Sean McMeekin: Communism lives

I posted this column by Professor Sean McMeekin over the weekend. Now that it has rotated off our home page, I am giving it one more spin in case you missed it.

Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College and the author of essential books including The Red Millionaire: Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940 (2004), The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017), and Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021). His new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, just published by Basic Books. In the current issue of the New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson assesses it “the best short history of communism I know.” It may be the book of the year. I invited Professor McMeekin to write something for us to bring it to the attention of our readers. Professor McMeekin writes:

My new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. As implied in the subtitle, one of the claims I make in the book is that Communism did not really die off with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and not only in the literal sense that avowedly Communist governments still exist in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, and only slightly less avowedly one-party Communist regimes in Cambodia and Cuba. Rather, I argue that certain practices common to Communist regimes have endured, thrived, and spread to many once-free countries in the West, above all in the realms of government surveillance, CCP-style “social credit” systems, “cancel culture,” and forms of public and private (or semi-private) censorship which grow more blatant all the time.

The Covid-19 lockdowns, from forcible government shutdowns of business to censorship of Youtube videos and the shutdown of government-critical Twitter accounts, to travel and work restrictions on the “unvaccinated,” were the most obvious example of this, but lately one can hardly miss the tsunami of news headlines about threats to shut down Twitter (now X), arrest or silence Elon Musk, or the sentencing of UK citizens for offensive social media posts. Indeed, since I finished drafting this book in spring 2023, the warning about creeping threats to freedom of speech in the US and western countries in my epilogue has proven, if anything, to have undershot the mark.

Nonetheless, I understand that drawing these historical comparisons can be unsettling. Several reviewers of the book, including Professor Harvey Klehr, have objected that my concerns about western crackdowns on freedom of speech are overblown, and that by focusing on contemporary parallels in the intellectual-cultural sphere to, say, China’s Cultural Revolution, I underplay the hard material side of maximalist Communist regimes, from nationalization of the means of production to state economic planning – material failures, that is, as every such regime grossly underperformed capitalist counterparts at best (most famously with the parallel examples of East vs. West Germany or North vs. South Korea) and produced famines and complete economic collapse at worst.

Professor Klehr was fair enough to point out that it is impossible to fit everything into a history of global Communism, objecting merely to the priority I devoted to some subjects rather than others. In the book, I should emphasize, I cover everything from War Communism and the New Economic Policy in the Lenin era to Stalinist central planning to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China and Gorbachev’s perestroika – along with the supposed “Chinese economic miracle” of recent years and its darker aspects. Still, Professor Klehr is not wrong that I end the book discussing censorship and social control and how these, and not maximalist suppression of private property and full-on central planning, represent the Communist “state of the art” today, and are therefore matters that should concern us.

Like all historians, I am writing at a particular moment in time. If I were writing the history of Communism in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was surging ahead in geopolitical competition with the USA, winning new client states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and American allies like Britain were descending into quasi-socialist stagnation owing to excessive state intervention in the economy, I likely would have focused more heavily on the woeful economic performance of Communist regimes, as many people – including, famously, CIA analysts – were then under the impression that fully state-planned economies could produce better growth and performance than freer ones, and it would have been necessary work to interrogate their claims against the historical evidence.

But not even Chinese Communist leaders really believe this anymore, and in the West only those deeply ignorant of history think that we should give full-on property nationalization and central planning of the entire economy another try. True, there are degrees of statism and central planning everywhere from China to the EU to the U.S. federal bureaucracy, and the implications of, say, Green New Deal-style statist schemes for energy policy, are worth training a critical eye on. Nonetheless there is little sign even the most ambitious bureaucrats of Brussels or Washington are about to bring back Gosplan.

Moreover, the economic planning failures of Soviet Gosplan and the broader East European Comecon, however genuinely important on their own terms, do not really explain why Communist regimes in Moscow and its satellites collapsed between 1989 and 1991. To be sure, Reagan’s S.D.I. and conventional arms buildup acted as a “ratchet,” forcing Gorbachev to respond and placing the Soviet economy under heavy strain. But as I show in the book, the Soviets were dramatically outproducing the Americans in armor, artillery, and most weapons categories by the late 1980s – in this area, if not in the consumer sector, perestroika actually worked.

Even the runaway Soviet inflation that forced Gorbachev to come begging for western loans need not necessarily have led to political collapse: the Chinese economy was reeling under similar inflationary pressure in 1989, which helped produce the Tiananmen Square protests. The Chinese Communist regime survived, and the Soviet one failed, not because of macroeconomic differences but because Gorbachev (for reasons I explain the book) was less ruthless and less successful in suppressing dissent than Deng Xiaoping was in China.

For a western historian today, what really stands out from the history of Communism are the eerie echoes in contemporary practices of the hysterical moral-terror panics of the Stalinist Great Terror or China’s Cultural Revolution, the bright red “denunciation boxes” the CCP provided citizens to denounce class enemies and wrongthinkers, or the “unofficial collaborators” the East German Stasi relied on to snitch out neighbors and even family members.

It is remarkable how much effort and expense Communist governments put into enforcing the “party line” – even as this line might change dramatically from month to month, from year to year. I am sure we are all familiar with bewildering “party lines” appearing in our social, work, and political lives today – lines we cross at our peril.

Of course, few of us today can imagine suffering the worst forms of Communist repression, from property expropriation (i.e., theft) to forced labor camps, executions, and mass starvation. We should not compare the plight of western “dissenters” today who might lose jobs or even, in some cases, serve jail time to the horrendous suffering of Ukrainians in the Holodomor or Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge. But we should still be aware of relevant historical parallels.

How many of us expected in the early days of the World Wide Web that the range of acceptable opinion would radically narrow rather than expand on the Internet, or that a speech platform like Facebook (as Mark Zuckerberg just confessed) or Twitter/X (until Elon Musk bought it and restored transparency) would cooperate with the U.S. government in censoring speech? Freedom of speech and assembly, once bedrock principles of American public life, seem to be hanging by a very thin thread. I have written my history of Communism with this in mind, and I hope readers will approach it in the same spirit of curiosity – and urgency.