George Steiner on Marxism and fascism: Notes from a reading of Language and silence: essays 1958-1966 by George Steiner

Steiner is very generous in the time and thought he pays to Marxism and the writings of leaders of the communist movement.

But like many others, he takes for good coin the Stalinist claims to continuity with Lenin. Whereas Stalinism represented a murderous break with and burial of that continuity.

Still, in a piece like "The Writer and Communism" excerpted below, he demonstrates using aesthetics what Trotsky and his comrades showed in the realm of working class politics: the absolute contradiction between Marxism and fascism.

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THE WRITER AND COMMUNISM

One of the striking differences between Fascism and Communism is this: Fascism has inspired no great work of art. With the possible exception of Montherlant, it has drawn into its orbit no writer of the first rank. (Ezra Pound was no Fascist; he used the occasions and trappings of Fascism for his own quirky economics.) Communism, on the contrary, has been a central force in much of the finest of modern literature; and personal encounter with Communism has marked the consciousness and career of many of the major writers of the age.

Why this difference? No doubt, Fascism is too vile and scurrilous an ideology to produce those charities of the imagination which are essential to literate art. Communism, even where it has gone venomous, is a mythology of the human future, a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand. Fascism is the ultimate code of the hoodlum; Communism fails because it would seek to impose upon the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct an artificial ideal of self-denial and historic purpose. Fascism tyrannizes through contempt of man; Communism tyrannizes by exalting man above that sphere of private error, private ambition, and private love which we call freedom.

There is also a more specific difference. Hitler and Goebbels were cunning manipulators of language; but they had scant respect for the life of the mind. Communism, by contrast, is a creed penetrated from the very moment of its historical origin by a sense of the values of intellect and art. In Marx and Engels this sense is explicit. They were intellectuals to the core. Lenin paid to art the supreme tribute of fear; he shied away from it, acknowledging the obscure, entrancing powers of plastic and musical form over the rational intellect. Trotsky was a littérateur in the most flamboyant sense of the word. Even under Stalin, the writer and the literary work played a vital role in Communist strategy. Writers were persecuted and killed precisely because literature was recognized as an important and potentially dangerous force. This is a crucial point. Literature was being honored, in however cruel or perverted a way, by the very fact of Stalin's distrust. And when the partial thaw came, the position of the writer in Soviet society grew once again complex and problematic. One cannot conceive of a Fascist state being shaken by a mere book; but Doctor Zhivago was one of the major crises in the recent life of the intelligentsia in Communist Russia.

Whether by instinct or meditation, writers have always been aware of their special position in Communist ideology. They have taken Communism seriously because it has taken them seriously....