The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  This image of society, then, was one of centralization and planning, and even military discipline. So how could it be married to the vision of work as joyful creativity? And how could either form of socialism be reconciled with revolutionary insurrection and violence? Marx and Engels struggled to resolve these tensions, but despite their best efforts a foundational flaw ran through the edifice of Marxism, reflecting its original three major constituent elements: the utopian Romanticism of people like Rousseau or Fourier, Babouvian revolution, and Saint-Simon’s technocracy. Three rather different visions can therefore be found in Marx’s and Engels’ works from the 1840s: a ‘Romantic’ one, in which people work for the love of it and govern themselves, without the need for authority imposed from above; a ‘Radical’, revolutionary and egalitarian one, in which the heroic working class unite on the barricades to fight the bourgeoisie and establish a new modern revolutionary state; and a ‘Modernist’ one, in which the economy was run according to a central plan, administered, at least in the early stages, by some kind of bureaucracy. These different visions also affected Marx’s and Engels’ response to another question: how was Communism to be achieved? For a more Radical Marx, the proletariat was ready for Communist society. Just as it could be trusted to work diligently, without direction from above, so its heroism and self-sacrifice would lead it to stage a Communist revolution in the very near future. But for the Modernist Marx, the revolution would only arrive when economic conditions were ripe, when industry was highly developed and when capitalism was on the brink of an often hard-to-define crisis. Those who simply had faith in the heroism of the working class to deliver Communism and demanded an immediate end to capitalism were ignoring economic realities and committing the deadly sin of utopian thinking.27

  The weight of the three elements after 1848, however, was unequal. Utopian Romanticism remained in the ultimate dream of ‘Communism’, but its prominence declined. Marxism was increasingly becoming a philosophy of both revolution and science, and the tension between the two created a fault-line within Marxism that persisted throughout its history. Marx and Engels struggled heroically to obscure it, yet paradoxically, this imperfection was not without its advantages. Whilst it offended their love of consistency, it also provided them with flexibility, allowing them to tilt towards Radicalism or Modernism depending on the particular situation. This balancing act was to prove vital for Marxism’s survival during the violent upheavals and sudden changes of political fortune in nineteenth-century Western Europe.

  IV

  Norbert Truquin, a poor, frequently unemployed labourer, went to Paris in 1848 in search of work, and found it turning a grinding wheel for two francs a day. Though well aware of socialist ideas, he was ambivalent about them. His autobiography records that he felt ‘anticommunist’ because ‘it seemed to me that community required an iron discipline, before which all individual will would be erased’. This would interfere with his ‘desire to roam the world’. However, he also saw the advantages of Communism: ‘If goods were held in common, we would not have to travel three leagues a day to get to work… we would not be reduced to eating nothing but broth, and children would not be forced to work so young.’28 And when revolution actually broke out in February 1848, Truquin joined the barricades. Reminiscing about the joyful atmosphere, as both bourgeois and worker denounced the Orleanist monarchy, he also detected tensions beneath the surface: ‘from the physical appearance of the bourgeois, you could tell that there was something false in their effusive gestures and that they were experiencing a poorly-disguised aversion for their comrades-in-arms.’29 Truquin had indeed sensed the beginning of the end of the bourgeois–worker alliance that had typified French revolutionary history. By June the split had become permanent.

  In fact the first signs of the split had emerged much earlier, in the aftermath of the 1830 revolution. The revolution had brought to power a regime that favoured laissez-faire economics, and the government of the Orleanist Louis-Philippe was unsympathetic to the demands of artisans and labourers who were suffering from the newly emerging capitalist economy. As cities grew, markets expanded and new technologies encouraged larger-scale ‘industrial’ factory production, small-scale artisans found themselves under pressure. Craft guilds, where they still existed, were damaged by the cheap goods churned out by capitalist entrepreneurs and their factories of less-skilled workers – Marx’s ‘proletarians’. Rebellion was the result, and the Lyon silk-workers’ uprising of 1831 can be seen as one of the first modern workers’ revolts.30 Workers had protested before of course – the sans-culottes of 1793–4 amongst them – but they had generally done so as hard-hit consumers, not as producers. Now, as their slogan ‘Live Working or Die Fighting!’ (Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!) showed, popular rebels saw themselves primarily as workers fighting against the propertied. And unlike the 1789 and 1830 revolutions, when an alliance of the poor, middling artisans and relatively well-off masters came together to protest at an aristocratic order, these rebels were largely manual workers, protesting against a liberal government. Indeed, some called themselves ‘proletarians’ even though they were not Marx’s new industrial workers and despite the fact that some owned their own businesses. Observers at the time understood that something new was happening. Eighteen thirty-one was the year that the term ‘socialism’ was coined by Henri Leroux, and the ‘social question’ became a fashionable topic of discussion.

