REDS : A GLOBAL HISTORY OF COMMUNISM

By Paul Mason

Head of Zeus. 574 pages. £30. ISBN 978-1035-90590-4

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Why did it all come about? How did millions of people, willingly or not,  become citizens of countries pledged to a system of government that, with some minor variations, involved dictatorship, not of the proletariat but of the Communist Party? We live in a world where China, with its fast-developing economy and its one-party control, is likely to be the world’s supreme power before long. Capitalism is in crisis and, as recent events have shown, it only needs a shift in the regular supply of oil for the economies of the nations that comprise Western society to begin to shake at their foundations.  Doubt arises and democracy is in trouble, with questions about its validity coming from both the left and the right. 

Paul Mason offers a survey of how communism developed from the utopian ideas of theorists in nineteenth-century France into what Marx saw as a scientific philosophy designed to redress society’s ills, and then into a political ideology. I’m out of necessity overlooking lots of Mason’s ideas and comments which take the story further back than the 1830s or so. But that seems a reasonable place to start with the Saint-Simonians and the idea that “All forms of power over humans, including democracy, would be abolished once science was combined with technocratic decision making”.

As Mason makes clear, this would necessitate a highly-selective and  hierarchical elite making all important decisions. In other words, it would be a form of dictatorship, no matter how well-intentioned, as with Robert Owen, for example.  And how would dissenters, those who wouldn’t conform, be dealt with in this situation? It would seem that all utopias, large or small, involve conformity, and more so than would be required in a democratic society.  Mason notes how “Marx and Engels are full of patronising praise for the quaint fantasies of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. But they never seriously engaged with their totalitarian implications”.

The Utopians faded from sight when Marx, Engels, and the anarchist Bakunin appeared on the scene. Their arrival coincided with a growing workers’ movement in Europe. It would be “Karl Marx who gave communism a philosophical foundation, and Friedrich Engels who turned Marx’s ideas into a coherent orthodoxy”.  As for Bakunin, he “invented revolutionary anarchism”.  And, Mason adds, “they converged on the belief that socialism would be achieved not through the flower gardens of Fourier’s imagination, but with rifles and barricades”. But it was Bakunin who warned that “centralised states are self-perpetuating” and, if “Marxism were ever to form a revolutionary dictatorship, it could not escape this logic; it would inaugurate the dictatorship of a minority, even if it was drawn from the working class”. Having a distrust of dictatorships of any kind I always favoured Bakunin’s views on such matters.

I’m moving quickly through such events as the1871 Paris Commune and the Russian revolution of 1905. Mason has accounts of both that are worth reading, though I’m inclined to think that the social innovations (women’s rights, rent controls, etc.) advocated by the leaders of the Commune, while worthy, were using up time and energies that might have been better employed in organising effective defences for the city. My reading of histories of the Commune is that it was something of a shambles, with neglected military hardware, badly trained and poorly disciplined troops, and a lack of any efficient central command. The Bolsheviks were much better organised when they overthrew the Kerensky government in Russia in 1917. 

The details of the events that brought Lenin to power, and the subsequent civil war, are too complex to deal with here. Suffice to say that, once in command, the Bolsheviks wasted little time in starting to eliminate their alleged enemies, and not just among the bourgeoisie. Anarchists, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries had played their part in the revolution, but the fact that they had their own programmes which didn’t tie in with what the Communists wanted, was sufficient to seal their fate. Mason utilises a quote from the German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg to illustrate what was at stake : “Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”.

A rebellion by sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, demanding free elections, an independent press, and similar reforms, was brutally supressed. It will outrage some people if I say that I don’t think Trotsky would have behaved any differently than Lenin had he been in charge, heroic though he may have seemed to be in the 1930s in his opposition to Stalin. It was Trotsky who, during the economic crisis of the post-civil war period, wanted the “militarisation of labour” as opposed to any form of syndicalism or workers’ control. And it was Trotsky who, in answer to complaints about authoritarian actions, replied : “You wax indignant at the naked terror we are applying against our class enemies. But let me assure you that in one month’s time at the most, it will assume frightful forms, modelled after the great terror of the French Revolutionaries. Not the fortress but the guillotine awaits our enemies”.   

Elsewhere, attempts at communist revolutions in Hungary, Germany, and Finland failed, usually with tragic results for the communists. Rosa Luxemburg was killed by members of the Freikorp, the military group acting on behalf of the government. Outside Europe, the Communist Party of China was formed in 1921, with Mao Zedong, a student convert to Marxism, among its founding members. The long struggle to assert communist control only came to fruition in 1949. That China became a dictatorship (of the party) is a fact, and that those in charge were prepared to crack down harshly on any expressions of dissent was made evident at the time of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. And before that, in 1966, Mao had launched the “Cultural Revolution”, a drive to enforce conformity to communist ideals, or his version of them, throughout the country. What happened, as Red Guards ranged throughout China was, in Mason’s words, “misery, chaos, and murder”. Public humiliation, beatings, and death for anyone accused of failing to fall in line, were common practices. Tellingly, Mason says what happened came about because of “a power struggle between small groups of bureaucrats”. The cost in lives only became evident after Mao’s death in 1976.

In Russia, in the 1920s, it had been necessary to introduce a New Economic Policy (NEP), allowing a certain amount of private enterprise, in an attempt to stabilise the economy. After Lenin died in 1924 there was, inevitably, a struggle for control which finally resulted in Trotsky being expelled from Russia and Stalin effectively taking over. In due course he eliminated anyone he considered a threat to his position, including many of the old Bolsheviks, such as Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who, at one time or another, had allied themselves with him. Mason provides a lot more information about Stalin’s rise to power than I can incorporate into my summary. To read about the purges Stalin instigated, in particular the period of the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials, famine in the Ukraine, and much more, is truly disheartening in terms of what can happen when a dictatorship, backed up by a supposed ideology which legitimises extreme measures, is established.

The rise of Fascism in the 1930s brought new problems. Stalin had instituted a policy of opposition to “social fascism”, on the basis that “if the imperialist countries were going fascist, that made the social democratic parties fascist as well”. Therefore, the strong Communist Party in Germany could not associate with the even stronger Social Democrat Party. When Hitler assumed power in 1933 he had only a divided opposition to contend with. Had the communists and the social democrats combined it’s possible they could have defeated Hitler, both at the polls and in the streets. There is a novel, Barricades in Berlin by Klaus Neukrantz, a member of the German Communist Party, originally published in 1933, and it’s instructive to read it for what was the Party view of Social Democrats at that time. They are seen as no longer relevant to the working class and its concerns, and are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Russia came to the aid of the Spanish Republic in 1936 when Franco started his assault on the legitimately-elected government, though it was at a price, with Spanish gold reserves shipped to Russia and infiltration of the administration by Party activists. They pursued anarchists and members of the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), who were said to be Trotskyists (they weren’t), with as much dedication as they opposed Franco’s forces. By this time the Popular Front had been proclaimed, and it was permissible to join forces with liberals, conservatives, and anyone else opposed to fascism, though it obviously didn’t appear to apply to the anarchists and Trotskyists.

The Popular Front did attract people to the communist parties in various countries, but Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler probably drove just as many away.  Communist parties in Britain and America struggled to justify such a move and Mason tells how Harry Pollitt, who initially supported Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939, had to perform a quick about-face when the Kremlin ordered him to withdraw that support and call for peace with Hitler. This, needless to say, caused another quick change when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. For a time Russia was popular, with films, books, and newspaper articles lauding the achievements of the Red Army. And, to be fair, it was the Red Army that essentially broke the back of the German army.

When the war ended, membership of the communist parties in France and Italy was at an all-time high and creating concern, especially in the United States.  The American Marshal Plan, boosting the recovery programmes of these and other European countries, was generous but only applied provided both France and Italy expelled any communists from their cabinets. By 1947 it was clear that the Cold War was under way and, to quote Mason, “communist takeovers in Eastern Europe began in earnest. The Czech example became notorious because it involved destroying parties and politicians with previous mass support”. East Germany was already under Russian occupation, and communist takeovers soon took place in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania. Yugoslavia stood apart, but it had a dictatorship, though under Tito, a communist but not fully controlled by Moscow.

Stalin was by1949 convinced that Zionism in the USSR was an agency for imperialism. Accordingly, he ordered the arrest of fifteen members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Fourteen of them were eventually executed. There were then purges in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Stalin being of the opinion that Western intelligence had penetrated the communist parties in those countries. A significant factor in these actions, as in the so-called “Doctors’ Plot”, was the presence of a majority of Jews among the accused. It’s unlikely that this was a mere coincidence.

The development of the Russian atom bomb, with its accompanying realisation of the depth of communist espionage in America and elsewhere, kept the Cold War pot boiling. In 1950, hostilities broke out in Korea as the communist North, backed by China, invaded the relatively democratic South. United Nations troops were soon involved defending South Korea. North Korea remains a communist dictatorship.

Stalin died in 1953 and in 1956 Khruschev disclosed details of his crimes, causing consternation among communists world-wide.  But the Soviet Union was still a repressive society and, when an insurrection erupted in Hungary, troops and tanks were soon sent into Budapest to crush it.  The same thing happened in 1968, when the so-called Prague Spring, an attempt to liberalise communism in Czechoslovakia, was quickly put down, albeit not with the same number of deaths that occurred in Budapest.

In some ways the Prague events, followed several years later by the creation of Solidarity in Poland, pointed to the demise of the Soviet Union once its satellite states began to aim for autonomy and communist rule collapsed. By 1989 it was virtually all over, and in 1991 communism in Europe was dead. Gorbachev’s efforts to liberalise communism had failed and he was followed by Yeltsin who allowed Russia to slide into chaos and corruption. And then came Putin.  There was still a powerful communist government in China, and with its assistance the communist North Vietnamese had driven out the American troops who had been aiding the South and fighting there.  

In an interesting comment towards the end of this informative book, Mason says that “Despite promising to achieve ‘socialism’ by 2035, Chinese society looks nothing like  ‘the association of free producers’ Marx envisaged. But it does look a lot like the totalitarian technocracy that the Saint-Simonians had in mind. With 58 percent of CPC members holding a university degree. The party is a self-selected managerial elite”. I suspect that could be what will happen generally, even outside communism and despite token asides to democracy. Dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and David Karp’s One may have described the future.

Reds : A Global History of Communism is a stimulating book, with much to say about the past but also about what might lie ahead. Paul Mason asks if “digital technologies and artificial intelligence” can be used as “the basis for a move beyond the market and private property”. It’s an interesting question, and one to which, as his book demonstrates, he dismisses the use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence under communism as an answer: “Tragically, the Russian working class swapped power for privilege, and many of its most idealistic members took an active part in the creation of Stalin’s totalitarian state”. I doubt that the great mass of the Russian working class ever got anywhere near either power or privilege. In any case, both can easily corrupt. In another provocative comment, Mason says: “It was anarcho-syndicalism and left social democracy that expressed working-class consciousness in its most authentic form”. I have leanings towards the notion of anarcho-syndicalism, though I wonder if. historically, it ever had more than minority support?  And do many people even think seriously about it now?  The danger is that, faced with a lack of faith in democracy, they may turn towards forms of dictatorship that seem to offer simple solutions to current social problems, rather than to anarcho-syndicalism and left social democracy.