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The rise and fall of Communism in Europe

After the fall of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, people rushed to proclaim that the experiment was doomed to failure from the beginning. Capitalism is the only viable system. Breaking with the rule of the market was always bound to end in bloody disaster. The only sections of the Left that have a future are the sensible folk who recognise that the means of production must be left in the hands of private businessmen.

But before we close the book on the debate, it might be worth having a look at the origins of the Communist movement. Everyone agrees that Communism was the most important challenge to capitalism since that system spread from the factories of industrial Britain and conquered the world. During the twentieth century, tens of millions of people looking for an alternative to capitalism rallied to its banner.

So you might think the strategies adopted by the Communists themselves were fairly important. And you might also wonder – did they make avoidable mistakes, or was their failure inevitable? Was there another road away from capitalism that might have led to a happier outcome? Any fair survey of the Communist movement would have to cover the entire globe, from Japan to South Africa and almost everywhere in between. For reasons of space, this article will concentrate on the European Communists – their history shows fairly well the main features of the whole movement.

THE SPLIT IN THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

A hundred years ago, the socialist movement was the rising force in Europe. Its parties were constantly gaining ground, no matter how you measured it. Their share of the vote was steadily increasing, they were recruiting new members, organising countless workers in trade unions. Having gathered all that political capital, they could now use it to promote the goals of their movement – in other words, to replace capitalism with socialism, to transform a system based on production for profit into one based on production for human need.

Barely a decade later, the working-class movement in Europe was bitterly split into two camps, Communism and social democracy. The split endured for the rest of the century. It’s tempting to ask what Communists and social democrats might have achieved if they had stood together, instead of fighting each other. Tempting, but short-sighted.

In truth, there was always bound to be a split in the workers’ movement. Its long-term goal was a socialist society, based on common ownership of the means of production. This could only be achieved by breaking the power of the capitalist class, who were unlikely to give up their property without a struggle. It would mean confrontation, mass mobilisation, perhaps even civil war. In a word, revolution.

But as the movement steadily established itself in countries like Germany and Britain, taking the form of legal mass parties and trade unions, the path towards confrontation began to seem less and less appealing. It would be a risky gamble, with no guarantee of success. The socialist movement could be smashed by its enemies if it was defeated.

On the other hand, there appeared to be opportunities to win modest but real gains for the working class, in the form of employment legislation, welfare programmes and so on. Influential voices began calling for the socialist parties to concentrate on short-term goals of that sort, and leave the final confrontation with the capitalists to some indefinite point in the future.

It was inevitable that sooner or later, there would be a parting of the ways between different kinds of socialists. Two camps would be formed, with radicals who took the long-term goals of the movement very seriously - and saw their day-to-day work as preparation for the overthrow of capitalism - separating themselves from moderates who preferred to work within the existing system for change.

The two camps became known as “reformists” and “revolutionaries”. The terms could be confusing, as the “revolutionaries” didn’t reject the need for reform – but they saw it as part of the transition to socialism, not an end in itself. The “reformists” often claimed to be just as much in favour of replacing capitalism with socialism as the “revolutionaries”, just in a more gradual, drawn-out process that would make revolution unnecessary. In practice, they usually acted as if capitalism would be around for as long as anyone could imagine.

THE BIRTH OF THE COMINTERN

In the end, the split in the movement was provoked by two world-shattering events: the outbreak of world war in 1914 and the Russian Revolution three years later. While the split into two opposing socialist factions was always bound to happen, the form that it took was shaped by the experience of war and revolution. There was no compelling reason why the radical wing of the workers’ movement had to emerge in the form of Communism - as it did after the war.

The First World War turned the theoretical debate inside the socialist movement into a bitter practical divide. The reformists were usually to be found in the pro-war camp, cheering on their national governments. That was the natural development of their cautious, law-abiding strategy. The revolutionaries were the most determined opponents of the war, from Britain to Russia.

The new Communist International (or “Comintern” for short) was intended to replace the pre-war Socialist International. The old federation had been a loose alliance of workers’ parties: its members had usually come together at international congresses to discuss various issues, then gone back to their home countries where they came up with their own strategies. Many revolutionaries held the lack of collective decision-making responsible for the behaviour of the reformist majority in 1914, when they caved in to nationalism.While the revolutionary Left began the war as an isolated minority, it was given a huge boost by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in October 1917. For the first time in history, a socialist party had taken power in the name of the working class and announced that it was breaking with capitalism. Many socialists believed that capitalism had entered its final phase. The Bolsheviks themselves saw their insurrection as the spark that would detonate the European revolution.

All over Europe, revolutionaries found themselves at the head of mass protest movements that posed a huge threat to the capitalist system. They also found themselves in conflict with reformists, who came forward as defenders of the old order (above all in Germany). When the Bolsheviks took the initiative in launching a “Communist International” to co-ordinate the work of revolutionary socialists across national borders, they received an eager response.

So the Bolsheviks were able to propose a structure for the Comintern that concentrated great power in the hands of its leadership. The Comintern’s Executive Committee (EC) would be the main authority of the movement between its world congresses: it would have the power to impose discipline on member parties, demanding that they expel groups or individuals whose ideas were unacceptable. The EC itself would be dominated by the party of the Comintern’s host nation. Since that remained Soviet Russia (early hopes that the International could move to Berlin after a German revolution came to nothing), the Bolsheviks were always the driving force behind Comintern policy.

Along with this structural advantage, the Bolsheviks had enormous prestige in the movement because of their success in leading a revolution and defeating its opponents against great odds. As the revolutionary wave began to recede across Europe, the fact that the Bolsheviks were the only member party of the Comintern to hold state power gave them a commanding position in every debate.

THE POWER OF A BAD EXAMPLE

Despite this, the Comintern was not a tool of the Soviet government in its early years. The Bolsheviks couldn’t simply order foreign Communists about, there were fierce debates at congresses of the International over strategy and tactics. But as it developed, there was a steady drive towards centralisation and rigid discipline, with Moscow playing the leading role in shaping the movement.

This tendency owed a lot to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution itself. Within a few years of “Red October”, the Soviet government had become a one-party state that was unaccountable to the people in whose name it ruled. Tracing the course of that degeneration would take up more space than we can presently spare. But a couple of points are important to note.

Firstly, the authoritarianism of the Soviet regime totally contradicted the traditional idea of what a socialist society should be. Karl Marx, the most important anti-capitalist thinker, had praised the ultra-democratic political system adopted by the Paris Commune during its short existence in 1871 as a model to follow. Following his lead, Marxists usually argued that a socialist society would greatly expand the limited form of democracy that existed under capitalism.

When the Bolsheviks took power, they put forward similar ideas. They counter-posed “council democracy”, based on delegates elected by work-places and communities, to parliamentary democracy (the Russian word for council, “soviet”, gave their government its name). But in practice, they transferred power from the councils in Russia to their own party, which became an unaccountable bureaucratic machine.

Whether or not this could have been avoided, under the circumstances that existed at the time, is a question that’s still debated. But clear-sighted socialists were bound to conclude that Soviet Russia was not in any way socialist. The famous German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, whose allies in the Spartacus League joined the Comintern, criticised the anti-democratic measures of the Bolshevik regime at the time. She believed that the Bolsheviks had been driven into serious errors by the dire conditions they had to deal with.

The greatest mistake, Luxemburg argued, would be to make a virtue out of necessity and hold those errors up as a healthy example to follow. Other socialists and anarchists, inside and outside Russia, believed that the negative features of Bolshevik policy could not simply be explained as a reaction to circumstances – they reflected inherent flaws in the party’s ideology.

In the first years after the October revolution, however, critical voices like these were rare enough (Luxemburg was murdered in 1919 by right-wing soldiers). Many revolutionary socialists were inclined to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt – not least because of the ferocious hostility shown to them by the ruling classes of Europe.

This leads to the second key point. By the time the dust had settled after the Russian civil war and a critical look at the Soviet dictatorship was very much in order, the Comintern was already well-established. And its structure gave the fast-degenerating Bolshevik party (now calling itself the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU for short) the power to control the movement.

The most radical elements in the working-class parties of Europe had flocked to the banner of the Comintern. The new Communist Parties (CPs) were struggling to establish themselves in very difficult conditions. Many CPs had already suffered bloody repression, and were soon to experience worse. The pressure for unity was enormous.

