The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  V

  In 1871 few places seemed further from the revolutionary turbulence of the Parisian Hôtel de Ville than the hushed neo-classical splendour of London’s British Museum Library. Seated in his comfortable blue leather-upholstered chair at desk number G7, beneath the massive dome painted in cool Georgian azure and picked out in gold, Karl Marx immersed himself in tomes of economics and history. Despite the calm surroundings, it could be tough going; at one particularly low moment he told one of his daughters that he had been transformed into ‘a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’ (a sentiment many academics will recognize).43

  Marx had decided to forsake politics for the library, and had shifted the focus of his struggles from the barricades to the realm of theory. Now that he was losing his earlier faith in proletarian heroism, he sought to show that another force would drive the world to Communism – economics. The result was his monumental, if little-read, work of synthesis: Capital.

  As the title suggests, Capital was largely an analysis of the mechanisms, weaknesses and supposedly ultimate demise of capitalism, and said little about Communism. But as Marx became more interested in the realities of the modern economy his views of Communism and how to achieve it began to change. Both he and Engels now insisted that a Communist society had to be a more economically rational society than one based on capitalism, fully embracing the realities of industrial society. His earlier opinion that labour could be self-motivated, creative and enjoyable yielded to the much more pessimistic view that work would have to be directed from above, by technicians and bosses. Promises of workers’ control over their factories were quietly dropped, and Marx made it clear that proletarian heroism and creativity were not enough. As he explained in Capital, ‘all combined labour on a large scale requires… a directing authority’.44 Self-realization and individual development could only happen after the end of the work-day, during leisure time.45 Moreover, Marx increasingly implied that he no longer hoped for the Romantic dream of the ‘complete’ man as morning hunter, afternoon fisherman and evening critic; even under Communism, he suggested, the modern division of labour was the only efficient way of producing things. For Marx now, the main advantage of Communism over capitalism lay in efficiency: rational planning and its ability to end the chaotic booms and busts brought by the free market.

  Marx and Engels were decisively tilting Marxism in a Modernist direction. Their Communism now increasingly resembled the mechanized and orderly modern factory rather than a Romantic idyll of self-fulfilment, whilst the heroism of the barricades was postponed. And given this view of Communism, it is not surprising that Marx insisted that it could only come about when the economic preconditions – large-scale industry and a dominant proletariat – had emerged. Marx had ceased to view the revolutionary heroism of the proletariat as the main driving-force of history. Rather, the objective, ‘scientific’ laws of social and economic development would deliver Communism, and the best people to accomplish this task were both proletarians and expert Marxists who understood the ‘science’ of history.46 Revolution could not be premature; the proletariat would have to wait until the time was ripe.

  This ‘scientific’ approach to Marxism was, in part, a response to the intellectual currents of the 1860s. Darwinian social theorists like Herbert Spencer were now in the ascendant; it was now fashionable to argue that mankind was on the verge of discovering general laws which would apply both to human societies and to the natural world. Marx and Engels were anxious to keep abreast of the latest scientific thinking. As Engels declared at Marx’s funeral in 1883, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’47 It was Engels who was particularly interested in transforming Marxism into a science, and thus proving the objective necessity of Communism. He spent a great deal of time trying to graft Hegel’s ideas of the dialectical pattern of history onto the natural sciences. The result was a body of rather eccentric theories that came to be known as ‘Dialectical Materialism’.48 One of these dialectical ‘laws’ was the theory that the natural world, like human societies, advanced through periods of evolutionary change, followed by revolutionary ‘leaps’; so, for instance, when heated, water changes gradually until it suddenly undergoes a ‘revolutionary’ transformation into steam.49 As will be seen, in later years, under Communist regimes these theories were used to justify efforts to promote extraordinary, and usually disastrous, economic ‘leaps forward’. Yet Engels himself tended not to take his ideas in this revolutionary direction. His attempt to recast Marxism as a science led inexorably to gradualist conclusions: if the laws of nature ensured that Communism was coming anyway, why try to force history?50

  Nevertheless, the revolutionary Radicalism of 1848 and the Romanticism of the youthful Marx were never entirely purged from an increasingly Modernist Marxism. Instead, Marx himself tried to reconcile the three elements, sketching what was essentially a route-map, showing the way to Communism, but delaying its more egalitarian elements to the distant future. The map was not consistent, as Marx was notoriously resistant to speculating about the future, and his followers had to piece it together from his and Engels’ often contradictory statements. But a broad outline was generally accepted by Marxists: Communist parties would organize the working class in preparation for the proletarian revolution, but during the initial stages of the revolution the working class could not entirely be trusted. Communists, ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties’, would therefore have to take the lead.51 Similarly, in the early stages of Communism immediately after the revolution, though the market and private property would be abolished, the state would persist. A new state, the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, would be established, which would suppress bourgeois opposition, and gradually ‘centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State’.52 There would then follow a longer phase, the ‘lower’ stage of Communism (which the Bolsheviks later called ‘socialism’), when workers, who still could not yet be trusted to work simply for the love of it, would be paid according to the amount they did. Only later, during the ‘higher’ stage of Communism (which the Bolsheviks described as ‘Communism’), would workers become so collectivist and public-spirited that they could be relied on to work without recourse to either coercive discipline or monetary bribes; only then would society be governed by the principle, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’; and only then would the whole of the people be able to govern themselves, allowing the state finally to ‘wither away’.53

  This route-map dominated Marxist thinking, and all Marxists were obliged to follow it. But it could obviously be interpreted in many different ways. For example, the timetable could vary: the road to Communism might be very swift or rather gradual, it could be a journey accompanied by revolutionary violence or one of largely peaceful economic development. Marxists could and did disagree about who was to be in the driving seat – the revolutionary working class, or a group of wise Marxist experts on the laws of history. They also took different views of the role of the state, and how quickly it could be replaced by a Paris Commune-style democracy.

  Marxism therefore still had its Romantic, Radical and Modernist elements, but from the 1860s until World War I a new equilibrium had been established, with its centre of gravity decisively shifted towards Modernism. The main Romantic Marxist texts of the 1840s were not published until the 1930s, and Engels, who became the leading theoretician after Marx’s death in 1883, set about popularizing a Modernist form of Marxism in seminal works such as Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. According to this Marxism, the journey to Communism would be a gradual one, workers would have to wait until economic conditions were ripe, and the Communist ideal was to be founded on modern industry and a powerful bureaucracy (under the control of workers). In the meantime, Communists, or ‘Social Democrats’ as they were now called, were to establish
well-organized, centralized political parties. They were to fight for workers’ interests as far as they could within the existing ‘bourgeois’ political system, participate in elections, and were not to push for premature revolutions. However, they were to maintain their independence; they were not to slip too far to the right and collaborate with bourgeois parties. This Marxism was far from the revolutionary egalitarianism of the barricades.

  After a long period in the 1850s when repression made any socialist politics very difficult, Marx and Engels returned to political activism in the 1860s, helping to found the ‘First International’, a grouping of national socialist parties, in 1864. The results were mixed. They failed to persuade the pragmatic British trade unionists to break from the Liberal party, and the International’s influence in Britain never recovered. But the left, if anything, was even more of a threat to Marx and Engels. Their main opponents were the anarchists Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, for whom Marxism seemed authoritarian and who favoured a decentralized form of socialism. For Bakunin, the charismatic son of a Russian count, Marx was ‘head to foot an authoritarian’, and his ‘scientific’ socialism was designed to give power to ‘a numerically small aristocracy of genuine or sham scientists’.54 Marx responded in kind: Bakunin was a ‘Monster. Perfect blockhead. Stupid. Aspiring dictator of Europe’s workers.’55

  Bakunin, however, enjoyed a great deal of support in the International, and the conflict between Marxism and anarchism was to contribute to the institution’s destruction. The final meeting took place in The Hague in 1872. Marx, who had become associated in the public mind with the Paris Commune of the previous year, was now a notorious figure (the ‘Red-Terror-Doctor’), and crowds followed the delegates from the station to their hotel, though according to one journalist, children were warned against going into the streets with valuables in case the evil International stole them.56 Yet Marx was unable to bring the leverage of his street-level reputation as the leader of socialism into the conference hall; he antagonized many of the delegates by his harsh treatment of both Bakunin and the British trade unionists. He was only able to impose control by moving the General Council from London to New York, leaving the Italian, Spanish and Swiss socialist parties to Bakunin’s rival, anti-Marxist international. The transfer to the United States was hardly practical, and soon afterwards the First International was dissolved.

  Yet in the longer term, Marx’s and Engels’ Modernist version of socialism proved to be more enduring in Western Europe than its anarchist rival. The so-called ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ of the 1880s and 1890s led to the development of what we think of as the modern industrial economy.57 Factories became bigger, as the metal, chemical, mining and transport industries came to the fore; machinery became increasingly complex and expensive; international competition became harsher; and the modern corporation emerged, employing hierarchies of managers to create efficient businesses and to police workers. All of this had an enormous effect on workers. The urban labour force became larger, and employers tried to increase productivity by cutting wages and using machinery to ‘de-skill’ workers, paying them less to perform routine mechanized tasks. At the same time, national economies were becoming more integrated, and workers became more aware of their fellow labourers.

  Many of Marx’s predictions were therefore being fulfilled by the time of his death in 1883. De-skilling and globalization were precisely what Marx had foretold, and the enlarged working classes provided a reservoir of recruits for Marxist parties. However, these new industrial workers were limited to a minority of the population in the more modern sectors of the economy, and they often had little in common with the mass of less organized, casual workers. Also, their reactions to economic change varied. De-skilling could anger workers and provoke militancy. But workers were often less radical than they had been in the early stages of industrialization. The labour unrest of early industrialization was fuelled by an ambivalence towards modern industry, and sometimes by a complete rejection of it. But now many workers had become part of the factory system, and had learnt to work within it. Employers often had a great deal of power over them and workers were more likely to accept the realities of the industrial world than rebel against it.58

  The evolution of European politics also contributed to this mixture of conflict and compromise. Workers and trade unionists continued to be the victims of state repression in many parts of Europe. However, the violent social ‘civil wars’ of the 1830s and 1840s had become muted by the 1860s. States were granting the liberal reforms demanded and refused in 1848, and they were gradually extending them from the middle classes to workers. Marxism, therefore, benefited from some of the social and political changes of the late nineteenth century, but not others. The poor of the Western world had a number of paths available to them, and they by no means all chose the Marxist one.

  VI

  The year after Marx’s death, in 1884, the French writer Émile Zola began his great ‘socialist novel’, determined to draw middle-class attention to what he regarded as the central issue of the time: the imminence of bloody revolution:

  The subject of the novel is the revolt of the workers, the jolt given to society, which for a moment cracks: in a word the struggle between capital and labour. There lies the importance of the book, which I want to show predicting the future, putting the question that will be the most important question of the twentieth century.59

  Zola initially planned to call the novel The Gathering Storm, but finally decided on the title Germinal, in deliberate evocation of the Jacobins who had given the name to their new springtime month. Zola believed he needed to force his complacent readers to acknowledge the shaky foundations of the bourgeois order as capital and labour struggled, quite literally, beneath their feet. In the immense coalmine, ‘Le Voreux’ (‘a voracious beast’), ‘an army was growing, a future crop of citizens, germinating like seeds that would burst through the earth’s crust one day into the bright sunshine’.60

  Zola’s main characters stand for four rather different socialist visions: Souvarine is a Russian émigré anarchist; Étienne Lantier a Marxist of sorts, an ‘intransigent collectivist, authoritarian, Jacobin’; Rasseneur, a ‘Possibilist’, or moderate socialist (based on Émile Basly, the former miner and future parliamentary deputy); and the abbé Ranvier, a Christian socialist. Étienne, the Jacobin, is the hero of the novel, but, like Rasseneur, is also shown to be egotistical and ambitious. Meanwhile Souvarine, though idealistic, is destructive, and Ranvier is ineffectual. Ultimately, Zola believes that none of the socialists can control the masses – a violent, almost animalistic force of nature. Zola terrifies his readers with his accounts of the uncontrollably violent strikes and demonstrations. His bourgeois characters saw

  a scarlet vision of the revolution that would inevitably carry them all away, on some blood-soaked fin de siècle evening… these same rags and the same thunder of clogs, the same terrifying pack of animals with dirty skins and foul breath, would sweep away the old world, as their barbarian hordes overflowed and surged through the land.61

  Zola himself had little sympathy with revolutionary politics, and ultimately Étienne, the leader of a disastrous strike, is shown to have ‘outgrown his immature resentment’, in favour of a future when workers would abjure violence and form a ‘peaceful army’. Organized trade unions would fight for their rights and bring about the demise of Capital by legal means. Then ‘the crouching, sated god, that monstrous idol who lay hidden in the depths of his tabernacle untold leagues away, bloated with the flesh of miserable wretches who never even saw him, would instantly give up the ghost.’62

  Zola’s prediction, that leftist politics would become less revolutionary and more law-abiding, was true for some countries but not for others. Where existing ‘bourgeois’ political parties were willing to accommodate workers in the political order and concede trade union representation, as was the case with the British Liberal Party and its ‘Lib-Lab’ politics, workers tended to jettison revolutionary g
oals; why confront an established order that gave workers what they wanted?63 In these more liberal conditions, the Étiennes did poorly, and the Rasseneurs were in the ascendant. Yet Marxists did not prosper in societies that were too illiberal either. In repressive countries with underdeveloped industries, such as Russia, the Balkans and much of Austria-Hungary, it was difficult for Marxists to organize parties and trade unions. In parts of Italy and Iberia, in contrast, anarchistic Souvarines and more radical Marxists who demanded immediate revolution seemed to have a more compelling case. There it was easier to organize politically, but the state often used harsh repression against popular demands, most strikingly during the violence of ‘Tragic Week’ in Catalonia in 1909. Anarchists also did well where poor peasants were demanding land redistribution, whilst Marxists often saw peasants as ‘backward’, and peasants themselves were often hostile to Marxist plans for centralized states. France was a hybrid case, and the Étiennes, Souvarines, Rasseneurs and Ranviers all found a constituency. Because sporadic state repression continued, Marxist parties enjoyed some success, but anarchists continued to thrive amongst artisans (who were still an important economic group), whilst relatively liberal governments made the lure of reformism irresistible to many potential Marxist recruits. Churches were also powerful opponents of Marxist parties. Marxists, following Marx, usually saw Christianity as a reactionary ideology that justified the old social structure, and the churches usually responded with equal hostility. The Catholic Church was especially antagonistic to Marxism, and it was particularly effective in resisting Marxist influence through its political parties and social organizations.