In Volume 2 of his Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalls how he and his fellow prisoners would amuse themselves by quizzing Marxist scholars who ended up alongside them in the Soviet labor camps. These professors of the Communist Academy could look directly at the ravages of Stalinist oppression, at the concentration camps in which they themselves were imprisoned, and insist that neither Stalin nor the Party were to blame.
“Look over there: how poverty-stricken our villages are,” Solzhenitsyn would say. “An inheritance from the Tsarist regime,” the true believer would reply. The impoverished countryside was “uncharacteristic”; food shortages and famine were “old wives’ tales”; and if the farmers were starving, well, “have you looked in all their ovens?”
Anyone who has debated a really committed Marxist will recognize this sort of unflappable devotion. “Impenetrability, that was their chief trait!” writes Solzhenitsyn. In the West, of course, entire university departments are devoted to insulating Marxism against the history of its own failure. Confronted with the manifold atrocities of Communist regimes worldwide, the diehard apologist will retort serenely that sabotage, or ideological impurity, or your lying eyes, are really at fault. True Marxism has never been tried.
In The Problem of Atheism (Il problema dell’ateismo), the great Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce shows that true Marxism has, in fact, been tried. He was well-positioned to make the case. While a young scholar in Turin, Del Noce got to see Marxism in its most attractive possible light, as an alternative to the rising Fascist regime. He could have been forgiven for concluding, as the political prisoner Antonio Gramsci did, that workers’ uprisings in the city represented the world’s great hope of defeating totalitarianism.
