DAVID PURDY 27
April 2018
Political actors must always
reckon with natural limits, structural bias, institutional inertia, vested
interests and the actions of their opponents, not to mention irreducible
uncertainty about the future. Book review.
Mike Makin-Waite seconded the
motion to dissolve the Communist Party of Great Britain as a delegate to its
final Congress in 1991. He was then active in the CPGB’s successor
organisation, Democratic Left, and remains involved in networks concerned with
the history of the left.
In this book, Communism and
Democracy: History, Debates, Potentials(Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), he
offers a fresh and unflinching overview of the history of communism from its
roots in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the collapse
of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the demise of the
international communist movement and the emergence of a global capitalist
system from which the “spectre” of communism has been banished.
His central concern is the
troubled relationship between communism and democracy.
Those of us who still aspire
to replace neo-liberal capitalism by a fairer, greener, happier, more
democratic and less divided world cannot avoid looking backward if we are to
move forward. For one thing, whenever even modest proposals are mooted to re-regulate
markets, increase spending on public services or make the tax system less
regressive, our opponents are quick to invoke the ghosts of Marx, Lenin and
Stalin.
More importantly, as the
author notes (p 4), the eclipse of communism has impoverished the western
imagination, undermining belief in the very “possibility of ever shaping the
world in line with the democratically agreed outcomes of reasoned
consideration, with the aim of meeting human needs.”
30 years since the fall of the
Berlin wall
Now, almost thirty years since
the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a good time to take stock of the strengths,
achievements, illusions, follies and crimes of communism.
The financial crash of 2007-8
triggered a deep slump and decade-long slowdown from which the world has barely
recovered and which has shaken public confidence in global capitalism and
neo-liberal policies. Yet the left has made scant progress in articulating and
winning support for a credible alternative.
On both sides of the Atlantic,
populist leaders and movements have emerged to challenge political elites, but
more from the illiberal, nationalist right than the liberal, cosmopolitan left,
whose commitment to open borders holds little appeal for the victims of global
economic restructuring. As yet, there is little sign of the intellectual
renewal, political realignment and institutional reform that history suggests
are the pre-requisites for resolving an organic crisis of capitalism.
Compare the past decade with
the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ten years after the Wall Street crash of
1929, the world was at war for the second time in a generation. But ideas and
plans for a managed and socialised form of capitalism had gained traction among
the intelligentsia and were about to be put to the test in running a war
economy.
Similarly, the formation of
anti-fascist popular fronts in the late 1930s and of resistance movements
during the war prefigured the national-popular governments that presided over
progressive social settlements after the war.
The short communist century
1917-89
Given the appalling human
rights record of the USSR and the quasi-military character of the Leninist
vanguard party, one might suppose that a book about communism and democracy
would be rather short.
But democracy is a complex,
shifting and contested concept. According to classical Marxism, liberal or
“bourgeois” democracy is an instrument of class rule that serves to protect
private property and to preserve the capitalist system. To create a social democracy,
capitalists and landlords would have to be expropriated. In countries with
parliamentary systems and universal suffrage, it might be possible to achieve
this goal with a sufficiently emphatic electoral mandate, though even in this
case force might be needed to quell a “slaveholders’ revolt”. Elsewhere, the
first priority of socialists was to establish democratic institutions.
Under the impact of the First
World War and the Bolshevik revolution, the international socialist movement
split into two hostile camps, henceforth known as social democrats and
communists, the former committed to electoral-legislative politics within the
framework of liberal democracy, the latter dedicated to defending the Soviet
Union and promoting world revolution.
Yet while the two sides
disagreed about the strategy for achieving socialism, both still aimed to break
the power of the propertied classes by taking the principal means of production
into public ownership. Once this was done and the government had decided on its
policy priorities, a system of central planning would replace the “invisible”
hand of the market as the primary mechanism of economic co-ordination,
allocating resources among the various branches of production and distributing
the social product among the members of society.
The advent of socialism, or
“lower” stage of communism, would, it was believed, usher in a superior, more
ample form of democracy, encompassing civil society as well as the state and
putting the satisfaction of human needs above the pursuit of private profit.
Major advances were
confidently expected to ensue: inequalities of income, wealth and status would
decline; the periodic crises to which capitalism was incorrigibly prone would
disappear; and rapid progress would be made towards the material abundance
required to sustain the “higher” stage of communism.
En route, socialist citizens
would acquire both the ability and the desire to participate in the management
of productive units and community organisations, as well as enjoying social
entitlements over and above the political rights and civil liberties that
marked the limit of citizenship status in the “bourgeois” democracies, at any
rate prior to the development of welfare states after 1945.
The promise of modernity
Makin-Waite describes this
prospectus as “the promise of modernity”. In the first part of the book, he
traces its genesis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the
second, he explains why the promise failed to materialise. At the heart of his
account is the Soviet experience. Having seized power hoping to bring about a
socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks found themselves driven, step-by-step, to
launch an industrial revolution, with an authoritarian one-party state
presiding over a bureaucratic command economy.
