From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
One important issue which Liebich brings to the fore is the way in which the Mensheviks revised post festum their history and analyses in order to present the development of their party as distinct and divorced from the dread influence of Bolshevism from the start, a mirror image of official Soviet historiography. Hence, the fuzzy differentiation between the two halves of Russian Social Democracy, the policy concurrences and personnel interchanges, prior to 1917 were subsequently reinterpreted as an irreconcilable and unbridgeable gulf from 1903. Similarly, the Mensheviks’ hesitant and inconclusive analyses of the great changes in the Soviet Union in 1927–30 were forgotten as the Stalinist socio-economic formation was subsequently seen – either positively or negatively – as the inevitable product of Bolshevism.
The Mensheviks maintained a sustained appraisal of Soviet affairs, and Liebich outlines their critique of the New Economic Policy, their following of the leadership struggle in the Soviet Communist Party, their critique of Stalin’s collectivisation and industrialisation schemes, and their accounts of the Menshevik Trial of 1931, the Moscow Trials, the 1936 constitution, and so on. He describes the Mensheviks’ relations with other Socialist parties, comparing their lack of success with the insular and indifferent British Labour Party leaders with the support they received in France and Germany. He also shows how the Mensheviks participated in the theoretical debates in the Socialist movement, and how the split between Dan and Abramovich was influenced and exacerbated by the rise of pro-Soviet tendencies, especially around Otto Bauer, and the emergence of theories of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Liebich also investigates the fate of the Mensheviks in exile in the USA. Dan’s minority wing, which split away in 1941, worked for pro-Soviet publications, whilst Abramovich’s majority aligned themselves with the predominant anti-Communist forces within the US labour movement, and subsequently concentrated upon academic work on the Soviet Union; not, it is worth noting, that this prevented them from being investigated as potential subversives by the FBI into the 1950s.
Noting that some Mensheviks considered that by 1930 their position on the Soviet Union was quite close to Trotsky’s, Liebich touches briefly upon the possibility of some sort of radical anti-Stalinist unity emerging in the 1930s. Nonetheless, this unity could not be forged. It was not so much that Trotsky, as Liebich correctly notes, refused to cooperate with them (although his programmatic call by the late 1930s for the legalisation in the Soviet Union of all parties accepting the soviet system implied the retrospective rehabilitation of all but the most right-wing Mensheviks, and the possibility of some sort of cooperation with them, at least with those who still adhered to Martov’s line), but the fact that many Mensheviks changed as the 1930s drew by. Liebich shows how the evolution of Dan and Abramovich drew them away from Martov’s line (although, rather confusingly, he also says that Dan kept to it, compare pages 84 and 198). Yet surely the great changes in the Soviet Union, with the creation in the 1930s of a huge working class through the building of a massive industrial base and the collectivisation of the peasantry, meant that the objective preconditions for a move towards Socialism now existed in the Soviet Union, and that Martov’s line could then have been updated to coincide with the programmes of various dissident Communists, Trotsky included, rather than rejected.
More perhaps could have been said about the relationship between the general trends within Social Democracy and the Mensheviks’ political evolution. The latter was most clearly exemplified by the repudiation of Martov’s line by both wings of the party. Dan’s pro-Soviet faction paralleled the left-wing Social Democrats who were willing to overlook or even justify the unpleasant nature of Stalin’s regime in their admiration of Soviet economic growth and in their quest to build a broad front against Hitlerite Germany, and whom after 1945 sailed too close to Stalinism in their desire to find a counterweight to capitalism and its apologists in the labour movement. Abramovich’s anti-Communist faction paralleled the mainstream Social Democrats who concluded that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would only end in tears, and that the sole way forward was through modifying capitalism, refining bourgeois society, rather than abolishing it.
Abramovich and his comrades were not sui generis in this respect. Many left-wingers fell into despair in the 1930s and especially after 1945, giving up on any transformative concept of Socialism, substituting for it at the most piecemeal reformism, and jumping with almost indecent haste into the clutches of the Campaign for Cultural Freedom and Cold War hysteria. Cold War Social Democracy did not need the Mensheviks to kick it off, it had long been hostile to the Soviet Union to the extent that it would line up with its own capitalist class against it, rather than take an independent class approach. As for the influence of the Mensheviks upon Western and especially US Sovietology in the postwar period, although their empirical and interpretative analyses were and remain eminently valuable, their political approach tended merely to add grist to the Cold War mill, and we had to await for a new generation of scholars to arise in the late 1960s before a more objective approach to the Soviet experience emerged.
In conclusion, one can only repeat what Isaac Deutscher said about ‘the long melancholy story’ of the Mensheviks in exile:
We cannot find in this volume any evidence of the CPGB’s vindictiveness towards left-wingers who refused to obey the strictures of the wartime union sacrée. Perhaps Branson feels that others have given sufficient publicity to, say, William Wainwright’s Clear Out Hitler’s Agents that she need not raise the matter. It’s not a minor issue, as the CPGB spent a lot of effort harassing recalcitrant Socialists, and in other parts of Europe this sort of mentality actually led to the Stalinists killing their left-wing rivals.
As for another embarrassing episode during the war, Branson does rather sheepishly admit that the Daily Worker ‘went so far as to suggest’ that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ‘would expedite Japanese surrender and thus save “valuable lives”’ (pp. 99–100). The actual words of the Daily Worker on 7 August 1945 were: ‘The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan.’ Not one or two, but their ‘substantial’ use; which represents a substantial distortion on the part of Branson.
The unsuspecting reader will not gather from this account that the CPGB maintained its hostility to working-class militancy for two whole years after the Second World War finished. It’s interesting what a little research will reveal. Coming up against a few contrary delegates, General Secretary Harry Pollitt warned the party’s 1945 congress:
Branson devotes a few pages to the CPGB’s anti-racist work, but she refrains from mentioning her party’s attitude to the German people, who, in an imitation of Hitlerite racial stereotyping, were held en bloc responsible for the Nazis. The Daily Worker said on 3 August 1945 that reparations, which hit the German workers more than any other class, were fair: ‘The German people have to pay for their support of the Nazi plunderers.’ Nor does Branson mention her party’s campaign against Poles in Britain. Horner’s pamphlet The Communist Party and the Coal Crisis warned: ‘We will not allow the importation of foreign – Polish, Italian or even Irish – labour to stifle the demands of the British people to have decent conditions in British mines.’ And as he fulminated against his members’ legitimate – and necessarily unofficial – action over pay and conditions, he threatened the government with a strike over foreigners, saying that it ‘might get Poles or displaced persons but not coal’ (The Times, 24 February 1947). The Stalinist-controlled Civil Service Clerical Association barred Poles from membership.
This chauvinism was accompanied by increasingly fierce manifestations of British nationalism as the 1940s drew to a close. Britain was seen as a mere colony of the USA, and the CPGB’s main gripe against the British bourgeoisie and the labour movement leaders was that they were unpatriotic. On 12 September 1949, the Daily Worker howled: ‘Britain and the Empire is to be sold piecemeal to the American money-lenders.’ In his subtly-titled pamphlet Get Out!, party historian Leslie Morton complained that US troops were spreading ‘corruption and moral degradation among our young people’. He condemned the influence of American comics and films, he demanded policies that would ‘put Britain first’, and called for the defence of ‘our cultural heritage’ and for ‘the protection of our children from the spread of these alien and disgusting attacks on their moral welfare’.
The CPGB’s aggrieved patriotism, of course, could not prevent it from coming under heavy fire during the Cold War, and Branson spends a fair amount of space describing the witch-hunts of the late 1940s, which ranged from party members being sacked from jobs and removed from union posts to the Cabinet discussions over whether to try the Daily Worker for treason – a capital offence – during the Korean War. This, it should be remembered, was under a Labour government! Whilst condemning these attacks, we should not forget that the Stalinists pulled the roof down on their own heads by defending the appalling conduct of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Branson’s half-hearted efforts at explaining her party’s apologies for Stalin’s actions add nothing to what her colleagues have said elsewhere.
Branson makes much of the attempts by the CPGB to appear as a British party rather than a British section of an international conglomerate, a task that was formally made more easy by the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943. I say ‘formally’, as few observers were fooled. It made no real difference, and the CPGB continued dutifully to follow Moscow’s twists and turns until at least the mid-1950s.
The CPGB was a product of the great wave of working-class radicalism that erupted at the end of the First World War. Formed in the wake of the Russian Revolution, it failed to recognise that the Bolshevik experience was to go sour, and that the regime they supported in Moscow was a cruel caricature of Socialism, ruled by an anti-working-class élite. British Stalinism’s ‘finest hour’, when its membership topped 50,000 for the only time and when its influence was at its zenith, was also when it most clearly failed in the fundamental duty of any Socialist organisation – the promotion of the independent interests of the working class – and this failure was rooted in its fealty to Moscow. Whilst it is a caricature to see British Stalinists purely as ‘agents of Moscow’, the CPGB nonetheless followed the Moscow line on all the major issues. Its most fondly remembered time was when the Soviet bureaucracy was aligned with the British ruling class, which is why the CPGB considered that the interests of the working class were synonymous with those of the bourgeoisie. The Stalinists did not understand this at the time, and, judging by this book, they are still unable to do so.
Oppositionists from the 1920s disappeared from photographs, airbrushed out or cropped. In one example here, Mr and Mrs Trotsky vanish behind two nonentities who have been crudely pasted over them. Later on, it’s Stalin’s cronies who disappear. Yagoda’s fall meant that Dmitri Nalbandyan’s group portrait was revised, with the disgraced secret police chief’s image being replaced by a coat draped over a handrail ‘as if he had neither the time nor the need to take it with him’ (p. 156). It wasn’t just political rivals who went. Some editing jobs were pointless, like the ordinary worker who vanishes from Stalin’s side, or just bizarre, like the telescope pointing at Krupskaya’s head in a family shot by Lenin’s sister Maria, which gradually disappears over three revisions.
Although all governments lie about their activities and try to suppress unpleasant facts, and although much history is written to serve the paymasters, and even in the most open parliamentary democracies much is withheld from the probing historian, let alone the general public, official falsification under Stalinism was peculiarly intense and far-reaching. How did the Soviet regime get into this appalling position? Why did it feel obliged continually to rewrite its history? Although this is not touched on in this book, it’s worth making an analytical aside.
The Bolsheviks took power in October 1917 at the head of a militant working class, with which it had a dynamic and close relationship. However, that relationship soon started to disintegrate as the more militant workers took up posts in the party-state apparatus, and many others returned to the countryside or became disenchanted with the Bolsheviks as conditions deteriorated during the Civil War. Rather than gradually dissolving itself within the working class, as a revolutionary party should do under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party started to substitute itself for the disintegrated working class, representing it in spirit, as it were. Instead of a dynamic relationship between party and class, the party-state apparatus started to see itself as the incarnation of the interests of the working class, and in its insecure position in the Soviet republic, it then began to see itself as the indispensable core of society.
Although the Bolsheviks looked to this mystical image of the party in order to legitimise their rule, it should not be thought that this was necessarily cynical or even conscious on their part, at least at first. As the 1920s drew on, however, and as the party-state apparatus developed into a discrete social stratum with interests that diverged from those of the working class, the myth of the party took on an increasingly cynical tone as the party’s leadership battled against the sharp criticisms of its revolutionary opponents, and used it as a device to discipline and expel them. Under these conditions, the sense of indispensability became mutated into a quasi-religious sense of infallibility – from having a monopoly over power to having a monopoly over the truth.
The cult of the mystified infallible party reached a peak under Stalin with the transformation of the Soviet bureaucracy into a self-conscious ruling élite. This coincided with the hypertrophied state control that was imposed during the massive industrialisation and collectivisation schemes of the First Five Year Plan. Lacking the coherence that genuine planning or even the market would provide, the Stalinist system was chaotic, with the centre attempting to control all aspects of social life. This proved an impossible task, and rule of the omniscient and infallible centre was necessarily convulsive and subject to sudden and dramatic shifts. Infallibility cannot coexist happily with drastic changes. In a situation in which what was correct yesterday may be totally wrong today, those responsible for the blunders of the past must not only be punished if the myth of infallibility is to survive, but their very presence and their actions must be struck from the record as well, in order to enable the current version to be seen as the only possible historical truth. This, of course, runs into problems as today’s truth may well be tomorrow’s blunders, thus leading to another round of record expunging and new historical truths. And so it goes on.
Faced with the rewriting of history, Trotsky told the Stalinist regime:
It is by no means only Irish Socialists for whom these writings are of interest. Connolly had first-hand knowledge of the British labour movement, and parts of the collection deal with the deficiencies of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. The article Parliamentary Democracy (The Workers’ Republic, 22 September 1900) gives a critique of the British Constitution. One of Connolly’s criticisms is:
Despite this, however, Socialist regimes will, if they remain true to the ideals of the revolution, refrain from religious persecution, ‘which would be offensive to the humanitarian ethic that is an integral part of international Socialism’. Even so, Ridley regards ‘scientific Socialist propaganda’ as being inevitably directed against religion, and sees the revolutionary party as obliged to combat ‘all manifestations of capitalism, including those which belong to the sphere of religion’ (p. 34).
Ridley indeed includes a brief note in which he sets out some arguments against the notion of the existence of a god:
It is perhaps also regrettable that when Frank Ridley and Ellis Hillman were preparing the pamphlet for republication in 1986, they did not include anything on the so-called ‘Liberation Theology’, which appeared amongst supporters of the Catholic Church in Latin America. This was a movement which tried to incorporate certain elements of Marxism into Christian thought, and which exerted an influence in, for example, the Brazilian labour movement, with the Partido dos Trabalhadores. Ridley would no doubt have been able to make some interesting observations on this.
Ridley’s anti-theological arguments are also somewhat unsatisfactory. Epicurus’ contention that God must be either all-powerful or all-good or neither is open to the objection that the ‘gift’ of free will for humans is of supreme importance, enabling them to establish themselves as co-workers in God’s scheme of things; also if the soul has a beginning, there is no a priori reason why it should have an end – although on materialist grounds this seems an acceptable conclusion to draw. Finally, by the term ‘cause’ we do not necessarily understand something that is also an effect of a previous cause; hence a ‘first cause’ is a distinct possibility. However, this first cause does not have to be ‘God’ or ‘the gods’; it might just as possibly be matter in some form. In the European middle ages, David of Dinant proposed something of this kind when he argued that God was in fact ‘prima materia’. He was roundly condemned for this by St Thomas Aquinas, but Aquinas’ difficulty sprang here from the prevalent notion that matter was essentially passive and inert. According to modern physics, this is by no means the case, and accordingly active matter can play the rôle of a non-theological first cause, if necessary.
So much for the criticism of religious metaphysics, which is, of course, not the sole possible criticism of organised religion. Space prevents any further remarks on this: I would only like to mention in this respect the entertaining and (hopefully) thought-provoking observations on the subject made by the comedian Dave Allen.
One final cavil: Ridley quotes Marx’s dictum ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ without giving the full quotation, which runs:
Moreover, some of the particular positions of Workers Power have been fathered upon Trotsky without any attempt to distinguish between them. Now Marxism is a creative methodology, and there is, of course, nothing at all wrong in principle for the theorists of our own day to disagree, alter or revise the points of view of the giants of the past, though in this case it has to be admitted that Mr Brenner is rather full of himself. But if this is to take place, the least we should require is that it be recognised in the text. For example, Trotsky resolutely refused to side with any one national group struggling against the others in his reportage of the Balkan wars, whilst Workers Power on the whole sides with the Bosnians; this deep difference is covered up with the seemingly innocuous remark that ‘he distinguished at all times between reactionary wars fought for profit and the justified resistance of nations whose fundamental freedoms were being denied’ (p. 7). Similarly, whatever the reasons for forming the Fourth International in 1938, the argument that each national party should operate ‘as an integral part of a democratic centralist international movement’ (p. 45) was hardly one of them, for the International Communist League had never operated on any other basis until then. And readers of such statements as ‘Trotskyists are not disillusioned by Stalinism’s collapse because we have been proved right’ (p. 21) might be forgiven for assuming that Workers Power had foreseen this outcome, which is certainly not the case.
It is a great shame that this carelessness should have marred so excellent an undertaking, for there is a deep need for such a basic introduction. Let us hope that such Workers Power veterans as Dave Stocking or Keith Hassell are allowed to correct the text before it is reissued in a second edition.
But for a state to retain a bourgeois character, a bourgeoisie has to wield power within it. The bourgeois parties in the Eastern European governments were transparent fictions, and real power lay in the hands of the local Stalinist bureaucrats, installed in office by a several million-strong Russian army in 1945. Whatever happened to the Marxist analysis of the state as ‘armed men standing in defence of property’? Wasn’t the Red Army the instrument of a workers’ state? Doesn’t the victor in a war between states of a different class character impose his property forms upon the vanquished? Even this text has to admit that ‘the Soviet bureaucracy was already in control of the state machineries’ (p. 6). So the only way out of the contradiction is to argue that Stalin’s puppets administering these states somehow represented the bourgeoisie there as well, so, for example, Imre Nagy is described as ‘a responsible politician of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time an entrenched Stalinist’ (p. 12).
It has to be said that the demands of the Hungarian insurgents as summarised in this pamphlet in no way prove that they were facing a bourgeois state. They are no different from the programme of a workers’ insurrection against Stalinism in the USSR as defined by the Transitional Programme. Khrushchev’s regime had already degenerated far from the norms of a workers’ republic, whereas regimes such as that of Rákosi and Gerö had never even approached them. By 1956, the distance was about the same, so that taking on one regime meant taking on the other.
Once we are on our guard against drawing sweeping conclusions, and ignore stock feminist anachronisms such as ‘weaklings or viragos: the ambiguities of womanhood’ (p. 354), this fascinating and well-illustrated book contains a wealth of material from an incredible spread of sources. Its other great strength is its careful organisation into well-ordered themes with informative introductions, such as ‘royalty and religion’, ‘family matters’, ‘economic activities’, ‘being female’, and, most interestingly, ‘status and law’. But because women’s studies do not have a clear methodology of their own, other disciplines have to be drawn upon, in this case making it very difficult for the editor to create a coherent picture, as well as to exercise complete control over her material. Few people can possibly combine a knowledge of Egyptian archaeology, papyrology, Hellenistic Greek, Patristics and Roman and Byzantine history, and even fewer (no more than a hundred in the entire world) can read Demotic documents.
This comes out in the lack of balance in this collection between pedantry and ignorance. On the one hand is the insistence upon such spellings as ‘Boubastos’ (p. 19), ‘Horos’ (pp. 49, 51, 54), ‘Anoubis’ (pp. 64, 69) and ‘Kleopatra’, and on the other we are told that Clemens Alexandrinus was not only a ‘bishop’ (p. 21), but even ‘bishop of Alexandria’ (p72). The ‘prophetess of Jeme’ named on the London Demotic papyrus not only lived in the ‘area around the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu’ (p. 59), but was obviously attached to the small temple alongside it, by then known for centuries as ‘the mound of Djeme’. Contrary to what we are told on page 72, the cult of Longinus was far more popular in Cappadocia than in Egypt. And whilst it might be the case in the Late Period that ‘the Egyptian priestly caste was a closed one’ whose ‘wives and daughters served within the temple communities’ (p. 55), this was certainly not so earlier. During the New Kingdom, there was no more common title for upper-class ladies than ‘Chantress of Amun’, whatever the religious status of their husbands. Not only is there ‘no evidence in ancient Egypt for the widespread use of cotton’ (p. 247), there is no evidence for its use at all before the third century BC. And if Procopius’ description of Theodora’s party turns before she assumed the purple are anything to go by, describing her as ‘of non-aristocratic origin’ (p. 45) must rank amongst the understatements of the last two millennia. Continuing in the same vein, the gentleman who asks his wife to be ‘subject to me in all ways that it befits women of nobility to display to their well-endowed and most beloved husbands’ (p. 210) can hardly be saying to the translator what he appears to be saying to the general reader.
Nonetheless, there is a great deal of life, interest and solid scholarship in this book. It cannot be ignored by anyone who aspires to understand the broader rhythms of history.
But perhaps the most exciting Russian article as far as this reviewer is concerned is that by Vladimir Borisovich Volodin (pp. 54–60), since it approaches from a different angle the reasoning in the preface to In Defence of the Russian Revolution and the article The Russian Revolution: A Twentieth Century Enigma (Lanka Guardian and What Next?, 1997). ‘Insofar as the means of production belong to the state’, he points out, ‘the bureaucracy emerges as a substitute for the bourgeoisie. Lenin had even contemplated the problem when he wrote about a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, the bureaucracy is a bourgeois organ of the workers’ state.’ (p. 55) After thus defining the nature of the state, Volodin goes on to place it in its historic context: ‘Normal primitive accumulation which was necessary for the transition from a patriarchal to an industrial society is the function of the bourgeoisie, which fulfils the task by means of uninterrupted violence against the workers’, he argues, ‘but the bureaucracy replaced the bourgeoisie.’ (p. 56) Now this in turn was itself only a stage in the development of the counter-revolution: ‘The bureaucracy’s total supremacy was the prelude to the restoration of capitalism, when state property had not yet been privatised but the workers had already been driven from state power.’ (p. 59) Jim Miles approaches the problem in like mind, describing the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘the consummate expression of the bourgeois tendency within the Soviet workers’ state’, whilst noting that ‘it is the bourgeois side of the workers’ state that has to “wither away” in order to make the transition to Communism; if this does not occur, the capitalist restoration is inevitable’ (p. 61).
Other Western contributions are less exciting, not necessarily because they have less to say. For example, Ticktin’s address (pp. 105–13) has already appeared in The Ideas of Leon Trotsky (pp. 65–85). Much the same can be said for Simon Pirani’s compact essay on the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, which goes over ground already familiar to readers of Revolutionary History (Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1990, and Volume 3, no. 2, Autumn 1990), Ngo Van’s Revolutionaries They Could Not Break, and the various books translated and written by Greg Benton. Geoff Barr, on the other hand, appears to believe that the united front could only be posed in Britain in 1926 in trade union terms – by the Anglo-Russian Committee and the National Minority Movement (pp. 157–8), and not at all at the level of state power by means of the Labour Party tactic. Since the remarkably obtuse British Communist Party had already been groping towards this with the National Left Wing Movement, and entire chapters in Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? hinge upon it, we can hardly conclude that the Workers Revolutionary Party and its successors have advanced the Marxist understanding of these islands very much.
A further defect of the Western contributions is to limit themselves to arguments of the ‘Trotsky woz right’ variety, but an additional disappointing feature that emerges in some of them (and not only those from the West) is an attempt to smuggle into the conference the sterile factional conflicts we have to endure over here. Chris Edwards, described as ‘a worker and an activist in the workers’ and Socialist movements in the United Kingdom’ (p. 177), uses most of his space (pp. 157–66) for an attack upon Sean Matgamna. The hapless Matgamna himself was not, of course, present to reply, though he would have found himself broadly in agreement with the thesis of Butenko (pp. 117–21; the coincidence in names is unfortunate) as opposed to the following article by Kuryonyshev (pp. 122–5).
In this context, it cannot be said that the work of the English language editor has at all added to the value of what is here. Spellings like ‘Dzhilas’ have been left as they were. The first article by Voyeikov has two sets of footnotes, one on the bottom of the pages and the other at the end, which makes following the text very confusing. The reason for this appears to be that the editor wished to abuse her position by ‘amplifying and clarifying some points’ (p. v), which on several occasions (for example, p. 14, n8; p. 22, n10; p. 23, n11) amounts to polemicising with the writer’s point of view. This is all the more impudent when we discover that she has seen fit to place her own contribution immediately after his, and subjects a later article by Gusev to the same treatment (for example, p. 83, nn2 and 3; p. 88, n5; p. 98, n7; p. 99, nn8 and 9). Her own article ‘setting the record straight’ includes the old story about Cannon, ‘one individual’ who ‘by chance learned about Trotsky’s positions’ and so ‘began’ the Trotskyist movement in the United States (p. 31). Such fairy tales do not gain in credibility the more they are repeated, and should have been abandoned long ago (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 1, Autumn 1993, pp. 106–7; Journal of Trotsky Studies, no. 2, 1994, pp. 226–7).
However, it would be small-minded to allow such things to get in the way of the instruction to be gained from this splendid book. And how exciting it is to discover that the great theorist of the revolution should again be so well understood in the land of his birth!
After leaving the Communist Party in 1931, at the height of the ‘Third Period’ lunacy orchestrated there by the double agent H.M. Wicks (p. 25), Nick Origlass was for many years the leading Australian Trotskyist. His infectious activism left a permanent stamp upon his movement, which has always carried on a high level of political activity on both local and international issues, and never spawned such contemplative sects as we trip over in Europe and North America. So the great value of this book lies in its detailed descriptions of Jack Sylvester’s work amongst the unemployed (pp. 15ff., 34ff.) and the industrial conflicts in which Origlass himself invariably played a courageous and honourable rôle (pp. 7–13, 48–54, 105–9, 122–35), culminating in the historic Balmain strike of 1945 that put an end to the onward march of Stalinism within the Australian trade unions (chapter 15, pp. 137-–48). This heroic wartime activity is by far the most exciting part of the book, even if its context is hampered by the author’s inability to grasp Trotsky’s politics at the time. For it is very dubious to argue that Trotsky ‘spoke out in favour of the entry of the United States into the war, principally because it would give Stalin courage to break his alliance with Hitler’ (p. 99; cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 39–40; Volume 3, no. 4, Autumn 1991, p. 14), and it is simply not true to say that Trotskyists ‘would not sabotage production for the war effort in countries allied to the Soviet Union’ (p. 100).
However deeply involved he was in his own movement, Origlass never forgot the international dimension of all true working-class politics. His first contribution to the American Militant was as early as October 1935 (p. 65), and for many years it was he who sat painfully translating Pablo’s manifestos and theses, word for word from a French dictionary (p. viii). It was on his insistence that the Australian group continued to support Pablo after Frank, Maitan and Mandel had decided to remove him from the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The description of this unseemly operation, which was carried on after Pablo’s imprisonment over the Algerian currency affair, so that the Troika could end its divorce with the Americans, occupies several pages (pp. 227–35). ‘When the Secretary was released after being captured by the enemy’, complained Origlass, ‘resumption of his position should have been automatic.’ (p. 231) The full toy-box of factionalism’s petty tricks is poured onto the floor for us to look at, including a notable contribution from Livio Maitan (p. 230). (Maitan seems to have been even better at this sort of thing than Frank, for he once allowed one of our comrades to go all the way to northern Italy to appeal to a world congress, and then had him ordered home on the station platform.)
But it is interesting (and enigmatic) to note that whilst Origlass insisted upon international democratic centralism, it appears to have been purely on the level of programmes and manifestos, for he does not seem to have applied it to himself. The mid-1930s was the first period of Trotskyism’s entry into Social Democracy, and the author admits ‘the absolute centrality of the Labour Party for anybody interested in working-class politics’ in Australia (p. 199). Yet Origlass himself was for many years the main opponent of entry into the Australian Labour Party on a thoroughly Oehlerite basis, it was only undertaken by the group as late as 1941, and he only applied to join himself in 1950! So having refused to accept Trotsky’s policy, when he did finally get in, it was in order to carry out the ‘sui generis’ tactic of Michel Pablo instead (pp. 202ff.).
For all its value (and it is considerable), the book still cannot escape history’s curse, which comes from its very nature, that it is always written with the advantage (?) of hindsight. Origlass himself rose to the leadership of the Australian group at its 1937 congress (pp. 73–7) by opposing the revision of Trotskyist theory and practice undertaken by John Anderson, described as a ‘precursor of the New Left ideas of the 1960s and 1970s’ (p. 74). ‘It seems ironical when we consider the later Nick Origlass, the pioneer of participatory democracy, that he should have been such an uncritical Bolshevik at this time’, comments the author; ‘later, of course, he would come to agree with much of Anderson’s thesis. Experience, social change, Balmain and Michel Pablo would ring that change.’ (pp. 77–8)
This is therefore very much a book written from an ex-Trotskyist point of view, so we get the obligatory references to the New Left, along with Gramsci, ‘the great Italian reformer [!]’ (p. 5). And whilst we can agree with its description of the War/Revolution thesis of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International as ‘apocalyptic’ (p. 193), the same label is also applied to the Transitional Programme, along with ‘messianic’, ‘dreaming’, ‘sectarian certainties’ and ‘a strong whiff of determinism’ (pp. 90–3). The author evidently shares Origlass’ final break with Trotskyism, repeatedly describing his politics as ‘maximum democracy – in the factory, in the office, in the union, in the neighbourhood – anywhere and everywhere’ (pp. vii–ix, 137, etc.), ‘the urban environment being important’ (p. viii).
So from the mid-1960s onwards, Origlass became increasingly involved in the sort of green and community politics that we associate with crusties and Young Liberals, with the inevitable result of emptying them of all class content. Since the focus of the last five chapters is limited to Balmain, an area not much larger than Stepney, the book from then on loses all its international appeal, and I suspect that it must leave many Australians themselves mystified. How did a man who set out so bravely to change the world end up in his own backyard?
Al Richardson
Enquiries for this book in Britain should be addressed to 11 Temple Fortune Lane, London NW11 7UB.
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The Shop Stewards and Workers Committee Movement was formally established in early 1917. Its suspicion of leadership was incarnated in the designation of its leading body as the National Administrative Council. It stood in theory for the overthrow of capitalism. Its practice was defensive struggle to maintain trade union controls in the workshops which spilled over into opposition to the state’s prosecution of the war, but never properly confronted the issue of ending it. The movement was largely limited to the skilled workers, and to the large engineering centres.
As a member of the NAC from August 1917, and of the SLP shortly thereafter, Murphy wrote the SSWCM’s credo, The Workers’ Committee, which analysed the weakness of union organisation and officialdom. It urged the creation of rank-and-file bodies, elected in the workshops but linking up across the industry, as a means of overcoming the lack of democracy and centralisation of the union leadership. For all its virtues, the statement remained within a Syndicalist problematic, circumventing the issues of political power and the capitalist state.
Perceiving the soviets as the realisation of their aspirations, the SSWCM leaders played a key rôle in the creation of the CPGB in 1920–21. After returning from Moscow, where he attended the first Comintern congress in 1920 and eagerly embraced Lenin’s prescriptions for Britain, Murphy was involved in the formation of the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions, which absorbed an SSWCM now severely weakened by the postwar downturn. He headed the party’s industrial departments, and became the British correspondent of Pravda. Although he joined his former SLP comrades, Arthur McManus and Tom Bell, in criticising the implementation of the Dutt-Pollitt report dedicated to the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPGB, Murphy was to be a loyal advocate of the party’s twists and turns throughout the decade, with only the occasional deviation. He was in the forefront of the campaign against Trotskyism in 1925–26.
After the General Strike, Murphy spent two years in Moscow as the CPGB’s representative on the Comintern’s Executive. His final transformation into a Stalinist functionary was confirmed by the attack on the CPGB he co-authored with Robin Page Arnot at the behest of the Comintern dignitary Otto Kuusinen. They rubbished the party’s failure to criticise the union lefts in the aftermath of the General Strike. Murphy’s assault on a policy in which he had been deeply involved in creating provoked severe, perhaps fatal, strains on his relationship with other British leaders. He came in for further excoriation in 1927 when he suggested that the National Left-Wing Movement, a coalition of CPGB and Labour Party members fighting Labour’s exclusion of Communists, should be transformed into a ‘third party’.
After intensive experience in key Comintern bodies as they underwent assimilation into the apparatus of the Soviet state, Murphy returned to Britain in 1928 a fanatical supporter of the ‘Third Period’ with its disastrous ‘class against class’ policy, and its denunciation of the Labour leaders as ‘Social Fascists’. Sensing Soviet disapproval – for reasons that finally remain obscure – Murphy became embroiled in a dispute with the CPGB over his call for a campaign for British government credits to facilitate the Soviet Union’s purchase of British goods. Somewhat mysteriously – although the party was at its lowest ebb ever – he resigned, and was ritually expelled. The whirligig of time wreaks its revenge. From Prinkipo, Trotsky wrote to his British supporter Reg Groves: ‘I have learned that Murphy is expelled as “a near Trotskyist”. What does this wonderful story mean?’
Murphy speedily established himself in the ‘Social Fascist’ Labour Party and the Socialist League, which was formed in the summer of 1932 by those members of the Independent Labour Party who wished to remain in the Labour Party after the ILP disaffiliated, and Labour lefts. By 1934, he had become the League’s National Secretary. His move to the right roughly paralleled the changing policies of the party he had deserted. By 1936, with the Soviet Union in the League of Nations, he was supporting military sanctions against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, a minority voice on the right of the Socialist League. In the summer of that year, he quit both his secretaryship and the League itself to prosecute the Popular Front as the full-time organiser of the People’s Front Propaganda Committee, recently set up by Liberals and ‘progressive’ capitalists. Murphy strongly supported the Second World War, and maintained his admiration of Stalin in a panegyric published in 1945. He renounced Marxism in the 1950s, and died in 1965 at the age of 76.
Ralph Darlington’s book provides the first full-length account of Murphy’s life. As such, it adds only a little to our existing knowledge of his formative years. Both his activities and their context – the Sheffield engineering industry, the ethos and policies of the ASE, the politics of that city’s labour movement prior to 1917 – are explained in a cursory manner. It is intriguing that Murphy joined a political party only when he was almost 30 years of age. Most of the important shop steward leaders, and certainly those who went into the CPGB, were long-standing members of the SLP or the British Socialist Party, organisations which contributed so much to the political feeling of the Marxist left in the years preceding the Russian Revolution. It is inadequate to dismiss the complexities of the BSP’s attitude towards trade unionism as ‘contempt’ (p. 12). It recruited leading shop stewards, such as Fred Shaw, Willie Gallacher, Harry Pollitt and Harry McShane, not to speak of John Maclean. Contrary to what is said here, Nellie Connole’s Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher (1961) implies that Ted Lismer, the leading ASE steward in Sheffield and a close comrade of Murphy’s, was a member of the BSP. So of course were the Sheffield union activists and later CPGB cadres Sam Elsbury and George Fletcher.
If the SLP had ‘no real base’ in Sheffield (p. 12), it had a branch after 1906 and again from 1912, whilst its paper, The Socialist, was readily available throughout this period. There is an interesting note on the Sheffield branch and the problems it faced in the issue of January 1915. According to Connole’s account, it was an SLPer, Jimmy Bowns, who initially forged links between Sheffield and the leading Clydeside stewards McManus (SLP) and Gallacher (BSP). At least one Sheffield SLPer, Lawrence Smith, was jailed for his opposition to the war. There may be problems with the availability of the materials required to pursue these matters, and Connole’s book certainly needs checking. But more attention to Murphy’s activities in the years and the environment in which his ideas developed would have made for a richer narrative, and a deeper grasp of his emerging politics.
Of course, this was the great age of Socialist pedagogy, and many young workers immersed themselves almost completely in the activities of the Plebs League and the struggle for independent working-class education. It is plausible that Murphy, something of an autodictat, recoiled, like others, from the shadow that Henry Mayers Hyndman cast over the BSP, and from the sectarianism, doctrinal disputation and dual unionism of the SLP to devote himself to the Labour College movement. Despite its potential importance to the formation of somebody he terms ‘an organic intellectual’ and ‘a worker intellectual polymath’ (p. xviii), the author does not pursue this avenue. He addresses the Labour Colleges only in passing in relation to their dispute with the CPGB in 1924. Yet together with his union, this movement was one of the few constants through Murphy’s life. It was Plebs, the journal of the National Council of Labour Colleges, which first announced Murphy’s ideas to a wider audience. It published his article Industrial Organisation, an early draft of The Workers Committee, in February 1917. In the very different world of 1959, the same journal recorded Murphy’s lifelong allegiances: ‘AEU Highgate with J.T. Murphy in the chair have started a class on automation.’ (Plebs, January 1959, p. 24)
The personal and intellectual influences on Murphy excite minimal curiosity in this text. Recent work of some relevance, such as Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock’s Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914 (1996), is not drawn on. There is little about the growth – across the political spectrum – of the idea of ‘the servile state’. Hillaire Belloc’s term was used in the SLP, and William Paul wrote a book about it. There is the suggestion in a footnote that Murphy’s conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy may have been influenced by reading Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s The History of Trade Unionism (1894). Another possible source was Roberto Michels, who ultimately presented in his ‘iron law of oligarchy’ a fatalistic account of the inevitability of bureaucratic control of the labour movement. Darlington mentions in a footnote a review by Murphy in 1920 of Michels’ Political Parties (p. 308, n42). But the book had been available in a translation by the British socialists Eden and Cedar Paul since 1916 – a year before The Workers’ Committee was published. And before he fell into despair, Michels had actively fought the bureaucratisation of the German Social Democratic Party, and wrote about it in The Socialist in 1905.
