Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide

Final Solutions

Final Solutions

Human Nature,

Capitalism and Genocide

Sabby Sagall

First published 2013 by Pluto Press

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Contents

Acknowledgements

A number of colleagues, comrades and friends have read different parts of the manuscript and made valuable comments or else directed me to important sources and texts. I would like to thank Professor Alex Callinicos, Dr. Alison Sealey, Andrew Enever, Professor Bob Carter, Dave Renton, Hilary Westlake, Professor Iain Ferguson, Dr. Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Professor Joel Kovel, Professor John Docker, John Rees, John Rose, Ken Muller, Professor Kevin Kenny, Dr. Kurt Jacobsen, Lindsey German, Dr. Marci Green, Professor Mike Gonzalez, Assistant Professor Murat Paker, Dr. Rainer Funk, Professor Roy Foster, Professor Stephen Frosh and Dr. Tirril Harris. My partner Hilary Westlake and my friend Kurt Jacobsen read the entire manuscript: their ideas and suggestions, at times critical but always constructive, gave me great encouragement, and helped to sustain me during a long and difficult writing process. Naturally, any errors of fact or judgment remain my responsibility. Many thanks also to Kurt Jacobsen for compiling the index. Hilary developed a good impersonation of a badger in her constant exhortation to complete the work as quickly as possible. My friend John Rose's pressure was also helpful and important. My friends Dr. George Paizis, Gerry Norris and Mel Norris also expressed interest and provided encouragement.

I would also like to thank the staff at Pluto Press for their patience and encouragement. Roger Van Zwanenberg, my original editor at Pluto, supported my project from the earliest stage and has been particularly helpful throughout the years it has taken me to complete it. My editor, David Shulman, has also been most supportive during that time. Robert Webb, production editor, has ably helped me cope with editing difficulties and delays. I am also grateful to my friend Dr. Ghada Karmi for the original introduction to Roger Van Zwanenberg. Thanks also to Melanie Patrick for the cover design. Tim Clark, copy-editor, and Dave Stanford, typesetter, are to be commended for their skill and efficiency.

Introduction:

Capitalism and Genocide

Certain historical events seem to defy all attempts at rational explanation. How is it possible that one group of human beings should have consciously planned, or at least visibly intended, to exterminate another group? Despite innumerable books having been written on the subject, there is no general consensus. The experts continue to engage in fierce debate, or else to ignore each other's contributions if they fall in an alternative discipline.

Apart from humankind, no animal species destroys large numbers of their own kind without any rational socio-economic or biological benefit. Yet in the American continent, between 1492 and 1890, possibly 80 million Native Americans died at the hands of the European colonists or from diseases brought from Europe – perhaps 95 per cent of the pre-Columbian population – arguably the greatest genocide in world history. In Turkey, between 1915 and 1922, up to one and a half million Armenians were slaughtered on the orders of the Young Turk regime. During the Second World War, six million Jews, but also tens of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally ill were massacred in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe in a programme of industrial genocide. And during the Rwandan crisis in 1994, some 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus. In the twentieth century alone, over 70 million people have been killed through ethnic conflict, a figure ‘dwarfing that of previous centuries’.¹

The term ‘genocide’ was coined by the jurist Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in the US in 1944. He defined it as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’. The new word, denoting ‘an old practice in its modern development’, is made up from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). Lemkin went on, however, to argue that ‘it does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accompanied by mass killings of all members of a nation’. The term signified ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.² As Leo Kuper points out, the term was initially used in the indictment of the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, the first formal recognition of the crime of genocide.³

In 1946, two years after the publication of Lemkin's book, and thanks to his unflagging lobbying efforts, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution which stated that ‘many instances of such crimes ... have occurred, when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part ... The punishment of the crime of genocide is a matter of international concern.’⁴ Finally, the Genocide Convention of the UN was adopted unanimously and without abstentions in 1948.

However, Martin Shaw argues in his very useful book What Is Genocide? that the Geneva Convention's definition of genocide unduly narrowed Lemkin's original broad meaning by restricting it to the physical extermination of a group. Killing is, of course, the ultimate means of genocide, the one which ‘trumps all others’, but it is not its primary meaning. For Lemkin, as indicated above, this lay in the annihilation of a group's way of life, its social networks, its economic, cultural and political institutions.⁵ There is a vast and growing literature on genocide, ethnic violence and ethno-nationalism. The lion's share of this endeavour has been given over to analyses of the Nazi Holocaust. In recent years, however, there has been increasing interest in the other modern genocides. A number of universities have set up special departments or programmes devoted to the study of genocide, Yale in the US and Southampton in the UK being two examples.

