4TH INTERNATIONAL INSIDE BASEBALL

Are You a Communist? Then Let’s Talk about the IMT


The International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods, is rebranding itself as “the Communists.” Does this represent a shift to the left? Sort of. Yet decades of opportunist positions do not disappear overnight.


IDEAS & DEBATES
Nathaniel Flakin 

February 12, 2024
LEFT VOICE


This month, the International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods, is rebranding some of its biggest sections. It plans to found a Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain, another in Switzerland, and yet another in Canada. 

As this article was going to press, they just announced they are renaming themselves the Revolutionary Communist International. For the last year, IMT members have been distributing the same sticker in several countries. “Are you a communist? Then get organized.” A QR code allows you to sign up for the IMT and start sending them money.

The IMT has existed in its current form for 30 years, and it has seldom used hammers and sickles until recently. What’s behind the rebranding? Let’s look at the IMT’s history to understand its current trajectory.

Split from the CWI

The IMT was founded in 1992 (although it adopted the name IMT only a decade later) as a split from the Committee for a Workers International. The CWI was the Trotskyist group founded in 1974 by Ted Grant, centered around the Militant tendency inside the British Labour Party.

Grant was a leader of the Fourth International, the revolutionary organization founded by Leon Trotsky, when it collapsed into centrism in the postwar period. After 1945, when the Trotskyist movement was isolated and disoriented, several leaders thought their best hope was to hibernate inside social democratic parties, turning the short-term tactic of “entryism” into a long-term strategy. While originally doubtful of this “entryism sui generis” (which can also be called “long-term entryism” or “entryism without exitism”), Grant soon became its most committed adherent.1

When a youth radicalization began around 1968, most splinters of the Trotskyist movement broke free of social democracy and founded new, independent revolutionary organizations. Grant, however, doubled down on his orientation to the Labour Party: he declared it a “historical law” that, in times of upheaval, the masses will always turn to their “traditional mass organizations,” obligating Marxists to join reformist parties.

Decades of work inside the Labour Party was naturally incompatible with defending an openly Bolshevik program. Under Grant’s leadership, Militant defended a centrist program that attempted to split the difference between revolutionary and reformist positions — raising only those demands that would not “scare off” an “average” worker. Militant, for example, claimed that socialism could be implemented peacefully if the Labour Party won a majority in parliament and carried out a bold socialist program. It claimed that police are “workers in uniform” and should be organized in trade unions. When Margaret Thatcher’s government launched an imperialist war against Argentina, Grant rejected any kind of anti-imperialist resistance because that would “put Marxists beyond the pale in the eyes of workers.”

You might also be interested in: Forty Years since Thatcher’s War against Argentina — Lessons for Today

By the mid-1980s, Militant had reached a certain influence (though claims of 8,000 members are exaggerated). Eventually, the Labour Party bureaucracy decided to rid itself of the Trotskyists running Labour’s youth organization. Militant, committed to a perpetual orientation to Labour, could not fight back — instead, Grant’s supporters attempted to burrow deeper. This led to demoralization and a collapse in membership numbers. By the early 1990s, much of the group’s sprawling apparatus under Peter Taaffe (with over 250 full-time staffers!) decided it needed to break with Labour to save what remained of the organization. This “Scottish turn” is when the majority of the CWI, after many decades, left social democracy.

What later became known as the IMT was the CWI minority, led by Grant and Woods, who opposed this break. Grant said leaving Labour would mean throwing away decades of patient work. Thus, the IMT’s whole reason for existence was to hold out inside the Labour Party, the German SPD, and other reformist workers’ parties.

The CWI and later the IMT practiced their long-term entryism not only in bourgeois workers’ parties but also in purely bourgeois parties, such as the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and later MORENA in Mexico, or the Pakistan People’s Party of the hyper-corrupt Bhutto clan. The IMT has elected only a single member to a national parliament — he was elected as a PPP candidate who, by the IMT’s own account, was just as corrupt as his party.

Searching for Subjects

After splitting from the CWI, the IMT continued as “the Marxist voice of social democracy” for several more decades. Yet it faced the same objective problem as Taaffe’s supporters: as Labour, the SPD, and similar parties implemented brutal neoliberal policies, they attracted fewer and fewer socialist-minded workers and young people. So the IMT, while formally committed to its entryist principles, had to cast out for new milieus.

It found a topic that enthused left-leaning youth in the early and mid-2000s: the pink tide governments in Latin America. Woods became a cheerleader for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. After the coup attempt in 2002 was defeated by mass mobilizations, Chávez changed his rhetoric and proclaimed his goal to be “socialism of the 21st century.”

As we’ve explained at length elsewhere, Chávez’s government represented what Marxists call Bonapartism sui generis. Hoping to gain more autonomy from imperialism, a section of the bourgeoisie of a semicolonial country needs to mobilize the masses with progressive demands. This is how Trotsky analyzed the government of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s, for example. Woods refused to apply Marxist categories to Venezuela — he declared that Chávez was leading a socialist revolution, even though Chávez was the head of a bourgeois state and always defended private property of the means of production. Chávez never even stopped paying the country’s foreign debt to imperialism. Woods applied Grant’s theoretical justification for opportunism, writing that a clear Marxist analysis of the Venezuelan government would be “sectarian” and “would immediately cut us off … from the masses.”

You might be interested in: Was There a Socialist Revolution in Venezuela? Using Trotsky’s Ideas to Understand Chávez’s Legacy

Woods’s strategy was based on the idea that the Bolivarian government, with enough pressure from the masses, could be pushed to break from capitalism. This is a classically centrist strategy, formulated in the early 1950s by Michel Pablo as a justification for his political support for the Algerian government of Ben Bela.

It is noteworthy that the IMT broke, without any comment, with Grant’s tradition. In the 1960s, Grant had criticized Pablo and other Trotskyist leaders for their adaptation to the Cuban deformed workers’ state under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Grant insisted that a proletarian revolution was necessary in Cuba, one that would establish a leadership independent of the Stalinists. Yet Woods was now arguing that socialism could be achieved in Venezuela under the leadership of Chávez, the head of a bourgeois state. This echoed Militant’s old, anti-Marxist belief in the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism.

And this is not just a break with Grant’s legacy — it is, above all, a break with everything Trotsky wrote about Latin America during his Mexican exile. While Trotsky called on workers to reject “People’s Front parties,” the IMT campaigned for workers to join Chávez’s party, the PSUV, and thus to unite with a progressive wing of the bourgeoisie.

As Chávez’s left Bonapartist project decayed under his successor Nicolás Maduro, adopting increasingly authoritarian and neoliberal policies, the IMT finally broke with the PSUV. Yet this was no break with the bourgeois-nationalist ideology of Chavismo. The IMT formed an alliance with the Stalinist party demanding a return to the Chavismo of Chávez.2 Left Voice’s sister organization in Venezuela, the Workers League for Socialism (LTS), has fought for the political independence of the working class.

You might also be interested in: Socialists Should Not Support AMLO

This opportunism was not limited to Venezuela. Woods similarly declared his support for the bourgeois government of Evo Morales in Bolivia. And for several decades, the IMT in Mexico has supported Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who was first mayor of the capital and is now president of the country. In the United States, the IMT correctly argues that socialists can never support Bernie Sanders because he is a bourgeois politician. South of the Río Grande, however, the IMT is unfamiliar with the principle of class independence. By embellishing Chavismo and other bourgeois governments, the IMT makes it more difficult to explain to young people what communism is and what it is not.
Creeping to the Left

Over the 2010s, while the IMT held up Grantian orthodoxy in theory, it was creeping to the left and silently breaking with its entryist strategy. In the UK, it ceased working as part of Young Labour, and instead set up its own Marxist student groups. When the Socialist Workers Party entered into crisis in 2013, losing its hegemonic spot as the largest radical left group at British universities, the IMT partially filled the void.

New layers of young people politicized during or after the capitalist crisis of 2008 are far more to identify with communism. Radicalization, facilitated by social media, has put broad swaths of young people quite a bit to the left of the IMT’s traditional positions. The IMT, for example, had always defended cop unions, claiming that these will draw police into the workers’ movement and “undermine the ability of the capitalist state to repress the working class.” Yet the millions who took to the streets in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 understood that cop unions are completely reactionary institutions that need to be expelled from our the labor movement.

Aiming to adapt to this new consciousness without renouncing its old position, the IMT has now ended up with hopelessly muddled formulations on police. It says it takes “the approach of opposing the actions of police unions that are at the expense of the wider working class, but supporting those actions that benefit workers and bring rank-and-file police closer to the labour movement.” In a typically centrist fudge, this sentence can mean either full support for cop unions or complete rejection. As Left Voice and the Trotskyist Fraction, we had no need to revise our positions in 2020, as we have always explained that cops are not workers. The IMT, in contrast, says that cop unions in the U.S. are irredeemably reactionary but potentially progressive in Canada or the rest of the world.

Even greater contradictions have come to the fore regarding Palestine. As we detailed in another article, for decades the IMT defended a “socialist two-state solution,” arguing that a “socialist Israel” should exist next to a “socialist Palestine.” In our opinion, the IMT’s position represents a concession to chauvinism. Growing numbers of young people support the Marxist proposal for a single, democratic, socialist Palestine as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. So the IMT has silently changed its position and has been scrubbing its website of some of the most odious anti-Palestinian content from the mid-2000s (with links available here).

You might also be interested in: The Farce of the “Two-State Solution” and the Socialist Perspective for Palestine

On several questions, the IMT is moving to the left and closer to correct Trotskyist positions. At the very least, it is quieter about its support for cop unions or a “socialist Israel.” Yet nowhere is it acknowledging these shifts, much less explaining them.
Lack of Theory

This brings us to the “revolutionary communist” rebranding. In just a few weeks, the IMT will break with some 70 years of work inside reformist parties. When Taaffe led the majority of the CWI out of social democratic parties 30 years ago, he aimed for theoretical consistency. Taaffe still defended Grant’s “historical law” that Marxists needed to be inside the “traditional mass organizations” of the working class. He posited, however, that Labour and other reformist parties had ceased to be bourgeois workers parties and were now simple bourgeois parties. This theory failed to account for the fact that in many countries, reformist parties continued to base themselves on the union bureaucracy, and therefore indirectly on the working class. (This, in our opinion, never obliged Marxists to adapt to such parties and work within them for decades.) At the very least, it was an attempt to provide a theory for a major strategic shift.

Now, Woods and his IMT are taking the same turn that Taaffe and the CWI did three decades ago — yet Woods, who considers himself something of a theoretician, has provided not a word of justification for this, besides generalities about communism. If it was a sectarian adventure to leave the Labour Party and found a competing party in the 1990s, as well as just 15 years ago, so why is that the right policy in the 2020s? Is the Labour Party under Starmer that much different from what it was under Blair?

It is welcome that the IMT has set itself the goal of building revolutionary communist parties. Yet this cannot be done by propaganda groups without well-known leaders of working-class struggles making proclamations. And despite calling himself a “revolutionary communist,” it does not appear that Woods has ceased supporting Mexico’s bourgeois government.

You might also be interested in: The Split in the CWI: Lessons for Trotskyists

Without any kind of serious programmatic base, the IMT’s leftward shift cannot last — it will turn back to the right with the next fad. One wild zig is inevitably followed by an equally wild zag. The IMT comrades are breaking with their long-held strategy of adaptation to reformism, but this is a political rather than an organizational break. This is clear when looking at the CWI’s record since leaving Labour: although it was no longer part of a reformist party, it continued to believe that some kind of reformist party is a necessary halfway house on the way to a revolutionary formation. This led the CWI to support “new” reformist parties in different parts of the world.

You might also be interested in: Trans Liberation and Socialist Revolution — A Debate with the IMT

Real Class Independence

In many ways, the IMT has unceremoniously dumped many of the positions that made up Grant’s tradition. In one sense, though, Woods is proving to be Grant’s most loyal student: both were masters of self-aggrandizement. The IMT often claims that Militant was the largest Trotskyist organization in the world after 1945. This is patently false. Even at its height, Militant could not compare to the LCR in France, the MAS in Argentina, not to mention the Trotskyists in Vietnam or Bolivia.

Woods proclaims that the IMT is “the only organisation that has a responsibility for re-establishing communism.” Other organizations, simply by not being the IMT, are all “sects.” It seems that IMT leaders, while moving somewhat closer to other Trotskyist tendencies politically, are increasing their vitriol. Woods says that any proposals for collaboration between different socialists should go “straight in the waste paper basket.”

For a counterexample, let’s look at the largest Trotskyist organizations in the world today. Trotskyists in Argentina form the Workers Left Front — Unity (FIT-U), of which the largest component is the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), the sister group of Left Voice. The FIT-U has five seats in Argentina’s congress (four of whom belong to PTS members), having won over 700,000 votes. The Trotskyist Left can mobilize some 25,000 people in Buenos Aires, filling soccer stadiums. More importantly, Trotskyist workers are in hundreds of workplaces and have led many important struggles.

With a tiny handful of members in Argentina, the IMT has made vague criticisms of the FIT, accusing the front of a “parliamentary bias.” Yet the PTS comrades have a proud record of using the parliamentary tribune for revolutionary agitation. As we have seen, the IMT has never had an opportunity to show in practice how their representatives would act in a bourgeois parliament.

Just a decade ago, Woods was calling for Marxists in Argentina to join the progressive bourgeois coalition of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. This is completely in line with his support for Chávez, Morales, AMLO, and other pink tide governments. Fortunately, most Trotskyists in Argentina rejected Woods’s wisdom and instead founded a coalition based on class independence. They have shown that they can work together on the basis of a class-struggle program while openly debating their differences.

It is a shame that Woods was willing to form a front with Chávez, Morales, or any number of other bourgeois governments, while rejecting any collaboration between socialists. We believe that especially in the context of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, it is imperative for socialists to work together as closely as possible, while making no secret of their differences. If Woods rejects this idea, we are convinced that IMT members are willing to consider it.

As Left Voice, we have a manifesto for a working-class party for socialism that we are proposing as a possibility to bring together organized socialists, militant workers, and young people in the United States. The PTS and the FIT-U in Argentina represent the largest and most successful Trotskyist project in the world right now. But it would be absurd to proclaim them to be the only revolutionaries. Instead, the experiences of the FIT can serve as a basis to build up genuine parties and rebuild the Fourth International. This can result only from both struggle and collaboration between the different tendencies of the revolutionary socialist movement.

Notes

Notes↑1 For a slightly more detailed version of this history, see my article on the split of the CWI in 2019. For a longer analysis of the Fourth International’s political collapse in the early 1950s, see “At the Limits of Bourgeois Restoration.”

↑2 For a critique of the Revolutionary Popular Alliance (APR) in Venezuela, formed by Stalinists, social democrats, and the IMT, see our sister site in Venezuela, Ángel Arias, “Sobre la APR y los ataques del Gobierno/PSUV: Se necesita un balance histórico y lecciones estratégicas.” Ideas de Izquierda Venezuela. September 27, 2020.




Nathaniel Flakin is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.

The Wood Theft Laws and the beginnings of Marxism

Submitted by Zac Muddle

 14 November, 2023 - 

 Author: John Cunningham

https://www.workersliberty.org/

LONG READ

Introduction

In the Ariège Department in Pyrenean France, between 1829 – 1831, men dressed up as women revolted against their landowners in what became known, curiously, as the ‘Girl’s War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ (Guerre Des Demoiselles). 

They were trying to protect their long held right to forage for firewood and graze their animals in the forests. A new forestry code passed in 1827 denied them this right and the rebellion spread across the region with many pitched battles taking place. So strong was feeling amongst the local populace that it became difficult to recruit anyone for the mayoralty lest they became ‘tainted’ with the detested new laws. The resistance of the ‘Maidens’ continued sporadically until 1872. Around the same time, over in the Rhineland, a part of Prussia, peasants hired a local Advocate (roughly equivalent to a lawyer in the British legal system), one Heinrich Marx of Trier, to fight a court case on their behalf in an attempt to affirm and uphold their long held right to collect firewood from the forests around Koblenz. The legal proceedings ran on for a staggering 27 years (outlasting Heinrich by seven years), prompting his slightly more famous son, Karl, (left) to write a series of articles in a liberal-radical newspaper (Rheinische Zeitung, RZ) about what became known as the Wood Theft Laws. What connects these two historical events, separated by geography and a few years? The answer is simple and complex at the same time: in both cases rural communities were denied a long established right to help themselves to firewood from the forests and surrounding woods. It sounds unimportant, trivial even, yet it became a burning issue – if somewhat localised – of the time, evoked much controversy and was indicative of wider and deeper trends. It was also important for the political development of the young Karl Marx.

All over Europe ideas and practices about ownership and inherited rights were in flux as economic needs, modes of production and demographic patterns changed. The last vestiges of feudalism were being erased and replaced by the new, dynamic yet more brutal mode of capitalism. The court case pursued by Heinrich Marx began when Karl was only nine yet it ran on into his adulthood and, in total he wrote five articles for the Rheinische Zeitung on this issue, all in 1842. It was not the first of his forays into radical journalism but it was one of the most important for the future author of The Communist Manifesto, written at a time when ‘Marxism’ was unheard of and the word ‘communism’ was being used for the first time in Germany. The young journalist from Trier, on the banks of the Moselle, considered himself a radical liberal, certainly not a communist or any of those other new-fangled labels that were just starting to circulate and soon to become common currency in Europe and elsewhere, particularly in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848-9 and beyond. Socialist and communist thought (the two terms were interchangeable at this time) began to take root in Germany in 1842 starting with a key publication: Lorenz von Stein’s ‘The Socialism and Communism of Present Day France’. This book had strange origins particularly in light of the role it would later play. It was originally commissioned by the Prussian government and planned as a report on the influence of leftist ideas among German immigrant workers in Paris. Stein was no socialist but inadvertently his book became widely read and helped spread the ideas of socialism in Germany (no doubt to the embarrassment of the Prussian government).

