Bolshevism: A Liberal View
I
‘WE have defeated Autocracy,’ said one of our New York dailies recently; ‘now we must turn and destroy Bolshevism.’ Other organs of Liberalism took up the echo. It was a challenge to a new war.
But we are startled only by its suddenness. For the proposal is not fanciful. It is an inevitable conflict, stirring even nowin the depths of every nation’s social life. We hear its rumbles in Great Britain’s labor congresses. It rose insistently in the recent conference of the French Unified Socialists. In Germany it has already become a precipice which blasts asunder the hope of an orderly democratization. It broods over Austria and Italy like a whispered menace of the inevitable — sullen, silent, armed camps, waiting for the Day. And in Russia it has already created a cataclysm which is irreparable. Even in the United States we have our Bolshevists, and they may be heard scoffing Liberalism on the streets of New York, in the mining-camps of Montana and Arizona, in the timber-belt of the Northwest, and down along the Pacific Coast. The conflict is not theoretical: it is already world-wide.
It comes to us unwelcomely, this new war. With superhuman endeavor we had crushed the German beast. Victory brought with it a mood of sweetness and complacency, and a yearning for lasting peace. And then the horizon suddenly flared with this new menace, and peace now seems far away. It is only now that we are beginning to realize our blindness to Bolshevism: that through the long months of the war it has been brewing insidiously; that its weeds have been springing up like a rank growth out of the gangrene of militarism; that it fed upon our mistakes and fattened, raven-like, in the devastation of the world-conflict. And so it has swooped upon us and caught us numb and unaware.
Now comes the new duty — to appraise this social foe, to study its unfamiliar language, to seek to understand it. For it is writing the issues of the future.
Upon the very threshold the task becomes formidable. We are halted by a sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. Liberalism we know and Autocracy we know. They express the dual cleavage of social philosophy which has been bequeathed to us by the Middle Ages. Our minds are schooled to reason and classify in the terms of this cleavage. History has taught us to believe that Liberalism and Autocracy are the two polarities of social thought, roughly blocking off between them the whole domain of man’s political concepts. That the silver t hread of meaning which has enlightened all history was the ascending march of Liberalism toward world-power. Universal Liberalism became for us a sort of Utopia, the goal of social evolution, admitting no beyond. Fatuously, perhaps, we trusted through the long months of the Great War that the downfall of German Autocracy would bring us to the goal; that the rule of Liberalism would then become worldwide and unchallenged.
Bolshevism shatters that dream. With the fall of Autocracy came this new opponent, raucous-voiced and crude, — a Caliban of politics, — challenging Liberalism to a new war; rallying to its cause all the sinister hosts of opposition.
To visualize the contrast between Liberalism and its new foe, we must disabuse our minds of many misconceptions. Bolshevism has suffered the fate of all new creeds — the fate of wilful journalistic distortion. Instead of a social philosophy, it has been presented as a reincarnated pirate. It has been made a term to terrify the hysterical.
Let us make it plain. Bolshevism is neither anarchy nor autocracy. It is not a spawn of Kaiserism. It is not a Camorra of pillagers and criminals. It is not a junta of political adventurers. These it has been called in the heat of hatred, but it would be puerile self-deception to delude ourselves with such concepts.
Nor, on the other hand, is it Socialism, or Anarchism, or Syndicalism. It falls into none of the glib moulds of previous revolutionary groupings. True, many Socialists are Bolshevists, also Anarchists and Syndicalists. But in Bolshevism they find resemblance, not identity. Bolshevism is broader than any of these.
In meeting Bolshevism, we find that Liberalism, also, passes through a sort of amplification. The Liberalism which contrasted itself with Autocracy is enhanced by new allies when it turns to combat Bolshevism. Old enemies vault to the Liberal side when the issue shifts to the class war. Thus, for the purposes of the present, we find the titled aristocracy and the economic aristocracy marching with the Liberals; and on the other extreme, we find the John Spargos of Socialism and the Benjamin R. Tuckers of Anarchism swinging stiffly into the Liberal squadrons. It is in the terms of this broader Liberalism that we must paint our contrast, throughout.