There are three points here. First, at an obvious level, this is undoubtedly to be welcomed. The deeper our understanding of human violence, the greater our chances of preventing it. A cliché, no doubt, but one to cherish.

Second, the burgeoning interest in genocides other than the extermination of the Jews – for example, that of the Armenians – represents an implicit challenge to the notion of the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust. This has been the focus of an important debate in recent years.

A third important, if obvious, point: we need to adopt a theoretical approach that is capable of accounting for the phenomenon of genocide. Without theory or a set of theories, there can be no understanding of human history and society. For example, without theory, we cannot explain the origins of Nazism or why the Holocaust occurred between 1941 and 1945 and not in 1923. Similarly with the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915. The question is, which theory or set of theories is most adequate to the task of explanation?

Most of the work produced in the last three decades adopts an external, objective approach, analysing the historical, social or economic factors involved in the Nazi and other holocausts – the effects of war, colonisation, economic crisis, the class background of the perpetrators or the relationship between the state and civil society. There is neglect of the subjective factors involved.

In addition, most of the work published since the 1970s has been couched within a liberal perspective, one that emphasises the role of leaders, the structure of the state, or cultural factors – for example, Prussian militarism. The debate in the late 1980s and 1990s between German historians adopting either an intentionalist or a functionalist position is an example of such a liberal approach. Briefly, the debate was between those arguing that the Nazis had intended from the very beginning to exterminate the Jews, but had to wait for the right opportunity, and as against those who claimed that deteriorating circumstances radicalised the Nazis, driving them to perpetrate the Holocaust.

Furthermore, most work on modern genocide has been undertaken from within the confines of a single discipline, reflecting the fragmentation and specialisation of the existing social sciences. Thus, most books and articles are written by professional historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists or social psychologists, each adopting a conceptual approach derived from their specialism. Rarely do we find an attempt to forge links between the different fields, to grasp the inner ties that unite the partial aspects of what is, after all, a single social and historical reality.

Though many crucial insights have been developed from within these specialisms, in the end their separation amounts to confinement within an intellectual straitjacket, one that allows for no more than a partial explanation. Only by organically linking elements from history, social theory, economics and psychology will it be possible to approach an understanding of the Nazi death-camps and the killing fields of North America, Turkish Armenia and Rwanda.

To illustrate the point: it is, arguably hard to understand the Nazi Holocaust without examining the failure of the German middle class to overthrow feudalism and autocracy in the 1848 revolution, and the manner in which German capitalism subsequently developed. From there, it's on to the economic crises that beset Germany following defeat in the First World War and the Great Depression, and the effects of these crises on the urban and rural middle classes. Also crucial are the skilful manipulation of the despair of these strata by the Nazi Party and, finally, the mentality and family background of those who joined it.

Dori Laub makes a similar point, though from a different position. Referring to the wars and genocides of the twentieth century, he argues that ‘disciplines in dialogue with one another are better suited to capturing the phenomena of massive psychic trauma, the raw data of genocidal events, than one scholarly discipline by itself’. Historians found themselves in the unprecedented situation of having to analyse ‘events of an unfamiliar and overpowering nature ... that could not be articulated in the customary categories of traditional historiography’.⁶

There is one intellectual tradition, however, that has always insisted on the need to view the world as a totality, its parts organically interrelated, our perceptions of its separate aspects fused into an integrated vision. To follow the footpath of this tradition is to discover a large garden segmented into different sectors, each of which is, however, linked to every other, and from each of which one sees the garden as a whole. In other words, no garden wall separates our history from current social and power relations. Nor does any artificial boundary split off our past from the ideas and emotions that govern or accompany human actions and decisions in contemporary society.

The tradition that has always sought to link these different aspects is Marxism. As the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács described the concept of ‘totality’ in Hegel and Marx:

In Marx, the dialectical method aims at understanding society as a whole. Bourgeois thought concerns itself with objects that arise ... from the process of studying phenomena in isolation ... In the last analysis, Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified – dialectical and historical – science of the evolution of society as a totality.⁷

So, Marxism is at once a philosophy of humankind and of human history, a theory of society, that is, of social stability and change, and an economic theory of crisis, not just under capitalism but under pre-capitalist societies as well. These phenomena, and the theoretical approaches to them, do not fall into separate compartments but are aspects of a single, revolutionary view of our world, one that is, moreover, an integral part of our striving to change it. I therefore want to argue that Marxism, not liberal theory or postmodernism, is the theoretical approach to history and society best suited to deal with the question of genocide.

Nevertheless, to gain a fuller understanding of such extreme human violence, I believe that we do need, in addition, to get to grips with its subjective side. How do we account for hatred and destructiveness on such an enormous scale? What motivated the principal perpetrators, what ‘made them tick’? As Freud put it, ‘human behaviour implies a readiness to hate, an aggressiveness whose roots are unknown and that one would be inclined to characterise as elemental’.⁸ Jacqueline Rose points out that this question is at the heart of all Freud's writings on collective life. We must, therefore, complement the objective analysis with an understanding of the perpetrators’ motivation, their inner world.⁹ Or as Mark Levene expressed it: ‘Understanding genocide ... is very dependent on probing the mindset of the perpetrator's regime ... in order to tease out the anxieties, phobias and obsessions which ... drive it to act in often ... deeply irrational ways.’¹⁰ The question is, where do such destructive urges come from? Are genocide and war expressions of the same basic destructiveness? Is it a ‘genetic’ human death instinct or drive, as Freud argued in the aftermath of the First World War, echoed later by Melanie Klein? Or do we need to analyse the relevant family and character structures and their historical development? Linked to this is the issue of human nature: is there a set of human features present in all societies, a bundle of universal needs, drives and capacities without which we cannot understand the phenomenon of genocide?

Let us be clear. All human actions, even those representing the most rationally devised means to an end, carry an emotional element. Analysing this dimension of feeling, grasping its links to rational aspects of action, is not, therefore, a dispensable after-thought, but an inescapable part of our task if we are to understand our history. We cannot comprehend such psychic or emotional phenomena through the application solely of economic, political or even ideological concepts. This is true not only at the individual level but also at the collective level. It is a point well brought out by Ramsay MacMullen: ‘What I suggest is ... nothing new, but only long out of fashion: a way of searching out the emotions that determined behaviour; and entering into them ... representing them in all their colours, so as more accurately to reveal the past, or re-feel it, and so to understand it.’¹¹ In other words, there is an area of human existence that is irreducibly subjective, that cannot be flattened out by the weight of our objective social relations or understood simply as their mirror-image.

Marx and Engels themselves didn't have much to say on the individual, subjective aspect of history. There is a reference in The German Ideology to personality being conditioned by class relationships.¹² This is a start but, on its own, doesn't get us very far. They are not to blame for this. The modern psychological sciences could only emerge out of other sciences such as medicine or the social sciences. Rooted in the Enlightenment, Marx and Engels always followed with avid interest new scientific developments, enthusiastically welcoming, for example, the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species or of Morgan's anthropological studies of Native American communities, books about which Engels wrote important works. Unfortunately, Engels died in 1895, the year in which Freud and his colleague Breuer published Studies on Hysteria. Freud's chapter on psychotherapy is generally regarded as marking the inception of psychoanalysis.¹³ Arguably, Engels would have greeted Freud's work with equal interest, and possibly enthusiasm, though no doubt critically. Indeed, Engels himself wrote:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously ... but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him ... He works with mere thought material, which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of thought.¹⁴

Indeed, in the 1920s, Trotsky pleaded for tolerance towards psychoanalysis in the face of virulent attacks by many Bolsheviks who dismissed it as incompatible with Marxism due to its alleged anti-materialism and over-emphasis on sex.¹⁵ ‘He protested against the disparagement of Freudism all the more strongly because he held that Freud's teaching, like Pavlov's, was inherently materialistic.’¹⁶ In 1923, Trotsky asked: ‘Can [psychoanalysis] be reconciled with materialism, as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also), or is it hostile to it?’¹⁷ And in 1926 he wrote: ‘it would be too simple and crude to declare psycho-analysis incompatible with Marxism ... We are not obliged to adopt Freudism ... Freudism is a working hypothesis. It can produce, and it does produce, deductions and surmises which point to a materialist psychology.’¹⁸

I don't wish to ignore the work of academic and experimental social psychology in the area of modern genocide: there have been important contributions to our understanding of patterns of obedience and conformity. But the question remains: conformity to what? Where does the hatred, the urge to destroy, come from? I do, therefore, want to argue that psychoanalysis – because of its dynamic approach, its appreciation of the way the past casts its shadow over the present, its materialist focus on the family and hence on society, and because of its understanding of unconscious sources of motivation – is the psychological theory best equipped to dealing with the subjective factors at the heart of political and social action, in this case, genocide. As Erich Fromm observed: ‘Freud did not simply state the existence of unconscious processes in general (others had done that before him), but showed empirically how unconscious processes operate by demonstrating their operation in concrete and observable phenomena: neurotic symptoms, dreams, and the small acts of daily life.’¹⁹

The fact remains that there was a gap in classical Marxism, one created by the absence of a theory of subjectivity, of the way external, material conditions become translated into the psyche of the individual, not just as ideology but as their overall emotional life. As Otto Fenichel wrote: ‘the economic conditions do not just influence the individual directly, but also indirectly, via a change in his psychic structure’.²⁰ Nor did vulgar Marxists of the Stalinist and social-democratic traditions help, with their fear of psychologism, their mechanical belief in the automatic translation of economic crisis into class consciousness. Their refusal to acknowledge the reality of the subjective factor, to admit the need for mediation between objective and subjective, resulted in a failure to understand fully the ‘manner and mode by which ideology is translated in the everyday life and behaviour of the individual’, including the presence or absence of revolutionary consciousness.²¹

More recently, Stephen Frosh has argued that ‘The potential value of psychoanalysis for people concerned with politics lies in its ability to provide an account of subjectivity which links the external structures of the social world with the internal world of each individual.’²² This is important for Marxists. It suggests they should take seriously the potential ability of psychoanalysis to help us understand how external structures of exploitation and oppression are internalised in the mind of the individual. Joel Kovel wrote in similar vein: ‘psychoanalysis has discovered in each of us a spontaneous well of subjectivity that simply does not contain in any immediate sense the categories of political economy yet plays a powerful determining role in social life’.²³

Jacqueline Rose likewise upholds the fruitfulness of psychoanalysis in its understanding of the individual in society: ‘psychoanalysis remains for me the most powerful reading of the role of human subjects in the formation of states and nations, subjects as driven by their unconscious ... in thrall to identities that will not save them and that will readily destroy the world’.²⁴ Dori Laub, too, stresses the need to acknowledge ‘the presence of the irrational, the unconscious, and the roles they play in the control of the rational mind, an alternative that calls for the involvement of the psychoanalyst who has become familiar with these processes through clinical work’.²⁵ He quotes Walter Benjamin's description of the psychological aftermath of the First World War: ‘Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer but poorer in communicable experience?’²⁶

However, most psychoanalytical approaches deal with the effects on the victims or else investigate the emotional background of the perpetrators without linking this to the broad historical experience of their class. In short, they divorce psychology from history. Arguably, most psychoanalytical explanations of genocide are of this kind, reducing historical phenomena to the psychology of the protagonists and, conversely, failing to locate their individual psychology within the wider society and its politics.

We need to firmly reject such psychological reductionism, which is in no way inevitable. It is not part of the intellectual essence of psychoanalysis, even if, in practice, most psychoanalytical writers have based their work on such a psychologistic approach. (The real problem in most contemporary debate about genocide is the opposite – sociological reductionism.) In sum, we need a psychoanalysis that sets out to trace the character and family structures back to their historical roots and class backgrounds. This cannot, on its own, amount to a sufficient analysis, but it is an indispensable link in the overall chain of explanation. To quote Lukács again: ‘what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its autonomy and becomes an end in itself’.²⁷

To my knowledge, however, no work attempting to link the objective and the subjective reasons for genocide has been done since the 1970s. We need, therefore, to rejuvenate this dual approach, and to revisit the contribution of the two generations of psychoanalytic Marxists who consciously struggled to develop ideas that lent themselves to integration within a Marxist framework. The first generation consists of the early Wilhelm Reich and certain members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. The psychologist Oliver James has stressed Fromm's role in highlighting the link between the materialism of modern capitalism and emotional distress, an argument put forward by Fromm in his classic work, The Sane Society.²⁸ James quotes the work of psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan, whose studies established that American students who put materialist aspirations ahead of emotional well-being suffered more depression and anxiety than those who did not.²⁹ However, it was Reich who first argued in a paper published in 1929 that Marxism and psychoanalysis were compatible: ‘Just as Marxism was sociologically the expression of man becoming conscious of the laws of economics and the exploitation of a majority by the minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of man becoming conscious of the social repression of sex.’³⁰ As John Rickert put it in a perceptive article: ‘Marxism originally turned to psychoanalysis in an attempt to understand the role of psychological factors in social phenomena. Specifically, it sought an account of the origin and power of ideology, the subjective conditions for social change, and the processes by which society enters the individual psyche.’³¹

