By Gwydion M. Williams

Being a Post-Leninist

Born 1950, I grew up in an Age of Hippies.  But I never quite was one.  I was a committed Leninist, Maoist in fact.  And I never smoked pot.

I watched things come apart in the 1970s.  Workers Control was briefly a real possibility, but pro-Moscow Leninists were against it as a needless compromise with ‘late Capitalism’.  They at least had a system that was a winner at the time: the main alternative was Trotskyists, convinced they were just about to become winners after 50 years of failure.  

Another 50 years of failure has taught the Trotskyists little or nothing (https://labouraffairs.com/2025/10/01/trotskyism-a-century-of-failures/).  And pro-Moscow Leninists failed to understand that their system was doomed when it suppressed the attempts by Slovak Leninists to carry through reforms similar to those which Deng Xiaoping later managed brilliantly in China (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/).  Gorbachev was a joke reformer, ignoring Deng’s advice to keep Leninist politics intact and use its solid authority to improve the economy.  He destroyed what he tried to save.  And Yeltsin as another bungler did gigantic damage to what was still a productive economy that gave millions of people a decent life (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/46-globalisation/1473-2/).    

Why did Leninism have a gigantic run of success from 1917 to the 1950s, and then fall apart in Europe in more recent decades?  The New Right like to pretend it never happened, even spreading the notion that the USA was liberator of Europe despite it being the Soviets who broke the back of Germany’s formidable war-machine (https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia).  But Asian Leninists never pretended that there was much difference between Lenin and Stalin.  And in China especially, almost everyone assumes that a strong state is a necessity for civilised life.

And it’s a fact that non-civilised life is just as coercive: just not so obvious to an outsider.  Not to people who swan through it with the protection of a powerful home society: those strangers lacking such protection generally don’t live to tell the tale.  And visitors see only what the tribalists want them to see.

Tribal societies impose a narrow pattern of behaviour on tribe members, with irregular violence to maintain it.  With death or expulsion for those who determinedly won’t fit in. I’ve also heard it said that African coming-of-age rituals do not just severely test youths expected to become warriors, but there is manipulation to kill off those who look like committed troublemakers.  The people most likely to object to such behaviour are also the most likely to be killed off in a society or a subculture where police are absent.

The Marxist class analysis of history is much better than anyone else’s, yet still incomplete.  Sometimes dangerously misleading, and Western Marxists from the 1960s were mostly misled.  It was particularly unwise to badmouth Stalin and the whole Soviet experience, without expecting right-wingers to take advantage.  And there were also a lot of delusions about spontaneous human goodness being there to burst forth if only nasty coercive state power were not there.

Engels in his famous Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is way wrong in adding Primitive Communism as the original human condition.  He does correctly mention that every tribe was inherently at war with every other tribe unless a specific peace had been made.  But might have called it Family Collectivism: to me this seems a much less misleading name. Families share with each other, but much less with outsiders.

Considering the primitive condition to be Family Collectivism, the state and state monopolies of violence look like a natural result of humans living in groups larger than a tribe.  Rival families don’t necessarily extend their concern to non-relatives.  Slavery seems to exist in every society that has agriculture, suggesting that this is members of weaker families being intimidated into obeying the strong.

Classical Greece and Rome were exceptional in having most farming done by actual slaves, and in constant wars to produce those slaves.  The norm was unfree peasants who were protected against being sold like animals.  But in Imperial China, almost all peasants were free.  Chinese slaves were mostly servants in rich families, and some of them could do very well out of it.

I’ll come back later to how the four first river-valley civilisations went different ways, with different and unconnected developments when the radical novelty of towns and cities became possible.  First I want to look at the ideas of Progressive Evolution.  The common ground between Marxists and the New Right

It’s not a Bespoke Universe

One British hippy slogan was ‘There is a fault in reality, please do not adjust your mind’.  Based on the primitive television technology, when you might need to adjust your Vertical Hold or Horizontal Hold, but not if the broadcast itself had gone wrong.

It is rooted in a false vision of the world.  People who’d been given great advantages when growing up did not feel they’d been given nearly enough.  They’d get discontented with what earlier generations would have seen as a wonderful life.  And a sadly large majority of those same people when they became tax-payers decided that the next generation did not deserve more of the same.  Not the free education or cheap housing that they’d benefited from.  

For the diminishing minority who stuck to the idea of fairness and human equality, there was vast unrealism about romantic revolution.  Not many would have known that Che Guevara always kept a positive view of Stalin, for instance (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/the-soviet-past/why-che-guavara-approved-of-stalin/).  

