The lies and falsifications of the 1920s—which were employed to remove Trotsky from power and to repudiate the program of socialist internationalism upon which the October Revolution was based—metastasized in the 1930s into the frame-ups of the Moscow Trials that were staged by Stalin as a pseudo-legal smokescreen for the mass extermination of the generation of Marxists that had led the working class to power, formed the Communist International and created the Soviet Union. Lies about history, as Trotsky explained, serve a vital role as the ideological cement of political reaction. Whether in the form of judicial frame-ups, state and media propaganda, or the distortion of the historical record by unscrupulous petty-bourgeois academics, their purpose is to legitimize the crimes of the ruling elites, disorient public opinion, and deprive the great mass of the people of the information and knowledge they require in order to mount an effective and revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. Thus, the struggle against the falsification of history is not a secondary, let alone optional component of political work. The defense of historical truth—especially that pertaining to the October Revolution and the strategic experiences of the international socialist movement in the twentieth century—is necessary for a renaissance of socialist consciousness in the working class. In the final years of the Soviet Union, there was an upsurge of popular interest throughout the country in the history of the Russian Revolution. After decades of suppression, articles about Trotsky and, more importantly, works by Trotsky, became widely available. This development aroused anxiety within the Soviet leadership. In contrast to the persistent pro-capitalist orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which sought to convince the public that a reversion to market economics was the only way forward, Trotsky’s writings and the record of the Fourth International’s struggle against Stalinism made clear that a socialist alternative to the bureaucratic regime was possible. Among the Kremlin’s central aims in carrying through the dissolution of the USSR was to preempt the resurgence of a socialist perspective in the working class. Thus, the dissolution was accompanied by a new campaign of historical falsification, centered on the claim that the Soviet Union was, from the start, a doomed enterprise. The emergence of this new “Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification” moved along the same trajectory as the writings of Fukuyama, Malia and Hobsbawm. All these works conveyed the basic message that the dissolution of the USSR followed inexorably from the October Revolution, and that no other outcome was possible. Stalinism was not a perversion of the October Revolution, but rather its necessary consequence. There was no alternative. In the development of the conception of the “Unfinished Twentieth Century,” the lectures and essays in this book insisted that the historical record proved conclusively that there did exist an alternative to Stalinism. I challenged Hobsbawm’s claim that any consideration of alternatives to Stalinism was a pointless and intellectually illegitimate exercise in counterfactual history. “History must start from what happened,” he wrote. “The rest is speculation.”[24] I call attention to this particular passage because it typifies an approach to the history of the Soviet Union that is widespread and insidious. Hobsbawm does not resort to outright falsification of historical material. But he sins against historical truth by withholding important facts and presenting an incomplete record. Hobsbawm’s omissions contribute to the distortion of history. Unfortunately, in many of the lectures and essays, I was compelled to deal not only with omissions but also with blatant distortions of historical facts. There were times when I could not help but be amazed at the brazenness with which some individuals, who call themselves historians, can put down on paper statements that are demonstrably untrue, and thereby leave to posterity evidence of their intellectual dishonesty. The practice of falsification has been abetted by the influence of various schools of postmodernism, whose cumulative impact on the study and writing of history has been nothing short of catastrophic. The connection between this regression in philosophy and the falsification of history cannot be overstated. Let us refer again to the work of Professor Baberowski, a disciple of Michel Foucault, who described in his Der Sinn der Geschichte ( The Meaning of History ) the methodology that guides his work: In reality the historian has nothing to do with the past, but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past. For there exists no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian Revolution really was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a historian means, to use the words of Roger Chartier, to examine the realm of representations.[25] (Emphasis added) Baberowski invokes the most extreme proposition of idealist solipsism—there exists no reality outside of and apart from thought—to legitimize the repudiation of historiography as the truthful reconstruction of a past that objectively existed. History, he tells us, exists only as a subjective construction. There is no objective historical truth that accurately depicts social, economic and political conditions as they once really existed. That sort of historical reality is of no interest to Baberowski. “A history is true,” Baberowski declares, “if it serves the premises set up by the historian.”[26] This debasement of history condones the writing of fraudulent narratives to serve subjectively contrived agendas—for example, the rehabilitation of Hitler’s criminal regime. It is not an accident that Professor Baberowski has joined forces with the likes of Ernst Nolte. Future generations will struggle to understand how philosophical reactionaries such as Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Foucault, working with concepts rummaged from the “basement of bourgeois thought,”[27] came to exert such an unwarranted and dangerous influence in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. I would be very pleased if the lectures and essays in this volume that deal with philosophical issues help future scholars understand the political and social pathology of the postmodernist pandemic. wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/01/unfi-a01.html
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 19:28:20 +0000
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