Throughout Europe, for generations, those who worked on the land (loosely labelled as ‘peasants’, although this was not in any sense a homogenous class), had certain rights. In England these rights went as far back as the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). For our purposes there were two main elements to this entitlement: firstly, the right to access common land to graze pigs and cattle and secondly the right to access the forests to gather firewood for domestic use. In some areas wood-burning to make charcoal was also included in these rights although the charcoal burners and wood gatherers would occasionally clash. The situation varied from place to place: killing a deer generally brought severe retaliations from landowners but catching the odd rabbit for the pot was sometimes allowed, likewise fishing in rivers was permitted in some areas but banned in others. Collecting the ‘fruits of the forest’ (mushrooms, berries, nuts etc.) was also part of this complex and varied but well-established package of rights. There were other activities such as gleaning (scouring fields after the harvest for left-over grain

‘The Gleaners’ (Les Glaneuses) by Jean Francois Millet, completed in 1857. Gleaning, although somewhat outside of the terms of our discussion, was another ancient right which came under attack from farmers and landowners and was fiercely contested by the French peasantry. The practice continues to this day and modern day gleaners can also be found in those groups who search the ‘waste’ bins of supermarkets to procure foodstuffs which are still edible, as depicted in Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000).

And other crops such as grapes left on the vine) which existed as long-established rights and they too came under attack. The extent to which the peasantry relied on these rights to survive (particularly in times of a bad harvest or a harsh winter) is hard to assess but it can be said with some certainty that the right to gather wood for the home fire was essential for heating and cooking, without which life would be grim indeed. The erosion of the right of access to common land and the forests was fiercely contested. Peasants would often engage in stand-up fights with the landowners and their stewards and bailiffs and it was not unusual for the military or police to be called in to crack open a few peasant skulls. In one notorious instance in the village of Newton on 8 June 1607 in Northamptonshire, England, over 40 villagers were killed in fighting. While this was an exceptional case, deaths were not uncommon. The erosion of commons rights was an issue, but not the main one in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and was a central motivating element in the Jack Cade Revolt of 1450 and Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 (all in England). It was also a concern of the Levellers and Diggers during the period of the English Revolution. In Scotland the Highland Clearances (roughly 1750-1850) took on an exceptionally brutal aspect as whole families were forced off their land to make way for sheep rearing, many being forced to emigrate to North America.

In Switzerland, herdsmen take their cattle to the commons for summer grazing. From ‘A Short History of Enclosure’ by Simon Fairlie in The Land No. 7. Summer 2009.

In England, common land was closed off mainly for sheep grazing in order to supply the growing and extremely lucrative wool trade. By the reign of Henry V (1413-1422) around 63% of the Crown’s total income came from a tax on wool exports. Wool was big business – the commons simply got in the way. It was a long process and there had already been many enclosures before the first enclosure facilitated by an Act of Parliament in 1604 (there were others). In practice, this meant that a landowner had simply to apply for an enclosure to Parliament and it was usually granted. Many more applications were to follow, over 5,200 individual cases. To take just one of a myriad of examples: the last enclosure in the Sheffield area occurred in 1837 when 1,200 acres in the district of Totley were enclosed. The last enclosure in Britain, astonishingly, occurred as late as 1914! On mainland Europe the seizure of the commons did not always lead to such confrontational and bloody showdowns as at Newton but nevertheless the peasantry of the Rhineland, France, Sicily (which enclosed its commons in 1789) and elsewhere fought to protect their ancient rights, whether through the courts or through guerilla warfare, acts of sabotage or open conflict. The resort to the courts, as in the Rhineland, was unusual as legal cases were often too expensive a course to pursue and, of course, the judges were frequently drawn from the landowning class. This was not a time for the faint-hearted, many were prepared to stand up and fight for what they saw as their inalienable rights and death threats were not unusual, though it is not possible to know how many were actually ever carried out. The anonymous sentiments expressed below were probably not that usual, though in this particular case, the Lord of the Manor, wasn’t gunned down in the street.

Anonymous letter received by John Edward Dorington (and his son) Lord of the Manor, Gloucestershire, England, in 1864:

‘You are robbing the working class of the Parish and their offspring for ever in fact you are not gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it [the common land] is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on the lookout for you both and so help my God I am on the alert for you and if I have one chance of you I will shoot you as dead as mortal.’

To put it simply: firewood ceased to be something you picked up on the floor of a nearby forest and took home; it became a commodity to be sold on the market, as explained by Karl Kautsky in the first of his two volume work The Agrarian Question, written in 1899,


Once urbanisation had made wood into a desirable commodity – and in the absence of coal or iron a much more important building material and fuel than now – the feudal lords tried to grab forest lands, either by taking them off the Mark [German village with a strong communal ethos] communities to whom they belonged, or, where they themselves owned them, by restricting peasant access for the collection of wood and straw for grazing. (Kautsky 24)

As in Britain this was no recent development. Over 350 years before Kautsky put pen to paper, the rebellious peasants of the 1525 Peasant War, issued a famous statement of their beliefs. The peasants, ill-equipped and with little or no military training, were slaughtered at the Battle of Frankenhauser (15 May 1525) but they left to posterity their famous Twelve Articles, drawing attention to their ancient rights such as wood gathering and couched in the religious idiom of the time. The famous leader of the peasants, Thomas Muntzer did not write this but he penned a supporting document, The Constitutional Draft. Sections four and five of the Twelve Articles read as follows:

The Fourth Article. – In the fourth place it has been the custom heretofore, that no poor man should be allowed to catch venison or wild fowl or fish in flowing water, which seems to us quite unseemly and unbrotherly as well as selfish and not agreeable to the word of God. In some places the authorities preserve the game to our great annoyance and loss, recklessly permitting the unreasoning animals to destroy to no purpose our crops which God suffers to grow for the use of man, and yet we must remain quiet. This is neither godly or neighbourly. For when God created man he gave him dominion over all the animals, over the birds of the air and over the fish in the water. Accordingly it is our desire if a man holds possession of waters that he should prove from satisfactory documents that his right has been unwittingly acquired by purchase. We do not wish to take it from him by force, but his rights should be exercised in a Christian and brotherly fashion. But whosoever cannot produce such evidence should surrender his claim with good grace.

The Fifth Article. – In the fifth place we are aggrieved in the matter of wood-cutting, for the noble folk have appropriated all the woods to themselves alone. If a poor man requires wood he must pay double for it (or, perhaps, two pieces of money). It is our opinion in regard to wood which has fallen into the hands of a lord whether spiritual or temporal, that unless it was duly purchased it should revert again to the community. It should, moreover, be free to every member of the community to help himself to such fire-wood as he needs in his home. Also, if a man requires wood for carpenter’s purposes he should have it free, but with the knowledge of a person appointed by the community for that purpose. Should, however, no such forest be at the disposal of the community let that which has been duly bought be administered in a brotherly and Christian manner. If the forest, although unfairly appropriated in the first instance, was later duly sold let the matter be adjusted in a friendly spirit and according to the Scriptures.

The historian Christopher Clark in his monumental study of 1848-9, Revolutionary Spring, highlights how the enclosures and wood theft laws closed down the open spaces previously accessible to the rural population. The forest skirmishes and land battles in pre-1848 Europe were ‘… often (though not always) rearguard actions against the more homogenous and spatially delimited forms of ownership that would become characteristic of modern society’. (Clark 88) Clark’s academic language should not be allowed to hide the brutal reality of what this meant: hunger, starvation, immiseration and death for thousands of rural people throughout Europe.


In the Rhineland

In Prussia (which included the Rhineland) the issue became so toxic that between 1830-1836, 77% of all prosecutions were concerned, in one way or another, with forestry, hunting and pasture rights. Generally speaking peasants had, under the old system of rights, been allowed to gather wood which was lying on the ground. In some cases there were maximum dimensions to the wood which you could pick and cutting down branches was not allowed and could result in a severe penalty. Now, under the increasing restrictions being introduced even this wasn’t permitted. Given the large number of prosecutions it looks as if this policy was energetically policed by the landowners, through their bailiffs, hired hands and the police and then pursued through the courts.

Urban growth in the Rhineland during the 1800s was the fastest in the whole of what was to become Germany in 1871: The figures below show urbanisation rates (in %) between 1815 – 1850 in the Rhineland.

Although these figures are not as great as some areas in Europe they nevertheless indicate an increasing escalation in the urban population. These people had to be fed and they needed fuel for their fires. Urban growth was to have a profound effect on rural life, not least in the drift of the rural population to toil in the workshops and factories now beginning to develop in the new towns and cities; increasingly the rural economy was geared to feeding the urban population and centuries old patterns of agricultural practice were swept away. Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto, ‘All that was solid melts in the air’ were rarely so appropriate. Wood was now collected by the landowners to be sold on the market in the growing towns and cities. If peasants collected firewood they could not use it for themselves unless they paid for it, or they could sell it to the landowner who in turn would sell it to merchants in the towns, at a profit of course.

Given that his father was the Advocate in the long-running legal battle around the Wood Theft Laws it is hardly surprising that the young Karl Marx became interested in the issue. Marx paid close attention to the debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly about the Wood Theft Laws which took place between 23 May to 25 July. The Rhine Province was created in 1822 from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg; its capital was Koblenz. The Assembly was formed a year later and was hardly democratic. The system of election was based on landownership which gave landowners a comfortable majority when it came to voting. Apparently, he attended all the sessions where the issue was discussed but, for reasons which are not clear, was not supplied with any of the relevant documentation pertaining to the issues raised in the chamber. Fortunately, he was an assiduous note-taker.

He reported, analysed and commented on what he heard in the Rheinische Zeitung (RZ) which had been established in January 1842 with Moses Hess as its editor. In October Marx was appointed to the editorial board. Before looking at what Marx wrote it is worth mentioning that, at this time in his life he was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Hegel who had taught at Berlin University before Marx arrived there. Although Hegel died in November 1831 and Marx arrived in Berlin in October 1836 the Hegelian influence was still very strong. Many of Marx’s early collaborators were Hegelians and he too fell under the spell of this philosopher who did much to shape the intellectual landscape of Germany and other parts of Europe. One result of this philosophical influence is that it renders some of what Marx wrote about the Wood Theft Laws rather abstract. In later years Marx turned away from Hegel (although never totally abandoning him) towards a class analysis based on historical materialism and a concentration on economic analysis as manifested in his monumental study Das Kapital, the first volume being published in German in 1867.

As a contributor and later as an editor on the RZ, Marx addressed a number of issues not least of which was the question of press censorship which was widely practiced at the time and would ultimately signal the death knell for the RZ in 1843. His concern for the Wood Theft Laws could be seen as an element in Marx’s growing awareness of what was often referred to, at the time, as the ‘social question’. There were numerous writings about the social conditions of the newly emergent working class which proliferated in the first half and middle of the 19thC: James Kay, Bettina von Armin, Heinrich Grunholzer, Ange Guépin and Eugene Bonamy were just five of these chroniclers of urban labour, poverty and destitution, to which we must add the classic study, The Condition of the Working Class in England written in 1845 (by which time Marx and his family were living in Belgium) by Marx’s future friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. Hal Draper elaborates,




Concern with the “social question” was not only new, it was the special characteristic of the pioneer socialists and communists whose ranks Marx was still unwilling to join. What was characteristic of these early radicals was that they mostly dissociated the “social question” from the “political question” (gaining freedom in the state) […] It was precisely Marx’s contribution to develop a communism that integrated into one consistent perspective both the battle for political democracy and the struggle on the “social question”. (Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. p. 66)


Marx’s articles in the Rheinische Zeitung

Turning now to what Marx wrote in the RZ about the Wood Theft Laws, it is striking that he expends much energy writing in a mode that, from today’s perspective, could be called satirical (in fact throughout his life Marx displayed an abundant talent for this kind of expression and rarely missed an opportunity to ‘have a go’ at an opponent). He clearly regards the Assembly Deputies as a bunch of idiots and there are many examples of his talent for put-downs and insults, although he mentions no-one by name. Marx’s articles on the Wood Theft Laws are not easy to follow (apart from other considerations he thought the debates were ‘tedious and uninspired’). There are detailed accounts on what constitutes a right, what punishments are appropriate or not and the appointment of Forest Wardens and the role they play; none of which need detain us any further. What follows is an attempt to pick out the main issues and summarise what Marx wrote, not to provide a blow-by-blow account of what transpired in the debating chamber.

His first article (although they are usually referred to as Supplements) appeared in the RZ 298 in 25 Oct. 1842. The other Supplements appeared in No. 300 (27 Oct.), No. 303 (30 Oct.), No. 305 (1 Nov.), No. 307 (3 Nov.). Two main themes soon begin to emerge:

a) the rights of property versus the rights of the people.

b) the relation between the state and the property owner.

One of the key aspects of the wood theft debates is to what extent does an inherited right have over a new law which clearly works to the disadvantage of those who have previously benefitted from the old, well-established practice? Does a new law simply sweep away the old rights? The dynamo of capitalist development was rapidly changing the face of Europe (and the rest of the world would follow), what chance did a relatively small number of peasants in the Rhineland and elsewhere have of maintaining a practice that was perceived by many (particularly landowners) as outmoded and flew in the face of the inexorable march of modernity? What did it matter that a few peasants would have to abandon an age old right and, probably also, at some point, abandon their whole way of life and move to the cities? Why not succumb to the inevitable? Marx did not see it this way, his sympathies were clearly with the wood gatherers.

Marx argued in RZ 300 that ‘Little thought is needed to perceive how one-sidedly enlightened legislation has treated and been compelled to treat the customary rights of the poor…’ (in all quotes from RZ italics are as in the original). The very question of whether wood lying on the floor of the forest was property or not was a matter of debate as was the question, if indeed it was property, to whom did it belong? Marx elaborates,


‘…all customary rights of the poor were based on the fact that certain forms of property were indeterminate in character, for they were definitely not private property, but neither were they definitely not common property being a mixture of public and private right, such as we find in all institutions of the Middle Ages.’

‘Indeterminate’ is a key word here. The wood on the forest floor is not private property (as opposed to the trees themselves). The scattered branches are ‘accidental’ and ‘elemental’ and belong to what Marx called ‘occupation rights’, in other words to ‘those excluded from all other property’ (in this case the peasantry). Marx likened the loose wood to the ‘alms of nature’ and just as the poor could claim alms (money or food distributed to the destitute) which were given out in the street, so they could claim branches and twigs lying on the forest floor. The wood becomes an ‘accidental appendage of property’. The landowners were having none of this – an attitude starkly illustrated by the apparently innocuous practice of picking berries in the forests. Traditionally, this task was left to children and was another long-established customary right. The landowners did away with this practice and the berries too became part of the monopoly of the landowning class. As a Deputy explained in the Assembly and quoted by Marx ‘…in his area these berries have already become articles of commerce and are dispatched to Holland by the barrel.’

What was particularly striking to Marx was the way the Wood Theft Laws represented the power of the landowners over the elements of the state at both regional and local level. The authority of the state has become a servant of the landowners, ‘All the organs of the state become the ears, eyes, arms, legs by means of which the forest owner, observes, appraises, protects, reaches out, and runs.’ (RZ 303) Marx continued on this theme in RZ 305, ‘What then are the harmful results? Harmful is that which is harmful to the interest of the forest owner.’ The Deputies even discussed taking punishment out of the hands of the law and, in effect, giving it to the landowner. The possibility arose of making a convicted wood thief work (unpaid of course) for the landowner meaning that the landowner would actually profit from the activity of the wood thief. In this way crime would ‘pay’ twice over but only for the landowner. Marx, evoking the spirit of Jonathan Swift, commented, ‘We are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with wood thieves.’

In his final article on the Wood Theft Laws (RZ, 307 3 Nov. 1842) Marx attempted to sum up the situation. Private interest (i.e. of the landowners/capitalists) was paramount, all else was subordinate, ‘Our account has shown the Assembly degrades the executive power, the administrative authorities, the life of the accused, the idea of the state, crime itself and punishment as well, to material means of private interest.’ Considering that his father was a legal Advocate it must also have impressed itself upon the young Marx how the law was ‘outvoted’ by the Assembly Deputies. The principles of law, supposedly so sacrosanct to the ruling classes, were sacrificed to the interest of forest protection, for the sole benefit of the landowners,


This abject materialism, this sin against the holy spirit of the people and humanity, is an immediate consequence of the doctrine which the Preussische Staats-Zeitung [Prussian State Gazette – an official publication] preached to the legislator, namely that in connection with the law concerning wood he should think only of wood and forest and should solve each material problem in a non-political way, i.e. without any connection with the whole of the reason and morality of the state.’

The relationship of the state and local authority to the landowner was one which Marx had not yet fully worked out; this would come later beginning in 1843 with some critical notes on Hegel and The German Ideology (written in 1845-6 but not published till much later). At the time Marx has no developed analysis of the state and he expects the state authorities to defend the wood gatherers, which of course, is precisely what did not happen. Another crucial aspect of Marx’s thought, which he is only just beginning to understand, is the notion of class. He does not talk about the working class in his articles on wood theft although he does refer to the poor as the ‘elemental class of human society’. He sees in the poor many virtues and here we can also locate an area where Marx moved away from Hegel. The latter was utterly disdainful of the poor who he referred to as Pöbel (usually translated into English as ‘rabble’). All in all, Marx’s writings on the Wood Theft Laws were important stepping stones in his political development, as mentioned by Hal Draper, ‘His article on the Wood Theft Laws anticipated his critique of Hegel: the Diet debases the state officialdom into “material interests of private interests.” His article on the Moselle peasants emphasised the narrowmindedness of the bureaucratic mentality’. Much later, when Marx was dead, Engels, writing to R. Fischer in 1895, made much the same point, ‘I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood theft laws and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions, and thus came to socialism.’

The Rhineland at this time, although developing quickly was not a place where the industrial bourgeoisie yet held sway and in Germany as a whole, even after 1871, landowners, nobility and the new bourgeoisie all vied for control while keeping an eye over their shoulder at the growing proletariat in the cities. One key aspect of Bismarck’s rule was his attempt, not always successful, to play-off one class or section of a class, against another and later Marx and Engels were to regard his regime as Bonapartist in the same way (though not exactly) as the Bonapartism of the the great Napoleon’s less illustrious, nephew Louis. In time, Germany was to develop as one of the industrial powerhouses of the world, defeating France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, flexing its imperial muscles overseas (in Morocco for example), building a navy, a large army and gearing up for the First World War. None of which would have been possible without a powerful, highly productive industrial base. In this complex and unstoppable process the needs and rights of the Rhineland peasants were swept aside.



Sources and notes:

For general background reading there are a number of biographies of Marx which mention, in varying degrees of depth (and quality), his engagement with the Wood Theft Laws and, although it is not a biography, Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. particularly chap. 2. ‘The Political Apprentice’ is excellent. The reference to the ‘Girls’ War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ can be found in The Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. The full text of the five ‘Wood Theft’ articles by Marx in the RZ can be found in various sources, I used the Marxist Internet Archive website which was also useful for footnotes giving background information (social makeup etc.) to the Assembly. For general background to issues around the question of land, land rights, enclosures etc. the journal The Land proved invaluable; the information about enclosures in Sheffield came from an article by Peter Harvey in the website our Broomhall.org.uk in 1982. The text of the threatening anonymous letter to John Edward Dorington can be found in a review by Dinah Birch of Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters by Emily Cockayne in London Review of Books, 21 Sept. 2023. Karl Kautsky’s classic study The Agrarian Question was published in English (for the first time) in two volumes by Zwan Publications in 1988. The Twelve Articles can be easily found on various websites. Some ideas about Marx and Hegel were derived from Draper (see previous reference) and ‘The Virtue of Poverty: Karl Marx’s Transformation of Hegel’s Concept of the Poor by Erica Sherover, Canadian Journal of Political Social Theory Vol. 3. No. 1 (Winter 1979) pp 53-66. Figures for urban growth in the Rhineland came from: ‘Population Growth and Urbanisation in Germany in the 19th Century’, Jurgen Reulecke in Urbanism Past and Present. No. 4. (Summer, 1977) pp 21-32. Engels’ letter to R. Fischer (15 April, 1895) is quoted in Draper, see previous reference p. 75.

Note on a source not used: For various reasons I was not able to locate a copy of Daniel Bensaїd’s The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’ Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor (University of Minnessota Press, Minneapolis, 2021). However, I understand that Bensaїd’s text uses Marx’s writings on wood theft primarily to discuss various issues arising in the 21st century and this is outside the remit of my basic introduction to the topic. Bensaїd was a highly respected theoretician and activist long associated with the international Trotskyist movement who died in 2010. A beautifully written assessment of his life and work can be found in chapter 11 of Paul Le Blanc’s Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2022).

Cover illustration: Peasants on a path in the forest (oil on panel, painted in 1626) by Jasper van de Lanen of Antwerp (1585-1634).

AMLO; NEO LIBERAL PERONIST
Mexican president masses supporters to show political ‘muscle’

By AFP
Published November 27, 2022

Supporters of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador fill a thoroughfare in Mexico City - Copyright AFP -
Jennifer Gonzalez Covarrubias

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and thousands of supporters took to the streets of the capital Sunday for a march seen as a show of political strength by the left-wing populist.

Amid cries of “it’s an honor to be with Obrador,” the president joined flag-waving crowds to personally lead a rally that comes as his allies warm up for the race to replace him in 2024.

The aim was to celebrate the government’s “transformation of Mexico” four years into his six-year term, Lopez Obrador, known by his initials AMLO, said ahead of the march.

“The president is not alone,” read a placard at the rally, while others vowed support for the government’s controversial electoral reform plan.

“I like the way AMLO governs, always doing everything for the most vulnerable,” said Alma Perez, a 35-year-old teacher who traveled from the southern state of Guerrero to join the march.

Lopez Obrador “has done what no other president has done for the poor,” said Ramon Suarez, a 33-year-old electrician.

“He has some areas in which to improve such as security, but that’s not done overnight,” Suarez added.

Mariachi bands entertained the president’s supporters, who arrived on buses from around the country, many wearing purple, the color of his Morena party.

The rally comes two weeks after tens of thousands joined an opposition protest against the president’s proposed electoral reform.

Lopez Obrador wants to “show muscle,” said Fernando Dworak, a political analyst at the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology.

“It was a serious mistake by the opposition to believe that the president can be beaten on the streets,” he told AFP, referring to the November 13 anti-government protest.

– ‘Oiled machinery’ –

Lopez Obrador, who enjoys an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, owes much of his popularity to his social welfare programs aimed at helping the elderly and disadvantaged Mexicans.

Mexican presidents are barred from serving more than one term, and Lopez Obrador has ruled out trying to change the constitution to stay in office.

Even so, he is keen to see his Morena party hold onto power after he stands aside.

Three of Lopez Obrador’s allies and potential successors — Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Interior Minister Adan Augusto Lopez — accompanied him at the rally.

Lopez Obrador knows “that in order for him to win elections he needs oiled machinery that works all the time,” said Gustavo Lopez, a political scientist at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican university.

Opposition parties accuse Lopez Obrador of being an “authoritarian” populist who is “militarizing” the country by giving a greater role to the armed forces in both security and infrastructure projects.

His efforts to revamp the independent National Electoral Institute (INE) have proven particularly controversial.

Lopez Obrador alleges that the INE endorsed fraud when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, before winning in 2018.

He wants the organization to be replaced by a new body with members chosen by voters instead of lawmakers and with a smaller budget.

Critics see the plan as an attack on one of Mexico’s most important democratic institutions.

The reform would require support from at least two-thirds of lawmakers in Congress, and Lopez Obrador’s political opponents have vowed to oppose the changes.

Mexico president to 'show muscle' at big political rally

Jennifer Gonzalez Covarrubias
Sat, November 26, 2022 


Supporters of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are expected to flood the streets of Mexico City on Sunday in a major show of political strength by the left-wing populist.

The rally comes as presidential hopefuls, including Lopez Obrador's allies, warm up for the race to replace him in 2024.

Two weeks after tens of thousands joined an opposition protest against his proposed electoral reform, Lopez Obrador plans to lead a pro-government march through the heart of the capital.

The aim is to celebrate the government's "transformation of Mexico" four years into his six-year term, Lopez Obrador told reporters.

"I invite all the people, all those who can attend," including government ministers and lawmakers, he said.

It will be the first such march led by a Mexican president in at least four decades, and possibly the biggest pro-government rally since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, according to experts.

Lopez Obrador wants to "show muscle," Fernando Dworak, a political analyst at the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology, said.

"It was a serious mistake by the opposition to believe that the president can be beaten on the streets," he told AFP, referring to the November 13 anti-government protest.

- 'Oiled machinery' -

Lopez Obrador enjoys an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, and few doubt his ability to draw a huge crowd on Sunday, when he plans to give a speech outlining his achievements in office.

Mexican presidents are barred from serving more than one term, and Lopez Obrador has ruled out trying to change the constitution to stay in office.

Even so, he is keen to see his Morena party hold onto power after he stands aside.

Two of Lopez Obrador's close allies and potential successors, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, are expected to march alongside him.

Lopez Obrador knows "that in order for him to win elections he needs oiled machinery that works all the time," said Gustavo Lopez, a political scientist at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican university.

Opposition parties accuse Lopez Obrador of being an "authoritarian" populist who is "militarizing" the country by giving a greater role to the armed forces in both security and infrastructure projects.

His efforts to revamp the independent National Electoral Institute (INE) have proven particularly controversial.

Lopez Obrador alleges that the INE endorsed fraud when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, before winning in 2018.

He wants the organization to be replaced by a new body with members chosen by voters instead of lawmakers and with a smaller budget.

Critics see the plan as an attack on one of Mexico's most important democratic institutions.

The reform would require support from at least two-thirds of lawmakers in Congress, and Lopez Obrador's political opponents have vowed to oppose the changes.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1934/340715.htm

Leon Trotsky: Bonapartism and Fascism (1934)

Apr 25, 2007 ... It is a military-police dictatorship with which we are confronted, barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism. But a government of ...

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx 1852

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the ...

We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History

Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Soviet leader, addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1930. (Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

LONG READ

BYENZO TRAVERSO
12.26.2021

JACOBIN

This is an extract from Enzo Traverso’s new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations — official communism and Cold War anti-communism — also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its “anatomy,” one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

Revolutionary Template

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the ‘long nineteenth century.’

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the “long nineteenth century,” and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution — no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break — October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenin’s State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marx’s ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

Earthquake

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue durée of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of “historical laws,” the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik “coup.” Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a “conspiracy.” In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, “is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.”

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an “overthrowing” or an “uprising” (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Disillusionment

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik “coup” is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different — not to say antipodal — but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes — as in Kronstadt — against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence — these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves — and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 1918–19, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks’ eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism — either social democratic or anarchist — of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.'

Revolution From Above

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (1918–21), the collectivization of agriculture (1930–33), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (1936–38).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a “betrayed” revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally. 

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies — notably the peasantry — and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Monumental and Monstrous

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices — pogroms and massacres — pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s — collectivization and the purges — in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

The massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face the dangers of Nazism.

Stalinism was a “revolution from above,” a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. 

In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a “feudal exploitation” of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as “an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes.” Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serge’s assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalin’s USSR had become in his words “an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count.” But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of “primitive capital accumulation.”

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the “midwife of history” and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

From Moscow to Hunan

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the “wheel of history” rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry — inherited from Marx’s writings on French Bonapartism — as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian “backwardness.”

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry — instead of the urban proletariat — as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself. 

The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD — a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers — the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

The Wind From Baku

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marx’s death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the “civilizing mission” of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties — particularly those located in the biggest empires — postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which “civilized Europe” could and must “act as tutor to ‘barbarous’ Asia.” Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of “white” European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSR’s foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empire’s involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned — emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power — permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

Revolutionary Reformists

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

In certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a “human face.”

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies — notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation — nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSR’s foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under François Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavia’s social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was “municipal socialism” in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian “red belt.” In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of “local,” postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious — and largely achieved — goal of defending the principle of the “free market” against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a “plan” that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction. 

The postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentier’s role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its “savage” face, rediscovered the élan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

After the Fall

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a “natural” form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the “alter-globalization” movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm “piling wreckage upon wreckage,” in Walter Benjamin’s image, and which millions of people mistakenly called “Progress”? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a “cold utopia.”

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and “memory flash up.” Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.