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.
********
In the European context, Mandel must be considered the most outstanding intellectual authority on the world economy since the Second World War. Credit must be given to his struggle to enrich Marxian analysis and rescue it from the stifling grasp of Stalinism. He researched and used extensive sources of empirical data to extend our knowledge of the laws of motion of modern capitalism.
The eight articles presented are by no means uncritical of Mandel. They are uneven, with the outstanding one being the fifth, by Mitchel Husson, entitled After the Golden Age: On Late Capitalism. A combined reading of these articles gives a view of the scope and depth of Mandel’s thought, and is therefore a useful introduction for any Marxist seeking an entrance into Mandel’s work. From this perspective, this book is worth reading.
This reviewer is not of the ‘Long Wave’ school. Capitalist evolution needs concrete analysis, and does not correspond to either ‘Long Waves’ or ‘Short Waves’. While it is true that the postwar boom lasted nearly 25 years, the downturn that followed it did not correspond to a pattern. For example, Japan only went into recession in 1991. The United States economy expanded from 1984, and Europe considerably later. In fact, the last 20 years have been characterised by a lack of synchronisation amongst the large three economic blocks. This lack of synchronisation was primarily due to the balance of class forces existing amongst them. If the USA powered ahead, it was due to the dominance of the bourgeoisie there, and if Europe lagged that was in turn due to the lingering strength of organised labour.
A brief explanation of waves is as follows: an upturn is characterised by rising rates of profit propelling rising rates of investment (accumulation), while a downturn is characterised by falling rates of profit dragging down rates of investment. By these definitions, 1996 should have marked a turning point in the world economy, an end to the downturn. For it was at this time that steadily-rising rates of profit finally began to encourage rising rates of investment. And indeed, for four years we saw an acceleration of economic growth and productivity. Some called it a new technological revolution, the information age in full bloom.
Yet four years later, the world economy is sliding into recession. What makes this recession unique is that unlike in 1980 and 1990, it is a classical recession based on over-accumulation of capital resulting in an absolute fall in the rate of profit, something which Mandel, incidentally, was wrong to dismiss. Phase one of the recession is in full flight, that is to say, a fall in investment. Phase two, the consequence of over-indebted consumers, is yet to occur. When it does, it is likely that we will experience a recession deeper than any that has occurred since 1974, a recession of sufficient magnitude to generate political consequences, especially in the Pacific Rim.
On the other hand, should this recession prove to be a temporary blip, a temporary correction of the upturn begun in 1996, then it will prove to be a vindication of the theory of Long Waves. This author thinks not. Despite the favourable balance of class forces from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, this recession will be sufficiently deep to remind us that there is no substitute for rigorous and extensive research of the present anatomy of the capitalist economy.
This is one of the longer discussions, which otherwise occur wherever the text touches upon the disgraceful abstentionism of the Italian Left, whether on Spain, Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia, or Japan’s upon China (p. 21). As for Trotsky being ‘unprepared’ for the Second World War, whilst he predicted to the month a year before when and how it would begin, the author’s much-vaunted Italian Left in exile collapsed in the face of it (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 4, Spring 1995, p. 200).
For the matrix in which this jumble is embedded is the idealist playground of Bordiga’s illegitimate children, who define themselves as ‘proletarian’ and everything else as ‘bourgeois’. This not only goes for those who disagree with them (Mandel was ‘a bourgeois economist’, p. 9), but includes the trades unions, the other workers’ parties, and even the workers themselves, for ‘there could be no class party in 1938 because there was no independent class movement’ (p. 13).
At the risk of being denounced as a capitulator, I can only quote Plekhanov at this point: ‘The only serious way to treat an absurdity is to laugh at it.’
At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924, its leader Grigorii Zinoviev famously denounced Lukács, along with the German Communist Karl Korsch, whose Communism and Philosophy had been independently written with a similar message. In his speech entitled The Struggle Against the Ultra-Lefts and Theoretical Revisionism, Zinoviev declared: ‘If we get more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost. We cannot tolerate theoretical revisionism of this kind in our Communist International.’ Bukharin, soon to replace Zinoviev as Stalin’s chief ally in the International, told Korsch: ‘We can’t put every piece of garbage up for discussion.’ It is doubtful whether either Zinoviev or Bukharin had ever read Lukács’ book.
That is how all discussion of Lukács’ important effort to develop philosophy among Communists was suppressed. Soon, Zinoviev set his ideological thugs to work, including an onslaught in Pravda. It has often been said that Lukács’ response to these attacks was to make a self-criticism of History and Class Consciousness, and then to fall silent until the 1960s. But a typescript in German, entitled Chvostismus und Dialektik, which was discovered in the Moscow CPSU archives and which appeared in Budapest in 1996, shows that Lukács was still vigorously defending his book, at least as late as 1926.
It is an answer to two of his critics. The former Menshevik Abram Deborin (1881–1963) was working his way to becoming the most prominent of Soviet philosophers. He succeeded, at least until his denunciation as a ‘Menshevising idealist’ in 1930. László Rudas was a founder of the Hungarian Communist Party and an ally of Lukács in Vienna. In 1923, he went into exile in Moscow and became a loyal Stalinist. Lukács has no difficulty in slapping these two down, and refuting their ritual denunciations of his book as ‘subjectivist’.
The present volume contains a translation by Esther Leslie of Chvostismus und Dialektik, together with an Introduction by John Rees, a translation of an introduction to the Hungarian edition by László Illés and a postface by Slavoj Žižek. (I don’t want to make a fuss about it, but the translation doesn’t make the reader’s far from easy task any easier. Translating both the word ‘Augenblick’ – ‘instant’ – and the important Hegelian term ‘Moment’ as ‘moment’ sometimes renders it impossible to see what Lukács is driving at. As for the gibberish ‘knotted line of mass conditions’, this reviewer can only shake his aged head over the lamentable state of education these days. Couldn’t anybody at Verso recognise ‘der Knotelinie der Massverhältnisse’ to be Hegel’s famous ‘nodal line of measure relations’? It appears that nobody knows or cares about such things any more.)
I don’t think this volume adds a great deal to our knowledge of the work of Lukács, although the fact that the author of History and Class Consciousness did not give in as easily as we used to think is historically important. John Rees’s introduction certainly doesn’t help. He wants to have his traditional Lenin cake, while eating a bit of Lukácsised Hegel icing. Rees tells us that History and Class Consciousness ‘recovered the greater part of Marx’s theory of alienation’. But Marx’s conception of alienation, which is the root conception of all his work, especially Capital, centres on ‘universal human emancipation’, and this does not feature anywhere in Lukács’ work, I believe.
The Postface by Žižek is called Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Leninism. I think he makes a good case for this title, but while he means it as a compliment to Lukács, I see it as a condemnation.
Today, the work of recovering Marx’s ideas should indeed take account of History and Class Consciousness, but this requires great care and attention. It is not the slightest use putting Lukács forward as the founder of ‘Western Marxism’, or ‘Hegelian Marxism’, without rescuing Marx’s actual ideas from all varieties of the ‘Marxist’ tradition. Anyone beginning a serious study of Lukács would do well to read the lengthy comments of István Mészáros in his Beyond Capital. (Rees has the chutzpah to refer to Beyond Capital, without telling anybody that it contains, among other things, an extended criticism of History and Class Consciousness.)
Mészáros shows that Lukács’ relationship with Stalinism is far more complex than a simple ‘capitulation to the bureaucracy’. He investigates, as a unity, Lukács’ evolution from youthful romanticism, through devotion to Bolshevism, to his own kind of Stalinism. He can then demonstrate the constant elements within this history, concerning precisely the philosophical problems of the relation between mass movement and subjectivity.
I must admit that I don’t understand what Renton means when he says that fascism is better understood as a movement than as an ideology. I think the main problem is that Renton confuses fascism and racism, as if they were one and the same, and, of course, this is not so. Anti-Semitism was endemic in the UK, and the Immigration Bill passed in 1906 was aimed against further Jewish immigration from Russia and Poland. Immediately before the Second World War, the number of Jewish refugees accepted from Nazi Germany was low indeed, and, as Renton points out, most of them were interned during the war on the Isle of Man, or shipped out to Canada or Australia. (Several hundreds on the Arandora Star drowned when a U-boat torpedoed the ship.) This type of racism, together with the refusal of golf clubs to admit Jews (p. 61) is not necessarily fascism, and many of the organisations Renton cites were High Tory rather than fascist. Fascism demands an economic, social and political programme, populist in that it appeals to the mass, although funded by big business. Of this programme, racism is only part.
I fully agree with Renton’s statement that anti-fascism was an appropriate response to British fascism, and that ‘anti-fascism provides the most immediate obstacle to the growth of fascist parties’.
The state certainly failed to take an active rôle in combating fascism; but does Renton really expect the state to have done so? For he himself points out that during the interwar years, MI5, taking the view that the British state was ‘under assault from minorities, extremists and Communists’ (p. 126), employed a number of fascists (apparently fascists were not included in ‘minorities’!), some of them continuing to be active in M15 during 1945–51. In fact, Maxwell Knight, a long-standing member of a fascist organisation, became head of Section F4, the wing of M15 with responsibility for placing agents within the Communist Party.
This is not to say that pressure should not have been put upon Chuter Ede, the Labour Home Secretary, by Labour Party members and the trade unions, against the antagonism of the police and the arrest of anti-fascists. With regard to banning fascist meetings, as Renton himself points out, bans for the most part work against the left, and not the right.
Did fascism fail? Renton points out in his preface that the fascist organisations in the UK, re-established at the end of the Second World War, ‘collapsed within the year’. He remarks that ‘the ascent and decline of immediate postwar fascism seemed sudden and inexplicable to contemporaries and needs to be explained’. While not underplaying the necessity for anti-fascist activity wherever and whenever fascism raises its ugly head, it has to be remembered that in the late 1940s the country was in a process of change. The East End of London, as well as other cities, had been badly bombed during the war, and families had moved out, never to return. Following the war, successive governments were engaged in building new towns out in the sticks, to which the working-class population was being decanted. This was taking place throughout the UK. Therefore, in the East End, the old Jewish communities on which the fascists based their racism were disappearing. Added to that, in a period of full employment and the inauguration of a welfare state, unlike Mosley in the 1930s at a time of economic crisis, the postwar fascists were deprived of a social (or anti-social) programme which would appeal to the mass of the people. It was not for some years until immigrants from Bangladesh settled in the East End that the race card was played again, and this time by a Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrat Council!
I smiled to read Renton’s remark that the fascists in the 1940s propagated the theory that economic slump was just around the corner, for this was the line of Gerry Healy, later to become leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party, but in his case it was used to forecast the Socialist revolution! As the poet William Empson wrote in his smack at Auden ‘waiting for the end boys, waiting for the end’.
I was surprised to find that Renton attributes much of the anti-fascist demonstrations and activity taking place at Ridley Road to Common Wealth, an ethical Socialist party formed by Sir Richard Acland to break the electoral truce during the war. To my knowledge, following the landslide Labour victory in the 1945 general election, Common Wealth MPs joined the Labour Party, as did many lay members. Therefore, finance dried up, the offices at 4 Gower Street were closed, the staff were sacked, and all that remained was one small office across the road, manned by two ex-servicemen and a secretary. Later publications were issued from Bloomsbury Street. Apart from the fact that Common Wealth was a middle-class movement, not given to scuffling with fascists or police, I doubt whether manpower would have been available in great enough numbers actively to oppose the fascists, although I am not arguing that members, or former members, of Common Wealth were not present at anti-fascist demonstrations.
In the 1930s, thousands of Mosley supporters, packed in the back of lorries, were conveyed to large fascist rallies. The fascist newspaper was sold outside Jewish shops throughout London and the suburbs; local fascist groups advertised on notice-boards – these were supported largely by small shopkeepers and businessmen. In the 1940s, as today, fascist demonstrations are infinitesimal compared with this, but I agree with Renton that it is always necessary to oppose actively the attempted re-emergence of fascist organisations.
Nor do Baines and Yoffee’s views remain unquestioned in what follows. Mary Van Buren’s analysis of the Inca Empire (pp. 77–87) considers that ‘the almost complete separation of élite high culture from the rest of society … discounts the rôle played by non-élites as an audience for state ideology, and suggests that alternative value systems did not exist in archaic states’, concluding that ‘it is here that the model’s fit with the Andean material breaks down’ (p. 77). She shows quite clearly how the local élites integrated Inca ideology into their own systems, and even ignored or rejected it, that ‘Inka control of conquered groups was highly variable and often mediated through local élites’, and that ‘they relied on local notions of social order to legitimate their control of conquered populations’ (p. 81). And she ends by suggesting that ‘the rôle played by non-élites in the transmittal of civilization is probably not unique to the Andes – only more visible’ (p. 87). The same pattern is demonstrated by Elizabeth Brumfiel’s concluding remarks about the Aztec empire in the valley of Mexico (pp. 134–8).
It is true that the Aztec and Inca empires were latecomers to their areas, conquering states that took over cultures more advanced than their own, which they may have been able to assimilate more thoroughly given time. From that point of view, they are perhaps closer to the position of the Greek polis within the Roman empire analysed by Susan Alcock’s case study of Aphrodisias (pp. 110–9).
But a superb essay by Bennet Bronson drawing upon the records of the great Han historians (pp. 120–7) shows that Baines’ and Yoffee’s contention that ‘the principal focus of high culture was the very élites themselves, at whose behest it was created, and for whom it was sustained, and the great gods’ (p. 16) barely fits the case of China either. He shows how the founder of the Han Dynasty manipulated élite culture to legitimise his rule and assure the future of his dynasty, whilst at the same time appealing to society below it by means of omens and portents, about which the Confucian élite was even more sceptical than that of the Romans (pp. 123–4). But in neither case was the top level of the state’s ideology – the cult of the ‘Son of Heaven’ in the one case and the emperor cult in the other – largely supported by the élites themselves. ‘The Roman and Chinese cases should make us cautious about accepting the general applicability of Baines and Yoffee’s thesis that civilizational collapse can be defined by the eclipse of traditional cosmologies’ (p. 125), he notes. ‘Cultural arbiters who do not belong to a political inner élite can certainly be discerned in the histories of Greece, Rome, India, the Islamic world, and the recent West’, he reminds us: ‘Kings, royal scribes, and high priests may have controlled the high cultures of the Egyptians and Sumerians, but their counterparts did not do so in China.’ (p. 126)
But those of us who find all this exciting from a Marxist point of view should not leave this splendid discussion without a suspicion that in the last analysis it is something of an artificial argument to counterpose status and class in the ancient world. The only society in which classes can be ranged against each other in their chemically pure form is advanced capitalism. Classes also have histories, new privileged classes have always emerged from differentiation within previous élites, and privileged groups can take centuries to evolve from status to private ownership, especially in less dynamic societies. The achievement of this book is that it shows us just how difficult the whole question is.
Lübeck was not in Saxony (p. 49); it was a free city for centuries until 1937, when the Nazis abolished the status. The translations of some of the newspapers are sometimes a bit quirky, but only in the case of the Völkische Beobachter would I make a fuss. Völkische can be rendered as ‘racial’ or ‘national’, so it could be called the Racial Observer, but certainly not the Popular Observer. Of the three Communists in the Thuringian government (p. 168), Tenner, Korsch and Neubauer, only Korsch is deemed worthy of a note. Albin Tenner had been a minister in a number of left-wing governments during 1918–20, became a leading German Communist Party (KPD) member and would lead its Landtag Group in Thuringia. During Ruth Fischer’s regime, he was expelled as a rightist for some months in 1925. In 1929, he was again expelled as a rightist and joined the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPD(O)). Theodor Neubauer became a loyal Stalinist and a Reichstag Deputy. He conducted himself with courage under the Nazis, and built up a resistance organisation in Thuringia which linked up with those in Saxony and Berlin. He perished in the aftermath of the July Plot in 1944. At a meeting of top Social Democratic Party (SPD) people, a ‘woman militant, Wurm’ is quoted, but not identified (p. 146). This would be Mathilda Wurm, a Reichstag Deputy who, with her husband Emanuel, was a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg. All of the above-mentioned seem to me to be worthy of a note.
In his introduction, Ian writes that ‘reading between the lines, it is also possible to see the fundamental weakness of the KPD’ because owing to the series of revolutionary crises during 1918–23, it had not been possible ‘to build a stable and consistent leadership, and to establish the necessary relations of intelligent trust between leadership and rank-and-file activists. The KPD had come into existence only in 1917 – no organisation had been built in advance of the crisis. Hence the rapid changes of leadership, the hesitations and tactical zigzags that marked the years of upheaval.’ (p. xi) Here we see both an oversimplification and a total failure to understand the real lessons.
When the KPD was set up at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, only three delegates voted against, one being Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s mentor. It adopted ultra-left positions, the majority of its 100,000 or so members upholding positions developed by Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter. The KPD was unable to adopt a coherent Communist approach to day-to-day matters as long as this was so, and the two fundamentally hostile tendencies fought each other. Paul Levi manoeuvred the ultra-left out of the KPD in the latter part of 1919 and early 1920. Some of them then set up the Communist Workers Party (KAPD). He then turned to winning over the approximately one million members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Levi also admitted that Leo Jogiches had been right, and that had the Spartacus Group stayed in the USPD ‘for another three or four months … the whole problem of how to divide the revolutionary masses in that party from their opportunist leadership would not exist’.
The revolutionary Marxist current had existed within the SPD long before August 1914. It crystallised out of the differences with the Marxist Centre around Kautsky over how to evaluate the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Spartacus Group established itself as a separate political current from the centrists on 1 January 1916, when it adopted the Junius Theses, though it did not separate itself organisationally from the most advanced workers, then belonging to the USPD. The ISD (International Socialists of Germany), which became the IKD (International Communists of Germany) during the revolution of November 1918, and which was the kernel of ultra-left concepts within the KPD, had separated from the SPD already in 1915. They, of course, had no more success in winning over the masses than Pannekoek and Gorter’s Dutch party, the Tribune Group, which had split from the Social Democracy in 1909.
The murders of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and others, the death of Mehring, and the constant interference by the Russian Communist Party (RCP(b)) leaders were the reasons why no stable leadership could be established. Through Radek, Lenin was pushing for a split from the USPD and for setting up the new International, whereas both steps were at first strongly opposed by Jogiches and Luxemburg. Creating a new International with no other powerful parties other than the Bolsheviks would only lead to them dominating it. Writing in 1930, Paul Frölich described it thus: ‘For 10 years the German Communist Party has been the guinea-pig for all sorts of political quackery and surgical interventions.’ Not only was the KAPD courted by the RCP(b), but the Comintern bureau in Berlin was a law unto itself. Spies and informers were installed in the KPD’s leading organs, and groupings and people were played off against each other. The Berlin leftists around Ruth Fischer were encouraged as a pressure group upon the Zentrale. Fischer, Maslow et al. opposed the united front, and the permanent intrigue not only hindered the KPD’s activities, but even threatened to split it. Indeed, in late April 1923, a conference took place in Moscow to try and reconcile both groupings. Brandler was forced to take four leftists into the Zentrale, Fischer and Thälmann among them. Brandler suspected the ECCI of playing a double-game, and on 12 July 1923 offered his resignation: ‘If the political line of the Berliners is correct, then the Executive should transfer the leadership to them.’ These underhand methods were used against Paul Levi within the USPD even before the split at Halle. Then, at the unification congress six weeks or so later, Levi’s manifesto advancing a sensible orientation was replaced by one from Radek, in a dubious fashion, which boasted: ‘The VKPD [United Communist Party] is strong enough where events allow or require it to go into action off its own bat.’ That was a few months prior to the March Action. Levi objected that the KPD was not a ‘branch office’ of the Bolsheviks. The archives contain letters from Brandler, Zetkin and others protesting to Lenin over these methods. Nothing changed – and all this was long before the rise of Stalin.
Moreover, it is inaccurate as well as an oversimplification of the problem facing the KPD to claim that the majority of the USPD fused into the VKPD in December 1920 (p. 47). Out of the about one million members, only around 280,000 joined the VKPD (it revised its initial optimistic figure of 500,000 to 350,000 members in 1921), around 340,000 stayed in the USPD, but the majority, around 350,000 or so showed their disapproval by dropping out of either party. The delegates at Halle only reflected the keen protagonists for or against the Comintern’s Twenty-One Conditions. In ‘red Saxony’, for example, only 21 delegates at Halle voted for acceptance, while 49 opposed the motion. All the USPD Landtag deputies, the party press and most of its officials stayed in the USPD, while only a small part of the membership went into the VKPD. Between November 1920 and January 1921, the Saxon KPD rose from 24,000 to 40,000 members, whereas the ‘right’ USPD kept more than double that until 1922. The KPD’s membership was mainly concentrated in West Saxony, while the KAPD was stronger in East Saxony (Otto Rühle in Dresden had a big following), but the right-wing SPD dominated the working class. The KPD faced rivals on its left and on its right. The reason for the majority of USPD members rejecting the Comintern was mainly the proposal to split the trade union movement and set up a ‘red union’ centre, but it was also due to the excessive centralisation of the Comintern.
Serge’s articles are valuable, and often show a literary quality, and the observational side is stronger than the analytical, as he is lumbered with the catastrophism of the Comintern as well as its sectarian language. The ‘fascist’ label is attached to all and sundry reactionaries. On the whole, I agree with Ian’s comments on them, and for example, Serge’s recent Anarchist past could account for his leftism. While he quotes Mathilda Wurm with approval, he is over the top in his comments on Levi and Kurt Rosenfeld, who were both from the same political current, and were both devoted to the working class (p. 46). The mature Serge would be better in that regard.
The article on the meeting of the three Internationals in Berlin (pp. 8–13), rather triumphalist and moralising, ends without reporting the conclusion or – of necessity in an account – the outcome. For the record, it was an initiative to bring about a united front proposed by the KPD Zentrale at its meeting on 21 December 1921. The omission could reflect his underestimation of the need, as noted by Ian, to win over Social Democratic workers, as one gets the sense that Serge focuses on the KPD alone. Whether he upheld the belief that one must capture a majority of the working class before taking the power, as did the pupils of Rosa Luxemburg, as set out in the first party programme, or thought in terms of a vanguard, is unclear.
Note 2 on pages 42–43 points out: ‘Since 1921 there had been much discussion of the demand for a “Workers’ Government”, that is, a KPD-SPD coalition within the existing parliamentary framework. Such a demand flowed from united front policies, yet risked encouraging reformist illusions.’ To clarify the picture, it is worth going into historical facts on this matter. The birth of the Workers’ Government as a parliamentary combination first appeared in a brochure entitled Der nahende Zusammenbruch der deutschen Bourgeoisie und die KPD, by Karl Bremer, that is, Radek), published in Hamburg in November 1921 by the Comintern firm Hoym. Radek was expressing the views of the Comintern’s Executive. When he advanced them as theses in a meeting of the KPD Zentrale, they were opposed by theses drafted by Thalheimer and Clara Zetkin, and rejected. The KPD Zentrale came under pressure from the ECCI. At its session on 18 December 1921, the Zentrale was attacked by Radek for rejecting his concept. The Fourth Congress of the Comintern in late 1922 discussed the Workers’ Government, but rather than clarify things it further confused them. Radek’s concept was adopted by the KPD’s Leipzig Congress in January 1923 under pressure from the ECCI. The Workers’ Government proposed by ADGB leader Legien during the Kapp Putsch, and which the KPD offered to support critically but not join, was wholly different, as it would have rested on the struggling organisations of the working class in a situation of civil war in parts of Germany during the greatest general strike hitherto seen.
Of particular interest is the last article, published in the left-wing non-party organ Clarté in February 1924, and which looks back over events in order to make his judgements on the causes of the failure to undertake a seizure of power during 1923. Serge mentions the underestimation – admitted by the KPD – ‘of the force of inertia of the Social Democrats in general’, and the overestimation of ‘the extent of Communist influence on the left Social Democrats’, but sees that of only minor importance. He identifies the difficulty in being able to ‘concentrate a great superiority of forces at the decisive point’ owing to the ‘extreme’ decentralisation of Germany’, etc. (p. 223). He also makes the extremely valid point that the labour force was everywhere ‘worn out by years of hunger, overwork and acrimony’ (p. 228). Various historians have made that point, and the fact that not only does one need to think of the years since 1918, but the war years too, and that the decisive errors of a sectarian nature were made between 1918-20, when a united labour movement should have fought to break the back of reaction by dispossessing the big industrialists and landlords, and by democratising the state. Furthermore, the decisive revolutionary opportunity was in 1920 during the Kapp Putsch. Serge rejects the views of the KPD left around Ruth Fischer, and quotes quite extensively from the theses of the newly-formed Centre Group. He could have been expressing the views of the ECCI, as at a meeting to discuss the German events in January, it had come out favouring an evaluation somewhere between that of the Centre Group and the leftists, and recommended that the KPD Zentrale be rejigged to be composed of five Centre people plus two leftists. That was duly carried out in February. It is not the case that ‘Ruth Fischer … became KPD leader with Zinoviev’s support in 1924’ (p. 231 n10). The scapegoating of Brandler, in which Serge did not indulge, the charge of ‘rightism’ and whipping up of leftism, combined with the anger and disappointment of the rank and file, elevated Fischer, Maslow & Co into the KPD leadership at the Frankfurt Congress in April 1924, against the wishes of the ECCI.
Owing to the struggle to succeed Lenin, the German events became a useful tool whereby rivals and their perceived supporters could be discredited. Thus no discussion ever took place, either in the KPD or the Comintern, to determine what went wrong in 1923. Only now with the opening of archives and new studies can we begin to get a picture of what was going on behind the scenes. Klaus Kinner’s Der deutsche Kommunismus (Berlin 1999) deals with the KPD during the Weimar Republic. The biography of Jacob Walcher by Ernst Stock and Karl Walcher (Berlin 1998), builds on Walcher’s unpublished autobiography until 1922. The rest was removed by the Stasi when Walcher died, but much of interest is included that reflects over the early years. Jens Becker, Heinrich Brandler (Hamburg 2000) will help illuminate the events of 1923. Serge’s writings help to set the scene.
Solano describes the struggles in May 1937, in which POUM and CNT militants fought against the Stalinist counter-revolution, and argues that once the CNT leaders ordered their members to withdraw from the barricades, the POUM had no alternative but to follow suit, given the vast disparity in the strength of the two organisations. The militant Anarchist group, the Friends of Durrutti, which opposed the CNT’s capitulation, was, he argues, small and had little influence. As those events and the subsequent murder of Nin and other revolutionaries are already well known, Solano’s account is most interesting for his first-hand description of working with Nin, and of the POUM’s struggle in clandestinity.
The author was with Nin the day before he was kidnapped, and he was part of the party’s clandestine leadership after the arrest and trial of the main leaders, until he himself was jailed. Solano, with other POUM leaders, was still in prison a week before Franco’s troops entered Barcelona. González Peña, the Minister of Justice, who together with BOC member Manuel Grossi had been sentenced to death after the 1934 Asturias rising, told them that their release might mean murder at Stalinist hands, and compromised by sending them to a prison outside Barcelona, where they freed themselves.
