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The radical revolutions of communism
November 18, 2024
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To Overthrow the World
by Sean McMeekin | Basic Books, 2024 | 443 pages
Professor Sean McMeekin of Bard College is an expert on 20th century history and has written on a range of topics including Russian and Turkish history.
His new book is titled To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.
In it, McMeekin traces the evolution of Communism from its roots in 18th-century French thinking through to its evolution into the clear ideology expounded by Marx and Engels, and then on to the 20th century, when Communist ideologues took power across much of the world.
The narrative is dense but fast-moving. McMeekin makes it clear from the outset that he is a strong critic, and he highlights the global rise of Marxist China as being a key reason for examining what is occasionally misconstrued as a dead ideology.
Alternative morality
Oddly, Communism has some roots in a sort of heretical Christianity, and in an effort by some unbelievers to recreate a moral system in a Europe where many people had ceased to truly believe in Christianity by the time of the Enlightenment.
McMeekin writes that the elitism of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire had the effect of forfeiting “much of the beauty and power of the Christian faith while also shunting Christian ideals about virtuous poverty and charity to the side.”
This left a moral or spiritual vacuum which could only exist for so long.
One little-known but highly influential French philosopher who tried to fill it in the latter half of the 18th century was Étienne-Gabriel Morelly.
Greed was destroying humanity in Morelly’s view, and he had a simplistic solution:
“Where no property exists, none of its pernicious consequences will exist either.”
Morelly believed that the “spirit of charity” among the early Christians had been ruined by the materialistic Church.
A collectivist spirit would be needed to restore what had been lost, and Morelly called for laws that would mean that “every citizen must be a man of public sustenance, maintained and occupied at public expense.”
In the wake of the Revolution, a new generation of French radical thinkers like François-Noël Babeuf would build on Morelly’s groundwork, and Morelly and Babeuf’s writings would inspire the German thinker Karl Marx.
Like many other far-left thinkers, the true father of Communism was from a privileged background.
He had never been inside a factory before he started calling for the nationalisation of industry, and his initial economic proposals were not informed by any kind of extensive research.
As McMeekin explains, the two intellectual schools of thought which shaped the young Marx were the French revolutionary tradition and the German philosophical tradition, where Hegel was the most important figure.
Marx rejected much of Hegel’s Christian worldview, though, and sought to radically change society — to overthrow the world, as per the author’s chosen title.
The immense bloodshed that the French Revolution had caused did not bother Marx, who would go on to defend the similarly destructive Paris Commune of 1871.
Massacres
Defenders of Communism are often faced with difficult questions as to why Communist systems almost invariably descend into mass slaughter.
It is also through violence that the great majority of Communist governments were first established, and treachery and the export of ideology across borders is a recurring theme too. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin openly sought the defeat of Russia in the First World War.
Lenin’s passage home from Switzerland was facilitated by the same German military-political elite which was waging war against Lenin’s countrymen.
The October Revolution of 1917 was not popular in Russia — three-quarters of voters opted for non-Bolshevik alternatives in the November 1917 elections — but after the crushing of all dissent and the Communist triumph in the subsequent civil war, Communism at last had a base of operations.
That nascent Soviet totalitarianism was important, particularly given that many apologists for the far left pretend that the ensuing problems related solely to the personage of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
However, the chaos of the Great Purges of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was replicated by Chairman Mao in China in the 1960s. More importantly, all leftist despots could point to how their intellectual ancestor Karl Marx had expelled the socialist anarchist Mikhail Bakunin from his First International movement. Ideological intolerance is in Communism’s DNA.
Social subversion
Often, people focus on the economic aspect of Communist revolution: the expropriation of businesses and farms and so forth.
Yet social radicalism has always been at the fore of Communist thinking, as McMeekin makes clear.
Engels refused to marry his longtime romantic partner on socialist grounds, and The Communist Manifesto that he and Marx co-authored in 1848 boasted that “the bourgeois family will vanish” and that the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child” would cease.
The implications of Communist theory for Christianity foreshadowed what would be involved in its practical implementation from 1917 onwards.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks quickly replaced church weddings with civil ceremonies, introduced divorce-on-demand and became the first country in the world to legalise abortion.
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The social policies of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 are similarly illuminating. The Hungarian commissar for education and culture György Lukács immediately introduced sex education in primary schools with the specific goal of overturning “bourgeois” morals.
Reflecting later on the failure of this 133-day Republic, Lukács argued that Communism could “come into existence only as a conscious transformation of the whole of society,” and McMeekin contends that Lukács’s views influenced the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Atheistic states
Economic destruction and religious persecution sometimes went hand-in-hand.
In 1922, Lenin gleefully told the Politburo that the famine which his policies had helped cause had sapped the energy of the Christian peasantry and left them unable to defend their most sacred places.
“It is now and only now, when in the famine regions there is cannibalism, and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) carry through the confiscation of Church valuables with the most rabid and merciless energy,” he wrote.
All of the regimes examined here took measures to recklessly transform the fabric of complex societies which had evolved over many centuries.
All of the regimes were anti-traditional and virulently hostile to religion, family and any independent civil society groups.
All of the regimes promoted individual atomisation in order to further collectivisation: a world in which a deified State would take the place of a dethroned God.
Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge is the most striking example of this.
McMeekin quotes one historical account which described how the Khmer Rouge’s revolution involved “stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have guided an individual’s life” with the goal of creating “an atomised, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine and substituting a series of new values.”
The failure of Cambodia and the scale of the crimes in the killing fields was so obvious that China subsequently downplayed its role in aiding Pol Pot, and they have largely gotten away with it.
Unsustainable
Social destruction from within can only go so far, however. Destroying the family or traditional values is harder than finding a viable substitute, as Communist rulers have found.
The denigration of marriage did not last long in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and nor did legal abortion. By 1934, there were three times as many abortions as births in Moscow health clinics, and the USSR’s villainous despot was forced to outlaw the killing of those children who would be needed in future to man Russia’s factories and fight Russia’s wars.
A similar process would later occur in China, where the ‘One Child Policy’ has been scrapped due to the incalculable damage it has caused to that country’s demographic structure.
One of the reasons why McMeekin wrote the book is the recent upsurge in sympathy in some quarters (particularly among the young) for far-left policies, which has coincided with the rise of Woke progressivism.
As McMeekin makes clear, even the few alleged achievements of Communism are greatly exaggerated.
The USSR’s various five-year plans created a more modernised economy at an enormous human cost, but “nearly all of Stalin’s great new industrial works were modelled on or designed by Western capitalist firms.”
Stalin’s Red Army indeed defeated Hitler’s Wehrmacht, but they did so using massive amounts of US aid.
One of the most humorous historical asides included here relates to the iconic image of a Soviet soldier raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945.
This staged image was actually edited to remove the stolen wristwatches from the soldier’s arm, the presence of which neatly symbolised what the Red Army was doing in every eastern and central European country they were ‘liberating’ around this time.
Crimes against humanity
Reviewing this book in The Irish Times, the respected left-wing historian Dr Brian Hanley criticised McMeekin for his “one-sided critique”. While conceding that McMeekin is not wrong to highlight Communist crimes, he laments the lack of a discussion on the role of Communist figures (such as trade unionists) in various social advances, what he calls “communism without concentration camps”.
There is something to this criticism. The concluding section of the book, which deals with contemporary China and issues like the Covid lockdowns, does not fit very well with what goes before it.
But Hanley is wrong overall. Communism deserves to be examined in the harshest light on the grounds of the basic facts, including some which are cited here.
Tsarist Russia was backward and oppressive. Yet Lenin’s Red Terror killed 15,000 people in its first two months: twice as many as were executed by the Tsarist authorities between 1817-1917. Stalin’s industrial-scale massacres built on this grotesque foundation.
There have often been famines in China historically, but there is nothing to compare with those caused by the Chinese Communist Party. The brilliant Frank Dikötter estimates that at least 45 million died in the Mao-made famine between 1958-1962.
Had an invading army exposed the crimes of Lenin, Stalin or Mao shortly after they had been committed in the manner that occurred in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, far more would be known about the sins of these monsters, some of whose evil works are still admired by many on the far-left, and by some in the centre-left too.
An ideology (and secular religion, in truth) that causes perhaps 100 million deaths in less than a century deserves to be hated, and yet mostly is not. More history is needed, and McMeekin’s book deserves praise.
A thought experiment. Imagine if Christ’s followers had established multiple tyrannical political regimes and massacred 100 million people within a century of the Crucifixion.
Christian apologetics would be rather more challenging in this context, no? And would early Christianity be given the same soft-touch treatment in academia and elsewhere as Marxism is now?
Ultimately, if left-wing readers do not like this book, it is probably because the truth about Communism really does hurt.
What do you think about Communism? Leave a comment below.
James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including history, culture, film and literature.
Image credit: Pexels
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Antonio Silva commented 2024-11-23 04:15:27 +1100Has Pope Pius XI wright, in DIVINIS REDEMPTORIS, communism is intrinsically bad…So, is bad everywhere and everytime…and has proved that! To catholics, this shouldn’t be matter os discussion!…
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Christopher Szabo commented 2024-11-20 02:43:41 +1100Great to see some honesty about Communism in the West. Sadly, moral midgets tend to pretend these crimes never occurred and will not occur again. I do wish Communism had come to Western Europe and the US, that would have cured them of their excuses and wishy-washy nonsense.
But it’s never too late, is it? -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-11-18 15:08:45 +1100Emberson Fedders
The mostly non-existent threat of “Communism” is a bogeyman that has served right wing demagogues well for decades. Why would you expect them to abandon it? -
Emberson Fedders commented 2024-11-18 14:09:00 +1100More scaremongering about the dangers of ‘communism’, an economic system that no Western country on the planet is interested in implementing.
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