The Red Flag: A History of Communism (4 page)

Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that Communism was entering its final phase, as it lost ground to other forms of radicalism: the new militant liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and political Islam. By the mid-1980s, the Kremlin was forced to respond, and Gorbachev sought to bring a renewed energy to Communism. It was these efforts to revive popular enthusiasm for Communism in the Soviet Union that were to lead to the system’s final dissolution.

Communism tended to follow cycles, through periods of radical revolutionary ‘advance’, followed by ‘retreat’ – whether towards technocratic Modernism, a more patriarchal Communism, or a pragmatic accommodation with liberalism. The revolutionary impulse renewed itself for various reasons, but the non-Communist world played its part. Capitalism, unrestrained, frequently discredited itself, as financial crises led to economic suffering, most spectacularly following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As important, though, were sharp international inequalities. The widespread attraction of the extreme right contributed to Germany’s and Japan’s bloody attempts to create new empires of ethnic privilege; and the Western powers’ desire to maintain empire in the developing world, before and after World War II, fuelled nationalistic anger in the Third World. Communism also seemed to be a recipe for rapid economic development, narrowing the gap between the poor South and the rich West. Domestically, too, social tensions – especially in the countryside – created fertile ground for revolutionary parties.

Communism in its old form has been discredited, and will not return as a powerful movement. But now that globalized capitalism is in crisis, this is an ideal time to revisit Communists’ efforts to create an alternative system, and the reasons why they failed. And to understand the origins of Communism, we need to start with Communism’s stirrings amidst the first Promethean challenge to the rule of Zeus of the modern era – the French Revolution.

In August 1793, the beginning of the most radical period of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, the artist and propagandist for the new regime, designed one of the many political festivals staged throughout France. The Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic celebrated the first anniversary of the end of the monarchy, and David erected five allegorical scenes to represent the various stages of the revolution so far, the most notable of which was the fourth. A huge figure of the Greek hero Hercules bestrode a model mountain in Paris’s Place des Invalides, holding in his left hand the fasces – the bundle of rods that symbolized power and unity. In his right hand he wielded a club, with which he beat the Hydra, shown as a creature with a woman’s head and serpent’s tail. The scene was intended to illustrate the alliance of the militant French people with the radical ‘Mountain’ faction of the Jacobins and their spokesman Maximilien Robespierre.
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Aeschylus had seen Hercules as the protector of the oppressed, and David’s interpretation was not dissimilar. When he proposed the construction of a permanent 46-foot-tall statue of Hercules after the festival, he described him as a figure ‘of force and simplicity’, an embodiment of the French people whose ‘liberating energy’ would destroy the ‘double tyranny of kings and priests’.
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His virtues, lest anybody be in doubt, would be quite literally carved into his body: ‘force’ and ‘courage’ along his arms, ‘work’ on his hands, and ‘nature’ and ‘truth’ across his chest. He represented, therefore, a very particular section of the French people: the people who laboured with their hands. These were the
sans-culottes
– the radical city-dwelling artisans ‘without breeches’ who were not afraid to use violence in pursuit of their ends. The editor of the journal
Révolutions de Paris
certainly saw David’s statue in this light: ‘We will see the people standing, carrying the liberty that it conquered and a club to defend its
conquest. No doubt, amongst the models entered in the competition, we will prefer the one which best projects the character of a
sans-culotte
with its figure of the people.’
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However, Hercules was not merely a figure of popular strength, but also of reason, as the inscription of the word ‘light’ across his brow showed. David had created a symbol merging the
sans-culotte
with the man of reason and Enlightenment, which embodied a powerful new view of politics.
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No longer was it sufficient merely to strike down tyrants and disperse their power, as liberals argued. The state had to be of a fundamentally new type, at once radical, energetic and intelligent, capable not only of integrating ordinary people but also of mobilizing them against the state’s enemies.

It is to David’s Hercules and its underlying intellectual inspiration – the quasi-classical Spartan vision of the Jacobins – that we must look for the sources of modern Communist politics. Of course, Communism as an idea had much earlier origins. The inhabitants of Plato’s ideal ‘Republic’ held property in common, and the early Church provided a model for fraternity and the sharing of wealth. This Christian tradition, combined with traditional peasant communities’ cultivation of ‘common land’, was the foundation for the Communist experiments and utopias of the early modern period – whether the ‘Utopia’ of sixteenth-century English thinker Thomas More, or the community established by the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley on common land in Cobham, Surrey, during the English Civil War in 1649–50.

But all of these projects were founded on the desire to return to an agrarian ‘golden age’ of economic equality, whereas future Communists also claimed they were creating modern states based on principles of political equality.
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And it is under the Jacobins that we can see this second, political ambition. The Jacobins did not redistribute property, nor did they oppose the market; indeed they persecuted those who did. Nor did they advocate ‘class struggle’. But they did argue, like later Communists, that only a united band of fraternal citizens, free of privilege, hierarchy and division, could create a strong nation that was dignified and effective in the wider world. Jacobinism was, then, in some respects the prelude to the modern Communist drama, and it is in the Jacobin crucible that many of the elemental tendencies of Communist politics and behaviour appeared in rough, unalloyed form. It is also no accident that the first revolutionary Communist of the modern era – François-Noël (Gracchus) Babeuf – emerged from the ranks of the Jacobins.

