Drawing on her new book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Anne Applebaum discusses the mentality of widespread collaboration with authoritarian regimes. She focuses both on the motives for it and on the inherent limitations in any loyalty won for a regime on the basis of totalitarian methods: 'the need to conform to a mendacious political reality left many people haunted by the sense that they were leading double lives'. The piece is well worth reading as a whole, but particularly interesting is this song - laughable, whatever else it may also be - that became the anthem of the Communist Party of East Germany:
The Party, the Party, she is always right!
And Comrades, so it will always remain...
Since he who fights for the right, is always right...
He who defends mankind is always right...
As raised to life by Lenin's spirit, as welded by Stalin
The Party, the Party, the Party!
One may wonder about the developments that link the thought of Karl Marx - who once gave as his motto the injunction to doubt everything, and whose philosophical consciousness was formed in a spirit of the permanent necessity of critique, according to which no theory, no truth, is ever definitively established, beyond the need for rational questioning - to the absurdity of the Party's being 'always right'. Two diametrically opposite views exist on this question: one is that the song and everything that went with it have nothing whatever to do with Marx's authentic ideas; the other is that the latter led in a straight line to the Stalinist experience and the absurd anthem of the East German Communist Party.
I find neither view convincing. Marx's thought contained more than one possible line of development, and amongst these are lines - strong lines - towards the standard requirements of democracy and pluralism. However, there are also less politically fruitful or defensible notions there, and while these are not the whole story about how classical Marxism evolved towards Stalinism, they supply definite threads of causation and explanation. Two such are these: the evolution out of which was begotten the notion of a single party of the working class with a monopolistic claim to represent its interests; and the idea of this party being guided by a theory, a scientific theory, that had no serious intellectual competitors. Owing to these two noxious developments, the idea of political representation got mixed up with a claim to final authority in matters of truth and falsehood - and that is a fatal moral conjunction.
