Name: Comrades
ISBN: 9780330439688

Robert Service

Almost two decades have passed since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Robert Service, one of our finest historians of modern Russia, sets out to examine the history of communism throughout the world. His uncomfortable conclusion and an important message for the 21st century is that although communism in its original form is now dead or dying, the poverty and injustice that enabled its rise are still dangerously alive.

Communism - a World History

Comrades

Tim Pendry

This is a sound one volume narrative history of communism, written from a fairly predictable liberal democratic perspective. Marxism is philosophically unsound. Leninism was astute at the process of seizing power but unable to manage the possession of power. The result was (and Robert Service is persuasive in this), inevitable brutality, oppression, bureaucratism and sclerosis with failure inbuilt into the system. However, the book is, like the liberal democratic strategy for dealing with communism after the Second World War, largely a work of containment. Like all liberals, Service is fair-minded – up to a point – but the narrative has its gaps. Those gaps ultimately diminish the value of the book as anything more than a rough-hewn historical narrative. There is no depth of understanding here. Service pays lip service to the conditions from which Communism emerged but it is merely that – lip service. A revolutionary vanguard emerges because all other methods failed to deal with abuses. These latter may seem small-scale for comfortable middle class people when compared to the later horrors of communism but they were far from so to the vast mass of the population in underdeveloped societies. It is easy to be moralistic on a full stomach. Lenin’s exiles experienced the Tsarist brutalities that preceded and accompanied the terror tactics of the desperate and failed Narodniks with no change for the better in peasant or worker conditions. The confused and often stupid tactics of Mao arose from a world in which their opponents included a Kuomintang that permitted perhaps a million peasants to be murdered when dams were deliberately broken. This is not to justify but merely to observe, since communism’s success and failure must be seen as the last desperate throw of the dice by radical intellectuals. They had (in their own eyes) to seize power against systems of exploitation under conditions where no one had been trained to exercise power once it was seized. The blame for the excesses of communism lies in the ineluctable human condition - the real idiocy of communism is its theory of our species. It also lies in the conduct of preceding elites that created an educated class that had no function as much as with the faults of the ideology itself. Create an educated class and then fail to listen to it or to feed it with sinecures (a lesson the Communists learned to the point of sclerosis when in power). Do this and you will inevitably create explosive frustration. Some of this elite will go on to become obsessive Lenins or Breiviks. The West now is in a similar state - an underemployed graduate class promotes liberal internationalism on the back of the general taxation of everyone else just as the base for that largesse is collapsing. Capitalists and property-owners have listened to progressive intellectuals, created an alliance of sorts, but this has merely ended up in costly failed foreign interventions to extend markets. This is what is meant by the ‘trahison des clercs’. Now the money is running out. It is the conservative populist right that may seem to have better answers than a Left which engaged in its own ‘trahison’ in complicity with a system that, as communists, it had once affected to despise. At the time of its arrival, Communism was often the only answer left to mass exploitation within underdeveloped territories and to the phenomenon of imperial exploitation. It is no accident that communism failed where workers were benefiting from exploitation of the wider world (in other words, where capital accumulation permitted mass participation in social democracy). Communists have had a continuing problem in that their preferred progressive forces will always have more in common with exploiters of the vast mass of humanity. Social democracy as a negotiated solution has thus worked for much of the period in which communism ruled as an alternative. It was a necessity for elites in facing off an alternative model. Social liberals have been struggling ever since communism collapsed to preserve what had only existed because this enemy also existed. When communism disappeared as a rival, elites started to claw back their power, a process that started in the crisis of the late-1970s. The complicity of the centre-left with a weird combination of free markets and authoritarian liberalism has now left it with no resources with which to reclaim leadership in the current time of troubles. This resistance gap is being filled with petit-bourgeois populisms like the Tea Party, violent anarchism, anomie, the black economy, libertarian hacktivism – anything but a discredited Marxism. Communism certainly succeeded in acquiring power and then became increasingly brutal to the degree that ideologues had massively ignorant but desperate populations to deal with. Desperation simply created urgent demands for short term results under external military pressures that could only be enforced through the most brutal means. Despite Eagleton’s claims (elsewhere) that brutality is no necessary result of communist control, the evidence is demonstrably against him. Pol Pot was a logical culmination of the constant outward flow to the margins of ‘empire’ of this ideology of desperation. Communism was always strongest where it was anti-imperialist and weakest where it was imposed by its own perverted imperialism (as in Eastern Europe). There is a lesson in this – Communism is always the last ditch ideological card for desperate poker players. Marxism, of course, may transmute (as it has done in Europe) into a devious bureaucratic corporatism but this very subterfuge indicates that it still requires a serious breakdown to come out into the open. Service occasionally mentions the benefits of communism in promoting egalitarian welfarism – if not always delivered in practice, always a definite intent. This intent was held back by lack of resources because of Communism’s own intrinsic economic incompetence. This, in turn, was based on its