Totalitarianism - David D. Roberts

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in 1919, other communist parties in Europe and beyond were founded under the Comintern umbrella. Among them was the Chinese Communist Party, launched in 1921. In adopting the communist label, they distinguished themselves from the socialist parties of the earlier Second International and committed to following the communist model under the tutelage of Russia (which became the Soviet Union in 1922). Entailing centralized discipline and control, the communist direction was arguably totalitarian precisely as the mainstream socialist direction was not.

      Totalitarianism has also been used to characterize tendencies even in liberal democracies. Critics on both the Left and the Right have sometimes claimed to discern a disturbing totalitarian potential inherent in secular modernity itself. The Left points to the modern reliance on instrumental reason and the use of knowledge for power and domination. Critiques from the libertarian Right often ran parallel as they lamented the seemingly relentless expansion of the modern state, assuming ever more powers and responsibilities, arguably at the expense of individual freedom.

      From either direction, that totalitarian potential might be considerably enhanced by new methods of government surveillance through social media and the internet, or of societal manipulation through genetic profiling and engineering. But is the totalitarianism category, which was, and to some extent remains, intertwined with the era of fascism and Stalinism, sufficiently flexible to illuminate such contemporary phenomena or, with all its baggage by this point, is it more likely to throw us off?

      Quite apart from the question of flexibility, a tendency toward careless usage, resulting from overfamiliarity, has threatened to make the category flabby. Even in scholarly discourse, totalitarianism is often used in a largely unexamined way, and in general discussion, usage sometimes veers from dilution to over-the-top sci fi fantasy.

      In a television documentary on Evelyn Cameron, a pioneering English-born photographer who settled in remote eastern Montana in the late 1890s, a British photography expert refers to her “almost totalitarian feel for the image.”4 Filmmakers, especially, have sometimes been accused of seeking total control in order to manipulate the audience. But totalitarian? Such casual usage surely waters down the category unduly.

      More plausible is Anna Burns’s use of the category in a recent novel to characterize the tense, oppressive, tightly controlled environment on the local level during the recent sectarian struggles in Northern Ireland.5 All aspects of life had become intensely politicized, with no escape. But though her narrator memorably conveys the sense of stifling oppressiveness, Burns too is stretching the category because there is no totalitarian intention or system but simply the atmosphere that has resulted from the sectarian struggle itself.

      Although “totalitarianism” continues to be widely used, some observers have come to feel that it obscures more than it illuminates. By the 1970s, it was widely charged that totalitarianism had become a mere Cold War propaganda tool to discredit the Soviet Union through association with Nazi Germany. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War, such concerns have diminished, but they have by no means disappeared altogether.

      In any case, the Cold War objection points to a more general question concerning the legitimacy of lumping fascism and communism as instances of totalitarianism when they seem so radically different, even diametrically opposed, in origin, ideology, and initial purpose. Moreover, the communists eliminated most forms of private property while the fascists did not. Both fascist regimes, though especially the Italian, rested on compromise with preexisting elites and institutions. The Soviets did away with the old regime far more systematically. Even if totalitarianism might account for certain common features, lumping fascist and communist regimes under the one category might seem inherently to be glossing over too much.

      Use of the totalitarianism category surely did reflect Cold War hostility to the Soviet Union on occasion, but resistance to the category on the part of those relatively sympathetic to the Soviet experiment also reflected Cold War pressures. In any case, the possibility of misuse does not in itself undermine the utility of the category, either as an analytical and comparative tool or as a way of characterizing aspirations and dynamics in practice. Put differently, the fact that it could serve Cold War purposes does not mean that this was the primary purpose, or that it did so in every case.

      But I noted that doubts about lumping together fascism and communism cut deeper. Few would deny that some combination of similarities and differences was at work, but those objecting to lumping may not do justice to the real-world dynamic bringing the particular fascist and communist regimes at issue closer together than an abstract consideration might recognize.

      The difference in originating aspirations does not rule out such commonalities, especially in light of the Leninist break from orthodox Marxism and the Stalinist break from within Leninism. Once the Soviets began pursuing “socialism in one country,” their Marxist underpinnings, which might seem especially to differentiate them from fascism, became ever more tenuous, even mythical. It remains the case that the Soviets made an anti-capitalist revolution as the fascists did not, but the Soviets and fascists were moving in a common statist, or arguably totalitarian, direction as an alternative to free market capitalism.

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