The Communist Century: From Revolution To Decay: 1917 to 2000

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Chapter One

The Emergence of Communism in the 19th Century

The idea of a classless society based on common ownership and equality did not appear in the 19th century. As early as the 6th c. BCE, the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (ca. 570 BCE - ca. 495 BCE) founded in Crotone, southern Italy a community of like-minded philosophers who wanted to establish a just and classless society. This idea influenced another ancient Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 428 BCE-ca. 348 BCE) who went even further and wrote in his treatise The Republic that in the ideal society people would share not only their property but also their spouses and children. Later, the Essenes - a Jewish sect which was popular between the 2nd c. BCE and 1st c. CE also proclaimed communal ownership as well as some early Christian groups. Such Christians claimed that private property was evil and quoted the New Testament to prove that Jesus Christ wanted egalitarianism, disapproved of money-changers, tax collectors and other well-off people and even called them thieves. These Christian communist ideas became very popular among Manicheans, Gnostics, Cathars, Bogomils and other early medieval Christian sects. The Bogomils, who emerged as a sect in the 10th c. CE spread their teachings from Bulgaria across the Balkans to Italy and France, believed that everything material had come from the devil. Other notable examples from antiquity include the Spartacus slave revolt for equal rights in 73-71 BCE which impressed Soviet and East European communists so much that a number of Russian and other East European athletic clubs are still called Spartacus (Spartak in Russian), as well as the Mazdak movement in 5th c. Persia which also demanded communal ownership.

The peasants in medieval Europe shared the manorial landholding system. Similar systems prevailed in Japan and India too. Under the manorial (known also as seigniorial) system the peasants held land from the lord, cultivated their fields together and had communal use of the village property. Feeling that these common rights were threatened, many peasants joined the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England and the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 in Germany. The leader of the German peasant insurgents Thomas Münzer (1489-1525) openly rejected private property and established a communist egalitarian society in the small town of Mühlhausen, Thuringia, which lasted only for a year until Münzer’s execution. The Protestant sect of the Anabaptists picked up Münzer’s egalitarian ideas and tried to uphold them in southern Germany and Switzerland but they were severely persecuted by both Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants because of their rejection of private ownership. During the English Civil War (1642-1651) there were also some political and religious groups such as the Levellers and the Diggers who demanded an egalitarian society. The Diggers attempted to put their ideas into practice by farming on common land. The 16th and the 17th centuries were also the time when Thomas More (1478-1535) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) wrote their famous works Utopia and The City of the Sun. More imagined in his Utopia a perfect utopian egalitarian society in which everybody was equal except the atheists who were tolerated but distrusted. Campanella reinstated Plato’s ideas for a perfect egalitarian society in The City of the Sun where all people lived and worked in a city with a perfect climate and living conditions and shared their property, wives and children under the supervision of officials who made sure that the distribution was just and fair.

The 18th and 19th centuries, however, were the time when modern capitalism emerged, thanks to the increasing industrialisation in Western Europe. The poor working and living conditions of the workers in the new factories made European workers and poor people in general much more responsive than ever before to communist and other egalitarian ideas which promised them radical distribution of property and wealth. The French Revolution of 1789 brought messages for economic justice and some French revolutionaries such as Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) and François-Noël (known as Gracchus) Babeuf (1760-1797) called for the equal redistribution of wealth among all French people. Babeuf even organised in 1796 his secret revolutionary faction Conspiracy of the Equals, which aimed to establish a new political regime based on common ownership of all property. Babeuf was arrested and executed in 1797 but his ideas inspired a number of other French thinkers and revolutionaries in the 19th c. such as: Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) and the British social reformer and pioneer in the cooperative movement Robert Owen (1771-1858). Thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Proudhon constantly talked about their visions of a just egalitarian society and the evils of private property. Robert Owen established in 1825 a self-sufficient cooperative agricultural-industrial community called New Harmony in Indiana but it eventually failed due to persisting disagreements among its members. Cabet and Fourier also inspired the launching of various settlements in the USA based on their ideas of communal property.

The English follower of Robert Owen, John Goodwin Barmby (1820-1881) founded in 1841 the London Communist Propaganda Society and claimed that he coined the term communism in 1840 after his conversations with French revolutionaries but most probably by the 1820s, the French intellectuals and revolutionaries already used the term socialism and by the 1830s the term communism. These terms became popular in the 1840s among the German intellectuals as well, who used the term socialism to describe a state in which all or almost all property is owned by the state and communism as the rejection of any ownership of property at all. Even though the term communism, from the Latin word communis - common/universal, was born and applied first in France in the early 19th century, it turned into a fully fledged political ideology with its modern definition after the publication of the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Both of them were German philosophers and political theorists living in England in the 1840s as émigrés who fled the German states because of their political views. In a letter to his father Marx expressed his personal motivation with the following statement: If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

When Marx and Engels met in 1844, they realised that they had much in common and for that reason they started working together. Besides contributing to Marx’s writing, Engels also supported financially his friend until the rest of his life. Marx and Engels created a new political ideology which would later become known as Marxism. The two German philosophers recognised the influence of various other thinkers in the creation of the new ideology. The German philosophers Georg Hegel (1770-1831), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) influenced Marx and Engels as well as the ideas and theories of the British economists Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823) as well as the above mentioned French revolutionaries and thinkers, such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and others. These French theorists were called by Marx and Engels utopian socialists to differentiate them from their own theory which they called scientific communism. Marx claimed that: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it. Therefore, Marx’s goal was not only to write but to change the world by finding followers of his ideas who were ready to apply them universally, across the globe. Attempting to make history scientific Marx and Engels developed the concept of historical materialism which was based on the principle of dialectical materialism. In a nutshell, following Hegel’s theory of Dialectics, including the idea that all social phenomena are material in nature, rather than spiritual, Marx applied this concept to the human history of the world. Essentially, history is about economics in the classical Marxist theory. The society is divided into different social classes with incompatible socioeconomic and political interests. These classes clash into a constant class struggle and this struggle prompts historical change in any period of history. Following Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx and Engels determined six successive stages in the development of any society:

Stage 1: Primitive communism - according to Marx and Engels, the first human groups of hunter-gatherers and other tribal communities were essentially communist in nature, since they were lacking any private property.

Stage 2: Slave Society - This stage starts when the tribes develop city-states with private property as in the ancient Greek city-states. The private property allows the emergence of aristocracy.

Stage 3: Feudalism - The aristocrats are the ruling class in this stage but this is also the time when merchants/bourgeois appear and gradually turn into capitalists.

Stage 4: Capitalism - In this stage the capitalists are the ruling class and they create and employ the working class (proletariat) to exploit it and increase their capital.

Stage 5: Socialism or Dictatorship of the Proletariat - According to Marx, this stage is transitional on the road to the final one. This is the time when the working class emancipates and gains class consciousness, removes all capitalists from power, and takes full control of all economic and political power of the state. All property is state-owned in this stage.

Stage 6: Communism - This is the last and final stage, the peak of human development, which would bring absolute justice according to Marx and Engels. In this stage, the society will be both classless and stateless because the state will have already lost its role as an institution by that point. In The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote: The theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolition of all private property.

The society was also divided into six social classes by Marx and Engels. The classes were defined according to their relationship to the means of production, i.e. capital:

Proletariat - workers who sell their labour for wages but they do not own any means of production/capital. This is the main force that can execute the communist revolution. They are the most numerous and the most oppressed class in the industrial world according to Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx stated: Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

Bourgeoisie - This is the class of the capitalists, who own the means of production and exploit the labour of the proletariat

Petit Bourgeoisie - small proprietors and other less wealthy people who might work and employ labour simultaneously.

Lumpenproletariat - Criminals, beggars and other similar groups disconnected from the capitalist economic system ready to offer their services to anyone who pays them.

Landlords - This class includes the remnants of the last aristocrats who still manage to retain their hereditary wealth.

Peasants and farmers - Even though