The Rise and Fall of Communism - Couverture souple

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The Idea of Communism

 

 

'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism.' When Karl Marx began his Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 with these famous words, he - and his co-author, Friedrich Engels - could have had no inkling of the way in which Communism would take off in the twentieth century. It became not merely a spectre but a living reality. And not just in Europe, but for hundreds of millions of people spread across the globe - in places very different from those where Marx expected proletarian revolutions to occur. Communist systems were established in two predominantly peasant societies - the largest country in the world, Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union, and in the state with the largest population, China. Why and how Communism spread, what kind of system it became, how it varied over time and across space, and why and how it came to an end in Europe, where it began, are the central themes of this book.

 

Marx's claim was an exaggeration when he made it in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century it had become almost an understatement. That is not to say that the 'Communism' which held sway in so many countries bore much resemblance to anything Marx had envisaged. There was a wide gulf between the original theory and the subsequent practice of Communist rule. Karl Marx sincerely believed that under communism - the future society of his imagination which he saw as an inevitable, and ultimate, stage of human development - people would live more freely than ever before. Yet 'his vision of the universal liberation of humankind' did not include any safeguards for individual liberty. Marx would have hated to be described as a moralist, since he saw himself as a Communist who was elaborating a theory of scientific socialism. Yet many of his formulations were nothing like as 'scientific' as he made out. One of his most rigorous critics on that account, Karl Popper, pays tribute to the moral basis of much of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century capitalism. As Popper observes, under the slogan of 'equal and free competition for all', child labour in conditions of immense suffering had been 'tolerated, and sometimes even defended, not only by professional economists but also by churchmen'. Accordingly, 'Marx's burning protest against these crimes', says Popper, 'will secure him forever a place among the liberators of mankind.' Those who took power in the twentieth century, both using and misusing Marx's ideas, turned out, however, to be anything but liberators. Marxist theory, as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently refashioned by Josif Stalin in Russia and by Mao Zedong in China, became a rationalization for ruthless single-party dictatorship.

 

During most of the twentieth century Communism was the world's domin ant international political movement. People reacted to it in different ways - as a source of hope for a radiant future or as the greatest threat on the face of the earth. By the middle decades of the last century there were Communist governments not only in a string of Soviet satellite states in Europe but also in Latin America and Asia. Communism held sway in what became the 'Second World'. The 'First World' - headed by the United States and its main European allies - was to engage in prolonged struggle with the international Communist movement for influence in the 'Third World'.

 

Even in countries with strong democratic traditions, among them the United States and Great Britain, many intellectuals were drawn for a time to Communism. In France and Italy, in particular, Communist parties became significant political forces - far stronger than they were in Britain and America. The French and Italian parties had substantial popular as well as intellectual support, together with significant parliamentary representation. After Communist systems had been put in place not just in Eastern Europe and Asia but in Cuba, too, it seemed to some at one point as if the system would triumph also in Africa. The global rivalry between the West and the Communist bloc led to prolonged tension and the Cold War. At times that came close to 'hot war' - most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

 

The rise of Communism, even more than the rise of fascism, was the most important political phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. For Communism turned out to be a much stronger, and longerlasting, movement - and political religion - than fascism. That is why by far the most significant political event of the later part of the century was the end of Communism in Europe - and its effective demise as an international movement. The decline, which preceded the fall, occurred over several decades, even though these were highly contradictory years which saw also Communist advances. It was after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had exposed some of the crimes of Stalin in 1956 that Communism had its singular success on the American continent - in Cuba - and that its Asian reach expanded to embrace the whole of Vietnam.

 

It is worth noting at the outset that Communist parties did not call their own systems 'Communist' but, rather, 'socialist'. For them, 'communism' was to be a later stage in the development of society - the ultimate stage - in which the institutions of the state would have 'withered away' and would have been replaced by a harmonious, self-administering society. Throughout the book - to reiterate an important distinction - I use 'communism' when referring to that fanciful future utopia (and 'communism' also for other non-Marxist utopias), but 'Communism', with a capital 'C', when discussing actual Communist systems.

 

 

Early Communists

 

While Marx and, later, Lenin were overwhelmingly the most important theorists of Communism - in Lenin's case, a key practitioner as well - the idea of communism did not originate with Karl Marx. Many different, and idealistic, notions of communism had come into existence centuries earlier. Most of these forerunners of both Communism and socialism had little or nothing in common with the practice of twentieth-century Communist regimes (or with those few such systems which survive into the twenty-first century) other than a belief in a future utopia, one more sincerely held by 'communists' from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries than by most Communist Party leaders in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet there were also millennial sects, attracted to a primitive communism, which foreshadowed Communist, even Stalinist, regimes in the the degree of their intolerance and their commitment to violent repression of their perceived enemies.

 

In medieval times social reformers looked back to the early Christians as examples of people who held everything in common. The prominent German historian Max Beer argued that even if it 'may fairly be doubted whether positive communistic institutions really existed amongst the primitive Christian communities . . . there cannot be any doubt that common possessions were looked upon by many of the first Christians as an ideal to be aimed at'. Indeed, according to the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples of Jesus 'were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common'. In the second half of the fourth century, St Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan (the mentor of St Augustine), declared: 'Nature has poured forth all things for all men, to be held in common. For God commanded all things to be produced so that food should be common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession of all. Nature, therefore, created a common right, but use and habit created private right . . .'

 

Many fourteenth-century Christian theologians, among them the English church reformer John Wycliffe, assumed that the earliest form of human society was one of 'innocence and communism'. Indeed, on occasion Wycliffe contended that 'all good things of God ought to be in common' (emphasis added). He cautiously qualified this, however, by saying that in practical life there was no alternative to acquiescing with inequalities and injustices and leaving wealth and power in the hands of those who had done nothing to deserve it. It was around the year 1380, Norman Cohn has argued, that people moved beyond thinking of a society 'without distinction of status or wealth simply as a Golden Age irrecoverably lost in the distant past' and began to think of it as something to be realized in the near future. Only a minority, however, challenged the monarchs and feudal lords and tried to create - or, as they saw it, 'recreate' - a communist society which would combine freedom for all with broad equality. One such person was the revolutionary priest John Ball, who years before the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England had occupied himself 'inflaming the peasantry against the lords temporal and spiritual'. Ball was regarded as an instigator of that major revolt, for which he was executed in the same year. An extract from one of the speeches, said to have been delivered by him, exemplifies his radical, but religiously based, egalitarianism:

 

Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall all be equal. For what reason have they, whom we call lords, got the best of us? How did they deserve it? Why do they keep us in bondage? If we all descended from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can they assert or prove that they are more masters than ourselves? Except perhaps that they make us work and produce for them to spend!

 

Ball put the same point still more pithily in the verse attributed to him:

 

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

 

Ball had his revo...

'At its peak, communism controlled one third of the human race ... Brown's scholarly, well-paced and critical overview contributes brilliantly to a reasoned reassessment' Sunday Times

'His account is studied with delightfully pertinent and pithy personal observations and anecdotes ....as a single-volume account of mankind's biggest mistake, Mr Brown's book is hard to beat' The Economist

The relentless rise of Communism was the most momentous political development of the first half of the twentieth century. No political change has been more fundamental than its demise in Europe and its decline elsewhere. In this hugely acclaimed book Archie Brown provides an indispensable history that examines the origins of the ideology, its development in different countries, its collapse in many states following the Soviet perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe.

The Rise and Fall of Communism explains how and why Communists came to power; how they were able, in a variety of countries on different continents to hold on to power for so long; and what brought about the downfall of so many Communist systems. A groundbreaking work from an internationally renowned specialist, this is the definitive study of the most remarkable political and human story of our times.

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