To Overthrow The World: A review
Sean McMeekin’s new book is a very good introduction to the history of Marxism in theory and then in practice. The theoretical sections deal with a genealogy of egalitarianism, then a chapter is dedicated to Marxist theory, and then there is a chapter on Marx’s organisation, the first international, and his weighings in on 19th century political developments. Then there is an overview of the second international and an introduction to Lenin and an explanation as to what made him different and why his stratagems were able to succeed.
The second part deals with communism in practice, which treads over materials from his works on the Russian revolution and Stalin’s war, but also fills in the entire interwar period and the fumbling attempts of the Comintern to spread communism around the world in that time period. Then we move past the Second World War and we’re in uncharted territories in respect to McMeekin’s previously published materials, dealing with Maoism, the establishment of the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, the Khrushchev years, the pivot of communism to the third world, and the Cambodian genocide. The final chapters deal with the scumminess and bankruptcy of communist Eastern Europe, its collapse, and the soviet whimper.
The book is not a triumphalistic reading of the rise and fall of communism, it neither blames nor exonerates Marx for their outcomes. The Leninist state is fully in tact in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and most importantly China, and he sees many of their tactics being applied in western countries. The abject failure of western institutionalisation in Russia, the entrenchment and growth of China, and authoritarian ideas such as debanking, the social distancing of the lockdowns and so forth have shown that Anglo-Saxon notions of liberty are being discarded at the drop of a hat. Mcmeekin does not conclude with a sense of optimism, but foreboding, with western regimes increasingly resembling Leninist control apparatuses, the explanation for why this happened are not explored.
As a descriptive summary of the history of communism it’s excellent as an overview. The only two limits are perhaps a more detailed summary of Marx’s philosophical anthropology and relation to the French socialists which might have added a chapter, but McMeekin probably didn’t want another monster size book straight after Stalin’s War. Nonetheless there is a great deal of insight into the life of Marx and reconstructs from his biography what was his overwhelming focus. We emerge with a clear picture of Marx as a Utopian German philosopher cum news junkie who was interested in his opaque Hegelian formulations and his main obsession was various forms of accelerationism towards his revolution. He in fact had very little interest in the material conditions of workers, not that he lacked empathy or humanism, but that he found factories and markets very dull, this goes a long way to explain the animation and elan in his political and philosophical writings and the utter and infamous dryness of capital, which only heats up in the conclusion demanding the expropriation of the expropriators.
The book also details Marx’s activism in his lifetime. His control and mothballing of the first international due to concerns he’d lose its ideological purity and Bakunin’s prophesy. His control over the organisation as a dictator lead to Bakunin’s fiery rhetoric, which is quoted at length in the book. It details almost exactly how Leninist revolution would look like in practice and this episode really highlights Kolakowski’s point that speculation over whether or not Marx would have endorsed communism in practice is pointless from at least three points of view. The first is that from a historical-sociological point of view the product of Marxism was the various self proclaimed Marxist revolutionaries that created the twentieth century tyrannies, whether or not Marx would have liked it is irrelevant.
The only historical fact that can’t be disputed is that this is what people took from him and this is what they did, as a result of trying to implement his vision in his most widely read works. The second point is that people warned contemporary to him that a managerialist dictatorship is what it would look like in practice, what in the end occurred wasn’t some surprising or unforeseen turn of events, people both predicted this is what would happen and people implemented it based on sincere interpretation. Finally Marx as news junkie endorsed the Paris commune, with which he had no links organising or inspiring, and which didn’t closely follow his strictures. If he felt as though something was clamouring in the progressive direction, he jumped at the opportunity to be involved somehow, even if from a safe vantage point.
Marx’s last ever written correspondence was praising Winston Churchill’s father for his hardline anti-tsarist stance, Marx was willing to see common ground even with tories if he saw tactical benefit. The other lesson about theoretical Marxism learned is that it was pretty well irrelevant as a theory of the economy very quickly, as can be seen in the “revisionism” controversy. Eduard Bernstein, a collaborator with Marx and Engels noted that in fact wages had gone up and a middle class was emerging, Marx’s immiseration thesis of an increasing concentration of capital in smaller hands and a lowering of wages and living standards for the proletariat was empirically faring very poorly, and this lead to a crisis, splitting and sidelining of Marxism in general.
Lenin really was the man to come to the rescue with two innovations. A new theory of imperialism and he strategy of revolutionary defeatism. On the latter, the collapse of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War had already served as a lesson in revolutionary defeatism by Marx, who pointed out the Paris commune was only possible in a collapsing country losing a conflict. Lenin took this lesson and expanded it further, not only was this the golden opportunity for the revolution, but active mutinies of the army were to be encouraged. Lenin had somewhat modified Marxist theory in the imperialism thesis that the empires were competing over scarce resources and trying to concentrate power along their hands nationally, leading to the First World War. World communism as anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism was born (these currents were there in Marx but not emphasised nearly as much).
The rest of the second international wanted to try their best to limit the scope of war and protest, but Lenin radically wanted to convert world war into civil war. The Russian revolution material is recapitulated here from McMeekin’s other work so I won’t go into detail here, but this is all excellent well researched material, he is after all a Russian specialist. Putting communism back into the centre of our understanding of the twentieth century is important, active soviet interference and opportunism in spreading the revolution westwards in Europe and in China are essential to understanding the reaction against these things coming from fascism and other currents. We have such a Hitler-Centric view of the interwar years, which are simply unintelligible without understanding the soviet role in things.
In the interwar period the communist international (Comintern) takes over all European communist parties but sabotages them inadvertently, because this Russian interference leads to a “great splitting” with many not wanting to be Russian puppets. This results in total failure in Italy and Germany, whilst having a damaging but not devastating impact on the French. Meanwhile in China the CCP is being funded alongside the KMT in their campaigns to liberate and unify China, but this ends in calamity as the CCP are purged in 1927. The CCP almost certainly would have died out if it weren’t for them being bankrolled through the long march (to pay off warlords for safe passage) and when Stalin personally intervened to stop Mao from executing Chiang in the infamous Xi’an incident, which would have lead to the KMT invading and stamping out the CCP in the mountains of shaanxi.
The story of the Second World War isn’t particularly complicated. Italy, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union were either disappointed with or excluded from the formation of the world order after the Great War, and were revisionist powers. The Japanese had ambitions to drive the European empires from Asia and take the mantle of the leader of Asia from the Chinese, Mussolini wanted a Mediterranean empire with naval dominance over the French, the Germans wanted to unify the German people and created new living space for them, and the Soviets wanted land lost from the Russian empire in Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland. The Soviets however were unique in rejecting the entire world order as such as illegitimate in being structured by imperialism and capitalism.
Stalin wanted a second imperialist war, in which as Lenin said, the imperialists would fight each other, and then the Soviets would swoop in and secure Europe and Asia for communism. The British, French and the Germans would fight, and the Japanese, Chinese, and Americans would fight. The Soviets would gather up strength, and then strike at the most opportune time to seize victory for the international proletariat. What makes the story of the Second World War interesting is how close things came to going seriously wrong. The Finns reject soviet demands and inflict humiliation, the Germans invade and come very close to winning, and so in the end the Soviets (and even then only with massive help from American and British lendlease) capture half of Europe rather than all of it. It’s only with the victory in the Second World War that the Soviets ascend to superpower status, as they mass relocate East German and Eastern European industry to the USSR itself in “reparations” even from countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia which had played no part in the axis side of the Second World War. Unlike the Hitler hiccup in east Asia things proceed more or less exactly to plan.
They use American lendlease and destroy the Japanese empire via the Manchurian invasion, quietly training and handing over leftover equipment and Japanese spoils to the PLA. The Chinese communists are only really able to win due to this but also their brutality, in the Manchurian city of Changchun they besiege it and turn it, as Lin Biao said, into a city of death. With roughly the same death toll as the Hiroshima bomb, just agonisingly drawn out. Using mongol siege tactics demoralised any serious resistance from the rest of China and the cities fall easily like dominoes.
The two great human catastrophes of communism, the Great Leap Forward and the Famines of 1932-33 as a result of the collectivisation of agriculture are also covered. Whilst the sheer number of victims of communism is a tired (although not wrong) conservative trope, what’s important to remember in both cases is that this was not the product of individual psychopathy or perversion, but a logical product of conviction politicians who believed in Marxism. Having enormous countries dominated by hundreds of millions of peasants in the countryside whilst being socialist in the cities completely denies basic Marxist doctrine, in which the economic base determines the political superstructure. Stalin and Mao were simply the only men who were willing to back up their convictions with action, sending the literal army as well as armies of political idealists to oppress and starve to death innocent people. The great discovery of communist archives is very simple: they were communists, they talk in private using the language of Marxism and they act as though it is true, when they have internal disputes there are shared assumptions. There is no mask to peal off to find the true hidden face of evil, its ideology all the way down.
Only something like communism, a strong belief system people are willing to die and fight for, could produce something as evil as the cultural revolution or the Cambodian genocide, which are also examined. Far from seeing it as an unfortunate spillover from the Vietnam war, McMeekin points out the dedication of Pol Pot and his followers to communism to an extreme degree. Any familial ties or personal ties of love had to be stripped away so that people were merely arms of the state, forcefully deurbanised and forced to work the fields separated from each other, so that they wouldn’t be distracted. Anywhere between a third and a seventh of the entire population was murdered or starved.
