HISTORY: The Rise and Fall of Communism,By Archie Brown, The Bodley Head, 720pp. £25
ARCHIE BROWN has written a clear and expert account of the rise and fall of communism. One of its many strengths is that, unlike some recent accounts, there is no tone of cheap gloating. With the economic debris from fallen skies everywhere, the decades of western political smugness have mercifully come to a halt.
Despite the pain and blight, which will stretch over the decades ahead, the collapse of market fanaticism (which in many respects mirrored the delusions of communism) offers hope. This damaged country, until recently in thrall to the idea of a Gaia-like self-regulating market, may see in communism something akin to the bogus elixir honoured, with such dire consequences, in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Interestingly, Brown distinguishes between Communism – the international movement devoted to the overthrow of capitalism – and communism – the classless, stateless utopia that was to end the long millennia of human struggle. It’s a useful reminder. The whole malarkey was supposed to be about getting to the end of history and living happily ever after in a terrestrial heaven lacking only wings and immortality. Yet most communists would leave the room if the subject were raised. The political movement was about something far removed from the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The millenarian prophesies of Columcille, which kept hope alive among the pre-Famine Irish peasantry, were typical of a thinking that worked well in the pre-modern world. But in modern urban conditions such concepts have less purchase. We are more interested in our power to effect results than our medieval and peasant forbears. It is not clear why Marx maintained history would end in utopia. Perhaps he was more influenced by religious thinking than he was aware. Certain it is, however, that the subject did not detain political communists for long.
One of communism’s most significant achievements was to move beyond the fatalism of the millenarian to the hard business of disciplined organisation, the absence of which in the past saw countless peasant revolts against grinding oppression easily crushed.
As Marx and Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto, philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Perhaps this interesting pair, operating respectively from the British Museum and bourgeois Manchester, had no idea what bloody steps Lenin, Trotsky and their successors and imitators would be prepared to take in pursuing this advice. Marx certainly had some concern about his "followers" and at one stage even denied he was a Marxist. One suspects he would have had problems with the great communist of the 20th century,
Lenin. Communists describe themselves as Marxists, but in practice there is something more central to communism than Marxist theory of history and economics and that is the winning and maintenance of state power.
The destructive and self-absorbed tendencies of modernism took their most extreme political form in Russian communism, both at home and abroad. In its vanity, Leninism felt neither respect for the past nor a responsibility for the future. In achieving its pre-ordained destiny, communism was prepared to crush everything that stood in its way, especially the teeming human ants below; wonderful in their collectivity but, as individuals, utterly dispensable. This impulse of destructive contempt characterised all forms of 20th-century communism ranging from mass movements, which enabled peoples to defend themselves against colonialism, to the remarkable and somewhat absurd late flowering of a disciplined old-style communist movement in EU Ireland of the 1980s. The success of communism as a bulwark against colonialism and other forms of dependency, particularly in China, will probably, in time, be seen as the movement’s most significant historical achievement, whereas its western European manifestations are likely to be seen as something of an oddity, having no lasting influence.
Brown describes his first meeting with a communist. It was in the late 1940s when he was in the British army. His communist companion informed him that after the revolution not even one shopkeeper could be permitted to remain in existence as the disease of capitalism could spread from that single source. Brown wonders what happened to that communist and speculates that he may have become a successful businessman. This reminded me of the first communist I met in the late 1960s, now happily a senior trade unionist living in one of Dublin’s leafier suburbs. In the course of an impromptu political lecture delivered in a Capel Street pub, he explained that after the revolution my father would be taken out and shot. Apart from some predictable feelings of outrage, it was not clear to me how my small shopkeeper father was impeding the social equality which I thought was the objective of left-wing politics.
This of course reflected my ignorance of hard-edged socialism based on a rigorous application of the iron laws of history. Those impeding progress would be dealt with. Only “slobbering moderates” could be sentimental about such matters; it was, as it were, simply a question of political hygiene. Many idealistic young people, in Ireland and elsewhere, seduced by the lure of communist certainties, turned their backs on the less dramatic but more reliable mode of change offered by social democracy. In Ireland this effective haemorrhage offers a partial explanation for the uninspiring and intellectually weak history of Irish social democracy. Perhaps the future will be different.
And as for communism and other forms of absolutism and authoritarianism, the conclusion to be drawn from 20th-century history, in Ireland and elsewhere, is clear: clerical functionaries, vanguards of the revolution, imperialists and multi-millionaires must, in the interests of civilisation, be restricted and regulated. That, at least in part, is what politics should be about. Now that various forms of universal truth have been tried and found wanting perhaps it is time for “slobbering moderates” to embrace the country’s problems and show what they can do.
Maurice Earls is joint editor of The Dublin Review of Books