Of course, Communism as an idea had much earlier origins. The inhabitants of Plato’s ideal “Republic” held property in common, and the early Church provided a model for fraternity and the sharing of wealth. This Christian tradition, combined with traditional peasant communities’ cultivation of “common land”, was the foundation for the Communist experiments and utopias of the early modern period.
But all of these projects were founded on the desire to return to an agrarian “golden age” of economic equality, whereas future Communists also claimed they were creating modern states based on principles of political equality. And it is under the Jacobins that we can see this second, political ambition. The Jacobins did not redistribute property, nor did they oppose the market; indeed they persecuted those who did. Nor did they advocate “class struggle.” But they did argue, like, later Communists, that only a united band of fraternal citizens, free of privilege, hierarchy and division, could create a strong nation that was dignified and effective in the wider world.
And yet there were tensions within the new type of politics, tensions that would become all too familiar in future Communist regimes. The revolutionary elite, seeking to build and consolidate an effective state, often found that their relations with the more radical masses were less confraternal than confrontational. Meanwhile, the Jacobins themselves split, between those for whom Hercules’ “courage”, or emotional revolt, was paramount, and those who emphasized order, reason and “light.” Ultimately these conflicts were to destroy the Jacobins, amidst much violence and turmoil.
The estates system was abolished, and with it the notion that men were born into particular and tiered stations of society ordained by God. No longer were the first two estates — the clergy and the aristocracy — to be privileged over the rest of society — the “third estate.” All men were declared to be legally equal, “citizens” of a single, coherent “nation” rather than members of separate estates, corporations and guilds. IN part, these demands for legal equality arose from third-estate anger at the superciliousness of the aristocracy; ordinary people also resented having to pay taxes from which their “superior” were exempt. But the attack on the estates system was also a much more profound critique of French society. Royal power and social distinctions, it was commonly argued, had weakened France and rendered it feeble (even effete) against its enemies — and especially against its great rival Britain. “Despotism” and “feudalism” not only created divisions between people but also engendered a servile and unmanly character.
A revolution is never made by halves; it must either be total or it will abort. All the revolutions which history has conserved for memory as well as those that have been attempted in our time have failed because people wanted to square new laws with old customs and rule new institutions with old men.
At the centre of the new culture were political equality and “reason,” or the break with tradition. Old distinctions of dress became unfashionable, and costume became much plainer. Meanwhile, the traditional was replaced with the “rational.”
At the root of Rousseau’s philosophy was a critique of inequality. He condemned the old aristocratic patriarchy and the servility it bred, but he did not approve of the liberal alternative either — the high road, he believed, to greed, materialism, envy and unhappiness. For Rousseau, the ideal society was either a benign paternalism, or a fraternity: a citizenry of brothers modelled on the classical, self-sacrificing heroes portrayed by David so vividly. Heroism then, once exclusively an aristocratic quality, was to be democratized; a republic had to have “heroes for citizens.”
Rousseau described his ideal community in his work The Social Contract of 1762: it would combine the merits of his native puritanical Geneva and ancient Sparta. Sparta appealed to Rousseau because at one point in its history it had been a city-state in which everybody had seemed to submerge selfish desires to communal goals and lived an austere life of heroic endeavour. In Rousseau’s utopia, the people as a whole would meet regularly in assemblies; abjuring individualism, they would act according to the “General Will,” a will that outlawed all inequality and privilege. This would also be a society in which every citizen owed military service, for Rousseau’s ideal was, at root, a quasi-military order — not because he was interested in expansionary wars, but he saw armies as the ideal fusion of public service and self-sacrifice.
Caught between the desire to keep the momentum of the revolution going, whilst saving it from the radicals and class division, Robespierre moved against both left and right. Both the ultra Hebert and the less radical Danton were arrested and guillotined. Having outlawed both ultras and moderates, Robespierre was left with an ever-shrinking base of support. In his efforts to continue the revolution without mass support, he turned to methods that had echoes in later Communist regimes: the persecution of those suspected of being “counter-revolutionaries” and propaganda, or, in Jacobin language, “Terror” and the promotion of virtue.
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in the time of revolution is both virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power. Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country.
The state had hitherto only centralized “physical government, material government”; the task was now to centralize “moral government.” The Commission produced revolutionary songs, censored plays, and staged political festivals. It also promoted one of Robespierre’s most ambitious projects: the founding of a new, non-Christian state religion — the “Cult of the Supreme Being.”