Rather than following these trails, Darlington relies on occasional conjecture as to Murphy’s activities before 1916, and on New Horizons, the autobiography Murphy published in 1941. Such retrospective accounts should be used, but – particularly in the case of a man who went underwent such drastic political reinvention – with circumspection and in conjunction with other sources. A mendacious statement of Murphy’s from 1956 makes the point succinctly: ‘When I resigned from the ranks of Communism at the introduction of Stalinist methods into the leadership of the British party ...’ (p. 256)
When Darlington’s text moves on to 1917 and the climax of the shop stewards movement, it is derivative. It follows closely, sometimes too closely for comfort, James Hinton’s The First Shop Stewards Movement (1973), as well as the same author’s introduction to reprints of Murphy’s The Workers’ Committee and Preparing for Power, both republished in 1972. Following Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein’s Marxism and the Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926 (1986), only one significant revision of Hinton’s work is offered. The shop stewards are criticised for failing to provide leadership in mobilising industrial action to halt the war as the movement against conscription developed in early 1918. Hinton sensitively analysed the interaction of the attitudes of the NAC – with their responsive conceptions and critique of leadership in terms of manipulation and substitutionism – and the consciousness of their members. He carefully contextualised these problems in the traditions of engineering trade unionism and craft consciousness. He concluded that the decision to retreat from calls for a strike against the war after they had consulted their members was understandable and realistic on the part of these stewards with these members in these conditions.
That judgement remains persuasive. It is rejected here, not on the basis of any detailed re-examination of the episode and elaboration of a rigorously documented and argued alternative course of action, but in terms of abstract, timeless rhetoric. Hinton, it is asserted, lets Murphy and his comrades off the hook for their failure actively to oppose the war, because ‘the only hope lay in trying to harness the strength of an engineers’ craft-based workshop organisation to the wider interests of the working-class movement, a class-wide agitation for militant trade unionism, fusing immediate economic issues with politics in a struggle against the war’ (p. 46). This is somewhat easier on the page than in the workshops. When Murphy was victimised at this time, it proved impossible to secure sympathy action, a fact which Darlington glosses over (p. 50). Nor could the NAC win wider support for the Midlands strikes in the autumn of 1918. What price then a national stoppage to secure peace? As Bernard Waite’s A Class Society at War: England 1914–18 (1983) demonstrated with a wealth of detail, there was a lack of support amongst workers for an anti-war movement. Posing alternatives is fruitful, but only so long as we have evidence to justify their serious consideration, and only so long as we operate with proper conceptions of historical possibility, related to a careful examination of what actions could have been realistically conceived by the protagonists at the time, as well as both the potential and the constraints within the prevailing situation. In the case under scrutiny, the social forces for the realisation of an alternative history were simply not present.
Much of Darlington’s material on the events leading to the formation of the CPGB flows directly from secondary sources, primarily Ray Challinor’s The Origins of British Bolshevism (1977). Perhaps understandably, Darlington tends to overemphasise Murphy’s rôle in the development of the SLP towards Bolshevism. The party was moving in that direction before Murphy became a member. As with The Workers’ Committee, we must recognise the dialectic between individual and collective in the generation of ideas. The rôle, amongst others, of McManus, Bell and Paul, stalwarts of the party from the start of the century, deserves more emphasis than it receives in statements such as ‘Murphy and the other SLP shop stewards’ and ‘Murphy and his comrades’ (pp. 58–9). The enmity that Murphy’s individualist stance on the BSP-SLP unity talks engendered amongst his comrades was long-standing (see Tom Bell, The British Communist Party: A Short History, p. 57).
The best section of this book examines Murphy’s involvement in the problems of the CPGB through the 1920s. Darlington has examined the documents of the CPGB in Moscow, and tracked down Murphy’s papers in Canada. The result is an account which adds significantly to earlier work such as Walter Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21 (1969), and LJ McFarlane’s The British Communist Party: Its Origins and Development Until 1929 (1966). Darlington’s research vindicates Kendall on the extent of Russian influence and subsidy to the CPGB. He estimates that around £1 million was expended on launching the party, although he emphasises the ideological confluence of the British Marxists and the Bolsheviks. The impact of the Soviet funds – some would argue they played a disorganising rôle rather than simply lubricating both the passage of alien conceptions of organisation and politics from the USSR to Britain and the CPGB’s subordination to Moscow – requires further assessment.
As against the recent tendency to detect and celebrate the CPGB’s autonomy from the Russians, Darlington is clear and emphatic; allowing for the need for tactical realisation of broad policy on the national terrain, political subservience was the norm. Any autonomy, he concludes, was ‘strictly circumscribed and limited mainly to day-to-day operational issues. All the major strategic issues were laid down by the Comintern in Moscow, and adhered to by the various national sectors.’ (p. 293) Whilst no good judge would disagree, the author occasionally minimises the space available for opposition. Discussing the lack of dissent in the CPGB over the excommunication of Trotsky in 1924–25, he argues a stark either ... or: ‘The problem for the CPGB leadership was that it had to accept the situation or break with the Comintern.’ (p. 141) Why then was there initial and sometimes extensive and sustained opposition in other national parties? As with much recent work on British Communism, the absence of international comparison limits the analysis. The history of the French party or, more dramatically, the similarly small and weak Belgian party demonstrates that before the ultimate interdiction of the International descended, there was room for manoeuvre. The specific weaknesses of the CPGB in relation to other parties, particularly the range of concrete factors which saw the British workers’ leaders of 1920 reduced by Stalinism, requires further exploration.
Darlington’s book is valuable in at least beginning to look in more detail at the precise processes by which the Comintern was subordinated to the emerging Stalinist state, and the national parties to the Comintern. One essential mediating factor was the reconstruction and absorption of national leaders such as Murphy. The rôle the International Control Commission played in hunting out heresy in individual parties, and the activities of the Comintern’s Commission on Internal Relations, touched on here, will bear further scrutiny. Murphy sat on both, and his activities on the Special Commission on the French party will be of particular interest to Revolutionary History readers.
Murphy’s resignation from the party is not even mentioned in Noreen Branson’s quasi-official History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927–41 (1985). Darlington provides the first detailed account. The incident remains difficult to understand in purely political terms. And quite why he terms Murphy’s subsequent expulsion ‘unjustified’ (p. 214) is unclear. Against the background of the CPGB’s practice and regime, Murphy’s baffling resignation and subsequent refusal to attend the Political Bureau to explain himself left the leadership with no alternative but to administer the coup de grâce to somebody most of them had very little time for anyway. This volume is of less interest in its treatment of the Socialist League, whilst Murphy’s speedy political evolution in the 1930s from ultra-leftism to Popular Frontism is explained only very broadly in terms of his acute awareness of the Fascist threat. Whether Murphy still remained in intellectual thrall to the party to which he had given so much of his life is not discussed. Darlington’s round-up of Murphy’s life in the 1940s and 1950s means we have a fuller picture of a life which for many on the left appeared hitherto to have ended in the 1920s.
At least some of the problems with this text lie in the framework in which the author has chosen to cast his story. Darlington is explicit, saying ‘this book derives from the theoretical tradition of the Socialist Workers Party’ (p. xxi). Many of the weaknesses of the evaluations made in the text of people and events flow from the debility of that tradition and the use of its preoccupations as a sometimes intrusive and ahistorical yardstick. One example will suffice: the Labour Party is portrayed in a one-sided, inflexible, unstrategic fashion in the chapters dealing with the 1920s and 1930s, as it has been by the International Socialists and the SWP over the last 30 years. It is to be avoided at all costs; it is as destructive to revolutionaries as kryptonite is to Superman. Thus Murphy is taken to school: ‘His notion that Socialists in the circumstances of the early 1930s should remain inside the Labour Party merely helped to provide a left cover and breed false expectations in such leaders.’ (p. 229) A few lines later, we are given a specific example: ‘As the German revolution of 1918–19 had demonstrated, the consequences of Socialists staying inside a reformist party in a revolutionary period led inevitably to catastrophe.’ (p. 229) The yawning gulf that separated the problems of British revolutionaries in 1932 and their German counterparts in 1918–19 is simply excised. The question also arises as to whether Tony Cliff has proved uniquely immune to kryptonite; did the sojourn of his followers in the Labour Party from 1950 to around 1965 merely help to provide a left cover and breed expectations in Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson? Sensing the difficulties, Darlington provides a rather evasive footnote stating that entrism is permissible, but only when revolutionaries are very weak, and so long as it is not long term. Most people would judge that revolutionaries were very weak in ‘the circumstances of the early 1930s’. So why is Murphy criticised for joining the Labour Party? Moreover, the Socialist Review Group’s decade-and-a-half visit was something more than the quick raid that its successor insists Trotsky envisaged.
Murphy, of course, was as isolated in 1932 as the SRG was in the 1950s. To criticise him for joining the Labour Party is ludicrous. But the Socialist League, 2,000 to 3,000-strong, is also taken to task for remaining in the Labour Party. Those who had any thoughts of leaving would have looked to the ILP, of which they had been members. The League is compared unfavourably with the CPGB, ‘despite its increasing Stalinism and the adoption of the Popular Front policy,... the Communist Party still rejected Labour’s parliamentary cretinism and had an orientation on the struggles of the working class’ (p. 231). That word ‘despite’, how small but how mighty in banishing little things like Stalinism and Popular Frontism and the ultimately integrated nature of Communist Party politics. It is unclear whether Darlington is suggesting that revolutionaries of the early 1930s should have stayed within the CPGB as on his judgement that it was healthier than the Socialist League – that is certainly the drift of his analysis. If so, the aspiration is utopian, as the expulsion of the Trotskyists in 1932–33 graphically demonstrated. It is interesting that these flesh-and-blood revolutionary activists of the early 1930s – Reg Groves, Henry Sara, Harry Wicks and their comrades, the difficulties they confronted, the decisions they took – are not mentioned in the text, still less used as a yardstick to measure Murphy’s activities. And there are only brief references to ‘the Trotskyists’ in the footnotes. After all, Groves was on the League’s Executive when Murphy was its Secretary. Instead of examining the concrete problems and alternatives that the revolutionary left faced in the 1930s in deciding whether to join the Labour Party or ILP or build an open organisation, that distant world and its struggles are refracted through the prism of the contemporary SWP. This is not the way to write history.
A second problem lies in Darlington’s eschewal of ‘standard biographical narrative (with irrelevant details of personal idiosyncrasies)’ (pp. xxiv–v). But life and logic teach us the importance of the ‘personal’ in understanding an individual’s political trajectory. The biographical form, still frowned upon in the academic world, is a useful weapon in the armoury of historians, its vices and virtues recently illustrated by Patricia Hollis’ Jennie Lee: A Life (1997). More intensive engagement with Murphy’s values, motivations and ‘personal idiosyncrasies’ just might have helped explain key incidents in his political trajectory which remain vague. Various personal details about Murphy and his wife Molly, whose autobiography has been published to coincide with Darlington’s book, are scattered through these texts. They are never brought together to frame his political trajectory, and thus deepen our understanding of it. Murphy, for example, demonstrated early aspirations to upward social mobility. But he was forced to abandon early plans to enter the civil service. Study, self-improvement, the shop stewards movement, the SLP and CPGB provided an alternative path to emancipation. Yet Murphy’s ambition remained intact. A recent article suggests that he attracted the patronage of ‘a prominent individual’ at the highest level of the Comintern. He saw criticism of the CPGB as a sure road to an internationally-assisted passage to its leadership (Andrew Thorpe, Comintern “Control” of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920–43, English Historical Review, Volume 113, June 1998, pp. 646, 653–4).
If ambition and its thwarting was one possible factor in his evolution, the bourgeois family was another. What appears to have been a very conventional marriage to a woman who described herself as ‘lower middle-class’ and took little interest in politics saw both parents’ ambitions transferred to their son. As Molly Murphy wrote: ‘From his earliest years, both his father and I had determined that he should have the kind of education which we wish had been ours.’ (Molly Murphy, pp. 159–60) These working-class revolutionaries were determined to send their son to a fee-paying public school, in Britain the pathway to the élite, and an important litmus test of class consciousness. Perceived as scandalous behaviour on the part of a leading Communist, this stimulated sharp criticism within the CPGB. It became an additional tension in a situation where personal differences inevitably play some rôle in political conflicts. It drew the Murphies into the domestic economy and life of the middle class. It imposed on the couple a financial burden beyond the reach of a working-class family, and most political activists, intensified by the need periodically to hire domestic help. The salary Murphy received from Pravda became essential to pay the fees.
By 1932, Murphy was relatively isolated in the CPGB leadership, and had lost the patronage of the Comintern. He was impressed by the resilience of the Labour Party. The CPGB had little more than 2,000 members. Its prospects appeared grim, as did Murphy’s when he lost his job. Harry Pollitt, admittedly a political antagonist, had little doubt that personal and material factors, as well as political issues, were involved in his resignation (p. 215). Thereafter, his desire to operate as a professional intellectual and continue his son’s education produced a willingness to accept financial donations from rich friends. Taken out of their political context, emphasis on these factors may provide a distorted, one-sided portrait. If we want to understand the man and his politics better, they should be critically confronted and integrated within that context. Greater attention to the interpenetration of the personal and political might have produced a richer, more complex study. As it is, we get little sense of the man and the texture of his life. Murphy remains as inscrutable at the end of Darlington’s book as at the beginning.
Written in the 1960s, Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist is more revealing, although those expecting the story of a British Kollontai or Pasionaria will be disappointed. Molly comes across as very much a woman of her class and time. She saw herself as ‘typical’ of English lower middle-class respectability and conventionalism (p. 74). She felt out of her depth in the world of the Comintern, embarrassed when Kollontai responded to her enquiry after her husband: ‘Which one, my dear?’ (p. 74) She played little part in political debates: ‘That was my husband’s job.’ Though she joined the CPGB, she emphasised ‘it meant simply that my husband’s friends were my friends, his loyalties my loyalties’ (p. 87). Intensely involved before 1914 in the suffragette movement, she seems to have been only briefly active in the CPGB, and not at all thereafter. Her main interests were children and nursing, although the quality of her commitments was demonstrated when she spent six months nursing in Spain in 1937. Very much the stereotypical supportive wife and mother, this record of her life surely deserves better than the Dave Spart-like comment: ‘She provides no analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution as a result of the combined impact of civil war and the revolution’s isolation internationally ...’ (p. v) Many women of that era, like Helen Crawford, Isabel Brown and Rose Smith, were Communist leaders. Others led overt or subterranean lives of great complexity and emotional intensity. There is no evidence of that here. And once again, the plot thickens; we are informed that according to her son, ‘her account was actually ghost-written by J.T. Murphy’ (p. iv). The editor has faith: ‘There is no question that the substantive nature of the account is Molly’s.’ (p. iv) For the conscientious historian, this leaves matters unresolved. Are we listening to Molly’s voice recapitulating what she thought, felt and did all these years earlier? Or are we listening to the voice of that inscrutable old Stalinist Jack Murphy, remembering, perhaps imperfectly, what he thought she ought to have thought and felt?
Watson’s declared aim is to overcome the ‘cleavage’ between art and politics/class. In particular, he champions modernism in music and poetry, arguing that the ‘refusal of exchange values gives Modern Art its relationship to revolutionary politics’ (p. 222). The argument takes us through knowledgeable and perceptive expositions of Coleridge, Fourier, Josef Dietzgen, Walter Benjamin, James Joyce and Philip K. Dick. Watson treats Stalinists and liberal academics with contempt, arguing that ‘both contend that knowledge exists objectively, independent of the person who thinks and the society that funds the thinker’ (p. 75). Post-modernism, Political Correctness and feminism all get their fair (and sometimes unfair) share of abuse.
I suspect that many readers of Revolutionary History will be profoundly irritated by Watson’s writing. The assault on the art/politics cleavage takes his writing beyond the boundaries of most works on either politics or culture. The footnotes repeatedly alternate between Lenin’s philosophical writings and Frank Zappa’s lyrics. A taste for puns and the sheer range and obscurity of the references ensure that this is not an easy read.
But in his insistence that music, poetry, sex, schizophrenia and death deserve discussion by Marxists, Watson is firmly in the tradition of Trotsky’s writings on culture and everyday life. He claims, convincingly, that the art/politics cleavage has produced ‘a marginalised and unimaginative revolutionary left and an effete, ornamental avant-garde’ (p. 341). Watson has done his best to provoke a dialogue, though he will get few thanks from either side.
The back cover promises a ‘rediscovery of Trotsky’. Watson skilfully deploys Trotsky against current academic trends, makes some useful comments on Trotsky and Freud, and claims that ‘Trotsky is the most appropriate political complement to the revolt of Modern Art’ (p. 185).
But he does not avoid a certain romanticisation of his hero. He dismisses as Stalinist misrepresentation (p. 10) the claim that Trotsky’s alliance with the surrealist Breton was primarily tactical rather than political or aesthetic, although there is impeccably Trotskyist confirmation from Naville and van Heijenoort that Trotsky knew little of surrealism, and didn’t much like what he knew. Likewise he claims that Trotsky ‘carried a book of Mallarmé’s poetry in his pocket when leading the Red Army’ (p. 10). We know from Alfred Rosmer that Trotsky had Mallarmé on his bookshelves in his military train, but to infer that he was declaiming ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’ as the bullets whistled through his hair is unsubstantiated wish-fulfilment. It is also unfortunate that Watson, an enthusiast for poodles, does not note Jacqueline Lamba’s recollection that Trotsky, in argument with Breton, ‘attributed an almost human soul to dogs ...’ (Arturo Schwarz, André Breton, Trotsky et l’anarchie, Paris 1977, p. 210).
The last third of the book is devoted to Voloshinov’s work on Marxism and linguistics. Again, there is much that is valuable here, but some of the claims are dubious. Watson counterposes ‘concrete utterance’ to ‘abstract systems’ (p. 373), and thus dismisses Saussure’s work, identifying it with the traditional grammar of the schoolroom. But his stress on utterance forgets that language cannot function unless it has a grammatical structure that makes it possible for one speaker to understand another; the English language exists independently of particular speakers, just as the solar system exists independently of human beings. In rejecting the ‘abstract’, he forgets that science requires abstraction; Marx’s Capital moves between the concrete and the abstract. Far from reinforcing traditional grammar after the manner of a Labour education minister, Saussure’s affirmation of the arbitrariness of language undermines any claim that one grammar is ‘better’ than another. And in his stress on ambiguity, Watson focuses excessively on literature. Ambiguity is a virtue in poetry, but a distinct disadvantage in Health and Safety regulations.
James Thurber once drew a cartoon of a bewildered man in an art gallery, captioned ‘he knows all about art but he doesn’t know what he likes’. Watson knows only too well what he likes, and the book sometimes turns into a catalogue of his personal tastes. Watson calls his method Materialist Esthetix; the eccentric spelling abbreviates as ME! (The conventional spelling would have given the acronym Ma, to the hilarity of amateur Freudians; or perhaps MA, symbolising the academics for whom he feels such searing hatred.) At one point, he lists 10 names (all unknown to the present reviewer) and describes their work as ‘the only poetry worth reading in England’ (p. 325). Anyone who disagrees with Watson’s tastes is damned, not only aesthetically, but politically and morally. This style of intellectual terrorism is much closer to Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis than Watson would like to think. Before attempting to establish a single revolutionary canon in music and literature, he should ponder the passage in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution which promises that under Socialism political parties will be replaced by ‘parties’ advocating different tendencies in theatre, music and sport.
As Watson acknowledges, to overcome the art/politics cleavage requires, not the best efforts of the best intellectuals, but social revolution (p. 341). Without that revolution, Materialist Esthetix, like surrealism and situationism, must be a judged a failure. Yet an interesting failure is sometimes preferable to a boring success.
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The latter part of the book, dealing with the Stalinised Comintern, is perhaps the less interesting. The broad outline of the crimes of the Third Period and the betrayals of the Popular Front are a well-known story, and although Broué adds much detail, he does not revise the general picture. Certainly he provides sufficient documentation to belabour any surviving admirers of Stalinism. Whilst the catastrophic outcome of the Third Period in Germany is all too familiar, the story of the massacres in Colombia and El Salvador, also produced by Third Period policies, will be less so. Broué also details the leadership changes carried out during the Third Period; as he points out, it was the leaderships established during the Third Period who implemented the policies of the Popular Front. Chapter 32 provides an extensive roll-call of those murdered at the hands of the Stalinist apparatus.
Yet, as Broué shows, the Comintern was never altogether a ‘monolith’ (as some of us have perhaps too easily believed). The famous zigzags were neither unanimous nor executed without hesitation. Thus the Comintern opposed Duclos’ attempt to get L’Humanité published legally under the Nazi occupation of France. Even when Stalin decided that the Comintern must be dissolved, there were divergent voices on the Executive. No-one defied Stalin, but there were several views as to how the strangulation should be carried out. Perhaps such differences should not surprise us in an organisation where fear and ambition had replaced principle. But individuals did make a difference, and Broué attempts to evaluate their rôles. Thus Dimitrov (whose direct involvement in the Sofia Cathedral episode Broué makes clear) emerges as a complete scoundrel, who drank too much and sexually harassed secretaries; André Marty, however, is said to have been a ‘big-mouth’, but not the butcher he is often accused of being.
Broué considers that by 1935 the Comintern was no more than a ‘direct dependency of the political police of the [Soviet] state’. Undoubtedly there is a substantial degree of truth in this, and Broué provides much detailed material on the rôle of Russian agents within the various Communist parties. Nonetheless, a number of reservations should be noted. Firstly, the various Stalinist parties retained sufficient roots in their national labour movements for them subsequently to develop into variants of Social Democracy. Secondly, in the 1930s and during the Second World War, the Communist parties continued to attract many of the best class fighters of their generation. To dismiss militants of the quality of Harry McShane or Joe Jacobs as merely ‘Stalinists’ because they became embroiled in Communist parties at a time when Trotskyism was almost invisible would be sectarian folly. And thirdly, a theoretical question arises: if the counter-revolutionary Comintern was simply a projection of the Russian state machine, then what sort of state was it? Could it in any sense be a state that represented workers’ class interests, in however degenerated a fashion? Wisely, Broué makes no attempt to pursue this point.
But it is the first half of the book which is much more illuminating and thought provoking, and highly relevant to the education of a new generation of revolutionaries. For here we are dealing with a living movement, with all its richness and contradiction, its spontaneity and its mistakes. Anyone who believes there was a line of continuity between the early Comintern and the later monstrosity that bore the same name should read Broué’s detailed account of the full debate and open argument that characterised the first congresses.
But Broué also undermines the romanticisation that has existed within the Trotskyist camp. I recall a faction in the International Socialists (led by Sean Matgamna) which included in its programme support for the ‘first four congresses of the Communist International’. I was never sure what this might mean, and having read Broué I am finally convinced it was meaningless. Indeed, the real Comintern was something of a ramshackle affair, a hasty improvisation to deal with an urgent and unpredictable situation. We can learn at least as much from the early Comintern’s mistakes – which were numerous – as from its programmatic declarations. But precisely these were the mistakes – and often dubious manoeuvres – of a living movement. The point was neatly summed by Georg Lukács, in a remark recorded by Victor Serge: ‘Marxists know that dirty little tricks can be performed with impunity when great deeds are being achieved; the error of some comrades is to suppose that one can produce great results simply through the performance of dirty little tricks.’ Here we have beautifully encapsulated the essential difference between Lenin and Zinoviev.
For many on the revolutionary left, even today, the Comintern is cited as though it provided a simple recipe book for the construction of revolutionary parties. But as Broué shows, the formation of the Comintern was a complex process, in which individuals, networks of personal contacts, the various ‘foreign sections’ based on ex-prisoners-of-war in Russia, small political groups and mass parties all interacted in the context of a unique revolutionary wave emerging from the war and the Russian October. Those who seek to reduce this to the shibboleth that all revolutionary parties come simply from splits within existing working-class institutions should study Broué and think again. Thus in the example of France, revolutionary Syndicalists like Rosmer, Monatte and Martinet played a key rôle in the formation of the Communist Party, even though they had never felt any inclination to ‘enter’ the SFIO. And if they had played an even larger rôle, whilst the corrupt parliamentarians like Cachin had been excluded, the PCF might have been better able to face up to the demands of the new period.
The real problem was, of course, that the overwhelming majority of the established leadership of the working class had sold out in 1914. The Comintern’s task was therefore to forge a new leadership, at every level from Central Committee to shop steward, within the few brief years before the revolutionary wave began to subside. The amazing thing is not that there were mistakes and that bizarre short-cuts were pursued, but that so much was achieved. Some of us might draw the lesson, contrary to the advocates of ‘entrism’, that it is a great pity that the left in the Second International did not break away – or at least develop a much more solid factional organisation – before 1914.
Be that as it may, the Comintern leadership found themselves in a race against time. Paradoxically, the Russians had to try to teach other parties to rely more on their own concrete analysis of circumstances, and less on imitation of the Russian example. This is the message of Lenin’s magnificent but despairing speech to the fourth Comintern congress, when he warned: ‘We have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners.’ Broué provides a neat example of the tendency to see the world through Russian eyes when he cites the repeated practice of the Italian Communists of referring to Mussolini’s Blackshirts as ‘White Guards’ – something hardly calculated to clarify the issues for the average Italian worker.
It is also in this context that the question of ultra-leftism in the Comintern must be understood, and here Broué can be criticised for taking too superficial a view of matters. It is easy enough in retrospect to condemn the March Action and the ‘theory of the offensive’. Of course, it is quite right to blame Béla Kun for his stupidities – as Lenin did one once occasion to such an extent that the congress record had to be altered to moderate his vituperation. But the fundamental questions are: firstly, why was there such a shortage of cadres that a man like Kun was given responsible positions? And secondly, why did the ultra-leftism of such leaders find a genuine ‘resonance’ (as our Pabloite friends used to call it) amongst the layers of newly radicalised young workers, militant, angry and impatient, but lacking experience and any real sense of tactics.
Lenin himself seems to have related to ultra-lefts of all types with understanding and patience. He realised that most ultra-lefts were genuine revolutionaries, and even amid the tremendous pressures of post-revolutionary Russia, he found time to argue and convince. Broué’s account brings out the differences between the various Bolshevik leaders. Indeed, contrary to the popular image of ‘Bolshevism’, even the leading core of Bolsheviks was far from being homogeneous. Broué brings out the different rôles of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek and others. Zinoviev, despite his talents as an orator, appears mainly in a negative light. It was Zinoviev (not Trotsky, as is often alleged) who threatened to shoot the Kronstadt insurgents ‘like partridges’. It was above all Zinoviev’s ‘Bolshevisation’ of the Comintern that paved the way for Stalin. Moreover, Zinoviev is shown to have been one of the very first proponents of the ‘theory’ that Social Democracy was a ‘variety of Fascism’.
But most striking of all is the visible gap between Lenin and even his most gifted associates. Lenin understood that the art of party-building requires a knowledge of when to split and when to pull together. Of course, splitting is a lot easier than pulling together, and all too many of Lenin’s would-be followers (including even, at times, Trotsky) have preferred to split rather than pull together.
Broué’s sympathies tend to be with the right wing of the revolutionary movement. In particular Paul Levi, whom he had already presented in a relatively positive light in his 1971 book on the German Revolution, is here presented as a major figure in the Comintern leadership. Certainly Broué is quite right to endorse Levi’s critique of the March Action; Levi was undoubtedly a shrewd analyst of the political situation. But it must also be said that he was an inept faction-fighter. One can scarcely imagine Lenin deciding to break party discipline, but then failing to follow through, and retreating from the debate. Within a more stable leadership team, Levi could certainly have played a very useful rôle, but in the near chaos of the German party he failed to live up to the demands upon him.
One review can only touch on a very few of the many issues raised in Broué’s book, which will undoubtedly continue to provoke discussion and further research for years to come. In the last issue of Revolutionary History, Al Richardson described the book as ‘magisterial’. Perhaps I am not quite so easily pleased, but there is no doubt that this is an important and valuable book. I would add the hope that an English translation will soon appear, but it might look as though I am volunteering for the job. Good luck to whoever has the stamina to undertake it.
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If Stalinism perverted the most liberating doctrines and noble instincts of humanity into a means of enslavement, and, for a while, marched relentlessly ahead on that basis, the erstwhile non-Stalinists of the left were reduced to wringing their hands and shaking their heads balefully at the dialectical way ‘history’ chose to march forward. And marching forward is exactly what history is said to have done when Stalinism advanced. So insisted not only the soothsayers of the Social Democratic left – the Coleses and Bauers and Dans; yet no more so, and certainly less flagrantly so, than the adepts of post-Trotsky Trotskyism – the Deutschers and Mandels and Cannons. The stormy spectacle of doctrinal hair-splitting and organisational reconfiguration with which official ‘Trotskyism’ greeted Stalinism’s advance measured little beyond the geometrically precise degree of accommodation with which this or that orientation was willing to greet Stalinist imperialism or its national manifestations. Like the vaudevillian lament over the restaurant whose food was so atrocious, and, what’s worse, served in such miserly portions, Trotsky’s epigones distinguished themselves at length by bemoaning Stalinist atrocities, whilst castigating its irresolution whenever a supposed opportunity for expansion was eluded.
That remarkable ambiguity remains the principal impediment in translating non-Stalinist sentiments into something coherently approaching a viable anti-Stalinist theory. ‘Orthodox’ Trotskyism never truly outgrew the faction fights of the 1920s when Marxists considered Stalinism to be a legitimate – if errant and reactionary – faction within the broader Socialist and working-class movement. It never in practice assimilated the evolving dynamic of Stalinism, a dynamic from which was to crystallise a new social organisation of labour serving an historically new ruling class, and held fast instead to a static picture of Stalinism derived from its origins as a petit-bourgeois tendency within Bolshevism. This led the deans of Trotskyism to ‘confirm’ Trotsky’s view that Stalinism was capitulating to capitalist restoration whenever a peasant in Siberia was found to have owned a cow. The initial lessons of the Stalinist Czech coup of 1948? Why, merely additional evidence, according to the American Socialist Workers Party, of Stalinism’s capitulation to capitalism. Was it not after all the Cannonites – and not they alone – who blithely announced just days before the Chinese Stalinist armies were to defeat Chiang, that Mao’s and Stalin’s greatest desire was – appearances notwithstanding – to surrender to Chiang? Of course, after the fact all sorts of additionally fascinating and equally erroneous lessons were drawn.
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism was necessarily in flux, and Matgamna’s offers the analytically elegant suggestion that rereading In Defence of Marxism in chronological order demonstrates precisely how close Trotsky himself came just prior to his murder in recognising Stalinism’s mutation into a new and hitherto unimagined social order. But it also true that these vague possibilities of historic alternatives other than Socialist revolution, once raised, were instantly dismissed or ridiculed. In the end, I think we are left with the conclusion that Shachtman and his comrades finally parted ways with Trotsky to a degree beyond which Matgamna is prepared to acknowledge. For if politics is the struggle for ‘alternative programmes’, the traditional conceptions of Marxism expressed in the theories and conclusions of Trotskyism were rejected in the search of a new programme within the broad framework of revolutionary Socialist principles. Trotsky distilled the problem of the day to that of the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and he sought its resolution on an international scale. He consistently insisted that the key to developing Russia on a Socialist basis and thereby breaking the stranglehold of the nationalist bureaucracy lay in ending Russia’s enforced isolation. In this he faithfully reflected the perspective of the Bolshevik revolution. What Trotsky was unwilling to concede was not merely that the Stalinist bureaucracy might mutate into a new ruling class, but that it had already largely created a new type of international movement, a new type of imperialism, and a new type of party. Trotsky sought the salvation of the revolution in the defeat of capitalism. Shachtman and his comrades soberly faced the emerging programmatic implications of a new international force operating within the working class, claiming the trappings and traditions of the Socialist movement, which at the same time sought the destruction of world capitalism in terms of its own reactionary bureaucratic collectivist interests.
If history had, in any case, by the late 1930s proceeded beyond the limits of ‘permissible’ speculation, Trotsky’s ‘orthodox’ following could not. Trotsky’s inquiries were not received as the provisional propositions of an unfolding understanding, but as a series of eternally fixed, self-contained truths – the cornerstones of a ‘finished’ programme. Apparent internal inconsistencies and contradictions were ascribed to the subtlety of the historic dialectic. This was less a synthesis than a juggling act, a juggling act, to be precise, where the very foundation of Marxism – the foundation which imbued Bolshevism in its time with an integrated revolutionary content – was simply suspended in mid-air. Thus Stalinism was at once the bureaucratic guardian, or night watchman, of the gains of October, whose privileges were derived from the defence of state industry and the planned economy; the wavering capitulator to capitalism; and above all a bureaucratic growth in the labour movement bisymmetrical with other forms of reformist Socialism, differing only in that it emerged out of and leaned on a workers’ state. All this contributed to the summary judgement of Stalinism as narrow, conservative and provincial – whose economic and social structures were incompatible with imperialist expansion, and whose internal frailties and limited life expectancy precluded its playing an independent historical rôle. Stalinism could only be understood and indeed it was, for Trotsky, the responsibility of Socialists to insist on an understanding of Stalinism solely within the traditional language and analysis of the bipolar world of classical Marxism.
So much the worse for Marxism. For wherever else Trotsky’s investigations led him, he left unquestioned the theoretical viewpoint of the 1924 opposition: that the Soviet Union represented a ‘degenerated workers’ state’, and that the responsibility of the revolutionary Socialists everywhere was to defend that state if threatened by war or intervention. But whereas the revolutionary movement could still make the case in 1924 that, despite draconian inroads against democracy, workers still tacitly exercised considerable control over the conditions of social life through elective bodies in the soviets, trade unions and cooperatives, the consolidation of bureaucratic power extinguished these remnants of revolutionary rule, and in so doing fundamentally transformed the revolutionary responsibilities of the left. The original programme of the left aimed to reform and thereby salvage the gains of the revolution by means of an invigoration, extension and deepening of workers’ democracy; by reining in the bureaucracy, and subjecting it to decisive subordination under party authority. Yet the society that Trotsky fought to revive was simply a different order and conception of humanity than that which he ultimately confronted in Stalinist Russia. And so too did Trotsky tacitly acquiesce to this judgement by dropping the ‘reformist’ strategy – of labouring to redirect the Communist movement, invoking instead the need for a political revolution predicated on a new International.
In this acquiescence lay, tragically, a greater obfuscation. For it had been the inherited understanding of the revolutionary movement that a given class is the ruling class when the entire economic and social structure is in conformity with its mode of production and its social domination, and is not compatible with the rule of any other class. Because the working class is not a property-owning class, its social rule must be bound to its political rule, and therefore cannot exist – in contradistinction to the capitalist class – where it has no political rights. Trotsky, for whom revolutionary Socialism was also inseparable from workers’ democracy, was forced into the untenable position of offering unconditional defence to a society where the political mechanisms of working-class social domination had been irrevocably obliterated and replaced by a socially autonomous bureaucracy. Thus the dilemma: to abandon the cause of revolutionary defencism, or to revise the criteria upon which the judgement of Soviet Russia as a workers’ state had crucially rested. Trotsky – who, better than any contemporary, had demonstrated that Stalinist Russia by reason of its politics, policies and activities, by its internal structure and world strategies, was a mortal enemy of Socialism and the working class everywhere – stumbled disastrously towards the latter alternative.
That this was a provisional judgement is clear from Trotsky’s final essays, as members of the Workers Party soberly pointed out. But for his followers in the SWP majority, the defence of the Soviet Union was now to rest on the existence of nationalised industry and state planning, on juridical forms rather than the (unexamined) exploitative property relations. Socialism was no longer immutably identified with democracy, a workers’ state with workers’ power. Russia was a workers’ state in which the workers exercised their social dominance, as it were, from jail. When Stalinism at the end of the war expanded its domain, by dint of bayonet and coup, Trotsky’s followers initially pronounced these satellites as reactionary police states, incapable of implementing progressive anti-capitalist measures. After their economies were taken under a bureaucratic wing, replicating Stalinist Russia in every essential detail, other, that is, than in having overthrown a workers’ revolution, these same ‘revolutionaries’ demonstrated heretofore unknown abilities for innovative social theory. By this time a bankrupt clique thoroughly permeated by a bureaucratic mentality, Fourth Internationalists declared yesterday’s reactionary Bonapartist police states to be workers’ states of a new kind, deformed perhaps, but the genuine article nonetheless. If ‘workers’ states’ could be fashioned entirely from above and maintained without the participation of the masses and even against their expressed desires – if such transformative measures were ‘progressive’ anti-capitalist actions – the gap between Trotskyism and Stalinism had become appreciably narrowed. Every venue of accommodation could now be thrown open.
The WP/ISL operated from an entirely different understanding. The rise of Stalinism was situated within the broader disintegrative tendencies of interwar society. Unable to resolve the once acute, now chronic problems of mass poverty and unemployment on a capitalist basis through accumulation, unable that is to rationalise the technological advances which capitalism itself engendered, a vacuum was created. The working class, which Marxists have always looked to as that force uniquely qualified to fill that vacuum, proved unable to mobilise its forces and emancipate society. But the imperative to hold society together in an epoch of rampant dissolution required some form of collectivisation, that is some third social force from outside the ranks of capital capable of substituting a new dynamic for the flagging mechanisms of capitalist expansion. That need was answered through the pervasive growth of the state bureaucracy, of bureaucratic controls and regulations supplanting the market as a method of allocating resources and distributing the social product. These tendencies necessarily operated on a world scale, though at different, uneven and hybrid stages of completion. Directed by technocratic and managerial élites – products of capitalism as is the working class, but unable to express their will through the fusion of political and economic democracy, these tendencies could only be realised in the form of minority domination from above. Whatever problems may have been rationalised by the exercise of bureaucratic collectivisation, the resulting social stabilisation was secured without the exercise of any new power or expanded participation of the working masses in the life of society. The means of production and exchange which fell to the disposal of the state under such circumstances could be collectivised, but not socialised.
The rise of the state bureaucracy as a social tendency necessarily operated through different social channels throughout the capitalist world. It had as its precondition, however, the partial paralysis of capital coupled with a pervasive sense of weakness on the part of the working class, a weakness wherein self-awareness – Socialist consciousness – was replaced by bureaucratic dependency. But where managerial elements in the West move in this direction, they are constrained by their direct ties with immediate capitalist interests. As soon as individual members of the bureaucracy acquire sufficient capital, they are reabsorbed into the existing network of class relations. By siphoning off promising members of the state bureaucracy and depositing its rejects therein, the private sector temporises the appetites of the state, and paralyses its effectiveness. The revolving door between the state and capitalist managerial functionaries, to the extent that it remains well lubricated, blunts the rise of an independent bureaucratic class consciousness, and thereby limits the scope of its social vision. Bureaucratic tendencies operating within an existing bourgeois context therefore necessarily operate in contradictory fashion. They bind capitalism together, and to that extent act as the implementors of capitalist interest, whilst bearing the as yet unrealised seeds of an alternative social formation.
The Stalinist revolution was the extrapolation of the existing disintegrative tendencies of interwar capitalism brought to fruition. Post-revolutionary Russia, though revived by the limited capitalist openings of the New Economic Policy, found itself unable to advance by capitalist methods, and yet equally unable to modernise on a Socialist basis due to the enforced isolation of the revolution. Those elements latent in Russian society, technical and professional personnel no longer able to vouchsafe their privileges through service to capital, coalesced to positions of bureaucratic power in a milieu virtually absent of external constraint beyond the enfeebled resistance of a war-weary working class. When these last vestiges of independent, organised working-class power and influence were broken with the bloody suppression of the Bukharinites and the Left Opposition, the bureaucracy was able to constitute itself as a ruling class in every significant sense of the term. This bureaucracy was ‘no longer the controlled and revocable “managers and superintendents” employed by the workers’ state in the party, the state apparatus, the industries, the army, the unions, the fields, but the owners and controllers of the state, which is in turn the repository of collectivised property and thereby the employer of all hired hands, the masses of the workers, above all, included’. The new ruling class administered the property forms created by the revolution, but by transforming them into a vast apparatus of bureaucratic power and exploitation, they drained them of their emancipatory purpose.
The new bureaucratic ruling class similarly wasted no time in modifying in kind the revolutionary world view it inherited. The teachings of Marx and Lenin were scoured and brutally purged of all their inconvenient and dysfunctional mass democratic, revolutionary and working-class features against which a monstrous state-worshipping, soul-crushing caricature was substituted. This new housebroken ideology became, in short order, a powerful ancillary instrument in the perpetual cleansing – and self-cleansing – from the ranks of the Stalintern of any who betrayed even the barest potential for independent thought or action.
Stalinism, which relentlessly waged its political war simultaneously on the national, international and ideological fronts, established itself as one of the most virulently class-conscious and expansive of all reactionary ruling classes. It had its mass movements everywhere, and successfully made a powerful appeal to the wretched and exploited of the underdeveloped capitalist world on the basis, not of its grotesque ideological formulations, but by virtue of its demonstrated commitment to an anti-capitalist programme. Stalinism fostered and distorted the revolt against capitalism, and for quite some time successfully rode its wake. Yet the economic ‘freedom’ that Stalinism offered was nothing but a cynical cover for the brutal reality of another form of oppression and domination. For Communist party leaders and bureaucrats abroad, service in the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy was the unavoidable means of advancing their own aspirations to become a national ruling class in the image of their sponsors. That is why the WP/ISL held the resolute conviction that such parties were not merely the ideological agents of Stalinism, as Social Democrats are of capitalism. For they, unlike the Social Democrats with respect to capitalism, could not realistically be expected to preserve the organisational independence of working-class institutions under Stalinist conditions. And under capitalist conditions, they could only be expected to wage or participate in working-class struggles to the extent in which the conjunctural interests of the Kremlin were served by such actions. Where Stalinists were aligned with New Deal capitalism, as they were during the Second World War, or where they had limited potential for gaining control over revolutionary events such as in the Paris uprising of 1968, the Stalinist movement advanced or preserved its own interests by sabotaging working-class interests. The Stalinists were, in the oft-repeated phrase of the WP/ISL a ‘reactionary, totalitarian, anti-bourgeois and anti-proletarian current in the labour movement, but not of the labour movement’.
But this already takes us far afield from the subject of Volume One of this compelling undertaking. It can only be hoped that this, amongst other aspects of the comprehensive reconstruction of the Socialist project that the ‘Shachtmanites’ pioneered, can be continued in forthcoming editions. In its time, the WP/ISL aspired to mobilise the third camp in its own name, and under its own political banner, completely independent of the two war camps. Freed of Stalinism as a menacing world force, the vestigial progressive community – there is no Socialist working class, no revolutionary movement as Trotsky or even Shachtman knew it – is today so thoroughly infected by the patterns of bureaucratic thought and habit which are the legacy of Popular Front Stalinism that this volume cannot, of necessity, be directed to them. Its great strength and significance lies as a tool for educating those who aspire to something other than permanent sectarian status at the boundaries of politics; those who intend to engage this broader leftish public with the ideas and ideals of revolutionary Socialism, fully determined to avoid rerunning the last reel of history, and moving on to the next.
Finally, much has been made of Shachtman’s moral and political collapse, as if the politics Shachtman came to adopt in support of the Democratic Party, of the labour bureaucracy and of American intervention in Vietnam were genetically programmed into his revolutionary critique of Trotsky and Trotskyism. This is an all-too-convenient, and equally dishonest, dodge on the part of those unwilling and unable to confront the WP/ISL analysis head on, and who continue to shirk responsibility for their own politics of disorientation. Matgamna deals with this issue pointedly, insisting that the true corpus of Shachtman’s work constitutes a ‘lineal defence, elaboration and continuation of Trotsky’s ideas... as they really were developing at Trotsky’s death’. Whether Matgamna overstates the case for continuity, it is even more true, as Matgamna suggests, that Trotsky’s orthodox followers lived for decades in a fantasy-world existence of their own making. Pitiably clinging to all the tentative, semi-contradictory positions of their mentor, necessarily unable to integrate these positions into a coherent theory, and smugly content to expand upon the mistakes of the past, Trotsky’s epigones became Stalinism’s attorneys – an unbroken political consistency which, unlike Shachtman’s, continues for that very reason to reverberate as their precise political legacy. If the gravitational pull of new class relations ultimately lured the majority of the Trotskyist movement into the camp of bureaucratic collectivism, ‘Shachtman and his comrades kept alive Marxist method, culture, political memory and the aspiration to working-class liberty in the age of political barbarism’.
For the evolution of British Trotskyism, the crisis of late 1956 in the CPGB was a moment of fundamental importance; and the historic rôle of Peter Fryer, a Daily Worker foreign correspondent, cannot be overstated. Fryer had joined the paper in 1947, and had covered the infamous Rajk trial in Budapest, swallowing as holy writ in the process Rajk’s confession of being a Titoist agent intent on overthrowing the Hungarian regime. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress in 1956, Fryer came to his senses, and being an honest man, and in no way a party time-server, he underwent a mea culpa phase: he admitted that he’d deceived the paper’s readers on the Rajk trial, and attacked the rôle of the current Soviet leadership in the cult of personality surrounding Stalin. At the CPGB’s congress, he asked the question: ‘What solid guarantees are there that such a combination of circumstances so grievously harmful to the interests of the working-class movement shall never happen again?’ On 24 July, the Daily Worker printed his article on the rehabilitation of 474 non-persons in Hungary, including Rajk. But since this was an approved party position, that was no great advance on the editor’s part.
Tensions within the party could be glossed over for the time being by a few minor concessions to the critics. But the Hungarian uprising that began in the autumn blew the façade of party unity wide apart. Johnnie Campbell, the Daily Worker editor, made the mistake of sending Fryer to Hungary to cover events. Fryer’s first article, in which he described witnessing 80 corpses of men, women and children shot down by the security police, remained unpublished. No less than 455 key words were cut out of his second despatch, whilst his third despatch was completely suppressed. David Ainley, the paper’s Business Manager, justified censorship on the grounds of Fryer’s hysterical tone, whilst damning Fryer’s integrity with the jibe that he’d taken refuge in the British Embassy (in order to avoid being shot on the streets, be it said). Incidentally, this reviewer has his own axe to grind: Ainley was instrumental in my suspension from the 1960 Committee in the London Co-op in the late 1960s.
Fryer had long ago given notice of his intention to quit the Daily Worker, and it duly printed his letter of resignation. Not that it had much choice in the matter, for the letter was simultaneously published in the Manchester Guardian. Meanwhile, the anti-Fryer smear campaign was working at full throttle, saying that his resignation was brought on by his wife’s hand being found caught in the till (a total Stalinist fabrication, needless to say). Fryer and his poisonous truths about Hungary had now to be fully isolated from the purview of the party faithful, and inevitably he was suspended from party membership on 26 November 1956. He was expelled by 486 votes to 31, with 11 abstentions, at the subsequent congress, the weakness of party dissidents being thoroughly exposed. Yet this result masks the fact that 7,000 members, over 20 per cent of the total, had flocked out of the organisation in a few months.
By this time, Mephistopheles (that is, Gerry Healy) had caught up with Fryer. Healy the Pabloite had been busying himself with the Young Communist League, and Macleod notes Healy’s lustrous presence at the YCL congress, where he ‘sat visibly giving orders to some delegates’. The YCL’s critical resolution on Hungary proving unwelcome to the party leadership, it naturally did not merit mention in the Daily Worker. By the time of Fryer’s formal expulsion, Healy was producing Fryer’s daily Congress Special intended for the edification of delegates, and had published in pamphlet form the text of his appeal. Macleod’s analysis of Fryer’s relations with Healy is a shrewd one: ‘Peter was to realise within three years that Gerry Healy ... had all the worst habits of the Communist Party leaders, such as rigging congresses, blackening the names of those who disagreed with him, and manipulating young people.’ But Healy had offered the expellee ‘a rational explanation’, some way ‘to make sense of the events which had hit us’. As with Brian Pearce (also on the Daily Worker) and Brian Behan, Fryer was drawn to Healy ‘not only because he had been right about Stalin, but because he boasted of a historical theory which accounted for Stalinism’. And as Macleod says: ‘The attraction of the Trotskyists, that winter, was not that their arguments were good. It was that they were prepared to argue at all. The orthodox were not.’ As readers will already have guessed, Alison Macleod was never attracted by Trotskyism herself. She caustically cites Trotsky’s In Defence of Terrorism as ‘a do-it-yourself manual. It shows how to construct a morality which will destroy you.’
This is an indispensable memoir, the best of its genre I know. Replete with unique accounts of the thinking of the party leadership, it penetrates to the sordid reality of the CPGB at a historical watershed from which it never recovered in a way that can’t be obtained by ploughing through the party’s dusty archives. Macleod’s shading in of how the leadership sought to withhold knowledge of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech from the membership is unsurpassed. Her account of the leadership’s inability to come to terms with the fact of Soviet anti-Semitism highlights how institutional anti-Semitism in Moscow produced a satellite counterpart in London. But in one respect, Macleod fails the reader. The Daily Worker had a highly respected racing tipster. At no point does she explain why he so regularly backed the right horse whilst the party leadership was so regularly backing the wrong one.
Both authors are, or were, associated with the FSP, which originated in a split from the US Socialist Workers Party (the FSP has for some years defined itself as Socialist-feminist). The text first appeared in their paper Freedom Socialist in the late 1970s, and subsequently in pamphlet form in 1978. The current pamphlet updates the accounts of radical gay and lesbian groups since then.
The argument of the opening sections of the pamphlet can be summarised thus. In ancient matriarchal societies there was complete sexual freedom, and this naturally extended to homosexual behaviour. This happy state of affairs was ended by the rise of patriarchy and monogamy, and led directly to the oppression of women and social hostility towards homosexuality. Classical Greece and Rome were well on the way to the full institutionalisation of patriarchy and monogamy, but retained some pre-civilisation freedoms. Asian cultures (with the exception of Zoroastrian Persia) and pre-Columbian American cultures remained free of these evils until they fell under the influence or control of Western culture. Ancient Judaism, seemingly another exception, generated the first legal prohibition against male homosexuality (in Leviticus), and its attitudes were adopted in their entirety, indeed developed further, by Christianity, and especially by the Pauline current.
Medieval European history was substantially shaped by the growing power and institutionalisation of Christianity. The centuries-long wars against heretics, witches and other dissident currents were the form taken by the growth of Christian power, and the means by which Christianity suppressed the residual sexual freedoms of the mass of the European populations. Homosexuality was a frequent accusation against the enemies of the Church. The heretics, however, were not fighting specifically in defence of homosexuality; rather they were defending the pre-Christian cultures and their freedoms as a whole. The objective of these long wars was the establishment of the nuclear, patriarchal family, which was essential to the orderly accumulation of capital.
The authors next present a brief account of the rise of movements for homosexual rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with Hirschfield and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany in the 1860s. It mentions the defeat of those movements by the Nazis, touches on the Bolsheviks’ reforms, and includes radicals such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. The following section is devoted to a presentation of lesbian contributions to literature, arguing that they prepared the cultural ground for later explicitly political movements.
The emergence of ‘liberal’ homosexual rights organisations in the USA is sketched in the next section, showing the impetus to their growth given by Kinsey and other researchers, and the setbacks suffered under McCarthyism. Some mention is given to similar movements in Europe. (The Minority Rights Group will perhaps be surprised to learn that they have a programme similar to that of the Daughters of Bilitis.)
The 1969 Stonewall riot marked a turning point, after which the majority of new movements had a distinctly radical character, or even hyper-radical in the case of the separatists. With the exception of the late 1970s campaigns against anti-gay changes in the law, these new movements have proven to be fissiparous, whilst the more general movement has built significant social institutions such as Gay Pride, and an infrastructure of publications and organisations.
In the closing section, the authors recognise and applaud the growth of a new leadership amongst gays from ethnic minorities, and argue that these victims of multiple oppression are the most capable of perceiving that gay oppression is a component of the problem of alienated life under capitalism.
That is the argument. How does the history stand up? There is a bibliography, but the authors do not provide specific references in support of their statements. No doubt this helps to maintain the punchy readability, but it makes it difficult to check on things and resolve questions about what is being said. For example, in his introduction, Roger Simpson writes that Deaderick and Turner remind readers that ‘oppression around sexual identity is as old as history’. By my reading, they argue only that it is as old as civilisation – a very different proposition.
I have practically no knowledge of ancient cultures, but I suspect that the very generalised claim made about them here – that they were all matriarchal and libertarian to an extreme degree – is a hostage to fortune which a hostile reviewer with special knowledge could assail. I don’t understand how such claims can be made on the basis of no written history and very limited evidence in the form of artefacts. And from what little I know of contemporary cultures that have had limited contact with capitalism, they do not closely resemble the joyous matriarchies which the authors describe. Trotsky’s reports of his escape from Siberia, for example, describe the most depressed and depressing pattern of life amongst the isolated tribes he encountered.
And I don’t see that the demand for gay rights today is in any way dependent upon a ‘golden age’ theory. No golden age lies behind other democratic and transitional demands, at least not since the English working class abandoned the demand to ‘throw off the Norman yoke’, and Connolly’s fables of primitive Irish democracy faded from view.
The section dealing with the Social Democratic parties and their response to homosexual rights campaigns seems to me to understate or neglect important elements of the Socialist response. Eduard Bernstein’s 1895 articles were published in English in 1977 by the British and Irish Communist Organisation (Athol Books), together with a related article by Herzen. This publication is perhaps obscure today, but in 1978, when the FSP articles first appeared, it was widely discussed. The BICO had a habit of disagreeing with the historical figures whose work they published, such as Bukharin and Jim Larkin. They gave a grudging acceptance to Bernstein with the conclusion: ‘Heterosexuality remains socially necessary and should be encouraged: homosexuality is fairly harmless and can be tolerated.’ This alone ensured that the publication was widely discussed. I would have included it in the bibliography.
Similarly, in 1978 the authors might not have had access to the English translation of Kautsky’s 1906 writings on Marxism and morality, which had been out of print for many years before it reappeared in Patrick Goode’s selection in 1983. An earlier version could probably have been found in university libraries, but nobody read the ‘renegade’ in those days. But by 1997 they cannot be omitted from a Socialist examination of moral questions.
Oscar Wilde is given the briefest of mentions, and his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism is not referred to. And for a 1997 revision not enthusiastically to recommend Richard Ellman’s splendid biography of Wilde is difficult for this reviewer to believe.
In describing the suppression of the German homosexual rights movement by the Nazis, the authors do not deal with the question of homosexuality amongst the Brownshirts. A reference to a publication that deals with this would be useful – such as the 1979 Big Flame pamphlet Sexuality and Fascism.
I found the brief section on the Russian experience disappointing for its lack of detail and references. A caption to an illustration refers to Batkis, but his book is not included in the bibliography.
If it is right (and it is) to credit lesbian novelists such as Virginia Woolf with a rôle in changing the climate of opinion, how can it be right to omit any mention of the beats? Allen Ginsberg’s courageous campaigning against the oppression of gays was even conducted in the heart of the Stalinist states, but he gets not the slightest nod of acknowledgement. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg deserves a place in the recommended reading.
No doubt every reader would be able to produce his or her own list of amendments to the literary aspects of this question. But there is a more important and more political omission to be rectified – that of organised labour. The unions are not mentioned until the last page of the pamphlet. I don’t think this fairly reflects the politics of the FSP. Freedom Socialist regularly reports the active union work of FSP militants. The FSP played an honourable part in the work towards the foundation of the Labor Party in the USA. So it is puzzling to find no commentary on or assessment of the successes and failures over the last 20 years in winning support within the trade unions for gay struggles. (Let us recall how Tony Cliff hectored us in 1979 that ‘we should look forward to the first leader of the London workers’ council being a 19-year-old gay woman!’)
There are other questions that one would like to debate with the FSP which are probably outside the scope of their pamphlet. The FSP does not call for political revolution in Cuba or China. Conditions for gays have improved somewhat over recent years in Cuba, but not at all in China (to the limited extent of the available information). Is sexual liberation, then, a reform which it is within the ability of those states to allow? If so, how can the demands best be advanced by oppressed gays in those countries, and by those in solidarity with them elsewhere? And if Stalinist states can accommodate gay liberation, why is it impossible to think of similar reforms without revolutionary overthrow in capitalist states? Does it seem likely today that homosexual business people would set out to subvert and disrupt the circulation and accumulation of capital by refusing to pass their assets when they die? By this, of course, I am seeking to clarify the status of the demand for gay rights within the Trotskyist programme. Is it an achievable reform, or a basis for mobilisations which will overthrow the power of capital? Deaderick and Turner do not, in my assessment, make a categorical case for the latter position.
In more principled quarters of the left, the Resistance has often been seen as an instance of the more general ‘revolution betrayed’. So, in this interpretation we see an Italian working class politically conscious and developed, armed and poised for power, were it not for the betrayal of the PCI, which instructed it to surrender its weapons to the Allied Command, mainly thanks to the party’s moral authority amongst the workers and the critical rôle played by Stalin, as well as the lack of preparation displayed by other possible alternative parties or groups to the left of the PCI. Whilst these factors contain some truth, for many, including the authors reviewed here, they are only part of the story.
Nevertheless, in times when speaking of a working class attracts accusations of hopeless anachronism, with repeated calls from left and right in Italy to ‘forgive and forget’ the excesses of a small number of ‘hotheads’ wearing black or red shirts, all in the name of ‘national reconciliation’ and ‘looking to the future’, any work which seriously tackles these issues and attempts to debunk the myths surrounding the Italian Resistance should be warmly welcomed.
Riccardo Anfossi’s book, whose title means ‘The Broken Resistance’, is an important work in this respect, whether or not one agrees with all its thought-provoking arguments. The picture of the Resistance which emerges from it is far from comfortable and unproblematic, but it deserves careful consideration.
Anfossi’s premises are categorical: ‘One cannot... speak of a Resistance that has had all its premises betrayed, as some historians, coming above all from an Actionist [Partito d’Azione] background have done, for these premises had been clear from the outset, and the development and choices of a political line were therefore coherent with such premises.’ The Resistance was ‘limited from the start by its political line and by the immaturity of the consciousness of the proletariat which – willingly or more often than not otherwise – to varying degrees made this line its own’ (pp. 155–7).
The Resistance, which Anfossi sees as just a part of a Europe-wide largely spontaneous opposition ‘from below’, was by no means the determining factor behind the collapse of Fascism in Italy. Not only was Mussolini’s fall decided by the monarchy and the army, with big capital withdrawing its support from the ailing Fascist party from 1943, it is not even possible to speak of a consciously mature workers’ movement during the Resistance in Italy.
Anfossi warns against an essentially political reading of events during 1943–45 in Italy. He insists that the driving force behind class struggle and strikes in those years was not anti-Fascism or national liberation, but the boss and the factory, how to survive on an ever-decreasing pay, and how to procure food. He concedes that the strikes of March 1944 were clearly more political in nature, but this was partly due to the work carried out by the PCI, which meant that they took on an anti-German character and therefore linked in with the strivings of the anti-Fascist forces for national unity.
Although the massive strikes of 1944 have been hailed as a success because they showed the growing ‘maturity’ of the working class, their ultimately disappointing outcome was because the workers recognised that their daily struggle went beyond the programme of the strikes’ organisers, and they viewed both the Nazis and the Italian ruling class as their enemy. Although the PCI and other anti-Fascist Resistance forces were unable to meet the challenge of this spontaneous action ‘from below’, the Italian workers’ movement was unable to ‘go beyond the factory gates’ (p. 43). This was not merely due to the obstacles posed by Stalinism, as the problem ultimately relates to the immature consciousness of the working class.
Anfossi sees the partisan guerrillas as the driving force behind the Resistance, but warns that they again reflected the general characteristics of the Resistance. Their members mainly joined spontaneously and for the most diverse reasons, and they were from all walks of life. Militarily, the Resistance was ‘totally subject to the requirements of war and to the political needs of the Anglo-American Command’. In general, partisans were organised in squads, and numerical estimates vary between 1,500 and 9,000 individuals at the outset, growing to between 50,000 to 70,000 in 1944, and approximately 100,000 by the end. Of these, Anfossi calculates that about 50 per cent were grouped in Communist brigades, and 20 per cent in Actionist brigades, whilst the remaining 30 per cent comprised squads of various allegiances. Partisan squads never reflected a ‘clear political choice’, but were loosely aligned with one particular party. The Allies favoured this, for they never envisaged any major military rôle for groups which could prove difficult to control. Although a genuine partisan war was waged, Anfossi reiterates that ‘the war was won by the Allied forces, and the contribution of the partisan forces was absolutely secondary’. The Allies did not stifle the potential of the partisan Resistance, because it was ‘conceived as a subordinate to the Anglo-American imperialist army, and became the military arm of the politics of national unity to free the country from the Germans and include Italy in the Western bloc’ (pp. 56–8).
The partisan formations were brought under one command in 1944, both in the name of patriotism, and to prevent fraternisation between partisans and German soldiers. Allied control prevented them from acquiring any military significance, and the PCI disarmed them politically. The party’s constant efforts to subordinate class struggle to the patriotic war for national liberation meant that – save for very few exceptions – the partisans merely replicated bourgeois relations and excluded any concrete control by the masses over the territories liberated in Italy during 1944.
The PCI’s rôle in containing and channelling the radical demands of the working class cannot be underestimated. The various stages of this party’s policy have already been outlined in this journal (see Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no 4, Spring 1995). What is important to emphasise is that the PCI’s attempt to become, in Togliatti’s words, ‘an Italian national party’ (p. 82), opposing any struggle aiming ‘to bring about any social or political transformation in a Socialist or Communist sense’ but ‘fighting for national liberation and for a progressive democratic regime’ (p. 80), precluded any other outcome for the Resistance. Exploiting its prestige within the working class as the party enjoying Stalin’s approval, ruthlessly expelling and persecuting all opposition, using the pretext of the Allies’ presence to rule out a priori any alternative course, and continuously promoting class collaboration, the PCI ‘turned into a mass all-class party, a party of government’ (p. 82), and subordinated all revolutionary demands to the reconstruction of the Italian state. The Italian proletariat was given the rôle of ‘the national subject, the backbone of the democratic bourgeois reconstruction’, able ‘to overcome any selfishness in its demands and its specific interests, so as to make its contribution to the needs of the fatherland in difficult times’ (p. 165), and to help restore Italy to its rightful position in the family of democratic nations.
Anfossi sees the Resistance as the spontaneous intervention of the Italian masses, the unifying character of which is – in the last analysis – a strong social and ethical protest against injustice, rather than a patriotic war of national liberation. He feels that these values must be understood and emphasised, as opposed to the mythologisation and cynical exploitation of the Resistance, most notably by the Italian left, for the purposes of the continuity of bourgeois rule, if we are to understand these crucial events in Italian history.
Notwithstanding the many valuable insights of this work and its various undoubtedly valid arguments about the Resistance, Anfossi leaves some crucial questions unresolved, and the issue of the immature consciousness of the Italian working class requires a much more detailed analysis. He says that the Italian proletariat was never able in a widespread sense to extend its struggles beyond the factories, and its demands became increasingly economic in nature. But is this a sign of its ‘immaturity’, or the effect of the workers’ declining political horizons resulting from the PCI’s increasingly evident renunciation of any political leadership, especially after the end of the war? It could be argued that Anfossi confuses the effect with the cause, as if he actually expected – in line with his party’s recent and rather selective embracing of aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought – to find a class fully developed for a revolutionary struggle in the absence of any revolutionary vanguard, nay, often despite the conscious political betrayals of its supposed vanguard party.
Guerriero and Rondinelli review the history and vicissitudes of Milan’s Volante Rossa – Martiri Partigiani (Red Flying Squad – Partisan Martyrs), a name deriving from the term used during the partisan war in Italy to denote small squads based in the mountains which carried out brief incursions onto the plains. The Volante Rossa was formed towards the end of 1945 by Giulio Paggio, known as ‘Lieutenant Alvaro’, himself a former member of a volante rossa and later of a partisan brigade, so that members could help each other, or ‘find work for the unemployed ... and take part, always united, in all kinds of patriotic events’ (p. 12).
The group came to be comprised of up to about 50 men, mainly ex-partisan fighters, all of them working-class members of the PCI, from the many large and medium-sized factories which made Milan, with Turin and Genoa, part of Italy’s ‘industrial triangle’. Here, in the first three years after the end of the war, worked highly militant and radicalised workers, almost all unionised and politically quite conscious. The story of the Volante Rossa is the story of partisans and Communists who were reluctant and even unwilling to lay down their arms and put an end to the struggle that had been waged during the war.
The authors convincingly show that the Volante Rossa was no mere anachronism, no wishful thinking or nostalgia on the part of few men who simply could not come to terms with the fact that the ‘victory’ over the enemy did not become a victory for the Italian workers over their rulers. The bourgeoisie swiftly regained its control when the war officially ended in April 1945. To add insult to injury, a large number of former Fascists, from low-ranking officers to men responsible for the persecution, torture and killing of partisans and workers, were often given prominent positions, and as early as 22 June 1945 an amnesty had been granted to Fascist prisoners, which reduced by one-third their ‘political’ sentences, whilst absolving altogether those responsible for ‘non-political’ offences, such as organising Fascist squads, marching on Rome, and collaboration. PCI leader Togliatti aided this process, arguing in parliament in February 1949 that such men ‘had nevertheless a right to several mitigating circumstances, above all if we consider that we were then trying to provide the widest possible basis for the new republican state’ (p. 19). Furthermore, the Italian right revived, the Movimento Sociale Italiano was legally formed in 1946, and elements in the higher echelons of the army and the carabinieri, the secret services and the police, aided by big business finance and the American secret service, provoked the working class with the aim of destabilising the country.
Unsurprisingly, despite the best efforts and propaganda by the left parties, the amnesty did nothing to calm the harsh protests of the partisans and the public. The partisans’ numerous spontaneous reactions in those years were to prove a thorn in the side of the PCI leadership and its allies. The years following the end of the war were characterised by an extremely confrontational and highly charged climate. Faced with attacks from the right and a severe economic crisis, with rising unemployment, inflation and grossly inadequate wage levels, the working class responded with an almost uninterrupted series of strikes, demonstrations, occupations, meetings and protests. And workers were simply not ready to resume their jobs under bosses and managers who, but a few months before, were fighting in the opposite camp.
The Volante Rossa, far from being an extremist grouping involved in terrorism or armed actions divorced from the working class, invariably carried out its work within the ranks of the Milanese workers, and was highly respected by them. Its members adopted a uniform and distinctive insignia, and became highly visible participants on workers’ marches, demonstrations and protests. Acting as a workers’ defence force, the Volante Rossa undertook various tasks, including stewarding, acting as a rapid response unit, and intimidating and attacking Fascists or Fascist collaborators. The group came to be regarded as a force to be reckoned with, and was to be found in practically every action taken by Milanese workers during that time, until the fateful date of 27 January 1949, when two murders were attributed to the Volante Rossa, despite the style of action and choice of victims being atypical of the group. A highly publicised trial lasting until 1951 brought about the group’s demise. Although Giulio Paggio and a few of the group’s founders fled abroad, most members received prison sentences of varying severity.
The authors and some surviving members of the group do, however, readily recognise that the Volante Rossa had effectively ceased to exist by the summer of 1948, after the left’s crushing defeat in the April election – the Christian Democrats (DC) won 48.5 per cent of the vote, as against 31 per cent for the PSI/PCI Fronte Popolare – the end of the government of ‘national unity’, and the failed attempt on Togliatti’s life on 14 July 1948, with the spontaneous working-class rising being effectively contained by the PCI leadership. One Volante Rossa member bitterly remembers how, in the aftermath of the attempt on Togliatti, everyone was ready to rise in Milan, and the city could have easily been taken without much difficulty, given the relative lack of organisation of the police and the weaponry at the Volante’s disposal. However, the PCI leadership wanted to avoid the outlawing of the party which would follow an armed insurrection. The leaders of the PCI branch in Milan intercepted the Volante men, and they were, as a Volante Rossa member said, ‘swiftly stopped’:
Nevertheless, the relationship between the Volante Rossa and the PCI was a troubled one, and it is more plausible that its apparent toleration by the party was a recognition of the group’s high prestige amongst Milanese workers and its excellent local experience and organisational skills. This relationship can, however, be appreciated only in the wider context of the PCI’s own national and international policy. The Volante Rossa was but another casualty of the course on which Togliatti and the party’s leadership had embarked prior to the end of the war, and of its logical consequences.
However, it is too easy to fall into the trap of cynicism with the benefit of hindsight. For the various reasons explained in the books reviewed here, we cannot doubt the extremely high level of radicalisation of sections of the Italian working class in the first postwar years, or the sincerity and commitment of all those involved. What is all the more poignant is the crucial rôle played by the PCI – thanks to the enormous prestige it enjoyed amongst the workers – in thwarting any revolutionary outcome and in bringing its constituency into line, with its repeated calls for discipline, respect for ‘democratic and republican legality’, consideration for the PCI’s constitutional partners, and so on.
In this light, it is not surprising that the partisan experience could not be absorbed into the party. So, from being ‘political immature’ individuals with a ‘low ideological level’ (p. 107), the partisans effectively became an enemy of the party. Togliatti argued as early as August 1945 that, to avoid possible provocations, the party ‘should take a firm stand against any surviving partisan organisations’. In September 1946, Togliatti told a closed party meeting that they were agent provocateurs within the party. They may have had ‘an honourable past’ and ‘actively participated in Communist organisations’, but had ‘now lost all links with the proletarian vanguard’, and had ‘become enslaved to foreign ideologies, if not servants of our worst enemies’ (pp. 112–3).
And despite lively dissent at grassroots level, in a situation of worsening provocations and defeats suffered by workers in the factories, the PCI succeeded in containing the discontent and channelling working-class activity into national reconstruction.
With Tom Behan’s book, we continue to analyse events in Milan, moving to the inner-city area of Porta Romana, perhaps more representative of the working-class composition of the city, characterised by the presence of numerous small and medium-sized factories and by a significant commuting workforce from the surrounding rural areas, than was the case of Sesto San Giovanni, the stronghold of the Volante Rossa.
Although one of the book’s strengths resides in the meticulous research carried out into the Porta Romana factories of the time and in the detailed recollections obtained from a large numbers of workers and political activists, another must surely lie in its in-depth analysis of the politics of the PCI in the years around 1945, and their impact on the Milanese working class. But Behan’s conclusions are indeed not limited to Porta Romana and are representative in many respects of Italy as a whole, and therefore constitute a very valuable contribution to any Marxist analysis of the political course embraced by the PCI, on the basis of ‘doppiezza’, that is, Togliatti’s policy of the ‘doppio binario’ (double track), or, more generally, of the Italian application of Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in stages’. Rightly, Behan recognises in this policy an ‘attempt to deal with an irresolvable contradiction’:
Behan provides a good account of the evolution of the PCI, which by 1943 had moved ‘from a commitment to revolution, to calling for class collaboration with the aim of creating a “progressive democracy”, a move which occurred without large numbers of workers becoming aware of it’ (p. 35). This was bound to cause disagreements once the party began to recruit workers, who often believed that the party had a hidden agenda: many workers thus continued to believe that the PCI was striving for revolution ‘as it had been in the years 1921–25’ (p. 37).