The failure of the Russian Revolution to spread, together with the rise of fascism in Europe, led a number of Marxist writers – in particular, but not only, the founders of the Frankfurt School – to attempt to deepen their understanding of the subjective obstacles to revolution. In Germany, following the failure of the revolution ushered in by the military collapse in 1918, most Marxists correctly stressed the absence of revolutionary leadership. For Karl Korsch, however: ‘In the fateful months after November 1918, when the organised political power of the bourgeoisie was smashed and outwardly there was nothing else in the way of the transition from capitalism to socialism, the great chance was never seized because the socio-psychological preconditions for its seizure were lacking.’³² Why did the working class fail to overthrow the decaying capitalist order with its perennial crises and wars and replace it with an alternative system – a revolutionary democracy? On the contrary, workers seemed to absorb not only capitalist ideology but capitalism's image of them as passive and ineffectual, its need for them to be accommodating and self-suppressing. Was it enough to talk about the failure of leadership, important as this was, or was there another factor, one that could perhaps explain why, in Lichtman's words, ‘people come to want what is destructive of their need’,³³ why workers not only remained imprisoned within the jail of alienation but had become their own jailers?³⁴

The early Reich, Fromm and Marcuse set about trying to answer these questions. To understand them might provide some clues as to the psychological conditions for change. For Reich and the members of the Frankfurt School, Freud, with his notions of repression, unconscious motivation, defence mechanisms and the internalisation of authority, was a necessary starting point, promising to illuminate ‘how human beings could come willingly to participate in their own dismemberment’.³⁵ As Reich expressed it, ‘psychoanalysis, by virtue of its method, can reveal the instinctual roots of the individual's social activity, and by virtue of its dialectical theory of instincts can clarify, in detail, the psychological effects of production conditions upon the individual...’ And most importantly, ‘psychoanalysis proves that the economic structure of society does not directly transform itself into ideologies inside the head’.³⁶ Put another way, Freud stressed that there was more to human suffering than could be explained by oppressive, external economic conditions.³⁷ As Russell Jacoby wrote: ‘The efforts of Lukács and Korsch, and after them others such as the Frankfurt School, were toward salvaging this lost dimension of Marxism: subjectivity.’³⁸

Moreover, if the family is the crucial mediator between society and the individual, the indispensable conveyor-belt of authority and repression, both Marx and Freud are found wanting. For Marx, the family was seen as ‘reflecting’ the existing social relations of production rather than as an incubator of pathology.³⁹ Or, as Max Horkheimer put it: ‘The family as one of the most important agents of education concerns itself with the reproduction of human character ... and largely imparts to human characters the authoritarian attitudes on which the bourgeois order depends.’⁴⁰ Freud, on the other hand, ‘ignores the manner in which the family acts as the mediation of larger social-historical processes’.⁴¹ The answer had to lie in some amalgamation of the two, more precisely, the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxism.

Periods of radical upheaval inevitably generate a preoccupation with a whole range of political and social issues, including that of personal alienation. Crucially, the liberation of society is seen to include the liberation of the human personality from the stultifying effects of capitalist alienation. So it was in the 1960s and the years following that most inspiring of decades. In the late 1960s, and during the 1970s and 1980s, a second generation of psychoanalytic Marxists made further important contributions to this debate – in chronological order, Reuben Osborn, Reimut Reiche, Michael Schneider, Joel Kovel, Richard Lichtman and Eugene Wolfenstein.⁴² Andrew Samuels is a psychoanalyst who has examined the links between politics and psychoanalysis from a Jungian perspective.⁴³ Most of these writers will be examined or referred to in the appropriate context in the chapters that follow. The current period that has been witnessing the emergence of new international movements will hopefully encourage fresh debate around these vital issues. Exploring these writers will, perhaps, throw light upon the tangled question of human destructiveness.

It is also crucial for this analysis to appreciate the contribution of post-Freudian psychoanalysis – in particular the work of Melanie Klein and the object-relations school. Too often writers outside the field of psychoanalysis write as though it began and ended with Freud, as if modern physics began and ended with Newton or Kepler.

