The History of Communism – Part 1

Communism’s need for coercion and its ideological origins.

Pockets of support for socialist political candidates have appeared in a couple of urban areas in America, New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Mayoral primary in June, 2025 with the support of a coalition that conspicuously did not include those making less than $50,000 a year. As the New York Post reported, “Despite the promise of redistributing from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, in an ironic twist, the socialist [Mamdani] beat [his primary opponent] Cuomo handily with wealthy New Yorkers. Meanwhile, Cuomo crushed Mamdani by a staggering 19 points with New Yorkers who make under $50,000 a year.” A resurfaced clip from a 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference shows Mamdani arguing that the “purpose” of “this entire project” of socialism is “not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism” and elect leaders who are “unapologetic about our socialism” and noting that certain issues socialists “firmly believe in” include “the end goal of seizing the means of production.” Another socialist, Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Democratic party for mayor of Minneapolis.

Even under the Trump Administration, as the Wall Street Journal reported:

President Trump on Friday trumpeted that the U.S. government will take a 10% equity stake (worth about $8.9 billion) in Intel, the struggling maker of computer chips … Federal support may help shore up the chip maker’s balance sheet in the short-term. But a big risk is that the government will direct Intel’s business in a way that will make it harder for the company to become competitive in chip manufacturing and design. The Administration says the deal won’t include a seat on Intel’s board or “governance or information rights,” and it will mostly vote its shares with Intel’s board. But government support will ease the imperative for Intel to become more competitive. That’s one reason China’s partially state-owned Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation has struggled. In the name of competing with China, the U.S. is imitating its model of state-run business. Washington is becoming Chinatown.

Given the rising prominence of socialism in such quarters, it’s worth reviewing the history of communism in the world, especially two aspects of that history. First, its inevitable resort to coercion. The collectivism supported by communists and democratic socialists means socializing things through force, rather than through voluntary associations. Second, communist collectivism, wherever it’s been tried, including in communist China today, inevitably comes to rely on free market capitalism to prop up its regimes, despite communism’s central rejection of free market capitalism.

Sean McMeekin has written an excellent book on this subject, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, and it will be the source used in our exploration of these issues in this series of essays.

As McMeekin writes:

It is now more than three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the USSR prompted Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the “End of History.” Like most Americans who lived through those heady and exciting times, I felt a surge of pride as one Eastern Bloc country after another discarded single-party Communist rule for pluralism and political freedom—even Russia itself, which for a time seemed just as eager to embrace the West. For the first time, Soviet archives were thrown open to Western researchers such as myself, who happily descended on them to probe the secrets of Soviet and global Communism. Confident postmortems of Communism then filled the airwaves, with a sense of relief and “goodbye to all that.” Twenty years later, things look rather different. Joseph Stalin is more admired in Russia today than at any other time since his death in 1953, his manifold crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union now either forgiven or forgotten … With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020–2022, the China model spread globally, as once inviolable rights, from freedom of speech and dissent to freedom of movement and travel, were temporarily abandoned in the West. For many young westerners, Communism is no longer a cause banished from mainstream discourse for its association with totalitarian regimes, for they have no living memory of them.

As McMeekin summarizes:

[T]he emergence of Communism in Russia, China, and their satellites required a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men. Despite the party’s claim to speak for the proletarian masses of humanity, and several much ballyhooed near misses, Communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box … [S]ome of Marx’s earliest critics, particularly those on the anarchist left, such as Mikhail Bakunin, perceived [that] the maximalist Marxist program, requiring state control of the banks, industry, agriculture, and economic exchange, could only be achieved with massive violence and a preponderance of force. Absent the catalyst of war, Communist revolution was inconceivable. Marx, like Vladimir Lenin after him, saw the revolutionary potential of modern wars, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, for the losing side — in the former case, France, and in the latter, Russia. Following Marx’s own reading of the first conflict and his interpretation of the second, Lenin forged the doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism,” by which he meant that, if a country lost a modern war decisively enough, the resulting collapse of military discipline and prestige could weaken its government to the point that it might then be toppled by armed revolutionaries. But these relatively contained bilateral wars, however lethal and destructive to social order, leading to the short- lived but sanguinary Paris Commune of 1871 and the equally violent but ultimately contained Russian Revolution of 1905, were not destructive enough for Marx’s or Lenin’s purposes. Only the utter devastation of the First World War did enough damage, and mobilized and armed enough angry and embittered young men, to make Communist revolution possible … Contrary to Lenin’s hopes, the advent of Communism in Russia did not inspire a global wave of revolution. Aside from a few short-lived upheavals in Germany and Hungary—countries that, like Russia, had been devastated by the First World War and found themselves on the losing side in 1918—Communism failed to gain traction anywhere outside Russia. Lenin tried gamely to speed the revolution along, creating a Communist International, or Comintern, in 1919 to coordinate global propaganda and paramilitary efforts to overthrow “capitalist” governments worldwide, but these efforts failed on all fronts … It was only with the collapse of international order in the 1930s that Communism once again began to make inroads, first in Spain, in the wake of a devastating civil war, and then in Eastern Europe and North Asia, after the Second World War, which unleashed social and economic devastation on those regions even more terrible than the First World War had. Try though Soviet Comintern leaders and their foreign agents did to update the Communist theory of revolution on the fly, it was not doctrine that mattered, but force of arms. Only in the exceptional circumstances of war did Communists stand a real chance of sniffing power, and it usually required years of attrition to weaken traditional regimes enough for them to fall—along with the extra muscle and funding Moscow provided. Sometimes, as in the imposition of Communism by Soviet conquering armies in Poland or Hungary, this was obvious enough. But even the most famous “native” Communist conquerors, such as Tito in Yugoslavia and Mao Zedong in China, as we shall see below, needed heavy doses of foreign assistance to overwhelm their enemies … I have written the history of Communism … knowing that the story, despite its seeming resolution in 1989 or 1991, is far from over. As long as people dream of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of “social justice,” some version of Communism will retain broad popular appeal, enticing young idealists—along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects—to champion its cause. The history of Communism may not always be edifying or reassuring, but it is worth reexamining dispassionately, without either prejudice or wishful thinking.

Regarding the ideological origins of communism, McMeekin writes:

Communism as a ruling doctrine is a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms, dating back just over a century—or, if we count parties bearing the name, such as the Communist League of Marx and Engels (c. 1847–1848), about 175 years. But the idea of material or social equality lying at the heart of Communist theory traces back deep into antiquity … In The Republic (c. 375 BC), Plato has Socrates observe that the proliferation of “such words as ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ and ‘someone else’s’” must lead to the dissolution of the social fabric. By contrast, the best-governed city would be one in which “all the citizens rejoice and are pained by the same successes and failures,” as the “sharing of pleasures and pains bind[s] the city together.” A thoughtful ruler, or philosopher-king, should thus establish a kind of political equality among active citizens, who by sacrificing selfish interests would come to equate their own fortunes with those of the polity to which they belonged. In his wicked satire Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen, c. 391 BC), Aristophanes went further, with his false-bearded female philosopher-queen Praxagora vowing to make “land, money, everything that is private property, common to all.” This dictum, she said, would include sexual relations: men must court the “ugliest and most flat-nosed [women]… side to side with the most charming [women],” and women were enjoined not to “sleep with the big, handsome men before having satisfied the ugly shrimps.” … [E]ven at its most radical, Western Christianity has stopped short of advocating for outright equality of wealth and material differences as proposed by Plato and Aristophanes (the latter satirically). The rich might be judged by God and found wanting; but not even the most devout Christian theologians have proposed, like Robin Hood, to rob them and redistribute their wealth in order to level out the social order. Theft is, indeed, expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (“Thou shalt not steal”), fundamental to the faith of both Jews and Christians. The embrace of poverty, or the practice of charity, for a Christian believer, is the conscious act of a free human soul, not a coercive act or something to be mandated in law.

But it was the writings of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau that were most influential regarding the promotion of “social equality”:

In the end, it was the skeptical enfant terrible of the French Enlightenment, the Genevan autodidact and itinerant tutor Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who left behind the era’s most enduring vision of social equality. Only in a “happy and tranquil republic,” Rousseau argued in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755), could humanity avoid the corruptions that led to the “different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of others, such as being richer, more honored, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them.” … [Rousseau] did not believe that reason and scientific “progress” would improve lives. “The more we accumulate knowledge,” Rousseau warned, “the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all.” Civilization and material improvement were morally corrupting, depriving people of their natural freedom, entrenching inequality and slavery, and rendering men selfish and ambitious. “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’” Rousseau surmised, “and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, ‘Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’” In this celebrated passage, Rousseau came as close to the vision of a propertyless world of social equals as any thinker had done since Plato and Aristophanes. But he did not repudiate private wealth entirely, recognizing that “the idea of property … was necessary to make great progress, acquire many skills and much enlightenment, and transmit and augment them from one age to another.” In the famous opening of his 1762 work On the Social Contract, Rousseau proclaimed that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”— but his program for liberating them did not include the abolition of private property. Rather, “in accepting the goods of private individuals,” a justly organized community “assures them of legitimate possession.” Rousseau did insist that “each private individual’s right to own his own land is always subordinate to the community’s right to all,” and thus conditional on one’s civic status. As Rousseau explained in his most notorious passage, in order for any “social compact to avoid being an empty formula, it tacitly entails the commitment— which alone can give force to the others— that whoever refuses to obey the general will [volonté générale], will be forced to do so by the entire body.” By “violating the laws” of the community, such a “malefactor” must be “put to death,” Rousseau argued, “less as a citizen than as an enemy.” Nonetheless, as long as a citizen obeyed the laws embodied in the “general will” of his political community, his right to own property was upheld. Radical republican Rousseau might have been, but he was not, quite, a Communist … A large part of the reason Rousseau’s works became a standard part of the Western educational curriculum is that they so clearly influenced the course of the French Revolution. Rousseau’s idea of the “general will,” a nebulous notion of consensus public opinion or mandate he never quite defines in the Social Contract—there is no implication that it need reflect an actual democratic vote—made it into clause 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen passed by the French National Assembly in August 1789 (“Law is the expression of the general will”), to which all other clauses are subordinated. In the language he used to justify the “Terror” of 1793–1794, Maximilien Robespierre channeled Rousseau’s views on the purging of disloyal citizens when he wrote that “if the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror.” With the guillotining of more than 20,000 traitorous “enemies of the people,” Robespierre brought Rousseau’s draconian vision to life, establishing a precedent for apocalyptic revolutionary terror that has alternately inspired or terrified westerners ever since … The furthest Robespierre had been willing to go in socioeconomic reform was the “Law of the General Maximum,” passed by the National Convention in September 1793, which established price ceilings on grain, meat, oil, soap, salt, shoes, and other essentials; punishments for violators; and a cap on wages. In the end, it may have been the national military draft, or levée en masse, of August 1793, not the short-lived Maximum of September, that established the more significant precedent for Communism. France’s government began forcibly conscripting soldiers and workers— from foundrymen and tanners and tailors to bakers— into war industry, thus establishing a model for state direction and control of the economy, at least in wartime.

McMeekin then turns to the thought development of Karl Marx:

Marx, still in his early twenties when he began writing his Hegelian commentaries, had no experience of business or politics; he was a kind of perennial student, who had done stints at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin before submitting a philosophy thesis for a doctorate at the University of Jena in April 1841. All the while, he was living off subsidies provided by his father, Heinrich Marx, a successful attorney in Trier, who was increasingly frustrated by his son’s refusal to train for a real profession. “As though he were made of gold,” Heinrich complained, “my gentleman son disposes of almost 700 Thalers in a single year, in contravention of every usage and every agreement, whereas the richest spend no more than 500.” … Karl Marx represented a new, though soon familiar, social type, the déclassé bourgeois intellectual, not rich or well-born enough to live a life of social consequence, but content to spend down his inheritance as long as his parents allowed him to … Rather than appreciating the good fortune that allowed him to live this agreeable life of leisure, Marx wrote poetry that, like his philosophy, was angry and misanthropic. In Savage Songs, published in January 1841, a twenty-two-year-old Marx lamented that humans were “shattered, empty, frightened,” the “apes of a cold God,” a God who warned his apes, “I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.” … Moses Hess, a wealthy Jewish Hegelian student from Cologne who, in October 1842, offered Marx his first real job—editing and writing for the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland news) … Curiously, Marx did not take a radical economic line in the Rheinische Zeitung, declaring that, as editor, he would not allow the “smuggling of communist and socialist dogmas” into reporting or cultural reviews, as had happened prior to his coming aboard … As his critics have observed, at the time he began banging on about proletarian revolution in 1843, Marx had not yet set foot in a factory, or met or talked to any factory workers. Nor had he done any research on industrial processes or wages … Although Marx was working from an original draft by Engels, the final Manifesto [of the Communist Party] bears his unmistakable stamp, hypnotic in its Hegelian thrust. “The history of all hitherto existing society,” Marx begins, “is the history of class struggles” between “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” Building on the theme of “alienation” he had explored in his Paris years, Marx deplored the cold hand of industrialization and “free trade,” which, though unleashing “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together,” and “rescu[ing]” peasants from “the idiocy of rural life” by driving them into factories, had torn apart the “motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’” leaving “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’” dissolving all human relations into “the icy water of egotistical calculation.” The human family, Marx claimed, had been stripped of “its sentimental veil” and “reduced … to a mere money relation.” … Above all, they knew and could teach “the theory of the Communists,” which “may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Spelling out what this radical doctrine might mean in practice, Marx condensed Engels’s original twenty-five points into a pithier and more memorable ten, headlined by (1) “the abolition of property in land and application of all rents to public purposes,” (2) “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” (3) “abolition of all right of inheritance,” and (4) “confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels” who might flee the scene. The “state,” by which Marx meant whatever proletarian government would assume the reins after the revolution, would be tasked with (5) “centralization of credit… by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” (6) “centralization of the means of communication and transport,” (7) the ownership, planning, and management of all “factories and instruments of production,” the “bringing of cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil… in accordance with a common plan,” (9) the “combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries,” the “more equable distribution of the population over the country,” and (10) the dispensation of “free education for all children in public schools,” and the “combination of education with industrial production.” In view of its ominous implications, the most significant clause of all may be no. 8, in which Marx proclaimed a kind of universal work obligation (“equal liability of all to labour”) and demanded the “establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” … [E]ven anarchists like Proudhon had warned that forcibly eradicating social inequality must entail “the abolition of individuality and freedom.” “Rightly so,” Marx declared, if “by freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.” Conservative concerns about family life, if education, like property, were taken over by a centralized state, Marx conceded, were well-founded; he boasted proudly that after the Communist revolution “the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course.” … Unlike socialists and utopian dreamers, Marx’s movement would not shy away from violence. “The Communists,” he wrote, concluding the Manifesto in a rousing finale, “disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”

Marx’s partner Engels also had to resort to mooching off his relatives:

Even Engels, from whom Marx had sponged money for years, was cut off by his wealthy parents after his revolutionary escapades in 1848–1849. By the summer of 1850, so desperate were these German Communist exiles that Engels proposed to his parents that he would abjure radical politics and cross the Atlantic to represent the family cotton business in America, his real idea being that he and Marx might rejuvenate their political fortunes among the huge German-speaking community in New York City. Alas, Engels’s mother, sniffing out her son’s intentions, proposed instead that he represent the family firm in Calcutta, a city empty of German radical exiles. Unable to scrape together money for the passage, Marx and Engels abandoned their idea of moving to New York and thus planting the seeds of Communism in America.

Marx’s major philosophical work was Das Kapital:

Volume One of Capital, meant as a capstone of Marx’s theories and the only one published in his lifetime, lays out his overarching views on currency, commodities, manufacturing, industry, and especially labor, which he sees as the ultimate source of the “surplus value” that allows capital accumulation. Capital is just as firmly rooted in the Hegelian dialectic as the Manifesto. Primitive economic transactions—the trading of basic commodities—become more complex over time as money and wage labor are introduced, leading to the “alienation” of workers from their product. The modern industrial era witnesses a culmination in the “appropriation of supplementary labour-power” by the “capitalists” owning the means of production, who drive down the price of labor by introducing machines, employing women and children at lower wages, and so on. In a typical Hegelian formulation, Marx concludes that the modern wage-laborer, who no longer makes goods for his own use or to sell himself, only “produces surplus value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital.” A critic might object that wage laborers, by definition, were compensated for their work, even if not earning nearly as much as their employers did. And it was conceivable, as Marx himself admitted, that productive workers contributing to an increase in a firm’s profitability might even share in its profits, whether in the form of increased wages or by paying lower prices for its (or other firms’) goods. In such ways, laborers might be able to “extend the circle of their enjoyments,” as they could “make some additions to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c. and … lay by small reserve-funds of money.” Common sense would suggest that this would be desirable, something to be encouraged and celebrated when it happened. But this is not how Left Hegelians think. Rather, as Marx improbably claims in his chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,”“a rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital,” does nothing but increase “the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself,” though perhaps allowing a “relaxation of the tension of [the chain].” The point is that the chain is still there. As soon as rising wages begin to “interfere with the process of [capital] accumulation,” that is, with a firm’s profits, “the price of labor falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital.” Labor, in Marx’s formulation, is always secondary to capital, always the “dependent” variable in any equation, and the “very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labor.” Nor, Marx claims, does economic growth in the modern industrial era lead to greater prosperity overall. Taking on Adam Smith’s attribution of wealth, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), to the specialized division of labor, competition, and expanding trade, Marx cries foul, claiming that, by reducing the proportionate cost of labor, any increase of labor productivity (owing, say, to the investment in new tools or machinery) simply tilts the share of wealth ever more heavily toward the owners of capital, impoverishing workers. Marx gives no data to support this assertion … One might suppose, following Smith, that increased labor productivity will lead to cheaper products, higher wages, or both, as well as a higher standard of living as a country’s economic “pie” grows ever larger. But Marxist economics are a zero-sum game. Growth brings only ever more alienated and impoverished workers, whose bargaining power, paradoxically, decreases the more productive they are. It is not that Marx saw capitalist competition as inherently a bad thing. Like any good Hegelian, he relished conflict; it was the “antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation” that propelled history forward. True, what economists saw as the “‘sacred’ law of supply and demand” was cruel to workers, who were impoverished in proportion to how productive they were becoming, but this, too, reflected the wages of progress. Were it not for competitive innovation; labor cost-cutting; bank credit to large firms, enabling consolidation; and the resulting “accumulation” and “concentration” of capital, Marx mused, “the world would still be without railroads.” Still, Marx was not a complacent economist like Adam Smith, admiring technologies that helped increase a nation’s wealth. Rather, he saw industrial progress as a prelude to sharpening class conflict … As the “centralization of capital” proceeds, it brings about “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.” But with this, too, everyone from artisans and farmers to managers and investors will join the growing ranks of “proletarian” wage laborers, says Marx. The process will not be unique to Britain, but will engulf the whole earth. “Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation,” he explains with curious zeal, “grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” … Whether or not Marx’s thesis in Capital (later called the Verelendung, or “immiseration thesis”) about the ever-diminishing bargaining power of labor and the accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands was borne out by economic data (already implausible in the Britain of 1867, his thesis was completely demolished by developments there over the next few decades), his moral critique of the unequal returns to capital was and remains plausible enough to sympathetic readers. Marx’s “expropriators are expropriated” line, however vague in specifics, was hypnotic in its promise of apocalyptic revolutionary violence.

In 1863, Marx was again saved financially by family inheritance:

The wind was under Marx’s sails again. His mother, Henrietta, had died in December 1863, leaving Marx with £700, a substantial sum. A German admirer called Wilhelm Wolff died in the spring of 1864 and left Marx even more than his mother had—nearly £1,000. The combined windfall allowed Karl, Jenny, and their children to move into a spacious and comfortable dwelling in the Modena villas in Maitland Park, where they would remain until Marx’s death in 1883.i In an ironic confluence of timing, Jenny threw a formal ball in the new family villa in October 1864, complete with “gold-rimmed invitations,” “liveried servants,” and a dance band, just as Marx was seizing the reins of the International Working Men’s Association. Whether or not Marx’s belated achievement of a high bourgeois lifestyle was appropriate for the sage of Communism, it did not hurt the impression he made on recruits.

McMeekin describes the trenchant critique Marx’s theories received at the time by Mikhail Bakunin:

In a blistering polemic later published as Statism and Anarchy, Bakunin produced a powerful critique of Marx and what would soon be known as Marxism. Although he drew on some of the same philosophical themes Proudhon had first sounded against Marx’s Communism, Bakunin had also experienced Marx’s rigid, top-down leadership style, which left a bad taste in his mouth. Most of all, it was the stale and lifeless Germanic quality of Marxism that repelled this Russian romantic. Somehow, the “adherents” of Hegel and other vaunted German philosophers, Bakunin observed in a curiously timeless passage, despite their “lofty ideals,” could still “serve as obedient and even willing agents of the inhumane and illiberal measures prescribed by their governments.” Marx and the Left Hegelian “doctors of philosophy” fancied themselves heroic radicals who “would leave the boldest figures of the 1790s far behind them and would amaze the world with their rigorously logical and relentless revolutionism.” Instead, the German revolutions of 1848 had fallen flat because of “the special historical character of the Germans, which disposes them much more to loyal obedience than to rebellion.” Even the most avowedly radical of them, like Marx with his Communist Manifesto, had “proceeded not from life to thought but from thought to life.” In the end Marx was nothing but a “metaphysician,” a “worshipper of the goddess science,” prophet of a desiccated approach to human affairs that, if ever realized, would mean that “life would dry up, and human society would be turned into a dumb and servile herd.” By contrast, “we revolutionary anarchists,” Bakunin declared, “are proponents of universal popular education, liberation, and the broad development of social life, and hence are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood.” As against this, Marxian Communists were “the most impassioned friends of state power.” “If the proletariat is to be the ruling class,” Bakunin pointed out, “then whom will it rule? There must be yet another proletariat which will be subject to this new rule, this new state.” True, the new ruling minority, the Communists claimed, would “consist of workers.” If so, then they would soon be “former workers.” “As soon as they become rulers,” he wrote, they “will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people. Anyone who doubts this is not at all familiar with human nature.” Alternatively, and more likely, the new rulers would not be workers at all, but “learned” or “scientific socialists” of Marx’s ilk—forming a government of intellectuals that, following Marx’s example in running the International, would likely become “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world.” What must happen after any such revolution was that “the leaders of the Communist party, in other words Marx and his friends,” would strive to “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision. They will create a single state bank, concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production, and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agricultural, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.” Marx’s “theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship,” Bakunin explained, could work only “by means of the dictatorial power of this learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people.” The real aim of “doctrinaire revolutionaries” like Marx, he concluded, was “to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” … Bakunin might have been right that the realization of Marx’s Communist program must demand both extreme political violence and a government more authoritarian than any seen before, but to radical activists in Marx’s time and those yet unborn, these features were a central part of the attraction.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how events in international politics subsequently brought communism to power in certain parts of the world.