Communism

Karl Marx was no enthusiast of parliamentarism. According to his biographer, socialism’s main ideologue thought “the illusion of political democracy was yet another symptom of the alienating power of commercial society.” Nonetheless, in Marx’s many volumes of work, we can find statements to suggest that in certain circumstances spreading the right to vote and workers’ participation in political life may help avoid a brutal revolution.² Friedrich Engels thought much the same—and after their deaths this concept grew stronger, particularly among Germany’s social democrats, the strongest and best organized leftist party in Europe.

All the same, socialist movements were forever marked by a kind of duality—democracy was not seen as an aim in itself, more like a tool to hasten the fall of capitalism. Revolution and civil war were a regular part of the leftist worker’s vocabulary, even if, on an everyday basis, the focus was on a more practical struggle to improve the lot of the industrial laborer.³

The coup organized by the Bolsheviks destroyed the new Russian democracy and became the beginning of the world’s first monoparty dictatorship. The triumph of Lenin’s supporters seemed to give the lie to Marx’s theory—the revolutionaries took power in a very backward country, not the most economically advanced one, as the teachings of dialectical materialism suggested.⁴ Furthermore, it was less mass gatherings than the fierce determination of groups of conspirators that led to the Kremlin chimes playing the Internationale. A fascination with this “new opening,” joined with admiration for the Bolshevik’s consistently anti-war stance after 1914, led nearly all of Europe’s socialist movements to splinter—newly created communist parties found themselves beholden to Moscow, officially coordinating their actions via the Third Internationale.⁵

An opposition to the wars between capitalists did not mean an aversion to violence as such—quite the contrary. During the civil war, Bolsheviks carried out 200,000 political executions, four times more than their opponents.⁶ In 1918, the first labor camp was founded on Solovetsky Islands, from which the mighty Gulag Archipelago later grew⁷—one of its inmates was Victor Serge, who is quote at the top of this page.

“And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction,” wrote Leon Trotsky in Terrorism and Communism of 1921.⁸