ROBERT MANNE: COLD WAR HANGOVER?

Robert Manne has established himself as a leading commentator on Australian politics and social affairs. Though an avowed conservative, the former editor of Quadrant in recent times has taken some quite progressive positions. Most notably, he has taken a strong stand against racism. He has condemned Pauline Hanson's One Nation party, deploring the failure of Prime Minister John Howard to repudiate its anti-Aboriginal, anti-Asian policies. In this regard he has taken up the issue of the `stolen generation' as a genocidal stain on our past. Most recently he has condemned what he sees as Howard's and Peter Reith's `conspiracy' against the Maritime Union of Australia.

Because he has taken some stances that were once the preserve of the Left, it makes it difficult to label him simply conservative. Yet while occupying such positions, and thereby distancing himself from the neo-liberal Right, Manne remains firmly in the conservative camp.

Manne's entrenched conservatism is most clearly betrayed by his attitude to the Left and the Cold War. (See Age, 3.8.1988.) Here his usually measured tone deserts him. According to Manne, the Left have been little more than willing apologists for Stalin, allegedly complicit in the crimes of communism -- from Russia to Kampuchea. Every communist is a little Stalin, intent on building socialism on a pile of `corpses and lies'. It is on this basis that Manne could condemn the `bloody muddle at the centre' of Manning Clarke's thought because of his sympathies with Lenin, and justify ASIO's surveillance of the Left and vetting of appointments to bodies such as the ABC. Manne suspends his commitment to liberalism when it comes to ASIO's policing of the Australian Communist Party and its sympathisers, because it was allegedly an agency of a so-called `totalitarian' state, the Soviet Union.

`Totalitarianism' is the chief weapon Manne likes to wield against the Left. Long-discredited as an analytical tool by serious researchers of Soviet history, totalitarianism is a convenient political instrument for Manne that pre-empts meaningful discussion because it immediately conflates the Soviet experience with that of Nazi Germany. In this view, Bolshevism and fascism were twins; Red Guards and Brownshirts a mirror image of each other. The October 1917 revolution, far from being the successor to the French Revolution of 1789, was a precursor to Hitler's accession to power in January 1933. Such a reading of the Soviet and Nazi experience is not only superficial, it is politically dangerous, given the recent rise of the racist Right that Manne correctly deplores.

The concept of `totalitarianism' was common currency in Western anti-communist circles at the height of the Cold War. It derived from apparent similarities between Stalinism and Nazism. In both cases, a personal dictatorship, a rigid official ideology, a centralised single party and a ruthless, omnipotent political police seemed to be their synonomous, and therefore defining characteristic. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both viewed as societies in thrall to an omnipotent, monolithic party-state. Hannah Arendt, to whom Manne acknowledges an intellectual debt, gave a particular twist to the totalitarian model, emphasising anti-semitism and concentration camps. Manne does not use totalitarianism in a precise way; but it is evident when he invokes the term that he has more or less all these elements in mind, concentration camps especially, which give his approach moral intensity if not analytical precision.

In a number of senses, totalitarianism is fundamentally flawed as an explanatory model. Its inductive, descriptive approach, based on abstract concepts such as terror and ideology, offers no real basis for comparing the Soviet and Nazi experiences, let alone explaining the rise of Stalin or Hitler, or the differing fates of Stalinism and Nazism. Focussed as it is on the apparatuses of mass repression, totalitarianism presumes Stalinism and Nazism were more alike than different. It can only do this by divorcing the Soviet and Nazi regimes from the social relations that underpinned them and their place in the world political economy.

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks rode to power on the back of a popular working-class and peasant uprising in a vast, semi-feudal, barely industrialised country, under the slogans `Peace, land and bread'. The revolution unleashed in Russia broke the back of the old Tsarist state apparatus and with it the social power of the land-owning and urban capitalist classes, most of whom fled or supported a fierce civil war, from 1918 to 1921, with the backing of the major Western powers. In short, the Bolsheviks unleashed a political and social revolution, the shockwaves of which were felt from China to Germany. Stalin, turning his back on the international aspirations of the Soviet revolution, by extremely authoritarian means put in place an autarkic, non-capitalist, command economy. He force-marched an underdeveloped agricultural country into the industrial age. Despite a hostile international environment, the Soviet Union achieved the highest growth rates per capita of any country until the mid-1960s. By the time it collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Union was a highly industrialised, urbanised society with an educated workforce; a far cry from the still predominantly peasant, barely literate society that confronted Hitler's Wehrmacht in 1941.

The contrast with the rise, rule and legacy of Hitler could not be more marked. Railing against Bolshevism and the Jews, a near-deified Hitler came to power in 1933 in the most highly industrialised, educated and `civilised' country in Europe. With the financial backing of industry and covert support from the military, he rode to power on the crest of a vehemently anti-communist wave of support, whipped up primarily among the urban and rural middle classes. This was no revolution from below, even if it posed as one. There was no civil war, nor international intervention. While Nazi Germany challenged Anglo-American hegemony, it was no threat to international capitalism as a whole. The German state colluded in Hitler's ascension to power, which he sought and achieved by constitutional means. Having won substantial parliamentary representation, he was appointed chancellor by a representative of the Prussian aristocracy. Hitler immediately acted to destroy the labour movement. The first inmates of his concentration camps were communists, social democrats and trade unionists. Later they were joined by the Jews, particularly after Kristallnacht in 1938. Private capital, whatever state impositions it suffered, was the beneficiary of a highly interventionist economic policy, slave labour and a war machine directed at the Soviet Union. Having dealt with Bolshevism at home, Hitler dealt with it abroad. The result was twenty-seven million Soviet dead, along with six million Jews.

German science and industry, harnessed for war, were in ruins. The ferocity of this war shows the shortcomings of viewing these repressive states as twins. At loggerheads were not simply two extremely authoritarian, concentration-camp regimes. Hitler's Germany aimed to provide the `final solution' to 1917, which had opened a breach in the world capitalist system, and thereby a non-capitalist path to modernity. German fascism was defeated on the Eastern Front by the tenacity of the Soviet citizenry under arms, who fought tooth and nail for the new Soviet order they had built, despite Stalin's repression.

Through the superficial symmetry of the `totalitarian' formula, Manne dissolves the inherent systemic incompatibility between the Soviet Union and Nazism. Moreover by a sleight of hand, comparing 1917 with 1933, he conflates Hitlerism not with Stalinism, but with Leninism, thereby erasing the fact that Stalin killed off the communists of 1917, and with it their principles of internationalism and socialist democracy. In this sense, Stalin did indeed have much in common with Hitler. Manne hails the demise of the Soviet Union as vindication for Cold Warriors such as himself. But it is not `totalitarianism' that has collapsed but an alternative industrial and social order, and with it the popular hopes that it had inspired, despite Stalinism. Fascism was the politics of despair. With the rise of Hanson's racist movement, in response to a rampant market, the absence of a left alternative is cause for concern. But if we accept the logic of Manne's totalitarianism shibboleth, One Nation and the left students mobilised against it are merely two sides of the one coin.

Roger Markwick is in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney.