Revolutionaries (11 page)

Yet this was patently not the typical case in the era of catastrophe for nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois society which saw the rise of both the
USSR
and the international communist movement from 1914 to the aftermath of World War II. Then the sense of a civilization in the convulsions of profound crisis, a world beyond restoration or reform by old procedures which were visibly failing, formed part of the social experience of intellectuals in many parts of Europe. To choose
between ruin and revolution – for Right or Left – between no future and a future, seemed, not an abstract choice but a recognition of how serious the situation was. As Furet recognizes – perhaps more clearly in the case of the Right than the Left – an apocalyptic view of the German situation in 1931–33, such as Spengler's, was not prima facie absurd (p. 233). In less emotional terms the Hungarian who was to become the Comintern's chief economics expert explained in 1921 what, in the ruins of 1918–19, had led him ‘into the camp of the Bolsheviks'. It was the conviction that ‘a return to peaceful capitalism seems excluded'. ‘The class struggle would end with the common ruin of the contending classes if the revolutionary reconstruction of all society does not succeed.'
⁴

Eugene Varga was obviously mistaken, as we now know. Indeed, the real illusion of communism – and of 1930s capitalism about the
USSR
of the Five Year Plans – was the belief that interwar capitalism was beyond salvation. And yet who in large areas of central Europe in 1919 would have placed large bets on the long-term survival of capitalism? As late as 1942 that very central-European work by a great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter's
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
foresaw the eventual triumph of a socialist economy, though – typically – for exactly the opposite reasons given by marxists, and without enthusiasm.

A glance at the curve of intellectual support for communism over the period with which Furet deals suggests that it reflects a practical response to situations rather than ‘a pure choice'. (
Le passé d'une illusion
unfortunately shows no interest in the questions ‘how much?' and ‘how many?' which many historians still find relevant.)

Britain may serve as an example. The small band of post-1917 intellectual communists shrank rapidly in the early 1920s.
Numbers rose significantly under the impact of the economic cataclysm after 1929, against which the Labour Party, then in government, proved helpless. Hence the conversion of the Webbs, arch-prophets of gradual reform, to the
USSR
of the Plan and the effective birth of British student communism in 1930–31 – well before the impact of Hitler. University communism – of which Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were not typical, even in Cambridge – grew in the anti-fascist era, for what seemed reasons of common sense. Who else was fighting appeasement and helping Spain? The collapse of the enterprise launched in Petrograd in October 1917, the unrealisability of the aims it set itself to achieve by the means regarded as appropriate by socialists and under the historic conditions in which it was undertaken, cannot be denied. Outside the
USSR
and (after 1945) the other states in which communist parties took power and gave their citizens no choice in the matter, the appeal of this enterprise in Europe was always limited to minorities and, in the case of intellectuals, usually to quite small minorities, though in some periods talented ones. The only period when communism may be regarded as hegemonic and then only in two or three countries was a brief one, say from 1943 to the early 1950s. This, is seems to me, must be the base-line of any discussion of the history of communist influence in the West. Nevertheless, the hope and fear of communism was real, and far larger than the actual strength of communist movements warranted. Both the hope and the fear belong equally to the ‘illusion' of communism. There is a strange, but not insignificant asymmetry in Furet's treatment of it, for we learn little of ‘the communist idea' as it existed, not in the heads of communists, but of those for whom, far more than in 1848, communism was ‘the spectre that haunted Europe'. For them it was the image of a force dedicated to the conquest of the world, nay, poised to cross the frontiers of freedom at
any
moment, if not deterred by nuclear armaments ready for action within minutes. Once victorious anywhere it
inevitably spread – ‘the domino theory'. Once established anywhere, it was irreversible by internal forces, for that was the very essence of totalitarianism. (Conversely, it was sometimes seriously argued that no communist regime had ever or could ever come to power by democratic vote.) In national politics, merely to ally with communists was fatal, since for them the object of any alliance was to control and then destroy the allies. (This was a not implausible supposition, but the corollary that they would inevitably succeed was patently at variance with the evidence.) Internationally, perhaps even domestically, it could only be resisted by adopting its own ruthless methods, even at the cost of suspending the political freedoms of liberal democracy. And so on. While these beliefs, more usually held by ideologists than by practical politicians faced with mass communist parties – de Gaulle, Mitterand, De Gasperi, Andreotti – were reinforced by an entirely legitimate and justifiable horror of regimes such as that of the
USSR
, they had no visible relationship to the actual danger of communism. Indeed, one might even argue that the excesses of anti-communism were inversely correlated to the degree of the communist threat. In Germany and the United States the two democracies which limited or abolished the legality of communist parties, the political appeal of the local parties was negligible.

In short, myth and counter-myth, illusion and counter-illusion in the twentieth century wars of (secular) religion, can no more be separated by the historian of our century than the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reactions to it can be by the sixteenth-century historian. That Furet fails to do so, throws serious doubt on his historical project.

A sympathetic, though not uncritical, reviewer has written: ‘Despite being confined to one dictatorship and a few intellectuals . . . [this book] is the first stab at a twenty-first-century history of our time.'
⁵
In my view this is exactly what it is not. It is
a book by a highly intelligent Western intellectual unsympathetic to communism, which could have been written at any time in the past thirty years, or – apart from references to later works – in the past half-century. Yet any history of our times which hopes to survive into the next century must, after 1989, which clearly marks the end of an entire historic era, begin by trying to take a tentative step away from the ideological and political battlefields of that era. Anyone who has tried to do so knows how enormous an effort of intellect and imagination this requires, and how great the obstacles are. Nevertheless, it has now become possible to try, and the attempt must be made. It does not require us to abandon our sympathies and convictions. Claudio Pavone's remarkable
Una guerra civile
(1991) has made the effort to see the Italian Resistance of 1943–45, not as most ex-resisters and the official legitimation of the Italian Republic are inclined to present it, as a simple nationalist rising against foreigners and fascism, but as a conflict between two minorities of Italians – one, admittedly, much larger than the other – in which most Italians were not involved until the last moment, except in a few mountain areas. His work is in no way intended as a critique of or attack on the Resistance. Pavone was and remains an anti-fascist and loyal to the Resistance in which he took part. It is simply now possible for him to see his own political choices and commitments in some historical perspective.

Strangely, Furet begins to approach some kind of historical perspective in his treatment of fascism with which he has never been associated. This is evident in his treatment of Italian fascism, though he makes far too many concessions to Nolte's attempt to exonerate the Nazis, which is not to be confused with the necessary effort, however much we may recoil from it, to remove the history of Nazism from the realm of moral theology and to reinsert it into German and global history. Unfortunately, this is not the case with his approach to the history of communism. What one criticizes is not his comprehensible opposition
to communism, even though it sometimes leads him to turn an analysis of why the illusion of communism took such a powerful hold in Europe into a mere denunciation of what communism did to Russia, which is not quite the same thing. It is that he writes about the history of communism as he might have done had Stalin, or even Brezhnev, still presided over its destinies. His book reads like a belated product of the Cold War era. But, to reverse and adapt a famous phrase of Marx: ‘The historians have been concerned with changing the world. The point is to interpet it.' Especially when it has actually changed.

¹
François Furet,
Le passé d'une illusion. Essai sur l'idée communiste au
xxe siècle, Robert Laffont/Calmann Lévy, 1995.

²
Furet's description of both as ‘les deux plus constants antifascistes européens' should be regarded as a rhetorical flourish. Churchill was against Hitler, but not against Italian fascism, and, as a strong anti-communist, could not bring himself to support the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

³
Noel Annan,
Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany
, London 1995, p.183.

⁴
Eugene Varga,
Die wirtschaftspolitischen Probleme der proletarischen Diktatur
, Vienna 1921, p. 19. My translation.

⁵
Tony Judt,
Times Literary Supplement
, 7 July 1995, p. 25.

The libertarian tradition of communism – anarchism – has been bitterly hostile to the marxist ever since Bakunin, or for that matter Proudhon. Marxism, and even more leninism, have been equally hostile to anarchism as theory and programme and contemptuous of it as a political movement. Yet if we investigate the history of the international communist movement in the period of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, we find a curious asymmetry. While the leading spokesmen of anarchism maintained their hostility to bolshevism with, at best, a momentary wavering during the actual revolution, or at the moment when the news of October reached them, the attitude of the bolsheviks, in and outside Russia, was for a time considerably more benevolent to the anarchists. This is the subject of the present paper.

The theoretical attitude with which bolshevism approached anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements after 1917, was quite clear. Marx, Engels and Lenin had all written on the subject, and in general there seemed to be no ambiguity or mutual inconsistency about their views, which may be summarized as follows:

(
a
) There is no difference between the ultimate objects of marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to exist.

(
b
) Marxists believe that this ultimate stage will be separated from the overthrow of bourgeois power through proletarian revolution, by a more or less protracted interval characterized by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' and other transitional arrangements, in which state power would play some part. There was room for some argument about the precise meaning of the classical marxist writings on these problems of transition, but no ambiguity at all about the marxist view that the proletarian revolution would not give rise immediately to communism, and that the state could not be abolished, but would ‘wither away'. On this point the conflict with anarchist doctrine was total and clearly defined.

(
c
) In addition to the characteristic readiness of marxists to see the power of a revolutionary state used for revolutionary purposes, marxism was actively committed to a firm belief in the superiority of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere ‘spontaneity'.

(
d
) Where participation in the formal processes of politics was possible, marxists took it for granted that socialist and communist movements would engage in it as much as in any other activities which could contribute to advance the overthrow of capitalism.

(
e
) While some marxists developed critiques of the actual or potential authoritarian and/or bureaucratic tendencies of parties based on the classical marxist tradition, none of these critics abandoned their characteristic lack of sympathy for anarchist movements, so long as they considered themselves to be marxists.

The record of the political relations between marxist movements and anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ones, appeared equally unambiguous in 1917. In fact, these relations had been considerably more acrimonious in the lifetime of Marx, Engels
and the Second International than they were to be in that of the Comintern. Marx himself had fought and criticized Proudhon and Bakunin, and the other way round. The major social democratic parties had done their best to exclude anarchists, or been obliged to do so. Unlike the First International, the Second no longer included them, at all events after the London Congress of 1896. Where marxist and anarchist movements coexisted, it was as rivals, if not as enemies. However, though the marxists were intensely exasperated by the anarchists in practice revolutionary marxists, who shared with them an increasing hostility to the reformism of the Second International, tended to regard them as revolutionaries, if misguided ones. This was in line with the theoretical view summarized in (
a
) above. At least anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism might be regarded as a comprehensible reaction against reformism and opportunism. Indeed, it might be – and was – argued that reformism and anarcho-syndicalism were part of the same phenomenon: without the one, the other would not have gained so much ground. It could further be argued that the collapse of reformism would also automatically weaken anarcho-syndicalism.