Towards the end of September 1943, the PCI issued a public appeal to the Italian people, in which the way forward was indicated as the conquest of national independence. So, the fight against Fascism and Nazism was to take the form of a struggle for national liberation, with Socialism receding ever further into the distant future. True to Stalin’s stages scheme, in Italy the fight was to proceed through the establishment of a bourgeois democratic regime. A Socialist society would eventually appear, not through class struggle, but by widespread national consensus. Even members of the PCI leadership found this hard to accept, and although this never led to an explicitly organised opposition, it is worth noting that the support for Badoglio, ordered from Moscow and left to Togliatti to sell to his comrades in Italy, actually caused the internal appointment of Mauro Scoccimarro as party leader in 1943, instead of Togliatti. Together with a number of earlier and later episodes, this also shows that, contrary to what many still maintain today, the PCI was at the time far from being a ‘monolith’.
Faced with a swift growth in membership and with the difficulties in controlling spontaneous protests and actions by radicalised workers, which were to continue with the strikes of December 1943 and March 1944, the PCI leadership embarked on an exercise of damage limitation. So, in his Instructions to All Members and to All Party Cadres of 6 June 1944, Togliatti stated: ‘Always remember that the aim of the insurrection is not the imposition of political and Socialist transformations in the Socialist or Communist sense. Its aim is national liberation and the destruction of Fascism.’ The party’s deputy leader, Luigi Longo, was even more soothing at the Milan conference of the Insurrectionary Triumvirate in November 1944, telling his members that they were ‘fighting... not for the dictatorship of the proletariat but for a progressive democracy’ which would not radically upset ‘the principle of exploitative capitalist property relations’ (pp. 79–80).
Strikes broke out in Milan at the start of 1944 independently of the PCI, thus confirming that radicalised workers were increasingly taking the initiative. This part explains why the PCI organised on a much wider scale for the March 1944 strikes. Despite their lack of success, these strikes saw concerted action between workers and partisans, and gave evidence of both political and economic demands. Strikers also asked for greater military support, which was provided by partisan forces, but not by the PCI’s military formations in Milan.
At the beginning of 1945, faced with hopes for the imminent ‘liberation’ and an armed insurrection, the PCI leadership had to act again. So, Pietro Secchia sent a directive to all PCI Federations, disclosing that the party had decided to propose to the Upper Italian National Liberation Committee that partisan formations be transformed into regular units of the Italian army. As this was an internal document, Behan is justified in pointing out that it showed the party’s real approach, and that the PCI was now supporting a discredited state militarily, as well as politically (pp. 121–2).
In the aftermath of the war, the PCI ‘doppiezza’ was used in an attempt, on the one hand, to assure the middle classes of their position and privileges, whilst, on the other, to pacify radicalised workers who expected rather more from the ‘liberation’. The PCI leadership began to appeal to workers to increase their productivity and help rebuild their fatherland. Behan correctly emphasises the fundamental flaw of the PCI’s economic programme. The PCI’s attempts to persuade the middle classes of its good intentions failed, it could offer little to workers, and its ‘doppiezza’ demoralised its members with this wait-and-see attitude, as they were to remain passive whilst waiting for the order to rise (or for Godot, as one could more truthfully say). Over the next three years, the PCI could be described as ‘a weak leadership and a confident rank and file, out of step with the leadership’s line’, constituting ‘an unstable and volatile mixture ... although differences only tended to emerge in brief spontaneous explosions. The use of terms such as “infantile over-confidence” was to become quite common in descriptions of the rank and file, although as time went by the most common term became “lack of consciousness”.’ (p. 170)
After 1945, both the right and the PCI itself placed great emphasis on alleged attempts at provocation, with a view to a possible coup or as an excuse for the government to ban left parties or implement repressive measures. It should be noted that huge amounts of weapons were still held by the partisans and others in the factories and elsewhere, with estimates of up to 30 cannons, about 1,000 machine guns, over 40,000 automatic and non-automatic rifles and revolvers, close to 50,000 grenades, nearly 600 tons of explosives and no less than five million rounds of ammunition! Whilst the Greek civil war, as well as the recent Gladio discovery, lends some justification to these fears, the situation was far from certain. Behan argues that if the PCI had really thought it to be the case, ‘they could probably have organised a clandestine military structure, something which never existed in any real sense’ (p. 291).
Faced with the rank and file’s increased militancy and with the objective economic problems in Italy at the time, the party had to decide where its allegiances lay. It is in this light that we should see the PCI’s renewed denunciations of ‘agent provocateurs’, ‘Trotskyists’, ‘outside agitators’, etc., as well as its rôle in causing the fall of the only government headed by a former partisan commander and leader of the left-wing Action Party, Ferruccio Parri, in November 1945, in favour of a new administration headed by the DC.
Evidence that the Italian working class was perhaps not so politically immature comes with two separate events: the reaction to prefect Troilo’s dismissal in 1947 and the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948. Behan devotes an extremely detailed analysis to them, especially to the latter, chronicling each day of the uprising in Milan and other Italian cities. We will have to limit ourselves to the main events here.
By 1947, Troilo was ‘the last “political” prefect, that is, someone appointed by the CLNAI following Liberation, and his selection as prefect [of Milan] clearly reflected his activities as a partisan leader’ (p. 206). Troilo had been dismissed because he refused to repress a general strike that erupted in Milan in response to the sacking of workers. But, as one worker commented, the sacking was no mere disciplinary measure, ‘it was an act against the Resistance’ (p. 206). His removal met immediately with a general strike and the resignation in solidarity of no less than 156 mayors in the region, including the mayor of Milan. Armed workers took over the prefettura building and other strategic places, and factory strikes ensued. Here we clearly see a spontaneous yet concerted action, which surely cannot be defined as limited to economic demands. Whilst PCI local cadres did join the protest, party leaders were busy finalising a compromise, with which Troilo would be temporarily reinstated until a suitable replacement could be found. It was largely thanks to the PCI’s pleadings with workers and partisan protesters that order could be restored.
On 14 July 1948, Togliatti was shot three times outside the parliament in Rome. As soon as the news spread, the entire country came to a halt. Transport was completely paralysed, telephone exchanges were taken over, armed occupations of factories took place, and weapons were retrieved and prepared. All this was entirely spontaneous, as the PCI leadership did not issue any directive, save for a call for the government to resign, and an appeal for all protest to remain within the bounds of legality. However, the prime minister, De Gasperi, refused to resign, so the PCI leadership went into permanent session, to decide what to do and gain time without committing themselves.
Although the situation in Milan at first appeared less eventful than in Genoa, Turin or Venice, it was here that workers proved most reluctant to end the strike. Perhaps uniquely, in Milan the PCI, the Socialist Party and the CGIL union federation set up ‘a kind of united front’ (p22). The masses proclaimed a general strike, and stayed away from the factories. The uprising lasted three days. From Behan’s collected data, workers’ confidence increased throughout this period. However, the PCI and CGIL leaders were working frantically to end the strike, without making any further demands and even giving justifications verging on the ridiculous: an end of the protest was necessary ‘to get more precise information on the situation, and to be able to judge things in greater detail’: the PCI and CGIL soon ‘engineered a return to work with no concessions having been made by the government, despite the fact that the strike movement had taken control from the government temporarily in some Northern cities, without even having any organised strategy or plan.’ (pp. 231–3)
It is true that, in the main, workers supported the idea of an armed insurrection ‘without serious consideration of the precise tactics and strategy necessary’ (p. 234). But, as already noted, their opponent’s resources and strength were far from formidable: ‘during the afternoon and evening of 14 July the state ceased to exercise authority in several towns and cities in Northern Italy ... the very strength of such a spontaneous and uncoordinated movement suggests that a planned and coordinated insurrection stood a good chance of success in many areas’ (p. 235).
Of course, this is not to say that revolution was a concrete possibility for Italy at that juncture. The Allied presence in Italy must be considered, as well as the dominance of Stalin over the international movement. It is also true that the PCI was a mass party with over two million members in 1948, but the political allegiances, let alone consciousness, of many of its members were highly debatable. But, argues Behan, in ‘1917 the Bolsheviks only enjoyed 25 per cent of the votes over the country as a whole ... what gave them greater support was the process of the revolution itself and its demands’ (p. 235). Moreover, the possibility for a left bloc in Italy did seem to exist at the time. Crucially, however, what separated the Bolsheviks from the PCI leadership was the latter’s explicit unwillingness to become the vanguard organisation of the working class, to promote class consciousness and support it in its struggles.
The left has long been divided along two lines: many argue that the balance of forces was so unfavourable, nationally and internationally, that a PCI-led insurrection in Italy was doomed from the start, and would have resulted in the establishment of a right-wing reactionary regime. Behan is more open on this question, and points to the doubtful readiness of the Allies to engage in a civil war in Italy, particularly with a partisan war waging in Greece, and the possibility that the insurrection might spread to France. Some of Behan’s views are validated by Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s findings, but the author is nevertheless correct in advancing a different scenario, one which does not simply limit itself to regard the status quo as the best that could be obtained given the ‘objective conditions’, a term to which the left is sometimes too fond to resort.
In his conclusions, Behan differs from Anfossi, for whom the ‘immature consciousness’ of the Italian proletariat was the determining factor. Even if it might be true that Italian workers ‘never went beyond factory gates’, and Anfossi may be justified in calling for a relationship between party and class consciousness more along the lines of Luxemburg’s ideas on the subject, in the sense that consciousness cannot be created by the party alone, Luxemburg never argued that the class can attain full Communist consciousness without the guidance of its vanguard organisation in an organic interchange. The PCI never wanted to be this, so to expect a mature Italian proletariat at that time displays a serious lack of understanding of revolutionary Marxism.
Finally, with Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s work, we add another piece to the puzzle, and look at the development and decisions of the PCI in the 1930s and 1940s from an international perspective. They were able to consult some of the documents and files recently made available with the opening of the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet Communist Party, and whilst some important evidence remains shrouded in official secrecy, they nevertheless believe that a much more informed opinion can now be formulated of the relationship between Moscow and the leadership of the PCI.
But far from evolving a new analysis from the new information, the authors, as if yearning for the certainties of yore, resort to the tired old nostrums of the Cold War:
The ‘Salerno switch’ followed the Soviet recognition of Badoglio’s government in March 1944, and was initiated by Togliatti on his return from Moscow. Traditionally, historians have been divided on this issue, with many maintaining that this political turn was closely linked with Soviet foreign policy, and others in the official Communist camp seeing it as a move by Togliatti towards greater autonomy from Moscow. In fact, despite Togliatti’s claim to the contrary, the switch was the direct result of a meeting held on 4 March 1944 between Togliatti and Dimitrov in Moscow, before the former departed to Italy. This was not a policy specific to Italy, and as early as 1941 Togliatti, as a Comintern leader, was directing other European Communist parties to unite with various national forces against Nazi Germany, and, after the fall of Fascism in Italy, in his radio broadcasts from Moscow he pointed to the need ‘to define the conditions on which the PCI and other anti-Fascist parties could become part of Badoglio’s government (pp. 58–9).
The real question is why Togliatti and Dimitrov opposed collaboration with Badoglio and the Italian king in early 1944, only to return to supporting them. The anti-Fascist front had been largely favourable to Badoglio, but events after the fall of Fascism led to his being criticised by anti-Fascists. Left to their own devices, the PCI leaders stayed with the anti-Fascist front and supported the formation of an alternative government. Togliatti and Dimitrov sought Stalin’s approval, but he made it clear that Moscow’s original support for Badoglio still stood as Italy had to present a strong and united national front, and so they dutifully lined up behind the general’s government.
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky consider that Moscow’s recognition of Badoglio permitted Soviet influence in Italy to grow, as the PCI, like other European Communist parties, would be able to make electoral gains, and take the lead of wide left-wing blocs, thus both creating tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, and keeping in check any ‘premature’ mass rising. They reject the idea that Togliatti’s policies after 1944 aimed simultaneously at resisting the division of Europe into two antagonistic camps and at promoting national unity to create a peaceful, prosperous and independent Italy, and claim that the PCI worked within the governments of national unity in order ‘not to reform capitalist society, but to conquer new positions and achieve power’ (p. 83), in accordance with Soviet strategy. They insist that these aims were fully endorsed by the PCI’s leaders, and were not imposed upon them.
The PCI expected to do well in the 1948 elections. With its allies in the left bloc, victory was guaranteed, and, so long as the Americans did not forcibly exclude the PCI from government, power was just around the corner. Its expectations were unfoundedly high, as the left-wing parties had been excluded from the government in May 1947, the PCI was unable to conclude a trade agreement with Moscow, and De Gasperi, the DC leader, had returned from Washington with the promise of Marshall Aid, which gave his party much credence.
Moscow had responded to the Marshall Plan by accelerating the ‘sovietisation’ of Eastern Europe, and by tightening its grip on the official Communist movement through the newly-formed Cominform. In the new reality of the division of the world into two opposing camps, the European parties were disingenuously condemned for their line of national unity, and they duly adopted a strong anti-American stance and a more militant posture. In October 1947, Togliatti attacked his co-leaders for wavering and lacking in initiative, openly recognising that an insurrection could not be ruled out, although the headstrong Pietro Secchia was told by Stalin that a civil war in Italy would be inappropriate just now. Stalin reprimanded Secchia, but (as Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky insist), always keen to keep his options open, ordered his appointment as the PCI’s second-in-command.
With the withdrawal of the last of the Allied troops from Italy in December 1947 and the elections looming, tensions rose between the two camps. Truman expected civil war to erupt in Italy, but he opposed any US intervention. At most, military force could be used ‘only in Sicily and Sardinia, and only upon the request of the legal government, taking it for granted that Northern Italy would have remained in Communist hands’ (p. 231). Nevertheless, the PCI began to prepare for armed action to defend its hoped-for electoral victory against US interference. In March 1948, Togliatti secretly met Kostylev, the Soviet ambassador, in Rome, and, whilst presenting a fairly optimistic picture, he argued that resistance in Italy could precipitate ‘a great war’ between the Soviet and Western blocs. Togliatti was told that the PCI could respond militarily if its offices were attacked, but taking power through an armed insurrection was definitely ruled out (p. 234).
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky explain this by pointing to the specific situation of Italy within the totality of East-West relations. For them, the fact that the PCI was willing to resort to armed action to enforce an electoral victory invalidates the traditional interpretation of its ‘doppiezza’, and proves that its real roots are to be found in the ‘profound contrast between the necessity to present itself as a national party in defence of the interests of wide strata of Italian society, and its rôle as an integral part of the international Communist movement dominated by the USSR’ (p. 236).
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky are correct to cast aspersions upon the Togliatti myth, and to emphasise his subordination to Moscow. But their methodology is wrong. Togliatti, along with Thorez, Pollitt and the rest, were committed to collaborating with non-Stalinist forces in a quest for national reconstruction because Stalin did not want their parties to seize power. Stalin wanted influence in Italy, not revolution. Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ led to domestic patriotism growing in Stalinist parties, and this could lead them to adapt too much for Stalin’s liking to non-Stalinist forces at home. There would necessarily be tension between Togliatti’s allegiance to Moscow and his activities as an Italian politician. The shift of the official Communist movement to a more radical stance after 1947 was not a return to a long-lost revolutionary standpoint, but an attempt by Moscow to restrict the influence of the USA in world and especially European politics.
The study of Italy during this crucial period is bound to continue. As it is, the books by Anfossi, Guerriero and Rondinelli and Behan are worthy contributions to the debate. Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s offering, however, belongs to an historiographical school that has long been discredited, and this greatly reduces its value for the historian.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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From the Other Shore
André Liebich
From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921
Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1997, pp. 476, £29.95
From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921
Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1997, pp. 476, £29.95
THIS book is a real labour of love. There can be very few people who would spend a great deal of time and effort chronicling the fate of the exiled remnants of a defeated and persecuted party, but that is what Professor Liebich has done with this most valuable account of the Mensheviks after their enforced exile in 1921.
Readers will probably be familiar with the approach elaborated by the Mensheviks’ leader Yuli Martov, which condemned post-1917 Bolshevism as an authoritarian utopian Socialist leadership coming to power in a backward country in which Socialism was impossible to construct, whilst refusing to side with right-wing attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime; and with the subsequent development of the post-Martov Menshevik leaders, with Rafael Abramovich becoming a Cold War anti-Communist, and Fedor Dan becoming a virtual apologist for Stalinism. However, readers may well be unaware of many of the other factors that Liebich outlines, such as the fact that the Mensheviks’ internal regime was fairly authoritarian and at times intolerant, and that their recruitment regulations did not permit people from outwith the Soviet Union or their own offspring to join, which effectively doomed the party to extinction.One important issue which Liebich brings to the fore is the way in which the Mensheviks revised post festum their history and analyses in order to present the development of their party as distinct and divorced from the dread influence of Bolshevism from the start, a mirror image of official Soviet historiography. Hence, the fuzzy differentiation between the two halves of Russian Social Democracy, the policy concurrences and personnel interchanges, prior to 1917 were subsequently reinterpreted as an irreconcilable and unbridgeable gulf from 1903. Similarly, the Mensheviks’ hesitant and inconclusive analyses of the great changes in the Soviet Union in 1927–30 were forgotten as the Stalinist socio-economic formation was subsequently seen – either positively or negatively – as the inevitable product of Bolshevism.
The Mensheviks maintained a sustained appraisal of Soviet affairs, and Liebich outlines their critique of the New Economic Policy, their following of the leadership struggle in the Soviet Communist Party, their critique of Stalin’s collectivisation and industrialisation schemes, and their accounts of the Menshevik Trial of 1931, the Moscow Trials, the 1936 constitution, and so on. He describes the Mensheviks’ relations with other Socialist parties, comparing their lack of success with the insular and indifferent British Labour Party leaders with the support they received in France and Germany. He also shows how the Mensheviks participated in the theoretical debates in the Socialist movement, and how the split between Dan and Abramovich was influenced and exacerbated by the rise of pro-Soviet tendencies, especially around Otto Bauer, and the emergence of theories of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Liebich also investigates the fate of the Mensheviks in exile in the USA. Dan’s minority wing, which split away in 1941, worked for pro-Soviet publications, whilst Abramovich’s majority aligned themselves with the predominant anti-Communist forces within the US labour movement, and subsequently concentrated upon academic work on the Soviet Union; not, it is worth noting, that this prevented them from being investigated as potential subversives by the FBI into the 1950s.
Noting that some Mensheviks considered that by 1930 their position on the Soviet Union was quite close to Trotsky’s, Liebich touches briefly upon the possibility of some sort of radical anti-Stalinist unity emerging in the 1930s. Nonetheless, this unity could not be forged. It was not so much that Trotsky, as Liebich correctly notes, refused to cooperate with them (although his programmatic call by the late 1930s for the legalisation in the Soviet Union of all parties accepting the soviet system implied the retrospective rehabilitation of all but the most right-wing Mensheviks, and the possibility of some sort of cooperation with them, at least with those who still adhered to Martov’s line), but the fact that many Mensheviks changed as the 1930s drew by. Liebich shows how the evolution of Dan and Abramovich drew them away from Martov’s line (although, rather confusingly, he also says that Dan kept to it, compare pages 84 and 198). Yet surely the great changes in the Soviet Union, with the creation in the 1930s of a huge working class through the building of a massive industrial base and the collectivisation of the peasantry, meant that the objective preconditions for a move towards Socialism now existed in the Soviet Union, and that Martov’s line could then have been updated to coincide with the programmes of various dissident Communists, Trotsky included, rather than rejected.
More perhaps could have been said about the relationship between the general trends within Social Democracy and the Mensheviks’ political evolution. The latter was most clearly exemplified by the repudiation of Martov’s line by both wings of the party. Dan’s pro-Soviet faction paralleled the left-wing Social Democrats who were willing to overlook or even justify the unpleasant nature of Stalin’s regime in their admiration of Soviet economic growth and in their quest to build a broad front against Hitlerite Germany, and whom after 1945 sailed too close to Stalinism in their desire to find a counterweight to capitalism and its apologists in the labour movement. Abramovich’s anti-Communist faction paralleled the mainstream Social Democrats who concluded that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would only end in tears, and that the sole way forward was through modifying capitalism, refining bourgeois society, rather than abolishing it.
Abramovich and his comrades were not sui generis in this respect. Many left-wingers fell into despair in the 1930s and especially after 1945, giving up on any transformative concept of Socialism, substituting for it at the most piecemeal reformism, and jumping with almost indecent haste into the clutches of the Campaign for Cultural Freedom and Cold War hysteria. Cold War Social Democracy did not need the Mensheviks to kick it off, it had long been hostile to the Soviet Union to the extent that it would line up with its own capitalist class against it, rather than take an independent class approach. As for the influence of the Mensheviks upon Western and especially US Sovietology in the postwar period, although their empirical and interpretative analyses were and remain eminently valuable, their political approach tended merely to add grist to the Cold War mill, and we had to await for a new generation of scholars to arise in the late 1960s before a more objective approach to the Soviet experience emerged.
In conclusion, one can only repeat what Isaac Deutscher said about ‘the long melancholy story’ of the Mensheviks in exile:
‘Thus Menshevism has ended its long career, driven into two ideological impasses: in one we saw the conscience-stricken Dan humbling himself before Stalinism; in the other we heard Abramovich praying for the world’s salvation by the Pentagon. What an epilogue this is to the story of Martov’s party; and how Martov’s ghost must be weeping over it.’ (Ironies of History, p. 225)
Minor points apart, this is an excellent book, and anyone interested in the history of the Socialist movement, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union should make the effort to read it.
Paul Flewers
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History of the CPGB (1941–1951)
Noreen Branson
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1941–1951
Lawrence and Wishart, London 1997, pp. 262
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1941–1951
Lawrence and Wishart, London 1997, pp. 262
THE Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920 for the explicit purpose of overthrowing capitalism and instituting Socialism. Even of late, when its political programme was openly reformist, it still called for the Socialist transformation of Britain. So it is an irony of history that the CPGB considered its finest hour to be during the Second World War, or at least the period after the Soviet Union joined the fighting in June 1941. This was the time when it stood closest to the ruling class, opposing working-class militancy, and supporting a coalition government led by the arch-Tory Winston Churchill. This book, the fourth volume of the history of the CPGB, covers the period when Stalin became a national hero in Britain, and the party bathed in his reflected glory. It also covers the gloomy years of the Cold War, when Stalin became the devil incarnate, and the CPGB was obliged to operate in the shadow of his infamy.
Noreen Branson presents a superficial and sanitised account. She is economical with the truth. It’s not that she tells porkies à la the History of the CPSU(b) (Short Course) or James Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito, but many issues are only lightly touched upon or are glossed over altogether.We cannot find in this volume any evidence of the CPGB’s vindictiveness towards left-wingers who refused to obey the strictures of the wartime union sacrée. Perhaps Branson feels that others have given sufficient publicity to, say, William Wainwright’s Clear Out Hitler’s Agents that she need not raise the matter. It’s not a minor issue, as the CPGB spent a lot of effort harassing recalcitrant Socialists, and in other parts of Europe this sort of mentality actually led to the Stalinists killing their left-wing rivals.
As for another embarrassing episode during the war, Branson does rather sheepishly admit that the Daily Worker ‘went so far as to suggest’ that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ‘would expedite Japanese surrender and thus save “valuable lives”’ (pp. 99–100). The actual words of the Daily Worker on 7 August 1945 were: ‘The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan.’ Not one or two, but their ‘substantial’ use; which represents a substantial distortion on the part of Branson.
The unsuspecting reader will not gather from this account that the CPGB maintained its hostility to working-class militancy for two whole years after the Second World War finished. It’s interesting what a little research will reveal. Coming up against a few contrary delegates, General Secretary Harry Pollitt warned the party’s 1945 congress:
‘You are either in favour or not of the line that has been expounded here of mass strikes as the only way to realise the workers’ demands, and if you are, I warn you you are playing with fire that can help to lose the peace and reduce this country to ashes ... You can get a strike in the coalfields tomorrow if you want it. Will it advance the working-class movement of this country, or the perspective of our nation being a first-rate nation in the family of united nations?’ (World News and Views, 8 December 1945)
True to their leader’s proclamation, the Stalinists who ran the Scottish region of the miners’ union made no protest when the Minister of Fuel and Power shut down Fauldhouse pit in April 1946 after an unofficial strike, putting 370 miners on the dole. A strike in Grimethorpe led to the whole of Yorkshire coming out in the summer of 1947. Arthur Horner, a CPGB Executive Committee member and the miners’ union General Secretary, said that the strikers were ‘holding the country to ransom’ (The Times, 9 September 1947). Shortly before, on 7 May, the Daily Worker delicately referred to ‘substitute winders’ during a winders’ strike in Durham and Lancashire. Such was the spirit of cooperation of the Stalinists in the miners’ union leadership that they continued to work closely with the National Coal Board and the government after the CPGB belatedly turned to support workers’ militancy when Moscow called for a harder line in late 1947.
Branson takes many of the party’s contemporary rationalisations at face value, betraying either naiveté or disguised disingenuousness. Are we really to assume that Pollitt did not recognise the reactionary nature of Clement Attlee’s government until 1948 (p. 157), or was it Moscow’s harder stance in late 1947 that made him think again? And as with the CPGB at the time, Branson makes much of the voting figures at the TUC and Labour Party conferences, as if these block votes wielded by union bureaucrats are anything but the vaguest reflections of working-class sentiments. She talks of the ‘hundreds of millions’ of people who signed the Stalinists’ international peace appeal during 1950, forgetting to add that every adult in the Soviet bloc was a signatory, showing, as Fernando Claudín put it, ‘the same impressive efficiency and unanimity with which they voted for the single lists at elections’ (The Communist Movement, p. 578).Branson devotes a few pages to the CPGB’s anti-racist work, but she refrains from mentioning her party’s attitude to the German people, who, in an imitation of Hitlerite racial stereotyping, were held en bloc responsible for the Nazis. The Daily Worker said on 3 August 1945 that reparations, which hit the German workers more than any other class, were fair: ‘The German people have to pay for their support of the Nazi plunderers.’ Nor does Branson mention her party’s campaign against Poles in Britain. Horner’s pamphlet The Communist Party and the Coal Crisis warned: ‘We will not allow the importation of foreign – Polish, Italian or even Irish – labour to stifle the demands of the British people to have decent conditions in British mines.’ And as he fulminated against his members’ legitimate – and necessarily unofficial – action over pay and conditions, he threatened the government with a strike over foreigners, saying that it ‘might get Poles or displaced persons but not coal’ (The Times, 24 February 1947). The Stalinist-controlled Civil Service Clerical Association barred Poles from membership.
This chauvinism was accompanied by increasingly fierce manifestations of British nationalism as the 1940s drew to a close. Britain was seen as a mere colony of the USA, and the CPGB’s main gripe against the British bourgeoisie and the labour movement leaders was that they were unpatriotic. On 12 September 1949, the Daily Worker howled: ‘Britain and the Empire is to be sold piecemeal to the American money-lenders.’ In his subtly-titled pamphlet Get Out!, party historian Leslie Morton complained that US troops were spreading ‘corruption and moral degradation among our young people’. He condemned the influence of American comics and films, he demanded policies that would ‘put Britain first’, and called for the defence of ‘our cultural heritage’ and for ‘the protection of our children from the spread of these alien and disgusting attacks on their moral welfare’.
The CPGB’s aggrieved patriotism, of course, could not prevent it from coming under heavy fire during the Cold War, and Branson spends a fair amount of space describing the witch-hunts of the late 1940s, which ranged from party members being sacked from jobs and removed from union posts to the Cabinet discussions over whether to try the Daily Worker for treason – a capital offence – during the Korean War. This, it should be remembered, was under a Labour government! Whilst condemning these attacks, we should not forget that the Stalinists pulled the roof down on their own heads by defending the appalling conduct of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Branson’s half-hearted efforts at explaining her party’s apologies for Stalin’s actions add nothing to what her colleagues have said elsewhere.
Branson makes much of the attempts by the CPGB to appear as a British party rather than a British section of an international conglomerate, a task that was formally made more easy by the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943. I say ‘formally’, as few observers were fooled. It made no real difference, and the CPGB continued dutifully to follow Moscow’s twists and turns until at least the mid-1950s.
The CPGB was a product of the great wave of working-class radicalism that erupted at the end of the First World War. Formed in the wake of the Russian Revolution, it failed to recognise that the Bolshevik experience was to go sour, and that the regime they supported in Moscow was a cruel caricature of Socialism, ruled by an anti-working-class élite. British Stalinism’s ‘finest hour’, when its membership topped 50,000 for the only time and when its influence was at its zenith, was also when it most clearly failed in the fundamental duty of any Socialist organisation – the promotion of the independent interests of the working class – and this failure was rooted in its fealty to Moscow. Whilst it is a caricature to see British Stalinists purely as ‘agents of Moscow’, the CPGB nonetheless followed the Moscow line on all the major issues. Its most fondly remembered time was when the Soviet bureaucracy was aligned with the British ruling class, which is why the CPGB considered that the interests of the working class were synonymous with those of the bourgeoisie. The Stalinists did not understand this at the time, and, judging by this book, they are still unable to do so.
Paul Flewers
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The Commissar Vanishes
David King
The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia
Canongate, Edinburgh 1997, pp. 192
The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia
Canongate, Edinburgh 1997, pp. 192
READERS will know how ‘unpersons’ vanished from Soviet pictures during the Stalin era, and will recall that infamous example where Trotsky and Kamenev became a set of steps up to the podium from which Lenin was speaking. Indeed, a few years ago, a graphics software advert reproduced that picture with a caption which went something like: ‘We could make Trotsky disappear better than Stalin.’ Certainly, there was often something incompetent about the hatchet-men’s scissor-work in Stalin’s time and afterwards. I remember seeing a pamphlet recounting Brezhnev’s wartime career illustrated with a picture of the man not only in which his head was twice as big as it actually was, but you could also see the join under his chin.
The Commissar Vanishes is a striking and chilling insight into the insane proportions of Stalin’s regime. The vivid style that we have come to expect from David King is used to brilliant effect, showing how people who had fallen from grace literally disappeared from official photographs, and the continual purges meant that each revision had to be replaced by a further one, often until only Stalin remained. Moreover, people would mutilate their own copies of books to ensure that ‘unpersons’ did not disgrace their shelves, and thus leave them open to accusations of sympathy towards them.Oppositionists from the 1920s disappeared from photographs, airbrushed out or cropped. In one example here, Mr and Mrs Trotsky vanish behind two nonentities who have been crudely pasted over them. Later on, it’s Stalin’s cronies who disappear. Yagoda’s fall meant that Dmitri Nalbandyan’s group portrait was revised, with the disgraced secret police chief’s image being replaced by a coat draped over a handrail ‘as if he had neither the time nor the need to take it with him’ (p. 156). It wasn’t just political rivals who went. Some editing jobs were pointless, like the ordinary worker who vanishes from Stalin’s side, or just bizarre, like the telescope pointing at Krupskaya’s head in a family shot by Lenin’s sister Maria, which gradually disappears over three revisions.
Although all governments lie about their activities and try to suppress unpleasant facts, and although much history is written to serve the paymasters, and even in the most open parliamentary democracies much is withheld from the probing historian, let alone the general public, official falsification under Stalinism was peculiarly intense and far-reaching. How did the Soviet regime get into this appalling position? Why did it feel obliged continually to rewrite its history? Although this is not touched on in this book, it’s worth making an analytical aside.
The Bolsheviks took power in October 1917 at the head of a militant working class, with which it had a dynamic and close relationship. However, that relationship soon started to disintegrate as the more militant workers took up posts in the party-state apparatus, and many others returned to the countryside or became disenchanted with the Bolsheviks as conditions deteriorated during the Civil War. Rather than gradually dissolving itself within the working class, as a revolutionary party should do under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party started to substitute itself for the disintegrated working class, representing it in spirit, as it were. Instead of a dynamic relationship between party and class, the party-state apparatus started to see itself as the incarnation of the interests of the working class, and in its insecure position in the Soviet republic, it then began to see itself as the indispensable core of society.
Although the Bolsheviks looked to this mystical image of the party in order to legitimise their rule, it should not be thought that this was necessarily cynical or even conscious on their part, at least at first. As the 1920s drew on, however, and as the party-state apparatus developed into a discrete social stratum with interests that diverged from those of the working class, the myth of the party took on an increasingly cynical tone as the party’s leadership battled against the sharp criticisms of its revolutionary opponents, and used it as a device to discipline and expel them. Under these conditions, the sense of indispensability became mutated into a quasi-religious sense of infallibility – from having a monopoly over power to having a monopoly over the truth.
The cult of the mystified infallible party reached a peak under Stalin with the transformation of the Soviet bureaucracy into a self-conscious ruling élite. This coincided with the hypertrophied state control that was imposed during the massive industrialisation and collectivisation schemes of the First Five Year Plan. Lacking the coherence that genuine planning or even the market would provide, the Stalinist system was chaotic, with the centre attempting to control all aspects of social life. This proved an impossible task, and rule of the omniscient and infallible centre was necessarily convulsive and subject to sudden and dramatic shifts. Infallibility cannot coexist happily with drastic changes. In a situation in which what was correct yesterday may be totally wrong today, those responsible for the blunders of the past must not only be punished if the myth of infallibility is to survive, but their very presence and their actions must be struck from the record as well, in order to enable the current version to be seen as the only possible historical truth. This, of course, runs into problems as today’s truth may well be tomorrow’s blunders, thus leading to another round of record expunging and new historical truths. And so it goes on.
Faced with the rewriting of history, Trotsky told the Stalinist regime:
‘You can juggle quotations, hide the stenographic reports of your own speeches, forbid the circulation of Lenin’s letters and articles, fabricate yards of dishonestly selected quotations. You can suppress, conceal and burn up historic documents. You can extend your censorship even to photographic and moving-picture records of revolutionary events. All these things Stalin is doing. But the results do not and will not justify his expectations. Only a limited mind like Stalin’s could imagine that these pitiful machinations will make men forget the gigantic events of modern history.’ (The Stalin School of Falsification, p. 69)
Although the re-emergence and discovery of hidden Soviet photographs, documents, etc., occurred in circumstances that Socialists did not particularly desire, at least they are now in the open, as are the ‘pitiful machinations’ of those who usurped and destroyed the Russian Revolution.
Paul Flewers
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James Connolly
Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh (ed.)
James Connolly: The Lost Writings
Pluto, London 1997, pp265, £45/£13.99
James Connolly: The Lost Writings
Pluto, London 1997, pp265, £45/£13.99
‘The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.’
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
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IT is the unfortunate fate of great political and religious leaders that when they die, their message frequently falls into the hands of their principal followers, who proceed to use it for their own purposes in ways with which the leaders would have disagreed had they remained alive. As Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh’s excellent introduction demonstrates, Connolly’s writings have suffered from this process with a vengeance. Following his judicial murder by the British authorities in Ireland in 1916, James Connolly’s literary and political legacy passed into the hands of his son-in-law William O’Brien [1], who became leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and also one of the principal ‘labour lieutenants of capital’ (in the time-honoured phrase) in Ireland. As a result, the main collection of Connolly’s writings, which appeared between 1948 and 1951, is an abbreviated version which creates difficulties for anybody trying to attain an overall picture of Connolly’s political development.
We have reason, therefore, to be immensely grateful to Ó Cathasaigh for assembling this collection of some 65 additional writings. Instead of dividing the material according to subject matter, as the ‘official’ collection does, the editor has arranged the pieces in more or less chronological order. As a result, it becomes easier to see how Connolly included in his vision of Socialism the conception of a free united Ireland under working class leadership – a goal which remains to be fought for.It is by no means only Irish Socialists for whom these writings are of interest. Connolly had first-hand knowledge of the British labour movement, and parts of the collection deal with the deficiencies of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. The article Parliamentary Democracy (The Workers’ Republic, 22 September 1900) gives a critique of the British Constitution. One of Connolly’s criticisms is:
‘The powers of parliament are... somewhat arbitrary and ill-defined. Every general election is fought on one or two main issues, and on these alone. It may be the franchise, it may be temperance, it may be Home Rule, or any other question, but when parliament has received from the electors its mandate on that one question it arrogates to itself the right to rule and decide on every other question without the slightest reference to the wishes of the electorate.’ (p. 48)
This point was originally made by Rousseau in The Social Contract:
‘The English people imagines that it is free: it is gravely mistaken. It is only so during the election of members of parliament: as soon as they are elected, it becomes a slave, it is nothing. The English people makes such use of the brief moments of its liberty that it deserves to lose it.’
Connolly, however, goes on to deepen our understanding of this lack of freedom:
‘The democracy of parliament is in short the democracy of capitalism. Capitalism gives to the worker the right to choose his master, but insists that the fact of mastership shall remain unquestioned; parliamentary democracy gives to the worker the right to a voice in the selection of his rulers, but insists that he shall bend as a subject to be ruled.’
Capitalist democracy is, in other words, a contradiction in terms: the people do not rule, the capitalists do.
Not surprisingly, in view of the above, we find in the Platform of the Socialist Labour Party of 1903 that Connolly includes a section as follows:
‘Public Ownership: 1. Right of all national and municipal employees to elect their immediate superiors and to be represented upon all public departments directing their industry. 2. Nationalisation and municipalisation of all industries upon the above basis.’
As can be seen from writings by Connolly reproduced up to now, it is the style which he employs that marks him out as a publicist. He constantly grasps the essential feature of a given situation, describes it graphically, and then finishes by drawing the necessary conclusion and ramming it home in an uncompromising fashion – and all this not without a spark of humour if possible. In this way, he contrives to follow his own advice to the Irish TUC:
‘We need to feel in every fibre of our consciousness that all the offices and positions through which civilisation performs its every function are manned, equipped and sentinelled by alert and implacable enemies of our class, and so feeling we must labour to create a public opinion that shall eventually supersede and destroy the public opinion of the master class as the standard by which our patriotism and the value and efficiency of our institutions are to be judged.’ (p. 136)
The more adverse the conditions, the more Connolly seems to be able to rise to the occasion. Most of the second half of the volume, to whit, pages 138–218, covers the period of the First World War. Absolutely typical of Connolly’s response is an article written for The Workers’ Republic, in which he begins by quoting the results of a survey of housing conditions in Dublin as reported in the Irish Times. This revealed that nearly 28,000 of Dublin’s citizens were living in accommodation deemed by the Corporation to be unfit for human habitation. This news reinforces Connolly’s basic Marxist conviction that the main enemy is at home:
‘Therefore we cry aloud that all might hear: War or no war, those slums must be swept out of existence; war or no war, those slum landlords are greater enemies than all the “Huns” of Europe; war or no war, our children must have decent homes to grow up in, decently equipped schools to attend, decent food whilst at school; streets, courts and hallways decently lighted at nights; war or no war, the workers of Dublin should exert themselves first for the conquest of Dublin by those whose toil makes Dublin possible; war or no war, the most sacred duty of the working class of Ireland is to seize every available opportunity to free itself from the ravenous maw of the capitalist system and to lay the foundations for the Co-operative Commonwealth – the Working Class Republic.’ (p. 153)
It is vintage Connolly. The Ulster poet John Hewitt was wrong when he said that Ireland had no equivalent of the Levellers and Diggers. They were there all right, right in front of his nose in his own century: Padraic Pearse was the Irish Lilburne, and James Connolly was the Irish Gerard Winstanley. Of course, the differences are also considerable between these Irish democrats and their English predecessors, but the part played in each national tradition is roughly the same.
Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh indicates in the introduction that there remains a great deal more of Connolly’s writings still uncollected, plus all his letters. We look forward to their appearance in print, and, I must say, it is our duty to do all we can to ensure this can be achieved. In conclusion, let me add, for any readers conversant with the Irish language, that Ó Cathasaigh has written a study of Connolly entitled An Modh Conghaileach, which, if this selection and its introduction is anything to go by, should be worth reading.
Chris Gray
Note by ETOL
1. William O’Brien was not Connolly's son-in-law. His daughter, Nora Connolly-O’Brien, who corresponded with Trotsky during the 1930s, was married to another man called O’Brien.
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James Connolly
F.A. Ridley
Socialism and Religion
Rationalist Socialist League, Amersham 1997, pp. 39, £1.50
Socialism and Religion
Rationalist Socialist League, Amersham 1997, pp. 39, £1.50
FRANK Ridley (1897–1994) was well qualified to write this short pamphlet, which serves as an introduction to a fascinating subject. Ridley was the author of a number of books on the place of religion in history, such as, for example, The Assassins (1938, republished by Socialist Platform in 1988), The Evolution of the Papacy (1938), The Jesuits (1938) and The Papacy and Fascism (1937). These have not, in my opinion, received the attention they deserve; if this pamphlet tempts readers to explore these writings, so much the better.
As Ridley says, religion involves a belief in a god or gods, from whom humans may derive benefits. He traces its roots back at least as far as the neolithic period of human history, if not earlier. In primitive societies, the gods appear either as personifications of mysterious natural forces, such as the sun, moon, thunder and so on, or else as the ghosts of great ancestors whose memory lives on. Later, with the growth of the division of labour and the emergence of ‘civilisation’, religion develops in the direction of greater abstraction. Hence Ridley draws a (useful) distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ religion (under which heading we may find Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and presumably also Hinduism, although the latter supposedly retains many features of the prior form of religion). He then goes on to outline ways in which established religion has served to support the status quo in numerous class-divided societies, from ancient Egypt onwards. Understandably, most of the remainder of the pamphlet deals with Christianity, most space being taken up by observations on Roman Catholicism, although there is some mention of the Church of England and of the ‘special case’ of the Russian Orthodox Church, which Stalin re-established in the Second World War. (The pamphlet was originally published in 1948.) Ridley’s conclusion is that established religion in all its forms is irreconcilably opposed to Marxian Socialism: were the latter to triumph on a scale sufficient to realise its programme, it would inevitably undermine the social bases of religion – namely, ignorance and fear. Hence ‘the gods form a united front against the revolution, for the revolution digs a common grave for all the gods’.Despite this, however, Socialist regimes will, if they remain true to the ideals of the revolution, refrain from religious persecution, ‘which would be offensive to the humanitarian ethic that is an integral part of international Socialism’. Even so, Ridley regards ‘scientific Socialist propaganda’ as being inevitably directed against religion, and sees the revolutionary party as obliged to combat ‘all manifestations of capitalism, including those which belong to the sphere of religion’ (p. 34).
Ridley indeed includes a brief note in which he sets out some arguments against the notion of the existence of a god:
‘Historically, in the pre-capitalist days of such sects as the Lollards and the Anabaptists, there were undoubtedly heretical churches that can accurately be called revolutionary, having regard for the circumstances of the time, but this is all ancient history. It is a far cry from the revolutionary Anabaptists of the sixteenth century to the smug Baptists of the twentieth; from Jan of Leiden to Spurgeon’s Tabernacle.’ (p. 30)
Most of this analysis seems to me sound, but Ridley could perhaps have allowed himself a little more space in which to develop certain points. For example, he could have mentioned the early Greek philosopher Xenophanes in connection with his ‘natural-supernatural’ distinction. Xenophanes criticised the ancient Greek polytheism of his day in the name of a single non-anthropomorphic deity; in the course of this criticism he advances propositions which are not inconsistent with the view that it is humans who make the gods in their own image, and not vice versa:
‘Mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own. The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair. But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.’ (See G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, 1957, pp. 168–9)
Similarly, Ridley’s discussion of religious movements opposed to the status quo could well have been extended. True, he does acknowledge the possibility that ‘as is not at all unlikely, Christianity itself started as a revolutionary mass-movement against Roman society’, but adds that ‘it was soon effectively captured by the ruling classes of the day’ (p. 24).
Here it would appear that the key rôle was played by St Paul, the Hellenistic Jew of Tarsus in Asia Minor, who correctly saw that any movement marked by Jewish revolutionary nationalism stood no chance of gaining mass support among the gentile populations of the Roman Empire (see Hyam Maccoby, The Myth Maker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986). In this connection, Ridley praises Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity as ‘probably the best single book ever written by a Marxist on a religious theme’ (p. 9), but Kautsky’s book was written in 1908, and there has been a wealth of scholarly commentary since then on the topic. Kautsky found it hard to accept the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical person – see Part One of his book – but the alternative, that the Christians invented some fictitious Messiah, raises even greater difficulties, and must be discarded. The most important recent development has been the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, writings which contain in places concepts that find their parallels in the so-called ‘synoptic’ gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), and which require consideration in any complete analysis of early Jewish Christianity. Here the work of Geza Vermes – Jesus the Jew, Jesus and the World of Judaism and The Religion of Jesus the Jew, plus his edition of the Scrolls in English translation, is of paramount importance. Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise’s book The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (Element Books, 1992) is also worth consulting. Kautsky’s work of 1908 is indeed of high quality, but it is certainly not the final word on the subject.It is perhaps also regrettable that when Frank Ridley and Ellis Hillman were preparing the pamphlet for republication in 1986, they did not include anything on the so-called ‘Liberation Theology’, which appeared amongst supporters of the Catholic Church in Latin America. This was a movement which tried to incorporate certain elements of Marxism into Christian thought, and which exerted an influence in, for example, the Brazilian labour movement, with the Partido dos Trabalhadores. Ridley would no doubt have been able to make some interesting observations on this.
Ridley’s anti-theological arguments are also somewhat unsatisfactory. Epicurus’ contention that God must be either all-powerful or all-good or neither is open to the objection that the ‘gift’ of free will for humans is of supreme importance, enabling them to establish themselves as co-workers in God’s scheme of things; also if the soul has a beginning, there is no a priori reason why it should have an end – although on materialist grounds this seems an acceptable conclusion to draw. Finally, by the term ‘cause’ we do not necessarily understand something that is also an effect of a previous cause; hence a ‘first cause’ is a distinct possibility. However, this first cause does not have to be ‘God’ or ‘the gods’; it might just as possibly be matter in some form. In the European middle ages, David of Dinant proposed something of this kind when he argued that God was in fact ‘prima materia’. He was roundly condemned for this by St Thomas Aquinas, but Aquinas’ difficulty sprang here from the prevalent notion that matter was essentially passive and inert. According to modern physics, this is by no means the case, and accordingly active matter can play the rôle of a non-theological first cause, if necessary.
So much for the criticism of religious metaphysics, which is, of course, not the sole possible criticism of organised religion. Space prevents any further remarks on this: I would only like to mention in this respect the entertaining and (hopefully) thought-provoking observations on the subject made by the comedian Dave Allen.
One final cavil: Ridley quotes Marx’s dictum ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ without giving the full quotation, which runs:
‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.’ (Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)
Ridley quotes only part of the next paragraph of Marx’s text on page 8 of his pamphlet; the paragraph in full runs:
‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.’
The passage is worth quoting in full, I think, because it shows amongst other things that Marx was more aware of the appeal of religion than many religious people are of the appeal of Marxism, and also that Marx did not demand that religious believers should simply give up their past beliefs, merely that they should work for real happiness achievable on earth.
I have indicated where I think Ridley could have expanded his analysis, but, in conclusion, I wish to stress one of the points he makes. He writes on page 21:
‘Under capitalism, and in particular under monopoly capital, the most advanced form of capitalism which brings all its contradictions to a head, the first natural root of religion – man’s awe of natural phenomena – becomes extremely weak, and indeed, in the most advanced countries, almost disappears with these societies’ growing mastery of natural forces due to the machine age. However, the second, social root in insecurity and in social disharmony acquires a terrible and altogether unprecedented power due to the previously unheard-of intensity of prevailing social contradictions, expressed in war, crisis, and universal instability. Hence, in our dealing with current religion, it is its second, social root that almost exclusively concerns us, as Lenin specifically insisted.’
The tasks for Socialists is to identify the insecurities and social disharmonies, and outline measures for their elimination.
The pamphlet includes an introduction by Terry Liddle, who also contributes a useful list of books. Socialism and Religion can be obtained from the publishers at 70 Chestnut Lane, Amersham, Buckinghamshire HP6 6EH, for £1.50 plus postage, cheques payable to Colin Mills.
Chris Gray
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Trotsky
Richard Brenner
Trotsky: An Introduction
LRCI publications, London 1997, pp. 51, £1.50
Trotsky: An Introduction
LRCI publications, London 1997, pp. 51, £1.50
THIS handy pamphlet aims at being a young people’s introduction to the life and contribution of Leon Trotsky, and as such should be welcomed. It is organised around a number of well-chosen sections, followed by short but useful bibliographies. It touches upon most of the main aspects of Trotsky’s contribution to Marxism. Unfortunately, it has been written with less care than it should have been. Because a publication aims at an elementary explanation, that does not mean that it has to be cavalier with the facts.
Apart from sloppy formulations that can easily give the wrong impression – such as that ‘the Left Opposition was based on the revolutionary working class’ but ‘the Bukharinites’ class basis was amongst the richest peasants’ (p. 24), there are a large number of straight factual bloomers. Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, takes the form of an animal fable, not a ‘fairy story’ (p. 24); Trotsky was not the only former Bolshevik leader not to capitulate to Stalin (p. 25); it is not true that the Chinese Communist Party made no attempt to win over soldiers in the Guomindang army (p. 31) – several of its future generals came from there; the Freikorps were set up in December 1918, not ‘1919’ (p. 33); it was impossible for Stalin to negotiate with the Nazis in 1924 (p. 37). (Even if this is a misprint for 1934, the Treaty of Berlin had been signed the year before, in May 1933.) The well-known quotation originating in Mexico claiming to come from Pravda describing the GPU’s activity in Spain (p. 39) was proved to be apocryphal some years ago. And if Comrade Brenner has been told ‘little of the great slave rebellion led by Spartacus’ (p. 1), then perhaps he should apply himself again to his books, for on this topic there have been enough of them. Similarly, he might be ‘left ignorant’ (p. 1) of the strikes of the tomb workmen of ancient Egypt (so ignorant, indeed, that he seems to think that they were paid in gold), but they have been known to modern scholarship for over a century (the best more recent account for those who do not read in Late Egyptian is in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Volume 10, no. 3, July 1951, pp. 137–45).Moreover, some of the particular positions of Workers Power have been fathered upon Trotsky without any attempt to distinguish between them. Now Marxism is a creative methodology, and there is, of course, nothing at all wrong in principle for the theorists of our own day to disagree, alter or revise the points of view of the giants of the past, though in this case it has to be admitted that Mr Brenner is rather full of himself. But if this is to take place, the least we should require is that it be recognised in the text. For example, Trotsky resolutely refused to side with any one national group struggling against the others in his reportage of the Balkan wars, whilst Workers Power on the whole sides with the Bosnians; this deep difference is covered up with the seemingly innocuous remark that ‘he distinguished at all times between reactionary wars fought for profit and the justified resistance of nations whose fundamental freedoms were being denied’ (p. 7). Similarly, whatever the reasons for forming the Fourth International in 1938, the argument that each national party should operate ‘as an integral part of a democratic centralist international movement’ (p. 45) was hardly one of them, for the International Communist League had never operated on any other basis until then. And readers of such statements as ‘Trotskyists are not disillusioned by Stalinism’s collapse because we have been proved right’ (p. 21) might be forgiven for assuming that Workers Power had foreseen this outcome, which is certainly not the case.
It is a great shame that this carelessness should have marred so excellent an undertaking, for there is a deep need for such a basic introduction. Let us hope that such Workers Power veterans as Dave Stocking or Keith Hassell are allowed to correct the text before it is reissued in a second edition.
Al Richardson
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Hungary 1956
International Communist Union
Hungary 1956: When the Workers’ Councils Raised the Banner of the Proletarian Revolution
Workers Fight, London, 1996, pp. 28, £1.00
Hungary 1956: When the Workers’ Councils Raised the Banner of the Proletarian Revolution
Workers Fight, London, 1996, pp. 28, £1.00
THIS pamphlet, no. 30 in the Internationalist Communist Forum series, commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, as well as placing it within the framework of the analysis developed by the ICU’s parent organisation, Lutte ouvrière. It makes the claim that the objective of the Hungarian insurgents was to create ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (p. 1) by overthrowing an ‘artificial bourgeois regime’ (p. 4), further defined as a ‘bourgeois regime ... prone to nationalist tendencies’ (p. 6). This is in line with Lutte ouvrière’s theory that the Soviet Union alone was a workers’ state, and that in spite of the parallel social, economic and political structures, all the ‘peoples’ democracies’, as well as China, Cuba, etc., remained bourgeois. This is not as illogical as it sounds, for it is undeniable that the USSR alone was founded by a true workers’ revolution, and so must retain more of a working-class character than states created by peasant insurrection or imposed by Russian conquest.
But there are obvious problems with this analysis, which surface from time to time in the text. It is early on admitted that it was Hitler’s conquest, rather than the Soviet occupation, which destroyed the embryonic bourgeoisies of Eastern Europe, and that ‘to all intents and purposes, the Eastern European bourgeoisies were therefore virtually expropriated by German capital’ (p. 2). Yet within a year or so these seemingly dead bourgeoisies come to life, apparently without any injection of capital, and Stalin is then said to have ‘filled the political vacuum with these artificial bourgeois regimes’ (p. 4), so that ‘because the Eastern European state bureaucracies remained intact, representing the same privileged classes, these regimes retained their original fundamental constitution’ (p. 6).But for a state to retain a bourgeois character, a bourgeoisie has to wield power within it. The bourgeois parties in the Eastern European governments were transparent fictions, and real power lay in the hands of the local Stalinist bureaucrats, installed in office by a several million-strong Russian army in 1945. Whatever happened to the Marxist analysis of the state as ‘armed men standing in defence of property’? Wasn’t the Red Army the instrument of a workers’ state? Doesn’t the victor in a war between states of a different class character impose his property forms upon the vanquished? Even this text has to admit that ‘the Soviet bureaucracy was already in control of the state machineries’ (p. 6). So the only way out of the contradiction is to argue that Stalin’s puppets administering these states somehow represented the bourgeoisie there as well, so, for example, Imre Nagy is described as ‘a responsible politician of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time an entrenched Stalinist’ (p. 12).
It has to be said that the demands of the Hungarian insurgents as summarised in this pamphlet in no way prove that they were facing a bourgeois state. They are no different from the programme of a workers’ insurrection against Stalinism in the USSR as defined by the Transitional Programme. Khrushchev’s regime had already degenerated far from the norms of a workers’ republic, whereas regimes such as that of Rákosi and Gerö had never even approached them. By 1956, the distance was about the same, so that taking on one regime meant taking on the other.
Al Richardson
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Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt
Jane Rowlandson (ed.)
Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, pp. 406, £16.95
Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, pp. 406, £16.95
AS far as the ancient world is concerned, the present reviewer would be the last to accept cheap jibes about ‘dead white males’, but it is still true that university courses in the history of political ideas have led Marxists to concentrate on Aristotle, Plato and other great thinkers, to the total neglect of how the system might have worked in practice. Anyone who wishes to take a real look at ancient society would do far better to study this book. However, it should be done in the knowledge that it is dangerous to use it for generalisations to apply to the rest of the Mediterranean world. Egypt was certainly not typical, and it is only the wealth of documentation provided by its hot dry climate that justifies so close an examination.
One of the reasons for Egypt’s anomalous position is that Graeco-Roman civilisation was largely imposed upon the older society without displacing it, leaving the original social and economic system intact in the countryside for some centuries. In fact, no less than three legal systems operated at different levels, Roman law at the top, Greek in the middle, and Egyptian custom at the bottom. Since this book draws largely upon Greek documents to illustrate the manners, mores and legal position of the upper classes, and upon Demotic documents for the native population, Marxists are able to compare them and draw important conclusions. For example, those who accept the contention that the position of women is a measure of the advance of any society, and uphold the schema of Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, will be disturbed to learn that although Greek society was considerably more advanced and dynamic than ancient Egyptian, women had an infinitely lower status within it. Legal documents show that the native Egyptian woman had far greater property rights and autonomous standing than her hellenised upper-class sister (pp. 156ff.), and ‘there is considerable evidence in Egyptian literature to suggest that the Egyptians took a much more relaxed attitude towards the sexual activity of unmarried women than the Greeks’ (p. 156). This was clearly part of Graeco-Roman Egypt’s legacy from Pharaonic times, and whilst the status of women in ancient Egypt was exceptional, other pre-classical civilisations also gave them more rights than did the Greek polis (cf. J.N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia, p. 105).Once we are on our guard against drawing sweeping conclusions, and ignore stock feminist anachronisms such as ‘weaklings or viragos: the ambiguities of womanhood’ (p. 354), this fascinating and well-illustrated book contains a wealth of material from an incredible spread of sources. Its other great strength is its careful organisation into well-ordered themes with informative introductions, such as ‘royalty and religion’, ‘family matters’, ‘economic activities’, ‘being female’, and, most interestingly, ‘status and law’. But because women’s studies do not have a clear methodology of their own, other disciplines have to be drawn upon, in this case making it very difficult for the editor to create a coherent picture, as well as to exercise complete control over her material. Few people can possibly combine a knowledge of Egyptian archaeology, papyrology, Hellenistic Greek, Patristics and Roman and Byzantine history, and even fewer (no more than a hundred in the entire world) can read Demotic documents.
This comes out in the lack of balance in this collection between pedantry and ignorance. On the one hand is the insistence upon such spellings as ‘Boubastos’ (p. 19), ‘Horos’ (pp. 49, 51, 54), ‘Anoubis’ (pp. 64, 69) and ‘Kleopatra’, and on the other we are told that Clemens Alexandrinus was not only a ‘bishop’ (p. 21), but even ‘bishop of Alexandria’ (p72). The ‘prophetess of Jeme’ named on the London Demotic papyrus not only lived in the ‘area around the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu’ (p. 59), but was obviously attached to the small temple alongside it, by then known for centuries as ‘the mound of Djeme’. Contrary to what we are told on page 72, the cult of Longinus was far more popular in Cappadocia than in Egypt. And whilst it might be the case in the Late Period that ‘the Egyptian priestly caste was a closed one’ whose ‘wives and daughters served within the temple communities’ (p. 55), this was certainly not so earlier. During the New Kingdom, there was no more common title for upper-class ladies than ‘Chantress of Amun’, whatever the religious status of their husbands. Not only is there ‘no evidence in ancient Egypt for the widespread use of cotton’ (p. 247), there is no evidence for its use at all before the third century BC. And if Procopius’ description of Theodora’s party turns before she assumed the purple are anything to go by, describing her as ‘of non-aristocratic origin’ (p. 45) must rank amongst the understatements of the last two millennia. Continuing in the same vein, the gentleman who asks his wife to be ‘subject to me in all ways that it befits women of nobility to display to their well-endowed and most beloved husbands’ (p. 210) can hardly be saying to the translator what he appears to be saying to the general reader.
Nonetheless, there is a great deal of life, interest and solid scholarship in this book. It cannot be ignored by anyone who aspires to understand the broader rhythms of history.
Al Richardson
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The Ideological Legacy of L.D. Trotsky
Marilyn Vogt-Downey (ed.)
The Ideological Legacy of L.D. Trotsky: History and Contemporary Times
International Committee for the Study of Trotsky’s Legacy, New York 1998, pp. 179, $11
The Ideological Legacy of L.D. Trotsky: History and Contemporary Times
International Committee for the Study of Trotsky’s Legacy, New York 1998, pp. 179, $11
THIS book contains papers submitted to the International Conference on Leon Trotsky held in Moscow on 10–12 November 1994. Since the organisers seem to have taken their subject more seriously than previous gatherings held there, the result is a very satisfactory publication. Most of the contributors have something to say, and some of the Russian ones are very stimulating indeed, cut off as they were for so long from Trotskyism’s stale orthodoxies abroad. Only rarely does this cease to be an advantage, such as when Dubrovsky discusses Trotsky’s policy on the Ukraine without betraying any knowledge whatsoever of the position of Hugo Oehler, against whom he was polemicising at the time (pp. 167–72; cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 2, Autumn 1990, pp. 1–8).
Although Voyeikov’s initial formulation of the problem of the Russian state (‘bureaucratic Socialism’, p. 5) is not a happy one, he gives a brilliant demonstration of the accuracy of Trotsky’s predictions about the further development of the counter-revolution in the USSR (pp. 17–8). It is also of note that he supports the position of the majority of the Greek Trotskyists, that the revolution cannot be completely reversed (p. 25), a view later endorsed by Chris Edwards (p. 157), although how the latter could have got it into his head that the capital required to create a national bourgeoisie there can only come from Eastern Europe itself remains a mystery to me (p. 158). Mamutov, on the other hand, calls the Russian model ‘Asiatic in character’, and points out that ‘it is fully legitimate to contrast the contemporary European model to “Asiatic Socialism”’ (p. 51). He also refers to the link between the existence of the USSR and social welfare in the West. ‘If there had not been a Soviet Union’, he notes, ‘there would neither have been present-day Western society’ (p. 52), a view we saw confirmed when moves to dismantle the welfare state took on added momentum after the collapse of the USSR. Mil Nikolaevich Gretsky provides a fascinating treatment of the thought of Bruno Rizzi (pp. 126–33), whose theories of the part that could be played by the market, producer cooperatives, etc., in the transition to Socialism have influenced such Socialist thinkers as our own Walter Kendall. Since Shachtmanites have for so long dishonestly denied Rizzi’s influence upon them (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 7, and Volume 4, no. 4, Spring 1993, p. 169), restoring him to his rightful place in the development of thought is most welcome, and Gretsky also directs our attention in passing to another Italian thinker, Umberto Melotti (p. 129), whose Marx and the Third World must be one of Marxism’s most neglected classics.But perhaps the most exciting Russian article as far as this reviewer is concerned is that by Vladimir Borisovich Volodin (pp. 54–60), since it approaches from a different angle the reasoning in the preface to In Defence of the Russian Revolution and the article The Russian Revolution: A Twentieth Century Enigma (Lanka Guardian and What Next?, 1997). ‘Insofar as the means of production belong to the state’, he points out, ‘the bureaucracy emerges as a substitute for the bourgeoisie. Lenin had even contemplated the problem when he wrote about a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, the bureaucracy is a bourgeois organ of the workers’ state.’ (p. 55) After thus defining the nature of the state, Volodin goes on to place it in its historic context: ‘Normal primitive accumulation which was necessary for the transition from a patriarchal to an industrial society is the function of the bourgeoisie, which fulfils the task by means of uninterrupted violence against the workers’, he argues, ‘but the bureaucracy replaced the bourgeoisie.’ (p. 56) Now this in turn was itself only a stage in the development of the counter-revolution: ‘The bureaucracy’s total supremacy was the prelude to the restoration of capitalism, when state property had not yet been privatised but the workers had already been driven from state power.’ (p. 59) Jim Miles approaches the problem in like mind, describing the Stalinist bureaucracy as ‘the consummate expression of the bourgeois tendency within the Soviet workers’ state’, whilst noting that ‘it is the bourgeois side of the workers’ state that has to “wither away” in order to make the transition to Communism; if this does not occur, the capitalist restoration is inevitable’ (p. 61).
Other Western contributions are less exciting, not necessarily because they have less to say. For example, Ticktin’s address (pp. 105–13) has already appeared in The Ideas of Leon Trotsky (pp. 65–85). Much the same can be said for Simon Pirani’s compact essay on the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, which goes over ground already familiar to readers of Revolutionary History (Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1990, and Volume 3, no. 2, Autumn 1990), Ngo Van’s Revolutionaries They Could Not Break, and the various books translated and written by Greg Benton. Geoff Barr, on the other hand, appears to believe that the united front could only be posed in Britain in 1926 in trade union terms – by the Anglo-Russian Committee and the National Minority Movement (pp. 157–8), and not at all at the level of state power by means of the Labour Party tactic. Since the remarkably obtuse British Communist Party had already been groping towards this with the National Left Wing Movement, and entire chapters in Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? hinge upon it, we can hardly conclude that the Workers Revolutionary Party and its successors have advanced the Marxist understanding of these islands very much.
A further defect of the Western contributions is to limit themselves to arguments of the ‘Trotsky woz right’ variety, but an additional disappointing feature that emerges in some of them (and not only those from the West) is an attempt to smuggle into the conference the sterile factional conflicts we have to endure over here. Chris Edwards, described as ‘a worker and an activist in the workers’ and Socialist movements in the United Kingdom’ (p. 177), uses most of his space (pp. 157–66) for an attack upon Sean Matgamna. The hapless Matgamna himself was not, of course, present to reply, though he would have found himself broadly in agreement with the thesis of Butenko (pp. 117–21; the coincidence in names is unfortunate) as opposed to the following article by Kuryonyshev (pp. 122–5).
In this context, it cannot be said that the work of the English language editor has at all added to the value of what is here. Spellings like ‘Dzhilas’ have been left as they were. The first article by Voyeikov has two sets of footnotes, one on the bottom of the pages and the other at the end, which makes following the text very confusing. The reason for this appears to be that the editor wished to abuse her position by ‘amplifying and clarifying some points’ (p. v), which on several occasions (for example, p. 14, n8; p. 22, n10; p. 23, n11) amounts to polemicising with the writer’s point of view. This is all the more impudent when we discover that she has seen fit to place her own contribution immediately after his, and subjects a later article by Gusev to the same treatment (for example, p. 83, nn2 and 3; p. 88, n5; p. 98, n7; p. 99, nn8 and 9). Her own article ‘setting the record straight’ includes the old story about Cannon, ‘one individual’ who ‘by chance learned about Trotsky’s positions’ and so ‘began’ the Trotskyist movement in the United States (p. 31). Such fairy tales do not gain in credibility the more they are repeated, and should have been abandoned long ago (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 1, Autumn 1993, pp. 106–7; Journal of Trotsky Studies, no. 2, 1994, pp. 226–7).
However, it would be small-minded to allow such things to get in the way of the instruction to be gained from this splendid book. And how exciting it is to discover that the great theorist of the revolution should again be so well understood in the land of his birth!
Al Richardson
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Red Hot
Hall Greenland
Red Hot: The Life and Times of Nick Origlass
Wellington Lane Press, 1998, pp. 336, £10
THE author of this biography, who was for a short time the organising secretary of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain, has given us a well-sketched-out picture of one of international Trotskyism’s most endearing characters, as well the authentic flavour of the Australian labour movement, so like our own, and yet so unlike. Let us hope that we do not have wait for the death of his old comrade Issy Wyner before we get a similar biography of him.Red Hot: The Life and Times of Nick Origlass
Wellington Lane Press, 1998, pp. 336, £10
After leaving the Communist Party in 1931, at the height of the ‘Third Period’ lunacy orchestrated there by the double agent H.M. Wicks (p. 25), Nick Origlass was for many years the leading Australian Trotskyist. His infectious activism left a permanent stamp upon his movement, which has always carried on a high level of political activity on both local and international issues, and never spawned such contemplative sects as we trip over in Europe and North America. So the great value of this book lies in its detailed descriptions of Jack Sylvester’s work amongst the unemployed (pp. 15ff., 34ff.) and the industrial conflicts in which Origlass himself invariably played a courageous and honourable rôle (pp. 7–13, 48–54, 105–9, 122–35), culminating in the historic Balmain strike of 1945 that put an end to the onward march of Stalinism within the Australian trade unions (chapter 15, pp. 137-–48). This heroic wartime activity is by far the most exciting part of the book, even if its context is hampered by the author’s inability to grasp Trotsky’s politics at the time. For it is very dubious to argue that Trotsky ‘spoke out in favour of the entry of the United States into the war, principally because it would give Stalin courage to break his alliance with Hitler’ (p. 99; cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 39–40; Volume 3, no. 4, Autumn 1991, p. 14), and it is simply not true to say that Trotskyists ‘would not sabotage production for the war effort in countries allied to the Soviet Union’ (p. 100).
However deeply involved he was in his own movement, Origlass never forgot the international dimension of all true working-class politics. His first contribution to the American Militant was as early as October 1935 (p. 65), and for many years it was he who sat painfully translating Pablo’s manifestos and theses, word for word from a French dictionary (p. viii). It was on his insistence that the Australian group continued to support Pablo after Frank, Maitan and Mandel had decided to remove him from the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The description of this unseemly operation, which was carried on after Pablo’s imprisonment over the Algerian currency affair, so that the Troika could end its divorce with the Americans, occupies several pages (pp. 227–35). ‘When the Secretary was released after being captured by the enemy’, complained Origlass, ‘resumption of his position should have been automatic.’ (p. 231) The full toy-box of factionalism’s petty tricks is poured onto the floor for us to look at, including a notable contribution from Livio Maitan (p. 230). (Maitan seems to have been even better at this sort of thing than Frank, for he once allowed one of our comrades to go all the way to northern Italy to appeal to a world congress, and then had him ordered home on the station platform.)
But it is interesting (and enigmatic) to note that whilst Origlass insisted upon international democratic centralism, it appears to have been purely on the level of programmes and manifestos, for he does not seem to have applied it to himself. The mid-1930s was the first period of Trotskyism’s entry into Social Democracy, and the author admits ‘the absolute centrality of the Labour Party for anybody interested in working-class politics’ in Australia (p. 199). Yet Origlass himself was for many years the main opponent of entry into the Australian Labour Party on a thoroughly Oehlerite basis, it was only undertaken by the group as late as 1941, and he only applied to join himself in 1950! So having refused to accept Trotsky’s policy, when he did finally get in, it was in order to carry out the ‘sui generis’ tactic of Michel Pablo instead (pp. 202ff.).
For all its value (and it is considerable), the book still cannot escape history’s curse, which comes from its very nature, that it is always written with the advantage (?) of hindsight. Origlass himself rose to the leadership of the Australian group at its 1937 congress (pp. 73–7) by opposing the revision of Trotskyist theory and practice undertaken by John Anderson, described as a ‘precursor of the New Left ideas of the 1960s and 1970s’ (p. 74). ‘It seems ironical when we consider the later Nick Origlass, the pioneer of participatory democracy, that he should have been such an uncritical Bolshevik at this time’, comments the author; ‘later, of course, he would come to agree with much of Anderson’s thesis. Experience, social change, Balmain and Michel Pablo would ring that change.’ (pp. 77–8)
This is therefore very much a book written from an ex-Trotskyist point of view, so we get the obligatory references to the New Left, along with Gramsci, ‘the great Italian reformer [!]’ (p. 5). And whilst we can agree with its description of the War/Revolution thesis of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International as ‘apocalyptic’ (p. 193), the same label is also applied to the Transitional Programme, along with ‘messianic’, ‘dreaming’, ‘sectarian certainties’ and ‘a strong whiff of determinism’ (pp. 90–3). The author evidently shares Origlass’ final break with Trotskyism, repeatedly describing his politics as ‘maximum democracy – in the factory, in the office, in the union, in the neighbourhood – anywhere and everywhere’ (pp. vii–ix, 137, etc.), ‘the urban environment being important’ (p. viii).
So from the mid-1960s onwards, Origlass became increasingly involved in the sort of green and community politics that we associate with crusties and Young Liberals, with the inevitable result of emptying them of all class content. Since the focus of the last five chapters is limited to Balmain, an area not much larger than Stepney, the book from then on loses all its international appeal, and I suspect that it must leave many Australians themselves mystified. How did a man who set out so bravely to change the world end up in his own backyard?
Al Richardson
Enquiries for this book in Britain should be addressed to 11 Temple Fortune Lane, London NW11 7UB.
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Politics of J.T. Murphy
Ralph Darlington
The Political Trajectory of J.T. Murphy
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1998, pp. 316, £32.00/£12.99
The Political Trajectory of J.T. Murphy
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1998, pp. 316, £32.00/£12.99
Molly Murphy
Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist
introduced by Ralph Darlington
Institute of Social Research, University of Salford, Salford, 1998, pp. 164, £7.99
Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist
introduced by Ralph Darlington
Institute of Social Research, University of Salford, Salford, 1998, pp. 164, £7.99
J.T. MURPHY was a significant figure on the British left between 1917 and 1936. He was a leading activist in the shop stewards movement of the First World War, and subsequently the Socialist Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and finally the Socialist League in the 1930s. Sadly, Murphy’s career demonstrates how a fierce fighter for revolution, workers’ democracy and Socialism from below became a passionate advocate of Stalinism and Popular Frontism. Murphy is of particular interest to readers of this journal for, as a functionary of the Communist International, he was directly instrumental in the consolidation of Stalinism and its imposition on the national Communist parties. It was Murphy who moved the expulsion of Boris Souvarine, the French defender of Trotsky, from the Comintern in 1926, and the resolution which removed Trotsky himself from the Comintern Executive in 1927.
