Leftism
5. The Historic Origins of Leftism
The Earliest Roots
Leftism in the Western World has roots reaching way back into the dim past. Leftist ideas and notions made themselves felt again and again in late medieval and modern history, but for its first concrete and, in a way, fateful outbreak and concretization we have to look to the French Revolution.
Leftist tendencies, according to the terminology outlined above, existed in ancient Greece. Hellenic (Athenian) democracy not only insisted on the rule of the many, it also had a strong egalitarian slant. Naturally the notion of equality only applied to the full citizens, not to women, slaves, and foreigners (metoikoi), so that the electorate in Greek democracies always constituted a minority. We must add that Greek democracies, while frequently most oppressive, had certain liberal aspects; respect for men in elevated positions was not stressed and the absence of a strongly concretized ruling class as well as the total lack of anything resembling a “presidency” weakened authority. In the descriptions of democracy by Plato and also by Aristotle we perceive the elements of equality and social, though not necessarily political liberty. Envy was written large and excellence was suspect. The fear of a monarchical restoration was a permanent feature and thus all concentration of power was dreaded. If anybody excelled in merits and prestige, exile through ostracism menaced him. Yet, while social liberties were perhaps marked, political liberties were few, though here we have to bear in mind that the concept of the person as we know it did not exist in antiquity. It makes its appearance in the Western World—and solely in the Western World—only with the advent of Christianity. When Aristotle called man a zoon politikon he meant a creature practically absorbed by the city or by the state.
Salvador de Madariaga has said that Western civilization rests on two deaths—the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. And indeed the Crucifixion was also a democratic event. When our Lord was brought before Pilate and told him that He had come as a witness to the Truth, the governor, as a true agnostic, asked Him, “What is Truth?” And without waiting for an answer, he passed Him by and consulted “the people.” The vox populi condemned our Lord to death as it had Socrates more than three centuries earlier. But if we despair of truth, if we believe that truth either does not exist or can humanly not be attained, we either have to leave things to chance or look for mere preferences—personal preferences or “preferences statistically arrived at” (which often means accepting the “verdict of the majority”). This is a handy means to settle differences of opinion, yet it neither tells us the truth nor does it offer rational solutions to burning problems.
What distinguished them from the Reformers was the cult of poverty as we find it, for instance, among the “Poor of Lyons,” an early Waldensian group. The Waldensians from Lombardy (as distinct from those of France) insisted that their faithful live from the fruits of manual labor. Especially as weavers they lived together, worked together, were hostile to military service, rejected oaths, and hated sumptuous churches. They also seem to have had an anti-intellectual bent. From Lombardy they spread as far as Bohemia.
The English Forerunners
Wyclif began by first denouncing papal supremacy, thus earning the sympathies of his king. He then proceeded to question transubstantiation and the prerogatives of the clergy for which he received the support of the nobility. Finally he advanced democratic theories and denounced wealth altogether, and so gave impetus to the agrarian revolt. An analogous development took place when Luther (who knew the writings of Wyclif) declared the Pope to be antichrist and received the protection of the princes against the Emperor; and then, when he denounced the clergy and the monastic institutions, he won the applause of the nobility. Luther never went further. When the enormous wave of criticism of the existing order reached the peasantry and resulted in violent rebellion, and the lower middle classes in certain regions embraced Anabaptism (Münster, for example), or engaged in iconoclastic orgies, Luther applied the brakes and denounced this extremism. Wyclif also once halfheartedly protested against Ball and Tyler (who insisted they were followers of Wyclif), but he died before the full development of Lollardy. Wyclif’s “Poor Preachers” are definitely an effort toward a “democratization” of religion, a “populism” along semiecclesiastical lines. The Poor Preachers were often pastmasters in exploiting the envy of the masses.
The other type of envy was nonmaterial: Theology was looked at askance as something complicated, not necessarily comprehended by the uneducated, and as the “private property” of the intellectually beati possidentes. As a matter of fact, even in the Franciscan Order, soon after its founding, there had been a bitter struggle between an intellectual and a nonintellectual faction ending in the victory of the former. Thanks to it we have in St. Bonaventure, Alexander Hales, Occam, and Duns Scotus outstanding representatives of Christian theology.
And, last, a third kind of envy made its appearance, an envy that had a spiritual cause: The clergy reserved the Chalice for itself.
Thus the demand for equality, the rebellion against differences and privileges was mounting. It is no coincidence that the cry first went up in England, one of the most class-conscious countries in Western civilization. It was repeated there in similar forms during the seventeenth century when egalitarian sects arose again in great numbers and when, for the first time in Christian European history, a king was formally put to death.
The death of Hus resulted in the establishment of two groups: A more moderate one, the Utraquists, content with administration of communion under both species, bread and wine, and a radical one, the Taborites, which found its center in the newly established city of Tábor. (Tábor in Czech means camp.) The Taborites were extreme fanatics, and they were organized militarily. Their leader at the beginning was Jan Zižka, scion of a recently nobilitated family of German origin. Their ideology was chiliastic, nationalistic, puritanical, democratic, and socialistic. Here we have a real and concrete prefiguration of all the isms of our times in a dynamic synthesis. By filiation perhaps more than by analogy the mass movements of our days are related to Taboritism.
Taboritism, however, was more deeply influenced by the Waldensians and the Beghards than by pure Hussite theology. In its earlier phase the socialist and puritanical ideas were more in the foreground and the ultra-extremists, the nudist Adamites, were severely persecuted by Zižka. Still, the Taborites believed in the coming of a millennium in the form of a Third Kingdom (taken from the prophecies of Daniel). A radically socialist program regarding property was adopted in the first years, but after the death of Zižka of Trocnov the egalitarian spirit weakened under the leadership of Prokop Holý (who apparently also was of German origin). Hussite armies invaded the surrounding German areas and a crusade was preached against the Taborites. The army of the crusaders was routed near Domažlice (Taus) and only then did the old leading classes become fully aware of the danger. In alliance with the Utraquists, who had kept the original moderate Hussite spirit, the Taborites were finally defeated in the battle of Lipan, and Prokop was killed. This furious explosion of a synthetic mixture of nationalism, socialism, and radical democracy with communist innuendos not only had devastated large parts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Upper Hungary, but also had deeply shaken the social and spiritual fabric of Europe. In their perennial ramifications the shadows of this profound revolution are still with us and will continue to be for some time.
From then on, the “wild sects” continued to exist almost solely in the Mundus Reformatus. The sixteenth century saw a furious outbreak of sectarian chiliasm in various parts of Germany—in the southwest along the Rhine and, above all, in Münster. It was Thomas Münster, a German Anabaptist who, after visiting Prague in 1521 to get in touch with Hussite circles, started a series of popular uprisings in the name of religion. He attacked the Reformers for having done halfhearted work, for not having gone far enough in the domain of religion, and for having neglected to change state and society. He preached and wrote in favor of a communistic theocracy he wanted to see established. He was completely opposed by Luther who wanted to have no truck with him. After having taken up contact with the Swiss Anabaptists he (together with the former monk Pfeifer) seized the Upper Alsatian town of Mühlhausen where he succeeded in deposing the local government and plundered the convents as well as the houses of the rich. In 1525 he joined the Peasant Revolt, but his warfare against the “godless princes and priests” ended in failure. Beaten in battle, he and Pfeifer were taken prisoner and decapitated.
More interesting than their religious faith was their social organization in that part of the Holy Roman Empire. Carl A. Cornelius gives us a short but vivid description:
Yet, as in the case of the Low-German Anabaptists (finally centred in Münster), the expectation of an imminent Day of Judgment, dooming the wicked and exalting the faithful, was very strong. In our time, though in a more secular version, the extreme left has also invariably believed in either a millennium or (sometimes anticipating this chiliastic fulfillment) in a very earthly Day of Judgment crowned by the triumph of the chosen race, be they the pure-blooded “Aryans” or the “proletarians” or just the “progressive forces of mankind,” over the Jews, the idle rich, or the dark forces of reaction—to use the Nazi expression, in a “Night of the Long Knives.”
With the downfall of the first Stuart monarchy and the execution of Charles I (a truly world-shaking event), a new outbreak of populism emerged from the lower social layers and even endangered Cromwell’s regime. The movement of the Levellers under John Lilburne threatened army discipline. Lilburne saw clearly that Cromwell’s and Ireton’s leadership led to oligarchic rule and thus he strongly emphasized the prerogatives of the Parliament. Cromwell rejected egalitarianism outright, and even Lilburne defended private property and protested against the “Leveler” label. But the most radical Levellers, the “Diggers,” went even further to the Left.