Many Communists resisted that pressure and continued to speak their minds. They challenged the Comintern policies for their own societies that were handed down by the Soviet leadership, and some asked whether the USSR itself was really on the road towards socialism. But the structures of the Comintern made it possible for the CPSU to isolate and expel dissenting voices. The Soviet leaders did so repeatedly over the coming years.

STALIN’S TRIUMPH

Inside the CPSU, Stalin won a bitter power struggle after the death of Lenin, and went on to establish a personalised dictatorship that became more and more blood-thirsty. At the same time, he launched a purge of the Comintern to root out the last traces of disagreement. Communist leaders outside Russia had a simple choice – they could keep their mouths shut, or else find themselves expelled from the movement. In most CPs leaders were chosen by Moscow, not because they were intelligent or capable, but because they were unthinkingly loyal.

In the space of a decade, the Comintern had mutated into a tool of the Soviet dictator. There was nothing the least bit natural or inevitable about this decline. It would have been unimaginable to most of the delegates at the first congress of the International in 1919. But it was the reality, and it had a number of damaging consequences.

To begin with, CPs the world over were obliged to defend the actions of the Soviet dictatorship. This did enormous damage to the reputation of Communism – especially when Stalin went out of his way to advertise the grisly nature of his regime, as he did by staging grotesque show trials of his enemies in the CPSU. The British and French CPs were even forced to defend the pact Stalin made with Hitler in 1939.

The Comintern had begun its life arguing for a more advanced form of democracy based on workers’ councils. But Communists ended up making excuses for the brutal tyranny that ruled the Soviet Union. Their betrayal of democracy alienated countless people who might otherwise have been sympathetic to the movement.

Secondly, the top-down, bureaucratic structure of the Comintern held back the search for viable political strategies by its member parties. Policies were determined, in the last analysis, by the requirements of the Soviet regime, not the needs of the various CPs. Debate was crippled by the lack of internal democracy. Notoriously, the Comintern tended to “zig-zag” – one policy would be replaced by another, without any discussion of the problems with the old line. The International would swing from right to left and back again, without ever striking the right balance.

Thirdly, the obligation to defend the USSR prevented Communists from having a real debate about the nature of a post-capitalist society. All kinds of questions had to be answered. How could a planned economy work, without becoming clogged up with bureaucracy? What political structures would offer the greatest opportunities for mass participation? How could violent counter-revolution be defeated, without snuffing out dissent altogether? Instead of asking tough questions and looking at the Soviet experience with a critical eye, Communists defended every action taken by the Soviet leadership. The alternative was to find yourself expelled from the movement.

By the time Stalin made his notorious deal with Hitler at the end of the 1930s, most CPs in Europe had been driven to the margins of political life. Many were illegal. But they were still able to hold their position as the main alternative to social democracy. Alternative forces on the radical left had to cope with the same difficulties, as the workers’ movement limped from defeat to defeat, but lacked the moral and material backing of the Soviet Union to sustain them.

THE RESISTANCE AND THE PEAK OF COMMUNISM

All across Europe, there was a massive shift left-wards as the Second World War drew to a close, and the Communists were usually in the driving seat. Having played a key role in organising resistance to Nazi occupation everywhere from France to Yugoslavia, the CPs reaped the political rewards after the Liberation.

In the East, communist regimes were established under Soviet tutelage, generally without much popular support. In Western Europe, Stalin had no direct control over the mass CPs emerging in countries like Italy and France. But those parties had been moulded into his preferred shape for the last two decades, and their leaders could be depended on to follow Moscow’s lead. Far beyond its European origins, Communism established itself as a major political force - especially in east Asia - following the model of organisation laid down by Moscow.

It’s often forgotten by historians that the CPs of Western Europe played a conservative role in the immediate post-war years. Following orders from Stalin, who wanted to preserve his war-time alliance with the US and the UK, the Communists of France and Italy made no attempt to seize power and helped re-construct the pre-war capitalist order. Despite this, they were excluded from all positions of influence when the Cold War began in earnest and retreated into a political ghetto.

