A. James McAdams’s Vanguard of the Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018) marks an ambitious stab at narrating the global history of communist leadership. Beginning with the League of Communists and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, the 584-page monograph journeys primarily through the history of different Soviet republics, some other European countries, the US, Cuba, China, and North Korea. In working against the ghettoization of this story by regional interests or specializations, what is particularly remarkable is McAdams’s ability to shift across contexts within thematically divided chapters, which allows the reader to gain a sense of the developments of a specific period in a global context. For example, chapter four, titled “Internationalizing the Party Idea,” starts with the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, and its decision to change the names of all parties to explicitly flag themselves as communists to distinguish themselves from social democratic forces. McAdams shows the great diversity of positions held within the Comintern prior to arriving at this decision. He then turns to specific national contexts to locate those varying positions, and further narrates how this decision kept shifting with developments in distant parts of the world. Yet there are significant limits to McAdams’s vision of this history. While any project of narrating such a vast story is bound to have omissions, McAdams’s story is tailored to a liberal teleology emerging from the Global North that prevents an examination of how the party form has proliferated in its variations beyond what his study suggests.
In the monograph’s first extended venture outside Europe, McAdams begins by noting that, as opposed to the “sinuous paths” of the European debates he has been tracing (over the previous 135 pages), the Comintern found its “greatest source of unadulterated support” in “the less developed, nonindustrialized world.” The implication is that Europeans debated with theoretical sophistication and nuance (“sinous”), and the rest of the world primarily expressed credulous (“unadulterated”) support, so their voices can be appended as numbers to a theoretical scaffolding established elsewhere. Representatives from these countries, who formed “one-quarter of the voting and nonvoting delegates at the Comintern’ s Founding Congress in 1919,” were “simply happy to have found a common home.” They merely appear to have translated Bolshevik terms—or whatever they understood by them—into their own struggles against colonialism, and did not contribute much to the formation of Comintern policies. Similarly, in the discussion of early Cuban communists, he writes: “Only a few of these founding fathers could claim to know much about Marxism… . Few had read the seminal works of their political forefathers. What these early communists lacked in ideological formation and organization, they made up for in the appearance of authenticity.” At a crucial point in the history of communism, when non-European communists were taking up the cause and radically changing what communism stood for, McAdams can’t help but read them along a European standard of literacy in the Marxist canon, and a performance of authenticity with respect to it.
It is therefore no surprise that there are significant omissions from this history. For example, while one reads about how revolutionaries from colonized countries participated in the Comintern, there is no discussion of how they informed its colonial policy. Among those missing is a figure of such importance as Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, who was a founding member of the communist parties of India (1920), as well as of Mexico (founded in 1917 as the Socialist Workers’ Party, and renamed as Communist in 1919), and whose criticisms of Lenin’s proposal on the colonial question within the Land and Colonial Commission resulted in modified versions of the two theses (Lenin’s and Roy’s) being simultaneously adopted at the Second Congress in 1920. Roy was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1922, and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924, and in 1926 he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Comintern.[1]
Then there is the account of how communist parties struggled with multi-party democracies as the Soviet model of one-party rule was falling apart during the 1980s. Commenting on Gorbachev’s remarks in 1990 regarding opening up to competition with other political parties, McAdams writes: “The party was either a vanguard or it was not. There could not be multiple vanguards.” The implication here—made more explicit by other comments, as well as the organization of the book itself—is an identification of the history of communism with one-party rule. It is unclear why this should be the case, however, since even his study of the early history of the party shows a wide variety of views of communist power, not all implying single-party rule. (China Miéville’s October also has a fascinating discussion of the failed attempts in 1917 Russia of Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks to work together in seizing power and governing as a multiparty soviet, a possibility that may well be worth revisiting.) For McAdams, the story of the Communist Party effectively ends with the fall of one-party rule in a large number of nations across the globe. The other varieties of communist organizations that he discusses in the buildup to this specific form of one-party rule drop out from his account and are thereby framed mostly as a prehistory to the party. McAdams’s position also implies an equation of a multiparty polity with liberal multiparty systems.
All that said, McAdams could very well present a valid critique of a form of communist leadership (and one that became a particularly strong historical force), which simply could not exist within a liberal multiparty polity or actualize an alternative model of multiparty competition. However, to make such an argument more generally for the world (viz. communists cannot survive elections), one may be expected to offer a reading of the long history of successful communist participation in elections—which he does in some contexts, but again with the kinds of geopolitical biases highlighted here. For instance, there is no discussion of the Communist Party of India, which reportedly formed the first elected communist government—within a bourgeois democratic framework—anywhere in the world in 1957 in the Indian state of Kerala, currently home to almost as many people as Canada, and with a coalition government led by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI–M).[2] Nor is there any reference to the CPI–M, which in the Indian state of West Bengal (with a population approaching two thirds of Russia’s) formed what is probably the longest-serving, continuously elected communist government in the world (winning seven terms by leading the Left Front coalition, 1977–2011). The Communist-supported government of the Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile merits only a passing mention.
While one can conceivably make a case for why these communist experiences of power through the ballot box are of less global consequence than, say, those of less successful communist activity in electoral regimes in Europe, which McAdams does discuss, it is far from obvious that this is the case. McAdams’ s omissions mark a pattern that marginalizes the role of countries of the global South in benefiting from and transforming communist legacies. This pattern of omission can be located in a variety of contexts, beyond the question of communist participation in elections discussed above. The long history of organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) (who just last year decided to abandon arms and contest elections), or various groups that are a part of the ongoing Naxalite movement in India, receive no mention. The role of communists in anticolonial struggles around the world, including figures such as Nelson Mandela (who was a member of the South African Communist Party in the 1950s), are not an important part of McAdams’ s story either.[3] This is not simply a question of the amount of text dedicated to a particular country, but of how the broader story is structured. For example, McAdams dedicates the bulk of two chapters (about eighty pages) to continuous and detailed discussion of the Chinese context. However there is hardly any discussion of the significant influence of Mao Thought or Maoism on communist (or communist-friendly) organizations across the world, even in the putative West. In other words, despite the first chapter on China being titled “A Different Kind of Party,” China becomes another important point in the communist spectrum that was born from Europe, but is not presented as a new and powerful radial node.
McAdams’s politics can to an extent be teased out from his short three-page preface. In the first paragraph he writes that over the course of the twentieth century the communists were “the primary challenger to the liberal-democratic party,” and then concludes by writing of “these politically tumultuous times, when liberal democracy is once again threatened by extremism and intolerance.” He offers his readers the tale of a threat that was contained and defeated, from the point of view of the liberal US. That McAdams’s liberalism constantly frames the narrative comes to the fore in his choice of adjectives and in various arguments made in passing. Deng Xiaoping, for example, who introduced market reforms in China, is usually referred to with neutral or positive adjectives, whereas Mao Zedong usually merits negative ones. Similarly, in discussion of Soviet Russia, Gorbachev is usually described with positive adjectives for his reforms. That the capitalist liberal democratic order is the more desirable norm is never open to question. The collapse of the Soviet project is located primarily in internal causes, and not the US’s imperialist aggressions. While noting that “clearly, the West’ s military and economic superiority over the USSR played an important role,” he contends that “the [communist] party was not defeated; it lost the will to stay alive.”
While discussing the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, among the “measures [that] verged on the bizarre,” which are listed without needing argument, appears the prominent philosopher and Deputy Commissar for Education György Lukács’s decision to open “proletarian theaters to raise the consciousness of the working class.” Words with negative connotations frame a specific party in a particular way even before the party’s work has been introduced—immediately before discussing the Hungarian Communists’ initial steps, he writes of the horrible circumstances in the country, which “created fertile ground for demagoguery and the advocacy of simplistic solutions.” His condescension toward those who have historically been kept away from power is expressed in dismissive comments about those who “gave voice to the triumphant bravado that is commonly found among people with little experience in real-world politics.” Criticizing the current liberal status quo, or its twentieth-century past, is not something his study of communism’s history leads him to. The otherness of communism as a political project is never under question. For instance, contemporary mobilizations against police brutality could have made this a fitting time to at least reference the Black Panthers’ place in the communist world of that time, or more generally to remark on the role of people of color and their relationship to communist organizing in the US. Research aside (of which there is a lot in this regard, even just by academics based in Chicago), if one simply runs a Google search for the title of McAdams’s book, one gets a page full of references to the 2015 documentary titled The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The subject of McAdams’s work is not as alien as the monograph makes it out to be.
McAdams’s book, then, is a far cry from another tradition of international communist history. Caribbean intellectual C. L. R. James’s World Revolution, 1917–1936 (1937), for example, was written in conversation with and critique of Leon Trotsky, and—although written in England as a part of a debate with the Communist Party of Great Britain (most specifically Rajani Palme Dutt’s World Politics, 1918–1936 ), and discussing primarily a European stage—spoke from a very different geopolitical vantage point. There have also been numerous critical negotiations with the history of communism from the 1980s onwards by scholars from Marxist, feminist, and Dalit perspectives, among others. McAdams’ s book does not specifically build on this work. Nor does it contain any reference to the reimagining of Marxist theory by groups such as the Zapatistas in Mexico—among the most exciting critics of vanguardist politics within the last two decades, and whose work (even beyond famous letters, such as the one titled “I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet”) has received some circulation in the US academy. Such work could have provided fresh frames for a critical appraisal of the history of communism, but McAdams’ s liberal perspective does not seem to have been enriched or challenged by it.
A wary reader of McAdams’ s book may find the disenchanted narrative of communist history helpfully provocative and informative. In particular, his study of party structures across a variety of contexts, and their relationship to individual personality cults that often reached dominant positions, offers a very helpful comparative study of an oft-noted problem, diagnoses of which frequently get mired in regional specificities. However, in attempting to write (as the book blurb and his university profile puts it) “the first comprehensive political history of the communist party,” (in any language, anywhere, one assumes!) McAdams offers a pickled vision of parties that for the most part have ceased to exist or be of much political relevance. In doing so, he ignores a broad swathe of communist organizations and influences that continue to inform struggles around the world today, as well as a wide variety of engagements with this heritage by noncommunists who seek to draw from particular aspects of it. While, in his conclusion, he notes in passing projects such as that led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, he tries to categorically separate these from their predecessors, for without such a separation he could not conclude with a last chapter titled “The Party Vanishes.”
McAdams’s achievement lies in his learned demonstration of how communism is hardly a monolithic form and has varied greatly according to context. Locating this strength of the book alongside the limitations imposed by his liberal political frame, one can follow the logic of proliferating forms that he outlines beyond the historical contexts that constrain his narrative. A perspective arising from within the wide variety of struggles around the world today would produce a very different history of communism and its legacies.
Notes:
[1] See Abhishek Bhattacharyya, “A Hundred Years of the Russian Revolution in India,” New Socialist (December 30, 2017). “Sobhanlal Datta Gupta’ s ‘The Russian Revolution, the Third International and the Colonial Question’ discusses some of these contexts, and also in passing references other (non-Indian) contributions to the debate. “ ‘Mustafa Subhi (Turkey), for example, pointed out that the destiny of the European revolution was also dependent on the fate of the revolutionary movements in the East (Riddell 1987: 208–09).’ Given the more familiar arguments about how the Russian Revolution’ s success depended on successful revolutions in Western Europe, such counterpoints may prove very helpful to think with.” The story of Roy’ s rise in the Comintern is discussed in John P Haithcox’ s “The Roy-Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: a New Interpretation,” The Journal of Asian Studies 23.1 (November 1963): pp. 93–101.
[2] From what I can find, there are precedents of communist involvement within elected governments (such as in San Marino (1945), once the smallest country in the world, where the communists were the junior partner in a coalition with socialists), but not of communist-led governments, particularly over a region of comparable size.
[3] In an earlier review, Patrick Iber, making a slightly different critique from mine with this point, has noted McAdams’ focus on communist leadership, lack of engagement with struggles against colonialism, and argued with reference to Mandela’s omission.
August 2018
This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.