The Long Goodbye

National Interest, The, Summer, 2001 by Neil McInnes

True socialism was never tried; only distortions. You can choose your own distorter: Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, as you please. Hobsbawm chose Russian "circumstances" and maintained, in 1994, that "the failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism." There was nothing in "the socialist idea" to suggest a one-party state or the imposition of an orthodoxy, he says, ignoring the massive evidence that a central plan will always require both. Last year he was still arguing that

communism wasn't Russia. It was a global cause ... if you think that communism is something greater than the histories of the backward countries in which it happened that communists got to power, then that history is not reason enough to abandon the chosen cause.

At this rate, there can never be such a reason, since the "socialist cause" has become a metaphysical entity, forever proof against the mere facts of history. That sneer at "backward countries" suggests that the poor Russian people let communism down, the way Hitler said the German people let him down. History will always let deluded tyrants down--but unfortunately only in the long run, when so many of us are dead. Besides, as Revel asks, if local circumstances or individual villainy is distorting the socialist ideal, how does it happen that the identical formula for "really existing socialism" is transmitted from Stalin to Mao, to Kim Il Sung, to Ho Chi Minh, to Pol Pot, to Ceausescu, to Castro and to Mengistu? Were all these men suffering the betrayal of a pure ideal, or were they not rather all applying the same horrendous methods to reach the same impossible goal, the only methods and the only goal communism ever knew?

Please pity the former communists. There was a mawkish piece in Les Temps Modernes headed "The end of communism: the winter of our souls." It gave the tone for a requiem Mass in honor, not of the countless victims, but of their executioners' friends, whose generous hopes had been so cruelly disappointed. Hobsbawm too invites us to admire their "loyalty to a great cause and to all those who had sacrificed their lives for it"--that means party activists, not those they deceived and betrayed. He says he stayed on in the CPGB long after his faith was shaken by 1956 (he can never bring himself to say "the crushing of the Hungarian revolt", just "1956", so much more sterile) out of loyalty to the heroes who had stuck to the party line. "I didn't want to end up in the company of all those ex-communists who had become anti-communists", i.e., the men and women who had the decency to admit that their god had failed. There was no need to recant anything, for party activists in, for example, Britain "cannot be held resp onsible for what happened in other countries and certainly not in Russia." Lying about and apologizing for "what happened in other countries" was blameless because it was inspired by noble ideals. As Hobsbawm put it:

Do I regret it? No, I don't think so. I know very well that the cause I embraced has proved not to work. Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen it. But, on the other hand, if people don't have any ideal of a better world, then they have lost something.... I cannot help feeling that humanity couldn't function without great hopes and absolute passions, even when these experience defeat.