a process of decomposition that will end up poisoning and corrupting society as a whole.36
Other arguments leave open the possibility that it may still be too early at this point in the history of the twentieth century to judge the situation in the USSR. That humanity, being still too alienated, or else—metaphysically speaking—being merely mortal, cannot exclude the future vindication of sacrifice. Precisely to the extent to which truth must inscribe itself concretely in the time and space of a specific situation, there exists no absolute vantage point from where it may be judged once and for all:
It certainly must be repeated: truth is concrete in time and in space. It must be kept quiet or said in conformity with strict relations but never, for any concept or reason whatsoever, outside of these relations. We must see the facts with the desolate and intrepid courage of human beings, for this is why we are communists. The lapses, the injustices, and even the crimes that our cause has incurred are crimes, injustices, and lapses that our cause commits—no matter how pure and untouched by evil we conceive it to be—when it becomes a concrete truth for the human beings of an alienated age and time. It is the mutilated and preformed men of our time, men themselves, and among them the best, who become assassins by virtue of carrying in their hands the burning flame of that other concrete but more real—or in any case the only real—truth that is in fact transmissible. They will also be punished, of course, they will be punished even after their death. But in the meantime, history—and this is the case, whether we want or not, in an objective way—does not permit us to talk or denounce everything all the time: man does not find himself at the height that would allow him to resist the disenchantment of himself, let us put it that way, by the radical self-critique with which he would finally humanize himself.37
Finally, there seems in fact to come a moment for the justification of a heroic and sacrificial outlook on history:
In light of this affirmation, nothing could appear for instance more impressive, more wrenchingly tremendous and beautiful, than the unprecedented sacrifice of the men who were sentenced to death in the Moscow trials, in their condition as victims consciously put on display to cover their names with ignominy, apparently an incomprehensible sacrifice, but for which it will be difficult to find even an approximate comparison in any other of the highest moments of human heroism from the past. Tomorrow history will vindicate these heroes, in spite of the errors, vacillations and weaknesses of their lives; these human beings who were able and knew how to accept the defaming stigma before the whole world, whose names are Bukharin, Piatakov, Rykov, Krestinski, Ter-Vaganyan, Smirnov, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Muralov, and so many others.38
All these interpretations, however, are not mutually exclusive, nor do they present a black-and-white picture of the ideological debate surrounding the Moscow trials. They sometimes invade the mind of a single character, dividing his inner sense with a terrifying uncertainty. This is the case of the communist intellectual Jacobo Ponce, who is on the verge of being expelled from the PCM—not unlike what happened, repeatedly, to Revueltas:
The other part of his self, the other part of his atrociously divided spirit, replied to him: no, these concrete truths are only small and isolated lies in the process of a general reality that will continue its course, despite and above everything. The miseries, dirty tricks, and crimes of Stalin and his cohorts will be seen by tomorrow’s communist society as an obscure and sinister disease of humanity from our time, from the tormented and delirious twentieth century that, all in all, will have been the century of the greatest and most inconceivable historical premonitions of humanity.39
From such ruminations, with their mixture of sinister premonition and sublime heroism, it is difficult to draw the simplistic conclusion that history, understood dialectically, would justify every possible means in the name of the communist end—or in the name of Stalin, as some of Revueltas’s detractors argue. Moreover, only a melodramatic imagination would define communism as a cause that is “pure and untouched by evil,” to speak the language of Los errores, but this does not mean that we should move to the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum so as to interpret evil as the profound truth of all militancy, which is the surest way to refute beforehand any future for the communist project.
In the final analysis, as in the quoted fragment above that seems to have given the novel its title, everything revolves around the status of errors: Is there or is there not sublation of the errors (mistakes, crimes, infamies) committed by history, in the sense of a dialectical Aufhebung? For those who reproach Revueltas for his blind confidence in the Hegelian dialectic, it would seem that the sheer idea of finding some sense or relevance in such errors only aggravates their criminal nature to the point of the abomination of justifying terror and totalitarianism. The problem with this indignant rejection of the possibility of sublating error, however, is that it leads to a position outside or beyond the history of communism. It interprets the errors as a definitive refutation of communism as such, in order henceforth to assert the cause of post-communism, or even anti-communism pure and simple. The Moscow trials, in this sense, play a role comparable to that of the Gulag, as described for the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, by leading to a defense of democratic liberalism as the only remedy against the repetition of radical Evil—that is, against the threat of so-called “totalitarianism,” with its twin faces of Nazism and communism: Hitler and Stalin.
For Revueltas, as for someone like Badiou, the task consists in thinking the crimes from within the politics of communism, and not the other way around—not so as to ratify the facts with the stamp of historical inevitability, but so as to formulate an immanent critique that at the same time would avoid the simple abandonment of communism as such. “I would not want you to take these somewhat bitter reflections as yet more grist to the mill of the feeble moralizing that typifies the contemporary critique of absolute politics or ‘totalitarianism,’” warns Badiou in his own Hegelian reading of the function of violence and semblance in the Moscow trials: “I am undertaking the exegesis of a singularity and of the greatness that belongs to it, even if the other side of this greatness, when grasped in terms of its conception of the real, encompasses acts of extraordinary violence.”40 What seems to be happening today, however, is a tendency to interrupt or, worse, to foreclose in anticipation any radical emancipatory project in the name of a new moral imperative—key to the “ethical turn” that globally defines the contemporary age from the 1980s onward, including within the so-called Left—which obliges us above all, if not exclusively, to avoid the repetition of the crime.
Beautiful Souls
Morality is impotence in action.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family
With Los errores, Revueltas may have become the unwitting accomplice of contemporary nihilism, which consists precisely in defining the Good only negatively by way of the need to avoid Evil. “Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the other way round,” as Badiou writes in his diagnosis of the ethical turn. “Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a counterpart of blind necessity.”41 In particular, there are two aspects of the debate regarding dogmatism in Los errores that run the risk of contributing to this complicity: the theme of the ethical role attributed to the party and the metaphysical, or more properly post-metaphysical, speculation about “man” or “humanity” (el hombre) as an erroneous being. Both of these themes obviously are presented in the hope of serving as possible correctives to the reigning dogmatism of Stalinism, but they could easily bring the reader to the point of adopting an ideological position that lies at the opposite extreme of the one its author upheld until his death just over thirty years ago.
Revueltas, on one hand, lets Jacobo Ponce, the character nearest to his own heart as an intellectual, devote most of his energy to the task of an ethical reflection about the party’s authority. “The party as an ethical notion”—such is the topic of Jacobo’s classes, against the orthodoxy of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat: “The party as a superior moral notion, not only in its role as political instrument but also as human consciousness, as the reappropriation of consciousness.”42 Thus, beyond the desire for reappropriation, or perhaps thanks to this desire, the critique of dogmatic reason already entails the temptation of a curious sense of moral superiority.