The Red Flag Quotes

“The term ‘utopian socialism’ was used by Marx and Engels as a way of dismissing a large number of their rivals, and denigrating their ideas in comparison with their own ‘scientific socialism’. Despite this, it does describe one strain of socialism in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the Communists, the utopians were generally not workers and initially did not have a close connection to working-class movements. They were also considerably less interested in seizing the central state. Instead, they focused their efforts on fashioning small, experimental communities, and presented a vision of the ideal society that was more appealing to many than the Spartan egalitarianism of the Babouvists. And rather than enforcing Weitling’s Christian morality, they sought to challenge what they saw as the oppressive doctrine of original sin on which Christianity was founded. Mankind, they argued, was naturally altruistic and cooperative, and right-minded education would permit these qualities to predominate. They were particularly hostile to what they saw as the grim work ethic of the new industrial capitalism, which was so closely associated with Christian, and particularly Protestant, ideas of the time. The factory system and the division of labour transformed men into machines and life into joyless drudgery. Society had to be organized so that everybody in the community could be creative and develop their individuality. Their vision was therefore Romantic in spirit. Though unlike the Jacobins, whose Romanticism was one of the self-sacrificing heroism of the soldier, theirs extolled the self-expression and self-realization of the artist.”
― David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism

“In 1929 the leadership replaced institutions for long-term prisoners with work camps, designed to extract minerals in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR where it was difficult to attract free labour. The Gulag soon expanded rapidly with the collectivization campaigns, as hundreds of thousands of kulaks, priests and other ‘enemies’ were imprisoned. By World War II, they had become subjects of an enormous slave state, and a central part of the Soviet economy, with a shocking 4 million people in the whole Gulag system.”
― David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism

“Lenin conceded that he had ‘retreated’ from the economic ambitions of 1919–20. ‘We made a mistake,’ he admitted, in thinking that the regime could eliminate the market, and moved too rapidly towards Communism.”
― David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism