Communism

V

Communist Parties

In the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution, Communism become a movement, distinct from the mainstream socialist movement. Its distinctive features were a commitment to Leninism and allegiance to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). World War I caused the dissolution of the Second International (created in 1889). The majority of socialists, including the powerful German and French parties, decided to support their own national governments. A minority, including the Russian Social Democratic Labour party (of which the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Illich Lenin were still a part) remained loyal to the anti-war positions repeatedly upheld by the Second International in the years leading up to 1914. In 1917, months before the Russian Revolution, Lenin re-examined Marx's distinction between the lower and higher phase of communism in his Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya (The State and Revolution), called the lower phase “socialism” and reserved the term “communism” for the higher phase in which there would be neither a state nor social classes. The state would still exist in the socialist phase. It would take the form of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”—a term rarely found in the writings of Marx and Engels. The purpose of this was to prepare the way for communism by combating “bourgeois” ideas and habits swiftly and severely. This dictatorship, explained Lenin, is “not our ultimate goal...but a necessary step for the purpose of thoroughly purging society of all the hideousness and foulness of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress”.

Following the successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia in October 1917, Lenin's supporters in the rest of Europe agreed that it was not necessary to await the full development of capitalism before starting the construction of a socialist society leading to communism. They assumed that the conditions were ripe for a communist revolution which would spread throughout the world. This revolution would abolish capitalism and set up a socialist state, not a communist one, for, strictly speaking, a “communist state” is a contradiction in terms since communism is a classless society which administers itself without coercion and hence without a state. This is why all states established by Communists called themselves either “socialist”, as in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, or “People's Republics” (for example, China) or “Democratic Republics” (for example, East Germany). To implement this vision a new organization was created, the Communist International (1919) or Comintern whose headquarters would be in Moscow, the new capital of the USSR. Sympathizers of the Bolsheviks in the various socialist parties were urged to form new parties to be called “Communist”. These would be organized on rigidly militarist and centralized lines. An iron discipline (“democratic centralism”) would prevail. Party cadres would be dedicated professional revolutionaries. Their task would be to demarcate themselves clearly from all other socialists who were deemed to be incurably reformist, and to prepare for an insurrection. By 1921 the working-class unrest which had rocked Europe after the war had ebbed while the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power in Russia. The probability of a worldwide conflagration had decreased considerably. By then, however, virtually all the socialist parties had split and Communist parties had been established. They quickly became heavily dependent on the USSR. Their relationship with the socialist and social-democratic parties from which they had separated was determined by the vicissitudes of the power struggle within the USSR and the changing requirements of Soviet diplomacy. Bitter denunciation of socialists as “social-fascist” in 1928-1934 was followed by invitations to form a common front (the Popular Front) against fascism. Throughout the inter-war period, no Communist parties succeeded in ousting any of the socialist parties from their dominant position in the labour movement.

VI

The Soviet Model

By 1930 Communism had come to denote an international movement whose fundamental aim was to defend and protect the USSR and whose immediate objective was to replicate, with some inevitable modification due to national differences, the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism in the USSR. In the inter-war years the basic assumption of Communists was that political power could only be achieved through an insurrection, and not by electoral and parliamentary means. The circumstances which made such revolution possible could not be determined by the Communists themselves but depended on what Lenin had called the general law of revolution: this would occur only when the ruling class was no longer able to rule and when the oppressed classes were no longer willing to go on in the old ways. The task of the Communist vanguard was to prepare for such eventuality. Only then would the Communists swiftly occupy the centre of power, abolish the bourgeois organs of representative democracy (parliament, etc.) where they existed, and establish a network of assemblies or Soviets somehow co-ordinated by the Communist party itself, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat. In practice this meant that the Communist party would rule the country using the central administration of the state, including the police and the secret services, in order to destroy opposition and prevent the formation of other independent parties or groups. By the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union had become a fully-fledged model for all Communists. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, had become not only its unchallenged leader but also the ultimate repository of orthodox Communist thought. The drive to collectivization and industrialization in the 1930s, conducted with astonishing brutality, was accompanied by massive political repression (the Great Purges) to eliminate all forms of dissent. Communists were expected not only to defend all aspects of economic and political developments in the Soviet Union but to struggle for the adoption of similar policies in their own countries. Thus Communists supported the seizure of power by violent means, the nationalization of the principal means of production, distribution, and exchange, a centrally directed planned economy, and the collectivization of agriculture.

VII

Communism outside Europe

Until about 1920 the socialist movement had been confined only to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (in the United States it was not significant). The victory of the Communists in Russia, however, gave a considerable boost to the expansion of socialist ideology outside the developed world. Anticolonial activists saw the USSR as a champion of anticolonialism and as a model for overcoming backwardness without recourse to capitalism. As early as 1920 Lenin had realized the potential appeal of Communist Russia to what we now call the developing world. The young Indian Communist Manabendra Nath Roy predicted that Asia would be the most fertile territory for the spread of Communism. Many young and largely middle-class Asian revolutionaries attended the Bolshevik Congress of Eastern Peoples in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920. Communist parties were created all over the world, including Japan, Turkey, Persia, India, and China. In the 1920s, however, the only Asian Communist party which had an important working-class following was that of China. Though traumatically defeated in 1927 by the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communist party, led by Mao Zedong retreated to the countryside, reconstructed itself as a peasant party, gradually emancipated itself from Soviet control, and eventually fought back until it gained control of the whole of China in 1949 and established the People's Republic.

