Racism and Revolution
Scapegoat of Revolution.
by Judd L. Teller.
Scribner’s. 352 pp. $4.50.
Until recently, no aspect of Soviet Communism was as little known and criticized as its actual (as against professed) racial and ethnic policies. In particular, Soviet policy toward the Jews was held up, even by people not otherwise sympathetic to Russian Communism, as a model of fairness and equity that put the practices of all non-Soviet societies, past and present, to shame. Today so naive an attitude is no longer possible; in the Russian “anti-cosmopolitanism” campaign, the Prague trials, and the abortive case prepared against the Moscow Jewish doctors, Communism blatantly appealed to anti-Semitic passions in accents echoing the most vicious Nazi diatribes. It is not even possible to maintain that overt anti-Semitism constitutes a new and radical departure in Soviet politics. Solomon M. Schwarz, in his study of The Jews in the Soviet Union (1951), demonstrated the destructive impact the Communist revolution had upon Jewish life in Russia virtually from the start. Under the Czarist regime the Jewish community in Russia was persecuted and oppressed; under the Soviets it was uprooted, dispersed, ground to dust. The Bolshevik revolution shattered both the material and the spiritual foundations of Jewish community life.
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that anti-Semitic motivations as such played no part in the original Bolshevik policies of the Leninist period. After all, Jewish community life was rooted in religion and the Bolsheviks, as militant atheists, were bound to seek its destruction, as they have sought to destroy the Christian and Moslem religious communities. If Russian Jewry came to grief in the Bolshevik revolution, it was because it upheld traditions and was involved in activities that the Bolsheviks were committed to destroy, such as positive religion or (to mention a different area of life) “capitalistic” business; it was not just because they were Jews. Anti-Semitism pure and simple was introduced into Soviet policies at a later date. But Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s anti-Semitism expressed a personal idiosyncrasy and was a distortion of the original socialist creed of tolerance and ethnic equality. The classic tradition of socialism vigorously opposed every kind of racial prejudice.
In Scapegoat of Revolution, Judd L. Teller takes violent issue with this thesis. According to him, the Bolsheviks’ Jewish policy was not only incidentally destructive of the Russian Jewish community in its results, it was essentially anti-Semitic in its inspiration. And what is more, the anti-Jewish animus that characterized this policy was by no means a purely Russian thing or a matter of personal idiosyncrasy: it was an integral part of the classic socialist tradition itself. All the founding fathers of 19th-century Continental socialism were anti-Semites—Fourier as well as Proudhon, Marx as well as Bakunin, and so on down the line. Racism was an integral part of their thinking.
Mr. Teller refuses to admit any essential difference between the early socialists (including Marx), who combined a gospel of class warfare with a racial bias, and later totalitarians like Hitler whose main emphasis was on race. They all professed, he writes, the same “theology,” with anti-Semitism (as well as anti-Christianity) as one of its fundamental dogmas. Thus 20th-century totalitarianism is a unitary phenomenon, with German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and Russian Bolshevism its main variants. This racist, totalitarian creed is not, according to the author, of modern origin. The same chaotic, apocalyptic gospel of violent social upheaval, with anti-Semitic overtones, already made its appearance with Luther and the Anabaptists in the 16th century.
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Mr. Teller has no patience with the common stereotype, either in its gratulatory or invidious form, that sees the Jews as being automatically on the side of radical social reform and revolution because of their traditions, instincts, and interests. He contends, on the contrary, that in point of historical fact the Jews as a people have always shown a basically conservative orientation. Jewry traditionally was fearful that chaotic social upheaval would only bring disaster in its train, whereas a stable social order, even if oppressive, at least provided a minimum of safety and the possibility of maintaining a way of life based on Jewish spiritual values and certainties. The author views the Jews who figured so conspicuously in the modern radical and revolutionary movements as completely alienated from Jewish life, people who ceased being genuine Jews before they launched out on a revolutionary career.
But this is certainly to beg the question. If we accept as genuinely Jewish only those groups and individuals who lived according to traditional modes and forms, then non-conservative, radical, and revolutionary Jews are excluded by definition. It is important to call attention to the fact that Jewish community life as it has been lived through the centuries has had a conservative center and basis; but one must also admit that the disintegration of traditional Jewish society and spiritual categories, as of all traditional forms in modern life, is a massive phenomenon not to be blamed solely on Hitlerite or Stalinist persecution. I am afraid that Mr. Teller answers one sweeping generalization with an equally sweeping counter-generalization.
He does much the same thing, I feel, when he argues the essential identity of socialist and racist totalitarianism. The “theology” involved in Hitler’s integral racism is not the same as that implied in Fourierism or Marxism. To mention a specific point: the author conjectures that one of Hitler’s characteristic arguments, his rejection of the Christian churches as “Judaized,” derives directly from Marx, who attacked the church in similar terms. But the conjecture is groundless. Marx charged the church with having ceased to be Christian and reverting to Judaism (by allying itself with capitalism), whereas the Nazis held that original Christianity itself was essentially Semitic and had to be drastically purged before it could be a fit religion for “Nordics.”
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Yet if Mr. Teller’s thesis is overdrawn, the evidence he presents concerning racist and anti-Semitic strands in early socialist thinking cannot be simply shrugged aside. It shows, at the very least, that socialism and racism are by no means as mutually exclusive as has been supposed. The essential content of Marxism by no means implies racism or anti-Semitism, but to Marx and many of his followers racial thinking had a curiously strong appeal. We can understand why if we examine the cultural soil from which Continental socialist thought sprang. In the mid-19th century, the practices and possibilities of modern technology were suddenly thrust upon a world habituated to the ideas of Romanticism; the combination turned out to be explosive. The old ideas of progress were greatly strengthened and extended when scientific and technological advance could be cited as evidence for them. Here was proof that mankind was, indeed, progressing. But it was not progressing as a body. Progress was centered in northwestern Europe, which had left all other regions and races of the world far behind in the race.
Technological (“scientific”) conceit was the main source of the ideas of racial superiority that emerged at this time. Still prevailing Romantic habits of thought demanded that basic social facts be interpreted as expressions of collective personalities endowed with a metaphysical essence. This is what racism essentially did. It was by no means a backward-looking ideology, but an offshoot of the modern ideology of progress, flattering and sustaining the conceit of individuals and groups who felt themselves to be advancing along the direct road towards Utopia.
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Marx’s thought was developed in this same cultural climate. We find in him the same belief in essential progress, the same technological and scientific arrogance, the same Romantic tendency to see social advance in terms of collective persons embodying basic historico-meta-physical principles. For him, as for the racists, the main thing was to determine who was in the van in the race towards Utopia. His vanguard, of course, was not the northwestern (“Nordic”) European people as a whole, but only its proletarian part. But for Marx, too, one had to be a member of the most advanced technological civilization in order to play a vanguard role. Hence his contempt for “lesser” races, for Slavs, for strata untouched by technology and progress (such as the peasantry), and also for the “backward” Jews, whom he considered to be an alien and malign excrescence on the body of progressive Western civilization.
All this does not mean to say that Marxism as an ideology is identical with racism. But the affinity between the two is real, and Mr. Teller deserves credit for having presented some of the evidence bearing on this issue.
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