Peter Hacks | Crusade against Communism

For Peter Hacks, art and communism were inextricably linked. The task of art, "from its special social position," was to create the "perfect human being." Communism, he argued, had been "on the horizon ever since art existed. And wherever art is properly considered, communism is also considered."

Hacks takes a stand on this ground: "As is well known, communists differ from the fanatics in that they are able to think beyond the day of the revolution." They are not content with "abolishing bourgeois society; rather, they intend to establish socialist society and then communist society."

For Hacks, the 20th century represents the antithesis of imperialism and socialism. Capitalism, he argues, reached the end of its civilizing power with the First World War. As a "topsy-turvy world of exploiters," it is polluting "the globe."

1914 was a decisive year for socialism: "The collapse of the Second International. The end of peace, as was easily foreseeable, would damage the existing world. But the end of socialism would destroy the future world." Before the Social Democrats' approval of war credits, "human society appeared to be in good order." Marxist social democracies were "growing in all countries of the world" and "united across borders. They represented both the working class and global reason, and it was considered certain that they would soon overcome imperialism and introduce communism in Europe."

But then: "Finance capital was preparing to kill ten million people, and the Social Democrats voted for it." The "technical term for this wonderful self-dissolution of the organized proletariat": "Opportunism." Its embodiment is Eduard Bernstein, "left-wing militarism" merely its "manifestation," its "essence" the "abolition of Marxist social theory and the imposition of bourgeois ways of thinking and values."

The watershed that brought socialism to life came in 1917: "Three years after socialism had completely disappeared from the face of the earth," the Russian Revolution took place. "A year later," the Communist Party of Germany decided that "it should henceforth be reckoned with." It was Lenin, Trotsky, and Kollontai who confronted Kautsky and his ilk in the West: Had it not been for us, you would still be lying in the trenches.

For Hacks, the first victorious proletarian revolution is absolutely crucial. A "sixth of the earth" turns red. Marxism spreads throughout the world. The October Revolution not only inspires the social anti-war revolutions in the West. Without it, the Communist Party of China, founded in 1921 in the Marxist spirit, would never have come into being. Without the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Marxism would neither have become the state ideology in a third of the world nor a source of inspiration for revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In short, the October Revolution paved the way for the globalization of the ideas of Marx and Engels.

Mao Zedong was convinced that every national liberation movement from imperialism has since been compelled to join the proletarian world revolution. There is no longer any room for limited bourgeois revolutions. Hacks shares this view: the "epochal contradiction" is that between world revolution and "world counter-revolution." He interprets the German division as one of class division: in West Germany, capitalist rule, i.e., "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"; in East Germany, public ownership, i.e., dictatorship of the proletariat. Imperialism is the form of counter-revolution at the interstate level.

Hacks says of himself: "As a child, in an anti-fascist family, I experienced imperialism in its most expressed form, Nazism." The post-fascist elite continuity fits in well: "An imperialist government without murderers would be an eagle without talons." The Federal Republic appears not merely as the legal successor of fascism, but as a continuation of its "crusade against communism."

Hacks relegates the notion of imperialism's capacity for peace to the realm of illusions. For him, bourgeois foreign policy is necessarily about power and violence. International law, he argues, is an attempt to regulate the "desires" of "states and monopolies" through a "legal relationship." He asserts that "no one has ever seriously adhered to this relationship. Even internal peace is inconceivable except under socialized property and the condition of overflowing productive wealth... External peace, indeed, is only possible under the condition of world socialism and global abundance."

Anti-imperialism is class struggle on a global scale. Its goal: the expansion of the world proletariat as an element of world revolution. The "possibility of its implementation" justifies it. Violence is "a possible means," but "an unpleasant one." The "means of revolution" will "have to take into account those of its opponents." However, it is certain "that the revolution never has any reason to be more violent than its opponents, and that it never will be." A classless society is "not an end state," but rather, with it, "human history only begins."

The Eurocommunist path proposed by Biermann, the "Eduard Bernstein of the cabaret scene," appears to Hacks as a way to reintroduce "an imperialist economy and rule." Regarding the convergence theory, he says: "Certainly, the idea that one could combine the advantages of socialism with the few remaining advantages of imperialism is appealing." But: "It is the desire for a chocolate Leninism, and a Lenin made of chocolate would quickly melt."

In 1989, the border to imperialism was opened. Using the French Revolution of 1789 as a case study, Hacks discusses the counter-revolution of 1989. The revolution as such, he argues, "doesn't present a pretty picture in any of its many stages," but it "actually brought nothing new, only a new era." Hacks goes on to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat as necessary, coupled with a warning against the "immense tyranny... of parliamentary democracy" as "the power of the parliamentary majority." "Of all forms of government," he asserts, "oligocracy is the worst, and of all oligocracies, the worst is the power of the parliamentary majority." "If a people wants to eat bread, it should avoid feeling liberal."

This article is a summary of Ingar Solty's presentation at the Peter Hacks Conference on November 1st in Berlin. www.peter-hacks-gesellschaft.de