In the inter-war years, Communism had acquired three features which distinguished it sharply from socialist parties. In the first place it was a movement in defence of the construction of socialism (the preparatory phase of Communism) in the USSR. Secondly, it consisted of militant and disciplined parties with a working-class following whose aim was a revolutionary upheaval. Thirdly, it embraced anticolonial activists for whom Communism provided not only a perspective for the anti-imperialist struggle but also a non-capitalist path of development for former colonies.

VIII

World War II

The Comintern was disbanded in 1943 at the height of World War II in order to assuage the USSR's Western allies. Its record was singularly unsuccessful. An organization whose aim was the co-ordination of world revolution had failed to establish a single new Communist state. Nevertheless, by the time the war was over, the popularity of Communism was at its height. This was due to a number of factors. In the first place most of the fighting against Hitler's Germany had been conducted by the USSR. The Red Army, through its victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, had turned the tide of the war in Europe. It had liberated Berlin and forced the Nazis to withdraw from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, part of Austria, and a small area of Yugoslavia. In the second place the Communists had appeared to be the most intransigent and daring fighters in the Resistance against the Nazis and the fascists in the countries of occupied Europe. In the third place the Great Depression of the 1930s had shown how unstable capitalism was, while Soviet industrialization was perceived as a model of a rationally planned economy. In the fourth place, the requirements of the international alliance against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) had led western governments to tone down anti-Communist propaganda. Finally the Communist parties had dropped their sectarian attitude towards other parties and had become active proponents of the continuation of the coalition governments of national unity which had sprung up throughout Europe. Similar demands were also advanced by Japanese and Chinese Communists. Internationally, the USSR hoped that an entente with the Western powers, especially the United States, could provide the space for its own reconstruction after the huge bloodletting of the war years. Communism's immediate goals in the advanced countries now appeared to be anti-fascist “progressive governments” whose aim was not dissimilar from that of socialist parties. In colonial and semi-colonial countries they propounded a policy of anti-imperialist collaboration with the local bourgeoisie. In Europe Communist parties had become powerful not only where Soviet occupation had favoured their success—as in Eastern and Central Europe—but also where they had contributed decisively to the Resistance—as in Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Italy, and France. Communists also made progress where they had not been a significant force between the wars. In the first post-war elections the Communists obtained 12.7 per cent of the vote in Belgium, 12.5 per cent in Denmark, 23.5 per cent in Finland, 11.9 per cent in Norway, and 10.3 per cent in Sweden. In France and Italy they became the main party of the Left, overtaking their socialist rivals.

The Cold War completely changed the international situation and, with it, the pattern of Communist power. Instead of moderate “progressive democracies”, the “People's Republics” established in Central and Eastern Europe turned into proletarian dictatorships following the Soviet model. By the end of 1948 the Communist movement had three components: the USSR, whose prestige as the directing centre of the movement had been greatly enhanced by the war, a system of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe more or less overlapping with the areas liberated by the Red Army, and a network of Communist parties operating in capitalist countries or involved in anti-colonial struggles. In 1947 a coordinating organization, the Cominform, was established, less centralized than the old Comintern. It included all the European Communist states and the two major Communist parties of capitalist Europe, the French and the Italian.

IX

Asia

The fortunes of Asian Communism were varied. Two common features can be distinguished: instead of aiming to overthrow capitalism (barely established in much of the continent except Japan), Communism in Asia, as in the rest of the developing world, aimed to free the country from colonialism and modernize it. Success thus depended on mobilizing the peasantry and leading the anti-colonial or patriotic movement. This largely explains its triumph in China and its defeat in India.

In 1942 the Indian Communist party refused to support the Congress party call on the British to “Quit India” and preferred to co-operate with Britain in the war effort as it had been instructed to do by the USSR. It thus enjoyed the status of being the only legal nationalist organization in India during the war. This was a poisoned chalice because it left it isolated from the post-war independence movement. Communism in India remained of significance only in the south-western state of Kerala and in the northern state of West Bengal.

In Korea the Communist party had been one of the leading forces in the anti-colonial war against Japan. The country, however, was too small for the party to establish a liberated zone as the Chinese Communist party had been able to do. At the end of the war the party had become overly dependent on the USSR, which was able to establish, north of the 38th parallel, a Communist government similar to those of Eastern Europe while, south of the parallel, a right-wing regime emerged under American protection. The Korean War confirmed the partition of the country. A similar pattern emerged in Vietnam, with the difference that the Vietnamese Communists were more independent of Moscow than the Korean (there was no common border with the USSR). Led by Ho Chi Minh, they fought successfully against the French colonialists and defeated them in 1954. The ensuing international negotiations partitioned the country, leaving the Communists in control of the north and a pro-Western right-wing regime in the south. By the Sixties the conflict between north and south led to direct US military involvement. After a long and bitter conflict the United States was forced to withdraw in 1973. In 1975 Vietnam was reunited under Communist rule. Pro-Communist regimes were also established in Cambodia and Laos.

In Indonesia the Communist party had successfully established itself as the largest Communist party in Asia after the Chinese. It supported the semi-democratic personal rule of the nationalist and non-aligned leader Ahmed Sukarno. In 1965-1966 pro-American forces led by General Suharto ousted Sukarno and utterly destroyed the Communist party. It has been estimated that up to one million Communists were murdered in the ensuing massacre.

In the Middle East and Africa, Communist parties remained peripheral, though a number of post-colonial regimes styled themselves “Marxist-Leninist” and added Communist-type appellations such as “People's” or “Popular” to their names: examples include Benin, Ethiopia, Yemen, Angola, and Mozambique. In South Africa the Communist party was a component of the African National Congress and joined in 1994 the first postapartheid government led by Nelson Mandela.