History surely made a big difference in shaping the character and divergent outcomes of Russian and Chinese communisms. Economic historians have now amply documented the pioneering role of medieval China in fostering the nearly modern levels of manufacturing and trade. Imperial China, however, did not become the first capitalist power in history for mainly geopolitical reasons. It was primarily the impressive permanence of an empire concerned with maintaining internal “harmony” and preventing nomadic attacks. In the West after the fall of Rome such an empire failed to materialize, which forced western capitalists to protect and consolidate themselves first as a system of city-states and later as modern national states. The Chinese empire fell late in the nineteenth century, but this series of catastrophic events only harmed indigenous capitalism. The Chinese entrepreneurs now faced both internal disorders and foreign domination by Western powers and Japan. It took another century full of grievous turmoil before the communist rebels prevailed in China—and essentially got stuck there. The Maoist attempt to launch a Soviet-type industrialization at the expense of the peasantry backfired in a huge famine followed by the decade of political bashing within party ranks. The human catastrophe surpassed even that of the Soviets in the 1930s without, however, generating a large modern industry and urbanization. China remained incapable of reaching even its immediate objectives in the regional neighborhood let alone the ideological goals of promoting a world anticapitalist revolution.
Here the geopolitical theory of Randall Collins identified a blessing in disguise. China was firmly contained in the world and regional power balances. Yet the same fact also removed China from the battle lines of the Cold War, thus enabling ideological decompression and economic engagement with the West. The Chinese cadres regarded radical Maoism as no less threatening to themselves than the Soviet nomenklatura regarded Stalinism after 1953. The long historical tradition of China suggested then the restoration of internal “harmony” by permitting grassroots and mainly rural economic entrepreneurship. Luckily, it was still surviving in the wake of abortive Stalinist industrialization. China’s market turn evidently also helped to keep in line the local party cadres through patronage that delivered opportunities for personal enrichment while exempting the loyal and properly performing clients from the public prosecution for corruption. Communism did not collapse in China. Even the official communist ideology still survives in a “lite” version. The Chinese leaders coming to the helm after Mao stumbled into the combination of structural conditions that reproduced on a grander scale the East Asia authoritarian model of the export-oriented developmental state. This realized the long-standing prediction of Immanuel Wallerstein: the communists rejoining world capitalism as pragmatic facilitators between foreign capital and their national labor.
CAPITALISM AND ITS TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHALLENGERS
Military geopolitics recurrently emerges in our analysis of communism because this appears the single most important factor determining the twentieth-century revolutions. To stress again, communism emerged not from the ideas of Karl Marx nor from the native traditions of Russia or China. It was the result of a particular leftist current, the Russian Bolsheviks, first finding its opportunity in the wake of a disastrous war to seize and technologically upgrade an eminently defensible platform in world geopolitics. The Bolsheviks, themselves consciously following the French Jacobin precedent, showed how radical intelligentsia could inspire and mobilize the popular masses for overthrowing old regimes, defeating foreign invasions, and building the stronger new states on much broader social bases.
The Soviet example, through direct aid or mainly by its very presence in the twentieth-century world scene, enabled the success of a whole variety of patriotic insurrections led by the radicalized native intelligentsias. Far from all became communist but surely all adopted some of the strategies pioneered by the Bolsheviks. The difference was mostly in the degree of economic expropriation by the newly reasserted states. Wherever states moved to control everything down to peasant households, the state was declared socialist. In states that seized only the properties of foreigners and some particularly “obscurantist” or unpatriotic owners, like the landlords and large comprador traders, the process and its result was called nationalism. The aftershocks of Bolshevik revolution emerged most strongly in the other erstwhile agrarian empires humiliated by Western capitalism and reduced to dependency status. This is what became known as the Third World national liberation movements, from the early example of Kemalist Turkey after 1918 and the Indian epic struggle for independence to the Iranian revolution of 1979. In the latter case a postmodern student movement of the 1968 type ignited a typically premodern rebellion of the urban poor and merchants against the impious despotism of the Shah. The result, however, was a quintessentially modern revolutionary state more closely resembling the Soviet-type regimes than the medieval Caliphate. Just as the two world wars in crucial ways defined the Soviet Union, the eccentric regime of the Islamic Republic was consolidated in the tremendous patriotic resistance of Iranians to the attack by Saddam’s Iraq which was surely acting as proxy of a broad counterrevolutionary coalition of foreign interests.
Despite the farrago surrounding the Sunni jihadi militancy after 2001, in the big picture of antisystemic challenges it was only a minor aftershock overdramatized by the American blunder of invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Qaeda sought a global geopolitical confrontation by the terrorist provocation of “morally cleansing” revolts and antiforeign resistance. Their strategy harkens back not to the Bolsheviks but perhaps rather to the nineteenth-century Russian Narodniki who had, after all, pioneered suicide bombings. And even more than the erstwhile Russian terrorists, the jihadists have failed politically to ignite popular rebellions.
In the core capitalist states, however, communist parties ran into the formidable wealth of Western societies and established parliamentarianism which favored the moderate tactics of social democracy. In the interwar Italy, Spain, and above all Germany, communists were brutally checked by the fascists, a new kind of counter-revolutionary force mobilizing both the embattled state elites and chauvinism of the “common angry men.” The fascist variety of antisystemic movements must be addressed seriously because it might yet reemerge in the wake of large crisis. After 1945 the Western Cold War ideology equated fascism with communism as the totalitarian twin evils. The convergence in the techniques of mass propaganda, industrial warfare, economic planning, and state control was real enough but these techniques became more widespread during the twentieth century than many people dared to recognize. In the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, the age of mass war and economic depression forced all governments to govern. This trend encompassed the more benign social democratic regimes of Scandinavia and the liberal democracies of Anglo-America that have shared to certain degrees in the new techniques of economic planning and mass consumption as well as police surveillance. Or just pay attention to public architecture and the typically muscular iconography of the thirties.
The scale of actual and symbolic state violence, significant as it was at the human level, depended mainly to the differential in geopolitical position and the strength of internal revolutionary challenges flowing from it. The dominant classes of Anglo-American democracies felt less threatened than their counterparts in continental Europe and therefore less compelled to let the violent and despicable racists fight in the streets against leftist revolutionaries or attempt to capture “living spaces” in foreign conquests. When it came to confronting Hitler’s ultramilitarism that threatened to finish capitalism not in a revolution but rather in a very bloody mess, the Anglo-American liberals readily allied with the communist counterforce. In a great but perfectly explicable irony of the twentieth century, the capitalist world-system was saved by the Soviet military industrialization resulting from a communist revolution.