The Undivided Past (19 page)

But while the rhetoric was that of a global Communist
revolution, and of confrontation between two antithetical but internally homogeneous and ideologically coherent blocs, the reality was very different and more nuanced. The newly established Communist regimes took many forms, but despite repeated claims to the contrary, none of them achieved power by the means, or were wielding it for the ends, that Marx and Engels had set out in
The Communist Manifesto.
⁶⁷
In the Soviet satellites of eastern Europe, Communism was externally imposed, and depended on a hierarchy of party collaborators and apparatchiks—a far cry from proletarian revolution vanquishing the
bourgeoisie. In China,
Mao’s brand of Communism depended above all on the peasantry (of whom there were many millions) rather than on the factory proletariat (of whom there were very few), but this was in deliberate (and necessary) defiance of the stress Marx and Engels (and
Lenin) had placed on the
industrial
working class as the agents of the proletarian revolutionaries, and it was not easy to reconcile with their disparaging remarks about “the idiocy of rural life.”
⁶⁸
In Indochina, parts of Africa, and Latin America, Marxist-inspired movements of
colonial liberation were a conceptually dubious amalgam of Communist internationalism and
anti-imperial nationalism, usually with the latter preponderant. And on the campuses of universities in the West, many self-styled Marxist students were more interested in individual liberties, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression than in espousing or leading proletarian revolution.
⁶⁹

This may have seemed
monolithic Communism to those on the outside looking in, but it was not the reality on the inside looking
out. As the novelist and pundit
C. P. Snow lamented in 1966, “we have tried to divide the world into two—just sharp black and white, like that. Nothing is more an over-simplification in terms of the real world.” He was right. In Soviet Russia,
Khrushchev repudiated
Stalin in the late 1950s, for (among other things) having perverted the doctrines of Marxism, and from the late 1940s to the late 1960s there were displays of dissent in
East Germany,
Poland,
Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia, while
Tito’s Yugoslavia successfully asserted its
independence from Moscow.
⁷⁰
For much of the postwar period, relations between Soviet Russia and Communist
China were deeply strained, so that by 1961 “the Communist bloc was irrevocably split,” and neither country wielded the power over
Ho Chi Minh in
Vietnam that some Americans claimed. Elsewhere in Asia, and in Africa, few of the newly independent nations became lastingly Marxist or Communist: most were determined to be “nonaligned,” as their leaders had no wish to become the clients of Washington, D.C., Moscow, or Beijing. Despite the worldwide fame and glamour of
Che Guevara, there were few successful Marxist
revolutionaries in Latin America, and the students who wore Che T‑shirts in the United States did so to express a general defiance of authority rather than an inclination to take Marxist teachings seriously.
⁷¹
As the American political scientist
John H. Kautsky (grandson of
Karl Kautsky) put it in the late 1960s, “Communism has come to mean quite different things in different minds, and quite different policies can hence be pursued in its name. As a descriptive category, ‘Communism’ has become useless.”
⁷²

Moreover, just as the “internal
struggles between classes” had constantly been modified by conversation and interaction, so too when recast as “conflicts between geo-political blocs,” relations were in fact often characterized by dialogue and exchange. Throughout the Cold War period, such encounters across this allegedly impermeable divide often went on, even though the Communist authorities officially deplored them: there was a growing amount of
trade and tourism and cultural diplomacy (such as the visits of the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballets to “the West”); despite his tough talk,
Churchill’s last great initiative as peacetime prime minister was to try to broker a meeting “at the
summit” between the Americans and the Russians; the
Cuban Missile Crisis was successfully resolved by negotiation between
Kennedy and
Khrushchev, and soon afterward, the “hotline” telephone was established to connect the leaders in Washington and Moscow directly; and both
Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher would later see in
Mikhail Gorbachev a Russian leader with whom they could (and did) “do business.”
⁷³
By the time the
Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989, attempts to prevent contact between the inhabitants of the Communist bloc and those living beyond its borders had clearly failed. In an increasingly globalized world of information technology, it had proved impossible for the Soviet authorities to prohibit conversations across, above, and underneath what became the increasingly ineffectual and eroded “iron curtain.”

