The Undivided Past (18 page)

These acrimonious and arcane controversies within the dwindling ranks of Marxist believers about whether, when, and how the proletarian revolution might occur were rendered abruptly irrelevant by the outbreak of the
First World War, when it became apparent that they had mistaken the identities and misjudged the aspirations of the European working class, in whose name and interests they had presumptuously claimed to speak. As the international crisis ran its course during the summer of 1914, Marx’s die-hard followers expected that the proletariat would rise up against their bourgeois leaders who were hell-bent on war and, refusing the
nationalist ardor and patriotism that had been foisted upon them, would choose instead continent-wide revolution. Yet the very opposite occurred, as the overwhelming majority of workers volunteered in their hundreds of thousands, as the leaders of the socialist parties declared their support for war, and as the Second International collapsed.
⁴⁸
In direct refutation of the claims and predictions of Marx and Engels, it turned out that the early-twentieth-century workers of Europe
were
very strongly attached to their respective countries and fatherlands, and that the belligerent patriotic identities ascribed to them, however oversimplified and misleading, were more important to them than any shared, transnational solidarities as members of the working class. “Seen from the perspective of August 1914,”
Eric Hobsbawm notes, “one might have concluded that
nation and nation-state had triumphed over all rival social and political loyalties.”
⁴⁹
Indeed one might, and many certainly did at the time.

In one of his last prefaces to
The Communist Manifesto
, written in 1890, Engels had claimed that “the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries … is still alive, and lives stronger than ever.”
⁵⁰
But the immediate future did not bear him out: in
1914, as in 1848, the revolutionary politics built around proletarian class identity and visceral hostility to the
bourgeoisie, which were meant to have ushered in the
socialist utopia, failed to materialize. Yet despite this missed opportunity, and notwithstanding the flaws in the writings of Marx and Engels about the collective identities, political significance, and
historical trajectories of class, the subsequent years from 1917 to 1989
would
be dominated by attempts to remake the world on the basis of
The Communist Manifesto.
In the end, most of these experiments, which amounted to
totalitarian repression and a denial of basic liberties rather than “the free development of all” that had been promised, would fail, collapsing under the weight of their internal contradictions, as well as the assaults of competing identities and ideologies, and as they were ultimately rejected by the very people in whose name they were supposedly instituted. Nevertheless, during the period from the
Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the most significant theme in the history of Europe, and of many other parts of the world, was the effort to construct a new form of politics and a new form of society based on the ideas derived (albeit in developed and distorted form) from Marx and Engels concerning the collective identities of class and the revolutionary potential of the urban, factory-based proletariat.
⁵¹

Dismayed in 1914 by the failure of the European working class to assume its putative historic role and carry out the proletarian revolution, Marx and Engels’s remaining followers faced some seriously challenging questions: if the workers of the world showed no inclination to unite and revolt in circumstances as propitious as those that had briefly obtained when war broke out, then how should they be helped, by whom could they be persuaded, and by whom must they be commanded to take up this essential and momentous task? The most portentous answers were offered by a self-styled revolutionary named Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin, who argued that the prediction of a decisive class war between a monolithic capitalist bourgeoisie and a monolithic
industrial proletariat, leading inevitably to revolution in
France, Germany, and
Britain, needed significant modification, especially farther east in his tsarist Russian homeland. (Marx and Engels
had themselves briefly entertained such a modification of their arguments in their preface to the second Russian edition of
The Communist Manifesto
, published in 1882, in which they hinted that Russia might undergo a revolution led by the
agricultural rather than the
industrial workers, and that this might become a “signal” for the proletarian revolution in the West; but after Marx’s death, Engels reverted to the original story, casting the industrial proletariat in the vanguard of revolutionary transformation.)
⁵²

As Lenin recognized, in such a vast, backward, and preponderantly agricultural country as early-twentieth-century Russia, whose peasantry constituted more than 80 percent of the population, even a bourgeois revolution had not yet taken place, while the industrial proletariat that had recently grown in cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow formed a smaller minority of the working class than anywhere else in Europe. Marx and Engels had believed that the bourgeois revolution must come first, and that a subsequent proletarian revolution must be patiently (if confidently) awaited. Lenin, by contrast, concluded that in Russia there must soon be a single revolution, which at one audacious stroke would propel the country almost overnight from backward
feudalism to futuristic
socialism.
⁵³
In such an endeavor, Lenin reasoned, the participation of the urban-industrial proletariat would be essential, but they would also need the sort of vigorous, ruthless, secretive, and conspiratorial leadership that could only be provided by members of the very class that was the proletariat’s sworn enemy, namely the
bourgeoisie. Instead of revolution resulting from a struggle between two massive, homogeneous classes, as Marx and Engels had insistently predicted, Lenin’s Bolshevik model proposed a very different vision: a high-level coup, led by an elite vanguard of committed, disciplined bourgeois professionals, willing to resort to violence and terror if circumstances required, and ready to persuade as many as possible of the (still relatively small) factory-based proletariat to follow them.
⁵⁴

In November 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks accomplished just that, as they stormed the Winter Palace and with the support of the industrial working class of Petrograd replaced the Russian provisional government. Although they claimed to have carried
out their coup in the name of the proletarian revolution, and as the culmination of the historical processes that Marx and Engels had discerned and predicted, the sudden seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was scarcely the result of a class war in which the
industrial workers had duly and deservedly triumphed by vanquishing the
bourgeoisie.
⁵⁵
Nor could it have been, because (as Lenin had recognized) the collective categories of class, with their attendant identities, did not exist in early-twentieth-century Russia in the way Marx and Engels had thought they must if an authentic and broadly based proletarian revolution was to occur. Instead, the “top-down” Bolshevik Revolution was a combination of bourgeois leadership and proletarian support, along with the backing of what would soon become the Red Army, but as
Kautsky noted, the revolution was in essence elitist and dictatorial, rather than a popular expression of aroused and belligerent collective identities. The majority of Russians, namely the peasantry, were far from enthused by the Bolsheviks, and between 1917 and 1921 Lenin and his followers had to fight fiercely to assert and maintain their domestic authority. This was not the classless utopia that Marx and Engels believed the proletarian revolution must eventually bring about.
⁵⁶