Murphy was born into the Sheffield working class in 1888. He was strongly influenced by reading Marx and by the Syndicalist ideas of the ‘Great Unrest’ of the early years of the twentieth century. As an activist in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, he became involved in the shop stewards movement which from 1915 fought against wartime dilution, the undermining of craft skills, and the conscription of skilled engineers. The strongholds of the agitation were on Clydeside, where the workers’ committee was led by members of the SLP, the small, intransigent dual unionist organisation influenced by the ideas of Daniel DeLeon, and in Sheffield.The Shop Stewards and Workers Committee Movement was formally established in early 1917. Its suspicion of leadership was incarnated in the designation of its leading body as the National Administrative Council. It stood in theory for the overthrow of capitalism. Its practice was defensive struggle to maintain trade union controls in the workshops which spilled over into opposition to the state’s prosecution of the war, but never properly confronted the issue of ending it. The movement was largely limited to the skilled workers, and to the large engineering centres.
As a member of the NAC from August 1917, and of the SLP shortly thereafter, Murphy wrote the SSWCM’s credo, The Workers’ Committee, which analysed the weakness of union organisation and officialdom. It urged the creation of rank-and-file bodies, elected in the workshops but linking up across the industry, as a means of overcoming the lack of democracy and centralisation of the union leadership. For all its virtues, the statement remained within a Syndicalist problematic, circumventing the issues of political power and the capitalist state.
Perceiving the soviets as the realisation of their aspirations, the SSWCM leaders played a key rôle in the creation of the CPGB in 1920–21. After returning from Moscow, where he attended the first Comintern congress in 1920 and eagerly embraced Lenin’s prescriptions for Britain, Murphy was involved in the formation of the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions, which absorbed an SSWCM now severely weakened by the postwar downturn. He headed the party’s industrial departments, and became the British correspondent of Pravda. Although he joined his former SLP comrades, Arthur McManus and Tom Bell, in criticising the implementation of the Dutt-Pollitt report dedicated to the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPGB, Murphy was to be a loyal advocate of the party’s twists and turns throughout the decade, with only the occasional deviation. He was in the forefront of the campaign against Trotskyism in 1925–26.
After the General Strike, Murphy spent two years in Moscow as the CPGB’s representative on the Comintern’s Executive. His final transformation into a Stalinist functionary was confirmed by the attack on the CPGB he co-authored with Robin Page Arnot at the behest of the Comintern dignitary Otto Kuusinen. They rubbished the party’s failure to criticise the union lefts in the aftermath of the General Strike. Murphy’s assault on a policy in which he had been deeply involved in creating provoked severe, perhaps fatal, strains on his relationship with other British leaders. He came in for further excoriation in 1927 when he suggested that the National Left-Wing Movement, a coalition of CPGB and Labour Party members fighting Labour’s exclusion of Communists, should be transformed into a ‘third party’.
After intensive experience in key Comintern bodies as they underwent assimilation into the apparatus of the Soviet state, Murphy returned to Britain in 1928 a fanatical supporter of the ‘Third Period’ with its disastrous ‘class against class’ policy, and its denunciation of the Labour leaders as ‘Social Fascists’. Sensing Soviet disapproval – for reasons that finally remain obscure – Murphy became embroiled in a dispute with the CPGB over his call for a campaign for British government credits to facilitate the Soviet Union’s purchase of British goods. Somewhat mysteriously – although the party was at its lowest ebb ever – he resigned, and was ritually expelled. The whirligig of time wreaks its revenge. From Prinkipo, Trotsky wrote to his British supporter Reg Groves: ‘I have learned that Murphy is expelled as “a near Trotskyist”. What does this wonderful story mean?’
Murphy speedily established himself in the ‘Social Fascist’ Labour Party and the Socialist League, which was formed in the summer of 1932 by those members of the Independent Labour Party who wished to remain in the Labour Party after the ILP disaffiliated, and Labour lefts. By 1934, he had become the League’s National Secretary. His move to the right roughly paralleled the changing policies of the party he had deserted. By 1936, with the Soviet Union in the League of Nations, he was supporting military sanctions against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, a minority voice on the right of the Socialist League. In the summer of that year, he quit both his secretaryship and the League itself to prosecute the Popular Front as the full-time organiser of the People’s Front Propaganda Committee, recently set up by Liberals and ‘progressive’ capitalists. Murphy strongly supported the Second World War, and maintained his admiration of Stalin in a panegyric published in 1945. He renounced Marxism in the 1950s, and died in 1965 at the age of 76.
Ralph Darlington’s book provides the first full-length account of Murphy’s life. As such, it adds only a little to our existing knowledge of his formative years. Both his activities and their context – the Sheffield engineering industry, the ethos and policies of the ASE, the politics of that city’s labour movement prior to 1917 – are explained in a cursory manner. It is intriguing that Murphy joined a political party only when he was almost 30 years of age. Most of the important shop steward leaders, and certainly those who went into the CPGB, were long-standing members of the SLP or the British Socialist Party, organisations which contributed so much to the political feeling of the Marxist left in the years preceding the Russian Revolution. It is inadequate to dismiss the complexities of the BSP’s attitude towards trade unionism as ‘contempt’ (p. 12). It recruited leading shop stewards, such as Fred Shaw, Willie Gallacher, Harry Pollitt and Harry McShane, not to speak of John Maclean. Contrary to what is said here, Nellie Connole’s Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher (1961) implies that Ted Lismer, the leading ASE steward in Sheffield and a close comrade of Murphy’s, was a member of the BSP. So of course were the Sheffield union activists and later CPGB cadres Sam Elsbury and George Fletcher.
If the SLP had ‘no real base’ in Sheffield (p. 12), it had a branch after 1906 and again from 1912, whilst its paper, The Socialist, was readily available throughout this period. There is an interesting note on the Sheffield branch and the problems it faced in the issue of January 1915. According to Connole’s account, it was an SLPer, Jimmy Bowns, who initially forged links between Sheffield and the leading Clydeside stewards McManus (SLP) and Gallacher (BSP). At least one Sheffield SLPer, Lawrence Smith, was jailed for his opposition to the war. There may be problems with the availability of the materials required to pursue these matters, and Connole’s book certainly needs checking. But more attention to Murphy’s activities in the years and the environment in which his ideas developed would have made for a richer narrative, and a deeper grasp of his emerging politics.
Of course, this was the great age of Socialist pedagogy, and many young workers immersed themselves almost completely in the activities of the Plebs League and the struggle for independent working-class education. It is plausible that Murphy, something of an autodictat, recoiled, like others, from the shadow that Henry Mayers Hyndman cast over the BSP, and from the sectarianism, doctrinal disputation and dual unionism of the SLP to devote himself to the Labour College movement. Despite its potential importance to the formation of somebody he terms ‘an organic intellectual’ and ‘a worker intellectual polymath’ (p. xviii), the author does not pursue this avenue. He addresses the Labour Colleges only in passing in relation to their dispute with the CPGB in 1924. Yet together with his union, this movement was one of the few constants through Murphy’s life. It was Plebs, the journal of the National Council of Labour Colleges, which first announced Murphy’s ideas to a wider audience. It published his article Industrial Organisation, an early draft of The Workers Committee, in February 1917. In the very different world of 1959, the same journal recorded Murphy’s lifelong allegiances: ‘AEU Highgate with J.T. Murphy in the chair have started a class on automation.’ (Plebs, January 1959, p. 24)
The personal and intellectual influences on Murphy excite minimal curiosity in this text. Recent work of some relevance, such as Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock’s Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914 (1996), is not drawn on. There is little about the growth – across the political spectrum – of the idea of ‘the servile state’. Hillaire Belloc’s term was used in the SLP, and William Paul wrote a book about it. There is the suggestion in a footnote that Murphy’s conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy may have been influenced by reading Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s The History of Trade Unionism (1894). Another possible source was Roberto Michels, who ultimately presented in his ‘iron law of oligarchy’ a fatalistic account of the inevitability of bureaucratic control of the labour movement. Darlington mentions in a footnote a review by Murphy in 1920 of Michels’ Political Parties (p. 308, n42). But the book had been available in a translation by the British socialists Eden and Cedar Paul since 1916 – a year before The Workers’ Committee was published. And before he fell into despair, Michels had actively fought the bureaucratisation of the German Social Democratic Party, and wrote about it in The Socialist in 1905.
Rather than following these trails, Darlington relies on occasional conjecture as to Murphy’s activities before 1916, and on New Horizons, the autobiography Murphy published in 1941. Such retrospective accounts should be used, but – particularly in the case of a man who went underwent such drastic political reinvention – with circumspection and in conjunction with other sources. A mendacious statement of Murphy’s from 1956 makes the point succinctly: ‘When I resigned from the ranks of Communism at the introduction of Stalinist methods into the leadership of the British party ...’ (p. 256)
When Darlington’s text moves on to 1917 and the climax of the shop stewards movement, it is derivative. It follows closely, sometimes too closely for comfort, James Hinton’s The First Shop Stewards Movement (1973), as well as the same author’s introduction to reprints of Murphy’s The Workers’ Committee and Preparing for Power, both republished in 1972. Following Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein’s Marxism and the Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926 (1986), only one significant revision of Hinton’s work is offered. The shop stewards are criticised for failing to provide leadership in mobilising industrial action to halt the war as the movement against conscription developed in early 1918. Hinton sensitively analysed the interaction of the attitudes of the NAC – with their responsive conceptions and critique of leadership in terms of manipulation and substitutionism – and the consciousness of their members. He carefully contextualised these problems in the traditions of engineering trade unionism and craft consciousness. He concluded that the decision to retreat from calls for a strike against the war after they had consulted their members was understandable and realistic on the part of these stewards with these members in these conditions.
That judgement remains persuasive. It is rejected here, not on the basis of any detailed re-examination of the episode and elaboration of a rigorously documented and argued alternative course of action, but in terms of abstract, timeless rhetoric. Hinton, it is asserted, lets Murphy and his comrades off the hook for their failure actively to oppose the war, because ‘the only hope lay in trying to harness the strength of an engineers’ craft-based workshop organisation to the wider interests of the working-class movement, a class-wide agitation for militant trade unionism, fusing immediate economic issues with politics in a struggle against the war’ (p. 46). This is somewhat easier on the page than in the workshops. When Murphy was victimised at this time, it proved impossible to secure sympathy action, a fact which Darlington glosses over (p. 50). Nor could the NAC win wider support for the Midlands strikes in the autumn of 1918. What price then a national stoppage to secure peace? As Bernard Waite’s A Class Society at War: England 1914–18 (1983) demonstrated with a wealth of detail, there was a lack of support amongst workers for an anti-war movement. Posing alternatives is fruitful, but only so long as we have evidence to justify their serious consideration, and only so long as we operate with proper conceptions of historical possibility, related to a careful examination of what actions could have been realistically conceived by the protagonists at the time, as well as both the potential and the constraints within the prevailing situation. In the case under scrutiny, the social forces for the realisation of an alternative history were simply not present.
Much of Darlington’s material on the events leading to the formation of the CPGB flows directly from secondary sources, primarily Ray Challinor’s The Origins of British Bolshevism (1977). Perhaps understandably, Darlington tends to overemphasise Murphy’s rôle in the development of the SLP towards Bolshevism. The party was moving in that direction before Murphy became a member. As with The Workers’ Committee, we must recognise the dialectic between individual and collective in the generation of ideas. The rôle, amongst others, of McManus, Bell and Paul, stalwarts of the party from the start of the century, deserves more emphasis than it receives in statements such as ‘Murphy and the other SLP shop stewards’ and ‘Murphy and his comrades’ (pp. 58–9). The enmity that Murphy’s individualist stance on the BSP-SLP unity talks engendered amongst his comrades was long-standing (see Tom Bell, The British Communist Party: A Short History, p. 57).
The best section of this book examines Murphy’s involvement in the problems of the CPGB through the 1920s. Darlington has examined the documents of the CPGB in Moscow, and tracked down Murphy’s papers in Canada. The result is an account which adds significantly to earlier work such as Walter Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21 (1969), and LJ McFarlane’s The British Communist Party: Its Origins and Development Until 1929 (1966). Darlington’s research vindicates Kendall on the extent of Russian influence and subsidy to the CPGB. He estimates that around £1 million was expended on launching the party, although he emphasises the ideological confluence of the British Marxists and the Bolsheviks. The impact of the Soviet funds – some would argue they played a disorganising rôle rather than simply lubricating both the passage of alien conceptions of organisation and politics from the USSR to Britain and the CPGB’s subordination to Moscow – requires further assessment.
As against the recent tendency to detect and celebrate the CPGB’s autonomy from the Russians, Darlington is clear and emphatic; allowing for the need for tactical realisation of broad policy on the national terrain, political subservience was the norm. Any autonomy, he concludes, was ‘strictly circumscribed and limited mainly to day-to-day operational issues. All the major strategic issues were laid down by the Comintern in Moscow, and adhered to by the various national sectors.’ (p. 293) Whilst no good judge would disagree, the author occasionally minimises the space available for opposition. Discussing the lack of dissent in the CPGB over the excommunication of Trotsky in 1924–25, he argues a stark either ... or: ‘The problem for the CPGB leadership was that it had to accept the situation or break with the Comintern.’ (p. 141) Why then was there initial and sometimes extensive and sustained opposition in other national parties? As with much recent work on British Communism, the absence of international comparison limits the analysis. The history of the French party or, more dramatically, the similarly small and weak Belgian party demonstrates that before the ultimate interdiction of the International descended, there was room for manoeuvre. The specific weaknesses of the CPGB in relation to other parties, particularly the range of concrete factors which saw the British workers’ leaders of 1920 reduced by Stalinism, requires further exploration.
Darlington’s book is valuable in at least beginning to look in more detail at the precise processes by which the Comintern was subordinated to the emerging Stalinist state, and the national parties to the Comintern. One essential mediating factor was the reconstruction and absorption of national leaders such as Murphy. The rôle the International Control Commission played in hunting out heresy in individual parties, and the activities of the Comintern’s Commission on Internal Relations, touched on here, will bear further scrutiny. Murphy sat on both, and his activities on the Special Commission on the French party will be of particular interest to Revolutionary History readers.
Murphy’s resignation from the party is not even mentioned in Noreen Branson’s quasi-official History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927–41 (1985). Darlington provides the first detailed account. The incident remains difficult to understand in purely political terms. And quite why he terms Murphy’s subsequent expulsion ‘unjustified’ (p. 214) is unclear. Against the background of the CPGB’s practice and regime, Murphy’s baffling resignation and subsequent refusal to attend the Political Bureau to explain himself left the leadership with no alternative but to administer the coup de grâce to somebody most of them had very little time for anyway. This volume is of less interest in its treatment of the Socialist League, whilst Murphy’s speedy political evolution in the 1930s from ultra-leftism to Popular Frontism is explained only very broadly in terms of his acute awareness of the Fascist threat. Whether Murphy still remained in intellectual thrall to the party to which he had given so much of his life is not discussed. Darlington’s round-up of Murphy’s life in the 1940s and 1950s means we have a fuller picture of a life which for many on the left appeared hitherto to have ended in the 1920s.
At least some of the problems with this text lie in the framework in which the author has chosen to cast his story. Darlington is explicit, saying ‘this book derives from the theoretical tradition of the Socialist Workers Party’ (p. xxi). Many of the weaknesses of the evaluations made in the text of people and events flow from the debility of that tradition and the use of its preoccupations as a sometimes intrusive and ahistorical yardstick. One example will suffice: the Labour Party is portrayed in a one-sided, inflexible, unstrategic fashion in the chapters dealing with the 1920s and 1930s, as it has been by the International Socialists and the SWP over the last 30 years. It is to be avoided at all costs; it is as destructive to revolutionaries as kryptonite is to Superman. Thus Murphy is taken to school: ‘His notion that Socialists in the circumstances of the early 1930s should remain inside the Labour Party merely helped to provide a left cover and breed false expectations in such leaders.’ (p. 229) A few lines later, we are given a specific example: ‘As the German revolution of 1918–19 had demonstrated, the consequences of Socialists staying inside a reformist party in a revolutionary period led inevitably to catastrophe.’ (p. 229) The yawning gulf that separated the problems of British revolutionaries in 1932 and their German counterparts in 1918–19 is simply excised. The question also arises as to whether Tony Cliff has proved uniquely immune to kryptonite; did the sojourn of his followers in the Labour Party from 1950 to around 1965 merely help to provide a left cover and breed expectations in Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson? Sensing the difficulties, Darlington provides a rather evasive footnote stating that entrism is permissible, but only when revolutionaries are very weak, and so long as it is not long term. Most people would judge that revolutionaries were very weak in ‘the circumstances of the early 1930s’. So why is Murphy criticised for joining the Labour Party? Moreover, the Socialist Review Group’s decade-and-a-half visit was something more than the quick raid that its successor insists Trotsky envisaged.
Murphy, of course, was as isolated in 1932 as the SRG was in the 1950s. To criticise him for joining the Labour Party is ludicrous. But the Socialist League, 2,000 to 3,000-strong, is also taken to task for remaining in the Labour Party. Those who had any thoughts of leaving would have looked to the ILP, of which they had been members. The League is compared unfavourably with the CPGB, ‘despite its increasing Stalinism and the adoption of the Popular Front policy,... the Communist Party still rejected Labour’s parliamentary cretinism and had an orientation on the struggles of the working class’ (p. 231). That word ‘despite’, how small but how mighty in banishing little things like Stalinism and Popular Frontism and the ultimately integrated nature of Communist Party politics. It is unclear whether Darlington is suggesting that revolutionaries of the early 1930s should have stayed within the CPGB as on his judgement that it was healthier than the Socialist League – that is certainly the drift of his analysis. If so, the aspiration is utopian, as the expulsion of the Trotskyists in 1932–33 graphically demonstrated. It is interesting that these flesh-and-blood revolutionary activists of the early 1930s – Reg Groves, Henry Sara, Harry Wicks and their comrades, the difficulties they confronted, the decisions they took – are not mentioned in the text, still less used as a yardstick to measure Murphy’s activities. And there are only brief references to ‘the Trotskyists’ in the footnotes. After all, Groves was on the League’s Executive when Murphy was its Secretary. Instead of examining the concrete problems and alternatives that the revolutionary left faced in the 1930s in deciding whether to join the Labour Party or ILP or build an open organisation, that distant world and its struggles are refracted through the prism of the contemporary SWP. This is not the way to write history.
A second problem lies in Darlington’s eschewal of ‘standard biographical narrative (with irrelevant details of personal idiosyncrasies)’ (pp. xxiv–v). But life and logic teach us the importance of the ‘personal’ in understanding an individual’s political trajectory. The biographical form, still frowned upon in the academic world, is a useful weapon in the armoury of historians, its vices and virtues recently illustrated by Patricia Hollis’ Jennie Lee: A Life (1997). More intensive engagement with Murphy’s values, motivations and ‘personal idiosyncrasies’ just might have helped explain key incidents in his political trajectory which remain vague. Various personal details about Murphy and his wife Molly, whose autobiography has been published to coincide with Darlington’s book, are scattered through these texts. They are never brought together to frame his political trajectory, and thus deepen our understanding of it. Murphy, for example, demonstrated early aspirations to upward social mobility. But he was forced to abandon early plans to enter the civil service. Study, self-improvement, the shop stewards movement, the SLP and CPGB provided an alternative path to emancipation. Yet Murphy’s ambition remained intact. A recent article suggests that he attracted the patronage of ‘a prominent individual’ at the highest level of the Comintern. He saw criticism of the CPGB as a sure road to an internationally-assisted passage to its leadership (Andrew Thorpe, Comintern “Control” of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920–43, English Historical Review, Volume 113, June 1998, pp. 646, 653–4).
If ambition and its thwarting was one possible factor in his evolution, the bourgeois family was another. What appears to have been a very conventional marriage to a woman who described herself as ‘lower middle-class’ and took little interest in politics saw both parents’ ambitions transferred to their son. As Molly Murphy wrote: ‘From his earliest years, both his father and I had determined that he should have the kind of education which we wish had been ours.’ (Molly Murphy, pp. 159–60) These working-class revolutionaries were determined to send their son to a fee-paying public school, in Britain the pathway to the élite, and an important litmus test of class consciousness. Perceived as scandalous behaviour on the part of a leading Communist, this stimulated sharp criticism within the CPGB. It became an additional tension in a situation where personal differences inevitably play some rôle in political conflicts. It drew the Murphies into the domestic economy and life of the middle class. It imposed on the couple a financial burden beyond the reach of a working-class family, and most political activists, intensified by the need periodically to hire domestic help. The salary Murphy received from Pravda became essential to pay the fees.
By 1932, Murphy was relatively isolated in the CPGB leadership, and had lost the patronage of the Comintern. He was impressed by the resilience of the Labour Party. The CPGB had little more than 2,000 members. Its prospects appeared grim, as did Murphy’s when he lost his job. Harry Pollitt, admittedly a political antagonist, had little doubt that personal and material factors, as well as political issues, were involved in his resignation (p. 215). Thereafter, his desire to operate as a professional intellectual and continue his son’s education produced a willingness to accept financial donations from rich friends. Taken out of their political context, emphasis on these factors may provide a distorted, one-sided portrait. If we want to understand the man and his politics better, they should be critically confronted and integrated within that context. Greater attention to the interpenetration of the personal and political might have produced a richer, more complex study. As it is, we get little sense of the man and the texture of his life. Murphy remains as inscrutable at the end of Darlington’s book as at the beginning.
Written in the 1960s, Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist is more revealing, although those expecting the story of a British Kollontai or Pasionaria will be disappointed. Molly comes across as very much a woman of her class and time. She saw herself as ‘typical’ of English lower middle-class respectability and conventionalism (p. 74). She felt out of her depth in the world of the Comintern, embarrassed when Kollontai responded to her enquiry after her husband: ‘Which one, my dear?’ (p. 74) She played little part in political debates: ‘That was my husband’s job.’ Though she joined the CPGB, she emphasised ‘it meant simply that my husband’s friends were my friends, his loyalties my loyalties’ (p. 87). Intensely involved before 1914 in the suffragette movement, she seems to have been only briefly active in the CPGB, and not at all thereafter. Her main interests were children and nursing, although the quality of her commitments was demonstrated when she spent six months nursing in Spain in 1937. Very much the stereotypical supportive wife and mother, this record of her life surely deserves better than the Dave Spart-like comment: ‘She provides no analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution as a result of the combined impact of civil war and the revolution’s isolation internationally ...’ (p. v) Many women of that era, like Helen Crawford, Isabel Brown and Rose Smith, were Communist leaders. Others led overt or subterranean lives of great complexity and emotional intensity. There is no evidence of that here. And once again, the plot thickens; we are informed that according to her son, ‘her account was actually ghost-written by J.T. Murphy’ (p. iv). The editor has faith: ‘There is no question that the substantive nature of the account is Molly’s.’ (p. iv) For the conscientious historian, this leaves matters unresolved. Are we listening to Molly’s voice recapitulating what she thought, felt and did all these years earlier? Or are we listening to the voice of that inscrutable old Stalinist Jack Murphy, remembering, perhaps imperfectly, what he thought she ought to have thought and felt?
John McIlroy
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Ian Birchall
Art, Class and Cleavage
(1999)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1999, pp. 263–65.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Ben Watson
Art, Class and Cleavage
Quartet, London 1998, pp. 431, £14.00
BEN Watson stands at the point of intersection of two traditions – a Marxist tradition running from Trotsky to the ‘state capitalist’ theories of C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff, and a tradition of revolt in (or against) art that goes from surrealism via situationism to the music of Frank Zappa and the poetry of J.H. Prynne. The only problem is to know whether these traditions do in fact intersect; for if they don’t, Watson has nowhere to stand, and is in free fall into the void – a conclusion supported by some of the more bewildering sections of this insightful but confusing book.Art, Class and Cleavage
Quartet, London 1998, pp. 431, £14.00
Watson’s declared aim is to overcome the ‘cleavage’ between art and politics/class. In particular, he champions modernism in music and poetry, arguing that the ‘refusal of exchange values gives Modern Art its relationship to revolutionary politics’ (p. 222). The argument takes us through knowledgeable and perceptive expositions of Coleridge, Fourier, Josef Dietzgen, Walter Benjamin, James Joyce and Philip K. Dick. Watson treats Stalinists and liberal academics with contempt, arguing that ‘both contend that knowledge exists objectively, independent of the person who thinks and the society that funds the thinker’ (p. 75). Post-modernism, Political Correctness and feminism all get their fair (and sometimes unfair) share of abuse.
I suspect that many readers of Revolutionary History will be profoundly irritated by Watson’s writing. The assault on the art/politics cleavage takes his writing beyond the boundaries of most works on either politics or culture. The footnotes repeatedly alternate between Lenin’s philosophical writings and Frank Zappa’s lyrics. A taste for puns and the sheer range and obscurity of the references ensure that this is not an easy read.
But in his insistence that music, poetry, sex, schizophrenia and death deserve discussion by Marxists, Watson is firmly in the tradition of Trotsky’s writings on culture and everyday life. He claims, convincingly, that the art/politics cleavage has produced ‘a marginalised and unimaginative revolutionary left and an effete, ornamental avant-garde’ (p. 341). Watson has done his best to provoke a dialogue, though he will get few thanks from either side.
The back cover promises a ‘rediscovery of Trotsky’. Watson skilfully deploys Trotsky against current academic trends, makes some useful comments on Trotsky and Freud, and claims that ‘Trotsky is the most appropriate political complement to the revolt of Modern Art’ (p. 185).
But he does not avoid a certain romanticisation of his hero. He dismisses as Stalinist misrepresentation (p. 10) the claim that Trotsky’s alliance with the surrealist Breton was primarily tactical rather than political or aesthetic, although there is impeccably Trotskyist confirmation from Naville and van Heijenoort that Trotsky knew little of surrealism, and didn’t much like what he knew. Likewise he claims that Trotsky ‘carried a book of Mallarmé’s poetry in his pocket when leading the Red Army’ (p. 10). We know from Alfred Rosmer that Trotsky had Mallarmé on his bookshelves in his military train, but to infer that he was declaiming ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’ as the bullets whistled through his hair is unsubstantiated wish-fulfilment. It is also unfortunate that Watson, an enthusiast for poodles, does not note Jacqueline Lamba’s recollection that Trotsky, in argument with Breton, ‘attributed an almost human soul to dogs ...’ (Arturo Schwarz, André Breton, Trotsky et l’anarchie, Paris 1977, p. 210).
The last third of the book is devoted to Voloshinov’s work on Marxism and linguistics. Again, there is much that is valuable here, but some of the claims are dubious. Watson counterposes ‘concrete utterance’ to ‘abstract systems’ (p. 373), and thus dismisses Saussure’s work, identifying it with the traditional grammar of the schoolroom. But his stress on utterance forgets that language cannot function unless it has a grammatical structure that makes it possible for one speaker to understand another; the English language exists independently of particular speakers, just as the solar system exists independently of human beings. In rejecting the ‘abstract’, he forgets that science requires abstraction; Marx’s Capital moves between the concrete and the abstract. Far from reinforcing traditional grammar after the manner of a Labour education minister, Saussure’s affirmation of the arbitrariness of language undermines any claim that one grammar is ‘better’ than another. And in his stress on ambiguity, Watson focuses excessively on literature. Ambiguity is a virtue in poetry, but a distinct disadvantage in Health and Safety regulations.
James Thurber once drew a cartoon of a bewildered man in an art gallery, captioned ‘he knows all about art but he doesn’t know what he likes’. Watson knows only too well what he likes, and the book sometimes turns into a catalogue of his personal tastes. Watson calls his method Materialist Esthetix; the eccentric spelling abbreviates as ME! (The conventional spelling would have given the acronym Ma, to the hilarity of amateur Freudians; or perhaps MA, symbolising the academics for whom he feels such searing hatred.) At one point, he lists 10 names (all unknown to the present reviewer) and describes their work as ‘the only poetry worth reading in England’ (p. 325). Anyone who disagrees with Watson’s tastes is damned, not only aesthetically, but politically and morally. This style of intellectual terrorism is much closer to Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis than Watson would like to think. Before attempting to establish a single revolutionary canon in music and literature, he should ponder the passage in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution which promises that under Socialism political parties will be replaced by ‘parties’ advocating different tendencies in theatre, music and sport.
As Watson acknowledges, to overcome the art/politics cleavage requires, not the best efforts of the best intellectuals, but social revolution (p. 341). Without that revolution, Materialist Esthetix, like surrealism and situationism, must be a judged a failure. Yet an interesting failure is sometimes preferable to a boring success.
*************
Ian Birchall
History of the Communist International
(1999)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1999, pp. 265–68.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Pierre Broué
Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste
Fayard, Paris 1997, pp. 1120, FF295
Histoire de l’Internationale Communiste
Fayard, Paris 1997, pp. 1120, FF295
PIERRE Broué’s history of the Communist International is an impressive achievement. As well as over 800 pages of scrupulously documented text, it contains a detailed chronology, an extensive bibliography, and an index with biographical sketches of virtually every individual who plays a part in the story. In addition, there is a list of some 8,000 pseudonyms used by those active in the Communist movement. (I was slightly less impressed when the first entry I checked – Tony Cliff – turned out to be inaccurate.) Doubtless there are errors and omissions, but it would require a whole team of specialists to locate where they are. Broué has provided not only an enthralling narrative, but a work of reference which will be indispensable to anyone working in the field.
Whilst the account centres on the key states of Central and Western Europe which decided the fate of the post-1917 revolutionary wave, Broué includes much material from other parts of the world, and there are full accounts of the development of revolutionary Communism, and then Stalinism, in both Asia and Latin America. Whilst some sections rely heavily on established accounts – Isaacs on the Chinese Revolution, Renshaw on the British General Strike – Broué also makes substantial use of recently discovered archive material. An important example is the use of material from the work of Bernhard Bayerlein, showing the divergences within the Comintern leadership at the time of the German events of 1923 and after. Amongst other material, he quotes a letter from Stalin in August 1923, urging that the Germans be held back and not stimulated; Zinoviev’s draft theses on Germany from August 1923; details of the dispute between Trotsky and Zinoviev in the autumn of 1923; and Rákosi’s report to Zinoviev of October 1923.The latter part of the book, dealing with the Stalinised Comintern, is perhaps the less interesting. The broad outline of the crimes of the Third Period and the betrayals of the Popular Front are a well-known story, and although Broué adds much detail, he does not revise the general picture. Certainly he provides sufficient documentation to belabour any surviving admirers of Stalinism. Whilst the catastrophic outcome of the Third Period in Germany is all too familiar, the story of the massacres in Colombia and El Salvador, also produced by Third Period policies, will be less so. Broué also details the leadership changes carried out during the Third Period; as he points out, it was the leaderships established during the Third Period who implemented the policies of the Popular Front. Chapter 32 provides an extensive roll-call of those murdered at the hands of the Stalinist apparatus.
Yet, as Broué shows, the Comintern was never altogether a ‘monolith’ (as some of us have perhaps too easily believed). The famous zigzags were neither unanimous nor executed without hesitation. Thus the Comintern opposed Duclos’ attempt to get L’Humanité published legally under the Nazi occupation of France. Even when Stalin decided that the Comintern must be dissolved, there were divergent voices on the Executive. No-one defied Stalin, but there were several views as to how the strangulation should be carried out. Perhaps such differences should not surprise us in an organisation where fear and ambition had replaced principle. But individuals did make a difference, and Broué attempts to evaluate their rôles. Thus Dimitrov (whose direct involvement in the Sofia Cathedral episode Broué makes clear) emerges as a complete scoundrel, who drank too much and sexually harassed secretaries; André Marty, however, is said to have been a ‘big-mouth’, but not the butcher he is often accused of being.
Broué considers that by 1935 the Comintern was no more than a ‘direct dependency of the political police of the [Soviet] state’. Undoubtedly there is a substantial degree of truth in this, and Broué provides much detailed material on the rôle of Russian agents within the various Communist parties. Nonetheless, a number of reservations should be noted. Firstly, the various Stalinist parties retained sufficient roots in their national labour movements for them subsequently to develop into variants of Social Democracy. Secondly, in the 1930s and during the Second World War, the Communist parties continued to attract many of the best class fighters of their generation. To dismiss militants of the quality of Harry McShane or Joe Jacobs as merely ‘Stalinists’ because they became embroiled in Communist parties at a time when Trotskyism was almost invisible would be sectarian folly. And thirdly, a theoretical question arises: if the counter-revolutionary Comintern was simply a projection of the Russian state machine, then what sort of state was it? Could it in any sense be a state that represented workers’ class interests, in however degenerated a fashion? Wisely, Broué makes no attempt to pursue this point.
But it is the first half of the book which is much more illuminating and thought provoking, and highly relevant to the education of a new generation of revolutionaries. For here we are dealing with a living movement, with all its richness and contradiction, its spontaneity and its mistakes. Anyone who believes there was a line of continuity between the early Comintern and the later monstrosity that bore the same name should read Broué’s detailed account of the full debate and open argument that characterised the first congresses.
But Broué also undermines the romanticisation that has existed within the Trotskyist camp. I recall a faction in the International Socialists (led by Sean Matgamna) which included in its programme support for the ‘first four congresses of the Communist International’. I was never sure what this might mean, and having read Broué I am finally convinced it was meaningless. Indeed, the real Comintern was something of a ramshackle affair, a hasty improvisation to deal with an urgent and unpredictable situation. We can learn at least as much from the early Comintern’s mistakes – which were numerous – as from its programmatic declarations. But precisely these were the mistakes – and often dubious manoeuvres – of a living movement. The point was neatly summed by Georg Lukács, in a remark recorded by Victor Serge: ‘Marxists know that dirty little tricks can be performed with impunity when great deeds are being achieved; the error of some comrades is to suppose that one can produce great results simply through the performance of dirty little tricks.’ Here we have beautifully encapsulated the essential difference between Lenin and Zinoviev.
For many on the revolutionary left, even today, the Comintern is cited as though it provided a simple recipe book for the construction of revolutionary parties. But as Broué shows, the formation of the Comintern was a complex process, in which individuals, networks of personal contacts, the various ‘foreign sections’ based on ex-prisoners-of-war in Russia, small political groups and mass parties all interacted in the context of a unique revolutionary wave emerging from the war and the Russian October. Those who seek to reduce this to the shibboleth that all revolutionary parties come simply from splits within existing working-class institutions should study Broué and think again. Thus in the example of France, revolutionary Syndicalists like Rosmer, Monatte and Martinet played a key rôle in the formation of the Communist Party, even though they had never felt any inclination to ‘enter’ the SFIO. And if they had played an even larger rôle, whilst the corrupt parliamentarians like Cachin had been excluded, the PCF might have been better able to face up to the demands of the new period.
The real problem was, of course, that the overwhelming majority of the established leadership of the working class had sold out in 1914. The Comintern’s task was therefore to forge a new leadership, at every level from Central Committee to shop steward, within the few brief years before the revolutionary wave began to subside. The amazing thing is not that there were mistakes and that bizarre short-cuts were pursued, but that so much was achieved. Some of us might draw the lesson, contrary to the advocates of ‘entrism’, that it is a great pity that the left in the Second International did not break away – or at least develop a much more solid factional organisation – before 1914.
Be that as it may, the Comintern leadership found themselves in a race against time. Paradoxically, the Russians had to try to teach other parties to rely more on their own concrete analysis of circumstances, and less on imitation of the Russian example. This is the message of Lenin’s magnificent but despairing speech to the fourth Comintern congress, when he warned: ‘We have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners.’ Broué provides a neat example of the tendency to see the world through Russian eyes when he cites the repeated practice of the Italian Communists of referring to Mussolini’s Blackshirts as ‘White Guards’ – something hardly calculated to clarify the issues for the average Italian worker.
It is also in this context that the question of ultra-leftism in the Comintern must be understood, and here Broué can be criticised for taking too superficial a view of matters. It is easy enough in retrospect to condemn the March Action and the ‘theory of the offensive’. Of course, it is quite right to blame Béla Kun for his stupidities – as Lenin did one once occasion to such an extent that the congress record had to be altered to moderate his vituperation. But the fundamental questions are: firstly, why was there such a shortage of cadres that a man like Kun was given responsible positions? And secondly, why did the ultra-leftism of such leaders find a genuine ‘resonance’ (as our Pabloite friends used to call it) amongst the layers of newly radicalised young workers, militant, angry and impatient, but lacking experience and any real sense of tactics.
Lenin himself seems to have related to ultra-lefts of all types with understanding and patience. He realised that most ultra-lefts were genuine revolutionaries, and even amid the tremendous pressures of post-revolutionary Russia, he found time to argue and convince. Broué’s account brings out the differences between the various Bolshevik leaders. Indeed, contrary to the popular image of ‘Bolshevism’, even the leading core of Bolsheviks was far from being homogeneous. Broué brings out the different rôles of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek and others. Zinoviev, despite his talents as an orator, appears mainly in a negative light. It was Zinoviev (not Trotsky, as is often alleged) who threatened to shoot the Kronstadt insurgents ‘like partridges’. It was above all Zinoviev’s ‘Bolshevisation’ of the Comintern that paved the way for Stalin. Moreover, Zinoviev is shown to have been one of the very first proponents of the ‘theory’ that Social Democracy was a ‘variety of Fascism’.
But most striking of all is the visible gap between Lenin and even his most gifted associates. Lenin understood that the art of party-building requires a knowledge of when to split and when to pull together. Of course, splitting is a lot easier than pulling together, and all too many of Lenin’s would-be followers (including even, at times, Trotsky) have preferred to split rather than pull together.
Broué’s sympathies tend to be with the right wing of the revolutionary movement. In particular Paul Levi, whom he had already presented in a relatively positive light in his 1971 book on the German Revolution, is here presented as a major figure in the Comintern leadership. Certainly Broué is quite right to endorse Levi’s critique of the March Action; Levi was undoubtedly a shrewd analyst of the political situation. But it must also be said that he was an inept faction-fighter. One can scarcely imagine Lenin deciding to break party discipline, but then failing to follow through, and retreating from the debate. Within a more stable leadership team, Levi could certainly have played a very useful rôle, but in the near chaos of the German party he failed to live up to the demands upon him.
One review can only touch on a very few of the many issues raised in Broué’s book, which will undoubtedly continue to provoke discussion and further research for years to come. In the last issue of Revolutionary History, Al Richardson described the book as ‘magisterial’. Perhaps I am not quite so easily pleased, but there is no doubt that this is an important and valuable book. I would add the hope that an English translation will soon appear, but it might look as though I am volunteering for the job. Good luck to whoever has the stamina to undertake it.
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The Fate of the Russian Revolution
Sean Matgamna (ed.)
The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Volume 1
Phoenix Press, London, 1998, pp603, £16.99
The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Volume 1
Phoenix Press, London, 1998, pp603, £16.99
We present two reviews of this important collection, the first by Barry Finger, the second by Jim Higgins.
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THE purpose of this ambitious volume is to acquaint the Socialist public with the living political legacy of the Workers Party/Independent Socialist League. A Marxist tendency which never amounted to more than a few hundred members, which endured for less than 20 years, and which led no revolutionary insurrections, the WP/ISL nevertheless bridged the gap between the epoch of the Bolshevik revolution and the retrogressive collectivist epoch which followed from its defeat. It germinated as a minority tendency within the Trotskyist movement, and came fully into its own by formulating an unabashed and full-throated defence of revolutionary Socialism, free of the fatuous and still fashionable insistence that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of Leninism, and offered the struggle against Stalinism, in the words of Max Shachtman, the leading political personality of the movement, ‘a theoretically unassailable basis and a political program that rested on international Socialism’. In an age in which the ‘general idea of Socialism’ is still invariably linked in the public mind with the fate of the Soviet Union, they stood alone in categorically rejecting the notion that what went awry was simply the results of ‘mistakes’, ‘serious errors’ or even ‘crimes’, and went on decisively to dismiss the notion that Stalinist Russia was any kind of workers’ state, degenerated or otherwise.
That these remonstrations remain largely unheeded and unassimilated explains to no small extent why the pall of the lunatic asylum hangs over the remnants of the Socialist movement. The endless, unintentionally self-mocking pronunciations of the ‘crisis of capitalism’ issued in the teeth not only of Socialism’s own unrelieved political failures, but against its own deepening moral and theoretical bankruptcies, is unwitting testimony to the continued relevance of the ground-breaking work of the ‘Shachtmanites’, for the larger failures of Socialism are attributable to issues other than that of mere inadequate reality contact. The heroic political failures of the oppressed and exploited are, after all, forgivable. The unbroken record of complicity of the non-Stalinist left in making alibis for, rationalising and defending totalitarian barbarism to the oppressed and the exploited – whilst coyly holding its nose, a project a bit less heroic – is not.If Stalinism perverted the most liberating doctrines and noble instincts of humanity into a means of enslavement, and, for a while, marched relentlessly ahead on that basis, the erstwhile non-Stalinists of the left were reduced to wringing their hands and shaking their heads balefully at the dialectical way ‘history’ chose to march forward. And marching forward is exactly what history is said to have done when Stalinism advanced. So insisted not only the soothsayers of the Social Democratic left – the Coleses and Bauers and Dans; yet no more so, and certainly less flagrantly so, than the adepts of post-Trotsky Trotskyism – the Deutschers and Mandels and Cannons. The stormy spectacle of doctrinal hair-splitting and organisational reconfiguration with which official ‘Trotskyism’ greeted Stalinism’s advance measured little beyond the geometrically precise degree of accommodation with which this or that orientation was willing to greet Stalinist imperialism or its national manifestations. Like the vaudevillian lament over the restaurant whose food was so atrocious, and, what’s worse, served in such miserly portions, Trotsky’s epigones distinguished themselves at length by bemoaning Stalinist atrocities, whilst castigating its irresolution whenever a supposed opportunity for expansion was eluded.
That remarkable ambiguity remains the principal impediment in translating non-Stalinist sentiments into something coherently approaching a viable anti-Stalinist theory. ‘Orthodox’ Trotskyism never truly outgrew the faction fights of the 1920s when Marxists considered Stalinism to be a legitimate – if errant and reactionary – faction within the broader Socialist and working-class movement. It never in practice assimilated the evolving dynamic of Stalinism, a dynamic from which was to crystallise a new social organisation of labour serving an historically new ruling class, and held fast instead to a static picture of Stalinism derived from its origins as a petit-bourgeois tendency within Bolshevism. This led the deans of Trotskyism to ‘confirm’ Trotsky’s view that Stalinism was capitulating to capitalist restoration whenever a peasant in Siberia was found to have owned a cow. The initial lessons of the Stalinist Czech coup of 1948? Why, merely additional evidence, according to the American Socialist Workers Party, of Stalinism’s capitulation to capitalism. Was it not after all the Cannonites – and not they alone – who blithely announced just days before the Chinese Stalinist armies were to defeat Chiang, that Mao’s and Stalin’s greatest desire was – appearances notwithstanding – to surrender to Chiang? Of course, after the fact all sorts of additionally fascinating and equally erroneous lessons were drawn.
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism was necessarily in flux, and Matgamna’s offers the analytically elegant suggestion that rereading In Defence of Marxism in chronological order demonstrates precisely how close Trotsky himself came just prior to his murder in recognising Stalinism’s mutation into a new and hitherto unimagined social order. But it also true that these vague possibilities of historic alternatives other than Socialist revolution, once raised, were instantly dismissed or ridiculed. In the end, I think we are left with the conclusion that Shachtman and his comrades finally parted ways with Trotsky to a degree beyond which Matgamna is prepared to acknowledge. For if politics is the struggle for ‘alternative programmes’, the traditional conceptions of Marxism expressed in the theories and conclusions of Trotskyism were rejected in the search of a new programme within the broad framework of revolutionary Socialist principles. Trotsky distilled the problem of the day to that of the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and he sought its resolution on an international scale. He consistently insisted that the key to developing Russia on a Socialist basis and thereby breaking the stranglehold of the nationalist bureaucracy lay in ending Russia’s enforced isolation. In this he faithfully reflected the perspective of the Bolshevik revolution. What Trotsky was unwilling to concede was not merely that the Stalinist bureaucracy might mutate into a new ruling class, but that it had already largely created a new type of international movement, a new type of imperialism, and a new type of party. Trotsky sought the salvation of the revolution in the defeat of capitalism. Shachtman and his comrades soberly faced the emerging programmatic implications of a new international force operating within the working class, claiming the trappings and traditions of the Socialist movement, which at the same time sought the destruction of world capitalism in terms of its own reactionary bureaucratic collectivist interests.
If history had, in any case, by the late 1930s proceeded beyond the limits of ‘permissible’ speculation, Trotsky’s ‘orthodox’ following could not. Trotsky’s inquiries were not received as the provisional propositions of an unfolding understanding, but as a series of eternally fixed, self-contained truths – the cornerstones of a ‘finished’ programme. Apparent internal inconsistencies and contradictions were ascribed to the subtlety of the historic dialectic. This was less a synthesis than a juggling act, a juggling act, to be precise, where the very foundation of Marxism – the foundation which imbued Bolshevism in its time with an integrated revolutionary content – was simply suspended in mid-air. Thus Stalinism was at once the bureaucratic guardian, or night watchman, of the gains of October, whose privileges were derived from the defence of state industry and the planned economy; the wavering capitulator to capitalism; and above all a bureaucratic growth in the labour movement bisymmetrical with other forms of reformist Socialism, differing only in that it emerged out of and leaned on a workers’ state. All this contributed to the summary judgement of Stalinism as narrow, conservative and provincial – whose economic and social structures were incompatible with imperialist expansion, and whose internal frailties and limited life expectancy precluded its playing an independent historical rôle. Stalinism could only be understood and indeed it was, for Trotsky, the responsibility of Socialists to insist on an understanding of Stalinism solely within the traditional language and analysis of the bipolar world of classical Marxism.
So much the worse for Marxism. For wherever else Trotsky’s investigations led him, he left unquestioned the theoretical viewpoint of the 1924 opposition: that the Soviet Union represented a ‘degenerated workers’ state’, and that the responsibility of the revolutionary Socialists everywhere was to defend that state if threatened by war or intervention. But whereas the revolutionary movement could still make the case in 1924 that, despite draconian inroads against democracy, workers still tacitly exercised considerable control over the conditions of social life through elective bodies in the soviets, trade unions and cooperatives, the consolidation of bureaucratic power extinguished these remnants of revolutionary rule, and in so doing fundamentally transformed the revolutionary responsibilities of the left. The original programme of the left aimed to reform and thereby salvage the gains of the revolution by means of an invigoration, extension and deepening of workers’ democracy; by reining in the bureaucracy, and subjecting it to decisive subordination under party authority. Yet the society that Trotsky fought to revive was simply a different order and conception of humanity than that which he ultimately confronted in Stalinist Russia. And so too did Trotsky tacitly acquiesce to this judgement by dropping the ‘reformist’ strategy – of labouring to redirect the Communist movement, invoking instead the need for a political revolution predicated on a new International.
In this acquiescence lay, tragically, a greater obfuscation. For it had been the inherited understanding of the revolutionary movement that a given class is the ruling class when the entire economic and social structure is in conformity with its mode of production and its social domination, and is not compatible with the rule of any other class. Because the working class is not a property-owning class, its social rule must be bound to its political rule, and therefore cannot exist – in contradistinction to the capitalist class – where it has no political rights. Trotsky, for whom revolutionary Socialism was also inseparable from workers’ democracy, was forced into the untenable position of offering unconditional defence to a society where the political mechanisms of working-class social domination had been irrevocably obliterated and replaced by a socially autonomous bureaucracy. Thus the dilemma: to abandon the cause of revolutionary defencism, or to revise the criteria upon which the judgement of Soviet Russia as a workers’ state had crucially rested. Trotsky – who, better than any contemporary, had demonstrated that Stalinist Russia by reason of its politics, policies and activities, by its internal structure and world strategies, was a mortal enemy of Socialism and the working class everywhere – stumbled disastrously towards the latter alternative.
That this was a provisional judgement is clear from Trotsky’s final essays, as members of the Workers Party soberly pointed out. But for his followers in the SWP majority, the defence of the Soviet Union was now to rest on the existence of nationalised industry and state planning, on juridical forms rather than the (unexamined) exploitative property relations. Socialism was no longer immutably identified with democracy, a workers’ state with workers’ power. Russia was a workers’ state in which the workers exercised their social dominance, as it were, from jail. When Stalinism at the end of the war expanded its domain, by dint of bayonet and coup, Trotsky’s followers initially pronounced these satellites as reactionary police states, incapable of implementing progressive anti-capitalist measures. After their economies were taken under a bureaucratic wing, replicating Stalinist Russia in every essential detail, other, that is, than in having overthrown a workers’ revolution, these same ‘revolutionaries’ demonstrated heretofore unknown abilities for innovative social theory. By this time a bankrupt clique thoroughly permeated by a bureaucratic mentality, Fourth Internationalists declared yesterday’s reactionary Bonapartist police states to be workers’ states of a new kind, deformed perhaps, but the genuine article nonetheless. If ‘workers’ states’ could be fashioned entirely from above and maintained without the participation of the masses and even against their expressed desires – if such transformative measures were ‘progressive’ anti-capitalist actions – the gap between Trotskyism and Stalinism had become appreciably narrowed. Every venue of accommodation could now be thrown open.
The WP/ISL operated from an entirely different understanding. The rise of Stalinism was situated within the broader disintegrative tendencies of interwar society. Unable to resolve the once acute, now chronic problems of mass poverty and unemployment on a capitalist basis through accumulation, unable that is to rationalise the technological advances which capitalism itself engendered, a vacuum was created. The working class, which Marxists have always looked to as that force uniquely qualified to fill that vacuum, proved unable to mobilise its forces and emancipate society. But the imperative to hold society together in an epoch of rampant dissolution required some form of collectivisation, that is some third social force from outside the ranks of capital capable of substituting a new dynamic for the flagging mechanisms of capitalist expansion. That need was answered through the pervasive growth of the state bureaucracy, of bureaucratic controls and regulations supplanting the market as a method of allocating resources and distributing the social product. These tendencies necessarily operated on a world scale, though at different, uneven and hybrid stages of completion. Directed by technocratic and managerial élites – products of capitalism as is the working class, but unable to express their will through the fusion of political and economic democracy, these tendencies could only be realised in the form of minority domination from above. Whatever problems may have been rationalised by the exercise of bureaucratic collectivisation, the resulting social stabilisation was secured without the exercise of any new power or expanded participation of the working masses in the life of society. The means of production and exchange which fell to the disposal of the state under such circumstances could be collectivised, but not socialised.
The rise of the state bureaucracy as a social tendency necessarily operated through different social channels throughout the capitalist world. It had as its precondition, however, the partial paralysis of capital coupled with a pervasive sense of weakness on the part of the working class, a weakness wherein self-awareness – Socialist consciousness – was replaced by bureaucratic dependency. But where managerial elements in the West move in this direction, they are constrained by their direct ties with immediate capitalist interests. As soon as individual members of the bureaucracy acquire sufficient capital, they are reabsorbed into the existing network of class relations. By siphoning off promising members of the state bureaucracy and depositing its rejects therein, the private sector temporises the appetites of the state, and paralyses its effectiveness. The revolving door between the state and capitalist managerial functionaries, to the extent that it remains well lubricated, blunts the rise of an independent bureaucratic class consciousness, and thereby limits the scope of its social vision. Bureaucratic tendencies operating within an existing bourgeois context therefore necessarily operate in contradictory fashion. They bind capitalism together, and to that extent act as the implementors of capitalist interest, whilst bearing the as yet unrealised seeds of an alternative social formation.
The Stalinist revolution was the extrapolation of the existing disintegrative tendencies of interwar capitalism brought to fruition. Post-revolutionary Russia, though revived by the limited capitalist openings of the New Economic Policy, found itself unable to advance by capitalist methods, and yet equally unable to modernise on a Socialist basis due to the enforced isolation of the revolution. Those elements latent in Russian society, technical and professional personnel no longer able to vouchsafe their privileges through service to capital, coalesced to positions of bureaucratic power in a milieu virtually absent of external constraint beyond the enfeebled resistance of a war-weary working class. When these last vestiges of independent, organised working-class power and influence were broken with the bloody suppression of the Bukharinites and the Left Opposition, the bureaucracy was able to constitute itself as a ruling class in every significant sense of the term. This bureaucracy was ‘no longer the controlled and revocable “managers and superintendents” employed by the workers’ state in the party, the state apparatus, the industries, the army, the unions, the fields, but the owners and controllers of the state, which is in turn the repository of collectivised property and thereby the employer of all hired hands, the masses of the workers, above all, included’. The new ruling class administered the property forms created by the revolution, but by transforming them into a vast apparatus of bureaucratic power and exploitation, they drained them of their emancipatory purpose.
The new bureaucratic ruling class similarly wasted no time in modifying in kind the revolutionary world view it inherited. The teachings of Marx and Lenin were scoured and brutally purged of all their inconvenient and dysfunctional mass democratic, revolutionary and working-class features against which a monstrous state-worshipping, soul-crushing caricature was substituted. This new housebroken ideology became, in short order, a powerful ancillary instrument in the perpetual cleansing – and self-cleansing – from the ranks of the Stalintern of any who betrayed even the barest potential for independent thought or action.
Stalinism, which relentlessly waged its political war simultaneously on the national, international and ideological fronts, established itself as one of the most virulently class-conscious and expansive of all reactionary ruling classes. It had its mass movements everywhere, and successfully made a powerful appeal to the wretched and exploited of the underdeveloped capitalist world on the basis, not of its grotesque ideological formulations, but by virtue of its demonstrated commitment to an anti-capitalist programme. Stalinism fostered and distorted the revolt against capitalism, and for quite some time successfully rode its wake. Yet the economic ‘freedom’ that Stalinism offered was nothing but a cynical cover for the brutal reality of another form of oppression and domination. For Communist party leaders and bureaucrats abroad, service in the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy was the unavoidable means of advancing their own aspirations to become a national ruling class in the image of their sponsors. That is why the WP/ISL held the resolute conviction that such parties were not merely the ideological agents of Stalinism, as Social Democrats are of capitalism. For they, unlike the Social Democrats with respect to capitalism, could not realistically be expected to preserve the organisational independence of working-class institutions under Stalinist conditions. And under capitalist conditions, they could only be expected to wage or participate in working-class struggles to the extent in which the conjunctural interests of the Kremlin were served by such actions. Where Stalinists were aligned with New Deal capitalism, as they were during the Second World War, or where they had limited potential for gaining control over revolutionary events such as in the Paris uprising of 1968, the Stalinist movement advanced or preserved its own interests by sabotaging working-class interests. The Stalinists were, in the oft-repeated phrase of the WP/ISL a ‘reactionary, totalitarian, anti-bourgeois and anti-proletarian current in the labour movement, but not of the labour movement’.
But this already takes us far afield from the subject of Volume One of this compelling undertaking. It can only be hoped that this, amongst other aspects of the comprehensive reconstruction of the Socialist project that the ‘Shachtmanites’ pioneered, can be continued in forthcoming editions. In its time, the WP/ISL aspired to mobilise the third camp in its own name, and under its own political banner, completely independent of the two war camps. Freed of Stalinism as a menacing world force, the vestigial progressive community – there is no Socialist working class, no revolutionary movement as Trotsky or even Shachtman knew it – is today so thoroughly infected by the patterns of bureaucratic thought and habit which are the legacy of Popular Front Stalinism that this volume cannot, of necessity, be directed to them. Its great strength and significance lies as a tool for educating those who aspire to something other than permanent sectarian status at the boundaries of politics; those who intend to engage this broader leftish public with the ideas and ideals of revolutionary Socialism, fully determined to avoid rerunning the last reel of history, and moving on to the next.
Finally, much has been made of Shachtman’s moral and political collapse, as if the politics Shachtman came to adopt in support of the Democratic Party, of the labour bureaucracy and of American intervention in Vietnam were genetically programmed into his revolutionary critique of Trotsky and Trotskyism. This is an all-too-convenient, and equally dishonest, dodge on the part of those unwilling and unable to confront the WP/ISL analysis head on, and who continue to shirk responsibility for their own politics of disorientation. Matgamna deals with this issue pointedly, insisting that the true corpus of Shachtman’s work constitutes a ‘lineal defence, elaboration and continuation of Trotsky’s ideas... as they really were developing at Trotsky’s death’. Whether Matgamna overstates the case for continuity, it is even more true, as Matgamna suggests, that Trotsky’s orthodox followers lived for decades in a fantasy-world existence of their own making. Pitiably clinging to all the tentative, semi-contradictory positions of their mentor, necessarily unable to integrate these positions into a coherent theory, and smugly content to expand upon the mistakes of the past, Trotsky’s epigones became Stalinism’s attorneys – an unbroken political consistency which, unlike Shachtman’s, continues for that very reason to reverberate as their precise political legacy. If the gravitational pull of new class relations ultimately lured the majority of the Trotskyist movement into the camp of bureaucratic collectivism, ‘Shachtman and his comrades kept alive Marxist method, culture, political memory and the aspiration to working-class liberty in the age of political barbarism’.
Barry Finger
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The Death of Uncle Joe
Alison Macleod
The Death of Uncle Joe
Merlin Press, Rendlesham 1997, pp. 269, £9.95
The Death of Uncle Joe
Merlin Press, Rendlesham 1997, pp. 269, £9.95
JUSTIFYING yet another memoir from the inglorious tradition of the Communist Party of Great Britain poses a lighter task now than it did a year or two back. As the Yeltsin era in Russia totters towards its end, Stalinism no longer appears the dead bird it was only five years ago. Shameless in their wooing of ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic currents, Russian Communists look quite capable of making a full comeback amidst the ruins of the Russian economy and social fabric. And – if we don’t watch our back-yard carefully – some significant satellite group may still emerge in Britain, their coffers suitably lubricated from abroad, without our quite being conscious of the new challenge. Marxism Today may have stepped back into a deserved obscurity only for Stalinism Yesteryear to pop out to take an unexpected late bow.
Alison Macleod’s recollections of her 13 years at the Daily Worker, from 1944 to 1957, are, then, timely – a reminder of the true nature of the beast which dominated the British left for so many years, which exercised a hegemony over trade union militancy for some decades, and which can in no way be excluded from that causal chain which led to the present parlous state of British left-wing Socialism. These memoirs are no apologia for the CPGB or the author, no subtle Hobsbawmian essay dovetailing past mistakes with supposed achievements in order to foster the illusion of justification. Macleod, who is fully aware of her own unimportance (she was the Worker’s lowly TV reporter), kept daily notes of debates and conversations for the crucial period, culminating in the traumatic months of 1956, and has since checked her facts and anecdotes with surviving participants. Consequently, her work is a detailed narrative of the party monolith in action, of the British leadership resolutely mimicking, or seeking to interpret, the Moscow line. And heaven help them when the line changed too abruptly, or got confused, as in the period following Stalin’s death! Such is Macleod’s cruel method that the reader has no choice but to alternate between bouts of indignation and fits of uncontrollable laughter. The casuistry of the Jesuits, acquiring its polish over the centuries, no doubt has its attractions, but Stalinist pseudo-scientific casuistry, with its dialectical basis, has a distinct earthy charm all of its own!For the evolution of British Trotskyism, the crisis of late 1956 in the CPGB was a moment of fundamental importance; and the historic rôle of Peter Fryer, a Daily Worker foreign correspondent, cannot be overstated. Fryer had joined the paper in 1947, and had covered the infamous Rajk trial in Budapest, swallowing as holy writ in the process Rajk’s confession of being a Titoist agent intent on overthrowing the Hungarian regime. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress in 1956, Fryer came to his senses, and being an honest man, and in no way a party time-server, he underwent a mea culpa phase: he admitted that he’d deceived the paper’s readers on the Rajk trial, and attacked the rôle of the current Soviet leadership in the cult of personality surrounding Stalin. At the CPGB’s congress, he asked the question: ‘What solid guarantees are there that such a combination of circumstances so grievously harmful to the interests of the working-class movement shall never happen again?’ On 24 July, the Daily Worker printed his article on the rehabilitation of 474 non-persons in Hungary, including Rajk. But since this was an approved party position, that was no great advance on the editor’s part.
Tensions within the party could be glossed over for the time being by a few minor concessions to the critics. But the Hungarian uprising that began in the autumn blew the façade of party unity wide apart. Johnnie Campbell, the Daily Worker editor, made the mistake of sending Fryer to Hungary to cover events. Fryer’s first article, in which he described witnessing 80 corpses of men, women and children shot down by the security police, remained unpublished. No less than 455 key words were cut out of his second despatch, whilst his third despatch was completely suppressed. David Ainley, the paper’s Business Manager, justified censorship on the grounds of Fryer’s hysterical tone, whilst damning Fryer’s integrity with the jibe that he’d taken refuge in the British Embassy (in order to avoid being shot on the streets, be it said). Incidentally, this reviewer has his own axe to grind: Ainley was instrumental in my suspension from the 1960 Committee in the London Co-op in the late 1960s.
Fryer had long ago given notice of his intention to quit the Daily Worker, and it duly printed his letter of resignation. Not that it had much choice in the matter, for the letter was simultaneously published in the Manchester Guardian. Meanwhile, the anti-Fryer smear campaign was working at full throttle, saying that his resignation was brought on by his wife’s hand being found caught in the till (a total Stalinist fabrication, needless to say). Fryer and his poisonous truths about Hungary had now to be fully isolated from the purview of the party faithful, and inevitably he was suspended from party membership on 26 November 1956. He was expelled by 486 votes to 31, with 11 abstentions, at the subsequent congress, the weakness of party dissidents being thoroughly exposed. Yet this result masks the fact that 7,000 members, over 20 per cent of the total, had flocked out of the organisation in a few months.
By this time, Mephistopheles (that is, Gerry Healy) had caught up with Fryer. Healy the Pabloite had been busying himself with the Young Communist League, and Macleod notes Healy’s lustrous presence at the YCL congress, where he ‘sat visibly giving orders to some delegates’. The YCL’s critical resolution on Hungary proving unwelcome to the party leadership, it naturally did not merit mention in the Daily Worker. By the time of Fryer’s formal expulsion, Healy was producing Fryer’s daily Congress Special intended for the edification of delegates, and had published in pamphlet form the text of his appeal. Macleod’s analysis of Fryer’s relations with Healy is a shrewd one: ‘Peter was to realise within three years that Gerry Healy ... had all the worst habits of the Communist Party leaders, such as rigging congresses, blackening the names of those who disagreed with him, and manipulating young people.’ But Healy had offered the expellee ‘a rational explanation’, some way ‘to make sense of the events which had hit us’. As with Brian Pearce (also on the Daily Worker) and Brian Behan, Fryer was drawn to Healy ‘not only because he had been right about Stalin, but because he boasted of a historical theory which accounted for Stalinism’. And as Macleod says: ‘The attraction of the Trotskyists, that winter, was not that their arguments were good. It was that they were prepared to argue at all. The orthodox were not.’ As readers will already have guessed, Alison Macleod was never attracted by Trotskyism herself. She caustically cites Trotsky’s In Defence of Terrorism as ‘a do-it-yourself manual. It shows how to construct a morality which will destroy you.’
This is an indispensable memoir, the best of its genre I know. Replete with unique accounts of the thinking of the party leadership, it penetrates to the sordid reality of the CPGB at a historical watershed from which it never recovered in a way that can’t be obtained by ploughing through the party’s dusty archives. Macleod’s shading in of how the leadership sought to withhold knowledge of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech from the membership is unsurpassed. Her account of the leadership’s inability to come to terms with the fact of Soviet anti-Semitism highlights how institutional anti-Semitism in Moscow produced a satellite counterpart in London. But in one respect, Macleod fails the reader. The Daily Worker had a highly respected racing tipster. At no point does she explain why he so regularly backed the right horse whilst the party leadership was so regularly backing the wrong one.
Ron Heisler
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Gay Resistance
Sam Deaderick and Tamara Turner
Gay Resistance: The Hidden History
Red Letter Press, Seattle 1997, $7.00
Gay Resistance: The Hidden History
Red Letter Press, Seattle 1997, $7.00
THIS journal will, I hope, always be interested in hidden histories, and especially interested in publications which bring them to light. Revolutionary History has not had many opportunities to review documents on questions of sexual liberation; consequently a recent visit to London from a comrade in the Freedom Socialist Party (closely associated with the publishers) with copies of this pamphlet is to be welcomed. It is to be regretted that there is no UK outlet for FSP publications.
The pamphlet could be used as a case study in support of Peter Fryer’s excellent advice to new writers: ‘Lucid, vigorous and brief.’ (So brief in fact that $7.00 may seem expensive for 50 pages of text.) As a political tool, it achieves its objective of placing gay struggles in an historical framework, of which class struggle is a main element. And no doubt it will raise the spirit of gay activists to be able to perceive themselves as part of a greater struggle, and defending an important heritage.Both authors are, or were, associated with the FSP, which originated in a split from the US Socialist Workers Party (the FSP has for some years defined itself as Socialist-feminist). The text first appeared in their paper Freedom Socialist in the late 1970s, and subsequently in pamphlet form in 1978. The current pamphlet updates the accounts of radical gay and lesbian groups since then.
The argument of the opening sections of the pamphlet can be summarised thus. In ancient matriarchal societies there was complete sexual freedom, and this naturally extended to homosexual behaviour. This happy state of affairs was ended by the rise of patriarchy and monogamy, and led directly to the oppression of women and social hostility towards homosexuality. Classical Greece and Rome were well on the way to the full institutionalisation of patriarchy and monogamy, but retained some pre-civilisation freedoms. Asian cultures (with the exception of Zoroastrian Persia) and pre-Columbian American cultures remained free of these evils until they fell under the influence or control of Western culture. Ancient Judaism, seemingly another exception, generated the first legal prohibition against male homosexuality (in Leviticus), and its attitudes were adopted in their entirety, indeed developed further, by Christianity, and especially by the Pauline current.
Medieval European history was substantially shaped by the growing power and institutionalisation of Christianity. The centuries-long wars against heretics, witches and other dissident currents were the form taken by the growth of Christian power, and the means by which Christianity suppressed the residual sexual freedoms of the mass of the European populations. Homosexuality was a frequent accusation against the enemies of the Church. The heretics, however, were not fighting specifically in defence of homosexuality; rather they were defending the pre-Christian cultures and their freedoms as a whole. The objective of these long wars was the establishment of the nuclear, patriarchal family, which was essential to the orderly accumulation of capital.
The authors next present a brief account of the rise of movements for homosexual rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with Hirschfield and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany in the 1860s. It mentions the defeat of those movements by the Nazis, touches on the Bolsheviks’ reforms, and includes radicals such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. The following section is devoted to a presentation of lesbian contributions to literature, arguing that they prepared the cultural ground for later explicitly political movements.
The emergence of ‘liberal’ homosexual rights organisations in the USA is sketched in the next section, showing the impetus to their growth given by Kinsey and other researchers, and the setbacks suffered under McCarthyism. Some mention is given to similar movements in Europe. (The Minority Rights Group will perhaps be surprised to learn that they have a programme similar to that of the Daughters of Bilitis.)
The 1969 Stonewall riot marked a turning point, after which the majority of new movements had a distinctly radical character, or even hyper-radical in the case of the separatists. With the exception of the late 1970s campaigns against anti-gay changes in the law, these new movements have proven to be fissiparous, whilst the more general movement has built significant social institutions such as Gay Pride, and an infrastructure of publications and organisations.
In the closing section, the authors recognise and applaud the growth of a new leadership amongst gays from ethnic minorities, and argue that these victims of multiple oppression are the most capable of perceiving that gay oppression is a component of the problem of alienated life under capitalism.
That is the argument. How does the history stand up? There is a bibliography, but the authors do not provide specific references in support of their statements. No doubt this helps to maintain the punchy readability, but it makes it difficult to check on things and resolve questions about what is being said. For example, in his introduction, Roger Simpson writes that Deaderick and Turner remind readers that ‘oppression around sexual identity is as old as history’. By my reading, they argue only that it is as old as civilisation – a very different proposition.
I have practically no knowledge of ancient cultures, but I suspect that the very generalised claim made about them here – that they were all matriarchal and libertarian to an extreme degree – is a hostage to fortune which a hostile reviewer with special knowledge could assail. I don’t understand how such claims can be made on the basis of no written history and very limited evidence in the form of artefacts. And from what little I know of contemporary cultures that have had limited contact with capitalism, they do not closely resemble the joyous matriarchies which the authors describe. Trotsky’s reports of his escape from Siberia, for example, describe the most depressed and depressing pattern of life amongst the isolated tribes he encountered.
And I don’t see that the demand for gay rights today is in any way dependent upon a ‘golden age’ theory. No golden age lies behind other democratic and transitional demands, at least not since the English working class abandoned the demand to ‘throw off the Norman yoke’, and Connolly’s fables of primitive Irish democracy faded from view.
The section dealing with the Social Democratic parties and their response to homosexual rights campaigns seems to me to understate or neglect important elements of the Socialist response. Eduard Bernstein’s 1895 articles were published in English in 1977 by the British and Irish Communist Organisation (Athol Books), together with a related article by Herzen. This publication is perhaps obscure today, but in 1978, when the FSP articles first appeared, it was widely discussed. The BICO had a habit of disagreeing with the historical figures whose work they published, such as Bukharin and Jim Larkin. They gave a grudging acceptance to Bernstein with the conclusion: ‘Heterosexuality remains socially necessary and should be encouraged: homosexuality is fairly harmless and can be tolerated.’ This alone ensured that the publication was widely discussed. I would have included it in the bibliography.
Similarly, in 1978 the authors might not have had access to the English translation of Kautsky’s 1906 writings on Marxism and morality, which had been out of print for many years before it reappeared in Patrick Goode’s selection in 1983. An earlier version could probably have been found in university libraries, but nobody read the ‘renegade’ in those days. But by 1997 they cannot be omitted from a Socialist examination of moral questions.
Oscar Wilde is given the briefest of mentions, and his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism is not referred to. And for a 1997 revision not enthusiastically to recommend Richard Ellman’s splendid biography of Wilde is difficult for this reviewer to believe.
In describing the suppression of the German homosexual rights movement by the Nazis, the authors do not deal with the question of homosexuality amongst the Brownshirts. A reference to a publication that deals with this would be useful – such as the 1979 Big Flame pamphlet Sexuality and Fascism.
I found the brief section on the Russian experience disappointing for its lack of detail and references. A caption to an illustration refers to Batkis, but his book is not included in the bibliography.
If it is right (and it is) to credit lesbian novelists such as Virginia Woolf with a rôle in changing the climate of opinion, how can it be right to omit any mention of the beats? Allen Ginsberg’s courageous campaigning against the oppression of gays was even conducted in the heart of the Stalinist states, but he gets not the slightest nod of acknowledgement. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg deserves a place in the recommended reading.
No doubt every reader would be able to produce his or her own list of amendments to the literary aspects of this question. But there is a more important and more political omission to be rectified – that of organised labour. The unions are not mentioned until the last page of the pamphlet. I don’t think this fairly reflects the politics of the FSP. Freedom Socialist regularly reports the active union work of FSP militants. The FSP played an honourable part in the work towards the foundation of the Labor Party in the USA. So it is puzzling to find no commentary on or assessment of the successes and failures over the last 20 years in winning support within the trade unions for gay struggles. (Let us recall how Tony Cliff hectored us in 1979 that ‘we should look forward to the first leader of the London workers’ council being a 19-year-old gay woman!’)
There are other questions that one would like to debate with the FSP which are probably outside the scope of their pamphlet. The FSP does not call for political revolution in Cuba or China. Conditions for gays have improved somewhat over recent years in Cuba, but not at all in China (to the limited extent of the available information). Is sexual liberation, then, a reform which it is within the ability of those states to allow? If so, how can the demands best be advanced by oppressed gays in those countries, and by those in solidarity with them elsewhere? And if Stalinist states can accommodate gay liberation, why is it impossible to think of similar reforms without revolutionary overthrow in capitalist states? Does it seem likely today that homosexual business people would set out to subvert and disrupt the circulation and accumulation of capital by refusing to pass their assets when they die? By this, of course, I am seeking to clarify the status of the demand for gay rights within the Trotskyist programme. Is it an achievable reform, or a basis for mobilisations which will overthrow the power of capital? Deaderick and Turner do not, in my assessment, make a categorical case for the latter position.
