I had recently read for the first time Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" and was so impressed with that book that when Amazon informed me that "The God That Failed" containing six essays from disillusioned communists and sympathizers including Koestler was available, I eagerly purchased and read the book. The six essays in TGTF are essentially reminiscences from the authors about their initial attraction to communism and then their developing disillusionment and eventual abandonment of party membership and communist affiliation. The book is dated; these six communists were attracted to Marxist-communist ideals and thus to the party (the CP) and the nation (the Soviet Union) that best represented those ideals. Their attraction occurred in the 1920s and particularly the 1930s (the so-called "pink decade") when the economic misery caused by the worldwide depression convinced many that the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism hurt the masses and that the competitive search for markets generated economic nationalism and war. Their disaffection with communism was generated by events in the 1930s and 1940s. Although communism has few adherents today, it remains fascinating to read how the prospects of an egalitarian society engineered by social planning and supposedly conducive to worldwide peace attracted these well-meaning but naïve idealists in the second quarter of the last century, and is instructive on how ideologies mesmerize and captivate people leaving many to be "true believers" all their lives regardless of historical evidence (I consulted Eric Hoffer's classic "The True Believer" after reading TGTF), while allowing more independent adherents, i.e., the six authors in this book, to confront the ugly realities of theory and practice.
The essays are of uneven quality and interest. Not surprisingly, Koestler's is the best and most interesting, perhaps because he was the most influential of the six, with the possible exception of Andre Gide. The Soviets must have viewed Gide as very influential because he relates how they invited him to the Soviet Union in 1936 , treated him extremely well while he was there, and had him visit their model collective farms and modern factories, but he was sufficiently perceptive to not like what he saw: the centralization of power, the utter absence of personal freedom, and the subordination of artistic expression to social and political ends, i.e., "art for art's sake" and so-called "formalism" were decried while "socialist realism" was advanced (in the form of paintings of farm tractors!). I give Gide, a writer and dramatist, a lot of credit because economists and social scientists like Lincoln Steffens and the Webb's visited Stalin's USSR about the same time and one of them memorably said: "I have seen the future and it works!" Silone's essay is noteworthy, for me at least, for his comparison between private morality (how we conduct ourselves within our families and with our neighbors) and public morality or how the large organizations of the polity, e.g., the state, the courts, employers, treat people. His stories from his youth in rural Italy about how the rich and powerful twisted the law for their own benefit, and abused ordinary people provided the impetus for his joining the CP. If communism achieved power, he felt, then the virtues of our private behavior would suffuse the public square. Richard Wright, another essayist in TGTF, was an American black who was attracted to communism because they were one of the few political movements at that time that promoted Negro equality. It was interesting to read in Wright's essay about his conflicts with Negro communists who were just as adamant in spouting the party line than the most doctrinaire central European ideologist. Among the fascinating elements of these authors' reminiscences are the arguments provided by their "true believer" comrades in response to the authors' expression of disillusionment with communism or the Soviet Union. They're told: the end justifies the means, future generations will benefit from the sacrifices and hardships of this generation, the Soviet Union as the only workers' state must command our loyalty come what may, and the party in its collective wisdom can see into the future. This last response reminds me of Bukharin's comical exaggeration of dialectical materialism: "We (Marxists) can see far into the future because only we know the laws of motion of history." (!!)
The essayists are all writers, journalists, or poets, and a common element of their disillusionment was the absence of personal freedom in the Soviet Union, the irrelevance to their local communist party of that absence of freedom, and the reduction of artistic expression to a more "accessible" but homogenized and pedestrian style. None of them mentioned the liquidation of the kulaks, or whether collectivization of agriculture was economically effective (aside from its infringement on economic freedom) , or whether mass industrialization driven by central planning would be effective over the long haul (see Hayek). As artists and independent-minded intellectuals, they seemed to be more concerned with personal, artistic, and intellectual freedom, than with issues of economic performance and centralization vs. decentralization of economic / political power. As artists and intellectuals, that absence of personal freedom seemed to me to be their biggest motivator in leaving the party (along with Stalin's abuses of power like the purges as well as abrupt reversals of policy, e.g., Popular Front to the Nazi-Soviet Pact) while the irony is that European communism ultimately collapsed in part for its absence of personal freedom but more so for its inability to provide anywhere near a standard of living near its capitalist competitors, or more broadly its abysmal economic performance. A few of these writers recognized this and said as much, in effect that intellectual freedom is important to intellectuals, but that bread and butter and decent wages are more important to "proletarians."
All of these writers were initially left-leaning, became communists, and after their disaffection remained leftists of some sort or another, presumably democratic socialists. I would be interested if similar reminiscences of disaffected communists and Marxists who moved far to the right, e.g., Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, would contain similar, or different, elements of attraction to communism and disaffection from communism, but TGTF includes a more ideologically compact group of writers. Nonetheless, the book warrants 4 stars (almost 5 stars) for its fascinating look into ideological conversion and ideological disillusionment.
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