9-07-07, 9:46 am

The first article of “The History You Aren’t Supposed to Know” series that I wrote, dealing with Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and its relationship Nazi desperation propaganda at the end of WWII, was republished on Democratic Underground, a website for progressive Democrats and other progressives. It received a comment from someone using the online name “rude boy,” which said that Stalin may not have been a fascist but he was a “totalitarian” so what is the difference?

I have studied in the past the concept of “totalitarianism” and its uses and abuses in the cold war era. The following article, inspired by “rude boy’s” not so rude comment, addresses these questions, which remain relevant today both for the readers of PA online and the readers of Democratic Underground, along with other progressive publications which seek to break the ideological barriers that, in an old line from the musical Auntie Mame, act as “braces on the brains” of all of us.

Is there such a thing as a “total state” or “totalitarianism”? Where does the term come from? How did it develop over time? What were and are its social purposes?

First let us look at the early history of the concept or assertion and its underlying assumptions. Like Churchill’s Iron Curtain concept, the idea of a total state derives from fascism, in this case Italian fascism. The entry on fascism in the Italian Encyclopedia in the late 1920s written nominally by Benito Mussolini himself when Winston Churchill was praising Mussolini for making the trains Italy run on time, first introduced the concept to the world. The article in reality was from my reading written by Giovanni Gentile, the Italian fascist philosopher.

The article defining fascism in a positive way (which was the only thing it was defining) rejected both liberalism and socialism (the way later champions of the “totalitarian” concept reject “communism and fascism”) and in effect saw the establishment of a centralized “total state” organized around a single party and leader to coordinate and develop the nation as the structural basis of fascism. This was a centralized hierarchical elite state that rejected that rejected both the liberties associated with liberalism and the egalitarianism associated with socialism. Its purpose was to restore the greatness of the past under modern conditions—in the Italian case, a modern Roman Empire.

Anti-liberalism and anti-Communism were the explicit aims of the “total state” organized around a single party and leader but “preserving” the rule of the existing ruling classes, who would be “protected” by the fascist regime (even if that “protection” was to function as a protection racket).

The concept was taken up by German reactionaries and fascists in the early 1930s who also saw themselves as making a “revolution” against both liberalism and socialism—in the German case, the fascists also appropriated the word “socialism,” calling themselves “national socialists,” This “socialism” was the opposite of what socialism had stood for generations. It was based on racist nationalism, militarism, the destruction of the Soviet Union and all the “Marxist” parties, and revenge against the Allied powers that had defeated Germany in the First World War.

In Germany, the total state concept was called at the beginning of the fascist dictatorship Gleichaltung or “total coordination” of the “racially” defined society around the leader and the party(in Germany the leader cult around Adolf Hitler, with its routinized obligatory Heil Hitler salutes through the society, oaths to Hitler, and opera buffo propaganda that permeated all aspects of life, assumed a sociopathic dimension far beyond Italian fascism, although both the core ideology(minus in the Italian case the extreme racism) and political structures of the fascist dictatorships were the same.

The total state-nation-society was essentially a fascist ideal to turn men into killing machines and women to produce more male killing machines and female producers of male killing machines. The fertility medals the Italian fascist regime gave out to women who bore large numbers of children (this was the source of anti-fascist humor in many countries) was one powerful example of this fascist world-view. The total-state-nation-society gained its fullest expression in Josef Goebbels “total war” propaganda in the last years of WWII saw both Anglo-American bombers and advancing Soviet armies devastated the German fascist Reich (empire).

The Nazi Machtergreifung (seizure of power) as they called it, brought the term “total state” and”totalitarian” and “totalitarianism” into international usage. Other terms borrowed from Nazi Germany would later be applied to the Soviet Union by anti-Communists. Revolution led by Communists and others on the left are to this day usually referred to as “seizures of power” in a negative light in capitalist media, after Machtergreifung.” The political police of the Soviet Union came to be referred to as the Secret Police after the German Gestapo, which is an acronym in German for secret state police, even though they were known by letters (NKVD, KGB) which were comparable as names to the FBI and the CIA in the U.S., which few have referred to as “secret police” agencies.

In the U.S. as early as 1936, the concept of a “total state” was first used by anti-New Deal Republicans in the presidential campaign to argue that the Roosevelt administration, through its labor and social welfare legislation and its regulation and criticisms of Wall Street and the large corporations was establishing a “total state” whose purpose was destroy American “liberty.” This total state, conservatives argued, was similar to the total state of the German and Italian fascists and the Soviet Communists.

In Europe at roughly the same time, anti-Communist Social Democrats, opposed to their parties joining with Communists to form United Fronts to fight the fascists after the Communist International (Comintern) called upon Communists throughout the world to work to built such united and peoples fronts against fascism, argued that Communists like fascists were advocates of a dictatorship of the party against the people and that socialists must oppose both Communists and Fascists. When the purge trials began in the Soviet Union in 1936 the totalitarian concept was applied more extensively by these anti-Communist Social Democrats in Europe.

The Soviet Purge Trials and ensuing mass purges, one should remember if one is to understand the larger context. occurred at the very time that the Soviets were aiding the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, working in the League of Nations to build Collective Security against the fascist powers, maintaining solidarity with liberal democratic Czechoslovakia threatened by the Nazis—in effect both advocating ant attempting to implement the only policies that could have defeated the fascist states short of World War.

For those who wished to fight the Soviets and the Communists rather than or more than the fascists among the non fascist capitalist states and for those on the left who were competitors with the Communists for working class constituencies (or in the case of various opposition Communist factions, particularly Trotskyists, victims of the Soviet purges and their international fallout) the totalitarian concept which derived from fascism was a convenient way to discredit both the Soviet anti-fascist collective security policy and the larger Communist initiated united and peoples front policies.

United Fronts meant formal institutional alliance between Communist and Socialist parties and organizations around elections and specific actions. People's or Popular Front meant much broader coalitions and campaigns between Communist, Socialist, liberal and all anti-fascist groups and individuals in a wide variety of political social, cultural and economic activities and both, along with collective security treaties among nations, were necessary to fight and defeat fascism generally and the emerging fascist Axis alliance of Italy, Germany and the Japanese empire specifically.

In Germany, an important conservative philosopher, Karl Schmitt, used the total state concept and applied to both states and movements as Hitler came to power to contend that the world was moving in the direction of total state societies away from liberal (in the European sense of free competition in markets and ideas) societies. Fascism, because it preserved private property and existing social elites, was a “milder” form of total state or “totalitarian” society than revolutionary Communism and thus deserved support as a sort of antidote to revolutionary Communism.

Although Schmitt arguments were used to prop up the Nazi regime, they would be developed with a different twist after World War II and would be carried forward with a different slant by one of his young student admirers, a Jewish-German would-be academic and intellectual, Hannah Arendt, forced to flee Nazi Germany when Hitler came to power.

Arendt’s important work, Origins of Totalitarianism, dealt mostly with Nazi Germany and tacked on in a mechanical manner much smaller examples from the Soviet Union to contend that the Soviets were also “totalitarian” (Arendt work in no way favored Nazi Germany over the Soviet Union or even advocated in a specific way fighting the cold war). This book became the most significant accessible assertion of the totalitarian concept in the postwar era, its powerful specific insights into the Nazi state used to give it credibility. (Fair-minded readers of the work found its treatment of the Soviets both very limited and shallow, but that did not stop its being used in the U.S. and internationally to equate the Soviets and the Nazis.)

It should be said here that the Communist movement always rejected the view that Communists constituted a top down total state-nation-society system as libel and slander. Although the total state concept was widely applied to the Soviets and the Communists of the world during the period of the German Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (August, 1939-June 1941), those who used it in that way were interested in discrediting and fighting against Communists.

During World War II, the concept remained a tool for those who opposed postwar Soviet-American cooperation, those who wanted to “contain” advancing Soviet armies in Europe regardless of its effects on the war, and to fight Communist and left-led anti-fascist resistance movements in Europe and Asia, even if that meant ignoring the oppressive nature of colonial regimes in Asia and Africa and the Chiang K’ai-shek regime in China.

The total state-nation-society concept, which had come from Italian fascism and had been globalized by German fascism, then rapidly became a major ideological prop of anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, anti-left forces throughout the world to fight the cold war, an ideological prop for those who sought to be the prewar class-based humpty dumpty of global capitalism back together again.

“Totalitarianism” also became an ism in itself, in essence an assertion based on a largely unexamined assumption. The U.S., the most important economic power before the war and also the most important global media power, became the organizer and financial and military backer of all of the right and center forces previously associated with the collapsing colonial regimes and the capitalist elites that had either collaborated with or brought into existence the fascist states.

Fascism was now in the emerging cold war consensus in the U.S. a “thing of the past.” “Totalitarianism,” linking Communists with fascists, was not only a way to mobilize elites and masses to fight the left here and abroad in the name of anti-Communism, but also to sanitize and mobilize those who fought with and for the fascist Axis during the war.

In the late 1940s, Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The Vital Center was an enormously influential work in developing the totalitarian concept for a large audience of pro New Deal liberal Democrats to in effect segregate the Communist and mass labor left from the mainstream of New Deal liberalism. Schlesinger argued that the traditional spectrum way of looking at politics, that is a right center and left, was flawed. Instead, modern politics should be seen in terms of a Center and a Periphery. In the center were liberals, conservatives, and “democratic socialists.” On the periphery were Communists and Fascists. The liberals, conservatives and democratic socialists had more in common with each other and should unite with each other in a “vital center” to fight the Communists and the Fascists, which would save and advance not only liberty and democracy but the social and economic reforms associated with the New Deal.

In practice these policies and the “totalitarian” assertions and assumptions which rationalized them meant supporting Truman and the Democratic party over Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in 1948, supporting the creation of NATO in 1949, the Truman administration’s intervention in the Korean Civil War in 1950, the Truman administration’s building of a hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, the nuclear arms race generally, the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba (when Schlesinger was part of the Kennedy administration), the “counter-insurgency” policies which expanded the war in Vietnam until the disastrous consequences of this way of thinking began to lead even those liberals, including who had accepted such assertions and even Schlesinger who had helped to develop them to begin to rethink the world around them.

But the “totalitarian” assertion and the assumptions which lay behind it continued and continue to resonate through the capitalist world in spite of scholarship that has undermined it since at least the 1970s.

First, students of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the fascist states generally, those doing empirical research and in most cases non-Marxists, found that “totalitarianism” didn’t in any way explain how the fascist states worked and what they were about. Private institutions, corporations, the Catholic Church and other religious institutions, retained substantial powers and in effect negotiated with the bureaucratic fascist state to protect and often extend and expand their interests. The bureaucratic fascist state also had its competing factions and interests who were often at cross purposes to each other.

Marxists can use this research to analyze fascism as bureaucratic state monopoly capitalism. Marxists can also point to the fact that Nazi Germany of the fascist states created the first modern “military industrial complex” which did end mass unemployment in Germany in the 1930s. While the Nazi military industrial complex, which had as its aim the conquest of Europe and global supremacy for German fascism, was destroyed during WWII, the totalitarian assertion became after the war in the greatest irony of all a device through which the U.S. military-industrial complex could profit from a “cold war” to save “civilization” from the Communist and Soviet “menace” which had just played the leading role in defeating the fascist Axis (and which of course had been along with the “Jewish menace” the major ideological centers of Nazi propaganda).

Scholars doing empirical research on the Soviet Union its Eastern European allies in the late Soviet period and after, although here many more were compelled to pay lip service to the totalitarian assertion for careerist reasons, found that it had little relevance to any understanding of these societies.

Rather than an all powerful “totalitarian” state, these scholars found often chaotic publicly-owned bureaucratically administered economies where workers had the equivalence of civil service protections, labor discipline was lax, the planning process saw great uneven development (great achievements coexisting with large wasteful errors), and most of all endless turf wars in which the planning processes associated in the most significant example with the Soviet Five Year Plans hid structural bottlenecks and other deficiencies and failed to correct flaws, even when those flaws were recognized and openly criticized, as they often were. While most of this scholarship gave little support for those who saw the Soviet model of socialism in a positive light, it also clearly showed that those who applied the totalitarian assertion to what was really happening in Soviet society where dangerously blind to social reality.

However, the totalitarian concept, regardless of the fact that ongoing serious scholarship found it increasingly useless, became even more sinister in the 1980s when the former cold war liberal intellectual, Jean Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration’s “neo-conservative ambassador to the United Nations, contended that the U.S. should support “authoritarian” regimes of the right (Pinochet’s regime in Chile was her best example) as a way to fight the “totalitarian” regimes of the left (Fidel Castro in Cuba was her best example).

In effect, Kirkpatrick was bringing back Karl Schmitt’s two kinds of “totalitarianism” argument from the early 1930s in Germany and contending as he did the fascist kind was better and might ultimately develop along more liberal lines. (Unlike Schmitt, she didn’t used words like fascist or even call regimes like Pinochet’s “totalitarian” but like Schmitt made an assertion based on assumptions that defied rules of evidence and whose purpose was to rationalize dictatorships of the right, in Kirkpatrick’s case outside the U.S. as a necessary part of U.S. foreign policy, in Schmitt’s case, in his own country to prevent Communists and Socialists from coming to power.)

Let me conclude by saying to our readers, hopefully other readers of Democratic Underground and other progressive websites who should read our website and subscribe to our publications if they are to both broaden themselves and participate in the peoples front activities that the totalitarian concept was supposed to frighten them away from, that the concept is useless for understanding the history of fascist states, socialist states, modern dictatorships, pretty much everything that it has been used to explain.

For those on the left particularly, it is an ideological club to attack others on the left. For those in the center it is a mindset to oppose alliances with the left, to either seek alliances with or validation from the right or merely to withdraw from political action. For those on the right, where the concept originated, it remains, however disconnected from reality, a useful ideological tool to advance reactionary political agendas.

After all, no fascist reactionary or conservative regime or movement was ever negatively impacted or hurt by the use of the totalitarian concept, whereas concrete analyses of fascist ideology and policies have enabled progressives to both comprehend and fight and defeat such ideologies, policies, and the movements and states associated with them.

We must, as an SDS leader said of the U.S. military industrial complex and its prosecution of the Vietnam war, understand and name the system which is producing the horrors that we are fighting (not simply condemn individuals or evil ideas) “lest it will destroy us.” The total state-nation-society world-view feeds on itself and blinds us to social reality, making it harder for us to engage and transform that reality.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

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