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.
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Ill-favoured Healy might have been, but he had the tremendous advantage of possessing a number of key texts by Leon Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed. There are better books by Trotsky, but there are none that could have been more appropriate to the times than The Revolution Betrayed in the years 1956–57. These gems from the pen of the master came to us via the good offices of the US Socialist Workers Party. Whatever my subsequent criticism of the SWP, I shall always be grateful for that introduction into a world of grown-up Marxist politics.
Nowadays, I am told, the SWP not only eschews all generosity with Trotsky’s texts, they have also eschewed Trotskyism. Under their maximum leader Jack Barnes, the SWP declares itself to be a sister party of the Cuban Communist Party. Whether the Cubans’ own maximum leader entertains similar feelings of sisterhood toward Jack Barnes and his comrades is open to doubt. Holding such views, it is only proper that they should abandon Trotskyism, for even the most egregiously opportunist Trotskyist could not pretend that the working class had moved south, and was surreptitiously carrying through its revolutionary purposes in the disguise of an overweight, bearded Cuban petit-bourgeois. Whilst this is noted in the book here under review, it does not seem to excite much interest in the authors. This may be because Breitman is dead, and was in any case part of the leadership that first endorsed the assumption of Cuba into the pantheon of ‘workers’ states’, whilst LeBlanc and Wald joined the SWP after this great theoretical breakthrough had been made.
Right at the beginning of this book Paul LeBlanc writes: ‘Neither my collaborator Alan Wald and I are satisfied with the modest cross section provided here ...’ Well, they can add my name to the list as well. For them, Trotskyism in the United States is the Socialist Workers Party, the 18 years of the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League merit only passing reference, and the International Socialists no mention at all. Wald and LeBlanc are American academics, and both of them write in that clotted style which was pioneered by Erlichman and Haldeman, and was not the least of their crimes against humanity. Wald, who has the more interesting thesis, was clearly pulling ahead of LeBlanc in the race for my approval, when he introduced that abomination the verb ‘to critique’ as in ‘he critiqued ...’ I subjected him to a great deal of ‘critiquing’ for that, I can tell you. Breitman, who was self-educated, produces an altogether nicer class of prose.
What the authors do have in common is that they were all expelled from the SWP by Jack Barnes and his camarilla. For Breitman this must have been a particularly bitter experience, because he had been part of the Farrell Dobbs-Tom Kerry leadership that had selected Barnes in the first place. As LeBlanc explains: ‘The most serious errors by the SWP “old guard” were made after Cannon’s retirement from the central leadership. These were associated, in part, with the selection and grooming of Jack Barnes as the new central leader of the SWP. He was allowed to assemble his own leadership team, and the kind of authority that Cannon, Dobbs and Kerry enjoyed was conferred upon him.’ It is LeBlanc’s general thesis that, with one or two reservations, the SWP was essentially a sound organisation until Barnes was handed the franchise. Having acquired the job through a pose of ultra-Cannonism, it was not too long before he ‘undermined the party democracy that is essential to Leninism’.
Barnes, according to the convincing testimony of our authors, behaved in an undemocratic manner. What seems to have escaped their notice is that there is something amiss in a leadership approaching its sell-by date hand-picking its successor. James P. Cannon chose Farrell Dobbs to be his successor, as the man most likely to continue the traditions of Cannonism. To ensure that Dobbs kept to that tradition, Cannon set up a sort of parallel centre in California where he could, with no little embarrassment to Dobbs, correct any deviations from Cannonite rectitude. This is a style of selection that was popular in the Tory party, until it conferred leadership on Alec Douglas Home, which effectively discredited the whole procedure. Unfortunately, when Barnes, through a stunning display of devotion to the living thought of Cannon, acquired the franchise and then proceeded to divest himself of this heritage, there was no way of effectively calling him to order. It was now Jack Barnes’ party, and he could give it to Castro, or to anyone else his mean little heart desired.
I have little doubt that Jack Barnes is not the man you would want in charge of your favourite revolutionary party. Frankly, I would advise against having him in for baby-sitting, but it has to be conceded that the constitutional niceties were observed when he got rid of troublesome opponents. He just utilised the draconian rules enacted by the Kerry-Dobbs leadership to rid themselves of Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson. Later, given a little practice, Barnes began to get a bit inventive with his expulsion technique. The Internationalist Tendency were declared to be a separate organisation, and were not allowed to re-register. This cunning ploy ensured that they were not allowed to utilise the appeals procedure.
Lowering over the history of the SWP is the dominating presence of James P. Cannon. Of the three authors of the essays in this book, George Breitman is the most dedicated Cannonite. His view is encapsulated in the quote: ‘I am very satisfied with Marxism and Leninism and with the American version of that, which came to get the name of “Cannonism” in our movement.’
Alan Wald represents the opposite pole in the volume. He takes the view that Cannon, despite his manifest talents, inculcated a notion in the party that it represented the acme of revolutionary purity, an immaculate organisation, with muscles twangingly poised to lead the workers to power at a moment’s notice. This, which we might call self-deluding sectarianism, is beautifully summed up in Cannon’s Theses on the American Revolution of 1946: ‘The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the US, does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the Socialist Workers Party... The fundamental core of the professional leadership has been assembled ... The task of the SWP consists simply in this: to remain true to its program and banner ...’ This was put even more sharply by Morris Stein (who was National Secretary whilst Cannon was in prison during the war) with the words:
Really though, the explicit sectarian vainglory in Stein is implicit in Cannon, because for good or ill he set his stamp on the SWP. Cannon was a native American revolutionary, experienced in working class politics before the founding of the CPUSA, and an influential figure within that party. He learned well and participated freely in the faction fights that enlivened the early years of American Communism, but he was always the junior partner in the combinations he joined. Early in the proceedings he became aware that advancement in the sections of the Communist International depended on choosing the right patron in its leadership. He was less concerned at the fact that Zinoviev and Stalin could impose a minority leadership on the majority of the US party, than that it was not his minority that was chosen. When it came to the much smaller world of Trotskyism, Cannon made sure that he was 110 per cent on the right side of L.D.T., and, whenever given the chance, operated in the Fourth International like a cut-price Zinoviev.
In the early years of the Left Opposition, if Cannon was the best known figure, he was, at least, associated with some other formidable personalities, the most outstanding being Max Shachtman. These two complemented each other very effectively in those formative years. Shachtman was the brilliant Socialist intellectual; witty, stylish, a ruthless polemicist and debater, and at the same time very funny and highly approachable, especially for the young. Cannon, an altogether more dour character, was given to dark depression when things were not going well, and in those moods was liable to withdraw from the struggle to commune with vast quantities of the hard stuff. Nevertheless, he was an exceptionally talented propagandist, both in print and on the platform. If Cannon was not in the same street as Shachtman intellectually, neither was Shachtman a patch on Cannon in the popular agitation stakes. Later on, others of considerable calibre joined the movement: James Burnham, A.J. Muste, Hal Draper, Felix Morrow, C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, to name just a few.
The movement has always been plagued by the proliferation of tiny groups, each with its founding guru, whose raison d’être is difficult to fathom, the quality of their cadre not discernible to the naked eye, and whose inevitable passing is unaccompanied by expressions of regret. The SWP, however, was not such an organisation. The people mentioned above would all have had some significant rôle to play in a movement that was infinitely more successful and with many more members than the SWP ever enjoyed. It was their tragedy, as it was for the rest of the Trotskyist movement, that they never connected with the working class in any but the most transitory and peripheral way. Perhaps, in general, it is true that the upper and nether millstones of Stalinism and Social Democracy ground the revolutionaries to dust, but in America Stalinism was never a mass party, and Social Democracy was even smaller. With the exception of the Teamsters, the SWP was hardly involved at all in the great upsurge of the CIO, and during the height of that union organising drive, the Trotskyists were engaged in two years of deep entry in the American Socialist Party.
None of this is to suggest that if they had had an orientation to the CIO it would have been a runaway success, but it is to say that in any set of circumstances where the revolutionary movement has a chance to connect with the workers, it should take it. You will not find the proletarian vanguard in Norman Thomas’ back pocket, any more than you will find it in Fidel’s beard, although there is at least one large petit-bourgeois behind that. The irony of the Trotskyists’ entry into the American Socialist Party is that they came out with more than double their original membership, having taken the Socialist Party’s youth movement almost lock, stock and barrel. This splendid young cadre formed the majority of Shachtman’s faction – and accompanied him out of the SWP in 1940.
The orientation to the working class is not just some fuddy-duddy old foible, it is the essence of revolutionary Marxism, but it is one of the easiest to forget in the over-heated enthusiasm for a new get-rich-quick theory. You can substitute the peasantry for the revolutionary class. You can witter on about ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’, or Fabian-Stalinism, like Pablo; you might even see the revolution springing unchained from the junior common room; or you could hymn the praises of youth, and good luck to you mate; but none of that will have anything to do with Marxism. One of the besetting sins of our movement is what might be called ‘the Socialism of the peroration’. This is where we affirm our ‘undying faith in the working class’, and promise to ‘storm both heaven and earth’ in the very near future. Then we go home and try and think up some short cut that will save us from all the hard work, and frequent failure, of organising in the working class.
It is this sort of thing that Trotsky called substitutionism, that is, a besetting sin. In 1973 the SWP had around 1,000 members, and LeBlanc quotes someone called Sheir who reported that at that time it had 120 persons, most of them paid, working at the party HQ, with room for many more. George Novack boasted that the SWP had ‘an infrastructure for a party of about 100,000’. During the period in question, SWP branches had local branch offices and full-time organisers, and paid for their own leaflets and propaganda. The subs range was from $5 to $50 per week (with the average much closer to $5 than $50, I should think), and the balance after paying local costs was sent to the party. How the party financed its 120 full-time head office staff and all the associated expenses on this income is difficult to understand. It is even more difficult to understand why the party members kept sending the money when it is recalled that this vast army of party functionaries managed in just 12 months to increase the membership by a pathetic 140. A year later still, Barnes’ imaginative expulsion tactics had reduced the membership once more to 1,000. You pays your money, and Jack Barnes makes his choice.
Whilst we are discussing membership figures, it is quite interesting to note that the SWP never had a membership of more than 1,500, and that was the high point in 1938, as they exited from the Socialist Party. That was the time when they were claiming 2,500 at the founding congress of the Fourth International. In 1944 they had just 840 as they set out to arrange the future of the British section and control the Fourth International. The postwar SWP, whose membership was usually in the hundreds and never exceeded 1,250, threw its weight about internationally, and presumed to lecture the world on how to make the revolution. It is difficult to say who was the most deluded, the SWP for believing its own vainglory, or the rest of us for accepting it as good coin.
When Trotsky was murdered, Cannon saw himself as the natural successor to lead the forces of the Fourth International. In 1940, of course, the Fourth International had been put into lukewarm storage for the duration, but in 1944 Cannon sent his man Sam Gordon to the UK to sort out the British Trotskyists. This, Cannon’s second attempt to unify the British section of the Fourth International, involved setting up Gerry Healy as the opposition to the Haston-Grant leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This silly piece of politicking is alone enough to nullify the picture of the wise leader portrayed in LeBlanc’s essays, if the fault had not been further compounded by his selection of Michel Raptis (Pablo) as the man to run the Fourth International when it was returned to Europe.
Neither of these interesting sidelights into Cannon’s legacy are mentioned in the book, although LeBlanc does treat us to examples of praise for Cannon and the SWP from ex-members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Now this is odd, because LeBlanc is co-editor, along with Scott McLemee, of C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, which suggests that he is familiar with the texts of the Johnson-Forest Tendency including, presumably, The Balance Sheet Completed (subtitled Ten Years of American Trotskyism), the tendency’s final farewell to Trotskyism. Here is what Johnson-Forest had to say, amongst other things, about the SWP:
For the rest, this is an inadequate book that will be all but incomprehensible to young would-be Marxists who do not have any great knowledge of Trotskyism in general, or the SWP in particular. This may be because some of the material was originally written by LeBlanc and Wald as internal bulletins in obscure faction fights in the SWP. Whatever the reason, this is a pity, because there is the beginning of a worthwhile critique that might help us all to greater clarity and effectiveness.
There is only one minor factual slip, the assertion that the mass base of the CNT was limited to Catalonia (p. 3), forgetting the support that it possessed amongst the very poorest peasantry in Andalusia, and indeed elsewhere in Spain. The CNT was, after all, by far the largest trade union federation, numbering some 1.5 million members to the UGT’s one million, and many of the UGT’s strongest sections were caught behind the Nationalist lines.
More could also have been done to discredit the dishonest and sinister claim dealt with on page 20 that the USSR granted disinterested ‘aid’ to the Republic. As a matter of fact, every piece of Soviet weaponry that arrived had been paid for several times over, for Spain’s gold reserve, one of the largest half dozen in the world, had been shipped into Odessa harbour. Stalin’s hold over the Republic’s wealth not only prevented it from buying any arms elsewhere, but also enabled the Comintern advisors, the Russian diplomats and the local Stalinist hierarchy to keep a stranglehold over the war effort and the country. It was for this reason rather than his expansion of the carabineros (p. 22) that Juan Negrín became prime minister after the Stalinists had ousted Largo Caballero (p. 28), for it was he who was responsible for the removal of this gold along with the Russian military attaché, Arthur Stashevsky.
This brings us to this pamphlet’s only real weakness, its failure to make much of a distinction between the Socialist left, which Trotsky regarded as centrist, and the Socialist right, which allied wholeheartedly with the Stalinists in the counter-revolution. Indeed, it even argues that the defeat of the left was its own fault: ‘If the Communist Party was able, in the end, to act as the policeman of the bourgeois order, it was primarily because the vast majority of revolutionary workers remained under the influence of the reformist leaders.’ (p. 32) By so placing an equals sign between gangsters like Orlov and muddled old Socialists like Caballero, the Stalinists are let neatly off the hook – and Trotsky placed the main responsibility for the betrayal squarely upon their shoulders. This stems from the strange assumption of Workers’ Fight and its co-thinkers that Stalinists are always to the left of Socialists, an assumption dubious in Spain, and laughable over here.
But if all the reader learns from this brochure is to watch his back where Stalinists are involved, it will have served a useful purpose.
Furthermore, the image of Lenin presented in this book is hardly unknown. Anyone with any knowledge of the man knows that he was poor at delegating work and involved himself with things which could have been dealt with at a lower level, went over the top at times in his polemics against political opponents, dealt deviously with foreign governments, was critical of his comrades, called for the exile of hostile intellectuals, and demanded harsh measures against opposition. So why publish a very small proportion of the thousands of documents that are in the archives, a selection which adds little to our knowledge of him?
As we have noted previously in this journal (Volume 5, no. 4, pp. 213–21), Pipes is an historian who allows his political views to influence his writings to the extent that they lose the objectivity that is necessary for a worthwhile historical account. It seems to me that the documents in this selection have been chosen specifically for the purpose of putting Lenin in as bad a light as possible. However, Pipes is fighting yesterday’s battles. Nobody these days sees Lenin as a plaster saint, Leninists themselves consider that some of his actions hindered the fight for Socialism, and is anyone going to lose any sleep over whether he had an affair with Inessa Armand? Not surprisingly, The Unknown Lenin has a somewhat redundant feel about it.
Some of the documents require more background information than is provided if they are to be fully understood, not least Lenin’s draft instructions to Bolsheviks in Ukraine which call for Jews and other urban people to be kept out of the Soviet administration. Although this is published here to infer that Lenin was anti-Semitic, it is much more likely to be in respect of ensuring that more Ukrainians were recruited to the Soviet regime in Ukraine, rather than Russians and Jews, who comprised much of the urban population, and were predominant in the Ukrainian Soviet apparatus. Anti-Semitism or indifference to the fate of the Jews is implied in respect of reports of pogroms to Lenin to which no responses have been found. If no replies can be found to these and other documents sent to him, were they written and then lost or misfiled? (That documents may have been lost is raised in the introduction.) Does marking documents ‘for the archives’ mean that Lenin did not act on them, as is suggested? Or did he take up the issues informally, without writing anything down? Some documents were also addressed to other leading Bolsheviks, so were they taken up first by them? Short of knowing every minute of Lenin’s life, and every word he spoke, something that was beyond the capabilities of even the most pedantic Soviet scholar, can anything categorical be said?
Although there are some interesting documents in this book, particularly Lenin’s disposition on Roman Malinovsky, the Tsarist police agent in the Bolsheviks’ Duma delegation, and his remarkably prescient warning to Kamenev about the consequences of removing Trotsky from the Central Committee, I can’t help thinking that Pipes has picked these documents in order to bolster his own bitterly hostile attitude towards Lenin. Like Volkogonov in his final years, Pipes seeks to promote a one-dimensional Lenin, a malignant incarnation of evil, and tries to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm. A less prejudiced investigator could have used the wealth of documentation in the archives in order to produce a worthwhile analysis of the mechanics of the Soviet government. If, as Yuri Baranov says in his introduction, work on unpublished Lenin material is to continue, let us hope that in future it is put in the hands of a scholar who can provide a more objective understanding of Lenin and the Soviet regime than old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Pipes.
Pitt’s thesis is not new, but is a reformulation of the orthodox Communist Party line that was first developed by Willie Gallacher and Tom Bell. It acknowledges Maclean’s courageous rôle during the First World War, which resulted in his imprisonment, and attributes Maclean’s estrangement from the developing CPGB in 1920–21 to the consequences of that imprisonment. These consequences are alleged to have undermined Maclean’s mental state to the point where paranoia profoundly affected his political judgement. Pitt cites various examples of Maclean’s paranoid behaviour, which involved a sense of being followed and watched by government agents, and his suspicious and startling criticisms of important figures within the revolutionary left, most notably Francis Meynell (the editor of The Communist), Colonel L’Estrange Malone and Theodore Rothstein, the long-time SDF member and the principal representative of the Bolsheviks in the processes leading to the formation of the CPGB. In addition, Maclean denounced Gallacher for lacking a real basis in Marxism, and for having betrayed him personally by asserting his mental instability in a letter to the SLP.
For Pitt, all this leads to the conclusion that Maclean was ‘mad’ at the crucial time when the CPGB was formed, and Maclean’s criticism of the party and its leaders can thus be safely rejected as the product of an unbalanced mind. Pitt’s purpose is not to denigrate Maclean, but ‘to set the record straight’, and counter those who would use Maclean’s criticisms to argue ‘that the Bolshevik Revolution and all its consequences were rotten from the start’. This is presumably aimed at someone like Walter Kendall, who has long held that the creation of the CPGB was the product of ‘external’ pressures, rather than a ‘natural’ development of the British revolutionary left. Moreover, Kendall sees this forced development as representing an ‘historic error on the grand scale’ because it effectively cut off the potentially rich tributaries of the left from the mainstream labour movement, leaving the left as a backwater.
It is not necessary to go all the way with Kendall to recognise that Maclean’s reservations about the revolutionary potentiality of the CPGB and its early leaders were not so absurd that they could not be shared by others who were no ‘madder’ than he. Indeed, it is worth noting that of those British left wing organisations specifically invited to the founding of the Third International, almost none lost its identity within the CPGB, but rather opposed its particular configuration. The CPGB did, however, offer prominent positions to Malone, a member of parliament with a history of virulent anti-Socialist outbursts, and Francis Meynell, who, along with Malone, was identified by Maclean as having no background in Marxism. Meynell himself subsequently observed that no revolutionary theoretical journal could have had an editor less theoretically versed in Marxism than he. Yet he was installed by Arthur MacManus.
It is difficult to judge Maclean’s ‘madness’ with any real confidence at this distance in time, and without a medical background. Certainly, as Pitt recognises, people like Maclean on the left were conventionally defined as ‘mad’ for holding the beliefs they did. But Pitt goes further, and accepts the evidence that Maclean was paranoid in the proper medical sense. For my part, the best evidence is that of Doctor Garrey, the Medical Officer at Peterhead Prison who refused to certify Maclean insane despite pressure from his superiors. The specific evidence of ‘madness’ related to Maclean’s allegations that his prison food was drugged. Since this was patently untrue, the medical practitioners saw this as clear evidence of mental instability. However, Garrey, who had the most contact with Maclean, refused to accept this diagnosis. Pitt’s suggestion that Garrey’s refusal to certify Maclean insane can be questioned on the grounds that having organised his forced feeding, he was anxious to deny that Maclean suffered ill effects that could have been attributed to his actions, is not a credible explanation. If Garrey had any concerns about how his treatment of Maclean might have been interpreted, the simplest course was to declare him insane. Maclean’s criticisms of leading Communists may well have been extreme. He may well have cited the wrong individuals as government agents operating at the highest level of the CPGB (ironically, the support for such a misconception comes from one such agent referred to in the pamphlet). However, there is no short cut to considering the essential criticisms made about the events surrounding the formation of the CPGB, nor about the inherent failings of that party.
Maclean was not an isolated revolutionary ‘non-joiner’, but was one amongst many. As Raymond Challinor has observed, the CPGB was formed as the result of a series of mergers, and, perhaps uniquely, the product of these mergers was less than the sum of those involved at the outset. Many of those who chose to remain outside did so because they believed it to be dominated by reformists and ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ to the revolutionary cause. Whilst some of these oppositionists can be seen as ultra-leftists or ‘infantile leftists’ in the Leninist sense, this is not a charge that could easily be laid at Maclean’s door. Maclean was not an ultra-leftist, and right up to the last few months of his life, when worn out, ill and isolated, he lost his sense of political reality, his letters and indeed his Open Letter to Lenin show him to be more realistic and balanced in his assessment of the political situation in Britain than the leadership of the CPGB. If you leave aside the vitriolic attacks launched on Maclean by members of the CPGB in language familiarly applied by Trotskyists and Stalinists to Socialists of all hues, then Maclean’s criticisms of the emerging and infant CPGB have a powerful ring to them. In taking them seriously, it is not inevitable that you are forced to repudiate the October Revolution, or even the need for a Communist Party in Britain, but maybe to ask whether the CPGB that was formed in 1921 was the only such party available, and if there were not better options.
Copies of this pamphlet can be obtained from the author at 92 Castlehaven Road, London NW1 8PL.
He makes it plain that not all the victims of anti-Semitism have been Jews, for racism breeds racism. Some horrible examples are given of Talmudic hostility to other peoples and creeds, even monotheistic ones (pp. 20–7, 74–98), and it is with some sadness that we learn that this spirit even infected Maimonides (pp. viii, 24–6, 80). But there is far more to the book than this.
Its analysis of the main phases in the history of Judaism (pp. 50–7) places them firmly within the development of the social conditions of its existence, a dimension that is so signally lacking in Traverso’s book. He explains our inability to grasp the real mechanism that drives Israel forward today from the fact that whilst knowledge of the Old Testament is widely disseminated, modern Judaism’s inheritance from Kabbala and Talmud is almost unknown to outsiders, and it is this fusion of traditional lore that exercises such a fatal influence upon the state (pp. 36ff.). His description of Kabbalism in chapter three as a ‘decay of monotheism’, and of Jewish society in eighteenth century Germany as ‘burning of books, persecution of writers, disputes about the magic powers of amulets’ (p. 16) might be upsetting to many, but it is backed by numerous and telling examples. By this time, he concludes, classical Judaism had degenerated into ‘a tribal collection of empty religious and magic superstitions’ (p. 47).
Nowhere was this worse than in Poland, ‘the most superstitious and fanatic of all Jewish communities’ (p. 63). It was this population from Eastern Europe, and particularly from Poland and the Ukraine, that set the tone for the politics of modern Israel. It was, as he points out, a community totally without a peasantry and with little sympathy for its predicament, since the rôle of the Jews as bailiffs and tax gatherers on behalf of the nobility in these lands had long exposed it to peasant uprisings and attendant pogroms (pp. 52–5, 61–6, 72–4, etc.). Now the inhabitants of the land whom they displaced were also predominantly peasants. ‘Insane as it sounds’, he concludes, ‘it is nevertheless plain upon close examination of the real motives of the Zionists, that one of the most deep-seated ideological sources of the Zionist establishment’s persistent hostility towards the Palestinians is the fact that they are identified in the minds of many East European Jews with the rebellious East European peasants who participated in the Chmielnicki uprising and in similar revolts.’ (p. 72)
And the position of Israel in global politics also condemns it to ‘a rôle not unlike that of the Jews in pre-1795 Poland: that of a bailiff to the imperial oppressor’ (p. 73). Only by unlocking this culture can we understand the incredible frenzy in some circles whenever the Israeli government comes to any sort of agreement, however advantageous, with its neighbours. For some rabbinical authorities interpret the poetical flourishes of the Old Testament so as to include within the borders of Biblical Israel all Egypt as far as Cairo, and ‘Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc., as far as the Euphrates (p. 9), whilst ‘in all Talmudic authorities the Land of Israel includes Cyprus’ (p. 90).
I could go further, but to bring out everything of value from this book would be to write a review as long as the book itself. Far better read it instead, and encourage all your friends to read it as well!
El trotskismo obrero ..., produced by a committee led by Ernesto González, shows how seriously the MAS takes its history. This first volume covers the period from 1943 until 1955, before the tendency had reached the strength which it was later to achieve. The first two chapters give an account of Trotskyism in Argentina until 1943, which agrees with that in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2. It then goes on to describe the beginnings of the MAS tendency when Moreno, a precocious boy who was giving lectures on philosophy when he was 15, founded his own group, the Grupo Obrero Marxista, whilst still in his teens, after breaking with Liborio Justo. Moreno had by 1943 come to the conclusion that the failures of Argentinean Trotskyism stemmed from its poor social composition. Therefore, he and his few young followers moved to activity in working class areas, recruiting some workers of Polish and Jewish origin in the textile industry. The book’s access to oral history sources is impressive here. How many groups can call on the memories of workers who were active 50 years earlier? The rich detail of the devoted work in building up trade union activity would be the envy of any university social history department.
The beginnings of the GOM coincided, of course, with the rise of Perón. Here, the book is less informative. In particular, the account of the massive workers’ demonstration and strike of 17 October 1945, which freed Perón from prison and brought him to power, is very unsatisfactory. On 17 October, the key date in Argentinean working class history, the Communist and Socialist Parties supported the oligarchy and opposed the strike, thereby condemning themselves to impotence. So did the GOM, although that is not made clear in El Trotskismo obrero ... Nor is it in González’s earlier work, Qué fue y qué es el Peronismo (1974). Once in power, Perón encouraged trade unionism, whilst trying to keep it under his own control, and forced through the massive welfare programme which won him the support of most workers. The unions were not merely Labour Fronts on the Fascist model, but they were subject to all kinds of bureaucratic interference. The GOM sensibly worked within these union structures, trying to form broad alliances against the sometimes violent opposition of the Peronist bureaucracy. Much of the latter part of the book is an excessively detailed account of these struggles, to the detriment of any overall analysis, so that it becomes the description of a trade union faction rather than of a political party. In 1948 the GOM became the Partido Obrero Revolucionario. In 1954 it took part in the elections as part of the Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional, which was legally entitled to stand. The book describes this tactic as ‘entrism’, but, in fact, it seems to have been a merger with a splinter of the old Socialist Party. Once again, political analysis is buried under lengthy, if vivid, descriptions of electoral meetings. The PSR opposed the military coup in 1955 which toppled Perón and restored the traditional oligarchy, but this gets less analysis than a description of the crimes of Pabloite revisionism – of which there can never be too much.
The book tells us something about Morenoism, both in its contents and what is left out. Clearly, Moreno directed his efforts in Argentina at the working class, not at rebel officers or an imaginary peasantry. The steady work over years brought results, even if the ‘Trotskyism’ was, in Moreno’s own words, ‘barbaric’. In terms of intellectual baggage, Moreno travelled light, and this seems often to have been an advantage. There is much mention of self-criticism, but it is expressed in such general terms as to be uninformative. While Moreno’s attitude to non-working class forces seems to be so incompatible with Marxism that opponents have seen him as a chameleon, prepared to adapt to any environment, his working class supporters seem to have accepted his sometimes bizarre alliances. What did they think of their party’s turns and twists? The extremely detailed personal reminiscences are of no help here. It is to be hoped that as well as producing further volumes, the MAS will open its archives to independent scholars who might be able to produce the synthesis which has eluded the present authors. Until that happens we are dependent on the works of Moreno’s political opponents. There have been detailed criticisms from Workers Power, the Spartacist League and (in Spanish) Politica Obrera. These describe how Moreno’s group survived the collapse of Maoism and Castroism, despite having embraced them.
Después Del Stalinismo is a very different book, and marks the formal abandonment by the MAS of Trotskyist positions on the Soviet Union and similar societies. As the subtitle suggests, Después ... abandons the Trotskyist categories of ‘workers’ states’ in favour of ‘bureaucratic states’. (Are not states bureaucratic by definition?) As the Morenoite attitude to the Soviet Union was always hostile, that would seem to be logical, but the change is proclaimed, not argued. Curiously, Romero hardly refers to the extensive polemics within the revolutionary movement on the class nature of those societies. He gives a fairly standard account of the degeneration of the Soviet Union. He describes the evolution of the Soviet Union in recent decades as making the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ label inappropriate, but insists that it was never really suitable. L.D. Trotsky is treated respectfully, but there is no examination of the ideas of those such as Shachtman which generally form the basis for opposed views of the Soviet Union. Frankly, this is poor stuff.
There are lengthy accounts of how the technology of the Soviet Union lagged behind that of the capitalist world. Most of this is generally accepted. Después ... has a stylistic resemblance to El Trotskismo ... in that both are padded with enormously long quotes. Much of Romero’s book consists of extracts from academic works and from the bourgeois press, with his own text almost buried in them. If there is a Morenoite style, it is one in which prolixity and silence are the best forms of concealment. Having struggled through the theoretical preliminaries, we get to the practical purpose of the book: extricating the MAS from Moreno’s prediction that world capitalism was about to collapse, and differentiating the MAS from other products on the political market. Romero claims that Ted Grant’s followers in Russia tag along behind the ‘red-black’ alliance, the United Secretariat joins Gysi’s Social Democratic Party, and the Lambertists everywhere cuddle up to right wing trade union leaders. The Spartacist tendency, amongst others, is criticised for describing the overthrow of Stalinism as a counter-revolution. On the contrary, it was an immense step forward
These two books describing the early and late stages of Morenoism will leave most non-Argentineans puzzled. A reading of Moreno’s own writings ought to cast light on the tendency. However, Nahuel Moreno’s El Partido y la Revolución, a polemic with Ernest Mandel written in 1973, does little to help our understanding. Usually, when Marxists disagree, they understand what their opponents are saying, but it is difficult to follow Moreno’s arguments. Part of the problem may be Moreno’s style of writing, influenced perhaps by his early philosophical inclinations, where criteria of logic, evidence and proof are usually absent.
So, was Morenoism a purely Argentinean phenomenon which cannot be understood outside that cultural context? An argument against it is that in the 1980s, Moreno formed an International (the LIT) which had branches in other Latin American countries, and even in Europe. Opponents seem to suggest that Morenoism is the political equivalent of glue sniffing, and that it is a waste of time to seek coherence where none exists. How, then, can his achievement in maintaining a working class group, often working under severe repression, be explained? He obviously inspired great devotion. His pragmatism allowed him to drop one strategy and pick up another, leaving lesser men to bother about justifications. Critics point to his inconsistency in supporting armed struggle throughout Latin America but not in the Argentine, but his followers owe him their lives for refusing to launch them into a suicidal guerrilla war in the 1970s. By contrast, the followers of Ernest Mandel, an outstanding Marxist theoretician, were massacred. Morenoism peaked in the mid-1980s, when he predicted the fall of capitalism and an Argentinean revolution which would lead the rest of the world. Given the fantastic nature of that world-view, dying in January 1987 saved him a lot of embarrassment. Without him, his movement began to fall apart, although there are three substantial groups claiming his inheritance. Like other great men he seems not to have found adequate successors. Perhaps the description of him by Peter Fryer in Crocodiles in the Streets as a jovial figure who took his place at the end of the queue in the canteen at party headquarters, provides a clue to the affection his followers felt for him.
The central thesis advanced by Kostick concerning the War of Independence begins from a consideration of the military balance of forces in 1921:
It became more and more difficult for the British to provide effective policing in rural areas, and the local courts began to be replaced de facto in many cases by republican ones. The rural poor began to seize land from the richer farmers, whilst the ITUC began organising agricultural workers. Against these threats wealthy farmers began to turn to the underground republican administration for help. But still more serious was the threat posed by the independent action of Irish workers (see Chapter 6, pp. 108–38).
Strikes and occupations mushroomed in the period 1918–23. Red flags appeared on numerous occasions, and occupations and other expressions of workers’ control occurred, called ‘soviets’ in obvious response to the momentous events of 1917 in Russia. In April 1919 Limerick City was declared to be under military control by the British authorities; Limerick’s workers, already angry at the treatment of republican prisoners in the area, answered with a general strike, and effectively ran the city for a fortnight. A year later, in April 1920, a number of republican prisoners in Mountjoy jail in Dublin went on hunger strike, and large crowds of people began gathering outside the prison. The ITUC, one of whose leaders, William O’Brien, had already been arrested and deported to England on trumped-up charges, issued a call for a general strike, which soon had the authorities reeling as locality after locality passed under the effective control of the strikers. The strike forced the release of republican prisoners in substantial numbers. Kostick argues:
Kostick brings out yet another pernicious effect of these misguided policies: their effect on the situation in the North where the Six County regime was attempting to consolidate itself. Here the damage started already in 1918 with the refusal of the Irish Labour Party to stand candidates in the election, the decisive election which resulted in the return of 73 Sinn Fein candidates, six for the Irish Parliamentary Party and 26 Unionists in a total of 105 Irish seats (p. 46; see Dorothy MacArdle, The Irish Republic, p. 247). The result can only have served to reinforce a laager mentality, a sense of dangerous isolation in Ireland as a whole, felt by large numbers of Protestant workers in Ulster. Yet other political influences were at work in the North, as is shown by the Belfast engineering strike of 1919, to which Kostick devotes a most valuable section of the book (Chapter 3, pp. 51–69). However, here again the post-Connolly leadership missed the bus:
The book’s main virtue is the way it hints at the possibilities existing in the period whereby Irish Labour could have increased its influence by standing openly and fighting resolutely for a Workers’ Republic of all 32 Irish counties. This is illustrated by a statement issued by Galway Trades Council in April 1920, one of those statements of ringing defiance so characteristic of the Irish revolutionary tradition:
Dubrovskii’s political learning began when he studied the reports of the congresses of the CPSU, as part of his preparation for joining the party, during military service in the early 1970s. Here he read the original speeches of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and, at later congresses, of Bukharin and the Right Opposition. This is very interesting; he became aware of revolutionary positions from material available during the Brezhnev regime. We can reasonably ask ourselves then, why does Dubrovskii seem to be so unusual in responding to it?
By 1975 he had concluded that the Workers Opposition of 1920 best represented the interests of the workers, and he arrived at a position that trade unionism was the form through which the workers could best organise. The ‘party’, as manifest in the CPSU, was something he rejected.
In the early 1980s Dubrovskii adopted Solidarnosc as the model form of workers’ organisation against Stalinism, and moved from the Workers Opposition to a more clearly defined Anarcho-Syndicalist programme. His agitation in the major factories of Dnipropetrovsk (for example, against unpaid Sunday working) through the Andropov period attracted the attention of the KGB, but he was not arrested.
After 1987 it was possible to state open political disagreements with the regime, and Dubrovskii was able to force his programme onto the agenda of the factory political education class. He was elected to the union committee against party candidates.
After a series of attempts to establish independent trade unions, he and his Anarcho-Syndicalist comrades concluded that the key strategy was to work in the official unions, to transform them from tools of management into being weapons of working class struggle. Whatever the logic of this shift, it put Dubrovskii in a position where he was elected Chairman of a strike committee to protest against price increases after 1991 and the independence of Ukraine.
By 1994 Dubrovskii shifted to a Trotskyist position, after being able to read The Revolution Betrayed and other books previously unavailable in Russia.
The final sections of the booklet describe another wave of strikes against the failure of the employers to pay wages. In the course of this struggle, new movements to democratise the unions and other workers’ organisations began to develop. Dubrovskii concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of a new working class party emerging from such movements, and from the wider circulation of Trotskyist ideas amongst the workers. He sees educating workers in the history of the Russian Revolution as a key part in this process, making clear what were its ideas, and showing how they were perverted by the Stalinists.
Simon Pirani is a man who takes his internationalism seriously, and conducts it with practical determination. He has previously contributed substantially to our knowledge of the revolutionary movement in Vietnam (through his own publications and his preparation of Ngo Van’s book). His reports from Russia and the FSU, especially from the mining districts, have provided important source material, and this booklet adds more.
In later years, despite many requests, Marx refused to rewrite the original Manifesto, as he termed it ‘an historic document’ that he did not feel he had the right to change. This was not because he held that it was true for all time, but that it related to a particular set of historical circumstances, and that in crucial ways his thought had progressed, although he continued to endorse its principles. This was clearly shown in the first of seven prefaces that Marx and Engels produced (although only two were signed by Marx) for Liebknecht’s ‘fake’ German edition of 1872: ‘No matter how much conditions have changed in the last 25 years, the general principles set forth in this Manifesto still on the whole retain their complete correctness today ... The practical application of these principles – so the Manifesto itself states – will depend everywhere and every time on the historically existing state of affairs.’ Incidentally, the edition was ‘fake’ because, although Marx and Engels used its papers to send to other countries for translations, it was never distributed in Germany itself. The story of how this happened is just one of the many ‘adventures’ of the Manifesto well chronicled by Draper in a very useful first section.
That Marx’s approach is essentially undogmatic comes through clearly. It was not published as the Manifesto of the Communist League, the organisation that commissioned it, but with its original title of Manifesto of the Communist Party, although no Communist Party existed at the time. As Draper states: ‘The decision to issue a manifesto not of the League itself but of the Communist point of view in general, reflected an attitude looking away from sectarianism ... The title of the Manifesto was an advance notice of the de-emphasis of the sect ... So when the manifesto was to be written, it was not a manifesto of the Communist League, but a manifesto presented on behalf of a broader aspect of politics than was contained in the organisational walls of any league.’ This was completely in line with Marx’s view that ‘the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties’, a point that is always worth repeating. (It was the German edition mentioned above which first used Communist Manifesto as the official title, as ideas were erroneously perceived as less likely to be banned at the time than a document purporting to come from a political party.)
Most of Draper’s book is taken up by parallel texts of three English translations of the Manifesto – the original translation by Helen Macfarlane of 1850 (starting with the infamous ‘a frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe’), the Authorised English Translation of 1888, and a New English Version, as well as the 1848 original in German. There are copious annotations bringing out significant differences which are often extremely illuminating. Like the original German version, the 1888 translation by Moore stands by right as an ‘historic document’, as it was the only one in which Engels had complete involvement, and its particular phrases have longed seeped into Socialist consciousness in the English-speaking world. In no way does the new translation given in Draper’s book seek to claim superiority – its aim is to be supplementary, often setting down ‘another alternative – not necessarily because it is better, let alone more “correct” – but simply to show the differences’.
It is instructive to see some of the assumptions behind the 1888 translation. Draper states that Engels’ expectation that the ideas of the Manifesto could penetrate Anglo-Saxon skulls only ‘with difficulty’ was going to have an important effect on the formulations in the English translation. Marx and Engels both believed that German workers were more amenable to revolutionary theory than those in America or England, and for them ‘plainer fare’ was needed. Thus ‘forms of consciousness’ is usually rendered as ‘general ideas’ for the simpler English mind, while ‘relations of production’ is regularly translated as ‘conditions of production’, which is not the same at all. At best, it becomes ‘social forms springing from ...’, etc.
Draper notes that a line-by-line comparison with the original German text produces an interesting characteristic. The Authorised English Translation is ‘either extremely literal or else boldly revisionary’. There are few sentences that are in the grey area between the two. He deduces from this that Moore provided the literal bits, and that the revisions were made by Engels, who ultimately controlled the translation. He rightly concludes that Moore would not have made such revisions on his own initiative. A most valuable part of the book is the complete list and explanation of the changes. Draper does not attempt an interpretation of Marx’s ideas – this is not the purpose of the book. His explanations, however, inevitably do throw light on Marx’s ideas, and are of more value than many an explicit interpretation of the Manifesto.
There have been other English translations. In 1928 Eden and Cedar Paul produced one for Martin Lawrence (later Lawrence and Wishart), which Draper ironically comments had higher literacy qualities than the Authorised English Translation of 1888. However, translating it on the same basis as a novel makes the whole work an extremely risky base from which to draw conclusions about Marx’s ideas.
Lawrence and Wishart followed this up with another edition around 1935 which purported to be the Authorised English Translation, but with key unacknowledged changes (Draper notes at least 56). This was perhaps the largest ever mass production of the work; there were hundreds and thousands of copies. Some changes are stylistic, others, such as the change of the Authorised English Translation’s ‘win the battle of democracy’ to ‘establish democracy’ were clearly done to support the Communist Party’s Popular Front politics of the time, although Draper does draw back from making this obvious point. Indeed, this is the joy of the book; there is so much raw material from which readers can draw their own conclusions. There is later a very interesting discussion of how best to translate the ‘winning of democracy’ from the German original, concluding that Marx was in many ways hedging his bets with the expression, and that the Authorised English Translation version had at least the merit of being as ‘virtually as cryptic’ as the original German. The ambiguity towards the concept of representative institutions of parliamentary democracy within the Marxist movement has continued ever since.
At a time when capitalism is finally reaching world-wide domination with the consequent widening gap between rich and poor predicted by Marx evident even in the most advanced industrial societies, the Marxist analysis of capitalism becomes increasingly relevant. In such a context it is important to go back to the classic texts of Marx and Engels unencumbered by later, and often spurious, interpretations. Thus, a book like Draper’s is to be very much welcomed. It is very much a labour of love, but one that is not, as so often, clouded by a preconceived ideological position.
One small quibble: Draper points out that it was impossible to use a grammar or spell checker on the Macfarlane translation, in order to preserve the original misprints and slips. However, it would perhaps have been a good idea to use one on other parts of the text where no such constraints apply. For example, on page 43 we finds two strangers called ‘EngelsLafargue’ and ‘Bakounine’, and on page 44 an odd sort of social institution called a ‘Commmune’ appears.
The scale of Stalinist power in Spain during the Civil War is emphasised if we look at an earlier attempt to frame Nin. I am referring here to a little known episode in 1933, when Nin, then a leader of the Trotskyist Izquierda Comunista de España, was detained by the Republican police in Barcelona and charged with possession of explosives. At the time, Nin was highly respected in Catalan cultural circles for his translations of Russian classics, including the major works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. His arrest was, therefore, greeted with widespread consternation and indignation, and prompted a spirited defence campaign, which led to his release in a matter of days. What is noticeable here was the support lent to Nin by leading Catalan intellectuals and academics, not to mention some petit-bourgeois Republican politicians who, though as anti-Communist as the unreconstructed monarchist police, knew that Nin was a professional revolutionary in the Bolshevik mould, and not a backstreet Anarchist bomber of the sort that abounded in Barcelona at the time, and which provided the main inspiration for police stereotypes of revolutionaries.
The arrest of Nin in 1937 provides a sharp contrast. The charges – that a lifelong revolutionary was a Fascist agent in the pay of German big business – and the ‘evidence’ – that Nin, despite his long experience of clandestine organisation, had personally signed a secret message to Franco with his own name – were far more preposterous than those in 1933. Despite all this, not a single Catalan academic or intellectual publicly denounced the arrest of Nin, nor were there serious protests from Republican politicians. Later on, when it was too late, and with Nin almost certainly dead, some Republican and Anarchist leaders did ask some ‘awkward’ questions, but these were always muted by the need to appease Soviet ‘advisors’ at any price, a price which included the repression of the POUM by the forces of Stalinism in defence of the bourgeois republic.
MacLachlan begins with an overview of the earlier historical studies which ‘rediscovered’ the Radical, Leveller and Ranter movements. Historians such as Guizot wrote convincingly of the similarities between the English and French Revolutions. The traditionalist Whig view of England’s ‘Great Rebellion’, as a defence of ancient rights against the alien innovations of the Stuarts, came under increasing attack. The Marxist model of structural contradiction, class conflict and revolution became more influential. The Civil War became a bourgeois class struggle involving a transition from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one. The Victorian period saw Cromwell resurrected in Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches. Even the definitive works of Whig narrative written by Gardiner recognised a ‘Puritan revolution’ in the events of the seventeenth century. The stage was set for the Marxists to ‘reclaim the revolution’ for history.
