The Red Flag: A History of Communism (11 page)

This route-map dominated Marxist thinking, and all Marxists were obliged to follow it. But it could obviously be interpreted in many different ways. For example, the timetable could vary: the road to Communism might be very swift or rather gradual, it could be a journey
accompanied by revolutionary violence or one of largely peaceful economic development. Marxists could and did disagree about who was to be in the driving seat – the revolutionary working class, or a group of wise Marxist experts on the laws of history. They also took different views of the role of the state, and how quickly it could be replaced by a Paris Commune-style democracy.

Marxism therefore still had its Romantic, Radical and Modernist elements, but from the 1860s until World War I a new equilibrium had been established, with its centre of gravity decisively shifted towards Modernism. The main Romantic Marxist texts of the 1840s were not published until the 1930s, and Engels, who became the leading theoretician after Marx’s death in 1883, set about popularizing a Modernist form of Marxism in seminal works such as
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
. According to this Marxism, the journey to Communism would be a gradual one, workers would have to wait until economic conditions were ripe, and the Communist ideal was to be founded on modern industry and a powerful bureaucracy (under the control of workers). In the meantime, Communists, or ‘Social Democrats’ as they were now called, were to establish well-organized, centralized political parties. They were to fight for workers’ interests as far as they could within the existing ‘bourgeois’ political system, participate in elections, and were not to push for premature revolutions. However, they were to maintain their independence; they were not to slip too far to the right and collaborate with bourgeois parties. This Marxism was far from the revolutionary egalitarianism of the barricades.

After a long period in the 1850s when repression made any socialist politics very difficult, Marx and Engels returned to political activism in the 1860s, helping to found the ‘First International’, a grouping of national socialist parties, in 1864. The results were mixed. They failed to persuade the pragmatic British trade unionists to break from the Liberal party, and the International’s influence in Britain never recovered. But the left, if anything, was even more of a threat to Marx and Engels. Their main opponents were the anarchists Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, for whom Marxism seemed authoritarian and who favoured a decentralized form of socialism. For Bakunin, the charismatic son of a Russian count, Marx was ‘head to foot an authoritarian’, and his ‘scientific’ socialism was designed to give power to ‘a numerically small aristocracy of genuine or sham scientists’.
⁵⁴
Marx responded
in kind: Bakunin was a ‘Monster. Perfect blockhead. Stupid. Aspiring dictator of Europe’s workers.’
⁵⁵

Bakunin, however, enjoyed a great deal of support in the International, and the conflict between Marxism and anarchism was to contribute to the institution’s destruction. The final meeting took place in The Hague in 1872. Marx, who had become associated in the public mind with the Paris Commune of the previous year, was now a notorious figure (the ‘Red-Terror-Doctor’), and crowds followed the delegates from the station to their hotel, though according to one journalist, children were warned against going into the streets with valuables in case the evil International stole them.
⁵⁶
Yet Marx was unable to bring the leverage of his street-level reputation as the leader of socialism into the conference hall; he antagonized many of the delegates by his harsh treatment of both Bakunin and the British trade unionists. He was only able to impose control by moving the General Council from London to New York, leaving the Italian, Spanish and Swiss socialist parties to Bakunin’s rival, anti-Marxist international. The transfer to the United States was hardly practical, and soon afterwards the First International was dissolved.

Yet in the longer term, Marx’s and Engels’ Modernist version of socialism proved to be more enduring in Western Europe than its anarchist rival. The so-called ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ of the 1880s and 1890s led to the development of what we think of as the modern industrial economy.
⁵⁷
Factories became bigger, as the metal, chemical, mining and transport industries came to the fore; machinery became increasingly complex and expensive; international competition became harsher; and the modern corporation emerged, employing hierarchies of managers to create efficient businesses and to police workers. All of this had an enormous effect on workers. The urban labour force became larger, and employers tried to increase productivity by cutting wages and using machinery to ‘de-skill’ workers, paying them less to perform routine mechanized tasks. At the same time, national economies were becoming more integrated, and workers became more aware of their fellow labourers.

Many of Marx’s predictions were therefore being fulfilled by the time of his death in 1883. De-skilling and globalization were precisely what Marx had foretold, and the enlarged working classes provided a reservoir of recruits for Marxist parties. However, these new industrial
workers were limited to a minority of the population in the more modern sectors of the economy, and they often had little in common with the mass of less organized, casual workers. Also, their reactions to economic change varied. De-skilling could anger workers and provoke militancy. But workers were often less radical than they had been in the early stages of industrialization. The labour unrest of early industrialization was fuelled by an ambivalence towards modern industry, and sometimes by a complete rejection of it. But now many workers had become part of the factory system, and had learnt to work within it. Employers often had a great deal of power over them and workers were more likely to accept the realities of the industrial world than rebel against it.
⁵⁸

The evolution of European politics also contributed to this mixture of conflict and compromise. Workers and trade unionists continued to be the victims of state repression in many parts of Europe. However, the violent social ‘civil wars’ of the 1830s and 1840s had become muted by the 1860s. States were granting the liberal reforms demanded and refused in 1848, and they were gradually extending them from the middle classes to workers. Marxism, therefore, benefited from some of the social and political changes of the late nineteenth century, but not others. The poor of the Western world had a number of paths available to them, and they by no means all chose the Marxist one.

The year after Marx’s death, in 1884, the French writer Émile Zola began his great ‘socialist novel’, determined to draw middle-class attention to what he regarded as the central issue of the time: the imminence of bloody revolution:

Zola initially planned to call the novel
The Gathering Storm
, but finally decided on the title
Germinal
, in deliberate evocation of the Jacobins
who had given the name to their new springtime month. Zola believed he needed to force his complacent readers to acknowledge the shaky foundations of the bourgeois order as capital and labour struggled, quite literally, beneath their feet. In the immense coalmine, ‘Le Voreux’ (‘a voracious beast’), ‘an army was growing, a future crop of citizens, germinating like seeds that would burst through the earth’s crust one day into the bright sunshine’.
⁶⁰

Zola’s main characters stand for four rather different socialist visions: Souvarine is a Russian émigré anarchist; Étienne Lantier a Marxist of sorts, an ‘intransigent collectivist, authoritarian, Jacobin’; Rasseneur, a ‘Possibilist’, or moderate socialist (based on Émile Basly, the former miner and future parliamentary deputy); and the abbé Ranvier, a Christian socialist. Étienne, the Jacobin, is the hero of the novel, but, like Rasseneur, is also shown to be egotistical and ambitious. Meanwhile Souvarine, though idealistic, is destructive, and Ranvier is ineffectual. Ultimately, Zola believes that none of the socialists can control the masses – a violent, almost animalistic force of nature. Zola terrifies his readers with his accounts of the uncontrollably violent strikes and demonstrations. His bourgeois characters saw

Zola himself had little sympathy with revolutionary politics, and ultimately Étienne, the leader of a disastrous strike, is shown to have ‘outgrown his immature resentment’, in favour of a future when workers would abjure violence and form a ‘peaceful army’. Organized trade unions would fight for their rights and bring about the demise of Capital by legal means. Then ‘the crouching, sated god, that monstrous idol who lay hidden in the depths of his tabernacle untold leagues away, bloated with the flesh of miserable wretches who never even saw him, would instantly give up the ghost.’
⁶²

Zola’s prediction, that leftist politics would become less revolutionary and more law-abiding, was true for some countries but not for others. Where existing ‘bourgeois’ political parties were willing to accommodate workers in the political order and concede trade union
representation, as was the case with the British Liberal Party and its ‘Lib-Lab’ politics, workers tended to jettison revolutionary goals; why confront an established order that gave workers what they wanted?
⁶³
In these more liberal conditions, the Étiennes did poorly, and the Rasseneurs were in the ascendant. Yet Marxists did not prosper in societies that were too illiberal either. In repressive countries with underdeveloped industries, such as Russia, the Balkans and much of Austria-Hungary, it was difficult for Marxists to organize parties and trade unions. In parts of Italy and Iberia, in contrast, anarchistic Souvarines and more radical Marxists who demanded immediate revolution seemed to have a more compelling case. There it was easier to organize politically, but the state often used harsh repression against popular demands, most strikingly during the violence of ‘Tragic Week’ in Catalonia in 1909. Anarchists also did well where poor peasants were demanding land redistribution, whilst Marxists often saw peasants as ‘backward’, and peasants themselves were often hostile to Marxist plans for centralized states. France was a hybrid case, and the Étiennes, Souvarines, Rasseneurs and Ranviers all found a constituency. Because sporadic state repression continued, Marxist parties enjoyed some success, but anarchists continued to thrive amongst artisans (who were still an important economic group), whilst relatively liberal governments made the lure of reformism irresistible to many potential Marxist recruits. Churches were also powerful opponents of Marxist parties. Marxists, following Marx, usually saw Christianity as a reactionary ideology that justified the old social structure, and the churches usually responded with equal hostility. The Catholic Church was especially antagonistic to Marxism, and it was particularly effective in resisting Marxist influence through its political parties and social organizations.

In the United States, Marxists and other socialists were also confronted with a mixture of repression and liberal democracy, but they were less successful in establishing a foothold than in most industrialized countries in Europe. Trade unions and socialist movements attracted a large following until the early twentieth century: the medievally named Knights of Labour had about 10 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force as members by 1886. But this left was later undermined by a combination of forces: ethnic divisions; a dominant liberal ideology; male suffrage as an alternative way of seeking change; and high levels of repression.

The ideal home for the Étienne Lantiers was to be found in Northern and Central Europe. The largest and most successful party was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the ‘SPD’), but Marxist parties were also successful in Scandinavia and some parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is not surprising that the centre of the Marxist hopes moved from France, where they had been in the middle of the century, towards the East. Germany now had a large industrial working class, and many of these workers were attracted by the Marxists’ commitment to modern heavy industry and their promise that the proletariat would inherit the earth. But political conditions were as important, if not more so, than economic structure. In 1878, following an attempt on the life of the Kaiser (for which the socialists were not responsible) Bismarck demanded that the Reichstag pass anti-socialist laws, banning the SPD and repressing workers’ organizations more generally. Nevertheless, the party and unions maintained an underground existence, and Social Democrats were still able to stand for parliament as individuals, thus providing a focus for working-class politics. But discrimination continued, even after the anti-socialist laws lapsed in 1890. The SPD was subject to police harassment, and employers were often harsh in dealing with strikes; workers were often treated as second-class citizens, patronized by the middle class and excluded from their clubs and associations. This state schizophrenia, its combination of freedom and repression, helped the Modernist Marxism of Marx and Engels to flourish. Repression kept the SPD outside established politics and ensured that it did not become a reformist party; the party adopted a Marxist programme at Erfurt in 1891, which promised the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism at some point in the future. But at the same time, the SPD had deputies in parliament, and its representation and strength grew after 1890, allowing the party to achieve a great deal through the existing order. It was therefore only to be expected that pressure for revolution was weak. As a result of these complex circumstances, the SPD was to embody the ideal Marx and Engels pursued in the First International: an independent Marxist party that fought for workers’ interests within the current system without collaborating with the bourgeoisie.