Robespierre also spent a great deal of his time checking up on officials’ ideological purity. Those with “patriotic virtue” were promoted; “enemies” — vaguely defined — removed and arrested. Repression was now directed not only against actual conspirators, but anybody with “counter-revolutionary” attitudes. The law created a new criminal category, one which was to be revived in the future: the “enemy of the people.” Anybody who might threaten the Revolution — whether by conspiring with foreigners or behaving immorally — could be arrested, and the law had a marked effect on the use of political repression.
They were also becoming increasingly anxious about its arbitrariness, for Robespierre alone had the power to decide on the measure of virtue and vice. The deputies understandably became worried that they could be the next targets, and began to plot his removal.
For a time, the very contradictions within the Jacobins’ project were an advantage. They could use the language of classical virtue and morality to mobilize the sans-culottes, whilst employing technically efficient methods in the army and industry.
They tried to build effective modern, technologically sophisticated economies whilst also believing that emotional inspiration was the best way of mobilizing the masses. At times they tried to solve these contradictions by trying to impose strict discipline, or by imposing a reign of virtue with propaganda and violence against unbelievers. Yet the Communists had no qualms about destroying property rights, and so could, for a time, secure the support of the poor. They could also learn from the history of the revolutionary movement, and of the French Revolution itself. The Jacobins had nothing to look back to, except a classical past that was of dubious value.
Indeed, many have seen in his famous painting a highly ambivalent attitude towards revolutionary violence: the figures closest to the viewer are corpses, and despite the title, it is not Liberty who leads the people but a pistol-brandishing child.
The failure of the Jacobins, he insisted, arose precisely from their excessive admiration for the classical city-state. Their nostalgia for ancient Sparta and Rome had led them to oppose the sans-culottes. The political equality they espoused, giving all men full citizenship, was no longer enough; in a modern society true equality and harmony would be realized only with full economic equality, and without support from society, they had been forced to use violence. Marx also made even greater efforts than Delacroix to temper is revolutionary Romanticism with an appreciation of science and economic modernity. The Jacobins, he argued, had exaggerated the power of morality and political will to transform society, underestimating the importance of economic forces.
Babeuf’s ideas became the core of what became known ad “Communism”: communal ownership, egalitarianism and redistribution to the poor, and the use of militant, revolutionary tactics to seize power.
How could work and pleasure be reconciled? Owen’s solution had much in common with Fourier’s: people between 15 and 20 would work, and with the help of children would be able to produce all that the community needed; those aged between 20 and 25 would supervise; and those aged between 25 and 30 would organize storage and distribution, but that would only take 2 hours of their day; the remaining time could be devoted to “pleasure and gratification.”
The goal of society was production, as “the production of useful things is the only reasonable and positive aim that political societies can set themselves.” Scientists, industrialists, or a combination of the two, therefore had to be in power. Democracy — the rule of the ignorant masses — was only dangerous and damaging, as the Jacobin experience had vividly illustrated. Indeed, ideally politics could be dispensed with altogether, in favour of rational decision-making.
The tension between the Enlightenment devotion to reason, order and science, and a Romantic disdain for routine and passion for heroic struggle, was a fissure within Marx’s own thinking. His personality certainly had more in common with the brilliant and extraordinary Romantic genius than the worldly and sociable Voltairean man of science.
And as has been seen, he identified with that great rebel of ancient myth — Prometheus, struggling against the tyrant Zeus.
Marx’s sentiments did not change markedly as an adult. Intense, pugnacious and sensitive, he declared that his idea of happiness was “to fight,” and his idea of misery was “submission.” He described his main characteristic as “singleness of purpose,” and this quality certainly put him at an advantage over his contemporaries. Although he was less original than many other socialist thinkers of the time, he was infinitely more energetic and painstaking in synthesizing and forging them into a coherent whole, and he put this rigour at the service of rebellion rather than the forces of order.
Given Marx’s self-image as a rebel, challenging authority to bring Enlightenment to humanity, it is not surprising that he became interested in radical ideas. Initially this radicalism emerged in debates on philosophy, when he was a member of the “Young Hegelian” group of thinkers. Georg Hegel, the German philosopher, had developed a theory of world history by which history was seen as the unfolding story of the progress of mankind’s spirit towards increasing freedom. The process was “dialectical,” that is, it moved forward through struggles between competing ideas and social systems, in which the clash between a principle (“thesis”) and its opposite (“antithesis”) resulted in “synthesis,” incorporating the positive aspects of both. Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern constitutional monarchy were all syntheses, stages in the movement of humanity towards the ideal society. After Hegel’s death, Hegelians disagreed over what constituted that ideal society. The establishment saw it as the contemporary Prussian Protestant monarchy, arguing that the existing order represented the “end of history.” The Young Hegelians, however, condemned the monarchy as reactionary and saw the ideal as a parliamentary system, which allowed freedom of the press and religion, though they decried the economic liberalism which, they argued, gave excessive power to private property.
It may seem strange, given later developments, that Marx’s primary interest was freedom. But this was “freedom” in a Rousseaunian sense — the end of dependence on other people and material things. In modern societies, Marx argued, man was losing his autonomy, his ability to express himself and the opportunities to develop his creative capabilities. In Marx’s Hegelian philosophical language, man was being controlled by “alienated” forces outside himself. Autocracies deprived the individual of freedom, but liberal democracy was no solution, because it merely allowed people to vote periodically for a government over which they then had little influence. Only when all citizens took part in running the state all the time — as had been the case in ancient Athens — would they end this political “alienation.” The same was true in the economic sphere. Man was a naturally creative being who, collaborating with others, realized his full potential through labor, whilst also changing the world around him. But in modern, capitalist societies, men had become slaves to “alien” forces, money, the market and the material things they themselves produced. They worked not to express their creativity, but merely to eat, drink, and acquire material things; they frequently worked for other people; they were cogs in a machine, forced to perform particular, narrow tasks, according to the modern division of labor; moreover, they were increasingly “alienated” from other people, unable to establish true human relationships.
For Marx, the solution to this grim state of affairs was the abolition of the market and private property, that is, the establishment of “Communism.” All men would govern the state directly, participating in government rather than electing parliamentary representatives. This, then, was not modern liberal democracy, which is based on the assumption that there will always be conflicts of interest between citizens. Marx’s vision of Communism assumed that once class division was overcome, complete consensus could be achieved. Liberal rights and freedoms, which protect the minority against the majority, would be wholly unnecessary. This critique of liberalism was to become central to the ideologies of Communist regimes.
Under Communism, economic life would also be transformed: people would not work for money, the market would be abolished, work would become a creative activity, and people would express themselves through their labor. As Marx put it, “our products would be like so many mirrors, each one reflecting our essence… My work would be a free expression of my life, and therefore a free enjoyment of my life.” And economic well-being would not suffer, because if men worked for enjoyment they would be much more energetic and enthusiastic than if they were downtrodden and exploited. The division of labor would end, and men would be “whole.”
Indeed, in some places The Communist Manifesto might be taken for a paen of praise for capitalism and globalization, and event its progenitors, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie of the Manifesto was a revolutionary class, in many ways to be admired. It had “accomplished wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”: by “subjecting the countryside the the rule of towns,” it had rescued “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life”; by creating more “massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together,” and centralizing production in huge factories; and it was even replacing “national seclusion” with “universal interdependence of nations,” a process which benefited the proletariat because, unlike the bourgeoisie, it had no fatherland.
Yet, whilst Marx and Engels praised the bourgeoisie for shaping nation states and the global economic system, they also maintained that it could not control the dynamic world it had created. Indeed, the bourgeoisie was unwittingly fashioning the tools of its own destruction: using the Romantic, poetic language he loved so much, Marx described it as “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Industrialization was destroying small-scale, artisanal production, and creating an enormous industrial working class, which would ultimately destroy the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie’s nemesis would take the form of the new industrial proletariat. Proletarians, Marx insisted, would be much more collectivist and better organized than artisans, learning how to cooperate from their work together in large factories. They would also become increasingly dissatisfied, as the logic of capitalism inevitably led to their increasing exploitation. Competition between capitalists would force them to invest more than more in new labour-saving machinery, which would inevitably reduce their profits and compel them to exploit workers even more brutally. But it would also compel capitalists to produce too much for the market to absorb, leading to periodic economic crises, putting many small capitalists out of business, and concentrating ownership in even fewer hands. The instability and irrationality of capitalism would thus prepare the ground for Communism: the workers, an increasingly revolutionary force, would be ready to seize control of a mechanized production process now ideally suited to rational management by central planning. The social and economic system, like a ripe fruit, would readily drop into the laps of the waiting workers. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.” The state would improve the economy “in accordance with a common plan,” and all workers would be mobilized in “industrial armies.”