The Forbidden Question — No. 2

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The First Utopia Killers

How the West Crushed 19th-Century Socialist Dreams Before the Cold War Was Even Invented

The standard narrative locates the systematic destruction of utopian thinking sometime around 1947 — the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the beginning of the American Century’s long ideological war against communism. This narrative is not wrong. But it is radically incomplete. The war on utopia did not begin with the CIA funding anti-communist intellectuals, or with the Congress for Cultural Freedom bankrolling literary magazines in Paris and Rome. It began in the rubble of the Paris Commune in 1871, in the gallows of Chicago in 1887, in the landing craft that deposited Allied troops on the shores of revolutionary Russia in 1918. The Cold War anti-utopian campaign was the sophisticated, institutionalised heir of a century-long tradition of state violence, legal criminalisation, and propaganda warfare directed at every movement that dared to imagine a world organised around different principles.

This article traces that longer genealogy. Its argument is simple but consequential: the suppression of utopian politics was not a reaction to Soviet power. It was a structural response by capital and its state apparatuses to the mere existence of organised working-class movements with transformative horizons. Stalin was, in a precise sense, irrelevant to the first chapter of this story. What triggered elite terror was not totalitarianism but possibility — the possibility that things could be genuinely, radically otherwise.

I. The Paris Commune (1871): Laboratory and Massacre

The Paris Commune lasted seventy-two days, from 18 March to 28 May 1871. In those seventy-two days it enacted a programme that terrified the propertied classes of Europe not because it was implemented but because it was thinkable. The Commune abolished the standing army and replaced it with a citizens’ militia; it mandated the election of all public officials, subject to recall at any moment; it decreed the separation of church and state and the secularisation of education; it handed abandoned workshops to workers’ associations; it suspended night-work for bakers.¹ These were not metaphors. They were administrative acts. And that is precisely why they were intolerable.

“The Commune was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” — Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

Marx composed The Civil War in France in the immediate wake of the Commune’s suppression, completing the final draft while bodies were still being counted in the streets of Montmartre and Belleville. The text is simultaneously a work of historical analysis, political theory, and public mourning. Marx did not romanticise the Commune; he read it as a political experiment, imperfect and contradictory, that had nonetheless disclosed the concrete shape of proletarian governance for the first time in history. What the Commune showed, Marx argued, was that the working class could not simply take hold of the existing state machinery — it had to smash it and replace it with forms adequate to its own emancipation.²

“The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery.” — Marx, 1871

The response of the French state, operating in effective coordination with the Prussian forces that had besieged Paris only months earlier, was systematic annihilation. The “Bloody Week” — la Semaine Sanglante — ran from 21 to 28 May 1871. Versaillais troops entered Paris and conducted what can only be described as a counter-revolutionary massacre. Historians’ estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 30,000, with Robert Tombs’s careful archival work settling on a figure of approximately 10,000 to 15,000 killed in the fighting and summary executions — though the precise number remains contested.³ Mass graves were dug in the parks and gardens of Paris. Tens of thousands more were arrested; over 4,500 were deported to New Caledonia.

The ideological work performed by this violence was as important as the physical suppression. The Commune was immediately characterised in the bourgeois press — in France, Britain, and Germany — as the work of criminals, lunatics, and foreign agitators. Le Figaro demanded the elimination of the “wild beasts.” The Archbishop of Paris, held hostage and ultimately executed during the fighting, was transformed into a martyr figure whose death licensed the massacre of tens of thousands of workers. Adolphe Thiers, head of the Versailles government, declared before the National Assembly that the Commune was “the most deadly, the most barbarous, and the most perverse” movement in all of French history.⁴

The European ruling class learns its lesson

The significance of the Commune’s suppression extended far beyond France. Marx noted immediately, in letters to friends, that the “massacre” had forged a new kind of European solidarity — not among workers but among states. Within weeks of the Commune’s fall, the British and French governments signed extradition agreements specifically designed to prevent Communards from finding refuge across the Channel.⁵ The International Workingmen’s Association — the First International — was blamed in the press of virtually every European country for having orchestrated the uprising, despite having had almost no organisational role in it. The scapegoating of the International served a double function: it allowed the Commune to be represented as an alien conspiracy rather than an indigenous social movement, and it provided the pretext for systematic legal harassment of labour organisations across Europe.

The lesson the European ruling class drew from 1871 was explicit and was stated explicitly in parliamentary debates, diplomatic correspondence, and conservative journalism: the toleration of socialist organisation produced utopian insurrection. The suppression had to be preventive, not merely reactive. This was the first articulation of what would become a century-long doctrine.

II. The Haymarket Affair (1886–1887): Criminalising the American Utopia

Fifteen years after the Commune, the United States conducted its own inaugural exercise in the judicial murder of utopian politics. The Haymarket Affair has been so thoroughly mythologised — both by the labour movement that built a monument to the “Chicago Martyrs” and by the conservative tradition that constructed the event as proof of anarchist violence — that it requires careful historical reconstruction.

On 1 May 1886, approximately 340,000 workers across the United States went on strike in support of the eight-hour working day.⁶ The movement was strongest in Chicago, where the anarchist-led International Working People’s Association had spent years building working-class organisation grounded in an explicitly utopian vision: not merely shorter hours but the abolition of the wage system altogether. The vision had a name — it was called anarchist communism — and it was articulated with extraordinary sophistication by figures like August Spies, the editor of the German-language labour paper Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned radical who had married a Black woman, Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, and moved to Chicago to organise workers.

“Do you think you can crush out the ideas which are fundamental in the Labour movement? […] Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.” — August Spies, address to the court before sentencing, 1886

On 3 May, Chicago police fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing at least two. The following day, a protest meeting at Haymarket Square was dispersing peacefully when a bomb was thrown — by a person who has never been identified — killing seven police officers. In the ensuing panic, police opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding dozens of workers as well.

What followed was not a criminal investigation but a political trial. Eight anarchist leaders were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, despite the fact that none of them had thrown the bomb and several were not even present at Haymarket when it exploded. The prosecution’s argument, stated without embarrassment, was that their writings and speeches had created a climate in which such violence was possible — that the ideas were the crime.⁷ Judge Joseph Gary allowed evidence of the defendants’ anarchist beliefs, their published texts, and their public speeches to be introduced as proof of guilt. Seven of the eight were sentenced to death; four were hanged on 11 November 1887. A fifth, Louis Lingg, died in his cell from an exploding cigar, almost certainly not of his own volition.

The legal architecture of utopian suppression

Haymarket’s significance lies not only in the executions but in the legal and institutional precedents it established. The “conspiracy” doctrine used to prosecute the Chicago anarchists — the notion that organising and agitating for radical change constituted a criminal act independent of any specific violent deed — became the template for virtually all subsequent prosecution of radical movements in the United States. It would be directly invoked in the prosecution of Eugene Debs after the Pullman Strike of 1894, in the prosecution of IWW leaders during and after the First World War, and in the prosecution of Communist Party members under the Smith Act in the 1940s and 1950s. The thread is unbroken.

The Governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving Haymarket defendants in 1893, issuing a blistering opinion that concluded the trial had been a travesty of justice and that the jury had been improperly selected and the verdict not sustained by the evidence.⁸ Altgeld was destroyed politically for it. He was not re-elected. The message was clear: defending the victims of anti-utopian state violence was itself a politically fatal act.

III. The Russian Revolution (1917) and the Allied Intervention: War Against the Possible

The October Revolution of 1917 presented the propertied classes of Europe and North America with a crisis of a qualitatively different order from anything that had come before. The Paris Commune had lasted seventy-two days. The Chicago anarchists had been hanged. But the Bolsheviks took and held power in the largest country on earth, and they did so in the name of a programme — land, peace, bread — that had immediate, visceral appeal to populations across the world who were exhausted by war and immiserated by capitalism.

It is essential to understand what precisely terrified Western elites about the Bolshevik revolution in its first year, before the civil war, before the Red Terror, and long before the emergence of Stalinism. The terror was not primarily about Soviet atrocities — those were largely in the future. It was about the content of the utopian programme itself. The decrees of November 1917 abolished private ownership of land without compensation, nationalised the banks, established workers’ control over industry, and published the secret treaties by which the Entente powers had planned to carve up the post-war world.⁹ This last act was particularly significant: it revealed to the populations of France, Britain, and Italy the cynicism of the war their governments had asked them to die in. The Bolsheviks were not merely a political threat. They were an epistemological threat — a regime whose first acts included the systematic demolition of ruling-class legitimacy.

“The poison of Bolshevism is spreading. It is moving steadily westward. […] Unless the peace conference takes heed and makes the world safe against the epidemic of Bolshevism, the people of England will catch the disease.” — David Lloyd George, memorandum to the Paris Peace Conference, 25 March 1919

The intervention as preemptive counter-revolution

Fourteen nations ultimately committed military forces to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The standard justification — both at the time and in subsequent historical apologetics — was that intervention was necessary to prevent Germany from seizing Allied war matériel and to reconstitute an Eastern Front. This justification does not survive historical scrutiny. The armistice with Germany was signed in November 1918; the intervention continued for two years after Germany’s defeat. The real objective was stated frankly in internal communications: the destruction of the Bolshevik government and the prevention of the revolution’s spread.¹⁰

Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, was the most ardent advocate of intervention. “We are fighting against a foul baboonery,” he told the House of Commons in 1919, calling for a “war against Bolshevism.” Churchill’s position was consistent with his wider political philosophy: socialism in any form represented a threat to the social order that had to be extirpated, not merely contained. He was more honest than most of his contemporaries about what was actually at stake.

IV. The Red Scare (1919–1920): The State Against Its Own People

The first Red Scare in the United States — commonly dated to 1919-1920 — is often presented as a panic, an overreaction, an episode of collective hysteria that quickly passed. This framing is misleading. The Palmer Raids and the broader programme of political repression they exemplify were not the result of hysteria. They were a calculated, institutionally coordinated campaign to destroy the organised left in the United States at precisely the moment of its greatest strength, using emergency wartime powers whose expiration had been simply ignored.

The context requires emphasis. The years 1919 and 1920 saw an extraordinary wave of labour militancy across the United States: the Seattle General Strike of February 1919, in which 65,000 workers shut down an entire city; the steel strike of September 1919, involving 365,000 workers; the Boston Police Strike; the Great Railroad Strike of 1920. Simultaneously, the Socialist Party had achieved its greatest electoral results, and the newly formed Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party claimed a combined membership of perhaps 70,000.¹¹ This was not a phantom enemy. It was a real and growing movement with real utopian horizons.

“Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order […] eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes.” — A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States, 1920

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, operating through a new unit in the Department of Justice headed by the twenty-four-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, conducted a series of coordinated raids beginning in November 1919 and culminating in the massive January 1920 raids that swept up over 10,000 people in a single night across thirty-three cities. The legal basis was the Immigration Act of 1918, which allowed for the deportation of non-citizen aliens who were members of anarchist or revolutionary organisations — a provision that effectively criminalised the political beliefs of enormous sections of the immigrant working class.¹²

Hoover’s filing system and the birth of political surveillance

The institutional consequence of the Red Scare was the creation of the modern American surveillance state. Hoover had already, before the raids, established a card index system containing the names of 150,000 suspected “radicals” — an enterprise in systematic political classification that owed more to the logic of the Alien and Sedition Acts than to any recognisable principle of criminal law. The index was the embryo of the FBI’s files on political dissidents, which would eventually encompass millions of names and stretch across eight decades.¹³

The deportation of Emma Goldman in December 1919, along with 248 other alleged radicals aboard the USS Buford (nicknamed “the Soviet Ark” in the press), was the symbolic centrepiece of this campaign. Goldman was perhaps the most prominent radical intellectual in the United States — author, lecturer, and editor of the anarchist journal Mother Earth. Her deportation was not legally straightforward; it required contorted legal reasoning and the suppression of evidence. But its political function was precisely its illegality: it demonstrated that the state would exceed its own legal limits in the suppression of utopian thought.

V. Structural Continuities: What the 19th Century Bequeathed

The four episodes examined here — the Paris Commune, Haymarket, the Russian intervention, and the first Red Scare — are not simply a list of historical injustices. They constitute the elements of a coherent pattern, a structure of response that the propertied classes and their state apparatuses developed over half a century in relation to organised movements with utopian political horizons. That structure has the following characteristic features.

First, the conspiracy doctrine. In each instance, the radical movement was represented not as a legitimate political force but as a foreign conspiracy, an alien importation, a criminal enterprise masquerading as politics. The Commune was blamed on the International; Haymarket on German anarchist “foreign agents”; the Russian Revolution on “German gold”; the Red Scare on Moscow’s supposed direction of American radicalism. The conspiracy frame accomplished two things simultaneously: it delegitimised the movement by denying its domestic roots, and it licensed legal treatment appropriate to criminal conspiracy rather than political opposition.

Second, the preemptive strike. In each case, the most intensive repression occurred not at the moment of greatest radical power but at the moment of greatest radical possibility — when the movement was growing, when its ideas were spreading, when the utopian horizon it articulated was beginning to seem achievable to significant numbers of people. The Allied intervention in Russia began before the civil war had produced the atrocities that were later used to justify it. The Palmer Raids targeted organisations that had not, in any legally cognisable sense, committed the acts they were charged with planning. The suppression was not reactive but prophylactic: it was directed at the future that the movements threatened to make possible.

Third, the legal-institutional sedimentation. Each episode of repression produced new legal instruments, new institutional capacities, and new ideological justifications that were then available for the next round. The conspiracy doctrine of Haymarket became the sedition prosecutions of 1918. The deportation mechanism developed for the first Red Scare was available — and was used — in the second Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. Hoover’s card index of 1919 became the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations of the 1960s. The continuity is institutional, not merely ideological.

Fourth, the cultural-propagandistic dimension. Alongside the physical violence and legal apparatus, each episode involved intensive work on public opinion — the production and distribution of images, narratives, and rhetorical frameworks designed to make the utopian movement appear not merely dangerous but monstrous: inhuman, sexually threatening, religiously blasphemous, racially alien. The White Army posters, the newspaper coverage of the Commune, the prosecution’s closing arguments at the Haymarket trial, Wilson’s speeches on Bolshevism — these are not incidental embellishments to the “real” political conflict. They are constitutive elements of the suppression itself, because utopian movements are destroyed not only physically but epistemologically: the precondition of their elimination is making it impossible to think of them as legitimate.

Conclusion: The War on Utopia Was Always Already Underway

When George Marshall announced the European Recovery Programme in June 1947, and when the CIA began funding anti-communist intellectual operations in the early 1950s, they were not inaugurating a new campaign. They were inheriting, institutionalising, and globalising a campaign that had been underway since the week Adolphe Thiers’s troops entered Paris. The sophisticated ideological machinery of Cold War anti-utopianism — the think tanks, the literary magazines, the sociological theories of “totalitarianism,” the celebration of irony and complexity against naive political hope — was built on a foundation of a century of cruder and more direct violence.

Understanding this longer genealogy has several theoretical consequences. It means that the suppression of utopian politics cannot be explained primarily by reference to the specific failures of actually existing socialism — the Gulag, the show trials, the famines. These failures became important resources for anti-utopian ideology, but the campaign preceded them by decades and was already structurally committed to the suppression of utopian possibility before the Soviet state had demonstrated anything. The campaign was not, in other words, a reasonable response to observable communist violence. It was a structural response of capital to the horizon of its own supersession.

It also means — and this is the point most systematically obscured in mainstream historiography — that the violence was not incidental to the suppression but constitutive of it. The thirty thousand dead of la Semaine Sanglante, the four hanged in Chicago, the mass graves of the Russian Civil War: these were not unfortunate excesses committed by otherwise reasonable political actors in moments of panic. They were, in Gramsci’s terms, exercises in coercive hegemony — the demonstration, directed at the surviving working class, of what the limit of political possibility was and what happened to those who exceeded it.

The Forbidden Question — the question that this series attempts to reconstruct from beneath the layers of its systematic suppression — is not merely “what alternative is possible?” It is the prior question: “why has the very asking of that question been met, for a century and a half, with such consistent and organised terror?” The answer to that question is the history we have just begun to trace.