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A Short History of Communism
By Robert Harvey St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 Robert Harvey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8807-4
CHAPTER 1
The Deity
Far from opposing these so-called excesses, these examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired actual memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a guiding hand. Karl Marx
Marx and Marxism
Dean Street, Soho, 1852. Vendors ply their wares with hoarse shouts. Prostitutes, coquettishly overdressed in voluminous bustles, wait on street corners. Innumerable restaurants reflect the colourful variety of nationalities that live in the area. Drunkards curse loudly on their way home. The background is one of material poverty, of people just one step ahead of the pawnbroker. Even more difficult to sustain is the endless struggle of those from bourgeois backgrounds in continental Europe to uphold the standards that separate them from the masses.
One man seeking to uphold such standards, because he considers no other his intellectual equal, lives in a squalid two-room flat on the street itself. At the age of 34, he is a man of middle height, robustly built, with a thick, gushing black beard and, in the words of a visitor, 'piercing fiery eyes that have something demonically sinister about them'. His world is one of utter chaos: notoriously unpunctual, he often stays up at night, sleeps during the day, works for days on end and then does nothing for weeks.
The flat is rudimentary in the extreme. His sitting room overlooks the disorderly street, while his bedroom is at the back. The sitting room is covered in half an inch of dust, the chairs mostly broken. In the middle stands a large, solid table covered with an oilcloth, on which lie scattered manuscripts, books and newspapers, cutlery, plates, glasses and an inkpot. The smoke that hangs like a pall makes the visitor's eyes water.
Karl Marx himself is cordial enough when he greets the pilgrims that come to this messy shrine. But intellectual arrogance is never far away. Nor is the sense of injustice, the heady German nationalism, the hatred of most things English, the smouldering temper, the colossal ego. His personal disorganization amounts to a statement of superiority over the established order of things. Yet beneath the surface he craves the bourgeois comforts and respectability he affects to despise.
Marx presides over his household like a traditional German patriarch. He frowns at the mention of anything improper and subjects his wife, two daughters and a son to rambling monologues upon every subject. He takes them for picnics on Hampstead Heath, a large wild sprawl on which thousands of middle-class couples descend for their promenades, frequenting small stalls and donkey rides. Marx rides donkeys too, which amuses his children.
Yet beneath the respectability of that tormented personality lies a further layer: the personal bully, uncaring of the feeling of others. True, he shows a tender side to his family, to whom he rarely speaks sharply. His wife Jenny, an attractive and long-suffering Prussian aristocrat, is so devoted to him that she closes her eyes to the circumstances in which his character compels them to live. But after his infant son's death from tuberculosis, his wife has a nervous breakdown and Marx forces his attentions on his hard-working, long-suffering maid, Lenchen, fathering a bastard son he later refuses to acknowledge.
There is a great humanity about Marx's battery of failings, a humanity that does not often pierce his lumpen prose. He is fond of arguments, singing raucously in the streets, getting drunk. On a pub crawl in London with a friend, Eduard Bauer, they stumble upon a working men's evening out. The German refugees are at first treated hospitably, until the inebriated Marx starts denouncing the British way of life. The Germans have to flee their increasingly enraged audience and, after smashing streetlights with stones, are chased by three policemen until they escape down an alley.
The high jinks are rare. Mainly he broods over his exile, political defeat in his native Germany that he aspired to rule as a revolutionary dictator, his domestic troubles. The hopes aroused by the publication, just four years earlier, of the catechism and bible of his thought, the Communist Manifesto, lie unfulfilled. This appeared in 1848, when the established order in Europe teetered on the brink of catastrophe and then pulled back. Yet submerged in personal and political failure, he cannot even conceive that his name and thought are to become the labels for one of the greatest upheavals in world history since the Christian Gospels.
* * *
For all his defects, for all the sharpness of his tongue wielded mercilessly upon his enemies, Marx was carried forward, ultimately, by a genuine human ideal. When he finished the first volume of Das Kapital in April 1867, he told his publisher that he had sacrificed '... health, happiness and family to complete it'.
I laugh at so-called 'practical' men and their wisdom. If one were willing to be an ox, one could naturally turn one's back on human suffering and look after one's own skin. But I would really have considered myself unfulfilled if I caved in before making my book or at least my manuscript quite ready.
For Marx, exploitation explained the brutalized state of the proletariat and the spiritual emptiness of the bourgeoisie. Idealizing a proletariat of which he knew that he would never be considered a member, his innate respect of convention and his rugged assertions of bohemianism were quintessentially middle class – he genuinely, passionately believed in his dream: that of a perfect world, so different from the one he lived in. His goal was a noble one, in spite of the processes he thought necessary for its attainment. Through all the ravages done in his name, Marx would have clung to one thought, now a twentieth-century political cliché: the end justifies the means. The terrible history of Marxism in the twentieth century would, in its creator's view, have been justified if from it had emerged the kind of society he envisaged: one with no classes, no exploiters or exploited, no bureaucracy, and no 'political', as opposed to civil, society.
In this ideal world, there would be pure democracy. Everyone could pursue their own unhindered course of action, so long as this did not impinge on anyone else's independence. Thus, the ultimate Marxist ideal – utopian, if not very original – was that of perfect individual freedom balanced by that of others, sighed over by political theorists throughout the ages.
* * *
In the beginning was the word; and more than any since the New Testament and the Koran, Marx's word captured the imagination of man. This may astonish anyone dipping, or rather sinking, into the morass of Das Kapital's first nine chapters: how could a complex, convoluted writer with prose anchored in the teachings of the German philosophers possibly find a publisher, let alone a mass audience? Moreover Marx's ideas were largely second hand. As Robert Payne writes in his fine biography, Marx:
'The workers have no country' was first said by Marat, the French revolutionary, who was also the first to say 'the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains'. Blanqui had invented the phrase 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. Though Marx wrote, 'When the people saw the ancient finished coats of arms decorating the backsides of the aristocracy, and incontinently dispersed with wide, loud and irreverent laughter', ... he was paraphrasing a verse from Heine's Germany, a Winter's Tale. Even the most famous phrase of all – 'working men of all countries unite!' – had been borrowed from Karl Schapper and had appeared in print four months earlier. The Communist Manifesto was a palimpsest of ideas culled from at least fifteen known sources. Marx had stirred the broth, poured in some colouring matter and then flung the pot at the faces of the bourgeoisie.
Why then did the Manifesto, rather than the only partially digestible Das Kapital, catch on? Marx claimed for his work an almost unparalleled universality. There had been books of political philosophy of great force like Machiavelli's The Prince and Hobbes' Leviathan and works of economic theory with similar appeal, like J.S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. But Marx was the first to combine a philosophical background – principally that of Hegel – with the language of the newly fashionable economic theorists and a cascade of statistics (in vogue in the late nineteenth-century) to produce a 'scientific' theory of history claiming to predict the future.
In addition Marx could be as vivid a polemicist as any that had lived. There is genuine compassion and strength of feeling for the victims of the new industrial age in his description of the accumulation of wealth at one pole as 'at the same time accumulation of misery, accumulation of work, slavery, ignorance, brutality and degradation at the opposite pole'.
Yet the main reason the idea caught on was because Marx articulated and knitted together six of the main sentiments of the new mass age. First, in a society of transparent inequality, he preached equality. Second, in an age of reason, he preached a scientific explanation of the way history worked. Third, in an age when workers could for the first time be organized into a political force, capable of mounting strikes and demonstrations, he preached worker power.
Fourth, he advocated the guiding role of the Communist Party, a party of intellectuals capable of understanding better than the workers themselves where their true interests lay; this was the forerunner of the elitist theories of the twentieth century in countries in which the traditional loyalties that bound society together were breaking down. Implicit in the whole structure was the belief, mentioned earlier, that the end justifies the means, that because history is inevitable anything done in the name of progress is essentially good, no matter what the cost.
Fifth, in an age when nationalism was tearing Europe apart, he preached internationalism. Sixth, he argued that revolutionary violence was acceptable when many social reformers were preaching that change was obtainable only through gradual evolution. The impact of each of these six clarion calls was to be electric: never mind that the framework that connected them was so flimsy.
