Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy (2007)

Chapter 12 of Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (2007), a collection of essays by various writers.

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Contents

• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.
• 6.
• 7.

1.

In Lenin the critique of colonialism and imperialism plays a central role, far beyond the immediacy of politics. What is democracy? Let us see how the classics of the liberal tradition define it.

Tocqueville describes the inhuman treatment reserved for the Indians and blacks in the United States lucidly and without indulgence. With successive deportations, and suffering the “terrible evils” that these involved, the former were by now clearly destined to be wiped off the face of the earth. As for the latter, they were subjected in the South to a more inflexible slavery than in the ancient classical world or Latin America. In the North they were in theory free, but in reality they continued to be victims of a “racial prejudice” that raged in a particularly cruel manner, so that the blacks were deprived not only of political rights but also civil rights, given that society had, in fact, delivered them helpless to racial violence: “Oppressed, you can complain but you will find only whites among your judges.” ^[1] This did not prevent, however, the French liberal from celebrating America as the only country in the world where democracy was in force, “lively, active and triumphant.” ^[2] The tones even become lyrical: “There you will see a people whose conditions are more equal than you will see even among us; in which the social order, the customs and the laws are all democratic; in which everything emanates from the people and returns to them, and where, however, each individual enjoys a more entire independence and a greater freedom than at any other time or in any other country on earth.” ^[3]

And the Indians? And the blacks? Tocqueville responds in advance to these objections in his programmatic declaration at the beginning of the chapter dedicated to the problem of the “three races that inhabit the territory of the United States”: “The main task that I imposed on myself has now been completed; I have shown, at least as far as it has been possible for me, what the laws of American democracy are and I have made its customs known. I could stop here.” He writes about the relations between the three races only to avoid possible disillusion in the reader: “These arguments, that touch my subject, are not an integral part of it: they refer to America not to democracy, and I wanted above all to paint a portrait of democracy!” ^[4] However cruel the fate of two of the three races inhabiting the territory of the United States might be, it has nothing to do with the problem of democracy!

Let us take a leap back three decades and turn to an author who Bobbio has elected as the founding father of “liberal socialism.” ^[5] In John Stuart Mill we can read that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind has become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.” ^[6]

This declaration is even more significant because it lies in a work thematically dedicated to the celebration of liberty (On Liberty). But it is clear that for the English liberal, liberty “is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties,” and certainly not to a “race” that can or must be considered as “nonage,” ^[7] that is sometimes scarcely above the superior animal species. ^[8] And once again democracy and liberty are defined independently of the fate of the excluded, who are, however, the majority of human beings.

With respect to this world, Lenin represents a break not only at the political level but also at the level of epistemology. Democracy cannot be defined by abstracting the fate of the excluded. It is not just a question of colonial populations. In the imperial metropolis itself, in England, “small” (or allegedly small) details of the electoral legislation “deny political rights to women” ^[9] and to the “really proletariat inferior strata.” ^[10] But the great Russian revolutionary concentrated particularly on the clause of exclusion of the colonial, or of colonial origin, populations.

2.

The history of the West confronts us with a paradox that can be best understood starting from the history of today’s guide-nation: democracy among the white community developed simultaneously in relation to the enslaving of the blacks and the deportation of the Indians. For thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the United States’ life, slaveowners held the presidency, and they were also those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Without slavery (and successive racial segregation), it is not possible to understand anything about “American liberty”: they grew together, one sustaining the other. If the “peculiar institution” already assured an iron grip over the “dangerous” classes at the workplace, the moving frontier and the progressive expansion westward defused social conflict, transforming a potential proletariat into a class of landowners, at the expense, however, of populations condemned to being removed or swept away.

After the baptism of the War for Independence, American democracy experienced a further development in the 1830s under President Jackson: the cancellation, for the most part, of the census discriminations within the white community that went step by step with the vigorous impulse given to the deportation of the Indians and with mounting resentment and violence against the blacks. An analogous consideration can also be made for the so-called Progressive Age that, starting from the end of the nineteenth century, covered the first fifteen years of the twentieth century: it was certainly characterized by numerous democratic reforms (assuring direct election to the Senate, the secrecy of the vote, the introduction of primaries, the institution of referendums, and so forth), but it was at the same time a particularly tragic time for blacks, who were the target of Ku Klux Klan terrorist squads, and for Indians, who were deprived of their residual lands and subjected to a pitiless process of assimilation that aimed at depriving them even of their cultural heritage.

With regard to this paradox that characterizes the history of their country, authoritative U.S. scholars have spoken of Herrenvolk democracy, that is, democracy valid only for the “master-race” (to use the language dear to Hitler). The line of demarcation between whites, on the one hand, and blacks and Indians, on the other, favors the development of equality within the white community. The members of an aristocracy of class or color tend toward self-celebration as “peers”; the net inequality imposed upon the excluded is the other face of the relationship of parity installed among those who enjoy the power to exclude the “inferiors.”

The category of Herrenvolk democracy can be useful also in explaining the history of the West as a whole. During the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the extension of the suffrage in Europe went step by step with the process of colonialism and with the imposition of servile or semi-servile work relations upon the subject populations; government by law in the metropolises was closely linked to the violence and arbitrariness of the bureaucracy and the police and with the state of siege in the colonies. It was, after all, the same phenomenon as in the history of the United States, only that in Europe’s case it was less evident because the colonial populations, instead of living in the metropolis, were separated from it by the ocean.

3.

It is very difficult to find a critique of this “master-race democracy” in liberal thinking, which is rather often the theoretical expression of this regime. Herrenvolk democracy is instead the privileged target of Lenin’s struggle. The revolutionary Russian leader stubbornly placed in evidence the macroscopic clauses of exclusion in liberal liberty at the expense of “red and black skins,” as well as immigrants from “backward countries.” ^[11] As in a play of mirrors, the West that gloried in government by law was placed before the reality of the colonies: “The most liberal and radical of politicians in free Great Britain … transformed themselves, when they became governors of India, into real and proper Genghis Khans.” ^[12]

Giolitti’s Italy can well be proud of the extension of citizenship to almost all the adult male population. But once again Lenin’s counter-chorus echoes against liberal self-celebration, noting that the extension of the suffrage was aimed at enlarging the base of agreement for the Libyan expedition, that “typical colonial war of a twentieth-century ‘civil’ state: here is a ‘civil and constitutional nation’ proceeding in its work of ‘civilization’ by means of bayonets, bullets, rope, fire and rape,” and even with the “slaughter”; it is “a civil, perfect butchery of men, a massacre of Arabs with ‘extremely modern’ arms … almost 3,000 Arabs were massacred, entire families were massacred, women and children massacred.” ^[13]

Yes, Mill could celebrate the British Empire as “a step, as far as it goes, towards universal peace, and general friendly co-operation among nations.” ^[14]

But, even ignoring the conflict between the great powers that finally led to the First World War, this celebration implies a monstrous repression: the expeditions of the great powers in the colonies are not considered wars. They were conflicts in which, even if “few Europeans died,” nevertheless “hundreds of men, belonging to the peoples the Europeans were suffocating, lost their lives.” And then — continued Lenin sharply — “can you call it war? In the strictest sense no, you cannot call it war and so you can forget it all.” Not even the honors of war were allowed the victims. Colonial wars were not considered as such because it was barbarians who were subjected to them and they “did not deserve even being called people (were Asians and Africans people?)” and, they, after all, are excluded from the human community itself. ^[15]

It was on this basis that the split with Social Democracy took place. It was not determined by the reform/revolution dichotomy. This is a standard image that does not become more credible by being often shared, with contrary value judgments by both the antagonists. In the decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Bernstein saluted imperial German expansionism as a contribution to the cause of progress, civilization, and world trade: “If socialists proposed to help savages and barbarians in their struggle against encroaching capitalist civilization prematurely, it would be a throwback to romanticism.” ^[16] Together with the West as a whole, Bernstein, like Theodore Roosevelt for his part, attributed to tsarist Russia too the role of “protecting and dominant power” in Asia. ^[17]

The German Social Democratic leader went up to the threshold of Social Darwinism. The “strong races” represented the cause of “progress,” and so inevitably they “tend to enlarge and expand their civilization,” while uncivilized and even peoples “incapable of civilizing themselves” conduct a useless and retrograde resistance; by “uprising against civilization” they must be fought even by the labor movement. If, on the one hand, he struggled for democratic reforms in Germany, on the other hand, Bernstein demanded an iron fist against barbarians: the logic is the same as that already analyzed of “master-race democracy.”