There is, however, one potential intellectual obstacle to this project: the ongoing legacy of postmodernism. Around 1979–80, politics in the UK and the US moved sharply to the right. As always, politics both reflects and influences social and intellectual developments. The effect of this political shift was felt throughout the cultural and academic spheres of the Anglo-Saxon world. In social theory, the result was a decline of interest in theories purporting to offer total views of society and history and the place of the individual within them. Postmodernism, with its narrow subjectivism, its denial of objective reality and of the possibility of all-embracing theory, came to dominate the intellectual scene. Postmodernist influence still prevails in many, if not most, sociology departments. However, there are a number of sociologists, historians and others who are unhappy with this dominance.

An important factor in my analysis is a distinction between different kinds of genocide. Michael Mann argues that genocide is essentially a modern phenomenon, inexplicable outside the rise of ethnic consciousness, whereas in ancient times class tended to ‘trump’ ethnicity.⁴⁴ Moreover, in earlier years, anthropologists adduced several arguments to back up their claim that tribal or pre-‘civilisation’ communities, that is, hunter-gatherer or early agricultural societies, did not experience the equivalent of mass murder.⁴⁵ In more recent debates, however, this claim has been subject to question.⁴⁶ What is clear is that, as regards the ancient and medieval worlds, in Greek, Roman or biblical societies, and also, say, the Middle Eastern world of the Crusades, brutal mass murders took place. It is, however, open to doubt whether these can be placed in the same category as modern genocides. More sensible would be to separate out the different kinds of genocide, analysing them in terms of their various sorts of economic and political contexts and the different kinds of motivation at their heart.

One can, therefore, distinguish between, on the one hand, economic and political genocides, which do have a ‘rational’ or utilitarian basis, and, on the other, those that have little or no instrumental explanation, and can therefore be deemed ‘irrational’, explicable if not only, then largely, in psychological terms. As regards ‘political genocide’ or political mass murder, what Mann calls ‘classicide’, examples would be Stalin's murder by summary execution or deliberate starvation of some ten million of the better-off peasant kulaks and other dissidents, or Pol Pot's murder of some 1.7 million Cambodians.⁴⁷ Both of these had a terrible ‘rationale’ as far as the economic and political objectives of the respective regimes were concerned. But they need to be distinguished from those genocides where no visible benefit accrued to the regime or perpetrator group, where, on the contrary, a preoccupation with the extermination of particular groups was against their interests, as they perceived them, and indeed set back the attainment of their objectives.

This issue is distinct from the question of whether the liquidation of an entire class, ethnic, national or religious group was planned or intended, as opposed to being the result of spontaneous mass anger. Both ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ genocides have been planned – for example, Stalin's and Pol Pot's liquidation of those perceived as enemies of the state, and, of course, the Nazi Holocaust. Some have been ‘semi-planned’, or at least the result of an intention discernible over time, as in the case of the genocide of the Native Americans and other colonial peoples.

As for the second category of genocide – those without any ‘rational’ explanation – they can be further sub-divided into genocides that are ‘spontaneous’, motivated by rage or the desire for revenge, and those that can be related to social character. As I shall argue, all four ‘irrational’ genocides examined in this book are rooted in the perpetrators’ social character. Some modern genocides will be found to contain both ‘rational’ and irrational elements, again, for example, colonial genocides such as that of the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines.

The point of all this, as already stated, is to devise a psychological explanation that is compatible with, or rather in part derived from, a Marxist understanding of history. These arguments will be taken up in Part One. Part Two, containing the remaining four chapters, will offer case-studies of the four modern ‘irrational’ or character-based genocides.

These debates are not solely of academic interest. Theoretical clarification, enlarging our understanding of the history of humankind, grasping where we came from and who we are, helps us forge the intellectual tools that we need for the transformation of society. Understanding the roots of human destructiveness can only be, at best, a modest contribution to forging those tools. Without them, however, we shall be unable to transcend a society based on individual greed and competitiveness, political domination, the alienation of human labour and the commodification of human beings and their relationships. We need to understand in order to effect change. But underpinning a desire to understand is our imagination, and the vision of an alternative possible world in which individual and collective autonomy and our potential for cooperation, mutual care and democratic self-government will be maximised. It is not unreasonable to hope that such a society will perhaps, if not eliminate human destructiveness, then at least have the potential to minimise it.

