The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  A good example of this type of party intellectual was Mikhail Gorbachev’s future ideology chief, Aleksandr Iakovlev. Born in 1923 to a peasant family, he had risen through the party, studied in party academic institutions, and become acting head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee from 1965. However, in 1972 he wrote an article criticizing all kinds of nationalism – including Russian ‘great-power chauvinism’ and anti-Semitism. Brezhnev, predictably, was displeased, and Iakovlev was exiled to Ottawa as ambassador to Canada.

  His apparent misfortune, though, was in fact his big break. In 1983, a new member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev, visited Canada, and Iakovlev was in charge of organizing the trip. They got on well, Gorbachev complaining about stasis at home, and Iakovlev explaining ‘how primitive and shaming the policy of the USSR looks from here, from the other side of the planet’.31 When Gorbachev took power two years later, Iakovlev was to become one of his main mentors. Their Canadian meeting marked the beginning of an alliance between liberal party intellectuals and Marxist party reformers that was eventually to destroy Soviet Communism.

  Ultimately, then, it was this small ‘vanguard’ alliance of Communist Party politicians and intellectuals that led the revolution against Communism – just as small bands of revolutionary intellectuals had brought Communism to power. But neither group was operating in a vacuum. By the early 1980s the future of Communism in the Soviet bloc looked increasingly grim. The majority of East European countries may have been stable – and, as we have seen, there was still much support for the regimes’ socialist paternalism – but the bloc had serious weaknesses, especially in Poland and in the developing world. And when, from the end of the 1970s, international economic conditions deteriorated and the West began its counter-attack, the bloc became extremely vulnerable. In these conditions, a fundamentally conservative leadership was willing to give the reformers a hearing.

  V

  In 1980, when the Polish Communist Party effectively collapsed before the onslaught of the Solidarity independent trade union, the film director Andrzej Wajda produced his cinematic account of the uprising and its history – Man of Iron. The film used documentary footage of the uprising but it was also a conventional film drama. At its core was the relationship between the old worker Birkut and his educated son, Maciek. Birkut is the conscience of the Polish working class, disillusioned with the party, but sharing little sympathy with the student rebellions of 1968 and Maciek’s involvement in them. The mistrust between workers and students is reciprocated when the students refuse to support the 1970 Baltic shipyard strikes. When his father is shot by police, Maciek realizes that he has to forge a worker–intelligentsia alliance and becomes an activist in Gdańsk. After many struggles, his goal is achieved with the Solidarity strikes of 1980. And helping to forge this unity is the Catholic Church: Maciek plants a cross where his father fell, and he marries in a church, his (film-maker) wife given away by the leader of Solidarity, the mustachioed electrician Lech Wałesa (played by himself).

  Wajda’s film reflected the crucial importance of the relations between white- and blue-collar workers. Divisions between the two were one of the main sources of stability in Communist regimes: society was too divided to mount a real challenge to the status quo. Also, many Polish workers, like their Soviet-bloc confrères, broadly endorsed socialist values and benefited from improving standards of living – a theme explored by the prequel to Man of Iron, Man of Marble. In Poland alone, however, the Communists’ paternalistic strategy failed to achieve the stability it needed, largely because nationalism, together with the extraordinary power of the Catholic Church, helped to reconcile white with blue.

  Poland, of course, had been the Achilles heel of the bloc for decades, and after the 1956 crisis the Polish party’s retreat – on the issues of collectivization, religion and the private sector – was more extensive than elsewhere. Even so, after a period of relative peace, conflict between the party and sections of society resumed after 1968. In that year Gomułka’s repression of student dissent alienated the intelligentsia, and in 1970 he antagonized workers with price rises. Strikes were put down by force, but Gomułka, who had survived so many vicissitudes, was forced to stand down. He was replaced by Edvard Gierek, a worker by background, who responded to worker discontent by pursuing one of the most lavish and expensive programmes of socialist paternalism in the bloc, all financed by Western loans. The strategy worked, for a time. Living standards rose by 40 per cent, and the party leaders basked in the public’s esteem: in 1975, when asked whether they had confidence in their national leaders, 84.8 per cent replied ‘yes’ or ‘rather so’.32 Yet in the absence of economic reforms, the massive new industrial investments did not provide the expected returns, and the leadership was forced to make sudden, savage cuts in investment and food subsidies. The resulting 60 per cent rise in food prices in 1976 showed how shallow and conditional popular support for the regime was. Workers’ strikes and violent demonstrations again flared up, and were again harshly suppressed. This time, though, the use of repression was more damaging to the regime. Notwithstanding Man of Iron, it was 1976 rather than 1970 that precipitated the worker–intelligentsia alliance, and in that year a group of thirteen intellectuals founded the Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR) to provide legal and other support for strikers, providing a model for many other oppositional groups throughout Poland. By 1980 Poland had a large network of democratic oppositional groups.

  Central to this alliance was the Catholic Church – and this is one of the main reasons why Poland was different. As in the rest of the bloc, blue-collar and white-collar groups had very different views on politics: workers favoured equality much more than the intelligentsia, and many of the intellectual dissidents, with their Marxist background, were suspicious of the Church.33 Nevertheless, the Church successfully placed itself at the head of a nationalist, anti-Communist revival. Its massive nine-year campaign to celebrate the ‘Great Novena of the millennium’, the anniversary of the coming of Christianity to Poland, saw huge crowds marching behind the Black Madonna of Częstochowa and the Polish crowned eagle. By the mid-1970s, therefore, the dissident intelligentsia was beginning to move towards the Church (with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council). When in 1978 the election to the papacy of Karol Wojtiła, Archbishop of Krakow and a worker in his youth, gave the Catholic Church even greater nationalist credentials, the Polish Communist party confronted a broad social movement united behind a coherent alternative ideology and an effective organization with international reach.34 The dissident Adam Michnik and the journalist Jacek Żakowski remember the power of this religious nationalism amongst workers:

  On 16 October 1978, I was riding in a taxi when the radio program was interrupted. The announcer, whose voice was dry and nervous, read the official press communiqué stating that Cracow’s cardinal Karol Wojtiła had just been elected pope. The taxi driver drove off the road. He couldn’t take me further because his hands were shaking from emotion… In Cracow’s market square, Piotr Skrzynecki [a well-known theatre and film director] shouted ‘Finally a Polish worker has amounted to something!’35

  As was clear from Skrzynecki’s comment, the intelligentsia and workers were now united behind the Catholic Church, and the Polish regime had to face unusually strong challenges to its authority. Even so, the Polish party’s travails were merely extreme forms of the forces buffeting every Communist state in the late 1970s and 1980s. All regimes, except the USSR’s, had taken advantage of the opening to the West in the mid-1970s and had borrowed money from Western banks. And all of them found their inefficient smokestack industries unable to pay off those debts with increased exports.

  Yet they were suffering, in extreme form, from conditions that affected the whole of the industrialized world. A global glut of heavy industrial goods, new computer technologies, and the oil-price hike all demanded radical changes to an economic project developed in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time organized labour had been empowe
red by high levels of employment and the after-shocks of the 1968 rebellions. Wage levels rose as productivity and profitability fell, and business lost faith and refused to invest. Share prices, an indication of economies’ levels of optimism, fell by two thirds between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s.36 Clearly the industrialized world needed a new economic model – one that redirected investment into more profitable, high-tech areas.

  Communist regimes found these challenges particularly difficult because, despite their image of power and monolithic unity, they were politically weak. They had been captured by powerful heavy-industrial and defence interests, and also could not risk renewed social conflict with workers. But west of the iron curtain, too, governments, especially of the left, found it difficult to promote reforms that might alienate workers. Meanwhile, business and the conservative right mobilized against the power of labour at home, moves which coincided with a massive American rearmament programme against the USSR. But this was an ideological counter-revolution as much as a military one. Much as Kennedy had tried to compete with the USSR by stressing a new capitalist model of Third World development, so Reagan’s United States adopted some of the revolutionary, optimistic style of 1970s Third World Communism in the interests of a right-wing liberalism. After an era of superpower realpolitik, ideas again took centre-stage.

  VI

  In the early 1940s, at the height of debates over the Nazi–Soviet pact, a young Brooklyn-born college lecturer, Irving Kristol, was regularly to be seen in Alcove Number 1 of the New York City College cafeteria, devouring the latest issues of the Trotskyist-leaning magazines the Partisan Review and the New Internationalist, edited by the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R James. The Stalinists, meanwhile, occupied Alcove Number 2. Like many New York intellectuals, they were all absorbed in European intellectual struggles, and they remained so.37 But by the end of the 1970s Kristol had switched sides in the conflict. He was now at the centre of a ‘neo-conservative’ group of intellectuals, many originally from the Marxist left, who were developing the intellectual firepower for a counter-revolution against the socialist and Third-Worldist vision of equality.

  Were the neo-conservatives Trotsky’s revenge on the USSR? It may seem far-fetched to seek Marxist roots in neo-conservatism, but a striking number of the writers for The Public Interest, Kristol’s neo-conservative journal, had been close to Trotskyism. They were now hearty cheerleaders for capitalism, having become, in effect, a variety of American nationalist (although as promoters of ‘universal’ American values rather than narrow xenophobes). But they shared a number of Trotskyist attitudes: internationalism, a belief in struggle, the utopian notion of a moral society at the ‘end of history’, a hatred of Stalinist realpolitik, and most importantly, a Romantic belief in the power of ideas and morality to change the world. The Trotskyist journals that Kristol had read so avidly in the 1940s condemned Stalinism from a Romantic perspective – for ignoring the role of mass enthusiasm in socialism – and similarly, neo-conservatives believed in the power of ideological commitment. Yet where Trotskyists hoped to mobilize the proletariat with ideas of collectivism, the neo-conservatives tried to rouse public opinion with a mixture of bourgeois morality and high patriotism. Although, like the old Marxist left, the neo-conservatives maintained links with organized labour, they had been incensed by the student assault on university authorities in 1968, and were outraged by the New Left’s support for Communist guerrillas in the Vietnam War.

  Kristol and his group, therefore, were the capitalist equivalent of the Romantic Marxists, calling for moral renewal and a mobilization against the Communist threat. But just as Communism was most effective when it combined the Romanticism of the young Marx with the technocratic later Marx, so the capitalist counter-revolution needed rationalistic as well as moral foundations. It found them in ‘neo-liberalism’, promoted most effectively by another, slightly older Brooklyner – the economist Milton Friedman. Friedman, a former New Dealer, was a militant opponent of the mixed economy created in the aftermath of World War II. He popularized an elegant and coherent vision of the laissez-faire economics propounded by people such as his fellow Chicago professor Friedrich Hayek: states, Friedman insisted, were predatory, corrupt and inefficient, stifling growth and creativity. Their power had to be destroyed and the natural forces of the market allowed to flourish. This ideology was highly technocratic: Friedman even argued that monetary policy – and thus, in effect, economic policy – could be run by a computer, which, free from political pressure, could defeat inflation. But it was also revolutionary. As one of Friedman’s students remembered: ‘What was particularly exciting were the same qualities that made Marxism so appealing to many other young people at the time – simplicity together with apparent logical completeness; idealism combined with radicalism.’38

  The two Brooklyners were not themselves close, and indeed there were major intellectual differences between them. Though both were visionaries, and were willing to support forceful attacks on Communism, Kristol’s neo-conservatives were more militaristic, moralistic and apocalyptic in their outlook, and were more positive about the role of the state and labour, than the neo-liberals. In the aftermath of 1968, however, they came together in the struggle against Communism, convinced, like the old Leninists, that a vanguard of intellectuals had to attack the old, corrupt state and replace it with something new. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives united behind a programme of ‘revolutionary liberalism’ that used the Marxist-Leninists’ militant and mobilizational methods against them. And they found their champion in another former New Dealer, now radical anti-Communist – Ronald Reagan.

  The continuing erosion of American power and evidence of revolutionary success in the Third World strengthened the credibility of the neo-conservatives. They were convinced that President Carter, in forcing America’s gendarmes to respect human rights, was weakening both them and American power. The neo-conservative intellectual Jean Kirkpatrick (later Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations) developed one of the most influential arguments for anti-Communist militancy, by drawing a sharp distinction between ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘authoritarianism’. Unlike ‘authoritarian’ regimes, she argued, which would evolve into liberal democracy as they modernized, ‘totalitarian’ regimes would never do so. Therefore if the United States wanted to promote democracy, it had to support authoritarians against totalitarian Communists, however unsavoury the former were.39

  The climacteric year of 1979 proved to be the turning point. The United States’ policy was buffeted by a series of disasters: the Sandinistas’ revolution, the Islamist defeat of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All seemed to bear out the neo-conservative analysis of Soviet strength and aggression, and the following year Americans responded by voting to fight back, electing Ronald Reagan president by a landslide the following November.

  The crisis of America’s economic order, though, was more acute and the response more immediate. Washington’s efforts to maintain both defence and welfare spending by printing money succeeded for some time, but the blows to American prestige in Iran and Afghanistan were the final straw, and Washington faced a flight from the dollar and the end of its status as the major world currency. On 14 October 1979 the head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, implemented the anti-inflationary measures proposed by Friedman and decided to give financiers what they wanted: a massive hike in interest rates, an assault on inflation, and a highly valued dollar. This, together with the so-called ‘supply-side’ economic revolution, increased the profitability of capital – cutting taxes on corporations and reducing welfare, whilst raising unemployment and weakening the power of labour.40 More generally, it marked the final end of the economic order established at Bretton Woods in 1944. The Vietnam defeat had shown Washington that it could not maintain its global hegemony by taxing and conscripting its citizens, but only in 1979 did it, almost accidentally, find a viable alternative. International finance would become the fuel of American power. It was this
alliance between the United States and global finance that gave it the power to fight a new phase in what is often called the ‘second Cold War’. And it was this powerful system that was to bestride the world for almost three decades, until it spectacularly imploded in September 2008.

  The United States’ final struggle against Communism was therefore largely financed by foreign loans – many of them Japanese.41 Washington could now fight to regain its global supremacy without demanding sacrifices from its population. However, its objective – rearmament – had less impact on American power than its unintended consequences. In order to fund its massive borrowing, the United States used high interest rates to attract much of the world’s capital. That in turn caused a financial famine within the Second and Third Worlds: a $46.8 billion outflow from the G7 industrialized countries in the 1970s became a $347.4 billion inflow in the 1980s.42 The resulting shortage of capital inevitably hit the indebted, and especially Communist regimes.