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Friday, February 07, 2014
***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
February is Black History Month
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway ....
He did a lazy sway ....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway ....
He did a lazy sway ....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Langston Hughes
…he, black as night, big, big lungs, some young son, hell, maybe grandson, of the president, no not that president, the Prez, Lester Young, showing some schooling, maybe Berkeley up in Boston where all the new cats learn to blow, sat on a lonely winter corner of 125th Street in high Harlem and blew, blew sweet white notes this way and that on a big sexy sax, tenor sax for the aficionados, against the moving traffic blowing those notes back in his face. He, evoking some big joyous immense faded tale remembrance when Duke, yes, that Duke, and all the jazz age cats, big and small, held forth nightly at the old Cotton Club where the Mayfair swells got their high-hats flattened, got there expensive illegal liquor chilled, and their high yella dream nights sated, were as chasing that faded high white note, chasing it far into the street.
And then he remembered what his father, or maybe it was old grandfather told him about the night Johnny, yes again, that Johnny blew the high white note, blew it to hell and back, and it never came back in his face, never. Yes, Johnny blew that big sexy sax, all dope high, sister, legal in those days, legal when Mister didn’t know he could make a dollar off of it, rather than let some iffy druggist sell it over the counter, maybe a little reefer to flatten the effect and then he blew, blew that big note on A Train, a high white note that trailed out the club door, headed down to the river, make that the East River for those not familiar with New Jack City, or high Harlem, and hit this guy, this lonely black guy, maybe just up from Mississippi goddam or red tide ‘Bama from his ragged attire and head down demeanor learned, hard-headed learned from Mister James Crow , who started grooving (maybe not using that word, maybe not even knowing that word, proving how raw he was, how new city) on that note, started to patter on that note-be-bop, be-bop, be-bop, be-bop (and this before Dizzy crowned boppy be-bop and Charlie swaggered that big sexy horn).
But that brother, that ebony night brother, just couldn’t quite get the hang of the thing, was wrapped up in some old time no electricity juke joint “blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind” , or “old Mister take your hand off me” delta fade-out. So that Johnny deflated note floated down to the sea, out to some homeland Africa fate. And that down south brother never did get another chance to grab the high white note, and probably would have just faded away except he had a son, or was it a grandson, who knew how to be-bop beat that drowsy old delta gimme, knew how to curl it around his big lung sexy sax and blow that thing from the East River haunts all the way up to 125thStreet, all the way up to faded Cotton Club Johnny dreams and endless Mayfair swells reeling out the door (with or without their high yellas) early in harsh Harlem morning…
***On Friendship-“The Nine”-NQHS Class of 1964
By the way many of those 158 friends I don’t know, have never ever met. Many are Brazilian who write in Portuguese and I don’t (I remember a little Spanish so I can roughly translate), and a number are somehow “friends” that are always pestering me to play some foolish on-line game that they participate in. All of this by way of introducing a rather strange idea these days- the idea of real in-person friends. A story about a group of friends, nine women from the Class of 1964 at North Quincy High (listed in the dedication), who have actually gotten together regularly and done stuff, and who have been doing that stuff together for at least forty-five years. Yes, 45 years.
The story of the continuing active friendships
of nine of our fellow Class of 1964 classmates at NQHS has intrigued me since I
first heard about it back in December. Personally I can think of only one
relationship of my own that goes back to high school days. Forget about nine. I
have asked around about this phenomenon as well and nobody else can come close
to that number either. Amazing.
I am a little light on details of how
it all started, how it continued, and the specifics of what this group has done
and is doing. Fortunately I can make up a story (use some literary
license, okay) and maybe they will grace this piece with some real details of
their long- standing friendships. Thanks to Phyllis for some of the information
below and see Paula Kelly's profile page for recent photos of the honorees.
Here is a little bouquet…
Hey, I
have just confirmed my 158th “friend” on Facebook
today. Well not exactly a friend but a woman who knows a woman I “know”
whom I “friended” (by the way when did friend become a verb). That latter woman
had been added to my “circle” after I confirmed for a man, somebody who
actually is a friend of mine. Or rather a person that I do some political work
with who has a huge network of “friends” and I now am part of that
network. By the way many of those 158 friends I don’t know, have never ever met. Many are Brazilian who write in Portuguese and I don’t (I remember a little Spanish so I can roughly translate), and a number are somehow “friends” that are always pestering me to play some foolish on-line game that they participate in. All of this by way of introducing a rather strange idea these days- the idea of real in-person friends. A story about a group of friends, nine women from the Class of 1964 at North Quincy High (listed in the dedication), who have actually gotten together regularly and done stuff, and who have been doing that stuff together for at least forty-five years. Yes, 45 years.
Here’s how it started. One young girl,
Phyllis, met another, Karen, in elementary school, the old Wollaston
School, on the playground playing jacks, one won, the loser cried, the
winner came over to console the loser and they thereafter were fast friends for
life (no one can remember who won or who lost such are the vagaries of time but
no matter). Then came dreaded hormonally-driven junior high days at Central
Junior High and those two formed a friendship with Janice to gain added
shelter against the raging hormones, bothersome boys, and what to do
about that “crush” two of them had on one of those same bothersome boys.
At North the group snowballed, picking
up the remaining six through attendance in the same classes (some business
classes) and this or that school club or event. At North this enlarged
grouping came together to try to survive those still raging hormones, figure
out what to do about those now not so bothersome boys, and, most importantly,
what to do about that “crush” two of them had on one of those now not so
bothersome boys. On the whole the group was on friendly terms at North. Maybe
not every day in every way girls’ “lav” Monday morning talk- friendly but more
than some passing “Hi.” (Or some such equivalent term used to acknowledge
another’s girl-ness. Guys gave the ubiquitous nod.)
Then came graduation and the nine were
swept away with the winds of change. Swept away to go their separate ways and look
forward to more school, work, romances, and marriages. Or so they
thought. Later, the year after graduation, 1965, the
group came together again at a Christmas party hosted by Millie and
that original mist of time from elementary school on
thereafter extended itself to the present. There you have it.
Now was what the group met over
lunch or some other occasion about some world-historic event, discussing
matters of great national and international import. Well, maybe in passing, as
those events impinged on their lives and they worried about their love ones
going off to war, losing jobs, trying to get home loans, stuff like that. But
what drove them was the stuff of ordinary human clay-at first school hassles,
going to the Cape on summer weekends, new jobs, trying to move up the ladder, dates,
finding some "Mr. Right."
Then came marriages, marriages
hopefully made in heaven, but as was the ethos then made hopefully to
last forever. (There is now a famous, class famous, photograph of one of
their number's wedding, Paula Palesse's in 2005, so hope springs
eternal. See Paula Kelly's profile page.) Unfortunately the group was not
exempt from the modern societal norms and not every marriage lasted as long as
the friendships. The coming of
children (I will not even hazard a guess at the collective number nor
will I grace this sketch with all their names and those of grandchildren for
fear of running out of cyberspace) who were a joy (mainly) and animated
many a luncheon table hour. Thereafter the telephone wires burned constantly
with glad tidings, mainly kid-centered, and sometimes sorrows as parents passed
on.
Later as the kids went out on their own
and had their own sets of children for grandmas to fret over, they had an
excuse to shop away the hours again and to make Oshkosh By Gosh and the like very profitable. More ominously
they talked of new pressing issues such as that tell-tale faraway look on a
middle-aged husband’s face which caused alarms to ring. (It is okay to mention
this male genetic defect I have had that faraway look myself, three times).
That is where the bonds of friendship held firm as they gathered around to
protect their own. But that vagrant look on his face passed.
A little later more mundane alarms took
center stage as the first signs of that raging illness that catches us all
reared its ugly head. The medical appointments schedule replaced the
kids' activities schedule in holding the place of honor on the
refrigerator door. The group too began to speak more often of how husbands had
become less attentive, more interested in Sunday television sports or strange
desires to hit the golf links, although still pledging eternal love.
By then though with time on their hands
and some unused dough now that the kids were no longer a constant drain on
the household economy they traveled, travelled by boat, by air, maybe took an
automobile trip and investigated those places that they had really meant to see
when they were younger but, well, his job got in the way, the kids cried for
Disneyland (and in their turn the grandkids), and the time just flew. They
travelled to the now obligatory Florida to catch some sun for frozen Northern
bones and when they hit fifty four of them for some unfathomable reason
(unfathomable to me who gets nervous and expects civilization to expire when a
streetlight goes out or when I am more than ten miles from the ocean) went
to the Canadian Rockies together.
Those are the ways the group spent its
time together, hanging tough, as one of their number said "through thick
and thin" and without a recorded argument if you can believe that. And
here they, the “nine,” stand as a monument to some pretty old-time values on a
globalized earth gone berserk with “interconnecting,” interconnecting for some
purpose, some purpose that I have not quite caught on to, and they probably
have not either.
They meet still, to share the latest
gossip, to show endless photos of grandkids and trips taken (photo-taking
the one blessed thing made easier in the world these days), to plan the next
trip to the islands and to occasionally look wistfully at the calendar and
wonder where the time went. Know this though in about one hundred years from
now when future generations are “connecting” on VirtualRealityBook or
some such “social networking” system if they look up the old-time meaning of
the word “friend” on some stratospheric cloud archives they will find this
very important example of what it was like when real friendships mattered. Hats
off to the “nine.”
Excuse me, my 158th “friend”
just sent a message.
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
PROBLEMS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, 1967
Recently I reviewed in this space Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, a novelistic treatment of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, that emphasized the problems at the base of Chinese society in its late phase after the popular front alliance with General Chiang Kai-Shek’s bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang broke down and Chiang began his extermination drive against the Chinese Communists. In Leon Trotsky’s book, under review here, we get a real time, real life analysis of the political questions that led to that catastrophe and what revolutionaries could learn from it.
I have noted elsewhere that the Communist International (hereafter Comintern) evolved in the mid-1920’s , under the impact of Stalinization, from a revolutionary organization that made political mistakes, sometimes grossly so, in pursuit of revolution to an organization that pursued anti-revolutionary aims as it turned primarily into an adjunct of Soviet foreign policy. Prima facie evidence for such a conclusion is the Soviet Communist Party /Commintern policy and its implementation toward the budding Chinese Revolution.
As much as policy toward the Chinese Revolution became a political football in the internal Russian Communist party fights between Stalin’s bloc and Trotsky’s bloc it is impossible to understand the strategy for the Chinese Revolution without an understanding of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. No Marxist, at least not openly and honestly, put forth any claim that in the West the national bourgeoisie could be a progressive force in any modern upheaval. Russia, in the early 20th century was, however, still a battleground over this question. This is where Trotsky formulated the advanced Marxist notion that in Russia the national bourgeoisie was too weak, too beholding to foreign capitalist interests and too dependent on the Czarist state and its hangers-on to fulfill the tasks associated with the classic bourgeois revolutions in the West. Thus, for Russia alone at that time Trotsky postulated that the working class had become the heirs of the revolutions in the West. The Revolution of 1905 gave a glimmer of understanding to that proposition and the Revolution of October 1917 cannot be understood except under that premise.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution the question of who would lead the revolutions of the countries even less developed that Russia, mainly colonial and semi-colonial regimes, formed one of the new political battlegrounds. And China was the first dramatic test that Trotsky’s originally Russia-only premise applied to underdeveloped ‘third world’ capitalist regimes, as well. However,unlike in Russia, this time Trotsky lost. The necessary independent organization of the working class and the political separation of the communist vanguard were not carried out and, to our regret, the Chinese Revolution was beheaded. As mentioned above this was a conscious Stalinist policy of kowtowing to Chiang by unequivocably ordering the Communist Party to make itself politically and militarily subservient to the Kuomintang as well as providing Comintern military advisers to Chiang.
Today, even a cursory look at countries of belated and uneven development emphasizes the fact that the various tasks associated with the Russian and Chinese Revolutions still need to be carried out. Thus, the political fights that wracked the international communist movement in the 1920’s which under ordinary circumstances would only be of historical interest today take on a more life and death meaning for many of the peoples of the world. That makes this book well worth the read.
I might add that there is a very interesting appendix at the end of this work detailing reports from the field filed by those Communist agents that carried out Comintern policy in China and who as a result of disillusionment with that policy had become oppositionists. These reports give added ammunition to Trotsky’s more theoretical arguments. They also give flesh and bones to the some of the points that Malraux was trying to bring out in Man’s Fate. Read on.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
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.
********
BOOK REVIEW
PROBLEMS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION, LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, 1967
Recently I reviewed in this space Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, a novelistic treatment of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, that emphasized the problems at the base of Chinese society in its late phase after the popular front alliance with General Chiang Kai-Shek’s bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang broke down and Chiang began his extermination drive against the Chinese Communists. In Leon Trotsky’s book, under review here, we get a real time, real life analysis of the political questions that led to that catastrophe and what revolutionaries could learn from it.
I have noted elsewhere that the Communist International (hereafter Comintern) evolved in the mid-1920’s , under the impact of Stalinization, from a revolutionary organization that made political mistakes, sometimes grossly so, in pursuit of revolution to an organization that pursued anti-revolutionary aims as it turned primarily into an adjunct of Soviet foreign policy. Prima facie evidence for such a conclusion is the Soviet Communist Party /Commintern policy and its implementation toward the budding Chinese Revolution.
As much as policy toward the Chinese Revolution became a political football in the internal Russian Communist party fights between Stalin’s bloc and Trotsky’s bloc it is impossible to understand the strategy for the Chinese Revolution without an understanding of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. No Marxist, at least not openly and honestly, put forth any claim that in the West the national bourgeoisie could be a progressive force in any modern upheaval. Russia, in the early 20th century was, however, still a battleground over this question. This is where Trotsky formulated the advanced Marxist notion that in Russia the national bourgeoisie was too weak, too beholding to foreign capitalist interests and too dependent on the Czarist state and its hangers-on to fulfill the tasks associated with the classic bourgeois revolutions in the West. Thus, for Russia alone at that time Trotsky postulated that the working class had become the heirs of the revolutions in the West. The Revolution of 1905 gave a glimmer of understanding to that proposition and the Revolution of October 1917 cannot be understood except under that premise.
In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution the question of who would lead the revolutions of the countries even less developed that Russia, mainly colonial and semi-colonial regimes, formed one of the new political battlegrounds. And China was the first dramatic test that Trotsky’s originally Russia-only premise applied to underdeveloped ‘third world’ capitalist regimes, as well. However,unlike in Russia, this time Trotsky lost. The necessary independent organization of the working class and the political separation of the communist vanguard were not carried out and, to our regret, the Chinese Revolution was beheaded. As mentioned above this was a conscious Stalinist policy of kowtowing to Chiang by unequivocably ordering the Communist Party to make itself politically and militarily subservient to the Kuomintang as well as providing Comintern military advisers to Chiang.
Today, even a cursory look at countries of belated and uneven development emphasizes the fact that the various tasks associated with the Russian and Chinese Revolutions still need to be carried out. Thus, the political fights that wracked the international communist movement in the 1920’s which under ordinary circumstances would only be of historical interest today take on a more life and death meaning for many of the peoples of the world. That makes this book well worth the read.
I might add that there is a very interesting appendix at the end of this work detailing reports from the field filed by those Communist agents that carried out Comintern policy in China and who as a result of disillusionment with that policy had become oppositionists. These reports give added ammunition to Trotsky’s more theoretical arguments. They also give flesh and bones to the some of the points that Malraux was trying to bring out in Man’s Fate. Read on.
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.
********
Reviews
Arif Dirlih, The Origins of Chinese Communism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989, pp315, £9.95
This is a work of most intensive scholar ship, one of the few to provide fresh in formation and insight into the origin and peculiarities of Chinese Communism. The future development in China of both Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be understood without it, and the data it provides can be used for comparison with the emergence of revolutionary movements in other countries during similar stages of radicalisation and industrialisation. The model constructed by the author begins with a loose network of circles of intellectuals with a diffuse and abstract Anarchist/populist ideology concerned mainly with problems of culture, whose limitations are painfully revealed in the defeat of the May Fourth Movement. The growth of a working class, and the impact of the War and the Russian Revolution lead to a turning to ‘Marxism’, whilst at the same time the need for organisation leads to the formation of a Communist Party. Just as Anarchism answered to the needs of the previous movement, Marxism seemed to meet the requirements of the new period. Comintern intervention thus fell on fertile soil, so that the Chinese revolutionaries in effect accepted Marxism without understanding it, and in a version that owed more to Kautsky than it did to Marx or Lenin, at least to begin with.
The book reveals a rich ideological ferment in China before the foundation of the CCP in July 1921. The most widespread ideology among the intelligentsia was Anarchist, in the form of Kropotkin's ‘mutual aid’, and here the author demonstrates that both Cold War and Chinese Stalinist historians have systematically neglected this background which fits so uneasily with their preoccupations (pp.3-4). Even Chinese perception of what had happened in Russia in 1917 came to them largely influenced by Anarchism (pp.25ff.). Yet here it is strange not to find any reference to the standard treatments of the early years of Chinese Anarchism, Robert Scalapino and George Yu’s The Chinese Anarchist Movement (1961) and Albert Meltzer’s The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China (1968). For if official historiography did its best to forget the Anarchist contribution, the Anarchists never did.
Other forms of thought jostled – or rather co-existed ’ with the general Anarchist overlay, and it is remarkable to discover that English Guild Socialism as popularised by G.D.H. Cole also enjoyed a respectable following (pp.129-30, 133-4). A striking parallel with the development of revolutionary ideology in Russia was the emergence of a sort of ‘legal Marxism’ among the left intellectuals of the Guomindang, almost a mirror image of the theories of Peter Struve, and the writer makes clear that in fact it was this group which probably had the clearest perception of what Marxism was, rather than the future leaders of the Communist Party (pp225-34, 267). Even after 1921, apart from what came in from the Comintern, “what there was in the way of independent Marxist literature came not from the Communists but the Marxists in the Guomindang” (p.269). And as in other countries where class antagonisms have not developed sufficiently to pose class questions, feminism also gained considerable support (p.67).
Having accepted Marxism as a by-product of their need for organisation, the early Chinese Communists took it over in its orthodox Second International version. Apart from the appearance of Lenin’s State and Revolution late in 1920, for the first few years Marxist literature in translation was limited to the Communist Manifesto, Wage Labour and Capital, Liebknecht’s biography of Marx, and Kautsky’s Economic Doctrine of Karl Marx and The Class Struggle, and with their Anarchist background it is not surprising that they found what they took to be Marxism’s economic determinism to be repugnant. As the writer comments, “Marxism in China was converted into a political movement too rapidly to allow time to find out about the theory, let alone apply it to the analysis of Chinese society” (pp.97-8), with the result that “the Communists themselves were riot to re-evaluate their assumptions concerning Chinese society until after 1927, when the Party’s policies, first having given it enormous power and prestige, had brought it within a few years to the verge of extinction” (p.l5).
When this re-evaluation began to take place, it is significant that it took the form of a reversion of Chinese Communism to its origins. In the case of Mao Zedong the writer supports Scalapino’s analysis that the strongest influence on him in 1919 was Kropotkin, whose thought he described as “broader and more far-reaching” than that of “the party of Marx” (p.178), and which he continued to support until the end of 1920 (p.206). The May Fourth Movement was, of course, a ‘Cultural Revolution’, and whilst noting that Meisner sees ‘populism’ as a salient feature of Chinese ‘Marxism’ from Li Dazhao to Mao, the writer drops the significant hint that “some have blamed the ‘Anti Party’ activities of the Cultural Revolution upon Anarchism” (p.271). In this way Mao promoted Anarchist-sounding ideas “to serve an authoritarian political structure” and “to undermine the Party” (p272).
It is significant also that Mao’s essay in support of Anarchism bore the title The Great Union of the Popular Masses (p.178), and he had a predecessor in Jiang Kanghu, the founder of China’s first Socialist Party, who rejected the idea of class struggle and was the first in China to use the term ‘New Democracy’ (p.139). When Mao turned once more to these notions in the ’thirties, he was only repeating what he had already said in 1919, that “as for the aristocrats and capitalists, it suffices that they repent and turn towards the good” (p.179).
One of the other directions taken by part of the leadership of the Party was, of course, Trotskyism. Here the author indicates that “now the political animus against Chen Duxiu that has long dominated Chinese historiography has subsided, at least relatively speaking, Chinese scholars admit that Chen Duxiu, not Li Dazhao, was responsible for the founding of the party in 1920-1921” (p.196, cf. also p.151). He shows how Chen, to his credit, was particularly suspicious of the alliance with the Guomindang imposed by Moscow, a policy which was “pushed through the party against the will of some of its older leaders” only “with the aid of younger members who had been persuaded in Moscow” (p.267). In a certain sense, Chen’s conversion to Trotskyism after the 1927 catastrophe also took the form of a reversion to origins, just as with Mao Zedong. The reader would have to be blind not to see in the debate with the ‘legal Marxists’ a groping towards the theory of Permanent Revolution:
The most interesting aspect ... was the upholding of Socialism’s relevance in contemporary China. Most fundamental was the argument that it was meaningless to speak of whether or not capitalism existed in China, since in the age of international capital, no distinction could be made between Chinese and foreign capitalism or capitalists. This argument (again an important Trotskyist argument later on in the decade) was shared by all Communist participants in the debate, including Li Dazhao, who, in his only contribution, insisted that there were no economic boundaries in the contemporary world. There was an accompanying argument, again one that Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu shared. While insisting on the unity of world capitalism, Chen argued that all Chinese held the position of labourers vis-a-vis foreign capital! China could not develop because Chinese capitalists were under the sway of foreign capital; real economic independence could only be achieved, therefore, through a workers' revolution. (p.232)
A significant number of those who held this view were later to side with Trotskyism. Li Ji argued that Marx was only human, that not all his ideas were eternally valid, and that “times had changed since Marx had formulated his historical theory, and new times required new explanations and solutions” (p.233), whilst Liu Renjing, who was the only one at the founding conference of the Communist Party “to hold an unequivocally Bolshevik position” (p.249) “argued for the immediate adoption of the policies of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p.247). In the passing over of this layer to the support of the theory of Permanent Revolution we can see that the evaluation of the crisis of 1927 led back to the original Marxist insights of the first generation of Chinese revolutionaries.
We are now able to examine the ‘tragedy of the Chinese Revolution’ in all its thought forms. As opposed to the first healthy instincts of the founders of Chinese Marxism, “decisions concerning the revolution were made for them by others, who claimed political superiority because they commanded theoretical superiority” (p.98), leading to “rocky relations” (p.197) and mutual mistrust (p.267). Having awakened Chinese Marxism, the Comintern, first of all of Zinoviev, and then of Stalin, stifled it, and a real examination of China in the light of a critical analysis had to wait until after the defeat of 1927, when it was too late to have a positive effect. As the author of this study so succinctly states it, “ideological cliches replaced a burgeoning Marxist inquiry into Chinese society that would not be revived seriously until it became evident in the later 1920s that the revolutionary strategy based on those cliches had failed” (p.l4). The fact that the writer of this book believes that the orthodoxy of the Comintern was Marxism, and that the revolutionary strategy that was appropriate to China was Mao’s peasant ‘Socialism’ does not alter the fundamental validity of this insight.
Serious enquirers should not allow themselves to be put off by this, or by the customary trendy genuflections to Hobsbawm, Kolakowski, Williams and Althusser, any more than they should be upset by the consistent misspelling of Stepniak’s name. These are trivia which in no way interfere with the massive learning and compelling logic in this work. It is by far the finest treatment of its subject in. the English language since the publication of the original edition of Harold Isaacs’ book.
Al Richardson
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Reviews
Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, pp903, £25When the first edition of Let History Judge was published in the west, it was of unusual significance. Here we had a massive indictment of Stalin and Stalinism by a dissident Soviet writer, who declared his allegiance to Marxism and the October Revolution at a time when official Soviet propagandists were indulging in the partial rehabilitation of Stalin, and when most Soviet dissidents were embracing; increasingly right wing viewpoints. Today, however, Let History Judge is of less significance to the western reader, despite the additional revelations and memoirs contained in this new edition. In these days of glasnost, Medvedev’s historical outlook is more or less officially acceptable in the Soviet Union, and just as he has had his party card returned and has been elected to the Supreme Soviet, the official climate has changed to the degree that this book could well be published in the Soviet Union.
Medvedev’s writings closely resemble those of the Soviet reformists and Eurocommunists. This is not surprising, as he is a staunch supporter of glasnost, and has expressed an admiration for Eurocommunism. Medvedev holds Bukharin in high esteem, and counterposes his policies to those of both Stalin and Trotsky. He claims that Bukharin’s policies were the direct and logical continuation of those elaborated under Lenin, and contends that had they been adhered to, the frightful experiences of the Stalin era would have been avoided.
Like anyone embarking on this task, Medvedev is obliged to distort the historical record. His treatment of Lenin shows the extent to which Medvedev, whatever his criticisms of Stalinism, is still influenced by it.
He holds that Lenin believed it possible to build Socialism within the bounds of a single country, claiming that Lenin “in 1915 and 1916 argued that not only could a revolution be made and power taken in one separate capitalist country but that ‘Socialist production could be organised’ and proletarian power defended against encroachments by other countries”. From 1918 to 1920 “Lenin’s and Trotsky’s views on this question virtually coincided” because “Lenin was sure of a rapid victory for the world revolution, or at least of the European revolution”, and because the economic devastation in the Soviet Union made it “impossible to build Socialism in Russia without the support of a Socialist Europe”. However, Medvedev assures us that “toward the end of 1922 ... Lenin confidently declared that NEP [New Economic Policy] Russia would ‘become a Socialist Russia’”. Stalin concurred with Trotsky until “under Bukharin’s influence and after becoming more thoroughly acquainted with Lenin’s texts”, he too changed his mind (p.129).
A good deal of tendentious text-mangling is required to find any support for the idea of Socialism in one country in Lenin’s works. However “thoroughly acquainted” Stalin may have been with them, all he could find were a couple of quotes torn out of context. Some 60 years later, Medvedev follows suit.
In On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, Lenin did indeed say that “the victory of Socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone” Collected Works Volume 21, p.342). But this article refers merely to the seizure of power, not the building of a Socialist society. In On Cooperation, Lenin refers to political power being in the hands of the proletariat, and the existence of state control of industry and peasant cooperatives, and asks “is this not all that is necessary to build a complete Socialist society?” (CW Volume 33, p.468). He then points to the need for a far higher level of culture. Medvedev cites him (p.129) – “this cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely Socialist country” – as if to show that the Soviet Union no longer required external aid. But where Medvedev puts a full stop, Lenin continued, “but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, must have a certain material base)” (CW Volume 33, p.457). Lenin was acutely aware of the situation right to the end. In one of his last articles, Better Fewer, But Better, he asked “shall we be able to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West European capitalist countries consummate their development towards Socialism?” (CW Volume 33, p.499). For all his condemnations of Stalin, Medvedev uses his methods to attribute to Lenin views that he never held.
Medvedev’s attitude towards Trotsky and the Left Opposition is also very much that of the glasnost intellectuals and Eurocommunists. The outright lies of the Stalin era and the less blatant distortions issued afterwards are repudiated. Trotsky’s rôle during the October Revolution and the Civil War are recognised, although Medvedev is quick to condemn his “extreme authoritarianism” (p.120). Similarly, he considers the Left Opposition’s fight against bureaucratism in the Soviet Communist Party to be valid. But whilst Medvedev excises some of the worst cliches of the first edition of this book (for instance, Trotsky’s “underestimation of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry”, Spokesman edition, p.38), and is now acquainted with a wide range of Trotsky’s works, his hostile attitude towards the Left Opposition remains substantially unchanged. One passage that has remained in the new edition refers to a certain Eshba who had “belonged to the Trotskyist opposition, but soon left and, having admitted his mistakes, was reinstated in the party” (p.384, my emphasis).
If Trotsky and his comrades get a plus for their activities prior to (roughly) 1924, things are different for later. In order to bolster Bukharin’s reputation, Medvedev portrays the Left Opposition as incurable ultra-leftists. But to prove his point, once again he is obliged to distort the historical record.
Under Bukharin’s influence, the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party voted in December 1927 in favour of certain restrictions upon rural capitalist elements. Medvedev comments:
However, contrary to the demands of the Left Opposition, it was proposed that these restrictions be carried out primarily through economic means – that is, within the framework of NEP and not by the methods of ‘War Communism’. Moreover, placing restrictions on the capitalist elements or going on the offensive against them did not at all mean that they should be squeezed out of economic life or ‘liquidated’. Therefore the Fifteenth Congress took a firm stand against the Left's proposals for compulsory requisition of grain from the prosperous strata in the countryside. The Congress also opposed any hasty mass collectivisation, since neither the subjective nor the objective preconditions for it had been created. (p.193)Unlike what Medvedev implies, the Left Opposition did not call for the return of War Communism, the liquidation of the kulaks, or “hasty mass collectivisation”. It called for the voluntary and gradual introduction of collective farming based upon modern techniques, provision of credit to small farmers for equipment, fiscal measures against the kulaks, and it warned that the capitalist elements could not be defeated by administrative orders or simple economic pressure.
Condemning the ultra-left idiocies of the Third Period, Medvedev notes that in 1934 some Communists were beginning to favour anti-Fascist unity with Social Democrats. He would then have us believe that Trotsky “in his treatment of the Social Democrats ... continued to defend a position that even Stalin found it necessary to gradually abandon” (p.323), implying that Trotsky adhered to the Third Period positions. In actuality, Trotsky opposed both the sectarianism of the Third Period and the opportunism of the ensuing Popular Front, and counterposed to them the tactics evolved in the Communist International during Lenin’s time, calling for left unity in action in order to expose the reformists and win the masses to a revolutionary leadership.
Ultimately, Medvedev doesn’t want to know, pointedly refusing to discuss the Left Opposition’s differences with Stalin and Bukharin over foreign policy (p.163), and writing off Trotsky’s work in exile thus:
... because of his inherent dogmatism, his tendentiousness, and his lack of information, Trotsky could not understand or properly evaluate the complex processes taking place in the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement in the ’thirties. As a result, he was not able to formulate an alternative Marxist programme. (p.180)In his highly appreciative portrayal of Bukharin, Medvedev does mention his “scholasticism” and “the elements of schematic thinking and oversimplification in almost all of his theoretical constructs” (p.190). Just where these characteristics made themselves felt, however, remains a mystery. But it is precisely the issues at which Medvedev considers that Bukharin fared best where his scholasticism was most apparent. This in itself would not be particularly significant was it not for the fact that from 1924 to 1929 the Soviet government’s policies were very much influenced by him.
Bukharin held that a national economy could exist, and its contradictions overcome, in isolation from the world economy. Now, if this was so, the Soviet Union could logically develop into Socialism insofar as imperialist intervention was averted. Socialism could be built in one country, and the main problem facing the Soviet Union was thus solved. The best means of defending the country would be the prevention of intervention, rather than the risky business of workers’ revolutions in the major capitalist powers. The primary task of Communist parties would turn from seizing power to attempting to force their ruling classes into establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union. A Communist party would adopt a conciliatory stance towards a capitalist class, or a faction of one, which, for whatever reason, favoured an alliance with the Soviet Union.
Moreover, if a capitalist class and its state could play a progressive rôle in the sphere of foreign policy, then why not in others? The basis for reformism was thus laid. And if backward Russia contained within itself all the necessary prerequisites for Socialism, then surely so did such advanced countries as Germany, Britain and the USA. The theoretical necessity for internationalism – that national boundaries were a barrier to the development of the productive forces – no longer existed. Each Communist party could develop its own national programme and go its own way. Bukharin’s theories gave rise to tendencies that threatened to – and did – transform the Communist International into a collection of national reformist parties.
