The experience of war and defeat also pushed some intellectuals towards revolutionary Marxism. Much of the reason for this lay in their attitude to the ‘bourgeoisie’, but the bourgeois they railed against was of a particular type. He was not the narrow, hard-nosed Gradgrind of Marx’s Capital but was best represented by Diederich Hessling, the anti-hero of Heinrich Mann in his popular novel Man of Straw (Der Untertan, literally The Subject) (1918). Hessling is a ‘feudalized’ bourgeois, a submissive Hermes to the Wilhelmine Zeus. He is, at root, a cynical opportunist but has learnt at school and university to venerate hierarchy. Pathetically he attempts to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, joining duelling fraternities and even adopting a Kaiser-style moustache, and embraces the fashionable militarism and imperialism. Meanwhile he exploits the workers beneath him.16
Man of Straw dramatized the theories of imperialism of Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg. They suggested that capitalism had become intimately connected with imperialism and militarism. The old liberal defence of capitalism as the bearer of freedom and peace no longer seemed credible. This analysis made sense to many, even those who were not fully paid-up Marxists. Karl Kraus, the owner of the Viennese satirical magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) and a critic of nationalism (but by no means a Marxist), captured the appeal of Communism to angry intellectuals. Writing in November 1920 he explained:
Communism is in reality nothing but the antithesis of a particular ideology that is both thoroughly harmful and corrosive. Thank God for the fact that Communism springs from a clean and clear ideal, which preserves its idealistic purpose even though, as an antidote, it is inclined to be somewhat harsh. To hell with its practical importance: but may God at least preserve it for us as a never-ending menace to those people who own big estates and who, in order to hang on to them, are prepared to despatch humanity into battle, to abandon it to starvation for the sake of patriotic honour. May God preserve Communism so that the evil brood of its enemies may be prevented from becoming more bare-faced still, so that the gang of profiteers… shall have their sleep disturbed by a few pangs of anxiety.17
But whilst Kraus may have had his doubts about Communism’s ‘harshness’, for others it now seemed normal; fire had to be fought with fire. Before the war, many of the avant-garde intelligentsia despaired of mundane, ‘philistine’, bourgeois life, with its enslavement to money and technology. They hoped for a politics of spirit, soul and enthusiasm. These Romantic anti-capitalists often welcomed the war as an opportunity to smash bourgeois complacency and create a new man, full of renewed vigour and spirit.18 But the war affected radicals in different ways. For some, like the Futurist Marinetti, who ended up on the fascist right, it showed the need for even more intense, messianic nationalism. But a more common response was a profound disillusionment with nationalistic flag-waving. Many of the leftist intellectuals of the Weimar period were deeply affected by fighting at the front.
Yet whilst the war may have discredited nationalist militarism, it did not do the same for wartime Romanticism. Artists and intellectuals were more determined than ever to create the new man, free of the confines of bourgeois society. But now the new man was to be the ideal worker, not a nationalist warrior. Many champions of expressionism in the arts – a movement that prized intense feeling and extreme imagery – moved to the left. The playwright Ernst Toller, for instance, became a leader of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919.19
Given the temper of the time, it is no surprise that the major Marxist theorists of this wartime generation should have been in the Radical Marxist camp, and were closer to Aleksandr Bogdanov and the Bolshevik left than to Lenin. György Lukács, for instance, an intellectual born to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest, had been a Romantic critic of capitalism before the war, but his interests were in utopian forms of mysticism, not the socialist left; socialism, for him, did not have the ‘religious power capable of filling the entire soul’.20 However, the war and ensuing Bolshevik revolution convinced him that Communism was the best way of creating a new society, free of the bourgeoisie’s stifling rationality. His friend, Paul Ernst, attributed the following views of the Bolsheviks to him:
The Russian Revolution… is just taking its first steps to lead humanity beyond the bourgeois social order of mechanization and bureaucratization, militarism and imperialism, towards a free world in which the Spirit will once again rule and the Soul will at last be able to live.21
It took Lukács some time to overcome his mistrust of Communist violence, and it was only in December 1918 that he was finally converted to Communism by Béla Kun. When Kun formed the Hungarian Soviet government in March 1919, Lukács was appointed the Deputy People’s Commissar for Public Education for the 133 days the regime survived, staging performances of George Bernard Shaw, Gogol and Ibsen for the workers of Budapest. In the final days of the Soviet government, this most cerebral of intellectuals became the political commissar for a division of the Hungarian Red Army, recklessly patrolling the trenches and braving the enemy’s fire.22 His Marxism was always more leftist and radical than Lenin’s, and he even suggested that the Communist Party should be dissolved once it had taken power.23 He became more orthodox in the years of his exile in Vienna, but his History and Class Consciousness of 1923 became one of the most important texts of ‘Western Marxism’ – a form of Marxism that stressed the power of culture and the subjective over science and the laws of history.24 Lukács was famously, and rather unfairly, satirized by Thomas Mann in his novel of 1924, The Magic Mountain, as ‘Naphta’, a strange combination of Jew, Jesuit and Communist. In one of the lengthy debates within the novel, he declared:
The proletariat has taken up [the medieval Pope] Gregory the Great’s task, his godly zeal burns within it, and his hands can no more refrain from shedding blood than could his. Its work is terror, that the world may be saved and the ultimate goal of redemption be achieved: the children of God living in a world without classes or laws.25
A preoccupation with cultural power over economics was also characteristic of the Marxism of the influential Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, even though his background was very different to that of the wealthy Lukács. The sickly son of a poor government clerk from Sardinia, where the landed aristocracy was still very dominant, Gramsci admitted to having had an ‘instinct of rebellion against the rich’ from a young age.26 He was perhaps therefore a more natural socialist than Lukács, and once he had entered the University of Turin – an industrial town with a strong union movement – he threw himself into leftist politics. However, he shared Lukács’s desire to reconcile Marxism with a politics of the spirit and cultural transformation. Communist intellectuals were not to be arid Kautskian scientists, agronomists and economists. Like the priests of the medieval Catholic Church, they had to be able to understand the passions of the masses. Influenced by the Russian Proletkult, Gramsci hoped that the factory council movement would create a new egalitarian proletarian culture, for socialism was ‘an integral vision of life’ with ‘a philosophy, a mystique, a morality’.27 He always remained true to this radical democratic tradition which placed its faith in elected workers’ organizations, rather than a centralized party.28 Even so, in the complex factional politics of the early 1920s he was recognized as head of the Italian Communist Party by Moscow in late 1923.
Lukács’s and Gramsci’s interest in the cultural and subjective aspects of Marxism was shared by many other Western intellectuals of their generation. The Marxist Institute for Social Research, or ‘Frankfurt School’, founded in Germany in 1923 (and which moved to New York in 1934 after Hitler came to power), included figures with few links to Communist politics, such as the Marxist cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.29 But all of these figures were less influential in the inter-war period than during the next flowering of Romantic Marxism in the West, in the 1960s. They were too young, although their most influential work was written in the 1930s – Gramsci’s whilst he was in a Fascist prison. Their rejection of scientif
ic, Modernist Marxism was also extreme. Yet there was one critic of the old Modernist Marxism who was both a major theorist and was active in Communist politics: ‘Red Rosa’ Luxemburg. A Radical Marxist and a strong supporter of revolutionary democracy, Luxemburg was a critic of Modernist Marxist ‘waiting’ and a Social Democratic leadership she saw as stolid and unimaginative. Her tastes were the opposite of Lenin’s. She hated what she called the ‘German mentality’ for its routine and officiousness, admiring instead Russian revolutionary verve.30 If Lenin saw his role as Westernizing Russia, Luxemburg saw hers as Russifying Germany. But in other ways she was close to Lenin – a Marxist, born in the Russian empire in the early 1870s, brought up in an orthodox Marxism, who insisted on a revolution whilst at the same time remaining convinced that capitalism was about to crumble anyway. She also shared Lenin’s interest in economics – her main theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, tried to show, like Marx’s Capital, why capitalism was doomed by its own internal economic contradictions. And like Lenin, a personal bourgeois fastidiousness in everyday life contrasted rather drastically with implacable criticism of the bourgeoisie.
