Having spent most of my working life in or dealing with societies suffering from the consequences of communism, I have tried to work out what it is communists really believe(d) in.

Communists’ immediate policy goals are clear enough. To run and above all control everything on exclusively their own terms with no accountability, all in the name of The People, not people. See eg this presumably unintentionally hilarious report on elections (or, perhaps one should write, ‘elections’) in Cuba.

There are now vast mountains of proof that this form of control creates a dismal mess, practically and philosphically. Yet when looking at any problem Western pro-communist writers, progressive thinkers and activists still typically insist that if only there was more state intervention and control on Leftist terms, everything would work better – and would go ‘forward’.

One deep common belief in varying communist worldviews is the idea of the Wheel of History.

The expression appears in the first chapter of the infamous, turgid Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848: "The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history".

This revealing passage is followed a few words later by a nice description of the lowest people in society, the ‘lumpenproletariat’: "the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society." Middle-class Leftist disdain for poor people who do not agree with them was there from the start.

The notion of the Wheel of History is, like the "don’t worry, they’ll muddle through somehow" cliche, replete with curious and questionable assumptions. That history ‘moves’. That it moves ‘forward’. That forward is ‘good’. That it can be ‘rolled back’, but only with necessarily negative consequences.

My own memorable encounter with the Wheel of History imperative came in 1988 when as First Secretary Internal at the Embassy in South Africa I went to visit Govan Mbeki, who several months previously had been released from Robben Island after 24 years’ imprisonment. Mbeki (father of President Thabo) was feted in progressive circles for his intellectual leadership in the South African Communist Party as well as the ANC.

I asked affable Mbeki Snr about the democratic strirrings then taking place in Poland where Solidarity were calling for free elections. Mbeki opined that he would go along with some sort of different election system in Poland and other parts of the communist world, but only on one clear condition – the elections had to be organised in such a way that the Communist Party won! "Any other result would turn back the wheel of history."

So there it was. The power of ideology. A man who had endured over two decades of harsh imprisonment wanted millions of Poles to continue to be oppressed, for no reason other than an abstract belief that their oppression was better for them and for the world than any possible alternative – that it took them ‘forward’. 

Mbeki of course was steeped in the beliefs of Scientific Socialism:  "Scientific socialists apply the inductive method. They stick to facts. They live in the real world and not in the spiritualist regions of scholasticism."

The Poles, living as they did in the real world run by Communists, stuck to facts. They wisely ignored Mbeki’s advice. And threw out the Communists. 

They are now ticking along very nicely. Dare one say rolling forward?