With encouragement from Thatcher and after the bulk of the left blocked reforms that would have changed everything, 1960s anti-authority attitudes became ‘The Vastly Popular Front for the Liberation of Just Me’.  

Yet Libertarianism and the creeds of the New Right have basically failed.  They have captured the politicians and the media, but they have lost the respect of most people.

After half a century of seeing those people in action, I’m quite definite that it was not even intelligent selfishness.  It helps that I’ve read the entire published works of Adam Smith, and many books by his various fans.  There is no logic in thinking that capitalism generates a decent morality if the state holds back, and plenty of observational evidence that it does not (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/48-economics/037-adam-smith-misleading/how-real-economic-growth-was-not-based-on-adam-smiths-ideas/). 

The West in the 1990s briefly had a chance to impose its own values on the rest of the world.  It failed, because thinking was dominated by people convinced that things familiar to them were obvious and natural.  That now they could revive things that they had not dared to when the Soviets were there as a serious alternative.

Keeping Russia prosperous and happy after the Soviet collapse would have cost a trillion or two, but they actually had those trillions.  Russia might then have become an efficient enforcer of Western values on the Global South.  China would not have been repelled by seeing their former Russian mentors humbled and exploited.

More widely, Baathist Iraq was the best prospect of actually moulding the diverse peoples of ancient Mesopotamia into something similar to a Western society.  My own view was and is that it was none of our business what Iraq made of itself.  But Bush and Blair and all their associates thought it would be easy.  That they had both a right and a duty to impose Western values on people they’d saved as recently as 1987 (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-004-october-1987/why-the-west-saved-saddam-hussein-in-1987/).  

From some Departments of Political Science, they picked up the idea of Westphalianism.  The dogma that sovereign nations had not existed before the weak compromise that ended Germany’s disastrous Thirty Years War (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/problems-magazine-older-issues/p1-76-nation-states-existed-long-before-the-peace-of-westphalia/). 

The big trouble with lying is that what you say is not true.  The same is true when fantasy is treated as applicable in the world you actually inhabit.  Outside of Europe and the USA, New Right doctrine and the centre-left capitulation to it was as disastrous as the Brezhnev idea of ‘limited sovereignty’.  The delusion which from 1968 helped kill off what was left of home-grown socialism and pro-Russian feeling in Middle Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brezhnev_Doctrine).  

Underlying this was a notion of a Bespoke Universe – a place designed for one’s own particular needs.  The Nanny State was not needed: a doctrine favoured by people who were alive and civilised because of actual nannies hired by rich parents, but who would often then scorn those women as serious inferiors.  Everything was already there.  Get rid of expensive and interfering state power and wait for God or Evolution to do their magic.

Many Massively Different ‘Slave Societies’ 

I said earlier that humans started with Family Collectivism.  For Marx and Engels, this then decayed into exploitation and class society.  Slave societies, later progressively replaced by feudalism and then capitalism.  And looking at the Indian subcontinent they added an Asiatic Mode of Production.  Yet they ignored China, which for more than 2000 years had something that seemed just as suitable for capitalism as Britain was.

I decided to rethink.  It was the early Class Societies that created the possibility of larger societies, and even of human unity.  But the first four human civilisations to emerge out of concentrated agriculture were very different from each other.  

•    Mesopotamia was first, and had an endless cycle of squabbling city-states, and its much-admired first Legal Code defined a difference between nobles, commoners, and slaves.  There was some attempt to share power between monarchs and nobles.  Perhaps even republics, but probably aristocrat republics.  Not democracies but systems with a built-in advantage for nobles, as later found in Rome   (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Rome-s-Undemocratic-Republic).  

•    Egypt was almost as old, and the two interacted.  But Egypt gained unity: rulers erased the difference between the triangular Nile Delta and a narrow fertile Nile Delta as far south as what’s now Sudan.  And their lives were so different from all other humans that they never conquered much beyond.  Pharaohs were absolute rulers, and unity was mostly defined by gigantic tombs for them.  They would indeed have seemed god-like when they organised collective labour and simple technology to build the pyramids as new-born mountains.  

•    The Indus Valley is broadly mysterious.  It lacked the caste system that must have arrived later with speakers of Indo-European languages who’d begun probably in what’s now South Russia or the Caucasus.  Its ruined cities lacked anything that looks like a palace or a temple, but houses in its cities show richer and poorer districts.  It had no signs of warfare, and walls may have been just to protect against flood.

That civilisation seems to have failed due to drought, with the early cast-based Sanskrit-speaking warriors and priests simply moving into and renewing the remains of that interesting culture.  Aristocratic republics flourished for a time, and the original Buddha may have come from one.

