The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  V

  In October 2008 Frau Müller, a German teacher, saw one of her Karlsruhe pupils wearing a hooded jacket sporting the letters ‘USA’, and told him to stand up. ‘Face the class,’ she ordered. ‘How dare you come to school wearing a Western pullover. This is not a fashion show for the class enemy – a letter will be sent to your parents’ collective.’ No letter, of course, was actually sent. Teacher and pupil were both taking part in a Communist re-enactment, designed to show young Germans the evils of the Communist system. The eighteen-year-olds were given Young Pioneer neckerchiefs and told to sing Communist songs. They were also ordered to denounce a ‘dissident’ student, and were apparently happy to obey. As the project organizer complained, ‘I deliberately create a totalitarian atmosphere and I am still always shocked how quickly and easily people are conditioned by it.’32 More generally, she feared the nostalgia amongst students for the GDR: ‘some think that it was like living in a social paradise’.

  As this episode suggests, in some former Communist societies, economic crisis will probably produce increased nostalgia for Communism, with its commitment to full employment and welfare. However, there is little likelihood of a return to ‘real existing socialism’; memories of its excesses and failures are too recent. It is true that current resentment at extreme inequalities of wealth has fuelled distinctly left-wing populism in some countries. But past experience suggests that while extreme economic inequalities have often been necessary, they are rarely a sufficient condition for the success of an extreme left. Empires and deeply entrenched hierarchies have also been required. Should these elements (or something resembling them) re-emerge, then a new form of extremist left-wing politics could certainly develop.

  It is also possible that the Romantic, participatory tradition of Communism – last sighted on the barricades of 1968 – will assume a new relevance. Indeed the anti-globalization and ecological movements share much with this form of politics. If a crisis of globalized capitalism develops, Romantic Marxist ideals of authenticity and democratic participation may therefore become more widely appealing. But the problem that Marx raised still remains: how can decentralized communities be combined with economic prosperity? Are they only compatible with a reduction in living standards and a narrowing of horizons, as Marx himself believed? If they are, it is difficult to see how this kind of politics could secure mass support.

  The history of Communism should have taught us two things. The first lesson, now drawn by many writers, is how destructive dogmatic utopian thinking can be. The second lesson, rather more neglected today, is the danger of sharp inequalities and perceived injustice – for they can make that utopian politics very appealing. Since 1989 the dominant powers have learnt neither lesson. Reacting sharply against Communist utopias, messianic dogmatic liberals have sought to export their system – sometimes by force – across the globe. Perhaps only now, chastened by the crises of 2008, will we finally learn from the history of Communism. Only if we do so will we be spared another bloody act in the tradgedy of Prometheus.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16 (1989), pp.3–18; F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992).

  2. For a strong statement of this case, see N. Podhoretz, World War IV. The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (New York, 2007).

  3. For the background to this claim, see W. Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era (London, 2002), p.511.

  4. This view was most coherently expressed by E. H. Carr in his histories of the Soviet Union. See E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929) (London, 1979). On ideas of ‘convergence’, see Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), ch.6; D. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

  5. For the most explicit expression of this view, see S. Courtois, ‘Introduction’, in S. Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp.1–31.

  6. For the argument that Stalin self-consciously followed in the traditions of the tsars, see, for instance, R. Tucker, Stalin in Power. The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), pp.60–4.

  7. Trotsky argued that Stalinism was a fundamentally conservative regime ruled by a bureaucracy corrupted by bourgeois mores. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and Where is It Going? (New York, 1970), pp.101–4. For the Trotskyist analysis, see B. Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1975), pp.380–410.

  8. See, for instance, M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994).

  9. See, for instance, Courtois, ‘Introduction’, p.16.

  10. Simon Goldhill argues that Greek tragedy explored the problems inherent in the ‘civic society’ emerging in the Greek city states, as more ‘modern’, ‘democratic’ ideals took over from the old Homeric aristocratic ethos. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), pp.77–8, 155–6, chs.3–4.

  11. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. and ed. A. Podliecki (Oxford, 2005), ll.1041–53.

  12. R. Berki points to four elements within socialism: egalitarianism, moralism, rationalism and libertarianism. He argues that Marxism included all four, but libertarianism was the weakest. R. Berki, Socialism (London, 1975).

  13. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London, 1976), vol. i, p.31. For the influence of the Prometheus myth on Marx, see L. P. Wessel, Prometheus Bound. The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge, 1984).