The subjection of colonial peoples cannot be impeded by sentimental obstacles nor by abstract juridical considerations. Strong and civilized races cannot be made the “slaves of legal formalities.” It was precisely the Social Democratic leader who theorized a superior substantial legality, starting from the philosophy of history dear to colonial tradition, and who then expressed his complete horror at the lack of respect for the rules of the game during the October Revolution.

That this represented a radical change with respect to an ideological and political tradition, in the setting of colonial arrogance and racial prejudice, is an obvious and self-evident fact. In these conditions, the appeal for a struggle for emancipation directed at the slaves of the colonies, and at the “barbarians” present in the capitalist metropolises themselves, could not but appear as a mortal menace to the white race, the West, and civilization as such.

Starting from that, the gigantic conflict that took place in the twentieth century can be understood. The fate reserved for centuries in the United States for Indians and blacks is a declared Fascist and Nazi model. In 1930, a prime ideologue of Nazism such as Rosenberg expressed his admiration for white supremacy America, that “splendid country of the future” that had had the merit of formulating the happy “new idea of a racial State,” an idea that it is time to put into practice, “with youthful force,” by expulsions and deportations of “Negroes and yellow-skins.” ^[18] If, on one hand, the Third Reich presented itself, with its “Aryan” rhetoric, as the attempt, carried out in the conditions of total warfare, to create a white supremacy regime on a world-wide scale under German hegemony, on the other hand the Communist movement gave a decisive contribution to overcoming racial discrimination and colonialism, whose inheritance Nazism intended to assume and radicalize.

4.

In his struggle against Herrenvolk democracy, Lenin radicalized the lesson of Marx and Engels: “The profound hypocrisy, the intrinsic barbarity of bourgeois civilization stand unveiled before us the moment that from the great metropolises, where they take on respectable form, we turn our eyes toward the colonies where they go around naked.” ^[19] The great capitalist and colonialist powers can well abandon themselves to self-celebration, but a people that oppresses another cannot be considered really free. ^[20] Meanwhile, enormous changes have taken place at the world level: Is Lenin’s lesson remanded to a closed chapter of history by now?

To reply to this question, let us look at some of the conflicts that characterize today’s world. The international press is full of articles or attitudes committed to celebrating, or at least justifying, Israel: after all — they say — it is the only country in the Middle East in which the freedom of expression and association exist, in which there is a democratic regime operating. In this way a macroscopic detail is suppressed: government by law and democratic guarantees are valid only for the master race, while the Palestinians can have their lands expropriated, be arrested and imprisoned without process, tortured, killed, and, in any case under a regime of military occupation, have their human dignity humiliated and downtrodden daily. We are here placed before an alternative, epistemological rather than political. Do we rely upon “democracy” in Israel in recognizing this country’s right to domination, plunder, and colonial or semi-colonial oppression; or do we consider from this reality of domination, plunder, and oppression precisely the character quite other than democratic of Israel?

Analogous considerations can be made of Israel’s great ally and protector. Inaugurating his first presidential mandate, Clinton declared: America is “the world’s oldest democracy,” and it “must continue to lead the world”; “our mission is timeless.” ^[21] The patent of democracy attributed to the United States at the very moment of its foundation authorizes ignoring in silence the genocide of the indigenous populations and black slavery (in any event the descendants of these two groups make up 20 percent of the total population). The same logic is used when looking at the present and the future. Not too long ago, the “commission for truth” instituted in Guatemala accused the CIA of having decisively helped the military dictatorship to commit “genocide” against the Maya Indians, who were guilty of having sympathized with the opponents of the regime dear to Washington. ^[22] But, being the most ancient and greatest democracy in the world, the United States has no problem in repressing all of this. Conserving its good conscience, it can continue to claim the right to bombard or dismember any state, having been superbly defined by Washington as a “pariah” or “rogue” state, thus condemning its population to hunger or starvation. But, it is precisely the treatment inflicted yesterday upon the Indians and the blacks and today upon the Mayas or “pariahs” and “rogues” in every corner of the world that demonstrates the ferocious anti-democratic nature of the United States.