MacLachlan’s chapter Reclaiming the Revolution explores the high profile given to the Leveller and Digger movements and the figure of Winstanley in the works of the 1930s and 1940s. The Putney Debates of Cromwell’s Army were compared with the Eighth Army ‘parliament’ of 1941. The development of a ‘Peoples History of England’ is traced, in which Hill’s work explained the Civil War as a class conflict involving a bourgeois attack on the hierarchical order. The chapter is also of interest for giving examples of the bitter doctrinal disputes for which the Communist Party was justly infamous, as Robin Page Arnott, Rajani Palme Dutt and others strove to impose a party line on the work of the Historians’ Group. The chapter on Marxist history in a Cold War era reveals how Stalin’s Cominform led to greater central control over the meetings of the Historians’ Group. Despite the Cold War polemics, the Group’s work was not deformed beyond recovery. Historians like Hill and Eric Hobsbawm were felt to be able to take an ‘intellectual disengagement from Stalinism’. MacLachlan believes the Marxist model was beginning to come apart just as their political decay accelerated.
The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the failure of the leadership of the Communist Party to admit the faults of the Stalinist era created a party crisis in 1956–57. This had a devastating effect on the Historians’ Group. Over half of its membership, including Hill, resigned from the Communist Party.
The analysis of the period of the 1950s to the 1970s is viewed as one in which Hill, Lawrence Stone and others tried to ‘save appearances’ in a retreat from the earlier position of class struggle and bourgeois revolution to one of a more ideological revolution. The change of approach was consistent with the contemporary movement away from an authoritative Soviet model of change to one in which Britain would reach Socialism by its own road. The revolutionary struggle of the 1640s was progressively broadened out by Hill into a longer process, as evidenced in the title of his book A Century of Revolution.
Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down showed his increasing interest in the history of the ‘common people’. The revolution was redefined through its radical legacy – a process MacLachlan labels as ‘levelling out the revolution’. Hill’s book became a radical text – a map of past experiences which broadened the scope of the English Revolution.
Hill’s work increasingly focused on ‘what went wrong’ with the English Revolution. Hill wrote in his book God’s Englishmen of the contradiction of Cromwell’s quest for a settlement after 1649, but he continued to defend the revolutionary consolidation achieved by the Protectorate.
MacLachlan explores the debate between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson on the place of the seventeenth century revolution within England’s past, and the more overtly revisionist studies popularised in the 1970s and 1980s. He traces the developments in the New Left and its treatment of history in a period of its own political disarray. During the 1980s history departments all over the country witnessed the retreat of the revolutionary version of England’s history. MacLachlan argues that the Marxists’ inability to come to terms with the normative features of most societies critically weakened their credibility. Yet the new revisionism didn’t resolve issues, and by 1993 Hill wrote of a return to a more social interpretation of the period. In the chapter entitled Revolution as Text and Discourse, MacLachlan shows how Hill’s works on the life of Milton reasserted that the key to his life was to be found in his revolutionary politics and radical religious ideas. Hill’s work on Milton helped to ‘hold the line’ against the general move to the right.
The concluding chapter, The End of the Line, provides an historical retrospect on the Marxist historians’ views in modern Britain. MacLachlan claims to balance a critical analysis with a sympathetic reappraisal of their rhetorical worth. He briefly refers to the Socialist Workers Party’s analyses in International Socialism, and particularly their criticism of Hill, Hobsbawm, et al. for failing to identify a revolutionary bourgeoisie and for defending the rôle of Cromwell, the ‘revolutionary Stalin’. The final chapter is anecdotal, with references to the implosion of the Soviet Union, and to Hobsbawm’s latter-day description of the October Revolution as a ‘vast detour in world history’.
MacLachlan concludes that Isaac Deutscher’s perception of an academic ‘red decade’ of the 1960s declined rapidly into revisionism in a period of political conservatism. He argues that the enlightened and grand narrative approach of Marxism in seeking to explain events in seventeenth century England has failed. Yet he argues that the New Right has not succeeded in imposing itself on social and historical thinking. Against this background, MacLachlan believes that Hill’s work in particular will remain of interest, despite his failure to fashion an indigenous revolutionary past.
Those on the left will find some uncomfortable reminders of their own decline in contemporary influence mirrored in the modern ‘non-revolutionary’ interpretations of seventeenth century English history. Yet the failure of the New Right’s approach provides the left with an opportunity for recovery. MacLachlan’s book reminds us that for long periods of history the progressive rôle played by Cromwell, the Protectorate and the various radical and revolutionary groups of the period was hidden from view. In more auspicious times, the importance of their contribution becomes more accepted. With this in mind, the work of Hill and others of the Historians’ Group should retain their central place on the bookshelves of those interested in understanding English history, and particularly the Civil War period.
The declared aim of Renzi’s book is, as he repeatedly states, that of emphasising the continuity of the struggle and activities of Trotskyism internationally towards the goal of a future revolution, albeit through moments of crisis and setback. This ‘march of Trotskyism’ was, and is, however, based on a core of shared principles and purposes, with successive generations of Trotskyists worldwide who have taken the struggle on from their founder since 1938, and continued along the same path. Renzi’s book goes up to the years following the Second World War. Despite some good initial intentions and a certain degree of objectivity on Renzi’s part, who, in the chapter devoted to the Left Opposition in the USSR, could still concede that Trotsky might have been mistaken in his excessive hopes in the self-reforming capabilities of the party apparatus, and in hesitating in taking the reins of the Opposition. But by the final chapter, on the Trotskyist movement, Trotsky has become ‘the creative disciple of Marx and Lenin’ (p. 105). In the intervening chapters, Renzi stresses the absolute convergence of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Marxism, with good old Rosa Luxemburg thrown in for good measure to complete the ‘triad’. Trotsky himself, while still vulnerable to error in the first half of the book, from 1938 onwards becomes almost infallible and, above all, a misunderstood figure by the ‘less flexible’ and ‘more dogmatic’ sections of the Fourth International.
These, however, are not merely Renzi’s methodological problems. They are the necessary consequences of the comforting but increasingly contradictory story he tries to tell, and they should be understood in this light. The theoretical shortcomings of Renzi are indicative of the main issues being debated by Trotskyism for decades. The factual content of this book is well established, and offers little new data. Renzi himself recognises the problem, and calls for its rectification. In the introduction we read that, especially in the light of the disclosure of new sources of information after the ‘epochal turning point of the August 1989 revolution in the USSR’ (p. 10), and ‘proportionally to the development of democratic revolutions in the East’ (p. 12), there still is an almost complete silence on the ‘historical and critical assessment by the various currents within Trotskyism as to their history. This, too, is a sign of the political retardation which afflicts the movement itself.’ (p. 13) In this light, therefore, SR’s willingness to discuss the history of Trotskyism is to be applauded, but unfortunately its failure lies precisely in its incapacity to open a debate on the strongest-held convictions of Trotskyism before and after the war.
Some of Renzi’s shortcomings will be pointed out by Piero Neri in his book on Moreno, so we will leave them until later. The wide subject of inquiry of Renzi’s work makes it impossible to stress all the potential difficulties in this short review, but three issues will serve to illustrate the point: the debate on the nature of the Soviet Union, the actions and line to follow on the eve of the Second World War, and the understanding of the nature and rôle of the Communist International. The more difficult and contradictory nature of some of Trotsky’s proposals in these respects, formulated towards the end of his life and in exile, and Renzi’s unwillingness to cast doubt on their validity and theoretical value, are also worthy of note, and it is a shame that Renzi’s entire and otherwise worthy enterprise is founded upon manifestations of Trotsky’s theoretical involution.
These three issues are, of course, closely interlinked. The story begins on familiar ground. The Bolsheviks allowed ‘free and dialectical confrontation on all major issues of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and the revolution worldwide’ (p. 20). However, Lenin and Trotsky increasingly understood that ‘the revolution could serve as no substitute for the necessary preparation of the revolutionary forces’ (p. 22), and founded the Communist International in 1919. This new International included the best exponents of international Marxism, but ‘coming from different experiences and backgrounds, with consequent fragility’ (p. 25). Meanwhile, in Russia the New Economic Policy was an ‘audacious and indispensable’ measure to save the soviets (p. 31), and by the mid-1920s the internal debate in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party had greatly diminished, partly due to Lenin’s ‘error in ratifying politically a practically necessary measure, that is, the temporary ban on internal factions’ (p. 34). Increasingly, a bureaucratic caste was on the rise, which would ultimately expropriate the workers and take power in the USSR (p. 41). The reasons for this process are, according to Renzi, the weakening of proletarian forces and their state and party political representatives; the rise of counter-revolutionary forces in Russian society, infiltrating the party and soviets; the rise of the ‘NEP men’; the proletariat’s exhaustion; the accommodation of some Bolshevik leaders to the new situation (as in the case of Bukharin); and, obviously, the failed revolution on the international plane. For Renzi, ‘there is a very close cause-effect relationship between the defeats suffered by the revolution and the collapse of the revolutionary leadership, its beating heart’ (p. 42). To counter this, in 1926 the Joint Opposition stressed the need to revert to a ‘truly international policy, to restore party democracy, to put an end to the concessions granted to rich peasants at the expense of the working class, and to pursue a serious planning of the economy’ (p. 51). Undoubtedly, these facts are objectively true, but no attempt is made to link these consequences to any underlying causative reason. We are therefore left largely in the dark as to how the situation in Russia should so swiftly deteriorate. As for Trotsky, ‘despite from the point of view of theory, politics and – above all – practice, the ruling bureaucratic faction moved closer and closer to imperialism, it had nevertheless not totally crossed the class divide’ (p. 71). Trotsky, motivated by ‘various and complex reasons’ (p. 74), continued to maintain a policy of ‘reform’. In 1933 the first conference of the International Left Opposition ‘reconfirmed its character of faction, not party’ in the official Communist movement (p. 78), and in the August of that same year the Plenum of the Opposition stated that it would defend the USSR in the event of war. Renzi admits that ‘with the exception of the Left Opposition in the American Communist Party ... the real building work for Opposition groups in other countries did not begin until the 1930s (p. 81). These attempts, followed in 1933 by the Declaration of the Four, failed because of the ‘limitations of the other signatories ... deep sectarianism and the poor tactical flexibility of Trotsky’s colleagues’ (p. 87). This ‘lack of flexibility’, which resurfaced towards Trotsky’s entrist policies, which were ‘not understood, or rejected, or badly applied’ (p. 88), is sharply condemned, despite Renzi’s admission that the Communist leadership had become the strongest obstacle to workers’ emancipation and to future revolutions, and that this strength derived precisely from the revolutionary tradition. Nevertheless, Trotsky, convinced that ‘his reasons were the reasons of Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and above all the international proletariat’ (p. 80), fought against strong opposition within the Fourth International and the American Socialist Workers Party, and argued for support for the USSR. If the reader should begin to see a problem here, Renzi comes to the rescue: ‘To attribute this situation to any errors or intrinsic limitations in our project would mean totally to fail to comprehend the great laws governing revolutionary policy, and hence also its organisation. Obviously many errors were made and many limitations existed, but they must be considered within the worldwide context of the prevailing tendencies of the time.’ (p. 90)
On the eve of the war the ‘fundamental problem for the Fourth International, and which – in different terms – we still find today, is the enormous disparity between the socio-economic and the political conditions for the Socialist revolution’ (p. 93). In this respect, Trotsky’s ‘vision of war’ and of the tasks of revolutionaries was an attempt to understand the specific character of the new world conflict. Crucial to these proposals were, once again, the nature of the Soviet state, and some of Trotsky’s practical strategies, such as the entry of revolutionaries into the imperialist armies. Renzi sharply accuses the Fourth International for ‘relative inertia’, which did not allow it to exploit the ‘colossal opportunities’ offered by the imperialist slaughter. In this section of Renzi’s book the quotations from Trotsky become several pages long. For our purposes, it is significant that the ‘colossal opportunities’ offered by the doubtful prospects of having governments pay to train militarily workers and the granting of workers’ officers, trained at their places of work, not to speak of the possibility of military training for workers under their control (see Trotsky, On The Question of Workers’ Self-Defence), amounted to a ‘navy fraction’ of the American SWP, approximately 150-strong, whose activity was ‘necessarily only one of propaganda’ (p. 110).
As for the defence of the USSR, here Renzi is at his most creative, and following his arguments will prove instructive. Incredibly, it seems that we won, and we do not even know it. The author informs us:
Renzi’s ‘march’ comes to an end leaving more questions unanswered than solved. What is most disappointing about his work is not so much the content, which is no better or worse than in many other ‘official’ histories of Trotskyism, but that events, choices, directions are simply stated as given or supposedly determined by outside events, without any attempt to clarify the possible causative relations between them. We are none the wiser as to the nature and structure that the International should take, or the internal development of the Bolshevik party, and we are ultimately left with a sense of defensiveness and powerlessness against each new enemy, be it Stalinism, Nazism, Pabloism or the enemies of the future, only doomed to repeat past errors and take the best remedial action.
Piero Neri’s biography of Nahuel Moreno is an altogether better book, in more ways than one. Neri knew Moreno personally, having been the delegate of the Italian LSR at the founding meeting of the LIT in Bogota (on which occasion the LSR broke from Moreno’s current, re-establishing relations only in 1986), and during Moreno’s stay in Italy in 1986, shortly before his death. This personal involvement on the author’s part, whose warm friendship and respect for Moreno are plain to see, does not prevent him from presenting a highly critical picture of the Argentine Trotskyist, in which no merit is denied, but no blame is spared. Moreover, the value of this book lies in the fact that such criticisms are not confined to Moreno’s activities, but are put in a direct relation with the general theoretical difficulties of the movement – as well as Moreno’s own shortcomings – and therefore acquire relevance for anyone wishing to avoid the repetition of the past. Neri defines Moreno as ‘the best leader produced by the Trotskyist movement from the aftermath of the war until now’ (p. 11). In his view, we can legitimately speak of ‘Moreno’s Marxism’, thanks to a ‘constructive revisionism’ (p. 14) which combined firmness of principles with theoretical originality, and was characterised by an attempt to maintain the independence of the programme and policies of revolutionary Marxism, while building its concrete expressions, that is, revolutionary organisations and the Fourth International (pp. 12–13). Moreno attempted to overcome the deep separation between theory and practice seen in Trotskyism after the war (p. 21). The entire activity of Moreno towards this goal consisted in ‘analysing and characterising the situation, elaborating a line and a political orientation, and then synthesising this in passwords’ (p. 43), so as to break with that ‘minority mentality and intellectualistic “philosophy” embraced by the great majority of the Trotskyist movement after the war’ (p. 43), ‘culminating in the 1950s in an “entrist” policy in reformist organisations, which continued for decades’ (p. 44). Moreno tried to ‘analyse revolutionary processes, in an attempt to derive lessons and generalisations from them’ (p. 74). This attempt brought him into conflict with the ‘international left bureaucracy’. He also maintained a polemic against large sections of the revolutionary left which, by calling for the support of the Cuban or Chinese revolutions, identified themselves as Maoist or Castroist. Moreno criticised the attempt to describe guerrillaism and Sandinism as ‘new surrogates for Marxism’ (p. 90).
This work by Moreno took on various forms, and he waged various battles with the Fourth International over the years. Moreno’s entire enterprise, however, was undermined by his erroneous understanding of revolutionary activity aiming to establish Socialism internationally, and this incorrect understanding, in turn, was to result in Moreno’s mistaken view of the rôle of the party and the International. Neri locates a few of the roots of Moreno’s mistakes in some general errors of the Trotskyist movement. Central to these issues is the analysis of bureaucratic states as ‘workers’ states’, since, according to Neri, their planned economy was given a Socialist, if limited, content. This, says Neri, mainly amounted to an arbitrary generalisation of some, in fact few, of Trotsky’s positions on the USSR in the 1930s, for example, the need to defend the Soviet workers’ state in the event of an imperialist attack, or to the contradiction posed between the existence of a political superstructure to fight – the totalitarian state – and an economic base to defend – Soviet planning (p. 13).
