The Red Flag: A History of Communism (10 page)

For Marx and Engels the outcome of the proletarian revolution was
to be a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. By this, they did not mean the rule of a revolutionary party over the majority, in the Jacobin or Blanquist tradition. Rather, they favoured a democracy in which the proletariat would rule through popular assemblies, and use emergency powers, violent if necessary, to break the old state.
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In the first half of 1848, Marx’s predictions for revolution in France did not look too implausible, and whilst the revolution, like its predecessors, united the middle classes and workers, the latter were determined to learn the lesson of 1830 and not to allow their revolution to be ‘stolen’.
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The right-liberal government of François Guizot, working under King Louis-Philippe, had alienated both the middle classes and the workers: it retained a highly restricted franchise and manipulated elections, whilst taking a harsh line with the poor. On the night of 22 February, over a million paving stones were torn up and over 4,000 trees felled, and by the morning more than 1,500 barricades had been built. The authorities were unable to persuade the National Guard to take action, and by the following day Guizot had resigned. The day after, Louis-Philippe fled to England, where he lived quietly in Surrey until his death two years later.

The new French government was dominated by moderate republicans, leavened by a minority of radicals, amongst them the famous socialist Louis Blanc and a solitary worker by the name of Albert. But the radicals were reinforced by a huge crowd of workers who put direct pressure on the government by assembling menacingly outside the Hôtel de Ville. The Provisional Government rapidly met many of their demands: a republic was declared, universal male suffrage introduced, and reforms specifically designed to help workers enacted. Subcontracting – a method used by employers to reduce wages – was banned, and the working day was restricted to ten hours (the first time a government had tried to regulate work in this way).

However, it was the Provisional Government’s commitment, under pressure from Louis Blanc, ‘to guarantee labour to all citizens’ that caused the most conflict with the bourgeois members of the government. ‘National Workshops’ were set up to employ the indigent, largely on public works schemes. The workshops were financed by a land tax, which fell on the mass of peasant farmers. But the elections of April, which were won by rural notables, showed how unrepresentative the Parisian radicals were and how sharply Paris and the countryside were
split. The newly elected Assembly promptly proposed that the workshops be closed, and workers fought back. In June they returned to the barricades – this time rather more sturdily built – and over 15,000 of them staged one of the most impressive of all worker insurrections. Some of the insurgents were members of the workshops, but most were artisans protesting against the new factory-based economy.
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The rebellion was brutally crushed; the government was forced to recruit about 100,000 national guards from the provinces, and fighting was bitter and lasted for several days. Thousands of workers were killed, imprisoned, or sent to Algeria. It was clear that the artisanal workers were not numerous or powerful enough to impose a socialist settlement on France.

If Marx’s predictions of a proletarian revolution had fared poorly in France, it was less likely that they would come to fruition in Germany. There the workers’ movement was smaller and more divided, and the middle classes more conservative – though parts of the peasantry were radical. Marx himself initially favoured the pursuit of constitutional, democratic objectives, rather than socialist ones. But by September, as it became clear that the middle classes were not going to play a revolutionary role, he and Engels called for a ‘red’ republic that would adopt socialist policies. Marx also favoured revolutionary insurrections where he thought they might work, though he insisted they be mass revolutions – involving both workers and peasants – not ‘Blanquist’ conspiracies.
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Engels was especially militant, and personally took part in uprisings in Elberfeld and the Rhineland-Palatinate in May 1849. The previous September he wrote enthusiastically of the armed rebellions, ‘Is there a revolutionary centre anywhere in the world where the red flag, the emblem of the militant, united proletariat of Europe, has not been found flying on the barricades during the last five months?’
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In 1848–9, therefore, Marx and Engels were setting an example for so many future Communist revolutionaries, fomenting popular revolution in undeveloped, agrarian societies.
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Throughout Western and Central Europe, artisans demonstrated against unemployment and competition, sometimes joined by rebellious peasants, as the loss of common land provoked enormous anger. The view of radicals like Marx, that 1789 could be repeated, was therefore understandable. But moderates and conservatives had also learnt the lessons of 1789, and were determined to suppress popular unrest, and
the authorities fought back.
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By November 1848 the Prussian revolution had been defeated, and thousands of workers were deported from Berlin and other cities. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, was elected president of France, trading on the Bonaparte name and garnering support from opponents of revolution in the countryside, the ‘party of order’, and workers resentful at the violence used against them by the liberal republicans. Once in power Louis-Napoleon’s politics became increasingly conservative, and by mid-1849 his troops had contributed to the defeats of the last revolutionary governments in Italy.

For some time after, however, Marx and Engels refused to accept that all was lost, and they continued to predict that revolution of the 1789 or 1848 type was about to break out. Their revolutionary hopes waxed and waned, but it was clear by the late 1850s that revolution was not on the horizon.

Socialists, however, could find solace in one revolutionary episode in an otherwise distinctly unrevolutionary period: the Paris Commune of 1871. Paris had been surrounded by the Prussians in one of the longest sieges of modern times (second only to Stalingrad), and when the government signed an armistice, Parisians were outraged. They held elections, and about a third of the elected deputies were craftsmen, making it the most worker-dominated government to appear in Europe thus far. Thirty-two of the eighty-one members of the assembly were members of the First International of socialist parties, which Marx had helped to found, but they were not his disciples.
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Most deputies were influenced more by the decentralized socialism of Proudhon, or by Blanqui’s insurrectionary Jacobinism.
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However, the Commune’s real significance lay in its legacy. It was the first government to be connected with Marx, and for the first time the red flag, not the Republic’s tricolour, flew above a seat of government, the Hôtel de Ville. Marx and Engels also described it as the model of their ‘proletarian dictatorship’.
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For them, the Commune had proved that the old state bureaucracy could be smashed, and all areas of government democratized. Elected deputies ruled directly, both legislators and executives, while all officials received workers’ wages and were subject to dismissal by the people.

