Ferenc Fehér’s article “In the Bestiarium—A Contribution to the Cultural Anthropology of ‘Real Socialism’” (from Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller (Cambridge: Polity, 1987)) gives an account ‘from below’ of Communism. For him, like Foucault’s histories of the clinic, prisons and asylums, it is the Gulag which tells the, by now, not so secret history of this system: “the Gulag, in its past and present forms, is an encyclopaedia and an open display of the hidden principles which keep the society of the dictatorship over needs running.”
To put it briefly, the principles are displayed in the control by authorities in the camps, the disavowal of collectivisation and individual rights, the denial of leisure and opportunity to do non-prescribed work. The control of the prisoner, too, reveals the forms of total social control: “mobilising the endlessness of time against the finitude of an individual’s life,” thrown out of the wagons and into the stone-age arctic climes of remotest Soviet Union, “abandoned to nature, to the ‘natural’ process of decomposition and disintegration”—the undernourished prisoner, self-tortured by denied medical care, was systematically weakened, the listless form opening up an obedient mind, subservient in all respects. For Fehér, this distinguishes the Gulag from the concentration camp. There is none of the camp’s bombast, violent efficiency and operatic melodrama in the Gulag. (Which is perhaps one reason why the Holocaust is endlessly more appealing to the cinematic lens and the literary novel than any of the ravages of the Gulag.)
In the Gulag, the body is exposed to “excesses of climate, heat or frost”—and systematically, passively in effect, run down. “But in all cases,” he notes, “it was a kind of bestial utilitarianism, never aesthetic sadism, as with the Nazis, that prevailed.” Fehér sees in this the telos of the entire “dictatorship over needs,” “the principle of total social control, a self-abandonment of enlightenment, a return to the tutelage of authority, i.e. to complete disenlightenment.” He sees it here in the “re-education process…the process of ‘voluntary’ self-abandonment of one’s Ego, of one’s opinions”; the admission to re-education a “sign of grace” from on high, which entailed “being fully absorbed by an alien and unchallengeable authority”—the better option than being “selected for destruction.” Throughout his essay, Fehér is playing with the Cartesian split—arguing that the Soviets use “the finitude of the body in the service of an alienating and imprisoning ‘soul’.” Against the individual body’s finite imprisonment, the attempt to imprison the soul is the greater barbarism, in Fehér’s account.
His biographical details—former Communist dissident in the Budapest School, marginalised by the Soviet-friendly Kádár leadership—suggest his theoretical investment in this role of dissidence in exile. For Fehér, Communism has become a shell. The attempt of the totalising Soviet rulers to gain the minds—souls?—of its citizens is the frontline of the entire system—the souls of the people are to vibrate in sympathy with that of the system. And yet: “the Soviet bestiarium imposes a false ideology of collectivism and cheerful optimism on every citizen which is no longer internalised even by a minority but which has no accepted public competition.” Returning to the soul-body metaphor but in a different register, he suggests that Bolshevism—and Fascism, for that matter—discover “illness in the body[:] Fascism finds it in the alien body (this is why it can and must be destroyed), Bolshevism in the body of ‘its own’ subject* which, therefore, has to be incarcerated and re-educated.” Bolshevism, then, is the maintenance of a false ideology by a system of incarceration, re-education and totalised socialisation.
(* At last night's Michael Dutton talk, he remarked that -- unbelievably -- in the period of the Maoist revolution in China, the Communists executed as many from the inside as the Nationalists did from the outside. This Communist quest for purity is endlessly brutal and irrational. As Fehér notes in his sweeping section of Dictatorship Over Needs, Communism has a preference for hyperrationality but largely delivers social irrationality: "anyone entering these societies from the world of calculative rationality has, as a first impression, the feeling that he has arrived in Bedlam. Nothing functions, or at least nothing does in the way one would expect having been brought up in the spirit of rationalist standards; mysterious interdictions block the road from one to the other in the shortest and most innocent peripatetics of everyday life, and usually the question 'why' receives no answer at all." Far from being some Eastern quaintness though, this wholly apparent irrationality -- despite the Communist formation's "enormous, technologically perfectionist army" and sixty years of existence -- masks a genuine social problem.)
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