Does Capitalism Have a Future?

There are obvious reasons for discussing communist states in a book debating the possible demise of capitalist markets. Communism still comes to many minds as the prime alternative to capitalism, along with its dreadful images of endless smokestacks, shortages, personality cults, and purges. There are less obvious reasons, too. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was taken for granted after the fact because communism now seemed to almost everyone patently inefficient and oppressive. Yet in the fifties and sixties prevalent opinions admired/dreaded the extraordinary military and scientific prowess of the U.S.S.R. and even many experts considered its nationality questions solved. During the heady years of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the 1980s, many people also, both in the East and West, seemed ready to embrace the humanistic goodness dawning from Moscow. Today the Chinese market miracle is hailed as capitalism’s biggest success and hope for the future, disregarding the oddity of many Chinese entrepreneurs still carrying their Party cards. This fact questions the common cliché that communism has ended in collapse.

The Soviet Union, however, did collapse. Toward the end, it became an advanced industrial society ruled by essentially a corporate oligarchy. Perhaps this allows us to posit on more empirical grounds the question of what the collapse of advanced Western capitalism might look like. Specifically, could a hypothetical anticapitalist revolution follow the classic pattern of 1917, or might it rather resemble the civic mobilizations of 1989? Which brings us to the special reason for considering the Soviet Union in this book. Two of its authors, the same Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins who now predict the end of capitalism, are on record as having predicted, still back in the 1970s and from different theories, the passing of communism in Russia.

Hence my confession: in 1987 I had no authorization from the KGB residentura at our embassy in the People’s Republic of Mozambique to meet the US citizen Immanuel Wallerstein. Waiting under the old jacaranda outside Maputo’s Hotel Polana felt like stepping into a Graham Greene spy novel: a young Soviet officer secretly meeting with a famous Western academic in an African country torn by Cold War proxy conflict. The intellectual curiosity driving me into this mad risk could be fully appreciated perhaps only by those who knew the excitement of touching a banned book. The Soviet censors regarded Wallerstein’s Neo-Marxian theory as, of course, heresy. Sensing my unease, Wallerstein graciously predicted: Relax, your generation of Soviets will be soon freely traveling around the world, though I am less sure this will make you much happier. At my incredulous look, he added with a smile: What makes you expect that there will be a military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, let us say safely, on the 7 of November 2017, the hundredth anniversary of an event which by then you might not even know what to call? The word crossing my mind at that prophetic moment was admittedly a cruder Russian equivalent of Preposterous!

Preposterous was also the main reaction of the audience at Columbia University’s venerable Russian Institute after the presentation delivered by Randall Collins in spring 1980. The outsider sociologist calmly told the gathering of Sovietologists that, according to his mathematical model, the dark object of their professional interests would disappear in their lifetime. America was still reeling from Vietnam, economic stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the presidency on the claim that the United States had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union in nuclear armaments and needed a massive arms buildup to contain the communist menace around the globe. And here was Randall Collins, himself son of a career American diplomat, suggesting nuclear disarmament and the continuation of détente. The benign recommendation, however, did not arise from a merely idealistic pacifism. It derived from the geopolitical theory first advanced by Max Weber.[1]

In the Weberian model devised by Randall Collins the U.S.S.R. came out surprisingly negative on all five parameters of geopolitical might. The critical unknown remained in seeing what pattern the Soviet decline would follow. Contrary to the contemporary mood, the same model showed that America in the 1980s was not yet facing geopolitical decline. Therefore the single highest priority for the world and American security was in avoiding a nuclear war with the declining Soviets. The historical precedents of many empires from the past suggested that disintegration from geopolitical overextension typically arrived very suddenly after a period of protracted confrontations gradually reducing the number of belligerents to just two big rivals and their satellites. The structurally weaker empire would then disappear either in an outburst of internal unrest led by separatist governors and weary generals, or in a showdown war fought at unprecedented levels of ferociousness, like Rome versus Carthage.

In all fairness, the Sovietologists had reasons to feel scandalized. Collins drew his empirical evidence from historical atlases of ancient and medieval empires. The geopolitical theory could say little about the latest developments in Poland, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, or Brezhnev’s health. Moreover, the prediction of Soviet collapse came with an extremely vague date, some time in the coming decades. Macrosociological predictions tend to be very general. They can only identify the directions of structural drift and roughly estimate their pace. It is doubtful that anyone could do better in the longer run. In fact, the predictions of Sovietology proved worse even in the shorter run.

How do the old predictions of Collins and Wallerstein relate to what we now know about the Soviet trajectory? The present debate on the prospects of capitalism calls for clarity regarding what actually was its communist alternative. But our object is heavily shrouded in ideological polemics. I suggest that a more meaningful way of explaining the rise and demise of communism is by placing it in a larger macrohistorical perspective.

THE RUSSIAN GEOPOLITICAL PLATFORM

The original communist breakthrough achieved on the ruins of Russian empire was an improbable historical contingency. It was, however, no more improbable than the original breakthrough of capitalism in the West or, for that matter, any consequential mutation in the organization of social power. This does not mean that the Bolshevik revolution was a freak event. Historical contingency typically is the human realization of the not yet evident structural opportunities emerging in moments of crisis when previous constraints are breaking down. Creativity and visionary energy—just like blindness to opportunity and failure of leadership—are all the results of human action on the emergent structural possibilities and constraints. The alternatives seem improbable to anyone except, of course, those who will be proclaimed visionaries in hindsight. What such visionaries actually do is discover new possibilities in the course of action and thus turn the possibilities real. Far from all possibilities, however, become reality. The Bolshevik uprising in 1917 closed the small possibility of Russia becoming a liberal democracy. It also closed the much greater possibility of Russia going fascist at the time. Lenin and his small band of comrades obviously mattered a lot in changing the trajectories of Russia and the whole world after 1917. But causality runs in the opposite direction, too. It no less mattered that communist revolutionaries first took over a country like Russia rather than, say, Italy, Mexico, or even China.

In order to appreciate the geopolitical and economic platform called Russia we must go back in history to the nodal points when the Russian empire took its familiar shape. The first such point is found at the dawn of modern era, somewhere between 1500 or 1550. If we polled the contemporary political experts regarding the direction of their world, they would concur above all on the spectacular emergence of new empires across the vast landmass between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These imagined experts might hardly mention the Protestant Reformation in the far northwestern extension of Eurasia, perhaps not even the recent discovery of the Americas. Ming China was surely the world’s manufacturing and demographic giant. Shortly after 1500 the Mughals imposed their imperial rule in the inherently fractitious India. At the very same time the Safavis were ascendant in Iran, the Ottoman Turks forcefully reclaimed the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, while the Spanish Hapsburgs appeared on their way to establishing a Catholic empire in the West. For almost everyone, the terrible Middle Ages were at last over. The renewed order and prosperity had been secured by the extensive empires and in turn strengthened by a whole range of important innovations: more efficient agrarian and artisanal techniques, bureaucratic taxation, the official conservative religions, and, not in the least, the new big guns.

Russia was a distant outlier in this larger picture. This proved, however, an advantage of sorts. The fledgling empire of the Tsars was protected by sheer geographical distance from its stronger rivals in the west and south, the Germans and Turks. The firearms in the meantime reversed the secular imbalance between nomadic cavalries and sedentary agriculturalists. Securing the Slavic ploughmen against Tatar rovers in the vast fertile lands in the steppe provided sixteenth-century Russia with vastly increased manpower and tribute flows. In its scope and nature, the Russian expansion became comparable only to Spain’s. The Cossacks, armed frontiersmen, followed by regular garrisons, traversed the steppe in directions exactly countering the erstwhile nomadic invasions. Soon Russia found itself bordering on China.

