their revolution without betraying its radical democratic ideals. Arguably the Jacobins failed to do either. Since then, most revolutionary projects have been faced with a similar choice as to whether or not to be seduced by the temptation of deploying dictatorial means to impose social change from above. The Jacobin state under Robespierre used the citizens’ army and the guillotine to dispatch those perceived as enemies of the revolution. In the end, the Jacobins created through such ruthless means the conditions for their own destruction, lashing out first against supporters of the ancien régime and then against radicals of the sans-culottes movement and other dissidents who were in favor of a more egalitarian republic. The Jacobins were left in a position of political isolation that set them up for defeat by the more moderate Girondins and ultimately allowed the rise of an emperor in Napoleon Bonaparte.1
This pattern reverberated through the revolutions of the 20th century. Lenin was inspired by the Jacobins when he created his own disciplined ‘democratic centralist’ Bolshevik party to spearhead the Russian Revolution. In doing so, he also created the dictatorial conditions that eventually condemned his Bolshevik comrades to death at Stalin’s hand (although he didn’t live to see it). Nemesis ruled, just as it did when Robespierre lost his head to the guillotine. With no freedom or power rooted in working-class society outside the Party, once the old Bolsheviks lost their power struggle to the ruthless Stalin there was nowhere for them to turn and they were murdered or executed.
Almost all revolutionary projects have been faced with this Hobson’s choice in one way or another: either destroy their own revolution internally by the use of dictatorial means (Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia is just the most dramatic example) or have it destroyed externally (as in Allende’s Chile) by an alliance of powerful and ruthless enemies. Today, overt partisans of secular revolutionary dictatorship are rare – the odd Leninist or Trotskyist groupuscule, or mediagenic but politically isolated intellectuals such as the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek2 or the French philosopher Alain Badiou. But these issues still haunt attempts to build a ‘21st-century socialism’, notably in Latin America where the tension between democratic initiative and bureaucratic fiat remains – although at least now it is recognized as such and debated as never before.
Democratic roots in the 19th century
After their defeats in the French Revolution, partisans of an alternative to emerging 19th-century capitalism had a hard row to hoe. Throughout Europe, reactionary aristocratic and monarchical power did its best to smother or at least severely limit the democratic impulse. While economic space for business was allowed, political space – particularly the right of assembly and to form radical organizations – remained severely restricted. The goal of a socialist republic was, for movements of the Left, just the logical conclusion of the democratic dream. Some socialist theorists saw in these movements an agency for realizing political projects that could provide an alternative; they were increasingly aware that capitalism threatened the idea of a fully evolved democracy. Among their most treasured goals was the expansion of the franchise, given that the vote was then restricted largely to males with property. The main alternative in which those opposed to the system invested their hopes was a socialism brought about in one way or another through the democratic transformation of the state. In those days no-one doubted that the triumph of socialism meant more, not less, democracy. Opponents of socialism were staunchly opposed to such an expansion of democracy, seeing it as a form of threatening mob rule.
Along with other pioneers of socialism, Karl Marx saw the state as the fulcrum that could leverage a fundamental redirection of economic life. Marx, though, had very ambivalent feelings about the state. He thought of it as a transitional phase in the achievement of a stateless form of communism based on the democratic self-rule of producers. He was deeply suspicious of the bourgeois form of the state and saw a radical democratic transformation of it as a necessary precursor to socialism. For Marx, the Paris Commune, which saw leftists take over Paris between March and May 1871, was an example of the initial form of this socialist democratization of the state, with all its leveling features and directly democratic assemblies. His brilliant Civil War in France, which charted the ill-fated course of the Commune, was one of his finest pieces of writing.3 This was the closest Marx came in his lifetime to seeing the self-emancipation of the workers to which he had dedicated himself.
In his writings on the state Marx chose to use the unfortunate phrase ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ to describe this transitional phase. The word ‘dictatorship’ had a far different and more limited definition in the 19th century than it has today. It meant a kind of directed control that would resist the challenges of the partisans of capitalism (particularly those that profited from the private control of the means of production) to reverse what Marx saw as a primarily democratic transition. But Marxism (not unlike the Bible and the Qur’an) can and has been used to support many different and competing viewpoints and interests. This is certainly true of the notion of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ that was picked up by Lenin and other Bolsheviks to justify whatever draconian police-state measures they deemed necessary to protect their notion of socialism.
This blind spot about using state power to install socialism from above is common to the social democratic as well as the communist Left, and it has proved the undoing of the socialist hopes that were so strong in the 19th century. It has been consistently challenged by the advocates of change from below, be they anarchists or other libertarians of the Left. The debate has waxed and waned over the course of the last two centuries, with the ‘practical’ advocates of state power holding the upper hand for most of the time. However, the notion of an alternative from below has never entirely disappeared and, given the eclipse of the Leninist ethos and politics embedded in the communist world, it has become again the principal source of opposition to the tepid reformism of the center-left tradition.
Communism and social democracy
Few would today argue that over-reliance on a centralized state played a key role in the undoing of both the politics and economics of orthodox communism. The consequence was an alternative to capitalism that was decidedly unattractive, as it squeezed popular democracy and personal freedom while at the same time failing to deliver on the promise of economic prosperity. A highly centralized planning mechanism undermined any effective feedback from below on which to base decisions as to what and how much to produce. The result was a combination of shortages and oversupply that became a notorious feature plaguing state communist economies. The system was able to achieve a forced-march industrialization that enabled first the Soviet Union (and, much later, China) to survive in the face of aggression from Hitler’s fascism and other enemies. A certain level of initial equality and security in daily life was eventually undermined by a growth in popular aspirations for a freer life with a wider range of opportunity and economic possibility. These systems have now been transformed back into a kind of autocratic capitalism where economic growth (spectacular in the Chinese case) has replaced stagnation but at the cost of galloping inequality. The usual, if limited, political freedoms associated with ‘advanced’ capitalism remain atrophied under these new forms of state capitalism. Undoubted advances in the general level of prosperity have not been accompanied by an opening up of the rights of assembly and independent organization that would allow trade unions and social movements to resist exploitation and inequality effectively.
In retrospect it could easily be claimed that orthodox state communism was not really an alternative to capitalism at all but merely a transitional form of it that allowed certain large ‘backward’ societies, hitherto blocked in their developmental path, to move towards their own peculiar model of autocratic capitalism. Today, both Russia and China, once the two centerpieces of world communism, have evolved into models of authoritarian capitalism in which a political élite, mostly made up of former communists, rules in alliance with a corporate and financial oligarchy. The ideological glue that sustains these regimes is no longer based on elusive communist ideals of equality or producer self-rule but instead on Great Power nationalism and individual self-enrichment.
The other strain of state socialism that has competed with orthodox communism is that of social