This is a familiar story. It
is, nevertheless, worth retelling. The author’s decision to focus on the
relationship between communism and democracy provides a strong narrative thread
through the twists and turns of communist history, highlighting, in particular,
the various periods and episodes when communists came to appreciate that
liberal democracy is a historic achievement to be cherished, nurtured and
defended: the pre-war popular fronts and wartime resistance movements; the
Prague Spring of 1968 and the military coup against Chile’s Popular Unity
government in 1973 – searing experiences both, which sparked the rise and
shaped the politics of Eurocommunism in the 1970s; and Gorbachev’s efforts in
the 1980s to bring the Cold War to an end while seeking to promote perestroika (reconstruction)
and glasnost (openness) in the USSR.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
– winning hearts and minds
Presiding over the argument is
the stoical, yet resolute spirit of Antonio Gramsci, a founding member of the
Italian Communist Party (PCI), who briefly became its leader before being
arrested and imprisoned by Mussolini.
Gramsci was primarily a
theorist of defeat. In his Prison Notebooks, he sought to explain why the
Russian revolution had not, as the Bolsheviks confidently anticipated at the
time, sparked off similar revolutions in the West. How had the ruling classes
in the heartlands of capitalism managed to see off the communist threat? Why
was there such a contrast between the collapse of Tsarist autocracy and the
resilience of “bourgeois” democracy?
In seeking answers to these
questions, Gramsci was obliged to rethink Marxist theory and communist
strategy. In particular, invoking the familiar distinction between the use of
coercion and government by consent, he gave a whole new meaning to the concept
of hegemony, the Greek word for leadership or supremacy.
His argument, in a nutshell,
was that while the state’s legal monopoly of the means of violence is always a
factor in any situation, by far the most effective and least risky way for
rulers to secure the allegiance, or least compliance, of their subordinates is
not to beat or cow them into submission, but to win their hearts and minds.
Thus, in the advanced
capitalist democracies, winning and retaining power, whether to preserve the
status quo or to pursue a radical alternative, depends primarily on providing
the moral and intellectual leadership required to resolve, or at least cope
with, society’s main problems.
Coping with a post-communist
world
The third part of the book,
“Routes for Radicals”, surveys the vestiges of the communist movement in China,
North Korea, Cuba and South Africa, together with the various intellectual and
political trends which have emerged since the 1990s and which retain some
affinity, however loose, with the communist tradition.
These include efforts to
combine perspectives and themes from Marxist and ecological thought into a new
red-green synthesis; the renewal of the left in Latin America (which now seems
to have stalled); the anti-globalisation and anti-austerity movements in Europe
and North America; the work of the so-called “New Communists” such as Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Zizek; the formation of new parties of the left such as Die
Linke in Germany, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain; and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers in the British Labour
Party.
The most intellectually
innovative and impressive of these post-communist initiatives is the red-green
dialogue, a serious attempt to rethink the relationship between capitalism,
society and nature. It is, however, still a work in progress and has made
little impact on organised politics.
The other developments
surveyed offer little more than old ideas in new guises. The “New Communists”,
for example, reject democratic norms and see contemporary struggles for
emancipation as struggles against (liberal) democracy. Thus, Zizek (quoted on p
258) declares that, “… what today prevents radical questioning of capitalism is
precisely the belief in democratic forms of struggle against capitalism.” It is
unclear whether Zizek really means this or is simply being provocative. He
claims to be an unreconstructed Leninist, but this may be a pose. Either way,
his apparent disdain for representative government is shared by those advocates
of direct democracy who repudiate the state-centred politics of the traditional
left in favour of direct action in “local spaces.”
Of course, the “propaganda of
the deed” is an old anarchist enthusiasm and can be a potent form of protest as
long as it remains non-violent. But action on the “horizontal” plane of
politics can never change the world unless it links up with action on the
“vertical” plane as part of a hegemonic project aimed at transforming the
state.
Irreducible uncertainty
Can the communist-shaped hole
in our politics be filled by forming a new party or breathing fresh vigour and
purpose into an old one? It depends what we hope and expect to achieve by such
endeavours. There is no harm in dreaming of a post-capitalist world or in
speculating about what it might look like. Dreaming revitalises the brain and
utopian thought feeds into ongoing debate about what kind of life is best for
humans and what kind of society would best sustain it.
But we should bear in mind
that the word “utopia”, coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, is a play on the
Greek words eu (good or well), ou (no or not) and topos (place).
Thus, utopia is a good, but non-existent place. It lies outside time and space:
“somewhere over the rainbow”, in the words of the song. Political projects, on
the other hand, are time-bound and operate in a resistant medium. Political
actors must always reckon with natural limits, structural bias, institutional
inertia, vested interests and the actions of their opponents, not to mention
irreducible uncertainty about the future.
The neo-liberal revolution and
the demise of communism have, between them, driven the possibility of a
post-capitalist world over the edge of political space into the realms of
utopian space. But while neo-liberal ideas and policies have reached every
corner of the world, their impact has not been uniform and there are still
different types of capitalism in different countries: China is
governed by a strong authoritarian state; Sweden remains a high-tax, high
public spending state; Germany retains its social market economy; Britain’s
capital city still hosts the world’s largest financial and trading hub; and so
on.
Equally, just as globalisation
has not eliminated institutional and cultural variety from the world, so there
is no reason to suppose that the neo-liberal form of capitalism will be the
last. There is every reason to do what we can to replace it by a better form,
not just by working for regime change at the national level, but by heading off
the current slide into international anarchy and rebuilding a rules-based
global order.