PART ONE

THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS

CHAPTER ONE

Why Do People Kill People?

What impels one human being to kill another, not because the latter has harmed him in any way, but simply because s/he is a member of a certain ethnic, religious or national group? I would argue that no explanation of human action is complete unless it adduces, not only its causes or the conditions under which it occurs, but also its reasons or motives. Experts from different fields, academic and clinical, have offered diverse explanations. In this chapter I shall, firstly, outline some of the theoretical approaches to the question of genocide and ethnic cleansing – those of political sociology, sociology, history and social psychology, including the non-psychoanalytical version of the authoritarian personality. I don't mean to suggest that the exemplars I quote deal fully with the contributions of these disciplines, merely that they represent good examples of their different approaches. I shall attempt to assess the extent to which they fulfil the criterion of providing reasons for genocidal behaviour. Secondly, I shall suggest, where possible, how insights arising out of these diverse methods might be integrated organically into a psychoanalytic Marxist view of history.

Towards Understanding Genocide

Political sociology

To what do we ascribe human destructiveness on such a scale? Recent work in the field of political sociology offers us one kind of answer. Michael Mann's book, The Dark Side of Democracy (2005), on ethnic cleansing and genocide, suggests eight general theses that purport to give us a collective explanation of these murderous phenomena.¹ To summarise briefly the main points:

Firstly, murderous cleansing is a modern phenomenon: conventional warfare has increasingly targeted civilian populations; moreover, amid the multi-ethnicity of modern societies, the ideal of rule by the people or ‘demos’ has often been entwined with ‘ethnos’ to produce the dominance of a particular group.

Secondly, ethnic hostility arises ‘where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification’.² In the past, ethnic conflict was rare since most big societies were divided along class lines, dominated by an aristocracy or other elite that rarely shared a common culture with the people. Where the modern struggle for democracy involved an entire people struggling against rulers defined as foreign, an ethnic sense of identity arose, for example in Ireland or Poland.

Thirdly, ethno-nationalism is strongest where it becomes enmeshed with a sense of exploitation: for example, the Nazis felt exploited by the Jews, the Turks by the Armenians, the Hutus by the Tutsis. The danger zone of murderous cleansing is reached when movements claiming to represent two ethnic groups both lay claim to their own state having all or part of the same territory, as in colonial genocides. The brink of murderous cleansing is reached when the stronger side believes it has overwhelming military power and ideological legitimacy, as in Yugoslavia. Going over the edge into murderous cleansing occurs when the state exercising sovereignty over the contested territory has been factionalised and radicalised in an unstable geopolitical environment that usually leads to war.

Of course, ethnic mass murder is not usually the initial intention of the perpetrators of violence, not even in the case of Hitler. When they reach that point, it is usually Plan C, Plan A being a compromise or straightforward repression, Plan B ‘a more radically repressive adaptation to the failure of Plan A’.³ Plan C, involving murderous cleansing, is adopted after the failure of A and B. Genocide is certainly deliberate but not premeditated. Moreover, there are three main levels of perpetrators: the radical elites running the party and state; the bands of militants forming the violent paramilitaries; and the core constituencies providing mass if not majority popular support.

Finally, it is ordinary people living in normal social structures who carry out murderous cleansing. Mann quotes the psychologist Charny: ‘the mass killers of humankind are largely everyday human beings – what we have called normal people according to currently accepted definitions by the mental health profession’.⁴ Indeed, in Bosnia, some of them were psychiatrists! Placed in similar situations, anyone might commit ethnic murder. ‘To understand ethnic cleansing, we need a sociology of power more than a special psychology of perpetrators as disturbed or psychotic people – though some may be.’⁵

These theses certainly provide significant insights insofar as they shed light on the conditions under which acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide have occurred in the modern world. However, in the end, they are a series of descriptions of factors, some of which, though not all, have been present in each of the events. Moreover, they refer exclusively to external factors – political, economic, territorial, and so on. Mann's analysis remains incomplete in that his theses do not offer us an explanation of genocide that includes the internal reasons or motives that drove groups of people to commit such crimes. And surely we need to understand what forces of hatred and destructiveness are unleashed by the various precipitating factors. The perpetrators of genocidal violence may well be ‘ordinary people’, and not clinically diagnosed homicidal psychotics, but at the very least certain situations have produced drastically altered mental states, characterised by a high level of destructiveness. Mann identifies necessary conditions, but these do not contain, in addition, sufficient conditions: a complete explanation requires both.

