The Red Flag: A History of Communism (103 page)

In the late 2000s, radical guerrilla Communism flourishes mainly in Nepal and India. In Latin America, in contrast, populist socialist movements – like those of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela – have been more successful than radical Marxists. The Colombian guerrillas – the FARC – have moved away from Marxism-Leninism to a more eclectic ‘Bolivarian’ socialism, although they continue to use violent methods. A new Latin American Marxist guerrilla movement did emerge in the mid-1990s, and it was the last to gain a significant international reputation – the Mexican Zapatistas. But their history showed how far Third World Marxism had evolved since the 1960s.

On New Year’s Eve 1994, a group of masked guerrillas appeared in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas. They engaged in a few skirmishes with the authorities and then melted back into the rainforest; more significant than the fighting was the torrent of words that followed. ‘Subcomandante Marcos’ – Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente – was, like Guzmán, a Marxist philosophy professor determined to defend the rights of the indigenous Indian peasantry. His Zapatista Liberation National Army (EZLN) found inspiration in an eclectic collection of figures, including Marx, the old Mexican socialist revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and the Sandinista revolutionaries. But Che Guevara was a primary influence – indeed the ‘Subcomandante’ modelled himself on the ‘Comandante’, adopting his pipe, beard, cap, his love of
Don Quixote
and self-satirizing, mock heroic prose style.
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But he rejected Che’s warlike methods and emphasized his ‘Marxist humanism’. Marcos’s guerrillas were effectively isolated by the Mexican army by 1995, and Mexico’s politics in the 1990s was much more liberal than much of Latin America’s in the 1980s, so culture and propaganda became more important in the Zapatistas’ politics than military action. One of the volumes of Marcos’s works was entitled
Our Word is Our Weapon
, and he was serious in attempting to forge a non-violent Communism. As he explained, ‘our army is very different from others, because its proposal is to cease being an army. A soldier is an absurd person who has to resort to arms in order to convince others, and in that sense the movement has no future if its future is military.’
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His approach – democratic and participatory – was indeed closer to that of the Western left of 1968 and the ‘Orange’ Alternative in Eastern Europe than the old Marxist left of the developing world. His style, which included writing politically committed children’s stories featuring Don Durito, a stubborn Zapatista beetle, as well as mastery of the internet, was ironic and even whimsical: ideal for these more peaceable times. It is therefore not surprising that Marcos became a hero of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in the 1990s to criticize the inequalities produced by the neo-liberal order. The Che–Marcos tradition was then the only strand of Communism that retained any real appeal on the left after the wreckage of 1989, and in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of Che’s death a new techno-version of ‘Hasta Siempre, Comandante’ performed by the glamorous singer Nathalie Cardone topped the French pop charts. Its extraordinary accompanying pop video showed Cardone viewing Che’s corpse, before leading a revolution of the Cuban poor encumbered only by an AK-47 in one hand and a small infant in the other. Notably, however, she only practises her shooting skills on a row of bottles; no blood is spilt.

The potential for radical socialist politics remains wherever sharp social inequalities can be linked to a critique of direct foreign intervention and ‘imperialism’, although the end of the Cold War has undermined those resentments. Soviet and American interventions helped to intensify social and ethnic conflicts, and in much of the world the United States had filled the vacuum left by the old European empires, propping up conservative elites because it believed that there was a threat from Communism. With the end of the Cold War, the Americans have been much less willing to use force to support unpopular elites. Since the
mid-2000s much of Latin America has moved to the populist left, reacting against neo-liberal reforms, but the United States has largely tolerated such radicalism, however much it dislikes it.

By the turn of the millennium, therefore, the old conflicts that linked the international, the social and the ideological had ended in most areas of the world, except for one region: the Middle East. For the most powerful revolutionary forces of the 1990s and 2000s did not gather beneath the red flag of Communism, but around the green banner of Islamism. They too believed that they were fighting on two fronts: Western ‘imperialism’ in the Middle East, and traditionalism, in the form of an ‘impure’, ‘superstitious’ Islam. They embraced social and gender hierarchies, unlike Communists, but like them they were mobilizers, seeking to unite their divided societies against the enemy. And when they launched the attacks of 11 September 2001 against the United States, they provoked a militant neo-conservative revival – much as the Soviets had in the 1970s. The Reaganite neo-liberal and neo-conservative alliance emerged once again under George W. Bush, to dominate politics for much of the 2000s.

This era, though, was to be a brief one. In the summer and autumn of 2008 the powerful order that had prevailed since 1979–80 finally collapsed. The failure of Lehman Brothers Bank in September – largely caused by an extreme laissez-faire approach to economics – marked the end of the neo-liberal age. Meanwhile the defeat of the American-aided ‘Rose’ revolutionary President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, by Russia in the August war over the disputed Georgian province of South Ossetia, showed that neo-conservative efforts to spread liberal democracy, already weakened by failures of the 2003 Iraq invasion, had reached their limits.

In a poem of 1938, ‘To Those Born Later’, Bertolt Brecht sought to justify his life as a Communist to future sceptics. He accepted that ‘hatred’ ‘contorts the features’, but even so, asked for ‘forbearance’; the times he had lived in were very different: they were ‘dark’ times of injustice, and there was no alternative to his harsh behaviour. Whilst he had wanted to ‘prepare the ground for friendliness’, he could not himself be friendly.
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Should we exercise forbearance? It is not the purpose of this book to grant, or to deny, Brecht’s appeal. We do need to make moral judgements about historical crimes, but we also need to explain. Also, it is one thing to indulge a Brecht; another a Stalin or a Pol Pot.

Brecht’s poem does, however, help us to understand the appeal of Soviet-style Communism – even to somebody as resistant to idealism and Romanticism as he. Communism sought to achieve universal ‘friendliness’ by unfriendly means. It was a movement whose goal was to overcome inequality and bring modernity, but it was founded on the view that this could only be achieved by radical means, ultimately through revolution.

Marxism’s desire to unite modernity and equality was to prove especially appealing to the patriotic students and educated elites who perceived their societies to be ‘backward’: men and women who followed in the footsteps of the Jacobins, Chernyshevskii and Lu Xun in their eagerness not only to challenge old patriarchal power, but also to compete with more ‘advanced’ nations. Even so the turn to Communism was not the inevitable result of backwardness and inequality. Had it not been for the chaos prevailing in Russia in 1917, or the Japanese invasion of China, the two states which provided the major inspiration for the Communist movement might never have emerged. Nevertheless, Communism often made sense to a variety of different people beyond core activists, even if it was rarely supported by the majority. But it was in its least Romantic and most illiberal form, Marxism-Leninism, that it was most often triumphant. This hybrid placed peculiar emphasis on a militant, secretive disciplined minority, the vanguard party.

Lenin’s ‘party of a new type’ emerged from the experience of Russian conspiratorial politics and civil war. It developed a peculiar mixture of quasi-religious and military culture, and became an almost sect-like organization, concerned with converting and transforming its members into adepts of the true socialist cause. And once it had consolidated its power, under Stalin its energies were harnessed to a yet another ‘heroic’ task: the industrialization of the country. The party saw itself as a developmental engine seeking to drag the peasantry and other ‘backward’ groups forward into modernity. It was this promise of dynamic but disciplined energy that gripped elites in so many developing and colonized countries. And it was this organizational élan that attracted those on the left engaged in war, placing Communists at the centre of effective resistance to lands occupied by Nazi Germany and Japanese imperialism.

And indeed Communists were often at their most confident when they were members of a revolutionary movement, opposing autocracy and imperialism, particularly in conditions of war. It was the actual practice of government that was more difficult. In the early years of Communist rule, the parties generally sought Radical transformation, designed to propel the society towards Communism, often using warlike methods. As Che Guevara admitted to the poet Pablo Neruda, ‘War… War… We are always against war, but once we have fought in a war, we can’t live without it. We want to go back to it all the time.’
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Radicalism also seemed to be more necessary because of war and foreign threats. More technocratic or pragmatic Marxism seemed much less relevant in these conditions. War or threat of war often helped Radical Communists to power, as was the case with Stalin in 1928 and Mao in 1943.

The mass mobilizations, the economic ‘leaps’ forward, land reform and collectivization campaigns all imitated military campaigns, and often inspired self-sacrifice amongst Communists and their supporters. A quasi-military campaigning style proved especially attractive to the young; but harsh methods inevitably created victims. These Communists, convinced that they were fighting a righteous cause, often acted brutally towards traditional peasant cultures, the religious and those deemed ‘bourgeois’ – now seen as enemies of progress and of the people.

Of course, some Communist regimes did not resort to mass violence. However, it was in Communism’s more ambitious, radical phases that most of its victims suffered – particularly when regimes were establishing themselves. The degree of the violence differed, depending on leadership and circumstances. It was most extreme in the Khmer Rouge’s Kampuchea; it was more muted amongst the ‘Marxist humanists’ of Cuba. Preparation for war could also lead to mass killings, as during Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s. Many of the victims of Communist regimes were supposed ‘class enemies’, but the majority of those who died under Communist regimes were killed by famine, the result of callously dogmatic agrarian policies.

Radical methods could not be used for long, as they damaged the economy and caused chaos. The experts and managers who had to run the planned system were undermined, overambitious ‘leaps’ created disorder, and ultra-egalitarian methods failed. Narrow, militant groups could not transform large, complex societies without broader support. Eventually the regimes realized that they had to ‘retreat’, and give themselves a more secure foundation. In the USSR after the war, a more technocratic approach was merged with one that stressed ‘patriotic’ unity, rather than sectarian division. But Stalin still sought to maintain the system’s militancy, and continued to use harsh methods against ‘anti-patriotic’ ‘enemies of the people’.

On Stalin’s death many Communists would begin to challenge the pre-eminence of the old model and demand that the movement become more inclusive and ‘democratic’. However, there was little agreement on how this was to be achieved. Technocratic solutions were tried by some, but they ran into opposition from leaders and people alike; others, such as Mao and Guevara, returned to a more Radical form of Communism, and inevitably economic disorder, chaos and civil war were the result. Yet another group combined a more ethical, Romantic socialism of human liberation, with pragmatic elements of the market and pluralist democracy, most notably during the Prague Spring. But the party was not ready to give up its monopoly of power, or to dilute the old planned system to such an extent. It was this that precipitated a conservative reaction in the Eastern bloc of the 1970s, under Brezhnev, which in turn strengthened the resolve of Gorbachev and his reformers to launch a peaceful ‘revolution’ against the party, and ultimately to destroy the old system itself.

Communist regimes had not always seemed so reactionary. Their emphasis on welfare, education and social mobility was often in sharp contrast to the priorities of the rulers who went before, and could be very popular. They also did much to modernize their societies, promoting national integration, social mobility and welfare. There were, however, severe limits to their achievements. Problems were most stark in the economy. They were wasteful and ecologically damaging. And for citizens of Eastern European Communist regimes who were aware of Western consumer societies the gap was very obvious. Communism had the feel of stagnating wartime austerity, not vibrant modernity.

But perhaps more damaging than the economic sclerosis was the gap between the ideal of Communism and the reality. By the 1970s in the USSR, few believed that the party was seriously seeking to create a new, dynamic and equal society. The party, having come to power as a militant, idealistic elite, now seemed to have lost its function, and seemed like an entity solely committed to keeping its power and privileges. Having overcome systems of entrenched inequalities, they seemed to be creating a new one. Urban, educated groups became especially disillusioned with their exclusion from power and lack of freedoms, and as the Western world – partly in response to the Communist threat after World War II – became more inclusive and equal, Communism now appeared as more elitist and less modern than its rival.