The book is less informative on the relations between Nin and the majority of the POUM leaders, who had come from the BOC. Joaquín Maurín had founded the BOC, and his position had been unchallenged, but the insurrection trapped him in enemy-held territory. Nin’s abilities made him the obvious choice to lead the POUM, but many former BOC members were suspicious of someone with a background in the Left Opposition. Nin and Maurín were personal friends, and both had held the position of National Secretary of the CNT, but from 1922 their histories had diverged. Nin had been based in the Soviet Union as the Assistant Secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, while Maurín had spent the 1920s in Spain, often in prison. The BOC’s politics had been formed by revulsion at the lunacies of the local Stalinists, rather than at Stalin’s policies in Russia. When, in 1936, the Moscow show trials of the old Bolsheviks began, some POUM leaders, notably Luis Portela, objected to La Batalla criticising the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the POUM paid a high price for its courage in defending the Bolshevik old guard, when the Socialist Party and the CNT kept a discreet silence.
In retrospect, it is obvious that Stalin could not permit criticism of his show trials. The fact that the POUM had political differences with Trotsky did not save it from being branded as ‘Trotskyist’, when it defended him and the other old Bolsheviks from the charges of being imperialist agents. Solano points out that the Stalinists’ attacks on the POUM began in Madrid, where the party was much weaker than in Catalonia, and where most of its members had come from the IC.
Solano pays generous tribute to the foreign comrades, especially Victor Serge, Marceau Pivert and Daniel Guérin, who defended the POUM against Stalinist slanders, and aided its members when they were refugees in France. He is less complimentary about Willy Brandt, then a leader of the SAP youth, who refused to take a clear anti-Stalinist position. The author is moved by the reception of Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom and by Catalan television programmes on the murder of Nin, which have done so much to clear the party’s reputation from the mountain of slanders heaped on it.
The book contains several useful appendices. One is an extract from a report by Luigi Longo, the Chief Commissioner of the International Brigades, discovered in the Moscow archives, which expresses concern at the opposition by some Socialist Party leaders to the frame-up of the POUM. Another reproduces an editorial from Treball, the paper of the Communist Party in Catalonia in 1989, which withdraws all the allegations made against Nin. Perhaps it might have come sooner, but it is complete and unequivocal. The lunatic Stalin-worshippers who still exist in Britain seem to have become extinct in Spain.
This neglect of the wider picture also affects his critique of Trotsky’s politics during the war, which can only be described as neo-Stalinist. ‘Now that we know the contingent nature of Trotsky’s conversion to Bolshevism’, Thatcher concludes, ‘his departure in much changed circumstances a decade later is not so peculiar. Rather than ponder why Trotsky was excluded, we may prefer to ask: what kept him so long?’ (p. 213) Thus he repeatedly states that Trotsky’s claim that his and Lenin’s thought converged during the First World War, ‘like so many others, turns out to be false’ (p. vi; cf. also pp. 72–5, 212, 230 n173). Now to begin with, if he had read a little further in the New International magazine from which he draws his material on Rosmer, he would have come across the series of articles in which Hal Draper lays to rest the myth of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism during the First World War, which cuts the ground beneath the whole argument of his fourth chapter. And if he had followed more closely Lenin’s later remarks he would also have found him saying of Trotsky in December 1916 that ‘little by little he is moving to the left’ (Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow 1964, p. 203). But to delve deeper into this question, the author would also have to be acquainted with the letter to which Lenin was replying at the time, Souvarine’s ‘à nos amis qui sont en Suisse’ (Le Populaire, no. 31, 27 November 1916; cf. La Critique sociale, no. 1, March 1931, pp. 43–8; the complete documentation was reprinted by Éditions Spartacus in June 1970), whose existence is nowhere even hinted at.
The sort of scholarship that has produced this book will always be of value, but to deal with Trotsky as a journalist pure and simple is really to reduce him to a one-dimensional man, which was precisely the technique of Zinoviev and Kamenev when they elaborated the orthodoxy of ‘Leninism’ and the heresy of ‘Trotskyism’. Surely we should have moved on a bit from this by now?
The national question came to the fore in wartime Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalists advanced from Western Ukraine in the wake of the Wehrmacht in 1941, promoting their fascistic call for an ethnically-pure independent Ukraine, and were very active in Vinnytsia in the power vacuum between the German withdrawal in 1944 and the reconsolidation of the Soviet regime. Their impact was limited, as the population of Central and Eastern Ukraine was not particularly receptive to their anti-Russian propaganda. The traditional anti-Russian sentiments common in Western Ukraine were far less prevalent, and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime was largely accepted by the inhabitants. The younger Ukrainians from these areas had only known the Soviet system, and had grown up since the traumatic days of collectivisation and the famine of the early 1930s. The Nazi regime, under whose aegis the nationalists had arrived in Vinnytsia, was even worse than Soviet propaganda had described it. Most importantly, it was the Soviet regime that had united the territory of Ukraine, and it was the Red Army that had defeated the Nazis and brought their destructive rule to an end. And so, as a result of the war, Ukraine as a whole was a part of the comity of the Soviet family of nations, and a leading actor at that, ‘almost on a par with the Russian people’ (p. 336). Although the country was to suffer more hardships in the immediate postwar years, the experience of the war served to strengthen and preserve the legitimacy of the Soviet regime in Ukraine.
The war also resulted in the reconstitution of the party élite in Vinnytsia. The old party élite was seen as a bunch of stodgy bureaucrats, whilst the new heroes were Red Army veterans who ‘cut through the red tape with a display of iron will and voluntarist enthusiasm’ (p. 49). Officials who were evacuated to the rear were viewed with suspicion. Indeed, one’s activities during the war became a crucially important criterion when applying for party membership – and when facing a party purge, and extensive purges started to take place even before the war had ended, despite a desperate shortage of cadres. However, war service alone was no guarantee of advancement. Many former partisans who had fought behind the German lines rose rapidly in the party, only to find themselves under suspicion (the powers that be were very suspicious of people who remained in occupied territory, irrespective of their conduct), and all the prominent partisans had left Vinnytsia within a few years.
One big problem for me with this book is that Weiner’s analytical approach is situated firmly within the Cold War paradigm that considers the main dynamic of the Soviet system to have been ideological, and that there were no fundamental changes in theory, practice and behavioural norms from Lenin’s earliest days as a Bolshevik, through Stalin’s era and onwards under his successors. Hence Stalin’s predilection for purges is rooted directly upon Lenin’s desire to maintain the revolutionary purity of the Bolsheviks, as if a manicure can be equated with an amputation. From the origins of Bolshevism, through the purges of the 1930s, to the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of the early 1950s, what we have depicted in this book resembles nothing less than a Communist Mrs Mopp wielding a political broom with demonic energy, ‘purifying’ firstly the party’s ranks, and then society as a whole.
Weiner’s explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism in the Communist Party and other Soviet institutions from the late 1930s – he gives many examples of its cancerous growth in Ukraine through and after the war – is glib: once class differentiations were eradicated, the criterion for purification then shifted to ethnicity. No mention is made of the rise of Russian nationalism as a result of Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’, which was a fundamental break from Marxism, and that this would almost inevitably key into anti-Semitism, which was historically intertwined with Russian nationalism, and which was still prevalent amongst the population and thus open to official manipulation. That the Soviet regime was willing to descend to this level is a clear indication that it was well on the way to forsaking – or indeed had forsaken – its Communist credentials.
Few would deny that by the 1930s the Soviet leadership had constituted itself as a conscious ruling élite, and yet, as one can see from this book, the idea still pervades that it was still interested in Communism, as if an élite would promote a philosophy that would force it to give up its privileged social position. Weiner objects to the theory of Thermidor, stating that its proponents were wrong in saying that the Soviet regime was ‘in favor of consolidation and stability at the expense of radical experiments’ (p. 15). No, Stalin and his successors were carrying on with the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary programme. But Thermidor does not preclude social changes, it means the transformation of a revolutionary regime into a new ruling élite, something which must have profoundly different social interests from the body from which it emerged. Indeed, the emergence of the Soviet élite as a nationalist, anti-Communist force was accompanied by the tremendous transformation of the country under the First Five Year Plan. The non-capitalist nature of the Soviet Union meant that its ruling élite was obliged to use the language of the revolution from which it had emerged. Stalin and his successors had certain goals for which they fought energetically, they did want to modernise and transform their country; in other words, it was a state-building exercise. But they had a material interest in stifling any movement towards Communism, and to confuse what was basically a mutated Russian nationalism with Communism is a grave error. Weiner, of course, is by no means the only one to make this mistake, but it is surprising that 70 years after Stalin’s consolidation of power, and 10 years after the ignominious resignation of the Soviet élite, he insists upon this now.
The political monopoly exercised by the Soviet élite had nothing to do with its having a messianic world revolutionary programme. The Soviet regime had dumped all that by the end of the 1920s. Stalin and his successors ruled with a strong authoritarian hand because of the peculiarities of the Soviet socio-economic formation that had emerged out of the First Five Year Plan. Eschewing both the market and democratic planning, the élite lacked any means of running the economy except by administrative means. Its consequential iron grip over society meant that it could not permit the existence of rival political currents; indeed, it could not even permit more than a tightly circumscribed circulation of ideas and opinions. But by so doing, it ensured that its knowledge of society remained defective. Beneath its confident and thrusting image, the Soviet élite was insecure to the point of paranoia, not because it was facing economic collapse or political revolt through much of its existence, but because it never felt fully in control of the society it ruled, either under Stalin’s terror or under his successors’ less coercive norms.
Let us look at this in relation to three episodes in Weiner’s book. In the first case, in the regime’s disgraceful treatment of Jews, there was an ideological factor at play, namely the prejudices of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, but it is ironic that this ideologically-driven policy could never be publicly proclaimed, as it went against the regime’s official ideology. But there was also the question of practicality, as the manipulation of popular prejudices through promoting anti-Semitism could help improve the popularity of Soviet rule. Furthermore, the innate paranoia of the Soviet élite would produce suspicion on its part of any Soviet citizens who had relatives abroad, as many Soviet Jews did, and it is no surprise that official anti-Semitism increased as the Cold War intensified. Secondly, it was not class criteria that caused the Soviet regime to take such a hard line against Ukrainian nationalism. Rather, unlike the Hungarian fascists mentioned by Weiner who were recruited to the Hungarian Communist Party in the late 1940s (a similar process happened in Romania and East Germany), there could be no space within the Soviet polity for a movement that refused to accept the legitimacy of the governing centre over ‘its’ territory. Any concessions to the Ukrainian nationalists would have resulted in a potentially uncontrollable situation in Western Ukraine. If minor differences were unacceptable, then Ukrainian nationalism was way beyond the pale. Thirdly, as Weiner himself points out, the purging of the wartime partisans was predicated upon the lack of trust in them on the part of the regular army leadership, who considered that they were undisciplined and wayward. In other words, they could not be relied upon by the centre to do as they were told. It was much the same with the Leningrad wartime leadership. It was purged in the late 1940s because it had successfully battled in isolation through tremendously difficult days, and thus was not trusted by the Moscow centre. The governing principle of the Soviet élite was the defence of its social ascendancy and political power, not any fealty to a revolutionary ideology.
To return to Weiner’s main thesis, for all the mass of information he has assembled, he is actually quite vague about the long-term impact of the war upon the Soviet Union. He mentions the widespread commemorations of the war that have continued into the post-Soviet period, which indicates that the legacy of the war had much more to do with state-building and national assertion than with Communism. He also talks of a ‘front-line assertiveness’ that ran through Soviet society, even into the Gulag (p. 367). How did this key into the process of de-Stalinisation that took off within a decade of the end of the war, and which made a profound change to the form, if not the content, of the Soviet polity? How did this militarised generation come to dismantle much of Stalin’s terror apparatus, and empty much of the Gulag? Unfortunately, Weiner says very little about this. Finally, one crucial question is that of the danger of basing one’s conclusions for an entire country upon a detailed study of a limited area. How typical was Vinnytsia of Central and Eastern Ukraine as a whole? The questions of the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and popular attitudes towards Russia and Russians would differ greatly in Eastern and Central Ukraine on the one hand and Western Ukraine and the Baltic States on the other. What questions were raised by the war in respect of Byelorussia or in non-Russian areas not occupied by the Third Reich, or indeed in Russia itself? Fascinating as Weiner’s book is, a whole range of studies of this type would have to be done before an overall view of the impact of the war on the Soviet Union could be obtained.
The sheer range of factual howlers must make this book one of the last century’s major achievements, a century by no means deficient in the cult of the big lie. Trotsky’s repudiation of Max Eastman was not insisted upon by his comrades as a way of remaining in the party, but was due to lack of courage (p. 23), Ted Grant was present at the 1933 conference (p. 40), when Van Overstraeten’s group was still ‘numerically strong’ (p. 42), and, best of all, ‘there is no reason to believe the German events of 1932–33 motivated Trotsky to call for a new International when earlier German, British and Chinese events hadn’t. There isn’t even a hint of a progression of disillusion in the Stalinist Third International in Trotsky’s vitriolic writings on the subject.’ (p. 47) Greece was ‘represented by Michel Raptis’ at the founding conference of the Fourth International (p. 86); Victor Serge was ‘a Stalinist-turned-Trotskyist leader’ (p. 328); Bob Smillie, Mark Rhein, Willy Brandt, George Orwell and Paul Frölich were all Trotskyists (pp. 124–5, 257), whereas Chandu Ram was British (p. 263); during the Burnham-Shachtman debate Trotsky ‘would not discuss the issue which initiated the debate, namely the Soviet Union’s actions in World War II, including its invasion of Finland’ (p. 135), and he was responsible for a split he had tried to avoid (p. 137). Coming on to the period after the war, apparently Chinese Trotskyists were never imprisoned (p. 325); Posadas’ split was over the Sino-Soviet dispute, where he supported the Russians (p. 191); the Bolivian Trotskyists entered the MNR in 1952 on Pablo’s insistence (p. 246); Molinier ‘never rejoined the Trotskyists’ (p. 309 n50); the Comintern still existed in the 1970s (p. 315 n42); the Marcyite ‘World Workers Party’ is ‘Trotskyist’, and we could go on. The writer certainly does.
And when we examine the ideological setting of these grotesqueries an even more woeful picture emerges. For example, Woolley’s ‘intimate friendship’ with Arne Swabeck (pp. viii, 46, 333), who abandoned Trotskyism for a rabid Maoism, has introduced into the narrative more than a dash of vulgar Stalinism. This is particularly so when we come to the Spanish Civil War, where the masses are described as a ‘red rabble’ (p. 298 n46) and the POUM repeatedly as ‘the outstanding representative of Trotskyism in Spain’ (p. 116; cf. pp. 44, 84, 299 n56, 303 n84, 304). Indeed, since ‘landlords and factory managers were also not spared the death penalty by political groups’ (p. 117), the Stalinists, who had ‘realistically separated the fight against war and fascism from the revolutionary struggle for power’ (p. 32), banned May Day in Barcelona ‘for fear of mass violence’ (p. 122), had to disarm the militias ‘to put a stop to the arming of criminal elements by the Anarchists and Trotskyists’ (p. 120), and were finally ‘forced to eliminate their political opponents’ (p. 118). But this was all to the good, for the aim of the Trotskyists was ‘to make sure the Spanish people were subjected to as much bestiality and death and destruction as it was possible to dish out under the name of humanistic Marxism’ (p. 75). They were, after all, ‘able to bring down persecution upon themselves from the very start of their movement’ (p. 114), and as for Trotsky himself, he ‘can be said to have almost willingly cooperated’ with the GPU (p. 103).
We might therefore ask what trace remains of the writer’s boasted years in the American Socialist Workers Party, followed by a close working contact with the Workers League and the Spartacists (p. 333), and subsequent access to ‘the personal collection of Mr James Robertson’ (p. 334) and ‘sources within the Socialist Workers Party and the Spartacist League who wish to remain anonymous’ (p. 335). The simple answer is rather more than his share of poisonous factionalism and sectarian dogmatism. The movement is described as a ‘Trotsky-led organization of cults’ (p. 96; cf. p. 81), ‘a narrow fanatical international clique’ (p. 31) of ‘unstable elements who were to be fanatics about trivial political points’ (p. 39) acting in ‘a futile attempt to establish the purity of socialism’ (p. vii). This is certainly the mentality he gained in the movement, for it failed to teach him the simplest proposition of revolutionary thought, that there can be no such thing as ‘orthodox Marxism’ (pp. 11, 182, 207, 223). And his particular brand of ‘orthodoxy’ comes out painfully clearly. Cannon’s support for Lore’s expulsion was ‘more out of a disinterest in foreign matters such as Trotskyism, than out of conviction’ (p23; cf p24). Pablo’s ‘entrism sui generis’ was ‘attempted liquidation into the Stalinist movement’ (pp. vii, 225–6), and yet was somehow at the same time a perspective of ‘virtually abandoning political activity within the European mass movement’ (pp. 190–1), whereas 1965–69 was ‘the period of the rise of revisionism in the USFI’ (p. 213). The Gelfand Case becomes ‘a book of historical significance’ (p. 330). The only modification Woolley makes in this historical picture is to suggest that a major cause of the decay of ‘orthodoxy’ in the Trotskyist movement in the 1960s and 1970s was the ‘degenerate habits’, particularly sexual ones, picked up by the ‘undisciplined sons and daughters of the upper-middle classes’ on college campuses (p. 230).
It is barely surprising, therefore, that his analysis displays no evidence of any command of Marxism at all. Hitler was a ‘brother Socialist’ of Stalin (p. 116). Labour parties are variously described as ‘left-liberal political organizations’ (p. 57) or ‘social democratic (that is, liberal or socialist)’ (p. 31). The united front is not an approach to the mass movement, but where ‘Marxists of different tactical views could collaborate in a united front for a specific purpose’ (p. 12). Entrism becomes ‘a raiding mission to recruit cadres’ (p. 49), ‘a blatant attempt to steal the cadres or parties and programs built by others’ (p. 51), ‘so sapping the strength of them as to eliminate them’ (p. 58; cf. p. 76). Permanent Revolution boils down to using ‘Social Democrats and social democratic demands as a starting point for the transformation of the democratic movement in Russia into a Communist one’ where ‘the Social Democrats were to be duped into supporting the proletarian revolution by working for impossible demands’ (p. 12). For transitional politics are no more than ‘a program of using the existing liberal movements in democratic countries to build a revolutionary movement … by so aggravating liberal demands as to make their realization only impossible’ (p. 91), meant to ‘attract liberals in a front with Communists’ (p. 92). The entirety of Marxism is thus reduced to a series of unpleasant manoeuvres and petty intrigues. They even crop up in the Appendix of Party Names, where someone in the Spartacist League has carefully provided him with the identities of ex-associates still active in the mass movement (pp. 225–63), even though they played no part in the period covered by his book, which ends in the early 1970s.
The only original component Woolley brings to his construct is an obsession with morals, particularly sexual ones. It becomes an all-purpose explanation, transcending other causal factors. Some examples are simply hilarious: ‘By lack of background and an intention not to renounce his fornication, Trotsky was blocked from seeking a religious philosophy of life’ (p. 4), for ‘orthodox Marxism … served to rationalize his youthful academic failure and promiscuity’ (p. 10). Strange sexual comments start on the first page and crop up all the way through: the early south Russian revolutionaries were ‘individuals of a dissatisfied and immoral nature’ (p. 1), whereas Trotsky’s ‘sexual immorality and inattention to personal finances identified him as a Bolshevik’ (p. 5). Every new actor appears on stage bearing a ready made moral tag. Natalia Sedova is repeatedly described as ‘Trotsky’s mistress’ (pp. 17, 33, 314, etc.). Lev Sedov, ‘Trotsky’s older illegitimate son’ (p. 10), and Jeanne Martin were ‘permanent adultery partners’ (p. 19); Fischer and Maslow were ‘fornication partners’ (p. 28), and Frida Kahlo ‘a vulgar, drug using and sometimes sodomite third wife of Rivera’ (p. 291). For sheer entertainment value I can thoroughly recommend the first section in Chapter 8, Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery (pp. 229–31, together with n3, p. 322). We even get a glimpse into the writer’s own tormented spiritual odyssey when he says of Eastman that ‘his perspicacious understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of Communism almost leads him to the Christian view of the depravity of man’ (p. 328).
Most of us would accept that the morality of the Alabama Bible belt does not equip us to understand political movements in the twentieth century, though why it was necessary to write a book of over 300 pages to prove it remains a mystery to me.
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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Legacy of Ernest Mandel
Albert Archar (ed.)
The Legacy of Ernest Mandel
Verso, London 1999, pp. 270
The Legacy of Ernest Mandel
Verso, London 1999, pp. 270
THIS book is based on papers presented at the first seminar organised by the Ernest Mandel Study Centre in July 1996. It consists of four main themes. The first consists of articles relating to Ernest Mandel’s theory of ‘Long Waves’, the second relates to his critique of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, followed by his opinions on the transition to Socialism, and the second part of the book contains interviews with Mandel, along with some of his unpublished articles.
This review does not cover Mandel as a political activist, nor does it present an appreciation or critique of the tactics he proposed. Rather it concentrates on his theoretical achievements and contributions to Marxian economic thought. This is particularly apposite as the capitalist world economy slides into recession.In the European context, Mandel must be considered the most outstanding intellectual authority on the world economy since the Second World War. Credit must be given to his struggle to enrich Marxian analysis and rescue it from the stifling grasp of Stalinism. He researched and used extensive sources of empirical data to extend our knowledge of the laws of motion of modern capitalism.
The eight articles presented are by no means uncritical of Mandel. They are uneven, with the outstanding one being the fifth, by Mitchel Husson, entitled After the Golden Age: On Late Capitalism. A combined reading of these articles gives a view of the scope and depth of Mandel’s thought, and is therefore a useful introduction for any Marxist seeking an entrance into Mandel’s work. From this perspective, this book is worth reading.
This reviewer is not of the ‘Long Wave’ school. Capitalist evolution needs concrete analysis, and does not correspond to either ‘Long Waves’ or ‘Short Waves’. While it is true that the postwar boom lasted nearly 25 years, the downturn that followed it did not correspond to a pattern. For example, Japan only went into recession in 1991. The United States economy expanded from 1984, and Europe considerably later. In fact, the last 20 years have been characterised by a lack of synchronisation amongst the large three economic blocks. This lack of synchronisation was primarily due to the balance of class forces existing amongst them. If the USA powered ahead, it was due to the dominance of the bourgeoisie there, and if Europe lagged that was in turn due to the lingering strength of organised labour.
A brief explanation of waves is as follows: an upturn is characterised by rising rates of profit propelling rising rates of investment (accumulation), while a downturn is characterised by falling rates of profit dragging down rates of investment. By these definitions, 1996 should have marked a turning point in the world economy, an end to the downturn. For it was at this time that steadily-rising rates of profit finally began to encourage rising rates of investment. And indeed, for four years we saw an acceleration of economic growth and productivity. Some called it a new technological revolution, the information age in full bloom.
Yet four years later, the world economy is sliding into recession. What makes this recession unique is that unlike in 1980 and 1990, it is a classical recession based on over-accumulation of capital resulting in an absolute fall in the rate of profit, something which Mandel, incidentally, was wrong to dismiss. Phase one of the recession is in full flight, that is to say, a fall in investment. Phase two, the consequence of over-indebted consumers, is yet to occur. When it does, it is likely that we will experience a recession deeper than any that has occurred since 1974, a recession of sufficient magnitude to generate political consequences, especially in the Pacific Rim.
On the other hand, should this recession prove to be a temporary blip, a temporary correction of the upturn begun in 1996, then it will prove to be a vindication of the theory of Long Waves. This author thinks not. Despite the favourable balance of class forces from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, this recession will be sufficiently deep to remind us that there is no substitute for rigorous and extensive research of the present anatomy of the capitalist economy.
Brian Green
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Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists
Communist Workers Organisation
Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists
CWO, London 2000, pp. 36, £2.00
Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists
CWO, London 2000, pp. 36, £2.00
THIS reviewer is far from giving the present Trotskyist movement a bill of health, but confused and vulgar attacks such as this can make no contribution to cleaning it up. To start off with, it would be difficult to find so many straight factual errors, often jostling each other on the same pages. Trotsky was, apparently, ‘an endorser of National Bolshevism in Germany’ (p. 5), ‘unprepared for imperialist war’ in 1938 (p. 15), and in In Defence of Marxism not only called for the defence of the USSR but even for ‘the defence of the ‘democratic swamp’ in general’ (p. 16). He is alleged to have described the Stalinist apparatus as ‘a parasitic class’ (p. 9), which must be overthrown by ‘a social revolution’ (p. 2). The author is not even consistent in his mixture of bad faith and ignorance here, for he elsewhere explains Trotsky’s argument correctly as ‘the Stalinist superstructure was in contradiction to the proletarian infrastructure of the economy’, and that ‘he preached “a political not social revolution”’ (p. 10).
Also worth noting is how close this fearfully ‘left’ critique approaches mainstream Stalinism. For Stalin also reminded Trotsky of ‘his Menshevik past’ (p. 4), also advocated ‘the united front from below’ (p. 18), also denied that a half-completed revolution had happened in Spain in 1936 (p. 20), and also argued for the possibility of ‘Socialism in one country’ (pp. 6–7). And far from anyone in the Second International endorsing this theory (p. 6), Vollmar made himself a laughing stock when he first raised it.This is one of the longer discussions, which otherwise occur wherever the text touches upon the disgraceful abstentionism of the Italian Left, whether on Spain, Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia, or Japan’s upon China (p. 21). As for Trotsky being ‘unprepared’ for the Second World War, whilst he predicted to the month a year before when and how it would begin, the author’s much-vaunted Italian Left in exile collapsed in the face of it (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 4, Spring 1995, p. 200).
For the matrix in which this jumble is embedded is the idealist playground of Bordiga’s illegitimate children, who define themselves as ‘proletarian’ and everything else as ‘bourgeois’. This not only goes for those who disagree with them (Mandel was ‘a bourgeois economist’, p. 9), but includes the trades unions, the other workers’ parties, and even the workers themselves, for ‘there could be no class party in 1938 because there was no independent class movement’ (p. 13).
At the risk of being denounced as a capitulator, I can only quote Plekhanov at this point: ‘The only serious way to treat an absurdity is to laugh at it.’
Al Richardson
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Defence of History and Class Consciousness
Georg Lukács
A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic
Verso, London, 2000, pp182
A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic
Verso, London, 2000, pp182
WHEN Lukács’ book History and Class Consciousness appeared in 1922, it caused an uproar in the Communist International. Its author, the highly-educated scion of a wealthy Hungarian family, was one of those who had opposed the First World War and had been swept into political activity by the October Revolution. Participating in the confused formation of the Hungarian Communist Party, Lukács (1885–1971) had served in the ill-fated Workers’ Republic in 1919, and escaped from the executioners of the right-wing military dictatorship to live as a revolutionary exile in Vienna, where he edited a Left Communist journal. Lenin attacked it in 1920, in the course of his fight against ‘ultra-leftism’ in the International.
History and Class Consciousness was an attempt to overcome the philosophical heritage of the Second International, in particular by restoring the connections between Marx’s ideas and those of Hegel. Lukács tries to give a philosophical account of the rôle of the Bolshevik party by identifying the proletariat as ‘the identical subject-object’. To do this, he makes a distinction between the consciousness in the heads of any particular group of workers, and the class-consciousness of the proletariat, by which he understands the ‘ascribed’ or ‘putative’ (zugerechnet) consciousness represented by the Party. This leads Lukács to a version of dialectics which clashes with that of Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach, in that it ‘applies’ solely to history, and not to nature.At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924, its leader Grigorii Zinoviev famously denounced Lukács, along with the German Communist Karl Korsch, whose Communism and Philosophy had been independently written with a similar message. In his speech entitled The Struggle Against the Ultra-Lefts and Theoretical Revisionism, Zinoviev declared: ‘If we get more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost. We cannot tolerate theoretical revisionism of this kind in our Communist International.’ Bukharin, soon to replace Zinoviev as Stalin’s chief ally in the International, told Korsch: ‘We can’t put every piece of garbage up for discussion.’ It is doubtful whether either Zinoviev or Bukharin had ever read Lukács’ book.
That is how all discussion of Lukács’ important effort to develop philosophy among Communists was suppressed. Soon, Zinoviev set his ideological thugs to work, including an onslaught in Pravda. It has often been said that Lukács’ response to these attacks was to make a self-criticism of History and Class Consciousness, and then to fall silent until the 1960s. But a typescript in German, entitled Chvostismus und Dialektik, which was discovered in the Moscow CPSU archives and which appeared in Budapest in 1996, shows that Lukács was still vigorously defending his book, at least as late as 1926.
It is an answer to two of his critics. The former Menshevik Abram Deborin (1881–1963) was working his way to becoming the most prominent of Soviet philosophers. He succeeded, at least until his denunciation as a ‘Menshevising idealist’ in 1930. László Rudas was a founder of the Hungarian Communist Party and an ally of Lukács in Vienna. In 1923, he went into exile in Moscow and became a loyal Stalinist. Lukács has no difficulty in slapping these two down, and refuting their ritual denunciations of his book as ‘subjectivist’.
The present volume contains a translation by Esther Leslie of Chvostismus und Dialektik, together with an Introduction by John Rees, a translation of an introduction to the Hungarian edition by László Illés and a postface by Slavoj Žižek. (I don’t want to make a fuss about it, but the translation doesn’t make the reader’s far from easy task any easier. Translating both the word ‘Augenblick’ – ‘instant’ – and the important Hegelian term ‘Moment’ as ‘moment’ sometimes renders it impossible to see what Lukács is driving at. As for the gibberish ‘knotted line of mass conditions’, this reviewer can only shake his aged head over the lamentable state of education these days. Couldn’t anybody at Verso recognise ‘der Knotelinie der Massverhältnisse’ to be Hegel’s famous ‘nodal line of measure relations’? It appears that nobody knows or cares about such things any more.)
I don’t think this volume adds a great deal to our knowledge of the work of Lukács, although the fact that the author of History and Class Consciousness did not give in as easily as we used to think is historically important. John Rees’s introduction certainly doesn’t help. He wants to have his traditional Lenin cake, while eating a bit of Lukácsised Hegel icing. Rees tells us that History and Class Consciousness ‘recovered the greater part of Marx’s theory of alienation’. But Marx’s conception of alienation, which is the root conception of all his work, especially Capital, centres on ‘universal human emancipation’, and this does not feature anywhere in Lukács’ work, I believe.
The Postface by Žižek is called Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Leninism. I think he makes a good case for this title, but while he means it as a compliment to Lukács, I see it as a condemnation.
Today, the work of recovering Marx’s ideas should indeed take account of History and Class Consciousness, but this requires great care and attention. It is not the slightest use putting Lukács forward as the founder of ‘Western Marxism’, or ‘Hegelian Marxism’, without rescuing Marx’s actual ideas from all varieties of the ‘Marxist’ tradition. Anyone beginning a serious study of Lukács would do well to read the lengthy comments of István Mészáros in his Beyond Capital. (Rees has the chutzpah to refer to Beyond Capital, without telling anybody that it contains, among other things, an extended criticism of History and Class Consciousness.)
Mészáros shows that Lukács’ relationship with Stalinism is far more complex than a simple ‘capitulation to the bureaucracy’. He investigates, as a unity, Lukács’ evolution from youthful romanticism, through devotion to Bolshevism, to his own kind of Stalinism. He can then demonstrate the constant elements within this history, concerning precisely the philosophical problems of the relation between mass movement and subjectivity.
Cyril Smith
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Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s
Dave Renton
Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, pp. 203, £42.00
Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, pp. 203, £42.00
THE difference between the printed page and the events portrayed (unless the writer is a talented novelist) is that the excitement, danger, commitment and camaraderie come over flatly, or not at all. I was there at Ridley Road, together with other comrades of the Revolutionary Communist Party, on a Saturday evening in the late 1940s, to take and defend the pitch and so prevent the fascists from getting a platform. Some of the comrades were actually sleeping rough overnight. The era for me is represented by milling crowds, the antagonism of the police, fear of arrest, the Cossacks (mounted police) riding in, and our determination.
Renton, under the heading of Method (p. 7), says that the main purpose of the work is to portray the attempted revival of British fascism in the late 1940s; ‘not any one dominant argument or thesis, but a series of secondary claims. At every stage, these arguments are linked together.’ These secondary points include:- That fascism did revive after 1945.
- That fascism is better understood as a movement than as an ideology.
- That anti-fascism was an appropriate response to British fascism.
- That the state failed to take an active rôle in combating fascism.
- That fascism failed.
I agree that the fascist organisations revived in the late 1940s. As Renton points out, fascist organisations were spurred on by the Cold War, in which both the government and the labour movement played its part. Renton records that 134 civil servants identified as ‘Communists’ were removed or sacked by the Labour government as ‘extremists’. One fascist was also sacked. It has to be remembered that at this time the trade unions also barred ‘Communists’ from holding office, and removed them from their posts.
As Renton points out, the fascists at this time took advantage of the results of British policy in Palestine, under which Ernest Bevin refused the Jews fleeing from Europe permission to settle in Palestine. This brought retribution from militant Zionists in the murder of British soldiers. In the UK, this encouraged anti-Semitism, racism and fascism.I must admit that I don’t understand what Renton means when he says that fascism is better understood as a movement than as an ideology. I think the main problem is that Renton confuses fascism and racism, as if they were one and the same, and, of course, this is not so. Anti-Semitism was endemic in the UK, and the Immigration Bill passed in 1906 was aimed against further Jewish immigration from Russia and Poland. Immediately before the Second World War, the number of Jewish refugees accepted from Nazi Germany was low indeed, and, as Renton points out, most of them were interned during the war on the Isle of Man, or shipped out to Canada or Australia. (Several hundreds on the Arandora Star drowned when a U-boat torpedoed the ship.) This type of racism, together with the refusal of golf clubs to admit Jews (p. 61) is not necessarily fascism, and many of the organisations Renton cites were High Tory rather than fascist. Fascism demands an economic, social and political programme, populist in that it appeals to the mass, although funded by big business. Of this programme, racism is only part.
I fully agree with Renton’s statement that anti-fascism was an appropriate response to British fascism, and that ‘anti-fascism provides the most immediate obstacle to the growth of fascist parties’.
The state certainly failed to take an active rôle in combating fascism; but does Renton really expect the state to have done so? For he himself points out that during the interwar years, MI5, taking the view that the British state was ‘under assault from minorities, extremists and Communists’ (p. 126), employed a number of fascists (apparently fascists were not included in ‘minorities’!), some of them continuing to be active in M15 during 1945–51. In fact, Maxwell Knight, a long-standing member of a fascist organisation, became head of Section F4, the wing of M15 with responsibility for placing agents within the Communist Party.
This is not to say that pressure should not have been put upon Chuter Ede, the Labour Home Secretary, by Labour Party members and the trade unions, against the antagonism of the police and the arrest of anti-fascists. With regard to banning fascist meetings, as Renton himself points out, bans for the most part work against the left, and not the right.
Did fascism fail? Renton points out in his preface that the fascist organisations in the UK, re-established at the end of the Second World War, ‘collapsed within the year’. He remarks that ‘the ascent and decline of immediate postwar fascism seemed sudden and inexplicable to contemporaries and needs to be explained’. While not underplaying the necessity for anti-fascist activity wherever and whenever fascism raises its ugly head, it has to be remembered that in the late 1940s the country was in a process of change. The East End of London, as well as other cities, had been badly bombed during the war, and families had moved out, never to return. Following the war, successive governments were engaged in building new towns out in the sticks, to which the working-class population was being decanted. This was taking place throughout the UK. Therefore, in the East End, the old Jewish communities on which the fascists based their racism were disappearing. Added to that, in a period of full employment and the inauguration of a welfare state, unlike Mosley in the 1930s at a time of economic crisis, the postwar fascists were deprived of a social (or anti-social) programme which would appeal to the mass of the people. It was not for some years until immigrants from Bangladesh settled in the East End that the race card was played again, and this time by a Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrat Council!
I smiled to read Renton’s remark that the fascists in the 1940s propagated the theory that economic slump was just around the corner, for this was the line of Gerry Healy, later to become leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party, but in his case it was used to forecast the Socialist revolution! As the poet William Empson wrote in his smack at Auden ‘waiting for the end boys, waiting for the end’.
I was surprised to find that Renton attributes much of the anti-fascist demonstrations and activity taking place at Ridley Road to Common Wealth, an ethical Socialist party formed by Sir Richard Acland to break the electoral truce during the war. To my knowledge, following the landslide Labour victory in the 1945 general election, Common Wealth MPs joined the Labour Party, as did many lay members. Therefore, finance dried up, the offices at 4 Gower Street were closed, the staff were sacked, and all that remained was one small office across the road, manned by two ex-servicemen and a secretary. Later publications were issued from Bloomsbury Street. Apart from the fact that Common Wealth was a middle-class movement, not given to scuffling with fascists or police, I doubt whether manpower would have been available in great enough numbers actively to oppose the fascists, although I am not arguing that members, or former members, of Common Wealth were not present at anti-fascist demonstrations.
In the 1930s, thousands of Mosley supporters, packed in the back of lorries, were conveyed to large fascist rallies. The fascist newspaper was sold outside Jewish shops throughout London and the suburbs; local fascist groups advertised on notice-boards – these were supported largely by small shopkeepers and businessmen. In the 1940s, as today, fascist demonstrations are infinitesimal compared with this, but I agree with Renton that it is always necessary to oppose actively the attempted re-emergence of fascist organisations.
Sheila Lahr
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Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States
Janet Richards and Mary Van Buren
Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, pp. 163
Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, pp. 163
WHILST every collection of articles has to be uneven in quality and varied in interest, this book is excellently conceived, and most of the contributions are very impressive indeed. It is especially valuable from our point of view because it extends to other early civilisations the argument between M.I. Finley and G.E.M. de Ste Croix about the classical world – is privilege in ancient society best understood from Max Weber’s point of view, as one of status, or that of Karl Marx, as one of class? This book’s formative essay by Baines and Yoffee would seem to come down very firmly on Weber’s side with the remark that ‘if we look to comprehend wealth, we should therefore see it as a social and civilizational phenomenon, rather than a technological or simply economic one’ (p. 15).
Yet the propositions upon which this judgement is based (summarised on page 21) come in for some sharp handling in the case studies to follow. As regards ancient Egypt, criterion no. 3, that ‘“city” development does not occur’, has already been challenged by the work of Barry Kemp. Now David O’Connor’s examination of the burial patterns in the Thinite nome (pp. 23–4) also questions criterion no. 4, that with the growth of civilisation ‘living standards deteriorate’ for the masses below, and criterion no. 6, that ‘the broader society, excluded from concepts and symbols monopolized by the élite, lacks a distinctive material culture’ and ‘does not display an aestheticised, ritualized life-style, or even the ‘proper burials’ which guarantee a privileged afterlife’. O’Connor suggests that ‘élites and the broader society were not sharply differentiated from each other and shared important customs’, and that ‘impoverishment may not have been the factor behind the apparent poverty of the relevant graves … the actual archaeological record at Nag’ el-Deir, as well as at Reqaqneh, contradicts this conclusion’ (p. 24). We might add that by showing a cultural identity between their own tombs and the mighty pyramids over on the plateau, the current excavations in the workmen’s settlement at Gizeh would seem to bear out his argument. Janet Richard’s following essay (pp. 36–45) also argues that the élite itself widened during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom.Nor do Baines and Yoffee’s views remain unquestioned in what follows. Mary Van Buren’s analysis of the Inca Empire (pp. 77–87) considers that ‘the almost complete separation of élite high culture from the rest of society … discounts the rôle played by non-élites as an audience for state ideology, and suggests that alternative value systems did not exist in archaic states’, concluding that ‘it is here that the model’s fit with the Andean material breaks down’ (p. 77). She shows quite clearly how the local élites integrated Inca ideology into their own systems, and even ignored or rejected it, that ‘Inka control of conquered groups was highly variable and often mediated through local élites’, and that ‘they relied on local notions of social order to legitimate their control of conquered populations’ (p. 81). And she ends by suggesting that ‘the rôle played by non-élites in the transmittal of civilization is probably not unique to the Andes – only more visible’ (p. 87). The same pattern is demonstrated by Elizabeth Brumfiel’s concluding remarks about the Aztec empire in the valley of Mexico (pp. 134–8).
It is true that the Aztec and Inca empires were latecomers to their areas, conquering states that took over cultures more advanced than their own, which they may have been able to assimilate more thoroughly given time. From that point of view, they are perhaps closer to the position of the Greek polis within the Roman empire analysed by Susan Alcock’s case study of Aphrodisias (pp. 110–9).
