Remembering communism

The memory and spirit of communism

Remembering communism, then, provides a vista onto all three works, none as self-consciously and self-critically as Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia. Significantly, Traverso, alongside his compatriot Domenico Losurdo, has been an important figure in the recent Marxian assault on the verities of revived liberalism, the critique of the concept of totalitarianism, and the attempted retrieval of Marxism and socialism from the dustbin of history. Traverso’s Fire and Blood (2016a) is a vivid, multi-layered consideration of the European Civil War, 1914–1945, bracing in its trenchant disregard for hegemonic recollections of the totalitarian 20th century, and ultimately unbowed about being communist. It recalls – though with less truculence – Badiou’s (2007) The Century in these ways, but, in an expansive history of ideas, explores culture in rich, provocative fashion, mirrored in the data deployed in Left-Wing Melancholia, ‘theories and experiences, ideas and feelings, passions and utopias’ (2016b: xiii). The left culture explored in this later book – contained in manifestos, letters, film, painting – conjoins two temporal dimensions, memory and utopia, entwined together as left future-oriented memory. It is no accident, Traverso suggests, that the crisis of Marxism, Mark II , coincided with the rise of memory studies, nor that this crisis plays itself out into a 21st-century ‘general eclipse of utopias’ (2016b: 5).

Traverso’s account of left defeat, here, is familiar and has affinities with Badiou, Ross (2002), Žižek (2001), Losurdo (2011, 2015), and Keucheyan (2013), among others. Neoliberalism has ushered us into ‘a suspended time between an unmasterable past and a denied future’ (2016b: 8). This presentism, bereft of utopias, imagines the 20th century as an age of war, (communist) totalitarianism, and genocide. It enshrines a newly dominant figure, the victim, with the Holocaust serving as a kind of civil religion, sacralising ‘the foundational values of liberal democracies’ (p. 15). The effects of this include both a new disenchantment of the world and a novel anthropological habitus. And this shift from hope to responsibility buries, in the process, entire dimensions of the history of the left – anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, feminism, socialism, and revolution.

Traverso’s response to the now ‘spiritually roofless’ (p. xiv) condition of the left is to rethink Marxism and socialism ‘through the prism of melancholy’ (p. xv), ultimately hopeful about a new way for the left to combine melancholy and militancy. The history of socialism, he points out, ‘is a constellation of defeats that nourished it for almost two centuries’ (p. 22). But this left culture of mourning was not one of passivity or cynicism, but rather a ‘secular liturgy of hope’ (p. 48). It was not, that is to say, a tragic (the realm of the ‘definitively lost’, p. 53) vision of the world, such as that recently, brilliantly and despondently argued for by T. J. Clark (2012). Defeats were, more often than not, necessarily lost battles on the path to, and to be redeemed by, final victory, with ‘remembrance as a key element of its [the left’s] utopian imagination’ (2016b: 71).

On this score, Benjamin is perhaps the central presence in Traverso’s work, and this presence overlaps considerably with a wider post-secular turn within and beyond critical theory today (McLennan, 2010). As Keucheyan (2013) has noted, this turn on the left, unsurprisingly, focuses on questions of hope and belief in the face of defeat and despondency. One part of the most recently opened season of Marxism, then, is filled with more respectful, thoughtful consideration of the once problematic connection made between Marxism and religion, science and utopia: the connection strenuously disavowed on the Marxian side, and emphasized, in frequently one-dimensional, accusatory ways, on the anti-communist side.

On this connection/opposition, in Favilli’s history of Italian Marxism, we are given a window to the vital role played in the growth of Marxism of science, questions of evolution, the language of necessity, the delineation of laws and objective systemic tendencies – the successful struggle, in short, to lend Marxism ‘dignity’ within the ‘fortress of science’ (Favilli, 2016: 88). Marx’s name, then, became a crucial scientific point of reference for the diverse workers’ movement, and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was a major source of this scientific Marxism across Europe (Sassoon, 1996), including Italy, where it was first translated in 1883.