  The year after the Lyon strike, Parisian workers tried to follow their example, in events which Victor Hugo portrayed so dramatically in Les Misérables. Socialist movements and thinking flourished in 1830s and 1840s France, but it was in Britain, where modern industry was already becoming dominant, that workers’ protest was most dramatic, as the Chartist movement united artisans and modern industrial workers in the demand for the vote. The events of the 1840s, in France and Britain, convinced many on both the right and the left that revolution was a real possibility; they certainly fuelled Marx’s and Engels’ optimism. As Marx wrote of one meeting with Parisian workers back in 1843:

  when Communist artisans form associations, teaching and propaganda are their first aims. But their association itself creates a new need – the need for society – and what appeared to be a means has become an end… The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.31

  Yet, as is clear from these observations, Marx’s profession of faith in the collectivism and revolutionary energies of workers was based largely on the experience of artisans, not in fact the industrial proletarians whom he assumed would be the creators of Communism. Artisans were indeed often very radical, though largely in defence of their old way of life against capitalism, not as heralds of the industrial future. Moreover, they lacked the power of numbers, coherence and organization. Production on the Continent was still largely artisanal, and where the proletariat did exist in large numbers – in England – it boasted few revolutionaries. Even so, whilst the Communist Manifesto, published in early 1848, was hardly noticed beyond a select circle of Communists, it appeared to be uncannily prescient, and the spread of revolution across Europe reinforced Marx’s belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism at the hands of the proletariat.

  The revolutionary events had begun in Switzerland in 1847, and early the following year spread to Sicily, Naples, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, Krakow, Milan and Berlin. In the vanguard were affluent liberal professionals who demanded freedom of speech and expansion of the franchise; sometimes, as in the Austrian empire, they called for national independence. The weaknesses of the old regimes became rapidly evident, and monarchs were toppled, or were forced to grant liberal freedoms. The new authorities introduced moderate, liberal reforms, destroying autocratic government and the serfdom typical of the ancien régime where they still existed, especially in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

  Marx had great hopes for these uprisings, seeing in them a prelude to h
is proletarian revolution. Together with his family and Engels, he left Paris for Cologne and set up a radical newspaper, the Neue Rhenische Zeitung, whilst working as a political activist. His attitude towards revolution depended on each country’s particular situation. In France, he believed that the revolution would follow the pattern of 1789: the bourgeois revolution would inevitably be radicalized and class struggle would then erupt between workers and the bourgeoisie. Germany, however, he thought too backward for this scenario; a bourgeois revolution had not yet happened. Even so, by the end of 1848 he argued that the prospects for Communist revolution were particularly favourable in Germany, because of its uneven development. Although German states were ruled by the old feudal aristocracy, the bourgeois revolution would take place with the help of a ‘developed proletariat’. Marx therefore urged his fellow Communists to support the bourgeoisie and fight for liberal political reforms, but then to carry on struggling for the proletarian revolution which would follow immediately after as the proletariat used its ‘political supremacy’ to centralize and increase production.32 This was the first enunciation, in embryo, of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’, the idea that even in a backward country the proletariat should support a bourgeois revolution and then immediately prepare for a second proletarian revolution. It was this theory that Leon Trotsky enunciated, and was then used to justify the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

  For Marx and Engels the outcome of the proletarian revolution was to be a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. By this, they did not mean the rule of a revolutionary party over the majority, in the Jacobin or Blanquist tradition. Rather, they favoured a democracy in which the proletariat would rule through popular assemblies, and use emergency powers, violent if necessary, to break the old state.33

  In the first half of 1848, Marx’s predictions for revolution in France did not look too implausible, and whilst the revolution, like its predecessors, united the middle classes and workers, the latter were determined to learn the lesson of 1830 and not to allow their revolution to be ‘stolen’.34 The right-liberal government of François Guizot, working under King Louis-Philippe, had alienated both the middle classes and the workers: it retained a highly restricted franchise and manipulated elections, whilst taking a harsh line with the poor. On the night of 22 February, over a million paving stones were torn up and over 4,000 trees felled, and by the morning more than 1,500 barricades had been built. The authorities were unable to persuade the National Guard to take action, and by the following day Guizot had resigned. The day after, Louis-Philippe fled to England, where he lived quietly in Surrey until his death two years later.