More specifically in the case of Moreno, Neri points to a serious limitation, again shared by the whole movement: that of the exclusion of Rosa Luxemburg’s current. Significantly, Moreno stated in his Actualización del programa de transición: ‘The existence of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party guaranteed the victory of the October Revolution, while in Germany the absence of a Lenin and a Trotsky ensured the failure of a Socialist revolution.’ (Cited on p. 22) In Moreno, this initial error of interpretation became a profound theoretical shortcoming. The reduction of historical revolutionary Marxism to Bolshevism distorted the relation between it as a current and theory, and also facilitated superficial simplifications and the rise of intolerance (p. 23). Moreno ‘considered Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Marxism far more homogeneous than they actually were. Trotsky’s decisive contributions after Lenin did not constitute an “evolution” of Leninism in Trotskyism.’ (p. 24) Trotsky, therefore, is not seen by Neri as the highest expression of historical Marxism, and he also points to a further consequence of this understanding, that is, the use of historical analogy by Moreno. In fact, he came to see the 1917 revolution and the Socialism of the first stage of Soviet power as the model for all future revolutionary developments. The adoption of this model, furthermore, conditioned the dynamic of Moreno’s understanding of the ‘relationship between political, social and economic change’ (p. 28). This is despite the Bolsheviks’ appeal to their comrades to do better than they could do in 1917.
Moreno’s concept of revolution evolved further, and led to a division of the revolutionary process into stages, which therefore does not constitute a truly dialectical model. In the first stage, the rising and ascent to power are envisaged, whereas the Socialist revolution in its proper sense only begins later. In this framework:
When faced with the issue of the tasks of the International, these instances of formalisation and contradiction remain firmly in place. In particular, between 1974 and 1979 Moreno’s current (the BT, later to become the BF) initiated a lively polemic, among others, with the American SWP. This led to a break with the United Secretariat, which had never recognised ‘Moreno’s Argentine current as an official organisation’, and which had ‘isolated it as a result of various differences’ (p. 97). The BF then began a disastrous but mercifully brief experiment with the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste headed by Pierre Lambert, and two years later, in 1982, established the LIT. The Italian LSR, until then part of Moreno’s international current, did not join, and broke with the LIT until 1986. Among the points of disagreement was precisely Moreno’s concept of the International.
In previous years, Moreno’s current had come to propose an equation between the International and the need for international centralisation. This centralisation, which we have already witnessed in the importance given by Moreno to the party at the national level, is here generalised in a concept of a ‘world party’. This need, moreover, was felt to be an a priori condition, so that this ‘world party’ should be firmly in place before the dynamic of class struggle and revolutionary developments could come into being. Moreno thus argued that a political current should become a faction. Possibly by generalising the actual situation of his own current, he then went on to theorise an ‘International Faction’ (p. 98), and by the time of the establishment of the LIT the International fundamentally envisaged a preliminary stage, a victory in Argentina after the fall of the dictatorship, which due to the perceived importance of that country and the southern region of Latin America, was to become the axis around which the entire International would orbit. Neri rightly stresses the ‘self-affirming and defensive character’ of this formulation (pp. 100–1), and also casts doubt on Moreno’s arguments as to the frictionless continuity among the four Internationals, which the LIT used to postulate its ‘iron law’ of the absolute priority of the International and its leadership. As is often the case, after the death of its leader this organisation exacerbated the elements of formalism present in his thought, and came to think of the existence of the International and its leadership as the automatic guarantee of revolution. Neri, however, reminds us that, in the history of all the Internationals, if anything it was disagreements, not conformism, which had allowed the more meaningful revolutionary developments to occur. Ultimately, Moreno’s understanding of the International as a ‘chief of staff’ to coordinate and allocate resources and activities according to the specific situations in various countries, amounts to the transfer to the international plane of his previous subordination of the tasks of the International to mere agitation in the national sphere, again at the expense of theory. Internally, this International would be governed by ‘democratic centralism’, elevated by Moreno to ‘a principle denoting the revolutionary programme itself, at the national and international levels’ (p. 111).
While all these developments should not be seen in isolation or as examples of individual deviance, but as part of a general problem within the entire Fourth International, Neri admits that some limitations are nevertheless unquestionably attributable to Moreno.
Once again, therefore, these two books serve, on the one hand, as a strong reminder of the absolute necessity for complete openness and honesty when faced with the past, and, on the other, of the disastrous consequences of a separation between theory and practice for revolutionary Marxism, and of the non-existence and futility of ‘short cuts’ or dogmatism in the task of building the necessary theoretical basis for a Socialist revolution.
In his foreword to Nadezhda Joffe’s memoirs, David North points out that the ‘survivor of Stalinism memoirs’ have become a literary genre. Here he echoes Stephen Cohen’s introduction to Larina’s memoirs. And the same point has been validly made elsewhere, in relation to volumes by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Irina Ratushinskaya and all too many others (curiously, North’s list of examples excludes the memoirs of Maria Joffe, One Long Night).
The regime created by Stalin to defeat the October Revolution marked one of the most extreme points of savagery and repression that humanity has ever perpetrated and suffered. It ranks with the Nazi holocaust, the slave trade and the century-long war between the ‘mongol hordes’ and China.
The memoirs of survivors of the Stalin terror are central in shedding personal light on the process of the long civil war which Stalin waged against the revolution. They illuminate and add force to the historical research of writers such as Conquest and Rogovin. But they do more than this. They can, at their best, demonstrate the survival of some tiny kernel of humanity in the face of the most immeasurable oppression. In this sense, Joffe’s memoirs, and others of their kind, go beyond the range with which a revolutionary historical journal is directly concerned, to some of the questions that call up the revolutionary spirit.
It is proper to consider the book in the first instance as historical material. It has to be said that the notes are sadly inadequate, pointing only to well-known public sources. They cannot be the author’s own notes, since the memoirs are dated 1971–72, but the notes refer to later material such as Trepper (1979) and Carr (1981), or to material to which Joffe is unlikely to have had access in Moscow (Trotsky, Deutscher). Of course, there would have been good reason for reticence in the early 1970s, but not in notes prepared for an English edition in 1994. There is also a curious reference (p. 39) to one of Broué’s books on Trotsky. Was this material really available in Moscow in 1972? In another indication that the text was revised later than the 1971–72 sign-off date, she refers to the publication of the Riutin platform. I have not traced any publication of the platform before 1990 in Russia (it is clear from the context that Joffe is not referring to any of the fragmentary publications of 1932).
Joffe’s own words and recollections provide some useful information. The early chapters deal with her early life, and give an account of her father’s life and career. Adolf Joffe was a figure of exceptional importance in the revolution, and in the development of the Opposition. As the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, he met important personalities, including Mehring. Nadezhda also met Rakovsky, Bukharin and Dzerzhinsky, and recalls these giants as daily visitors during her childhood. She also recollects Trotsky as a warm, friendly individual who had a good rapport with children (contradicting Larina’s description of him as a cold, frightening figure).
She also provides us with an all-too-brief glimpse of the dazzling intellectual life of revolutionary Moscow – meeting Lunacharsky, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. She witnessed the famous Lunacharsky-Vvedensky debate, and tells a tale of Lunacharsky delivering a brilliant lecture on Campanella without notes or preparation. These bright days were to come to an early end. Joffe happened to be present for Krupskaya’s announcement of Lenin’s death.
We do not get an analysis from Joffe of the rise of the Opposition – she was very young in the early 1920s. Almost the first we hear from her is her voting against a resolution in 1926 condemning Trotsky. She begins her political material from the death of her father, denied access to overseas medical treatment by the vindictive party bureaucracy. The translation of Trotsky’s funeral oration for Joffe differs from that in the Pathfinder collection Portraits Political and Personal, but does not seem to change any of Trotsky’s meaning.
She also presents the full text of Joffe’s final letter to Trotsky, and adds a few details to the account of Joffe’s funeral – the booing and shouting down of Riutin (the Central Committee representative).
She reminds us of Sedova’s work in preserving antiquities and monuments after the revolution, especially the old quarter between Red Square and the old city wall. Most of this was later cleared by Stalin, and eventually became the site for the huge, hideous and cockroach-infested Hotel Moskva. But little of this is first hand. She was, after all, a teenage girl at the time. She sets down a few memorised fragments of poems dedicated to Trotsky, which were probably excluded from the history of Soviet literature entirely by the mid-1920s.
The beginning of her oppositional activity is briefly described, from the autumn of 1927 in her third year at the Plekhanov Institute (apparently a year after her 1926 vote ended her ‘party career’). She even quotes from a leaflet she wrote for distribution by the Moscow Komsomol Centre – how was this preserved? She shows that when Radek, Preobrazhensky and Smilga began the first wave of capitulations in May 1929, this was not simply an individual political realignment. It triggered a vast new wave of repressions against the Opposition. (They would have known that this would be the consequence of their action, since the same thing had happened a year earlier when Zinoviev and Kamenev ‘repented’.) For Joffe, this resulted in her first arrest in the spring of 1929, leading to exile in Krasnoyarsk in the summer. There she met some notable oppositionists, including Dumbadze (Serge campaigned in his defence after being expelled from the USSR. He cannot have been at Krasnoyarsk long, as a letter published in Cahiers Léon Trotsky refers to him at the Cheliabinsk isolator in the autumn of 1929) and A.S. Yenukidze, but we don’t get any details on their politics or their activities.
She describes meeting Rakovsky in Moscow after his readmission to the party. He convinced her that there existed a layer in the party that could, gradually and carefully, be influenced. She added her signature to his political statement. She tells us nothing more about activity in the Opposition, or how this legal ‘influencing’ in the party was carried out.
She may have maintained some level of activity which even in the 1970s could not safely be written about, because when she was arrested for the second time, in 1936, her flat contained ‘seditious literature’, including Trotsky’s Collected Works. She was charged only in relation to her earlier oppositional work up to 1927.
At this point, the Opposition as such disappears from her account, although we get information about some individual oppositionists that she meets. We are now on grimly familiar territory, the dismal details of interrogations, the bleak architecture of the Butyrka and other prisons, and the dehumanised and dehumanising administration of the gulags.
Along this desolate road, in Magadan, Joffe met Trotsky’s first wife Aleksandrovna Lvovna Bronstein (née Sokolovskaya), and carried her parting message of defiance across the decades: ‘If you ever read somewhere or hear that I have confessed to being guilty, don’t believe it. This will never happen, no matter what they do to me.’ This is probably the last sighting of Sokolovskaya. Joffe was later returned to Magadan, but learned that Sokolovskaya had been moved to central Siberia. A small enough historical detail perhaps, but as an example of indomitable courage and determination, this last message from Sokolovskaya to the future is of incomparable value.
The case of Olga Ivanovna Grebner, whom Joffe met in Kolyma, sheds another grim sidelight on the Stalin regime’s morbid fear of Trotsky’s ideas. Grebner received a five year sentence. Her ‘crime’ was that her husband’s niece had been the first wife of Sergei Sedov, Trotsky’s younger son. Grebner herself had hardly even met Sedov, but even this remote link was enough to strike fear into the regime.
As late as 1938 there are occasional signs of oppositional activity. Joffe met a young Leningrad student who had learned from ‘seditious literature’ how all of Lenin’s closest collaborators had been purged as ‘enemies of the people’, and had been imprisoned for this knowledge. But even before this, most of the Opposition had been stamped out. The mass arrests of 1937, according to Joffe, brought to the camps not Trotskyists but loyal Stalinists with records of action against the Trotskyists, who were sentenced more harshly than previous waves of accused (in fact as early as May 1936 Serge had warned Trotsky that the mass arrests were not of new oppositional elements).
Much of the rest of Joffe’s account is concerned with her eventual release (she long struggled to be reunited with her daughters), her peremptory rehabilitation, and her restoration of her father’s grave at the historic Novodevichy Convent site. (It is only in relation to the grave of A.A. Joffe that she mentions his second wife, Maria – author of another excellent gulag memoir, One Long Night). There is no indication that Joffe took any part in any of the oppositional movements of the 1960s or 1970s, focusing on samizdat publications and occasional illegal demonstrations, and she expresses no opinion on them. (In an undated introduction, presumably prepared for the English edition, she does remark that she expected her memoirs only ever to be read in samizdat form.) This would have been difficult in the early 1970s, of course, but it would have been possible for the publishers in 1994 to ask her for a supplementary comment, which would have added substantially to the value of the book.
To summarise, as a work of history, Joffe’s memoirs add some valuable details to our knowledge of the Opposition, but change nothing of substance. As a personal memoir, they present an inspiring example of courage and determination to hold onto whatever can be retained of humanity and decency through one of the most appalling periods of history. And perhaps, too, there is the suggestion that we should not judge those we too casually refer to as ‘capitulators’ too harshly.
The members of the bureaucracy and petty bureaucracy, in competition with each other in the finding of ‘enemies of the people’, were as likely as anyone else to end up as prisoners in the camps. Baitalsky tells of the executions at Vorkuta, prisoners hurried across melting rivers to be shot down by machine-guns, 50 men at a time. Later, the bureaucrat in charge of these executions was himself arrested and was heard screaming from a window of the Kotlas prison where he awaited execution: ‘Tell the people that I am Kashketin! I am the one who shot all the enemies of the people at Vorkuta!’ Baitalsky remarks: ‘And when these Moors had done their duty, they were charged with exceeding their authority and shot.’ In this way Stalin wiped his hands clean of the terror.
Baitalsky remained a Leninist, having read Lenin’s Testament 30 years before it became generally available. With regard to Trotskyism, he was unaware at that time as to whether any remained anywhere in the world. However, he raises some important questions for us with regard to the nationalisation of property. Nationalisation of the means of production has always been regarded by us as more efficient than production in private hands, in that planning should result in a higher standing of living for the population. However, as Baitalsky points out, the nationalised economy of the Soviet Union became distorted because it was harnessed firstly to the needs of the state – the large bureaucracy (which required private clinics, private shops, private schools, etc), the security services, the military, ‘show’ or status projects, such as space exploration, and so on. Therefore, the standard of living continually lagged behind that of the Western world. To allay discontent, shortages were blamed upon ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘Trotskyists’ who were sabotaging Socialist development.
Apart from this distortion of the economy, it is a fact that technological invention requires intellectual freedom, which did not exist in the Soviet Union. Baitalsky spent some of his imprisonment in the First Circle (also written about by Solzhenitsyn). In this prison were gathered engineers and others with technological knowledge, instructed to ‘invent’ within a specified time an object of technology already in use in the West. Trade magazines from the West were treated as blueprints, and were locked away in a safe.
Baitalsky speaks also of the changing face of the working class in a peasant country. Following the forced collectivisation, starving peasants poured into the towns, and sat begging homeless in the streets. Stalin met this problem by reintroducing the Tsarist pass laws, which resulted in these dispossessed peasants being forced ‘home’ to starve. An added advantage to Stalin of these pass laws was that peasants, without any working class experience, could be introduced into the workforce in an organised manner.