Luxemburg also shared Lenin’s attitudes towards revolutionary strategy in 1918 and 1919. A committed militant activist, she called for socialism, immediately, in Germany, and her Spartakus League became the core of the KPD, the German Communist party established on 30 December 1918. She was always a revolutionary democrat and critic of terror, and she condemned the authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks. Even so, Lenin retained his affection for her. After her death he compared her to the eagle, in the Russian fable of the eagle and the chicken. She could sometimes fly lower than the chicken – as when she disagreed with him on the question of violence and revolution – but she also soared to heights of Marxist virtue.31
In 1918 and early 1919 Lenin himself was prepared to accede to the revolutionary radicalism in the West which he had begun to abandon in Russia itself. Western workers, Lenin reasoned, were more mature than backward Russians. In the West revolutions might ‘proceed more smoothly’, and achieve power in more diverse ways, without the need for the iron discipline of a vanguard party. So, whilst Lenin was eager to establish a third, Communist International – the Comintern – to rival the second, Social Democratic one, he did not think it needed to impose centralized control. The first Comintern congress took place in a draughty Kremlin hall on a cold Sunday in March 1919, and was a chaotic affair. Very few of the foreign delegates had arrived, and those who did had to deal with the ‘flimsy chairs at rickety tables obviously borrowed from some café’, whilst ‘the carpets strove, though in vain, to make up for the heaters that blew terrible gusts of frigid air at the delegates’.32 The frosty temperature was soon countered by the heat of the rhetoric. Many delegates were convinced that world revolution was imminent, and that workers’ councils were the seeds of the new state. Indeed, Trotsky’s ‘Manifesto to the Proletariat of the Entire World’ did not even mention the rule of the vanguard, the Communist party; the model of the new order was that outlined in State and Revolution.33
III
For a time, Marxist theory and popular attitudes appeared to be moving in tandem, as Marxist Radicals tapped into the ideas of the more militant strains of the workers’ movement. Communists did better in some countries than in others, though the pattern was not the one predicted by orthodox Marxism. Unified, cohesive working classes did not produce powerful Communist movements. Instead, they helped moderate socialists and trade unionists, who could use the power of organized labour to win concessions from the ruling classes. Rather, Communists did best in underdeveloped agrarian economies where industrialization was late and patchy, and the working class was poorly organized. In these countries, peasants tended to be angry at the remnants of an old agrarian order, and moderate socialists were weak.34 Communists were also helped by defeat in war, which discredited aristocracies and the socialists who had cooperated with them.
Russia, of course, fulfilled these conditions most closely. But Hungary also partially fitted the template. Unlike Russia, it did not have a strong tradition of revolutionary Marxist politics; however, it was a predominantly agrarian society ruled by a narrowly based, conservative aristocratic regime, which had lost the war and refused to make concessions either to other classes, or to its minority nationalities. With the discrediting of elites and the threat of territorial disintegration, rural unrest and a bloodless revolution by Budapest workers brought the liberal Count Karolyi to power in October 1918, presiding over a Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists. Though it was supposedly preparing for elections to a Constituent Assembly, these were repeatedly postponed, on the grounds that they could not take place while Allied troops occupied Hungary. The government was also paralysed by divisions between liberals and socialists over land reform. The result was pressure from increasingly radical workers, peasants and demobilized soldiers.
Hungary seemed to be following a path similar to Russia’s a year and a half earlier. It also had a Bolshevik party (strongly influenced by Russian socialists), that took advantage of the unfolding situation. However, that party had been germinated abroad, in Russia, not at home. On the outbreak of the February revolution, Russia hosted about half a million Hungarian prisoners of war, many of whom were highly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. One of them, the charismatic journalist Béla Kun, became closely involved in the politics of the soviets and was transferred to Petrograd, where he organized a group of Hungarian prisoner-of-war Communists in Russia. This was one of the first Bolshevik attempts to export revolution. They believed that after Germany, Hungary was the ‘weakest link’ in the capitalist chain. Revolutionary schools were established in Moscow and Omsk to train Hungarian ex-prisoners, and then to send them as revolutionaries into Hungary. In November 1918, the Hungarian Communist Party was formally established in the Hotel Dresden, Moscow, and from there Kun led a group home to convert the ‘Hungarian Kerenshchina’ (rule of Kerenskii) into the ‘Hungarian October’.