At the same time, the repression and defeats suffered by the early workers’ movement required emotional resources, provided, in part, by the clearly ‘mythical-utopian aspects’ (p. 148) of theory. Thus, rigid and iron determinism intertwined with a catastrophism overflowing with millenarian qualities. The oscillations, here, between science and utopianism became particularly pronounced in the early part of the 20th century and around the ‘crisis of Marxism’, what Favilli names as ‘a crucible of transitions’ (p. 195). We have, for a start, eschatological and millenarian elements present among the popular classes as ‘long-term mental structures’ (p. 165). We have Bauer’s resonant emphasis on faith, an emphasis within socialism that coincided with Pareto’s extra-socialist contentions. And we have the emergence and growth of revolutionary syndicalism, an expression of a wave of strike activity and the pan-European discussion of the mass strike. This syndicalism was, as well, a variegated movement, Favilli shows. One part joined Marx with voluntarism, underscored proletarian autonomy, and sought to distance socialism from bourgeois egoism and materialism (‘the philosophy of the stomach’, p. 414), from liberal democracy and reformism. Favilli describes, here, an emerging ‘climate’ of Italian Sorelism – ‘the shock of insurrectionism’ (p. 367), an ‘epic state of mind’ (p. 412) – which, as we know, became a tributary into what Traverso (2003) has elsewhere called ‘the fascist drift’.

We find analogous tendencies and developments in the Dutch culture of socialism. As mentioned, the question of the mass strike became a Europe-wide debate, and was a point of separation between the left, centre, and right currents within social democracy. The Dutch left were close to Luxemburg, and Bourrinet suggests the latter’s Mass Strike pamphlet can be viewed as the first manifesto of the Dutch-German left – proletarian spontaneity and autonomy, anti-reformism, insurrection. This left also expressed certain distinctive religious and philosophical concerns. For instance, Nieuwenhuis, the leading figure in Dutch socialism of the Second International period, was a former preacher who retained ethical, utopian, and eschatological attachments. Herman Gorter and Henriette Roland-Holst, too, had religious beginnings. ² Further, while the Dutch were to propound a strict materialism, eventually connecting their opposition to Lenin in such terms (with Pannekoek’s 1938 book Lenin as Philosopher skewering Lenin’s merely bourgeois materialism), their Marxism was not of a piece with that of social democratic orthodoxy. Neither did it take the Hegelian route forged by Antonio Labriola in Italy. Early on, both Gorter and Pannekoek emphasised the ‘spiritual factor’ in the struggle for socialism (Bourrinet, 2017: 75) – this, in Pannekoek’s case, becoming a component part of his battle against Kautsky’s ‘passive radicalism’ and, later, against Leninism. In this theme, the Dutch uniquely relied upon Joseph Dietzgen, who was deployed, too, in the Dutch confrontations with Austro-Marxism and with the ideas of Georges Sorel. Drawing on Dietzgen to emphasize the relativity of knowledge, the role of spirit, and proletarian spontaneity, Pannekoek was to foreshadow Western Marxist contentions in rejecting the notion of Marxism as a ‘fixed system or rigid theory’ (p. 88).

In the turbulent age of empire, then, economic fatalism and catastrophism played a quasi-religious role, mobilizing revolutionary élan, and promising redemption for defeats, while also being viewed, at times, as threatening the movement. We see some of the complications entailed within the revisionism debate, where evolution and revolution both cohabit and collide. In Italy, there are extensive debates over the possible collapse of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the affirmative side leaning towards maximalist revolutionism. On the other side, Turati and Graziadei admitted the growing complexity of contemporary capitalism, and these novelties, unforeseen by Marx and Engels, were viewed as requiring flexibility and a break from the policy of ‘absolute opposition’ (p. 295). For Turati, reforms were, in any case, ‘the revolution on the march’ (p. 310). This line was eventually met by the revolutionary syndicalist call for complete proletarian autonomy and by its peculiar mixture of iron determinism with the most extreme voluntarism.

Revolution: Power and knowledge

Vacillation and tension around determinism and voluntarism are found, too, within the Dutch left. Thus, Pannekoek, close to Luxemburg in many respects, rejected the catastrophism evinced in her Accumulation of Capital, emphasised consciousness beyond economic determinism, but would nevertheless arrive at a thoroughly functionalist and economistic reading of the Bolshevik Revolution. Bourrinet’s own political education makes him attentive to the multiple hesitations and contradictory formulations of the Dutch-German left on the question of 1917. Early on, the Dutch drew close to the Bolsheviks over the critique of centrism and worked closely with Lenin as part of the Zimmerwald resistance to war, Roland-Holst and Pannekoek editing The Herald, organ of this opposition. Gorter’s Imperialism, the World War, and Social Democracy of 1914 was influential on Lenin, and Lenin’s State and Revolution was marked by the ideas of Pannekoek. Further, despite some disagreements, the Dutch were initially supportive of the Revolution – Gorter, for instance, seeing Bolshevik action against the Kronstadt rebels as necessary. The already existing differences, though, were increasingly felt – the Dutch taking anti-parliamentary and anti-union positions, and critical of the NEP and the drive for uniformity within the Third International. Making his way to Russia by hijacking a fishing vessel, the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany’s (KAPD) Jan Appel, for instance, was presented by Lenin with a draft of the latter’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism. Gorter replied with his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin in July 1920. In the same period, Otto Ruhle travelled widely in Russia and came to the conclusion that the revolution was degenerating. By 1921, Gorter was already expressing concern about the possible state capitalist and dictatorial directions the revolution was taking, and a KAPD pamphlet of 1923 declared the Russian Revolution a dual revolution, bourgeois and proletarian.

With respect to 1917, Bourrinet’s book conveys a profound sense of just what a remarkable moment we have, here, of left openness, optimism, and dialogue – a counterpoint to the left melancholia that followed. 1917 and its immediate aftermath also gives rise to one of the most fundamental contributions of the historic ultra-left – the attempt at a sociology of the Bolshevik Revolution. Multiple, and clearly advancing beyond Trotskyist efforts, ³ this left came to a diagnosis of the USSR as state capitalist. For the Dutch Group of International Communists (GIC) – established in 1927, with Henk Canne Meijer as leading light – the Russian Revolution had inevitably been but a bourgeois revolution, on account of Russia’s relative underdevelopment. The tendency towards state capitalism was, moreover, global, with fascism and social democracy other, equally insupportable, variants. Bourrinet rightly underscores the inconsistencies and problems here. Nevertheless, his lament about the ‘slide’ of the GIC into anti-Leninism and its accommodation with Ruhle’s ‘cult of anti-authoritarianism’ (p. 521) doesn’t do justice to the questions raised, and can be read as ciphers of a position already inclined to read the Dutch-German left as a ‘series of rejections’ (p. 518) born of defeat and disillusionment.

Tightly interwoven with this debate is the problem of the party and the early socialist struggle with problems of knowledge and power. In the Italian context, such questions were raised very early because of the influence of Bakunin’s ‘anti-authoritarian’ line in the country (Favilli, 2016: 35). The failure of a number of ‘ill-conceived uprisings’ (p. 45) issued in a crisis of Bakuninism from the mid-1870s and a desire to systematically arrange resistance, captured in the growing purchase of the language of ‘class struggle’, together with an organising impulse in the face of waves of strike activity. Thus, in the 1890s, both Turati and Labriola worked assiduously towards the construction of a Marxist party. Attached to this search for organisation, we see a surge in translations of Marx and Engels, alongside the appearance of 155 works on Marxism through the 1890s (p. 219). Into the early part of the 20th century, the debates around revisionism, Marxism’s crisis, and syndicalism pivoted around problems of the autonomy or not of the political, leadership and spontaneity (self-emancipation), and useable and valid revolutionary knowledge.

The council communism that emerges from the Dutch-German current wrestled with precisely these questions, arriving at a largely anti-party destination, embodied in Ruhle’s contention that the phrase ‘revolutionary party’ was a contradiction in terms. Here, too, though, there was no smooth and unidirectional unfolding of ideas. The KAPD, influenced, above all, by Gorter, continued to insist on the need for political organisation, until the party’s disappearance. The GIC vacillated, criticizing ‘leader politics’ (p. 299), but formulating a variety of designations for an assortment of roles lent to communist groups – ‘working groups’, ‘discussion groups’, propaganda groups’. The anti-party path was to be taken in a most thoroughly workerist direction after the Second World War by former GIC militant Cajo Brendel, a line congruent with certain tendencies within Socialism or Barbarism in France. In this direction, workerism was arguably unable to convincingly respond to the queries Castoriadis raised in his own post-war dialogue with Pannekoek. Surely, this issue remains a live one, when we consider the problems facing a new anarchist-leaning, Occupy-era left.

Above all, for the GIC, and in Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils, the central communist problem became one of economic organization. In this vein, Jan Appel used his spell in prison to begin work on his Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, which the GIC continued to work on after its initial publication in 1930. This rather idiosyncratic, ponderous document arrived at similar conclusions to Marx’s then unavailable marginal notes on the Gotha Programme. The focus, here, is on problems of socialist accounting, with communism depicted exclusively as a question of economic self-management. Bourrinet’s critical assessment that this focus simply glosses over problems of the state and violence, power, organization, and knowledge seems clearly on point.

Nation, globality, fascism

Two further connecting points to the problem of economism can be registered here – Eurocentrism and fascism. In a chapter on Marxism and the West, Traverso revisits an earlier joint-authored piece (Traverso and Lowy, 1990) on the antinomies of Marx on this question: Western domination as providential destiny, Engels’ ‘peoples without history’, admiration for the revolutionary achievements of the bourgeoisie, on the one side; condemnation of empire, departures from a linear philosophy of history, a remarkable distance from the hegemonic racism of the time, on the other. In this chapter, Traverso includes an intriguing discussion of the missed dialogue between Theodore Adorno and C. L. R. James (who met a couple of times in the 1940s): Adorno’s blithe disregard of the non-European world and his deafness to jazz, against James’s syncretic critique of civilisation and attentiveness to popular culture. Traverso closes the discussion with the mordant observation that:

Several decades after the missed encounter between Adorno and James, Western Marxism and Postcolonial studies merged under the sign of defeat. The former was born from the failure of revolution in the 1930s – Stalinism and fascism – and the latter emerged on the ashes of the colonial revolutions, buried in the mass graves of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Their common field became the academy, where critical thought found a haven, far from the sound and fury of the past century. History is made of missed encounters, of lost opportunities that leave the bitter taste of melancholia. (Traverso, 2016b: 177)

The Italian Socialist Party supported the invasion, Amadeo Bordiga (future head of the PCI) strenuously objected to any connection between socialism and nationalism, and, in that year, a young Antonio Gramsci penned an essay on colonialism and oppression (Fiori, 1973). In the same year, the entry of the German gunboat Panther into Moroccan waters unleashed parallel socialist tensions in Germany. It is, for instance, in this year that Kautsky, for the first time, rejects one of Pannekoek’s articles as unsuitable for Die Neue Zeit. In the following year, the Dutchman stridently criticises nationalism within the International, provoked by Bauer’s book on the national question. The internationalism of the Dutch-German left is largely unambiguous from this point: for instance, a ‘defeatist’ stance in the face of the Great War, against social democratic strictures on ‘defensive wars’, and a stringent Luxemburgist position, against the self-determinist direction of the Baku Congress, from the middle of the 1920s. Despite some contradictory moments, ⁵ the mature council communist position has been one of unwavering anti-nationalism, a point of clear separation from Leninism, but a position, too, often marked by a profoundly determinist and Eurocentric focus as to the spatial centre of communist hope.

A second site for reflection on economism and politics concerns the problem of fascism. Again, Traverso provides a compelling way in to this problem in his chapter on Bohemia. There are numerous possible connections between Bohemia and communism to be found in both Italian socialism and the Dutch-German left: the strength of anarchism in the Italian context, and the frequent intimacy between Bohemia and anarchism from the 19th century (Sonn, 1992); the fact that Gorter and Roland-Holst were poets; the influence of the KAPD on the German expressionist movement, for instance. Traverso provides us with a tight, vivid encapsulation of Bohemia:

Rejection of bourgeois conventions, lack (or voluntary renunciation) of a fixed abode and regular work, frequent visits to cafes, cabarets, and popular taverns, a taste for nocturnal life, ostentatious sexual freedom, a keen penchant for alcohol and drugs, the fair communal share of meagre available resources, and even, at times, a certain ‘sectarianism’ coloured by the use of secret codes shared only by a select brotherhood of initiates. (p. 120)

Bohemia, as Helmut Kreuzer notes, contains a number of predominant currents – green (freedom, art, youth, hope), black (distress, poverty, despair), red (rebellion) (in Traverso, 2016b: 126), and it is politically ambiguous, the complaint of Marx and Trotsky. Thus, Bohemia might become ‘the melancholy realm where, behind the façade of the restored order, the vanquished retire to meditate on their defeat’ (p. 150). Courbet’s The Killed Hart or The Trout exemplify this. On the other side of things, we have the Bohemia-fascism connection – Celine, Marinetti, Gottfried Benn. Traverso’s (2003) The Origins of Nazi Violence stands as one of the best culturalist Marxist readings of fascism, in its grasp of these latter complications. Complicated, too, and embarrassing, is the presence of leftist elements within fascism – Mussolini’s trajectory providing materials to the argumentative machinery that solders together communist and fascist totalitarianism.

Equally uncomfortable – especially, one imagines, in Traverso’s eyes, given his efforts at saving the fast-fading memory of the left’s contribution to anti-fascism – is communist anti-anti-fascism. Almost nothing could seem as perverse, for many on the left. Yet, there it stands, both within the German-Dutch left current and within Italian Bordigism, and still extant within the fragmentary remains of the ultra-left. On the Italian side, some of the tangled roots of anti-anti-fascism can be found, variously, in the debate around revisionism, in rejections of reform and alliance politics; in the growing ‘will to [proletarian] separation, the affirmation of a sure identity’ (Favilli, 2016: 149); in the syndicalist insistence on the primordial and exclusive importance of economic struggle; and in a climate of growing anti-liberalism, up to, then beyond, the First World War. Amadeo Bordiga’s anti-democratic intransigence contains other ingredients, as well, given the vital role he lends the party, as ‘social brain’ of the revolution. In Bordiga’s and Bordigism’s estimation, there was no essential difference between democracy and dictatorship. As Jean Barrot (aka Gilles Dauvé) (1992), a more contemporary thinker influenced by this tradition, puts this, ‘anti-fascism is the worst product of fascism’.

Bourrinet draws these two anti-anti-fascist currents together numerous times, having also authored a monograph on Italian Bordigism (ICC, 1992). These currents, along with a generous reading of Lenin, are, as mentioned, uniquely joined in the International Communist Current. Representatives of both councilist and Bordigist currents were present, say, during attempts at international leftist regroupment, at a conference in Belgium in May 1947, and within Socialism or Barbarism (treated very sparely by Bourrinet). The GIC articulated the common arguments made here: a refusal to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship and to choose a ‘lesser evil’; the related insistence that democracy had, in fact, prepared the ground for dictatorship; the rejection of united front politics, visible in the absence of sympathy with republican forces in Spain; the determinist argument that fascism was but an efflux of a new phase of capitalism, state capitalism.

Naturally, this maximalist ultra-leftism has been assailed from all sides, criticised as converging with the Stalinist ‘social fascism’ thesis, and, thus, as partly responsible for the victory of fascist violence. More damning still have been certain tenuous charges of convergence with Holocaust revisionism, made against elements of French Bordigism. ⁶ On the other side of this, Bourrinet delivers some fascinating material around the morphing of anti-fascist currents in Holland into council communist groupings. Of particular relevance, here, is the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, which helped organise the anti-Nazi strike in Holland. Decapitated in 1942, it was succeeded by the Communistenbond Spartacus, which evolved into a more councilist organisation, initiating contact with Meijer and Appel in 1944. On this note, the curious case of Marinus van der Lubbe, a GIC sympathiser, executed for the 1933 Reichstag fire, is also touched upon in one of the many intriguing episodes chronicled by Bourrinet.

Whatever one makes of such leftist positions, the resolute internationalism of the Dutch-German left still seems impressive, as does the remarkable globality of the early socialist movement as a whole. Traverso demonstrates this in attending to the extraordinarily interconnected quality of left collective memory: Lenin counting the days until the Russian Revolution had outlasted the Paris Commune; James’s book on Toussaint, framed by a communism initiated by encounters with Trotsky’s History and Spengler’s Decline; the monuments of left memory in film, such as Battle for Algiers, or, more recently, Land and Freedom. For the left, salvation is universal salvation; the past to be redeemed is a global one. On this score, one of the strengths of Favilli’s work is its detailed recording of translations in the early history of Italian Marxism: the widespread translation and dissemination of the IWMA’s Inaugural Address and the Provisional Rules, or, later, say, Antonio Labriola’s translation of the Manifesto, and Gentile’s translation of the Theses on Feuerbach. We see further evidence of this cross-border extension of social relations in the ripples caused in Italy by the SPD’s electoral results of 1890 and the Bernstein debate, the polemic between Arturo Labriola and Plekhanov, the Italianization of Sorel. And, as noted, we see what Favilli (2016: 3) names as ‘the relative permeability of the entire revolutionary ecosystem’, as these global influences intertwine with national specificities, say, Mazzinian organisations, Italian Bakuninism, Italian criminal sociology, or the work of Achille Loria.

The global dimensions of the Dutch-German left are equally in evidence in Bourrinet’s work: from Nieuwenhuis’ interventions within the Second International, to Pannekoek’s role as teacher and revolutionary journalist in Germany from 1906, to Zimmerwald. Beyond this, Gorter played a crucial role in the formation of the Communist Workers’ International (KAI), the GIC dallied with Esperanto, and the Dutch left made efforts at international regroupment in the mid-1930s and also after the Second World War. Here, Bourrinet touches upon the range of like-minded organisations across the world. These include Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, the Glasgow group around Guy Aldred, Mattick’s organisation and Root and Branch in the US, the workerist outgrowths from Socialism or Barbarism, Solidarity in Britain, Melbourne’s Southern Advocate, and more. Here, as in the case of the very abrupt ending to Favilli’s book, the reader is left with a sense of truncation, Bourrinet dealing very lightly with this tradition from 1945. The first version of the book appeared in 1988 as a doctoral thesis, a reworked version of which was published in 1995. The absence of discussion of the resonances between the Dutch-German left and new global left is, then, understandable, though certainly regrettable. However, the revival of these currents in the 1960s and ‘70 s surely deserves more than the fleeting attention Bourrinet devotes to this.

On this critical note, while the three works under review here are immensely valuable for contemporary efforts to re-remember communism, the reader might feel certain hesitations around elements of each. In Traverso’s case, there is a certain wavering focus, which means the book just doesn’t attain the heights of Fire and Blood, the reworked essays lacking the tight, unitary logic of the earlier book. Thus, at times, there is a sense that the chapters have been forced together. Despite the many brilliant moments where Traverso impels us to rethink mourning and militancy, it often feels, too, that the author has only expressed a portion of his wealth of thought on these questions. Favilli, meanwhile, paints an extremely rich, multi-layered portrait of early Italian socialism, which fills in numerous gaps for Anglo-only readers. ⁷ He provides new, sturdier foundations for thinking the sources of the Italian socialisms that followed – Gramsci, of course, the specificity of the PCF, ⁸ or the autonomists. Aside from the book’s brusque ending, my major qualm, here, concerns prose style, where Favilli (or his translator) opts for a density of formulation, riven with multiple negatives that can, at times, be mind-boggling. Finally, Bourrinet brings into view a marginal but still germane communist current. Despite the welcome detail, the ideological and temporal foci do not always do justice to the object, and perhaps more of Traverso’s circumspection or Favilli’s scholarly care would have made the work even stronger. Such quibbles aside, the three works are further valuable moments in the contemporary re-enchantment of Marxism and socialism, beyond the neoliberal eclipse of utopias and ends of history – outstanding meditations that demonstrate that remembering that communism is never simply just that.