heard is a complete denial of the whole social democrat doctrineand the whole theory of scientific Marxism. We have just heard a clear andunmistakable declaration of anarchy. Its herald, Lenin, is Bakunin’s heir.Lenin, the Marxist, Lenin the leader of our social democrat party exists nomore. A new Lenin has been born, Lenin the anarchist.”12 In other words,Lenin the voluntarist, who “staked his life on a mighty wager, a gigantic actof faith”13 and with a coup de main, which was as daring as it was fortunate,had conquered the Winter Palace, since Russia had precipitated into the “an-archy of dualism of power”14 and the democratic forces were, as Sukhanovcorrectly stated, in a “state of disarray.”

But the occupation of the Winter Palace did not mean the conquest ofpower. It was simply a gesture of great symbolic value: it “charged” the soulsof the Bolsheviks, showed them that “paradise was within reach” and thatrevolutionary determination was capable of veritable miracles.15 Nonetheless,1918, not 1917, was the decisive year. It demonstrated that, with the activesupport of the population, the October coup could become a real revolutionand make Lenin’s dream come true—forcing all Russia to adapt to the rigidmold of collectivist Utopia in order to accomplish the great revolutionaryexperiment.

The ordinance of October 26 (November 8) 1917, instituting the Councilof People’s Commissars, defined the Council as “a provisional government ofworkers and peasants” that would exercise its authority “until the conveningof the Constituent Assembly.”16 When the Constituent Assembly was con-vened—Bolshevik representation was only 25 percent—it was immediatelydissolved by order and stamped as a “factory of gossip.”17 From the very start,the “machine of revolution”18 patiently constructed by Lenin brutally de-stroyed all opposition. The first to go was freedom of the press. As early asNovember 17, 1917, an official Bolshevik resolution defined the free press asa weapon in the hands of “capitalists, poisoners of the minds of the people.”19

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich introduced a principle that was rigorously followed bythe new regime: “During the revolution there can be only one press, therevolutionary press.”20 Ergo, all nonaligned publications should be sup-pressed. The liberal press went first; the axe of the Bolshevik Party then fellin rapid succession on the press of the parties of the left, accused of being“bourgeois,” no matter the social composition of their following.21 So, “Leninnationalised the means of communication even before [he nationalized] themeans of production.”22

The Bolshevik Party did not limit itself to denying the opposition the rightto express its opinions freely; it denied its very right to exist.23 Gradually thereal meaning of the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” became clear: itmeant total domination by the sect that believed it was endowed with thehistorical calling of freeing humanity from the corrupt and corrupting bour-

Page 187: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

174 Revolutionary Apocalypse

geois spirit. It was a domination that had no limits and tolerated no opposi-tion. Whoever refused to bend to its will was annihilated or at least renderedharmless.24 It knew one method only: “extermination of the opposition in everyform.”25 Lenin pursued the method with absolute brutality, repeating con-stantly: “The resistance of the exploiters is crushed,”26 and established a “rule thatis unrestricted by any laws”27 and concentrated in the hands of “a full-fledged‘oligarchy’ . . . the Party’s Central Committee.”28 This was the indispensablecondition for conquering an enemy—capitalism—both powerful and insidious,which even when beaten “is disintegrating . . . polluting the air and poisoningour lives, enmeshing that which is new, fresh, young and virile in thousands ofthreads and bonds of that which is old, moribund and decaying.”29

2. The first one-party dictatorship of the twentieth century30 was also thefirst dictatorship based on terrorism. The CHEKA—“one of the most for-midable institutions for the perpetration of state-organised homicide that theworld has ever seen”31—concentration camps, summary trials, mass shootingswere the tools and the practices used by the Communist Party to “remake theRussian population and all humanity,”32 bending everyone and thing to itsdemiurgic will. Not even the workers on whose behalf the Bolsheviks claimedto rule were safe from “class terrorism.”33 If they refused unconditional ac-ceptance of the new regime, they were stamped as “impure proletariats, con-taminated by the petit-bourgeois mentality”34 and treated as “enemies of thepeople.” Lenin in person directed the “infernal machine” of total terror. InNovember 1917—that is, during the revolutionary “honeymoon”35—he is-sued the following instructions: “In one place half a score of rich, a dozenrogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work . . . will be put in prison.In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place theywill be provided with ‘yellow tickets’ after they have served their time, so thateveryone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons. . . . In a fourth place,one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place mixedmethods may be adopted. . . . The more variety there will be, the better andricher will be our general experience, the more certain and rapid will be thesuccess of socialism.”36

The instructions issued in June and July 1918 were even more chilling:“Comrade Zinoviev, only today we have heard at the C.C. that in Petrogradthe workers wanted to reply to the murder of Volodarsky by mass terror andthat you . . . restrained them. I protest most emphatically. . . . We must en-courage the energy and mass character of the terror against the counter-revolutionaries. . . .” “You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Executionfor concealing arms. Mass deportation of Mensheviks and unreliables.” “Es-sential to crush the kulak rising with great energy, speed, and ruthlessness. . . .”“Act in the most resolute way against the kulaks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionary scoundrels who have made common cause with them.” “Essen-

Page 188: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 175

tial to suppress the kulak extortioners mercilessly.” “Essential to combineruthless suppression of the kulak Left Socialist-Revolutionary. . . . ”37

These instructions were music to the ears of the Bolsheviks, who had beenmentally prepared by Lenin in person “for the day in which they would defendthe achievements of the dictatorship of the proletariat using the most radicaland effective means of revolutionary struggle: red terror.”38 They unleasheda general offensive against the “bourgeois,” the “suspects,” the “harmful ele-ments,” and “useless citizens,” using the tribunals as a “revolutionary weapon”and complying with the principles of the “new moral” and the “new law,” asthey had been codified by Krylenko: “In times of civil war, action [againstSoviet power] and inaction are equally criminal . . . The tribunal is not thebody for generating new legal refinements and casuistry . . . We are creatinga new law and new ethical norms . . . We don’t need legal refinements becausewe don’t have to establish whether the accused is guilty or innocent: the con-cept of guilt, an old bourgeois concept, has been eradicated . . . A tribunal isan organ of class struggle of workers directed against their enemies . . . itmust function from the perspective of the interests of the revolution, . . .taking into account the most desirable results for the worker and peasantmasses.” In other words: men are no longer men but “bearers of certain ideas.Whatever their individual qualities, one can assess them on the basis of onecriterion, namely that of class convenience.”39

Naturally, judgment as to what constituted “class convenience” was madeby the “conscious avant-garde”; that is to say, the Bolshevik Party. “Everyworker with a class consciousness [stated Zinoviev to justify the “protectivefunction” the Bolsheviks claimed to have over the proletariat] must realisethat the dictatorship of the working class can only be achieved through thedictatorship of the avant-garde, ie. through the Communist party . . . All issuesconcerning reconstruction, economic growth, military organisation, populareducation, supply policies etc., all these issues upon which depend the out-come of the proletarian revolution are decided first of all in Russia and, inthe majority of cases, within the party organisation . . . The control of theparty over the Soviet bodies, the unions, is the only guarantee that corporateor group interests do not prevail over the interests of the proletariat as awhole.”40 So to be against the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist Partywas to be against the historical interests of the “general class.” The Com-munist Party identified itself with Marxism by definition; Marxism, with theproletariat; and the latter, with the “will of History.” So the Bolsheviks be-lieved—quite logically given the ideological world of “organic lying” in whichthey operated—that by establishing terror they were using violence in themanner of an obstetrician: their function was limited to that of assisting thedelivery of the new society (Marx’s famous metaphor). They were authorizedto do all in the name of their gnosticism, given that they alone were aware ofwhat was required to restore the original unity of the human race and endexploitation and oppression.

Page 189: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

176 Revolutionary Apocalypse

All this had a definite historical precedent: Jacobin terror. The CommunistParty was inspired by Robespierre41 in building a system that it considered tobe the most advanced form of democracy,42 but which in fact was based onthe “extreme concentration of power implemented under the banner of mil-itarisation that imposed an iron discipline upon its followers and terror on itsenemies.”43 The Communist Party went a step beyond the Jacobin model: ittook Jacobin Manicheism to its extreme logical consequence, adding to the“model of Terror” an institution that was destined to become the very symbolof Communist Utopia in power: the gulag.

The Bolsheviks were literally obsessed by the issue of “ideological purity.”A revolutionary party—so Lenin had preached in What is to be done?—wouldonly remain such if it avoided being polluted by the ideas of the surroundingenvironment, which were all “bourgeois” and therefore contaminating of rev-olutionary consciousness. A revolutionary party therefore had to be structuredlike an “ideological bunker” in order to prevent infection from the intellectualand moral miasma of the external world. Since there was no way of guaran-teeing that the bourgeois spirit would not penetrate the consciousness of in-dividual militants, it was imperative to institutionalize ideological censorship andconduct permanent purges to “liberate” the party from everything that wasincompatible with its historical mission. Hence the importance of fighting ontwo fronts: externally, against the declared enemies of communism, and in-ternally, against those who claimed to absorb “bourgeois ‘freedom of criti-cism,’ within the Party.”44

As soon as the Bolshevik Party took over power, it created a special “un-loading area” in which to concentrate all the impure and nonassimilable ele-ments to prevent them from contaminating society.45 The gulag was a placefor unloading impurity: an extensive system of concentration camps to im-prison those who, for one reason or another, the party considered to be car-riers of negative tendencies. And, since the Bolsheviks accused entire socialclasses—entrepreneurs, traders, kulaks, and so forth—of being incompatiblewith the social organization that was to replace the capitalist bourgeois society,the gulag obviously had to assume huge dimensions. It became a “worldapart,”46 destined to remain in existence until “universal purification” wasachieved. Revolution therefore was conceived as a struggle for the destructionof the external enemy and as a “mortal war against the internal enemies.”47

Fear and suspicion grew in the heart of the Bolshevik Party. The so-called“dictatorship of the proletariat” did not even spare the Bolshevik leaders; “thefact that a guilty or supposedly guilty person was at the top of the party or ofthe institutions required exemplary forms of punishment.”48

3. Of course, if the Bolsheviks had limited themselves to terrorism, theywould never have obtained the mass support they needed to destroy the otherparties and extend their rule throughout Russia. They promised peace, powerto the Soviets, land for the peasants; they propagated the chiliastic utopia of

Page 190: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 177

a society without class and without state. Maria Spiridonova’s stirring wordsimmediately after the conquest of the Winter Palace are revealing: “Newhorizons that history has never known lie before the workers of Russia. In thepast workers movements have always failed. This movement is internationaland therefore invincible. No force in the world can extinguish the fire ofrevolution! The old world is collapsing, a new world is rising.”49 This messagewas uttered again and again all over Russia, opening exciting new prospectsthat fired the enthusiasm of millions of individuals, giving them the fanaticalconviction that times were ripe for the social palingenesis. After a purifyingbloodbath, a “golden age would start and men would live without laws, withoutpunishment, spontaneously doing what is right and good.”50 The Bolshevikrevolution was successful because it combined utopianism and terrorism andconvinced the masses that terror was the most effective means for material-izing that ideal of a classless and stateless society that generations and gen-erations of socialist activists had injected in the hearts of the workers.

The other factor that contributed to the success of the Bolsheviks was aunique phenomenon that dominated the world arena starting from 1917: therapid and practically total disintegration of civil society under the dual impact ofthe Great War and internal war. Russian civil society was too fragile to with-stand the impact of the sudden collapse of the tsarist regime. The industri-alization policy had only just been introduced. The professional groupsstamped by communism as incompatible with the type of society it wished tocreate were paralyzed by fear.51 Two and a half million citizens abandonedRussia in the space of only four or five years. They were the “more active andcreative members of the population and this deprived the country almostcompletely of its leaders.”52 A huge social void in combination with the po-litical void made Russia easy prey for the one force, the Bolshevik Party,endowed with strong internal cohesion and animated by an iron will to imposeitself on every other force. With the active support of “almost half the army,which then numbered at least ten million men,”53 the Bolsheviks ruthlesslyexterminated all the other political forces and “took their place in the civilsociety liquidated by civil war and world war.”54

Six hundred thousand rigorously selected, carefully indoctrinated, and pe-riodically “purified” partiny surrogated the bourgeoisie who had fled the coun-try. In Pareto’s terms, this meant the very rapid substitution of an “elect”bourgeois class with a new “elect” class composed of the professionals ofpermanent revolution. The destruction of civil society was completed by asavage nationalization policy55 willed and implemented by the Bolsheviks forideological reasons. They were convinced that the liberation of humanityfrom all material and moral misery required the elimination of private prop-erty and free enterprise. For political/power reasons, it also required the ex-istence of a small organized minority within a disorganized hostile world. TheBolsheviks lived in fear of a Thermidor-type reaction and protected them-selves from that danger by dispossessing society of all its resources.

Page 191: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

178 Revolutionary Apocalypse

In 1917, Russia therefore experienced a military, political, and social col-lapse. The first marked the end of tsarism; the second made the October couppossible; the third—the spontaneous dissolution of bourgeois society follow-ing the diaspora of its leaders—opened the way for the Bolshevik policy oftotal substitution of civil society by the all-possessing state.

The outcome was the creation of universal charismatic bureaucracy: “char-ismatic” because it derived its right to rule from an idea of collective salvation;“universal” because it claimed unlimited power of jurisdiction. Nothing wasprivate: not the economic or organizational resources, not institutions, norideas, nor even people. Everything was public; that is to say, state propertyand therefore the property of the charismatic bureaucracy. “We recognisenothing private,” wrote Lenin to Kursky, the people’s commissar “In the eco-nomic sphere, for us everything is public and not private. We acknowledge onlystate capitalism, but we are the State.”56 “We,” meant namely the gnosticgroup of professional revolutionaries elevated to the rank of “spiritus rector”[Bukharin’s definition]57 of the New Order guided by the fundamental prin-ciple: “The party rectifies, prescribes and builds according to a single principle—toenable the communist elements linked with the proletariat to imbue the pro-letariat with their own spirit, win its adherence, and open its eyes to the bour-geois deceit.”58

Inevitably, the methodical application of this principle produced the mili-tarization and idealogization of every expression of human life. A state is firstand foremost a war machine; if everything is nationalized, there is a strongthrust toward universal militarization. And if, at the same time, a doctrineproclaiming it knows the method for accomplishing nothing short of the “res-urrection day of mankind”59 is made the compulsory state philosophy, societybecomes one huge militarized convent. This is exactly what happened in Russiaas soon as the Bolshevik Party started to extend its hold to all the institutionsand resources of society, after outlawing all the other parties including thosedriven by the ideals of socialism. With the result that “the State—that is, thegovernment—became the sole carrier of every truth, the sole proprietor ofall material and spiritual goods, the sole initiator, organiser, animator of thecountry’s entire life, in all its ramifications.”60

The operation was successful—this must be stressed—because the hugediaspora of Russian bourgeoisie had led to the almost complete dissolution ofcivil society. There were no independent social forces capable of resisting theBolsheviks. The workers, upon whose shoulders the Bolsheviks came topower, tried to break away from the totalitarian yoke. But their attempt atKronstadt to restore the power of the Soviet and the fundamental libertieseradicated by the policy of “absolute centralization”61 ended in a bloodbath.62

The “bureaucratic revolution”63 triumphed; the workers became the servantsof the all-proprietor state, which, in the name of socialism, demanded the“unquestioning subordination of the masses to a single will which directs theprocess of labour.”64 Through a series of “compulsory stages” masterfully de-

Page 192: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 179

scribed by Rosa Luxemburg, the dictatorship of the proletariat was convertedinto a dictatorship over the proletariat, before the totalitarian metastasis hadbecame fully evident.65 It was exercised by a sect of gnostic activists whoclaimed to express the “real interests” of the working masses, on the basis ofthe following reasoning:

The Communist party is part of the working class: it is its most progressive, mostaware and therefore most revolutionary part. The Communist party is created bymeans of the selection of the best workers, the most aware, the best equipped, in termsof spirit of sacrifice and far sightedness. The interests of the Communist party are nodifferent from those of the working class. The Communist party stands out from the massof workers insofar as it is capable of seeing the historical path of the working class in its entiretyand in every moment of crisis it tries to defend the interests of the working class as awhole, and not those of groups or categories of workers separately. The Communistparty is the lever of political organisation thanks to which the most aware part of theworking class guides the entire proletariat and semi-proletariat mass along the right path.66

4. The peasants were the only social group that escaped the direct controlof Lenin’s gigantic bureaucracy. To obtain their support, the Bolsheviks prom-ised ownership of land and embraced the policy of the revolutionary social-ists,67 even though private ownership of land was obviously incompatible withcommunism and was the seed of capitalism, since it implies free trade and“freedom of trade is capitalism.”68 After they had swept away all the otherparties, the Bolsheviks were then forced to wage a veritable war of extermi-nation against the small farm owners “animated by universal class hatred againstcapital.”69 The declared objective was “the destruction of individualism”70

through the eradication of ownership of small plots of land by farmers. Giventhat “socialism . . . means the abolition of commodity economy”71 and given thatthe market economy is closely linked to private property, land must also benationalized and controlled by a central planner. Otherwise, the laws of com-petition inevitably lead to the spontaneous generation of large property fromsmall property and the “weed” of capitalism can flourish and eventually spreadto all society.

A military communism—a pleonastic expression, given that communismand military organization of society are one and the same thing72—was nottherefore imposed by circumstance but was a rational, rigorous, and ruthlessattempt to eradicate what Marx and Engels had indicated as the sole cause ofexploitation and individualism: the production of goods for commercialpurposes.73

On this point the literature is absolutely clear. In a speech on May 19, 1919,Lenin explained that the “total victory of communism” required giving priorityto “the struggle of oppressed working people for the complete overthrow ofcapital and the abolition of commodity production stands in the forefront.”74

He reiterated the concept on July 20 of that same year:

Page 193: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

180 Revolutionary Apocalypse

We are fighting a real battle against capitalism and we assert that no matter whatconcessions capitalism may force us to make we are still in favour of the struggle againstit and against exploitation. We shall fight in this field as ruthlessly as we are fightingDenikin and Kolchak, because they draw fresh strength for themselves from the mightof capitalism, and this might, of course, does not fall from the sky, it is based onfreedom to trade on grain and other goods. . . . If we win in this fight there will beno return to capitalism and the former system, no return to what has been in the past.Such a return will be impossible so long as there is a war against the bourgeoisie,against profiteering and against petty proprietorship. When we have got the peasantaway from his property and we have made him turn towards the work of our state weshall be able to say that we have covered a difficult section of our road.75

To destroy the seed of capitalism—that is to say, what remained of civilsociety: small peasant property and free trade of wheat—and subject economiclife to the imperatives of state planning, the Bolshevik Party adopted thefollowing policy:

1. maximum expansion of public property and of state authority2. compulsory allocation of labor and introduction of military-type discipline in

factories3. centralized management of production4. distribution of goods and services according to political/ideological criteria5. naturalization of the economy through the suppression of currency

Inevitably, this model of economic organization was incompatible with free-dom of choice of occupation. If this “bourgeois” freedom were not eradicated,the productive process would never be managed according to the imperativesof the central plan. Hence, Bukharin’s very explicit theory of the dictatorshipover the workers: “Given that the tasks of the revolution have to be accom-plished at whatever cost, understandably so-called freedom of labour must belimited from the point of view of the proletariat, in the name of the effectiveand non-fictitious liberty of the working class. For such freedom is not suitedto a closely organised planned economy and the corresponding division of thelabour force. Hence, a regime of compulsory labour and of state distributionof the workforce under the dictatorship of the proletariat is already an ex-pression of a relatively high degree of organisation of the entire apparatus andof the solidity of proletariat power in general.”76 Even more brutal was Trot-sky’s description of “militarised proletarian production.”77

The army has suitable means for forcing soldiers to do their duty. In one form or theother, it is necessary to do the same with workers. Undoubtedly, if we want to talkseriously about a centrally planned, uniform economy and if we want the labour forceto be distributed according to the needs of economic development, we cannot allowthe mass of workers to move freely from one part of Russia to another. The workersmust be directed and ordered in the same way as soldiers are. This is the basis of the

Page 194: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 181

militarisation of workers;78 We are heading towards a type of labour that is regulatedsocially on the basis of a central plan, a labour that is compulsory for the whole country,ie., imposed on the workers, having established that fundamentally, ‘not formally butfundamentally’, we recognise the right of the worker State to send workers, male andfemale, wherever their labour is most necessary for the attainment of the economicobjectives. Hence we acknowledge that the State has the right to punish the workerwho refuses to carry out the orders of the State, who refuses to subordinate his willto that of the working class and its economic responsibilities. The militarisation oflabour in the profound sense I referred to constitutes a fundamental and indispensablemeans for organising our work-force.79

Obviously, the one conclusion to be drawn from the above is that the unionmust cease performing its traditional role of “tribune of the plebs” and becomean institution at the service of the central planner state, docile to its desiresand willing to implement its orders without question. On this point Trotskyis, as always, brutally frank: “Without the general service of labour, withoutthe right to give orders and have them executed, the unions would be trans-formed into an empty, unreal form. The young Soviet state needs unions, notfrom the perspective of the struggle to improve the conditions of labour—which is the scope of social organisation and of the State as a whole—but toorganise, educate, discipline, distribute, and bring together the working classfor the purposes of production. In a word, they exercise their authority inconjunction with the State and guide the workers in accordance with thesingle economic plan.”80

5. The project of creating a gigantic militarized convent and extending theJesuit-like discipline of the Bolshevik Party to the whole of Russian society81

clashed with the laws of the economy and the resistance of the peasant world.Requisitioning led to a black market economy82 and was boycotted by thefarm owners who considered themselves to have been betrayed by the Bol-sheviks. This was followed by the immediate collapse in the production offood, and by famine. Cannibalism was common in many parts of the country.“People [we read in an investigation by Mikhail Osorgin] mostly ate thosewho died closest to them; they fed on the older children, but also on babies,who had not even learnt to live; they were not spared either, no matter howsmall the yield. People devoured in their own little corner, not at the commontable, and no one mentioned it.”83

The devastating famine that cost the lives of no fewer than five millionpeople84 was the result of requisition and nationalization policies that smoth-ered any incentive to produce. Yet, Lenin claimed that the perverse nature ofthe farm owners was responsible for the famine and, at least until late 1920,suggested that the only solution was “to butcher the kulaks.”85 Naturally, theconsequence of such an outrageous solution was that what had been peasantresistance became armed revolt all over the country. The Bolsheviks avoided

Page 195: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

182 Revolutionary Apocalypse

collapse because “the party saved the situation in extremis by suppressing therequisitioning of cereals and substituting it with a tax in kind, it revived freetrade and introduced a system of liberation of the economy known as NEP.”86

The revival of a mini-market economy implied the revival of currency, oftrade, of private enterprise, and profit—of course, under the rigid control ofthe ideological power of the State-Party. In this way it was possible to increasethe production of food and therefore overcome the famine generated by theblind doctrinarianism of the Bolsheviks.87 The Russian economy acquired thefeatures of a mixed system with two separate spheres: a state sphere of hugeproportions, regulated by the principles of central planning, and an extensiveprivate sphere governed by the law of demand and supply.88 Obviously, it wasa compromise solution, but it worked. The concessions granted to the farmowners and the improvement in the situation of the people extinguished thehotbeds of revolt and the Bolshevik Party managed to recuperate the supportit had lost in the attempt to reorganize Russian society according to collectiveprinciples.

But a market communism is a hybrid system that operates with the seedsof capitalism and is therefore intimately contradictory. When Giacinto Me-notti Serrati underlined this contradiction in a conversation with EvgenyPreobrazhensky, he was promptly reassured. The party, argued the Bolshevikleader, was ever vigilant and had a firm hold on all the levers of power. Forthis reason it was able to control the evolution of Russian society.

The nepmany are the minus habentes of the Soviet regime. They have no vote. The donot participate in public life. They are like those animals that are fattened up to bekilled for Christmas. At the appropriate moment, the Communist government willput an end to the NEP and to those who take advantage of them. Of this they are soaware, they feel this so strongly that they don’t save, they don’t accumulate but squan-der. It is as if their instinct tells them that their end is not far off . . . They are not aclass yet, and we will not let them become one. They are individuals whose goal is toexploit a situation for pleasure and to become rich . . . We are too strong: we can playcat and mouse with them . . . Today we feed the nepmany, like the nobles fed themuraena. With this difference: we feed them on their own flesh, we let them eat eachother. The big ones eat the smaller ones . . . But we know who these sharks are, andtheir life is in our hands. One find day we will close the outlets and make a huge catch.That will be a new phase of the revolution.89

The intimate conviction of the man responsible for the perekachka theory—the forced “pumping” of the agricultural sphere to the industrial sphere—wasthat socialism would only be achieved in the framework of a completely na-tionalized and centrally planned economy, conceived as “a unitarian complexmoulded with the political power in conditions of systematic limitation untilthe total elimination of competition.”90 This conviction was common withinthe Bolshevik Party. At the end of 1929, Stalin was to make it reality by“unleashing a wave of terror on the countryside.”91

Page 196: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 183

On this point, Stalin’s loyalty to Lenin was absolute.92 His ruthless massacreof millions and millions of peasants was simply the execution of the deathsentence pronounced by the charismatic leader of Bolshevism every time heharangued his followers.93 As early as May 1918, he stated, “There is no doubtabout it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaksmassacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress therevolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the workingpeople’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of thequestion: even if they have quarreled, the kulak can easily come to terms withthe landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never. Thatis why we call the fight against the kulaks the last, decisive fight. . . . Thekulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters. . . . These leecheshave sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workersin the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering thelanded estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants.Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! hatred and contempt for theparties which defend them—the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Men-sheviks, and today’s Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crushthe revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand.”94

In the mind of the leaders of the “iron detachment of the proletariat, class-conscious and boundlessly devoted to communism,”95 who had occupied thecountry like an invading army, Russia was a gigantic laboratory in which toconduct the alchemistic experiment of extracting new humanity from the“mass human material which has been corrupted,”96 from capitalism. TheNEP therefore was simply a “strategical retreat.”97 It was impossible for Leninto change his attitude toward the small entrepreneur without giving up whatwas the fundamental idea of communism: the eradication of competition andof everything linked to competition: profit, currency, private property, con-tracts, and laws of value: all things Marx and Engels abhorred and consideredagents of spiritual corruption to be ruthlessly destroyed. So at the VII partyconference of the Governorship of Moscow, Lenin developed the followingreasoning in perfect harmony with the lessons of the founding fathers of“scientific socialism”: “The private market proved too strong for us,” placingus before the “problem of our very existence”: “That is why we find ourselvesin the position of having to retreat still further, in order, eventually, to go overto the offensive.”98 Again and again, Marx reiterated the principle that thecommunist revolution was forced to wage a war against free trade, which wasthe very foundation of capitalism. Therefore the NEP had to be conceived asa mere armistice. Hostility would be renewed in the near future and on a vastscale, until the “final assault,” which would end with the annihilation of allindependence in the peasant world and the triumph of collectivism. At thatpoint only would the victory of communism be complete. Nothing would beprivate and everything would have become public. It was only a matter oftime. The main thing was that the party should remain firmly anchored to its

Page 197: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

184 Revolutionary Apocalypse

convictions and retain its monopoly of power—hence the need to institution-alize what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the system of “permanent purge,”99 forit was an essential tool for guaranteeing the spiritual unity of professionalrevolutionaries and their absolute identification with party orthodoxy.

6. The “war communism” experiment was such a disaster for the Russianeconomy that only a perverse spirit could have envisaged repeating it. But,for Lenin’s Diadochi to admit the importance of the market would have beento acknowledge the folly of the communist idea. This would have been theequivalent of political suicide, since it would have destroyed the very principlethat legitimated their power. Moreover, democratic centralism made it im-possible for the party to abandon Marxist ideology. It had been introducedprecisely to block in embryo any temptation to revise “scientific socialism”;the permanent purge system had been introduced specifically to eliminateanyone who “entertained” any doubts at all about the ultimate goal of therevolution. The Bolsheviks had no alternative but to follow the route indicatedby Lenin. They were prisoners of the system they themselves had created.

The “second Bukharin”—the man responsible for the NEP—was con-vinced that communism and the market were mutually incompatible. In aspeech authorizing the farm owners to sell their surplus products on the mar-ket, in which he repeated Guizot’s famous slogan: “Get rich!” he was carefulto stress his unconditional loyalty to the fundamental lesson of the father ofBolshevism. “In the pamphlet Sull’imposta in nature [the “Party favorite” wrotein an article published on April 24, 1924, in Pravda] Lenin writes that, inprogressing toward socialism, the first step is to overcome widespread petit-bourgeois spontaneity. Petit-bourgeois spontaneity, the small entrepreneur isour main enemy and to get the better of him, it is necessary to have the courageto make an alliance with big capital, especially through concessions. The pro-letariat, the socialist element of the economy, plus large capital will form abloc that will break that widespread petit-bourgeois spontaneity.”100 “We mustachieve socialism, ie. a centrally planned economy. This is our ultimate goal.But petit-bourgeois spontaneity, our main enemy, we shall overcome in alli-ance with its major ally, concession capitalism: with State capitalism. Coop-eration is the element that works in association with the capitalist elements,the kulak elements, in the countryside. But we are adding this ring to thesystem of State capitalism; in so doing, with the help of these capitalist ele-ments we will be able to curb the advance of petit-bourgeois spontaneity.”101

The underlying idea of Bukharin’s strategy—which, according to a highlyimaginative interpretation fostered the permanent coexistence of communismand the market102—was that it would be possible to solve the catastrophic crisisof the Russian economy generated by “war communism”103 by means of a “peas-ant Brest,” a compromise with the farm owners. They would be allowed totrade, but, at the same time, the one-party dictatorship would be consolidated,thus avoiding a revival of capitalism104 by “enhancing economic controls which

Page 198: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 185

are an integral part of the state machinery”105 and controlling the kulaks bymeans of a totally nationalized bank system and the “monopoly of externaltrade.”106 The barriers would be such that it would be unthinkable for Russiansociety to abandon communism. In other words, shut the “golden-eggedchicken” in a cage [that is how Bukharin referred to private enterprise] exploitit for as long as possible, and let it gradually die. This is what the “Party favorite”meant by “snail-pace communism”: a “gentle death”107 of the micro-marketeconomy revived in 1921 with the declared objective of avoiding a “peasantVendee” by increasing the production and productivity that had collapsed fol-lowing requisition and rationing.

Stalin disagreed. He flirted very briefly with the theory of “snail-pace com-munism” but then adopted the strategy advocated by Trotsky and Preobra-zhensky and attacked the small entrepreneur as the “principal enemy ofsocialism.”108 Stalin hoped to arrive at the “final solution” of the peasant issueby eliminating all evidence of private property in the countryside.109 With com-pulsory collectivization of land, the military logic practically prevailed over theeconomic logic and “administrative coercion [penetrated] the heart of produc-tion”110 transforming all society—precisely as foreseen by Bakunin in directpolemic with Marx and Engels—into one immense barracks.111

Contrary to Trotsky’s opinion,112 this second assault was by no means aThermidor. In 1794, the Thermidor reaction in France had restored at leastpart of the civil powers confiscated by Jacobin terror, with the introductionof the ideological control of production and distribution processes. The “Sta-lin revolution” instead enveloped the peasant world in the coercive structuresof the centrally planning state and transformed the “red bureaucracy” into anall-powerful class. It was the complete triumph of the monopolistic logic overthe pluralistic-competitive logic. Stalin succeeded where Lenin had failed.113

The “widespread petit-bourgeois spontaneity” was destroyed on the basis ofthe principle of ontological incompatibility between communism and themarket.114

In human terms, the price paid for the revival of “war communism” wasdevastating.115 More than 12 million peasants died in the concentration camps.Other millions of wretches starved to death as a result of the famine provokedby the requisitioning of agricultural goods on the basis of the so-called “Preo-brazhensky law,”116 which required covering the food requirement of thoseallocated to the industrial sector.117 It was the biggest bloodbath in the historyof humanity, far worse than the horrendous Nazi holocaust.118 Even “fromthe agricultural perspective it was also . . . a complete failure”119 from whichthe Soviet Union would never recover.

Nonetheless, the “red bureaucracy” attained its political objective:120 thepeasant class was suppressed as an independent social force and transformedinto a mass of regimented workers. “State serfdom”121 was a form of rule evenmore total than oriental despotism. What remained of civil Russian societywas disintegrated by the “infernal machine” built by Lenin and assimilated

Page 199: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

186 Revolutionary Apocalypse

by the structures of the new all-owning state, which became a ruthless and alldevouring Moloch. The market was almost completely eradicated and theState-Party became the sole regulator of social life. Lenin’s dream came true:“society [was transformed] into one big office and one big factory” as a “nec-essary step for the thoroughly cleaning society of all infamies and abominationsof capitalist exploitation.”122

The result was the creation of a “civil/state society [in which the State] wasnot divided from civil society by a Chinese wall: one crossed into the otherand from a certain perspective the countless—even extensive—organizationsof civil society were peripheral organs of the State.”123 The Communists calledthe new social formation—comparable to the Inca system for the total controlof the state over human life124—“dictatorship of the proletariat.” But this typ-ical “ideological formula” hid a very different reality. The logical and inevi-table consequence of the complete destruction of the market was the equallycomplete destruction of civil society and therefore universal bureaucratization; thispredictably generated what Max Weber in a prophetical conference on Marx-ist socialism had called the “dictatorship of the clerk over the worker.”125

In conclusion, the homo ideologicus shaped by the party ideated and createdby Lenin pursued a policy of total planning to produce the structural andcultural conditions for the triumph of the “man-function”;126 that is to say, ofthe homo burocraticus.

NOTES

1. Montgomery, Storia delle guerre (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970), p. 479.2. In the preface to Bukharin’s pamphlet “The World Economy and Imperialism”

(1915) Lenin writes: “Inevitably imperialism will burst and capitalism will be trans-formed into its opposite” (Complete Works, vol. 22, p. 107).

3. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 35, p. 76.4. On this point, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant work, Lenin in Zurich

(London: Bodley Head, 1976).5. Anatoly Lunacharsky has left us the following description of Lenin’s departure

from Zurich: “Lenin was relaxed and happy. Watching him as he stood smiling on thestep of the departing train, I had the sensation that he was thinking more or less this:“Finally, finally, that has arrived for which I was born, for which I prepared, for whichI prepared the entire party, without which our whole life would be merely prepatoryand unfinished.” (Quoted from Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin [New York: Harper &Row, 1963], p. 110.)

6. “History [wrote Lenin to the Central Committee of his party] will never for-give the revolutionaries for putting off what they could have gained immediately.”

7. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks.8. In fact, for a long time Lenin believed that the revolution would be composed

of two phases and was even critical of Trotsky for believing that the socialist phasewould start immediately. But, as soon as the tsarist regime collapsed, he adopted thesame attitude as Trotsky.

Page 200: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 187

9. “When much later I read Bourgeart’s book on Marat, I discovered that in manyways we had simply copied without knowing it the great example of the true ami dupeuple (not the one falsified by the monarchists) and that all the fuss and all the his-torical falsities handed down to us for almost one hundred years described a completelydeformed Marat had a reason, that the ruthless Marat removed the mask from Lafay-ette, Bailly and the other idols of the moment and revealed them as perfect betrayersof the revolution and that he like us did not want the revolution to be considered over,but declared it to be permanent” (Friedrich Engels, “Marx e la ‘Neue RheinischeZeitung”” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Il partito e l’Internazionale [Rome: Ed-izioni Rinascita, 1948], pp. 83–84). So it should be no surprise that Lassalle shouldhave considered Marx to be “the Marat of the [socialist] movement” and that Leninshould have defined Marxism as Jacobinism “fused with the working class movement”(see B. D. Wolfe, Marxism: One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine [New York: DialPress, 1967], p. 164.).

10. This was a destiny predicted by Prince Tolstoi with amazing accuracy. In 1884,during a conversation with Bulow, the future German chancellor expressed himself inthese terms: “If tsarism is ever overturned, it will be substituted by the communismof a certain Mr. Marx of London who died recently and to whose works I am devotingtime and attention” (quoted from J. P. Nettl, The Soviet Achievement [London: Thames& Hudson, 1967]).

11. Quoted from Leon Trotsky, Storia della Rivoluzione russa (Milan: Mondadori,1969), p. 326.

12. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin (Milan: Longanesi, 1966), pp. 294–295.13. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Grosset & Dun-

lop, 1977), p. 140. On the nature, the functions, and the methods of the CHEKA, itsleader wrote: “The CHEKA is not a tribunal. The CHEKA is the defense of therevolution in the same way as the Red Army. Like the Red Army, in the civil war itcannot stop to ask itself if its actions might damage single individuals but it must pursueone thing only, that is the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so theCHEKA must defend revolution and destroy the enemy even if its swords sometimesfall on the head of the innocent” (quoted from Ugo Scuotto, La dittatura del proletariato[Naples: Conte, 1976], p. 94).

14. Leon Trotsky, Storia della Rivoluzione russa, p. 233.15. In early 1921, Lenin stated that “in certain respects, a revolution is a miracle

. . . a miracle took place. . . . ” (“Speech at a Moscow Soviet Plenary Meeting,” inComplete Works, vol. 32, p. 153).

16. Quoted from E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1950).17. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS (Milan:

Rizzoli, 1984), p. 45.18. Quoted from Adam B. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (London: Collins, 1965),

p. 235.19. Quoted from John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (London: Lawrence &

Wishart, 1961).20. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 67.21. “The Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries are nothing but a variant of

a petty-bourgeois democracy” (Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 18, p. 196). So there existsonly one proletarian and socialist party: the Communist Party; hence, the cynical

Page 201: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

188 Revolutionary Apocalypse

definition of the so called “proletarian democracy” by Tomsky: “One party in power,the others in prison.”

22. Enzo Bettiza, Il mistero Lenin (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 157.23. Enlightening in this regard is the following anecdote: “In April 1917, Volin

met Trotsky in New York. He told him he intended travelling to Russia to take partin the revolution even though he was convinced that the ‘left wing Marxists’ aftertaking power would exterminate anarchists ‘like partridge.’ ‘You are imaginative, ob-stinate and incorrigible dreamers’ answered Trotsky; ‘there are only very vague dif-ferences between you anarchists and we communists.’ What he meant became clearin December 1919 when Volin was arrested by the Bolshevik military authorities, giventhat Volin was considered a major enemy, Trotsky was informed of the arrest. Hisbrutal, not to say laconic response: ‘Shoot Volin immediately.’” (Daniel Guerin, NoGod, No Master [New York: A. K. Press, 1998]).

24. Even those who had contributed to building the Soviet State were considereddangerous elements to be rendered impotent as soon as they expressed a position thatdid not agree with the general line of the party. About Angelica Balabanova, Leninhad this to say: “If she perseveres in scandal and intrigue, we’ll send her to Siberia”(quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Revolution sovietique [Paris: EditionsComplexe, 1980], p. 66).

25. Angelica Balabanova, La mia vita di rivoluzionaria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979),p. 150.

26. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 71.27. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in Complete

Works, vol. 28, p. 236.28. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 47.29. Lenin, Letter to American Workers, p. 72.30. “Yes [declared Lenin on August 3, 1919] it is a dictatorship of one party! This

is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position.” (Complete Works, vol. 24,p. 535.)

31. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 67.32. B. D. Wolfe, “Leninisme,” in M. M. Drachkovitch, ed., De Marx a Mao Tse-

Toung (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1967), p. 82.33. Lenin illustrated the meaning of dictatorship of the proletariat to Fossart and

Cachin, two of the founders of the French Communist Party: “The dictatorship ofthe proletariat is not exercised only on the bourgeoisie but also on the still not con-scious and reluctant part of the proletariat and their allies; as for the reformists, theyare shot” (quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Revolution sovietique, p. 61).And in fact the reformists were exterminated on the basis of the following reasoning:“Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain fromexpressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly inthe present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was whenthe whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blameif we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements” (Lenin, “Elev-enth Congress of the RCP (B),” in Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 283).

34. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 71.35. This was not marked, as claimed by Marcel Liebman, by “relative but very real

moderation in the repression of the counter-revolutionary elements” (Leninism underLenin [London: Merlin Press, 1975]). Liebman forgets that as soon as the Bolshevik

Page 202: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 189

party came to power, the ascete Feliks Dzerzhinsky said this to his comrades: “Do notbelieve that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; in this moment it is not justice thatwe need. Now it is a question of direct warfare, of fighting to the last drop of blood.Life or death! I propose, indeed I demand, a body for the revolutionary showdownwith the counter-revolutionaries” (quoted from Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gor-dievski, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev [Londonet al.: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990]).

36. Lenin, “How to Organise Competition?” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 414.37. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 37, pp. 336, 349, 350, 353, 354. The historian

Dmitry Volkonogov recently came across a letter of instructions from Lenin to theSoviet of a village: “Kill at least one hundred kulaks, take their bread from them, sothat the others live in terror.” The adjective Volkonogov uses to describe the person-ality of the charismatic leader of world bolshevism is “satanical.”

38. Bonch-Bruevich (quoted from Robert Conquest, “Le origini del terrore,” inAA.VV., Il costo umano del comunismo [Rome: Edizioni del Borghese, 1972], p. 31).

39. Quoted from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (Lon-don: Fontana, 1974). No less horrifying were the instructions given by Latsis to theagents of the CHEKA: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is uselessto seek proof to demonstrate that such and such is guilty of words or actions againstthe interests of Soviet power. The first words you address to the person arrested mustreveal: the class to which he belongs, his origins, his education and profession. Theseelements should mark the destiny of the accused. This is the essence of the red terror”(quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 496).

40. Quoted from Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, andSoldiers Councils, 1905–1921 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).

41. The uncovering of a statue of Robespierre in the vicinity of the Kremlin wasone of the first public actions of the Bolshevik regime.

42. “The democratic republic, the Constituent assembly, general Assembly, gen-eral elections, etc, are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for theemancipation of labour from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replacethis dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the prole-tariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies,falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and estab-lish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessibleto the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bour-geois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majorityof working people.” (Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” in Complete Works, vol.28, p. 370.)

43. Giuliano Procacci, Il Partito comunista nell’Unione Sovietica (Bari: Laterza,1974), p. 43.

44. Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature” in Complete Works, vol. 10,p. 47.

45. On this issue, see Vittorio Strada’s fundamental essay “Dissenso e socialismo”in AA. VV., Socialismo e dissenso (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).

46. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (Heinemann: London, 1951).47. Barrington Moore Jr., Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in

Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 154.

Page 203: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

190 Revolutionary Apocalypse

48. Marco Tarchi, Partito Unico e dinamica autoritaria (Naples: Akropolis, 1981),p. 254.

49. Quoted from John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World.50. The slogan was coined by Lunacharsky and approved by Lenin.51. See Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Sociology of Revolution (Philadelphia: Lippincott,

1925), pp. 215 et seq.52. Martin Malia, La Rivoluzione russa e i suoi sviluppi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974),

p. 156.53. Lenin, “Third Congress of the Communist International,” in Complete Works,

vol. 32, p. 471.54. Ibid., p. 471.55. This is Bonch-Bruevich’s description of the orgy of collectivisation that fol-

lowed the conquest of the Winter Palace: “The course of revolutionary events sochanged our social relations that it was considered an absolute good to nationaliseabsolutely everything from the large factory to the barber shop with one worker andone pair of scissors and two razors and even down to the last carrot in the shops.Barriers were raised everywhere so that no one could get food through, everyone wassubject to rationing” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storiadell’URSS, p. 63).

56. Lenin, Opere complete, vol. 41, p. 487.57. Nikolai Bukharin, Economia del periodo di transformazione (Milan: Jaca Book,

1971), p. 78.58. Lenin, “Speech at Conference of Political education,” in Complete Works, vol.

31, p. 367f.59. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, dedication in The ABC of Com-

munism, transl. by E. and C. Pane (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1922).60. Volin, The Unknown Revolution: Kronstadt 1921, Ukraine 1918–21 (London:

Freedom Press, 1955).61. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 47.62. See Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1970).63. See Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution (New York: Donald Press,

1962); Cornelius Castoriadis, La societe bureaucratique (Paris: Union Generaled’Editions, 1973); Claude Lefort, Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Geneve:Droz, 1971); Pietro Grilli di Cortona, Rivoluzioni e burocrazie (Milan: Angeli, 1991).

64. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” in Complete Works,vol. 27, p. 271.

65. “Lenin and Trotsky have substituted the representative bodies elected by uni-versal suffrage with the Soviet, as the only true representation of the working masses.But, by suffocating public life throughout the country, it is fatal that life should becomeincreasingly paralysed within the Soviet themselves. Without general elections, with-out unlimited freedom of press and assembly, without the free exchange of opinions,life dies in every public institution, it becomes an apparent life where bureaucracyremains the only active element. Public life hibernates; a few dozen party leaders oftireless energy and unlimited idealism direct and govern; among these in reality theleadership is in the hands of a dozen superior minds; and an elite of the working classis summonsed from time to time to meetings to applaud the speeches of the leadersand to vote unanimously the resolutions put forward to them—so deep down it is

Page 204: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 191

government by a gang, a dictatorship certainly, but not the dictatorship of the prole-tariat, the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense,in the Jacobin sense” (Rosa Luxemburg, “La rivoluzione russa,” in Scritti politici [Rome:Editori Riuniti, 1970], pp. 590–591).

66. The official definition of the Communist Party contained in an order of theday voted at the second congress of the Communist International (1920).

67. “Small extensions of land, cultivated independently by the peasants and theCossacks, were excluded from confiscation. That was one of Lenin’s more intelligentpolitical moves, whether one considers it a strategy to obtain the support of the peas-ants or a prelude to the plan to divide and weaken the revolutionary socialists, byremoving their supremacy in the Russian countryside” (Edward H. Carr, The BolshevikRevolution). Without the euphemisms, this means that Lenin, even though he knewthat small ownership was incompatible with the objectives of his revolution, rode thetiger of “land for the peasants” for purely strategic reasons; in other words, he willfullytricked the people with the deliberate objective of leading it into the trap of totalitarianpower.

68. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 357.69. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980), p. 224.70. Ibid., p. 222.71. Lenin, “Agrarian Question in Russia,” in Complete Works, vol. 15, p. 138.72. With his usual brutal frankness Trotsky explained this theory at the IX congress

of the RBCP of March 1920: “Militarisation is inconceivable without the militarisationof the unions as such, without the creation of a regime under which each worker feelsthat he is a soldier of labour who is not free to do as he chooses; if he is ordered tomove, he must obey; otherwise he becomes a deserter to be punished. This is themilitarisation of the working class” (quoted from Gianfranco Dellacasa, La controri-voluzione sconosciuta [Milan: Jaca Book, 1977], p. 33).

73. On this point, see the particularly enlightening monograph by Laszlo Sza-muely, First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems: Principles and Theories (Budapest:Akademiai Kiado, 1974).

74. Lenin, “First All-Russia Congress on Adult Education” in Complete Works, vol.29, p. 352.

75. Lenin, “The Food and War Situation,” in Complete Works, vol. 29, p. 525f. Onthe basis of such statements of principle it is hard to claim, as Maurice Dobb does,that “war communism was an empirical creation and not the a priori result of a theory”(Soviet Economic Development since 1917, 6th ed. [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1966]). The truth of the matter is that “NEP is explained by the force of things, warcommunism by the force of false ideas” (Raymond Aron, In Defence of Decadent Europe[Regnery/South Bend: Gateway, 1979]).

76. Nikolai Bukharin, Economia del periodo di transformazione, p. 83.77. Ibid., p. 130.78. Quoted from Laszlo Szamuely, First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems.79. Quoted from Ugo Intini, Se la Rivoluzione d’Ottobre fosse stata di maggio (Milan:

SugarCo, 1977), p. 191.80. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Kautsky (Ann Arbor: Uni-

versity of Michigan Press, 1961).81. Bertrand Russell made the following comment on Bolshevik Russia: “The

country comes to resemble an immensely magnified Jesuit College. Every kind of

Page 205: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

192 Revolutionary Apocalypse

liberty is banned as being ‘bourgeois’” (The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism [Notting-ham: Spokesman, 1995], p. 104).

82. One of the ironies of the history of the October Revolution is that it wasprecisely the black market that “allowed the Bolsheviks to retain power in their firstone hundred days of life” (Roy Medvedev, Dopo la Rivoluzione [Rome: Editori Riuniti,1978], p. 479).

83. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich Storia dell’URSS, p. 132.84. Nothing demonstrates the ruthless cynicism of the Bolshevik “morals” in the

face of the frightful consequences of “war communism” better than Gorky’s words: “Isuppose that most of the 35 million who are starving will die . . . The people who aredestined to die are semi savage, stupid brutes from the Russian villages . . . and willbe substituted by a new race of educated, reasonable, people full of energy” (quotedfrom Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 136).

85. Lenin’s answer to Gorky in 1919 when asked how he intended getting breadfor the people.

86. Robert Linhart, Lenin, i contadini e Taylor (Rome: Coines, 1977), p. 81.87. See David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961),

p. 204 et seq.88. Luciano Cafagna, “Bucharin e la rivoluzione immatura,” in Mondoperaio,

(1976), p. 12.89. Quoted from Rodolfo Mondolfo, Studi sulla Rivoluzione russa (Naples: Morano,

1968), pp. 207–208.90. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, “La legge fondamentale dell’accumulazione origi-

naria socialista,” in Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, L’accumulazionesocialista (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), p. 91.

91. Jean Elleinstein, The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Lawrence and Wishart,1976). It should perhaps be stressed that the Stalin terror was not directed only againstthe kulaks but also against farmhands. This is not too much of a surprise, since inLenin’s time—as we read in a document prepared by the Kronstadt rebels—“the entiremass of peasants had been declared enemies of the people and assimilated to the kulaks”(quoted from Gianfranco Dallacasa, La controrivoluzione sconosciuta, p. 52).

92. See Angelo Tasca, Autopsia dello stalinismo (Milan: Comunita, 1958).93. Lenin had pronounced this death sentence many years before the October

Revolution. In 1907 for example, he wrote, “In the peasant lives the instinct of pro-prietor—if not of today, then of tomorrow. It is the proprietor’s, the owner’s instinctthat repels the peasant from the proletariat, engendering in him an aspiration to be-come someone in the world, to become a bourgeois, to hem himself in against allsociety on his own plot of land, on his own dung-heap” (“Fifth Congress of theR.S.D.L.P.,” in Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 467).

94. Lenin, “Forward to the Last Decisive Fight,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 56f.95. Lenin, “On the Famine,” in Complete Works, vol. 27, p. 398.96. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works, vol.

28, p. 388.97. Lenin, “The NEP and the Tasks of the Committees for Political-Cultural

Education,” in Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 63.98. Lenin, “Seventh Moscow Gubernia Conference of the RCP,” in Complete

Works, vol. 33, p. 96.

Page 206: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Utopia in Power 193

99. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1956).

100. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 36.101. Ibid., p. 48.102. Stephen Cohen is notably the most ardent supporter of this interpretation

(Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 [Oxford: OUP,1980]). For an opposite interpretation, see C. Salmon, Le reve mathematique de NicolaiBukharin (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980).

103. The most complete analysis of the causes of the famines experienced by Russiansociety between 1918 and 1920 remains that of B. Brutzkus, Economic Planning in SovietRussia (London: Routledge, 1935). This text was the first empirical corroboration ofthe theory developed theoretically by Ludwig von Mises, namely that a commandeconomy is intrinsically irrational.

104. Bukharin’s response in October 1926 to the worker Iakov Ossovsky, who ad-vocated recognition of the legitimacy of free exchange of opinion and even demandedthe institution of a second party: “Discussion is inadmissible, because it would shakethe very foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the unity of our party andits dominant position in the country, because it would take water to the mill of thegroups, large and small, aspiring to political democracy” (quoted from Mikhail Hellerand Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 326).

105. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 36.106. Ibid., p. 48.107. A. Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–28 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1960).108. Lenin, The Tax in Kind, p. 330.109. General Grigorenko described “the enthusiasm and passion” generated in the

communists by the “final offensive” in the following terms: “Bread was scarce, youhad to queue, famine and rationing were just behind the corner, yet we allowed our-selves to be dragged along by Stalin and were pleased: Yes, truly, a great change, theelimination of small farm owners, the destruction of the very soil on which capitalismcould revive. Let them try to attack us now, those imperialist sharks! We are on theright path, the route leading to the triumph of socialism” (quoted from ChristopherAndrew and Oleg Gordievski, KGB: The Inside Story).

110. David Rousset, A Critical History of the USSR (London: Allkison and Busby,1982).

111. “The communists will take over the reins of government because the peopleneed proper protection; they will create one State Bank that will concentrate in itshands all trade, industry, agriculture and even scientific production while the popularmasses will be split in two armies: the industrial and the agricultural army, under thedirect command of the engineers of State who will constitute a new political-knowledgeable cast of privileged” (Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge:CUP, 1990).

112. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1937),p. 105ff.

113. According to Roy Medvedev, the Stalin revolution violated “the leninist prin-ciple of voluntary collectivisation” (On Stalin and Stalinism [Oxford: OUP, 1979], 323).He refrains to mention that as early as January 1919 Lenin had explained to his mostdirect assistants that the objectives of Communism could not be attained “without the

Page 207: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

194 Revolutionary Apocalypse

use of terror” (quoted from Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Stalin: Order Through Terror[London: Longman, 1981]).

114. A principle illustrated by Gorky in the early thirties that contained a deathsentence for the farm owners: if the entrepreneur farmer does not realize that “theterm granted him by history” is over, then “we are entitled to consider ourselves stillin a situation of civil war. And the consequence is obvious: if the enemy will notsurrender, let him be eliminated” (quoted from Aleksandr Tsipko, Le radici della per-estrojka [Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990], p. 119).

115. For an idea of the horrors that accompanied compulsory collectivisation, oneneed refer only to the heartbreaking confession made by a colonel of the OGPU: “Iam an old bolshevik. I fought against the tsar and I fought in the civil war. I did allthis to surround villages with machine guns and order my men to fire indiscriminatelyon the crowd of peasants? Oh, no, no!” (Quoted from Isaac Deutscher, Stalin [NewYork: Vintage Books, 1962], p. 325.)

116. Yuri Ambartsumov, NEP: A Modern View (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988),p. 63.

117. According to Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties[Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1968]), the overall balance of the Stalin revolution was nofewer than 20 million victims. Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) indicates 60million.

118. Stephane Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme (Paris: Laffont, 1997).119. Moshe Lewin, Storia sociale dello stalinismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. 89.120. Victor Zaslavsky has rightly observed that “if one accepts the official Stalin

interpretation of collectivisation as a painful but inevitable measure for modernisingthe country and increasing the productivity of soviet agriculture, it is not clear whythe kulaks, who constituted the most active and productive group of peasants, had tobe eliminated. The interpretation of the Stalin government is much easier to under-stand if one considers that the real objective of its policy was not to increase produc-tivity per se, but the total control of peasants and the total integration of agriculturein the centrally planned system” (Storia del sistema sovietico [Rome: La Nuova ItaliaScientifica, 1995], p. 100).

121. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World: The USSR: Bureaucratic Collec-tivism (London: Tavistock, 1985).

122. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” in Complete Works, vol. 25, p. 474.123. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 253.124. See Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru (Princeton, NJ: D. van

Nostrand Company, 1961).125. Max Weber, “Socialism” in Political Writings (Cambridge: CUP, 1994).126. Aleksandr Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism (London: Gollancz, 1984).

Page 208: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 10

The Proletarian Church

1. The October Revolution was a veritable declaration of war against Westerncivilization and all its institutions, from private property to parliamentary de-mocracy. While Europe seemed intent on destroying itself in a ghastly blood-bath, an elite of revolutionaries, trained at the rigid school of Lenin,announced that, at last, they had found a way for making the “Event” proph-esied by the holy scriptures of scientific socialism—the end of capitalism—become a reality. A new era was about to start: “the era of the global offensive,the era of the triumph of the global socialist revolution”1 that would culminatewith “the liberation . . . of the entire proletarian world . . . and of all oppressedpeoples and countries.”2

Essential for this grandiose program—“to remake the world”3 by turning itcompletely upside down—was the creation of a supranational body to whichto entrust the role of chief of state of the proletarian army. The Cominternwas established at the start of 1919, with the idea that it would be a globalparty, with separate divisions in each country—the individual communist par-ties operating outside the Soviet Union—shaped “by the extremely severe,truly iron discipline”4 of democratic centralism and subjected to “periodicalpurges, . . . with the purpose of eliminating personal and petit-bourgeoisinterests.”5 Part of the program of “bolshevization” of the European workers’movement was “the mass action of the proletariat to start armed conflictagainst the ruling force of capitalism.”6

The declared objective was to create a centralized party system willing to“subordinate the interests of the movement of each country to the commoninterests of Revolution on an international scale.”7 Since the only country inwhich the communists were in power was the Soviet Union, it was inevitable

Page 209: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

196 Revolutionary Apocalypse

that the “hegemony of the revolutionary International should have been inthe hands of the Russians.”8 The Bolshevik party was the only party that hadestablished a dictatorship of the proletariat, and leadership of the revolution-ary movement was its by right. In any event, who else was there to lead theplanetary battle to abolish the “final form of slavery: salaried slavery”?9 So itcame to pass that, following the October Revolution and the creation of theComintern, “an insignificant sect, ignored or denigrated by the Western so-cialists” was transformed “in a world power, the object of endless admirationor profound hatred.”10

The historical event that had begun in 1789 now had a new chapter. “Doas in Russia” became the magic password of the more extreme elements ofthe European socialist movement. All of a sudden, Bolshevism had become apolitical-ideological force of continental dimensions, to which no one—richor poor, strong or meek, educated or ignorant—could remain indifferent. Itwas imperative to take a stand, to declare oneself for or against, to take sides.

Thus began what Ernst Nolte has called the “world civil war.”11 A formi-dable new historical actor—the Communist International—had made a rev-olutionary call to arms, to form a planetary army composed of the “internalproletariat” and the “external proletariat” of modern industrial civilization,with the declared goal of rebuilding the whole world from its foundations.For the first time ever, the history of civilization was one. At its core, theexistential duel between two mutually repulsive models of society: on the oneside, the society that rotated around the market, on the other, the plannedsociety controlled by the state.

The Bolsheviks made no mystery about their intention to spark a civil war,wherever possible. In 1918, Zinoviev triumphantly announced: “Civil war hasbroken out all over Europe: in Germany, the victory of communism is abso-lutely inevitable; within the year, Europe will be communist; then the fightfor communism will start in America, possibly in Asia and in the other con-tinents.”12 “Soon [echoed Lenin] we will convince the whole world that justiceis on our side.”13

In Europe hope in the communist palingenesis went parallel with fear of therevolution. The bourgeois governments did not miss an opportunity to mockthe Bolshevik experiment, claiming it would end in a rapid, total failure, butin fact it made them nervous. “Bolshevism [wrote a worried Clemenceau toPichon] has become a force that threatens, with its Red Army . . . to extendthe Soviet regime to all the territories, first of ancient Russia, and then ofEurope. This monstrous new form of imperialism is a danger that looms overEurope just when the end of the war will inevitably determine an economicand social crisis in each country. The allies must bring about the fall of theSoviets and place Bolshevism in quarantine so that it is isolated and con-demned to wasting away.”14

In effect, the call to arms and the hopes stirred by the Bolsheviks inevitablyexercised a strong influence on the proletarian masses of Europe, for a variety

Page 210: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 197

of reasons. For generations, they had been educated to expect a revolt ofliberation. The Great War had had a traumatic impact on all forms of tradi-tional authority, and the confidence of workers in the leadership of the So-cialist International and its gradual, legalistic methods of battle had weakened.This contributed in no small degree to the revival of extremism that had nevercompletely died out. Moreover, life in the trenches had had a profound impacton the psychology of the soldiers, encouraging the spontaneous growth ofwhat Martov referred to as “consumer communism”:15 millions of individualshad come to see politics as a battle whose purpose was the complete destruc-tion of the opposition. This obviously facilitated the penetration of Bolshevikpropaganda, completely centered on the idea of war among classes.

For all these reasons, the Soviet experiment was charged with extraordinarymeaning and millenarian hopes16 and the Comintern was perceived as a char-ismatic institution. On the other hand, the leaders of Soviet communism wereresponsible for giving the Comintern its soteriological role, by presenting itas the historical actor destined to “prepare the resurrection of humanity.”17 EvenGramsci, in referring to and developing a remark by Engels,18 indicated thatthe “communist party was . . . the only institution that could seriously compareitself to the religious communities of primitive Christianity,”19 with the onefundamental difference that, whereas the Christian church gathered togetherthe “militants of the City of God,” the communist church—“the home offaith” and “the repository of doctrine”20—organized the “militants of the Cityof Man” in “iron-like battalions,”21 always on “the warpath,”22 and driven bythe firm conviction that the “nucleus of a new society” had been created inthe Soviet Union and that the “reconstruction of the world” was possible andwould start from there.23

Despite its militant atheism, this movement had all the elements necessaryto be considered the “third great Judaic religion,”24 born from the unionbetween traditional Russian messianism and Marxian messianism. In effect,“like other new religions, Leninism did not derive its power from the mul-titudes, but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts, to each of whomwillpower and intolerance gave the strength of one hundred apathetics. Likeother new religions, Leninism was led by those who had been able to combine,possibly sincerely, the new spirit with the capacity to see much further forwardin time than their followers: politicians with an at least average dose of po-litical cynicism, . . . agile experimenters that religion had freed from the com-mitment to truth and pietas but who were not blind to the reality of facts andconvenience, and so liable to being accused of hypocrisy . . . Like other newreligions, it seemed to remove all the warmth, all the fun and freedom fromdaily existence, leaving a dull, morose expression on the face of its faithful.Like other new religions, it mercilessly and unjustly persecuted anyone whoput up an active resistance. Like other new religions, it had no scruples. Likeother new religions, it was permeated by missionary ardour and ecumenicalambitions.”25

Page 211: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

198 Revolutionary Apocalypse

In other words, at last the prophecy made by Lassalle had come true: “Theproletariat will be the rock on which the church of the future will be built,”26

founded on the “union of the workers class and of science for the salvationof humanity.”27 The eschatological pathos of Marxism had found its mostsuitable institutional guise: the Comintern as a global organization of therevolutionary proletariat, led by the sect of true believers—the “experts ofliberation”—who had transformed the whole of Russia into an immense lab-oratory for the most extraordinary experiment ever undertaken: the metastatictransformation of human nature, through the annihilation of all the institu-tions—first and foremost private property—and spontaneous impulses thathad made the world a “desert populated by wild beasts.”

2. The Bolshevik leaders were very aware of the charismatic nature of theirmovement and lost no opportunity to enhance it. “Lenin was considered theleader of . . . a priestly hierarchy”28 and, already in 1921, Stalin explicitly de-scribed the Communist Party as a “sort of Order of sword-bearing knightswithin the Soviet State, directing its bodies and inspiring its activity.”29 Theparty was promoted to the rank of “infallible” institution,30 the absolute rulerof History,31 which would extend its jurisdiction to the whole world.

How could it have been otherwise? After all, Lenin had proclaimed that“the doctrine of Marx was omnipotent because it was right.”32 The logical con-clusion was naturally that the Comintern, insofar as institutionalization of therevolutionary gnosis, always moved in the right direction. Its every action hadto be in accordance with the immanent purpose of reality and of its supremeleaders. Insofar as they provided the correct interpretation of the Holy Writ-ings of scientific socialism, they were none other than the impersonal agentsof History, “the only representatives of revolutionary Good.”33

Lukacs provides us with the most complete and philosophically aggressivetheorization of the soteriological nature of the revolutionary undertaking. Itwas “a total break with all the institutions and dominant life styles of thebourgeois world,”34 and therefore essentially a “horizontal” version of chili-asm. Consequently, the Communist Party is described as a sacral institution,an exclusive and intolerant Ecclesia militans that claims the historical right tobuild a planetary dominion to free humanity from the capitalist-bourgeoisethos. In other words, citing Hegel’s famous formula, the Communist Party is“the entrance to God’s entrance to the world.”35

Admittedly, Lukacs places the proletariat at the core of his eschatologicaldialectics, but it is the “supposed proletariat”—as Irving Fetscher called it36—not the actual workers’ class as such. The proletariat to which Lukacs entruststhe historical mission of building the Marxian kingdom of liberty is not anempirical reality but a more hegeliano; that is, a metaphysical category createdin the laboratory of dialectics: the proletariat, “according to his concept,” theproletariat as it would behave if it were conscious of its true interests and ofthe role assigned to it by history.

Page 212: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 199

So much so that, after stating that “only class can penetrate social realitywith its action and change it in its totality”37 and that “the class consciousnessof the proletariat is the truth of the historical process as actor,”38 Lukacs addsthat this consciousness is of a “latent and theoretical character” and is onlyaroused through the demiurgic intervention of the party. The CommunistParty therefore has “the lofty function of being bearer of the class conscious-ness of the proletariat, and . . . of its historical mission.”39

In other words, the party is responsible for instilling revolutionary con-sciousness in the proletariat. And, since this consciousness—in accordancewith the principle that subject and object coincide—is consciousness of theabsolute of self, insofar as teleologically oriented toward communist society,the logical conclusion is that the Comintern is the sole and exclusive holder of thetruth of History. In fact, Lukacs writes that “the communists are the classconsciousness of the proletariat in visible form”40 and that for this reason theymust “enlighten the masses on their actions”41 and also exercise “the dicta-torship of the proletariat, . . . the only possible route for allowing the salvationthat allows salvation.”42

As with Lenin, the party vis-a-vis class is “what idea is with respect to matterin Plato’s theory: what gives shape to the shapeless.”43 It converts “class in se”into “class per se” and in this way makes the empirical existence of the pro-letariat coincide with its concept. For this reason, the Communist Party—the“incarnation of the idea of revolution” and uniter “of the conscious avant-garde”44—has the historical right to lead “the men spiritually ruined and cor-rupted by capitalism”:45 a right that derives from no formal mandate butexclusively from the consciousness that the party has of its own revolutionarymission, a consciousness that coincides in the Hegel manner with the scienceof the ultimate purpose. From that point on, the empirical class is consideredto be affected by a particular social trachoma, a “false consciousness,” and theparty assumes eo ipso the role of gnostic paraclete whose task is to protect theproletarian masses from “the corrupting influence of . . . bourgeois thought.”46

This is like saying that the “empirical class” thinks and acts in a differentmanner from the “supposed class”; that by nature it is reformist, whereasscientific socialism wants it to be revolutionary in order to destroy bourgeoissociety. For this precise reason, the proletarian masses must have the ideologicalprotection of the party. Only the party can prevent the “spontaneous” reform-ism from prevailing on revolutionary “consciousness.”

Lukacs’s theory is, to say the least, paradoxical: his “class consciousness” isnot a consciousness of class but the “absolute consciousness” that derives froma philosophy of history, to which, however, the workers contributed nothing,given that it was a typical product of the bourgeois culture. Be that as it may,Lukacs writes that “class consciousness is the ethics of the proletariat, theunity of its theory and practice, the point in which the economic necessity ofits battle of liberation is dialectically converted into freedom. The party isrecognised as an historical figure, as an active vehicle of class consciousness,

Page 213: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

200 Revolutionary Apocalypse

and at the same time is the vehicle of the ethics of the fighting proletariat.This function must determine its policy. Even if it were not in accord withthe empirical reality of the movement, and its passwords not used, in the endthe necessary course of history will give it satisfaction and the moral forcederiving from the appropriate class consciousness of appropriate class actionwill bear its fruits.”47

So there is an insuperable ontological and gnoseological asymmetry betweenclass and party. It is true that, initially, class was given an extraordinary power:to bring to an end the prehistory of humanity with its collective action, andmake the “dialectical leap from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty.”48

However, immediately afterward there is the statement that only the party,insofar as “incarnation of the union of theory and practice,”49 can indicate theroute to salvation. In a world dominated by bourgeois liberty—which is a “cor-rupt and corrupting privilege”50—and “false consciousness”—which blinds theexploited, preventing them from perceiving the route to salvation—only the“conscious avant-garde” has a clear vision of the immanent purpose of reality.Its superior knowledge derives from its monopoly of the tools for correctlydecoding the theory—Marxism—that has at last broken “the chain of errorsand ruses” and made it possible to “unveil the essence of society.”51

The Communist Party is therefore the institutionalization of a superiorknowledge that is both scientific and soul-saving. In a world turned upside downby private property and transformed into a huge prison dominated by the per-verse laws of reification, salvation is still possible, as indicated by the dialectical-revolutionary gnosis. The party must vigilate constantly to ensure that thesoteriological message is not adulterated and must fight both against the bour-geois ideology and “the dangers of opportunism”52 that tend to keep reemergingin the revolutionary movement. “It is essential [insists Lukacs] that the classconsciousness of the proletariat be kept pure as it is the only instrument capableof staying en route in a stormy sea.”53 Were it to be contaminated by Social-Democratic opportunism—“the class enemy that hides within the very ranksof the party”54—the titanic battle of humanity to free itself from reificationwould be destined to fail. Hence, Lukacs’s defense of Leninist “iron discipline”55

based on the “conscious submission” of the ascetics of the revolution to the“overall will of the party”56 and on the Jacobin method of “purges”57 in orderto uproot in embryo every “deviation (from) the end to be achieved.”58

3. History and Class Consciousness is a work indispensable for understandingthe intellectual and moral world of revolutionary gnosticism. It develops inthe best possible fashion all the corollaries implicit in the immanentizationof the Judeo-Christian eschaton accomplished by Marx following the pathdrawn by Hegel. The underlying formula is clearly a reelaboration of thegnostic-Manichean vision of history: (a) two principles engaged in a mortalbattle between “revolutionary consciousness” and “false consciousness”;(b) three phases: original unity, fall, and restoration of the harmony destroyed

Page 214: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 201

by the bourgeois ethos; (c) an actor-pariah charismatically elected by history:the proletariat conceived as Messiasklasse; and (d) a Paraclete—the party of theconscious and active revolutionaries—with the mission of guiding humanitythrough the moral desert of the “society of egoism” toward the “society ofaffection.”59 The absolutely logical conclusion, given the metaphysical prom-ises of the Hegel-Marx theodicy, is that the jurisdiction of the revolutionaryparty is total, indeed totalitarian in the strongest sense of the term, since ithas a cosmic-historic mission to fulfill: the salvation of humanity depends onits planetary expansion.60

One can understand why the proletarian church adopted the maxim: ExtraEcclesiam nulla salus. “The party [Trostky declared in 1924] is always right. Wecan only be right together and with the party, since history has given us noother way of being in the right. The English have a motto, My country, rightor wrong. We have a better historical justification when we say: it may be rightor wrong depending on the individual case, but it is my Party, and if the Partymakes a decision that one or other of us believes to be unfair, it is my Party,and I must tolerate the consequences of its decisions to the end.”61 Even moreenlightening is the description of the religious nature of the Communist Partymade by the Bolshevik Grigory Piatakov:

According to Lenin, the party is founded on a principle of coercion that knows nolimit or impediment. And the central idea of this principle of unlimited coercion isnot coercion itself, but the absence of any limit—moral, political or even physical—no matter what. Such a party is capable of miracles and acts that no other humancollectivity could perform . . . A true communist, that is to say a man educated in theparty who has profoundly absorbed its spirit, becomes in a certain sense a miraclemaker. For the party, a true Bolshevik will willingly free his mind of ideas in which hehas believed for years. A true Bolshevik buries his personality in that of the collectivity,the Party, to the point of eradicating his opinions and convictions and agreeing hon-estly with the party—this is the proof that he is a true Bolshevik. There can be no lifefor him outside the ranks of the party and he is prepared to say that black is white andwhite is black, should the party desire it. In order to become one with this party, hewill be amalgamated with it, will abandon his personality, until there remains withinhim not a single particle that is not one with the party, that does not belong to it.62

In these words of Piatakov, it is hard not to recognize exactly the same spiritthat we find in a letter written by Loyola describing the mental dispositionof the true Jesuit: “In the hands of my superior, I will be like soft wax, some-thing from which he can demand what he wants . . . and I must use the utmostcare, in carrying out each order. I will consider myself a dead body withoutdiscernment or will; a mass of matter, that passively allows itself to be placedwherever anyone wishes, like a walking stick in the hands of an old man,who uses it according to his needs, and places it wherever he chooses. So willI be in the hands of the Order, so that I may serve it in the manner it seesmost fit.”63

Page 215: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

202 Revolutionary Apocalypse

The hierarchy in the Leninist party closely resembled that of the Mani-chean church. Just as in the Ekklesia eklekte, the catechumens could only “hopein salvation, if they remained in contact with, and at the service of, the Per-fects,”64 so in the Comintern the proletarian masses could only escape “op-portunism” and “bourgeois corruption” if they accepted without reserve theleadership of the ascetes of permanent revolution. Hence, the importance ofextending centralization to its extreme limits, guaranteeing on the one sidethat the “body of consecrated” was intellectually and morally united and, onthe other, that the base obeyed the orders of the summit of the charismaticcommunity. Everything in the Comintern—in this, too, it was a kind of avatarof the Manichean church—is ordered from above and rests on the absoluteauthority of one leader, who is outside and above the hierarchy. He is thesupreme Auctoratis spiritualis, whose specific function is to guarantee unity oftheory and practice because he alone has the capacity to interpret the holywritings correctly. This is an indispensable condition, if the impersonal domin-ion of the revolutionary gnosis is to be effective and the party is to fulfill itsmission of opposing the perverse rule of capital until it has been annihilatedon a world scale.

Now, a political body that aspires to be the “compact and militant formationof an idea”65—the definition is by Gramsci—must perforce harbor within itsbreast a body of “doctors of law,” the “guard dogs of orthodoxy.” They aloneare equipped with the special symbolic code and have the institutional role ofaddressing three classes of user: “(1) the proselyte, who has identified with theorganisation and considers it to be the bearer (and only guarantor) of reality;(2) the propagandist, who circulates the messages professionally, in accordancewith the auditorium, guaranteeing unity of language by means of a didacticsystem authorised by the organisation itself; (3) the enemy, who talks of realityin terms of empirical or traditional points of reference. To the three classesof user correspond the three stylistic genres that evolve in the language of thecharismatic bureaucracy: (1) slogans or verbal expression of the commitmentthat derives from identifying with the charismatic organisation, (2) manuals,indicating the commandments and (3) the apologia, the ritual language usedbefore the enemy.”66

Orthodoxy increasingly becomes a rhetoric that has no link with reality. Ata certain point it becomes what Alain Besancon has suggested calling “ideo-logical surreality”;67 that is to say, an institutionalized lie to be accepted astruth in order to remain part of the charismatic community. On the otherhand, an orthodoxy “can only survive by being immobile: the tiniest crack canmake the whole building tumble down.”68 This also explains why huntingdown deviation and excommunication played such a central role in the Com-munist movement.69 Inquisition was essential for preserving the orthodoxspirit and for preventing reality from breaking in, inevitably weakening theperception of the militants and their fanatical determination to see the un-dertaking triumph no matter what the price. Equally essential for the party-

Page 216: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 203

gnosis was the methodical use of censorship and ideological terrorism: withoutwhich the agents of corruption—revisionism, opportunism, deviationism, andso forth—would have gradually led the revolutionaries to slide into the “bour-geois bog.”

Yet, none of this can be interpreted as a degeneration, a perversion, of theauthentic inspiration of scientific socialism. From the very beginning, thephilosophy of Marx claimed to be “History that has acquired consciousness ofself.”70 This derives directly from the “false consciousness” theory, accordingto which in modern industrial society every spiritual product—none ex-cluded—is deformed, polluted, and poisoned by the malignant institution—private property—which has split humanity and sparked the civil war betweenthe haves and the have-nots. In other words, a kind of social trachoma pre-vents people from seeing the world as it really is: divided, upside down, be-witched. This would explain the existence of a bourgeois consciousness inwhich social actors and the relations between them “are as if back to front, asif in a camera obscura.”71 Fortune would have it that certain individuals—inour specific case, Marx and Engels—are able to capture the hidden essenceof reality and draw back the “Maya veil” with which private property hadcovered the eyes of men. For this precise reason, they are in the right and thebourgeois, always and inevitably, in the wrong, since their ideas can only bethe expression of an ideological consciousness that is, by definition, distortedand distorting.

The situation is the one described in the platonic cave myth: at last truthhas been revealed to the dialectical-revolutionary philosopher; he has aban-doned the world of shadows that men mistake for reality—the “chimeras” andthe “dogmas” of bourgeois society;72 he alone knows the “only practice ca-pable of changing the world.”73 This explains the privileged epistemologicalstatus of scientific socialism: “because of its principles, [it is] . . . above thedissent between the bourgeois and the proletariat since it considers it war-ranted, in its historical meaning, only for what concerns the present, not thefuture; in fact it intends to suppress this dissent. It acknowledges that, as longas the dissent persists, the resentment of the proletariat against its oppressoris a necessity, indeed that at the start it is the most important lever of theworkers movement; but it goes beyond this resentment, for communism is acause that concerns all humanity and not only the workers.”74

It is evident that Marx and Engels reformulated, in sociological language,the classic gnostic distinction between pistis (overturned conscience of theoverturned world) and gnosis (conscience-liberating science) to conclude thatany idea that is foreign to their doctrine must be polluted and polluting, andexpressed in the interests and illusions of that part of society—capitalists,landowners, lower middle class—about to be swept away by the necessary,progressive march of history.

This theory is a perfect example of the particular intellectual perversionthat Popper called “re-inforced dogmatism.”75 It is structured in such a way

Page 217: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

204 Revolutionary Apocalypse

that the theorems can never be confuted by reality: even if the whole workers’class were to turn its back on revolution, this could always be explained as a“bourgeois infection.”76 In any event, any objections to the communist ideaare meaningless, since those who express such objections are enveloped intheir “bourgeois skin”77 and, on principle, excluded from truth. Their scienceis pseudoscience, insofar as the necessary expression of a “false consciousness”from which there is no escape other than by accepting the theorems of sci-entific socialism.

Marxism is therefore an airtight, rigorously self-referential system—“itdoes not recognise criteria of truth that are external to it.”78 Its theory ofideology as false conscience is a tool of psychological warfare that can be, and infact is, used to censure and demonize whoever has not yet identified with therevolutionary undertaking. Ernst Topitsch rightly claims that the MarxianWeltanschauung has “first and foremost the task of conferring upon its ideatoran absolute authority in the context of knowledge, of power and, above all,of morals, not only with respect to the aristocracy and the bourgeois, but alsoto other socialists and communists and, to some extent, even the proletariat.Whoever opposes the Messiah, or even doubts of him, is blind and abject inthe double sense, destined to come to an end, and morally corrupt.”79

Not surprisingly, as soon as the Bolsheviks took possession of power, theyinstitutionalized what Evgeny Zamiatin was to call “The Unique State Sci-ence”80 based on a triple identification: of the party with the proletariat, ofthe proletariat with Marxism, and of Marxism with the truth of history. Hence,dissent was inadmissible. For the “guard dogs of orthodoxy,” dissent was asinful relapse, a return to the blindness preceding the Annunciation of themessage.81 It was essential to exercise a relentless, inquisitorial control andconceive the party as the “tribunal of History.” Whoever “objectively” wasconsidered to harbor dangerous ideas was to be brought before this court.Naturally, first and foremost, the institutional guardians of religious traditionsagainst whom the order was to “fight a war with determination and withoutpity.”82 Nor was a claimed allegiance to Marxism sufficient to avoid the ex-communication used by the proletarian church to expel deviants and protectthe depositum fidei from pollution. Much more was necessary: absolute accep-tance of everything that the church—or rather, its supreme leader, the true“prince of believers,” in whose hands was concentrated both temporal andspiritual power83—considered to be true and right, opportune and necessary.In other words, what was required was total identification with the collectivethought, which was the spiritual engine of the process of revolutionary trans-formation. As collective thought was the institutionalization of the “only sci-entific conception of history,”84 logically, anything outside that was consideredto be “confusion and lies.”85

The fact that through its official interpreters collective thought declaredthat it was a “party science” does not mean that it did not possess the “objec-tive, unique, final truth.”86 While “bourgeois science” expressed the selfish

Page 218: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 205

interests of a class condemned by history, “proletarian science” expressed theinterests of the “general class” and therefore of all humanity. So “the Marxistshad every right to consider proletarian science to be the true science and todemand that it be generally recognised as such.”87 They also had every rightto insist that the party could make every expression of spiritual life submit toits imperatives, for these were irremediably “of a biased character”88 and sim-ply the ideological dimension of the mortal duel between proletariat and bour-geoisie, socialism and capitalism, revolution and reaction. Autonomy was outof the question: whoever raised the flag of “art for art’s sake” or “science forscience” was simply deluding him or herself and others. In a world poisonedby private property, neutrality and objectivity were illusions. A cosmic-historicwar was under way and nothing could escape its martial logic. The moral: thePartiinost principle was supreme, and the Communist Party had the right andthe duty to decide spiritual production in light of the tactical and strategicrequirements of the class war. Every symbolic form had to be politicized,controlled, and directed by the collective actor—the “chief of staff” of therevolution—whose role it was to lead the proletariat of the world to the finalvictory.

On the other hand, as the party was by definition “the bearer of truth,”89

it naturally insisted on exercising ideological custody over all spiritual activi-ties, from science to philosophy, to literature, to the figurative arts. “Even if(it had been) weak in terms of numbers, with its ideology it still representedthe workers class [and] incarnated the class consciousness of hundreds of thou-sand or millions of men.”90 It rightly believed that “it knew the genuine de-sires, interests and thoughts of society better than society.”91

In conclusion, the party was entitled to exercise complete control over ev-eryone and everything because Marxism was the “science of the general lawsof social evolution” that led the proletariat in the “grandiose historic battle forcommunism.”92 The first duty of the “soldiers of the revolution” was to defendthe dogmas of Marx to the bitter end. “The banner of the proletarian revolution[proclaimed rhetorically the ‘Bolshevik’ immediately after Lenin’s death] thebanner of Marxist dogma (had to be preserved) in all its purity. There wasnothing wrong with the word dogma. Criticism of dogmatic Marxism had al-ways been the work of reformists of the Bernstein type, who were the absolutelyremoved from Marxism. The best of the workers movement has always foughtfor the dogma of Marx, which has gathered together millions of men and beenconfirmed in the course of over one hundred years of class war. Criticism ofdogmatism was really a form of revisionism disguised: the duty of every Marxistis to defend the dogma of Marx at whatever price.”93

For all these reasons, the Communist Party was a sui generis institution. Itwas quite “different” from every other party. Indeed, it wasn’t a party at all,it was a charismatic community that brought salvation, and, for this very fact, ittransmitted to its militants an extraordinary moral charge. They became theinstruments of the absolute, were mystically united to the undertaking.

Page 219: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

206 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Hence, their existence was transfigured, filled with meaning, and made anintegral part of a lofty cosmic-historic process. For the conscious, active mil-itant, the party was “truth, communion, the way, the conscious agent of his-tory”94 as is so typical in the communist world. The party tried to guaranteethe above result by developing a strategy that tended “(1) to make sure that[its members] would find [in the party] all the satisfaction that previously theyhad found in a variety of organisations, breaking all the links between partymembers and other cultural organisations and (2) to destroy all the otherorganisations or incorporate them in a system in which it was the only ruler.”95

In this way, the Communist Party effectively became the only object ofdesire of the activists of permanent revolution whose lives gravitated exclu-sively around the party. It also invaded and shaped their personality. Therewas no longer any distinction between public and private, between politicsand morals. Strictly speaking, “there could be nothing but party life”96 sincethe party was the incarnation of the absolute, which was history conceived asan irresistible march toward the “natural destination” of humanity: a classless,stateless society. There was no limit to the totalitarian vocation of the revo-lutionary party. Everything had to come under its jurisdiction: opinions, ac-tions, interests, feelings, values, value judgments. The militant guaranteedabsolute obedience to the point of “abnegation.”97 To sacrifice self for partywas the supreme and, in a sense, the only virtue of whoever had the honor ofbeing a “militant of the City of Man.”

For a brilliant description of the psychological mechanism leading to thevoluntary abnegation of self in the Great Collective Soul, see Arthur Koestler’sBuio a mezzogiorno (Darkness at Noon). The mechanism resembles the onegoverning life in religious orders where every act, thought, sensation is as-sessed on the basis of the price the individual is expected to pay for the re-demption of all. It is evidence of absolute loyalty to the undertaking, whichis sacred. The only morally acceptable attitude is sincere, enthusiastic dedi-cation to the complete sacrifice of individuality. Once again, the Leninist partyproves itself to be a functional equivalent of the religious institutions, drivenby a spirit that has nothing in common with the lay spirit of the secular city.It is no coincidence that its historical parable contains all the elements thatnourished 20 centuries of Christianity: “collective enthusiasm, individual sac-rifice, fanatical heroism, persecution suffered and inflicted without pity, butwith noble motives. As they were massacred, the communists shouted to theirmurderers the message of the early Christians: Fools! It is for you that I die.”98

Wherever they went, they testified to the transfiguring and mobilizing powerof a doctrine whose mask of science hid the salient features of the JewishApocalypse and Manichean gnosticism.

4. The gnosis-party, created by Lenin as soon as he took over power andstarted building “proletarian civilization,” exercised an irresistible fascinationfor religious spirits, disoriented by the death of God; for idealists, searching

Page 220: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 207

for a cause to which to dedicate their existence; for authoritarian personalities,looking for an exclusivistic and intolerant doctrine; for frustrated intellectuals,hungry for power; for the workers, ensnared in the machinery of capital andtransformed into goods among goods. The party that proclaimed to the wholeworld that it was the materialization of the Great Hope sparked by the pro-phetical message of Marx and Engels, and propelled by the constant prose-lytization of the parties of the Second International, proved to have all thequalities necessary to fill the spiritual vacuum that had come into being withthe progress of rationalism, whose corrosive acids had destroyed the systemof religious beliefs professed for centuries by the people of the West.

Of course, the Comintern waved the banner of science, materialism, andatheism. However, its most profound aspiration—which it proclaimed for allto hear—was to uproot faith in religious institutions and substitute it withfaith in the party. It was convinced that it possessed the formula to eradicatereligions and materialize their promises of salvation in the next world, bymeans of a continuing revolution of every existing form of life: “Let priestsof all confessions [declared Trotsky, as if to eliminate any doubt as to thereligious nature of the communist undertaking] talk of Heaven in anotherworld, we say that it is in this world that we must create a real Heaven. Wemust not lose sight of our great ideal for one instant, for it is the most beautifulideal humanity can have. All that is most beautiful and noble in the ancientreligions and in the doctrine of Christ is incarnated in our doctrine of so-cialism,”99 which “opposes a terrestrial Messianism to celestial Messianism;the commitment to edify a terrestrial City to the sterile expectation of thecelestial City.”100 So it should not surprise us to read in an article by Gramscithat “socialism is the religion that will kill Christianity.”101 After all, what chanceis there for a Christian faith based on hope in the hereafter, once the revo-lution has transfigured the here and now into a world in perfect harmony withhumanity’s innermost desires?

This exaggerated promise—the Promethean construction of a “realheaven”—is precisely what gave the communist church its extraordinary ap-peal. On the other hand, its coming into being had been prepared throughoutthe nineteenth century by the many revolutionary sects that had conjugatedthe “problem of salvation” and the “problem of justice,” the desperate searchfor a functional equivalent of the lost faith in transcendence and a diagnosis-therapy of the abysmal conditions of workers, which disturbed the more sen-sitive spirits to the point that they wanted a complete regeneration of society.

This point cannot be stressed too often: in identifying the reasons that ledto the foundation of the proletarian church and guaranteed it an extraordinaryspiritual authority for a whole historical age, it is important to remember twoaspects in particular: the situation of general anomy that persisted in Europethroughout the nineteenth century and the moral trauma generated by theGreat War. The tremendous changes produced by the war generated the blind(and sincere) conviction that the socialist ideal was not a dream but a powerful

Page 221: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

208 Revolutionary Apocalypse

force that had the power to shake the whole world and reshape it from scratch.A civilization in the midst of traumatic change, devastating conflicts, and in-justices of every type greeted the communist promise with enthusiasm. Itcame to be the only raison d’etre of millions of unfortunates, allowing themto glimpse the chance of transcending a reality that offered them virtually nogratification and attaining harmony and peace.

Remember also that the Communist International was the church of theproletarians not only because it delivered a message of hope to the victims ofthe transition from traditional society to modern society, but also because itpromised them what they had been deprived of by the impersonal logic of theself-regulated market and secularization: a community founded on solid moraland affective ties and driven by the Promethean pathos of building the Cityof Man.

In a world where religious tradition had lost its normative cogency andwhere a painful process of social and cultural marginalization and unrest wasunderway, a huge increase in the proletarized masses, who for various reasonshad been “shaken up and left to themselves without material or moral sus-tenance,” was inevitable. They were individuals desperate for a surrogate ofthe Gemeinschaaft they had lost, for something that would give “value andmeaning to their futile, empty existence.”102 Their cathexis was ready to fixitself on a new object of desire.

So, it is easy to understand why the both the “internal proletariat” and the“external proletariat” of capitalist-bourgeois civilization were particularly sen-sitive to the revolutionary message of the communist movement. With itsexclusive, all-pervasive organization and its eschatological tension, it was in acertain sense the “natural” response to the problems of transition and themillions of material and moral difficulties besieging the masses “proletarian-ized” by the progress of anomy. It filled the axiological and normative vacuumwith new values and new norms; it soothed the anxiety of individuals who hadbeen split up and expelled from their traditional community; it ended thestate of anarchy, by imposing a new spiritual hierarchy; it gave people moti-vation, showing them that at last their desires could become reality. In a word,it transformed chaos into kosmos.

According to Hannah Arendt, the totalitarian movements—“organisationsof marginalised and isolated individuals”103—constituted a global response—affective, moral, organizational, and so forth—to the process of massification.In fact, they did not limit themselves to giving mass-man—a “proletarized”and therefore alienated individual—identity and solidarity; they also gave hima highly gratifying mission. Admittedly, they demanded total sacrifice, but, inexchange, they offered the solidarity of comradeship, a raison d’etre, the cour-age to fight, hope in the future. Which explains why mass-men are willing tocompletely annul their personalities when they join a totalitarian movementand accept the will of the movement, even to the point of joyfully making thesupreme sacrifice—death—if it will help build the New World.

Page 222: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 209

The revolutionary party comes to represent the one certainty, the onlyescape from anomy. It is light in the night, an oasis in the desert, a refugefrom the storm. It is everything that society no longer is: a community thatprotects and sustains the individual; an authority that orders and assigns tasks;a spiritual force that indicates the values and the goals of existence. It is a“therapeutic” institution, particularly suited to curing the ontological anguishgenerated by the condition of radical insecurity in which proletarized indi-viduals are condemned to live.

Alienated intellectuals play a role of great strategic importance in this pro-cess. They are particularly sensitive to what they consider the “irrationality”of the world, in part because the “search for meaning” is their specific missionand in part because as “marginal men” they cannot but look at the world witha radically critical eye. The Great Transformation has taken from them thetwo things without which life becomes intolerable: faith and community. Theyaspire to recover both but to do so need the help of a charismatic institutionthat is able to recreate the lost sense of belonging and give meaning to theirlives. The alienated intellectual thus becomes active ideologue and organizerof the proletarianized masses. He ceases being a mere producer of symbolsand participates “actively in practical life as builder, organiser, permanent per-suader.”104 He becomes a professional politician or, better, a professional rev-olutionary, ascetically dedicated to the sacred-holy cause of permanent waragainst the cruel forces that prevent humanity from breaking away from theworld of corruption and alienation.

Thus, the proletarianized intellectuals play a leading role in the process ofconstruction of the revolutionary church. In addition to being intensely mo-tivated to enter into conflict with the establishment, they have mastered thesymbols indispensable for drawing up the message that will “bring hope andfulfilment to those who are alienated, frustrated and excluded from what theybelieve to be their rightful place in the community.”105 The revolutionarychurch is the organization that gives the proletarianized intellectuals the toolfor materializing their program of regeneration.

5. The Communist International was both proletarian and ecumenicalchurch, because of the charismatic fascination it exercised on all men. Thischarisma is explained by what Jankelevitch calls “la vocation infiniste,”106 whichis not linked to any particular social, existential condition, but which respondsto a universal need that is part of man’s very nature: the aspiration for a worldthat is radically different from the present one,107 where there is no room forcontingency, impotence, insignificance, or death. It is part of man’s nature towish for and imagine an afterlife that is “exceptional,” “extraordinary,” “outof the ordinary,” and in total contrast with the “usual routine, cursed a thou-sand times over.”108 No matter how gratifying or comfortable, everyday liv-ing109 is tormented by obligations, repression, frustration, banalities. UsingHeidegger’s terminology, it is completely dominated by the anonymous dic-

Page 223: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

210 Revolutionary Apocalypse

tatorship of Das,110 which levels everything and makes everything insignifi-cant. So it is an “inauthentic” life, constitutionally incapable of satisfying whatmakes a person human, what renders man an irremediably metaphysical being:the wish for an ultrabiological life, where everything has meaning and valueand everything is in accordance with one’s wishes. This explains why a “fright-fully large number of men is dissatisfied with civilisation, and unhappy in it,feeling it as a yoke from which to free themselves.”111 It also explains the manydesperate attempts made throughout the history of humanity to eliminate thehorrors of the world—or at least make them more bearable—and to givemeaning to what is meaningless, starting from the frightening enigma ofdeath. It explains the proliferation of religious illusions “built using the ma-terial from the memory of the impotence of one’s own childhood and ofhuman kind” and whose essential function is to “protect man in two direc-tions: against the dangers of nature and of fate and against all the offences ofhuman society.”112 The desire to give meaning to existence produces the ideathat “life in this world serves a higher purpose, one that is certainly not easyto guess but definitely strives for the perfection of the human being.”113 It isan idea that is most comforting, for it satisfies (at least to some degree) theaspiration to live in a world “different” from a world dominated by routineand the tyranny of reality.

When the desire of the totally “other”—which is felt by all human beingsin varying degrees—can no longer be a satisfied by the traditional religiousinstitutions, the search inevitably begins for what Weber calls the “ideal sur-rogates” of religion.114 This happens wherever the “faith of the fathers” ap-pears implausible and “God’s orphans” are forced to direct their cathexis andhopes toward the revolutionary promise. Jules Monnerot describes the phe-nomenon; he refers to as the “shift of the sacred,” thus: “the fervour and theenergy, let loose and freed from religious beliefs, are poured onto other ob-jects: it is as if the formation of a new type of sacredness comes by chance tocompensate the loss of the former beliefs.”115

So it should not surprise us to hear Paul Eluard declare: “Without theparty? I wouldn’t even light the gas.”116 Or to learn that, after a visit to theSoviet Union, Paul Nizan confessed to Sartre: “A revolution that does notfree us from the obsession of death is no revolution.”117 Nor less to read in afamous essay by Herbert Marcuse: “A philosophy that does not operate in themanner of a servant of the repression reacts to death with the Great Refusal—the refusal of Orpheus, the liberator.”118

These statements, revealing the typical psychological mechanism of “de-fence from existential anguish,”119 lead us to the heart of the revolutionaryundertaking, which is as much of a metaphysical nature as of a social nature.It promises to rid the world of exploitation and violence, but it also aspires tosolve the enigma of death, by eliminating it as a problem, or at least stupefyingmilitants with total commitment to the political cause, so that they never havea chance to reflect upon their condition.120 The objective of the undertaking—

Page 224: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 211

the end of the aeon of alienation and the start of the aeon of universal hap-piness—is of such cosmic-historic significance that it confers an absolute valueupon those who have devoted all their intellectual and moral energy to thecause; for this, in a certain sense, cancels their finiteness.121 On the other hand,the revolutionary party cannot tolerate that horror of death should absorb thethoughts of its militants, because it would prevent them from dedicatingthemselves body and soul to the undertaking.122 Death must be removed fromthe field of perception of the revolutionaries. Hence, the both “extraordinary”and “amazing” fact, observed by Louis Aragon in Les communistes: the com-munists “seem to absolutely ignore metaphysical anguish” and “death occu-pies so little space in what they write.”

However, communism did not stop at solving the problem of death bystupefying the militants with total political engagement and enveloping themin the compact solidarity of the revolutionary community, so as to preventthem from feeling alone and abandoned. It went further than that. It elabo-rated a philosophy that made men think of death “at the level of the species.”Death was no longer lived as an absurd scandal but as a dialectically necessarymoment in the “infinite youth of humanity.”123 The starting point of thisphilosophy, similar to that of Durkheim,124 was developed in great detail byLangevin: “The individual who is aware of being mortal cannot live in iso-lation without falling into despair . . . There exists a close link between thevice of egoism, of which our species has so much trouble freeing itself, andthe tenacious illusion of a future life.”125 This illusion will disappear, withoutman being assailed by ontological anguish, as soon as he ceases consideringhimself an individual and—the words are of the communist martyr JacquesDecour—becomes accustomed to perceiving himself “as a leaf that falls inorder to form the earth.” In other words, this will happen as soon as there isno longer any distinction between individual ego and the “Great All,” whichis humanity marching toward complete self-fulfillment. This will be achievedat the conclusion of the great revolutionary change, with the “infinite victoryover hell.”126 Meanwhile, the task of the proletarian church is to fuel the“idolatrous cult of the ecumenical community,”127 preannouncing the finaltriumph over impotence and contingency. In its breast, the church will raisethe “red hero” who “lives to refuse the limits imposed by objective reality, . . . whofights to redeem those defeated by history, who acts to achieve the Marxianutopia of socialist liberation, humanisation of nature and naturalisation ofman.”128 As Ernst Bloch puts it, the “red hero” opposes death with the con-sciousness of solidarity that “is extended simultaneously to the victims of thepast and to the winners of the future,” which “means immortality of the per-son insofar as immortality of his best intentions.”129

6. In accordance with its gnostic-Manichean vocation, the proletarianchurch is totalitarian with respect to both the “faithful” and to non-believers,to be converted to the Marxist gnosis by persuasion, if possible; otherwise by

Page 225: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

212 Revolutionary Apocalypse

force. There is no limit (there cannot be) to the planetary expansion of itspassion of regeneration. Its historical mission is to create the kingdom of Godon earth, and it cannot tolerate the existence of traditions, institutions, re-sources, interests that do not fall within its normative jurisdiction. Everythingmust submit to its cathartic power in order to be reshaped and returned tonew life. The policy of the proletarian church therefore is totalitarian in thestrongest and most complete sense. In general, an authoritarian policy re-quires only one thing from its subjects: ready and automatic obedience. Theproletarian church requires much more: unconditional compliance with thevalues it incarnates. Since universal metanoia is its goal, it “is not exclusivelyinterested in conquering power and bringing about political and socialchanges; it wants absolute domination over every sphere of life, spiritual andsecular,” since it is guided by the doctrine that “it is the only true guide ofaction, the only [doctrine] destined to achieving justice among men and alsoshaping all knowledge and human behaviour.”130

This makes revolutionary policy a demiurgic, indeed a divine practice. And,in effect, it is impossible “to conceive a totalitarian policy without presup-posing its divine character.”131 For there to be a totalitarian system, it is es-sential that the state and the church, and its leader, be perceived as the vicarof God on earth. On this condition only does power have the right-duty tovigilate over every aspect of the life of its subjects, without distinction betweenpublic and private, politics and morals, action and thought, behavior and in-tentions. After defining the communist movement the “Islam of the XXthcentury,” Monnerot correctly suggests that “the sacralisation of policy is theoriginal element of modern totalitarianism with respect to tyranny; it presentsitself as an expansionist, secular Islamic-type religion: no distinction betweenthe political, religious and economic sphere, concentrated power, initiallywithout form.”132

Certainly, we are looking at a very particular type of religious movement,since denial of the existence of God is an absolute article of faith of the com-munist credo. We see no lay conception of life but the determination to sub-stitute the traditional objects of cult with a new one: the cult of humanity,conceived more gnostico as a degraded God aspiring to recover its true naturecorrupted by the bourgeois spirit. This aspect, which is present in all the sectssparked by revolutions, found its most rigorous and fascinating conceptuali-zation in Marx’s philosophy. “Religious alienation (sin), that cannot be elim-inated by anything other than grace, so that the kingdom of liberty can neverbe of this world, is substituted with economic alienation (exploitation of menby men) that can be eliminated by man himself, with the suppression of privateproperty, therefore the kingdom of liberation in the near or distant future willcome about in this world. The moment of violence and the moment of lib-eration are inexorably counterposed: where there is one, there cannot be theother; the positive destiny of many—in traditional religions: religious trans-

Page 226: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 213

valuation; in the proletarian church: terrestrial transformation—lies in thepassage from one condition to the other.”133

Of course, the relations between the children of light and the children ofdarkness will be dominated by the imperatives of the “holy war” until thedialectical leap into the millenarian kingdom of liberty has been successfullyaccomplished. It will be a most horrendous war with terrible material andhuman costs and unheard of sacrifices and horrors but, in the end, the aeonof universal happiness will begin: the soteriological design of what Marx, par-aphrasing Hegel, called the “astute spirit” will be accomplished, and the wholeof humanity will enter a land-without-evil.

Obviously, this vision of the battle for socialism leaves no room for toler-ance, pluralism, or coexistence with “anyone different.” The “class enemies”must be annihilated and “proletarian science” must reign sovereign over alland everyone, so that the prophecy of the revolutionary writings can be ful-filled. For this to be possible, there must be a phase of transition so that theparty can reshape the existing, in the light of the doctrine of which it is thepriestly guardian and the only authorized interpreter. This is why it mustexercise a revolutionary dictatorship, over things and especially souls, in thename of and on behalf of the proletariat, in order that they may be emptiedof their former ideas and values and be remodeled. This is explained withalmost brutal clarity by Gramsci: “In developing, the modern Prince upsetsthe whole system of intellectual and moral relations, because his developmentmeans that every action is conceived as useful or harmful, virtuous or wicked,only insofar as referred to the modern Prince in person and to increasing hispower or lessening it. In consciences, the prince takes the place of divinity andof the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis of modern laicism and ofa completely lay life and all its relations and customs.”134

Naturally, this grandiose intellectual and moral reform promised by thefounding fathers of scientific socialism—to bring “heaven on earth”—willonly be successful if the leadership of the revolutionary party is in the handsof the minority that understands the revolutionary doctrine. Suffering as itdoes from the devastating effects of “bourgeois opium,” the proletariat isincapable of appreciating its full meaning without the help of this minority.Therefore, to that minority “endowed with a greater awareness and a moreprecise historical perception [must be] entrusted the future of the entire class,which it will protect from every external and internal danger. It is thereforethe natural leader of the historical movement through which the proletariatwill be led to power. It understands the many different phases, assesses everyaction in the light of the final goal, exercising criticism and providing clari-fication for action.”135 In other words, the historical role of “the consciousavant-garde” is to offer the workers their pedagogical protection until they havebeen freed of all the elements deposited in their conscience by the past.

A gap therefore exists between the proletariat and the “gnostic aristocracy.”Nor could it be otherwise. “When it comes to intervening on overall social

Page 227: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

214 Revolutionary Apocalypse

organisation, it is necessary to have a scientific knowledge of society and itsdevelopment, in all its complexity at every level (political, ideological, eco-nomic etc.).”136 The only people equipped with this scientific knowledge arethose who are professionally responsible for the elaboration, accumulation,and socialization of knowledge. In other words, the dictatorship of the pro-letariat can only take shape through the dictatorship of Marxist intellectuals whoare in possession of the hermeneutic key—dialectics—to interpret the mean-ing of the human adventure and are scientifically equipped “to defend theclass interests”137 of the proletariat: only they, “on the basis of a scientificinterpretation of the social organisation and of a given historical situation canestablish the passwords, the objectives and the alliances that are necessary ata given point of time.”138

Thus we find ourselves facing the following sociological paradox: the rev-olutionary party proclaims itself to be “the party of the workers’ class.” How-ever, the leaders and chosen troops of this party are not workers.139 They aremostly members of the small intellectual bourgeoisie that increased enor-mously and more or less everywhere with the planetary expansion of capital-ism. On the other hand, the very nature of the revolutionary undertakingrequires the subordination of the workers to the elite monopolizing “generalknowledge.”140 The gnostic revolution needs the masses to overturn the ex-isting order, but it cannot allow them to act spontaneously and without guid-ance, lest they be reinfected by the bourgeois spirit. Once the revolutionbecomes state, it is forced to operate like an immense intellectual and moralcensor and repress in embryo, if necessary using violence, ideas and behaviorsconsidered to be incompatible with the communist organization of societyand its essential values. Democratic centralism is precisely that: “an organi-zational weapon” conceived to prevent “spontaneity” from prevailing over“consciousness” or—which basically is the same thing—to guarantee that therevolutionary intellectuals dominate the proletarian masses.

NOTES

1. Lenin, “IV Extraordinary Congress of the Soviets,” in Complete Works, vol. 27,p. 199.

2. Nikolai Bukharin, Il programma dei comunisti (Rome: Tindalo, 1970), p. 211.3. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution,” in Complete Works,

vol. 24, p. 88.4. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 23.5. This was established in one of the “Twenty-one points” of the Third

International.6. From the telegram sent on January 24, 1919, by the Bolshevik Party to the

revolutionary socialists of every country (quoted from G.H.D. Cole, A History of So-cialist Thought, vol. 4).

7. Letter from Lenin to European Communists (quoted from Piero Melograni,

Page 228: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 215

Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reason of State, 1917–20 [AtlanticHighlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989]).

8. Lenin, “The Third International and its Place in History,” in Complete Works,vol. 29, p. 310.

9. Ibid., p. 307.10. A. S. Lindemann, Socialismo europeo e bolscevismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1988),

p. 89.11. Ernst Nolte, Nazionalsocialismo e bolscevismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1988), p. 3.12. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 139.13. Lenin, “Speech on the Conference of the Workers and the Soldiers of the Red

Army,” in Opere complete, vol. 31, p. 137.14. Quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Revolution sovietique, p. 41.15. Iury Martov, Il bolscevismo mondiale (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), p. 5.16. In 1919, the French Communist Louis-Oscar Frossard described the chiliastic

hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution thus: “Besieged by a hostile world, reducedto starvation in an atmosphere of anarchy and disorder, Russia was fighting to buildthe country of justice and harmony that we had all dreamt of. Ostracised and hatedby all, in Russia socialism triumphed. The Russian socialists animated by a firm willwere achieving what socialists the world over had been desiring and waiting for invain. On the ancient empire of the czars flew the red banner of the International. Theexploitation of man by man was over! At last capitalism had been suffocated, beaten,put to one side. Onward! Humanity was no longer condemned: on Russia was risingthe dawn of a new day!” (Quoted from C. Andrew and O. Ogordievskij, KGB: TheInside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev.)

17. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism,dedication.

18. “Still, Ernest Renan did say one good thing: if you want to have a good ideaof what the primitive Christian communities were like, do not compare them to theparochial church congregations of our time; they were more like the local divisions ofthe International Workers Association. This is correct. Christianity conquered themasses in exactly the same way as modern socialism, by the formation of various sectsand especially by opposing individual ideas, some clear, others more confused, . . . butall opposed to the dominant system of established interests” (Friedrich Engels, Sulleorigini del cristianesimo [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974], p. 64).

19. Antonio Gramsci, Sotto la Mole (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), p. 228.20. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 11.21. Ibid., p. 115.22. Ibid., p. 121.23. Ibid., p. 9.24. K. E. Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (New York: The Free Press, 1970),

p. 134.25. J. M. Keynes, Esortazioni e profezie (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), p. 223.26. Quoted from Jean Jaures, Questioni di metodo, pp. 191–192.27. Quoted from Henri de Man, Au de la du marxisme, p. 214.28. Leon Trotsky, My Life. Trotsky forgets to mention that Lenin had always been

idolized by the activists of the Bolshevik Party, as is evident from the following wordsof Nikolai Sukhanov: “The whole Bolshevik effort was kept inside the iron frame ofthe spiritual centre abroad, without which the party workers felt themselves completely

Page 229: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

216 Revolutionary Apocalypse

helpless, in whose presence they were proud to stand, and to which the best of themregarded themselves as devoted and dedicated servants, like knights of the Holy Grail”(quoted from Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Actingof History [Collins: Fontana, 1972], p. 459).

29. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 131.30. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (San Diego,

CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). For a Communist Party “there are never anymistakes in the present, but only in the past, and even then they only become mistakes,if they are acknowledged to be so by the party itself; the mistakes of the past are thoserecognised by the party and not by others” (Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and GiorgyMarkus, Dictatorship over Needs [Oxford: Blackwell, 1983]).

31. Of future but also past history, in the sense that the leader of the world pro-letarian revolution soon believed it had the right to modify the past, by cancelinganything that proved to be incompatible with its policy. In this way, by continuallyrewriting history, it implicitly stated that it considered its power to be superior evento that of God.

32. Lenin, “Three Sources and Integral Parts of Marxism,” in Complete Works, vol.19, p. 23. In absolute accord with Lenin’s gnosticism, Gramsci did not hesitate todeclare that the superiority of the Communist Party with respect to the bourgeois andreformist parties was based on the fact that it was in possession of an “infalliblemethod” for analyzing and transforming reality (La costruzione del Partito comunista[Turin: Einaudi, 1971], p. 13).

33. Heinz Abosch, Trockij e il bolscevismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), p. 10.34. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Materialist Dialectics

(London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. XIIIf.35. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996).36. Irving Fetscher, Marx and Marxism (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), p. 82.37. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 39.38. Ibid., p. 40.39. Ibid., p. 41.40. Gyorgy Lukacs, Lenin, p. 27.41. Ibid., p. 36.42. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 226.43. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little and Brown, 1960), p. 421.44. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 107.45. Ibid., p. 106.46. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 20.47. Ibid., p. 55.48. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 226.49. G.E. Rusconi, La teoria critica della societa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968), p. 64.50. Giorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 65.51. Ibid., p. 66.52. Ibid., p. 67.53. Ibid., p. 328.54. Ibid., p. 328.55. Ibid., p. 339.56. Ibid., p. 327.57. Ibid., p. 326.

Page 230: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 217

58. Ibid., p. 396.59. Gyorgy Lukacs, “I fondamenti morali del comunismo,” appendix to AA. VV.,

Storia e coscienza di classe, oggi (Milan: Edizioni Aut Aut, 1977), p. 121.60. Gyorgy Lukacs, Lenin, p. 11.61. Quoted from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 182.62. Ibid., pp. 187–188. Therefore, Sergio Quinzio correctly observes that “modern

totalitarianism has no trouble recognising itself in the famous statement: ‘In order notto make mistakes, we must always consider what we see to be white as black, ifthe Church hierarchy says so’” (Radici ebraiche del moderno [Milan: Adelphi, 1990],p. 83).

63. Ignatius Loyola, Constitutions de la Compagnie de Jesus, vol. 1 (Paris: Desclee deBrouwer, 1966), p. 171.

64. H. C. Puech, “Il manicheismo,” in H. C. Puech, ed., Storia delle religioni, vol.2, 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1977), p. 685.

65. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo, p. 69.66. Vaclav Belohradsky, “Burocrazia carismatica,” in Luciano Pellicani, ed., Sociol-

ogia delle rivoluzioni (Naples: Guida, 1975), p. 227.67. Alain Besancon, Present sovietique et passe russe (Paris: Hachette, 1980), p. 198.68. Jean Grenier, Sur l’esprit d’orthodoxie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 17.69. Typical was the terrible anathema uttered during the Spanish Civil War by

Dolores Ibarruri: “No repression will ever prove to be excessive if taken to purge theproletarian field from the poisonous plant of Trotskyism” (quoted from David Caute,The Left in Europe since 1789 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966]).

70. J. P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 1982).71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 36.72. Ibid., p. 23.73. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Use of Social Theory, 2nd

ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).74. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, p. 581f.75. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, One Volume (London: Rout-

ledge, 1995), p. 445f.76. “Letter of April 9, 1863,” from Marx to Engels, in Complete Works, 41, p. 378.77. Karl Marx, Il Capitale, vol. 1, 1, p. 259.78. Jules Monnerot, Sociologie de la revolution, p. 80.79. Ernst Topitsch, Per una critica del marxismo, p. 167. The strategy adopted by

Marx to affirm his superiority over all the leaders of the socialist movement was dev-astatingly simple: whoever did not agree with him was automatically labeled as a petit-bourgeois who defended interests that were foreign to those of the proletariat, underthe banner of socialism; therefore a “class enemy” in disguise (see Luciano Pellicani,Miseria del marxismo, p. 56 et seq.).

80. Evgeny Zamiatin, Noi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), p. 28.81. In fact, “whoever is convinced that at a certain moment in history he has been

revealed the absolute truth and thereby understood once and for all the natural re-sponse of history, will never agree that it is a good thing to let others think otherwise.With respect to those who think differently, he will consider that it is his right andduty to intervene, with violence if necessary, to make them change their mind or atleast refrain from expressing it and, in this way, risk ruining the minds of others andrestoring them to their former situation of blindness. Thus apocalyptic Marxism re-

Page 231: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

218 Revolutionary Apocalypse

turns to being medieval, as was the spirit of intolerance, the system of inquisition,prohibition and repression of thought” (G. Calogero, Il metodo dell’economia e il marx-ismo [Bari: Laterza, 1967], pp. 96–97).

82. These are the words used by Lenin to incite the Bolsheviks to shoot the “mem-bers of the reactionary clergy” to eliminate every trace of Christianity from Russiansociety (see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime [London: Harvill, 1994],pp. 337 et seq.).

83. Richard Lowenthal considered Communism in power to be a new form of“Caesar-Papism” (World Communism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966],p. 235). In effect, “the Head of State was confused with the Head of the Church bothin the byzantine tradition and in the Soviet regime” (Raymond Aron, The Opium ofthe Intellectual [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977]).

84. Lenin, “What Are the Friends of the People?,” in Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 142.85. Lenin, “Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” in Complete Works, vol. 14, p. 132.86. Ibid., p. 133.87. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1969), p. 12.88. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, p. 354.89. Pierre Herve, La rivoluzione e i feticci (Milan: Longanesi, 1956), p. 111.90. Victor Serge, Vigilanza rivoluzionaria (Milan: CLUED, 1970), p. 27.91. Leszek Kolakowski, “Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” in R. C. Tucker, ed., Stalin-

ism (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 293–294.92. AA. VV., Les principes du marxisme-leninisme (Moscow: Editions du Progres,

n.d.), p. 128.93. Quoted from Kostas Papaioannou, La metamorfosi del marxismo (Florence: Val-

lecchi, 1972), pp. 39–40.94. Francois Fejto, L’heritage de Lenin (Paris: Casterman, 1973), p. 95.95. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 98.96. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, p. 127.97. Lenin, “Ninth Congress of the RCP (B),” in Complete Works, vol. 30, p. 447.98. Dominique Desanti, L’International Communiste (Paris: Payot, 1970), p. 11.99. Quoted from Manuel Garcia Pelayo, Miti e simboli politici, pp. 47–48.

100. Giulio Girardi, Marxismo e cristianesimo (Citta di Castello: Cittadella Editrice,1970), p. 50.

101. Anatonio Gramsci, Sotto la mole, p. 228.102. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, p. 24.103. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books,

1964), p. 323. See also William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York:The Free Press, 1959).

104. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 113.105. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community.106. Vladimir Jankelevitch, La mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 162.107. When Beaudelaire was asked where he would have liked to live, he answered,

“Anywhere, providing it is not in this world.”108. Leon Trotsky, My Life.109. Kant remarked that with these words: “Give a man all that he wishes and then

he will discover that that ‘all’ is not truly all.”110. Martin Heidegger, Essere e tempo (Turin: UTET, 1969), pp. 214 et seq.

Page 232: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Proletarian Church 219

111. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Norton, 1961).112. Ibid., p. 27113. Ibid., p. 28.114. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 486.115. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo, p. 502.116. Quoted from Edgard Morin, Autocritica (Bologna: IL Mulino, 1962), p. 110.117. Quoted from J. P. Sartre, Ribellarsi e giusto (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 67. Sartre

remarks: “It is not wrong. If you are involved in some undertaking that takes manyyears to achieve and you think of death, your anguish is less marked, if you think thatyour comrades will bring it to conclusion after you. But you must really believe in thisundertaking and identify it with your own life.” This is precisely what Sartre himselftried to do in endeavoring to escape from suicide, which was the only logical conclusionof his desperate and despair-inducing philosophy. Having always refused the funda-mental metaphysical principles of Marxism, he was forced to play the disconcertingrole of “believer without faith” (see Girolamo Cotroneo, Sartre: rarete e storia (Naples:Guida, 1976).

118. Herbert Marcuse, Eros e civilta (Turin: Einaudi, 1968), p. 248.119. See Luigi De Marchi, Scimmietta ti amo (Milan: Longanesi, 1984).120. Andre Malreaux observed that “when a man is alone, he cannot help himself

from thinking about the problem of his destiny; and death is always there before himas proof of the futility of life” (quoted from Jacques Choron, Death and Modern Man[New York: Collier Books, 1964], p. 161). So it becomes clear why the revolutionaryparty is able to remove the problem of death: with its strong, all-enveloping solidarity,it makes sure that its militants are never alone, never alone with themselves, alwaysabsorbed by the great collective task.

121. See Robert Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality (London: Penguin Books, 1971).122. In Incontro con il comunista (Milan: Adelphi, 1978), Guido Morselli captured the

grotesque consequences of the Leninist conception of dedication to party, placing inthe mouth of the main character of his novel the following words: “To make love withyou is a step forward. With the others, kisses and the rest had no political justification.And it is not pleasant for a man such as I am to perform an activity, even under thesheets, that does not fall within the objectives of the party, to feel for months on endthat the most important thing for us has nothing to do with the class war.”

123. Michel Verret, L’ateismo moderno (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 192.124. So similar that Marx—on the basis of a study by Jacques Peuchet—developed

an explanation of suicide that anticipates that of Durkheim. Suicide is presented as“one of the thousand symptoms of the general social battle permanently under wayfrom which many fighters withdraw because they are tired of being among the victims,or because they rebel against the idea of earning a place of honour among the slaugh-terers” (Del suicidio, p. 550); therefore as an expression of the loss of social solidarity,the direct consequence of the liberation of possessive-competitive individualism.

125. Quoted from Michel Verret, L’ateismo moderno, p. 189.126. Ibid., p. 198.127. A. J. Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion (London: Oxford University

Press, 1956), p. 312.128. Stefano Zecchi, Utopia e speranza nel comunismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974),

p. 200.129. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

Page 233: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

220 Revolutionary Apocalypse

130. Waldemar Gurian, Introduzione al comunismo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1962), p. 71.131. Ugo Spirito, Il comunismo, p. 36.132. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo, p. 447.133. Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 187.134. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 117.135. Palmiro Togliatti, Opere, vol. 1 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967), p. 196.136. Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle

in Latin America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).137. Ibid., p. 85.138. Ibid., p. 86.139. In fact, in the Lenin strategy “the militant revolutionary type is conceived in

such a way as to make the worker a mere executor who will never be able to performconcrete tasks within the organisation” (Claude Montal, “Il proletariato e il problemadella direzione rivoluzionaria,” in M. Baccianini and A. Tartarini, eds., Socialisme oubarbarie [Parma: Guanda, 1969], p. 232).

140. A communist theoretician wrote, “It is the distinction between particularknowledge and general knowledge that is the foundation of democratic centralism: itis a tool of knowledge prior to being a tool of action. If we remember this, we canreject as demagogy the appeal sometimes made to the base with the idea of offsettingcentralism: the point of view of the base is indispensable for formulating the rightpolicy and the expression of this point of view must be organised as an element ofknowledge; but the knowledge of the base is partial” ( J. Arnoult, “La nouvelle cri-tique,” December 1963, quoted from Pierre Rosanvallon, L’age de l’autogestion [Paris:Seuil, 1976], pp. 62–63).

Page 234: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 11

Building the New World

1. Even after seizing power, the communist revolution has to continue to livein a state of permanent war, for it is then that it has to fulfill its deepest calling,which is to annihilate the perverse forces that prevent humanity from enteringthe “millenarian Kingdom of liberty.” Before being able to “construct a newlife,”1 tradition must be completely overturned, with all its interests, values,beliefs, institutions, uses, and customs. Such a huge undertaking requires con-centrating unlimited power in the hands of the gnostic aristocracy, for twoessential objectives have to be achieved, one negative and the other positive:the destruction of bourgeois society by means of “a war of extermination”2

and the production of “new people, or cleansed of the filth of the old world.”3

Given its objectives, the revolution has no alternative but to resort to Terrorin the negative destructive phase. Terrorism and revolution go together, fora variety of reasons. The powers of the old world have to be rendered im-potent; the “class enemy” is an absolute enemy and revolutionary justice re-quires its destruction; the existing order must be completely overturned inorder to “grasp the root of the matter,”4 to uproot evil wherever it lurks andmake a complete break with the past. For the gnostic revolution, it is as ifterrorism is inevitable. Not to use it would be considered evidence of un-willingness to pursue its goals and willingness to compromise with the oldworld: in other words, an unforgivable betrayal.

Clearly, the Bolshevik pantoclastic policy was no different from that of themany European millenarian movements that came into being between theLow Middle Ages and the start of the modern age, which all proclaimed thata holy war was the only way to uproot evil from the world. Equally clearly,the Bolshevik revolution was dominated by the same “idea-passion” as the

Page 235: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

222 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Jacobin revolution. In his Report to the Committee of Public Safety of Feb-ruary 5, 1794, Robespierre stated very clearly that terror had to be the specificmodus operandi of the revolution: “Two opposite geniuses [wrote the Incor-ruptible on that particular occasion] contend the empire of nature”: libertyand tyranny. The two are absolute enemies. The revolutionaries are thereforecompelled to follow a simple and at the same time terrible maxim: “to guidethe people, with reason, the enemies of the people with terror” until historyhas issued its verdict: the defeat of the republic or the “suffocation of itsinternal and external enemies.”5

So thought Robespierre, and so thought the founding fathers of scientificsocialism who simply radicalized the Jacobin lesson and proclaimed with dev-astating logic that genocide was a necessary step to “realize (their) philosophy.”

“With the victory of the ‘red republic’ in Paris [we read in an article byMarx in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” of November 7, 1848] armies willbe rushed from interior of their countries to their frontiers and across them,and the real strength of the fighting parties will become evident. We shallremember this June and this October and we too shall exclaim: Vae Victis!The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events,the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very canni-balism of the counter-revolution will convince the nations that there is onlyone means by which the murderous death agonies of the old society and thebloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and con-centrated—and that is by revolutionary terror.”6 Engels promptly associatedwith this chilling proposal of revenge: “One day we will achieve the bloodyrevenge of the Slaves,”7 he repeated six months later (May 19, 1849) in an articlethat concluded with these words: “We have no compassion and we ask nocompassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses forthe terror.”8

Even more chilling is Engels’s formulation of the “moral” principles of thecommunist revolution in February 1849: “To the sentimental words directedtoward us by the more counter-revolutionary European nations, we respondthat hatred for the Russians was, and still is, the first revolutionary passion ofthe Germans. After the revolution, to this hatred for the Russians was addedhatred for the Czechs and the Croats. It will only be possible for us to safe-guard the revolution together with the Poles and the Magyars by using themost ruthless terrorism against these Slavonic populations . . . fight then, implacablefight for life and for death, against Slavism, the betrayer of revolution: totalannihilation and terrorism; not in the interests of Germany but in the interestsof the Revolution.”9

In an article written a month earlier (which has rightly been said to emanate“the odor or stench of pre-Nazism”),10 Engels had explained why the revolutionrequired exterminating the reactionary classes and even genocide: “Among allthe large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progresstook an active part in history, and still retain their vitality—the Germans, the

Page 236: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 223

Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other largeand small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in therevolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary. . . these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearersof counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss oftheir national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protestagainst a great historical revolution.”11 The inexorable conclusion is the follow-ing: “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of theearth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionarypeoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”12

These delirious words did not fall on deaf ears, although the vast majorityof the socialists of the Second International cultivated a profound moral aver-sion for anything resembling Jacobinism.13 Mindful of the Marx-Engels les-son, Lenin tried to justify the use of terrorism as early as 1901: “In principlewe have never rejected, and cannot reject terror. Terror is one of the formsof military action that may be perfectly suitable and even essential at a definitejuncture in the battle, given a definite state of the troops and the existence ofdefinite conditions.”14 A few years later, Lenin reminded the socialists thatthey were waving “the scarecrow of Jacobinism before the eyes of the Social-Democratic workers”; that is to say, Marx’s statements on the indissolublebond between revolution and terrorism, and added “[We] want the people,i.e. the proletariat and the peasantry, to settle accounts with monarchy andthe aristocracy in the ‘plebeian way,’ ruthlessly destroying the enemies of liberty.”15

We know from Bonch-Bruevich and Valentinov that the man who built thefirst totalitarian state of the twentieth century prepared his comrades, psy-chologically and morally, for the idea that the transformation of “sordid re-ality” required ruthless terrorism and violence. The true revolutionary hadconstantly to bear in mind the lesson learned during the Jacobin Terror. Leninwas in open disaccord with the “soft” wing of the Russian Social-DemocraticParty:

Jacobinism does not mean fighting with white gloves, but fighting without sentimen-tality, without being afraid of the guillotine; it means fighting without being discour-aged by failure. Of course Bernstein and company would never be Jacobins becausethey supported democratic principles. Hostility for the Jacobin methods inevitablygenerates hostility for the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat, namely violence,which is inevitable if the socialist revolution is to triumph and the enemies of the pro-letariat be annihilated. If the Jacobin purges are indispensable for the success of thebourgeois revolution, they are all the more indispensable for the successful outcomeof a socialist revolution. A Jacobin spirit is essential to establish the dictatorship of theproletariat. This point is fundamental: the dictatorship of the proletariat can only befounded on Jacobin violence.16

On the other hand, this political-ideological attitude was widespreadamong the Russian revolutionaries.17 For generations, Bakunin, Nechaev,

Page 237: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

224 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Tkachev, and countless others had preached the cult of violence as a meansof regeneration. Zaichnevsky, a fervent supporter of Chernyshevsky and au-thor of a violent manifesto, perhaps deserves special mention. In the opinionof the Soviet journal Proletarskaia Revoliutsia, he was one of the spiritual fathersof Bolshevism:

Let us not forget the lesson that comes to us from Europe. We will not repeat theerrors of the whimpering revolutionaries of ’48 and the terrorists of ’92. We will bemore coherent. We will squash the Czarist tyranny even at the cost of bloodshed. Wewill be three times more inflexible than the Jacobins were in 1790 . . . We haveconfidence in ourselves, in our strength, in the people. We believe in the gloriousmission assigned to Russia: edification of socialism. To the cry of: To the executioner’saxe! Without pity we will kill the followers of the czars who today kill us. We will killthem in the squares, if these scoundrels dare to show their face; we will kill them inthe houses, in the alleys, in the streets! Let us not forget that whoever is not with us,is against us, that whoever is against us, is our enemy and enemies will be exterminatedby every means. Long live the social and democratic Russian republic.18

As soon as the Bolsheviks took over power, Lenin predictably declared that“ruthless struggle-terror”19 was their password. Later he stressed that “terrorismand the CHEKA were absolutely indispensable.”20 Socialism could only flour-ish “in the course of the most intense, the most acute class struggle—whichreaches heights of frenzy and desperation—and civil war,”21 since its objectivewas the “bloody extermination of the rich.”22

The words of the closest collaborators of the charismatic leader of globalBolshevism were no less explicit and brutal. Latsis: “It is necessary to showthe greatest strictness, pitilessness, directness . . . Shooting must be appliedwhen the work of counterrevolutionists finds expression in open armed activ-ity, when plots are revealed, when there are uprisings. . . . But it is very oftennecessary to resort to this measure when there is still no direct danger.”23

Zinoviev: “We are the only legal party in Russia; we hold, one might say, themonopoly of legality. We have torn political liberty from our enemy. We willnot allow a situation in which people can legally try to compete with us. Wehave padlocked the lips of the Mensheviks and revolutionary socialists. Wecould do no otherwise. Comrade Lenin tells us that the dictatorship of theproletariat is a tremendous undertaking. There can be no victory of the dic-tatorship of the proletariat without breaking the back of every enemy of thedictatorship. No one can predict when we will be able to review our attitudein this regard.”24 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky: “The principal task of theworkers’ government is to crush this opposition ruthlessly. Precisely becausethe opposition will inevitably be so embittered, it is necessary that the worker’sauthority, the proletarian rule, shall take the form of a dictatorship. Now‘dictatorship’ signifies very strict methods of government and a resolute crush-ing of enemies. It is obvious that in such a state of affairs there can be no talk

Page 238: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 225

of ‘freedom’ for everyone. . . . The proletarian dictatorship must be harsh andstern. . . . In the extreme cases . . . use the method of the terror.”25 Trotsky:“Revolution insists on the revolutionary class achieving its objective withevery means at its disposal, if necessary armed insurrection; if necessary, ter-rorism . . . War, like revolution, is based on intimidation. Revolution worksin the same way: it kills individuals and intimidates thousands. In this sense,the red terror is no different from an armed insurrection, of which it repre-sents the direct consequence.”26 “Russia is split into two unreconcilable fields:that of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat . . . There is nothing im-moral in the fact that the proletariat is the class to give the coup de grace toa class in agony: that is our right. You are indignant at the open terror thatwe exercise against the class enemy, but let us tell you that within a month atthe most, it will be much more terrible and based on the example of the GreatFrench Revolution. Not prison, but the guillotine awaits our enemies.”27

2. Throughout the history of humanity, civilizations have used terror, es-pecially in periods of consolidation of new regimes and of revolt against theexisting order, as a rule brutally repressed by those in power.28 The radicallynew aspect of the revolutionary millenarian movements is the use of terror asa means for the regeneration of human nature. In other words, terror is not onlyjustified but legitimated29—rectius: sacralised—insofar as an instrument ofcatharsis.

Lenin wrote that the first task of revolutionary terror is to “cleanse of anyharmful fleas . . . the damned capitalist society.”30 Disinfestation of this“swamp” requires the use of “systematic . . . coercion to an entire class [thebourgeoisie] and its accomplices”:31 a cruel, ruthless but absolutely necessaryoperation if “grasping, malicious, frenzied filthy avidity of the money-bags”32

is to be eliminated. On the other hand, what right do beings who are not menbut filthy “spineless hangers-on” have to exist,33 people who like “vampires”34

feed off the blood of the workers? Their elimination is a moral obligation andessential for the complete destruction of “bloodstained, sordid, rapacious,shopkeeping capitalism.”35

If state terror is indispensable in the phase of consolidation of revolutionarypower, it is no less indispensable when it comes to constructing the new order.Engels justifies the use of terror on the grounds that the “fall”36—the genesisof private property—had corrupted human nature, filling it with vices such asgreed, envy, love of leisure. It is unthinkable to construct socialism withoutfirst fighting the spontaneous, widespread acceptance of the (dis)values of thecapitalist society. Thanks to the Marxian gnosis, the members of the Com-munist Party have managed to escape universal corruption and will conductthe “last holy war” against the civilization of the “haves.” Constant vigilanceis necessary. It is essential to remain in a state of permanent war even afterthe exploiters and their accomplices have been eliminated. The bourgeoisspirit is not only responsible for creating “corrupt human material,”37 but it

Page 239: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

226 Revolutionary Apocalypse

possesses a formidable power of attraction and temptation that is expressedin countless ways and to be fought with every means, and at whatever price.

Clearly, this is simply another version of the doctrine of the homo naturalis.According to moral Christian theology, man is a mixture of sinful desires, oneof which is a particularly pronounced desire for possession, which destroyssolidarity and the idea of universal brotherhood. Mindful of the words of itsfounding fathers, “Love not the world nor the things of the world” (St. John),the church went to great lengths to tame l’homo naturalis with a rigid moralcode that systematically repressed the worldly desires that undermine univer-sal love and prevent salvation.38 The proliferation of sinful worldly passions—first and foremost, avaritia—coincided with the genesis and growth of themarket economy that “liberated” homo naturalis from the protection of thechurch. The planetary expansion of the market economy is what producedthe capitalist-bourgeois civilization.

Communism reacted against the triumph of the homo naturalis, alias thebourgeoisie, dominated by self-interest and profit, in exactly the same way asall the other heretical Christian sects. It accused the church of having aban-doned the struggle against sin and gave itself the historical mission of up-rooting evil, institutionalizing terror. The declared objective was to extirpatethe acquisitive spirit and force men to strip themselves of “old Adam.”39 In aword, to create the New Man.

With these givens, Marxist-Leninist communism inevitably acquired all thefeatures of an immense crusade against modern civilization. The church was nolonger able to placate the acquisitive spirit and the desire for worldly pleasures;the civilization, edified by homo naturalis, became a veritable regnum perditionis,to be demolished stone by stone, with the exception, of course, of its scientific-technical machinery that was essential for building the kingdom of plenty.Moreover, Marxist-Leninist communism had to conduct its crusade on a plan-etary scale. If one tiny corner of the planet earth escaped the ideological holdof the party, sooner or later the acquisitive spirit would revive and infecthumanity, driving it back into the swamp of corruption, lies, and selfishness.

For the acquisitive spirit is most contagious. Though unnatural and sinful,it is spontaneous. “Small production [wrote Lenin in the margin of Bukharin’stext on transition economy] generates capitalism and bourgeoisie constantly,every day, every hour, in a spontaneous manner and in vast proportions.”40

Consequently, “it is the revival of the petty bourgeoisie and of capitalism onthe basis of some freedom of trade (if only local)” since “freedom of trade iscapitalism.”41

The conclusion is inevitable: revolution cannot limit itself to suppressingthe plutocratic bourgeoisie and nationalizing large industry; it must do some-thing far more radical and difficult: it must fight widespread, small productionand trade in every way possible, bearing constantly in mind that the “petty-bourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism.”42 In other words, itmust destroy spontaneity, an undertaking that can only be accomplished by

Page 240: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 227

means of a “latent form of civil war between the government and thepeople.”43

If it wishes to remain faithful to its soteriological mission, the revolutionary partymust exercise permanent terror until the Great Change has occurred and NewMan has risen from the ashes of the ruins of the old world. In 1922, whenSoviet power had annihilated all its enemies, Lenin wrote the following letterto the commissar for justice: “Comrade Kursky, Further to our conversation.I herewith enclose the draft of an article supplementary to the Criminal Code.It is a rough draft and, of course, needs altering and polishing up. The mainidea will be clear, I hope, in spite of the faulty drafting—to put forward pub-licly a thesis that is correct in principle and politically (not only strictly jurid-ical), which explains the substance of terror, its necessity and limits, andprovides justification for it. The courts must not ban terror—to promise thatwould be deception or self-deception—but must formulate the motives un-derlying it, legalise it as a principle, plainly, formulated in the broadest pos-sible manner, for only revolutionary law and revolutionary conscience canmore or less widely determine the limits within which it should be applied.”44

According to Lenin, the justification and legitimation of terror as a consti-tutive feature of the revolutionary government were beyond discussion. Withthe psychology typical of the “cold fanatic,” he was convinced of the absolutescientificity of Marxism and equally convinced that the party incarnated theinexorable laws of history. Nothing else counted: not the false, hypocriticalprinciples of bourgeois morality, not sentimentality, not compassion. It wasthe sacred right of the proletarian dictatorship to eliminate everything thatwas incompatible with communism, for the moral purification of the worldwas at stake. In 1922, in a letter to Stalin, Lenin wrote: “We will cleanseRussia for a long time to come.”45

In this situation, the first duty of the professional revolutionary was toprepare himself psychologically for the use of mass terror. This was essentialgiven that it was not conceivable to build a communist society without firstliquidating the petit bourgeoisie. “It was the bourgeoisie that opposed thegreat clarification willed by History, the decisive clash between exploiters andexploited that the Revolution had to take to its extreme, in order to solve itbrutally by annihilating the former.”46 The kulak, that is to say the small landproprietor, who had no other concern but his own plot of land and his pettyselfish interests, was the main obstacle to the creation of the New World. Aslong as he was able to contaminate society with his “squalid, hateful, crazygreed of the pile of money,” humanity would never know moral regeneration.The party could have only one cry before this “poisonous spider”: “Death tothem!”47

Revolution and genocide are therefore one and the same thing. Revolutioncannot accomplish its historical mission, the eradication of self-interest, with-out exterminating the millions of individuals—a veritable “hylic mass” des-tined to annihilation—who have no desire but “to obtain a place in the market,

Page 241: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

228 Revolutionary Apocalypse

or a higher price for his product or his labour.”48 According to the man rightlyconsidered to be the “little Lenin,”49 these individuals constituted a “barrierof corrupt, dissolute, putrid humanity used by capitalism to defend its eco-nomic and political power”; therefore they must be expelled from “the socialfield, just as one would use iron and fire to expel locusts from a half destroyedfield.”50

3. Given the Marx-Leninist theory of corruption (bourgeois) and purifi-cation (revolutionary), the Bolshevik Party inevitably placed mass killings onits agenda as soon as it took over power. “In order to tame our enemies[declared Zinoviev during a meeting of the Soviet of the first urban districtof Petergrad in September 1918] we must create a militarism of our own, asocialist militarism. Ninety of the one hundred million inhabitants of SovietRussia must be won over to our cause. As for the others, there is nothing tosay to them: they must be annihilated.”51

This insistence on the need for purgative terror demonstrates the pro-foundly totalitarian nature of communism. Terror, as Hannah Arendt has ob-served, is the “real essence” of totalitarianism and what defines this trulyunique form of government. Even when a totalitarian movement successfully“gains absolute control and substitutes propaganda with indoctrination, it usesviolence not so much to terrify the population (this is necessary only in theinitial phases when political opposition still exists) as to continually implementits ideological doctrines and practical organization.”52

The epochal novelty of the Bolshevik conquest of power was that for thefirst time in history (with the exception of the Jacobin experiment) a politicalregime used terror not only to dominate society but also, and especially, to“possess” it intimately and just as intimately “purify” it. The genesis of theSoviet State is singular in that a minority of gnostic paracletes—the savior-saved aristocracy—endeavored to instill its revolutionary drive in the humanmasses it wanted to rule, in order to liberate them of the layers of corruptiondeposited upon them by centuries of lies. Russian society became one hugelaboratory in which tens of millions of individuals were used as guinea pigsfor the most extraordinary experiment ever conceived by a human mind:53 tocompletely reshape the existing in order to create a radically different reality.

The first step of the Great Revolutionary Change was to liberate the Rus-sian land from the “harmful insects” that infested it like parasites. Those notcrushed by the party’s “iron hand” were “removed” from the population toavoid the spread of infection. Dzerzhinsky euphemistically referred to theseplaces of removal as “labour camps”; in fact, they were extermination camps,used by the party to get rid of whoever it considered contaminated and con-taminating and for whatever reason.

Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have described in detail theorganization and cruelty of the concentration camp world that has come tobe known as the gulag archipelago.54 It was a veritable society within society—

Page 242: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 229

a “world apart” as Gustav Herling called it55—split up into hundreds of lagers,whose gates bore these words: “Labour is a question of honour, of value andof heroism.” Given that millions of individuals were interned in this socialsubsystem, one can only conclude that it was not “a penal institution createdfor the punishment and the repression of crimes, but a political structure foraltering the social fabric, by removing and cancelling entire sectors and groupsfrom society.”56 In other words, the quantitative hypertrophy of the concen-tration camp world is inexplicable unless one remembers that the ultimategoal of the Marxist-Leninist revolution was to purify the existing by elimi-nating any element that might pollute society “not unlike the carrier of anillness.”57 The fate of these polluting elements was irremediably marked:58

they had to die; or rather, they had to disappear. The communist lagers wereorganized like “dens of oblivion where anyone could come to an end, withoutleaving any of the usual traces of the existence of a person, a body or a grave.”59

How could it have been otherwise? If the historical mission of the revo-lution was to purify the existing, it had to place on the agenda the extermi-nation of whoever had been contaminated by the moral miasma of “putridcapitalism” and ensure that even the memory of them was eliminated.

This leads us to another typical characteristic of Communism in power:concentration camps have to be a permanent institution,60 at least until themetamorphosis of the existing is complete and the goal for which power wastaken over has been achieved. Once the spontaneous tendencies of “oldAdam” have been eradicated, the party can do without the purges, confessions,and lagers, which are simply instruments of “social prophylaxis.”61 In otherwords, the revolution needs terror to render the enemy impotent, but alsoand essentially “to free the present of the past.”62 Centuries and centuries ofcorruption and lies have left a layer on consciences. It is virtually impossible—so reasons the man who identified totally with the Marxist-Leninist revolu-tion—to imagine regenerating “the mass human material which has beencorrupted by hundreds and thousands of years of slavery, serfdom, capitalism,by small individual enterprise”63 without resorting to an intensive, violenttherapy. This is a huge educational undertaking in which it is necessary todestroy the harmful effects of “religious illusion” and “bourgeois deception,”uproot men from the tradition in which they have been socialized, and freetheir minds from the classist culture.

4. In addition to the purges, the murders, the summary trials, and concen-tration camps, communism in power also needed brainwashing to achieve itspalingenetic ends. Brainwashing was an unprecedented practice of paramountimportance. Its purpose was to break the spirit of the victim, to disintegratehis personality to the point that he was willing to grasp the only hope ofsalvation available, and accept the doctrine being forced upon him. Brain-washing,64 unlike torture, was not a technique for making people confess. Thepurpose was to provoke a strong sense of guilt, which in turn produced uncon-

Page 243: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

230 Revolutionary Apocalypse

ditional, impassioned faith. In other words, brainwashing was used to “pro-voke conversions.” By exercising intense material, mental, and moral pressureon individuals, the party tried to produce artificially the mystic experienceexperienced by the “true believers” when they first heard the message of sal-vation of the charismatic leader. When the guilt became particularly intense,the brainwashed victim was psychologically ready for conversion. The factthat this was the only way to end complete isolation of course contributed.Reduced to absolute impotence, mortified daily by “reeducators,” the victim’sonly hope was to agree to be regenerated by the party, to embrace the revo-lutionary ideology and reject anything in conflict with it.

The process of spiritual regeneration followed five phases:65

1. Complete isolation: the victim “is dead to the world.”

2. Guilt: the victim acknowledges his mistakes and feels shame.

3. Surrender: the victim’s resistance breaks down completely, and he takes all the blamefor what he is accused of (usually in the presence of a benevolent and understandinginquisitor).

4. Change of perspective: the victim starts to express “the popular point of view.”

5. Moral renaissance: the positive conclusion of the purgative process.

Jean Pasqualini’s report on his horrific experience in one of Mao’s laogai isa particularly lucid description of how the party used brainwashing to keepthe “bad element of society” in a state of permanent childhood, until the guiltand anguish became intolerable: “Our relationship with the State was a re-lationship between a child and parent rather than between an adult and an-other adult . . . The child is forced to place all his trust in the parent becausehe has no other choice . . . There was no other solution but to follow themovement, to do as it asked . . . What else is there to do against an omnipotentauthority?”66

The innermost intentio of revolutionary pedagogy was clearly the redemptionof those corrupted by the bourgeois spirit. The party gave them the oppor-tunity to acknowledge their intellectual and moral crimes and show sincererepentance, by accepting the uniform collective will of the people on the basisof the following diagnosis-therapy of evil: “All crimes have definite ideologicaland social roots. The negative ideology and bad habits left over from the oldsociety (pursuit of personal advantage at the expense of others and leisurewithout toil) continue to be part of the mentality of certain individuals to amarked degree. If we are to eradicate crime, in addition to inflicting duepunishment on criminals, we must also introduce a variety of effective mea-sures to transform the various negative ideological concepts in the minds ofmen, so that they can be educated and reformed, transformed in new men.”67

In short, correction is possible even though dissent, error, lack of revolu-tionary passion are unforgivable crimes against the community. Once the “bad

Page 244: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 231

element of society” has acknowledged its guilt and placed itself in the handsof the party, the process of reshaping his personality can begin. The processis intellectual, moral, and affective. The cathexis of the repentant individualwill be completely reshaped and liberated from the traditional objects of de-sire—irremediably corrupt and corrupting—and become absolutely “avail-able.” Nothing will stand in the way of measureless love of revolution and thesoteriological institution incarnating it: the party.68

This explains why revolution in power is literally obsessed with confessions.69

They are organized periodically according to a precise ritual in the knowledgethat they offer a gratifying spectacle to those who have been regenerated andoffer confirmation of the absolute validity of the values and objectives of therevolution. They are also confirmation of the perversion of whoever resistsand continues to feel and reason according to the ideology governing thebourgeois culture. Moreover, the rite of public confessions allows the partyto demonstrate its benevolence and willingness to save whoever has fallen intoabjection.70 It offers the possibility of a total catharsis (intellectual, moral, andaffective) and relief from “guilt, especially in association with the masochistictendencies that draw pleasure from personal degradation. Moreover . . . it cancreate an orgiastic sense of unanimity . . . and the dissolution of Self in thegreat flux of the Movement.”71

5. Revolution in power devotes all its energy to the “systematic annihilationof the individual.”72 When the gradual process of spiritual lobotomy is complete,“dangerous ideas” and “bad thoughts” are no longer a threat, or a potentialsource of moral infection. Revolution acts as it does for the purification ofsociety. It frees society from everything that corrupts and degrades it.73 Onlypeople with a “bourgeois” mentality consider the manipulation of the psyche,so well described by George Orwell in his masterpiece 1984, to be a mon-strosity. To the militant communist, who sees reality from a Marxist-Leninistperspective and has been suitably resocialized via a process of what ArthurKoestler has called “emotional saturation,”74 brainwashing is an indispensabletool of spiritual regeneration and therefore a technique for creating the NewMan.

Indeed, brainwashing can legitimately be said to be part of the genetic codeof the communist ideological system in which the world is divided into twospheres: the “sphere of the pure,” or the aristocracy of the saviors-saved, andthe “sphere of the impure,” containing the hylic elements. Direct conflict isthe only conceivable relationship between the two. It ends once the formerhas absorbed the latter. Purification means exterminating the impure ele-ments75 and converting those who are not completely lost though not enlight-ened. These people are between lightness and darkness; rather, they live indarkness but can still be enlightened and therefore redeemed. The party-gnosis has a moral obligation to educate and transform them. This is essentialif catharsis is to be universal. No one is exempt from ideological re-education.

Page 245: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

232 Revolutionary Apocalypse

The very nature of the revolution requires it. And, in effect, revolutionarygnosticism believes in collective salvation and is hostile and suspicious of who-ever claims to have found salvation, in isolation from the corrupt and cor-rupting world.

Although it reveals the intimately totalitarian nature of the communist rev-olution, brainwashing is not a routine practice of the Marxist-Leninist party,at least not statistically speaking.76 It tends rather to invest huge resources(organizational, financial, and human) in young people. The reason is obvious.Young people are the future. The revolution will have a future if the youngpeople are spiritually won over. The adults who have been corrupted by thebourgeois culture have to be reeducated, whereas young people are like softwax in the hands of the agencies of socialization of the state party and can beshaped at will. Properly indoctrinated, they can be convinced that their moralsare the same as those of the state-party and that there exists no truth or valueoutside the revolutionary ideology.

The process is easier if special organizations are created to educate andtrain young people to be the future “guardians of the revolution.”77 The re-gime uses these organizations to implement its policy of intensive indoctri-nation to achieve permanent psychological mobilization and the creation ofa fanatical youth impervious to any counter-messages.78 In any case, suchmessages are systematically eliminated because the media are monopolized bythe party whose censorship ensures that nothing and no one disturbs theprogram of education of the “executor of the law of History.”79 A completelynationalized (or duly controlled) press, radio, and cinema has the responsi-bility of producing a constant flow of messages, whose overall result is thecreation of a uniform and compact symbolical universe in which the individ-ual—presuming that this term means something in a society modeled byMarxism-Leninism—has no choice but to acknowledge that the image of theworld built and conveyed by the regime through the media80 in fact corre-sponds to the real world. In effect, ideology and reality become one and thesame thing—in the sense that the former squashes and hides the latter—andthe manipulation of minds can be total.81

The “gigantic undertaking of re-orienting spirits, converting consciencesand spreading faith”82 by imposing the “catechism of revolution” is accom-panied by another important strategy: the conversion of professional associ-ations and trade unions into transmission belts of the will of the party, andthe organization of popular celebrations in favor of the regime and its infal-lible charismatic leader. In the end, this produces what Friedrich and Brze-zinski called the “totalitarian psychic fluid”83 and an environment favorableto the revolutionary transformation of society.

The process is still not complete. The gnostic dictatorship now needs anAbsolute Enemy. In fact, hatred is another powerful factor of unity and mo-bilization. The propaganda “needs a situation in which the enemy of the State,the enemy of class, the enemy of the people, can no longer do any harm, but

Page 246: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 233

has not completely disappeared and can still be ridiculed.”84 This is the onlyway it can justify its constant reminders to vigilate, control, suspect, denounce:all essential to preserve the psychological “state of siege” climate typical oftotalitarian regimes.

Of course, the revolution in power claims to be driven by humanitarianmotives and, in fact, Gorky rightly defined it as socialist humanism. However,this love of humanity “cannot be dissociated . . . from hatred for the enemiesof humanity.”85 Of course, humanity is an abstract concept and the “enemiesof humanity” are rather more concrete. The result is that “love of humanity”becomes rhetorical. Its function is to legitimate that particular form of moraltribalism based on the “pedagogy of hatred” that Zamiatin and Orwell de-scribed so brilliantly in their dystopiae.

The most decisive strategy for preventing the spiritual pollution of thepeople is, however, cultural isolation. It is imperative to protect the masses fromany potential source of “ideological contamination.” This can only be doneby interrupting all communication with the corrupt and corrupting bourgeoisworld. Socialist society is structured like a “fort under siege” in permanentwar with the outside world and therefore ever suspicious of exogenous mes-sages. Besieged by the bourgeois world, it must have the protection of an“iron curtain” if it is not to be invaded by the propaganda of the class enemyand the moral miasma of putrid capitalism.86

6. Such a state is an ideocracy or a logocracy87 in which the population isendlessly bombarded by revolutionary doctrine. The purpose of propagandais to “make it possible to believe in what does not exist and deny reality.”88

Since this situation is extremely unpleasant for whoever happens not to belongto the new class, “the present must no longer be perceived as experience butbecome pure expectation, a political and spiritual hibernation.”89 This explainswhy revolution in power is obliged to build a “kingdom of lies.” If realitywere to be perceived for what it is, the gap between everyday life and theextraordinary expectations fueled by party propaganda would be too great90

and the ideological foundations collapse. Revolution in power is forced to liesystematically91 and to institutionalize the “Shigalev model”: “Every memberof society jealously spies on the other and controls each . . . Public control atevery hour and moment. Everyone must spy on the other and denouncehim.”92 Given the aspiration of the party to create a spiritual unity of thepeople, at whatever price, it inevitably has to use the same inquisitorial meth-ods used by the church to combat heresy in the Counter-Reformation.93

Equally inevitable is the use of a particular type of language.This political language—in which there is “co-existence of opinions within

a system of opinions that are logically contradictory”94—exists in every cul-ture.95 With the genesis and development of the Marxist-Leninist ideologywe witness the apotheosis of “duplicitous thought.” It is so pervasive thatrevolutionism becomes institutionalized schizophrenia. The communist claims

Page 247: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

234 Revolutionary Apocalypse

that he is fighting for a real democracy, but his true goal is dictatorship; heclaims that his only aspiration is to liberate the oppressed but demands thetotal compliance of the workers to the will of the party; he constantly spoutstheories on the primacy of science but systematically sacrifices science to thedogmas of the (compulsory) state ideology.96 No opportunity is missed todemand that the people should participate in decisionmaking processes, butevery spontaneous movement of society is regarded with suspicion and fear;he utters fiery invectives against the privileges of the bourgeoisie but pretendsnot to perceive the rigorously classist structure of socialist society. In otherwords, the communist uses a lexicon in which words have a meaning that doesnot correspond to consolidated usage and as a result lives in a state of per-manent “false consciousness.” In Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy everything isduplicitous; everything runs on different levels, and the levels never meet.However, while the simple militant is a “cheated cheater”; that is to say, avictim of the lies and deception, higher up the party hierarchy there is in-creasing awareness that lying is essential for the conquest of power and theedification of socialism.

Note that Marxist-Leninist ideology does not limit its theory to the plu-tocratic bourgeoisie and its organic allies. It does something more radicalwhen it extends the theory to include the workers. In a secret documentwritten by Lenin in 1902 we read: “The more ‘indulgence’ we show, in thepractical part of our programme, towards the small producer (e.g. to the peas-ant), the ‘more strictly’ must we treat these unreliable and double-faced socialelements in the theoretical part of the programme, without sacrificing one iotaof our standpoint. Now then, we say, of you adopt this, our, standpoint, youcan count on ‘indulgence’ of every kind, but if you don’t, well then, don’t getangry with us! Under the ‘dictatorship’ we shall say about you: there is nopoint in wasting words where the use of power is required.”97

This is surely a most peculiar form of Machiavellianism that is only com-prehensible if we remember that the starting point of revolutionary gnosticismis that we are all in a state of “false consciousness,” with the exception of asmall minority. In order to attain the superior objective to which it has ded-icated itself—the demolition of the “edifice of deception and prejudice”98—this small minority cannot withdraw from its obligation to use lies. Of course,the function of a revolutionary lie is nothing like the function of a bourgeoislie: the former acts for the triumph of truth, the latter for the eternalizationof self. In other words, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, the professional revo-lutionaries can and must use the “noble” lie.

So paradoxically—and yet absolutely logically given the metaphysical prem-ises of revolutionary gnosticism—lies are a means for edifying the “kingdomof truth.”99 It goes without saying that the masses must not realize they arebeing lied to. It is imperative they believe they are being told absolute self-evident truths. This is only possible if the party develops a new type of lan-

Page 248: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 235

guage that is structured in such as way as to make reality systematically complywith the needs of “duplicitous thought.”

This is exactly what the party did. Barely two years after the conquest ofthe Winter Palace, Kisselev published a “language reform plan.” In this doc-ument he stressed that the old mentality would never be overthrown, if thestructure of the Russian language was not also transformed and purged. In-evitably, it expressed a bourgeois, reactionary spirit. For the communists itwas “compulsory” to create a lexicon that was in harmony with Marxism, theonly “scientific conception of life and society.”100 This was the first step of aprocess that eventually led to the development of what George Orwell re-ferred to as “neo-language.” In addition to fostering the spread of the “right”mentality, this neo-language had the function of blocking the genesis of het-erodox ideas and finding a linguistic guise suited to “duplicitous thought.” Inabsolute accordance with the nature of the revolutionary project—to make aclean slate of the existing in order to purify it—the party appointed itself“demiurge of the word,” the absolute lord of language. This allowed it tobetter control the spiritual activities of society, obliging everyone to use ameans of expression that had been carefully sterilized to prevent the emer-gence of individual ideas and feelings, on principle considered “bourgeois”and, therefore, corrupt and corrupting. Thus the imperative of orthodoxygenerated the imperative of orthogloxy, which in turn generated a “woodenlanguage”: a stereotyped jargon consisting of formulas and empty slogans,whose purpose was to prevent people from thinking outside the boundariesof collective thought.

NOTES

1. Lenin, “Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New,” in Complete Works,vol. 26, p. 385.

2. Lenin, “Gli insegnamenti dei fatti di Mosca,” in Opere complete, vol. 9, p. 360.3. Lenin, “Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress,” in Complete Works, vol. 28,

p. 424.4. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 182.5. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours, p. 221.6. Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-revolution in Vienna,” in Complete

Works, vol. 7, p. 505f.7. Friedrich Engels, Il panslavismo democratico, p. 377 (italics added).8. Karl Marx, “The Summary Suppression of the ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’” in

Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 453.9. Friedrich Engels, Il panslavismo democratico, p. 381.

10. Francesco de Aloysio, Engels senza Marx (Naples: Liguori, 1979), p. 143.11. Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” in Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 230 and

234 (italics added).12. Ibid., p. 238.13. See Karl Kautsky, Terrorismo e comunismo (Milan: Bocca, 1946).

Page 249: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

236 Revolutionary Apocalypse

14. Lenin, “Where to begin?,” in Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 19.15. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in

Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 59 (italics added).16. Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin.17. This was so widespread that even a moderate such as Herzen published an

appeal of a Russian revolutionary in his journal “Kolokol,” claiming that “liberationcould come only from the executioner’s axe.”

18. Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin.19. Lenin, “Moscow Party Workers’ Meeting,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 211.20. Lenin, “Discorso conclusivo del VII congresso dei soviet,” in Opere complete,

vol. 20, p. 207.21. Lenin, “Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New,” in Complete Works,

vol. 26, p. 401.22. Lenin, “Draft of a Manifesto to the Peasantry,” in Complete Works, vol. 26,

p. 373. Lenin insisted on the extermination of the rich to such an extent that a youngrevolutionary socialist asked him, “Why have a Commissar for Justice then? Let usjust call him what he is, the commissar for social extermination, and be done with it!”At which Lenin’s face lit up: “Well said, that is exactly how it should be, except thatwe cannot say it” (quoted from Orlando Figes, La tragedia di un popolo [Milan: Cor-baccio, 1997], p. 645).

23. Quoted from W. H. Chamberlin, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 78.24. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 510.25. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. 80f.26. LeonTrotsky, Terrorism and Communism.27. Quoted from Pierre Broue, La rivoluzione perduta (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,

1991), p. 172.28. See J.C. Chesnais, Histoire de la violence (Paris: Laffont, 1981).29. While “justification is made in relation to urgent situations, legitimation is

made in relation to the requirements of law or of reason” (Dominique Colas, “Lenineet la dictature du parti unique,” in Maurice Duverger, ed., Dictatures et legitimite [Paris:PUF, 1982], p. 312).

30. Lenin, “How to Organise Competition,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 410.The “harmful fleas” were the “bourgeois intellectuals,” but also the “rich, the roughs,the idlers and the rowdies . . . these dregs of humanity, these hopelessly decayed andatrophied limbs, this contagion, this plague, this ulcer that socialism has inherited fromcapitalism.”

31. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 402.32. Ibid., p. 402.33. Ibid., p. 402.34. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour,

and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 241).35. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works, vol.

28, p. 388.36. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, p. 204.37. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works,

p. 388.38. See Walter Ulmann, Medieval Foundations of Renaissance and Humanism (Lon-

don: Elek, 1977).

Page 250: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 237

39. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 403.40. Quoted from Stalin, “Questioni di politica agraria nell’URSS,” in Questioni del

leninismo, vol. 1 (Rome: Societa editrice “L’Unita”, 1945), p. 334.41. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 344 and 357.42. Ibid., p. 330.43. Milovan Djilas, The New Class.44. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 358.45. Quoted from Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free

Press, 1994).46. Michel Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme (Paris: Jacob, 1990), p. 84.47. Lenin, Forward to the Last, Decisive Fight!, p. 57.48. Lenin, Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems, p. 388.49. Giuseppe Bedeschi, “Il piccolo Lenin. Antonio Gramsci e l’ ‘Ordine Nuovo,’”

in Nuova Storia Contemporanea, no. 6 (1998), p. 39 et seq. On Gramsci’s totalitarianism,see Luciano Pellicani, Gramsci: An Alternative Communism? (Stanford, CA: The Hoo-ver Institution Press, 1981).

50. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 61.51. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 494.52. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 341.53. The “experimental nature” of Communism in power was promptly captured

by Gorky in an article published on December 23, 1917: “What characterises Leninis an absence of morality and a profound lack of compassion for the life of the popularmasses. Lenin is a leader, a Russian aristocrat, who has no lack of the attitudes, thefeelings, of this social class in the process of disappearing. This is why he thinks hehas the right to conduct a cruel experiment on the life of the Russian people . . . ForLenin and his followers the workers class is what iron is for metallurgists: let us see ifwe can extract a Socialist State from this material in these given circumstances. At firstsight it does not seem possible, but why not try?” (Quoted from Domenico Settem-brini, Fascismo, controrivoluzione imperfetta [Florence: Sansoni, 1978], p. 59.)

54. Roy Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1979); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (London: Fontana, 1974).

55. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (London: Heinemann, 1951).56. Domenico Fisichella, Totalitarismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Scientifica,

1987), p. 57.57. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 423–424.58. To the extent that the ex-common prisoner, Minaev, reports that the guards of

the Gulag went to great lengths to let it be known “on every possible occasion . . .that criminals were not completely lost for the motherland; prodigal sons so to say,but still sons. But for the fascists and for the counter (revolutionaries) there was noplace on the face of the earth, nor would there ever be” (quoted from Roy Medvedev,On Stalin and Stalinism).

59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism p. 434.60. Even after Stalin’s death, dissidents—or rather those who did not share the

(compulsory) ideology of the state, thus demonstrating that their mind was still pris-oner of the bourgeois ideology—were interned in special psychiatric clinics. This alonewould confute the theory that totalitarianism was not a constitutive element of thecommunist revolution but an unfortunate deviation from Marxism-Leninism. Someeven claimed that it could be proved that totalitarianism is not a scientific category

Page 251: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

238 Revolutionary Apocalypse

but an ideological weapon shaped in the cold war. This claim overlooks the fact thatthe adjective “totalitarian” was used in a positive sense by the Fascist Giovanni Gentileand the Communist Antonio Gramsci (see Luciano Pellicani, Rivoluzione e totalitarismo[Rome: Pagine, 1993], pp. 33–34).

61. J. G. Gliksman, “Social Prophylaxis,” in C. J. Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), p. 61.

62. Regis Debray, A Critique of Arms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).63. Lenin, Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems, p. 388.64. Edward Hunter was the first to use the term “brainwashing” in a text contain-

ing an enlightening anecdote. Pavlov had been invited by Lenin to write a report onconditioned reflexes. After reading the report, Lenin congratulated the famous psy-chologist for indicating a method for “saving the Revolution” (Brainwashing [NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957], p. 40). Of course, the method referred toinvolved the total manipulation of the human psyche until it took the shape dictatedby revolutionary gnosis.

65. O. Reboul, L’indottrinamento (Rome: Armando, 1979), p. 104.66. Jean Pasqualini, Prisonnier de Mao (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 54 and p. 141.67. From an article published on the “Quotidiano del Popolo” (quoted from A.

Devoto, La tirannia psicologia [Florence: Sansoni, 1960], p. 350).68. See Hongda Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder, CO: Westview

Press, 1992).69. See F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (Lon-

don: Hurst and Blackett, 1951).70. Lenin spoke of the heretic Paul Levi in these terms: “If he submits to the

discipline, if he performs well (he might for example collaborate anonymously withthe official Party organ, write some useful pamphlets etc.) I will not wait longer thanthree or four months to write an open letter asking that he be rehabilitated. This isthe trial he must accept. Let us hope that he finds an honourable solution” (quotedfrom Clara Zetkin, Lenin (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1968), p. 40.

71. R. J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York: Norton,1961), p. 426.

72. Pin Yathay, L’utopie meurtriere (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), p. 69. Thisbook report was written by one of the few victims of the Cambodian Revolution whomanaged to escape. Along with Pasqualini’s book, it is absolutely essential for under-standing the nature of the “infernal pedagogy” institutionalized by communism inpower.

73. The Khmer Rouges obsessively reminded the people being reeducated: “Wemust try and purify you. L’Angkar will make real revolutionaries of you” (quoted fromPin Yathay, L’utopie meurtriere, p. 91).

74. Arthur Koestler, Le yogi et le commissaire (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1946), p. 177.75. On August 4, 1919, Pravda wrote: “Workers and poor, take up your arms, learn

to shoot, be ready to fight the revolt of the kulaks or white guards, insurge againstwhoever acts against the power of the Soviet, ten bullets for whoever raises its handagainst them . . . the rule of capital will only be extinguished with the last breath ofthe last capitalist, of the last nobleman, of the last Christian, of the last officer” (quotedfrom Boris Levitsky, L’inquisizione rossa [Florence: Sansoni, 1969], p. 21).

76. Brainwashing was used almost exclusively by Asian communism. The reason

Page 252: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Building the New World 239

is to be sought in the persistent influence of Confucianism, according to which hu-manity is naturally good and therefore always redeemable, at least in theory.

77. See Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1962), pp. 283 et seq.

78. See A. Haynal, M. Molnar, and G. de Puymege, Le fanatisme (Paris: Stock,1980).

79. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).80. In the “Russian proletarian dictatorship [wrote Joseph Roth in 1926] the news-

paper is at the service of censorship: not so that it can suffocate truth but because itdiffuses the will of the censor. The will of the censor is the will of the government.The newspaper is the official organ of the censor because it is the official organ of thegovernment” (Viaggio in Russia [Milan: Adelphi, 1992], p. 116).

81. In fact, the complete socialization of individuals requires abolishing the family.Communism certainly never managed to do that but it did definitely develop a theorythat went in this direction. Immediately after the conquest of the Winter Palace,Aleksandra Kollontai proclaimed: “The family is no longer indispensable. It is no useto the State because it prevents women from doing useful work, or to the members ofthe family itself, because the State will gradually take over responsibility for the edu-cation of children” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storiadell’URSS, p. 64).

82. Francois Fejto, Storia delle democrazie popolari, vol. 1, p. 539.83. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autoc-

racy (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 107.84. Ernst Junger, Trattato del ribelle (Milan: Adelphi, 1991), p. 15.85. Quoted from Mikhail Heller, La machine et les rouages (Paris: Calmann-Levy,

1985), p. 124.86. On January 29, 1958, Pravda published an editorial containing the following

words: “When we Communists fail to do our political work with the masses, we allowconditions to be created for the penetration of the influence of foreign bourgeoisideology, for the revival of the remains of capitalistic ideas among the Soviet people”(quoted from A. L. Unger, The Totalitarian Party [London: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1975], p. 9).

87. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld and Nic-olson, 1968).

88. Mikhail Heller, La machine et les rouages, p. 231.89. Constantin Dumitresco, La cite totale (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 95.90. The expectations were described by the Soviet writer, Leonid Leonov, as fol-

lows: “The world we imagine is more concrete and better suited to the needs of manthan the Christian paradise” (quoted from Andrei Siniavsky, Che cos’e il realismo soci-alista?, p. 60).

91. An anecdote of the French anarchist Gaston Leval is most enlightening in thisregard: “In Petergrad I met the former anarchist Victor Serge. He has now beenconverted to Bolshevism. In his articles he talked of a liberated world. He already hadto hide what he really thought”: “There are no trade unions, compulsory paymentsare exacted on salaries, the workers are militarised. It is worse than it was during thewar under the czars, but we are obliged to lie in order to save what can be saved of theRevolution” (quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Revolution sovietique, p. 81).

92. Fedor Dostoevsky, Taccuini per “I demoni” (Sansoni: Florence, 1958),

Page 253: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

240 Revolutionary Apocalypse

pp. 1098–1099. Communism had to create a huge and powerful police system for thesame reason. In the end, the following paradox was produced: The “Party, the masterof politics, becomes the slave of the police” (Pierre Naville, Burocrazia e rivoluzione,p. 99).

93. See A. Alcala, ed., Inquisicion espanola y mentalidad inquisitorial (Barcelona: Ariel,1984).

94. Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 36.95. See Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification (Oxford: Blackwell,

1975).96. See T. J. Blakely, La escolastica sovietica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974).97. Lenin, “Materials for the Elaboration of the Programme of the Russian SDLP,”

in Complete Works, vol. 6, p. 53. Immediately after the end of the Second World War,the communist leaders of Eastern Europe demonstrated that they had learned Lenin’slesson to perfection. In fact, they used a “strategy of lies” to achieve their objective ofintroducing a one-party dictatorship but made statements such as the following: “Wesupport the principle that to impose the Soviet system on our country would be amistake, since this method does not correspond to the present conditions of our de-velopment. What we say instead is that the priority interest of our people in the presentsituation imposes the use of a different method, namely the introduction of an anti-classist democratic regime, of a parliamentary democratic republic, with full demo-cratic rights and liberty for all individuals” (quoted from Henry Kissinger,“Communist Parties in Western Europe,” in A. Ranney and G. Sartori, eds., Eurocom-munism [Washington: American Enterprise Institution, 1979], p. 186).

98. Karl Marx, Discorso dell’Associazione di Cultura di Londra, p. 619.99. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Letter to Soviet Leaders (London: Collins, Harril

Press, 1974).100. Quoted by Daniel Siniavsky, La Civilisation Sovietique (Paris: Albin Michel,

1988), p. 76.

Page 254: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 12

The Cultural War betweenWest and East

1. According to a theory that was so common in the sixties that it was al-most a cliche, the October Revolution was a process of “defensive moderni-zation” that fueled an ambitious policy of social change with a view toeliminating the technological, scientific, and economic gap that separatedRussia from the capitalist countries.1 In their effort to build a classless, sta-teless society, the Bolsheviks had developed a method for ending stagnationand showed the countries of the Third World that underdevelopment couldbe overcome. Although authoritarian, the historical role of the Bolsheviks wasprogressive and quite different from the one they had envisaged: they created“a modern industrial State” on the ruins of the old feudal order.2

The economic bankruptcy of the Soviet Union has of course completelydestroyed this theory, which was shared even by people who were horrifiedby totalitarian communist regimes. In fact, the planned dictatorship acted asa “brake mechanism”3 on productive forces rather than a propeller. We knowthat early in the century, czarist Russia had embarked upon industrializationwith such enthusiasm and success that the editor of the Economiste Europeen,E. Thery, concluded his monograph on the Russian economy with thesewords: “If, between 1912 and 1950, things in the great European nationscontinue as they have between 1900 and 1912, by around the middle of thecentury, Russia will dominate Europe both from the political point of viewand from the economic and financial point of view.”4

In light of Thery’s documented forecast,5 we can only conclude that byeliminating the market and everything to do with the market—private prop-erty, private enterprise, competition, and so forth—the October Revolutionled the Russian economy into a dead end, cutting it off from the advanced

Page 255: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

242 Revolutionary Apocalypse

industrial countries. Moreover, even if the Bolsheviks had achieved their eco-nomic goal, the idea that their revolution was a “defensive modernization”would still be debatable.

Contrary to a widespread but quite arbitrary theory, modernization andindustrialization are not one and the same thing.6 The Industrial Revolutionundoubtedly permitted modernity to spread like a huge cultural avalanche,sweeping away everything it found en route: interests, beliefs, traditions, in-stitutions, consolidated practices, and the like. Nonetheless, there should bea rigorous distinction between the concept of modernization and that of in-dustrialization. The former is a global social phenomenon, of which indus-trialization is only a particular dimension. We can say that industrialization isa product of modernization but not vice versa. Modernization is possible with-out industrialization—for example, Pericles’s extraordinary experiment inAthens7—though modern civilization indisputably was able to become a masscivilization thanks to the Great Transformation. Industrialization can alsowork against modernization, as illustrated particularly dramatically by the So-viet example.

We usually understand modernization to be a historical process that leadsin successive stages to the transition from a traditional society to a modernsociety. In order to clarify the semantic value of the concept of modernization,it is important to define as precisely as possible the terminus a quo and theterminus ad quem of that transition. In this context, the expressions “traditionalsociety” and “modern society” indicate two ideal-types that are at the extremesof a theoretical continuum within which real societies are situated. This pro-cedure has the function of producing the conceptual grid for interpretinghistorical phenomena of such vast dimensions, though of course there is nevera perfect match between the ideal type and reality. What we find are “impuretypes”; that is to say, social formations that contain traditional and modernelements in varying degrees The process of modernization is never over: it islike exploring a territory without borders. This is why Marx conceived mod-ern society as a society in a state of “permanent revolution” and Schumpeterdescribed the modus operandi of capitalism, the material base of the modernworld, as a continuous “creative destruction.” In short: modern society is inperpetual movement and perpetual metamorphosis.

With this perhaps not superfluous methodological premise, we can examinethe set of interrelated and mutually supportive elements that constitute thecore of modernity. There are seven essential elements: (1) elective action,(2) nomocracy, (3) citizenship, (4) institutionalization of change, (5) culturalsecularization, (6) autonomous subsystems, and (7) rationalization.

Elective action is perhaps the most typical cultural element of modernity.In traditional society, elective action is reduced to the minimum: traditio hassuch normative cogency that there is no way the individual can escape itsorders and prohibitions. Tradition rules over everyone and everything; thestatus of each member of society; every thought, feeling, and action, is estab-

Page 256: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 243

lished beforehand. The classic example is Sparta, where even the members ofthe ruling class could not have a personal life project. The freedom of modernhumanity—which is precisely the freedom to plan one’s own life—was un-known to the people of Sparta. The only freedom they knew was collectivefreedom, or the right/duty to participate in political decisions.8 The Spartanculture was therefore holistic, whereas modern culture is individualistic. Anindividualistic culture is particularly sensitive to the rights of individuals. Theymust be defended, protected, guaranteed. This is only possible if there arecertain limits to the power of the state. The state cannot be omnipotent. Inother words, the individualistic culture postulates the government of law, ora nomocracy, the only system that guarantees some protection of individualrights.

Modern society is a society not of subjects but of citizens, of people withcertain unalienable rights. The people themselves guarantee that these rightsare respected, by participating, directly or indirectly, in the making of laws.Elective action and individual rights therefore imply nomocracy and partici-pation, as well as democracy, which is the “natural” political organization ofa society on the way to modernity. Universal citizenship rights (civil, political,social) are not automatic but are the product of the battles conducted by thepopulation, which feels that it has been “excluded” and wants to increase thebourgeois border of liberal democracy. In this sense, class battles—not to beconfused with class wars—are an essential element of modern society, so es-sential that modern society has rightly been defined as a society based on theinstitutionalization of conflict.

From this derives another typical characteristic of modernity: willingnessto change. In traditional societies people do not have much chance to modifythe normative structure, which is all-pervasive. It shapes and regulates everyaspect of human life; being sacred, it is intangible. The ideal of traditionalsociety is to avoid change and anything that might upset the present equilib-rium. This does not mean that traditional society is absolutely immobile butthat innovations cannot be in open conflict with tradition.9 The creativity ofa traditional society is therefore prevalently orthogenetic but never, or almostnever, heterogenetic. Classical India is one of the purest and most evidentexamples of how a traditional society is hostile to change. It aspired to be animmobile, “fixed society.” Its spiritual elite—the professional Brahmin cus-todians of the sacred, unchangeable tradition—ruled out even the smallestbreak with the “eternal yesterday.”10 In modern society, change is a value tobe methodically pursued in all fields: in the areas of technology and economy,but also in fashion, philosophy, and art. The modern age is dominated by averitable mania for things new and different. Unlike traditional civilization,which hates anything new, by nature it favors novelty.

For modern society, tradition is not an intangible heritage but a complexsystem of knowledge, techniques, institutions, models of behavior, and values,that can, and must, be constantly modified, renewed, challenged, and even

Page 257: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

244 Revolutionary Apocalypse

rejected. In modern society, the sacred element does not pervade every aspectof life, as it does in traditional society. Its jurisdiction is rigorously limited.This makes modern society a secular city, where vast spheres of action andthought are independent of religious institutions and imperatives, to the ex-tent that one of the most significant dimensions of the process of moder-nization is “disenchantment,” or the loss of plausibility of the religiousWeltanschauungen that accompanied the development of the lay culture.

And this brings us to the sixth element of modernity: subsystems are au-tonomous. With the reduction of the sphere of the sacred and of its normativecogency, social practices become independent of religious institutions. Theytend to regulate themselves according to codes that are not imposed fromwithout but are the expression of specific requirements. As a result, economy,science, art, and the like are emancipated from the sacred—they are secular-ized—and structured in a set of relatively autonomous subsystems. The veryspirit of modernity can be expressed as “art for art,” “economy for economy,”“politics for politics,” “science for science,” and so forth.

In this process of emancipation of social practices from religious impera-tives, the spontaneous self-regulation of the economy that led to the institu-tionalization of the capitalist mode of production and the triumph of thecapitalist ratio played a particularly important role. The capitalist ratio wasnot restricted to the economic world. It extended to other spheres of conductand thought, stimulating a Promethean approach that perceives the world asa kind of huge machine to be dominated, manipulated, exploited, transformed.This was a fascinating, but worrying development, which was responsible forextraordinary results in technology and knowledge, but for equally dramaticmental and moral aberrations; for example, universal marketization and theuse of utility as the only criterion for assessing people and things.

2. What structural conditions generated modern civilization? The best an-swer is probably “the autonomy of civil society from the state.” This auton-omy is only possible in the framework of a social organization in which atleast some material resources are managed in a competitive regime. Thismeans that both historically and logically the market is the economic base ofcivil society.11 A society cannot be autonomous if the state controls all themeans of production. This is obvious if we accept that these are “sources oflife” (Marx’s definition is correct). To monopolize the means of productionmeans to control life, the domination of the “universal entrepreneur,” thebureaucratic managerial state. Autonomy is therefore a key element. Withoutautonomy, the adventure of modernity—the exploration of the neverending“world of possibles”—cannot even begin. A state that exercises a “triple mo-nopoly”—over the political, the economic, and the spiritual spheres—pre-vents the development of any spontaneous movement of society. Society iskept in cultural isolation, to avoid infection from exogenous messages. Theresult is the undisputed and indisputable rule of tradition.

Page 258: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 245

The market is the main agent of modernization and of secularization be-cause, by definition, it is a system that knows no boundaries. It breaks downbarriers, places populations in permanent contact, stimulates spiritual and ma-terial contacts. The expansion of trade goes hand in hand with cultural ex-change. An “open society” is precisely that: a cultural universe “fertilized” bydialogue with other cultures. Experiments are possible, insofar as the statedoes not curb the spontaneous movements of society. A society is only openif it is not chained to the “eternal yesterday” and individuals are free to explorenew routes and open new horizons.

Even a very fleeting look at the history of Western civilization confirms mythesis.12 The process of modernization—that is to say, the transition from aclosed to an open society—was made possible by the permanent capitalistrevolution, which not only permitted the prodigious development of produc-tive forces but also the growth of civil society. To use Gramsci’s fortunatemetaphor, society became a diversified system of “fortresses and asylums” andfor this precise reason was able to oppose the natural despotism of the state.What came into being was a type of civilization based on a dialogue betweenstate and civil society13 and on the set of institutions and values that are re-ferred to as the secular city. Analogously, and inversely, Oriental societies—with the sole exception of Japan—did not experience modernity, because theyfailed to free themselves from the control of the state. The only form of rulethey experienced—the Weberian “iron cage”—prevented economic growthand the building of the secular city.

Given the above, the Soviet regime was undeniably the absolute negationof the secular city. It eliminated elective action and destroyed civil society. Bysanctifying Marxism it blocked the process of secularization and preventedthe passage from a “society of subjects” to a “society of citizens.” It froze thesources of orthogenetic creativity and eradicated the ratio whose foundationslay in the market. In short: the October Revolution was a titanic effort to arrestthe Western cultural invasion, expelling all the essential elements of modernity fromRussian society.14 It strove to absorb the material culture of modern civiliza-tion—industry, technology, and science15—but refused its spiritual culture,attributing to the concepts of liberty, secularization, citizenship, democracy,and so forth, a meaning that was opposite to the one that prevailed in theWest. This explains why the Bolsheviks proclaimed their determination tolearn from the advanced industrial countries, in order to accelerate economicgrowth, but at the same time demonized the “bourgeois” institutions andpivotal values of the “rotten West.” Essentially, it was a selective zealot re-action. They tried to achieve two antithetical objectives: material accultura-tion but preservation of Russia’s spiritual identity, threatened by the “forcefulimmigration of Western ideas.”16 They gave the impression that their objec-tive was modernization. Instead it was the ruthlessly scientific “purification”of the Russian people from every external influence: ideas, values, institutions,

Page 259: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

246 Revolutionary Apocalypse

and so on. The only way to prevent the Western cultural invasion was to makethe country impenetrable, to seal its borders, to build an “iron curtain.”

The former ex-Soviet diplomat Dmitrievsky captured the spirit of the Bol-shevik revolution with extreme lucidity: “A victory of the peasants in thecountryside [he remarked when the Kulaks were being liquidated] would bea victory of the West: of its fundamental conception of individualism andliberalism in political life,”17 a prospect that was most alarming for the Com-munist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). By eliminating microcapitalism inthe countryside, the last vestige of civil society, they were convinced that theywould “save” Russia from being infected by the West. Dmitrievsky stressedthe profoundly anti-European message of Russian policy: “For many yearsthe Russian people [he wrote] have been drinking a terrible poison: hatredand mistrust of anything to do with the West.”18 Stalin’s bloody tyrannyseemed “popular” because it presented itself as a permanent war against West-ern civilization: “It is necessary to catch up with, and overtake, the hated West,in order to squash it and break its arrogant strength. For this objective, Stalinis willing to sacrifice not only the people menu, from whom he was born, butalso all present generations.”19

Proletarian internationalism was clearly a disguise for a resentful, aggressiveform of nationalism.20 This explains what Nikolai Trubetskoi has called the“nightmare of the ineluctability of universal Europisation”21 that carried somuch weight in Russian spiritual life from the beginning of the nineteenthcentury.

In reality, the fight against capitalist imperialism was a fight against Westernmodernity, perceived as a foreign and threatening presence. Communist Rus-sia urged proletarians all over the world to join the revolution. They promisedto emancipate colonized populations from Western hegemony. Psychologi-cally, this role was particularly gratifying for a nation mortified by the arrogantEuropean hegemony. Moreover, Marxian messianism had much in commonwith the messianism of the Christian-Orthodox tradition and revived the sec-ular aspiration of the Russian people to be the charismatic actor destined to“realising the historical destiny of humanity.”22

The Russian population is the “theophanic population” to whom Provi-dence has assigned a soteriological role of planetary dimensions, Dostoevskyproclaimed, after stressing that “every great population believes and indeed mustbelieve, if it wishes to have a long life, in its own priority among nations andin its mission of redeeming the world.”23 He added: “The destiny of the Rus-sian is paneuropean, universal. To become a true Russian means none otherthan to be the brother of all men, universal man; . . . to be a true Russianmeans to seek the reconciliation of all European peoples; this is suited to theRussian race, the eternally unifying Russian soul that can embrace all popu-lations with the same brotherhood and at last utter the Word of Christ’sGospel. Yes, to us has befallen the task of uttering the new word: it will beuttered to consecrate at last the brotherhood of all men.”24 This was a eu-

Page 260: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 247

phemism for stating that the Russian people were spiritually superior andtherefore it was their historical mission to conquer and dominate the world.

Forty years later, the revolution gave Gorky a chance to express an updatedversion of the Dostoevsky theory of Russia’s historical mission, which in turnwas none other than the final expression of the myth of Third Rome:25 “Thereis almost no population that has not at some time or other considered itselfto be a kind of messiah, destined to saving the world and mobilising the bestforces for life and for action. Everything points to the fact that history hasnow assigned this important role to the Russian people.” It is true that Russiagave the impression of being a backward nation but, continued Gorky, usinga typically populist approach, it is precisely this being backward that entitlesRussia to become the demiurge of the New World: “We Russians are a nationthat is rightly considered to be culturally backward. We are a nation withouttraditions and for this we are more daring, more docile, less subject to theinfluence of the past; we are the first to follow the route of the final destructionof the obsolete structures that are typical of the capitalist State.”26

These feelings were shared by the General Bolshevik Staff. At the FirstCongress of Oriental Peoples held in Baku in 1920, Radek, the keynotespeaker, concluded his diatribe against the West with the words: “The capi-talist culture implies the death of every other culture. The sooner that culturedies the better . . . Comrades we call upon the fighting spirit that alwaysanimated the people of the East, when they invaded Europe under the lead-ership of the great conquistadores. Comrades, we know that at this point ourenemies would say that we are referring to Gengis Khan and the great caliphsof Islam. But we are convinced that you will unsheathe your scimitars and notbe conquered.”27

Zinoviev was even more explicit: “The real revolution will explode whenthe 800 million people of Asia join us, when the African continent joins us,when we set in motion thousands of millions of men. It is up to us to proclaima veritable holy war against the British and French capitalists . . . We will be ableto say that the time is ripe when workers the world over arouse tens andhundreds of millions of peasants, creating a red army in the East and armingand organising revolts behind the backs of British armies, poisoning the ex-istence of each British officer arrogantly lording it in Turkey, in Persia, inIndia, in China.”28

Stalin expressed the mission of Communist Russia in these terms: “Para-phrasing Luther’s famous words, Russia could say: I am at the divide betweenthe old capitalist world and the new socialist world. On this divide I bringtogether the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasants of theEast, in order to bring about the collapse of the old world. May the God ofHistory assist me.”29

At the end of 1918, in two short but enlightening articles, Stalin illustratedthe essential elements of the “Asianization” of Marxism that 10 years laterwas to find its greatest interpreter in Mao Tse Tung.30 The future dictator of

Page 261: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

248 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the Soviet Union stressed that Asia had a decisive role to play in preventinga eurocentric vision of the revolution. He stressed that the “wave of liberationwas advancing from the East to the West”31 because “the Russian Revolutionhad been the first to stir up the oppressed peoples against imperialism.”32

Stalin illustrated the strategic consequences of the fact that, contrary to theexpectations of Marx and Engels, the communist revolution had not brokenout in the heart of the capitalist system but in a peripheral country, midwaybetween Europe and Asia: “To awaken oppressed peoples from a centuries-old delay, to instill the liberating spirit of the revolution in the workers andthe peasants of Asian countries, to involve them in the fight against imperi-alism and so deprive global imperialism of its safe backwaters, of its inex-haustible reserve.”33 In other words, by breaking the chain of imperialismwhere it was weakest, the Russian Revolution had opened a new historic era,the building of the New World. This justified reviving the formula previouslyused by the Slavophils, “Ex Oriente lux.” As for the West, “with its imperi-alistic cannibals it had become a hotbed of ignorance and slavery”34 and there-fore had to be swept away without hesitation.

Lenin reached exactly the same conclusion as soon as he realized that thecommunist revolution had no hope of success in the West. “In the final anal-ysis, the outcome of the battle [he declared in one of his last speeches] dependson the fact that Russia, India, China etc. constitute the vast majority of thepopulation. And it is precisely this majority that has recently and with un-precedented rapidity joined the battle for its liberation. So in this sense therecan be no shadow of a doubt as to the final outcome of the global battle. Inthis sense the final victory of socialism is undoubtedly assured . . . The nextarmed conflict will be between the imperialistic counter-revolutionary Westand revolutionary nationalistic East, between the more civilised States of theworld and the more backward States, such as those in the East.”35

The meaning of these messages is clear: the West was no longer the epi-center of the movement to liberate the oppressed and was now the mainobstacle preventing the revolution from achieving its purpose. This did notmean there was no communist future for Europe. The policy was conceivedin such a way as to induce a Leninist of absolute obedience such as Krasikovto draw the following scenario. It contains the essence of the imperialist call-ing of what Mikhail Agursky called national-bolshevism: “Just as the planetsrotate around the sun, so all the European and also Asian countries that em-bark upon socialism will feel increasingly attracted to Russia, as if it were thesun, the natural core of the system of socialist states of Europe and of Asia.It is no coincidence that the social revolution started precisely in Russia.”36

3. If the objective of the regime produced by the October Revolution wasto industrialize the nation, this does not mean that its goal was also to mod-ernize Russian society. Quite the opposite. Lenin’s party simply used theknow-how of Western civilization to suffocate the spirit of modernity37 that

Page 262: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 249

had been “shaping” Russian society for decades and to build a social systemthat was completely impervious and hostile to everything Western. Like allthe other revolutions inspired by it, the Bolshevik revolution was not mod-ernization by revolution38 but a defensive reaction against the invasive pres-ence of Western civilization. The strategic objective was the creation of asocial organization that was antithetic to that of modern society.39

In order to identify the roots of the communist revolt against modernityand the magnetic attraction it exercised on the people of the Third World,we must go against the tide of history, back to the era in which the expansionof European nations was at its peak and “other cultures” succumbed to theirresistible pressure of industrial civilization.

No civilization, not even particularly traditional ones, is ever imperviousand impenetrable. All civilizations absorb exogenous cultural elements, whichthey reelaborate and adapt. Civilizations are complex systems that export andimport cultural goods of various natures. As such, they are mutually conta-gious, albeit within precise limits and in varying degrees. As there is a constantinterchange, dialogue is the rule that governs relations between civilizations.And precisely because there is that dialogue, civilizations are enriched withknowledge, new ideas, technologies, institutions, and values from outside.Obviously, this does not mean that there is no conflictuality. History booksdocument that cultural interchange often takes place because of the violenceof the impact between civilizations. War has always been a powerful factor ofcommunication and cultural hybridization. Reference need only be made towhat Europe received from the Arab-Islamic civilization during the Crusades.

It is no less true that every civilization refuses those cultural elements thatthreaten—or seem to threaten—its identity. The reason for this is intuitive:the law of continuity dominates the existence of a civilization. Civilizationsneed to have a strong link with the past, since the past—cultural tradition—is what defines their identity. Too rapid and generalized a process of accul-turation can even lead to the extinction of a civilization as an historic entitydistinct from the others. Civilizations refuse the idea of reshaping every formof life. The borrowing of cultural goods from other civilizations involves acareful process of selection and a lengthy process of assimilation. Civilizationschange gradually, without losing their cultural identity. They remain in inti-mate contact with their tradition and especially with the essential core of thatidentity that is always of a religious nature. In effect, with the term “civili-zation” we refer first and foremost to a set of collective values, which areconsidered to be permanent and untouchable, in a word, sacred.40 This is trueeven for modern industrial civilization. Even though secularization has re-duced the normative jurisdiction of the sacred to the minimum, our civiliza-tion owes much more than is generally thought to Christian tradition. Deepdown, what is Kant’s ethic, if not Christianity without dogmas? And what didBenedetto Croce mean when he said that we could call ourselves Christians,if not that Christianity is one of the essential elements of our civilization?

Page 263: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

250 Revolutionary Apocalypse

What strongly characterizes the contemporary age is the fact that for thefirst time in the history of humanity we are living in a civilization that isplanetary. Civilizations have always operated within a limited geographic area.Western civilization knows no borders. Its power of expansion is unlimited.After a difficult labor, it came into being on the promontory of Asia knownas Europe. From the fifteenth century on, it has been overflowing, breakingdown boundaries, flooding the whole world in successive stages.

The most significant consequence of the expansion of Western civilizationis not linked to scientific and technological expansion or to the fact that agood part of the planet is under the political-military control of the West. Itis that Western civilization possesses a quite extraordinary radioactivity thatmakes it particularly “contagious.” It is an imperialistic civilization whose maininstitution is the market. Thus it has an “ecumenical” vocation, in that it tendsto subject everything it finds in its path to the impersonal imperatives of itslogic and ratio. Penetration of the market inevitably produces huge changesthat spare nothing and no one. Its “destructive creativity” and unrestrainable,self-propulsive dynamism place other non-Western civilizations before a dra-matic “challenge”: either they find an adequate “response” or they are de-graded to the rank of satellite of the capitalist system.

Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression41 is useful for understanding theparticular relationship that developed between the West and the East afterthe Industrial Revolution.

According to Toynbee, when two civilizations come into permanent con-tact, the one with the most radioactivity forces the other civilization to makea radical change, directing its attention to the exterior rather than to the past.The weaker civilization starts to imitate an alien mode of life, to take theother civilization as its model, in part because of its overpowering attractionbut also because it has no alternative if it wishes to avoid humiliation anddegradation. If this “mimetic” process comes into being promptly, the at-tacked society has a chance of neutralizing the external threat. This is noteasy, however: if it wants to evolve at the same pace as the stronger civilization,it has to make radical changes in its internal organization and specific formsof life. This means that an efficient response to the external challenge requiresinstitutional changes that can be compared to painful surgery. An example isthe “Meiji revolution,” whereby Japan transplanted a great number of exoticcultural elements and so avoided the threat of being dominated by Westerncivilisations.42

There is no guarantee of success, however. The society attacked by aliencultural radiations may be decadent or its basic structures too rigid to permita prompt and effective response. In that case, the cultural aggression producesa dramatic situation in which the attacked society obstinately and resentfullyopposes the intrusion of the allogenous culture, considering it an attackagainst its core values and therefore a threat to its spiritual identity. At thatpoint, the diffraction of the elements of the radioactive culture is diluted so

Page 264: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 251

that they acquire differentiated speed and power of penetration. Accultura-tion, rather than being a planned, harmonic process becomes a gradual processof penetration of isolated cultural fragments, without monitoring their long-term effects.

Toynbee formulates three laws or empirical generalizations. The first is thatthe power of penetration of a cultural element is proportional to its futilityand superficiality. This is a sinister law. The receiving society is unable toescape from the influence of the radioactive culture and ends up acceptingthose elements that seem easier to imitate or less dangerous. So, the processof forced acculturation produces diffraction and superficial selection, with theworst or inferior elements insinuating themselves into the body of the hostsociety with disastrous effects.

In fact—and this is the second law of cultural aggression—a cultural ele-ment that is beneficial or at least harmless in its own social system tends tohave devastating new effects in the social system that hosts it, like an exotic,isolated intruder. Toynbee’s third law is that “one thing leads to another”during the process of radiation-reception because a culture is not simply anaggregate but a system of interrelated elements. So all the efforts of the societyto prevent the penetration of undesirable cultural elements are destined tofail. Once it starts, the process of acculturation is irreversible. Attempts to atleast slow down the process simply prolong the agony.

Once it becomes obvious that acculturation is inevitable and that the re-ceiving society’s capacity of self-determination is rapidly disappearing,“Herod’s Party” comes onto the scene. Unlike the “zealots,” it supports adeliberate planned acculturation. The “Herodians” do everything in theirpower to stimulate a kind of autocolonization rather than accept a militarilyimposed colonization.

The fundamentalist zealots believe that this option will destroy the spiritualidentity of their civilization. Conflict between the “modernizing party” andthe “traditionalist party” is inevitable. The modernists believe that salvationlies in stealing the secret of the power and creativity of the aggressor. Thetraditionalists consider anything that comes from outside to be a poison forthe forms of life consecrated by tradition. The only way to avoid the incum-bent cultural catastrophe is to expel the intruder and seal the frontiers.

4. Although ideal-typical, Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression providesus with useful empirical material. Essentially, it illustrates the devastating con-sequences of the penetration of modern industrial civilization into the coun-tries of the Third World. Nothing is left untouched: institutions, customs,and values. Worse still, people are deprived of their ancestral habitat andcondemned to live in a foreign or even hostile environment. Modernity hasattacked the societies outside its area of endogenous development, uprootedmillions of beings, transforming them into a huge, resentful “anomic mass.”

Page 265: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

252 Revolutionary Apocalypse

In every cultural area touched by this diabolical exogenous force, these mil-lions of beings make up the “external proletariat” of Western civilization.

The permanent contact between modernity and traditional societies hashad such a devastating impact on traditional societies that one can, and must,talk of an induced cultural catastrophe generated by the “imposition of a marketeconomy on the population of Asia and by the consequent gradual revolutionof almost every aspect of their life.”43 In traditional society, the function ofthe market was secondary with respect to existential issues. With the processof forced acculturation, “existence and existence-related issues became sec-ondary with respect to the market.”44 This freed the colonized populationsfrom community bonds45 but subjected them to the impersonal laws of com-petition and profit. This “liberation” and the consequent divide between theeconomic and other spheres of social life deprived the colonized populationsof their cultural roots.

We have already seen that the institutionalized separation of the economicsphere from other social spheres had traumatic anomic effects in Europe.However, after decades of conflictuality, thanks to a spectacular increase inmaterial wealth and the reintegration and protection offered by trade unionsand socialist parties, the “internal proletariat” gradually ceased to be a humbleoutcast of bourgeois society.

In the Third World this did not occur. The human cost of the intrusion ofthe self-regulated market into the vital fabric of the traditional communitywas increased by the cultural heterogeneity between aggressor and those ag-gressed against. The invaders exploited labor more or less intensively, de-pending on the specific historical circumstances, but inevitably theexploitation was atrocious, since there was not that minimum degree of sol-idarity between the leaders and the inferior classes that had at least attenuatedthe negative effects in Europe. For obvious reasons, in the colonized countriesthere could be no affective identification or moral communion between ex-ploiters and exploited, other than that based on a patronizing hypercriticalform of protection. For generations, the “white man’s burden” was the rhe-torical formula used by Europe to disguise the degradation of the colonizedpopulations considered biologically inferior and requiring a discipline im-posed by others.46 Inevitably, this led to what has been called the “clochar-dization” of the countries of the Third World.47

Naturally, in Oriental societies the resentment against the cultural aggres-sion of the West was huge. The acculturated intellectuals appointed them-selves the “official” interpreters of that resentment. Nor could it have beenotherwise. One of the most important consequences of the planetary expan-sion of modernity has been the formation of a special category of individualswhom we refer to as “acculturated intellectuals.” These individuals werecaught between two worlds—that of their ancestral culture and that of invasivemodernity—but could not identify completely with either. The definition ofintelligentsia is precisely that: a class of “cultural half-castes,” if we may use

Page 266: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 253

the term, that developed spontaneously from the penetration of secular valuesand ideas into traditional environments, composed of individuals of dual so-cialization and therefore inevitably cut off and equally inevitably alienated.We are talking about an “intellectual proletariat,” people who were painfullyaware of being excluded from the society in which they lived—in that spiritualtrading with the lay culture had made them critical of ancestral customs andhabits—and excluded from modern civilization whose arrogance mortifiedtheir pride daily.

Added to this, the dominant oligarchies mistrusted the acculturated intel-lectuals for their “dangerous” ideas and kept them away from positions ofleadership. They had no chance of ever acquiring the social status they feltwas their right. In their eyes, their superior knowledge made them the moralaristocracy whose destiny was to emancipate the country. But the material andspiritual backwardness of their environment forced them to occupy a precar-ious and marginal professional position and therefore to suffer a permanentlack of status, which inevitably aroused in them the resentment typical of“outcasts of the intelligentsia.”

The result: the intelligentsia was condemned to live in a macrocosm thatwas not, or was hardly, homogeneous with their spiritual microcosm. For thisprecise reason, they had no alternative but to transform reality and make itsuit their needs. Politics exercised an irresistible attraction. To reshape themacrocosm was the only activity that gave them confidence in the future andthe chance to escape alienation. The more radical the strategic objectives, themore attractive politics was for them. The barricades of revolutions becametheir natural habitat. Revolution was the only alternative to humiliation.

In order to be able to revolutionize everything around them they neededan impact mass to reshape and use as a tool for overturning the dominantoligarchies and breaking the siege of the aggressive Western civilization. Insemiindustrial or even preindustrial circles, where else could they find thismass other than among the peasants?48 “To go to the people” became theethical-political imperative of the alienated intellectuals. That was no easymatter, however. Extenuating propaganda was necessary to “infect” the peas-ant masses and mobilize them against established order. Nothing could bedone until the “crust of customs” had been broken. Fortunately, the culturalinvasion worked in favor of revolution. The intrusion of the market graduallybroke up the “world of tradition,” weakened the normative cogency of reli-gious institutions, deligitimated the power and privileges of the dominantoligarchies, swelled the ranks of the intelligentsia, “proletarized” peasants, andmodified their ancestral habitat. In short, by turning everything upside downit created the preconditions for the overturning of established order.

5. So the “imperialism of the industrial States of the West passed over thetropics like a rainstorm destroying great civilisations in its frantic race, lev-elling and reducing all populations to an undifferentiated exploited mass.”49

Page 267: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

254 Revolutionary Apocalypse

It also created a new historical actor, the intelligentsia, which took upon itselfthe task of waking the peasant masses from their ancestral stupor, giving thema reason to fight and build a new social order. To do so, it used the “spiritualarms” of Western revolutionary tradition, first and foremost those shaped byMarxism. The intelligentsia found what they were looking for in Marx’s gran-diose Weltanschauung: a ferocious critique of traditional forms of rule; a de-nunciation of the horrors of modern civilization; and, above all, the exaltingprospect of creating, through permanent revolution, a social system capableof combining the maximum growth of productive forces and the eliminationof bourgeois individualism, a generator of anomie and alienation.

Marxism’s eschatological vision of the historical process provided the in-tellectual proletariat of most Western civilizations with a “political religion”whose goal was the demiurgic reshaping of reality. By proclaiming the in-eluctable catastrophic collapse of capitalism and combining sociological de-terminism and political voluntarism50 in an illogical but effective theoreticalsynthesis, Marxism gave hope to the revolutionary elites: at last the future wason their side. The final victory of socialism was written in the providentialplan of history.

This “modern version of Manicheism, according to which one’s party rep-resents simultaneously moral good and the wave of the future,”51 became aformidable political force, once the Third World elites adopted the model oforganization and the strategic plan developed and tested by Lenin. Bothserved the purpose to which the intelligentsia aspired: to guide the destiny ofthe “peoples of the East enslaved by imperialism,”52 to destroy the much hatedtraditional order and the equally hated Western capitalism, fomenting whatSamuel Eisenstadt has called a “totalitarian-ideological change.”53 The Len-inist concept of party, based on the idea that professional revolutionaries arethe “lieutenants of the working class,”54 therefore the only authentic inter-preters of the real interests of the exploited masses, on the one hand gaveideological legitimacy to the totalitarian dictatorship and, on the other, sat-isfied the intense need of the proletarized intellectuals to feel that they werepart of an “alternative community” that had substituted the traditional com-munity invaded by modernity.55 The Marx-Lenin sociology was also an excuseto blame the West—this “Moloch that claims the whole world as is its vic-tim”56—for the backwardness of the East. All one had to do was show thatthe “transfusions of wealth” obtained by exploiting the colonies had allowedEurope to really take off but, at the same time, had “upset the whole devel-opment of the donor countries [compromising] drastically the subsequentcourse of events.”57 At that point, the destruction of capitalism came to be aprecondition for the emancipation of the “damned of the earth.” So the elitesof the Third World consumed and propagated a myth58 that eased their frus-tration and inferiority vis-a-vis the industrial world. Moreover, by placing allthe blame on the West,59 they felt morally superior to the arrogant “rulers ofthe world.”

Page 268: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 255

In other words, Marxism came into being as the revolutionary conscious-ness of the “internal proletariat” of liberal civilization. In the hands of theintelligentsia it became a major resource of the “external proletariat” for com-bating the West60 and refusing its culture.61 To the “proletarian nations” itoffered an operational model—planned society structured like an impenetra-ble fortress—to resist the capitalist invasion and spiritual arms for respondingto the challenge of the industrial world, transforming the aggressor into ag-gressee.62 In fact, Marxism calls all modern civilization before the Weltgerichtand condemns it forevermore as a “bewitched, deformed and upside downworld,” split by “unnatural scissions” and based on a self-destroying anarchy;a world therefore that was profoundly irrational and immoral, destined to die,suffocated by its own unsolvable internal contradictions.

With its spiritual arms and power technology, communism gave those be-sieged by industrial civilization the tools they needed to become the besieg-ers.63 With these tools they would conduct a revolutionary war, conceivedboth as war of class and of national liberation,64 against a world from whichthey felt excluded.65

The authentic meaning of the Marxist message was not changed by “Asian-ization.” On the contrary, the revolutionary intelligentsia made exoteric whathad been esoteric. Behind the mask of futurism and idolatry of the progressivecharacter of the Industrial Revolution, Marx hid an intense desire to annihilatethe modern Gesellschaft and return humanity to the protective womb of theprimitive Gemeinschaft. Modern liberty was the main enemy, an enemy thatcould only be destroyed by eliminating every inviolable area and making “allthe resources (depend) on an ideologically inspired central bureaucraticpower, guardian of paradigmatic truth.”66 Hence, the “elective affinity” be-tween the Marxian program and the aspirations of the acculturated intellec-tuals who “consciously or not, found in communism certain elements thatrevived a tradition with which they kept strong ties,”67 first and foremost aholistic vision of the “good society” permanently hostile to individualism.68

The outcome of what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “love affair”69 betweenthe intellectuals of the Third World and Marxism was the generation of atype of social organization that, to the extent to which it more or less com-pletely nationalized civil society, “perfected” traditional despotism, conferringvirtually unlimited power on managerial bureaucracy. In this, Karl Wittfogelwas perfectly right when he pointed to an “Asian restoration”70 in the com-munist revolution.

In effect, the new class that emerged from the bureaucratization of theintelligentsia that began immediately after the revolutionary conquest ofpower71—to prevent a “caricature like . . . and obscene imitation”72 of Westerncivilization—closed the “proletarian nations” inside the “iron cage” of theplanned state and adopted the Bukharinist principles according to which “thequestion of where to go (back to capitalism or ahead to communism) cannotbe the object of discussion.”73 Thus, although they destroyed traditional order,

Page 269: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

256 Revolutionary Apocalypse

the revolutionary Third World elites revived its holistic spirit. This confirmsGermani’s theory that authoritarianism became totalitarianism every time a“deliberate attempt (was made) to reconstruct the community artificially.”74

NOTES

1. See C. E. Black, “The Modernization of Russian Society,” in C. E. Black, ed.,The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967),p. 661 et seq.

2. H. F. Achminov, “Da Marx a Lenin,” in Sovietica, nos. 16–17 (1969), p. 17.3. See Luciano Pellicani, “L’anti-economia collettivistica” in Le sorgenti della vita

(Rome: SEAM, 1997).4. Quoted from Domenico Settembrini, Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx, p. 561.5. A forecast also made by the Russian minister Kokovtsov in his budget report of

1913.6. One example will suffice: David Apter identifies modernization with the “dif-

fusion and use of industrial type roles in non-industrial environments” (Some Concep-tual Approaches to the Study of Modernization [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,1968], p. 334). Although Apter does acknowledge that “choice” is one of the mostimportant characteristics of modernity, he claims that the typical values of modernitycan be incarnated in the system of “the sacred collectivity” (The Politics of Modernization[Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965], p. 24) thus overlooking a pointdemonstrated by Howard Becker in his penetrating essays, namely that freedom ofchoice is incompatible with the sacred model of society (Through Values to Social In-terpretationi [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950]).

7. See Luciano Pellicani, “Il primo disincanto del mondo,” in Modernizzazione esecolarizzazione (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997).

8. See H. Michell, Sparta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).9. In fact, there is another possibility: the sudden appearance on the scene of a

charismatic leader whose extraordinary personality and message is capable of breakingthe “crust of custom.”

10. See Luciano Pellicani, I Rajput (Rome: Newton Compton, 1994).11. This escaped Gino Germani completely, despite his very enlightening studies

on processes of modernization.12. For an analytical expose of this thesis, see my book The Genesis of Capitalism and

the Origins of Modernity.13. See Jean Baechler, Democraties (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985), p. 520 et seq.14. That the restoration of the closed society was the goal of the communist rev-

olution is particularly evident from the words in praise of humanism of the Sovietwriter V. Ilenkov: “Russia followed along the path of universally uniform thought. Forthousands of years men have suffered from not thinking in the same manner. For thefirst time we Soviets understand each other, speak the same universally comprehensiblelanguages, our thoughts on major issues are identical. This unity of thought gives usstrength. Therein lies our superiority over other men who are divided, torn apart bypluralism of thought (quoted from Andrei Siniavsky, Che cos’e il realismo socialista [No-vara: EPIDEM, 1977], p. 74).

15. This is science but not the scientific spirit, which is essential for producing

Page 270: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 257

science. One of the most dramatic contradictions of the Soviet system was that itclaimed to develop scientific knowledge by eradicating free investigation in compliancewith the Leninist principle of “particity,” which required an inquisitorial control overall spiritual activity, described by Karl Korsch as follows: “The materialistic philo-sophical protection of all the sciences of nature and of society and the further overalldevelopment of cultural consciousness in literature, drama, the figurative arts etc.,driven to the most absurd consequences by Lenin’s epigones ended up producing asingular ideological dictatorship that fluctuated between the revolutionary progressand obscure reactionarism which is practised in the Soviet Russia of our time in thename of so-called Marxism-Leninism. It is exercised not on the spiritual life of thebureaucracy in power but on that of the workers’ class. Recently attempts have alsobeen made to extend this spiritual control beyond the frontiers of Soviet Russia to thecommunist parties of the West and of the whole world” (Marxism and Philosophy [Lon-don: NLB, 1970]).

16. Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Oxford: Polity, 1994). In a conversationwith the actor Nikolai Cherkassov, Stalin praised Ivan the Terrible for “having pre-served Russia from the penetration of foreign influence” (quoted from Alexander Ya-nov, The Origins of Autocracy). No less revealing of the antimodern spirit of theBolshevik revolution is Andrei Zhdanov’s description of the role assigned by CPSUto “the engineers of souls”: “an organic group of militant philosophers armed to theperfection by the Marxist philosophy who conduct a vast offensive in the conscienceof the Soviet people against hostile foreign ideologies and the remains of bourgeoisideology” (Politica e ideologia [Rome: Rinascita, n.d.], p. 114).

17. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 280.18. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in USSR

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), p. 336.19. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 285.20. This is so much so that Lenin used to say, “Scratch at a Bolshevik and you find

a Panrussian nationalist.”21. Nikolai Trubetskoi, L’Europa e l’umanita (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. 66. It is in-

teresting to note that resentment against Western civilization led the anti-BolshevikTrubetskoi to draw up a program whose essence coincided with that of the ThirdInternational: “If humanity, not the one of which the Romano-Germanics like to talk,but real humanity that is made up of Slavs, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Africans and otherraces which all, without distinction of colour, suffer under the oppressive yoke of theRoman-Germanics and waste their national effort for European factories, if all thishumanity were to join forces against the oppressors, the Romano-Germanics, it isprobable that sooner or later they would manage to break the hateful yoke and elim-inate from the face of the earth these predators and all their culture.”

22. Giuseppe Guariglia, Il messianesimo russo (Rome: Universale Studium, 1956),p. 15.

23. Fedor Dostoevsky, Diario di uno scrittore (Milan: Garzanti, 1943), p. 549.24. Ibid., pp. 805–806.25. Berdiaev wrote: “The Russian people have not achieved their messianic idea of

Moscow Third Rome: nor less the empire of Petersburg. But at times their messianicideas are called to take on an apocalyptic form, at others a revolutionary form; thisproduces a surprising event for the destiny of Russia: instead of Third Rome Russiawill achieve the Third International, and this will contain more than one aspect of

Page 271: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

258 Revolutionary Apocalypse

that. It is hard to make the West understand that the Third International is not anInternational but a national Russian idea, a transformation of Russian messianism” (Ilsenso e le premesse del comunismo russo, p. 190).

26. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 211.27. Ibid., p. 226.28. Quoted from W. H. Chamberlin, History of Russian Revolution, vol. 3, p. 392f.29. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 226.30. See Rocco Pezzimenti, Il marxismo asiatico (Milan: SugarCo, 1984).31. Stalin, “Dall’Oriente la luce,” in Opere complete, vol. 4 (Rome: Rinascita, 1951),

p. 201.32. Stalin, “Non dimenticare l’Oriente,” in Opere complete, vol. 4, p. 195.33. Ibid., p. 195.34. Dall’Oriente la luce, p. 206.35. Lenin, “Meglio meno, ma meglio,” in Opere complete, vol. 33, pp. 457–458.36. From the course held at the Academy of the Staff of the Red Army and published

in London in 1922 under the pseudonym Pavlovitch, with the title Foundations ofImperialist Policy.

37. In light of Radek’s statement according to which “the West started with theMensheviks” (quoted from E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution [London: Macmillan,1950]) we can undoubtedly say that the Bolsheviks were aware of the anti-Westernspirit of their revolution. In fact, Martov always claimed that socialism could not be“the denial of individual liberty and individualism but on the contrary its most nobleincarnation” (quoted from Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution [Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986], p. 19). Lenin had an opposite opinion: in his view, the freedomof the moderns had to be eradicated from the Russian land. Therefore it should notcome as a surprise that one of the first acts of the Soviet regime was to “liquidate” theMenshevik party in which the Bolsheviks inevitably saw a kind of fifth column ofWestern culture.

38. The formula is Samuel P. Huntington’s (Political Order in Changing Societies [NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1968], p. 264). Still more misleading is Robert Daniels’sformula “totalitarian modernizing revolution” (The Nature of Communism [New York:Vintage Books, 1962], p. 178) given that totalitarianism and modernization are anti-thetic. Daniels acknowledged that the Bolshevik revolution was animated by a violentlyanti-West spirit that led to the creation of a new and more perfect form of Asiandespotism.

39. So one is inevitably perplexed to read that there exists a “matrix of Modernity. . . common to historical capitalisms and communisms” ( Jacques Bidet, Teoria dellaModernita [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992], p. 45).

40. See Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (New York: Lane, 1994).41. See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 8.42. See E. H. Norman’s classic, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State: Political and

Economic Problems of the Meji Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).43. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch

of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953).44. E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber,

1971).45. See J. H. Boeke, “The Village Community in Collision with Capitalism,” in J.

Page 272: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Cultural War between West and East 259

C. Davies, ed., When Men Revolt and Why (New York: The Free Press, 1971), p. 34 etseq.

46. See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticismin French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Roger Bastide,Noi e gli altri (Milan: Jaca Book, 1990); Guy de Boschere, I due versanti della storia, vol.1 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973).

47. See Ludovico Garruccio, L’industrializzazione fra nazionalismo e rivoluzione (Bo-logna: Il Mulino, 1969), p. 54.

48. This generated the following paradox: so-called “proletarian revolutions” werecarried out by uprooted peasants under the leadership of a minority of alienatedintellectuals.

49. Jan Romein, The Asian Century: A History of Modern Nationalism in Asia (London:Allen and Unwin, 1962).

50. From a strictly logical standpoint, the combination of “sociological determinismand political voluntarism” is unsustainable. However it conferred upon the Marxiandoctrine an out-of-the-ordinary power of mobilization. In effect, nothing is moregratifying for a man who has made permanent revolution his Beruf than the idea thathis cause is destined to triumph. Tom Bottomore quite correctly defined Communismthe “Calvinism of the XX century” (Elites and Society, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge,1993]).

51. Robert Waelder, “Protest and Revolution against Western Societies,” in M.Kaplan, ed., The Revolution in World Politics (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 8.

52. Ho Chi Minh, On Revolution (New York: The New American Library, 1968),p. 293.

53. Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 106.

54. Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1967).

55. See Edward Shils, “The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the NewStates,” in J. H. Kautsky, ed., Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries (New York:Wiley, 1967), p. 205.

56. Karl Marx, “Teorie sul plusvalore” in Opere complete, vol. 36, p. 491.57. Paul Baran, Il surplus e la teoria marxista dello sviluppo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970),

p. 158.58. On the mythological character of Third World sociology, see Luciano Pellicani,

“La scoperta del modo di produzione asiatico,” in Le sorgenti della vita.59. See Peter Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New

York: Free Press, 1986).60. Interestingly, just before he died Khomeyni wrote to Gorbachev asking him to

acknowledge that only Islam could lead Eastern populations against the Great WesternDevil, which indicates that the charismatic leader of Islamic fundamentalism was awareof the zealot inspiration of the Bolshevik revolution. Basically, that revolution was an“Asian reaction” against modernity and therefore a chapter in the cultural war betweenWest and East that dominated the twentieth century and may well continue in thetwenty-first century (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-making of World Order [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996]).

61. “A study of the history of battles of liberation reveals that in general they werepreceded by an increase in the number of cultural events that gradually took on a more

Page 273: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

260 Revolutionary Apocalypse

concrete form in the more or less successful attempt to assert the cultural personalityof the dominated population as an act of denial of the culture of the oppressor” (Amil-car Cabral, Cultura e guerriglia [Milan: Collettivo Editoriale, 1976], p. 67).

62. Luis Diez del Corral correctly defined “Asianized” Marxism as a “tool of re-venge” (El rapto de Europa [Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974], p. 239).

63. See Carlos Rangel, Third World Ideal and Western Reality: Manufacturing PoliticalMyth (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1986).

64. Irving Horowitz has remarked that Lenin internationalized the class war byturning it into a conflict between the “have and have not nations rather than the haveand have-not classes” (Three Worlds of Development [London: Oxford University Press,1972], p. 167).

65. Mao expressed better than any other revolutionary leader the aspiration of the“external proletariat” to escape from their humiliating situation with a colossal armedrevolt against the West: “American imperialism is now under close siege from thepeople of the whole world . . . Peoples the world over join together to defeat theAmerican aggressors and their grovellers. Peoples all over the world be daring, dareto fight, defy difficulty and advance in waves. In this way the whole world will belongto the people and every kind of monster will be destroyed” (quoted from S. R. Schram,The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969]).

66. Francesco Alberoni, Movement and Institution (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1984,) p. 371.

67. Robert A. Scalapino, “Communism in Asia,” in Robert A. Scalapino, ed., TheCommunist Revolution in Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 7.

68. “Individualism [said Ho Chi Minh] places a big obstacle in the way of socialism.The victory of socialism cannot therefore be separated from success in the fight tocombat individualism” (“La moralita rivoluzionaria,” in Il Calendario del Popolo, no. 377(1976), p. 4764).

69. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973),p. 64.

70. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).

71. See Gerard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects (Haa-socks: Harvester Press, 1977).

72. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: MacGibbon and Lee, 1965).73. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 253.74. Gino Germani, “Ideologie autoritarie e crisi di transizione,” in Luciano Pelli-

cani, ed., Sociologia delle rivoluzioni, p. 346. Identical is the thesis of Pierre Birnbaum,“Individualisme, holisme et totalitarisme,” in Guy Hermet, ed., Totalitarismes (Paris:Economica, 1984), p. 119 et seq.

Page 274: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

CHAPTER 13

The Annihilators of the World

1. For well over two centuries revolutionary gnosticism dominated the worldarena, before the conquest of the Winter Palace, as expectation of the GreatEvent; after, as the Great Experiment. The declared purpose was to transformRussian society into one “immense fraternal community.”1

The “building of socialism” aroused extraordinary expectations. Nothingseemed able to stop the spectacular advance of communism. Nothing indi-cated its equally spectacular and sudden demise. For more than half a centurythe Soviet Union threatened the very existence of Western civilization, withits formidable military power from without and its devastating spiritual armsfrom within. Yet, it melted like snow in the sun, leaving a trail of material andmoral ruin and monstrous bloodshed.2

Its initial goal had been a noble one: to end oppression and exploitation,introducing universal brotherhood. A greater contrast between promises andresults is hard to imagine. Heterogeneous goals? The cruel irony of history?Social conditions not mature? Misinterpretation of the Holy Scriptures? Cor-ruption of the original idea by petty human passions? Or could the infinitehorrors generated by the communist revolution wherever it triumphed havebeen implicit, at least potentially, in the doctrine itself?

The fact that all the classics on revolutionary tradition stress that the onlyway to destroy the old world is to use violence and even mass terror wouldseem to indicate that the crimes committed by communist parties were thedirect consequence of the doctrine. That the liberticide consequences of thespread of communism were predicted with amazing precision several decadesbefore the Bolshevik October should also make us suspect that “the wormwas in the fruit.”3

Page 275: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

262 Revolutionary Apocalypse

In fact, the most amazing aspect of the historical experiment referred to asthe “building of socialism” is its total sterility. As a movement, it created noth-ing, other than a dazzling mythology and a formidable “power technology.”4

After only a few decades, it simply dissolved, acknowledging before the wholeworld the folly of the principles that had governed it. Hence, it is into thoseprinciples that we must look for the determinants of what Brzezinski calledthe “great failure.”5

Taken literally, the communist idea requires eliminating trade among socialactors. This is easier said than done, given that trade is essential to economiclife. Indeed, John Stuart Mill suggested using the term “catalytics to refer tothe discipline that studies the ways in which men produce, distribute andconsume goods and services.”6 An economy without trade is a contradictionin terms: it is like saying “square circle.” Of course, trade does not create thematerial of wealth. As Jevons correctly stressed, it gives “utility to matter”7

and, above all, it shows the value of goods and makes it possible to make thenecessary economic calculations. Trade is also a “physiological” practice.“Some of the so-called primitive economies are able to meet” the conditionsenvisaged by the model of a perfectly competitive market “better than oureconomic systems for which the theory was built.”8

According to Marcel Mauss, the economic market is a natural thing that“is present in every known society.”9 For Georg Simmel, man is “the animalthat practises exchange.”10 For Marx, the market is a diabolical intrusion thatis responsible for the disintegration of “original unity” and the “age of uni-versal corruption.” Fundamentally, Marx’s whole work was an immense, fa-natical attempt to prove, first, that “in commercial society men lose theirquality as men and this quality can only be re-discovered by suppressingtrade”;11 second, that a planned system is much more productive than theanarchy and spontaneity of the market.

Unfortunately, Marx never developed a positive theory to prove that aplanned economy was better than a competitive economy, for the very simplebut fundamental reason that such a theory is impossible. An economic systemcannot exist without the market. Marx’s theory on the inevitable catastrophiccollapse of capitalism was simply a way to avoid having to prove his theory.There probably was no alternative. Communism cannot be described usingthe lexicon of sociology because it is a “society with no social structure.”12

Like the Millennium of the Apocalypse fanatics, of which it is simply a dif-ferent version,13 it can only be defined in negative terms.

Marx was aware of this from the start. As early as 1843, in a letter to ArnoldRuge, he wrote that rather than “dogmatically anticipating . . . find the newworld through criticism of the old world.” He felt authorized not to concernhimself with the form the future city would be likely to take. “The astutenessof History” would see to that. Scientific socialists should concentrate on “anunbiased critique of everything that existed”14 and leave the utopians the taskof fantasizing about the institutions of terrestrial Jerusalem. The communist

Page 276: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 263

alternative was “immunized” by Marx when he stated that whoever drew upa program was, eo ipso, a reactionary.15

The objective of this very successful strategy was obviously to keep thecommunist ideal out of the “tribunal of reason.” By the time Marxism hadgained ideological hegemony over the entire European workers’ movement,all socialists were convinced of the superiority of the planned economy, al-though they had not a single positive reason to support this conviction.16

When asked “what was meant by socialism, in the best of cases the answerwas a description of capitalism, and the remark that socialism would eliminatecapitalism by socialising the means of production. All the emphasis was onthe negative aspect, namely that capitalism had to be eliminated; even theexpression, socialisation of means of production, essentially means denial ofprivate ownership of the means of production.”17 Despite this, every Marxistalive was convinced of the validity of the scientific doctrine underlying socialdemocracy and that a planned economy was “necessary because of the incum-bent bankruptcy of the production of goods.”18

The Bolsheviks had one idea in their head when they took over the city ofcommand: the only way to build a socialist society was to shatter the edificeof capitalism stone by stone.

All we knew [Lenin admitted in May 1918] and this we learned from those who werebest informed about capitalist society, from the best minds that had anticipated itsdevelopment, was that the transformation was historically inevitable, that it wouldfollow a master plan, that capitalism would crumble and the exploiters would be ex-propriated. This had been established with scientific precision. And we knew this whenwe took the banner of socialism in our hands, when we declared ourselves socialists,when we founded the socialist parties, when we started to transform society. We knewit, when we took over power in preparation for the socialist re-organisation. But whatwe could not know was the form that the socialist transformation would take . . . Ofall the socialists who have written about this, I remember not a single work or phraseof a famous socialist regarding the future socialist society, that refers to the practical,concrete difficulty that the workers’ class will have to face after taking power.19

If words mean anything, Lenin was practically confessing that the revolu-tion he had in mind was a revolution “in the dark,”20 a revolution that had noidea whatsoever on how the economy of Russian society was to be organized.Its only certainty was an iron will to accomplish “the destruction of everythingthat was old, the implacable annihilation of all forms of capitalism.”21 Nor couldit have been otherwise. Marx’s definitions of communism—“real circulationthat abolishes the present state of things,”22 “the abolition of private prop-erty,”23 “denial of denial”24—did not go beyond stressing that it would endthe rule of capital. Branko Hovat has quite rightly defined Marxism “a [criti-cal] theory of capitalism and of its destruction, not a theory of socialism.”25

By nature, communism therefore is an antithesis, a negation, a refusal, acry against the existing.26 It can only express itself with the language of criti-

Page 277: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

264 Revolutionary Apocalypse

cism.27 When it tries to outline the type of social organization it intends tobuild on the ruins of the civilization of the “haves,” it simply lists the evilsthat will disappear from the face of planet earth once the cyclopic task of therevolution has been completed. In the course on Marxism organized for themilitants of the French communist party, communist society is described inthese terms: “It is undoubtedly hard to give a complete representation of whatthe new society will be like, but one thing is certain. In the new society, inthe Communist society, there will be no police. There will no longer be pris-oners. Of course there will be no churches. There will no army. There willbe no form of prostitution, there will be no criminals . . . Every idea ofconstraint will disappear. Men will have the sensation of having ridded, freed,themselves of what once constituted their slavery. They will be completelynew men.”28

The ultimate goal of revolution is a transfigured reality that transcends allpredications. The inhabitants of the “world of alienation” have no words fordescribing it. “Everything that belongs to the old aeon must be dissolved, . . .of the functioning of the future society we cannot talk, except in terms ofdenial.”29 Being simply a different term for indicating the “totally Other,”communism is forced to define itself with formulas that are typical of negativetheology. In this it is identical to anarchy, but with one fundamental differ-ence: the creation of an all-powerful state is indispensable to sweep away theold world.

2. An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since the total destructionof civil society is the only way to destroy capitalism. By civil society we meanthe “society of industry, of general competition, of freely pursued privateinterest, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality alienated from self.”30

But since capitalism—Lenin’s definition is correct—is a phenomenon that isgenerated spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes its watch,31

the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be permanent. It isa matter of annihilation that requires mass terror, since the main enemy ofcommunism is “widespread petit bourgeois spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolu-tionary project challenges the normal course of history.”32 It is a huge effortto prevent humanity from moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society.This is only achieved through permanent terror. Lenin insisted on having theprinciple of terror included in the Soviet penal code because he knew that itwould impossible to eliminate something as natural and spontaneous as tradewithout it.

But to eliminate trade—this can never be stressed too much—means toannihilate the economy. This explains the presence in the history of com-munist countries of a typical phenomenon, brilliantly analyzed by Alain Be-sancon:33 fluctuation between the war model of communism and the NEPmodel. The latter comes into being whenever the ideological power is forcedto loosen its hold, in order to avoid the total paralysis of production. Private

Page 278: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 265

initiative is allowed to revive to a certain limited degree, while civil societyremains firmly enclosed in the “iron cage” of the bureaucratic-totalitarianstate.34

An authentic curse dominated the existence of communism in power.Whenever it was absolutely loyal to its principles, production collapsed cat-astrophically. The many famines—in 1918 and 1930 in the Soviet Union, in1959 and 1967 in China, in 1977 in Cambodia, just to mention the worst—were generated not by natural calamities or negative economic cycles, but bythe ruthless determination of communists to achieve the objective of scientificsocialism: the annihilation of the market.

Added to this, capitalism will reemerge to infect humanity with its moralmiasma, if even the remotest corner of the globe somehow manages to avoidthe totalitarian rule of the conscious avant-garde of the global proletariat.

Both Marx and Engels tirelessly proclaimed that to achieve its historicalmission, the communist revolution had to be of planetary dimensions.35 Acommunist revolution in one country only is a contradiction in terms. It isbut one step of the historical process whose final objective is to eliminatecapitalism from the face of the earth.

This explains why Lenin conceived revolution as a planetary war betweenthe army of imperialism and the army of socialism, a war that would end onlyonce every trace of the “sordid, hateful, spasmodic desire for the purse”36 hadbeen eliminated and men had got rid of “old Adam.”37

So, as long as, and to the extent to which, a communist regime remainsfaithful to its principles, it must inevitably conduct a dual war of annihilation:one against internal capitalism that tends, like the Arabian phoenix, to ariseanew on its ashes; the other against external capitalism by which it is besieged.And it is for this reason too that the communist revolution must aspire toplanetary rule: its mission—“to purify the earth from all exploitation, violenceand slavery”38—forces it to bend “the entire terrestrial sphere to the powerof the Unique State.”39

This is a war that communism cannot win without destroying itself. To an-nihilate capitalism means to annihilate the “real economy,” substituting it withan “imaginary economy.” In fact, all the Marxist-Leninist parties in power—with the exception of Pol Pot’s Angkor—were forced to tolerate some degreeof capitalism in the form of a parallel and/or hidden economy. This preventedproduction from collapsing completely but also produced schizophrenic re-gimes condemned to live by what they denied, to feed off goods and servicesproduced by their “predestined victim”: the market.40

Hence, in a Communist regime the people are like guinea pigs. By virtueof the superior consciousness they owe to their having been enlightened bythe “great science of victory,”41 those in power feel entitled to conduct theirexperiment: to regenerate human nature by methodically liberating it fromevery vestige of tradition, including the “spectre of religion.”42 The party-gnosis will exercise its inquisitorial control over society until the process of

Page 279: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

266 Revolutionary Apocalypse

regeneration is complete. In this way the spontaneous tendencies of societythat are all negative will not develop. If the party-gnosis were to leave toomuch space to spontaneity, hunger for money would inevitably raise its head,and that is precisely what the communist revolution wants to eradicate fromthe human soul.43 Extra moenia there is an imperialistic capitalist system thatis one gigantic hotbed of ideological infection. Hence, the imperative forevery communist party in power to raise an insuperable protective barrier toavoid contamination. An open communist society is inconceivable. Either itis an hermetically sealed militarized convent or it risks being invaded by spir-itual forces—the so-called “bourgeois ideas”—that are incompatible with itsfundamental project, which is to eliminate everything personal.44

From this derives another typical trait of communist regimes: power isconcentrated in the hands of a small minority that, unlike the unskilled massesand the vast majority of militants, knows the secrets of the doctrine. Theseregimes cannot function without institutionalizing a system of “dual truth”:an esoteric dogmatic truth that knows no revisionism and is in the custody ofa group of experts in interpreting the Holy Scriptures; and an exoteric realistictruth that makes numerous concessions to the bourgeois world. The functionof the latter is of course purely strategic. Its main purpose is to cheat theenemy, but also the people. If the masses were to be aware of the immensecost of the undertaking, they would be reluctant to make the sacrifice. So thefollowing situation comes into being: the majority of those who declare theyare communists, or in any event somehow support the fight against capitalism,are intentionally kept in the dark as to the long-term objectives of the revo-lution. In other words, they are cheated. On the other hand, how else couldthe custodians of the revolutionary temple eradicate all spontaneity from theminds of men?

3. The reasons for the total sterility of the Marxist-Leninist experiment aremore than evident. Given that its objective was the implacable annihilation ofevery form of spontaneity, communism was forced to institutionalize a rigorousstate monopoly of enterprise and exercise an oppressive political-ideologicalcontrol. The combination of the two inevitably sterilized every source of cre-ativity.45 Since the economy and the market go hand in hand, the obviousconclusion is that, taken literally, the communist project destroys the condi-tions for the production and reproduction of material life and eventually de-stroys itself.

This is more than corroborated by the outcome of the Cambodian Revo-lution, which has been wrongly interpreted as an expression of homicidal folly.The atrocious genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge would be incom-prehensible, if we did not know that, during their sojourn in Paris, the leadersof the Angkor—typical proletarianized intellectuals—had been schooled bythe masters of Western Marxism. They had been told that the only way tocreate a communist society was “to extirpate alienation by attacking the mar-

Page 280: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 267

ket.”46 Convinced, therefore, that the only way to eliminate evil was to makea clean slate of the bourgeois world, as soon as they took possession of power,they abolished private property, trade, and currency and introduced a regimebased on the idea that rigorous economic equality could only be achieved bypredetermining needs ideologically. Other communist countries had alreadyattempted this experiment, but unsuccessfully. The black market had alwaysfound a way around the so-called “dictatorship over needs.” Something moreradical had to be invented to make the collectivistic utopia and reality coin-cide. The Angkor decided that one solution would be to distribute cookedrice so that the population would no longer need to trade or store it. Theyalso decided to end the division of labor by deporting the urban populationto the countryside. The result was that the whole system of production col-lapsed and the Cambodians suffered an atrocious famine.

The dire consequences of this “naturalization” of the economy were not amatter that overly concerned the Khmer Rouge. The “fanatical . . . followersof the Maoist theories of integral communisation”47 were convinced this wasthe price to pay for a classless society. Their strategy to accelerate the “cross-ing of the desert” was based on the following theorem: “If you want to pullup the weeds, then you must pull up the roots of those weeds in order topurify the people.”48 They split the population into two large groups: thebourgeoisie (to be exterminated because they were corrupt and corrupting)and the masses (to be regenerated). Regeneration meant imprisonment in“correction camps” until every “bourgeois prejudice” and “religious illusion”had been eliminated.49

In the end, the “patient industry of death”50 established by the KhmerRouge led to a veritable autogenocide. It would probably have culminated withthe total extinction of the Cambodian people, had the Vietnamese not decidedto bring the atrocious experiment to an end, forcing Pol Pot and his fanaticalfollowers to seek refuge in the jungle.

Given that the experiment in Cambodia was “the logical development ofthe Soviet model, a re-thinking of that model and its ruthless implementationdown to the last detail,”51 it seems legitimate to presume that the genetic codeof revolutionary gnosticism contains a powerful drive toward destruction andself-destruction. Of course, the declared objective is to create a New World,but it is also the apokatastis panton—the regeneration of all—that means theannihilation of “the old and putrid global regime.”52 Not one of the customs,values, ideas, institutions, and practices was to be spared. Total regenerationrequires razing everything to the ground before embarking on the process ofinnovation.

“War on the bourgeois models! War on ideologically putrid production!Revolutionary masses, repudiate the customs of the classes dedicated to ex-ploitation!”:53 these words seen in a shop window summarize the objectivesof the great proletarian cultural revolution: to make a clean slate of traditionand create a “white page”54 on which to draw the “totally Other.” Nothing is

Page 281: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

268 Revolutionary Apocalypse

to be spared: “everything was destroyed . . . Libraries public and private, worksof history, geography, literature, philosophy, science, art . . . Everything wasset on fire. In every region, in every district, province, city, level and unit:schools, barracks, hospitals, everywhere. For centuries and even millennia,libraries had been the historical heritage of the ancient [Chinese] civilisation,containing priceless treasures of culture and art . . . the fury of the Red Guardsspared nothing.”55 Maoist ideology had taught the young activists of the Chi-nese Communist Party “to consider the past negative and responsible for theproblems and underdevelopment of China.”56 If the symbols of the old worldwere razed to the ground,57 a radiant future would be assured, as if by magic.

On the other hand, when the Red Guard embarked on the frantic policyto demolish the “four ‘olds’”—old ideas, old culture, old traditions, oldhabits58—they were simply applying what they had learned from Europeanrevolutionary tradition. Saint-Etienne first declared the destructive nature ofthe gnostic program during the French Revolution: “Tout detruire, pour toutrefaire a neuf.”59 A few years later, Babeuf explained the need for a “tabularasa” policy: “Evil has reached its peak; it can get no worse; there is no remedyother than total subversion! May everything be turned upside down then!May all the elements be entangled, mixed up, in conflict! May everything bepart of chaos and a new and regenerated world come forth from that chaos!”60

Generations and generations of revolutionaries were to follow this advice, inthe blind belief that there was no other way to end “the want, squalor, painand shame of a miserable existence”61 than “terrible, complete, general, ruth-less destruction”;62 that there was “one science only, the science of destruc-tion”;63 it did not ask what form future society might be expected to take64

but simply sought the most suitable means for “overturning from top to bot-tom” the old world “that had become impotent and sterile,”65 urging for “civ-ilisation to be placed under iron and blood.”66 The slogans they shouted were:“Hurrah for chaos and destruction! Hurrah for death, and may the futureassert itself.”67

A new divinity—the god of revolution, possessed by what Hegel called the“fury of disappearing”68—had emerged on the European arena:

I will destroy the existing order of things that splits humanity, which is one, into peoplewho are enemies, into the strong and the weak, into men with all the rights and menwith no rights, into rich and poor, because this only makes everyone unhappy. I wantto destroy the order of things which renders millions of men slaves of the few andthose few, slaves of their very own power, their very own wealth. I will destroy theorder of things that separates pleasure from work, that makes work a burden, pleasurea vice; that makes men unhappy because they are deprived, and unhappy because theyhave too much. I will destroy this order because it devours the strength of men at theservice of the rule of the dead, of inanimate matter. I want to annihilate the verymemory thereof, destroy every trace of this monstrous order composed of force, lies,worries, hypocrisy, need, sufferance, pain, tears, dupery and crime. At times, it issuesa gust of stinking air but almost never a ray of authentic joy. May everything that

Page 282: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 269

oppresses you and makes you suffer be destroyed, and from the ruins of this old worldarise a new world of undreamt happiness. No more hatred, envy, disgust or rivalry.You who live on this earth must recognise each other as brothers and be free . . . Onyour feet! Follow my footsteps in the crowd, because I make no difference amongthose who follow me. From now on there are only two people: those who follow meand those who hinder me. I will lead the former to happiness, the latter I will treadupon and squash because I am the revolution, I am life that creates in eternity, I amthe one God that all beings recognise, that embraces everything that exists, that giveslife and happiness.69

Despite their claim to have transformed socialism “from utopia to science,”Marx and Engels’s revolutionary program was negative: to annihilate the civ-ilization of the “haves,” declaring the “last holy war.”70 We know from thefounding fathers of scientific socialism that two parties at war faced each otheron the world arena: the “conservative party” and the “destructive party.”71 Theywere mortal enemies. The unnatural division of alienated humanity will onlybe transcended in a new superior unity—“harmonious society”—once theentire edifice of liberal civilization (with the exception of productive forces)has been razed to the ground. With the explosion of the communist revolu-tion, “a general fire will burn down the old institutions”72 and make “a cleanslate of the old spectral world.”73

The meaning is clear. Communism cannot accomplish its historical mis-sion—the total liberation of humanity—without annihilating in Europe a cul-tural condition that has been irremediably contaminated by “bourgeoisinfection.” The password of permanent revolution is “repudiate the past andlook solely at the future.”74 “Being the most radical break with traditionalproperty relations” it is inevitable that it should also be “the most radical breakwith traditional ideas.”75

Marx and Engels’s program is therefore not that different from the programof those they scornfully referred to as the “alchemists of revolution”: It is apantoclastic program with no conception as to the form of the future city, otherthan the conviction that it is necessary “to start from zero,”76 to the extentthat, although stressing his absolute trust in the “rationality of the real,” En-gels adopted the nihilist theorem placed by Goethe on the lips of Mephi-stopheles: “Everything that exists is worthy of perishing.”77 This is like sayingthat the “fury of disappearing” is something that concerns everyone and thing,since it is history that ensures that the destruction of the old world is theantichamber of the “millenarian Kingdom of liberty.”78

The function of “historical providentialism” is clearly to endow a nihilisticprogram with at least a semblance of scientificity. The idea of “making a cleanslate so that society can be radically re-generated”79 is based on the crazyassumption that by exploiting his power of destruction man can recreate thetotality of his being. Essentially, this is a sophisticated rationalization elabo-rated on the basis of a futuristic and activistic interpretation of Hegel’s the-

Page 283: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

270 Revolutionary Apocalypse

odicy of pathos, dominated by a horror of the existing80 that is perceived as thekingdom of general corruption and therefore as “an abominable thing” thatmust be “substituted with something new.”81 This confirms the theory that,even when it claims to be scientific, revolutionism is the last manifestation ofJudeo-Christian millenarianism, hybridized with Manichean gnosticism: tworeligious traditions animated by faith in the regenerating capacity of totaldenial, which have produced legions of “Apocalypse fanatics” over the cen-turies. “Everything is about to collapse! We are on the verge! Let us increasethe chaos! Let us exasperate contradictions and suffering! Let us destroy ev-erything. This will speed up the catastrophe that precedes the Event!”82

4. From the enthusiasm of the response to the “science of destruction,” itis evident that this “science” must have answered a profound existential need.Otherwise the history of revolutionary gnosticism would be inexplicable.

