AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 27 Communism In Crisis i The Beijing Massacre and the recent dramatic events in Poland and Hungary emphasise that the socialist world is splitting up into reformers and monoliths. Gareth Stedman Jones traces the origins of its breakdown. n May 1968 when student sickening and mindless terror - a sordid 1960s, violence has been an inseparable demonstrations had brought and inhuman end to a great movement accompaniment to the history of 20th- the French government to the whose awesome achievements had century communism. verge of collapse, it is reported once attracted all that was most noble But this sombre and terrifying se­ I and courageous in 20th-century China that General de Gaulle made a quence of events bears only a superfi­ to its banner. secret visit to General Massu to cial resemblance to the violence unleashed in Tiananmen Square. It discover whether the army would Thus, if May 1989 had begun by resembling May 1968, by June it had forms part of a history which is now ' intervene to restore order if the come to resemble June 1848 when har­ past; it belongs to an epoch in which a -need arose. In the event, the dened generals like Cavaignac and world communist movement con­ troops were not called in; conser­ Windischgratz led raw and uneducated sidered itself to be engaged in mortal vative sentiment within the soldiers, fed on tales of the corruption combat with the forces of capitalism, , civilian population was effectively and decadence of the towns, against the imperialism and reaction. However ter­ mobilised and the legitimacy of democratic students and workers of rible the initiatives of Stalin and Mao, the government preserved. Paris and Vienna they can only be understood within this ^ • It may be presumed that Deng Xiao If 1848, rather than the previous his­ frame. The purges and the cultural Ping would have followed General de tory of communism, suggests a better revolution were the effects of mass Gaulle’s course of action in June had the point of comparison, it is because, by revolutionary processes in which mil­ , option been open to him. But it seems acting in the way in which it did, the lions were mesmerised and gripped by clear that it was not. Popular sentiment Communist Party leadership turned it­ a radical demonology, a civil war in Beijing was mounting daily, even self into a form of ancien regime and waged between the imaginary social hourly, against him. Neither the party, engaged in a form of violence which categories conjured up by political the police, nor the locally-based marks a break with its communist past. rhetoric. They can no more be attributed military could be relied upon to halt the Twenty years ago hundreds of to the well-oiled machinery of process of popular mobilisation. Un- thousands of Chinese people perished totalitarianism than can the aroused 1 able to find any accessible source of in the cultural revolution and 50 years fury of radical Islam unleashed by the legitimacy in civil society and in­ ago millions died in the campaigns and Ayatollah in Iran. Similarly, the Soviet capable of activating its day-to-day ap­ purges which followed Soviet collec­ interventions in Eastern Europe in the paratus of political authority, the tivisation. From the suppression of the ’50s and ’60s were also presented as the Communist Party abdicated. Its man­ Kronstadt rising in the early days of the armed defence of an international date from heaven was irretrievably lost. Russian revolution through the quell­ revolution under threat. Political power was surrendered to the ing of political rebellions in Berlin, Violence and metaphors of violence military and the result was an act of Budapest and Prague in the 1950s and dominated communist language from 28 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW the beginnings of bolshevism. The class the devastating human waste which consequences of this communist com­ war was a war, and the tactics of the capitalism had engendered. mand economy itself. vanguard party were conceived as battle The proclaimed success of Soviet col­ This was a moment of truth of ines­ engagements. The Communist Party lectivisation and the first five-year plan timable significance. It put into ques­ was thus an instrument designed for forced economists and politicians in the tion the very idea of a communist war; its unique power derived from the capitalist world to consider the neces­ state-led economy. The choice con- recruitment of civilian energy within a sity to control capitalism through some fronting communist states was either to quasi-military formation governed by form of economic planning. maintain self-sufficiency (but also clear lines of command. From the time Roosevelt’s New Deal, some isolation) at the cost of declining stand­ of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done, the ‘Keynesian planning’ for full employ­ ards of living, growing political dissent party’s purpose was to concentrate and ment and even the National Socialist and increasing technological disad­ lead the social forces in the revolution­ strategy in Germany to create full vantage; or else, to open themselves to ary struggle, and to divide and disperse employment through directed public new forms of economic thinking, attract state power and its reactionary supports. works and rearmament were in part in­ foreign investment, and to allow for the The original rationale of Lenin’s fluenced by the Soviet example. It is growth of unregulated market sectors. strategy lay in the special conditions of easy to forget that this perception of While smaller socialist countries like Tsarist Russia - an autocratic regime communist economy persisted into the Cuba or Vietnam could pursue the first and thus, the necessity for the party to 1960s. China had attained greater choice, for the communist superpowers work clandestinely. After the success of growth rates than India and Khrushchev themselves this choice was ultimately 1917, this animating idea was extended could confidently boast "we will bury impossible. The Soviet Union was al­ to all states in which the new communist you" when talking of the strategy of ready becoming dependent on the parties were to operate. From the foun­ ‘peaceful coexistence’. American wheat surplus from as early dation of the Comintern, the interna­ It was not until the 1970s that such as 1927 and the intensification of the tional communist movement was to act beliefs, both in the communist and in Cold War in the early 1980s imposed aii as one, both in leading the class struggle the capitalist sphere, were radically intolerable strain on the stagnant in particular countries and in defending transformed. In the 30 years since 1945, domestic economy. In China, the ex­ the first workers’ states, threatened on perience of the cultural revolution was every side by the manoeuvres of world a vivid illustration of the consequences capitalist encirclement. "the...Communist of attempting to isolate the communisi state from the world. Out of this emerges the particular stance towards But if this choice was ultimately ines­ communist stance towards democracy: democracy:...desirable, capable, the political costs were heavy. democracy was desirable, but a luxury in a situation in which the international but a luxury" For economic liberalisation could not proletarian cause was assailed by but erode the core of beliefs, both counter-revolution and fascism. Ac­ mass democracy had become the norm dirigiste and egalitarian, which had cording to the theory of democratic in Western European countries and the animated and sustained communism centralism, decisions within the party promises of better living standards through the first two-thirds of the 20th were supposed to be arrived at by a which apologists for capitalism had century. It necessarily meant the aban­ democratic process but, once laid down, been making for a hundred years, be­ donment of a manichean world view in the line was to be followed by all. It was came a perceived reality for the which the communist party had the within this manichean framework held majority of the population in in­ leading role to play. The warlike from 1917 through 1956, that com­ dustrialised countries. metaphors of leninism no longer pos­ munists were able to live with and The perceived success of the com­ sessed purchase in the domestic or the defend even the most stupefying chan­ munist model in underdeveloped international sphere. The egalitarian ges of tactic and the most unacceptable countries in the 1950s was also increas­ priorities of old communist leadership's uses of coercion. ingly challenged: the early successes of were now qualified by the language of China and North Korea were now market efficiency and the necessity of It is now difficult to understand what matched by the growth produced by nurturing an entrepreneurial spirit. In looks like the immense credulity of the capitalism in such ‘underdeveloped’ the USSR in the Brezhnev era these supporters of communism, unless the countries as South Korea, Singapore contradictions were resisted or ignored. foundation of this belief is remembered: and Taiwan. Conversely, in the com­ But with the advent of Gorbachev the that is, that it was capitalism that was in munist world, leaders and party offi­ need for basic changes, political as well crisis, while communism represented cials had been forced to face up to the as economic, was confronted. the hope of the future. incompetence and, indeed, impotence In China, on the other hand, the policy Such a view seemed to be borne out of their economies to provide basic con­ was more contradictory. Modernisation by the facts of mass unemployment and sumer needs and to compete in the field was declared a priority, foreign invest­ depression, of the violence of of new technologies, civil and military, ment was welcomed and tens of colonialism and imperialism and of the which were rapidly developing in the thousands of students were sent to study1 unreason underpinning fascism and West Even more galling, it was becom­ abroad.