Totalitarianism Seminar

The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt

Totalitarianism is completely different from other forms of political organisation. It develops an entirely new political institution and destroys all political, legal and cultural traditions of the country. It transforms the classes into masses and strips people of their individuality. Totalitarianism is so different from what has come before it’s difficult to predict their course of action. Some may try to compare totalitarianism as some modern form of tyranny but the difference is that tyranny is entirely lawless but totalitarianism believes that there’s a higher law.

Totalitarianism defies all positive law, even those it has established itself. Positive law= Statute and common law, laws that are developed by society. Totalitarian law is derived from the law of history or the law of nature. Arendt uses the examples of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia to demonstrate different types of totalitarian societies. Nazi Germany followed the law of nature, using biology, as the basis for their laws. The race struggle and segregation of the Jews was based on Darwin’s idea that man is a product of natural development. Whereas Stalin’s Communist Russia was based on Marx’s teleological view of history, that history is working towards something. Engels referred to Marx as the “Darwin of History”.

Totalitarianism is prepared to sacrifice everyone’s interests to follow the letter of the law. You remove people’s individuality so they can’t break away from the regime. It has total bureaucracy so that if one person goes against the ideology then there is always someone above them to punish them. Because totalitarian regimes invade every aspect of society there are no public spaces for people to express their feelings or exchange ideas of rebellion, so people begin to feel isolated, which prevents revolution.

Terror and ideology strips away peoples responsibility and ability to choose as they depend on the authority to take the responsibility. An example of this is the Milgram experiment.
You don’t have to be inherently evil to do bad things, Arendt identifies this as the “banality of evil”. An example of this is the Stanford Prison Experiment, where Professor Zimbardo created a prison atmosphere using student volunteers who were assigned the role of prisoner or guard for two weeks. Zimbardo took the role of prison officer. He gave the guards the position of total power but they weren’t allowed to use physical violence. By day 2 some of the prisoners chose to rebel by barricading themselves in their rooms with their bed. The professor didn’t expect them to rebel so early but they were rebelling against the status differences. The guards were given reflective sunglasses so they couldn’t see their eyes which reduced their humanity. The prisoner at the head of the rebellion was put in the “hole” which was a completely dark, small, cramped space. The guards would wake the prisoners up in the middle of the night to disorientate them and force them to do menial tasks and hard physical work, whilst they hurled insults at them. One prisoner asked to leave, at which point the professor (acting as prison officer) offered him instead the option to act as a snitch. The prisoner then took this as he was not allowed to leave and he returned to tell the other prisoners that they weren’t permitted to leave. The prisoner then pretended to be crazy but this soon began to turn into real mental issues, at which point he was allowed to leave the experiment. After he left rumours began that he was going to return to free the other prisoners. The professor reacted to this as a prison officer and saw this as a real threat so chose to relocate the prisoners. Zimbardo was questioned about the legitimacy of the experiment but he was by this point more concerned about the prison than the experiment.  The rumoured jailbreak never took place which they took out on the prisoners. The prisoners then lost their unity and didn't stand by one another. Prisoner 819 went to leave the experiment but when he was leaving he heard the other prisoners shout “prisoner 819 did a bad thing”. This made 819 not want to go as he didn't want to be a bad prisoner and the professor had to remind him that this wasn't a real prison. As time went on the guards became more creative with their evil. Prisoner 416 went on a hunger strike and by da 5 was put in the hole. The prisoners were offered the option to give up their blankets in return for 416 being allowed to leave and none of the prisoners agreed to this. The prisoners completely lost any sense of unity and sided with the guards view of 416. By day 5, 4 prisoners had broken down and been released. Another professor went down to see the experiment and she was disgusted by the suffering of the young men. The next day the experiment ended.

There are three types of ideology:
1) Based on motion based on history.
2) Becomes independent from experience/reality
3) Individuals perceptions of reality always changes

Propaganda removes the reality from experience. Terror is the realisation of the totalitarian movement. The totalitarian regime claims to transform human beings into unfailing carriers of law, which before they were just subject to. 

Karl Marx 1818-1883

Marx was born in Germany to Jewish parents but later converted to Lutherism . His career took many different turns as he moved from studying law, to philosophy then to revolution.  Marx met Fredrich Engles in 1844 in Paris. Engles was a factory owner so he was living right in the heart of the industrial revolution. Engles had a profound influence in Marx’s most renowned publication “The Communist Manifesto”.

Marx believed that you could explain everything about a society by analysing the way economic forces shape social, religious, legal and political processes. He described man as the productive animal; mankind creates the environment it inhabits, “not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape”.  Like Hegel, Marx had a teleological approach to history, he believed it was heading towards something.

According to Engles Marx’s theory provided a fusion of:
1) Hegelian Philosophy
2) British Empiricism
3)French Revolutionary Politics – Especially socialist politics

Although Marx did not agree with Hegel’s mysticism, he did however like Hegel’s dialectic, the system of change through conflict. Marx saw the significance in the class struggle throughout history and sought the explanation of the historical process through the relationship between man and the material conditions of his existence (dialectic materialism).

Marx was opposed to capitalism because it produced “alienation”.  The property-less working class (proletariat) had nothing to lose but everything to gain, yet they still did nothing to change their situation. Marx stated this was due to the fact that capitalism alienates men from themselves and from each other; we begin to see one another as commodities to exploit. Work is the loss of self, it belongs to another, it does not help to develop our body or mind.  (This is characterised in instances where people state they are not themselves when they are at work.)  Capitalism alienates us from our need for satisfying work, replacing it with the desire for money.  Capitalism seeds its own destruction, the things we want to buy will always be more expensive than what we could earn, the system in itself doesn’t work. Although capitalism will try to survive, Marx states that the fixes are only temporary and the collapse of capitalism is inevitable.

In a communist society there would be no difference between mental and physical labour. Whether you’re a scientist, a musician or a bin man, has no relevance as all of these jobs would have equal worth. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.  People will do the job which they enjoy and which they are skilled at. There would be no need for a state as everyone would have an equal share of money. Marx saw communism as being a utopian society, a Garden of Eden on Earth.