In analyzing the spirit of revolutionary gnosticism, one is immediatelystruck by its passionate hatred of the bourgeois world.83 For whoever has maderevolution his calling, the bourgeois world is intrinsically evil; worse, per-verse.84 In Marx, in particular, it has all the features that Rene Guenon attrib-utes to the anti-Christ:85 it is the kingdom of contradiction, of evil powersthat prevent humanity from returning to its “original unity.” It is “a Molochthat claims the whole world as its rightful victim”86 and wants “to make thewheel of history turn backwards.”87 Despite its formidable power, capitalismis so close to disintegration that it is as if it has already been annihilated. Itsdestiny is marked, for it “carries its death within it.”88 Its great historicalfunction was to create a method for increasing production so that humanitycould be released from its dependence on nature. Unfortunately, capitalismwas also responsible for unleashing the acquisitive spirit, whereby “money hasdefiled all the Gods of man and turned them into goods.”89 That is the capitalsin of bourgeois civilization: to have deconsecrated the world and turned itinto one big market, where every physical and moral thing is but a goodamong goods.

In effect, the “silent revolution” of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie didsomething far more radical and dramatic than substituting the static feudalform of production with a self-propulsive one. It privileged the utilitarian andrational spirit and by so doing profaned everything. The sacred dimension ofexistence became impossible. The infinite capacity to manipulate things usingscience and technology and the equally infinite capacity to produce goodsconverted the world into a “system of objects”90 deserted by the gods and byeverything that gives meaning to life.

The revolutionary rebels against such a process. His aim is “to straightena reality turned upside down by the bourgeoisie”;91 the declared objective isto restore the sacred by creating a “new immanent and non-transcendent reli-giousness of the human community and of history.”92 He hates bourgeoissociety not only, or not so much, because it is selfish and degrades workers,

Page 284: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 271

who become mere goods among goods, but also, and especially, because it haskilled all hope in the “totally Other.”93 The revolutionary wants to annihilatethe existing, because he has an ardent desire to transcend his own impotenceand contingency. He is mobilized against the bourgeois world and its(dis)values by that need for the infinite, which Feuerbach considered to be thesource of the religious spirit.94 There is no surprise then that “the revolution-ary impulse comes into being precisely when religions fail to satisfy man’sneed for the infinite. Prior to this, the specific need that generates revolu-tions—the need to be God and not simply to be his ally in order to receivegrace—was expressed in an anti-religious spirit perhaps, but always in thecontext of religion itself. If man was not satisfied with the idea of God as hisSaviour, he could deny the existence of God, but this is still a form ofreligion. . . . In recent centuries, we have instead abandoned heretical reli-giousness for a revolutionary spirit. Religiousness is no longer the centre ofman; to entrust one’s self to another hope becomes inevitable.”95 This otherhope is “hope in revolution,” hope in the self-redemption of humanity.

This hope can only become reality if the “world is purified, re-created”96 andhumanity is able to reshape being so that it corresponds to the principle ofpleasure. In fact, this is the revolutionary’s metaphysical challenge to theworld: “We will reach everything! We will dominate everything! We will re-build every thing!”97 Trotsky’s words reveal an insatiable libido dominandi andexpress all the hubris of the communist revolution and its ambition to trans-figure reality, through a catabolic change that spares nothing.

In Greek tradition, hubris is the excessive arrogance of man in the face ofthe gods, the desire to be as and more than the gods, the refusal of man’sfiniteness. On the basis of Sartre’s well-known theory that “man is funda-mentally the desire to be God,”98 hubris is inevitably a natural and constanttemptation. Probably the most radical and decisive experience that man hasin the course of his life is the discovery that he is limited, dependent, impotent.This is particularly painful because “the very fact of comprehending the ex-ternal world or parts of that world in self makes the ego start to feel omnipo-tent.”99 As soon as humanity perceives his dependence on reality, heexperiences an intense need for psychological compensation. This might besome kind of fantastic reality where the painful existential experiences, firstand foremost death, that so humiliate the original narcissism of the ego, arenot possible. So “in man the postulatory conscience of his own relativity isinseparable from the postulatory conscience of the Absolute. In him is there-fore generated a strong and equivocal desire to be precisely what he is not:the Absolute, to participate in this other superior reality, to be able to bringthat reality back to his limited and needy reality, to make omnipotence partof his native impotence.”100

In other words, man feels that he is impotent and at the mercy of a hostileand ungratifying world. He is condemned to live an insensate life and destinedto be the food of time. For this precise reason, at the very moment in which

Page 285: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

272 Revolutionary Apocalypse

“he feels a profound disgust for his existence and . . . for the conditions thataccompany it,”101 he aspires with all his might to live in a transfigured world.This is the existential source of all religions of salvation and all metaphysicalneeds.102 It is also the source of the revolutionary spirit and of its demiurgicproject to reshape the totality of being. In other words: the objective of revolutionis the divinization of humanity.

5. That the “secret passion” of the revolutionary is a measureless “hubristic”desire of self-divinization is more than evident in the poems written by Marxbetween 1836 and 1839. For example, the amazing:

I want to build myself a throne,cold and immense will be its coveringits bastion, superhuman trembling,dark sorrow, its master.Whoever with healthy eye looks upwill return mortally pale and silent,caught by the blind breath of cruel deathhappiness will dig its own grave.

I would destroy the whole world by forcebecause I myself cannot create.If a god has taken all from memade me cursed, under the yoke of destinyI give up his world—everything—everything!All that is left me is revenge, yes that I haveI shall revenge myself with pride.I seek revenge against that Being on highmay my strength be patched up weaknesseven my own good without reward103

Psychoanalysts are familiar with this kind of language. The narcissistic de-sire for omnipotence is considered a symptom of egomania.104 Alfred Adlerstressed that the sense of inferiority experienced by the individual when herealizes that the external world limits him on all sides and denies his originalsense of omnipotence generates a “virile protest” that leads him to “identifywith God,105 in order to gain “supercompensation”106 for the painful woundinflicted upon his ego. This is the start of an interminable battle betweennarcissism and reality in which the hypertrophic ego creates the defensemechanisms, notably “domination, triumph, scorn”107 that such personalitiesdevelop to offset an intolerable dependence. Thus, they unleash “the desireto control the object, the sadistic satisfaction of beating it, of getting the betterof it and of triumphing . . . over it.”108

Such desires are often too intimate and personal to confess, not only pub-licly but even to the individual himself. But Marx’s desire to be God is un-

Page 286: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 273

containable.109 In the Quaderni sulla filosofia epicurea, he could not helpformulating this aphorism: “Upon he who has not the pleasure of re-constructing the whole world with his own means, of being the creator of theworld, but prefers to eternally turn over in his own skin, upon he the spirithas pronounced his anathema.”110

The “secret passion” of whoever has made permanent revolution his callingis to be the “king of the world,”111 to be able to recreate it from its foundations. Thereactionary De Maistre112 and, most significantly, also the revolutionary Ba-kunin both declared such a passion to be “diabolical.” The latter even declaredthat the symbol of the revolution was “Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and emancipator of the worlds, who makes man ashamed of hisanimal-like ignorance and obedience, and emancipates him, driving him todisobey and eat the fruit of science.”113

In Christian tradition, Satan is the angel who refuses his own existentialcondition and turns against God, aspiring to take his place. His pride anddesire for power are immense. Creative acts fail to satisfy that desire and aretransformed into a desire for destruction and self-destruction.114 This is ex-actly what Marx cries in his youthful tragedy, Oulanem:

Oh! I must be part of the flaming wheel,to dance in the circle of pleasure of eternity!If there were something outside that could swallow meI would jump in, were I to shatter the worldthat stands between me and that!Explode it would, for the huge curse.My arms I would put around the hard Beingand embracing me it would be silent and vanishand then, down, into nothingnesstotally down, not to be, that would be life.115

We know that in psychoanalysis, the theory of inversion suggests we shouldlook for subconscious desires behind declared objectives. What Marx is sayingwith a crudeness that is almost offensive is this: if the world refuses to bereshaped by the demiurgic will of Marx, then it might as well sink into noth-ingness. Oulanem preannounces the immense tragedy of communism inpower. It was a tragedy dominated by the desire of gnostic activists to build“the Kingdom of God on earth, but without and against God”;116 a desire tomake reality adapt to their own personal ideological design, so that humanitywill attain the happiness promised by religions of salvation.

Such a project inevitably had a strong impact on people who had becomethe “wretches of the earth” and “God’s orphans” following the traumatic ad-vance of modernization. On the basis of a diagnosis-therapy that it claims tobe rigorously scientific, the gnostic revolutionaries promise the imminent ma-terialization of a state of completeness and mystical absorption of the indi-

Page 287: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

274 Revolutionary Apocalypse

vidual soul in the collective soul,117 which is known in psychoanalysis asNirvana. It is described as the overcoming of the trauma of birth through a“return to the womb”:118 for the individual this means “to regain paradise lost. . . and identify with God.”119

Igor Shafarevich declares that, if it is true, as thousand of symptoms suggest,that Nirvana is the ultimate goal of communism, then it is legitimate to saythat thanatos (death) is the driving spirit of revolution. What it really wants isthe self-destruction of humanity.120 However, Shafarevich may have misun-derstood the meaning of the revolutionary undertaking. He accepts theFreudian version of the principle of Nirvana, according to which it expresses“the tendency of the throb of death”121 and “the goal of every life is death.”122

This would seem a form of rationalization rather than a scientific theoremthat offered “some comfort . . . and alleviated the fear of death,”123 whichtormented Freud. The truth is that humanity has a horror of death and des-perately seeks comfort from the unacceptable prospect of annihilation. Basi-cally, religious doctrines and many philosophical doctrines are simply adesperate attempt to find an answer to what for humanity is the problem ofproblems.124

Nirvana therefore is not the desire for death—that does not exist, at leastnot as an original desire125—but for the millenarian end of time. It “does notimply expectation of the end of being, the anguish of nothing; instead, endof time is man’s access to the real being and the end of all negativity; it is thedeath of death, the negation of non being.”126

In this case, it is logical that Marx’s apocalypse should present communismas the “negation of negation.” Every “image of paradise in the history ofreligions shows evidence of a dialectical negation or of a will to overturn.”127

In the religious conscience, paradise is always presented as an inversion of theprofane, or as a paradise lost, due to the assault of the profane. Consequently,to restore the kingdom of the sacred means to overturn the existing. This isexactly what the communist revolution is: the overturning of the overturnedworld so that primordial reality—the great universal harmony that lives moreor less intensely in all humans in the form of nostalgia for paradise lost—canreturn to the being.128 When that happens, the principle of reality will beabolished through the unio mystica of humanity with nature129 and life willbe regulated exclusively by the principle of pleasure. There will no longer becontradictions, conflicts, anguish, fear, frustration. Above all, there will benone of the guilt that so oppresses humanity.130 Scientific socialism went sofar as to define communism as “the level of development that renders allexisting religions superfluous and abolishes them.”131 It does so by “Prome-theically” bending being to desire, by eliminating the reasons that cause hu-mans to aspire to live in another world. The new world that will come intobeing once the revolution “has left not one stone upon stone of the . . . inertand putrid daily life.”132 It will be what desire orders it to be, what it absolutelymust be, if man is not to feel alienated, split apart, impotent, “in the way.”

Page 288: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 275

From the ruins of the old world will come into being “a Superman”133 similarto God:134 “master of his destiny,”135 born of self, for self, ens causa sui. Onceall this has come into being, the great truth revealed by Feuerbach will at lastbe visible: “Man is the god and the saviour of man.”136

On one point Shafarevich was undoubtedly right: Marx effectively expressesa violent desire for destruction and self-destruction. However, this is not anoriginal desire for death, but a reaction against intolerable frustration. Notbeing able to have and be all—that is, not being able to be God—Marx iswilling to be swallowed up by nothingness, dragging the world with him. Hisneed for the absolute was so great that he thought of suicide. He changed hismind when the savior he invoked137 appeared to him as a revolutionary apoc-alypse and gave him the certainty that the painful odyssey of humanity wouldcome to a providential end with the final reconciliation between the individualand the species, between the finite and the infinite. This self-constructedcertitude satisfied his ego—his delirium of omnipotence—and his superego—his moral conscience—which required him to devote his life to the cause ofthose who were victims of the “have” civilization. His “egolatric” passion wassublimated and his sense of guilt appeased.138 Thus, Satan was transformedinto the redeemer of a humanity degraded by mammon.

In conclusion: the profound aspiration of revolutionary gnosticism is notdeath but life; rather, a super life that is in accordance with desire. But thisaspiration requires a pantoclastic policy139 given that it is not possible to “re-construct the whole world” without first destroying everything that exists.140

The “infinite immensity of the ends”141 of revolution requires the creation ofa “situation in which there can be no going back,”142 razing to the groundanything—ideas, values, institutions, people—that willfully opposes the as-piration to modify the human condition ab imis fundamentis, bringing to thesurface the one-all.143 Once the necrophilic144 drive has been unleashed, theend result is inevitably self-destruction. This can only be avoided if the ab-solute enemy of the revolutionary spirit, the principle of reality, enters thescene. At that point, the fury of destruction is somehow alleviated and all thatis left is totalitarian rule as a surrogate of divine omnipotence and “the des-perate simulation of paradise.”145

NOTES

1. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. 70.2. See Stephane Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme.3. On the truly prophetical pages by Proudhon and Bakunin on the inevitable

liberticide outcome of communism, see Luciano Pellicani, Miseria del marxismo,pp. 163–177 and 198–209.

4. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, La technologia del potere (Milan: La Casa di Ma-triona, 1980).

Page 289: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

276 Revolutionary Apocalypse

5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism inthe Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1989).

6. John S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to SocialPhilosophy, Books 3–5, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and Buffalo: Routledge and KeganPaul, University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 455.

7. Stanley Jevons, Economica Politica (Milan: Hoepli, 1880), p. 126.8. H. K. Schneider, Economic Man: The Anthropology of Economy (New York: Free

Press, 1974).9. Marcel Mauss, “Essay on the Gift,” in A General Theory of Magic (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).10. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd enlarged ed. (London: Routledge,

1990).11. Henri Dennis, L’economie de Marx (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 204.12. Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (London: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1969), p. 201.13. See Gerard Walter, Les origines du communisme (Paris: Payot, 1975), and Ro-

berto Gobbi, Figli dell’Apocalisse (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993).14. Karl Marx, “Letters from ‘Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher,’” in Complete

Works, vol. 3, p. 142.15. The Manifesto actually does present a program set out in 10 separate points,

but it has nothing to do with the final goal of the revolution: it is a purely reformistprogram whose purpose is simply to disguise the embarrassing fact that communismis a “negative ideology” incapable by its very nature of formulating constructive ideas.

16. For example, whenever anyone asked Kautsky to elaborate on Marx’s policy ofsocial reorganization, his answer was that “social democracy could make positive pro-posals only for the present society, not for the future society” (Il programma di Erfurt,p. 127).

17. Karl Korsch, Scritti politici, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 5–6.18. Karl Kautsky, Il programma di Erfurt, p. 111.19. Lenin, “Speech at First Congress of Economic Councils,” in Complete Works,

vol. 27, pp. 410 and 412.20. “On s’engage et puis on verra” were the revealing words used by Lenin to

summarize his imminent undertaking.21. Lenin, “Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets,” in Complete Works, vol. 26,

p. 471.22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, L’ideologia tedesca, p. 34.23. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 498.24. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 751.25. Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk: Sharpe, 1982),

p. 124.26. Things being thus, one can say that the function of student protest has been

to reveal what Marxism had artfully hidden behind the theorems of economic science,namely the nihilistic character of total revolution, whose motto can only be: destroy all sothat all can be regenerated.

27. That the only language Marxism is capable of using is the language of negationis confirmed by the approach of the gnostic Paracletes of the School of Frankfurt: intheir works we find not one page of constructive criticism. So much for the principlesof so-called “critical theory.” This led Thomas Mann to write a letter to Adorno

Page 290: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 277

inviting him to formulate “at least one positive statement.” To no avail: Adorno re-vealed nothing on the nature of the “purified communism,” in the name of which hecondemned the present. Kolakowski correctly observes that “it is hard to imagine amore convenient position. The negative dialectic announces first that he cannot becriticised, from neither a logical or a factual point of view, as he has already stated thatthese criteria do not concern him; secondly, that he is intellectually and morally su-perior precisely because he does not respect these criteria; thirdly that the negation ofthese criteria is the essence of the negative dialectic. In other word it is simply a blankcheque, signed and turned by History, by the body, the Actor, the object, in favour ofAdorno and his supporters; on this blank cheque you can what you like. Everything isvalid” (Nascita, sviluppo e dissoluzione del marxismo, vol. 3, p. 328).

28. Quoted from Jean Servier, Histoire de l’utopie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 300.29. Augusto Del Noce, Lezioni sul marxismo (Milan: Giuffre, 1972), p. 75.30. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, p. 122.31. “Communist morality . . . unites the working people against all exploitation,

against all petty private property; for petty property puts into the hands of one personthat which has been created by the labour of the whole of society. In our country theland is common property. But suppose I take a piece of this common property andgrow on it twice as much grain as I need; and profiteer on the surplus? Suppose Iargue that the more starving people there are, the more they will pay? Would I thenbe behaving like a Communist? No, I would be behaving like an exploiter, like aproprietor. That must be combated. If that is allowed to go on, things will revert tothe rule of the capitalists, to the rule of the bourgeoisie” (Lenin, The Tasks of the YouthAssociations, vol. 31, pp. 293).

32. Jacques Ellul, Autopsie de la revolution (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1969), p. 68.33. Alain Besancon, Present sovietique et passe russe, p. 195 et seq.34. It is interesting to read Tiziano Terzani’s observations on the idea that the

Chinese communists had of the relationship between State and market. “The basicconcept, constantly repeated by the Communist leaders, is that the economy mustremain socialist, while the private sector must move in the framework of nationalplanning. It is like a bird—a top Peking economist told me—that is free to fly, butonly inside a cage” (Behind the Forbidden Door: Travels in China [London: Allen andUnwin, 1986]).

35. “Empirically, Communism is only possible as the action of peoples who dom-inate everybody at once and at the same time, which presupposes the universal devel-opment of the productive force and global relations that Communism itself implies. . . The proletariat can only exist on the level of universal history, just as Communism,which is its action, cannot exist other than as universal historical existence.” (Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels, L’ideologia tedesca, p. 34).

36. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 402.37. Ibid., p. 403.38. Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets, p. 480.39. Evgeny Zamiatin, Noi, p. 21.40. Referring to the many experiments conducted by communist parties in power,

Rene Sedillot speaks correctly of the “clandestine revenge of the market economy”(Storia dei socialismi, vol. 2 [Rome: Armando, 1977], p. 358).

41. Mikhail Suslov, Il Marxismo-Leninismo (Varese: Dall’ Oglio, 1976), p. 320.42. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 98.

Page 291: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

278 Revolutionary Apocalypse

43. On this point it is particularly enlightening to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novelCuore di cane, in which the description of the grotesque efforts of Professor Preobra-zhensky to “transform animals into men” is a violent satire of the claim of communismto achieve an alchemistic transformation of human nature.

44. Here reference should be made to the words used by Karl Heinzen, who wasin direct contrast with Marx and Engels, to describe the inevitable liberticide conse-quences of the communist revolution: “Removing all private property from the indi-vidual, communism also eliminates individual existence. The consequence of this isagain, perforce, the regimentation of every individual in a collective economy builtpossibly in the shape of a community. Thus communism destroys individuality, de-stroys independence, destroys liberty, while seeming to want to establish it (in KarlMarx and Friedrich Engels, Moralismo e politica rivoluzionaria, pp. 42–43).

45. In one field only did the Soviet system show any form of rationality and evencreativity, in an effort to keep up with the United States: in the field of military tech-nology (see Fritjof Meyer, Il tramonto dell’Unione Sovietica [Milan: Longanesi, 1984]).

46. Roger Garoudy, Progetto Speranza (Assisi: Cittadella, 1976), p. 43.47. Luciano Vasconi, Da Mao alla Tiananmen (Rome: EDIM, 1989), p. 163.48. Quoted from S. Prasith in Panorama, 13 September 1977.49. See Pin Yathay, L’utopie meurtriere.50. Jacques Lacouture, Cambogia: i signori del terrore (Florence: Sansoni, 1978),

p. 100.51. Ferenc Feher, “Cambogia: l’utopia omicida” in Mondoperaio, no. 3 (1983),

p. 100.52. Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets, p. 488.53. Quoted from A. Zelokhovtsev, La Rivoluzione Culturale vista da un sovietico

(Milan: Rusconi, 1971), p. 191.54. Mao’s words. He never tired of repeating that the “revolution would change

all,” including human nature (see R. H. Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the ChinesePolitical Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971]).

55. The description of the destructive fury of the Red Guards of a Chinese intel-lectual to Bruno Neroni. Between 1968 and 1971 he was subjected “to a massiveMarxist-Leninist indoctrination, extenuating interrogations, to humiliations, threatand torture” (Prigioniero di Mao [Rome: Il Borghese, 1973], p. 9).

56. Tiziano Terzani, Behind the Forbidden Door.57. The symbols of the “old world” to be ruthlessly eliminated included also a

good “35 million bad elements” as Mao indicated in 1967 (quoted from C. W. Cas-sinelli, Total Revolution [Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Books, 1985], p. 187) after boastingthat he “had outdone Chin Shihuang a hundred times over” (quoted from Simon Leys,Chinese Shadows [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978], p. 208). So it is not surprising that,in an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci, Teng Xiaoping should have impliedthat the Maoist revolution had made even more victims than Stalin’s revolution (seeLuciano Vasconi, Da Mao a Tiananmen, pp. 148–149).

58. See J. K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800–1985 (New York: Harper& Row, 1986), p. 367f.

59. Quoted from Wilhelm Muhlmann, Messianismes revolutionnaires du TiersMonde, p. 299. Saint-Etienne was simply making more explicit the destructive natureof the revolutionary program that Robespierre had described as follows on May 7,1794: “Everything has changed in the physical order: everything has to change in the

Page 292: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 279

moral and political order.” So he, Carlyle, was absolutely right when he wrote thatthe revolution was the “black desperate battle of Men against their whole Conditionand his Environment” dominated by the uncontainable desire to destroy “all that wasdestructible,” to annihilate the “Untruth of an Existence had become insupportable”(The French Revolution, vol. 3, Book 5 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 333f).

60. F. N. Babeuf, Il tribuno del popolo, p. 244.61. Mikhail Bakunin, Dio e Lo Stato (Pistoia: RL, 1974), p. 32.62. Sergei Nechaev, Catechism of the Revolutionist.63. Ibid.64. This aspect of revolutionism has been well summarized by Riccardo Bacchelli:

“The scope, destruction; the method, terror; the programme, nihil. To give a deadline,a purpose and a statute to Revolution, is to betray it before starting” (Il diavolo aPontelungo [Milan: Mondadori, 1965], p. 32).

65. Mikhail Bakunin, “Appello agli slavi,” in Carlo Doglio, Bakunin, una vita av-venturosa (Milan: IEI, 1945), p. 121. In the same work Bakunin predicted that the “starof revolution” would rise “high and free over Moscow from a sea of blood and fire”and would become the “polar star” that would guide the “liberation of humankind.”

66. E. Coeurderoy, Pour la revolution (Champ Libre: Paris, 1977), p. 37.67. Aleksandr Herzen, Dall’altra sponda, p. 98.68. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., transl. J. B. Baillie (London:

Allen & Unwin, 1949), p. 604.69. Richard Wagner, Scritti Scelti, p. 107.70. “War on the German conditions! By all means! They are below the level of history,

beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who isbelow the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle againstthose conditions criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is nota lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refuse but toexterminate.” (Karl Marx, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 177.)

71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, p. 36.72. Friedrich Engels, “Lettera dalla Germania,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 16.73. Karl Marx, Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte, p. 115.74. Friedrich Engels, Il discorso di Louis Blanc a Digione, p. 430.75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 504.76. Augusto Del Noce, L’epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffre, 1970), p. 52.77. Friedrich Engels, “Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,”

in K. Marx and F. Engels, Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 359.78. Friedrich Engels, “Schelling and Revelation,” in Complete Works, p. 239.79. Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press,1984).80. In this regard the words of the terrorist Bommi Maumann are particularly

enlightening: “To us life seems senseless, boring, empty, inhuman. We try somehowto escape, to experience sensations of happiness, tenderness, of being together, thatthis bourgeois society denies us. The prospect of having to live and work for ever morein these conditions seems so horrible that we remove ourselves from it, we abandonourselves to drugs and enter a state of apathy, without worrying about anything. Butwe soon realise that, even there, the system won’t leave us alone . . . this filthy, shittysociety has managed to arrange everything so that every individual is forced either tointegrate or to die in the sewers. Here [in prison] I see the victims of this repression

Page 293: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

280 Revolutionary Apocalypse

every day and, through their history, I understand the history of capitalism” (quotedfrom Enrico Bernard, Il privato terrorista [Rome: EA, 1988], p. 61).

81. Gyorgy Lukacs, L’uomo e la rivoluzione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), p. 67.82. Elemire Zolla, Che cos’e la tradizione (Milan: Bompiani, 1971), p. 207.83. Sartre’s statement is typical: “In the name of the principles that it has driven

into me in the name of humanism and humanists, in the name of liberty, of equalityand fraternity, I have consecrated a hatred for the bourgeoisie that will only die whenI die.”

84. “Small or big, the proprietor is marked in his essence . . . [For this], revolutionis useful as an agent of destruction; even if it were bad, there is one aspect that willalways redeem it: it alone knows what sort of terror to use to shake the world ofproprietors, the most atrocious of all possible worlds” (E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia[London: Quartet, 1991]).

85. Rene Guenon, Le regne de la quantite, pp. 265–267.86. Karl Marx, “Teorie del plusvalore,” in Opere complete, vol. 36, p. 491.87. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 494.88. J. P. Sartre, Les communistes et la paix, op. cit., p. 92.89. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 172.90. “To desacralise an object means to limit one’s self to understanding it in its

utilitarian and rational dimension and that is precisely to not to see it as anything otherthan an object” (Alain de Benoist, L’eclisee del sacro [Rome: Edizioni Settecolori, 1992],p. 146).

91. L. Rozitchner, Morale borghese e rivoluzione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), p. 94.92. Lucien Goldmann, L’illuminismo e la societa moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1967),

p. 95.93. “Destroyer of eternity [remarked Berdiaev], the bourgeois spirit is the opposite

of the Absolute” (quoted from Andre Stephane, L’univers contestationnaire [Paris: Payot,1969], p. 101). Even more drastic is Baudelaire’s thesis, later adopted by Nietzsche:“By its essence, trade is satanic” (The Will to Power).

94. “Man wants to be, to be happy, independent, unlimited, omnipotent; he wants,in a word, to be God” (Ludwig Feuerbach, L’essenza della religione [Turin: Einaudi, 1982],p. 90).

95. Vittorio Mathieu, La speranza nella rivoluzione, p. 189.96. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Religione e socialismo, p. 121.97. Lev Trotsky, Letteratura, arte, liberta, p. 198.98. J. P. Sartre, L’etre et le neant, p. 653.99. Otto Fenichel, Trattato di psicanalisi (Rome: Astrolabio, 1951), p. 51.

100. Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Maschere,” in Meditazioni del Chisciotte (Naples: Guida,1986), p. 188.

101. Ludwig Feuerbach, La morte e l’immortalita (Trento: Melita, 1990), p. 17.102. See J. J. Wunenburger, Le sacre (Paris: PUF, 1981).103. Karl Marx, “Poesie e saggi letterari giovanili,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 581

and p. 620. The young Bakunin was devoured by the same delirium: “My destinationis God. Great storms and thunder, move land, I fear you not, I despise you because Iam a man! My invincible and proud will serenely make its way through your tremorsto reach its supreme predestination! I am a man and I will be God!” (Quoted fromVittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to Aleksandr Herzen, A un vecchio compagno, p. LII).

Page 294: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 281

104. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age ofDiminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 38 et pass.

105. Alfred Adler, Il temperamento nervoso (Rome: Newton Compton, 1971), p. 65.106. Alfred Adler, Conoscenza dell’uomo (Milan: Mondadori, 1954), p. 74.107. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth Press, 1952).108. Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis: 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth,

1950), p. 318.109. The same applies to Bakunin. In a letter to his sisters he confesses, “I suffer

because I am a man and I wish to be God” (quoted from E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin[New York: Octagon Books, 1975]). Like Marx, Bakunin found a solution to his ex-istential problems when he saw revolution as a “sacred and priest-like mission” aimedat the “total transformation of the structure of the world” and the creation of an“essentially new, hitherto unknown life” (La reazione in Germania [Ivrea: Altamurgia,1972], p. 34). Declared objective: “the man-God, that we must all be.”

110. Karl Marx, “Quaderni sulla filosofia epicurea,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 501.111. Saint-Just expressed himself thus in a youthful essay in which he imagined

himself as universal executioner (quoted from Mario Mazzucchelli, Saint-Just [Milan:Dall’Oglio, 1980], p. 46).

112. De Maistre was notably the first to underline the satanic nature of the revo-lution, imagining a conversation between God and the revolutionary activists in whichthe latter declared the following resolution: “Everything that exists displeases us be-cause your name is written on everything that exists. We want to destroy everythingand re-make everything without you” (Saggio sul principio generatore delle costituzionipolitiche e delle istituzioni umane [Milano: Il Falco, 1982], p. 92).

113. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State. Bakunin was very influenced by GeorgeSand’s novel Consuelo in which Satan was introduced as the “archangel of legitimaterevolt.” But, before him, William Blake had already exalted Satan as a prodigious“redeeming force” in The book of Urizen.

114. See AA. VV., Satan (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1978) and Giovanni Papini, Ildiavolo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1953).

115. Karl Marx, “Oulanem,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 659. Bakunin was possessedby an identical devil: “I no longer belong to myself, the genius of destruction has takenpossession of me” (quoted from A. Reszler, Mythes politiques modernes [Paris: PUF,1981], p. 41). No less revealing of the destructive nature of the “revolutionary passion”are the words noted by Moses Hess after his meeting with Engels in Cologne: “Heleft me transformed in a supermilitant communist. This is how I cause havoc!” (Quotedfrom Richard Wurmbrand, Mio caro diavolo [Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1979], p. 52.)

116. Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michi-gan Press, 1971), p. 26.

117. “Once everything is one [says Woland, the satanic character of Il Maestro e lamargherita by Mikhail Bulgakov] everything will be fair”; more precisely, there will beno problem of justice. So John Rawls was right, when he defined Marx’s kingdom ofliberty as “a society beyond justice” (A Theory of Justice [Oxford: Clarendon Press,1972], p. 281).

118. Otto Rank, Il trauma della nascita (Bologna: Guaraldi, 1972), p. 79.119. Bela Grunberger, Il narcisismo (Bari: Laterza, 1977), p. 25.120. Igor Shafarevich, “Le phenomene socialiste,” p. 324 et seq. and “Passato e

avvenire del socialismo” in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Voci da sotto le macerie (Milan:

Page 295: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

282 Revolutionary Apocalypse

Mondadori, 1981), p. 69 et seq. It may not be superfluous to remember that in a notewritten in 1884, Nietzsche had already defined socialism as “the negation of life.”

121. Sigmund Freud, “Il problema economico del masochismo,” in Opere complete,vol. 10, p. 6.

122. Sigmund Freud, “Al di la del principio del piacere,” in Opere complete, vol. 9,p. 235.

123. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Harmondsworth: Pen-guin, 1982).

124. An example chosen from many: Giovanni Gentile even wrote that “death isnot frightening because it does not exist, just as nature and the past do not exist; justas dreams do not exist. The man who dreams exists, but not the things he dreams.And so death is the negation of thought but what is implemented by the negation thatit makes of itself cannot be real. In fact thought can but conceive itself as immortal,because it is infinite” (Sistema di logica, vol. 2, p. 200). Here, Gentile’s philosophy showsitself to be like all idealistic philosophies, namely a sophisticated form of animismwhose core is the desire to deny the contingency of man.

125. That is if the desire of death does not exist; what, however, does exist in us iswhat Cioran called the “temptation to die,” for suicide presents itself under the “tempt-ing” guise of “sudden liberation: nirvana through violence” (Il funesto demiurgo [Milan:Adelphi, 1986], p. 72).

126. Vladimir Jankelevich, “La presenza e la fine dei tempi,” Antonio CavicchiaScalamonti, ed., Il senso della morte (Naples: Liguori, 1984), p. 237.

127. T. J. J. Altizer, “Il sacro e il profano,” in T. J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton,La teologia radicale e la morte di Dio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 160.

128. See Mathilde Niel, Psychanalyse du marxisme (Paris: Le Courrier du Livre,1967), p. 123 et seq.

129. Ernst Bloch summarized the idea behind Marx’s gnosis in these terms: “Onlywith knowledge, by being in accord with the trends and latency of the process of theworld in the present phase, is it possible to attain victory. Thus there opens a prospectfor which neither optimism nor pessimism constitute a sufficient category, but whereat last the world is positively changed, until it becomes recognisable; where at last ithas become identical to self, no longer persisting in the state of being distant, not onlyfrom us, but from things themselves” (Mutare il mondo, p. 120).

130. “If it destroys everything, this is the proof that everything must be destroyed,because everything is bad; hence the proof that only society is bad and that I am notaggressive, but innocent” (quoted from Serge Lebovici, I sentimenti di colpa nel bambinoe nell’adulto [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973], p. 152). Rudy Dutzschke’s words are a definiteconfirmation of the theory according to which the revolutionary plans to destroy theworld to reconquer a state of Eden-like innocence, freeing himself of guilt (see V.Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1967]).

131. Friedrich Engels, Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, p. 103.132. Leon Trotsky, Letteratura, arte, liberta, p. 105.133. Ibid., p. 107.134. He will also be a man who is “biologically incapable of causing war and creating

suffering” (H. Marcuse, La liberazione dalla societa opulenta, p. 186), an angelic manthen at last liberated from his beastliness. He will also be an omnipotent man, readyto “ascend the biblical throne of God and take the sceptre” (Adam Schaff, Il Marxismo

Page 296: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

The Annihilators of the World 283

e la persona umana [Feltrinelli: Milan, 1963], p. 249). Evidently, Dostoevsky was rightwhen he identified the revolution with the program to put an end to the kingdom ofthe biblical God by fomenting the birth of the “new man, happy and proud.” “Whoeverconquers pain and fear [of death] will become God [these words Dostoevsky placedon Kirillov’s lips]. Then there will be new life, new man, everything will be new . . .Then history will be divided in parts: from the ape to the destruction of God, andfrom the destruction of God to the physical transformation of man and earth. Manwill be God and will be transformed physically: and the world will be transformed tooand actions will be transformed and thoughts and all feelings” (I demoni, p. 117).

135. Augusto Del Noce, Il problema dell’ateismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964), p. 164.136. Ludwig Feuerbach, L’Essenza del Cristianesimo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), p. 292.137. “My head spins, if Mephistopheles were to appear, I would be Faust because

it is clear that we are all Faust and therefore our life is a circus; we run around, welook everywhere until we fall on the ring and the gladiator, more precisely life, killsus; we must have a new Saviour since—torment you steal my sleep, you steal my health,you kill me—we are unable to distinguish the left side from the right side, we don’tknow where they are” (Karl Marx, “Scorpione e Felice,” in Opere complete, vol. 1,p. 717).

138. After a detailed analysis of the Jewish question using the hermeneutic methodof psychoanalysis, Robert Misrhai has reached the conclusion that “Marx turns hisdeaf and latent guilt, that is to say his self hatred and his desire for self destruction,into hatred of others, that is of Jews, and the will to destroy Hebrewism” (Marx et laquestion juive [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], p. 237). It is hardly necessary to say that, insubsequent works, the enemy to be destroyed became the bourgeoisie whom Marxconsidered the modern incarnation of the Jewish spirit.

139. This is confirmed, among others, by the dynamic of the Karaite sect that “inits social practice—mass religious migration—expressed a will of subversion, thatreached the extreme with desire for death, for collective suicide” (Pierre Clastres,Archeologia della violenza [Milan: La Salamandra, 1982], p. 92).

140. This theory was formulated very clearly in the famous memorandum of theCCP of May 16, 1966: “Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction withoutdestruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation, it means revolution. . . . Putdestruction first, and in the process you have construction. Marxism-Leninism, MaoTse-tung’s thought, was founded and has constantly developed in the course of thestruggle to destroy bourgeois ideology.” (Quoted from Joan Robinson, The CulturalRevolution in China [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], p. 75f.)

141. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Opere complete,vol. 11, p. 107.

142. Ibid., p. 107.143. In the poem “Dio e il mondo,” Goethe expresses the desire that animates the

ideal of One-All: “Be lost the single, with daring heart to rediscover the Infinite, whereall tedium is dissolved. No more desires, effort, will, heavy want, bitter duty: to aban-don oneself is voluptuousness” (Opere [Florence: Sansoni, 1993], p. 1349).

144. If a typical symptom of the necrophile personality is desire for annihilation,then Orwell was right when he defined the communist ideology in power as the “cultof death.”

145. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in Leszek Kola-kowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld and Nich-

Page 297: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

284 Revolutionary Apocalypse

olson, 1974), p. 43. The “Kirillov solution” is the other alternative to the inevitablecheckmate that awaits the gnostic revolutionary. The Kirillov solution is suicide as ametaphysical protest against the human condition. It is a far less literary solution thanis generally imagined: in fact, in 1978 the followers of Jim Jones, the founder of theMarxist sect, People’s Temple, justified their decision to put an end to their existencethus: “We have committed a revolutionary act of suicide to protest the contradictionsof an inhuman world (quoted from Mario Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo [Milan:SugarCo, 1993], p. 67). After vainly seeking a “new start” ( J. Jones) that could modifythe ontological status of reality, they reached the desperate conclusion that the onlyway to escape the evils of the world was a self-annihilation (see Enrico Pozzi, Il carismamalato [Naples: Liguori, 1992]).

Page 298: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

A Conclusion?

Toward the end of the First World War, when Anatole France was already anold man, he expressed his skepticism about a future of peace. “I am sure [hesaid prophetically] that the age of violence will not end with the conclusionof this war, which carries within it three or four equally awful wars.” To acharming lady, who happened to be visiting at the time and had remarkedthat he was pessimistic about humankind, he answered: “Don’t you see thatthe cruellest actions, the worst massacres, have been inspired by the idea thatman is a virtuous being? Those good for nothing demagogues, whose job itwas to look after France and who, instead, were responsible for mass murderand drowning their country in blood, wished to restore primitive goodness,the virtue that allegedly is only to be had in Eden. They lacked that benev-olence and tolerance that can only come from a knowledge of human weak-ness. Those ambiguous visionaries wanted justice for all, they wanted truthto govern the world. They exterminated masses of people to guarantee heavenon earth to the few who survived. As for me, I have a poor opinion of men,but I love them and, since I love them, I am sympathetic toward them.”1

These words simply reiterated the message Anatole France had alreadyexpressed in his novels Gli Dei hanno sete and La rivolta degli angeli, describingthe flood of destructive and self-destroying consequences provoked by therevolutionary project to make men angels.

