The Books of My Life: The Red Flag

Most people of a certain age, particularly in the West, when they think of communism today,  think of it as an utter failure, as the evil empire, and as something that defeated by the capitalist and democratic West, and particularly by America, during the Cold War from the late 1940s to the 1990s. Communism was, however, more than the demonic force of polemicists and more than the last great hope for humankind of its apologists. It was a social movement that was at the heart of global economics, politics, and culture during most of the twentieth century.

David Priestland in his The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove, 2009) explores the history of communism from its beginnings in the late 18th century to today. Just as sociologists of religion have tried to escape the iron cage of orthodox and heretical polemics and apologetics via dispassionate typology, Priestland tries to escape the iron cage of polemics and apologetics about communism since the 19th century. Priestland delineates several ideal type forms of communism. There is, he argues, the romantic communism of the barricades with its romantic revolutionary hero. There is the science and industrialisation as progressive and history as teleological modernist communism. And there is pragmatic communism or socialism with its compromises with bourgeois "democracy" and nationalism, another very prominent cultural meaning system in the modern and postmodern world.

These varieties of communism are, Priestland argues, ideal types--an approach Max Weber pioneered in--varieties of communism that can be isolated in theory but often succeeded or proceeded one another, interacted with, and were often interrelated in practise, something Priestland nicely shows in his explorations of the history of communism in all its varieties from the 19th century on. Needless to say the empirical fact that there were multiple forms of communism and socialism was lost on many anti-communist polemicists and pro-communist apologists, like the Bolsheviks, who argued, similarly to the Catholic Church when it maintains that it is the only true variety of Christianity, that there was only one true variety of communism, For the Bolsheviks and for those who demonised Bolshevism, the only variety of communism was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.

There are a number of points about communism that Priestland makes in his synthesis that I wholeheartedly agree with. Priestland rightly emphasises that war played an important role in the rise of revolutionary, modernist, and pragmatic varieties of communism and that communism was a reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of the modern world.

Priestland notes that communism was and is a meaning system and that as a cultural meaning system it has similarities to religious meaning systems that originated in the Mediterranean world and which are still with us today, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Revolutionary communism, for example, whose cultural or meaning system developed in the context of war, initially the French Revolution and the European revolutions that followed, in the context of great economic change--the advent of mass capitalism and mass industrialisation--in the context of political change--the coming of mass politics and mass bureaucracies--and in the context of cultural change, created a social movement around a culture opposed to hierarchies and inequalities associated with industrialism and capitalism (and later imperialism) along with a cult of the romantic hero manning the revolutionary barricades a la Hugo. Modernist communism developed a culture that saw industrialisation and science as progressive and the triumph of communism as historically inevitable, a triumph that would result, modernist communists believed, in the end history (teleology). Revolutionary and modernist communisms even had their own catechism, Stalin's Short Course, for example.

By looking at communism as a social movement with a culture that creates a sense of identity and a sense of a community with a mission, it is clear that communism shares a lot with Western Christianity and Islam. Looking at communism in this way also allows us to see how communism shares a lot with a Weberian understanding of the sectarian process. Weber argued that most religious groups or culturally oriented social movements began in charisma, the charisma of a charismatic leader. As a result a sense of identity arose out of a common perception of that charismatic leader, and a strong sense of community with a mission to evangelise the message of that charismatic leader arose. Over time, Weber argued, particularly with the death of a charismatic leader, the charismatic sect morphs into a paternalistic church or denomination, and eventually, with the coming of modernity, into a rational bureaucratic church or denomination. With bureaucratisation, however, Weber argued, came dissent and the claim that the bureaucratic church or denomination was only a shade of what it originally was. As a result new sects seeking to capture the primitive or original spirit of the charismatic sect arose setting in motion the sect/church/denomination cycle anew. As Priesland makes clear communism of the romantic and modernist varieties with their conviction that they and they alone had the truth (ethnocentrism) and that others needed to be told of this truth (evangelisation) led to periodic purification or inquisitional campaigns, periodic renewal campaigns, and periodic sectarianisation within the communist movement. Think of all the varieties of Trotskyism over the years.

Ironically, as Priestland points out, this sense of ideological purity, the need for renewal, and evangelical fervour, is not only found in Christianity, Islam, and communism. It can also be readilly discerned in the neo-liberalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Like Christianity, Islam, and communism neo-liberals, particularly in their revolutionary and modernist forms, claim to have a monopoly on the truth--free markets as god's or nature's economic system--tend to be exclusive and purificationist thanks to their I'm OK, you are not OK, if you want to be OK you need to be like me mentalities, and tend to have a belief in the necessity of bringing their one truth message to the rest of world via evangelisation. Neo-liberals, in other words, as Priestland notes, are somewhat inverted communists.

Priestland rightly notes that communism in comparison with capitalism was more transparent. Capitalism thanks to its almost occult and magical take on the workings of the market, was and perhaps is a more powerful ideology and opiate than communism. Those in the communist world could more readily see, particularly after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that the equality and radiant future that communism preached seemed at odds with the realities of inequality, perks for the powerful, and the seemingly endless putting off of the utopia at the end of the communist radiant rainbow. Neo-liberalism, in other words, with its ideology that inequality is inevitable thanks to the workings of the free market and variations in how hard one works and its messianic utopianism--everyone will benefit from the free market--is a more difficult drug for the masses to see through, claims Priestland. It is so difficult to see through that many believe, despite the oligarchic republicanism present in the West to varying degrees, despite inequalities and increasing inequality between rich and poor in the West and particularly in the US and UK, that individuals are responsible for their own destinies, that individuals make their own beds and must, as a result, lie in them.

While there are other equally dispassionate ways to typologise communisms--one might distinguish between utopian, scientific, and communal forms of communism--Priestland's approach is not only helpful but, and this is critical, more dispassionate than the capitalist "democracy" versus evil godless commie approach, an approach that parallels the religious orthodoxy versus religious heresy typology that has has dominated popular and even intellectual and academic approaches to communism. As Priestland notes it is absolutely essential to put the polemical and apologetic approach to rest if we are to truly understand the "nature" of socialisms and communisms of all types and communist dynamics.

Priestland's book doesn't, by the way, simply give us a glimpse into the social movements of the left. It also gives us an analogical glimpse into the social movements of the right. We currently live in an era of vast inequalities, of periodic conflicts, and of hardening hierarchies, all of which have led to the revival of the romantic capitialist nationalism of the American, Polish, Austrian, British, Hungarian,  Philippine, and British varieties. Given this reality, Priestland's superb book should be self-recommending not only to those interested in social movements of the left but to those concerned about the revival of the romantic right and who are interested in social movements of the right. The more things change...