Marx destroys all transcendence, then carries out . . . the transition from fact to duty. But his concept of duty has no other origin but fact. The demand for justice ends in injustice if it is not primarily based on an ethical justification of justice; without this, crime itself one day becomes a duty. When good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing is any longer good or bad, but only either premature or out of date. Who will decide on the opportunity, if not the opportunist? Later, say the disciples, you shall judge. But the victims will not be there to judge. For the victim, the present is the only value, rebellion the only action. . . . [Thus] the kingdom of ends is used, like the ethics of eternity and the kingdom of heaven, for purposes of social mystification (R, 209-10, 225).
We have come full circle. The inversion is complete. “How to live without grace—that is the question that dominates the nineteenth century. ‘By justice,’ answered all those who did not want to accept absolute nihilism. To the
people who despaired of the kingdom of heaven, they promised the kingdom of men” (R, 225).
But, as with St. Just, that kingdom must be organized; justice must be interpreted and implemented. There will be disagreements. Some will claim insight into the truth. Since that truth is both absolute and our sole path to salvation, the sternest measures must be taken against those who impede its realization. In fact, since that truth offers salvation, those who oppose it must be ignorant, misled, or evil. In any case, their repression, reeducation, or elimination is more than justified. The movement from St. Just to Lenin is clear.
All that remains is to give flesh and force of arms to the mystical body of the proletariat that embodies the sacred mission of the resurrection of historical humanity.7 Herein lies the originality of Lenin. Being totally committed to the revolution, his central concern was the seizure of power. Strategic issues are central for Lenin, because all the essential metaphysical and moral questions are resolved in advance. He is a true believer, and his is a sacred universe.
RUSSIAN MESSIANISM
Lenin’s Precursors
To appreciate this sacred universe within which Leninism emerges and of which it is the evangelical doctrine—thus marking the end of one strand of historical rebellion—a brief detour back to its Russian roots is called for. We can simplify Camus’s own treatment by concentrating on Bakunin and Nechaiev. Three factors must be recalled. First, Russia in the nineteenth century was a deeply Christian country in which religion and politics were never far apart. Second, its society was suffering under the burden of a decaying feudalism, coming under increasing pressure for change from the West, to which its alienated intellectuals were either looking for direction or responding with an impassioned rejection of its degenerative influence. Into this brew, Hegelian thought broke with dramatic force, shattering the intellectual world and suggesting a new world vision. In a milieu both creatively alive and culturally adrift, in which salvation and the meaning of existence pervaded most discussion, attitudes toward Hegel and the political question were hardly likely to be phrased in moderate terms.
Bakunin had buried himself in Hegel “‘to the point of madness'” only to reject Hegel’s identification of the Prussian state with the realization of reason. In both commitments he attested to his demand for the absolute, for
‘the universal and authentically democratic Church of Freedom'” (R, 157).
History is governed by only two principles: the State and social revolution
. . . which arc engaged in a death struggle. The State is the incarnation of crime. ‘The smallest and most inoffensive State is still criminal in its dreams.’ Therefore revolution is the incarnation of good” (R, 157).
By reintroducing “into rebellious action one of the themes of romantic rebellion,” thus turning politics into historicized theology of the struggle of good and evil, Bakunin leaves no ground of resolution, no standard other than the triumph of good over evil by whatever means necessary. Certainly Bakunin wanted liberation, “but he hoped to realize it through total destruction.”
To absolutize the struggle and to see all that is established as an expression of evil is to make practical and constructive action impossible. It is to condemn in advance the values by which people live—in the very name of liberating them.
To destroy everything is to pledge oneself to building without foundations, and then to holding up the walls with one’s hands. He who rejects the entire past, without keeping any part of it which could serve to breathe life into the revolution, condemns himself to finding justification only in the future and, in the meantime, to entrusting the police with the task of justifying the provisional state of affairs. . . . This is the logic by which his commitment to total liberation of humanity from the oppression of the state, by way of the absolute and total rejection of existing values, led to the justification of “political cynicism” and “the absolute subordination of the individual to the central committee” (R, 159).
It was Nechaiev who sought ruthlessly to put this doctrine into practice. “If history is, in fact, independent of all principles and composed only of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there is no way out but to espouse wholeheartedly one of the two and either die or be resurrected” (R, 160). If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. For him the revolution was all. Not friends, not morality could be allowed to stand in its way. If we follow Hegel in the destruction of transcendent values, if “the future is the only transcendence for men without God (L’HR, 207; R, 166), and if that future is defined in terms of the revolution, “in the name of what value is it possible to decide that this tactic [of systematic violence and deception] is repugnant?” (R, 163). “When revolution is the sole value, there are, in fact, no more rights, there are only duties” (R, 163). Not duties to others, but to the revolution. The absence of rights is the absence of any individual claim to respect and dignity. In the face of this sacred battle of good and evil, finite individual destiny counts for nought.
Systematic political cynicism simply had to be rationally organized in order to be effective: Secret societies were organized into small cells of dedicated revolutionaries under the direction of a central committee whose rule was law, whose interpretation was reality, whose method was the use of words
as an instrument of the struggle, and whose decision was final, implemented ruthlessly, and without scruples. No wonder Camus would claim that it is “the joint legacy of Nechaiev and Marx” that “will give birth to the totalitarian revolution of the twentieth century” (R, 174).
Lenin
More than anyone else, Lenin incarnated this dual legacy, giving it its modern formulation. Since for him questions of metaphysics and morals were essentially resolved in advance, being summed up in the doctrine of the revolution, the only important issues that remained were strategy and tactics. “Lenin’s point of view, in order to be understood, must always be considered in terms of strategy” (R, 229). Before the task of organizing the revolution, all other matters were inconsequential. Moral scruples impede revolutionary action. Even more, the revolution is not a matter of personal expression or of collective self-determination. Spontaneous protest on its own leads nowhere. The revolution must be organized, and it must have a theory that is strategically useful and believable to the followers. You cannot rely upon the workers to develop this knowledge themselves. The proletariat may be the revolutionary class, but no dedicated revolutionary can entertain romantic myths concerning the insights generated by the degraded conditions of their existence. Lenin insists: The workers will never elaborate an independent ideology by themselves. He denies the spontaneity of the masses. Socialist doctrine supposes a scientific basis that only the intellectuals can give it. . . . “Theory,” he says, “should subordinate spontaneity.” In plain language . . . revolution needs leaders and theorists. . . . The revolution, before being either economic or sentimental, is military. Until the day that the revolution breaks out, revolutionary action is identified with strategy. . . . The revolution will have its professional army as well as the masses, which can be conscripted when needed. This corps of agitators must be organized before the mass is organized. . . . From that moment the proletariat no longer has a mission. It is only one powerful means, among others, in the hands of the revolutionary ascetics (R, 227-8).
In this sacred world, human values have become matters of strategic expediency in the purview of the priestly vanguard into whose hands the mission of the proletariat has been entrusted.
The revolution become dogma now promises earthly salvation. But in order to bring about complete liberation, the revolution must be organized. Democratic centralism will insure the strictest obedience to orders: “All freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom” (R, 233). Camus summarizes Lenin’s thought: