The Undivided Past Page 14

  In November 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks accomplished just that, as they stormed the Winter Palace and with the support of the industrial working class of Petrograd replaced the Russian provisional government. Although they claimed to have carried out their coup in the name of the proletarian revolution, and as the culmination of the historical processes that Marx and Engels had discerned and predicted, the sudden seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was scarcely the result of a class war in which the industrial workers had duly and deservedly triumphed by vanquishing the bourgeoisie.55 Nor could it have been, because (as Lenin had recognized) the collective categories of class, with their attendant identities, did not exist in early-twentieth-century Russia in the way Marx and Engels had thought they must if an authentic and broadly based proletarian revolution was to occur. Instead, the “top-down” Bolshevik Revolution was a combination of bourgeois leadership and proletarian support, along with the backing of what would soon become the Red Army, but as Kautsky noted, the revolution was in essence elitist and dictatorial, rather than a popular expression of aroused and belligerent collective identities. The majority of Russians, namely the peasantry, were far from enthused by the Bolsheviks, and between 1917 and 1921 Lenin and his followers had to fight fiercely to assert and maintain their domestic authority. This was not the classless utopia that Marx and Engels believed the proletarian revolution must eventually bring about.56

  Far from eliminating the class-based Russian state, Lenin was compelled to expand it, and because there were no other options, it was run by those despised “bourgeois experts” who had survived the tsarist regime. Instead of ushering in the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Communist Party now exercised dictatorial powers, allegedly on behalf of the workers, but in practice on behalf of itself. And rather than abolish class, the Bolshevik Revolution perpetuated it, and even expanded it: “the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie” were not eliminated, and neither was the peasantry, but all were joined by a new hierarchy of party managers and officials. “How,” a Soviet worker inquired in 1934, “can we liquidate classes, if new classes have developed here, with the only difference being that they are not called classes?”57 As these words suggest, it was the same under Stalin, who by the late 1930s had made peace with the peasants, the priests, and the bourgeoisie, and who urged that national unity mattered more than the global solidarities of class. “Socialism in one country” was more important than world revolution, and this view became the conventional wisdom during the years of the “Great Patriotic War,” from 1941 to 1945, during which Stalin blatantly and successfully appealed to Russian nationalist sentiment, persuading his countrymen to endure unspeakable hardship and deprivation. Yet this was more sleight of hand with respect to identity, since many in the USSR were not Russian by nationality—among them Stalin himself, who had been born in Georgia, and served as commissar for nationalities under Lenin.58

  The Bolshevik Revolution also failed in that it did not become the expected “signal for proletarian revolution in the west,” because as in 1914, the “workers of the world” refused to unite around a class-based identity in preference to their sense of nation-based solidarity. In 1919, Lenin had established the Third International (known as the Comintern) to support Communist parties abroad in their quest for revolution, and at its first meeting Trotsky had delivered his “Manifesto to the Proletariat of the Entire World,” proclaiming global revolution to be imminent.59 But with the exception of Mongolia, no other nation would officially espouse Communism during the next twenty years. At the end of the First World War, there were some initially promising signs: a Communist-supported uprising in Berlin of January 1919, and later in the year the establishment of Soviet republics in Hungary, Bavaria, and Slovakia, followed by renewed Communist agitations in Germany during 1921 and 1923.60 But they were all successfully suppressed, as the forces of “bourgeois” authority reasserted themselves, and by the end of the 1930s no significant or lasting Communist advances had been made, in Europe or anywhere else, despite (for example) the Republican efforts in the Spanish Civil War and the creation of the Popular Front in France. Once again, the great global revolution that Marx and Engels had urged and foreseen had failed to materialize.61

  Neither domestically nor internationally did Lenin’s original revolution conform to Marx and Engels’s formula. Yet from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, it often seemed that the “specter” of Communism was “haunting” Europe more dangerously than in 1848 or 1918, and was also insinuating itself in many regions for beyond.62 In the aftermath of the Second World War, Soviet Russia extended its formal borders, gobbling up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of Poland, while it further enlarged its European sphere of influence via the satellite states of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. At the same time in China, Mao Zedong and his followers overwhelmed the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, thereby establishing the most populous Communist regime in the world. In Indochina, Marxist-inspired insurgents, most famously Ho Chi Minh, expelled the French imperialists from the whole region, and would eventually drive the United States from Vietnam. In Africa, the writings of Marx and Engels appealed to many anticolonial agitators, and in 1980 Angola, Benin, the Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Somaliland all claimed to be Marxist-Leninist states. In Latin America, Fidel Castro established a Communist regime in Cuba, and Che Guevara would inspire freedom fighters everywhere, battling against American imperialism. Even in the United States, the combination of civil rights agitation, protest against the Vietnam War, and unprecedented student unrest suggested that at least among the college-educated younger generation “almost everyone was, or wanted to be thought, some sort of Marxist.”63

  Hence the era of the Cold War, when from either side the world looked deeply divided, in a stark and Manichean way, between the antagonistic identities and ideologies of Communism and capitalism, the USSR and the USA, “the East” and “the West.” According to Winston Churchill, the divisions “between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom” were “spread over the whole world.”64 Harry S. Truman believed his presidency had been “dominated by this all-embracing struggle between those who love freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness.” His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made the same point in his first inaugural address, when he declared that “the forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history.65 It was to help “the West” in this struggle that MIT professor Walt Rostow wrote his famous and influential book The Stages of Economic Growth, which was revealingly subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto, and which offered advice as to how the West might (and must) win the adherence of the newly independent and nonaligned nations of the Third World, who were constantly being courted by Moscow. Rostow later served in the White House as a hawkish advisor to President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War—a conflict that both men believed was a vital part of the global struggle against Communism. China and North Korea had already been “lost”: Indochina must not be allowed to go the same way.66 Thus were the supposedly irreconcilable identities of class transposed onto the world stage and transmuted into the supposedly no less irreconcilable identities of social, economic, and political systems.

  But while the rhetoric was that of a global Communist revolution, and of confrontation between two antithetical but internally homogeneous and ideologically coherent blocs, the reality was very different and more nuanced. The newly established Communist regimes took many forms, but despite repeated claims to the contrary, none of them achieved power by the means, or were wielding it for the ends, that Marx and Engels had set out in The Communist Manifesto.67 In the Soviet satellites of eastern Europe, Communism was externally imposed, and depended on a hierarchy of party collaborators and apparatchiks—a far cry from proletarian revolution vanquishing the bourgeoisie. In China, Mao’s brand of Communism depended above all on the peasantry (
of whom there were many millions) rather than on the factory proletariat (of whom there were very few), but this was in deliberate (and necessary) defiance of the stress Marx and Engels (and Lenin) had placed on the industrial working class as the agents of the proletarian revolutionaries, and it was not easy to reconcile with their disparaging remarks about “the idiocy of rural life.”68 In Indochina, parts of Africa, and Latin America, Marxist-inspired movements of colonial liberation were a conceptually dubious amalgam of Communist internationalism and anti-imperial nationalism, usually with the latter preponderant. And on the campuses of universities in the West, many self-styled Marxist students were more interested in individual liberties, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression than in espousing or leading proletarian revolution.69

  This may have seemed monolithic Communism to those on the outside looking in, but it was not the reality on the inside looking out. As the novelist and pundit C. P. Snow lamented in 1966, “we have tried to divide the world into two—just sharp black and white, like that. Nothing is more an over-simplification in terms of the real world.” He was right. In Soviet Russia, Khrushchev repudiated Stalin in the late 1950s, for (among other things) having perverted the doctrines of Marxism, and from the late 1940s to the late 1960s there were displays of dissent in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, while Tito’s Yugoslavia successfully asserted its independence from Moscow.70 For much of the postwar period, relations between Soviet Russia and Communist China were deeply strained, so that by 1961 “the Communist bloc was irrevocably split,” and neither country wielded the power over Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam that some Americans claimed. Elsewhere in Asia, and in Africa, few of the newly independent nations became lastingly Marxist or Communist: most were determined to be “nonaligned,” as their leaders had no wish to become the clients of Washington, D.C., Moscow, or Beijing. Despite the worldwide fame and glamour of Che Guevara, there were few successful Marxist revolutionaries in Latin America, and the students who wore Che T‑shirts in the United States did so to express a general defiance of authority rather than an inclination to take Marxist teachings seriously.71 As the American political scientist John H. Kautsky (grandson of Karl Kautsky) put it in the late 1960s, “Communism has come to mean quite different things in different minds, and quite different policies can hence be pursued in its name. As a descriptive category, ‘Communism’ has become useless.”72

  Moreover, just as the “internal struggles between classes” had constantly been modified by conversation and interaction, so too when recast as “conflicts between geo-political blocs,” relations were in fact often characterized by dialogue and exchange. Throughout the Cold War period, such encounters across this allegedly impermeable divide often went on, even though the Communist authorities officially deplored them: there was a growing amount of trade and tourism and cultural diplomacy (such as the visits of the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballets to “the West”); despite his tough talk, Churchill’s last great initiative as peacetime prime minister was to try to broker a meeting “at the summit” between the Americans and the Russians; the Cuban Missile Crisis was successfully resolved by negotiation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and soon afterward, the “hotline” telephone was established to connect the leaders in Washington and Moscow directly; and both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would later see in Mikhail Gorbachev a Russian leader with whom they could (and did) “do business.”73 By the time the Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989, attempts to prevent contact between the inhabitants of the Communist bloc and those living beyond its borders had clearly failed. In an increasingly globalized world of information technology, it had proved impossible for the Soviet authorities to prohibit conversations across, above, and underneath what became the increasingly ineffectual and eroded “iron curtain.”

  In the light of its global collapse, the verdict has to be that the once-bright Communist future had not worked, and since 1989 it has increasingly become the Communist past, relegated to that very dustbin of history that Trotsky hubristically believed awaited all other systems, except that which the Bolsheviks themselves had created. But even when abetted and assisted by self-styled and self-appointed revolutionaries, history did not unfold as Marx and Engels had insisted it would and predicted it must. Those Communist regimes that did come into being abolished neither class nor inequality nor property, and to the extent that class persisted, it was never the preeminent, all-encompassing identity that Marx and Engels claimed. Elsewhere, in the non-Communist world, their predictions have been even more thoroughly confounded: indeed, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, they have been “invalidated beyond the possibility of recovery.” Capitalism has survived, and with it the lumpenproletariat, the peasantry, and the petite bourgeoisie, and so (most disconcertingly) have the bourgeoisie themselves. While greed and exploitation persist, relations between the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie” have been characterized more in the long run by conversation, collaboration, and cooperation than by anger, antagonism, and animosity. The manual, industrial, factory-based working class, which Marx and Engels believed would be the instigator, the bearer, and the avatar of global proletarian revolution, has largely disappeared, except in emerging countries where the opportunity to participate in such production, even on harsh terms, is welcome relief from abject rural poverty. And since the 1980s, collective identities built around religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism have reasserted themselves with noteworthy virulence and ferocity, to the relative occlusion of class consciousness.74 The faiths that Marx and Engels dismissed as mere “bourgeois prejudice” are very much still in existence, while the claim that “the age of division into nationalities is past” now seems utterly mistaken.

  Since their underlying analysis of the past and present was incorrect, it is scarcely surprising that the predictions made by Marx and Engels have been falsified rather than borne out by subsequent events. Although they promised and urged the liberation of humanity, and although the Manifesto was later invoked as the inspiration by Communist leaders in many lands, the result in every case where they obtained power was ruthless single-party dictatorship, and the denial, not enhancement, of individual human freedom.75 Perhaps this was what Margaret Thatcher was getting at when she once declared that class was “a Communist concept,” which “groups people as bundles, and sets them against each other.” But not for long, and not in the end successfully, since the twentieth century makes plain that class is an insufficient basis and an inadequately convincing or compelling identity from which, and with which, to set out to bring history to what Marx and Engels mistakenly believed was its culminating conclusion and predestined utopia. Small wonder that belief in the possibility or even the desirability of a future Communist society has become very largely extinct, and so has the belief in the collective categories and social identities on which the deluded Communist experiment was based.76

  CLASS AS HISTORY

  Yet while in retrospect Communism seems to have been doomed, because of error and failure that were built into it from the beginning, there was a period from the 1930s to the 1980s when the collective identities of class and the inevitability of class conflict seemed widely appealing, and the classless society was among the most alluring prospects imaginable: as Eric Hobsbawm recalls, it represented for people like him “the hope of the world.”77 Moreover, these Marxist doctrines were not only applied to practical politics with revolutionary aspirations for changing the imperfect present into the utopian future; they were also appropriated in academic endeavors with no less revolutionary aims of reinterpreting the past to help change the politics of the present. Since Communism claimed to be an historically validated ideology, and with class historically validated as the most important collective solidarity, it was scarcely surprising that during its heyday many scholars embraced a Marxist view of the past and insistently proclaimed that history should not be primarily concerned with investigating (and thereby helping to perpetuate) the trivialit
ies of religious affiliations and disputes, or the superficialities of national identity and conflicts, but that it must itself be radicalized, reoriented, and redirected to investigate (and help realize?) those deeper truths of the past embodied in class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle.

  This view of history was embraced by a generation of British-born or British-based scholars, for whom the defining decade of their lives was the 1930s, and who included Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, George Rude, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm.78 They were among the first children of the Bolshevik Revolution; they believed Marxism offered the best way of understanding their stricken world; they wishfully viewed capitalism as being in terminal crisis in the aftermath of the Great Depression; and they embraced Communism by way of protesting against the Fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco and the infirm democracies of Baldwin’s Britain and France’s Third Republic.79 They were also influenced by the pioneering writings of two older Marxist scholars, A. L. Morton and Maurice Dobb, who had begun to outline a new historical vision built around class identity and class struggle.80 In 1938, Morton published his People’s History of England, which sought to explain the national past not as a cavalcade of constitutional Whiggish progress but as the outcome of a continued (and unfinished) battle between the classes, initially between the feudal aristocracy and the peasantry, then between the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and finally between the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. And in 1946, Dobb published Studies in the Development of Capitalism, which proclaimed the special importance of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early modern period as the “main and central problem” for Marxist historians.81