Meanwhile Stalin consolidated his rule over Eastern Europe by imposing gruesome dictatorships. After the defection of the Yugoslav Communists from the Soviet bloc in 1948, real or imagined dissidents in the other ruling CPs were purged savagely, along with non-Communist opponents of the new regimes. These crimes were widely publicised by the Western powers and provided invaluable propaganda material in the new Cold War. Again, many people who might have been sympathetic to an anti-capitalist alternative that preserved democratic rights became staunch anti-Communists because of the record of the USSR and its affiliated CPs.

The Yugoslav CP offered an interesting example of an different approach in these years. The Yugoslav Communists had a genuine popular base, won through their brave and highly successful role as the spear-head of resistance to Nazi occupation. They were able to take power after the war without any assistance from the Red Army. Their new regime was unflinchingly authoritarian, but they clashed with Stalin because of his determination to subordinate Yugoslav development to Soviet needs.

After the break with Moscow, Tito’s regime proved to be a great deal milder and less tyrannical than neighbouring states in the Soviet bloc. But this “liberalism” was kept firmly within the limits of a one-party system, with the boundaries ultimately policed by state repression. The Yugoslav experience showed how deeply the authoritarian virus had penetrated the Communist movement – even when a ruling CP escaped Stalin’s control, it still maintained an iron grip on power through police methods. The idea of socialism as the democratic self-organisation of the people, the expansion of democracy into all areas of society, had almost been forgotten.

COMMUNISM AFTER STALIN

Stalin died in 1953, but his legacy endured for decades afterwards. His successors in Moscow introduced a mild reform programme known as the “Thaw”, and the worst features of Stalinist tyranny were phased out. But they never had any intention of blending socialism with democracy, or giving the Russian working class a genuine say in the planning of the economy.

1956 was a crucial year for the development of the international Communist movement. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to accelerate the process of “de-Stalinisation” by delivering a secret speech at the CPSU congress denouncing Stalin as a tyrant and a murderer. Details of the speech soon leaked out with dramatic results. Workers in Poland revolted and Gomulka, a “reform Communist”, became leader of the Polish CP.

The Soviet leaders decided to allow Gomulka to continue in power, but they responded brutally when another Communist reformer, Imre Nagy, took over in Hungary. Nagy became leader of the Hungarian CP after a mass uprising against the Stalinist clique running the country. He announced the abolition of the Communist monopoly of power and began to withdraw Hungary from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev sent the Red Army across Hungary’s borders to overthrow Nagy and replace his government with a puppet regime.

The secret speech denouncing Stalin and the invasion of Hungary had a traumatic effect on the Communist movement in Western Europe. After defending Stalin for years, Communist activists were now told by their own leaders that he had been a mass murderer. Many of them had genuinely believed the stories fed to them by the party leadership, lacking alternative sources of information about conditions in Russia that weren’t tainted by their anti-Communist political origins (needless to say, the CP leaders couldn’t offer the same excuse, knowing full well what had happened under Stalin).

They were bitterly disillusioned by the events of 1956, and hundreds of thousands of party members left the CPs in Britain, France and Italy. Some dropped out of politics altogether, while others laid the foundations for the “New Left” – a broad tendency which sought to inspire a fresh direction for the European Left, neither Stalinist nor social democratic.

Despite these losses, the various CPs remained by far the most important force on the left wing of the labour movement, the only effective rival to social democracy (with a few isolated exceptions). Although their leaders had applauded the Soviet action against Nagy’s reform government, some CPs took advantage of the new post-Stalinist mood to put some distance between themselves and Moscow, claiming the right to define their own strategies in line with national conditions.

Khrushchev himself fell victim to a palace coup in 1964, ousted by elements in the CPSU that saw him as an unreliable maverick. Under the new leader Brezhnev, all reform initiatives were strictly curtailed – there was no return to the worst days of Stalinism, but the foundations of the Soviet system were left untouched. The command economy continued to stagnate and decline, political dissidents who challenged the one-party system were repressed, and the USSR continued to offer as unattractive a model of “socialism” as could be imagined.

Outside the Soviet bloc, the Communist movement was still over-shadowed by its “big brother”, the ruling party in Moscow. Communists increasingly tried to defuse suspicions of their programme by declaring their commitment to democracy in a post-capitalist order. But their close links with the Soviet dictatorship made it easy for their opponents to ridicule these commitments and affirm that any state ruled by Communists would do away with basic democratic freedoms.

Those links were greatly strained by another Soviet invasion – this time in Czechoslovakia. A group of reform Communists took control of the Czech CP in 1968 and announced their “Action Programme”, intended to liberalise the system. There was a huge popular response, and pressure for full democratisation. The Czech leaders declined Soviet invitations to stifle this movement from below, and found themselves overthrown by Red Army tanks before the year was out.

The decade since Hungary had seen important changes in the CPs of Western Europe, and their response was very different. This time most western CPs condemned the invasion. But they still hesitated before drawing the necessary conclusions about the Soviet system – namely, that it was a society controlled by a self-serving bureaucratic elite with no more interest in genuine socialism than Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Formal ties with Moscow were preserved.

EURO-COMMUNISM

The invasion of Czechoslovakia helped clarify a trend among several CPs in countries like Italy, Spain and France, which became known as “Euro-communism”. Euro-communism was an attempt to put a clear distance between the practice of the Soviet regime and the CPs competing for power west of the Iron Curtain. For a time it caught the imagination of large sections of popular opinion in Western Europe. But by the end of the 1970s it was clear that Euro-communism had been a failure.

The new tendency in European Communism had a number of merits. To begin with, it was the first clear attempt to carve out an independent direction for the movement, independent of Soviet control. In itself, this was a progressive move – the dominant force on the radical left had been firmly in the Soviet orbit since the 1920s. Secondly, the CPs rejected out of hand the idea that a socialist society could be ruled by a single party with a monopoly of power. After decades of CPs making excuses for authoritarian regimes, this commitment to democracy was vital if Communism was to make a break-through and win enough support to do away with capitalist power for good.

But these virtues went hand-in-hand with a number of weaknesses. Firstly, none of the CPs managed to free themselves altogether from the legacy of Stalinism. They were used to functioning as tightly centralised organisations, with little room for dissent within their own ranks and a commanding role for the party leadership in deciding policy. This model of organisation was modified but not abandoned by the Euro-communist CPs.

The Spanish CP was known for its enthusiastic embrace of the Euro-communist project, and its leader Santiago Carrillo was willing to criticise the USSR sharply. But Carrillo himself was notorious for his authoritarian style of leadership. The same could be said of the French CP, and even the Italian party, with its more liberal reputation, resorted to expulsions of dissidents when they pushed their disagreement too far and began organising as a tendency.

These democratic limitations were partly responsible for another major weakness – the failure of the western CPs to channel the energies of a new generation of left-wing activists that emerged after 1968. In France and Italy, the New Left produced tens of thousands of highly dedicated, enthusiastic young campaigners with a fierce commitment to socialist change. These activists should have provided the French and Italian CPs with a vital shot in the arm. Instead, they were alienated by Communist arrogance and authoritarianism, and often driven into a sectarian dead-end.

A third major weakness needs to be mentioned. In the process of discarding old ideological baggage, the Euro-communist parties often threw out the baby with the bath-water. Their view of the State was a classic example. Having rightly committed themselves to the idea of a democratic road to socialism, the CPs began to take the propaganda claims of western parliamentary democracy at face value – often forgetting about the undemocratic power structures that lurked behind the parliamentary façade, ready to defend capitalist privileges against any triumph at the ballot box.

Naivety of this sort was partly responsible for the bloody defeat of the Popular Unity government headed by Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende’s electoral victory had been hailed by the Euro-communists as proof that a parliamentary road to socialism would bear fruit. But the military coup which smashed the Chilean workers’ movement showed that capitalist elites would be determined to stop any radical government from converting a parliamentary majority into social revolution, and could rely on the support of large sections of the old State machine.

The Euro-communists forgot a very old and crucial principle of the radical left – the working class can’t simply take over the old State and use it to introduce socialism, it must dismantle it and build new political structures based on participatory democracy. Decades of Stalinist mis-education had buried this key lesson of history.

Another example of this weakness was the softly-softly approach taken by the Euro-communists in dealing with social democrats and even right-wing parties. During the hey-day of Stalinism, Communists had been quite happy to say that they would ban social democratic, liberal and conservative parties after taking power, and applauded such repressive measures in Eastern Europe.

