Martin Kettle*1 “How did my communist family get it so wrong? Because politics was their religion” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/22/communist-family-politics-religion
最近、共産党員の息子として生まれ育ったThe TimesのコラムニストDavid Aaronovitch氏*2のメモワール、Party Animalsが上梓されて*3 、英国では共産党員子女の告白が注目されているようなのだ。上掲のテクストはDavid Aaronovitch氏の著書に触発されたものだが、Martin Kettle氏の両親も共産党員である；
The first public event I can remember took place in 1953. I was three years old. But I don’t remember the Queen’s coronation, as other children of my age may have done. What I remember was my mother reading from the Daily Worker about the death of Stalin. This tells you a lot about what it was like to grow up in a communist family, even in a not particularly doctrinaire one like mine. We lived in a different world from normal people.
ここでのひとつの問いは、共産党員の多くは「本質的にディーセントで知性的な人たち」だったのに、何故粛清などの共産主義運動の暗黒面を知っても、はたまた共産主義的実験の失敗が誰の目にも明らかになったときでさえ、「党」にしがみついていたのか、という問い。
「党は教会だった」。信者にとって、共産主義とは「知性」だけでなく「信念や信仰」の問題でもあった。
(...)Nothing is harder for an atheist than to be told they are, in fact, religious. But in his book Aaronovitch makes just such a claim. The Party was a cause and a world– an incredibly supportive world in my experience – to which people, including his parents and mine, chose to dedicate their lives. “The Party was a church,” he writes. “Its strength was that it was about belief and faith as much as about intellect.”I think that is an important insight, and it still matters in leftwing politics today. It’s one that Eric Hobsbawm also came to, years ago, when he described the cold war as a war of religion. But in the 1950s the claim that communism was a religion would have been both insulting and laughable to my parents. For we communists had Marxism to guide us in our world view. Marxism was scientific – its laws of history were as incontestable as the laws of physics. Marxism was, quite simply, true. Everything else was mere ideology or, in the case of religion, superstition.
そして、
(…) They believed in the ideals. They believed that Marxism was true. They had faith for a lifetime. When the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, with whom the book starts, my boyhood hero too, flew into space in 1961, the faith still seemed plausible, providing you overlooked Stalin’s trials and purges, the invasion of Hungary, the ban on Boris Pasternak and the rest. But they went on believing in the ideals and the Party long after it became obvious that it had all gone irrevocably wrong, and was perhaps even wrong in the first place.
Communism didn’t work. And most people who lived under it hated it. These are not passing objections. They will need to be relearned as the centenary of the Russian revolution approaches. Yet our parents were like the deluded old Bolshevik in the gulag in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate*4, who cannot see the connection between his youthful political commitment and the horror of life and death in the labour camp. They were like – in Sam and Lavender’s case*5 they actually were – people who remained in a failed marriage. They couldn’t in the end face the reality that something that had given their lives such meaning had turned out so badly. They put loyalty before sense and reason in their politics and in their lives. They lived with their lies as best they could. And they certainly weren’t the only ones, then or since.
さて、Martin Kettle氏やDavid Aaronovitch氏の親たちが属したグレート・ブリテン共産党（Communist Party of Great Britain=CPGB）*6は1991年に解党した*7。Martin Kettle氏はその後に再活性化した左翼も共産党と同様の「宗教」性を共有した「別の教会」なのではないかと疑っている；
(…) True, we don’t have a communist movement any more. But we do without doubt have a revived left in Britain, which has dusted off some of the same ambitions, some of the same political ideas, some of the same historic dreams and some of the same deep flaws, foolishness and even intellectual turpitude that made British communism unsustainable.This left of today looks to me suspiciously as if it is developing into another church. This left too is marked by a reluctance to ask necessary but difficult questions about its plans for the world beyond the church walls. This left too seems happiest as a fellowship of true believers, squabbling among itself, dismissive of all those who remain sceptics or whose beliefs the elders find unacceptable. Just as the communists knew things deep down that they should have faced up to, so too does this left.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having a politics that is essentially a religion, providing that you recognise it for what it is, something personal between you and your friends. But I’ve been there and done that. If politics is an act of faith – rather than a programme and a willingness to change and adapt to new times – it will fail, as communism did. That’s fine for those for whom belief in socialist principles matters more than anything else, just as it was for the communists. But it won’t work. And in the end people will hate it too.
*1:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20121011/1349971231
*2:See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Aaronovitch http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/profile/David-Aaronovitch
*3:See Alexei Sayle “Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists by David Aaronovitch – dark memories of Marxism” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/30/party-animals-my-family-other-communists-review-david-aaronovitch-marxism この書評を書いている Alexei Sayle氏も共産党員の息子。
*4:See Francis Spufford “Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/31/life-fate-vasily-grossman
*5:David Aaronovitchの両親。
*6:See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain
*7:http://cpgb.org.uk/というサイトがあり、Communist Party of Great Britainを名乗っているが、これはCommunist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)という無関係ではないが別組織のサイト（See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain_%28Provisional_Central_Committee%29 ）。なお、解党後、グレート・ブリテン共産党の主流派はDemocratic Leftという組織を結成したが、1998年頃に活動を停止している（See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Left_%28UK%29）。