But a superb essay by Bennet Bronson drawing upon the records of the great Han historians (pp. 120–7) shows that Baines’ and Yoffee’s contention that ‘the principal focus of high culture was the very élites themselves, at whose behest it was created, and for whom it was sustained, and the great gods’ (p. 16) barely fits the case of China either. He shows how the founder of the Han Dynasty manipulated élite culture to legitimise his rule and assure the future of his dynasty, whilst at the same time appealing to society below it by means of omens and portents, about which the Confucian élite was even more sceptical than that of the Romans (pp. 123–4). But in neither case was the top level of the state’s ideology – the cult of the ‘Son of Heaven’ in the one case and the emperor cult in the other – largely supported by the élites themselves. ‘The Roman and Chinese cases should make us cautious about accepting the general applicability of Baines and Yoffee’s thesis that civilizational collapse can be defined by the eclipse of traditional cosmologies’ (p. 125), he notes. ‘Cultural arbiters who do not belong to a political inner élite can certainly be discerned in the histories of Greece, Rome, India, the Islamic world, and the recent West’, he reminds us: ‘Kings, royal scribes, and high priests may have controlled the high cultures of the Egyptians and Sumerians, but their counterparts did not do so in China.’ (p. 126)
But those of us who find all this exciting from a Marxist point of view should not leave this splendid discussion without a suspicion that in the last analysis it is something of an artificial argument to counterpose status and class in the ancient world. The only society in which classes can be ranged against each other in their chemically pure form is advanced capitalism. Classes also have histories, new privileged classes have always emerged from differentiation within previous élites, and privileged groups can take centuries to evolve from status to private ownership, especially in less dynamic societies. The achievement of this book is that it shows us just how difficult the whole question is.
Al Richardson
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Witness to the German Revolution
Victor Serge
Witness to the German Revolution
Redwords, London 1999, pp. 238, £8.99
Witness to the German Revolution
Redwords, London 1999, pp. 238, £8.99
THIS book gathers a selection of articles written for the Comintern press agency during 1923 by Victor Serge, then working illegally for Inprekorr in Germany. It also includes two pieces, one from 1922 which helps to set the scene, and another from 1924 which reflects on the events. Ian Birchall has translated the articles from French, seems to have provided most of the annotation, and has supplied the reader with a chronology, an explanation of the abbreviations and German terms used, as well as brief biographies of key personalities, tips for further reading, an appendix on article sources, and an introduction to the collection. Though inspired by the French edition edited by Pierre Broué, this one has eight further items not included there.
For some reason, Ian insists on using the Polish names for Breslau, Danzig and Stettin, which at the time were in Germany, or, in the case of Danzig a free city, and known the world over by the above names. Yet in the case of Küstrin, erroneously placed ‘near Berlin’, when it is actually on the Polish side of the Oder, which marks the postwar border, and thus named Kostrzyn, the old name is used. It is as if a Chartist action was described as occurring in a Welsh-named town then known widely only by its English name.Lübeck was not in Saxony (p. 49); it was a free city for centuries until 1937, when the Nazis abolished the status. The translations of some of the newspapers are sometimes a bit quirky, but only in the case of the Völkische Beobachter would I make a fuss. Völkische can be rendered as ‘racial’ or ‘national’, so it could be called the Racial Observer, but certainly not the Popular Observer. Of the three Communists in the Thuringian government (p. 168), Tenner, Korsch and Neubauer, only Korsch is deemed worthy of a note. Albin Tenner had been a minister in a number of left-wing governments during 1918–20, became a leading German Communist Party (KPD) member and would lead its Landtag Group in Thuringia. During Ruth Fischer’s regime, he was expelled as a rightist for some months in 1925. In 1929, he was again expelled as a rightist and joined the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPD(O)). Theodor Neubauer became a loyal Stalinist and a Reichstag Deputy. He conducted himself with courage under the Nazis, and built up a resistance organisation in Thuringia which linked up with those in Saxony and Berlin. He perished in the aftermath of the July Plot in 1944. At a meeting of top Social Democratic Party (SPD) people, a ‘woman militant, Wurm’ is quoted, but not identified (p. 146). This would be Mathilda Wurm, a Reichstag Deputy who, with her husband Emanuel, was a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg. All of the above-mentioned seem to me to be worthy of a note.
In his introduction, Ian writes that ‘reading between the lines, it is also possible to see the fundamental weakness of the KPD’ because owing to the series of revolutionary crises during 1918–23, it had not been possible ‘to build a stable and consistent leadership, and to establish the necessary relations of intelligent trust between leadership and rank-and-file activists. The KPD had come into existence only in 1917 – no organisation had been built in advance of the crisis. Hence the rapid changes of leadership, the hesitations and tactical zigzags that marked the years of upheaval.’ (p. xi) Here we see both an oversimplification and a total failure to understand the real lessons.
When the KPD was set up at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, only three delegates voted against, one being Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s mentor. It adopted ultra-left positions, the majority of its 100,000 or so members upholding positions developed by Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter. The KPD was unable to adopt a coherent Communist approach to day-to-day matters as long as this was so, and the two fundamentally hostile tendencies fought each other. Paul Levi manoeuvred the ultra-left out of the KPD in the latter part of 1919 and early 1920. Some of them then set up the Communist Workers Party (KAPD). He then turned to winning over the approximately one million members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Levi also admitted that Leo Jogiches had been right, and that had the Spartacus Group stayed in the USPD ‘for another three or four months … the whole problem of how to divide the revolutionary masses in that party from their opportunist leadership would not exist’.
The revolutionary Marxist current had existed within the SPD long before August 1914. It crystallised out of the differences with the Marxist Centre around Kautsky over how to evaluate the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Spartacus Group established itself as a separate political current from the centrists on 1 January 1916, when it adopted the Junius Theses, though it did not separate itself organisationally from the most advanced workers, then belonging to the USPD. The ISD (International Socialists of Germany), which became the IKD (International Communists of Germany) during the revolution of November 1918, and which was the kernel of ultra-left concepts within the KPD, had separated from the SPD already in 1915. They, of course, had no more success in winning over the masses than Pannekoek and Gorter’s Dutch party, the Tribune Group, which had split from the Social Democracy in 1909.
The murders of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and others, the death of Mehring, and the constant interference by the Russian Communist Party (RCP(b)) leaders were the reasons why no stable leadership could be established. Through Radek, Lenin was pushing for a split from the USPD and for setting up the new International, whereas both steps were at first strongly opposed by Jogiches and Luxemburg. Creating a new International with no other powerful parties other than the Bolsheviks would only lead to them dominating it. Writing in 1930, Paul Frölich described it thus: ‘For 10 years the German Communist Party has been the guinea-pig for all sorts of political quackery and surgical interventions.’ Not only was the KAPD courted by the RCP(b), but the Comintern bureau in Berlin was a law unto itself. Spies and informers were installed in the KPD’s leading organs, and groupings and people were played off against each other. The Berlin leftists around Ruth Fischer were encouraged as a pressure group upon the Zentrale. Fischer, Maslow et al. opposed the united front, and the permanent intrigue not only hindered the KPD’s activities, but even threatened to split it. Indeed, in late April 1923, a conference took place in Moscow to try and reconcile both groupings. Brandler was forced to take four leftists into the Zentrale, Fischer and Thälmann among them. Brandler suspected the ECCI of playing a double-game, and on 12 July 1923 offered his resignation: ‘If the political line of the Berliners is correct, then the Executive should transfer the leadership to them.’ These underhand methods were used against Paul Levi within the USPD even before the split at Halle. Then, at the unification congress six weeks or so later, Levi’s manifesto advancing a sensible orientation was replaced by one from Radek, in a dubious fashion, which boasted: ‘The VKPD [United Communist Party] is strong enough where events allow or require it to go into action off its own bat.’ That was a few months prior to the March Action. Levi objected that the KPD was not a ‘branch office’ of the Bolsheviks. The archives contain letters from Brandler, Zetkin and others protesting to Lenin over these methods. Nothing changed – and all this was long before the rise of Stalin.
Moreover, it is inaccurate as well as an oversimplification of the problem facing the KPD to claim that the majority of the USPD fused into the VKPD in December 1920 (p. 47). Out of the about one million members, only around 280,000 joined the VKPD (it revised its initial optimistic figure of 500,000 to 350,000 members in 1921), around 340,000 stayed in the USPD, but the majority, around 350,000 or so showed their disapproval by dropping out of either party. The delegates at Halle only reflected the keen protagonists for or against the Comintern’s Twenty-One Conditions. In ‘red Saxony’, for example, only 21 delegates at Halle voted for acceptance, while 49 opposed the motion. All the USPD Landtag deputies, the party press and most of its officials stayed in the USPD, while only a small part of the membership went into the VKPD. Between November 1920 and January 1921, the Saxon KPD rose from 24,000 to 40,000 members, whereas the ‘right’ USPD kept more than double that until 1922. The KPD’s membership was mainly concentrated in West Saxony, while the KAPD was stronger in East Saxony (Otto Rühle in Dresden had a big following), but the right-wing SPD dominated the working class. The KPD faced rivals on its left and on its right. The reason for the majority of USPD members rejecting the Comintern was mainly the proposal to split the trade union movement and set up a ‘red union’ centre, but it was also due to the excessive centralisation of the Comintern.
Serge’s articles are valuable, and often show a literary quality, and the observational side is stronger than the analytical, as he is lumbered with the catastrophism of the Comintern as well as its sectarian language. The ‘fascist’ label is attached to all and sundry reactionaries. On the whole, I agree with Ian’s comments on them, and for example, Serge’s recent Anarchist past could account for his leftism. While he quotes Mathilda Wurm with approval, he is over the top in his comments on Levi and Kurt Rosenfeld, who were both from the same political current, and were both devoted to the working class (p. 46). The mature Serge would be better in that regard.
The article on the meeting of the three Internationals in Berlin (pp. 8–13), rather triumphalist and moralising, ends without reporting the conclusion or – of necessity in an account – the outcome. For the record, it was an initiative to bring about a united front proposed by the KPD Zentrale at its meeting on 21 December 1921. The omission could reflect his underestimation of the need, as noted by Ian, to win over Social Democratic workers, as one gets the sense that Serge focuses on the KPD alone. Whether he upheld the belief that one must capture a majority of the working class before taking the power, as did the pupils of Rosa Luxemburg, as set out in the first party programme, or thought in terms of a vanguard, is unclear.
Note 2 on pages 42–43 points out: ‘Since 1921 there had been much discussion of the demand for a “Workers’ Government”, that is, a KPD-SPD coalition within the existing parliamentary framework. Such a demand flowed from united front policies, yet risked encouraging reformist illusions.’ To clarify the picture, it is worth going into historical facts on this matter. The birth of the Workers’ Government as a parliamentary combination first appeared in a brochure entitled Der nahende Zusammenbruch der deutschen Bourgeoisie und die KPD, by Karl Bremer, that is, Radek), published in Hamburg in November 1921 by the Comintern firm Hoym. Radek was expressing the views of the Comintern’s Executive. When he advanced them as theses in a meeting of the KPD Zentrale, they were opposed by theses drafted by Thalheimer and Clara Zetkin, and rejected. The KPD Zentrale came under pressure from the ECCI. At its session on 18 December 1921, the Zentrale was attacked by Radek for rejecting his concept. The Fourth Congress of the Comintern in late 1922 discussed the Workers’ Government, but rather than clarify things it further confused them. Radek’s concept was adopted by the KPD’s Leipzig Congress in January 1923 under pressure from the ECCI. The Workers’ Government proposed by ADGB leader Legien during the Kapp Putsch, and which the KPD offered to support critically but not join, was wholly different, as it would have rested on the struggling organisations of the working class in a situation of civil war in parts of Germany during the greatest general strike hitherto seen.
Of particular interest is the last article, published in the left-wing non-party organ Clarté in February 1924, and which looks back over events in order to make his judgements on the causes of the failure to undertake a seizure of power during 1923. Serge mentions the underestimation – admitted by the KPD – ‘of the force of inertia of the Social Democrats in general’, and the overestimation of ‘the extent of Communist influence on the left Social Democrats’, but sees that of only minor importance. He identifies the difficulty in being able to ‘concentrate a great superiority of forces at the decisive point’ owing to the ‘extreme’ decentralisation of Germany’, etc. (p. 223). He also makes the extremely valid point that the labour force was everywhere ‘worn out by years of hunger, overwork and acrimony’ (p. 228). Various historians have made that point, and the fact that not only does one need to think of the years since 1918, but the war years too, and that the decisive errors of a sectarian nature were made between 1918-20, when a united labour movement should have fought to break the back of reaction by dispossessing the big industrialists and landlords, and by democratising the state. Furthermore, the decisive revolutionary opportunity was in 1920 during the Kapp Putsch. Serge rejects the views of the KPD left around Ruth Fischer, and quotes quite extensively from the theses of the newly-formed Centre Group. He could have been expressing the views of the ECCI, as at a meeting to discuss the German events in January, it had come out favouring an evaluation somewhere between that of the Centre Group and the leftists, and recommended that the KPD Zentrale be rejigged to be composed of five Centre people plus two leftists. That was duly carried out in February. It is not the case that ‘Ruth Fischer … became KPD leader with Zinoviev’s support in 1924’ (p. 231 n10). The scapegoating of Brandler, in which Serge did not indulge, the charge of ‘rightism’ and whipping up of leftism, combined with the anger and disappointment of the rank and file, elevated Fischer, Maslow & Co into the KPD leadership at the Frankfurt Congress in April 1924, against the wishes of the ECCI.
Owing to the struggle to succeed Lenin, the German events became a useful tool whereby rivals and their perceived supporters could be discredited. Thus no discussion ever took place, either in the KPD or the Comintern, to determine what went wrong in 1923. Only now with the opening of archives and new studies can we begin to get a picture of what was going on behind the scenes. Klaus Kinner’s Der deutsche Kommunismus (Berlin 1999) deals with the KPD during the Weimar Republic. The biography of Jacob Walcher by Ernst Stock and Karl Walcher (Berlin 1998), builds on Walcher’s unpublished autobiography until 1922. The rest was removed by the Stasi when Walcher died, but much of interest is included that reflects over the early years. Jens Becker, Heinrich Brandler (Hamburg 2000) will help illuminate the events of 1923. Serge’s writings help to set the scene.
Mike Jones
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The POUM in History
Wilebaldo Solano
El POUM en la historia: Andreu Nin y la revolución española
Los libros de la Catarata, Madrid 1999, pp. 282
El POUM en la historia: Andreu Nin y la revolución española
Los libros de la Catarata, Madrid 1999, pp. 282
THERE are good accounts of the two groups whose merger created the POUM, BOC 1930–1936 on the Bloque Obrero y Campesino by Andrew Durgan, and El movimiento trotskista en España on the Izquierda Comunista (IC) by Pelai Pàges, but there has been nothing comparable on the POUM itself. Wilebaldo Solano, as the Secretary of its youth organisation, the Juventud Comunista Ibérica, from its formation, and a member of the POUM Executive Committee during the Civil War, is well placed to write its history.
The book describes the party’s evolution from its foundation in 1935 until the first year of exile after Franco’s victory. It is not a theoretical analysis, although it defends the POUM from the criticism of Trotsky and others. The POUM formed part of the Popular Front alliance for the February 1936 election which produced a left government, but Solano insists that it stood under its own banner, and did not forfeit its independence.Solano describes the struggles in May 1937, in which POUM and CNT militants fought against the Stalinist counter-revolution, and argues that once the CNT leaders ordered their members to withdraw from the barricades, the POUM had no alternative but to follow suit, given the vast disparity in the strength of the two organisations. The militant Anarchist group, the Friends of Durrutti, which opposed the CNT’s capitulation, was, he argues, small and had little influence. As those events and the subsequent murder of Nin and other revolutionaries are already well known, Solano’s account is most interesting for his first-hand description of working with Nin, and of the POUM’s struggle in clandestinity.
The author was with Nin the day before he was kidnapped, and he was part of the party’s clandestine leadership after the arrest and trial of the main leaders, until he himself was jailed. Solano, with other POUM leaders, was still in prison a week before Franco’s troops entered Barcelona. González Peña, the Minister of Justice, who together with BOC member Manuel Grossi had been sentenced to death after the 1934 Asturias rising, told them that their release might mean murder at Stalinist hands, and compromised by sending them to a prison outside Barcelona, where they freed themselves.
The book is less informative on the relations between Nin and the majority of the POUM leaders, who had come from the BOC. Joaquín Maurín had founded the BOC, and his position had been unchallenged, but the insurrection trapped him in enemy-held territory. Nin’s abilities made him the obvious choice to lead the POUM, but many former BOC members were suspicious of someone with a background in the Left Opposition. Nin and Maurín were personal friends, and both had held the position of National Secretary of the CNT, but from 1922 their histories had diverged. Nin had been based in the Soviet Union as the Assistant Secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, while Maurín had spent the 1920s in Spain, often in prison. The BOC’s politics had been formed by revulsion at the lunacies of the local Stalinists, rather than at Stalin’s policies in Russia. When, in 1936, the Moscow show trials of the old Bolsheviks began, some POUM leaders, notably Luis Portela, objected to La Batalla criticising the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the POUM paid a high price for its courage in defending the Bolshevik old guard, when the Socialist Party and the CNT kept a discreet silence.
In retrospect, it is obvious that Stalin could not permit criticism of his show trials. The fact that the POUM had political differences with Trotsky did not save it from being branded as ‘Trotskyist’, when it defended him and the other old Bolsheviks from the charges of being imperialist agents. Solano points out that the Stalinists’ attacks on the POUM began in Madrid, where the party was much weaker than in Catalonia, and where most of its members had come from the IC.
Solano pays generous tribute to the foreign comrades, especially Victor Serge, Marceau Pivert and Daniel Guérin, who defended the POUM against Stalinist slanders, and aided its members when they were refugees in France. He is less complimentary about Willy Brandt, then a leader of the SAP youth, who refused to take a clear anti-Stalinist position. The author is moved by the reception of Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom and by Catalan television programmes on the murder of Nin, which have done so much to clear the party’s reputation from the mountain of slanders heaped on it.
The book contains several useful appendices. One is an extract from a report by Luigi Longo, the Chief Commissioner of the International Brigades, discovered in the Moscow archives, which expresses concern at the opposition by some Socialist Party leaders to the frame-up of the POUM. Another reproduces an editorial from Treball, the paper of the Communist Party in Catalonia in 1989, which withdraws all the allegations made against Nin. Perhaps it might have come sooner, but it is complete and unequivocal. The lunatic Stalin-worshippers who still exist in Britain seem to have become extinct in Spain.
John Sullivan
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Trotsky and World War One
Ian D. Thatcher,
Leon Trotsky and World War One, August 1914–February 1917,
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, pp. 264, £45.00
Leon Trotsky and World War One, August 1914–February 1917,
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, pp. 264, £45.00
THIS is certainly a book to be welcomed, for it charts in considerable detail Trotsky’s writings over the period covered, many of which have never been made available in English. Separate chapters are devoted to his writing in Switzerland and Paris, to his attitudes towards Russian politics, both at home and in the emigration, as well as to those of European Social Democracy, and to his relations with Martov and the Mensheviks, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Unfortunately, by restricting himself almost exclusively to Trotsky’s journalism, there is a marked neglect of its wider setting in his revolutionary activity. Whilst the author refers to the standard treatments of Trotsky’s life by Deutscher, Broué and Cliff, there is no reference to Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova’s biography, and the use made of Kostas Mavrakis’ Maoist mystification of 1976 can only be regarded as a curiosity. And we look in vain for references to more specialised accounts of Trotsky’s activity at the time, such as Jürg Ulrich’s Trotzki als junger Revolutionär, or Alfred Mansfeld’s description of the early part of the period in the Cahiers Léon Trotsky (no. 51, October 1993), or the 1992 Vienna Jahrbuch, and Walter Davis’ Trotsky in Nova Scotia (Halifax-Dartmouth Young Socialists, August 1971) from the end of it. He should also have mentioned Sigurd Zienau’s discussion of the correspondence with Henrietta Roland Holst dealt with on page 70 (Trotsky: A Rediscovered Document, Spokesman Offprints, no. 2, 1973). But the most striking omission is Trotsky’s close involvement with the French anti-war left during most of the war, which occupies only four and a half pages (pp. 181–5). For whilst the writer draws upon Rosmer’s single article in New International (September–October 1950), he nowhere shows any knowledge of the full length book Rosmer wrote, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la première guerre mondiale (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 4, 2000, pp. 46ff.). In fact, the frequent misspellings of French names (Monatte, pp. 54, 56; Renaudel, p. 141; Hervé, pp. 120, 126, 136, 158) show that the material relating to these not inconspicuous figures has been translated straight out of Russian without even checking the names in their French context.This neglect of the wider picture also affects his critique of Trotsky’s politics during the war, which can only be described as neo-Stalinist. ‘Now that we know the contingent nature of Trotsky’s conversion to Bolshevism’, Thatcher concludes, ‘his departure in much changed circumstances a decade later is not so peculiar. Rather than ponder why Trotsky was excluded, we may prefer to ask: what kept him so long?’ (p. 213) Thus he repeatedly states that Trotsky’s claim that his and Lenin’s thought converged during the First World War, ‘like so many others, turns out to be false’ (p. vi; cf. also pp. 72–5, 212, 230 n173). Now to begin with, if he had read a little further in the New International magazine from which he draws his material on Rosmer, he would have come across the series of articles in which Hal Draper lays to rest the myth of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism during the First World War, which cuts the ground beneath the whole argument of his fourth chapter. And if he had followed more closely Lenin’s later remarks he would also have found him saying of Trotsky in December 1916 that ‘little by little he is moving to the left’ (Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow 1964, p. 203). But to delve deeper into this question, the author would also have to be acquainted with the letter to which Lenin was replying at the time, Souvarine’s ‘à nos amis qui sont en Suisse’ (Le Populaire, no. 31, 27 November 1916; cf. La Critique sociale, no. 1, March 1931, pp. 43–8; the complete documentation was reprinted by Éditions Spartacus in June 1970), whose existence is nowhere even hinted at.
The sort of scholarship that has produced this book will always be of value, but to deal with Trotsky as a journalist pure and simple is really to reduce him to a one-dimensional man, which was precisely the technique of Zinoviev and Kamenev when they elaborated the orthodoxy of ‘Leninism’ and the heresy of ‘Trotskyism’. Surely we should have moved on a bit from this by now?
Al Richardson
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Making Sense of War
Amir Weiner
Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, pp. 416
Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, pp. 416
THAT the Second World War had a devastating effect upon the Soviet Union is indisputable. Professor Weiner goes further, and claims that the war became the defining factor in the Soviet polity, validating ‘the original revolutionary prophecy while at the same time almost entirely overshadowing it’ (p. 7). His findings are mainly based upon a close examination of events in the Central Ukrainian region around Vinnytsia (or Vinnitsa, to use the Russian rendition) during the years of the war, when it was occupied by the Axis powers, and the immediate postwar period, although factors involving broader areas of Ukraine and the Soviet Union as a whole are also taken into consideration.
Ukraine was a key area in the titanic clash between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. A vitally important agricultural and industrial area of the Soviet Union, its rich territory was coveted by the Nazis. Occupied by the Nazis and their allies for four years, it was the scene of huge military battles, underground skirmishes, civilian massacres large and small and terrible material damage. This book investigates the impact of the war in respect of the structure and outlook of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the national question in Ukraine, especially the activities of the Ukrainian nationalists and the relationship of Ukraine to the Soviet Union, and the fate of the country’s Jewish population.The national question came to the fore in wartime Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalists advanced from Western Ukraine in the wake of the Wehrmacht in 1941, promoting their fascistic call for an ethnically-pure independent Ukraine, and were very active in Vinnytsia in the power vacuum between the German withdrawal in 1944 and the reconsolidation of the Soviet regime. Their impact was limited, as the population of Central and Eastern Ukraine was not particularly receptive to their anti-Russian propaganda. The traditional anti-Russian sentiments common in Western Ukraine were far less prevalent, and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime was largely accepted by the inhabitants. The younger Ukrainians from these areas had only known the Soviet system, and had grown up since the traumatic days of collectivisation and the famine of the early 1930s. The Nazi regime, under whose aegis the nationalists had arrived in Vinnytsia, was even worse than Soviet propaganda had described it. Most importantly, it was the Soviet regime that had united the territory of Ukraine, and it was the Red Army that had defeated the Nazis and brought their destructive rule to an end. And so, as a result of the war, Ukraine as a whole was a part of the comity of the Soviet family of nations, and a leading actor at that, ‘almost on a par with the Russian people’ (p. 336). Although the country was to suffer more hardships in the immediate postwar years, the experience of the war served to strengthen and preserve the legitimacy of the Soviet regime in Ukraine.
The war also resulted in the reconstitution of the party élite in Vinnytsia. The old party élite was seen as a bunch of stodgy bureaucrats, whilst the new heroes were Red Army veterans who ‘cut through the red tape with a display of iron will and voluntarist enthusiasm’ (p. 49). Officials who were evacuated to the rear were viewed with suspicion. Indeed, one’s activities during the war became a crucially important criterion when applying for party membership – and when facing a party purge, and extensive purges started to take place even before the war had ended, despite a desperate shortage of cadres. However, war service alone was no guarantee of advancement. Many former partisans who had fought behind the German lines rose rapidly in the party, only to find themselves under suspicion (the powers that be were very suspicious of people who remained in occupied territory, irrespective of their conduct), and all the prominent partisans had left Vinnytsia within a few years.
One big problem for me with this book is that Weiner’s analytical approach is situated firmly within the Cold War paradigm that considers the main dynamic of the Soviet system to have been ideological, and that there were no fundamental changes in theory, practice and behavioural norms from Lenin’s earliest days as a Bolshevik, through Stalin’s era and onwards under his successors. Hence Stalin’s predilection for purges is rooted directly upon Lenin’s desire to maintain the revolutionary purity of the Bolsheviks, as if a manicure can be equated with an amputation. From the origins of Bolshevism, through the purges of the 1930s, to the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of the early 1950s, what we have depicted in this book resembles nothing less than a Communist Mrs Mopp wielding a political broom with demonic energy, ‘purifying’ firstly the party’s ranks, and then society as a whole.
Weiner’s explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism in the Communist Party and other Soviet institutions from the late 1930s – he gives many examples of its cancerous growth in Ukraine through and after the war – is glib: once class differentiations were eradicated, the criterion for purification then shifted to ethnicity. No mention is made of the rise of Russian nationalism as a result of Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’, which was a fundamental break from Marxism, and that this would almost inevitably key into anti-Semitism, which was historically intertwined with Russian nationalism, and which was still prevalent amongst the population and thus open to official manipulation. That the Soviet regime was willing to descend to this level is a clear indication that it was well on the way to forsaking – or indeed had forsaken – its Communist credentials.
Few would deny that by the 1930s the Soviet leadership had constituted itself as a conscious ruling élite, and yet, as one can see from this book, the idea still pervades that it was still interested in Communism, as if an élite would promote a philosophy that would force it to give up its privileged social position. Weiner objects to the theory of Thermidor, stating that its proponents were wrong in saying that the Soviet regime was ‘in favor of consolidation and stability at the expense of radical experiments’ (p. 15). No, Stalin and his successors were carrying on with the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary programme. But Thermidor does not preclude social changes, it means the transformation of a revolutionary regime into a new ruling élite, something which must have profoundly different social interests from the body from which it emerged. Indeed, the emergence of the Soviet élite as a nationalist, anti-Communist force was accompanied by the tremendous transformation of the country under the First Five Year Plan. The non-capitalist nature of the Soviet Union meant that its ruling élite was obliged to use the language of the revolution from which it had emerged. Stalin and his successors had certain goals for which they fought energetically, they did want to modernise and transform their country; in other words, it was a state-building exercise. But they had a material interest in stifling any movement towards Communism, and to confuse what was basically a mutated Russian nationalism with Communism is a grave error. Weiner, of course, is by no means the only one to make this mistake, but it is surprising that 70 years after Stalin’s consolidation of power, and 10 years after the ignominious resignation of the Soviet élite, he insists upon this now.