It was absolutely right and necessary for the Euro-communist CPs to abandon this anti-democratic position. But they tended to replace it with the far-fetched view that social democrats and even conservatives could be partners for the transformation of society. It would have been far more realistic to see them as rival currents that had to be fought politically, not through repression, but by winning the argument with the majority of working-class people.

The great hopes invested in Euro-communism were almost entirely disappointed. The Italian CP reached an all-time high in the mid-70s, but spent its peak years from 1976 to 1979 trying to form a coalition with the right-wing Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats kept them at arm’s length, and the experiment ended without Communist participation in government: after 1979 the Italian party went into permanent decline.

The French CP formed a long-term alliance with the Socialist Party: after almost a decade, it became clear that most of the benefits from this alliance were being reaped by the social democrats, and the CP ended the unity pact. It was unable to come up with any alternative project, entered the Socialist government of Francois Mitterand in a subordinate role in 1981, then limped out a couple of years later and went into free-fall for the rest of the decade.

The experience of the Spanish CP was even worse. Euro-communism proved to be a failure, but CPs that rejected the new direction and stuck with old-school Stalinist practices did no better. The Portuguese CP, the most Stalinist party in Western Europe, found itself in a hugely promising situation after the revolution of 1974 launched by left-wing army officers. For some time there was a real fear in NATO circles that Portugal might emulate the Cuban model.

However, the Portuguese Communists were out-manoeuvred and out-fought by their social-democratic rivals, who promised to combine socialism with democracy – and won a crushing victory at the ballot box. In power, they left capitalism very much in place in Portugal, but the dubious credentials of the CP when it came to preserving democratic rights prevented it from challenging the Socialists effectively, never mind leading Portugal down a non-capitalist road.

AFTER THE FALL

Euro-communism was the last chance for the European Communist movement to break free of the crippling influence of the USSR and its so-called “actually existing socialism”. Its inability to do so owed a great deal to the damaging legacy of the Stalinist era. For thirty years, the Communist movement was tightly controlled by the regime in Moscow. Although this monolithic structure began to disintegrate after 1956, and was more or less finished by the 1970s, the whole political culture of the CPs was still heavily constrained by the experience of Stalinism.

Meanwhile, the USSR blocked any alternative path within the Soviet bloc, crushing reforming experiments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. When Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989, soon followed by the Soviet regime two years later, the whole idea of a left-wing alternative to capitalism was tainted by association with the failure. The parties which came out of the Third International survived after 1989, sometimes with a new name, sometimes not. But the whole Communist project was discredited.

Looking back over the history of that project, it should be obvious that there were a number of points when different paths could have been followed. It wasn’t inevitable that the radical wing of the workers’ movement would organise itself as the Communist International. It wasn’t inevitable that the Comintern would establish a tightly centralised “world-party” with great power in the hands of the Soviet leadership. It wasn’t inevitable that the fortunes of the anti-capitalist left would be so tightly entangled with the fate of the USSR. These outcomes were the result of conscious political choices, which could have been made differently.

The way the Communist movement developed had an incalculable effect on the successes and failures of socialism in the twentieth century. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that there had been a movement of the anti-capitalist left that was both radical and democratic, that allowed room for different currents of opinion within its own ranks and committed itself to preserving democracy after capitalism had been done away with. This is not idle speculation – there were always strong tendencies on the radical left who wanted to build a movement exactly like that.

It’s impossible to believe that a movement of that sort would not have done better with the opportunities that were available. A firm commitment to democracy on the part of the anti-capitalist left would have allowed it to compete with the reformist, social-democratic tendency from a much stronger position. It would have disarmed one of the most powerful arguments of right-wing propaganda – namely, that socialism was incompatible with freedom. And it would have released the creative energies of socialist militants themselves for grappling with all the tough political questions that needed to be answered – the sort of thinking that was stifled by a monolithic party culture.

We can’t turn the clock back now, and there is no sense trying to recreate the early Communist movement. Any radical force that can pose a challenge to capitalism today will have to assume a very different shape and base itself on new social constituencies. But the experience of Communism has plenty of lessons for activists trying to rebuild the Left. Either 21st century socialism will be democratic or it won’t be worth having at all.