Baitalsky also writes of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and claims that after the Second World War when the Nazi concentration camps were revealed to the world, the population of the Soviet Union were not told that Jews were the main victims. Every nationality was stated to have been found in the camps, but not Jews, but by this time ‘cosmopolitanism’ had also become a dirty word in Russia. This meant that Jews had relatives and other contacts outside Russia, and were therefore suspect.
In the light of the present war by Russia against the Chechens, it is of interest to know that there is a history relating to this, for the Chechens were one of five peoples deported from their homelands as ‘unreliable’ when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War. History might not always repeat itself, but it certainly colours events. For instance, Baitalsky states that one of Stalin’s great heroes was Ivan the Terrible!
Baitalsky writes also of his private life, his first wife and the mother of his two children, whom he met in the Komsomol, but who became a committed Stalinist, and his friends from Komsomol days who disappeared into the camps, or who lived in poverty. This is a book that’s well worth reading, it’s thought-provoking, and poses many questions on the nature of bureaucracy and the state.
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.
********
Jim Higgins
Trotskyism in the United States
(1997)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 6 No. 2/3, Summer 1996, pp. 265-69.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
George Breitman, Paul LeBlanc and Alan Wald
Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp. 318
Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp. 318
I FIRST came across the Trotskyist movement, and that in its Healyite manifestation, in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. That speech, such a well-kept secret that the full text was in the next issue of the Observer, showed beyond dispute that Stalin was not only fallible, but also a mass murderer in the tradition of, and easily surpassing, Ivan the Terrible. The shock of all these revelations was rather like the one you might experience on hearing the Virgin Mary ask the procurator to take her first born into care. In that splintered aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech, I, together with thousands of others, came to realise that yesterday’s political certainty was but the prelude to today’s disillusion.
During that hand-wringing interregnum, where the most oft-heard phrase was ‘Oh God, where did it all go wrong?’, a few hundred of us were introduced to Trotskyism. The negative aspect was Gerry Healy, who on first, and all subsequent, sight looked as if he had recently been fulfilling an active rôle in the murkier recesses of an apocalyptic work by Hieronymus Bosch. The Healy factor was, however, heavily outweighed by the Trotsky effect, as expressed in his published works. The simple, not to say simple-minded, certainties of Stalinism were no match for the high tensile, armoured certainties of Trotskyism. This was not just any old suit of armour, it came fully equipped with hand-stitched lapels, waistcoat and two pairs of trousers. Not only could this theory answer all your questions, even those you had not the wit to ask, but it was also a complete defence against all the slings and arrows of any outrageous fortune that happened to be lurking about the place.Ill-favoured Healy might have been, but he had the tremendous advantage of possessing a number of key texts by Leon Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed. There are better books by Trotsky, but there are none that could have been more appropriate to the times than The Revolution Betrayed in the years 1956–57. These gems from the pen of the master came to us via the good offices of the US Socialist Workers Party. Whatever my subsequent criticism of the SWP, I shall always be grateful for that introduction into a world of grown-up Marxist politics.
Nowadays, I am told, the SWP not only eschews all generosity with Trotsky’s texts, they have also eschewed Trotskyism. Under their maximum leader Jack Barnes, the SWP declares itself to be a sister party of the Cuban Communist Party. Whether the Cubans’ own maximum leader entertains similar feelings of sisterhood toward Jack Barnes and his comrades is open to doubt. Holding such views, it is only proper that they should abandon Trotskyism, for even the most egregiously opportunist Trotskyist could not pretend that the working class had moved south, and was surreptitiously carrying through its revolutionary purposes in the disguise of an overweight, bearded Cuban petit-bourgeois. Whilst this is noted in the book here under review, it does not seem to excite much interest in the authors. This may be because Breitman is dead, and was in any case part of the leadership that first endorsed the assumption of Cuba into the pantheon of ‘workers’ states’, whilst LeBlanc and Wald joined the SWP after this great theoretical breakthrough had been made.
Right at the beginning of this book Paul LeBlanc writes: ‘Neither my collaborator Alan Wald and I are satisfied with the modest cross section provided here ...’ Well, they can add my name to the list as well. For them, Trotskyism in the United States is the Socialist Workers Party, the 18 years of the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League merit only passing reference, and the International Socialists no mention at all. Wald and LeBlanc are American academics, and both of them write in that clotted style which was pioneered by Erlichman and Haldeman, and was not the least of their crimes against humanity. Wald, who has the more interesting thesis, was clearly pulling ahead of LeBlanc in the race for my approval, when he introduced that abomination the verb ‘to critique’ as in ‘he critiqued ...’ I subjected him to a great deal of ‘critiquing’ for that, I can tell you. Breitman, who was self-educated, produces an altogether nicer class of prose.
What the authors do have in common is that they were all expelled from the SWP by Jack Barnes and his camarilla. For Breitman this must have been a particularly bitter experience, because he had been part of the Farrell Dobbs-Tom Kerry leadership that had selected Barnes in the first place. As LeBlanc explains: ‘The most serious errors by the SWP “old guard” were made after Cannon’s retirement from the central leadership. These were associated, in part, with the selection and grooming of Jack Barnes as the new central leader of the SWP. He was allowed to assemble his own leadership team, and the kind of authority that Cannon, Dobbs and Kerry enjoyed was conferred upon him.’ It is LeBlanc’s general thesis that, with one or two reservations, the SWP was essentially a sound organisation until Barnes was handed the franchise. Having acquired the job through a pose of ultra-Cannonism, it was not too long before he ‘undermined the party democracy that is essential to Leninism’.
Barnes, according to the convincing testimony of our authors, behaved in an undemocratic manner. What seems to have escaped their notice is that there is something amiss in a leadership approaching its sell-by date hand-picking its successor. James P. Cannon chose Farrell Dobbs to be his successor, as the man most likely to continue the traditions of Cannonism. To ensure that Dobbs kept to that tradition, Cannon set up a sort of parallel centre in California where he could, with no little embarrassment to Dobbs, correct any deviations from Cannonite rectitude. This is a style of selection that was popular in the Tory party, until it conferred leadership on Alec Douglas Home, which effectively discredited the whole procedure. Unfortunately, when Barnes, through a stunning display of devotion to the living thought of Cannon, acquired the franchise and then proceeded to divest himself of this heritage, there was no way of effectively calling him to order. It was now Jack Barnes’ party, and he could give it to Castro, or to anyone else his mean little heart desired.
I have little doubt that Jack Barnes is not the man you would want in charge of your favourite revolutionary party. Frankly, I would advise against having him in for baby-sitting, but it has to be conceded that the constitutional niceties were observed when he got rid of troublesome opponents. He just utilised the draconian rules enacted by the Kerry-Dobbs leadership to rid themselves of Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson. Later, given a little practice, Barnes began to get a bit inventive with his expulsion technique. The Internationalist Tendency were declared to be a separate organisation, and were not allowed to re-register. This cunning ploy ensured that they were not allowed to utilise the appeals procedure.
Lowering over the history of the SWP is the dominating presence of James P. Cannon. Of the three authors of the essays in this book, George Breitman is the most dedicated Cannonite. His view is encapsulated in the quote: ‘I am very satisfied with Marxism and Leninism and with the American version of that, which came to get the name of “Cannonism” in our movement.’
Alan Wald represents the opposite pole in the volume. He takes the view that Cannon, despite his manifest talents, inculcated a notion in the party that it represented the acme of revolutionary purity, an immaculate organisation, with muscles twangingly poised to lead the workers to power at a moment’s notice. This, which we might call self-deluding sectarianism, is beautifully summed up in Cannon’s Theses on the American Revolution of 1946: ‘The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the US, does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the Socialist Workers Party... The fundamental core of the professional leadership has been assembled ... The task of the SWP consists simply in this: to remain true to its program and banner ...’ This was put even more sharply by Morris Stein (who was National Secretary whilst Cannon was in prison during the war) with the words:
‘We are monopolists in the field of politics. We cannot stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution, can do it only through one party and one program ... This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretence of being a working class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to the revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery.’
If, on reading this, you do not experience something of the cold chill of the Lubyanka cellars, you almost certainly have your central heating turned up expensively high.
The middle ground in all this is occupied by Paul LeBlanc. His view is that the formative years of the SWP were the time when the opposing contenders for leadership in the working class were either Stalinism or Social Democracy. In the 1930s neither of these forces would accept work or discussion with Trotskyists, who were thus alone and must shout very loud to be heard.Really though, the explicit sectarian vainglory in Stein is implicit in Cannon, because for good or ill he set his stamp on the SWP. Cannon was a native American revolutionary, experienced in working class politics before the founding of the CPUSA, and an influential figure within that party. He learned well and participated freely in the faction fights that enlivened the early years of American Communism, but he was always the junior partner in the combinations he joined. Early in the proceedings he became aware that advancement in the sections of the Communist International depended on choosing the right patron in its leadership. He was less concerned at the fact that Zinoviev and Stalin could impose a minority leadership on the majority of the US party, than that it was not his minority that was chosen. When it came to the much smaller world of Trotskyism, Cannon made sure that he was 110 per cent on the right side of L.D.T., and, whenever given the chance, operated in the Fourth International like a cut-price Zinoviev.
In the early years of the Left Opposition, if Cannon was the best known figure, he was, at least, associated with some other formidable personalities, the most outstanding being Max Shachtman. These two complemented each other very effectively in those formative years. Shachtman was the brilliant Socialist intellectual; witty, stylish, a ruthless polemicist and debater, and at the same time very funny and highly approachable, especially for the young. Cannon, an altogether more dour character, was given to dark depression when things were not going well, and in those moods was liable to withdraw from the struggle to commune with vast quantities of the hard stuff. Nevertheless, he was an exceptionally talented propagandist, both in print and on the platform. If Cannon was not in the same street as Shachtman intellectually, neither was Shachtman a patch on Cannon in the popular agitation stakes. Later on, others of considerable calibre joined the movement: James Burnham, A.J. Muste, Hal Draper, Felix Morrow, C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, to name just a few.
The movement has always been plagued by the proliferation of tiny groups, each with its founding guru, whose raison d’être is difficult to fathom, the quality of their cadre not discernible to the naked eye, and whose inevitable passing is unaccompanied by expressions of regret. The SWP, however, was not such an organisation. The people mentioned above would all have had some significant rôle to play in a movement that was infinitely more successful and with many more members than the SWP ever enjoyed. It was their tragedy, as it was for the rest of the Trotskyist movement, that they never connected with the working class in any but the most transitory and peripheral way. Perhaps, in general, it is true that the upper and nether millstones of Stalinism and Social Democracy ground the revolutionaries to dust, but in America Stalinism was never a mass party, and Social Democracy was even smaller. With the exception of the Teamsters, the SWP was hardly involved at all in the great upsurge of the CIO, and during the height of that union organising drive, the Trotskyists were engaged in two years of deep entry in the American Socialist Party.
None of this is to suggest that if they had had an orientation to the CIO it would have been a runaway success, but it is to say that in any set of circumstances where the revolutionary movement has a chance to connect with the workers, it should take it. You will not find the proletarian vanguard in Norman Thomas’ back pocket, any more than you will find it in Fidel’s beard, although there is at least one large petit-bourgeois behind that. The irony of the Trotskyists’ entry into the American Socialist Party is that they came out with more than double their original membership, having taken the Socialist Party’s youth movement almost lock, stock and barrel. This splendid young cadre formed the majority of Shachtman’s faction – and accompanied him out of the SWP in 1940.
The orientation to the working class is not just some fuddy-duddy old foible, it is the essence of revolutionary Marxism, but it is one of the easiest to forget in the over-heated enthusiasm for a new get-rich-quick theory. You can substitute the peasantry for the revolutionary class. You can witter on about ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’, or Fabian-Stalinism, like Pablo; you might even see the revolution springing unchained from the junior common room; or you could hymn the praises of youth, and good luck to you mate; but none of that will have anything to do with Marxism. One of the besetting sins of our movement is what might be called ‘the Socialism of the peroration’. This is where we affirm our ‘undying faith in the working class’, and promise to ‘storm both heaven and earth’ in the very near future. Then we go home and try and think up some short cut that will save us from all the hard work, and frequent failure, of organising in the working class.
It is this sort of thing that Trotsky called substitutionism, that is, a besetting sin. In 1973 the SWP had around 1,000 members, and LeBlanc quotes someone called Sheir who reported that at that time it had 120 persons, most of them paid, working at the party HQ, with room for many more. George Novack boasted that the SWP had ‘an infrastructure for a party of about 100,000’. During the period in question, SWP branches had local branch offices and full-time organisers, and paid for their own leaflets and propaganda. The subs range was from $5 to $50 per week (with the average much closer to $5 than $50, I should think), and the balance after paying local costs was sent to the party. How the party financed its 120 full-time head office staff and all the associated expenses on this income is difficult to understand. It is even more difficult to understand why the party members kept sending the money when it is recalled that this vast army of party functionaries managed in just 12 months to increase the membership by a pathetic 140. A year later still, Barnes’ imaginative expulsion tactics had reduced the membership once more to 1,000. You pays your money, and Jack Barnes makes his choice.
Whilst we are discussing membership figures, it is quite interesting to note that the SWP never had a membership of more than 1,500, and that was the high point in 1938, as they exited from the Socialist Party. That was the time when they were claiming 2,500 at the founding congress of the Fourth International. In 1944 they had just 840 as they set out to arrange the future of the British section and control the Fourth International. The postwar SWP, whose membership was usually in the hundreds and never exceeded 1,250, threw its weight about internationally, and presumed to lecture the world on how to make the revolution. It is difficult to say who was the most deluded, the SWP for believing its own vainglory, or the rest of us for accepting it as good coin.
When Trotsky was murdered, Cannon saw himself as the natural successor to lead the forces of the Fourth International. In 1940, of course, the Fourth International had been put into lukewarm storage for the duration, but in 1944 Cannon sent his man Sam Gordon to the UK to sort out the British Trotskyists. This, Cannon’s second attempt to unify the British section of the Fourth International, involved setting up Gerry Healy as the opposition to the Haston-Grant leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This silly piece of politicking is alone enough to nullify the picture of the wise leader portrayed in LeBlanc’s essays, if the fault had not been further compounded by his selection of Michel Raptis (Pablo) as the man to run the Fourth International when it was returned to Europe.
Neither of these interesting sidelights into Cannon’s legacy are mentioned in the book, although LeBlanc does treat us to examples of praise for Cannon and the SWP from ex-members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Now this is odd, because LeBlanc is co-editor, along with Scott McLemee, of C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, which suggests that he is familiar with the texts of the Johnson-Forest Tendency including, presumably, The Balance Sheet Completed (subtitled Ten Years of American Trotskyism), the tendency’s final farewell to Trotskyism. Here is what Johnson-Forest had to say, amongst other things, about the SWP:
‘Finally there was forced upon us a shocking recognition of the callousness, the brutality, the lack of elementary human decency, far less revolutionary principle and vigilance to which substantial elements of the most highly placed leadership had sunk ... As we understood ourselves and where we were, the cry became unanimous: “Let us get out of here at once. It is a political gas chamber. We do not trust this political leadership to carry out its own political line. None of our comrades who is in any difficulty can trust himself to them. Even those who are not degenerate are ready to support those who are when their crimes are discovered. We do not want to discuss with them. Such a discussion can only besmirch us. Let us get out of here as quickly as we can.” We hesitated for a moment, but the final, the ultimate certainty came with the discovery that the one with the most brains, authority and experience who had come to the rescue of the politically unstable and fortified the turn to Stalinism, was also at the disposal of any degenerate who might need protection.’