It is not so wondrous that in the sixteenth century Russia became an empire along with the many gunpowder empires of its generation; it is more wondrous that in 1900 Russia was still an expanding great power. After all, neither China nor India and Iran, not even Turkey or Spain, could by 1900 preserve their splendid positions. The reason for this massive decline of the rest was obviously related to what had emerged in the intervening centuries from the far West. Spain’s impressive bid for the Catholic restoration of Western Roman Empire ran headlong into the collective resistance of lesser kingdoms, principalities, independent cantons, and city leagues of northwestern Europe. Had the Hapsburg monarchy crushed this resistance, the Protestant Reformation would have remained in the historical record as yet another heresy, while the anti-Hapsburg princes and merchants would be considered seditious feudal warlords and seaborne pirates. Of course, the actual course of events awarded a perfectly livable stalemate to the capitalist alliance of Protestant states interlaced by the cosmopolitan merchant networks. It was this military and ideological stalemate rather than the Protestantism in itself that secured the survival of the first capitalist states like the Netherlands and England.

Peter the Great launched his absolutist reformation of Russia only a couple generations after capitalism’s breakthrough in the West. The incredible Tsar Peter, who worked in disguise as apprentice carpenter at the Amsterdam shipyards and probably met Isaac Newton in London, was determined to learn from the best. Holland remained Peter’s first and most ardent love. To appreciate the power of this hegemonic example one might notice that the flag of Russia is a slightly modified Dutch flag, and the canals of Sankt Pietersburg (the original Dutch spelling) have no other reason than Peter’s ferocious belief that a modern capital must have canals like Amsterdam.

Similar reforms by emulation were attempted by many contemporary statesmen: Portugal’s Marquês de Pombal, Austria’s Emperor Joseph, and, for that matter, Alexander Hamilton in the United States. The rate of success seems to rapidly recede as we move outside the western core. Even Spain eventually lost its imperial possessions and fell into isolation behind the Pyrenees. India, China, and Iran failed outright and slid into foreign dependency. The proudly libertarian and aristocratic Poland-Lithuania, once the biggest European country, disappeared in partitions. The glorious cavalry of Polish feudal szlachta was doomed in the new epoch when wars were won by qualitatively more expensive navies, standing armies, and artilleries. The Ottoman Turks gathered force for their Tanzimat reforms a whole century after Petrine Russia, by which time it was too late to shed Turkey’s reputation as the “sick man” of Europe. The impressive Albanian Muhammad Ali, the rogue warlord of Egypt, who in 1810–1840 began building his own navy, gun foundries, and modern bureaucracy, comes close to the example of Peter the Great. But the absolutist modernizer of Egypt was soon checked by the British, decidedly unwilling to see a regional power rise in the Middle East astride the projected Suez route to India.

Among the nonwestern states only Japan in the course of its Meiji Restoration after 1868 managed to become a serious force in the military-industrial geopolitics of the age. This odd pairing, Petrine Russia in one century and Meiji Japan in another, possibly suggests a clue. These two very different outliers shared in common an ideological duality of intense national pride with deep-seated insecurity, caused by humiliating confrontations with superior Western forces. Such dualistic perception of their place in the world could be an enabling but not sufficient condition because it was scarcely unique to Japan and Russia. The embattled empires had to gather institutional capacity and finances to act on their anxious sense of backwardness and vulnerability. The relative isolation of Russia and Japan from foreign trade penetration and military pressures afforded both states the breathing space to build up their capabilities and engage in contemporary arms races. The tremendous costs of imperial modernizing burdened mainly the peasants. They had to supply their states with increased taxes, many more laborers on state projects, and army recruits. Coercing the peasants, however, was still not enough. The absolutist reformers had to discipline, re-educate, reward and inspire their own elites by essentially conscripting them wholesale into the state service as military officers and bureaucrats.

This developmentalist pattern was based on the intensive centralization of coercion and territorial expansion bringing in new resources, subject populations, and imperial glories. The standard theory of neoclassical economics extols Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and private enterprise with secure property rights as the road to modernity. But there obviously was a different way of staying in the running among the contemporary leading states. The alternative coercive strategy compensated for the relative dearth of capitalist resources by turning the state itself into major entrepreneur and fostering modern industries and institutions by decree. Little wonder then that both Japanese and Russian modernizers seeking to emulate the Western advantages typically preferred Germanic examples. The Russian empire since the times of Peter and Catherine the Great had actually imported scores of underemployed German aristocrats and artisans as a developmental boost. This was the peculiar kind of geopolitical platform that the Bolsheviks had seized in 1917.

FORTRESS SOCIALISM

Nobody in 1917 considered the revolution in Russia unexpected. The Russian nobility had long been haunted by the specter of serf peasants revolting to avenge their near-slave condition. A modern proletarian revolution had been awaited ever since the European upheavals of 1848. This fear/hope was fed by strikes of industrial workers met with Cossack cavalry charges. No less significant was the growth of the famous modernist intelligentsia, the middle strata of educated specialists who felt stymied by the old aristocratic bureaucracy and the generalized backwardness of their country. The intelligentsia saw itself as the guiding force of epochal renovation. This sense of lofty mission translated into a spate of subversive strategies, from creating a world-class literature to volunteer charitable activism and throwing bombs at the oppressors.

Nevertheless, the empire kept on muddling through and even registered impressive industrial growth mainly because for almost half a century it had luckily avoided losing wars, a typical trigger of revolutions. The tipping points—as observed in many other revolutions—arrived with the costly and morally embarrassing military defeats in 1905 and again in 1917. The soldiers rebelled against their commanders while the police disintegrated. The collapse of state coercion released all the long-repressed specters of rebellion: furious peasant revolts in the countryside; the now armed worker militancy in big cities; the intelligentsia enthusiastically organizing a panoply of political parties and nationalist movements that soon became independent governments in the ethnically non-Russian provinces.

It is not too surprising that the Bolsheviks seized power amidst this breakdown of state order. It is truly surprising that they were still in power a few years later. How did they do it? The Bolsheviks before 1917 were a small insurrectionist current of intelligentsia. The conditions of illegality and persecution engendered among them strict internal discipline, conspiratorial secrecy, and vigilance against the ever-present police spies. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, the Bolsheviks were not guerrillas and had virtually no presence outside the big towns. This supported their prejudiced view of peasants as an uneducated mass to be marched into a better future. And, of course, the almost religious devotion of the Bolsheviks to the cause followed the eschatological vision of Karl Marx. But Marxism also carried a powerful scientific side. This made the Bolsheviks a peculiarly rationalist kind of ideological visionaries enamored with modern science and industry. From the outset, these anticapitalist and anti-imperialist Marxist revolutionaries were prepared to take up the weapons of their enemies: German military organization, state industrial planning, and the production lines of Henry Ford.

The Bolshevik party in power first grew its own secret police: the infamous Cheka, which absorbed scores of revolutionary terrorists. This ensured the internal political monopoly of the fledgling state. Next the party created its own Red Army. Forging an army amidst civil war and foreign military interventions more than safeguarded the Bolshevik state; it essentially became the Bolshevik state. The spirited and disciplined party-in-arms also proved eminently adapted for organizing all sorts of rear support and moral boosters: making the collapsing industries run, requisitioning food from peasants, but also, in the Enlightenment élan of intelligentsia, opening museums, theaters, literacy courses, and universities.

One key aspect of Bolshevik state-building, however, was unprecedented for a polyglot empire: national republics constituting the Soviet Union. The multisided civil war was won by forging political and military alliances across the dividing lines of nationality, race, and religion. In a critical episode during 1919, the counterrevolutionary White Army of General Anton Denikin was hit from the rear by Muslim Chechen fighters who had allied with the Bolsheviks in the belief that Marxism was also a form of jihad. The Caucasus Muslim rebels might have seemed politically naïve. Yet the Bolsheviks earnestly meant development for the non-Russian periphery, albeit on their own terms. The Leninist nationality policy institutionalized the national republics where native cadres could enjoy promotion preferences and considerable resources to build the institutions of modern ethnic cultures: the same schools and universities, museums, film studios, opera and ballet but specifically destined for the non-Russian nationalities.

The Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War cannot be reduced to creating state order out of chaos, although in itself this was an inordinate achievement. The lesson was rather in forging the extensive structures that harnessed and directed the emotional energies of the millions touched by revolution. These masses of young men and women suddenly saw their life chances dramatically expanded by the technical education and promotions available within the new Soviet institutions. The opportunities for social mobility grew exponentially once the furiously massive construction of new industries and towns was launched in the early 1930s. For all their brutal daily austerity, political terror, and inhuman workloads, the industrialization and Second World War also produced a mass constituency of patriotic Soviet citizens with new identities and lifestyles generated by a vast modernistic state. The demolition of old communities, churches, and extended patriarchal families released millions of younger men and women into the wider modern society. On a wholly different scale, the effect resembled the eighteenth-century westernization of Peter the Great (who was lionized in Soviet novels and films). The Petrine absolutism succeeded in its own epoch by multiplying the ranks of nobility and endowing the new elite with ample service opportunities, ideological confidence, and Westernized lifestyles. In the Soviet era the children of peasants, both Russian and ethnically non-Russian, could learn to operate modern machinery, move into state-built apartments with running water and electricity, acquire new Soviet-made watches and radios, and lunch in workplace canteens on industrially produced hot dogs, canned peas, mayonnaise salad, and ice cream (these originally American imports soon became regarded as dearly native). State-led industrialization created a perennially overheated economy of pervasive shortages including the shortage of skilled labor. The Soviet Union in effect became a giant factory and therefore it had to become a gigantic company town, too, where the state as sole employer provided social welfare from cradle to grave.

Directing the transformations were party cadres from the special appointment rosters called nomenklatura. Eventually the name nomenklatura would become a pejorative for stolid bureaucrats. Its first generations, however, were the battle-hardened youthful commissars and emergency managers full of revolutionary charisma and “can-do” spirit. They believed that incredible historical fortune—and Lenin’s genius—had advanced them into the vanguard of humanity’s progress. Losing their political power even temporarily, like in an electoral democracy, was tantamount to betraying the march of history. The Bolshevik revolutionary atrocities and their Enlightenment enthusiasm appeared to many commentators and historians impossible to reconcile on moral grounds. Both aspects of communism are incontrovertible facts; it is the perceived contradiction that is an ideological illusion. The Russian revolution imposed a comparatively thin layer of radical intelligentsia over a huge predominantly peasant country. These activists of epochal change ardently believed in electricity and universal progress, but they had also learned in the recent civil war to trust the victorious Party and rely on the cherished Mauser handguns. In short, Russian revolutionaries won their battles by becoming an unprecedented charismatic bureaucracy. These militant developmentalists fused the ideological, political, military, and economic institutions of the twentieth century into a single dictatorial structure. Its summit amounted to a high pedestal.

Stalin’s personality was perhaps as twisted as his amazing life trajectory of a latter-day catacomb Christian becoming Great Inquisitor and later a Renaissance Pope, too. Yet personality does not explain the leader cults and purges in many situations where Stalin could not be a direct culprit, such as Tito’s Yugoslavia, Maoist China, and Cuba. Or consider, for that matter, Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign that between 1985 and 1989 cost the jobs if not the lives of nearly two-thirds of the Brezhnev-era nomenklatura. From the perspective of bureaucratic victims, the Moscow-mandated democratization amounted to another calamitous purge. This realization, as we shall see, goes a long way toward explaining the desperately defensive and destructive reactions of Soviet nomeklatura that would ruin the state after 1989. All great communist leaders/villains periodically unleashed campaigns of political denunciation because less blunt mechanisms of control were unavailable to them. The suppression of unofficial organizing and information leaves the supreme leader essentially blind to whatever is happening under his feet and rightly suspicious that his commands are not fully implemented.

This ugly feature of Leninist regimes had no direct relation to Russian, Chinese, or any national culture. It would have certainly appalled Karl Marx, maybe even Lenin himself. The problem, however, was rooted right in the geopolitical origins of communist states (and, we may add, their non-Marxist nationalist emulators across the Third World). These revolutionary states were born in deadly confrontations. Great leaders emerged at their summit because the extraordinary national mobilizations called for supreme military, political, and economic commanders. Their genius then appeared validated by their great improbable victories. Napoleon Bonaparte truly served as the historical prototype for all revolutionary emperors of the twentieth century.

The revolutions capturing single states, even as big as Russia, would immediately run into interstate rivalries. Hence the typical modern sequence of successful revolutions followed by external war. Revolutionary transformations provoked military confrontations with other states that were either seeking to preserve the conservative status quo or, as in the case of the Third Reich, intending to remake the world through a war of conquest and extermination. The emergence of communist states in the twentieth century was a major achievement of leftist forces. But, given the terrible wars amidst which the communist and national liberation insurgents could take power, from the inception their regimes grew oppressive and institutionally flawed. The twentieth-century revolutionaries had no other course of action if they intended to defend and consolidate their antisystemic conquests. If one needs a big rationalist argument for curbing militarism, then there it is.

Was the Soviet Union genuinely socialist or was it rather totalitarian? Such exceedingly ideological abstractions are not useful in explaining reality. It was what it was: a huge centralized state with an unusual ideology and a formidable military-geopolitical position achieved as the result of extraordinary industrialization. The geopolitical inheritance of Russian empire, uniquely strong in the world’s semiperipheral zone, made possible the survival of such a state in the first place. The same structural inheritance also suggested the state-driven coercive strategy of industrialization predicated on dispossessing the peasantry and putting every effort into building an up-to-date military force.

The U.S.S.R. was quintessentially modern and self-consciously modernist. It successfully adopted the advanced power techniques of its age: mechanized military, assembly line industry, planned big towns, mass education and social welfare, and standardized mass consumption including sports and entertainment. After the futuristic decade of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks would also recycle as new mass culture the classical music, ballet, and literature inherited from the imperial intelligentsia. The Stalinist state had indeed ended up looking imperial in many respects. Yet the ability of the U.S.S.R. to integrate its numerous nationalities for almost three generations was arguably progressive and modernistic. The Soviets pioneered affirmative action and then proved by development and broad inclusion that they really meant it.

At the time many observers, friend and foe alike, tended to agree that these achievements based on economic planning and the abolition of private property in sum amounted to socialism. The key Soviet features were emulated or reinvented by a broad variety of developmentalist and nationalist regimes because such a concentration of state powers appeared extraordinarily successful for the duration of twentieth century. Here we find a number of former empires whose peoples were hoping to redeem their historical humiliations and claim a better, stronger position in the world: the communist partisan states of China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam, but also nationalist Turkey and, later, Iran, with its peculiar antisystemic ideology of Islamic nationalism. Even the small, defiant Cuba and, on the opposite side of the Cold War divide, the most peculiar State of Israel added to the variety of insurgent nationalisms adopting the features of “fortress socialism.”

