It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history. Even the image – if there was one – of the wonderful hopes we had for human life has been overlaid by the range of goods, services, prospects and personal options which are today available to the majority of men and women in the incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the West. Marx and Engels wisely refrained from describing what communist society would be like, but most of what little they said about what individual life would be like under it, now seems to be the result, without communism, of that social production of potentially almost unlimited plenty, and that miraculous technological progress, which they expected in some undetermined future, but which is taken for granted today.
Rather than reconstruct in my eighties what made us communists, let me quote from shortly after the 1956 crisis, when I was closer to the convictions of youth. I wrote that even the most sophisticated revolutionaries share ‘that utopianism or ‘‘impossibilism’’ which makes even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical pain at the realization that the coming of socialism will not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all problems’. I observed that ‘revolutionary movements … appear to prove that almost no change is beyond their reach’.
Liberty, equality and above all fraternity may become real for the moment in those stages of the great social revolutions which revolutionaries who live through them describe in the terms normally reserved for romantic love. Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice …Theirs is at such times a miniature version of the ideal society, in which all men are brothers and sacrifice everything for the common good without abandoning their individuality. If this is possible within the movement, why not everywhere?
By this time I had recognized, with Milovan Djilas, who has written wonderfully well of the psychology of revolutionaries, that ‘these are the morals of a sect’, but that is precisely what gave them such force as engines of political change.4
It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed. However, three further elements distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations to a new society. First, Marxism, which demonstrated with the methods of science the certainty of our victory, a prediction tested and verified by the victory of proletarian revolution over one sixth of the earth’s surface and the advances of revolution in the 1940s. Marx had shown why it could never have happened before in human history, and why it could and was destined to happen now, as indeed it did. Today the foundations of this certainty that we knew where history was going have collapsed, notably the belief that the industrial working class would be the agency of change. In the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ they looked firm.
Second, there was internationalism. Ours was a movement for all humanity and not for any particular section of it. It represented the ideal of transcending selfishness, individual and collective. Time and again young Jews who began as Zionists became communists because, obvious as the sufferings of the Jews were, they were only part of universal oppression. Julius Braunthal wrote, describing his conversion to socialism in Vienna at the start of the century: ‘I felt sorry for my Zionist friends whom I had deserted; but I hoped I would be able to persuade them one day to understand that the smaller aim has to give way to the bigger.’5 With retrospective bitterness disguised as cynicism my New York colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller describes her conversion to communism in a Hungarian Zionist work camp in 1947 at the age of eighteen:
We lived in community, we felt we belonged together. We needed neither money nor the rich … I didn’t like the rich, today I am ashamed of it. I abominated the black market dealers, the dollar speculators, the men of rapacity and greed. No problem! I’d stay loyal for ever to the poor. So, crazy chick that I was, I joined the Communist Party to be with the poor. 6
In practice, national or other collective or historical identities were far more important than we then supposed. Indeed, communism probably made its greatest impact outside Europe, where it had no effective rival in the fight against national or imperial oppression. Ho Chi Minh, the liberator of Vietnam, chose as his nom-de-guerre in the Comintern ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Chin Peng, who led the communist insurgency and jungle guerrillas in Malaya, though less successfully, began as a youthful patriot who first turned to communism when he abandoned hope in the ability of the Kuomintang Party to liberate China. He told me so himself, an elderly Chinese gentleman of intellectual interests looking most unlike a former jungle guerrilla leader, in the improbable environment of the Athenaeum’s Coffee Room. Nevertheless, even for those who began with limited aims, even for those who abandoned the wider hope when it disappointed the narrower one, like the many communist Jews who left the Party under the impact of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, communism represented the ideal of transcending egoism and of service to all humanity without exception.
But there was a third element in the revolutionary convictions of Party communists. What awaited them on the road to the millennium was tragedy. In the Second World War communists were vastly over-represented in most resistance movements, not simply because they were efficient and brave, but because they had always been ready for the worst: for spying, clandestinity, interrogation and armed action. Lenin’s vanguard Party was born in persecution, the Russian Revolution in war, the Soviet Union in civil war and famine. Until the revolution communists could expect no rewards from their societies. What professional revolutionaries could expect was jail, exile and, quite often, death. Unlike the anarchists, the IRA or movements of Islamic suicide bombers, the Comintern did not make much of a cult of individual martyrs, though the French CP after liberation appreciated the attraction of the (true) fact that during the Resistance it had been ‘le parti des fusillés’ (the party of those executed by firing squad). Communists were undoubtedly the quintessential enemy for almost every government, including even the relatively few which allowed their Parties legal existence, and we were constantly reminded of the treatment they could expect in jails and concentration camps. And yet we saw ourselves less as sufferers or potential casualties than as combatants in an omnipresent war. As Brecht wrote in his great 1930s elegy on the Comintern professionals, An die Nochgeborenen:
I ate my meals between battles I lay down to sleep among the murderers.
Hardness is the soldier’s quality, and it ran even through our very political jargon (‘uncompromising’, ‘unbending’, ‘steel-hard’, ‘monolithic’). Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the bolshevik. It was the necessary response to the times. As Brecht wrote: