CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

The entire review could be spent picking these holes, but a general critique of the volume must
focus on the principles behind Service’s handling of the communist movement and the states ruled
by communist parties. Almost certainly, what became the standard socio-economic principle of the
ruling parties and the aspiration of most others, the command economy in irremovable singleparty
regimes, (other parties, if permitted, would be reduced to impotence) was unviable from the
start, doomed to failure and only appeared for a time to be successful on account of extraordinary
historical circumstances. Nonetheless the flawed nature of that model can only be effectively
judged in relation to the rival which it confronted – not merely the power of the United States,
formidable though that was, but the consumer society of the first world in all its glittering
attractiveness. The communist bloc did not have to collapse when it did – even under the global
circumstances which existed in 1988 it could have gone on for decades longer; if challenged only by
third world type economies it could have continued indefinitely. Moreover, the very existence of the
communist rival and the kind of appeal which it represented played a very significant role in
restraining the predatory instincts of international capital, easing labour exploitation in developed
economies and permitting the long boom of the fifties and sixties to occur.
In other words, the movement can only be understood in the context of its world situation and the
relentless siege to which the bloc was subjected by its enemy. Service wholly fails to address these
issues in any explanatory fashion, to identify the basic project of leading western governments
between 1917 and 1991; namely to repress communism wherever and whenever possible, to enter
only temporary and provisional agreements with the USSR, to make life as difficult for it as they
could and never to accept the states of the Soviet bloc as fully legitimate members of the
international community.
It isn’t that Service fails to draw attention to western crimes and massacres – he does, and in
regard to one of the worst, the bloody extermination of the Indonesian communists in 1965, he
cites a death figure even higher than the one generally accepted, though even in this instance there
is a distortion. The attempted coup which triggered the bloodbath was not, as Service claims, a
communist initiative, but staged by a group of ultra-leftist junior officers, for which the party next
day incautiously and fatally expressed its approval.
These atrocities however are treated by Service as contingent to the nature of US-led western
democracy, regrettable aberrations, unlike the communist ones, which, we are given to
understand, must be the inevitable outcome of its defective ideology. Expressed in theoretical
terms, the approach is thoroughly idealist, rather as though the fundamental drive behind US
administrations was argued to come from protestant evangelism and not the concrete problems of
keeping American elites enormously wealthy. That said, there is no question that communists took
ideology seriously in a way that no other political movement ever did; the point is that Service only
very superficially tries to relate their beliefs to the material and moral dilemmas they faced. ‘Kindly
Bukharin’ (Service’s own words) for example, is nevertheless indicted for ‘condoning’ violence
(p478), without any attempt to investigate the reasons why he might have done so.
That is one example. Service is never able to penetrate the actuality of what made communists tick,
to get inside their heads, particularly among the non-ruling parties, where membership seldom
offered great material rewards and indeed usually debarred communists from enjoying any such
thing. His closing chapter, ‘Accounting for Communism’ might be expected to address such matters
but signally fails to do so. It does not account for communism, but instead is a (relatively accurate)
summary of the faults and shortcomings of the communist regimes and the reasons why they were
disliked by their publics. It has nothing to say about the communist movement elsewhere. In his
concluding sentences Service writes that ‘Communism also infected other movements for the
transformation of society’ (p481). The metaphor is revealing, and he goes on to compare
communism to a virus. He then concludes – if not by identifying the bolshevik regime with all
forms of subsequent tyranny (even the Taliban), by suggesting that at least it provided the
precedent. Comrades is a spectacularly missed opportunity and a singular failure of historical
imagination.
Willie Thompson
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