•    Early China, like Ancient Egypt, had absolute rulers, and not a trace of aristocratic republics.  And its rulers were never more than men favoured by a link with Heaven.  Officials were privileged servants of those rulers, but it was meritocratic.  Clever commoners could rise to power as state-appointed Governors over rich families who mostly lacked inherited titles.

There were also two separate developments in the New World: in Central America and along the Andes.  But those had their higher functions erased by Spain, and no longer count.

Mesopotamia is the root of Western ways of life.  The concept of aristocratic republics seems to have been spread by people we call Phoenicians.  Carthage, its highest expression, was recognised by Rome as a system similar to their own.  Greeks had borrowed from Phoenicians both politics and letters: the societies depicted by Homer have much less of a role for commoners.  He also assumes an illiterate society.  The epic has only a hazy memory of the Mycenaean society as it would have existed when the real Troy was sacked.

Engels’s hopeful notion of a primitive human unity that would seem natural to us was fanciful.  A hybrid of French and Germanic culture seemed possible, but he had no sympathy for various Slavs and other conquered identities re-emerging.  He and Marx broadly ignored the Chinese Taiping, at the time the only armed communists anywhere in the world.  Engels failed to see how similar it was to the intensely religious collectivists he’d described in his Peasant War In Germany.

The simplified Social Evolution that Marx and Engels outlined in the Communist Manifesto was a big advance on the similar system put forward by Adam Smith.    They were clear about the destruction of independent small property, which Smith had expected to continue as part of general prosperity in a class-based society.  Which today’s New Right still claim to uphold, and blatantly do not uphold: a failure that produces current aberrations like MAGA and Britain’s Reform party.

The Soviet Union lived and in the end died on the basis of the much-cherished version of a Universal Republic.  Hampered by its practical basis in Russian culture, just as Napoleon’s system was basically French.  Leaders might come from the fringes: Napoleon was Corsican, Lenin had mixed Central-Asian and Swedish and Jewish ancestry, and Stalin was from an ancient people with a unique language, the Georgians.  All of them tried to create a universal culture based on an existing culture they themselves has entered as outsiders.  But French culture influenced most of Europe well before Napoleon: Tolstoy’s War and Peace is mostly about the Russian elite discovering that they were not in fact French.   Even the Russian alphabet, close to the Europe-teaching Greek alphabet, is confusing to those growing up with the evolved Latin version. 

The Soviet Union tried to be Universalist, but became a continuation of the open-ended imperialism of the Tsars.  A system which already had the merit inherited from the Roman Empire of being willing to accept people of any ethnic background if they would set aside their origins and accept the majority culture.

China is in no way Imperialist: it is one of many states with a giant ethnic majority and a number of much smaller intermingled minorities.  Tibet is the famous case, but it was the Tang dynasty with its merger of nomad culture into Chinese civilisation that spread Buddhism to Tibet.  The people of the Tibetan plateau had previously been shamanistic and resisted the creed that had begun on the other side of the Himalayas.  Tibet shares with the majority Han a language from the same language family, and its calendar is one of many variants of a system that began along the Yellow River.  Tibetans intermingle both with Han and with the culturally Chinese Muslims called Hui.  Hui dominated the region where the current Dalai Lama was born, and his elder brother was a senior cleric when he was ‘discovered’ as a rebirth of the previous Dalai Lama.  No other version of Buddhism other than Tibet’s Lamistic creed believes in such useful controlled rebirth.

Good Gods, Bad Gods and Ugly Gods

Chimps can learn some of our language.  But unlike children, they hardly ever ask why.  At some time after our ancestors split from chimps, we must have developed a need to get a wider picture of how the world works.

Humans developing the idea of first spirits, then gods, and then God.  A Supreme God encourages rationality, and also fanaticism and dishonesty.  All three are found in Plato.  A man called Critias was the closest to Hitler you can find in the ancient world: Plato was a follower, and continued admirer.  Some of the worst deeds of humans have been justified by supposed Divine Approval.  You could call them Abusive God-users.

That epic film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is entertaining, but what lessons does it give?  It gets away from hazy ideas of God and virtue in Westerns.  And mostly there is nothing much in its place.  

With God supposedly in charge, an imperfect world can be explained by a Bad God set in opposition.  Or the Divine Spirit might be arbitrary – an Ugly God.  But discarding the whole notion of spirits and gods makes more sense.

People do want a better world.  They just need a better understanding of how we get there.

Copyright Gwydion M. Williams.