What Next Now That Red Is Dead?

Nearly 150 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” only 20 years after students preached revolution in the streets of America and Europe, the failure of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union appears to have driven the final nails into the coffin of “the left.” Glasnost and perestroika promise renewal for the Soviet Union but mark the end of the revolutionary socialist movement that threatened the status quo in the last half of the 19th Century and conquered half the globe in the first half of the 20th. The specter of revolution--or communist subversion, take your pick--was the great fact of world politics for a century and a half. It is over. “The left” is dead.

Of course leftists will insist this is news to them. Marxist-Leninists rule in Moscow, Beijing and a dozen other capitals. Almost every country has a Communist Party, many underground, and dozens of leftist revolutionary groups are plotting to seize power in the Third World. More important, democratic socialists have never ceded moral supremacy to the communist left and are far from moribund.

But “the left” as a cultural fact, as a challenge to society’s established order, as a locus of political discontent, as a promise or threat of radical upheaval-- the left, in short--appears to have faded from the equation of world politics. Time was, not so long ago, when the left posed the first big question faced by every activist for whom politics was a passion before it became a profession--yes or no, for or against, fellow traveler or principled opponent. The left was skilled at capturing the moral high ground--as champion of the working class during the 20 years on either side of 1900, as the alternative to capitalism and fascism during the crisis of the 1930s, as the party of “peace” at the onset of the Cold War.

The left was never monolithic: Marx himself, a polemicist without mercy or restraint, established the tradition of sectarian infighting among rival groups on the road to revolution. The Marxist left never won a free election. In Russia, as Vladimir I. Lenin said, power had been found lying in the streets after the czarist regime collapsed under the strain of World War I. The Soviet Red Army made the “revolutions” of Eastern Europe after 1945, and revolutions since--in China, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua--were made by guerrilla armies and sustained by secret police.

The political challenge posed by the left did not rely on the legitimacy of popular democratic support, but on other factors--intellectual power, organizing skill, mastery of publicity and seizure of issues of transcending importance such as war and peace, poverty and social justice. For decades, leaders of the left understood better than ordinary politicians what they were doing, took the longest view, had the best writers, inspired lofty ideals, built formidable organizations, won the disciplined allegiance of able leaders, made the most noise and promised to make the biggest difference on issues that mattered. Above all, it offered a radical analysis of society--tactical political maneuvering was always in the service of genuinely revolutionary ambitions.

The Bolshevik success in Russia proved that “red revolution” was a real possibility. After Lenin established the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, the fear of militant Communism, supported on a global scale by Moscow, was a potent political factor everywhere. Twice the United States was swept by a “red scare”--in the years after World War I and again after the World War II.

But that was the least of it. If the harsh victors’ peace imposed on Germany in 1918 was one great factor in the rise of Adolf Hitler, then fear of Bolshevism was the other--and not just in Germany. The appeasement policies of Britain and France in the 1930s can be explained only partly by fear of another war, great as that was. Equally important was the panicky inability of allied leaders to see that fascism posed the greatest immediate danger to the stability of Europe, not Bolshevism.

In retrospect, both the high-water mark of the left as a player on the world’s stage and the fatal illness called “Stalinism” came in the 1930s. The twin crises of fascism and the Great Depression posed absolute challenges for which only the left seemed to offer an absolute solution. But in the emergency, the left swallowed Josef Stalin’s lethal draught--imposition of the world’s least creative economic system, which made wartime austerity a fixture of Soviet society, and a purge that killed millions of Russians and forbade mourners to speak of it. No movement could survive failures so immense.

But “fatally stricken” is not dead. Black crepe was not hung until Mikhail S. Gorbachev policies admitted the Soviet state’s failure to provide for the safety and prosperity of its citizens. Fear of “red revolution” in the West did not survive the 1950s; now “world revolution” at the point of Soviet bayonets joins it in history’s dustbin. Soviet analysts have conceded as much in the cautious language of bureaucrats walking the cat back. They will be explicit in time.

It is often said that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. The left might still have a few years to go if Gorbachev promised to cure Soviet ills with more Marxism or Leninism, but he does not. It is markets, not Marxism, he has chosen, and democracy, not Lenin’s “democratic centralism.” What may emerge from this is still to be seen, but the absolute solution of Marxism-Leninism is not even on the drawing board.

The effect of the Soviet Union’s agonizing reappraisal can be seen in every Marxist-Leninist state or party based on the Soviet model. Intransigence may be the order of the day in East Germany and Cuba, but the rigor and poverty of the system will be increasingly difficult to justify. As the Soviet Union surrenders its monolithic structure, however haltingly, its position as the moral center of gravity in the socialist camp will wither accordingly. A faith abandoned is a faith denied. One by one, the “fraternal states” will become less socialist, until no camp remains--just a loose network of separate states with interests that change with the seasons. More important will be the effect on revolutionary movements still drawing up their own programs. It will be increasingly hard to pick Marxism-Leninism as a model demanding a detour through oppression and economic stagnation. Die-hards may insist they’ll do it right this time, but as a rallying cry it sounds lame.

None of this is meant to suggest that peace has arrived. The Soviet Union remains one of the world’s great powers, a potent rival of the others and a potential threat to its neighbors. What is changing is the ideological cast to the conflict called the Cold War. The Soviet Union claimed, and other nations feared, that its own national interests came second to its role as champion of the left--the immutable class war that promised revolutionary upheaval. The claim looked thin decades ago; now it’s an embarrassment.

Of course, Gorbachev may stumble. The recent Soviet elections tapped a vast reservoir of discontent and resentment; officials were stunned by crushing defeats in contests no amount of charity could call close. Fearing the whirlwind, the Soviet government may chuck Gorbachev and try to make some of it back. But no turning in the party line can redeem failures that have brought the world’s first socialist revolution--once Russia’s proudest boast--to the brink of moral, political and economic collapse. Desperate clinging to power is not the same as faith. The party, the army and the KGB may long for their eminence under Marxism-Leninism, but not even they believe in it.

When the American journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from a visit to Russia in the early years of the revolution, he told reporters, “I have seen the future, and it works.” He didn’t mean the future of Russia, but of the world--when it had been transformed by the left. The October Revolution made Russia the laboratory of the left, the “workers’ homeland,” the “vanguard of the revolution.” Leftists may have privately agonized over the revolution’s “excesses,” but they stood fast--explained away the horrors of collectivization and the purges, rallied in defense of Russia against Hitler, denounced U.S. imperialism and revised the history of the Cold War. But who defends the “workers’ homeland” now? Who thinks there is one?

The death of the left is a great cultural fact, signaling a change in the way the world talks to itself. Whatever else may be going on, “The Communist Manifesto” has moved from the streets to the libraries. Marx had his chance and the Soviet Union was it. Steffens was wrong: It didn’t work. History does not pause for excuses. “Come the revolution” is an irony.

But if the right may be forgiven a sigh of relief, it has no cause for rejoicing. Triumphant now, conservatives will soon feel their own cohesion slipping in the absence of the ancient enemy. Signs of political confusion can already be seen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Helmut Kohl’s West Germany and George Bush’s United States, as the old frontier between right and left loses definition.

The death of the left has been a long time in coming and the inevitable realignment will not happen overnight. The Democrats in the United States are still bandaging the wounds of their failure in November; who would dare to predict what rallying cry might restore the sense of unity and purpose that made them unbeatable in the 1930s and 1940s? The left once offered a plausible alternative philosophy on how to organize a modern state. Until a new theory emerges, we are forced to tinker with what we have. Thatcherism and Reaganism tell us what to expect in the meantime, which is where we all live.