Yet, this man who had spent his whole life warning himself, and others,against the “hubristic”2 temptation succumbed to the appeal of the OctoberRevolution. In 1922 in an enthusiastic “salute to the Soviets” published inL’Humanite, he praised the Bolshevik experiment lavishly and completely de-nied what he had written in Il Giardino di Epicuro: “The folly of the revolution

Page 299: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

286 A Conclusion?

lay in its desire to establish a government of virtue on earth. When one desiresto make humanity good and wise, free and noble, one inevitably ends upwanting to kill every man. Robespierre, believed in virtue yet, in the end, heintroduced a government of terror. Marat, who also believed in virtue, orderedtwo hundred thousand heads to be chopped off.”

The moral of Anatole France’s sudden conversion is that we should neverforget that man is a “metaphysical climber” who aspires to “act on all, tocreate and transform at pleasure, without intermediaries.”3 The desire to tran-scend the condition of being finite drives him to follow the example of Icarus,4who refused the principle of reality and threw himself body and soul into the“crazy” enterprise of destroying the limits imposed by the ontological struc-ture of the world.5

The historical parable of Marxist-Leninist communism has come to a close.The collectivistic utopia disintegrated in the face of the “harsh response ofhistory,” inflicting a fatal blow on the idea that revolutions solve alienation.Yet, caution is necessary: the need for the absolute is still with us. In a civi-lization that has been deserted by the gods but continues to be shaped by theJudeo-Christian tradition, where the civitas diaboli and the civitas Dei6 are inconstant state of conflict, in a civilization that is permeated by the “Gnostictemptation of absolute, total knowledge, that will liberate [humankind] fromthe anguish of partial, conflictual knowledge,”7 who can be sure that in somemore or less distant future the revolutionary spirit will not resurface undersome new guise?8

NOTES

1. Quoted from T. Reik, Mito e colpa (Milan: SugarCo, 1969), p. 422.2. In La pierre blanche—an unusual dystopian novel—Anatole France had also de-

scribed the inevitable bureaucratic and liberticide consequences of the socialistrevolution.

3. G. Papini, Un uomo finito (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), p. 144. In this work Papinistated, “We must act on reality as a whole, on absolutely everything without exception. . . And if we are victorious, the whole world will be ours, a plastic and manageablematter that we will shape as we wish and the Garden [of Eden] will come true: Youwill be similar to Gods! To be God! All men, Gods! That is the great dream, the im-possible undertaking, the superb end we are seeking! And I will be like a plan—formyself and for others. In Imitation of God: All knowing, all powerful . . . On this claimthat is mine and of the Man God, I thought to found a religion.”

4. In fact, Etienne Cabet called his imaginary, harmonious, perfect society Icaria,after the character of Greek mythology who had wanted to make a dream come true.

5. On the “Icarus principle,” see the beautiful pages written by C. Dumitresco, LaCite totale, p. 11 et seq.

6. See Alberto Asor Rosa, Fuori dell’Occidente ovvero ragionamento sull’Apocalissi (Tu-rin: Einaudi, 1992).

Page 300: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

A Conclusion? 287

7. Giovanni Filoramo, Il risveglio della Gnosi ovvero diventare Dio (Bari: Laterza,1990), p. 15.

8. Maybe the revolutionary spirit has already reemerged. In Vittorio Mathieu’s pref-ace to the reprint of Speranza nella rivoluzione, it is suggested that revolutionary spirithas identified ecology as its new area of action, an area already indicated 20 years agoby Andre Gorz to the gnostic left: “The ecological struggle is not an end to itself, itis a transition step. It is capable of creating problems for capitalism and forcing it tochange” (Ecologia e politica [Cappelli: Bologna, 1978], p. 17). More recently Gorz ar-gued for “The dialectical materialist faith in the goodness of Nature, and of a naturalorder which is to be re-established” (Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology [London, New York:Verso, 1994], p. 7).

Page 301: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 302: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index

Abnegation of self in Great CollectiveSoul, 206

Absolute Enemy, need for, 232–33Acculturation, 251; forced, 252; of

intellectuals, 123–25, 126, 252–53;selective, 122

Adler, Alfred, 272Aggression, cultural, 250–51Agli uficiali dell’esercito (Bakunin),

132–33Agursky, Mikhail, 248Albitte, 46Alexander II, 137Alienation: gnosis of Mani and therapy

for, 15–16; gnostic syndrome and,151; of intellectuals, 4–7, 123–25,209; Marxism and, 154–57

Alla giovane generazione (Mikhailov),137–38

Althusser, Louis, 156Anabaptist movement, 19Anarchists, 85–86; Lenin as, 172–73Ancien regime, legitimation of, 35. See

also French RevolutionAnimism, 149–50; Hegel’s revival of,

154Answers, social mobilization and, 64

Anti-Duhring (Engels), 86Anti-institutionalism of Marxian

philosophy, 156Apocalypse fanatics, 11–28. See also

Millenarian movements of LowMiddle Ages

Apologia, 202Aragon, Louis, 211Arendt, Hannah, 208, 228Aristocracy, 69; gnostic, 213–14Aristocratic proletariat, 13Aron, Raymond, 6Asian despotism, 35Atheism, 61–62Athens, querelle on Sparta and, 39Augustine, Saint, 14Autonomous subsystems,

modernization and, 244Autonomy of civil society from State,

modernization and, 244–45

Babeuf, E.N., 40Bakunin, Mikhail, 6, 85, 117, 126,

132–34, 173, 223, 273Ball, John, 16Baxter, Richard, 23Becker, Howard, 60

Page 303: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

290 Index

Berdiaev, Nikolai, 117, 126Bernstein, Eduard, 90–93; challenge to

Marxism, 90–93, 99Besancon, Alain, 202, 264–65Blanquisme, 135; Marxism as updated

form of, 91Bloch, Ernst, 18, 159, 211Bloch, I.S., 171, 172Bockelson, Jan, 19Bolshevik Party, 172–73; as “conscious

avant-garde,” 175, 200, 213–14;terrorist strategy of, 174–76

Bolshevism/Bolshevik revolution, 117,285–86; cultural war vs. WesternModernity, 245–49; destruction ofcivil society by, 177–78, 264;economic organization policy,180–84; famine following, 181–82,185; Great War impact and, 177;influence on proletarian masses ofEurope, 196–97; Jacobins as spiritualfathers of, 41, 42, 108–9, 116, 176,221–23; nationalization policy, 177,178; peasants and, 179–84; aspolitical-ideological force ofcontinental dimensions, 196; Russianeconomy and, 241–42; steps toward,129–31; universal charismaticbureaucracy created by, 178–79;utopian message of, 176–77; warcommunism experiment, disaster of,184–86; Zaichnevsky as spiritualfather of, 224. See also Communism/communist revolution; Lenin,Nikolai; New World, building

Bonch-Bruevich, V.D., 173, 223Bossuet, 35Bourgeoisie, 2–3; cultural, 3; fear of

internal proletariat and communism,70; flight from Russia underBolsheviks, 177, 178; intellectualsopposition to capitalist-bourgeoisorder, 5–6; Jacobin revolution’sconsequences to, 46–49; passionatehatred of, 270–71; “silent revolution”of entrepreneurial, 270; workingclass and, 68–70

Bourgeois revolution, 40; FrenchRevolution as, 36

Bourgeois spontaneity, 184, 185,262–63, 264, 266

Brainwashing, use of, 229–33Brinton, Crane, 43, 47Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 31British labor movement, 100Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 184, 232, 262Buio a mezzogiorno (Darkness at Noon)

(Koestler), 206Bukharin, Nikolai, 180, 184–85, 224Bund (order), 107Bureaucracy: Jacobin, 47–48; universal

charismatic, 178–79, 186Byzantine world, 117–18

Calvin, John, 20, 21Cambodian Revolution, 266–67Cannibalism, 181Capital, Marx on alienation and,

155–56Capital (Marx), 81–82, 84–85, 139–40:

function of, 81–82Capitalism: antagonism between the

feudal system and, 17, 21; autonomyof civil society from State and, 245;bipolar class thesis and, 83–84;categorical imperative to fight,161–64; cultural catastrophes and,12; effect of modernization ontraditional societies, 251–53; enigmaof, 84; factory system, 64, 65, 67–70;inevitable catastrophic collapse of,Marx on, 81–82, 84–85; intellectualopposition to capitalist-bourgeoisorder, 5–6; intolerable contradictionpermeating, 162; Leninistdestruction of, without plan foralternative, 263; origin of modernintellectual class and, 4;revolutionary movements andintroduction of, 11–12; Rousseau’svision of history and, 37–38; Russianrevolutionaries’ fear of bourgeoisWest and, 136–40; self governmentof economy and, 66–67; tsarist“controlled modernization” policy

Page 304: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 291

and development of, 135–36;working class and, 67–71

Capitalist ratio, 244Carlyle, T., 43Cassirer, E., 36Catastrophic-palingenetic concept of

revolution, 42–43Catechism of the Revolutionary (Nechaev),

130–31Categorical imperative, revolution as,

100, 106, 161–64Cavalli, Luciano, 104Censorship, 203, 232; See also

Brainwashing, use ofCentralization, Marx and Engels on,

80–81Centralism, democratic, 214; of Lenin,

105–6Change, modernization and willingness

to, 243Charisma-bearing group, Lenin’s

revolutionary party as, 103–5Chartism, 78–79Che fare? (Chernyshevsky), 106, 115;

“new man” of, 128–29, 130CHEKA, 174, 224Chernyshevsky, N.G., 127, 128, 130Chiliasm, gnosticism and, 16Chinese Communist Party, 268Christianity: anti-institutional

radicalism in early, 13–16;transformation from religion ofprotest to religion of legitimation,14–15

Citizenship, modernization and, 243Civil society: autonomy from State,

modernization and, 244–45; totaldestruction of, 177–78, 264

Class battles, modern society and, 243Class consciousness, Lukacs on,

199–200Class war: millenarianism and, 16–17;

Puritanism and, 23Clemenceau, G., 29, 196Closed society, transition to open

society from, 60Cobban, Alfred, 39–40

Collective dictatorship of secretorganizations, 133–34

Collective Thought, 204–5Comintern (Communist International):

as avatar of Manichean church, 202;declared objective of, 195–96;establishment of, 195; as globalorganization of revolutionaryproletariat, 198; as sole and exclusiveholder of truth of history, 199;source of charismatic fascinationwith, 209–11; spiritual vacuum filledby, 206–9

Committee of Public Safety (France),32–33, 46, 47

Commune, 80–81Communism/communist revolution,

18, 40, 99–103: consumercommunism, 197; dual truth, systemof, 266; Engels’ formulation of“moral” principles of, 222;expectations of, 261, 269; faminesunder, 181–82, 185, 265, 267;fluctuation between NEP model andwar model of, 264–66; fundamentalprinciples of, 81; initial goal of, 261;market and, principle ofincompatibility between, 184–85;market communism, 182; Marx andEngels’ future society under, 162–64;Marx’s definition of, 263; asnegation, 263–64, 267–69; Nirvanaas ultimate goal of, 274; objectivesof, 221; planetary dimensions of,265; Rousseau and, 37–38; assolution to conflict betweenexistence and essence, 157–61;sudden demise of, 261; totalitariannature of, 228; total sterility of, 262,266–70; tragedy of, 273; warcommunism, disaster of, 184–86; Seealso Lenin, Nikolai; New World,building

Communistes, Les (Aragon), 211Communist Party: as a sacral

institution, 198, 200–206; terroriststrategy of, 174–76

Page 305: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

292 Index

Concentration camps (gulags), Russian,176, 185, 228–29

Confessions, obsession with, 231Conscious avant-garde, 175, 200;

historical role of, 213–14Constant, B., 29, 39“Consumer communism,” 197Conversions, brainwashing to provoke,

230–31Couliano, Ioan, 151Council of People’s Commissars, 173Cox, Harvey, 61Croce, Benedetto, 249Cromwell, Oliver, 23Cultural aggression, Toynbee’s theory

of, 250–51Cultural bourgeoisie, 3Cultural catastrophes, 12Cultural isolation, 233; Lenin’s

centralism and, 106Cultural secularization, modernization

and, 243–44Cultural war between West and East,

241–60; Bolshevik revolution andWestern Modernity, 245–49; culturalaggression, Toynbee’s theory of,250–51; effect on traditionalsocieties, 251–53; elementsconstituting core of Modernity and,242–44; intelligentsia and, 252–55

Danton, Georges Jacques, 31, 32David, Eduard, 91Death: Comintern and solution to

enigma of, 210–11; as dialecticallynecessary moment in “infinite youthof humanity,” 211; thanatos as drivingforce of revolution, 274

Decentralization, Communards’ modelof, 80

Declaration of the Parisian Population, 80Decour, Jacques, 211Defence from existential anguish, 210De Jouvenel, B., 38–39De Maistre, 273Democracy: Jacobins as spiritual fathers

of, 41; Rousseau and, 38–39

Democratic centralism, 214; as Lenin’smodel of organization, 105–6

Denis, Henri, 150Deux Revolutions Francaises, Les

(Ferrero), 29Dialectical enlightenment, 160–61Dictatorship. See Bolshevism/Bolshevik

revolution; Communism/communistrevolution; Jacobin experiment

Dislocation, social mobilization and,64–65

Disraeli, Isaac, 64Division of labor, Marx and Engels on,

163Dmitrievsky, 246Domela-Nieuwehuis, Ferdinand, 82Donatism, 13Dostoevsky, Fedor, 127, 131–32,

246–47Dualism dominating Western

civilization, 40–41Dual truth, system of, 266Duplicitous thought, need for, 233–35Durkheim, E., 71, 211Dutard, 39Dzerzhinsky, F.E., 228

Economic exploitation, 68Economic maturity, principle of, 81–82Economic organization: under

Bolshevik Party, 180–84; Jacobin,46–49; planned economy, 262–63

Eisenstadt, Samuel, 254Elective action, modernization and,

242–43Eluard, Paul, 210Enemy (class of user), 202Engels, Friedrich, 19, 67, 77, 78, 87,

106, 149, 157, 159–60, 203, 269; ondivision of labor, 163; onrevolutionary terror, 222–23,225–26; scholastic arrangement ofbasic socialist dogmas by, 86

England: crisis of Chartism in, 78–79;Great Rebellion in, 19–23;Restoration in, 23

Enlightenment, 150; FrenchRevolution as outcome of, 34–36;

Page 306: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 293

mechanistic concept of world in,61–62; origins of the spirit of, 41;romantic reaction against, 153

Ephesus, Council of, 14Equality, revolution of growing

expectations and spread of idea of,69

Essence, Hegel’s theory of, 83–84European absolutism, 35European society: impact on Russian

civilization, 116, 117–27;modernization and secularization of,118, 120

Existential anguish, defence from, 210Expectations: imbalance between

intellectuals’ status and legitimate, 7;revolution of growing, 69

Exploitation, economic, 68External proletariat, 251

Factory system, 64, 65; factory owner-worker relationship, 67–70

Fall, the, 152; rupture of original unityfollowing, 156–57, 160

“False consciousness” theory, 203, 204,234

Famine: failure of Communistprinciples and, 265, 267; followingBolshevik revolution, 181–82, 185

Fear: bourgeois, of internal proletariatand communism, 70; FrenchRevolution and, 29, 30, 31, 32–33.See also Terror, terrorism

Ferrero, Guglielmo, 29, 30, 33, 36, 88,92

Fetscher, Irving, 198Feudalism, capitalism and, 17, 21Feuerbach, Ludwig, 271Fouquier-Tinville, A.Q., 42France, Anatole, 285–86Frank, Ludwig, 91Frankenhausen, Battle of, 19Free market, 66Freischwebende Intelligenz, 1, 2French Revolution, 29–57, 124; as

antibourgeois, 39–40; ConstitutiveAssembly, 30–31; as dual revolution,40–41; “Great Fear,” 30; Marxist

view of, 39–40; philosophicalfoundations of, 34–36; revolutionwithin, 32–33, 34, 39; Rousseau and,36–39; unexpected results ofprinciples of, 29, 31–32

Freud, S., 274Friedrich, Carl J., 232Furet, Francois, 48

Gasset, 5, 159Gemeinschaft (community), 66, 89, 90,

92, 107, 137, 255; desperation forsurrogate of, 208

Genocide, 222–23; of Khmer Rouge,266–67; revolution and, 227–28. Seealso Terror, terrorism

German democratic socialism, 86; self-imposed cultural isolation of, 88

Germani, Gino, 64, 255Gesellschaft (society), 66, 89, 90, 107,

137, 255Girondist party, 31–32Gnostic aristocracy, 213–14Gnosticism, revolutionary, 11, 149–70,

200; characteristics of “gnosticsyndrome,” 151–53; chiliasm and,16; collective salvation, belief in,232; Communism as therapy foralienation, 157–61; CommunistParty and, 200–206; defined, 152;diagnosis of alienation, 154–57;distinction between pistis and, 203;existential need answered by, 270–72;Hegel’s philosophy of history and,153–54; Nirvana offered by, 273–74;powerful drive toward destructionand self-destruction, 267; purpose of,261; revolution as categoricalimperative against capitalism,161–64; self-divination and, desirefor, 271–75; vision of history,200–201

Gnostic Manichean tradition, 15–16;movements reviving, 16–19

Godwin, William, 29Goldenberg, Josif, 172–73Gorky, Maxim, 171, 233, 247Gouldner, Alvin, 3

Page 307: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

294 Index

Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 197, 202, 207,213, 245

Great Rebellion in England, 19–23Great War, 197; Bolshevik revolution

and impact of, 177; enthusiasm forcommunist promise after, 207–8

Guenon, Rene, 60, 270Guerin, Daniel, 47Guilt, brainwashing to provoke sense

of, 229–31Guitton, Jean, 14Gulags (concentration camps), 176,

185, 228–29Gutermann, 164

Hatred, unity and mobilizationthrough, 232–33

Hayek, Friedrich, 2, 35–36, 88Hegel, G.W.F., 2, 60, 153–54, 268–70;

historicism of, 62; Marxian versionof Hegelism, 154; theodicy of,62–63; theory of essence, 83–84

Heidegger, Martin, 210Hell (secret society), 130Herling, Gustav, 229Herzen, Aleksandr, 126, 127, 137, 139Higher education, frustration of

intellectuals following extension of,6–7

Historical materialism, 2Historicism, 62History, gnosticism and periods or

aeons of, 152History and Class Consciousness, 200–201Hobsbawm, Eric, 255Hoelderlin, 61Holbach, P.H.D. d’, 36Holy war, 213, 221Homo naturalis, doctrine of, 226;

communist reaction to, 226–28Hope in the self-redemption of

humanity, 271Hovat, Branko, 263Hubris, 271–72, 285Hume’s laws, 149, 150Hus, John, 16

Ideas: power of, 5; process of becomingbeliefs, 5

I demoni (Dostoevsky), 131–32Ideologia tedesca, 78, 81Ideological terrorism, 203Il Giardino di Epicuro (France), 285–86Indirizzo del 1850 (Marx and Engels),

172Individualistic culture, 243Indulgences, 17Industrialization: in czarist Russia, 241;

modernization vs., 242Industrial Revolution, 7, 242;

phenomenon of the “two nations” asconsequence of, 64; socialmobilization and, 64–65

Institutionalized schizophrenia,revolutionism as, 233–34

Integration, social mobilization and, 64Intellectual proletariat, concept of,

123–24Intellectuals: alienated, role in

constructing proletarian church, 209;alliance with workers, 70–71;dictatorship of Marxist, 214; inJacobin party, 47; plethora ofproletarized, in Russian society,116–17; Puritanism and, 21–22;revolutionary theory as exclusivedomain of, 100–101. See alsoIntelligentsia, Russian

Intellectuals as a class, 1–9; alienationand impotence experienced by, 4–7,123–25, 209; declasses, 6–7; imbalancebetween status and legitimateexpectations, 7; impact on societyreality, 5; opposition to capitalist-bourgeois order, 5–6; origins ofmodern, 4; revolutionary secessionof, 7; social functions, 3

Intelligentsia, Russian, 115–47;acculturation of, 123–25, 126,252–53; alienation of, 123–25, 209;Bakunin’s revolutionary policy and,132–34; definition of, 252–53;features typical of ethos of, 126–27;impact of European civilization on,116, 117–27; modernization and,252–55; Nechaev’s revolutionarypolicy and, 130–31, 132, 133;

Page 308: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 295

nihilism of, 126, 127–29;palingenetic overturning of societydesired by, 126–27; paradoxicalnature of role played by, 136;Populists, 134–40; Slavophiles, 137,138–39; steps toward Bolshevism,129–31; Tkachev, 134–36, 224

Internal proletariat, 63–64, 70, 71, 252I presupposti del socialismo e i compiti della

social democrazia (Bernstein), 90Iron curtain, 245Ishutin, Nikolai, 129–30Islam, Communist movement as

twentieth-century, 212Ivan the Great, 119Ivan the Terrible, 119

Jacobin experiment, 29–57; as anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, 41–42;Bolshevism and, 41, 42, 108–9, 116,176, 221–23; catastrophic-palingenetic concept of revolution,42–43; consequences to bourgeoisie,46–49; dictatorship dominated byfear, 32–33; network of clubs,organization through, 47–48;philosophical foundations of, 34–36;as political Messianism, 43;redemption of humanity as goal ofTerror, 43–45; Rousseau’s democracyand, 39; suppression of Girondistparty, 31–32; Thermidor reaction to,40, 48, 185

Jankelevitch, Vladimir, 209Jaures, Jean, 39Jesuits of revolution, 99–113; Lenin

and, 99–103Jevons, Stanley, 262

Kant, I., 249Kaplan, Abraham, 102Kautsky, Karl, 86–89, 90Kelsen, Hans, 150Khmer Rouge, 266–67Kisselev, 235Knox, John, 20, 21Koestler, Arthur, 206, 231Konrad, Gyorgy, 3

Krizhanich, Iury, 121Krylenko, N.V., 175Kursky, 178, 227

Langevin, 211Language, political, 233–35Lanot, 43Lassalle, Ferdinand, 77, 198Lasswell, Harold D., 102Latsis, 224Lavrov, P.L., 129Le Bon, Gustave, 6–7Le Chapelier law, 41Lefebvre, 164Lenin, Nikolai, 41, 99–103, 171–72,

178, 179–80, 234; as anarchist,172–73; attitude toward workers,101; concept of politics, 100;criticisms of, 115–16; democraticcentralism as model of organization,105–6; elements in Leninism incommon with new religions, 197–98;elimination of free press, 173; aselitist, 101–3, 104, 107–9;extermination of opposition, 173–74;on historical mission of Russia, 248;lack of plan for post-capitalisteconomy, 263; on petit-bourgeoisspontaneity as main enemy, 184;reasoning behind NEP, 183–84;revolutionary party of, 102–9;revolution as categorical imperativeto, 100; terrorist strategy of, 174–76,223, 224, 225, 226–27, 264

Lessons on the Philosophy of History(Hegel), 153–54

Lettere dalla francia e dall’italia (Herzen),137

Liberalism, socialism as historical heirof, 91

Lilburne, John, 23Lipan, Battle of (1434), 17Lobotomy, spiritual, 231Lollard movement, 16–17Louis, Pierre, 80Louis XVI, 31Loyola, Ignatius, 201–2Lukacs, Gyorgy, 198–200

Page 309: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

296 Index

Luther, Martin, 17–18Luxemburg, Rosa, 106, 179Lying, conquest of power and, 234

Mably, G.B. de, 39Machajski, Jan Waclaw, 6, 101Machiavellianism, 234Malia, Martin, 125, 138Man, Henri de, 65Manicheism/Manichean church: gnostic

tradition, 15–19; principles of, 153;similarity of proletariat church to,200–206

Mannheim, Karl, 1, 2Manuals, 202Manuscripts of 1844, The (Marx), 155Mao Tse Tung, 247Marcuse, Herbert, 158, 210Market: free, 66; as main agent of

modernization and of secularization,244–45

Market communism, 182Market economy, planned economy vs.,

262–63. See also CapitalismMarket society, Marx on, 156Martov, Iury, 115, 197Marx, Karl, 2, 6, 63, 67, 77, 120, 149,

203, 242, 269; belief in plannedeconomy, 262–63; desire for self-divinization in poems by, 272–75; ondivision of labor, 163; hatred ofbourgeoisie in, 270; military vision ofclass struggle, 6, 78–80; problem ofalienation at heart of theory of,154–57; on revolutionary terror, 222;scientific socialism of, 150–51;strategy of controversial expectancyof “hour x,” 78; violent desire fordestruction and self-destruction, 275

Marxism, 77–97; as airtight, rigorouslyself-referential system, 204; anti-institutionalism of, 156;“Asianization” of, 140; Bernstein’schallenge to, 90–93, 99; bipolar classthesis, 83–84; as a categoricalimperative, 106; immunizing workersfrom “bourgeois infection,” 81–82,83;

instilling confidence in proletariat,83; Kautsky and, 86–89, 90; aspolitical religion, 159, 254–55;revolutionary theology of, 85;Russian Populists and, 139–40;similarity of Catholic Church and,85–86; social organization, avoidingproblem of, 82–83

Massification, totalitarian movements asglobal response to process of, 208–9

Mathiez, Albert, 41Mattys, Jan, 19Mauss, Marcel, 262Media, image of the world built and

conveyed by regime through, 232Medvedev, Roy, 228–29Mehring, Franz, 80Merchants, resentment toward, 4. See

also BourgeoisieMering, Franz, 99Merton, Robert, 2Messianic expectation: of revolutionary

palingenesis, 85; of revolutionaryparousia, 82

Messianism, Jacobin experiment aspolitical, 43

Methivier, Hubert, 30Michelet, Jules, 68, 69–70Michels, Robert, 5Mikhailov, Mikhail, 137–38Milan, Edict of, 14Mill, John Stuart, 262Millenarian movements of Low Middle

Ages, 11, 12–23; leadership of, 13;origins of, 13–16; prophetae of, 11,13, 15, 16; Puritanism, 19–23;revolutions of, 16–19; similarity ofanarchists to, 85–86

Mobilization, social, 64–65Modernization: effect on traditional

societies, 251–53; elementsconstituting core of Modernity,242–44; industrialization vs., 242;intelligentsia and, 252–55; aspermanent process, 242;secularization and, 60–61; structuralconditions generating moderncivilization, 244–48

Page 310: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 297

Money, Marx on essence of, 155, 156Monnerot, Jules, 108, 210, 212Muntzer, Thomas, 18–19

Nationalism: proletarianinternationalism as form of, 246–48;of Russian intelligentsia, 138

Nationalization policy, Bolshevik, 177,178

Nechaev, Sergei, 130–31, 132, 133, 223Negation, Communism as, 263–64,

267–69Neo-language, 235NEP, 182, 183–84; fluctuation between

war model of Communism and,264–66

New World, building, 221–40;brainwashing and, 229–33;concentration camps (gulags) usedin, 176, 185, 228–29; desire for self-divination and, 274–75; politicallanguage and need for duplicitousthought in, 233–35; terrorism and,221–28. See also Communism/communist revolution

Nicholas I, 129Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62, 63, 107Nihilism, 62–63, 159, 269; of Russian

intelligentsia, 126, 127–291984 (Orwell), 231Nisbet, Robert, 67Nizan, Paul, 210Nolte, Ernst, 196Nomad, Max, 6Nomocracy, modernization and, 243Nostalgia, gnostic syndrome and, 151

Oaks, 152Obshchina, peasant, 136, 139October Revolution. See Bolshevism/

Bolshevik revolutionOpen society, transition from “closed

society” to, 60Opportunism, 103Orphans of God, 62–63; emergence of,

62. See also IntellectualsOrtega, Jose, 5, 159Orthodoxy, purity as, 103

Orwell, George, 231, 235Osorgin, Mikhail, 181Oulanem (Marx), 273

Padri E Figli (Turgenev), 127Palingenesis, phases of, 86Paraclete, science of gnostic, 152Paradox of all revolutions, 29, 32, 33Parvus, 116Pasqualini, Jean, 230Peasant obshchina, 136, 139Peasants, Bolshevik revolution and,

179–84Perfection, aeon of, 152Peter the Great, 121; open-door policy

of, 121–23Petit-bourgeois spontaneity:

destruction of, 185, 262–63, 264,266; Lenin on, 184

Pfeifer, 18Philosophes, 34–36, 37Piatakov, Grigory, 201Pisarev, Dmitry, 127–28Pistis, 152, 203Planned economy, 262–63Platonic cave myth, 203Plebeian proletariat, 13, 16Plekhanov, G.V., 115Pneumatics, 152Polanyi, Karl, 12, 66Polemical-hierocratic order, Lenin’s

party as, 107–9Political language, 233–35Politics: Lenin’s concept of, 100;

salvation as political issue inrevolutionary, 37; as soteriologicalpractice, Puritanism and, 20–22

Politika (Krizhanich), 121Pol Pot, 265, 267Popper, Karl R., 204Popular sovereignty, 31, 32Populists, Russian, 134–40Power, Marx and Engels on strategy for

conquest of, 172Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 182, 185, 224Preobrazhensky law, 185Principles of Political Economy in Light of

Page 311: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

298 Index

the Science of Logic, The (Ricardo),150

Professional revolutionaries, 104–9;Bakunin, 6, 85, 117, 126, 132–34,173, 223, 273; Bolshevik revolutionand gnostic, 178, 179; as custodian oforthodoxy, 106; Leninist conceptionof party of, 134; Nechaev, 130–31,132, 133, 223; “new men” of CheFare?, 128–29, 130; psychologicalpreparation for use of mass terror,227; self-discipline of, 105; Tkachev,134–36, 224; ultimate goal ofrevolution for, 134

Proletarian church, 195–220;Communist Party and, 198–206;historical mission, 212; role ofalienated intellectuals inconstructing, 209; spiritual vacuumfilled by Lenin’s gnosis-party, 206–9;task of, 211; as totalitarian, 211–14

Proletarianization, 65; Bernstein’scritique of, 90

Proletarian science, 205Proletariat: external, 251; intellectual,

123–24; internal, 63–64, 70, 71, 252;marginalized from community life,12; plebeian vs. aristocratic, 13, 16;thought, 134–35

Proletarization as cultural deracination,67, 68–69

Proletarized intelligentsia, 20;revolutionary gnosticism and, 11;transformed by Puritanism intoactivists, 22

Propaganda, purpose of, 233. See alsoBrainwashing, use of

Propagandist (class of user), 202Proselyte (class of user), 202Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 46, 108Psychic, the, 152Purges for purity, 103. See also

Genocide; Terror, terrorismPurification: brainwashing and, 231–32;

concentration camps used for,228–29; terror used for, 228–29

Puritanism, 19–23; politics assoteriological practice in, 20–22;

strategy to create mass revolutionarymovement, 22–23

Purity, obsession with: of Bolsheviks,176; Lenin’s democratic centralismand, 105–6; in millenarian sects,102–3

Radek, K.B., 247Reaction, social mobilization and, 64Redemption: brainwashing for, 230–31;

as goal of Jacobin Terror, 43–45;hope in self-redemption of humanity,271

Reform, the, 17–18Regeneration, 269; as goal of

Cambodian Revolution, 267; ofhuman nature, terror as means for,225–28; spiritual, phases in, 230

Reintegration, social mobilization and,64

Religion: abandonment of religiousnessfor revolutionary spirit, 271;existential source of all, 271–72; idealsurrogates of, search for, 210; Marxand Engels on end of age of, 160–61;Marxism as political, 159, 254–55.See also Proletarian church

Restoration, aeon of, 152Restoration, English, 23Revisionism, 103; Bernstein and,

90–93; generated by gap betweenMarxist prognosis and effectivedynamics of capitalism, 99;opposition of officers of“bureaucratic socialism” to, 92–93

Revolution: as art vs. spontaneous massaction, 108–9; catastrophic-palingenetic concept of, 42–43; ascategorical imperative, 100, 106,161–64; folly of, 285–86; genocideand, 227–28; goal of Marxian, 158;of growing expectations, 69;terrorism and, 221–25; will todestroy all in order to reconstructall, 163

Revolutionaries. See Professionalrevolutionaries

Page 312: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 299

Revolutionary consciousness, workingclass and, 100

Revolutionary gnosticism, 11Revolutionary party of Lenin, 102–9; as

Bund or religious order, 107; ascharisma-bearing group, 103–5; asmechanism of selection, 107; aspolemic-hierocratic order, 107–9; aswar machine, 102–3

Revolutionism, 270Revolution of growing expectations, 69Ricardo, David, 150Robespierre, Maximilien, 32–33, 40,

41–42, 45, 48, 176; Report to theCommittee of Public Safety ofFebruary 5, 1794, 222

Roman Empire, Christian anti-institutional radicalism in, 13–16

Romantic age of revolutions, Lenin andend of, 109

Romantic intellectuals, loss ofChristianity experienced by, 61–62

Rooting, need for, 65Rousseau, J.J., 33, 36–39, 44;

revolutionary nature of anthropologyof, 37

Ruge, Arnold, 262Russia: creation of “civil/state society,”

186; destruction of civil society of,177–78; economic organizationunder Bolsheviks, 180–84, 241–42;February democratic-bourgeoisrevolution and tsarist collapse (1917),172, 177; flight of bourgeoisie from,177, 178; gulags, 176, 185, 228–29;historical mission of, 246–47; utopiain power, 171–94; war communism,disaster of, 184–86

Russian revolution: intelligentsia and,115–47; Lenin and, 99–109; nihilisticturning point as fundamental inevolution of, 127–29; See alsoBolshevism/Bolshevik revolution;Communism/communistrevolution

Russian society: impact of Westerncivilization on, 116, 117–27;

permanent cultural war in, 117, 122,124, 125; social structure, 125; totalsymbiosis between State and Churchin, 119–20; tsarism and, 119–25,135–36, 172, 177; universityinstitution generating acculturatedintelligentsia, 123–25, 126

Sacred, the: in modern society, 61;restoration of kingdom of, 274; intraditional closed society, 60

Saint-Etienne, 268Saint-Just, L.A.L. de, 33, 40, 42, 43, 44,

46, 48Sartori, Giovanni, 7Sartre, J.P., 271Schism, social mobilization and, 64Schlegel, Friedrich, 59–60Schmalenbach, Herman, 107Schuitt, Conrad, 91Schumpeter, Joseph A., 2, 7, 242Scientific socialism, 101–9, 150–51;

aristocracy of spirit generated by,104; Communism defined by, 274;dual claim at heart of, 157–58;grandiose intellectual and moralreform promised by, 213; privilegedepistemological status of, 203

Scienza della logica (Hegel), 83Second Coming, expectation of, 13, 14,

15Second International, 90, 116Secret organizations, collective

dictatorship of, 133–34Secularization, 60; cultural, 243–44;

modernization and, 60–61Self: abnegation of, in Great Collective

Soul, 206; desire of self-divinization,271–75

Selznick, Philip, 47Serrati, Giacinto Menotti, 182Shafarevich, Igor, 274, 275Shigalev paradox, 131–32, 134, 233Simmel, Georg, 262Slavophiles, 137, 138–39Slogans, 202Smirnov, Volodia, 101Soboul, Albert, 40

Page 313: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

300 Index

Social classes: class battles, 243; classwar, 16–17, 23; intellectuals as class,1–9; working class, 67–71, 100–101.See also Bourgeoisie

Social Contract, 36Social Interpretation of the French

Revolution, The (Cobban), 39–40Socialism, socialist movement:

Bernstein’s challenge to socialistidentity, 92; cults, 77–78; asdialectical necessity, 149; divisionwithin European, 85–86;ecclesiastical conception of, 85–86;historical heir of liberalism, 91;intellectuals and, 6–7; Kautsky and,86–89, 90; scholastic arrangement ofbasic dogmas by Engels, 86; astherapeutic diagnosis of intellectualand moral anarchy, 77; vision ofbattle for, 213; as voice of greatcollective resentment, 71. See alsoCommunism/communist revolution;Marxism; Scientific socialism

Socialist Humanism, 233Socialist State, 3Social mobilization, 64–65Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 228–29Sombart, Werner, 71Sparta: culture of, 243; democracy of,

39Spd, 86, 87; Bernstein and, 90–91, 92;

as bureaucratic device, 88; as partymodel, 90; revisionism as threat to,92–93; spiritual extraneity ofcounter-society of, 89, 92–93

Spiridonova, Maria, 177Spiritual lobotomy, 231Spiritual regeneration, phases in, 230Spontaneity, bourgeois, 184, 185,

262–63, 264, 266Stalin, Joseph, 198, 246, 247; on

“Asianization” of Marxism, 247–48;terror unleashed by, 183, 185–86

Stark, Werner, 2, 3State serfdom in Russia, 185–86State terrorism. See Terror, terrorismStrauss, David, 61Sukhanov, Nikolai, 172, 173

Supreme Being, cult of, 46Symbolic production, specialists of, 1–3Szelenyi, Ivan, 3

Taborites, 16–17Talmon, Jacob L., 38–39, 43, 59Technocratic age of revolution, Lenin

and beginning of, 109Terror, terrorism, 221–28; destruction

of civil society through permanent,177–78, 264; Engels onrevolutionary, 222–23, 225–26;ideological terrorism, 203; Jacobin,31, 32–33, 43–45; of Lenin andCommunist Party, 174–76, 223, 224,225, 226–27, 264; Marx on, 222; asmeans for regeneration of humannature, 225–28; revolution and,221–25; Stalin and, 183, 185–86

Tertullian, 14Thanatos (death) as driving force of

revolution, 274Theodicy, Hegelian, 62–63Thermidor reaction, 40, 48, 185Thery, E., 241–42Thiers, L.A., 85Third World, effect of modernization

on, 251–53Thompson, Edward, 77Thought proletariat, 134–35. See also

Intelligentsia, RussianTkachev, Petr, 134–36, 224Tocqueville, Alexis de, 68, 69Toennies, Ferdinand, 66, 107Topitsch, Ernst, 204Totalitarianism: as global response to

process of massification, 208–9;proletarian church and, 211–14;sacralisation of policy as originalelement of modern, 212; terror as“real essence” of, 228

Toynbee, Arnold J., 12, 123, 154,250–51

Trade, Communism and elimination of,262, 264–66. See also Bourgeoisie

Transition ideology, Puritan doctrineas, 22

Page 314: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

Index 301

Trench warfare, Marx and Engels onstrategy of, 78, 79

Tribal community, communism andreturn to, 163–64

Trotsky, Leon, 115–16, 172, 180–81,185, 207, 225, 271

Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 246Tsarism, 119–25; February democratic-

bourgeois revolution and collapse of(1917), 172, 177; long-termconsequences of “controlledmodernization” policy, 135–36

Turgenev, L.S., 127, 128Tyler, Wat, 16

Unions, 70Universal charismatic bureaucracy,

178–79, 186Universities: acculturated intelligentsia

and, 123–25, 126; socialization andrecruitment of political-ideologicalmembers of Populist movement inRussia at, 129

Usurpation, concept of, 29

Valentinov, Nikolay, 223Varennes, 31Venturi, Franco, 136

Vollmar, Georg Von, 91Von Martin, Alfred, 4

Walzer, Michael, 19–20Weber, Max, 12–13, 60, 103–4, 186,

210Weil, Simone, 65Welfare State, 3Wendland, P., 15Western civilization: cultural war

between East and West, 241–60; asplanetary, 250, 252. “radioactivity”of, 250–51. See also European society

Willingness to change, modernizationand, 243

Winstanley, Gerrard, 23Wittfogel, Karl, 118, 255Working class: within the capitalist

system, 67–71; revolutionaryconsciousness and, 100–101

World war: Great War, 177, 197,207–8; Marx and Engels predictionof, 79

Wyclif, John, 16

Young people, communistindoctrination of, 232

Zaichnevsky, 224Zamiatin, Evgeny, 204Zinoviev, G.E., 175, 196, 224, 228, 247

Page 315: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse
Page 316: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse

About the Author

LUCIANO PELLICANI is professor of political sociology at the LiberaUniversita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali of Rome, director of the Schoolof Journalism LUISS of Rome, and editor of Mondoperaio, the review foundedby the socialist leader Pietro Nenn. He is also president of the FoundationGino Germani.