"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." The Communist Manifesto of 1848 gathered up all the ills of capitalism into an assurance of ultimate emancipation from wage slavery, but it had very little to say about how that transformation was to be effected. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concluded with a rallying cry, "Workers of the world, unite!" but what form was that common endeavour to take?
A distinction between the communist party as embodying the idea, or indeed the ideal, to which the makers of the new order dedicated themselves, and the party as an organisation capable of directing it, runs through this comprehensive survey of the communist party in all its national manifestations.
James McAdams, originally a German specialist and now a professor of international studies at Notre Dame University in Indiana, set himself the task of explaining the rise and fall of this fateful institution of the modern era.
The sudden collapse of communism at the close of the last century brought a flurry of post mortems. It seemed obvious after the event that the command economy was hopelessly inefficient, the official ideology bankrupt and that the ailing, sclerotic despots could not suppress the demand for freedom – even though some of those conducting the autopsies had argued previously that a totalitarian regime maintained total control.
McAdams rejects such blanket explanations. He sees different communist regimes that faced mounting difficulties in the 1980s responding with different strategies: Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, the erratic attempts to accommodate critics in Hungary and Poland, the path of modernising autocracy chosen in China.
A common predicament was how to breathe life into a revolutionary party that had become an instrument of control. That party was conceived by Vladimir Lenin as a body of dedicated individuals devoting themselves to the task of bringing revolutionary consciousness to a slumbering proletariat and guiding it to its appointed historical mission. This was a vanguard party primed for battle and governed by an iron discipline.
The Bolshevik party was the product of Russian circumstances that allowed very little space for open political activity and the breakdown of the Tsarist regime during the First World War that allowed Lenin's Bolsheviks to seize power. They did so in the expectation of a wider revolution across and beyond Europe, but the failure of these uprisings left them with the task of constructing socialism in one country, a country ravaged by civil war and beleaguered by external enemies. In response Lenin created the Communist International to direct the efforts of revolutionaries in all parts of the world and imposed his own party model on them.
McAdams rightly draws attention to the way that international communism was formed in an epoch of social upheaval, civil as well as global war, economic collapse, ethnic conflict, colonial uprisings and national humiliations.
The First World War was rightly known as the Great War, for it was unprecedented in its scale and ruinous consequences. It destroyed the longstanding Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanoff and Ottoman empires, parcelling out their territories among new nation-states that were racked by ethnic and social conflict. It created destitution and left crippling weaknesses in the world economy. The history of communism ran in parallel with that of liberal democracy, and many of the new democracies failed to survive the rise of fascism over the following two decades.
If Lenin's vanguard party offered a model for gaining power, it provided little guidance how to govern. The practical tasks of government, moreover, had to be combined with the task of building a new socialist order.
As is well known, differences among Lenin's successors over how this should be done ended with Stalin using his control of the party apparatus to suppress dissent and then unleashing the Great Terror to eliminate any threat to his total domination. This culminated in show trials of his defeated rivals and a purge that removed the majority of leading party members – of 149 full and candidate members elected to the Central Committee in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot as enemies of the people.
As McAdams observes, Stalin replaced party rule with personal dictatorship; between 1934 and his death in 1953, there were just two party congresses. And his own cult of the all-powerful, all-knowing leader prefigured the way that communist regimes installed after the Second World War produced their own dictators.
This corrosive tendency to centralisation and absolutism was intrinsic to the vanguard party. Its centralised decision-making and disciplined obedience made it vulnerable to personal rule. In speaking for the party, the Titos, Maos and Hoxhas monopolised its authority and a lack of accountability was an endemic weakness. More than this, the party itself became a docile organisation incapable of animating the goal of a classless society.
The book excels in explaining the repertoire of methods whereby the new communist regimes that came to power after the Second World War tried to maintain their momentum. It has less to say about communist parties in the West, where the emancipatory endeavour was overlaid by the same form of party organisation, though without the sanctions available where communists ruled. The Cold War has little place in this history.
McAdams draws attention to an essay Lenin wrote towards the end of his life, when he likened the party to a mountain climber. During the ascent the climber reaches a point where it is apparent he can no longer continue. Naturally, he is discouraged at the prospect of retracing his steps to find an alternative route, conscious that those watching from the ground will ridicule his mistake. It is fortunate, said Lenin, the climber cannot hear their mockery for he needs to keep a clear head at high altitudes. It's a telling parable of the need to ignore criticism.
Nikita Khrushchev performed such a manoeuvre in 1956. Having won the struggle for succession, he set out to restore the party and his secret speech to the 1956 congress set Stalin's cult of personality against Lenin's supposedly collegial style of leadership. As he recited Stalin's crimes, it is said that a delegate had the audacity to demand of the new first secretary why he had done nothing to stop this tyranny. Khrushchev supposedly stopped and demanded "who said that?" Silence. "Now you understand why we didn't do anything," Khrushchev observed.
Khrushchev was not the only leader to retrace his steps and seek an alternative path to the goal of communism, but he and others after him found there was no way back from the party as a lifeless instrument of dictatorship. As McAdams puts it, instead of searching for a new path, they left the mountain behind. His carefully plotted account of their fruitless journeys shows why.
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