The Six Commandments
To take each of these commandments in turn: first, Marx's theory of the exploitation of man, so simple that almost anyone could understand it. The vast panorama of human history was telescoped into one brief message:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, continued in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. This chaotic process had, in nineteenth-century society, essentially been resolved into a direct clash between the workers and the bourgeoisie, which had supplanted the old initially feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment.
Marx genuinely admired the bourgeoisie's achievements. It had, he said, 'accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put to shame all former exoduses of nations and crusades'. He admired the bourgeoisie also for creating the conditions for its own downfall, for bringing into being an industrial working class that would inevitably overthrow it.
Marx was right to play up the inequality of the nineteenth century – especially as it applied to societies he had not envisaged – like Russia, where large numbers of people were migrating from a feudal countryside into industrial cities for the first time. In the countryside they had, as Marx said, been largely cowed by the message of feudal respect for their superiors; furthermore, they could not organize effectively there.
In Russia, country life meant institutionalized inequality. Wealthy landowners, for all their finery, were remote figures, separated from their inferiors by manner and birth; they could ignore the discontent of the farm workers, who lived too close to poverty to have their discontent taken seriously. Peasant smallholders were the most conservative class of all, jealously defending their right to a few acres of subsistence.
But in the city the rural incomers found themselves at the mercy of incomprehensible economic forces. In the countryside the weather, harvest failure or an employer's unpleasantness were to blame for hardship. In the city people could lose their jobs without apparent explanation. Marx made great play too, of the way capitalism required a certain level of unemployment to keep wages down and maximize its profits.
The cramped conditions of the new urban slums destroyed the family and local ties that made rural life so rigid and yet so stable. The urban rich instead lived next door to the poor, had sprung from their ranks, were apparently living off their sweated labour and were unlegitimized by manner or birth. People flung into the cities found themselves rootless and restless – the new creed of worker equality drew them like magnets, giving them an identity within, and explanation of, their terrifying new world.
Thus Russia, where urbanization started late in the nineteenth century, was riper for revolution than England, where enclosures had taken place before the Industrial Revolution, or France, where revolution had preceded the industrial development of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Later in the twentieth century Marxism found its followers almost exclusively among countries in the same state of rushed development.
Marx was to be proved entirely wrong in his prediction of the consequences of urban inequality, in asserting that the bourgeoisie 'produces above all its own gravediggers'. In his view, capital would become concentrated among so few, and productive power among so many, that ultimately the former would be overthrown. In fact revolution succeeded only in countries where power had initially been concentrated in a very few hands – usually those of the old feudal class – when industrial change took place. A representative middle class already holding power when the industrial revolution took place was usually too numerous and too powerful to be dislodged, its base expanding rather than contracting as industrialization proceeded.
Marx's second commandment – that history obeyed scientific laws – was pinched directly from his intellectual mentor, Hegel. The scientific law in question was the dialectic – originally the ancient Greek concept of one point of view being put forward and then opposed, so that a synthesis of opinions, a 'reasonable balance', could be achieved. Marx believed that history worked the same way: he borrowed from Hegel, and many other nineteenth-century thinkers, the certainty that history was a progress. Hegel believed that people in the early stage of history understood only their own individual surroundings; that in a later stage they would understand how the world worked, enabling them to make more balanced decisions about how to react to events; and that in the final stage, through religion and art, people would understand how their own reason worked (he called this 'absolute knowledge of the spirit').
Marx evolved his own theory of scientific political laws. Society started first as feudal; then it became bourgeois; finally, after too much capital had been concentrated in too few hands, the system collapsed and the organized proletariat took over. There were advantages in asserting that history was scientific. It chimed in with the fashionable view of the Age of Reason that everything could be explained. It made historical progress inevitable, and anything that impeded it merely delayed and harmed progress: thus history was just a relentless march forward towards the eventual victory of Communism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Short History of Communism by Robert Harvey. Copyright © 2004 Robert Harvey. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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