In 1871 few places seemed further from the revolutionary turbulence of the Parisian Hôtel de Ville than the hushed neo-classical splendour of London’s British Museum Library. Seated in his comfortable blue leather-upholstered chair at desk number G7, beneath the massive dome painted in cool Georgian azure and picked out in gold, Karl Marx immersed himself in tomes of economics and history. Despite the calm surroundings, it could be tough going; at one particularly low moment he told one of his daughters that he had been transformed into ‘a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’ (a sentiment many academics will recognize).
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Marx had decided to forsake politics for the library, and had shifted the focus of his struggles from the barricades to the realm of theory. Now that he was losing his earlier faith in proletarian heroism, he sought to show that another force would drive the world to Communism – economics. The result was his monumental, if little-read, work of synthesis:
Capital
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As the title suggests,
Capital
was largely an analysis of the mechanisms, weaknesses and supposedly ultimate demise of capitalism, and said little about Communism. But as Marx became more interested in the realities of the modern economy his views of Communism and how to achieve it began to change. Both he and Engels now insisted that a Communist society had to be a more economically rational society than one based on capitalism, fully embracing the realities of industrial society. His earlier opinion that labour could be self-motivated, creative and enjoyable yielded to the much more pessimistic view that work would have to be directed from above, by technicians and bosses. Promises of workers’ control over their factories were quietly dropped, and Marx made it clear that proletarian heroism and creativity were not enough. As he explained in
Capital
, ‘all combined labour on a large scale requires… a directing authority’.
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Self-realization and individual development could only happen after the end of the work-day, during leisure time.
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Moreover, Marx increasingly implied that he no longer hoped for the Romantic dream of the ‘complete’ man as morning hunter, afternoon fisherman and evening critic; even under Communism, he suggested, the
modern division of labour was the only efficient way of producing things. For Marx now, the main advantage of Communism over capitalism lay in efficiency: rational planning and its ability to end the chaotic booms and busts brought by the free market.

Marx and Engels were decisively tilting Marxism in a Modernist direction. Their Communism now increasingly resembled the mechanized and orderly modern factory rather than a Romantic idyll of self-fulfilment, whilst the heroism of the barricades was postponed. And given this view of Communism, it is not surprising that Marx insisted that it could only come about when the economic preconditions – large-scale industry and a dominant proletariat – had emerged. Marx had ceased to view the revolutionary heroism of the proletariat as the main driving-force of history. Rather, the objective, ‘scientific’ laws of social and economic development would deliver Communism, and the best people to accomplish this task were both proletarians and expert Marxists who understood the ‘science’ of history.
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Revolution could not be premature; the proletariat would have to wait until the time was ripe.

This ‘scientific’ approach to Marxism was, in part, a response to the intellectual currents of the 1860s. Darwinian social theorists like Herbert Spencer were now in the ascendant; it was now fashionable to argue that mankind was on the verge of discovering general laws which would apply both to human societies and to the natural world. Marx and Engels were anxious to keep abreast of the latest scientific thinking. As Engels declared at Marx’s funeral in 1883, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’
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It was Engels who was particularly interested in transforming Marxism into a science, and thus proving the objective necessity of Communism. He spent a great deal of time trying to graft Hegel’s ideas of the dialectical pattern of history onto the natural sciences. The result was a body of rather eccentric theories that came to be known as ‘Dialectical Materialism’.
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One of these dialectical ‘laws’ was the theory that the natural world, like human societies, advanced through periods of evolutionary change, followed by revolutionary ‘leaps’; so, for instance, when heated, water changes gradually until it suddenly undergoes a ‘revolutionary’ transformation into steam.
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As will be seen, in later years, under Communist regimes these theories were used to justify efforts to promote extraordinary, and usually disastrous, economic ‘leaps forward’. Yet Engels himself tended not to take
his ideas in this revolutionary direction. His attempt to recast Marxism as a science led inexorably to gradualist conclusions: if the laws of nature ensured that Communism was coming anyway, why try to force history?
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Nevertheless, the revolutionary Radicalism of 1848 and the Romanticism of the youthful Marx were never entirely purged from an increasingly Modernist Marxism. Instead, Marx himself tried to reconcile the three elements, sketching what was essentially a route-map, showing the way to Communism, but delaying its more egalitarian elements to the distant future. The map was not consistent, as Marx was notoriously resistant to speculating about the future, and his followers had to piece it together from his and Engels’ often contradictory statements. But a broad outline was generally accepted by Marxists: Communist parties would organize the working class in preparation for the proletarian revolution, but during the initial stages of the revolution the working class could not entirely be trusted. Communists, ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties’, would therefore have to take the lead.
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Similarly, in the early stages of Communism immediately after the revolution, though the market and private property would be abolished, the state would persist. A new state, the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, would be established, which would suppress bourgeois opposition, and gradually ‘centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State’.
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There would then follow a longer phase, the ‘lower’ stage of Communism (which the Bolsheviks later called ‘socialism’), when workers, who still could not yet be trusted to work simply for the love of it, would be paid according to the amount they did. Only later, during the ‘higher’ stage of Communism (which the Bolsheviks described as ‘Communism’), would workers become so collectivist and public-spirited that they could be relied on to work without recourse to either coercive discipline or monetary bribes; only then would society be governed by the principle, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’; and only then would the whole of the people be able to govern themselves, allowing the state finally to ‘wither away’.
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