  14. These different forms of Communism, ‘Romantic’, ‘Radical’, ‘Modernist’ and ‘Pragmatic’, are of course ‘ideal types’. They rarely existed in pure form, and often overlapped. The Romantic elements of Marxism, seen most strongly in the early writings of Marx, were more ‘libertarian’, in Berki’s terms, less concerned with political power and more interested in overcoming human alienation and encouraging creativity. These themes re-emerged in the ‘Western Marxisms’ of the 1950s and 1960s, as is seen in Chapter Eleven.

  15. For the contrast between party sectarianism and ‘inclusion’ in Communist regimes, see K. Jowitt, New World Disorder. The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), ch.3.

  PROLOGUE

  1. For this festival, see M. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Warren Roberts, Jacques Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics and the French Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1989), pp.292–3.

  2. Cited in L. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (London, 1986), p.99.

  3. Cited ibid., p.107.

  4. For the symbolism of Hercules, see Hunt, Politics, pp.94–103; James A. Leith, Space and Revolution. Projects for Monuments, Squares and Public Buildings in France, 1789–1799 (Montreal, 1991), pp.130–4.

  5. This is not to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly influenced by the Jacobins, as some have postulated. See J. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1986). For differences between Bolsheviks and Jacobins, see P. Higgonet, Goodness Beyond Virtue. Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p.330. For comparisons between the Jacobins and Stalin’s ‘revolutionary patriotism’, see E. Van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin. A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London, 2002).

  6. See David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France. Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800, (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp.146–54. See also Sièyes’s condemnation of the weak, ‘oriental’ bourgeoisie: W. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution. The Abbé Sièyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC, 1994), p.62.

  7. Cited in Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p.151.

  8. Marat-Mauger, quoted in Hunt, Politics, p.27. For the concept of the ‘new man’, see M. Ozouf, ‘La Révolution Française et l’idée de l’homme nouveau’, in C. Lucas (ed.), The French Revolu
tion and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 2: The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988).

  9. See, for instance, the views of the Abbé Sièyes: E.-J. Sièyes, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (Paris, 1988); Sewell, Rhetoric, pp.103–4.

  10. Cited in N. Parker, Portrayals of Revolution. Images, Debates and Patterns of Thought on the French Revolution (Carbondale, Ill., 1990), pp.83–7.

  11. Cited in F. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1789–1848 (London, 1987), p.25; Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, pp.16–29.

  12. J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Projected Reformation’, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. and ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), p.227. For the ‘heroism’ of the ‘revolutionary man’, see A.-L. Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, ed. C. Vellay (Paris, 1908), vol. ii, p.327. For heroes and self-sacrifice, see Higgonet, Goodness, p.1.

  13. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. M Cranston (Harmondsworth, 1968), bk 2.

  14. J. Shklar, Men and Citizens: a Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969), p.206.

  15. J.-J. Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, trans. B. Thompson (Paris, 1966). For the paternalism of Wolmar, and the distinction between Rousseau’s hierarchical ideas of the family and more democratic views of the state, see N. Fermon, Domesticating Passions. Rousseau, Woman and the Nation (Hanover, NH, 1997). See also Shklar, Men and Citizens pp.150–4.

  16. Cited in K. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), p.135.

  17. D. Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (London, 1985), p.160.

  18. M. Robespierre, Oeuvres complètes, ed. E. Hamel (10 vols.) (Paris, 1903–68), vol. i, p.211.

  19. Cited in Jordan, Revolutionary Career, p.142.

  20. S. Maréchal, ‘Le jugement dernier des rois’, in L. Moland, Théâtre de la révolution: ou, choix de pièces de théâtre qui ont fait sensation pendant la période révolutionnaire (Paris, 1877).

  21. Cited in R. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: the First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford, 1978), p.11.

  22. Cited in ibid., p.140.

  23. Cited in J. Lynn, ‘French Opinion and the Military Resurrection of the Pike, 1792–1794’, Military Affairs (1977), p.3.

  24. K. Alder, Engineering the Revolution. Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997), pp.264–5, 255.

  25. Quoted in J. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Urbana, Ill., 1984), p.173.

  26. Cited in D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare (London, 2007), p.131.

  27. Cited in A. Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, NC, 1990), p.160.

  28. For their radicalism and the hostility they caused, see especially C. Lucas, The Structure of the Terror: the Example of Javogues and the Loire (Oxford, 1973).

  29. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. x, p.357.