Far from eliminating the class-based Russian state, Lenin was compelled to expand it, and because there were no other options, it was run by those despised “bourgeois experts” who had survived the tsarist regime. Instead of ushering in the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Communist Party now exercised dictatorial powers, allegedly on behalf of the workers, but in practice on behalf of itself. And rather than abolish class, the Bolshevik Revolution perpetuated it, and even expanded it: “the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie” were not eliminated, and neither was the peasantry, but all were joined by a new hierarchy of party managers and officials. “How,” a Soviet worker inquired in 1934, “can we liquidate classes, if new classes have developed here, with the only difference being that they are not called classes?”
⁵⁷
As these words suggest, it was the same under
Stalin, who by the late 1930s had made peace with the peasants, the priests, and the bourgeoisie, and who urged that national unity mattered more than the
global solidarities of class. “
Socialism in one country”
was more important than world revolution, and this view became the conventional wisdom during the years of the “Great Patriotic War,” from 1941 to 1945, during which Stalin blatantly and successfully appealed to Russian nationalist sentiment, persuading his countrymen to endure unspeakable hardship and deprivation. Yet this was more sleight of hand with respect to identity, since many in the USSR were not Russian by nationality—among them Stalin himself, who had been born in Georgia, and served as commissar for nationalities under
Lenin.
⁵⁸

The Bolshevik Revolution also failed in that it did not become the expected “signal for proletarian revolution in the west,” because as in 1914, the “workers of the world” refused to unite around a class-based identity in preference to their sense of nation-based solidarity. In 1919, Lenin had established the Third International (known as the Comintern) to support Communist parties abroad in their quest for revolution, and at its first meeting
Trotsky had delivered his “
Manifesto to the Proletariat of the Entire World,” proclaiming global revolution to be imminent.
⁵⁹
But with the exception of Mongolia, no other nation would officially espouse Communism during the next twenty years. At the end of the
First World War, there were some initially promising signs: a
Communist-supported uprising in Berlin of January 1919, and later in the year the establishment of Soviet republics in
Hungary, Bavaria, and Slovakia, followed by renewed Communist agitations in Germany during 1921 and 1923.
⁶⁰
But they were all successfully suppressed, as the forces of “bourgeois” authority reasserted themselves, and by the end of the 1930s no significant or lasting Communist advances had been made, in Europe or anywhere else, despite (for example) the Republican efforts in the
Spanish Civil War and the creation of the Popular Front in
France. Once again, the great global revolution that Marx and Engels had urged and foreseen had failed to materialize.
⁶¹

Neither domestically nor internationally did Lenin’s original revolution conform to Marx and Engels’s formula. Yet from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, it often seemed that the “specter” of Communism was “haunting” Europe more dangerously than in 1848 or 1918, and was also insinuating itself in many regions for beyond.
⁶²
In the aftermath of the
Second World War, Soviet
Russia extended its formal borders, gobbling up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of
Poland, while it further enlarged its European sphere of influence via the satellite states of
Albania,
Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia,
East Germany, Poland,
Romania, and Yugoslavia. At the same time in
China,
Mao Zedong and his followers overwhelmed the nationalist forces of
Chiang Kai-shek, thereby establishing the most populous Communist regime in the world. In
Indochina, Marxist-inspired insurgents, most famously
Ho Chi Minh, expelled the French
imperialists from the whole region, and would eventually drive the United States from Vietnam. In
Africa, the writings of Marx and Engels appealed to many
anticolonial agitators, and in 1980 Angola, Benin, the Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Somaliland all claimed to be
Marxist-Leninist states. In Latin America,
Fidel Castro established a Communist regime in Cuba, and
Che Guevara would inspire freedom fighters everywhere, battling against American imperialism. Even in the United States, the combination of
civil rights agitation, protest against the
Vietnam War, and unprecedented student unrest suggested that at least among the college-educated younger generation “almost everyone was, or wanted to be thought, some sort of Marxist.”
⁶³

Hence the era of the
Cold War, when from either side the world looked deeply divided, in a stark and
Manichean way, between the antagonistic identities and ideologies of Communism and
capitalism, the USSR and the USA, “the East” and “the West.” According to Winston
Churchill, the divisions “between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom” were “spread over the whole world.”
⁶⁴
Harry S. Truman believed his presidency had been “dominated by this all-embracing struggle between those who love freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness.” His successor,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, made the same point in his first inaugural address, when he declared that “the forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history.
⁶⁵
It was to help “the West” in this struggle that MIT professor
Walt Rostow wrote his famous and influential book
The Stages of Economic Growth
, which was revealingly subtitled
A Non-Communist Manifesto
, and which offered advice as to how the West might (and must) win
the adherence of the newly
independent and nonaligned nations of the
Third World, who were constantly being courted by Moscow. Rostow later served in the White House as a hawkish advisor to President
Lyndon Johnson during the
Vietnam War—a conflict that both men believed was a vital part of the
global struggle against Communism.
China and North Korea had already been “lost”:
Indochina must not be allowed to go the same way.
⁶⁶
Thus were the supposedly irreconcilable identities of class transposed onto the world stage and transmuted into the supposedly no less irreconcilable identities of social, economic, and political systems.