The Red Flag: A History of Communism (9 page)

However, crucially, Marx did not want his Communism to be ‘backward’; he saw it as similar in some ways to pre-capitalist society, but operating at a higher level of economic development. Unlike most Communists and utopian socialists, he accepted that capitalism and markets had brought benefits which had to be built on, not destroyed. He praised the way in which capitalism had integrated the world and destroyed ‘backward’ institutions and old, primitive ways of life. Here we see the influence of Saint-Simon, an author whom Marx had admired as a youth, and of whom Engels wrote that almost all of the ideas of later socialists were contained in embryo in his theories. Marx, therefore, had little sympathy for the decentralized utopianism of a Proudhon or Owen. Indeed, in some places
The Communist Manifesto
might be taken for a paean of praise for capitalism and globalization, and even its progenitors, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie of the
Manifesto
was a revolutionary class, in many ways to be admired. It had ‘accomplished wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals’: by ‘subject[ing] the countryside to the rule of towns’, it had rescued ‘a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’; by creating more ‘massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’, and centralizing production in huge factories; it was forging nation states out of fragmented communities; and it was even replacing ‘national seclusion’ with ‘universal interdependence of nations’, a process which benefited the proletariat because, unlike the bourgeoisie, it had no fatherland.
²⁴
Marx’s Communism was therefore unmistakeably a modern society; it would follow capitalism but build upon it. It could not, he insisted, emerge in a backward country dominated by a feudal aristocracy and lacking a powerful industrial base and a large modern proletariat. A ‘bourgeois revolution’ against the feudal aristocracy, like the French Revolution, was therefore the essential precondition for the future proletarian revolution. Social development followed a series of stages, from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, and then on to Communism.

Yet, whilst Marx and Engels praised the bourgeoisie for shaping nation states and the global economic system, they also maintained that it could not control the dynamic world it had created. Indeed, the bourgeoisie was unwittingly fashioning the tools of its own destruction: using the Romantic, poetic language he loved so much, Marx described it as ‘like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’.
²⁵
Industrialization was destroying small-scale, artisanal production, and creating an enormous industrial working class, which would ultimately destroy the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie’s nemesis would take the form of the new industrial proletariat. Proletarians, Marx insisted, would be much more collectivist and better organized than artisans, learning how to cooperate from their work together in large factories. They would also become increasingly dissatisfied, as the logic of capitalism inevitably led to their increasing exploitation. Competition between capitalists would force them to invest more and more in new labour-saving machinery, which would inevitably reduce their profits and compel them to exploit workers even more brutally. But it would also compel capitalists to produce too much for the market to absorb, leading to periodic economic crises, putting many small capitalists out of business, and concentrating ownership in ever fewer hands. The instability and irrationality of capitalism would thus prepare the ground for Communism: the workers, an increasingly revolutionary force, would be ready to seize control of a mechanized production process now ideally suited to rational management by central planning. The social and economic system, like a ripe fruit, would readily drop into the laps of the waiting workers. As the
Manifesto
declared, ‘The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.’ The state would improve the economy ‘in accordance with a common plan’, and all workers would be mobilized in ‘industrial armies’.
²⁶

This image of society, then, was one of centralization and planning, and even military discipline. So how could it be married to the vision of work as joyful creativity? And how could either form of socialism be reconciled with revolutionary insurrection and violence? Marx and Engels struggled to resolve these tensions, but despite their best efforts a foundational flaw ran through the edifice of Marxism, reflecting its original three major constituent elements: the utopian Romanticism of people like Rousseau or Fourier, Babouvian revolution, and Saint-Simon’s technocracy. Three rather different visions can therefore be found in Marx’s and Engels’ works from the 1840s: a ‘Romantic’ one, in which people work for the love of it and govern themselves, without the need for authority imposed from above; a ‘Radical’, revolutionary and egalitarian one, in which the heroic working class unite on the barricades to fight the bourgeoisie and establish a new modern revolutionary state; and a ‘Modernist’ one, in which the economy was run according to a central plan, administered, at least in the early stages, by some kind of bureaucracy. These different visions also affected Marx’s and Engels’ response to another question: how was Communism to be achieved? For a more Radical Marx, the proletariat was ready for Communist society. Just as it could be trusted to work diligently, without direction from above, so its heroism and self-sacrifice would lead it to stage a Communist revolution in the very near future. But for the Modernist Marx, the revolution would only arrive when economic conditions were ripe, when industry was highly developed and when capitalism was on the brink of an often hard-to-define crisis. Those who simply had faith in the heroism of the working class to deliver Communism and demanded an immediate end to capitalism were ignoring economic realities and committing the deadly sin of utopian thinking.
²⁷

The weight of the three elements after 1848, however, was unequal. Utopian Romanticism remained in the ultimate dream of ‘Communism’, but its prominence declined. Marxism was increasingly becoming a philosophy of both revolution and science, and the tension between the two created a fault-line within Marxism that persisted throughout its history. Marx and Engels struggled heroically to obscure it, yet paradoxically, this imperfection was not without its advantages. Whilst it offended their love of consistency, it also provided them with flexibility, allowing them to tilt towards Radicalism or Modernism depending on the particular situation. This balancing act was to prove vital for Marxism’s survival during the violent upheavals and sudden changes of political fortune in nineteenth-century Western Europe.

Norbert Truquin, a poor, frequently unemployed labourer, went to Paris in 1848 in search of work, and found it turning a grinding wheel for two francs a day. Though well aware of socialist ideas, he was ambivalent about them. His autobiography records that he felt ‘anticommunist’ because ‘it seemed to me that community required an iron discipline, before which all individual will would be erased’. This would interfere with his ‘desire to roam the world’. However, he also saw the advantages of Communism: ‘If goods were held in common, we would not have to travel three leagues a day to get to work… we would not be reduced to eating nothing but broth, and children would not be forced to work so young.’
²⁸
And when revolution actually broke out in February 1848, Truquin joined the barricades. Reminiscing about the joyful atmosphere, as both bourgeois and worker denounced the Orleanist monarchy, he also detected tensions beneath the surface: ‘from the physical appearance of the bourgeois, you could tell that there was something false in their effusive gestures and that they were experiencing a poorly-disguised aversion for their comrades-in-arms.’
²⁹
Truquin had indeed sensed the beginning of the end of the bourgeois–worker alliance that had typified French revolutionary history. By June the split had become permanent.

In fact the first signs of the split had emerged much earlier, in the aftermath of the 1830 revolution. The revolution had brought to power a regime that favoured laissez-faire economics, and the government of the Orleanist Louis-Philippe was unsympathetic to the demands of artisans and labourers who were suffering from the newly emerging capitalist economy. As cities grew, markets expanded and new technologies encouraged larger-scale ‘industrial’ factory production, small-scale artisans found themselves under pressure. Craft guilds, where they still existed, were damaged by the cheap goods churned out by capitalist entrepreneurs and their factories of less-skilled workers – Marx’s ‘proletarians’. Rebellion was the result, and the Lyon silk-workers’ uprising of 1831 can be seen as one of the first modern workers’ revolts.
³⁰
Workers had protested before of course – the
sans-culottes
of 1793–4 amongst them – but they had generally done so as hard-hit consumers, not as producers. Now, as their slogan ‘Live Working or Die Fighting!’ (
Vivre
en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!
) showed, popular rebels saw themselves primarily as workers fighting against the propertied. And unlike the 1789 and 1830 revolutions, when an alliance of the poor, middling artisans and relatively well-off masters came together to protest at an aristocratic order, these rebels were largely manual workers, protesting against a liberal government. Indeed, some called themselves ‘proletarians’ even though they were not Marx’s new industrial workers and despite the fact that some owned their own businesses. Observers at the time understood that something new was happening. Eighteen thirty-one was the year that the term ‘socialism’ was coined by Henri Leroux, and the ‘social question’ became a fashionable topic of discussion.

The year after the Lyon strike, Parisian workers tried to follow their example, in events which Victor Hugo portrayed so dramatically in
Les Misérables
. Socialist movements and thinking flourished in 1830s and 1840s France, but it was in Britain, where modern industry was already becoming dominant, that workers’ protest was most dramatic, as the Chartist movement united artisans and modern industrial workers in the demand for the vote. The events of the 1840s, in France and Britain, convinced many on both the right and the left that revolution was a real possibility; they certainly fuelled Marx’s and Engels’ optimism. As Marx wrote of one meeting with Parisian workers back in 1843:

Yet, as is clear from these observations, Marx’s profession of faith in the collectivism and revolutionary energies of workers was based largely on the experience of artisans, not in fact the industrial proletarians whom he assumed would be the creators of Communism. Artisans were indeed often very radical, though largely in defence of their old way of life against capitalism, not as heralds of the industrial future. Moreover, they lacked the power of numbers, coherence and organization. Production on the Continent was still largely artisanal, and where the proletariat did exist in large numbers – in England – it boasted few revolutionaries. Even so, whilst the
Communist Manifesto
, published in early 1848, was hardly noticed beyond a select circle of Communists, it
appeared to be uncannily prescient, and the spread of revolution across Europe reinforced Marx’s belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism at the hands of the proletariat.

The revolutionary events had begun in Switzerland in 1847, and early the following year spread to Sicily, Naples, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, Krakow, Milan and Berlin. In the vanguard were affluent liberal professionals who demanded freedom of speech and expansion of the franchise; sometimes, as in the Austrian empire, they called for national independence. The weaknesses of the old regimes became rapidly evident, and monarchs were toppled, or were forced to grant liberal freedoms. The new authorities introduced moderate, liberal reforms, destroying autocratic government and the serfdom typical of the
ancien régime
where they still existed, especially in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Marx had great hopes for these uprisings, seeing in them a prelude to his proletarian revolution. Together with his family and Engels, he left Paris for Cologne and set up a radical newspaper, the
Neue Rhenische Zeitung
, whilst working as a political activist. His attitude towards revolution depended on each country’s particular situation. In France, he believed that the revolution would follow the pattern of 1789: the bourgeois revolution would inevitably be radicalized and class struggle would then erupt between workers and the bourgeoisie. Germany, however, he thought too backward for this scenario; a bourgeois revolution had not yet happened. Even so, by the end of 1848 he argued that the prospects for Communist revolution were particularly favourable in Germany, because of its uneven development. Although German states were ruled by the old feudal aristocracy, the bourgeois revolution would take place with the help of a ‘developed proletariat’. Marx therefore urged his fellow Communists to support the bourgeoisie and fight for liberal political reforms, but then to carry on struggling for the proletarian revolution which would follow immediately after as the proletariat used its ‘political supremacy’ to centralize and increase production.
³²
This was the first enunciation, in embryo, of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’, the idea that even in a backward country the proletariat should support a bourgeois revolution and then immediately prepare for a second proletarian revolution. It was this theory that Leon Trotsky enunciated, and was then used to justify the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.