"My real glory is not the 40 battles I won . . . defeat will destroy the memory of as many victories. What nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code."
Revolution has come to Europe. An oppressed population overthrows the Christian monarchy and declares that they will build a new republic on the principles of rationality. Power consolidates in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy which claims to channel the “popular will” of the people. Cautious of what dissidents might do to their vision, the central leaders begin hunting down and executing tens of thousands of “enemies of the revolution.” A hyper charismatic leader rises to power and becomes a dictator, one bent on expanding his rule and pushing the state ideology across the world. The leader conscripts half of the men in his country into a massive military and begins to annex “satellite republics” in the name of bringing “liberty” to their lands.
If you had to guess who I’m talking about, I think most people would recognize a lot of the characteristics of Stalin and the spread of communism to Eastern Europe. Actually I’m talking about Napoleon and the spread of liberalism to Western Europe.
Much has been written comparing the similarities between the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, from their liberation themed rhetoric to their respective reigns of terror. Marx himself thought of the French Revolution as a viable blueprint for the eventual communist revolution, and Lenin had a statue of Robespierre built in Moscow to really drive the point home. But my goal here isn’t to reiterate the similarities between France and Russia’s revolutionary governments; what grabs my interest is the parallels in how they spread their political systems.
While Napoleon as Dictator decisively ended France’s own chance at democracy, his imperialism was instrumental in spreading the new French state ideology of liberalism. Feudalism, which had held strong for a thousand years, was swept away like old cobwebs as Napoleon’s armies spilled across continental Europe. In its wake, new French client states were forced to adopt the “Code of Napoleon,” a legal system which codified the separation of church and state, established the right to private property, ended slavery and guaranteed all men equality under law.
I think the recent past has given us an impression of the liberal republic as a uniquely peaceful, stable system, the kind of political structure most people would naturally want to live under if given a chance. But it bears worth remembering that those basic liberties listed above were enforced at the point of a gun and the behest of a conqueror.
This process wasn’t unique to continental Europe. I single Napoleon out partially because he represents one of the most influential founding moments in the spread of liberalism, and partially because the parallels between him and the much darker spread of Stalinism are so starkly clear. However, it's just as true that the spread of liberalism through the English speaking world came via bloody revolution and violent overland expansion.
But all that has changed over time. The Western world has calmed down for the most part and we’ve had time to see that the liberal republic actually has a lot going for it. In the post WW2 era dozens of countries have chosen peacefully to adopt the system, and the majority of the most successful, stable countries have been liberal republics for a long time.
Which brings me to my main question: considering the parallels between the bloody, expansionist and authoritarian origins of the spread of liberalism and of communism, how can we claim with confidence that communism won’t shift over time into a more sustainable system as well?
I’m a liberal. I believe the liberal republic is a great system, imperfect sure, but pretty darn good. But if I were born, say, at the turn of the nineteenth century and saw liberalism blazing a path of destruction across Europe, maybe I would quite logically think it’s a horrible system that should never be implemented anywhere. Certainly this is how I feel when I look at the major communist experiments in the early USSR and Maoist China. But right now we only have the up close, short term view of communism. Sure it was awful to begin with, but the birthing pains of liberalism were nothing to sneeze at either.
What Makes Liberalism and Communism Different?
One answer is that liberalism provided a set of liberties and rights people actually wanted, had demanded in popular protests long before Napoleon, and continued to demand after he was vanquished. Alternatively, the ideology of communism has lost much of its steam in the collapse of the USSR and China’s adoption of capitalism. Maybe one sign we have that liberalism was a political model destined to thrive for longer is that it stuck around in the marketplace of ideas for longer - or, realistically, that it had been dominant in the marketplace of ideas long prior to Napoleon, he just happened to be one man who pushed those reforms via force.
In fact, this is true even of the USSR as well, the birthplace of political communism. Many of the popular demands in the early Russian Revolution were for what we’d call standard liberal reforms, like basic labor laws and a non-arbitrary justice system. A sizable contingent of the anti-Czarist movement were actually people who explicitly called themselves as liberals, and the actual leftists themselves were divided in countless directions and lacked a cohesive, agreed upon model of change and governance. There was never an all consuming popular demand in Russia for the tenets of communism, even the ascendant Bolshevicks represented just one minority vision for society. But then again, the Jacobins, and then Napoleon, could also be accused of pushing minority views on society. How do we really know their liberal vision really reflected the will of the people at large?
Problems with Top Down Systems
This brings me to my second point, which is that I kind of rushed over history a little to drive a comparison home and tell a good story. I hope you’ll forgive me. That crucial detail I skipped is that Napoleon’s reign lacked the main ingredient in the thriving, peaceful liberal republics of today, which is of course Democracy. Instead, he quite literally made himself Emperor and put his family in charge of every country he conquered. No, Napoleon’s contribution to the evolution of liberalism was merely establishing the underlying edifice of laws which outlined basic personal liberties.
This was the first stage in continental Europe’s progress towards the eventual model of the liberal republic. The second stage, which brought the citizenry in harmony with the ideology, was the superstructure of democracy. The First French empire was ultimately fleeting compared to the lifetime of the democratic liberal republic, which has remained the most durable and successful system tried in the modern era. Because the tenets of liberalism have managed to prove the test of time in a form of government where the masses actually have a say, this gives us good sign that it’s a system with some broad based appeal.
Alternatively, both Marxism-Leninism and Maoism quite explicitly call for a centralized vanguard authority to take dominant control - in other words a small minority controlling the rest of the population. This supposedly leads towards the Dictatorship of the proletariat, but generally starts off with good old fashioned dictatorship. Like Napoleon’s Empire, the vanguard model recreates the same top down, autocratic political structure that drove people to rebel against their monarchs in the first place.
But communism moves in stages too, at least in theory. In the same way continental Europe moved from a dictatorship that enforced liberalism eventually into a series of thriving democratic liberal republics, Marxist-Leninist and Maoist doctrine claim that communism only begins with the vanguard government. Once enough progress is made then the state can wither away, leading to the final stage of full communism. Does this mean that liberalism and communism suffer an equivalent problem in their evolution towards a final, peaceful system?
The answer is that history has shown that liberalism doesn’t necessarily need this “first stage.” If I stop my ceaseless fixation with Napoleon for a moment, we can point out that even in his own day and age there were the contemporary Anglosphere revolutions, which, while violent, led immediately to democracy with no interim dictatorship. There were also reformist states during this era which skipped revolution entirely, as happened in Bismark’s German Empire. In the modern day numerous nations have adopted liberalism peacefully and we can see the emergent system sans revolution, absent of dictatorship and divorced from imperialism.
Problems with Bottom Up Systems
In fairness, there have also been examples of communists coming to power relatively peacefully, though so far they have all inserted themselves into the Marxist-Leninist minority-rules-over-majority vanguard model. That said, other visions of communism offer a softer, long term vision towards their final society - one that may not even require this centralization of power. Let’s say hypothetically communism can also exist without a stage that involves top down authoritarian control in the vein of Napoleon or Stalin - whether because it shifted first into a powerful government and then later into full communism, or because it skipped this stage altogether and went through a natural process more like anarcho-syndicalism.
The challenge I need answered is how communism as a model would survive in this “second stage,” as a system that involves the consent of the governed.
Because liberalism has been implemented in dozens of democracies, we’ve seen that it can weather the popular will of a voting population. But note that all liberalism does is guarantee everyone the same baseline of liberties, and beyond this makes little promise as to what the outcome will look like. If the majority of people in a liberal republic want to change the current outcome, they are able to tweak and shift the system via the voting booth - which is how softer versions of many socialist demands have become incorporated as civil rights and labor laws. While Marx did outline some general rules, communism is not a single set of laws that can be applied and left alone like the Napoleonic Code; rather it is a continuous restructuring aiming to achieve a specific model society over the long term.
How far can a nation realistically progress down this path to become a moneyless, cooperative society in absence of a top down authority? The few democratic nations which did flirt with socialism, such as India, Israel and maybe the U.K., all took some steps down this “path,” but eventually shifted towards free markets as voters changed their minds. Though there are far left parties in dozens of democracies, the only instance so far of committed communists coming to power is in Nepal. Significantly, the Nepalese Maoists were unable to achieve true leftist policy through the democratic process, especially when contrasted to the socialist reforms made under vanguard states like the USSR and China. Alternatively, if a vanguard state did fully achieve communism, once the state withers away what will stop a few dissenters from upsetting the balance and reversing that progress?
Liberalism offers a bit of both security and liberty, creating a broadly defined middle ground that offers a lot for the average person. Communism, in contrast, offers a very specific vision of a desirable society, and is probably more likely to appeal to the tail-ends of the population than the people as a whole. Insofar as there will always be a spectrum of beliefs in any population, it will always be challenging to implement and maintain a far left or far right ideology if you have to take everyone’s votes or opinions into account.
Different Visions
Finally, let’s zoom way out, past the historical examples of communism, past the hypothetical designs for future governments, and all the way to broad, long term philosophical goals. At their core, the ideologies of liberalism and communism have fundamentally different visions for global order: the prior seeks to establish a balance of power between different states, while the latter envisions their ideology as eventually overwriting previous systems and rendering a new world order.
This international “balance of power” existed before Napoleon, since the days of the Westphalian peace conference, which established a set of independent national actors each on equal ground. In this sense, Napoleon’s attempt to write over independent nation states with a unifying ideology is an aberration in the Western balance of power; in his wake the useful aspects of liberalism were reconfigured and repurposed to serve autonomous nations once more.
The spread of communism, in contrast, is not an aberration but part of the blueprint, not a bug but a feature. Communism sells itself on being the ultimate historical endpoint that all systems will eventually converge upon. In this context Stalin’s short lived policy of “socialism in one country” was the real deviation from the script, the normally prescribed order of communism advocates the overturning of old systems and the convergence upon one final political and social model.
While a communist nation could hypothetically exist with the same, voluntary, participatory internal structure as a liberal nation, on a global scale liberalism also promotes a voluntary, participatory international system where every independent nation can demand an equal say. The participating nations in this world order are allowed to define themselves internally by a range of radically different cultures and religions as long as they follow the same basic rules as everyone else. This system is not without dissenters (looking at you America) but on the whole has held for a period of remarkable stability and reduced conflict between participating member states. On a global scale communism does not seek this balance of power between unique identities with differing views; rather communism seeks to wash this away the old and establish a new global cohesive ideology.
An Open Call for solutions
I don’t believe that liberalism and republicanism were inevitably the systems that the world would settle upon. I do think they come the closest to reflecting the broad range of rights, freedoms and political powers most people desire. Because liberalism compromises on a spectrum of basic liberties and gives every individual and every nation a voice, it may be more likely to sustain than bottom up communism, which seeks a specific cohesive vision which inevitably will be rejected by some individual citizens or some individual nations. Alternatively, top down communism shares many of the qualities of absolutism that made people overthrow their monarchs in the first place.
Perhaps I’m merely showing my ignorance of true leftist theory, and this is the kind of thing that strategies have been exhaustively prepared to counter. But leaving aside the long debate about whether communist economies are functional, what will make communism a viable, stable system, that develops as intended without dissent from the populace and without tyranny from the leaders?
I do have the humility to acknowledge that from the wrong historical angle my own system also probably looked like it would never improve. I’m willing to have my mind changed if I’m given enough evidence. To any leftists who do read this blog, now or in the future, I welcome suggestions of how communism would change over time as well, and what would make a viable communist model.
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