Although Medvedev prefers not to touch upon the foreign policy debates in the 1920s, it’s worth noting that Bukharin played an important part in introducing into the Communist International the schematic Marxism of the Second International, from which the Bolsheviks had broken decisively in 1917. The October Revolution proved conclusively that not only could a workers’ revolution occur in a country with a large peasantry and in which the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not taken place or had not been completed, but that the tasks of that revolution could only be carried out under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Communist International in Lenin’s days recognised that in anti-colonial struggles, any alliance with bourgeois nationalists would be inherently unstable and temporary, and the proletariat must maintain its political independence.
Nevertheless, in 1922 the fledgling Chinese Communist Party was instructed by the Communist International to join the bourgeois nationalist Guomindang, to which it rapidly became subordinate. A mass anti-imperialist uprising blew up in May 1925, and civil war raged for the next two years. The Chinese bourgeoisie took fright, and it was clear that the Guomindang leadership was mobilising against the insurgents. Despite pleadings from several leading Chinese Communists, Bukharin and Stalin, convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible in China, refused to allow the CCP to break from the Guomindang, even though workers had seized power in Shanghai in March 1927. The ‘anti-imperialist bloc’ had to be maintained even though the bourgeoisie was more afraid of the workers and peasants than of the imperialists. The uprisings were drowned in blood. All Bukharin’s chatter about the ‘anti-imperialist bloc’ was just a cover for the long-discarded dogma that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had to be led by the bourgeoisie.
Unlike Preobrazhensky and the Left Opposition, Bukharin did not consider that an immanent conflict existed between the private and state sectors in the Soviet Union. He held that, as all societies require a mechanism for the distribution of labour time, the capitalist law of value was in essence no different to the consciously planned economic regulation of a Socialist society. The two sectors of the Soviet economy could, therefore, coexist peacefully, and the capitalist sector would gradually be absorbed into the Socialist sector. Bukharin considered that the initial driving force behind the revival of the Soviet economy would be the accumulation of funds within the private agricultural sector, with the increase in demand for manufactured products boosting industry. He was happy to see the unrestricted growth of capitalist farming, and most of the remaining restrictions on the richer farmers were lifted in 1925. The few collective farms in existence were left to stagnate, and insufficient resources were directed towards industry. Bukharin energetically opposed the Left Opposition’s calls for the steady collectivisation of agriculture and for far-reaching industrial development.
As it happened, the Soviet government was soon confronted with the fruits of Bukharin’s policies. The slowness of industrial growth resulted in a goods famine. The peasants, with little to purchase in exchange for their produce, started to withhold their grain from the market. In late 1927 Bukharin, borrowing not a little from the Left Opposition, called for fiscal measures against the rich peasants, and moves towards collectivisation and increased industrialisation. But valuable time had been wasted. Irreparable damage had been done. The NEP, the judicious use of market measures under the auspices of a workers’ state, was very much a delicate balancing act in which disproportions would jeopardise the development of the economy. Whatever his enthusiasm for the NEP, Bukharin’s policies ensured that the necessary balance was not maintained, thus causing the problems which ultimately led to the demise of the NEP in 1929.
The appeal of Bukharin is easy to understand. Compared to the boorish and ignorant men who made up much of Stalin’s entourage, he was undoubtedly a humane and cultured figure. Compared to the programme of the Left Opposition, Bukharin’s moderate policies appear more realistic and less risky. His market-oriented schemas appear attractive to those who see market measures as the means of overcoming the stasis in the Soviet economy. Yet Bukharin’s approach had disastrous effects in both the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Moreover, he played a major and ignominious part in the defeat of the Left Opposition – something else that Medvedev glosses over – and thus aided the ascendancy of Stalin.
The crucial question facing any historical study of the Soviet Union is how and why the workers’ revolution degenerated into Stalin’s terror regime. Medvedev lists many of the factors which undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat: the disintegration of the working class during the Civil War, the absorption of activists into the state machine with a concomitant divorce from the masses, the increasing reliance of officials upon administrative solutions for political questions, the overall low level of culture, the political inexperience of many party cadres, etc. Medvedev also makes much of Stalin’s personality. Disagreeing with Trotsky’s claim that if Stalin at the start of his fight against him had foreseen the consequences of it, he would have stopped short, Medvedev says: “No, Stalin would not have stopped even if he had known beforehand the cost of his own victory and of his virtually unlimited power.” (p.89)
Like many bourgeois biographers of Stalin, Medvedev sees Stalin's political life as a narrow quest for personal power:
It was not out of love for suffering humanity that Stalin came to Sqqialism and the revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks because of his ambition and his lust for power. When he joined the radical wing of the revolutionary movement, he already believed in his own special mission ... For Stalin the party was always just an instrument, a means of reaching his own goals ... His main motive ... was lust for power, boundless ambition. (pp.600-1, 585)This does not ring true. The mere lust for personal power cannot explain why a rebellious seminary student would join a tiny, persecuted movement which, for most of its existence before 1917, appeared to have little or no chance of attaining power.
It’s not surprising that Medvedev concentrates on Stalin’s character. The factors undermining the dictatorship of the proletariat were real enough, but cannot of themselves explain the terrible features of Stalin’s era. Medvedev overlooks the transformation during the 1920s of the Soviet bureaucracy from an administrative machine into a ruling elite, standing above the workers and peasants, and becoming increasingly hostile to proletarian revolution. Stalin and his faction personified the bureaucracy, and their victory represented the consummation of the bureaucracy’s transformation into an elite.
The bureaucracy, faced with the necessity of maintaining control over the rebellious countryside and of building a large-scale industrial base, initiated in 1929 schemes for agricultural collectivisation and industrial development. But because the bureaucracy was unwilling to relinquish its newly-found ascendancy, it could not contemplate encouraging workers’ democracy, and therefore, with the market measures of the NEP destroyed, it had no means of regulating the economy except through coercion. The terror of the Stalin era was due, not to the unpleasant traits of the man himself, but to the inability of the bureaucracy to impose its authority over society by any other means. This resulted, especially in the 1930s, in convulsions and irrationalities, the outward form of which were the purges and general yet arbitrary repression, which Medvedev describes in detail. Sure, Stalin, at the apex of the system, had his features stamped on society, but these characteristics were only fully developed in and by the society in which he lived. The Stalin of the Moscow Trials was not the Stalin of 30, 20 or even 10 years previously. Medvedev strives to find the secret of Stalin’s victory and the basis for his regime in his personality, projected back from its ultimate development. That is not Marxism.
History is politics projected back into the past. Medvedev aims to prove that Stalinism was not the logical consequence of Bolshevism. But he insists that an unbroken thread runs from Lenin to Gorbachev, even if it was severely strained during Stalin’s days, that the Soviet Union remains a Socialist state, and that the official Communist movement remains a force for progress. He refuses to accept that, by the end of the 1920s, the dictatorship of the proletariat had been destroyed, and that the Soviet bureaucracy had become a ruling elite and a barrier to workers’ revolution. Medvedev gives the Soviet bureaucracy a legitimacy it does not deserve.
Let History Judge was undoubtedly written with a Soviet audience in mind. Its reception, should a Soviet edition appear, will very much depend upon the course of events there. It should prove popular with the glasnost reformers; who knows, Medvedev could become some kind of court historian for those who wish to claim their descent from 1917 but who want to dissociate themselves from the Stalin era. However, noting how rapidly key sections of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia are openly advocating capitalist solutions, it won’t be long before they junk the entire Soviet period, Lenin and all. And anyone intending to revive the Bolvshevik tradition will find Medvedev's historical method inadequate as they seek to explain the turbulent history of their country.
Paul Flewers
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Reviews
R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, Macmillan, 1989, pp232, £7.99We are living in the midst of extraordinary events. Developments in Eastern Europe are opening up a new phase in world history – a phase which will mercilessly test every ideology and philosophy. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Thus the bleak realisation of Sir Edward Grey, Liberal Foreign Secretary, as old ‘Liberal’ Europe descended into war in August 1914. Dare we hope to hope that the lights might now be beginning to come on again after the dark decades of world wars, Fascism, Stalinism and Orwellian subjection to interdependent Cold War ideologies?
The deepest questions are being raised in the Soviet Union itself, though they have received less publicity in the Western media, and it is in revealing some of the details of these debates that this book has its merits. The harsh realities of the inabilities of the excessively centralised Stalinist “command-administrative system”, as Gorbachev is calling it, to develop the Soviet economy further has led to a return and extension of the liberalising policies initially initiated by Khrushchev, and for the same reasons. Khrushchev, as Sandor Kopacsi has shown in his memoirs of Hungary from 1953-56, was driven by the twin fears of the need to improve the conditions of the masses and the fear of the retribution of the workers if he failed. In the short term the bureaucracy, terrified by some of the forces unleashed by Khrushchev not just in Hungary, Poland, but in Georgia and other parts of the Soviet Union to clamp down again. Khrushchev was removed from office and a further bleak 20 years, under Brezhnev, Andropov and finally Chernenko ensued. But the underlying problems did not go away, and it took Gorbachev less than a year, from 1985-86, to discover that the necessary restructuring and revitalisation of the economy could not be done by technological means alone. The creative talents of the Soviet peoples had to be reawakened and harnessed and that meant liberalisation, ‘glasnost’, braving the risks, and this time without any turning back. What is still little acknowledged yet is just how far the reawakening of critical discussion and activity has already gone, in ways not fully anticipated or controlled by the bureaucracy. In the sense that “the debate about the past is also a debate about the future of Soviet society”, to quote Davies, the unleashing of more or less unfettered debate on the history of the Soviet Union has been one of the most important developments this last two years. This is what Davies’ book deal with; but what it has also unleashed, and what Davies also provides evidence of, is a rebirth of genuine Marxist debate within the Soviet Union.
By 1985 Brezhnev had finally destroyed what little remaining credibility Marxism had had within the USSR; even amongst dissidents names such as Trotsky and Bukharin were little invoked, such was the discredit Stalinism had brought down on anything and anyone connected with Marxism. Dissidence had been forced into channels far from Marxism: nationalism, reactionary hankerings even after aspects of Czarism, Orthodoxy and capitalist restoration. Certain aspects of this were understandable, and an absolute condemnation of some of the crimes of the bureaucracy: censorship, the postal system, treatment of dissidents, and many aspects of culture and human relations had, in certain respects, been better, even for many of the poor, under Czarism. The Hungarian dissident Tamas has recently pointed out too how, under Stalinism, entire concepts such as charm, wit, elegance, style, beauty, fairness, justice, shock, vulgarity and excellence had simply been destroyed. These criticisms remain true, and an absolute indictment of Stalinism, but what has reawakened is the vision that Marx had had of a Socialism which would deliver a quality of life that was not possible under capitalism either.
The debate which Gorbachev unleashed is described by Davies in the following terms:
Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the world. In the course of 1987 and 1988, tens of millions of Soviet citizens became passionately involved in studying their country's past ... Gorbachev did not anticipate this outburst of public interest in the past, and it was largely uncontrolled ... in the course of 1988 ... the main daily newspapers published long articles about Stalin, Bukharin, Trotsky, collectivisation and the repressions.Readers here will be more than well aware of one of the most crucial of the new publications, Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, which describes life in Stalin’s inner circle. But there is also the film Repentence, and even Rybakov does not tell all of the story now revealed. And it is not just making available in the Soviet Union material which was already known outside. Many more genuine details of Stalin, his immediate entourage, and relations between these is now surfacing. The horrors of the system were well enough known to Trotskyists and those who were willing to listen, but the revealed personal brutality not just of Stalin himself, but also of Beria, Molotov and Kaganovich in particular is quite startling. Revealed too, however, are details of struggles even within Stalin’s immediate inner circle which have hitherto remained unknown. If anything the new details of the reality within the hitherto faceless upper bureaucracy bring new confirmation of the analysis of the nature of the bureaucracy as a usurping Bonapartist clique upheld by Trotsky in exile against the proponents of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘bureaucratic collectivism’.
Understandably Trotsky has remained one of the more sensitive topics, and he has not been ‘rehabilitated’. Nevertheless, his role has now received some recognition and at least one article in Izvestia has gone as far as producing the following remarkable statement:
There are grounds for concluding that in the years of his active work for the party (1917-24) he was not an enemy of the revolution and Socialism. But he was already then an enemy of Stalin. Trotsky must be given his due: he was not broken by Stalin’s dictatorship, unlike many others. Until the end of his life he regarded Lenin with respect.Several excerpts from Trotsky’s writings have now appeared openly too, but most crucial of all is the question of his analysis of the bureaucracy. This too has appeared in all its essentials, but not necessarily with acknowledgement to him.
One of the less pleasant of the developments charted by Davies is a resurgence of anti-Semitic narrow Russian chauvinism. This may in part be a genuine, if unfortunate, reaction within some sections of the Russian community to the upsurge of nationalism elsewhere in the Union, but it is also a cover manipulated by unreconstructed Stalinist elements. It is certainly being used to raise pernicious odium against some, including Trotsky.
Despite all the problems, however, at least three remarkably senior academicians have gained publicity for class analyses of the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy which are very close indeed to Trotsky’s, even if they have scrupulously avoided linkage to him. One Sergei Dzarasov is found arguing that the bureaucracy as a caste had its own selfish interests which were “incompatible with democracy – the rule of the people”, before going on to outline quite specifically the measures which Lenin had proposed to counter the growth of bureaucracy: the universal election and recall of officials, and their payment only on the levels of the workers themselves. From this he has argued the necessity for “the democratisation of the whole social and political structure”, with the ‘labour collective [as] the full master”. From the Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System the Director, O. Bogomolov, has further argued that Stalinism also had a “unified social nature” that was common to Eastern Europe and China as well as the USSR. A.P. Butenko, from the same Institute, has followed up by agreeing with Dzarasov that the “unified social nature” was “a huge stratum of state and party bureaucracy, torn away from the people and not under its control”, “it was not the proletariat and the labouring peasantry which were in power, but those who usurped power – Stalin and his entourage”, “that section of the administrators which ... use their functions for their selfish interests ... and ... slow down and put a break on ... development”. Not surprisingly Davies reports that these analyses have been “strongly challenged”; but the arguments are out and there are workers who will listen and draw conclusions.
Even the most fundamental features of the one-party system are now open to scrutiny. Even aspects of Lenin’s Russia, previously out of bounds even to those who criticised Stalin, are up for debate. Rosa Luxemburg’s critical comments of 1919 have been printed, and deep debate has opened, but only very recently, on the banning of internal party factions in 1921 and the deficiencies of the control mechanisms introduced then to prevent abuses. Gorbachev himself makes claim to wishing to use the “post-1917 experience of a powerful Congress of Soviets and Central Executive Committee” as his model, and wishing to “revive the fine tradition of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of Lenin’s time”. The contradictions in Gorbachev’s position, however, are manifest, given how far historical debate and enquiry have already entered the Lenin period.
Davies ends with many intriguing questions, some overt, others implicit. Many are inherent in Gorbachev’s claims to be “returning to Leninist norms”. Davies is driven to commenting that Gorbachev’s claims to libertarianism look more like the Lenin of 1917 than of the Civil War or even the NEP, but also finds it necessary to point out the stark contrast to these flights of rhetoric and the fact that Gorbachev is simultaneously rejecting criticisms of the Soviet administrators as a group, and has restated Stalin’s 1931 rejection of ‘equalisation’, though of course without mentioning Stalin. The questions he then raises are: just how in this case is the “introduction of self-management in state factories” to be achieved, and how is this to be tied in and combined with central state planning, whether the replacement of the centralised supply system with a system of wholesale trade will also involve allowing demand rather than the state to set prices, whether collectives and co-operatives will be allowed to become genuine collectives and co-operatives or whether they will become some sort of private enterprise, whether in the end “perestroika will lead to a social revolution, in which the bureaucratic hierarchy gives way to some form of Socialist democracy”?
When the workers do finally move and have their decisive say then other questions and perspectives will open up too. Some of the dream of reconstructed social relations hinted at by the early Marx and Marxist visionaries such as Engels’ English collaborator William Morris has already been raised again by the Czech Vaclav Havel: “Ideology”, he has written, “is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity and of morality, whilst making it easier for them to part with them.” The promise of reasserting genuine human worth and responsibility, crushed and degraded under both capitalism and Stalinism reawakens. Perhaps too, as Bulgaria’s Eco-Glasnost is trying to make us aware, this is only just in time to enable sane management to mitigate the world ecological catastrophe already set in train by unrestrained and uncontrolled abuse and exploitation in both East and West. “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” necessitates a recreation of an accepted framework of obligations and personal responsibilities beyond the conquest of power.
Khrushchev told Rakosi in 1953: “You’re covered in crimes. If this continues, your people will grab their pitchforks and pitch you out of the country”. Western Marxists will have a role in helping the peoples of the Soviet empire keep this ‘pitching out’ on a constructive read. But those who have lived under the Stalinist bureaucracies will also have lessons and experiences for us too. We cannot afford not to listen to and learn from the new free forces of Eastern Europe or the debates current within the USSR. Davies’ work is a uniquely useful guide to what are only the early stages of political restructuring in the USSR. In that respect there is one final but very telling observation:
The view of the Stalin period which now predominates is more that of the scientist and intellectual, and of the peasant as understood by the intellectual. It is significant that so far the factory workers ... have hardly appeared at all ...
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Reviews
Marxism and the Great French Revolution, International Socialism, no.43, Special Issue, June 1989, pp214, £2.50Although we do not usually review magazines in this section, the one under consideration here in fact amounts to a considerable book, and is well worth more than a passing mention. It is made up of three extended essays, one by Paul McGarr, who gives us an overview which extends beyond a mere narrative to take in class questions, one by Alex Callinicos which discusses the various attacks upon and defences of the traditional Marxist class analysis, and a final piece by John Rees attempting to understand the development of Hegel’s thought against the background of 1789-1815. Apart from Peter Taaffe’s good basic book and a thoughtful essay in Permanent Revolution no.8, it represents the only effort by the Trotskyists in Britain to rise to the theoretical problems posed by the French Revolution, which Marxists have always believed was the classic model of a bourgeois revolution.
Paul McGarr’s contribution is so compact that it can be recommended to anyone whose prior knowledge is less than encyclopedic. Apart from at the end, where Callinicos feels obliged to advertise Cliff’s ersatz theory of ‘deflected permanent revolution’, most of the arguments for and against a class analysis appear to be taken in, even if enough is not made of the fact that the bourgeoisie already has strong influence within a feudal society, and therefore does not need any high degree of class consciousness to be able to organise for complete power, as opposed to the working class, which not only needs this but a fully developed theory of social relations and historical understanding to be able to gain control of society. The last contribution is interesting but one-sided, but as it is meant to look at Hegel’s thought through the prism of the French events, the writer cannot be blamed. But some indication should have been given to first time readers that there is far more to Hegel than that.
Nonetheless, the whole makes up a valuable contribution, if only to take the British Trotskyist movement out of its parochial concerns and remind it that it is meant to be the heir of all previous revolutionary traditions.
Al Richardson
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