  The new French government was dominated by moderate republicans, leavened by a minority of radicals, amongst them the famous socialist Louis Blanc and a solitary worker by the name of Albert. But the radicals were reinforced by a huge crowd of workers who put direct pressure on the government by assembling menacingly outside the Hôtel de Ville. The Provisional Government rapidly met many of their demands: a republic was declared, universal male suffrage introduced, and reforms specifically designed to help workers enacted. Subcontracting – a method used by employers to reduce wages – was banned, and the working day was restricted to ten hours (the first time a government had tried to regulate work in this way).

  However, it was the Provisional Government’s commitment, under pressure from Louis Blanc, ‘to guarantee labour to all citizens’ that caused the most conflict with the bourgeois members of the government. ‘National Workshops’ were set up to employ the indigent, largely on public works schemes. The workshops were financed by a land tax, which fell on the mass of peasant farmers. But the elections of April, which were won by rural notables, showed how unrepresentative the Parisian radicals were and how sharply Paris and the countryside were split. The newly elected Assembly promptly proposed that the workshops be closed, and workers fought back. In June they returned to the barricades – this time rather more sturdily built – and over 15,000 of them staged one of the most impressive of all worker insurrections. Some of the insurgents were members of the workshops, but most were artisans protesting against the new factory-based economy.35 The rebellion was brutally crushed; the government was forced to recruit about 100,000 national guards from the provinces, and fighting was bitter and lasted for several days. Thousands of workers were killed, imprisoned, or sent to Algeria. It was clear that the artisanal workers were not numerous or powerful enough to impose a socialist settlement on France.

  If Marx’s predictions of a proletarian revolution had fared poorly in France, it was less likely that they would come to fruition in Germany. There the workers’ movement was smaller and more divided, and the middle classes more conservative – though parts of the peasantry were radical. Marx himself initially favoured the pursuit of constitutional, democratic objectives, rather than socialist ones. But by September, as it became clear that the middle classes were not going to play a revolutionary role, he and Engels called for a ‘red’ republic that would adopt socialist policies. Marx also favoured revolutionary insurrections where he thought they might work, though he insisted they be mass revolutions – involving both workers and peasants – not ‘Blanquist’ conspiracies.36 Engels was especially militant, and personally took part in uprisings in Elberfeld and the Rhineland-Palatinate in May 1849. The previous September he wrote enthusiastically of the armed rebellions, ‘Is there a revolutionary centre anywhere in the world where the red flag, the emblem of the militant, united proletariat of Europe, has not been found flying on the barricades during the last five months?’37 In 1848–9, therefore, Marx and Engels were setting an example for so many future Communist revolutionaries, fomenting popular revolution in undeveloped, agrarian societies.38

  Throughout Western and Central Europe, artisans demonstrated against unemployment and competition, sometimes joined by rebellious peasants, as the loss of common land provoked enormous anger. The view of radicals like Marx, that 1789 could be repeated, was therefore understandable. But moderates and conservatives had also learnt the lessons of 1789, and were determined to suppress popular unrest, and the authorities fought back.39 By November 1848 the Prussian revolution had been defeated, and thousands of workers were deported from Berlin and other cities. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, was elected president of France, trading on the Bonaparte name and garnering support from opponents of revolution in the countryside, the ‘party of order’, and workers resentful at the violence used against them by the liberal republicans. Once in power Louis-Napoleon’s politics became increasingly conservative, and by mid-1849 his troops had contributed to the defeats of the last revolutionary governments in Italy.

  For some time after, however, Marx and Engels refused to accept that all was lost, and they continued to predict that revolution of the 1789 or 1848 type was about to break out. Their revolutionary hopes waxed and waned, but it was clear by the late 1850s that revolution was not on the horizon.

  Socialists, however, could find solace in one revolutionary episode in an otherwise distinctly unrevolutionary period: the Paris Commune of 1871. Paris had been surrounded by the Prussians in one of the longest sieges of modern times (second only to Stalingrad), and when the government signed an armistice, Parisians were outraged. They held elections, and about a third of the elected deputies were craftsmen, making it the most worker-dominated government to appear in Europe thus far. Thirty-two of the eighty-one members of the assembly were members of the First International of socialist parties, which Marx had helped to found, but they were not his disciples.40 Most deputies were influenced more by the decentralized socialism of Proudhon, or by Blanqui’s insurrectionary Jacobinism.41 However, the Commune’s real significance lay in its legacy. It was the first government to be connected with Marx, and for the first time the red flag, not the Republic’s tricolour, flew above a seat of government, the Hôtel de Ville. Marx and Engels also described it as the model of their ‘proletarian dictatorship’.42 For them, the
Commune had proved that the old state bureaucracy could be smashed, and all areas of government democratized. Elected deputies ruled directly, both legislators and executives, while all officials received workers’ wages and were subject to dismissal by the people.