Furthermore, Mann writes as though pathology were a purely individual phenomenon. Yet surely we can legitimately posit the notion of social pathology, a situation in which a high proportion of members of a society or of certain groups or classes display identifiable symptoms of emotional malfunction, of being severely out of touch with reality. The middle class in Nazi Germany – and currently Israeli society – arguably fall within this category. If so, then individuals would not stand out from the pathological group to which they belong. As group psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described it: ‘no individual, however isolated in time and space, can be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology’.⁶ Or again: ‘diseases manifest themselves in the individual but they have characteristics that make it clear that it is the group rather than the individual that is stricken’.⁷

This is the position espoused by Erich Fromm in his much-admired The Sane Society (1956) in which he argues that ‘many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity: the problem of mental health is that of unadjusted individuals, not ... of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself’. He proposes, therefore, to deal ‘not with individual pathology but with the pathology of normalcy ... the pathology of contemporary Western society’.⁸

Fromm invokes the authority of no less a figure than Freud himself, who wrote: ‘would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilisation – or epochs of it – possibly even the whole of humanity – have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilising trends’.⁹ Freud underpinned this view with an insistence on the social nature of human beings, a challenge to the common interpretation of Freud as irredeemably individualistic. I will return to this argument in Chapter 2.

Psychoanalytic Marxist Michael Schneider offers a further example of group pathology. He argues that the traditional bourgeoisie, that of the pre-imperialist, pre-monopoly capitalist era, once it lost its independent, entrepreneurial role as the creator of new, revolutionary means of production, became prone to specific forms of mental illness. This collective neurosis expressed the loss of its historical role and its new powerlessness, its inability to defeat the emerging depersonalised structures of corporate power and its state ally.

By destroying its social and economic foundation, developing monopoly capitalism not only transformed the classic bourgeois family into a breeding ground of psychic crises and disturbances; but through its elements of immanent social and political crisis, it created a social ‘atmosphere’ which favoured the massive creation of neurosis.¹⁰

Mann's theses are useful insofar as they refer to the sum of necessary external conditions for the occurrence of genocide. But, as already suggested, explanations both of natural phenomena and of human behaviour need to identify sufficient conditions as well. Moreover, Mann's necessary conditions refer to certain indispensable precipitating factors. But again, we need in addition to know if there are any predisposing factors, an inner proclivity or receptiveness, that becomes activated under the right precipitating conditions. Both predisposing and precipitating factors are necessary if we are to provide a fully rounded explanation, one that is both theoretically valid and empirically plausible. In other words, we need to establish the existence of the following historical situation: the presence of subjective predisposing factors which, however, lack precipitating factors such as economic crisis or social breakdown, intensifying military or territorial conflict between rival ethnic or national groups, favourable strategic moments, and so on. The converse would be historical situations which contain such precipitating factors but which do not slide into murderous cleansing. Can we establish that these situations do not result in genocide because of the absence of the necessary predisposing, subjective factors? Clearly, in both these situations, it would be hard to draw conclusions in the absence of relevant historical or empirical research.

Taking the second category first – the presence of objective precipitating factors with no genocidal outcome – there have, of course, been many such situations in the post-war world, for example, the numerous conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa in which hundreds of thousands have perished but which fall short of a Rwandan-type exterminatory genocide. The conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s would perhaps be another, despite the Srebrenica massacre. Eight thousand men and boys were murdered but women and girls, around 16,000, were escorted to Tuzla by the Bosnian Serbs.¹¹ But clearly such war zones do not provide fertile ground for conducting the kind of scrupulous research necessary to establish the presence of the subjective factors that are an essential ingredient of irrational genocide.

Sociology

As we saw in the Introduction, Martin Shaw aims to restore Lemkin's original sociological definition of genocide by seeing it as involving more than the physical extermination of a group. Important though this is – and genocide always involves mass killing – the core meaning of the term refers, in addition, to the use of legal and military power to destroy a group's social, economic, political and cultural life and institutions.¹²

Shaw therefore criticises the proliferation of concepts intended to refer to ‘other forms of violence’ – for example, ethnic cleansing, but including the many ‘-cides’ of genocide, such as ethnocide, classicide, politicide, etc.¹³ These are taken to refer to phenomena separate from ‘full-blown genocide’, in particular