In the light of its global
collapse, the verdict has to be that the once-bright Communist future had not worked, and since 1989 it has increasingly become the Communist past, relegated to that very dustbin of history that
Trotsky hubristically believed awaited all other systems, except that which the
Bolsheviks themselves had created. But even when abetted and assisted by self-styled and self-appointed revolutionaries, history did not unfold as Marx and Engels had insisted it would and predicted it must. Those Communist regimes that did come into being abolished neither class nor inequality nor property, and to the extent that class persisted, it was never the preeminent, all-encompassing identity that Marx and Engels claimed. Elsewhere, in the non-Communist world, their predictions have been even more thoroughly confounded: indeed, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, they have been “invalidated beyond the possibility of recovery.” Capitalism has survived, and with it the lumpenproletariat, the
peasantry, and the petite
bourgeoisie, and so (most disconcertingly) have the bourgeoisie themselves. While greed and exploitation persist, relations between the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie” have been characterized more in the long run by conversation, collaboration, and cooperation than by anger, antagonism, and animosity. The manual,
industrial, factory-based
working class, which Marx and Engels believed would be the instigator, the bearer, and the avatar of global proletarian
revolution,
has largely disappeared, except in emerging countries where the opportunity to participate in such production, even on harsh terms, is welcome relief from abject rural poverty. And since the 1980s, collective identities built around
religious fundamentalism and ethnic
nationalism have reasserted themselves with noteworthy virulence and ferocity, to the relative occlusion of
class consciousness.
⁷⁴
The faiths that Marx and Engels dismissed as mere “bourgeois prejudice” are very much still in existence, while the claim that “the age of division into nationalities is past” now seems utterly mistaken.

Since their underlying analysis of the past and present was incorrect, it is scarcely surprising that the predictions made by Marx and Engels have been falsified rather than borne out by subsequent events. Although they promised and urged the liberation of
humanity, and although the
Manifesto
was later invoked as the inspiration by Communist leaders in many lands, the result in every case where they obtained power was ruthless single-party dictatorship, and the denial, not enhancement, of individual human freedom.
⁷⁵
Perhaps this was what
Margaret Thatcher was getting at when she once declared that class was “a Communist concept,” which “groups people as bundles, and sets them against each other.” But not for long, and not in the end successfully, since the twentieth century makes plain that class is an insufficient basis and an inadequately convincing or compelling identity from which, and with which, to set out to bring history to what Marx and Engels mistakenly believed was its culminating conclusion and predestined utopia. Small wonder that belief in the possibility or even the desirability of a future Communist society has become very largely extinct, and so has the belief in the collective categories and social identities on which the deluded Communist experiment was based.
⁷⁶

Yet while in retrospect Communism seems to have been doomed, because of error and failure that were built into it from the beginning, there was a period from the 1930s to the 1980s when the collective identities of class and the inevitability of class conflict
seemed widely appealing, and the classless society was among the most alluring prospects imaginable: as
Eric Hobsbawm recalls, it represented for people like him “the hope of the world.”
⁷⁷
Moreover, these Marxist doctrines were not only applied to practical
politics with revolutionary aspirations for changing the imperfect present into the utopian future; they were also appropriated in academic endeavors with no less revolutionary aims of reinterpreting the past to help change the politics of the present. Since
Communism claimed to be an historically validated ideology, and with
class historically validated as the most important collective solidarity, it was scarcely surprising that during its heyday many scholars embraced a Marxist view of the past and insistently proclaimed that history should not be primarily concerned with investigating (and thereby helping to perpetuate) the trivialities of
religious affiliations and disputes, or the superficialities of
national identity and conflicts, but that it must itself be radicalized, reoriented, and redirected to investigate (and help realize?) those deeper truths of the past embodied in class
formation, class consciousness, and class struggle.

This view of history was embraced by a generation of British-born or British-based scholars, for whom the defining decade of their lives was the 1930s, and who included
Rodney Hilton,
Christopher Hill,
George Rude,
E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm.
⁷⁸
They were among the first children of the
Bolshevik Revolution; they believed Marxism offered the best way of understanding their stricken world; they wishfully viewed
capitalism as being in terminal crisis in the aftermath of the
Great Depression; and they embraced Communism by way of protesting against the Fascism of
Hitler,
Mussolini, and
Franco and the infirm
democracies of
Baldwin’s
Britain and
France’s Third Republic.
⁷⁹
They were also influenced by the pioneering writings of two older Marxist scholars,
A. L. Morton and
Maurice Dobb, who had begun to outline a new historical vision built around class identity and class struggle.
⁸⁰
In 1938, Morton published his
People’s History of England
, which sought to explain the national past not as a cavalcade of constitutional Whiggish progress but as the outcome of a continued (and unfinished) battle between the classes, initially between the
feudal
aristocracy and the
peasantry,
then between the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and finally between the bourgeoisie and the
industrial proletariat. And in 1946, Dobb published
Studies in the Development of Capitalism
, which proclaimed the special importance of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early modern period as the “main and central problem” for Marxist historians.
⁸¹

After the Second World War,
Rodney Hilton and his fellow Marxists organized the
Communist Party Historians’ Group, many of whom were involved in setting up the journal
Past and Present
in 1952. Following the
Soviet invasion of
Hungary in 1956, most members resigned from the Communist Party, but they remained loyal to
Marx’s teachings, and helped establish the
New Left Review
four years later. They shared A. L. Morton’s view that English history must be understood as a history of class identity and class struggle, in relation to which certain eras and episodes were of particular significance. They agreed with
Maurice Dobb that the central, defining problematic was the nature and timing of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the role of class conflict in bringing it about. They also believed that class “eventuated” as “men and women live their productive relations,” for it was out of conflicts at the workplace that an awareness of class antagonism, and thus also a shared sense of class solidarity, developed and evolved.
⁸²
By the 1960s, their works were widely read and exceptionally influential, for they not only set out to reinterpret the past by studying it from a class-based perspective, but also sought to support and reinforce contemporary working-class identities and to offer historical validation to the aspirations and policies of the parties of the left. As
Eric Hobsbawm recalled, “Most intellectuals who became Marxists,…including Marxist historians, did so because they wanted to change the world in association with labour and socialist movements which, largely under Marxist inspiration, became mass political forces.”
⁸³

Between the late 1930s and the mid-1960s, these Marxist scholars evolved a new version of English history, which filled out the major episodes in the class-based account first sketched by A. L. Morton. Rodney Hilton interpreted the uprising of 1381 as the first major eruption of class
consciousness and class conflict, when an active and united peasantry, with a strong sense of
its shared collective interests, rebelled against a feudal aristocracy.
⁸⁴
Christopher Hill argued that the
English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century was neither a conflict over
religion nor a fight for
political freedom, but in fact the first bourgeois
revolution, when a rising middle
class vanquished the declining order of aristocracy and gentry, thereby bringing about the transition from feudalism to
capitalism.
⁸⁵
E. P. Thompson insisted that the years from the 1780s to the 1830s represented not only the transformation of the English
economy as a result of the
Industrial Revolution, but also the making of the English working class as the first self-conscious, and potentially revolutionary, proletariat, sharing “an identity of interest as between themselves and as against their rulers and employers.”
⁸⁶
And
Eric Hobsbawm traced the later reinvigoration of this working-class self-consciousness, through the trade union movement and the ascent of the Labour Party, from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s and 1970s, by which time organized
labor in Britain seemed more unified and powerful than ever—truly a “mass political force.”
⁸⁷