Podcast #253: A Brief History of Communism
Jonathan Kay speaks with Bard College historian Sean McMeekin about his new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.
[00:00:00] Jonathan Kay: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillette. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Quillette.com and becoming a paid subscriber. This subscription will also give you access to all our articles, and early access to Quillette social events.
Today’s guest is Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin, whose newly published book on the history of communism was recently excerpted on the Quillette website. As you may have guessed, Professor McMeekin isn’t scared off by big subjects.
Sean McMeekin
[00:00:43] But even for a renowned scholar such as this, a full history of communism sandwiched between two covers is a tall order. But he pulls it off, based on my own reading, beginning with communism’s early ideological roots in ancient and medieval history, before proceeding through to Karl Marx and his disciples, the many schisms within Marxist thought, and then of course on through the Soviet Union, Chinese communism, and the modern era, in which communism continues to be embraced, in some form, in scattered nations across the planet, as well as by a new generation of Western left-wing idealists… if that’s the right word. To cover all of these subjects, it probably would have been necessary to keep Professor McMeekin at the microphone for a full day. But we only had an hour or so. So I had to make editorial choices about what to cover.
[00:01:31] As you’ll see, the focus of my questions was largely on communism’s early history, including the ideological contributions offered by Christian doctrines of charity, communal welfare, the renunciation of individual wealth, and the overarching belief that history is driving toward some kind of final judgement, beyond which the gates of a perfect society await us.
[00:01:52] We also talk about Rousseau and the contributions of the French Enlightenment philosophes; as well as the doctrinal adaptations (some might say, distortions), that were introduced in the twentieth century when history refused to unfold according to Karl Marx’s prophecies. Please enjoy my interview with Sean McMeekin, author of To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.
Sean McMeekin
[00:02:18] Jonathan Kay: One thing that I think will interest readers is you start off by talking about the ideas that preceded communism—that influenced it and in a way that I think will provoke thought because you linger a little bit on the connections between Christianity and communism. The idea of sharing, the idea of a better world, the idea of accumulating riches in what I guess what we would now call a capitalist class, as being morally suspect.
[00:02:46] Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:02:47] Sean McMeekin: Well, sure. I do linger on it a bit because I think it’s important. I mean, it maybe makes some people uncomfortable to think there’s any connection—if they view communism as this atheistic new morality meant to supplant Christianity.
[00:03:02] And eventually you did get these regimes that were aggressively atheistic. They would actually go in and even try to disprove the existence of relics and that sort of thing. But I think you obviously can see there’s a common root. Notions of, in the broadest sense, social equality—that is to say, the equality of all believers, the equality of all souls. Christianity one of the real innovations in a way that people used to talk about Athens and Jerusalem that a lot of our inheritance comes from the Greco-Roman world and mythology and ideas about politics. And that’s true, of course—ideas about democracy, republican governance, and so on. But in a lot of ways, that was still a very elite, comfortable world.
[00:03:39] That is to say, there was always this notion that certain people had more value than others, or maybe they were “greater” than others, they were more heroic or stronger, obviously richer in many cases. The Greco-Roman world was very comfortable with slavery, for example. Obviously, the whole society really couldn’t have existed without it.
[00:03:55] In fact, there’s almost a notion that you can’t really have citizens without slaves. It was even denounced by Nietzsche. I don’t talk about Nietzsche in the book just because I don’t think he’s an important antecedent for communism, but it’s a related idea [insofar as he saw Christianity] almost as a slave religion, that is, a religion of the weak, of the meek, of the oppressed.
[00:04:10] And then you get to this tradition, which I talk a little more about, about material renunciation. The idea that the true Christian must not seek worldly riches, or if they happen to attain them, they should renounce them, share them. The idea of dying in rags and poverty, the idea of charity and sharing out the wealth.
[00:04:29] This is obviously an important part of the tradition that will in some strands, I think, eventually lead to more radical ideas about social equality. One way of putting it is that communism (and Marxism, from which communism derives) is a kind of [Christian] heresy. You might say it’s taking Christianity in a new direction because Marx himself obviously explicitly criticised Christianity.
[00:04:50] And to some extent he took a Hegelian strand of philosophy about history and he emptied it of the Christian content, but he obviously was getting the ideas from somewhere. The ideas about social progress or material renunciation, and there being almost this sin in being greedy or wealthy. He obviously takes it in a different direction, but I think he’s clearly drawing on that broader tradition… it’s almost impossible to imagine Marxism from ... the eschatology, the idea of a final judgment. Some of it is also just the way thought progresses in the Christian tradition, toward a final judgment for mankind.
[00:05:27] Jonathan Kay: This is an aspect I hadn’t thought of. The idea of history moving forward in a particular direction. Because you make the point that we take it for granted that a lot of systems of thought dominant in our society imagine societies improving—whether it’s the progressive tradition making society more fair, or technological utopianism. But, in fact, for the majority of history, in most systems of thought, history was largely thought of as cyclical… there are seasons, the world would be reborn, but not in any way that was moving forward to some kind of, call it a utopia, or in Christianity, a final judgment or a new Jerusalem.
[00:06:08] But Marxism, communism, is very much about a linear, stage-wise progression of humanity…
[00:06:16] Sean McMeekin: I think that’s right. It’s not just that other cultures in Asia and India and China and Buddhism have a different notion, sense of time. Cyclical might be one way of describing it…
[00:06:26] Jonathan Kay: …which, by the way, makes sense in eras of human history when the pace of technological development was extremely low, so you lived in your grandfather’s world, so it made sense to see life as cyclical…
[00:06:36] Sean McMeekin: Yeah, some things might have gotten better, some things might have gotten worse. There was a time, a cycle, like you say, for all seasons. But you could even see this in the Western world before the advent of Christianity. You could see it, for example, in traditions of thought about democracy and republicanism. You look at Greece and there’s all this, well, you have democracies and they lead to tyrannies and then maybe they lead back to something like oligarchy or maybe monarchy and Aristotle’s talking about all the different forms of government.
[00:06:58] It’s not like there’s progress, exactly. It’s more like, sometimes you have better periods of governance and sometimes worse and then eventually into the Romans, you even get this cycle and this famous trope about the republic, its death agonies producing in the end, an empire.
[00:07:14] And so here you have… not progress exactly. It’s ... well, you have one thing and then you have another. Whereas in Christianity, the idea is not just that our lives have this kind of moral momentum, but that mankind as a whole is looking forward with millenarianism and these other ideas, that there’s this final judgment that awaits us all.
[00:07:32] There’s a little bit of this in Islam and a little bit of this in Judaism, but it’s particularly strong in Christianity. Eschatology is what it’s sometimes called, and you can see this almost more clearly than the ideas about equality, for example, in a lot of Marx’s writing—the idea of this thunderous progression of history toward this final cataclysmic judgment. You can see it in Hegel in a slightly different way. Maybe it’s not quite as violent and extreme. But Hegel’s drawing on the Christian tradition as well, and saying, well, look, history is working its way out, and there it’s a little friendlier to Christianity as a superior system of belief and religion and morality that eventually had produced real social progress and better lives for people, and more respect for the poor and for those who are less fortunate.
[00:08:17] Hegel mixed this together with ideas about the secular quasi-national modern state that protected people and protected their civil rights and we have laws and all the rest of it. That there was a kind of progress that was working itself out. So Marx took those ideas, some from Christianity, some from Hegel’s reading of Christianity, and moved them in a slightly more violent direction by adding the socialist elements, the idea about class and class struggle.
[00:08:45] But the belief system is quite similar. It’s very eschatological. There’s this very clear linear momentum towards a final moment of judgement, and eventually he works this out in Das Kapital with the idea of the integument of private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated. [“This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”] This thundering decision moment when communism is supposed to be ushered forth in the world. You can very clearly tell where that tradition comes from: it certainly doesn’t come from Buddhism; it doesn’t come from Islam.
[00:09:15] Jonathan Kay: But there’s a certain messianic quality to it, and you see it maybe in some of the language of the appointed vanguard, this idea of this intellectually rarefied class of people, who see history for its purportedly scientific character and accelerate migration toward this more exalted state of humanity. We’re dealing with loose metaphors here—but this is a sort of self-appointed priestly class who sees beyond the shadows projected on the wall, right? Who sees the movement of history.
[00:09:46] And even if the broad public proletariat, on whose behalf this revolution is happening, even if they don’t understand it, that’s okay because the vanguard can read Latin and they can read Marxist scripture
Sean McMeekin: And they’re prophets in that sense.
[00:09:56] And some of Marx’s earliest critics, I single out [Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail] Bakunin in particular, and he sees this and he sees where these would-be prophets are going.
[00:10:06] That is, they see themselves as this kind of elite priestly class who see further than the others—the vanguard, the seers, et cetera.
[00:10:14] Jonathan Kay: There’s a great quote that was attributed to him. Something to the effect of, well, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be all dictatorship and no proletariat.
[00:10:20] Sean McMeekin: That’s right, a dictatorship over the ruins. You have this elite class of oppressors—in some ways, the most authoritarian the world has ever seen, because they’re presuming to direct everything, and so he saw it coming. And I think he saw it for good reason because he was such a great student of Marx.
[00:10:37] And he actually had to interact with Marx in the history of the first International Working Men’s Association, [where] they vied for power. The anarchists were the first to suss out where Marxism was going, because they had a suspicion of all constituted authority, including the one that Marx wanted to constitute.
[00:10:51] Jonathan Kay: We’re going down a rabbit hole here with the anarchists, but when you read the history of the Russian Revolution, the communists stole ideas that were popular from the anarchists. Here, we’re getting into the weeds of the SRs and the Left SRs; but amid the intra-left-wing foment of the 1910s and 1920s, when all this was sorting itself out, the anarchists had the better of it in terms of what normal [Soviet] citizens actually wanted.
[00:11:15] They didn’t have a lot of patience for the more rarified theories that Marx and Lenin had spun.
[00:11:21] Sean McMeekin: Yeah, anarchists—also sometimes called populists—that is those who had this programme of the consumption of labour standard, this idea that the land should return to the peasants, who should determine who should have how much land based on their need, and this sort of idea.
[00:11:34] And the Bolsheviks were perfectly willing to just copy and steal that idea for the time being. Which they did, even though they later abandoned it. I mean, that was part of the peace/land/bread trinity, although they later, of course, abandoned it… But yeah, anarchists as well, particularly with the story of Kronstadt, this famous rebellion against Bolshevism that erupts in 1921, many of these people [anarchists] were militants, who initially just saw the Bolsheviks as militants against oppression, and so they were willing to fight for them, and they didn’t realise that eventually the Bolsheviks would be even more oppressive than the previous [Czarist] government had been.
[00:12:04] Jonathan Kay: People who read the Quillette website will know that a couple of weeks ago I published a review of a new history of the German peasant revolt of 1524–25.
Jonathan Kay
[00:12:14] I think it’s wrong to call [that revolt] a proto-communist revolution, but when you look at what some of these heretics, as they were denounced, these peasant folk preachers who rose up, one of the first things they said was this feudal system makes a mockery of Christ’s teachings. They were particularly angry with the monasteries, which were essentially the capitalists of the time.
[00:12:37] They brewed beer, and they had local monopolies. It wasn’t just a bunch of monks praying. They operated businesses. They were very exercised about fish ponds, which the locals couldn’t fish in. Which sounds ridiculous, but that could be life and death. Get rid of the monasteries, get rid of the bishops, get rid of the priests.
[00:12:52] Let us read the Bible for ourselves, down with hierarchies. Let us keep the food that we produce instead of sending it all off in tithes and taxes. Every time someone had a kid or get married they had to give away part of their estate to the local lord. It’s actually quite shocking that Marx just said [Christianity] is the opiate of the masses, it’s a false messiah. Is that because people can only deal with one god, and your god has to be either communism or Christianity? And the way the human mind works—is there can only be one source of morality in the way our simplistic brains are organised?
[00:13:25] Sean McMeekin: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, going back to the German peasant rebellion, you’re right, whether or not they were proto-communists, they’re obviously drawing on this message of Christianity. The idea that these are all violations of Christ’s teaching: the corruption, the taxation, the inequality, just the grotesque wealth of the church. Luther himself, of course, distanced himself from the radicals. His rebellion is in some way curtailed and he doesn’t take [his Christian ideas] to their logical conclusion. Whereas, in many ways, you could say that [the rebels’ demands were] very Christian, the things that they’re both objecting to and that they’re trying to stand on—all these things that are violating Christ’s teaching and the spirit and the essence of Christianity.
[00:14:01] You’re right, though, about both Marx and then later Lenin. Why is it that they were, in some ways, so violently opposed to Christianity, whereas a lot of their ideas are drawn from that tradition? Maybe it’s that they don’t want to admit that their ideas are drawn from that. They’re trying almost too hard to distance themselves because they don’t want to be just another voice, another sect of Christianity.