J.J. Plant
**************
The Broken Resistance
Riccardo AnfossiLa Resistenza SpezzataProspettiva Edizioni, Rome 1995, pp. 171, Lit 24,000
Carlo Guerriero & Fausto Rondinelli
La Volante Rossa
Datanews Editrice, Rome 1996, pp. 142, Lit 18.000
La Volante Rossa
Datanews Editrice, Rome 1996, pp. 142, Lit 18.000
Tom Behan
The Long Awaited Moment: The Working Class and the Italian Communist Party in Milan, 1943–1948
Peter Lang, New York 1997, pp. 310, $35
The Long Awaited Moment: The Working Class and the Italian Communist Party in Milan, 1943–1948
Peter Lang, New York 1997, pp. 310, $35
Elena Aga-Rossi & Victor Zaslavsky
Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la Politica Estera Staliniana negli Archivi di Mosca
Il Mulino, Bologna 1997, pp. 312, Lit 38,000
Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la Politica Estera Staliniana negli Archivi di Mosca
Il Mulino, Bologna 1997, pp. 312, Lit 38,000
THESE books each deal with different aspects of the years immediately preceding and following the end of the Second World War in Italy. They are jointly reviewed here as they all seek to shed light on the Italian Resistance and its consequences after 25 April 1945, the official date of Italy’s ‘liberation’ by the Allied forces, as well as on the policies embraced by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its rôle in the outcome of this historical period.
In the past decade or so, the treatment afforded to the Resistance by successive Italian governments, historians and intellectuals of both the left and right has undergone a notable development, symptomatic of a wider international trend towards the obliteration of any class analysis of historical events. So, whilst it is not uncommon to see the Resistance termed as a ‘second Risorgimento’, painting an idealised and grossly inaccurate picture of the Italian people fully united in an attempt to repel the Nazi invader, the parties of the Italian official left, and most notably the PCI, emphasise the contribution made by the highly ‘democratically responsible’ and ‘nationally aware’ working masses ‘in guaranteeing Italy’s future as a nation’.In more principled quarters of the left, the Resistance has often been seen as an instance of the more general ‘revolution betrayed’. So, in this interpretation we see an Italian working class politically conscious and developed, armed and poised for power, were it not for the betrayal of the PCI, which instructed it to surrender its weapons to the Allied Command, mainly thanks to the party’s moral authority amongst the workers and the critical rôle played by Stalin, as well as the lack of preparation displayed by other possible alternative parties or groups to the left of the PCI. Whilst these factors contain some truth, for many, including the authors reviewed here, they are only part of the story.
Nevertheless, in times when speaking of a working class attracts accusations of hopeless anachronism, with repeated calls from left and right in Italy to ‘forgive and forget’ the excesses of a small number of ‘hotheads’ wearing black or red shirts, all in the name of ‘national reconciliation’ and ‘looking to the future’, any work which seriously tackles these issues and attempts to debunk the myths surrounding the Italian Resistance should be warmly welcomed.
Riccardo Anfossi’s book, whose title means ‘The Broken Resistance’, is an important work in this respect, whether or not one agrees with all its thought-provoking arguments. The picture of the Resistance which emerges from it is far from comfortable and unproblematic, but it deserves careful consideration.
Anfossi’s premises are categorical: ‘One cannot... speak of a Resistance that has had all its premises betrayed, as some historians, coming above all from an Actionist [Partito d’Azione] background have done, for these premises had been clear from the outset, and the development and choices of a political line were therefore coherent with such premises.’ The Resistance was ‘limited from the start by its political line and by the immaturity of the consciousness of the proletariat which – willingly or more often than not otherwise – to varying degrees made this line its own’ (pp. 155–7).
The Resistance, which Anfossi sees as just a part of a Europe-wide largely spontaneous opposition ‘from below’, was by no means the determining factor behind the collapse of Fascism in Italy. Not only was Mussolini’s fall decided by the monarchy and the army, with big capital withdrawing its support from the ailing Fascist party from 1943, it is not even possible to speak of a consciously mature workers’ movement during the Resistance in Italy.
Anfossi warns against an essentially political reading of events during 1943–45 in Italy. He insists that the driving force behind class struggle and strikes in those years was not anti-Fascism or national liberation, but the boss and the factory, how to survive on an ever-decreasing pay, and how to procure food. He concedes that the strikes of March 1944 were clearly more political in nature, but this was partly due to the work carried out by the PCI, which meant that they took on an anti-German character and therefore linked in with the strivings of the anti-Fascist forces for national unity.
Although the massive strikes of 1944 have been hailed as a success because they showed the growing ‘maturity’ of the working class, their ultimately disappointing outcome was because the workers recognised that their daily struggle went beyond the programme of the strikes’ organisers, and they viewed both the Nazis and the Italian ruling class as their enemy. Although the PCI and other anti-Fascist Resistance forces were unable to meet the challenge of this spontaneous action ‘from below’, the Italian workers’ movement was unable to ‘go beyond the factory gates’ (p. 43). This was not merely due to the obstacles posed by Stalinism, as the problem ultimately relates to the immature consciousness of the working class.
Anfossi sees the partisan guerrillas as the driving force behind the Resistance, but warns that they again reflected the general characteristics of the Resistance. Their members mainly joined spontaneously and for the most diverse reasons, and they were from all walks of life. Militarily, the Resistance was ‘totally subject to the requirements of war and to the political needs of the Anglo-American Command’. In general, partisans were organised in squads, and numerical estimates vary between 1,500 and 9,000 individuals at the outset, growing to between 50,000 to 70,000 in 1944, and approximately 100,000 by the end. Of these, Anfossi calculates that about 50 per cent were grouped in Communist brigades, and 20 per cent in Actionist brigades, whilst the remaining 30 per cent comprised squads of various allegiances. Partisan squads never reflected a ‘clear political choice’, but were loosely aligned with one particular party. The Allies favoured this, for they never envisaged any major military rôle for groups which could prove difficult to control. Although a genuine partisan war was waged, Anfossi reiterates that ‘the war was won by the Allied forces, and the contribution of the partisan forces was absolutely secondary’. The Allies did not stifle the potential of the partisan Resistance, because it was ‘conceived as a subordinate to the Anglo-American imperialist army, and became the military arm of the politics of national unity to free the country from the Germans and include Italy in the Western bloc’ (pp. 56–8).
The partisan formations were brought under one command in 1944, both in the name of patriotism, and to prevent fraternisation between partisans and German soldiers. Allied control prevented them from acquiring any military significance, and the PCI disarmed them politically. The party’s constant efforts to subordinate class struggle to the patriotic war for national liberation meant that – save for very few exceptions – the partisans merely replicated bourgeois relations and excluded any concrete control by the masses over the territories liberated in Italy during 1944.
The PCI’s rôle in containing and channelling the radical demands of the working class cannot be underestimated. The various stages of this party’s policy have already been outlined in this journal (see Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no 4, Spring 1995). What is important to emphasise is that the PCI’s attempt to become, in Togliatti’s words, ‘an Italian national party’ (p. 82), opposing any struggle aiming ‘to bring about any social or political transformation in a Socialist or Communist sense’ but ‘fighting for national liberation and for a progressive democratic regime’ (p. 80), precluded any other outcome for the Resistance. Exploiting its prestige within the working class as the party enjoying Stalin’s approval, ruthlessly expelling and persecuting all opposition, using the pretext of the Allies’ presence to rule out a priori any alternative course, and continuously promoting class collaboration, the PCI ‘turned into a mass all-class party, a party of government’ (p. 82), and subordinated all revolutionary demands to the reconstruction of the Italian state. The Italian proletariat was given the rôle of ‘the national subject, the backbone of the democratic bourgeois reconstruction’, able ‘to overcome any selfishness in its demands and its specific interests, so as to make its contribution to the needs of the fatherland in difficult times’ (p. 165), and to help restore Italy to its rightful position in the family of democratic nations.
Anfossi sees the Resistance as the spontaneous intervention of the Italian masses, the unifying character of which is – in the last analysis – a strong social and ethical protest against injustice, rather than a patriotic war of national liberation. He feels that these values must be understood and emphasised, as opposed to the mythologisation and cynical exploitation of the Resistance, most notably by the Italian left, for the purposes of the continuity of bourgeois rule, if we are to understand these crucial events in Italian history.
Notwithstanding the many valuable insights of this work and its various undoubtedly valid arguments about the Resistance, Anfossi leaves some crucial questions unresolved, and the issue of the immature consciousness of the Italian working class requires a much more detailed analysis. He says that the Italian proletariat was never able in a widespread sense to extend its struggles beyond the factories, and its demands became increasingly economic in nature. But is this a sign of its ‘immaturity’, or the effect of the workers’ declining political horizons resulting from the PCI’s increasingly evident renunciation of any political leadership, especially after the end of the war? It could be argued that Anfossi confuses the effect with the cause, as if he actually expected – in line with his party’s recent and rather selective embracing of aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought – to find a class fully developed for a revolutionary struggle in the absence of any revolutionary vanguard, nay, often despite the conscious political betrayals of its supposed vanguard party.
Guerriero and Rondinelli review the history and vicissitudes of Milan’s Volante Rossa – Martiri Partigiani (Red Flying Squad – Partisan Martyrs), a name deriving from the term used during the partisan war in Italy to denote small squads based in the mountains which carried out brief incursions onto the plains. The Volante Rossa was formed towards the end of 1945 by Giulio Paggio, known as ‘Lieutenant Alvaro’, himself a former member of a volante rossa and later of a partisan brigade, so that members could help each other, or ‘find work for the unemployed ... and take part, always united, in all kinds of patriotic events’ (p. 12).
The group came to be comprised of up to about 50 men, mainly ex-partisan fighters, all of them working-class members of the PCI, from the many large and medium-sized factories which made Milan, with Turin and Genoa, part of Italy’s ‘industrial triangle’. Here, in the first three years after the end of the war, worked highly militant and radicalised workers, almost all unionised and politically quite conscious. The story of the Volante Rossa is the story of partisans and Communists who were reluctant and even unwilling to lay down their arms and put an end to the struggle that had been waged during the war.
The authors convincingly show that the Volante Rossa was no mere anachronism, no wishful thinking or nostalgia on the part of few men who simply could not come to terms with the fact that the ‘victory’ over the enemy did not become a victory for the Italian workers over their rulers. The bourgeoisie swiftly regained its control when the war officially ended in April 1945. To add insult to injury, a large number of former Fascists, from low-ranking officers to men responsible for the persecution, torture and killing of partisans and workers, were often given prominent positions, and as early as 22 June 1945 an amnesty had been granted to Fascist prisoners, which reduced by one-third their ‘political’ sentences, whilst absolving altogether those responsible for ‘non-political’ offences, such as organising Fascist squads, marching on Rome, and collaboration. PCI leader Togliatti aided this process, arguing in parliament in February 1949 that such men ‘had nevertheless a right to several mitigating circumstances, above all if we consider that we were then trying to provide the widest possible basis for the new republican state’ (p. 19). Furthermore, the Italian right revived, the Movimento Sociale Italiano was legally formed in 1946, and elements in the higher echelons of the army and the carabinieri, the secret services and the police, aided by big business finance and the American secret service, provoked the working class with the aim of destabilising the country.
Unsurprisingly, despite the best efforts and propaganda by the left parties, the amnesty did nothing to calm the harsh protests of the partisans and the public. The partisans’ numerous spontaneous reactions in those years were to prove a thorn in the side of the PCI leadership and its allies. The years following the end of the war were characterised by an extremely confrontational and highly charged climate. Faced with attacks from the right and a severe economic crisis, with rising unemployment, inflation and grossly inadequate wage levels, the working class responded with an almost uninterrupted series of strikes, demonstrations, occupations, meetings and protests. And workers were simply not ready to resume their jobs under bosses and managers who, but a few months before, were fighting in the opposite camp.
The Volante Rossa, far from being an extremist grouping involved in terrorism or armed actions divorced from the working class, invariably carried out its work within the ranks of the Milanese workers, and was highly respected by them. Its members adopted a uniform and distinctive insignia, and became highly visible participants on workers’ marches, demonstrations and protests. Acting as a workers’ defence force, the Volante Rossa undertook various tasks, including stewarding, acting as a rapid response unit, and intimidating and attacking Fascists or Fascist collaborators. The group came to be regarded as a force to be reckoned with, and was to be found in practically every action taken by Milanese workers during that time, until the fateful date of 27 January 1949, when two murders were attributed to the Volante Rossa, despite the style of action and choice of victims being atypical of the group. A highly publicised trial lasting until 1951 brought about the group’s demise. Although Giulio Paggio and a few of the group’s founders fled abroad, most members received prison sentences of varying severity.
The authors and some surviving members of the group do, however, readily recognise that the Volante Rossa had effectively ceased to exist by the summer of 1948, after the left’s crushing defeat in the April election – the Christian Democrats (DC) won 48.5 per cent of the vote, as against 31 per cent for the PSI/PCI Fronte Popolare – the end of the government of ‘national unity’, and the failed attempt on Togliatti’s life on 14 July 1948, with the spontaneous working-class rising being effectively contained by the PCI leadership. One Volante Rossa member bitterly remembers how, in the aftermath of the attempt on Togliatti, everyone was ready to rise in Milan, and the city could have easily been taken without much difficulty, given the relative lack of organisation of the police and the weaponry at the Volante’s disposal. However, the PCI leadership wanted to avoid the outlawing of the party which would follow an armed insurrection. The leaders of the PCI branch in Milan intercepted the Volante men, and they were, as a Volante Rossa member said, ‘swiftly stopped’:
‘... that was the end for us, because at that point we realised that the revolution would not be possible, whilst we had been thinking that we were on the eve of the working class taking power. It was clear that it was impossible. We had the chance to take power, but the situation did not allow it. The great majority of the party realised this, and at that point a cycle effectively came to an end. That blow plunged us into a crisis, so much so, that we asked ourselves what point there was in continuing the struggle at all.’ (p. 50)
The crucial issue was the relationship between the Volante Rossa – and, by extension, the Milanese and Italian working class – and the leadership of the PCI. Since everyone in the Volante Rossa was a PCI member, and, as the authors convincingly show, the PCI always remained their reference point, what did the PCI really think of the Volante men?
Since the group was a constant feature in working-class activity of the time, much of which being either organised by the PCI or saw its participation, was the Volante Rossa the ‘armed branch of the PCI’ (p. 109)? Far from it. Its closest official involvement with the party leadership began with the series of protests in the autumn of 1947, and culminated with the PCI’s Sixth Congress held in Milan in January 1948, when the Volante Rossa men were appointed as stewards, seemingly enjoying the approval of the party’s leadership. It is also not unreasonable to concur with the authors’ assumption that Paggio and his comrades could not have fled to Eastern Europe without the help of the PCI.Nevertheless, the relationship between the Volante Rossa and the PCI was a troubled one, and it is more plausible that its apparent toleration by the party was a recognition of the group’s high prestige amongst Milanese workers and its excellent local experience and organisational skills. This relationship can, however, be appreciated only in the wider context of the PCI’s own national and international policy. The Volante Rossa was but another casualty of the course on which Togliatti and the party’s leadership had embarked prior to the end of the war, and of its logical consequences.
However, it is too easy to fall into the trap of cynicism with the benefit of hindsight. For the various reasons explained in the books reviewed here, we cannot doubt the extremely high level of radicalisation of sections of the Italian working class in the first postwar years, or the sincerity and commitment of all those involved. What is all the more poignant is the crucial rôle played by the PCI – thanks to the enormous prestige it enjoyed amongst the workers – in thwarting any revolutionary outcome and in bringing its constituency into line, with its repeated calls for discipline, respect for ‘democratic and republican legality’, consideration for the PCI’s constitutional partners, and so on.
In this light, it is not surprising that the partisan experience could not be absorbed into the party. So, from being ‘political immature’ individuals with a ‘low ideological level’ (p. 107), the partisans effectively became an enemy of the party. Togliatti argued as early as August 1945 that, to avoid possible provocations, the party ‘should take a firm stand against any surviving partisan organisations’. In September 1946, Togliatti told a closed party meeting that they were agent provocateurs within the party. They may have had ‘an honourable past’ and ‘actively participated in Communist organisations’, but had ‘now lost all links with the proletarian vanguard’, and had ‘become enslaved to foreign ideologies, if not servants of our worst enemies’ (pp. 112–3).
And despite lively dissent at grassroots level, in a situation of worsening provocations and defeats suffered by workers in the factories, the PCI succeeded in containing the discontent and channelling working-class activity into national reconstruction.
With Tom Behan’s book, we continue to analyse events in Milan, moving to the inner-city area of Porta Romana, perhaps more representative of the working-class composition of the city, characterised by the presence of numerous small and medium-sized factories and by a significant commuting workforce from the surrounding rural areas, than was the case of Sesto San Giovanni, the stronghold of the Volante Rossa.
Although one of the book’s strengths resides in the meticulous research carried out into the Porta Romana factories of the time and in the detailed recollections obtained from a large numbers of workers and political activists, another must surely lie in its in-depth analysis of the politics of the PCI in the years around 1945, and their impact on the Milanese working class. But Behan’s conclusions are indeed not limited to Porta Romana and are representative in many respects of Italy as a whole, and therefore constitute a very valuable contribution to any Marxist analysis of the political course embraced by the PCI, on the basis of ‘doppiezza’, that is, Togliatti’s policy of the ‘doppio binario’ (double track), or, more generally, of the Italian application of Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in stages’. Rightly, Behan recognises in this policy an ‘attempt to deal with an irresolvable contradiction’:
‘On the one hand the party leadership was keen to assure the middle classes, a central pillar in their strategy of alliances, that their policies would by and large cause them no serious harm. On the other hand there were large numbers of radicalised workers within the factories who were intransigently opposed to both the middle classes and the employers.’ (pp. 139–40)
Indeed, the title of Behan’s book defines what, in the minds of many workers, the years after 1945 would come to represent, a time of reckoning with the capitalists and the longed-for moment of that fateful ‘second stage’ towards the Socialist revolution that, alas, the PCI would do its utmost to avoid. What we find in his book is an explanation as to why a radicalised class, albeit arguably politically ‘immature’ – we would rather say it lacked guidance – and largely confined to the factory milieu, should maintain its trust in the PCI, betrayal after betrayal, blow after blow.
Behan convincingly shows that in many instances this class was not as politically immature as one might think, and that rather than being solely confined to economic demands, some of its actions were clearly political in nature, and were sometimes conducted independently of the PCI leadership. Whilst no one is proposing to substitute class consciousness for party leadership, it is also the case that the PCI totally failed in its task as the vanguard of the class, denying the latter the necessary support and guidance to transcend ‘the factory gates’.Behan provides a good account of the evolution of the PCI, which by 1943 had moved ‘from a commitment to revolution, to calling for class collaboration with the aim of creating a “progressive democracy”, a move which occurred without large numbers of workers becoming aware of it’ (p. 35). This was bound to cause disagreements once the party began to recruit workers, who often believed that the party had a hidden agenda: many workers thus continued to believe that the PCI was striving for revolution ‘as it had been in the years 1921–25’ (p. 37).
Towards the end of September 1943, the PCI issued a public appeal to the Italian people, in which the way forward was indicated as the conquest of national independence. So, the fight against Fascism and Nazism was to take the form of a struggle for national liberation, with Socialism receding ever further into the distant future. True to Stalin’s stages scheme, in Italy the fight was to proceed through the establishment of a bourgeois democratic regime. A Socialist society would eventually appear, not through class struggle, but by widespread national consensus. Even members of the PCI leadership found this hard to accept, and although this never led to an explicitly organised opposition, it is worth noting that the support for Badoglio, ordered from Moscow and left to Togliatti to sell to his comrades in Italy, actually caused the internal appointment of Mauro Scoccimarro as party leader in 1943, instead of Togliatti. Together with a number of earlier and later episodes, this also shows that, contrary to what many still maintain today, the PCI was at the time far from being a ‘monolith’.
Faced with a swift growth in membership and with the difficulties in controlling spontaneous protests and actions by radicalised workers, which were to continue with the strikes of December 1943 and March 1944, the PCI leadership embarked on an exercise of damage limitation. So, in his Instructions to All Members and to All Party Cadres of 6 June 1944, Togliatti stated: ‘Always remember that the aim of the insurrection is not the imposition of political and Socialist transformations in the Socialist or Communist sense. Its aim is national liberation and the destruction of Fascism.’ The party’s deputy leader, Luigi Longo, was even more soothing at the Milan conference of the Insurrectionary Triumvirate in November 1944, telling his members that they were ‘fighting... not for the dictatorship of the proletariat but for a progressive democracy’ which would not radically upset ‘the principle of exploitative capitalist property relations’ (pp. 79–80).
Strikes broke out in Milan at the start of 1944 independently of the PCI, thus confirming that radicalised workers were increasingly taking the initiative. This part explains why the PCI organised on a much wider scale for the March 1944 strikes. Despite their lack of success, these strikes saw concerted action between workers and partisans, and gave evidence of both political and economic demands. Strikers also asked for greater military support, which was provided by partisan forces, but not by the PCI’s military formations in Milan.
At the beginning of 1945, faced with hopes for the imminent ‘liberation’ and an armed insurrection, the PCI leadership had to act again. So, Pietro Secchia sent a directive to all PCI Federations, disclosing that the party had decided to propose to the Upper Italian National Liberation Committee that partisan formations be transformed into regular units of the Italian army. As this was an internal document, Behan is justified in pointing out that it showed the party’s real approach, and that the PCI was now supporting a discredited state militarily, as well as politically (pp. 121–2).
In the aftermath of the war, the PCI ‘doppiezza’ was used in an attempt, on the one hand, to assure the middle classes of their position and privileges, whilst, on the other, to pacify radicalised workers who expected rather more from the ‘liberation’. The PCI leadership began to appeal to workers to increase their productivity and help rebuild their fatherland. Behan correctly emphasises the fundamental flaw of the PCI’s economic programme. The PCI’s attempts to persuade the middle classes of its good intentions failed, it could offer little to workers, and its ‘doppiezza’ demoralised its members with this wait-and-see attitude, as they were to remain passive whilst waiting for the order to rise (or for Godot, as one could more truthfully say). Over the next three years, the PCI could be described as ‘a weak leadership and a confident rank and file, out of step with the leadership’s line’, constituting ‘an unstable and volatile mixture ... although differences only tended to emerge in brief spontaneous explosions. The use of terms such as “infantile over-confidence” was to become quite common in descriptions of the rank and file, although as time went by the most common term became “lack of consciousness”.’ (p. 170)
After 1945, both the right and the PCI itself placed great emphasis on alleged attempts at provocation, with a view to a possible coup or as an excuse for the government to ban left parties or implement repressive measures. It should be noted that huge amounts of weapons were still held by the partisans and others in the factories and elsewhere, with estimates of up to 30 cannons, about 1,000 machine guns, over 40,000 automatic and non-automatic rifles and revolvers, close to 50,000 grenades, nearly 600 tons of explosives and no less than five million rounds of ammunition! Whilst the Greek civil war, as well as the recent Gladio discovery, lends some justification to these fears, the situation was far from certain. Behan argues that if the PCI had really thought it to be the case, ‘they could probably have organised a clandestine military structure, something which never existed in any real sense’ (p. 291).
Faced with the rank and file’s increased militancy and with the objective economic problems in Italy at the time, the party had to decide where its allegiances lay. It is in this light that we should see the PCI’s renewed denunciations of ‘agent provocateurs’, ‘Trotskyists’, ‘outside agitators’, etc., as well as its rôle in causing the fall of the only government headed by a former partisan commander and leader of the left-wing Action Party, Ferruccio Parri, in November 1945, in favour of a new administration headed by the DC.
Evidence that the Italian working class was perhaps not so politically immature comes with two separate events: the reaction to prefect Troilo’s dismissal in 1947 and the attempted assassination of Togliatti in 1948. Behan devotes an extremely detailed analysis to them, especially to the latter, chronicling each day of the uprising in Milan and other Italian cities. We will have to limit ourselves to the main events here.
By 1947, Troilo was ‘the last “political” prefect, that is, someone appointed by the CLNAI following Liberation, and his selection as prefect [of Milan] clearly reflected his activities as a partisan leader’ (p. 206). Troilo had been dismissed because he refused to repress a general strike that erupted in Milan in response to the sacking of workers. But, as one worker commented, the sacking was no mere disciplinary measure, ‘it was an act against the Resistance’ (p. 206). His removal met immediately with a general strike and the resignation in solidarity of no less than 156 mayors in the region, including the mayor of Milan. Armed workers took over the prefettura building and other strategic places, and factory strikes ensued. Here we clearly see a spontaneous yet concerted action, which surely cannot be defined as limited to economic demands. Whilst PCI local cadres did join the protest, party leaders were busy finalising a compromise, with which Troilo would be temporarily reinstated until a suitable replacement could be found. It was largely thanks to the PCI’s pleadings with workers and partisan protesters that order could be restored.
On 14 July 1948, Togliatti was shot three times outside the parliament in Rome. As soon as the news spread, the entire country came to a halt. Transport was completely paralysed, telephone exchanges were taken over, armed occupations of factories took place, and weapons were retrieved and prepared. All this was entirely spontaneous, as the PCI leadership did not issue any directive, save for a call for the government to resign, and an appeal for all protest to remain within the bounds of legality. However, the prime minister, De Gasperi, refused to resign, so the PCI leadership went into permanent session, to decide what to do and gain time without committing themselves.
Although the situation in Milan at first appeared less eventful than in Genoa, Turin or Venice, it was here that workers proved most reluctant to end the strike. Perhaps uniquely, in Milan the PCI, the Socialist Party and the CGIL union federation set up ‘a kind of united front’ (p22). The masses proclaimed a general strike, and stayed away from the factories. The uprising lasted three days. From Behan’s collected data, workers’ confidence increased throughout this period. However, the PCI and CGIL leaders were working frantically to end the strike, without making any further demands and even giving justifications verging on the ridiculous: an end of the protest was necessary ‘to get more precise information on the situation, and to be able to judge things in greater detail’: the PCI and CGIL soon ‘engineered a return to work with no concessions having been made by the government, despite the fact that the strike movement had taken control from the government temporarily in some Northern cities, without even having any organised strategy or plan.’ (pp. 231–3)
It is true that, in the main, workers supported the idea of an armed insurrection ‘without serious consideration of the precise tactics and strategy necessary’ (p. 234). But, as already noted, their opponent’s resources and strength were far from formidable: ‘during the afternoon and evening of 14 July the state ceased to exercise authority in several towns and cities in Northern Italy ... the very strength of such a spontaneous and uncoordinated movement suggests that a planned and coordinated insurrection stood a good chance of success in many areas’ (p. 235).
Of course, this is not to say that revolution was a concrete possibility for Italy at that juncture. The Allied presence in Italy must be considered, as well as the dominance of Stalin over the international movement. It is also true that the PCI was a mass party with over two million members in 1948, but the political allegiances, let alone consciousness, of many of its members were highly debatable. But, argues Behan, in ‘1917 the Bolsheviks only enjoyed 25 per cent of the votes over the country as a whole ... what gave them greater support was the process of the revolution itself and its demands’ (p. 235). Moreover, the possibility for a left bloc in Italy did seem to exist at the time. Crucially, however, what separated the Bolsheviks from the PCI leadership was the latter’s explicit unwillingness to become the vanguard organisation of the working class, to promote class consciousness and support it in its struggles.
The left has long been divided along two lines: many argue that the balance of forces was so unfavourable, nationally and internationally, that a PCI-led insurrection in Italy was doomed from the start, and would have resulted in the establishment of a right-wing reactionary regime. Behan is more open on this question, and points to the doubtful readiness of the Allies to engage in a civil war in Italy, particularly with a partisan war waging in Greece, and the possibility that the insurrection might spread to France. Some of Behan’s views are validated by Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s findings, but the author is nevertheless correct in advancing a different scenario, one which does not simply limit itself to regard the status quo as the best that could be obtained given the ‘objective conditions’, a term to which the left is sometimes too fond to resort.
In his conclusions, Behan differs from Anfossi, for whom the ‘immature consciousness’ of the Italian proletariat was the determining factor. Even if it might be true that Italian workers ‘never went beyond factory gates’, and Anfossi may be justified in calling for a relationship between party and class consciousness more along the lines of Luxemburg’s ideas on the subject, in the sense that consciousness cannot be created by the party alone, Luxemburg never argued that the class can attain full Communist consciousness without the guidance of its vanguard organisation in an organic interchange. The PCI never wanted to be this, so to expect a mature Italian proletariat at that time displays a serious lack of understanding of revolutionary Marxism.
Finally, with Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s work, we add another piece to the puzzle, and look at the development and decisions of the PCI in the 1930s and 1940s from an international perspective. They were able to consult some of the documents and files recently made available with the opening of the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet Communist Party, and whilst some important evidence remains shrouded in official secrecy, they nevertheless believe that a much more informed opinion can now be formulated of the relationship between Moscow and the leadership of the PCI.
But far from evolving a new analysis from the new information, the authors, as if yearning for the certainties of yore, resort to the tired old nostrums of the Cold War:
‘The intent behind this book has been to explore the as yet barely studied theme of the web between Stalinism and the Italian Communist Party ... On the part of the USSR, this web represents an attempt by the mature Stalinist totalitarianism to expand in a new territory by peaceful means, using as its tool a party capable of mass mobilisation and of permanent opposition to capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Seen on the part of Italian society, this means the affirmation within the newly-born democratic regime of a party seeking to transform Italian society on the basis of the Soviet model.’ (p. 273)
Several episodes are analysed in an attempt to debunk the commonplace idea that, with the exception of the Cominform period of 1947–56, the PCI increasingly asserted its autonomy from Moscow.
The authors claim that the newly-found documentation firmly points to an hitherto unsuspected degree of both cooperation and consultation between Rome and Moscow, and dependency and subordination on the part of the PCI. This is central to the two crucial points that are made in this book. The first concerns an idea, still held in some quarters, that Togliatti was a fairly original leader in his relationship with Moscow. The authors insist that these qualities were mainly a result of Stalin’s willingness to allow the PCI some space, but that any autonomy was strictly circumscribed, and that at every crucial juncture Togliatti and his party capitulated to Stalin’s demands. The second point concerns the PCI’s ‘doppiezza’. Here the authors argue that this is not so much to be understood as the coexistence of a revolutionary and a counter-revolutionary soul within the party, but as a consequence of the PCI’s being both a national party and a member of the international Communist movement. Only in this light can the PCI’s policies be understood. Analysed by itself, as an autonomous scenario, the ‘Italian case’ can never be fully interpreted. We will concentrate here on two major issues: the ‘Salerno switch’ – the explicit orientation of the PCI as a national party – and the events culminating in Togliatti’s attempted assassination in 1948.The ‘Salerno switch’ followed the Soviet recognition of Badoglio’s government in March 1944, and was initiated by Togliatti on his return from Moscow. Traditionally, historians have been divided on this issue, with many maintaining that this political turn was closely linked with Soviet foreign policy, and others in the official Communist camp seeing it as a move by Togliatti towards greater autonomy from Moscow. In fact, despite Togliatti’s claim to the contrary, the switch was the direct result of a meeting held on 4 March 1944 between Togliatti and Dimitrov in Moscow, before the former departed to Italy. This was not a policy specific to Italy, and as early as 1941 Togliatti, as a Comintern leader, was directing other European Communist parties to unite with various national forces against Nazi Germany, and, after the fall of Fascism in Italy, in his radio broadcasts from Moscow he pointed to the need ‘to define the conditions on which the PCI and other anti-Fascist parties could become part of Badoglio’s government (pp. 58–9).
The real question is why Togliatti and Dimitrov opposed collaboration with Badoglio and the Italian king in early 1944, only to return to supporting them. The anti-Fascist front had been largely favourable to Badoglio, but events after the fall of Fascism led to his being criticised by anti-Fascists. Left to their own devices, the PCI leaders stayed with the anti-Fascist front and supported the formation of an alternative government. Togliatti and Dimitrov sought Stalin’s approval, but he made it clear that Moscow’s original support for Badoglio still stood as Italy had to present a strong and united national front, and so they dutifully lined up behind the general’s government.
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky consider that Moscow’s recognition of Badoglio permitted Soviet influence in Italy to grow, as the PCI, like other European Communist parties, would be able to make electoral gains, and take the lead of wide left-wing blocs, thus both creating tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, and keeping in check any ‘premature’ mass rising. They reject the idea that Togliatti’s policies after 1944 aimed simultaneously at resisting the division of Europe into two antagonistic camps and at promoting national unity to create a peaceful, prosperous and independent Italy, and claim that the PCI worked within the governments of national unity in order ‘not to reform capitalist society, but to conquer new positions and achieve power’ (p. 83), in accordance with Soviet strategy. They insist that these aims were fully endorsed by the PCI’s leaders, and were not imposed upon them.
The PCI expected to do well in the 1948 elections. With its allies in the left bloc, victory was guaranteed, and, so long as the Americans did not forcibly exclude the PCI from government, power was just around the corner. Its expectations were unfoundedly high, as the left-wing parties had been excluded from the government in May 1947, the PCI was unable to conclude a trade agreement with Moscow, and De Gasperi, the DC leader, had returned from Washington with the promise of Marshall Aid, which gave his party much credence.
Moscow had responded to the Marshall Plan by accelerating the ‘sovietisation’ of Eastern Europe, and by tightening its grip on the official Communist movement through the newly-formed Cominform. In the new reality of the division of the world into two opposing camps, the European parties were disingenuously condemned for their line of national unity, and they duly adopted a strong anti-American stance and a more militant posture. In October 1947, Togliatti attacked his co-leaders for wavering and lacking in initiative, openly recognising that an insurrection could not be ruled out, although the headstrong Pietro Secchia was told by Stalin that a civil war in Italy would be inappropriate just now. Stalin reprimanded Secchia, but (as Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky insist), always keen to keep his options open, ordered his appointment as the PCI’s second-in-command.
With the withdrawal of the last of the Allied troops from Italy in December 1947 and the elections looming, tensions rose between the two camps. Truman expected civil war to erupt in Italy, but he opposed any US intervention. At most, military force could be used ‘only in Sicily and Sardinia, and only upon the request of the legal government, taking it for granted that Northern Italy would have remained in Communist hands’ (p. 231). Nevertheless, the PCI began to prepare for armed action to defend its hoped-for electoral victory against US interference. In March 1948, Togliatti secretly met Kostylev, the Soviet ambassador, in Rome, and, whilst presenting a fairly optimistic picture, he argued that resistance in Italy could precipitate ‘a great war’ between the Soviet and Western blocs. Togliatti was told that the PCI could respond militarily if its offices were attacked, but taking power through an armed insurrection was definitely ruled out (p. 234).
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky explain this by pointing to the specific situation of Italy within the totality of East-West relations. For them, the fact that the PCI was willing to resort to armed action to enforce an electoral victory invalidates the traditional interpretation of its ‘doppiezza’, and proves that its real roots are to be found in the ‘profound contrast between the necessity to present itself as a national party in defence of the interests of wide strata of Italian society, and its rôle as an integral part of the international Communist movement dominated by the USSR’ (p. 236).
Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky are correct to cast aspersions upon the Togliatti myth, and to emphasise his subordination to Moscow. But their methodology is wrong. Togliatti, along with Thorez, Pollitt and the rest, were committed to collaborating with non-Stalinist forces in a quest for national reconstruction because Stalin did not want their parties to seize power. Stalin wanted influence in Italy, not revolution. Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ led to domestic patriotism growing in Stalinist parties, and this could lead them to adapt too much for Stalin’s liking to non-Stalinist forces at home. There would necessarily be tension between Togliatti’s allegiance to Moscow and his activities as an Italian politician. The shift of the official Communist movement to a more radical stance after 1947 was not a return to a long-lost revolutionary standpoint, but an attempt by Moscow to restrict the influence of the USA in world and especially European politics.
The study of Italy during this crucial period is bound to continue. As it is, the books by Anfossi, Guerriero and Rondinelli and Behan are worthy contributions to the debate. Aga-Rossi and Zaslavsky’s offering, however, belongs to an historiographical school that has long been discredited, and this greatly reduces its value for the historian.
Barbara Rossi
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