At the same time, the terminology used is significant. As far as the expression “pariah state” is concerned, it clearly goes back to the history of societies divided by caste, where no equality, indeed no contact was permitted or possible between the members of a superior caste on the one hand, and the untouchables on the other. But the expression “rogue state” is perhaps even more eloquent. For a long time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Virginia, indentured servants, white-skinned temporary semi-slaves, when caught after escaping, which they often did, were branded with the letter R (for “rogue”): made immediately recognizable, they no longer had a means of escape. Later, the problem of identification was definitely solved by replacing the white semi-slaves by black slaves: the color of their skins made branding superfluous, the black was in himself synonymous with “rogue.”

In order to bend or force “pariah or rogue states” into capitulation, there is no hesitation in using the practices that, before invading the heart of the West itself during the twentieth century, have tragically characterized the history of the colonial tradition. The embargo is a kind of postmodern version of the concentration camp. In the epoch of globalization, there is no longer any need to deport a people: it is enough to block the influx of food and medicine, and with some “intelligent” bombing, you succeed in destroying aqueducts, sewage systems, and sanitary infrastructures, as indeed happened in Iraq.

5.

We have seen Clinton claim an eternal mission for the United States and we are led back to the history of colonialism and imperialism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in arguing against the American and European prophets of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, a left-wing English liberal, ironically characterized them as the “manifest destiny” and “mission of civilization” party. ^[23] Using this information, too, Lenin formulated a political program of a “complete break with the barbarous policies of bourgeois civilization” that legitimized and celebrated the dominion of “a few elect nations” over the rest of humanity. ^[24] Has this vision and this imperial pretension dispersed? In the course of his election campaign, George W. Bush did not hesitate to proclaim a new dogma: “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world.” ^[25] In his time, his father had declared: “I see America as leader, as the only nation with a special role in the world.” Let us listen to other voices. Said Henry Kissinger, “World leadership is inherent in America’s power and values.” ^[26] Dixit Madeleine Albright, the United States is the only “indispensable nation.”

This eternal “mission” or leadership is claimed in the name of “the rights of man.” We are led to think of the history of British imperialism, which, as it expanded, felt committed to “making wars impossible and promoting the best interests of humanity.” This was how Cecil Rhodes expressed himself, synthesizing the philosophy of the British Empire as “philanthropy + 5 percent,” ^[27] where “philanthropy” is synonymous with “human rights” and the 5 percent indicates the profits that the English capitalist bourgeoisie made or intended to make by colonial conquest and waving the banner of “human rights.” Let us now see how an American journalist describes and celebrates globalization: it serves to export, first of all, the products, technology, ideas, values, and style of American capitalism; “to swift China,” the United States has to know how to combine “gunboats, trade and Internet investments,” other, naturally, than the password of “democratizing” the economy and politics. ^[28] The formula dear to Rhodes, the voice of British imperialism, can therefore be reformulated with extra precision and frankness: “philanthropy (or human rights) + 5 percent + gunboat policies.”

6.

But should we not be talking by now of overcoming the nation-state? It was with this slogan that the war against Yugoslavia was launched. The process of recolonizing the Third World and its periphery with respect to the West goes ahead with universalistic slogans that proclaim the absolute transcendence of ethical norms over state and national borders. But this, far from being a novelty, is a constant of the colonial tradition. At the same time, it is clear that, in claiming the right to declare the sovereignty of other states surmounted, the great powers attribute themselves an enlarged sovereignty, to exercise well beyond their own national territories. The dichotomy that had scanned colonial expansion, in the course of which its protagonists have constantly refused to recognize as sovereign states the countries subjected or transformed step by step into protectorates, is reproduced in a scarcely modified form. The outlines of a “new international order” clearly emerge: on the one hand, there are those who have the right and obligation to launch “international police actions,” and on the other, “rogue states,” outlaw states, or more exactly nonstates, whose illegal behavior must be struck down with every means. In the kind of world state that is being evoked here, the West completes the monopoly of legitimate violence, and this renders de-emancipation explicit, consumed at the expense of the excluded.

7.

Claiming the modernity of Lenin does not mean, however, ignoring or undervaluing the elements of innovation that have taken place in the international situation. Certainly, in some cases the national question continues to be put in the classic fashion, such as the struggle for liberation from colonial domination and to construct an independent nation-state (the Palestinian case). At other times, the national question is linked to the struggle to defend the results achieved following the process of decolonization.

Compelled to recognize the independence of countries that have escaped from their control, the great capitalist powers now try to disintegrate them by appealing to ethnic and tribal rivalry. It is an easy maneuver. Newly independent countries, often with uncertain, badly drawn, or arbitrary borders, do not have a unitary history behind them. In itself the colonial inheritance is fertile soil for the emergence of separatist and secessionist movements, where imperialism easily has a hegemonic role. “Hence the constant, and eventually often vain calls of the leaders of such new States to surmount ‘tribalism’, ‘communalism’ or whatever forces were made responsible for failure of the new inhabitants of the Republic X to feel themselves to be primarily patriotic citizens of X rather than members of some other collectivity.” ^[29]

The events that took place in the Congo between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s are exemplary. Compelled to concede independence, Belgium immediately committed itself to promoting the secession of Katanga. Was it not in the name of self-determination that the Congo (like all Africa) had claimed and continued to claim independence? Well, this same principle ought to apply also to the rich mining region controlled by the Union minière. A “revolutionary” ready to wave this banner was immediately found for the occasion: Moise Chiombe, “son of the first Negro millionaire” of Katanga. Secessionists and colonial forces captured Lumumba, the leader of the National Congolese Movement, who supported “a unitary, progressive inter-tribal program.” He was therefore guilty of opposing the secession and “self-determination” of the rich region that the colonists did not intend to relinquish; he was therefore massacred. ^[30]

Moreover, colonial domination has left its mark: on the economic level, the inequality of development among different regions has been accentuated; while the hegemonic presence at every level of the great powers and the policy of ethnic engineering, often promoted by them, has accentuated cultural, linguistic, and religious fragmentation. Secessionist tendencies of every kind are once again lying in wait, regularly fed by the ex-colonial powers. When it wrested Hong Kong from China, Great Britain certainly did not conceive of self-determination, and it did not remember it even during the long years in which it exercised its dominion. But, suddenly, on the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China, to the motherland, the governor sent by London, Chris Patten, a conservative, had a species of illumination and improvised conversion: he appealed to the inhabitants of Hong Kong to claim their right to “self-determination” against the motherland, thus remaining within the orbit of the British Empire.

Analogous considerations are true for Taiwan. When, at the beginning of 1947, the Kuomintang, which had fled from continental China and the victorious People’s Army, let loose a terrible repression that provoked about ten thousand deaths, ^[31] the United States was careful not to invoke the right to self-determination for the inhabitants of the island; on the contrary, it sought to impose the thesis according to which Chiang Kai-shek’s government was the legitimate government not only of Taiwan but also of the whole of China. The great Asian country had to remain united but under the control of Chiang Kai-shek, reduced to a simple pro-consul of Washington’s sovereign imperialism. As the dream of reconquering the mainland slowly faded away, and the stronger became the aspiration of the whole Chinese people to achieve full territorial integration and independence, ending the tragic chapter of colonial history, so the presidents of the United States experienced an illumination and a conversion similar to that of Chris Patten. They too began to caress the idea of “self-determination.” Incoherence? Not at all: “self-determination” is the continuation of imperial policy by other means. If it was not really possible to get their hands on China as a whole, it was, meanwhile, convenient to secure control of Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Finally, it needs to be kept in mind that, in determinate circumstances, the national question can be made acute even in the heart of the West. On the basis of recently declassified U.S. documents, the CIA was ready, on the eve of the April 1948 elections, in case of a left-wing victory, to support secessionist movements in Sardinia and Sicily and dismember Italy. ^[32] Unduly claiming the right to declare the sovereignty of other states surmounted, the great powers attribute themselves a monstrously dilated sovereignty. This radical inequality among nations is an essential characteristic of imperialism, that is, that political-social system characterized, according to Lenin, by the “enormous importance of the national question.” ^[33] In proclaiming their “mission,” the United States and the great imperial powers can well wave the flag of “democracy”; it still remains a Herrenvolk democracy, constituting the constant target of Lenin’s action.