The Catholic Church and the Comintern

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I began my adult life as an activist in the IMG, the British Section of the Fourth International and successor to the Comintern, immersed in the rituals of Marxist politics, endless meetings, and the promise of a transformed world. Decades later, I now find myself an activist in the Catholic Church (parish treasurer and project manager for our facilities) and I am struck by how familiar it all feels. These two great global organisations, one secular and revolutionary, the other religious and traditional, are oddly similar in their institutional life, with the activists still complaining about the passivity of most of the ordinary members...

Both claim to speak a universal truth. For the Comintern it was Marxism-Leninism, the scientific doctrine of history; for the Church it is the legacy of faith handed down from the Apostles. If you hold the key to human destiny, then errors and deviations should not be tolerated.

Hence orthodoxy, hence heresy, hence the long shadow of discipline.

For both rest on centralised authority. The Party had the Central and Political Committees - and the Control Commission; the Church has the Pope and the Magisterium. Democratic centralism vs. (in extremis) papal infallibility. Different idioms, same structural necessity: following discussion, unity is determined by a final arbiter.

Both manage conscience. In the Comintern, members were subjected to criticism and self-criticism (in the IMG not so much). In the Church, we have the confessional, the insistence on recognising fault and reaffirming commitment. In both settings, the ethos is interiorised, made personal (and thus more effective).

Both are missionary - universal in scope. The Comintern aspired to world revolution; the Church, to universal salvation. Both sprawl across cultures, nationalities, and centuries, and both face the constant problem of cohesion in the face of secular challenge.

Any institution that combines (1) a monopoly on truth, (2) a universal mission, and (3) a fragile global reach will converge on the same logic: central authority, discipline, self-examination, orthodoxy and exclusion. Whether the foundation is transcendental revelation or historical materialism, the organisational necessities are much the same.

Inside both, there is reward for those signed-up. In the Party it was the intoxicating sense of being active on the side of history. In the parish it is the palpable commitment of people who give their time, energy, and skill for something beyond themselves. Work can be mundane but has its life-affirming qualities. You are sustained by a sense of purpose and by the comradeship of those around you.

So from the Comintern to the Catholic Church, structures resemble while ideologies diverge. But in the lived experience of the activist core, the resemblance is remarkably similar, and the reward is the same: a life shaped by shared labour in service of a mission that transcends the individual.

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Russian History after a Bolshevik Defeat

Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution argued that in economically backward countries like early 20th-century Russia, the bourgeoisie was too weak and reactionary to carry out a full capitalist transformation, including land reform and democratic rights. Instead, he believed that only the working class, leading the peasantry, could overthrow the old order and usher in profound change.

In so doing, it could not simply hand over affairs to the politically-impotent bourgeoisie; instead the workers’ movement would have to forge on, working to establish a socialist state. Thus the communist revolution would be ‘permanent’, i.e. completed once and for all.

Trotsky never anticipated that the revolution would not expand beyond Russia itself. Russia was so backward economically, its productivity so low, that a society of equality based on abundance was unthinkable. It would have to be helped by workers’ states in prosperous western europe. 

Trotsky’s model, however, was fatally flawed; tragically simplistic: centrally planned economies controlled by workers’ councils simply do not work in practice. And so Russia proceeded to Stalinism, heckled by Trotsky from increasing distances, until the exiled dissident was eventually assassinated.

Perhaps, contrary to Trotsky's vehemently-expressed views, there really was no ‘Trotskyist’ alternative to Stalinism after the revolution succeeded in 1917. But what would have happened if Lenin’s Bolsheviks had failed in their putsch against the collapsing Kerensky government? Despite the disintegration of the army, enough units of the Russian military were, after all, standing by, as the Bolsheviks discovered in the long civil war which followed.

Had the Bolsheviks failed in 1917, Russia would certainly have fallen under a military dictatorship, facing the same challenge Stalin later confronted: dragging a feudal, agrarian society towards a modern industrial economy and state. The military dictatorship would have been forced to depopulate the countryside, dismantling peasant agriculture to create a mass urban workforce. This brutal transition - akin to enclosures in Europe but imposed at breakneck speed - would have been necessary to fuel rapid industrialisation, driven by the imperatives of security and military rivalry, particularly with Germany.

Schumpeter’s insight applies: authoritarian command economies, whether Stalinist or capitalist, can be equally effective at economic take-off. The regime would have pursued state-directed capitalism, using repression to discipline labor, expand heavy industry, and consolidate large-scale capitalist farming. Political rhetoric would frame these measures as national survival, not class struggle, but the human toll - displacement, famine, and political terror - would mirror Stalin’s forced modernisation.

Yet, no dictatorship lasts forever. Spain, Portugal, and Greece transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy as modernisation weakened their regimes. A Russian junta, once its industrial goals were met, might have faced internal power struggles, economic stagnation, or public unrest in the second half of the twentieth century. However, Russia’s deep imperial and autocratic traditions could have prolonged authoritarian rule, replacing one strongman with another rather than fostering genuine democracy.

In the end, a post-1917 military dictatorship would have shaped Russia much as Stalinism did - through coercion, industrial might, and state-driven modernisation. Whether it collapsed into reform or prolonged despotism would depend less on economic success than on Russia’s historical inertia: a state that has long thrived on repression is rarely eager to let go.

But a capitalist Russia emerging from dictatorship would have had a working civil society, an economic power-base separate from the state apparatus. Consequently, the chances of a democratic transition would have been far greater than with the Russia we currently have, where civil society (weak to begin with) has been thoroughly crushed for a century by the power of an overweening state.

Without Stalinism to discredit it, it’s possible that the revolutionary left in a Bolshevik-defeat world would be more vigorous than in our actual world; but overall, if the Bolsheviks had been defeated, that world today would most likely be a better and more peaceful place than our own, too.

Unusual Reasons

This post is about people who undertake significant life changes, but for unusual reasons.

1. Programming

Dr Hamid Lesan escaped to England from Iran, where, as a dissident, he was under the scrutiny of the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. He worked as a colleague of mine at STL in the mid-1980s on formal methods research and AI. I asked him once how he had gotten into programming; he replied that he had first engaged with programming as an interesting application of the lambda calculus.

[Dr Hamid Lesan received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic from the Department of Mathematics of the University of Manchester in 1978. After a brief period of teaching, he joined STL in 1980, where his work has been mainly concerned with Formal Methods and Natural Language Processing. He is currently working on tools for supporting the formal specification and development of software in the context of the ESPRIT project RAISE. (ICL Technical Journal, Volume 7 Issue 1 - May 1990). He died in August 2006 - I’m not aware of the circumstances.]

2. Joining the revolutionary left

In the early 1970s, when I was at Warwick University, there was a plethora of far-left organisations looking to recruit: the International Socialists (IS, later SWP); the Socialist Labour League (SLL); the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party; and the International Marxist Group (IMG), British Section of the Fourth International.

It was a time of unrest, and we talked big. Our perspective was becoming a mass revolutionary party as the Bolsheviks had achieved in 1917. Once, one of our leaders, Peter Gowan, came to Warwick to speak. He looked forward to the future mass party, but mentioned that today, most of the leading cadres had elected to join the IMG - rather than other bigger, higher profile organisations - specifically because of its link with the International.

Probably not one in one hundred thousand workers and students had ever heard of the Fourth International: I certainly hadn’t before I was recruited…

3. Being received into the Catholic Church

People join religious organisations for many, often prosaic reasons. But JD Vance joined after an intense study of St. Augustine’s massive City of God. In this fifth century work, Augustine condemns Rome, the City of Men, devoted to present excess, hedonism, selfish ambition and heedless individualism. Vance had no problem identifying those ancient Roman pagans with contemporary American coastal elites with their mindless hedonism; their secular, patronising arrogance.

Augustine counterposes the City of God, the community of those who love God and live according to His will. The Catholic Church is a visible manifestation of the City of God on earth, and promotes the virtues of humility, communitarianism and morality.

JD Vance considered the Catholic Church as the right organisation of resistance: he decided to join.

[St. Augustine wrote "The City of God" over a span of several years, beginning in 413 AD and completing it around 426 AD. This period was during a time of great turmoil in the Roman Empire, particularly marked by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD, which partly inspired Augustine to write the work. The full title of the work is "De Civitate Dei contra Paganos" (The City of God against the Pagans), and it addresses the decline of Rome and defends Christianity against the accusations that it was responsible for the fall of the Empire. (ChatGPT).]

Revolutionary Christmas Cards (redux)

They've arrived.

Click on image to make larger.

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One's too soppy, one's too earnest and one's too crass. The remaining five have now been posted to their carefully targeted recipients.

Revolutionary Christmas Cards

Buy me!

In this year of insurrectionary turbulence I determined to eschew the traditional Christmas card.

"No!" to Father Christmas, reindeer, snow, holly and angels!

But what's the alternative? If our future is right-wing oligarchic authoritarianism, you won't find me sending out Trump-, Le Pen- or UKIP-themed Christmas greetings.

Better to return to the soft-headed but so-romantic leftism of my youth.

It turns out that left-wing Christmas cards are hard to find. There's nothing useful on Amazon, and Google isn't much better. I draw the line at those incompetent authoritarians Stalin and Mao, and have little time for the Fidelistas.

I looked, but the Fourth International (which increasingly espouses only trendy identity politics) isn't doing cards this (or any) year.

Help finally from The Radical Tea Towel Company ("You wash, I'll try ... to change the world!").

A Mixed Pack

I ordered the mixed pack.

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Update: they arrived.

"The Star Fraction" - Ken MacLeod

What would I have done without the Fourth International? As a marxist cadre in my early twenties I experienced the camaraderie of a close-knit community, endless parties and discos, a structure and framework to my life plus a mission of the greatest importance - the future of humanity itself.

Ken MacLeod's "The Star Fraction" is Trotskyist science-fiction. Published in 1995, twenty years after I attended countless demos and endless meetings in smoke-filled rooms above pubs, the comforting ambience of daily life in the revolutionary-left is summoned again as an old friend.

Macleod is entranced by one of his female characters, the intriguing Catherin Duvalier (part of her allure is the absence of that terminal 'e'). Here is how she is described, entering a bar:

"She moved liked a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn't tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knees by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew."

And here's the Wikipedia summary of the plot:

"The world is controlled by the US/UN, a sort of semi-benign meta-dictatorship which doesn't rule directly so much as enforce a series of basic laws on a vast number of microstates. Many of the microstates are in a near-constant state of low-intensity warfare. Among the laws enforced on them is a prohibition on certain directions of research, such as intelligence augmentation or artificial intelligence; precisely what is prohibited is of course secret, and as violation of the prohibitions will result in the swift and efficient death of everyone directly involved, scientific research is a dangerous proposition at best.

"The main characters – a trotskyist mercenary, a libertarian teenager from a fundamentalist microstate, and an idealistic scientist – find themselves caught up at the center of a global revolution against the US/UN. The revolution was planned, and partially automated using financial software, in order to break out when a certain set of conditions were reached. The stakes are raised at the end of the book, when it is revealed that the autonomous financial software has evolved into an intelligent form, which might cause the paranoid US/UN to make a "clean break" with the earth, knocking the planet back to the stone age with the orbital defense lasers."

Ken Macleod is part of that Scottish SF 'mafia' which also included Iain M. Banks. The group has consistently eluded true eminence, Banks coming nearest although he never wrote the definitive great science-fiction novel. Macleod is a competent writer and you are prepared to relax and be taken into his world. There is of course a 'but'. He lacks stardust - the originality, audacity and sheer intelligence to pin the reader back in surprise and remake their worldview. Few have it, of course: for the remainder we hum along -  'hmm .. yep .. that's interesting' - and don't wholly feel the guilt of wasted time.

This was a nostalgia-fest for me, both the left-wing politics and the sub-Neuromancer tech-extrapolation (who 'jacks in to modems' these days?). The conflict which informs the plot is that of oldtime Marxist-Leninist proletarian vanguardism vs. the identity politics of the truculent middle-classes: greens, ecologists, gender politics. In my time this was all just getting going: we welcomed these strange new allies in the struggle for workers' power; in the 1990s the conflict was a battle for primacy, while latterly, in the historic absence of any significant worker radicalisation, the far-left has finally been captured altogether.

Still, I may have been one of the few readers who knew the difference between a faction and a fraction without having to look it up.