There is, in the origin story of communism, something akin to what happens the first lines of the Book of Genesis. Left-wing politics in the 1830s are like the biblical “formless void”, with the early workers’ movement mesmerised by pointless speculative Utopias. Then Marx turns up in Paris in 1843, armed with the dialectical logic he has learned at Berlin University, and says, “Let there be light!”
An intellectual system is formed, based on the principles of social science. It conquers the European labour movement in the back half of the century, is ported over into the extreme social conditions of Russia by Lenin, gets rocket boosters from the slaughter of the Great War, and by 1949 bestrides Russia, China and half of Europe.
It’s rubbish, of course, but it’s the textbook version still taught in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and echoed among the growing number of fanboys and girls for Stalinism to be found in the “decolonisation” circles in Western universities.
In Reds: A Global History of Communism, I show how, far from being the founder of the communist tradition, Marx is the anomaly within it. He did, indeed, attempt to form a complete theory of capitalism, its destiny and the agency of the working class – mixing Hegel’s dialectics with the political economy of David Ricardo and the radicalism of the French workers he met in Paris.
But his ideas were both preceded and eventually replaced by a synthesis of two radical traditions Marx abhorred: Utopianism and Jacobinism.
In the book I show how the French Enlightenment gave birth to two ideas, which underpin all subsequent communist politics, and recur even today.
First, that history has laws, and that by studying them we can design better outcomes, handing the task of delivering social justice, economic development and wealth redistribution to technocrats, not politicians or indeed the masses.
Second, that a political revolution is not enough: after the overthrow of kings and despots there must be a second, social revolution – led, of necessity, by a small group of conspirators who can hold power until the masses are educated enough to exert it through democracy.
The first idea was formulated by the Count Henri de Saint-Simon, writing in the late Napoleonic and early Bourbon restoration period. The second was embodied in the brief life of Francois-Noel Babeuf, a revolutionary agitator whose “Conspiracy for Equality” attempted to seize power from the French Directory in 1796.
Babeuf, inspired by the Utopian writings of Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, initiatied a plan to abolish property by force and impose a system where universal public benefits replaced wages. Though executed a year later, his methodology lived on among his followers until the late 1820s, when a cache of his writings was published.
By now the sans-culottes of the 1790s had become the proletariat. And in the shape of Louis-Auguste Blanqui – a man inspired by Babeuf’s ideas – found a mesmeric leader during the uprisings of the 1830s.
Marx, on his arrival in Paris in 1843, found a left divided between two projects: the left-wing Jacobinism of Blanqui and the pacifist utopianism of Etienne Cabet’s Icarian movement, who dreamed of a future of straightened rivers and clean streets, but abjured revolutionary violence.
Marx says to the workers, effectively, forget the Utopian schemes: design the socialist future through trial and error, pushing the democratic revolutions of 1848 as far down the route of social change as possible. And he outright rejects the left-wing coup mentality that Blanqui, now his political rival, had kept alive.
By the time we get to the 1890s, with Marx dead but Lenin active in the Russian underground, there is an international labour movement rooted in legality, democracy and trade unionism. Utopianism has been ditched in favour of reforms to be enacted in the present; Blanquism is a distant memory.
So what made Lenin adopt the precise mixture of Utopianism and elitist revolutionary violence that Babeuf had pioneered? And how was he able to pass it off as Marxism? And why does it still matter?
In Reds, following a trail blazed by the Cold War historian Albert Weeks, I show how – as he improvised the Bolshevik project of an elitist, insurrectionary party – Lenin fastened on the writings of a half-forgotten Russian revolutionary named Pyotr Tkachev.
Tkachev believed Russia, not Western Europe, was the prime venue for a socialist revolution. With a thousand committed revolutionaries he believed he could overthrow the Tsar. He despised the peasantry, especially the richer kulaks. He rejected the aspirations of non-Russian nations trapped in the Tsarist empire. He wanted a “permanently revolutionary state”.
Lenin, locked in factional conflict with the more moderate Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP) discovered Tkachev’s old papers in an émigré library in Geneva, opened in August 1904. He demanded a key to the library, his own desk, and spent the second half of the year immersed in these materials.
He barely noticed the zemstvo movement that winter, in which liberal Russian nobles had begun to demand a constitution, and when informed that the workers of St Petersburg were planning to hold a march to present their own demands, Lenin predicted there would be “musical comedy effects”.
By the time news of the Bloody Sunday massacre, the trigger for the 1905 Revolution, Lenin arrived in Geneva, fully converted to Tkachev’s ideology: Utopia imposed by force, by revolutionary elite, in a permanent state of exception in which – and remember Lenin was a qualified lawyer – there can be no law, only force.
By tracing Lenin’s steps to these conclusions, we can restore a historical sequence that has been obscured and deliberately forgotten.
Tkachev was the first Russian Blanquist. His newspaper was actually funded by supporters of Blanqui, while the man himself was in prison following the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. So Tkachev is the living link between Lenin and Blanquism: there is direct genealogy, not just resemblance, between the left Jacobin tradition and Bolshevism.
The consequences of Lenin’s political evolution were vast. In the summer of 1917, sitting in a fisherman’s hut and hiding after his followers had tried to overthrow a government of left wing socialists, Lenin wrote The State And Revolution. In it he outlines a plan for a system that looks like “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” – in which the rule of law is absent, and in which the social elite is “excluded from democracy”.
Armed with this entirely novel definition of what Marx had called “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, Lenin engineered the seizure of power – a mixture of genuine mass uprising and military coup.
But that was the easy bit. By January 1918 the Bolsheviks were obliged to dissolve the only democratic assembly Russia has ever elected, following the most democratic elections it has ever held, because it returned a majority in favour of a left-wing socialist republic that would continue the war with Germany.
Then began the first, catastrophic experiment in Utopia: War Communism, during which the Bolsheviks tried to fast-forward to the kind of property-free society Morelly had imagined – using the methods of Tkachev, Blanqui and Babeuf.
The Soviet Civil War was, of course, a battle for survival against the armies of the invading imperialist powers and the remnants of Tsarism. But it was also a class war, of the proletariat against the peasantry, which the proletariat lost.
It was, in addition, the proximate cause of a famine that killed at least 5 million people in 1921-22. Though Russia’s poor agricultural infrastructure and bad weather played their part, War Communism had proved a reckless gamble with nature.
Fast forward to the early 1930s, when a second Utopian experiment began – the forced collectivisation of agriculture – and famine strikes once again, this time with the added animus of genocidal intent against the people of Ukraine. Over 8 million people die. Fast forward to 1959 and Mao’s China enacts the same, basic formula, with this time killing a mean estimate of 40 million humans. And Pol Pot gets to repeat the experiment in Cambodia, in the 1970.
So in the 200-year history of attempts to combine elite, revolutionary dictatorship with fast-forward Utopianism, Marxism is the short-lived glitch. It produced only reformist workers’ parties dedicated to slow, democratic change until the carnage of the Great War tipped the balance in favour of Lenin’s formula.
It is difficult to write a book containing so much horror – in particular because, alongside the horror, the communist movements I study produced so much selfless heroism, by working people who knew little or nothing of these crimes.
And because once established, these highly imperfect and totalitarian systems were also engines of social mobility. The darkest years of the 1930s – described by the anarchist writer Victor Serge as “midnight in the century” were actually the most prosperous for those Russian workers who were not dragged into a basement and shot.
Likewise, during the Second World, once Stalin had given up his pact with Hitler and stopped trying to join the Axis, communist parties and resistance movements performed heroic acts during the liberation of both Europe and China, to which our generation must go on paying tribute.
But this acute dichotomy – heroism alongside horror – which lies at the heart of all research into communist parties and states, is not simply a matter for the history books.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, when I first reported from the PRC, I met communist party bureaucrats who would tell me, privately, “we are really just Swedish-style social democrats; we just want a welfare system, a decent life for our people and a thriving private sector; once we get that, the party dictatorship will be relaxed”.
Under Xi Jinping those sentiments are gone. Today China’s ruling party is fully immersed in the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. If it succeeds in its goal of making China the dominant force on the planet by 2049, it won’t matter whether you or I think it is “really communist” – or a gross parody of the Marxist original.
They will get to write both the definitions and the history books.
As I built the narrative of Reds – from Babeuf, via Marx, the Paris Commune, the Great Unrest of the Edwardian Era through to the resistance movements of the Second World War, I’ve became haunted by the fear of what these stories might look like, if told exclusively by Chinese communist academia.
Modern Chinese politics is trapped in brain-frozen cliches: the Chinese Commmunist Party no longer uses merely the “dead metaphors” Orwell decried in the 1930s: it deploys entire chunks of pre-formed language whose meaning is usually the opposite of what is said.
The party is at war with historical truth over Maoism, over the Tiananmen Square Massacre, indeed over its own entire history. How might it rewrite 1917, 1848 or indeed 1789 if given the chance?
For me, that’s why the real battle over the history of communism has only just begun. Everything we succeed in writing now is a story the CCP will have to erase if it ever rules the world.
Like many writers engaged with the history of both fascism and communism, I’ve often come away from a day in the archives or the library semi-traumatised. But I understand why, for a young Western generation that never experienced the dead hand of Stalinism, revolutionary anti-capitalism remains attractive.
The point of my book, beyond trying to summarise this vast story in a single volume, is to say: you’re right to question whether capitalism can survive, and right to ask whether a more equal and just society could be achieved in its aftermath. The answer contained in the pages of Reds is: not like this.
Paul Mason is an award-winning journalist, a former economics editor of BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and the author of Reds: A Global History of Communism, published by Head of Zeus.
