The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  However, there was one weakness both the Babouvian and the utopian traditions shared: they rarely showed convincingly how Communism or socialism could solve the problem of economic security and productivity. It was liberal thinkers, the defenders of the market – amongst them Adam Smith and, later, Herbert Spencer – who seemed to have cornered the market in sound economic theory. But there was one variety of socialism that did address this criticism – Henri de Saint-Simon’s ‘scientific socialism’.

  Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, born in 1760, was an aristocrat from an ancient ducal family but had originally welcomed the French Revolution. He fell foul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned, but his response to his persecution differed sharply from Fourier’s and Babeuf’s: he looked to science to rescue France. Saint-Simon was the prophet of the Plan. The goal of society was production, as ‘the production of useful things is the only reasonable and positive aim that political societies can set themselves.’10 Scientists, industrialists, or a combination of the two, therefore had to be in power. Democracy – the rule of the ignorant masses – was only dangerous and damaging, as the Jacobin experience had vividly illustrated. Indeed, ideally politics could be dispensed with altogether, in favour of rational decision-making.

  Saint-Simon was condemned by Marx and Engels as a ‘utopian socialist’ because he was not ‘scientific’ enough for them, but this label is misleading. Saint-Simon was the heir of the anti-Romantic strain of Enlightenment thinking, and his ideas proved enormously appealing to later socialists who tried to reconcile equality with economic prosperity. And it was the combination of his ideas, together with those of Babouvian Communism and (to a lesser extent) Romantic ‘utopian’ socialism, that was to be the hallmark of the system created by Marx and Engels. Just as the left in the 1990s sought a ‘third way’ between visions of social justice and the ‘rationality’ of the global market, so too Marx and Engels tried to show how a much more radical social model, Communism, could be wedded to economic prosperity.

  III

  Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland town of Trier. During the French occupation after the Revolution, Trier was governed according to the relatively liberal Napoleonic laws, which had benefited Marx’s father, Heinrich, a respected lawyer and the son of the rabbi. However, the absorption of the town into the more hierarchical and conservative state of Prussia was a disaster for Heinrich; under Prussian law Jews were denied all positions in state service, unless they had a special dispensation. Heinrich was forced to convert to Protestantism, and was baptized in 1817, the year before his son Karl was born.

  Marx, therefore, grew up in a region resting on a historical and political fault-line: between modern, revolutionary France, with its principles of equality of all citizens before the law, and ancien régime Prussia, founded on autocracy, hierarchy and aristocratic privilege. Unsurprisingly Marx, whose own family had briefly bathed in the rays of Enlightenment before being cast back into ancien régime darkness, was keenly interested in how the forces of history might be accelerated to bring ‘progressive’ politics to a ‘backward’ country. In his youth Marx, like the French revolutionary generation of the 1770s and 1780s, was obsessed with his country’s backwardness. The German middle class, he complained, was weak and in thrall to the aristocracy, and, unlike its French counterpart, could not be relied on to challenge the old order.

  The Rhineland in the early nineteenth century did not lie only on a political fault-line between French liberalism and German conservatism, but also on an intellectual one: between French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Marx’s father, according to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, was a man of reason and the Enlightenment, ‘a real Frenchman of the eighteenth century who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart’.11 Yet Marx also came under the influence of a rival mentor, Baron von Westphalen, father of his future wife, Jenny, who introduced him to the Romantic worldview. As Eleanor wrote, the baron ‘filled Karl Marx with enthusiasm for the Romantic school, and whereas his father read Voltaire and Racine with him, the Baron read him Homer and Shakespeare – who remained his favourite authors all his life.’12

  The tension between the Enlightenment devotion to reason, order and science, and a Romantic disdain for routine and passion for heroic struggle, was a fissure within Marx’s own thinking. His personality certainly had more in common with the brilliant and extraordinary Romantic genius than the worldly and sociable Voltairean man of science. One of his father’s letters to him at university captures the tension between the civilized, Enlightened father and the Romantic son:

  God help us! Disorderliness, stupefying dabbling in all the sciences… Unruly barbarism, running wild with unkempt hair in a learned dressing-gown… Shirking all social contacts, disregarding all conventions… your intercourse with the world limited to your sordid room, where perhaps lie strewn in classical disorder the love letters of a Jy [Jenny] and the well-meant, tear-stained exhortations of your father.13

  As a student in Bonn in the mid-1830s, Marx attended courses on the philosophy of art, some delivered by the famous Romantic theorist August von Schlegel. He also planned to publish a work on Romanticism, and penned poetry infused with Romantic themes. Nevertheless, his worldview was far from the early Romanticism of Rousseau, with its elevated regard for virtue. Marx’s was a high Romanticism, with the hero figured as the artist-as-rebel. In one poem, ‘Human Life’, he wrote of the dreary self-interestedness, or ‘philistinism’ as he often called it, of everyday life: ‘Life is death / An eternal death; / Distress dominates / Human striving. /… / Greedy striving / And miserable goal / That is its life, / The play of breezes.’14 Marx, however, was determined not to succumb to conventional life. He would rebel. As he explained in his poem ‘Feelings’:

  Never can I carry out in peace,

  What has seized my soul so intensely,

  Never remain comfortably quiet,

  And I storm without rest.15

  And as has been seen, he identified with that great rebel of ancient myth – Prometheus, struggling against the tyrant Zeus.

  Marx’s sentiments did not change markedly as an adult. Intense, pugnacious and sensitive, he declared that his idea of happiness was ‘to fight’, and his idea of misery was ‘submission’. He described his main characteristic as ‘singleness of purpose’, and this quality certainly put him at an advantage over his contemporaries. Although he was less original than many other socialist thinkers of the time, he was infinitely more energetic and painstaking in synthesizing ideas and forging them into a coherent whole, and he put this rigour at the service of rebellion rather than the forces of order.

  Given Marx’s self-image as a rebel, challenging authority to bring Enlightenment to humanity, it is not surprising that he became interested in radical ideas. Initially this radicalism emerged in debates on philosophy, when he was a member of the ‘Young Hegelian’ group of thinkers. Georg Hegel, the German philosopher, had developed a theory of world history by which history was seen as the unfolding story of the progress of mankind’s spirit towards increasing freedom. The process was ‘dialectical’, that is, it moved forward through struggles between competing ideas and social systems, in which the clash between a principle (‘thesis’) and its opposite (‘antithesis’) resulted in ‘synthesis’, incorporating the positive aspects of both. Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern constitutional monarchy were all syntheses, stages in the movement of humanity towards the ideal society. After Hegel’s death, Hegelians disagreed over what constituted that ideal society. The establishment saw it as the contemporary Prussian Protestant monarchy, arguing that the existing order represented the ‘end of history’. The Young Hegelians, however, condemned the monarchy as reactionary and saw the ideal as a parliamentary system, which allowed freedom of the press and religion, though they decried the economic liberalism which, they argued, gave excessive power to private property.

  On becoming editor of the Cologne-based liberal newspaper Rhenische Zeitu
ng in 1842, Marx espoused these causes with energy. He showed a particular interest in social issues, protesting on behalf of peasants who were losing their old communal rights (to forest land) to individual ownership in the name of liberal ideas of private property. In 1843 the Rhenische Zeitung was closed down by the authorities, and this setback encouraged Marx to adopt an even more radical position. His hopes that a free press would be a force for reform now dashed, he argued instead that political change was not enough; a fundamental social and economic transformation was needed. Moreover he had also lost faith in the German middle classes, who had been cowardly in the face of the monarchy’s assault on press liberties. Unlike the French bourgeoisie, which had led the French revolution of 1789 and had defended liberal freedoms in the 1830 revolution, the German bourgeoisie, he argued, was hopelessly backward.

  Marx, along with several of his radical friends, decided to emigrate from a repressive Germany to the more open atmosphere of Paris, and it was here in 1843 and 1844 that he developed what was to be the core of his future ideas. Marx had always been interested in French socialism and in this period he increasingly fell under the influence of French socialist writers, their hostility to constitutional democracy becoming more evident in his own writings. Marx also became more aware of English intellectual currents through his life-long collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Engels, the son of a prosperous, Calvinist lace manufacturer from Barmen, Westphalia, had, like Marx, been a radical in his youth, dabbled in Romantic versification, and was a member of the Young Hegelians. But there were also significant differences between the two. Most marked was the contrast between their temperaments. Engels, more sociable and less combative than Marx, fitted well into conventional bourgeois society. He fenced and rode, enjoying music and the company of women, and drinking fine wines. Yet he was also well-organized and business-like, unlike the chaotic Marx, which was fortunate for Marx as Engels was able to bankroll his frequently impoverished friend. But most importantly, Engels brought an English perspective to Marx’s thought. He had been sent by his father to work in the Manchester branch of the family firm, and it was here, in the city at the frontier of the modern economy, that Engels became aware of the nature and mechanisms of capitalism, and its socialist critics. Engels was close to the Owenite movement, and despite his later criticisms of its ‘utopianism’, he remained highly sympathetic to its goals. At this crucial time in the development of Marx’s thought, therefore, Engels encouraged his interest in ‘utopian’ socialism, whilst also providing Marx with a more detailed, practical knowledge of how modern capitalism worked.16

  In the next few years, on the basis of this fruitful partnership, the foundations of Marxism were built – in the Paris Manuscripts and a number of other works. It may seem strange, given later developments, that Marx’s primary interest was freedom. But this was ‘freedom’ in a Rousseauian sense – the end of dependence on other people and material things.17 In modern societies, Marx argued, man was losing his autonomy, his ability to express himself and the opportunities to develop his creative capabilities. In Marx’s Hegelian philosophical language, man was being controlled by ‘alienated’ forces outside himself. Autocracies deprived the individual of freedom, but liberal democracy was no solution, because it merely allowed people to vote periodically for a government over which they then had little influence. Only when all citizens took part in running the state all the time – as had been the case in ancient Athens – would they end this political ‘alienation’. The same was true in the economic sphere. Man was a naturally creative being who, collaborating with others, realized his full potential through labour, whilst also changing the world around him. But in modern, capitalist societies, men had become slaves to ‘alien’ forces, money, the market and the material things they themselves produced.18 They worked not to express their creativity, but merely to eat, drink and acquire material things; they frequently worked for other people; they were cogs in a machine, forced to perform particular, narrow tasks, according to the modern division of labour; moreover, they were increasingly ‘alienated’ from other people, unable to establish true human relationships.

  For Marx, the solution to this grim state of affairs was the abolition of the market and private property, that is, the establishment of ‘Communism’. All men would govern the state directly, participating in government rather than electing parliamentary representatives. This, then, was not modern liberal democracy, which is based on the assumption that there will always be conflicts of interest between citizens. Marx’s vision of Communism assumed that once class division was overcome, complete consensus could be achieved. Liberal rights and freedoms, which protect the minority against the majority, would be wholly unnecessary. This critique of liberalism was to become central to the ideologies of Communist regimes.

  Under Communism, economic life would also be transformed: people would not work for money, the market would be abolished, work would become a creative activity, and people would express themselves through their labour. As Marx put it, ‘our products would be like so many mirrors, each one reflecting our essence… My work would be a free expression of my life, and therefore a free enjoyment of my life.’19 And economic well-being would not suffer, because if men worked for enjoyment they would be much more energetic and enthusiastic than if they were downtrodden and exploited. The division of labour would end, and men would be ‘whole’. In an extraordinarily utopian vision of Communist society, each person would be able to ‘do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’20

  In these early political writings, therefore, Marx’s ‘Communism’ bore little resemblance to Babouvian equality, the ‘crude Communism’ which was merely ‘universal envy setting itself up as a power’.21 It was much closer to Fourier’s vision, founded on a Romantic, fundamentally artistic view of life, which identified the philistinism and materialism of modern culture as the main evil. The German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, with whom Marx spent a good deal of time in Paris, may have been an influence here. He strongly defended a ‘sensualist’ vision of a future society in which all could fulfil themselves, whatever their rank in society; his enemies were the socialist puritans, who would ‘mercilessly smash the marble statues of beauty’.22

  Yet Marx’s Communism was also founded to some degree on his view of pre-capitalist societies, and a Rousseauian love of ancient ‘wholeness’.23 Marx explained that amongst primitive peoples there had been very little division of labour, except within the family; men produced for themselves or relatives, rather than employers or the market. Therefore they were not ‘alienated’ but had full control over their economic lives, in contrast to those who lived under capitalism, in which people were producing for a larger market. They also had power over their political lives, running their own affairs in small-scale communities.

  However, crucially, Marx did not want his Communism to be ‘backward’; he saw it as similar in some ways to pre-capitalist society, but operating at a higher level of economic development. Unlike most Communists and utopian socialists, he accepted that capitalism and markets had brought benefits which had to be built on, not destroyed. He praised the way in which capitalism had integrated the world and destroyed ‘backward’ institutions and old, primitive ways of life. Here we see the influence of Saint-Simon, an author whom Marx had admired as a youth, and of whom Engels wrote that almost all of the ideas of later socialists were contained in embryo in his theories. Marx, therefore, had little sympathy for the decentralized utopianism of a Proudhon or Owen. Indeed, in some places The Communist Manifesto might be taken for a paean of praise for capitalism and globalization, and even its progenitors, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie of the Manifesto was a revolutionary class, in many ways to be admired. It had ‘accomplished wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals’: by ‘subject[ing] the countr
yside to the rule of towns’, it had rescued ‘a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’; by creating more ‘massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’, and centralizing production in huge factories; it was forging nation states out of fragmented communities; and it was even replacing ‘national seclusion’ with ‘universal interdependence of nations’, a process which benefited the proletariat because, unlike the bourgeoisie, it had no fatherland.24 Marx’s Communism was therefore unmistakeably a modern society; it would follow capitalism but build upon it. It could not, he insisted, emerge in a backward country dominated by a feudal aristocracy and lacking a powerful industrial base and a large modern proletariat. A ‘bourgeois revolution’ against the feudal aristocracy, like the French Revolution, was therefore the essential precondition for the future proletarian revolution. Social development followed a series of stages, from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, and then on to Communism.

  Yet, whilst Marx and Engels praised the bourgeoisie for shaping nation states and the global economic system, they also maintained that it could not control the dynamic world it had created. Indeed, the bourgeoisie was unwittingly fashioning the tools of its own destruction: using the Romantic, poetic language he loved so much, Marx described it as ‘like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’.25 Industrialization was destroying small-scale, artisanal production, and creating an enormous industrial working class, which would ultimately destroy the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie’s nemesis would take the form of the new industrial proletariat. Proletarians, Marx insisted, would be much more collectivist and better organized than artisans, learning how to cooperate from their work together in large factories. They would also become increasingly dissatisfied, as the logic of capitalism inevitably led to their increasing exploitation. Competition between capitalists would force them to invest more and more in new labour-saving machinery, which would inevitably reduce their profits and compel them to exploit workers even more brutally. But it would also compel capitalists to produce too much for the market to absorb, leading to periodic economic crises, putting many small capitalists out of business, and concentrating ownership in ever fewer hands. The instability and irrationality of capitalism would thus prepare the ground for Communism: the workers, an increasingly revolutionary force, would be ready to seize control of a mechanized production process now ideally suited to rational management by central planning. The social and economic system, like a ripe fruit, would readily drop into the laps of the waiting workers. As the Manifesto declared, ‘The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.’ The state would improve the economy ‘in accordance with a common plan’, and all workers would be mobilized in ‘industrial armies’.26