  30. Cited in J. Hardman, Robespierre (London, 1999), p.137.

  31. Ibid., p.127.

  32. See Higgonet, Goodness, pp.118–20.

  33. Hunt, Politics, pp.76–7.

  34. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1962), vol. i, p.247.

  A GERMAN PROMETHEUS

  1. H. Adhémar, ‘La Liberté sur les barricades de Delacroix, étudiée d’après des documents inédits’, Gazette des Beaux Arts 43 (1954), p.88. See also T. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 (London, 1999), pp.18–20; B. Joubert, Delacroix (Princeton, 1998).

  2. See F. Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, trans. D. Furet (Chicago, 1988).

  3. Ibid., p.21.

  4. P. Buonarotti, Conspiration pour l’égalité dite de Babeuf: suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu, et des pièces justicatives (Brussels, 1828), vol. ii, pp.132–8; R. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: the First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford, 1978), 213.

  5. Cited in R. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (2 vols.) (London, 1984), vol. i, pp.155–6. See also C. Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees. German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (London, 2006), ch.2.

  6. For the use of this term, and the distinction between utopians and the egalitarian Communists, see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 2002), pp.66, 69.

  7. C. Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, eds. G. Stedman Jones and I. Patterson (Cambridge, 1996).

  8. P.-J. Proudhon, What is Property?, eds. D. Kelley and B. Smith (Cambridge, 1994), p.196.

  9. R. Owen, Selected Works, vol. 3, The Book of the New Moral World, ed. G. Claeys (London, 1993), p.292.

  10. Keith Taylor (ed.), Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825): Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organization (London, 1975), pp.166–8.

  11. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, n.d), p.130.

  12. David McLellan, Karl Marx: a Biography (London, 1995), p.12.

  13. Cited in S. Barer, The Doctors of Revolution (London, 2000), pp.548–9.

  14. Cited in L. P. Wessel, Prometheus Bound. The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx’s Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge, 1984), p.118.

  15. Cited in ibid., p.119.

  16. For this contrast between the two, see especially Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, pp.50–71. See also McLellan, Karl Marx, pp.112 ff.

  17. For Marx’s understanding of this idea, see A. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, 1995), p.41.

  18. For a discussion of these ideas, see B. Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution. Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley, 1992), pp.256 ff.

  19. K. Marx, ‘On James Mill’, in K. Marx, The Early Texts, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford, 1971), p.202.

  20. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works [MECW] (New York, 1975–), vol. v, p.47.

  21. K. Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Marx, Early Texts, pp.146–7.

  22. Cited in Barer, Doctors, p.351.

  23. For this analysis, see Walicki, Marxism, pp.82–3.

  24. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, pp.222–3.

  25. Ibid., p.225.

  26. Ibid., pp.243–4.

  27. For a more detailed discussion of the tension between these Marxisms, see D. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization. Ideas, Power and Terror in Inter-war Russia (Oxford, 2007), pp.21–34. Many others have commented on contradictions in Marx’s thought, drawing slightly different distinctions. See A. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (London, 1980), p.32; S. Hanson, Time and Revolution. Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997), pp.37–55.

  28. ‘Diary of Norbert Truquin’, in M. Traugott (ed.), The French Worker. Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley, 1993), p.276.

  29. Ibid., p.285.

  30. W. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: the Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), ch.9; for the Lyon uprising of 1831, see R. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), ch.2.

  31. MECW, vol. iii, p.313.

  32. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p.258. See also A. Gilbert, Marx’s Politics. Communists and Citizens (Oxford, 1981), pp.197, 217–19.

  33. There is an enormous debate on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. This follows the view of D. Lovell, From Marx to Lenin. An Evalutation of Marx’s Responsibility for Soviet Authoritarianism (Cambridge, 1984). For the view that it merely meant radical democracy, and did not involve real dictatorship over other classes, see Hunt, Political Ideas, pp.284–336; H. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Vol. III: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (New York, 1986).

  34. For a deta
iled account, see G. Duveau, 1848. The Making of a Revolution, trans. A. Carter (London, 1967). On labour motivations, see R. Bezucha, ‘The French Revolution of 1848 and the Social History of Work’, Theory and Society 12 (1983), pp.469–84; M. Traugott, ‘The Crowd in the French Revolution of February 1848’, American Historical Review 93 (1988), pp.638–52.

  35. For artisans and the June revolution, see R. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Communities and Protest from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995).