The political monopoly exercised by the Soviet élite had nothing to do with its having a messianic world revolutionary programme. The Soviet regime had dumped all that by the end of the 1920s. Stalin and his successors ruled with a strong authoritarian hand because of the peculiarities of the Soviet socio-economic formation that had emerged out of the First Five Year Plan. Eschewing both the market and democratic planning, the élite lacked any means of running the economy except by administrative means. Its consequential iron grip over society meant that it could not permit the existence of rival political currents; indeed, it could not even permit more than a tightly circumscribed circulation of ideas and opinions. But by so doing, it ensured that its knowledge of society remained defective. Beneath its confident and thrusting image, the Soviet élite was insecure to the point of paranoia, not because it was facing economic collapse or political revolt through much of its existence, but because it never felt fully in control of the society it ruled, either under Stalin’s terror or under his successors’ less coercive norms.
Let us look at this in relation to three episodes in Weiner’s book. In the first case, in the regime’s disgraceful treatment of Jews, there was an ideological factor at play, namely the prejudices of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, but it is ironic that this ideologically-driven policy could never be publicly proclaimed, as it went against the regime’s official ideology. But there was also the question of practicality, as the manipulation of popular prejudices through promoting anti-Semitism could help improve the popularity of Soviet rule. Furthermore, the innate paranoia of the Soviet élite would produce suspicion on its part of any Soviet citizens who had relatives abroad, as many Soviet Jews did, and it is no surprise that official anti-Semitism increased as the Cold War intensified. Secondly, it was not class criteria that caused the Soviet regime to take such a hard line against Ukrainian nationalism. Rather, unlike the Hungarian fascists mentioned by Weiner who were recruited to the Hungarian Communist Party in the late 1940s (a similar process happened in Romania and East Germany), there could be no space within the Soviet polity for a movement that refused to accept the legitimacy of the governing centre over ‘its’ territory. Any concessions to the Ukrainian nationalists would have resulted in a potentially uncontrollable situation in Western Ukraine. If minor differences were unacceptable, then Ukrainian nationalism was way beyond the pale. Thirdly, as Weiner himself points out, the purging of the wartime partisans was predicated upon the lack of trust in them on the part of the regular army leadership, who considered that they were undisciplined and wayward. In other words, they could not be relied upon by the centre to do as they were told. It was much the same with the Leningrad wartime leadership. It was purged in the late 1940s because it had successfully battled in isolation through tremendously difficult days, and thus was not trusted by the Moscow centre. The governing principle of the Soviet élite was the defence of its social ascendancy and political power, not any fealty to a revolutionary ideology.
To return to Weiner’s main thesis, for all the mass of information he has assembled, he is actually quite vague about the long-term impact of the war upon the Soviet Union. He mentions the widespread commemorations of the war that have continued into the post-Soviet period, which indicates that the legacy of the war had much more to do with state-building and national assertion than with Communism. He also talks of a ‘front-line assertiveness’ that ran through Soviet society, even into the Gulag (p. 367). How did this key into the process of de-Stalinisation that took off within a decade of the end of the war, and which made a profound change to the form, if not the content, of the Soviet polity? How did this militarised generation come to dismantle much of Stalin’s terror apparatus, and empty much of the Gulag? Unfortunately, Weiner says very little about this. Finally, one crucial question is that of the danger of basing one’s conclusions for an entire country upon a detailed study of a limited area. How typical was Vinnytsia of Central and Eastern Ukraine as a whole? The questions of the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and popular attitudes towards Russia and Russians would differ greatly in Eastern and Central Ukraine on the one hand and Western Ukraine and the Baltic States on the other. What questions were raised by the war in respect of Byelorussia or in non-Russian areas not occupied by the Third Reich, or indeed in Russia itself? Fascinating as Weiner’s book is, a whole range of studies of this type would have to be done before an overall view of the impact of the war on the Soviet Union could be obtained.
Paul Flewers
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Adherents of Permanent Revolution
Barry Lee Woolley
Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International
University Press of America, 1999, pp. 356
Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International
University Press of America, 1999, pp. 356
ACADEMIC histories of Trotskyism, such as those of Robert Alexander and John Callaghan, are either so out of sympathy with their subject, or based upon so defective a methodology, that they can only be used with caution to gain a real understanding. And the writer of this book, whilst admitting that Alexander has done ‘just about as well as you can without being in the movement’ (p. 325), describes him as writing from ‘an academic point of view divorced from actual contact with the Trotskyist movement’, without ‘a real feel for the Trotskyist use of Marxist “theory” as polemical weapon’ (p. 329). On the other hand, apart from personal memoirs, those written by insiders or participants, such as David North or Pierre Frank, are so factionally slanted that the truth only puts in a rare appearance as a casual visitor. So our hopes can only rise when we learn that Woolley had ‘a personal participation in many of the events’, and ‘intimate friendships with early international Trotskyist leaders’, which ‘allowed some of the clandestine operations of the Trotskyists to be made known to the author’ which ‘would never have been told to a “bourgeois historian” according to general Marxist-Leninist principles’ (p. viii).
However, when we examine his sources, and the use he makes of them, we can only turn back to such a disinterested observer as Alexander with a sigh of relief.The sheer range of factual howlers must make this book one of the last century’s major achievements, a century by no means deficient in the cult of the big lie. Trotsky’s repudiation of Max Eastman was not insisted upon by his comrades as a way of remaining in the party, but was due to lack of courage (p. 23), Ted Grant was present at the 1933 conference (p. 40), when Van Overstraeten’s group was still ‘numerically strong’ (p. 42), and, best of all, ‘there is no reason to believe the German events of 1932–33 motivated Trotsky to call for a new International when earlier German, British and Chinese events hadn’t. There isn’t even a hint of a progression of disillusion in the Stalinist Third International in Trotsky’s vitriolic writings on the subject.’ (p. 47) Greece was ‘represented by Michel Raptis’ at the founding conference of the Fourth International (p. 86); Victor Serge was ‘a Stalinist-turned-Trotskyist leader’ (p. 328); Bob Smillie, Mark Rhein, Willy Brandt, George Orwell and Paul Frölich were all Trotskyists (pp. 124–5, 257), whereas Chandu Ram was British (p. 263); during the Burnham-Shachtman debate Trotsky ‘would not discuss the issue which initiated the debate, namely the Soviet Union’s actions in World War II, including its invasion of Finland’ (p. 135), and he was responsible for a split he had tried to avoid (p. 137). Coming on to the period after the war, apparently Chinese Trotskyists were never imprisoned (p. 325); Posadas’ split was over the Sino-Soviet dispute, where he supported the Russians (p. 191); the Bolivian Trotskyists entered the MNR in 1952 on Pablo’s insistence (p. 246); Molinier ‘never rejoined the Trotskyists’ (p. 309 n50); the Comintern still existed in the 1970s (p. 315 n42); the Marcyite ‘World Workers Party’ is ‘Trotskyist’, and we could go on. The writer certainly does.
And when we examine the ideological setting of these grotesqueries an even more woeful picture emerges. For example, Woolley’s ‘intimate friendship’ with Arne Swabeck (pp. viii, 46, 333), who abandoned Trotskyism for a rabid Maoism, has introduced into the narrative more than a dash of vulgar Stalinism. This is particularly so when we come to the Spanish Civil War, where the masses are described as a ‘red rabble’ (p. 298 n46) and the POUM repeatedly as ‘the outstanding representative of Trotskyism in Spain’ (p. 116; cf. pp. 44, 84, 299 n56, 303 n84, 304). Indeed, since ‘landlords and factory managers were also not spared the death penalty by political groups’ (p. 117), the Stalinists, who had ‘realistically separated the fight against war and fascism from the revolutionary struggle for power’ (p. 32), banned May Day in Barcelona ‘for fear of mass violence’ (p. 122), had to disarm the militias ‘to put a stop to the arming of criminal elements by the Anarchists and Trotskyists’ (p. 120), and were finally ‘forced to eliminate their political opponents’ (p. 118). But this was all to the good, for the aim of the Trotskyists was ‘to make sure the Spanish people were subjected to as much bestiality and death and destruction as it was possible to dish out under the name of humanistic Marxism’ (p. 75). They were, after all, ‘able to bring down persecution upon themselves from the very start of their movement’ (p. 114), and as for Trotsky himself, he ‘can be said to have almost willingly cooperated’ with the GPU (p. 103).
We might therefore ask what trace remains of the writer’s boasted years in the American Socialist Workers Party, followed by a close working contact with the Workers League and the Spartacists (p. 333), and subsequent access to ‘the personal collection of Mr James Robertson’ (p. 334) and ‘sources within the Socialist Workers Party and the Spartacist League who wish to remain anonymous’ (p. 335). The simple answer is rather more than his share of poisonous factionalism and sectarian dogmatism. The movement is described as a ‘Trotsky-led organization of cults’ (p. 96; cf. p. 81), ‘a narrow fanatical international clique’ (p. 31) of ‘unstable elements who were to be fanatics about trivial political points’ (p. 39) acting in ‘a futile attempt to establish the purity of socialism’ (p. vii). This is certainly the mentality he gained in the movement, for it failed to teach him the simplest proposition of revolutionary thought, that there can be no such thing as ‘orthodox Marxism’ (pp. 11, 182, 207, 223). And his particular brand of ‘orthodoxy’ comes out painfully clearly. Cannon’s support for Lore’s expulsion was ‘more out of a disinterest in foreign matters such as Trotskyism, than out of conviction’ (p23; cf p24). Pablo’s ‘entrism sui generis’ was ‘attempted liquidation into the Stalinist movement’ (pp. vii, 225–6), and yet was somehow at the same time a perspective of ‘virtually abandoning political activity within the European mass movement’ (pp. 190–1), whereas 1965–69 was ‘the period of the rise of revisionism in the USFI’ (p. 213). The Gelfand Case becomes ‘a book of historical significance’ (p. 330). The only modification Woolley makes in this historical picture is to suggest that a major cause of the decay of ‘orthodoxy’ in the Trotskyist movement in the 1960s and 1970s was the ‘degenerate habits’, particularly sexual ones, picked up by the ‘undisciplined sons and daughters of the upper-middle classes’ on college campuses (p. 230).
It is barely surprising, therefore, that his analysis displays no evidence of any command of Marxism at all. Hitler was a ‘brother Socialist’ of Stalin (p. 116). Labour parties are variously described as ‘left-liberal political organizations’ (p. 57) or ‘social democratic (that is, liberal or socialist)’ (p. 31). The united front is not an approach to the mass movement, but where ‘Marxists of different tactical views could collaborate in a united front for a specific purpose’ (p. 12). Entrism becomes ‘a raiding mission to recruit cadres’ (p. 49), ‘a blatant attempt to steal the cadres or parties and programs built by others’ (p. 51), ‘so sapping the strength of them as to eliminate them’ (p. 58; cf. p. 76). Permanent Revolution boils down to using ‘Social Democrats and social democratic demands as a starting point for the transformation of the democratic movement in Russia into a Communist one’ where ‘the Social Democrats were to be duped into supporting the proletarian revolution by working for impossible demands’ (p. 12). For transitional politics are no more than ‘a program of using the existing liberal movements in democratic countries to build a revolutionary movement … by so aggravating liberal demands as to make their realization only impossible’ (p. 91), meant to ‘attract liberals in a front with Communists’ (p. 92). The entirety of Marxism is thus reduced to a series of unpleasant manoeuvres and petty intrigues. They even crop up in the Appendix of Party Names, where someone in the Spartacist League has carefully provided him with the identities of ex-associates still active in the mass movement (pp. 225–63), even though they played no part in the period covered by his book, which ends in the early 1970s.
The only original component Woolley brings to his construct is an obsession with morals, particularly sexual ones. It becomes an all-purpose explanation, transcending other causal factors. Some examples are simply hilarious: ‘By lack of background and an intention not to renounce his fornication, Trotsky was blocked from seeking a religious philosophy of life’ (p. 4), for ‘orthodox Marxism … served to rationalize his youthful academic failure and promiscuity’ (p. 10). Strange sexual comments start on the first page and crop up all the way through: the early south Russian revolutionaries were ‘individuals of a dissatisfied and immoral nature’ (p. 1), whereas Trotsky’s ‘sexual immorality and inattention to personal finances identified him as a Bolshevik’ (p. 5). Every new actor appears on stage bearing a ready made moral tag. Natalia Sedova is repeatedly described as ‘Trotsky’s mistress’ (pp. 17, 33, 314, etc.). Lev Sedov, ‘Trotsky’s older illegitimate son’ (p. 10), and Jeanne Martin were ‘permanent adultery partners’ (p. 19); Fischer and Maslow were ‘fornication partners’ (p. 28), and Frida Kahlo ‘a vulgar, drug using and sometimes sodomite third wife of Rivera’ (p. 291). For sheer entertainment value I can thoroughly recommend the first section in Chapter 8, Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery (pp. 229–31, together with n3, p. 322). We even get a glimpse into the writer’s own tormented spiritual odyssey when he says of Eastman that ‘his perspicacious understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of Communism almost leads him to the Christian view of the depravity of man’ (p. 328).
Most of us would accept that the morality of the Alabama Bible belt does not equip us to understand political movements in the twentieth century, though why it was necessary to write a book of over 300 pages to prove it remains a mystery to me.
Al Richardson
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