Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)
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Robert Service's Comrades: A History of World Communism. 2007. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Xviii+571 pp. $US35.00.<1> The first thing that needs to be said about Robert Service's sizable work, Comrades!, is that it is not nearly that which it claims to be. It's subtitle proclaims it A History of World Communism. In actual fact it is a (partial) history of authoritarian or state communism, primarily as developed in Europe.
<2> While Service's work begins with a very brief discussion of elemental figures in utopian communism and anarchism, specifically Charles Fourier and P-J Proudhon, these currents are quickly dropped from the 40 chapters of this story of world communism and its ongoing development. Little is said of their lasting contributions to the understandings and practices that continue to inform non-statist and anti-statist versions of communism. This is especially unfortunate given that it is the utopian and libertarian or anarchistic currents of communism that provided often the most incisive and trenchant criticisms of statist communism, and whose proponents were most abused by state communist movements and governments . Even more, it is arguably the non-statist and anti-statist versions of communism that have provided the greatest inspiration for recent generations of social movement actvists, from the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s to the alternative globalization activists of the twenty-first century.
<3> Thus Service can say nothing about recent developments since his partial history ends in the 1980s with the fall of the Berlin wall. This is rather unfortunate since it means that Service can offer not even passing commentary on history's lessons for the present. Other than a replaying of the rather simplistic truism that (state) communism is bad. Often his “analysis” is baffling as when he bothers to criticize chroniclers of the Soviet Union thus: “The shoddiness of Soviet clothes, shoes and furniture was rarely highlighted” (368). He is not even able to extend the other typical assessment of state communism that it is a monstrous distortion of a wonderful or inspirational ideal because he has not examined the process by which this historical distortion was effected and repeated.
<4> For Service non-statist communism, a naive movement in his view, was doomed to failure anyway because it could not, and anyway did not want to, achieve state power. Thus there is really no need to examine more closely or probe the role of state communism in ensuring the defeats of its non-statist alternatives. Even less is there a questioning of how the actions of the state communists actually served to bolster the capitalist world system rather than challenge it.
<5> Service reduces the entire history of anarchism, a diverse movement that predates Marxist Communism, to criticisms of Bolshevism levelled by Emma Goldman against Lenin and the oppression of anarchsts by the Communist Party during and after the Civil War. Service says little about the Makhnovist movement in Ukraine. This was a substantial alternative communist movement that waged a “two-front” battle against the White armies as well as against the Reds.
<6> Even more, there is a marked Eurocentrism in Service's account of “world Communism.” Thus innovative developments in communist theory and practice ranging from the guerrilla politics of Che Guevara and Giap to the community-based agararian communism of African Socialism are generally left out of the story. In fact, Service's assessment of Che Guevara descends to a level that is embarrassing: “The esteem for Che Guevara was enhanced by his good looks” (374). Similarly the significant, often central, interconnections between communist movements in Africa, including the Marxist parties that played such important parts in independence movements in Angola and Mozambique, as well as Latin America and Asia, including Laos, Mongolia, Nepal and Vietnam, are largely ignored. Crucial issues such as the role that communism in Angola, and the war between Cuban and Angolan forces and the apartheid armies of South Africa are overlooked. This Eurocentrism is anachronistic given advances that have been made in historiography and social science in recognizing and engaging non-Western perspectives (particularly where a volume claims to be a world history).
<7> Service clearly has little regard for his subject and this is matched by a lack of respect for the social activists and organizers who have drawn inspiration from varieties of communist thought and practice. He states, again in embarrassing fashion: “The generation of Westerners who liked mini-skirts, long hair, hallucinogenic drugs responded positively to Mao's pretentious platitudes” (374). Service's contempt for communists does not stop at Mao or Che but extends to New Left thinkers who had less direct links to Soviet-style parties. He dismisses the influential New Left Review, a journal that continues to make significant contributions to critical thought and diverse social theory as “earnest” and similarly arcane. Tariq Ali, the noted author and critic, who continues to influence critical academics and activists alike, is disparaged as a “muddled Oxford student with a talent for improvising speeches” (375). Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Pau Sartre, Lucio Colleti and Luis Althusser are reduced to “style-maestros of turgidity” (373). Curiously, Service misreads (or distorts) Althusser's interpretation of Marxism completely. Whereas Althusser discarded the humanistic writings of the early Marx and shifted emphasis towards his later “properly Marxist” writings on political economy, Service erroneously suggests that “Althusser claimed that Marxism's claim to analytical superiority lay in the scientific method and content of Marx's early writings; he argued that the later corpus lacked the same rigour” (373, emphasis added). Never mind letting the facts get in the way of an ideological mission.
<8> At times this reads like a historical leftover, a straightforward piece of Cold War anti-communism. Service places American imperialism in quotations as if the US has not been, and does not continue to be, an imperialist power. While showing only disdain for communists, he is unable to contain his predisposition to fellow anti-communists: “Commentators – at least those who were not commited anti-communists were often confused and under-informed in what they said about the communist order” (368). Were there no confused and under-informed anti-communists?
<9> By overlooking, ignoring or avoiding alternative communist movements and ideas, especially where they have made important historic contributions, Service leaves a large part of the actual history of world communism untold. He is left presenting a partial history that takes the reader along his predetermined path. By silencing alternative voices of world communism he not only presents a narrow picture of communism as inherently statist and authoritarian. Even more, and most ronically, he lines up with the official Communist Party censors, the Stalinists and Maoists he so dislikes, in erasing heterodox, minority and oppositional versions of communism. The very voices the CP apparatuses worked so hard to silence, in their own attempts to present their own situation as synonymous with communism.
<10> There are moments when this lengthy work provides a detailed overview of developments within communism, including sometimes overlooked movements and uprisings such as the Munich Soviet of 1919. These moments are too few, unfortunately, to recommend this book.
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