What do we mean by communism?

For much of the twentieth century, most people, left or right, believed that states like the Soviet Union and post-1949 China were examples of the communism advocated by Marx. That misunderstanding is still a problem for the left today, writes Colin Wilson.

Revolutionary socialists such as members of rs21 are fighting to end capitalism. We want to replace capitalism with a society characterised by democracy, equal access to resources and an end to oppression – taken together, an unparallelled increase in human freedom. This means a qualitative change in social organisation, not just reforms or nationalisation which gives more power to the state.

The forces of the revolutionary left are tiny compared with those of global capitalism, and this has almost always been the case, so there is absolutely no guarantee we’ll be successful. Yet, a little over a hundred years ago, anti-capitalist forces made a breakthrough, against the odds and in the unlikeliest part of the world. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 not only ended the centuries-long autocracy of the Tsar. Thousands of workers and soldiers took part in the mass democracy of workers’ councils. Landless peasants seized land from aristocrats. Jews had suffered severe oppression and had been banned from living in much of Russia – now leading figures in the new Bolshevik regime, most prominent among them Leon Trotsky, were Jews. Hundreds of children’s homes and factory creches, along with communal dining halls, made it possible for women to have a life outside of childcare and the family. The Tsarist regime, inseparable from the church, had banned same-sex acts – now the marriage of a trans man and cisgender woman was ruled to be legal, the trans man’s gender identity recognised.

There have been revolutions throughout history – they continue to this day. Yet almost all of them are political revolutions, which change governments or even to some extent the ruling class, but which leave the basic nature of society unaltered. The Russian Revolution was a social revolution which, until it was defeated, ended capitalism, liberated oppressed people and put workers, peasants and soldiers in power. These events inspired millions worldwide in their immediate aftermath and through the twentieth century. The following year, 1918, saw the start of a revolutionary wave in Germany which did not end until 1923. 1919 and 1920 saw hundreds of thousands in Italy involved in socialist and trade unionist organising, including enormous strikes. Even in Britain, almost all of the Met Police went on strike in 1918, and the following year returning servicemen burned down Luton Town Hall. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, wrote to his French counterpart that ‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution.’ That spirit was also felt outside Europe, as communist parties inspired by the October Revolution were established around the world – in China in 1921, for example, and in India in 1925. 

However, back in Russia the revolution was in crisis. From the beginning it had faced the challenge that Russia was an undeveloped country, where capitalist cities were islands in a sea of subsistence agriculture and the resources to deliver anything beyond an equality of misery weren’t available. On top of that, Russia was invaded by seventeen foreign armies from both sides in World War One, all determined to defeat the new regime and aided by supporters of the Tsar. Those armies were defeated, but by the early twenties there were 7 million homeless children in Russia, and in 1921 the revolutionary government was forced to adopt the New Economic Policy, a partial reintroduction of capitalism which saw many children’s homes and factory creches closed, and women thus forced back into the home. 

The revolution degenerated through the 1920s. Joseph Stalin, one of the 21-strong Bolshevik Central Committee during the October revolution, manoeuvred his way to the top of the regime. Of the two most significant revolutionary leaders, Vladimir Lenin, died aged only 53, his health undermined by a previous assassination attempt, and Trotsky was sent into exile by Stalin in 1929, to be murdered by a Soviet agent in 1940. Mass democracy was replaced by a dictatorship and secret police – by 1932, two million people were in prison camps. Homosexuality was recriminalised in 1933-34 and abortion, legalised in the revolutionary years, became illegal again in 1936. Land was taken from peasants as state-run collective farms were established, and forced collectivisation led to famine and millions of deaths, especially affecting ethnic minorities such as Ukrainians.

By the 1930s the Soviet regime was a player in the world of imperialist great power politics. In August 1939 the Soviets signed a defence pact with Nazi Germany. The following month, Germany invaded Poland from the West, and ten days later the Soviet Union invaded from the East. In 1941, after Germany changed its position and invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviets decided it was now in their interest to side with Britain and the US. The cynical and undemocratic deal-making over the heads of millions that this involved is clear from Churchill’s memoirs, where he recalls meeting Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 and discussing the post-war order. Churchill suggested, ‘So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 per cent in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?’ Churchill wrote this down on a piece of paper and Stalin added a large tick. That alliance quickly fell apart after World War Two, as the Soviet Union established satellite governments in Eastern Europe, and a comparable regime, initially friendly to the Soviets, was established in China in 1949. 

Much of the world was now divided into two superpower-led blocs. The US government launched witch-hunts against leftists and queer people which saw thousands sacked. In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying for the Soviets, despite international opposition from Einstein, Picasso and the Pope, among many other well-known names, while black US dockers struck in their defence. This was a world where almost everyone accepted that there were two possible choices – you rejected the October Revolution as a dictatorship from the start, rejected the Soviet Union and sided with the West, or else you celebrated October, which meant you supported the current Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese regimes. The view that the October Revolution had been a huge endorsement for Marxism but had failed, had been betrayed, was held by the followers of Trotsky – they were right, but their numbers were tiny. And so for many people horrified by American imperialism – such as the war in Vietnam, in which up to three  million Vietnamese people died – it made sense to side with the Soviets and/or Chinese.

It was also the case that the Soviet Union could claim considerable achievements. The 1930s purges had seen the Soviet state kill over 600,000 people, but these deaths didn’t happen because Stalin was a sadistic madman. Their goal was to discipline the Soviet bureaucracy and population, to keep everyone looking over their shoulder and working at breakneck speed to industrialise Russia and so compete with its Western enemies, most of all militarily. Those rapid advances in Soviet economic development happened as western economies suffered depression and mass unemployment in the 1930s. The Soviet economy advanced further after the war, with its first atom bomb test taking place in 1949 – only four years after the Americans. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, four months ahead of the US equivalent, to American horror. Meanwhile, China had kicked out the Western imperialist powers trying to carve the country up for a century, had begun industrialisation and improved levels of literacy. Communists elsewhere won credibility – in France and Greece, for example, Communist Party members had played a key role in the Resistance under German occupation.

But, for all these achievements, these individual acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, the Soviet Union and China were not communist countries or even moving in that direction. Decisions were made by unelected state bureaucracies which acted in the name of the working class or the people, but never by the working class themselves. Those who rejected the ruling regimes faced prison camps and repressive ‘psychiatry’. Countries that showed signs of breaking from Soviet control were invaded, as was Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Protesting trade unionists were beaten and in some cases killed, as in Poland in 1981. These countries weren’t separate from global capitalism – they competed within it, in particular in military terms. And yet, around the world most people assumed that societies of this kind were what was meant by communism.

There isn’t space in a short article to fully describe how this contradiction played out in the lives of millions of people around the globe. But it’s worth highlighting two aspects of it which remain relevant today. The first is the nature of the Communist Party in Global North countries like Britain and France. In Britain, the CPGB recruited a powerful network of industrial militants – in 1969 the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, in which the CP was influential, coordinated a strike against anti-union laws involving half a million workers, which stopped production of all national newspapers. But the Committee’s strategy was not to enable rank and file activity, but to support Labour left leaders friendly to the CP. When those leaders backed down before the courts in 1972, the CP retreated too.

The second is that by this point the CPGB had become a reformist party. Its 1951 programme, The British Road to Socialism, declared that revolution was unnecessary in Britain, where socialism could be won through parliament. This would be achieved by a ‘broad coalition or popular alliance’ of workers, professional people, small business owners ‘and all lower and middle sections’ in towns, plus farmers. ‘Men and women who are determined and loyal advocates of the people’s power will replace those who uphold the old system in all positions of authority in the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the Judiciary and the Diplomatic Service.’ The problem here isn’t just the fantasy that the ruling class will peacefully hand over power once the left wins an election. It’s that the CPGB adopted one of the worst aspects of reformism – its nationalism. All the main parties were ‘betraying the interests of Britain to dollar imperialism’, while the Communists stood for ‘the unity of all true patriots to defend British national interests.’ In any case, the CPGB was not advocating global revolution, but rather ‘the peaceful coexistence of socialism and capitalism’ – and as part of building ‘peace and international cooperation’, argued that ‘Britain should associate its efforts with the Socialist Soviet Union, People’s China … and all peace-loving countries’. All this had nothing to do with the international, revolutionary unity of the working class, but reflected Soviet foreign policy interests.

This kind of reformism wasn’t unique to Britain – in May 1968, protesting students put up barricades in Paris and fought paramilitary police in the streets. Major trade union federations called a one-day general strike two days later, and days after that, tens of thousands of French workers began to occupy factories. The French Communist Party (PCF) was contemptuous of the students – at the start of the month their paper had told its readers that ‘These false revolutionaries must be energetically unmasked … For the most part they are the sons of rich bourgeois … who will quickly turn off their revolutionary ardour and go back to managing Daddy’s firm.’ PCF leaders initially opposed the calling of the one-day general strike. When it happened anyway, they aimed to control it. After students marched across Paris to the striking Renault plant at Billancourt, for example, they were met by rows of shop stewards from the CGT, the PCF-aligned union federation, who stopped them talking to the workers. A combination of the radical ideas of the students and the industrial power of the workers could have brought down the government – at one point the French president was so alarmed he fled to Germany. Instead, the momentum of the movement declined and the government survived. As usual with trade union officials, CGT leaders saw their purpose as negotiating with the ruling class, winning reforms from them, not smashing them.

The British Road to Socialism also repeatedly mentioned another key political issue of the mid-twentieth century – the break-up of colonial empires like Britain’s. The programme called for the withdrawal of British troops from colonies like Malaya – a principled demand, but also a country where Communists played a major role in the national liberation movement, so one compatible with Soviet interests. From the perspective of the Global South, meanwhile, where post-colonial rulers aimed to overcome the effects of colonial exploitation, the rapid economic development of the Soviet Union offered an appealing model. Five year plans, a key feature of the Soviet economy, were widely adopted by Global South countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ghana and Ethiopia.

However, while industrialisation had made the Soviet Union into a strong, global power, such strategies made former colonies into small and weak capitalist powers. Independence resulted from sometimes heroic struggles and involved real reforms, but such strategies proved finally to be dead ends. One of the best-documented and recent examples is that of South Africa. The African National Congress (ANC) – headed by Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years by the apartheid regime – was greatly influenced by the South African Communist Party (SACP), which Mandela himself joined in the 1950s. The SACP supported a ‘stageist’ strategy for the movement – national liberation, the end of apartheid, was the initial goal, with the struggle for socialism a second ‘stage’ put off to some later time. The growth of mass, militant workers’ struggles in the 1980s posed an alternative to that strategy as they forced South Africa’s rulers to abandon apartheid, and opened the way to even bigger changes. Some extraordinary advances were achieved, such as a ban in the new constitution on sexual orientation discrimination, a global first. Yet it’s all too clear now that the outcome of the victory over apartheid hasn’t been an ongoing struggle moving on from the achievement of national liberation towards socialism, but the consolidation of South Africa as a site of capital accumulation, and neoliberal capitalism at that. The depressing personal story of Cyril Ramaphosa highlights the problems with the political strategy – in the 1990s the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, South Africa’s most powerful union, Ramaphosa is now a businessman worth over $450 million, president of the ANC and of South Africa. In 2012, when miners at Marikana took strike action, Ramaphosa, a board member at Lonmin, their employer, called the strike ‘criminal’ and demanded that ‘action’ be taken against strikers – the next day police shot 34 miners dead.

If the death of Stalin lies in the distant past, and the collapse of the Soviet Union happened 35 years ago, 2012 is comparatively recent. Still today, mass communist parties exist in India – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has over a million members and governs the state of Kerala, home to 36 million people, while the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation has an affiliated union body with 600,000 members and a 38,000-strong youth organisation. The Chinese Communist Party, with over 90 million members, rules over the most dynamic capitalist economy of the 21st century. Back in Britain, anyone who argues for revolutionary change will sooner or later face the response that ‘they had communism in Russia and it was a disaster’. So it remains important that we are clear what we’re fighting for: not reforms, nationalisation or state control, not the societies of the Soviet Union or post-1949 China, but economic justice, personal freedom, democracy reaching into workplaces and the economy, and internationalism.