Kun was an effective propagandist and beguiling rhetorician, as even his enemies admitted. One, a socialist, described one of his speeches:
Yesterday I heard Kun speak… it was an audacious, hateful, enthusiastic oratory. He was a hard-looking man with a head of a bull, thick hair and moustache, not so much Jewish, but peasant features, would best describe his face… He knows his audience and rules over them… Factory workers long at odds with the Social Democratic Party leaders, young intellectuals, teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks who came to his room… met Kun and Marxism.35
This energy, combined with Soviet financial help, was highly effective, but the Communists also benefited from the radicalization of the workers’ councils, and the threats to Hungarian territorial integrity.36 The Karolyi government soon became a victim of Allied support for Romanian, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav demands for chunks of Hungarian territory, whilst the Communists argued that an alliance with the USSR would deliver more than kow-towing to the perfidious Allies. In March the socialists merged with the Communists to create a joint government to resist them, and the Hungarian Soviet Republic was born.
The Hungarians were therefore amongst the first Communists explicitly to embrace nationalism cum revolutionary fervour, and initially they had some success in prevailing on the Allies to improve their terms. It looked as if rejecting Lenin’s internationalist orthodoxy might unite a large number of Hungarians behind the Communist banner. But in other areas, Kun and the Hungarian Communists were much less pragmatic than Lenin. They derived their economic ideas from the Radical Marxism of State and Revolution and its model of ‘proletarian democracy’, which had been in the forefront of Bolshevik rhetoric in 1917 and early 1918.37 For Kun, Hungarians were superior to Russians, and therefore more capable of the rapid transition to Communism than the Russians. Payment of workers by results – piece rates – was abolished, wages were increased and workers’ rents reduced; factories were to be nationalized and the economy subjected to cen
tral control. Moreover, the army was declared a purely proletarian body, conscription was outlawed, and all non-worker soldiers were dismissed. At the same time, a ‘Terror Squad of the Revolutionary Governing Council’ nicknamed the ‘Lenin boys’, comprising leather-coated toughs, pursued the wealthy and the former leaders of the old regime.
Many of these Communist experiments caused chaos, and, under socialist pressure, were reversed. But the regime failed to restore order to the urban economy, and, most importantly, it continued to rule in the narrow interests of the proletariat. It ordered that the land be nationalized and farmed collectively. Lenin urged the Hungarians not to attempt this foolishly ambitious step, but Kun’s obstinacy was tinged with national pride: ‘Let us carry out the revolution on the agrarian field as well. We should be able to do it better than the Russians…’38 The Communists’ use of forced requisitions to feed the army, and their anti-religion campaign, merely convinced the peasantry that the regime was at war with it.
The Hungarian Soviet government soon found itself with very little support. Peasants were particularly hostile, but workers too were angered by shortages and a worthless inflated currency. But it was the regime’s ultimate failure to defend the nation from foreign aggression that really destroyed it. In the late spring of 1919 the Hungarian Red Army responded to a Czech incursion, and struck deep into Slovakia, establishing a Slovak Soviet Republic in June. Kun even planned a coup in Vienna, although this was easily foiled. However, when the French Prime Minister Clemenceau and the Allies demanded a Hungarian withdrawal, Kun complied, leading to a collapse in army morale and encouraging Hungary’s neighbours to counter-attack. In its final weeks the regime launched a ‘red terror’ against internal ‘enemies’ to consolidate their rule, leading to the deaths of 587 people. Kun desperately appealed to Lenin for military help but in vain. The Bolsheviks were too hard-pressed in Russia itself. On 1 August the Revolutionary Governing Council decided to hand over power to a trade-union government, and Kun and his allies fled to Austria. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was the victim of foreign pressure rather than popular uprising, but Kun realized that his regime had failed to gain the support of the Hungarian workers, let alone the population as a whole.
The Red Flag: A History of Communism Page 17
