atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
José Revueltas, Dialéctica de la conciencia
Aside from its melodramatic plot line pitting the lumpenproletariat of prostitutes and pimps against the fascistoid anticommunists, Los errores in a second and parallel story presents a narrativized judgment regarding the dogmatic excesses of Stalinism and its nefarious effects in the rest of the world, including in the Mexican Communist Party. In this sense, the novel participates in a much larger self-evaluation of the twentieth century, in which we could also include Alain Badiou’s The Century or, closer to Revueltas’s home, parts of Bolívar Echeverría’s Vuelta de siglo.33 In fact, Badiou once commented to me that he had planned originally to include a chapter on Mexico in The Century. I am not sure what events (texts, artworks, political sequences) would have been summoned in this chapter, which for better or for worse remained in the drawer of good intentions. What I do know is that Los errores had already asked, forty years earlier, some of the same questions that drive Badiou’s project in The Century. In particular, Revueltas’s novel gives us important insights into the potential destiny of a whole jargon of finitude when it is combined with an antitotalitarian, antidogmatic, left-wing revisionism. A central place in this combination is reserved, as we will see, for our human capacity for error—our human finitude—reconceived as the essential truth in Hegel’s dialectic.
Revueltas, like Bertold Brecht in his play The Decision, to whom Badiou devotes a chapter in The Century, is concerned above all with the interpretation that history has in store for the great events in the international expansion and perversion of communism. Its main problem is addressed in an odd parenthesis, in which the narrator for once seems indistinguishable from the author’s own voice:
(One cannot escape the necessity of a free and heterodox reflection about the meaning of the “Moscow trials” and the place they occupy in the definition of our age, of our twentieth century, because we true communists—whether members of the party or not—are shouldering the terrible, overwhelming task of being the ones who bring history face to face with the disjunctive of having to decide whether this age, this perplexing century, will be designated as the century of the Moscow trials or as the century of the October revolution.)34
Revueltas leaves us no clear verdict in this regard. Was the twentieth century criminal or revolutionary? The disjunctive remains open throughout Los errores, since there is also no single character capable of occupying the organizing center of consciousness that we might attribute to its author. Critics such as Christopher Domínguez Michael, after expressing their dismay at Revueltas’s “far-fetched and immoral” hypothesis regarding the Moscow trials, are quick to add how much they lament the fact that Revueltas could have suggested some kind of dialectical justification of sacrifice and terror: “Revueltas takes the liberties of a novelist with regard to history and, in his enthusiasm for the Hegelian triads, he converts Bukharin’s tortured mind into a precise and chilling dialectical synthesis.”35 In reality, the text is far more ambiguous; and it even stages this ambiguity itself by providing several characters with a split conscience.
Thus, we find examples of an analysis of the problem in terms of the corrupting nature of power with regard to historical truth. This is the case of Olegario:
The Moscow trials in this sense—Olegario had told himself from that moment on—present an entirely new problem for the conscience of communists: the problems of power and historical truth split off and grow apart, to the point where they become opposed and violently exclude one another in the arena of open struggle. Meanwhile, the historical truth, in the margin of power, becomes invalidated, without support, and without any recourse other than the power of truth, in opposition to everything the truth of power represents in terms of compulsive force, repressive instruments, propaganda means, and so on. This is when one must uncover and demonstrate in any way possible the fact that power has entered into 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