The Jacobin approach to politics achieved some successes, for a time. The French, after years of defeats, actually began to win wars, and it seemed as if they had finally overcome the debilitating weaknesses of the Bourbon
Ancien Régime
. And yet there were tensions within the new type of politics, tensions that would become all too familiar in future Communist regimes. The revolutionary elite, seeking to build and consolidate an effective state, often found that their relations with the more radical masses were less confraternal than confrontational. Meanwhile, the Jacobins themselves split, between those for whom Hercules’ ‘courage’, or emotional revolt, was paramount, and those who emphasized order, reason and ‘light’. Ultimately these conflicts were to destroy the Jacobins, amidst much violence and turmoil.

With the end of the
Ancien Régime
in 1789, a social order founded on legally entrenched and inherited hierarchy collapsed. The estates system was abolished, and with it the notion that men were born into particular and tiered stations of society ordained by God. No longer were the first two estates – the clergy and the aristocracy – to be privileged over the rest of society – the ‘third estate’. All men were declared to be legally equal, ‘citizens’ of a single, coherent ‘nation’ rather than members of separate estates, corporations and guilds. In part, these demands for legal equality arose from third-estate anger at the superciliousness of the aristocracy; ordinary people also resented having to pay taxes from which their ‘superiors’ were exempt. But the attack on the estates system was also a much more profound critique of French society. Royal power and social distinctions, it was commonly argued, had weakened France and rendered it feeble (even effete) against its enemies – and especially against its great rival Britain.
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‘Despotism’ and ‘feudalism’ not only created divisions between people but also engendered a servile and unmanly character. As Abbé Charles Chaisneau explained in 1792, the French had been naturally virtuous, but ‘despotism ruined everything with its impure breath; this monster infected the truest feelings at the source’.
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It was no wonder that the French had become impotent.

All the revolutionaries had initially agreed that they had to create a wholly new culture, and efforts were made to remove all traces of the
Ancien Régime
from everyday life; indeed nothing less than a ‘new man’ was required, free of the habits of the past. As one revolutionary declared:

At the centre of the new culture were political equality and ‘reason’, or the break with tradition. Old distinctions of dress became unfashionable, and costume became much plainer. Those keen to advertise their revolutionary sympathies wore cockades and red liberty bonnets, modelled on the Ancient Greek Phrygian cap, which was worn by freed slaves as a symbol of liberty. Meanwhile, the traditional was replaced with the ‘rational’. Names of the days and months of the year were ‘rationalized’: a ten-day ‘decade’ took the place of a seven-day week, and the ten new months were to describe the changing natural world; the spring months, for instance, became ‘Germinal’ (from ‘germination’), Floréal (‘flowering’) and Prairial (‘pasture’). New rituals, such as David’s Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic, were designed to create a set of rites for the new citizens, replacing the old Christian traditions.

However, differences soon emerged between the revolutionaries over the content of the new culture, and two distinct visions can be discerned. The first, which prevailed for the first two years of the revolution, was fundamentally a liberal capitalist one.
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Ancien Régime
privileges, as well as traditional protections from the market granted to artisans and peasants, were all swept away in favour of individual property rights and free commerce. But the second vision proffered a much more politically collectivist idea of society, one which looked back to an austere classical republicanism for inspiration. It was this worldview that was to be the foundation of the radical Jacobins’ ideology.

A vivid insight into this classical vision is to be found again in the work of David, this time his extraordinarily popular painting
The Oath of the Horatii
, completed in 1784. The picture showed three Roman heroes swearing an oath to their father before a battle: they would die, if necessary, for their fatherland; meanwhile the women of the family sit
by, anxious but powerless. The episode, a tragic scene from the Roman historian Livy via the French dramatist Corneille, was intended to celebrate the triumph of patriotism over personal and familial attachments. Horatius and his two brothers had been chosen to fight for Rome against three warriors from the neighbouring town, Alba Longa. All except Horatius are killed, and when his sister grieves for one of the slain enemy, to whom she had been betrothed, Horatius, enraged, kills her. His crime is then pardoned by the senate. This was a drama in praise of masculine, military virtues, and David’s austere neo-classical style was designed to reinforce the tough and high-minded message. His images of ‘heroism’ and ‘civic virtues’, he hoped, would ‘electrify the soul’ and ‘cause to germinate in it all the passions of glory, of devotion to the welfare of the fatherland’.
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And his wish was granted: a German observer wrote: ‘At parties, at coffee-houses, and in the streets… nothing else is spoken of but David and the
Oath of the Horatii
. No affair of state of ancient Rome, no papal election of recent Rome ever stirred feelings more strongly.’
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The
Oath of the Horatii
was merely giving graphic form to a set of ideas already well-established, largely thanks to the intellectual who most influenced the revolutionary generation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At the root of Rousseau’s philosophy was a critique of inequality. He condemned the old aristocratic patriarchy and the servility it bred, but he did not approve of the liberal alternative either – the high road, he believed, to greed, materialism, envy and unhappiness. For Rousseau, the ideal society was either a benign paternalism, or a fraternity: a citizenry of brothers modelled on the classical, self-sacrificing heroes portrayed by David so vividly. Heroism then, once exclusively an aristocratic quality, was to be democratized; a republic had to have ‘heroes for citizens’.
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Rousseau described his ideal community in his work
The Social Contract
of 1762: it would combine the merits of his native puritanical Geneva and ancient Sparta. Sparta appealed to Rousseau because at one point in its history it had been a city-state in which everybody had seemed to submerge selfish desires to communal goals and lived an austere life of heroic endeavour. In Rousseau’s utopia, the people as a whole would meet regularly in assemblies; abjuring individualism, they would act according to the ‘General Will’, a will that outlawed all inequality and privilege.
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This would also be a society in which every
citizen owed military service, for Rousseau’s ideal was, at root, a quasi-military order – not because he was interested in expansionary wars, but because he saw armies as the ideal fusion of public service and self-sacrifice.
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