Tracking backwards to the situation in Europe, in the immediate postwar years you saw equivalent purges in Eastern Europe that you had seen within the Soviet Union and the facade of a “people’s democracy” quickly fell apart. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death Beria destabilised east Germany with his rhetoric and promise of a soviet withdrawal and so riots and resistance spread like wildfire. Beria was thus ousted by Khrushchev. Despite Khrushchev thus setting the precedent for interventionism in the soviet satellite states he destabilised things further than Beria with his secret speech in which he denounced Stalinist terror. The aftermath of this and the shock of it lead to the expectation of reform and lead to chaos in Hungary where thousands were killed by the soviet army.
Very quickly the standards of life, quality of consumer products and indeed even populations of Western Europe massively went up which shocked and confused the communist leadership of Eastern Europe which fell behind massively. Media from the outside had to be shut down and people had to be prevented from trying to emigrate, with many escaping anyway. Eastern Europe became a very scummy place, where they sought prestige by massive doping campaigns in the olympics, leading later to many athletes dying early and suffering severe health issues, and women suffering heavily from the effects of unknowingly being given doses of testosterone. Romania under Ceaușescu made its fortune exporting oil and Jews and Germans. The German and Jewish remnants were sold, with extra premium going for those educated and with potential prospects, scamming massive amounts of money out of Israel and west Germany in the process. Needless to say the economies of the eastern bloc countries were not serious.
Around the 1970s the satellite states started heavily borrowing loans in hard currency from the west which made them bankrupt. It enabled better consumer goods products, reduced shortages and somewhat lowered the gap between east and west, but they had to keep taking out more loans to pay out the previous ones, eventually with the budgets of these countries largely going into paying off interests. Nonetheless nobody predicted that these countries would all implode rapidly in 1989. The reasons for this are twofold, one is a complete and utter collapse in confidence of the regimes in themselves, the other is Gorbachev.
Mcmeekin points out that after fascist purges, there were about a thousand communists in the whole of Romania in the aftermath of the Second World War that Stalin had to work with. But they were able to successfully install a totalitarian regime which conducted the gruesome Pitesti prison experiment. They were willing to go so far because they believed that they were on the right side of history and that they were working to establish a utopia. All of this was absolutely the opposite by 1989, they had huge secret police forces, a native standing army, huge numbers of informants and so forth. How is it possible this whole society could be overthrown? Absolutely zero self confidence, everything they had tried had failed, they were bankrupt, thus they had what’s been called a “political bank run” a kind of mass protest in which there was simply a palace coup. Although there are a number of superficial differences between the collapses of these regimes, structurally they’re almost all totally identical.
Of course the absolute collapse in self confidence isn’t enough to explain them crumbling because in the past they’d always had a trump card: the Brezhnev doctrine. The Soviets could be reliably called upon to prop them back up with an intervention. Only Gorbachev had made it clear that he was the face of reform and that he wouldn’t intervene at all. Partially this was to secure western aid for the USSR itself. Gorbachev was accused of thus selling off Stalin’s victory in the Second World War for a few Deutschmark. Another lesson of the book is that you can’t be half communist in the same way that you can’t be half pregnant: the Leninist party state cannot have an independent judiciary, media or any political opponents. Any time they’ve made any move in that direction there had been implosion, Hungary 56, Czechoslovakia 68, and eventually the whole of the eastern bloc 89 and then the USSR 91. An authoritarian regime cannot allow the emergence in people’s minds of any political alternative, it simply spells death and is not a process that can be controlled.
China wanted to make sure not to make the same mistakes and so opted for the opposite course of careful openings of “special economic zones” of markets for peasants whilst remaining in control of Lenin’s “commanding heights” of the economy. Bukharin became mandatory reading. And so when massive protest engulfed Beijing and other parts of the country the regime didn’t flinch and Deng gave the protestors a warning then sent the army in.
There’s a great deal more to get into with the book, the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet’s attempts to woo the non-aligned movement which came undone with the disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, the postwar battleground of interfering with Western Europe’s elections by the Americans and Soviets. I also missed out on all the internal debates in the second international, and McMeekin’s discussions of various proto-communisms at the outset. The only mild criticism I have is the story of African communism is almost entirely left out, the story of the Red Emperor Mengistu’s terror famine and downfall, the collapse of Somalian communism into pure tribalism, and the collapse of Angola and Mozambique’s communist states into cynical kleptocracies are important.
The book has immediately entered the canon of high quality centre right commentaries on communism, especially since it lacks the complacency from many. It will be treading some old ground if you’re aware of the twentieth century communist atrocities very well but there’s almost certainly something valuable you’ll find in it, whether it’s the history of Marxism prior to the Soviet Union, whether it’s the debunking of communist mythologies of Maoist revolution and the great patriotic war, a refutation of the “real communism has never been tried” motif owing to the overwhelming archival evidence that more or less all the attempts at communism were sincere, with the results speaking for themselves, the poor record of Marx’s predictions, and a close to complete picture of the Cold War.