All such states faced hostile geopolitics. After the initial periods of revolutionary romanticism, the world-system’s structural realities kicked in with hard policy choices: spontaneity versus discipline, idealists versus enforcers, inspiring the masses or coercing the peasants, ideological purity fraught with perilous isolation or uneasy international alliances. If communists wanted to be serious players on the world stage, their effective response had to be opportunistic realpolitik. Despite ideological proclamations, communist states could never totally quit the capitalist world-system. Conflict is in fact one of the strongest kinds of ties in social networks, be it at the level of small groups or among the states. The core capitalist states continued to be the main preoccupation and reference point for Moscow. Germany before 1945 and America ever after posed the main military menace dictating the priorities of Soviet industry and science. But the West also remained the vital source for buying advanced machinery and prestigious goods with the earnings obtained mainly from the export of raw materials. The once endless debates about communist alternative have been ultimately ended by the fact that all communist states, one way or another, eventually reverted to capitalism.

THE COSTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL SUCCESS

This brings us back to the old predictions of Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein. Their ability to see the coming end of communism derived from very different theories and focused on different processes: geopolitical overextension for Collins, and the structural imperatives of the capitalist world-economy for Wallerstein. The predictions, however, reinforced each other in interesting ways. Collins saw two dire outcomes to the Soviet dilemma of overextension: imperial disintegration or an all-out war of last resort. Wallerstein identified the third possibility in a pan-European economic and military bloc emerging around the axis of Paris—Berlin—Moscow. This scenario evidently conformed to the long-standing ambitions of Charles de Gaulle and the hopeful spirit of the 1970s German Neue Ostpolitik. Analytically, Wallerstein’s unrealized prediction directs our attention to an important counterfactual. It posits Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as a viable possibility. Incidentally, this counterfactual still implies that a rebuilt Russia and the EU can find structural reasons to form a military and economic bloc in the near future. The past predictions of Collins and Wallerstein, however, were abstract sketches that left a lot to be filled in regarding the shifting social forces, specific mechanisms, and event sequences leading to the observed as well as aborted historical outcomes.

Randall Collins derived his prediction from extending into future the dynamics of great geopolitical turmoil in Europe between 1914 and 1945 that had removed the majority of Russia’s erstwhile adversaries. The sweeping simplification of world geopolitics after 1945 from complex multipolarity to a Cold War binary opposition of just two ideological blocs turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. But such a position also brought costs and liabilities at an unprecedented scale. In the continuing confrontation with America, reasoned Randall Collins back in 1980, the U.S.S.R. had already reached the tipping point at which the costs of controlling allies and confronting external rivals must become insuperable.

In an important corollary, the same model predicted China’s potential for economic prosperity. At the time almost nobody took seriously this huge reservoir of Asiatic poverty presided by idiosyncratic Chairman Mao. The side effects of superpower rivalry, however, left China in a lucky kind of geopolitical limbo. The eccentric communist state in East Asia by the late 1970s found itself in a constraining but also stable interstate environment where its geopolitical costs seemed very minor in comparison to Soviet costs. Chinese leaders, like the leaders of Japan after 1945, were left to pursue the state goals of power and prestige through the path most obvious in their region at the time—the export-oriented industrialization dependent on the American consumer markets.

Immanuel Wallerstein had been long (and very controversially) comparing communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike.[2] If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The workers might get a better distribution of material rewards, but not equality or democracy. The more “realist” among labor organizers would reimpose production discipline, compellingly citing external market pressures. The “Iron Law of Oligarchy” in complex organizations predicted that the narrow circle of those making managerial decisions would cut themselves off from the larger group and evolve into a new ruling elite. It might take time before ideological vapor entirely escaped from the cauldrons. Nevertheless the moment would come when the erstwhile organizers turned managers would no longer feel compelled to disguise the reality. The factory would then revert to being a normal capitalist enterprise, and the managers would cash in on their positions. If you wish, it is a sociological version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but Wallerstein’s analysis specified in a clear and logical fashion the structural conditions and causal sequences. He also added an important political caveat: socialism in one country or one factory may not last unless the whole capitalist world-system is replaced by a different historical system where capital accumulation is no longer the paramount priority.

Wallerstein based his metaphor of the union-controlled factory rejoining capitalism on the actually observed facts. Soviet leaders tried to trade their ideological and military positions for economic integration with the West as early as 1953. Days after Stalin’s death, the dreadful head of secret police Lavrenty Beria ordered the first massive release of inmates from the Gulag and signaled to the West Moscow’s willingness to withdraw from East Germany. This short-lived episode points to a curious possibility. Beria was known to be an utterly cynical opportunist but also a ruthlessly pragmatic economic manager. Had he succeeded, communism would have likely ended much sooner. Beria would probably have ruled as a personalistic dictator selectively allowing his cronies to share in the capitalist profits at the time when Soviet industries and newly educated labor were just entering their prime. This could have outdone the market recovery of China after the death of Mao. Imagine Western consumers driving today the stylish Soviet-made Volgas and wearing Vostok watches. But in 1953 the unification of Germany was a broadly unwanted proposition in the Western alliance, and Europe had plenty of its own skilled eager workers emerging from the decades of war and depression.

In historical reality Beria was arrested and executed by his Politburo rivals. It was the revenge of party nomenklatura and military commanders for the fear and humiliations at the hands of secret police. In 1956 the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin—and merrily survived this indiscretion. He would be toppled in 1964 only after attempting to undo the bastions of bureaucratic intransigence in the gigantic vertically integrated industrial ministries, the Soviet equivalent of economic corporations. The nomenklatura cadres certainly desired a limited de-Stalinization. But they wanted to stop the changes once officialdom had achieved their bureaucratic paradise of life tenure, generous perks, and a more relaxed work pace. The sprawling command apparatus of economic ministries, dating back to the industrial spurt of 1930s, thus perpetuated itself essentially unchanged. Its parts would survive even the Soviet collapse of 1991, ensuring that postcommunist capitalism acquired a distinctly oligarchic character of tremendous wealth concentration and corrupt insider politics.

The costs of bureaucratic self-incorporation were transpiring already after the death of Stalin. Command economy must have its Supreme Commander who makes decisions regarding the allocation of resources. In his absence central government is reduced to bureaucratic inertia amidst the corporate lobbying of influential ministries and territorial governments. The old economic debate about the virtues of plan versus market is based on the timeless and therefore false assumption that these are mutually exclusive ideological choices. Planned or rather command economies could be more effective in the short run when time demanded delivering the miracles of large-scale standardized production, such as required during wars, postdisaster recoveries, or industrialization leaps. The command model, however, is unsuited for the longer and more normal periods that require more diversified and flexible adaptations. But how could anyone dare suggest scrapping the giant obsolescent enterprise that was the pride of the first Five-Year Plans and whose top managers, incidentally, were voting members in the Central Committee? This is precisely what toppled Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. The Soviet executives and ideologues grew as intolerant of market ideas as their capitalist counterparts in the age of neoliberalism would grow intolerant of public property and regulation. The intransigence of industrial and political bosses, however, had deeper reasons than orthodoxy alone. In the main, it was the fear that their better-educated and energetic younger subalterns were bound to unseat the seniors if open discussion and competition were allowed.

The main tension of Soviet communism in its late period pitted the now stolidly bureaucratized nomenklatura against the rising middle strata of educated specialists and creative intellectuals. The new youthful groups of the romantic “sixtiers” emerged from the lower and middle ranks of the state institutions of economic planning, higher education, and culture. In a quite literal sense, these were the children of Soviet modernization. The original ideology of young specialists was a version of the New Left movements emerging all over the world between 1956 and 1968. Only much later, during the crisis of Gorbachev’s perestroika, would the antibureaucratic frustrations of junior echelons find a radically different expression in the individualistic philosophy of neoliberalism or in the affirmation of their ethnic nationalisms. The official antisystemic ideology of the Soviet bloc thus suggested to youthful rebels the adoption of Western systemic ideologies, and then, by logic of polarization, in their most extreme versions.

In no social arena did this process emerge as vigorously as in culture. The official orthodoxy prescribes “socialist realism”? Give them absurdist comedies and spiritualist mysticism! The nomenklatura extol friendship among the peoples? Then play on the local ethnic sentiments. The Ministry of Culture enforces the classicist canon in music and arts? Bring forth abstractionism, jazz and rock. The irony is, of course, that the ageing dictatorial regime that stopped acting as a dictatorship became a perfect target for youthful pranks and provocations. The now sclerotic generation of obedient Soviet bureaucrats formed in the end of Stalinist purges could never incorporate this iconoclastic enthusiasm, as the Bolsheviks could in earlier generations.

Just as it could not reign in the intelligentsia, the Soviet regime in its later stage failed to make the workers work. The immediate reason was political. Having reigned in the secret police for the sake of their own safety, the nomenklatura were least of all willing to unleash again any kind of mass repression. In the meantime the expansive industrial economy precluded the disciplining whip of unemployment. The Soviet managers needed labor to accomplish the plan assignments, and workers could in effect bargain for better conditions or seek them elsewhere in the specially supplied Moscow or in the generously paying industries of Siberia.

Yet by far the biggest structural reason giving more power to Soviet workers was demographic transition. The villages of central Russia now stood drained of manpower. By default, this situation significantly increased the social power of women. In the meantime towns, industrial employment, and education irreversibly changed their lifestyles, and birthrates plummeted in merely a generation. The shortage of labor was historically unprecedented in Russia. The tsars and even Stalin could always rely on a seemingly endless supply of peasant labor and army recruits. In the 1960s the demographic pool had suddenly dried up. Recasting peasants into workers was in fact the triumph of Soviet civilization. It also meant the undoing of the centuries-old Russian tradition of supporting the elites and competing militarily with the West at the expense of the peasantry. Relative demographic scarcity left no grounds for traditional despotism.

The formation of Soviet industrial society and its new demographic dynamic fostered two structural preconditions for changing the now hopelessly obsolete structures of Soviet militarized industrialism. The emergent democratization, however, still needed the third and explicitly political condition if it were to overpower the despotic nomenklatura. It was an alliance between the liberal intelligentsia and professionals with the newly empowered labor. In fact, this kind of broad democratic alliance had already proven its force in the explosive popular mobilizations of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980. The post-Stalinist regimes seemed and indeed felt extremely vulnerable to the leftist popular uprisings because they have lost or willingly retired their ideological and coercive resources to confront the challenge of social movements with massive violence. Yet class conflict in a mature industrial society, contrary to the classical Marxist imagery, was not two-sided. It was rather played out in the triangle of Soviet corporate executives, liberal intelligentsia, and workers. Therefore the nomenklatura’s best option was to buy off the workers at the expense of the intelligentsia.

The political taming of Soviet workers in the Brezhnev period was secured with two costly tactics: increased popular consumption and the tacit toleration of inefficiencies. The nomenklatura essentially invited the workers to share in their own complacency and perks while at the same time denigrating the engineers and intellectuals and occasionally bashing dissident intelligentsia for their “rootless cosmopolitanism.” The windfall of petrodollars in the 1970s comfortably subsidized this conservative welfare compact for more than two decades. Its true costs defy material estimation. The notorious rises in alcoholism, male mortality, and petty theft from the workplace, along with the shoddy quality of Soviet goods, all must be regarded as the pathological consequences of lost dynamism and pervasive cynicism. It was this avoidance of consequences and a social immobilism stifling the young that came to be despised in the Brezhnev “decades of stagnation.”

HOW INEVITABLE THE COLLAPSE?

The long-awaited energetic younger leader Mikhail Gorbachev belonged to the generation of Sputnik and de-Stalinization. These achievements of the early sixties had experientially validated the belief of his peers in the Soviet system. Gorbachev might be even considered a part of the New Left resurgence from the sixties. Yet he also came heavily invested in the official positions of authoritarian power and, objectively speaking, his goals were quite conservative. By taking the Soviet bloc into state capitalism, he was hoping essentially to strengthen the existing political structures and recast at least the younger nomenklatura into technocratic managers of large industrial holdings with foreign participation. These were the contradictions that rendered Gorbachev’s ebullient rhetoric so confusing to his prospective supporters and fatally confused the last General Secretary himself. Few observers believed at the time that Gorbachev really meant what he was saying, but everybody assumed that this seasoned apparatchik knew what he was doing. The truth, as it happens, was exactly the opposite. Gorbachev’s policies looked so haphazard and amateurish because the decades-long suppression of policy debate had produced in the U.S.S.R. a highly charged ideological polarization. Between the ritualistic wooden discourse of the Party and the abstract humanism of the dissidents lay a vacuum of ideas and practical solutions. Amateurish improvisation was what remained to the political leader intent on any serious reform.

But imagine for a moment that Gorbachev had succeeded. Extending the key vectors of his policies gives us a fairly plausible end destination. The U.S.S.R. abandons its widespread commitments across the Third World and withdraws from Eastern Europe. From the standpoint of Moscow, this would not be such a loss given that Poland and Czechoslovakia would soon find themselves between the unified Germany and its strategic economic partner Russia. Disarmament deals with America dramatically reduce geopolitical burdens, at last allowing Moscow to restructure its military-industrial complex. The Soviet industries, still formidable and staffed by skilled and comparatively low-paid labor, attract West European investments through government-brokered contracts. (The Soviet managers always felt intuitively close to their German, French, and Italian counterparts embodying broadly similar state-corporatist dispositions.) Pent-up consumer demand in the former communist countries, coupled with job creation, soon generates a big economic upswing. The communist parties perhaps become split into ruling majorities of moderate social democrats and isolated minorities of ideological stalwarts. The entire European continent from the Urals to the Atlantic is unified in a single geopolitical and economic bloc, with Germany as its economic engine and Russia as the supplier of labor, raw materials, and military force. In this version of events, American hegemony fades away much sooner from world geopolitics. A social democratic and paternalistic Europe together with a recast U.S.S.R. would have enough reasons and power to oppose the neoliberal Washington consensus. The geopolitically and ideologically marginalized America, however, would not be doing too badly economically. Given the strengths of the European example, Washington might find the spirit to adopt the political measures necessary to generate internal demand and establish its own trading bloc with Latin America and China. The world in this case remains certainly capitalist but it would be a different variety and configuration of capitalist globalization.

If the world had gone down this pathway, Gorbachev would now appear the political “sphinx” astutely placating different constituencies with his opaque messages. The visionary pragmatist then would have been praised for taking his country “across the river feeling with his foot one stone at a time” to the shores of capitalist prosperity. The river-crossing metaphor is, of course, Chinese, and it refers to Deng Xiaoping. It is perhaps worth remembering that until the end of 1989, or even later, Gorbachev was universally praised as democracy promoter and the bold unifier of Europe, while Deng was vilified as the butcher of Tiananmen Square. The difference between the Chinese and Soviet exits from communism, however, was not only in the leading personalities and their political styles. There existed plenty of structural differences, the majority of them historically inherited, contingent, and generally unrelated to communism.

In two very different ways, the year 1989 marked the extinction of communism. The Soviet Union fell even faster than China rose. The People’s Republic of China also had experienced its close call in the spring of 1989 when an emergent factional split at the top of communist hierarchy had provoked the student movement symbolically associated with Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The student movement displayed the same strengths and weaknesses as the contemporary antiauthoritarian movements in the Soviet Union or, for that matter, the western New Left in 1968 and the Arab Spring of 2011. The spontaneous protest delivered a huge charge of youthful emotional energy directed primarily at the hypocritical and self-serving elders. But the movement lacked an extensive autonomous organization, short-term political goals, and robust connection to provincial towns, let alone the countryside. In 1989 the Chinese party cadres closed their ranks against the movement because the previous episode of upper-echelon factionalism provoking student militancy, the ultra-Maoist Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, was very much in their memory. Perhaps more importantly, senior Chinese cadres remained the veterans of armed struggle—unlike Gorbachev and his comrades who were career apparatchiks two generations removed from revolution and civil war. For people like Deng Xiaoping, the notion of power growing from a gun barrel was not merely a metaphor.

The suppression of the Tiananmen protests, however, came at a steep ideological cost. The activist students laid claim on the same ideals that legitimated the Communist party itself. The leftist attack on a leftist regime produced a turn to the right even if nobody from the top ever dared to officially acknowledge it. In effect, 1989 marked the end of Chinese communism, too. The ruling CCP quietly put aside its dangerously double-sided ideology and shifted instead to what might be called performance-based legitimacy. This was in fact a well-known move in the policy repertoire of communist regimes. As early as in 1921 the Russian Bolsheviks, ever mindful of past revolutionary precedents, had been coyly admitting that their market-driven New Economic Policy (NEP) meant the necessary phase of “auto-Thermidorean restoration” in revolutionary sequence. In other words, we better liberalize ourselves, as temporary retreat and ahead of the class enemies. Also recall the once famous examples of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Janos Kadar’s Hungary in the 1960s that combined various market experiments with targeted political repression. Even the uneventful reign of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, in retrospect nostalgically remembered as the “good decades,” in fact meant a conservative reaction to the boisterous and unsettling period of Khrushchev’s Thaw. In the 1970s Soviet leaders, however, ended any talk of market socialism because the export earnings from oil and natural gas afforded them the transient luxury of a risk-free bureaucratic inertia.

Post-Maoist China, of course, had little oil to export. Instead, the CCP could draw for its latter-day NEP from the human ocean of industrious peasants and provincial artisans as well as the market knowledge of the Chinese diaspora. The immediately political rationale for admitting market forces into the Chinese countryside and export zones was clear and simple: to let the peasants feed themselves and the cities in order to defuse tensions. By making this first defensive step, the Chinese communists stumbled on the long road that led them to bypass the political crisis of 1989. Still nominally communist, China essentially reproduced at a greater scale the earlier pattern of anticommunist developmental states in East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, which had grown under the Cold War patronage of American hegemony.

The inadvertently lucky escape of Chinese communism helps us to pinpoint the causes of the Soviet inadvertent disaster. It was, overall, a colossal failure of collective action on the part of nomenklatura. The avalanche of political events in 1989 caused panic and numerous defections from the ranks of Soviet officialdom. It was they who actually undid their own state—not the romantic nationalists in the non-Russian republics, nor the democratic intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad. The antinomenklatura insurgents, for all their emotional appeal, had not yet gathered force to overthrow communism on their own. In 1989 and still in 1991 they were lacking serious organizational bases to rapidly mobilize and intercept the falling political power.

Surprisingly enough, neither could the Soviet nomenklatura rely on any legitimate overarching networks to coordinate their self-defenses at a critical moment. During the years of perestroika in 1985–1989, Mikhail Gorbachev had been astutely using his supreme powers as General Secretary to safeguard himself from the bureaucratic backlash of the kind that had buried Nikita Khrushchev. Gorbachev’s maneuvering, conducted both in public (i.e., glasnost) and in the insider apparat intrigues, in which he was reputedly so adept, confused and immobilized all three institutional pillars of Soviet regime: the Communist Party, central ministries, and secret police. But in 1989 Gorbachev’s inevitable sacrifice of the satellite communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly revealed to the embattled nomenklatura their true stakes in this big and uncertain game. Following 1989, the Soviet oligarchic elite fragmented exactly along the lines of bureaucratic turf in the industrial sectors and national republics. For the first time since the legendary 1920s, various political factions appeared within and around the Communist party. But these factions, progressive and reactionary alike, proved short-lived because in the rapidly unwinding chaos they had very little time to pull themselves together. By default, the nomenklatura were left with what they actually knew very well: the elementary personalistic networks of corruption and collusion. At the time, this process seemed utterly chaotic—yet it was not entirely random.

The nomenklatura represented the top echelon of bureaucratic administration. This is why they were all hierarchically subordinated and in principle removable. As in any big managerial bureaucracy, the secrets of survival had always been extending the insider networks of patronage connections, accruing lobbying weight, and protecting the turfs. After 1989 these survival strategies were opportunistically pushed to a totally new scale. The nomenklatura existed in three intersecting hierarchies: territorial governments (including ethnic autonomies), economic branch ministries, and the central controlling apparatus of the secret police and the party’s ideological “inquisition.” Among the three, the controlling hierarchy had been preeminent, yet it also proved the most difficult to privatize. After all, a secret police without a state becomes a mafia, and ideological “inquisition” without a ruling party is reduced to a sulking sect. The territorial and economic units of the former U.S.S.R., by comparison, proved fabulously endowed for the self-aggrandizing separatism. Who could now remove a national president for life or a private capitalist oligarch with his assets stashed away in an exotic tax haven?

The Soviet industrial assets by various brutally simple schemes were snatched into private control (admittedly a mild way of saying stolen) even before privatization was sanctioned by any legislation. Meanwhile national republics and city halls also became corporate property of the kind that Americans call “political machines.” Ironically, the liberal intelligentsia themselves suggested these new strategies along with their ideological justifications. The nascent “civil societies” (in practice, the networks of intelligentsia usually limited to capital cities) were now aspiring to turn their countries into liberal democracies bound to join the capitalist West on their own, bypassing Moscow and its mumbling, outpaced Gorbachev. This rapid ideological drift, from the erstwhile New Left and reform communism to the creed of Margaret Thatcher, reflected the radicalization of demands typical of any revolution. After 1989 the insurgent intelligentsia were demanding three things: free elections, national sovereignty, and markets. All three demands were construed as battering rams against ruling bureaucracy and the means of miraculously emancipating the popular initiatives. But the governors of the Soviet republics, who had witnessed 1989 in Eastern Europe, also realized that preemptive declarations of sovereignty could help to ensure them against removal by Gorbachev in his ongoing “rejuvenation of cadres” (read: purge). Early elections in the meantime often allowed the nomenklatura incumbents to outrun the loud but ideologically utopian intelligentsia. Market privatization then splendidly served the old/new presidents who doled out fabulous deals to their relatives and clients.

The mass defection of the former nomenklatura and their vertiginous self-recasting into capitalists and nationalists wrought havoc in state and economic structures. Ethnic wars flared up along the southern periphery of the collapsing Soviet Union. Even in the heartlands, amidst the breakdown of public order, the running nomenklatura had to fear for their lives or cut dirty deals with the Mafioso violent entrepreneurs. Such outcomes travestied Gorbachev’s intents. His aim was to negotiate from the position of superpower strength an advantageous collective inclusion in the capitalist networks of Western Europe. But the former Soviet republics rapidly lost the advantages of a strong military and international prestige, advanced science, and public order. The dramatic weakening of successor states made impossible any kind of directed industrial development.

The Soviet Union fostered a mono-organizational industrial society where all spheres of public activity were centrally directed. The loss of state integrity undermined all modern institutions and therefore disabled collective action at practically any level above family and crony networks. This condition became self-perpetuating. Individually the most rational and rewarding course of action now suggested looting the state assets and ferreting the loot abroad after a few lucky runs. The rulers themselves were eminently complicit in the weakening of their states because corruptible officials and impotent judiciary became the necessary conditions for looting and personalistic patronage. Such traditional concerns of state power as military strength and containing internal protests became largely irrelevant in the world geopolitics policed by the hegemonic America and institutions of global finance. All the former Soviet states compliantly proclaimed themselves market democracies, albeit with various “national specificities” clumsily excusing the primitive monopolism of their rulers.

Privatizations dealt a crushing blow to the once boisterous intelligentsias whose prestigious secure jobs and professional networks were embedded in state institutions. Liberal intellectuals, and even especially the social critics, found themselves shamefully impoverished, politically outmaneuvered, and ideologically speechless because their liberal and nationalist programs had been cynically hijacked. Moreover the shift of elite power strategies from state-run industrial production and military aggrandizement to private security, commodity exports, and financial speculation had the further perverse effect of insulating the postcommunist oligarchies from the rest of citizenry. The specialists and workers lost their collective leverage as productive labor and patriotic army recruits, or even as voters and taxpayers. What sense did it now make to organize strikes at bankrupt factories, march in the streets under the discredited slogans of national independence and market reform, or campaign for the politicians who would all become traitors? The perestroika-period atmosphere of public empowerment and optimistic anticipation abruptly changed to apathetic cynicism, preoccupations with economic hardship and criminality, and the desperate desire to emigrate. Instead of the promised land of Western Europe, the post-Soviets ended up closer to the harsher realities of the Middle East.

PREDICTIONS AND HISTORICAL PATHWAYS

Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein overall correctly discerned the structural trends pointing to the imminent end of communism. Collins highlighted the paradox of geopolitical limitations to Soviet power when it appeared at the pinnacle of expansion. He was also right in predicting the pattern of collapse suddenly emerging from the massive defection of subordinate elites in the national republics and satellite states in reaction to the political incapacitation of imperial center. But the model of Randall Collins anticipated neither speed nor the direction of Moscow’s action on its superpower dilemmas.

Wallerstein went further in his analysis of available options and argued that the best possible destination of Soviet reforms would be a negotiated return to capitalism under a pan-continental European alliance. In the Cold War atmosphere virtually nobody including the Soviet reformers themselves seriously calculated on this possibility. Wallerstein, however, underestimated the burdens of institutional complexity embedded in the ethnic federalism and industrial ministries of the U.S.S.R. The fragmented successors did all revert to capitalism, albeit of a weaker peripheral variety. Instead of rationally bargaining on superpower advantages for a more honorable collective inclusion in the world capitalist hierarchy, the nomenklatura squandered and cannibalized Soviet assets in a panicked rush to protect the individual oligarchic positions against both Gorbachev’s purging and the prospect of popular rebellions. Wallerstein’s theory was fundamentally correct because of its macroperspective on world capitalism; and for the same macroscopic reason it failed to envision the embarrassing political failure of Soviet elites to act together in the pursuit of their best historical opportunity. This should serve us a stark warning: oligarchic elites, especially when institutionally disunited and blinded by ideological prejudice, can grievously botch their transitions.

Contrary to the dominant Left/Right beliefs of the time, measuring the Soviets against ideological yardsticks, the analyses of Collins and Wallerstein proved overall to be correct because they were systemic and relational. In other words, they considered the Soviet bloc as part of a larger world. Collins based his predictions on the long-term regularities of military geopolitics. Wallerstein focused on the dimensions of capitalist world-economy and political options accessible to the elites across its various zones. These are different but analytically meshing dimensions. In fact, the combination of two approaches best explains the structural factors of China’s lucky exit from communism.

History surely made a big difference in shaping the character and divergent outcomes of Russian and Chinese communisms. Economic historians have now amply documented the pioneering role of medieval China in fostering the nearly modern levels of manufacturing and trade. Imperial China, however, did not become the first capitalist power in history for mainly geopolitical reasons. It was primarily the impressive permanence of an empire concerned with maintaining internal “harmony” and preventing nomadic attacks. In the West after the fall of Rome such an empire failed to materialize, which forced western capitalists to protect and consolidate themselves first as a system of city-states and later as modern national states. The Chinese empire fell late in the nineteenth century, but this series of catastrophic events only harmed indigenous capitalism. The Chinese entrepreneurs now faced both internal disorders and foreign domination by Western powers and Japan. It took another century full of grievous turmoil before the communist rebels prevailed in China—and essentially got stuck there. The Maoist attempt to launch a Soviet-type industrialization at the expense of the peasantry backfired in a huge famine followed by the decade of political bashing within party ranks. The human catastrophe surpassed even that of the Soviets in the 1930s without, however, generating a large modern industry and urbanization. China remained incapable of reaching even its immediate objectives in the regional neighborhood let alone the ideological goals of promoting a world anticapitalist revolution.

Here the geopolitical theory of Randall Collins identified a blessing in disguise. China was firmly contained in the world and regional power balances. Yet the same fact also removed China from the battle lines of the Cold War, thus enabling ideological decompression and economic engagement with the West. The Chinese cadres regarded radical Maoism as no less threatening to themselves than the Soviet nomenklatura regarded Stalinism after 1953. The long historical tradition of China suggested then the restoration of internal “harmony” by permitting grassroots and mainly rural economic entrepreneurship. Luckily, it was still surviving in the wake of abortive Stalinist industrialization. China’s market turn evidently also helped to keep in line the local party cadres through patronage that delivered opportunities for personal enrichment while exempting the loyal and properly performing clients from the public prosecution for corruption. Communism did not collapse in China. Even the official communist ideology still survives in a “lite” version. The Chinese leaders coming to the helm after Mao stumbled into the combination of structural conditions that reproduced on a grander scale the East Asia authoritarian model of the export-oriented developmental state. This realized the long-standing prediction of Immanuel Wallerstein: the communists rejoining world capitalism as pragmatic facilitators between foreign capital and their national labor.

CAPITALISM AND ITS TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHALLENGERS

Military geopolitics recurrently emerges in our analysis of communism because this appears the single most important factor determining the twentieth-century revolutions. To stress again, communism emerged not from the ideas of Karl Marx nor from the native traditions of Russia or China. It was the result of a particular leftist current, the Russian Bolsheviks, first finding its opportunity in the wake of a disastrous war to seize and technologically upgrade an eminently defensible platform in world geopolitics. The Bolsheviks, themselves consciously following the French Jacobin precedent, showed how radical intelligentsia could inspire and mobilize the popular masses for overthrowing old regimes, defeating foreign invasions, and building the stronger new states on much broader social bases.

The Soviet example, through direct aid or mainly by its very presence in the twentieth-century world scene, enabled the success of a whole variety of patriotic insurrections led by the radicalized native intelligentsias. Far from all became communist but surely all adopted some of the strategies pioneered by the Bolsheviks. The difference was mostly in the degree of economic expropriation by the newly reasserted states. Wherever states moved to control everything down to peasant households, the state was declared socialist. In states that seized only the properties of foreigners and some particularly “obscurantist” or unpatriotic owners, like the landlords and large comprador traders, the process and its result was called nationalism. The aftershocks of Bolshevik revolution emerged most strongly in the other erstwhile agrarian empires humiliated by Western capitalism and reduced to dependency status. This is what became known as the Third World national liberation movements, from the early example of Kemalist Turkey after 1918 and the Indian epic struggle for independence to the Iranian revolution of 1979. In the latter case a postmodern student movement of the 1968 type ignited a typically premodern rebellion of the urban poor and merchants against the impious despotism of the Shah. The result, however, was a quintessentially modern revolutionary state more closely resembling the Soviet-type regimes than the medieval Caliphate. Just as the two world wars in crucial ways defined the Soviet Union, the eccentric regime of the Islamic Republic was consolidated in the tremendous patriotic resistance of Iranians to the attack by Saddam’s Iraq which was surely acting as proxy of a broad counterrevolutionary coalition of foreign interests.

Despite the farrago surrounding the Sunni jihadi militancy after 2001, in the big picture of antisystemic challenges it was only a minor aftershock overdramatized by the American blunder of invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Qaeda sought a global geopolitical confrontation by the terrorist provocation of “morally cleansing” revolts and antiforeign resistance. Their strategy harkens back not to the Bolsheviks but perhaps rather to the nineteenth-century Russian Narodniki who had, after all, pioneered suicide bombings. And even more than the erstwhile Russian terrorists, the jihadists have failed politically to ignite popular rebellions.

In the core capitalist states, however, communist parties ran into the formidable wealth of Western societies and established parliamentarianism which favored the moderate tactics of social democracy. In the interwar Italy, Spain, and above all Germany, communists were brutally checked by the fascists, a new kind of counter-revolutionary force mobilizing both the embattled state elites and chauvinism of the “common angry men.” The fascist variety of antisystemic movements must be addressed seriously because it might yet reemerge in the wake of large crisis. After 1945 the Western Cold War ideology equated fascism with communism as the totalitarian twin evils. The convergence in the techniques of mass propaganda, industrial warfare, economic planning, and state control was real enough but these techniques became more widespread during the twentieth century than many people dared to recognize. In the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, the age of mass war and economic depression forced all governments to govern. This trend encompassed the more benign social democratic regimes of Scandinavia and the liberal democracies of Anglo-America that have shared to certain degrees in the new techniques of economic planning and mass consumption as well as police surveillance. Or just pay attention to public architecture and the typically muscular iconography of the thirties.

The scale of actual and symbolic state violence, significant as it was at the human level, depended mainly to the differential in geopolitical position and the strength of internal revolutionary challenges flowing from it. The dominant classes of Anglo-American democracies felt less threatened than their counterparts in continental Europe and therefore less compelled to let the violent and despicable racists fight in the streets against leftist revolutionaries or attempt to capture “living spaces” in foreign conquests. When it came to confronting Hitler’s ultramilitarism that threatened to finish capitalism not in a revolution but rather in a very bloody mess, the Anglo-American liberals readily allied with the communist counterforce. In a great but perfectly explicable irony of the twentieth century, the capitalist world-system was saved by the Soviet military industrialization resulting from a communist revolution.

Fascism and communism meant radical escalations unleashed by the cataclysmic experiences of the First World War in the two rival political currents of the nineteenth century, nationalism and socialism. Both ferociously fought each other for the overlapping mass constituencies in the rising lower classes of society: clerks, junior officers, intellectuals, workers, peasants. Both movements offered to their followers vastly enhanced self-prestige, empowerment, and the prospect of unprecedented promotions through the ranks of party, state bureaucracy, and the military. The two movements were breaking the taboos of old aristocratic regimes and advancing whomever they defined as their common men.

It is an uncomfortable realization that the modern ideal of justice and political rights for the common people, in theory and in practice, could have not one but two antagonistic expressions. Justice as social equality and unity of humanity was usually called socialism. It is, of course, the original Enlightenment ideal that enjoys a great intellectual tradition and enduring attraction. But at the level of politics this program was never easily sustained because it cuts across the social cleavages of group status, locality, religion, race, and gender. Justice in less universal terms, as privileging only a particular group against other groups, typically translates into the politics of nationalism, sexism, racism, religious fundamentalism, or whatever their contingent mixture. The intellectual tradition of such ideas is much cruder. But they often proved more effective in the age of mass politics. Nationalism over the last two centuries has animated a great many passionate or downright virulent political mobilizations. In fact, it is still the most effective of all political programs today.

Communism was not a genetic twin of fascism. They were ideological opposites and mortal enemies emerging from the imperialist industrial warfare of the early twentieth century. Neither communism nor fascism can reemerge in their familiar forms because, fortunately, their geopolitical and ideological preconditions have been eliminated. It does not mean that another major crisis in the future will not provoke strong reactions from the opposite sides of political spectrum. In fact, such antagonistic reactions will become likely as the conventional political mainstream loses coherence. But if my co-authors in this volume are right in their future predictions, as they proved in the past, then we might also make several further predictions.

The crisis of capitalism in the 21st century will be unfolding primarily in the world economy rather than in geopolitics. Its consequences will look more like class struggle, broadly construed to include the educated specialists, than world wars among coalitions of states. Moreover, the struggles will involve primarily the core capitalist areas where democratic politics have strong institutions and the enduring traditions of social movements. At stake will be public control over the private economic corporations rather than state armies or ideological paramilitaries. The nasty xenophobic reactions will be still prominent on one side because class struggles in a global world full of migrants inescapably will acquire the aspects of race, religion, and ethnicity. Extreme nationalisms will likely attempt to direct the powers of modern states into extreme coercion and policing resembling the erstwhile totalitarian practices, perhaps taken to a new technological level. Here is a big danger. But on the other side we will see political coalitions mobilizing around the liberal-leftist program of universal justice that has been ascendant in the modern world since at least the epoch of Enlightenment. Both capitalist classes and social movements, learning their lessons after 1945, cumulatively did a lot to make far less likely the wars between states and the internal civil wars. If warfare could be avoided, then violent revolution and dictatorships of both far left and the far right might be also avoided in the twenty-first century.

If this analysis is correct, then the Bolshevik 1917, fortunately, is not very relevant in predicting what the end of capitalism will look like. It could be rather the mass civic mobilizations like the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet perestroika at its height in 1989. In both instances the ruling elites reacted with more panic than outright violence. But the insurgent movements even more shamefully failed to exploit the momentous disorganization in the ranks of dominant classes. The outcomes were unhappy. Therefore thinking boldly and responsibly about the future should imply considering the political and economic programs as well as the possible coalitions and tradeoffs in order to minimize the uncertainties of transitions in the face of major crisis. Ultimately, this could be the most useful lesson of communism.