The last words of this book must be reserved for the uncountable people who militated in parties and movements that led to these socio-political systems, supported or even in good faith staffed them. This includes others who, like Trotskyites, criticized them but could not think of revolutions that would not reproduce the problems that made of them an oppressive rather than an emancipatory reality. Surely there have been those who were cynical as well as misguided or prone to delusion. But there were also those, and they were legion, who were dedicated and believed that the future would be bright once class society and private property were abolished, despite the price paid in the transitional period. These were people who sided with the wretched of the earth and took upon themselves sometimes personally dangerous and difficult, even brutal, decisions, with the dream of a society free from exploitation and oppression in the hope that, as Brecht poetically put it, those who were born later would forgive them for their harshness. Far too often they made mistakes and committed unjustifiable acts, but far too often did they do so in good faith, in the midst of complicated historical processes. The situation is no longer the same, history has moved on and the shortcomings of such a perspective are now plain to see.

Just after the Second World War (partly under the influence of debates about French resistance heroes and collaborationists, and in fact siding to a large extent with Stalinist arguments, with a sort of consequentialist ethic), Merleau-Ponty ([1947] 1951, particularly 3–4) thought it possible that even the Moscow Trials could truly make sense – could be justified indeed – to communists. He thought that within Marxism, the outcomes of decisions – right or wrong – could acquire an objectivity that implied a sort of personal responsibility for agents, in which revolutionary violence and terror found a place, though extraordinary if compared with other historical circumstances. Future outcomes of a history in the making were somehow the judge of the present, in which actors in a strange retrospective/prospective manner could find themselves wrong. Moreover, he argued that liberalism was not innocent of violence either, in fact even under ordinary circumstances.