true weakness, its failure to comprehend ‘human nature’ in terms of the persistence of human desire for ‘things’, individualist rationality and lack of shared ‘belief’. True believers are always a minority in any religion. Sclerosis, corruption and a police state were inevitable results. The majority simply accept the nostrums while a further minority either work the system to their own benefit or insist on the value of some ‘better’ system. Service is very persuasive that Communism was intrinsically unreformable despite the hopes of reform Communists because reformers are, in the end, not really electable as Communists. What he does not do is delve very far into the psychology of Communist failure. By not going deeper into this top-down intent to improve the lot of the general population without its actual consent, the phenomenon ultimately remains unexplained. Pol Pot, Hoxha, Mengistu and Ceaucescu are the leaders that we are supposed to be horrified by. We are all supposed to be impressed by that rank example of political incompetence, Mikhail Gorbachev. But this is absurd. Even Service falls for a moment into the ‘good’ Communist trap. Gorbachev brought down communism as an idealist communist. This is not an example of goodness or nobility but merely of stupidity. The same might be said of Dubcek. Only Havel saw things clearly. We are certainly right to be horrified by the Pol Pots but we should equally be stunned that ‘democratic centralism’ should turn up such a light weight and dreamer as Gorbachev. If a system can only produce thugs, sclerotics and dreamers, then it is patently not working.Communism fails fundamentally as a political ideology because it simply is incapable of managing complex societies. Democratic centralism is flawed because bureaucracies and revolutionary struggles thrust inadequates into power by the nature of the process. Nevertheless, liberal democrats are not wise to strut over the ‘end of history’ or the inevitability of free markets and liberal institutionalism. The anti-Communists have operated as vilely as the Communists on many occasions but with much less excuse except defensive greed. If the West had stood back and permitted the Revolution of 1917 space in return for a policy of non-interference elsewhere, then Bukharinism might have created a social-fascist state. Such a state need not have been a threat or quite so murderous. But that is a big argument and we shall never know. The Oslo bombing indicates that resentment exists against the self-satisfaction of progressive liberalism. Self-serving elites govern on behalf of the people in name but for themselves in practice. When all the customary expressions of horror have passed, it behoves to ask what the conditions are that trigger such actions. It is not enough to simply refer to such ‘extremists’ as mad or evil. The history of democratic centralism (communism) may yet offer us some lessons on dealing with this sort of ‘ressentiment’ and this is a recommended basic text in that process. Something will always emerge that may offer cause to the propertied to be fearful whenever a new generation of radical intellectuals see the state of the exploited and oppressed, culturally and economically. If there are not enough jobs for high school graduates and if they can create cadres capable of sufficient organisational competence, liberal democracy and capitalism have a problem. This book is valuable, therefore, for two entirely different reasons. It is a well argued case study about a movement of resistance that collapsed under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions'. It is also valuable for what it fails to talk about – for the gaps in the narrative. What is now needed is to supplement this narrative with a look at those gaps. This means the conditions that permitted communism to emerge and the precise effect of the fear and loathing of imperial elites (internal and external and not forgetting the US) on its trajectory. We should also be honest about the short term positive changes communism effected through often brutal means for majorities against minorities. And about those internal contradictions and inherent flaws we have referred to (on which Service tells us most but not all of the story). From there we can start to consider what, to be fair, Service, does address though almost in passing – could ‘communism’ arise again? The answer is probably ‘yes’ but not in that name, nor in that particular Marxist-Leninist form nor in any way that is recognisably communist as we now understand the term. In the end, Communism was just Nietzsche’s priestly Christianity but with bureaucratic and military teeth, a religion for the masses. But it did give some voice to the weakest. Instead of operating alongside the State, it became the State. For priests read apparatchiks and bureaucrats. As with Christianity, the weak were represented but their interests perverted by special interests - and yet they did get some benefits. The refusal to accept this 'good' in communism is to be blind to the possibility of its return as some form of authoritarian national welfarism that might easily have a rightist cultural cloak. While the Soviet Union collapsed surprisingly quickly under the weight of its own contradictions, we now seem to be blind to the potential for collapse in our remaining two large imperial systems. We now get the cultural panic without the analysis or the remedial action. The Chinese are now wholly dependent for growth on grabbing overseas resources with all the verve of British imperial pirates, while the US represents a financial system with crumbling machinery. That debt-ridden machinery depends for its short term survival on Chinese desperation to keep it and European capitalism in operation. We are back in an age of unstable competing empires and of terrorism, exactly where we were in the late nineteenth century. Marx loved irony – that the whole capitalist thing is being held together by an exploitative communist peasant state will have him grimly smiling in his grave. Perhaps the local revolutionary struggles of the Zapatistas on the ground, of Anonymous in the ether and of national and religious fundamentalists give us clues to the future. Today, only one of these trends owes anything to Marxism – and then only indirectly. One might come to say one day, without irony: “Communism is dead. Long live revolutionary national welfarism.”

Comrades Communism - a World History

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