The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The year 1968 saw the explosion of a whole range of long-established resentments heralding a high tide of revolutions throughout the world. Never before nor again would Marxist language be so fashionable and commonplace, as activists in the global South joined those in the West to struggle against ‘imperialism’, ‘racism’ and ‘paternalism’. The number of Marxist regimes proliferated and the map of world Communism was at its reddest. And yet beneath the apparent unity, Communism had never been so diverse and disunited. The decade or so after 1968 saw it emerge in all its varieties. It was as if the whole history of the movement had been condensed into one febrile decade: from a late 1920s-style Stalinism in Africa, to a Cultural Revolution Maoism in Cambodia; from the Popular Front Communism of Allende’s Chile, to the Marxist Romanticism of the soixante-huitards; from an almost Social Democratic Eurocommunism, to Nicaragua’s Guevara-inspired guerrilla struggle.

  But the sense of Romantic liberation and democracy beckoned by 1968 proved fleeting. Though the defeat of American power in Vietnam had emboldened a vast range of radical political and social forces, the United States and its allies soon rallied. And as Communist movements and regimes became entangled in great power rivalry and Cold War competition, the politics of protest meetings, discussion groups and love-ins gave way to those of guns, bombs and grenades. Khrushchev’s Third World ‘zone of peace’ had become a bloody battlefield.

  II

  In the summer of 1964 about a thousand American students from Northern universities – most of them white – travelled to the Southern state of Mississippi as part of a campaign by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to fight against the racial segregation that prevailed there. During the ‘Mississippi Summer’, the students lived in communes – or ‘Freedom Houses’ – or with local black families, registered voters and taught in ‘Freedom Schools’.5 Much of this earnest activity recalled the ‘Going to the People’ movement of idealistic young Russians in 1874. But unlike the Russian agrarian socialists, these American students were joining an already well-established grass-roots movement and their relations with the local African-Americans were good. Nevertheless, like their Russian forebears, they had to contend with repression. Ten days after they arrived, three students were beaten to death by segregationists (assisted by the local police) and many more were victimized.6

  The Mississippi Summer was a radicalizing experience for all involved; and it was with anger, therefore, that a group of returning Berkeley students discovered they had been banned by the university authorities from land which they had previously used to set up stalls and distribute political leaflets. When the police turned up to enforce the ban, one student, Mario Savio, led a ‘sit-in’ around the police car – a technique used in Southern civil rights demonstrations. Attempts by Berkeley to punish Savio provoked the newly formed ‘Free Speech Movement’ (FSM) to organize massive sit-ins and demonstrations involving an estimated 10,500 of the university’s 27,000 students. These remarkable events became a model for student protests that was swiftly exported, making Berkeley, in a sense, the epicentre of the series of rebellions (or even ‘revolutions’) which swept across America, Europe and beyond and which we call ‘1968’.

  The Berkeley student movement, like its Russian and Chinese predecessors, was an attack on both legally sanctioned inequality – in this case ethnic – and on paternalistic power structures, and in particular the university authorities. Savio explicitly linked civil rights and university politics in a speech of 1965:

  In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast, virtually powerless majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the University bureaucracy to suppress the students’ political expression. That ‘respectable’ bureaucracy is the efficient enemy in a ‘Brave New World’.7

  Savio’s language is strikingly radical, but before the 1964 demonstration he was not known as an especially politicized person. As an Italian-American – one of the ethnic groups that had been so successfully mobilized in the anti-Communist crusade – Savio was a beneficiary of the welfare state of Truman and Eisenhower. He was also attending a university (or ‘multiversity’ as it proclaimed itself) committed both to technological research – some of it for the military effort – and to social mobility, at least for white Americans. Berkeley was therefore typical of many universities, especially in the Western world, which had rapidly expanded and now counted amongst their students many people from rather modest families with no previous history of higher education. And like the first-generation students in 1860s Russia, they did not always appreciate the rather hierarchical and sometimes alienating educational culture they encountered. As one student recalled, ‘We really did speak of Berkeley as a factory. Classes were immense, and you didn’t feel that you could get near professors because they were this presence way up in front of the lectern.’8

  In recent years it has become common to see the student rebellions of the 1960s as naïve and self-indulgent, but whatever our opinion of their objectives, we should not underestimate their historical significance. For like their Romantic student predecessors, they registered a fundamental shift in worldview. Western students of the 1960s and 1970s were taking a stand against all ‘fathers’, whether at home, in the university or in the state. Within the essentially fraternal communities fostered by student life, young people were questioning traditional hierarchies and authority, challenging prevailing attitudes to women and gay people, and even experimenting with new forms of domestic life in hippie communes.9 At the same time the feminist and homosexual rights movements challenged traditional patriarchal attitudes. At the centre of their vision, therefore, lay a participatory form of democracy. Much of this iconoclasm was the consequence of a long-term change in the position of young people since the 1950s. With higher incomes and the autonomy of higher education, the young seemed more independent and assertive than in the past.

  Moreover, as the elision of the university and the ‘factory’ illustrated, a critique of gender and ethnic discrimination, along with paternalism, could soon evolve into a more generalized attack on what was perceived by some as the ‘military-welfare state’ of the post-war era. To their critics it seemed that Western states, though not as regimented as their Soviet-style counterparts, demanded an intolerable degree of social discipline. Factories were governed by the ‘Fordist’ production line, and corporations had become huge, hierarchical and alienating. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, when many feared Stalinist subversion and accepted the imperative need to rebuild swiftly shattered economies and societies, such discipline had seemed defensible. But as in the Soviet bloc, once the threat of real war retreated, the young were less willing to submit to these constraints for which the compensations of welfare and consumer goods seemed insufficient. As Barbara Garson, the editor of the FSM newsletter, wrote: ‘Many people were beginning to say: “I want to do something with my life. I don’t want to be a sharply chiseled tool to be used for corporate profit.”’10

  In crucial respects, therefore, the Western student movements differed from their Russian and Chinese forebears: they were suspicious of the very technology, machinery and organizational modernity that their predecessors had so admired. Indeed they were challenging a fundamental element of the Promethean project, as was perhaps not surprising, given the fact that they did not perceive their societies as ‘backward’ and were uninterested in international competition. In some ways the protests of the mid-1960s, with their attacks on ‘imperialistic’ and ‘militaristic’ fathers by rebellious sons and daughters, were closer to the convention-ridiculing Dadaists of World War I than to Chernyshevskii and Lu Xun. The European Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s acknowledged that debt. Convinced that deep down Western men and women were ‘alienated’ by philistine consumer society, they believed that provocation and ‘spectacle’ would shock them out of their numbed complacency.11 The main theorist of the ‘Situationist International’,
Guy Debord, insisted that ‘proletarian revolutions’ had to be ‘festivals’ based on ‘play’ and the indulging of ‘untrammelled desire’.12 Debord’s book, The Society of the Spectacle, published at the end of 1967, became one of the gospels of Western student revolutionaries.

  But as had happened during World War I an essentially aesthetic frustration at bourgeois philistinism evolved into a more political Romanticism, bearing powerful Marxist influences. Indeed, it brought the return of the Lukács–Frankfurt School brand of Marxism to prominence. Herbert Marcuse, a pre-war Frankfurt School luminary who had left Germany for the United States in 1934, was to emerge as philosopher-in-chief of the 1968 student revolt. His One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, was an extreme restatement of the Romantic Marxist worldview, albeit one now exotically blended with Freud. Marcuse argued that modern capitalism was imbued with a technocratic rationality that had fused the ‘Welfare state and the Warfare state’ to produce a ‘society of total mobilization’. Consumerism and hierarchical institutions like corporations, the military and political parties had established a ‘mechanics of conformity’, people were alienated and autonomy was suppressed whilst the genuinely pleasurable, creative and erotic aspects of life had been outlawed.13 In Marcuse’s rejection of the Modernist Marxism of planning and rationality, one sees a revival of Fourier’s phalansteries and the Romantic ‘Young Marx’. And given his rejection of the Marxist synthesis of modernity and revolution, it is hardly surprising that Marcuse condemned Soviet Communism as vociferously as he did capitalism. For him both industrial capitalism and Communism were heirs of Nazism – ‘totalitarian’ orders, ruled by soulless technocratic elites.

  Marcuse’s deep mistrust of technology and science, and his view of Nazism, industrial capitalism and Soviet Communism as all symptomatic of a ‘totalitarian’ syndrome, permeated the Romantic left politics and culture of the 1960s. Domineering fathers, Nazis and atom bombs were vividly yoked in the soon cultic poetry of the American Sylvia Plath. And 1960s technophobia haunted the powerful films of Stanley Kubrick. The figure of Dr Strangelove in his 1964 satirical film of that name encapsulated many of Marcuse’s themes – a bomb-obsessed German-born scientist and adviser to the American president, whose mechanical arm kept rising in an involuntary Nazi salute.14 In 2001: A Space Odyssey, first shown in 1968, technological progress is shown as a sinister force that leads to violence, most famously in the form of the murderous Cyclopean computer HAL.15 Mario Savio’s most famous speech at the Berkeley rallies was full of this Romantic rhetoric:

  There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put the bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop.16

  Marcuse was, however, merely the most prominent of the ‘New Left’ thinkers – an eclectic group, amongst whom we can count the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, the British historian E. P. Thompson and the Greek-born Trotskyist intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis. In adopting the label ‘New Left’, they consciously defined themselves against an ‘old’ left, both Social Democratic and Soviet Communist. Their objections to the old left were numerous; they disliked its obsession with party organization and hierarchy, championing instead free discussion and participatory democracy. But at its root the conflict between old and new left turned on conceptions of equality and power: for 1960s thinkers economic equality alone (a core value of the old left) was simply not enough. More important was a change in authority relations, a cultural revolution and an end to all forms of hierarchy. As Gregory Calvert, a president of the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) explained, ‘revolutionary mass movements are not built out of a desire for the acquisition of material goods… Revolutionary movements are freedom struggles born out of the perception of the contradictions between human potentiality and oppressive actuality.’17

  This opposition to ‘economistic’ Marxism was closely connected with disillusionment with the industrial working class, which (at least in northern Europe and the United States) the radicals believed had been bought off by the ‘warfare–welfare state’. The new revolutionaries would be an alliance of groups who suffered from legal, political or racial discrimination in a world dominated by an imperialistic United States – an alliance of students, African-Americans, Third World revolutionaries, women and homosexuals. As Wright Mills wrote in his ‘Letter to the New Left’ of 1960:

  Forget Victorian [i.e. Kautskian, technocratic] Marxism, except when you need it; and read Lenin, again (be careful) – Rosa Luxemburg too…

  Whatever else it may be, it’s not [utopian]. Tell it to the students of Japan. Tell it to the Negro sit-ins. Tell it to the Cuban Revolutionaries. Tell it to the people of the Hungry-nation bloc.18

  By the early 1960s the parallels between African-American civil rights at home and American anti-Communism abroad seemed obvious to some intellectuals and activists. But it was only with the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that the comparison became a commonplace. With the doubling of military conscription, students were inevitably radicalized. Although deferments were possible, avoiding the draft was often difficult. Protests began in the universities in 1965, and radical academics began to cancel normal lectures and organize ‘teach-ins’, based on the Mississippi Freedom Schools – day-long seminars on the war. One Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) member remembered how powerful the New Left conception of an alliance between students, blacks and Vietnamese had become:

  1965 – that was the year for me of the connection between all this rhetoric of American values and what we were really doing. The connection between civil rights and the Vietnam war. Keeping down a large underbelly minority population at home and bombing back to the stone-age a peasant population of another race and culture abroad.19

  A radical anti-imperialist language became increasingly dominant within the SDS. As another SDS activist and future terrorist, Cathy Wilkerson, recalled, it was at this time that Vietnam and a perception of persistent economic inequality led her from liberal democracy to the revolutionary belief that ‘we could sweep out the old government ourselves’, and ‘any “sweeping out” would not be accomplished without a fight, given the violent nature of our government’.20 By 1967, the SDS leadership – though not always the rank-and-file – was turning to revolutionary Marxism, because, as Carl Oglesby explained, ‘there was – and is – no other coherent, integrative, and explicit philosophy of revolution’.21

  A similar radicalization was occurring in the civil-rights movement. The Vietnam conflict was the cause of a double resentment, as resources were funnelled away from social programmes and into the war, whilst a far higher proportion of blacks than whites found themselves conscripted. Martin Luther King’s non-violent strategy which had worked so well in the South did not resonate with the radical youths of the Northern cities where violent riots erupted in the summer of 1967.22 A new generation of Black Power politicians drew freely from the rhetoric of guerrilla Communists, and in particular the violent Third Worldism of the Martinique-born revolutionary, Franz Fanon. Speaking in London in 1967, one of Black Power’s most charismatic spokesmen, Stokely Carmichael, quoted Fanon and Che Guevara in a paean of praise to political violence, adding:

  We are working to increase the revolutionary consciousness of black people in America to join with the Third World. Whether or not violence is used is not decided by us, but by the white West… We are not any longer going to bow our heads to any white man. If he touches one black man in the United States, he is going to war with every black man in the United States.23

  The rebellion also spread to America’s ‘empire by invitation’ in Western Europe. Anger at events in Vietnam was central to all student protests there, particularly once TV screens began to fill with images of airborne, mechanized violence. Opposition to the war grew rapidly in those states where the government supported t
he conflict, as in Britain. One British student remembered: ‘There was the bombing and the relentlessness of the bombing… I think people now probably don’t understand that, but it was just terrible. Everything that was progress was being used to destroy… My feelings were so strong that I feared the sense of my own violence.’24 Europe’s elites began to question their support for the United States. France’s De Gaulle refused to contribute to NATO operations, and the British declared that financial difficulties would force them to reduce their troop commitment in Europe.

  The United States, of course, never experienced a Marxist revolution, but 1968 brought a taste of it. At home and abroad waves of rebellion, partly inspired by ethnic nationalism, partly by various very different forms of Marxism, were threatening the American imperium. President Johnson, faced with ‘guerrillas’ in both urban America and Vietnam, was determined to continue welfare at home and warfare abroad. But as in so many empires in the past, a combination of domestic unrest, defeat abroad and financial profligacy provoked a crisis.