Macron’s error on communism – L’Express

To celebrate the entry of the Manouchians into the Pantheon, Emmanuel Macron distinguished himself with a singularly kitsch eulogy of communism. After having evoked without any distance the “communist ideal” embraced by Manouchian and, in passing, putting “1789” and “1793” on the same level, he ended up declaiming with emphasis: “Because they are communists, they know nothing other than human fraternity, children of the French Revolution, watchers of the Universal Revolution. As revealed in our pages, the first person in the State even found himself “very proud” of his “find”, “because communism starts from a good feeling, from an ideal which certainly ends badly”, according to the text explanation provided by one of its “strategists”.

Surprising on the part of a supposedly “ultraliberal” leader, this posture nevertheless turns out to be frequent within the left and the extreme left in Europe, who thus justify their indulgence and even their admiration with regard to a an ideology whose human toll nevertheless amounts to several tens of millions of deaths.

Likewise, the figure of Karl Marx, the designer of communism as a political system, remains largely spared from criticism. There visit to his birthplace in Trier, transformed into a museum, is instructive in this respect. No mention is made of the numerous critiques, notably liberal and conservative, who responded to the analyzes and proposals of the German who took refuge in London during his lifetime. Bolshevik Russia is given a quarter of a coin, Mao’s China half of a quarter, no mention being made of the gulag or the laogai! In reality, we can learn, these regimes have shamefully exploited a beautiful and generous idea, “the universal liberation of humanity [étant] the main driving force” of Marx’s ideas which, since the 19th century, have perhaps inspired dictators but especially social democrats.

“The ultimate omelet”

What about 1989? Commenting on a cover of Sunday Times Magazine dating from the end of that year and titled “RIP communism” [“Que le communisme repose en paix”] Under the photo of Marx’s funeral monument in Highgate Cemetery, an annoying caption reads: “Such headlines present Marx as the symbol of communism, make him a scapegoat and declare him finished.” In reality, the museum retorts, “the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 marks a turning point but not the end: in the 21st century, global poverty and political and economic crises are reviving the search for their structural causes, [que] Marx [avait entreprise]”. In other words, Marx’s thinking remains both valid and legitimate.

We cannot reduce the philosopher Marx to the co-author of Manifesto of the Communist Party. His intellectual contribution proved to be major to the extent that, in a 19th century in full political transition, he was able to shed light on the influence of the concrete living conditions of individuals on their vision of the world. On the other hand, the impact of the author of Capital on all communist regimes, from their conception of power to the orchestration of collectivist reforms, is evident. If we do not choose our readers and aficionados, it is still astonishing that a significant number of those of Marx have shaped similarly inhumane political systems.

In other words, the “means” implemented to achieve this “ideal” praised by Emmanuel Macron have always proven to be cruel. During the time of Lenin and then Stalin, certain Western communists (or related) denied the existence of repression, purges and camps. Others believed, and there were more and more of them as the bodies piled up, that a few “broken eggs”, to use the ironic words of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, were well worth the concoction of ” ultimate omelette. Marx, for his part, in The Civil War in France, had made civil war, that is to say the elimination of one’s enemies, the revolutionary criterion par excellence. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, the non-communist left believed it could accuse the gulag without invalidating its political matrix. Even though the eggs should not have been broken, the omelette was still desirable. This is the same position that Emmanuel Macron defended before the Pantheon.

The negation of “proper”

But that’s where the problem lies. The systematically repressive character of communist revolutions suggests that their harmfulness lies precisely in the ideas that inspired them. In other words, the ultimate omelet tastes terrible. Setting as a political aim the establishment of a perfectly egalitarian society, without classes or wages and, to do this, achieving the total pooling of the means of production, amounts to ignoring a fundamental human aspiration, that of having “own” goods. Taken in the sense that the English philosopher John Locke gave to this term, these do not only designate the material property of an individual but also his life, his freedom, his body or even his conscience, in other words, to use the terms of François Gauvin, “everything that allows him to know himself, to know what he wants and to feel responsible for what he does.” To achieve communism, in fact, it is not enough to collectivize the means of production; individuals must be forced to renounce their own aspirations, that is to say, themselves.

Safeguarding what is proper does not imply exclusively privileging competition between men over their cooperation; on the contrary, it involves the search for a balance between two contrary tendencies. But ignoring competition to impose cooperation amounts to preventing human beings, and therefore any society, from flourishing, while paving the way for the most authoritarian figures to take power. By wanting to suppress any competitive instinct, we condemn ourselves to exacerbating it.

That communism brought immense constraints on beings of flesh and blood, persecuted, imprisoned and put to death, therefore turns out not to be an unintended consequence but the very essence of this terrible project. However, if the inhumanity of this ideology has been amply denounced by its victims, its witnesses and its historians, these thousands of pages written, read and commented on have not been enough to put an end to the quibbles vainly attempting to distinguish the Marxist “good intentions” of their calamitous results. We must therefore, once again, remember that the means used to achieve these so-called good intentions did not turn out to be inhumane. despite they but well because of them. To paraphrase Jean-François Revel, “communism is Nazism, plus good feelings.”

Putting reality on its feet, in this case, does not only aim to recall the historical truth. The issue is moral, political and geopolitical. To lie about the “communist ideal” is to insult the memory of its tens of millions of victims. This is to justify a priori any political movement claiming, today and tomorrow, to advance its vision of “good” to the detriment of the integrity of others. It is, finally, to weaken our position vis-à-vis Russia and China, two countries which have not completely broken with their communist past and seem to have retained a profound insensitivity towards human dignity. It has escaped no one’s notice that these two powers do not wish us well. However, rewriting the history of communism in rosy terms means telling them that we do not really believe in the values ​​that we constantly oppose to them.