The term ‘bourgeoisie’ is a technicality of the Marxist theory. But it has a real human reference, and that reference is you and me. We who own property, deal in markets, collect salaries, have spouses and children, and live by the ordinary day-to-day morality of neighbourliness, are the people whom Lenin set out to destroy. We are the targets of resentment, and
Marxism is the theory of that resentment.
One thing we should surely learn from the Russian revolution is that resentment is always on the lookout for the theories that will justify it. And the lesson that bore in on me in vivid and unforgettable ways during my own journeys behind the Iron Curtain, is that resentment, when it finally takes power, spells the death of politics. The real purpose of politics is not to express resentment but to contain and conciliate it. When, in the wake of the Grenfell fire, leading political figures began calling for a ‘day of rage’, and for the requisitioning of bourgeois property, I heard again the voice of that old resentment. And I asked myself how could it be that the lesson has not been learned?
The problem is not a lack of literature. Invocations of communist terror abound, and include masterpieces that all educated people should know, such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. However, resentment easily overrides the evidence. Just as anti-Semitism has survived constant reminders of the Holocaust, so does the Marxist vision survive the accumulated testimony to its murderous legacy. Resentful people cherish their hatred more than they respect the rights of those who arouse it.
For this reason it is surely time to establish museums devoted to the Marxist legacy. We have a model, indeed, in the House of Terror, established in Budapest in 2002 under the directorship of Maria Schmidt. This commemorates the victims of both fascism and communism, and has been controversial for that very reason. Even in Hungary, leftist intellectuals tell us that the two evils cannot be compared, and that to commemorate their victims in a single museum is to deny their most important difference: that the aims of communism were good, those of fascism bad. It is precisely in order to counter that kind of apology that Maria Schmidt has turned the same light on both ideologies.
The aim of both, she insists, was the same. What difference does it make that one focused its resentment on the Jews, the other on the bourgeoisie, when the primary aim was in both cases the mass murder of their victims? Or do we say, with Eric Hobs-bawm, that in the one case, but not in the other, the end justified the means?Roger Scruton