Completeness we cannot hope to attain. Through the very heart of social thought the chasm gapes, and one must repeat all the categories of theory, even to approach finality. Each category will reveal the fathomless gulf of contrast. The roads of Liberalism and Bolshevism never meet, and each survey must mark them further apart. For brevity, then, we will compare them in the light of three major problems of the day: the problem of Democracy; the problem of Social Evolution; and the problem of Internationalism. Upon each of these we may read the contrast. Bolshevism will then become explicable.
II
The central principle of Bolshevism is proletarianism. It would reorganize life upon the basis of the class-control of the proletariat. It would level all social classes into one. It would give to this class supreme power.
In this, Bolshevism differs sharply from Liberalism. For proletarianism is nothing else but equalitarianism. Liberals believe in Democracy, but not in equality. Bolshevists seek equality, but not Democracy. In this paradox lies the key to the distinction.
Proletarianism is the foe of Democracy. Upon the principle of Democracy, Liberalism and Bolshevism draw their sharpest contrast. It is the root-distinction. The old gap between Autocracy and Liberalism was but a step in comparison. To resolve Autocracy into Liberalism, we needed but to shift the mechanism of government; but to pass from Liberalism to Bolshevism, we must reintegrate all the strata of social life.
Minds trained in democracy cannot at first catch the Bolshevist standpoint: it is remote and elusive, for it eliminates the duality of our social life. Hitherto, social effort has run in two parallel moulds — the political and the economic. It was thus that life divided itself. Politics we regarded as a thing apart from the industrial world; principles which obtained in politics were reversed in industry. Only in minor problems did government intrench upon economic life. We felt an intuitive distinction, and all of our institutions have sought to deepen it. There was a world of politics and a world of business. We abandoned one when we entered the other.
Such has been the traditional Liberal point of view, although modifications have begun to soften the contrast. Bolshevism reverses this point of view. From the standpoint of the present State, Bolshevists are anti-Statists, for they would build a state which would be economic as well as political; economic life under Bolshevism would cease to be an institution inseparable from politics; on the contrary, politics would be merged into the economic system. The pivot of political action would shift: it would pass from Parliament to the factory, and the State would transmute itself into a great executive committee in a world of super-industrial unions; or, in other words, the State, as it exists to-day, would perish; in its place would be substituted an economic hierarchy of industrial committees.
The nearest American counterpart to Bolshevism would be the I.W.W. To conceive a Bolshevist world, we must visualize a world draped around the wheels of coördinate industrial unions. To rule in such a world, one must be a worker — a proletarian; to vote in such a world, one must be a proletarian; even to live in such a world, one must be a proletarian. In such a world there would be no political state; in its place would rise an industrial democracy.
Thus, claim the Bolshevists, their goal also is democracy. But note the distinction. To the Bolshevist there can be no Democracy except among equals; there can be no equality politically while there is inequality industrially. They would solve the dilemma by leveling all economic distinctions, by rolling all economic classes into one — the proletarian. When all are thus equalized economically, Democracy automatically restores itself.
But, for the present, the fight of the Bolshevists is essentially a fight against Democracy. Seekers of industrial Democracy, they scorn political Democracy. Society, they assert, is composed of three economic classes — the plutocrats, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. The programme of Bolshevism is a dictatorship of the proletariat; that is, that the proletariat should arbitrarily seize the political power, disfranchise the bourgeoisie and the plutocrats, and then proceed to create a new industrial system in which their unfortunate rivals will be ut terly obliterated. They would ruthlessly extirpate all minorities. The end would justify the means, and for their victory, worlds must be in travail. The enormity of the Bolshevist threat looms up on us; it rocks the foundations of the world.
From Aristocracy to Liberalism was but a step in contrast to this plunge into the abysmal. For Aristocracy, like Liberalism, arrogated no more than political powers; its domain was bounded by the State; economic life, at least, remained unravaged; and even the maddest tyrants never sought to quell the opposition of minorities by blotting out an entire class: only the fanaticism of Utopia could project such a programme.
In contrast to the Bolshevists, Liberalism offers a sane and rationalized ideal. Liberalism has its Utopias too, and it has dreamed of equality as well as they. But Liberalism represents a maturer social mood.
Change, agrees the Liberal, is the condition of our social health, but change need not be Bolshevism. For, in the latter case, the change would be more fatal than the condition. A wild riot of passion, — a chaos of social incendiarism, — such would be the brief day of Bolshevism, followed by the cold, gray morning of reaction. In contrast to such, Liberalism offers a programme of rationalized change. It rejects the blind blundering of revolution; it substitutes the reasoned mechanisms of evolution.