[00:14:24] They want to have a new faith, a new religion. And you’re right that in that religion there isn’t room for the old relics. Eventually, of course, they produce new relics. They replaced all the Christian holidays with their own holy days—which would be everything from celebrating the February Revolution to the Paris Commune, obviously the October Revolution.
[00:14:44] Jonathan Kay: The people lining up to see the corpse of Stalin, and what we’ve seen in North Korea, which looks a lot like a religious cult when it comes to the Kim dynasty…
[00:14:52] Sean McMeekin: Yeah, it’s a replacement faith. And so, Christianity was then a threat because of course a lot of the people still believed in Christianity, particularly the peasants… and that’s part of the reason why the peasant wars became so violent, and oftentimes they were literally fought out in churches.
[00:15:07] Some of it was because the regime was trying to seize wealth—gold, silver, et cetera—from the churches, but some of it was also that they saw that the peasants still had this loyalty to the old faith, and they can’t tolerate that because they want their loyalty to be to the new government.
[00:15:21] And so some of the [Soviets’] war with the peasants was over the food supply, but some of it was also about matters of faith, matters of religion. They tried this in the French Revolution as well. I didn’t talk a lot about this in the book, but both with the civil constitution of the clergy and the nationalisation of the church property, the Bolsheviks take this, of course, to an even more extreme degree, but in the end, it was ultimately about loyalty.
[00:15:42] The French revolutionaries wanted all of the clerics of the church to be loyal to the new state, not to Rome. In the case of the Bolsheviks, eventually they realised they had to make some sort of modus vivendi with the church, but obviously they had to make sure that the key figures in the church—renovationists, they had other names for them, basically we might call them toadies, the ones who were willing to just toe the line and go along with the government—they had to purge and shoot a lot of bishops.
[00:16:09] They did. You’re talking low four figures. It’s maybe not genocide on the scale of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but it’s a significant number. They literally did shoot a lot of them because they saw them as rivals for the faith and the loyalty and obedience of the people.
[00:16:25] Jonathan Kay: In his last days, Robespierre essentially declared himself to be the prophet of a new religion.
[00:16:31] Sean McMeekin: Right. The Festival of the Supreme Being with Robespierre, it was in part because Robespierre thought the atheism had gone too far. But he didn’t want to let the church back in the saddle. And so he said, we need a new religion, a new state religion.
[00:16:44] And in the end, it didn’t quite come off…
[00:16:49] Jonathan Kay: His head came off, is what happened.
Sean McMeekin: His head came off. He had apparently convinced everyone that he himself was now this dangerous would-be messianic tyrant.
Jonathan Kay: He was the Lenin of the French Revolution. In this way, communism isn’t special. It attracts sociopathic figures who see the revolutionary language as a conduit to complete power.
[00:17:06] Is that one of the problems with any totalising creed is that it’s flypaper for people who have authoritarian tendencies, and they just immediately recognise that if you control this rhetoric, you can have absolute power?
[00:17:22] Sean McMeekin: Yeah, it’s a licence to steal and rob and do so with this kind of righteous fury… you believe you’re carrying out some quasi-divine mission to make the world a better place.
[00:17:31] But what you’re actually doing, of course, is robbing and stealing, and in some cases raping, and desecrating what a lot of people find holy. But it’s “justified right,” because you do have this this belief. And again, maybe some people had it more. Some of the sadists attracted to it might not really have cared that much about the faith or the ideas. They just enjoyed the violence it basically gave them the right to commit. But when you’re talking about the Robespierres and the Lenins of the world and the Maos of the world, absolutely I think they come to embrace this mission and they see it as all-encompassing. It’s not just the ends justifying the means, but that they’re actually doing something sacred—putting class enemies to death because this is actually an essential part of the faith: class enemies and the state’s enemies, rebels. A lot of the language is already there in Marx, but he never really had the chance to put it into practice. A lot of the language is already there about expropriation.
[00:18:23] And you can see elements of that in Rousseau already with the social contract, the idea of people outside the political community maybe forfeiting their rights. But of course, with Marxism and then communism, it’s not just about some ideal republican community and you put yourself outside of it. It’s now literally that you could be inside the community, but you’re a class enemy or you’re a tool of the old regime. And so putting these people to death is then part of this cleansing ritual.
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