And here again we find the Bolshevist and the Liberal irreconcilably apart; for this is the most fundamental of cleavages. In all social thinking these two grooves appear, the revolutionary and the evolutionary. It is a contrast of temperaments. Even science knows the cleavage, and biological, geological, and psychological theories are battled out in the spirit of this twofold division. The cataclysmic school of geologists, the cult of De Vries in biology, are but the counterparts in the world of science to the Bolshevists in the world of politics.
The revolutionist is obsessed with the spirit of immediacy. He blinds himself to the realization that progress is a process of slow accretions; that society moves upward only by building on the endowments of the past; that change is synonymous with progress only to the extent that it conserves the gains which have been achieved in the illimitable corridors of life’s yesterdays. Scorning these truths, he becomes an iconoclast. He hurls down the barriers of ordered life in order that he may snatch beyond them at some glittering Utopia. And when the Utopia eludes him, he finds, too late, that his shelters of retreat are also lost. The revolutionist is a social child, wandering forever in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Though beside him lie treasure-houses of silver, he knows only the lure of the gold.
Such is the Bolshevist. Not so the Liberal. Liberalism represents the scientific spirit in politics. Its goal is also a millennium, but it journeys there by an evolutionary route. Progress, in the lexicon of Liberalism, is a process of accumulation; it proceeds slowly but unendingly. We may not find the gold to-day, but we shall not pettishly scorn the silver. And so, by compromise and bargainings, by peaceful penetrations and step-at-a-time reforms, Liberalism moves its tortuous but onward course. Battling ever for something higher, it never risks the loss of what it has already won. Its progress, therefore, is real; its victories are for all time.
In the terms of evolution and revolution, then, Bolshevism and Liberalism cut themselves in cameo-clearness. We perceive that Bolshevism is not so new, not so different, after all: that it is merely the reincarnation of a social force as old as history — a force which, through the ages, has doomed the ordered progress of the race. For Bolshevism is the mood of childhood expressed in politics. It has all of childhood’s fugitive ideologies and love of pageantry and lurid, surging life; all the impetuosity of childhood’s will to power. Always Liberalism has rocked before the onslaughts of this spirit of revolution. Bolshevism is but its latest voice.
And so, as historic forces, Liberalism and Bolshevism challenge each other to-day. A world is to be reconstructed. A new social mansion is to be reared. Which shall be the architect, evolution and its certainties, or revolution with its vague, ineffable dreams? The future of history waits upon the answer.
III
And then we reach the third contrast — the most vivid of the moment; at the coming Congress of Paris it will flare up in lurid spectacularity. It is the contrast between Nationalism and Internationalism. And here again the Liberal and the Bolshevist are pitted on opposing sides.
All idealists dream of Internationalism. Unfortunately, we approach it by different avenues. To the Bolshevist, naturally, Internationalism demands a doing of further impossibilities. Dreaming of a day when the race will be a universal family, it refuses to recognize the impedimenta which lie between us and that goal. To the Bolshevist, Nationalism and its age-long yearning for selfexpression — Nationalism and raceculture, Nationalism and race-religion, all that vast domain of virile loyalties— are but bagatelles and myths. Bolshevism would hurl them all into the cauldron. The fine tints of racial variation would melt into the murky drabness of a mongrel Internationalism.
Were this dream possible, it would be, indeed, calamitous. But the menace becomes an absurdity upon a moment of thought. Like all other projects of Bolshevism, it reveals the naïveté of the Utopist.
For Internationalism has no meaning apart from a coördinate Nationalism. We seek Internationalism in order that we may be secure in the preservation of Nationalism. All the momentum which has gathered behind the Internationalist movement proceeds from Nationalistic impulses. To win through to a Nationalistic-Internationalism, we have allowed ourselves to be maimed, starved, and slaughtered for four years of awful war. Nationalism was the light which sustained us. Nationalism emerges from the conflict upon the very historic crest of its prestige; and, with fatuous fanaticism, the Bolshevist defies it in this moment of its power.
The Bolshevist programme is bald. The proletariat of all nations are brothers, say they; therefore, let us abolish nations by decreeing an international civil war. Let us abolish the perpendicular groupings of the world; let us replace them by lateral, horizontal strata. National Kultur is but the fad of the leisure classes. Let us obliterate these classes and their Kultur will vanish with them. Let us establish an Internationalism in which there shall be no nations.
To this, Liberalism must reply that, in destroying the culture of the races, we would destroy the very vehicle of progress. Life is to be measured by more than quantity, our economic determinists to the contrary notwithstanding. The only meaning of life’s riddle is found in the struggle of culture to widen the circumference of thought and mood. They who would destroy culture and the cultured classes, would vandalize the sole hope of the ages.
And culture has ever expressed itself in Nationalistic garb. It is peculiarly localistic, and it finds intensity only to the extent that it finds isolation. The flair of unseen, hidden worlds comes in the cottage — not in the cosmopolis. Nationalism, culturally considered, seeks to allow expression to every localistic school; it gives encouragement to each minority of thought; it encourages the growth of social genius by sowing the seeds of variation; it realizes that uniformity leads to stagnant waste: only through variation can new worlds be brought forth.
And Nationalism has always been the spur to culture. The dreams of the politically enslaved have always been Nationalist dreams. It is a primitive emotion — this of Nationalism; an immitigable urge; a social home-lure. Ireland, Italy, Serbia, mountain-bound Switzerland, and Uranian Finland — these are but flashes of that tenacity of racial culture under the goad of foreign thralldom. Like Liberty, Nationalism is a universal thirst.
Bolshevism, with its weltering Internationalism, would obliterate such culture. And, in so doing, it would trample down the seedlings of social growth. It would warp the universe into a pattern. For the idolatry of culture it would substitute the idolatry of the stomach.
Liberalism seeks a Nationalism which shall be without wars; Bolshevism is an Internationalism which would carry a class-war into every nation and village. Liberalism seeks to build a Federation of Nations, reared upon reason and understanding, subserving the interests of all by conserving the interests of each. Bolshevism would build an international imperium of proletarianism, blotting out the social energies of Nationalism, quenching every culture but its own. Liberalism would broaden life by narrowing its units; Bolshevism would narrow life by making it too broad.
And thus again, upon the problem of Nationalism, Bolshevism and Liberalism are truceless foes. The Great War etched the contrast. Liberals gladly died that Nationalism might be conserved. Bolshevists joined the enemy because Internationalism adumbrated their reason. And the struggle still goes on.
Thus the contrast might be continued. The chasm which we have uncovered stretches illimitably. Just as we find Bolshevism seeking (1) Proletarianism in place of Democracy, (2) Revolution in place of Evolution, (3) Internationalism in place of Nationalism, so, upon every social problem, Liberals and Bolshevists are juxtaposed. Thus we find the struggle reasserted in the battle of Idealism against Materialism, Determinism against Free-will, Individualism against the Commune. Points in common may sometimes interlock, but the variance persists.
So we at last begin to apprehend the extent of our problem. The trial of contrast which we found in politics leads us through all the polarities of life. We discover that the chasm is psychic; that it is universal; that it is of all times and peoples; t hat Liberalism and Bolshevism are new names for old opposites; and that the battle w hich they have now begun is but a new clash in an old series. And so we relegate the problem from politics to history.
The outcome of the present battle may be uncertain; but the ultimate victor is assured. Life has always had its centrifugal as well as its centripetal forces. At times the revolutionist has won ascendency and has struck tangents away from the ordered path of progress. But eventually he blunders back, and evolution again grinds forward, altered only in the time which the revolutionist has forced it to squander. And though the trails of theory may be many, the trails of action all return to evolution. Liberalism, then, is the inevitable final victor.
For the present, it is futile to prophesy. The disconcerting danger in Bolshevism is the danger of uncertainty. For Bolshevism is an emotional explosive and it performs miracles. It is irrational, therefore super-rational; it is adolescent and filled with the dreams of destiny. So we watch it with wondering eyes; and though, with all the better integrated minds of the age, we may rallyto the Liberalist ranks, we may be pardoned if we see in Bolshevism something greater than our Liberal journalists have told us we should see: a foe as old as human progress, yet as young as human dreams; a foe whom Liberalism may take pride to conquer — the eternal anarch of Revolution.