Now all of that, which might put you in mind of the last days of the Roman Empire or of the Weimar Republic – or Gerry Healy – is saying that for Johnson-Forest the SWP was a moral swamp, and one would have expected that an admirer of both James P. Cannon and C.L.R. James would, if he must quote Johnson-Forest in this context, have something to say about the tendency’s final considered word on the SWP.
Alan Wald, despite his addiction to the noun-verb, does cast a rather more critical eye on the SWP. He pays due homage to the high talents of some of the Trotskyist leaders, but points out that not only were they unsuccessful in their own terms, but were also failures by almost any comparison you like to make. Dogmatism was and is almost always confused with high principle, and this is nowhere more apparent than on the tortured question of the class nature of the Stalinist states. As Wald says in a footnote on page 285: ‘None of these theories [state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivism or workers’ state – JH] persuasively accounts for all aspects of these societies ... Unfortunately, for most Trotskyists, absolute fidelity to their particular interpretation of a specific theory of Soviet-type societies is their political touchstone.’ Wald, as you will see from this, has a definite grip on reality. He sums up his final essay: ‘Trotskyism!!! is dead. Long live Trotskyism.’ I do not mind seconding that particular proposition.For the rest, this is an inadequate book that will be all but incomprehensible to young would-be Marxists who do not have any great knowledge of Trotskyism in general, or the SWP in particular. This may be because some of the material was originally written by LeBlanc and Wald as internal bulletins in obscure faction fights in the SWP. Whatever the reason, this is a pity, because there is the beginning of a worthwhile critique that might help us all to greater clarity and effectiveness.
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When the Proletariat Rose
Workers Fight
When the Proletariat Rose to Change the World
Internationalist Communist Forum no. 27, London 1996, pp. 32, 70p
When the Proletariat Rose to Change the World
Internationalist Communist Forum no. 27, London 1996, pp. 32, 70p
SURPRISINGLY LITTLE has been produced by the left in Britain in book or in pamphlet form to defend Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom from the ferocious attacks of the Stalinists. An honourable exception is Bob Pitt’s translation of the crucial passages from Hernández’s memoirs reviewed elsewhere in this issue, and this pamphlet ranks with it as a valuable summary of the real politics of the Spanish Civil War.
Far from being a conflict of ‘Fascism versus democracy’, it tells us right at the start that ‘the reality was entirely different’ (p. 1), and develops its argument step by step from there. It is clearly written, and crams an amazing amount of accurate material into a few pages. No better guide can be placed in the hands of those approaching the subject for the first time, and it deserves to be sold outside every showing of the film.There is only one minor factual slip, the assertion that the mass base of the CNT was limited to Catalonia (p. 3), forgetting the support that it possessed amongst the very poorest peasantry in Andalusia, and indeed elsewhere in Spain. The CNT was, after all, by far the largest trade union federation, numbering some 1.5 million members to the UGT’s one million, and many of the UGT’s strongest sections were caught behind the Nationalist lines.
More could also have been done to discredit the dishonest and sinister claim dealt with on page 20 that the USSR granted disinterested ‘aid’ to the Republic. As a matter of fact, every piece of Soviet weaponry that arrived had been paid for several times over, for Spain’s gold reserve, one of the largest half dozen in the world, had been shipped into Odessa harbour. Stalin’s hold over the Republic’s wealth not only prevented it from buying any arms elsewhere, but also enabled the Comintern advisors, the Russian diplomats and the local Stalinist hierarchy to keep a stranglehold over the war effort and the country. It was for this reason rather than his expansion of the carabineros (p. 22) that Juan Negrín became prime minister after the Stalinists had ousted Largo Caballero (p. 28), for it was he who was responsible for the removal of this gold along with the Russian military attaché, Arthur Stashevsky.
This brings us to this pamphlet’s only real weakness, its failure to make much of a distinction between the Socialist left, which Trotsky regarded as centrist, and the Socialist right, which allied wholeheartedly with the Stalinists in the counter-revolution. Indeed, it even argues that the defeat of the left was its own fault: ‘If the Communist Party was able, in the end, to act as the policeman of the bourgeois order, it was primarily because the vast majority of revolutionary workers remained under the influence of the reformist leaders.’ (p. 32) By so placing an equals sign between gangsters like Orlov and muddled old Socialists like Caballero, the Stalinists are let neatly off the hook – and Trotsky placed the main responsibility for the betrayal squarely upon their shoulders. This stems from the strange assumption of Workers’ Fight and its co-thinkers that Stalinists are always to the left of Socialists, an assumption dubious in Spain, and laughable over here.
But if all the reader learns from this brochure is to watch his back where Stalinists are involved, it will have served a useful purpose.
Al Richardson
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The Unknown Lenin
Richard Pipes
The Unknown Lenin
Yale University Press, London, 1996, pp. 204, £18.50
The Unknown Lenin
Yale University Press, London, 1996, pp. 204, £18.50
HOT ON the heels of his sizeable no-holds-barred volumes on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime under Lenin, the leading conservative historian Richard Pipes presents a hundred or so assorted documents by Lenin that had been omitted from his Collected Works and kept hidden away in the Soviet archives, together with some documents addressed to him along with his comments.
The title itself isn’t quite accurate. Some of this material has appeared elsewhere in the English language. Lenin’s speech at the Ninth Party Conference in 1920 was included in Al Richardson’s collection In Defence of the Russian Revolution, and his instructions calling for gold to be confiscated from Orthodox churches appeared years ago in Religion in Communist Lands (Volume 7, no. 1, Spring 1979). Dmitri Volkogonov’s Lenin: Life and Legacy and the third volume of Robert Service’s Lenin trilogy, The Iron Ring, both quote from many of the documents in this book, and, moreover, put them into a much broader context.Furthermore, the image of Lenin presented in this book is hardly unknown. Anyone with any knowledge of the man knows that he was poor at delegating work and involved himself with things which could have been dealt with at a lower level, went over the top at times in his polemics against political opponents, dealt deviously with foreign governments, was critical of his comrades, called for the exile of hostile intellectuals, and demanded harsh measures against opposition. So why publish a very small proportion of the thousands of documents that are in the archives, a selection which adds little to our knowledge of him?
As we have noted previously in this journal (Volume 5, no. 4, pp. 213–21), Pipes is an historian who allows his political views to influence his writings to the extent that they lose the objectivity that is necessary for a worthwhile historical account. It seems to me that the documents in this selection have been chosen specifically for the purpose of putting Lenin in as bad a light as possible. However, Pipes is fighting yesterday’s battles. Nobody these days sees Lenin as a plaster saint, Leninists themselves consider that some of his actions hindered the fight for Socialism, and is anyone going to lose any sleep over whether he had an affair with Inessa Armand? Not surprisingly, The Unknown Lenin has a somewhat redundant feel about it.
Some of the documents require more background information than is provided if they are to be fully understood, not least Lenin’s draft instructions to Bolsheviks in Ukraine which call for Jews and other urban people to be kept out of the Soviet administration. Although this is published here to infer that Lenin was anti-Semitic, it is much more likely to be in respect of ensuring that more Ukrainians were recruited to the Soviet regime in Ukraine, rather than Russians and Jews, who comprised much of the urban population, and were predominant in the Ukrainian Soviet apparatus. Anti-Semitism or indifference to the fate of the Jews is implied in respect of reports of pogroms to Lenin to which no responses have been found. If no replies can be found to these and other documents sent to him, were they written and then lost or misfiled? (That documents may have been lost is raised in the introduction.) Does marking documents ‘for the archives’ mean that Lenin did not act on them, as is suggested? Or did he take up the issues informally, without writing anything down? Some documents were also addressed to other leading Bolsheviks, so were they taken up first by them? Short of knowing every minute of Lenin’s life, and every word he spoke, something that was beyond the capabilities of even the most pedantic Soviet scholar, can anything categorical be said?
Although there are some interesting documents in this book, particularly Lenin’s disposition on Roman Malinovsky, the Tsarist police agent in the Bolsheviks’ Duma delegation, and his remarkably prescient warning to Kamenev about the consequences of removing Trotsky from the Central Committee, I can’t help thinking that Pipes has picked these documents in order to bolster his own bitterly hostile attitude towards Lenin. Like Volkogonov in his final years, Pipes seeks to promote a one-dimensional Lenin, a malignant incarnation of evil, and tries to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm. A less prejudiced investigator could have used the wealth of documentation in the archives in order to produce a worthwhile analysis of the mechanics of the Soviet government. If, as Yuri Baranov says in his introduction, work on unpublished Lenin material is to continue, let us hope that in future it is put in the hands of a scholar who can provide a more objective understanding of Lenin and the Soviet regime than old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Pipes.
Paul Flewers
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John Maclean and the CPGB
Bob Pitt
John Maclean and the CPGB
Pitt Publications, London, 1995, pp. 44, £2.00
John Maclean and the CPGB
Pitt Publications, London, 1995, pp. 44, £2.00
JOHN MACLEAN is a familiar figure to those with an interest in the politics of the revolutionary left in Britain. A member of the Social Democratic Federation from early 1903, he remained a committed Social Democrat up to the outbreak of the First World War, winning a modest reputation as a tireless propagandist and a skilful Marxist educator. On the outbreak of war, he adopted a position of active opposition to a war which he characterised as imperialist, and he consistently maintained the view that the destruction of the British Empire was an object to be enthusiastically desired and fought for. To that end he gave immediate support to the Dublin Rising of 1916 in terms not dissimilar to Lenin’s, and he remained committed to the cause of Irish liberation as a key element in the anti-imperialist project. It also brought him to the attention of Lenin, and, following the October Revolution, assured him an important status in the Third International. However, in 1920–21 Maclean became estranged from those who were forging a British Communist Party, and he never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Instead, he criticised those who were initially prominent within it, and found a niche briefly in the Socialist Labour Party, and later the Scottish Workers Republican Party, before he died at the end of 1923, a largely isolated figure.
Bob Pitt has produced a pamphlet dealing with Maclean’s relationship with the CPGB, which was a decisive if not the decisive moment in his political career. The pamphlet is well and clearly written, and adds new information to that already available on Maclean’s rôle in the political debates surrounding the formation of the CPGB. It also contains a reprint of Maclean’s Open Letter to Lenin, in which he outlined his analysis of the general political situation in Britain, and his particular criticisms of the political manoeuvring then taking place on the revolutionary left.Pitt’s thesis is not new, but is a reformulation of the orthodox Communist Party line that was first developed by Willie Gallacher and Tom Bell. It acknowledges Maclean’s courageous rôle during the First World War, which resulted in his imprisonment, and attributes Maclean’s estrangement from the developing CPGB in 1920–21 to the consequences of that imprisonment. These consequences are alleged to have undermined Maclean’s mental state to the point where paranoia profoundly affected his political judgement. Pitt cites various examples of Maclean’s paranoid behaviour, which involved a sense of being followed and watched by government agents, and his suspicious and startling criticisms of important figures within the revolutionary left, most notably Francis Meynell (the editor of The Communist), Colonel L’Estrange Malone and Theodore Rothstein, the long-time SDF member and the principal representative of the Bolsheviks in the processes leading to the formation of the CPGB. In addition, Maclean denounced Gallacher for lacking a real basis in Marxism, and for having betrayed him personally by asserting his mental instability in a letter to the SLP.
For Pitt, all this leads to the conclusion that Maclean was ‘mad’ at the crucial time when the CPGB was formed, and Maclean’s criticism of the party and its leaders can thus be safely rejected as the product of an unbalanced mind. Pitt’s purpose is not to denigrate Maclean, but ‘to set the record straight’, and counter those who would use Maclean’s criticisms to argue ‘that the Bolshevik Revolution and all its consequences were rotten from the start’. This is presumably aimed at someone like Walter Kendall, who has long held that the creation of the CPGB was the product of ‘external’ pressures, rather than a ‘natural’ development of the British revolutionary left. Moreover, Kendall sees this forced development as representing an ‘historic error on the grand scale’ because it effectively cut off the potentially rich tributaries of the left from the mainstream labour movement, leaving the left as a backwater.
It is not necessary to go all the way with Kendall to recognise that Maclean’s reservations about the revolutionary potentiality of the CPGB and its early leaders were not so absurd that they could not be shared by others who were no ‘madder’ than he. Indeed, it is worth noting that of those British left wing organisations specifically invited to the founding of the Third International, almost none lost its identity within the CPGB, but rather opposed its particular configuration. The CPGB did, however, offer prominent positions to Malone, a member of parliament with a history of virulent anti-Socialist outbursts, and Francis Meynell, who, along with Malone, was identified by Maclean as having no background in Marxism. Meynell himself subsequently observed that no revolutionary theoretical journal could have had an editor less theoretically versed in Marxism than he. Yet he was installed by Arthur MacManus.
It is difficult to judge Maclean’s ‘madness’ with any real confidence at this distance in time, and without a medical background. Certainly, as Pitt recognises, people like Maclean on the left were conventionally defined as ‘mad’ for holding the beliefs they did. But Pitt goes further, and accepts the evidence that Maclean was paranoid in the proper medical sense. For my part, the best evidence is that of Doctor Garrey, the Medical Officer at Peterhead Prison who refused to certify Maclean insane despite pressure from his superiors. The specific evidence of ‘madness’ related to Maclean’s allegations that his prison food was drugged. Since this was patently untrue, the medical practitioners saw this as clear evidence of mental instability. However, Garrey, who had the most contact with Maclean, refused to accept this diagnosis. Pitt’s suggestion that Garrey’s refusal to certify Maclean insane can be questioned on the grounds that having organised his forced feeding, he was anxious to deny that Maclean suffered ill effects that could have been attributed to his actions, is not a credible explanation. If Garrey had any concerns about how his treatment of Maclean might have been interpreted, the simplest course was to declare him insane. Maclean’s criticisms of leading Communists may well have been extreme. He may well have cited the wrong individuals as government agents operating at the highest level of the CPGB (ironically, the support for such a misconception comes from one such agent referred to in the pamphlet). However, there is no short cut to considering the essential criticisms made about the events surrounding the formation of the CPGB, nor about the inherent failings of that party.
Maclean was not an isolated revolutionary ‘non-joiner’, but was one amongst many. As Raymond Challinor has observed, the CPGB was formed as the result of a series of mergers, and, perhaps uniquely, the product of these mergers was less than the sum of those involved at the outset. Many of those who chose to remain outside did so because they believed it to be dominated by reformists and ‘Johnny-come-latelys’ to the revolutionary cause. Whilst some of these oppositionists can be seen as ultra-leftists or ‘infantile leftists’ in the Leninist sense, this is not a charge that could easily be laid at Maclean’s door. Maclean was not an ultra-leftist, and right up to the last few months of his life, when worn out, ill and isolated, he lost his sense of political reality, his letters and indeed his Open Letter to Lenin show him to be more realistic and balanced in his assessment of the political situation in Britain than the leadership of the CPGB. If you leave aside the vitriolic attacks launched on Maclean by members of the CPGB in language familiarly applied by Trotskyists and Stalinists to Socialists of all hues, then Maclean’s criticisms of the emerging and infant CPGB have a powerful ring to them. In taking them seriously, it is not inevitable that you are forced to repudiate the October Revolution, or even the need for a Communist Party in Britain, but maybe to ask whether the CPGB that was formed in 1921 was the only such party available, and if there were not better options.
Copies of this pamphlet can be obtained from the author at 92 Castlehaven Road, London NW1 8PL.
John McHugh
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Israel Shahak
Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Pluto Press, London 1994, pp. 127, £11.99
Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Pluto Press, London 1994, pp. 127, £11.99
APART FROM providing a useful supplement to Enzo Traverso’s work reviewed in our last issue, few books explain quite so much modern history as this one does. Why is a state professing a universalist religion so ruthlessly racist with its Palestinian victims? Why are more of its governmental crises ‘caused by religious reasons, often trivial, than by any other cause’ (p. 98)? Why do so many studious-looking gentlemen dressed in mid-nineteenth century clothing turn out to stone archaeologists digging up bronze age burials? Why does a people of such small numbers once believed to inhabit an area no larger than Wales harbour such far-reaching plans of conquest? How did the ideals of the later Old Testament prophets give rise to such a frightening and frightful obscurantism, backed by so predatory a state?
Shahak’s credentials for his bold exposure of the racist corruption of Israeli politics are impeccable. A retired professor of chemistry who had suffered in Belsen and served in the Israeli army, he turned to civil rights activity when he found to his disgust that rabbis who supported a Jew who refused to call an ambulance for a gentile on the sabbath were acting in accordance with Talmudic law (p. 1). Although he makes no secret of his ‘opposition to Marxism, both in philosophy and as a social theory’ (p. 49), much that is vital to a revolutionary understanding of world politics is crammed into his pages, with a staggering display of erudition, and not a word of it is wasted.He makes it plain that not all the victims of anti-Semitism have been Jews, for racism breeds racism. Some horrible examples are given of Talmudic hostility to other peoples and creeds, even monotheistic ones (pp. 20–7, 74–98), and it is with some sadness that we learn that this spirit even infected Maimonides (pp. viii, 24–6, 80). But there is far more to the book than this.
Its analysis of the main phases in the history of Judaism (pp. 50–7) places them firmly within the development of the social conditions of its existence, a dimension that is so signally lacking in Traverso’s book. He explains our inability to grasp the real mechanism that drives Israel forward today from the fact that whilst knowledge of the Old Testament is widely disseminated, modern Judaism’s inheritance from Kabbala and Talmud is almost unknown to outsiders, and it is this fusion of traditional lore that exercises such a fatal influence upon the state (pp. 36ff.). His description of Kabbalism in chapter three as a ‘decay of monotheism’, and of Jewish society in eighteenth century Germany as ‘burning of books, persecution of writers, disputes about the magic powers of amulets’ (p. 16) might be upsetting to many, but it is backed by numerous and telling examples. By this time, he concludes, classical Judaism had degenerated into ‘a tribal collection of empty religious and magic superstitions’ (p. 47).
Nowhere was this worse than in Poland, ‘the most superstitious and fanatic of all Jewish communities’ (p. 63). It was this population from Eastern Europe, and particularly from Poland and the Ukraine, that set the tone for the politics of modern Israel. It was, as he points out, a community totally without a peasantry and with little sympathy for its predicament, since the rôle of the Jews as bailiffs and tax gatherers on behalf of the nobility in these lands had long exposed it to peasant uprisings and attendant pogroms (pp. 52–5, 61–6, 72–4, etc.). Now the inhabitants of the land whom they displaced were also predominantly peasants. ‘Insane as it sounds’, he concludes, ‘it is nevertheless plain upon close examination of the real motives of the Zionists, that one of the most deep-seated ideological sources of the Zionist establishment’s persistent hostility towards the Palestinians is the fact that they are identified in the minds of many East European Jews with the rebellious East European peasants who participated in the Chmielnicki uprising and in similar revolts.’ (p. 72)
And the position of Israel in global politics also condemns it to ‘a rôle not unlike that of the Jews in pre-1795 Poland: that of a bailiff to the imperial oppressor’ (p. 73). Only by unlocking this culture can we understand the incredible frenzy in some circles whenever the Israeli government comes to any sort of agreement, however advantageous, with its neighbours. For some rabbinical authorities interpret the poetical flourishes of the Old Testament so as to include within the borders of Biblical Israel all Egypt as far as Cairo, and ‘Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc., as far as the Euphrates (p. 9), whilst ‘in all Talmudic authorities the Land of Israel includes Cyprus’ (p. 90).
I could go further, but to bring out everything of value from this book would be to write a review as long as the book itself. Far better read it instead, and encourage all your friends to read it as well!
Al Richardson
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After Stalinism
Andres Romero
Después Del Stalinismo: Los Estados Burocráticos y la revolución socialista
Antídoto, Buenos Aires 1995, pp. 251
Después Del Stalinismo: Los Estados Burocráticos y la revolución socialista
Antídoto, Buenos Aires 1995, pp. 251
Ernesto González (Coordinador)
El trotskismo obrero e internacionalista en la Argentina. Tomo I. Del GOM a la federación Banners Del PORN (1943–1955)
Antídoto, Buenos Aires 1995, pp. 274
THE MORENO tendency produces considerable puzzlement outside Argentina. In the mid-1980s Moreno’s party, the MAS, was probably the largest group in the world claiming to be Trotskyist. Nahuel Moreno (Hugo Bressano, 1924–87) was obviously a figure of enormous dynamism, whose ability to build and sustain a group for more than 40 years was an enormous achievement. Yet we have, until now, lacked a detailed history of the tendency, and have had to rely on polemical accounts from political opponents. These two recent books by leading members of the MAS are, therefore, to be welcomed.El trotskismo obrero e internacionalista en la Argentina. Tomo I. Del GOM a la federación Banners Del PORN (1943–1955)
Antídoto, Buenos Aires 1995, pp. 274
El trotskismo obrero ..., produced by a committee led by Ernesto González, shows how seriously the MAS takes its history. This first volume covers the period from 1943 until 1955, before the tendency had reached the strength which it was later to achieve. The first two chapters give an account of Trotskyism in Argentina until 1943, which agrees with that in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2. It then goes on to describe the beginnings of the MAS tendency when Moreno, a precocious boy who was giving lectures on philosophy when he was 15, founded his own group, the Grupo Obrero Marxista, whilst still in his teens, after breaking with Liborio Justo. Moreno had by 1943 come to the conclusion that the failures of Argentinean Trotskyism stemmed from its poor social composition. Therefore, he and his few young followers moved to activity in working class areas, recruiting some workers of Polish and Jewish origin in the textile industry. The book’s access to oral history sources is impressive here. How many groups can call on the memories of workers who were active 50 years earlier? The rich detail of the devoted work in building up trade union activity would be the envy of any university social history department.
The beginnings of the GOM coincided, of course, with the rise of Perón. Here, the book is less informative. In particular, the account of the massive workers’ demonstration and strike of 17 October 1945, which freed Perón from prison and brought him to power, is very unsatisfactory. On 17 October, the key date in Argentinean working class history, the Communist and Socialist Parties supported the oligarchy and opposed the strike, thereby condemning themselves to impotence. So did the GOM, although that is not made clear in El Trotskismo obrero ... Nor is it in González’s earlier work, Qué fue y qué es el Peronismo (1974). Once in power, Perón encouraged trade unionism, whilst trying to keep it under his own control, and forced through the massive welfare programme which won him the support of most workers. The unions were not merely Labour Fronts on the Fascist model, but they were subject to all kinds of bureaucratic interference. The GOM sensibly worked within these union structures, trying to form broad alliances against the sometimes violent opposition of the Peronist bureaucracy. Much of the latter part of the book is an excessively detailed account of these struggles, to the detriment of any overall analysis, so that it becomes the description of a trade union faction rather than of a political party. In 1948 the GOM became the Partido Obrero Revolucionario. In 1954 it took part in the elections as part of the Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional, which was legally entitled to stand. The book describes this tactic as ‘entrism’, but, in fact, it seems to have been a merger with a splinter of the old Socialist Party. Once again, political analysis is buried under lengthy, if vivid, descriptions of electoral meetings. The PSR opposed the military coup in 1955 which toppled Perón and restored the traditional oligarchy, but this gets less analysis than a description of the crimes of Pabloite revisionism – of which there can never be too much.
The book tells us something about Morenoism, both in its contents and what is left out. Clearly, Moreno directed his efforts in Argentina at the working class, not at rebel officers or an imaginary peasantry. The steady work over years brought results, even if the ‘Trotskyism’ was, in Moreno’s own words, ‘barbaric’. In terms of intellectual baggage, Moreno travelled light, and this seems often to have been an advantage. There is much mention of self-criticism, but it is expressed in such general terms as to be uninformative. While Moreno’s attitude to non-working class forces seems to be so incompatible with Marxism that opponents have seen him as a chameleon, prepared to adapt to any environment, his working class supporters seem to have accepted his sometimes bizarre alliances. What did they think of their party’s turns and twists? The extremely detailed personal reminiscences are of no help here. It is to be hoped that as well as producing further volumes, the MAS will open its archives to independent scholars who might be able to produce the synthesis which has eluded the present authors. Until that happens we are dependent on the works of Moreno’s political opponents. There have been detailed criticisms from Workers Power, the Spartacist League and (in Spanish) Politica Obrera. These describe how Moreno’s group survived the collapse of Maoism and Castroism, despite having embraced them.
Después Del Stalinismo is a very different book, and marks the formal abandonment by the MAS of Trotskyist positions on the Soviet Union and similar societies. As the subtitle suggests, Después ... abandons the Trotskyist categories of ‘workers’ states’ in favour of ‘bureaucratic states’. (Are not states bureaucratic by definition?) As the Morenoite attitude to the Soviet Union was always hostile, that would seem to be logical, but the change is proclaimed, not argued. Curiously, Romero hardly refers to the extensive polemics within the revolutionary movement on the class nature of those societies. He gives a fairly standard account of the degeneration of the Soviet Union. He describes the evolution of the Soviet Union in recent decades as making the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ label inappropriate, but insists that it was never really suitable. L.D. Trotsky is treated respectfully, but there is no examination of the ideas of those such as Shachtman which generally form the basis for opposed views of the Soviet Union. Frankly, this is poor stuff.
There are lengthy accounts of how the technology of the Soviet Union lagged behind that of the capitalist world. Most of this is generally accepted. Después ... has a stylistic resemblance to El Trotskismo ... in that both are padded with enormously long quotes. Much of Romero’s book consists of extracts from academic works and from the bourgeois press, with his own text almost buried in them. If there is a Morenoite style, it is one in which prolixity and silence are the best forms of concealment. Having struggled through the theoretical preliminaries, we get to the practical purpose of the book: extricating the MAS from Moreno’s prediction that world capitalism was about to collapse, and differentiating the MAS from other products on the political market. Romero claims that Ted Grant’s followers in Russia tag along behind the ‘red-black’ alliance, the United Secretariat joins Gysi’s Social Democratic Party, and the Lambertists everywhere cuddle up to right wing trade union leaders. The Spartacist tendency, amongst others, is criticised for describing the overthrow of Stalinism as a counter-revolution. On the contrary, it was an immense step forward
These two books describing the early and late stages of Morenoism will leave most non-Argentineans puzzled. A reading of Moreno’s own writings ought to cast light on the tendency. However, Nahuel Moreno’s El Partido y la Revolución, a polemic with Ernest Mandel written in 1973, does little to help our understanding. Usually, when Marxists disagree, they understand what their opponents are saying, but it is difficult to follow Moreno’s arguments. Part of the problem may be Moreno’s style of writing, influenced perhaps by his early philosophical inclinations, where criteria of logic, evidence and proof are usually absent.
So, was Morenoism a purely Argentinean phenomenon which cannot be understood outside that cultural context? An argument against it is that in the 1980s, Moreno formed an International (the LIT) which had branches in other Latin American countries, and even in Europe. Opponents seem to suggest that Morenoism is the political equivalent of glue sniffing, and that it is a waste of time to seek coherence where none exists. How, then, can his achievement in maintaining a working class group, often working under severe repression, be explained? He obviously inspired great devotion. His pragmatism allowed him to drop one strategy and pick up another, leaving lesser men to bother about justifications. Critics point to his inconsistency in supporting armed struggle throughout Latin America but not in the Argentine, but his followers owe him their lives for refusing to launch them into a suicidal guerrilla war in the 1970s. By contrast, the followers of Ernest Mandel, an outstanding Marxist theoretician, were massacred. Morenoism peaked in the mid-1980s, when he predicted the fall of capitalism and an Argentinean revolution which would lead the rest of the world. Given the fantastic nature of that world-view, dying in January 1987 saved him a lot of embarrassment. Without him, his movement began to fall apart, although there are three substantial groups claiming his inheritance. Like other great men he seems not to have found adequate successors. Perhaps the description of him by Peter Fryer in Crocodiles in the Streets as a jovial figure who took his place at the end of the queue in the canteen at party headquarters, provides a clue to the affection his followers felt for him.
John Sullivan
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Revolution in Ireland
Conor Kostick
Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917–1923
Pluto Press, London, 1996, pp. 239
Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917–1923
Pluto Press, London, 1996, pp. 239
ALL SERIOUS students of Irish history in the present century, all those British Socialists who wish to further the cause of the working class in our sister isle as well as over here, and all those wishing to understand the labour movement in Europe and its course over the last hundred years or so cannot afford to pass over this book. Packed with vital information available in many other separate publications, but never, as far as I know, assembled in quite such a masterly way in a work of less than 250 pages, it must surely deserve pride of place as the authoritative Socialist survey of this turbulent period in Ireland’s history.
This review cannot possibly do justice to the wealth of detail conveyed in the work. Instead I will try to trace some dominant themes concerning the achievement of Irish independence, the part played by the successors of Larkin and Connolly as leaders of Irish Labour, the partition of the country, and, in general, the policy and tactics necessary to advance the cause of labour in Ireland in those years.The central thesis advanced by Kostick concerning the War of Independence begins from a consideration of the military balance of forces in 1921:
‘The usual argument given for the reason why, despite their determination to crush the rebellion, the British government were forced to the negotiating table is that they had been worn down by the War of Independence waged by the Irish Republican Army. However an examination of the figures challenges that assumption. According to both unionist and republican figures, approximately 18 policemen were killed by the IRA in 1919. In 1920 around 176 policemen were killed (251 wounded); additionally 54 soldiers were killed (118 wounded). Foster’s figures for the whole War of Independence are that 400 policemen and 160 soldiers were killed. This represents about one-fortieth of the police and well under one per cent of the troops in Ireland. If military considerations were the only ones, then the British were far from experiencing difficulties. The IRA numbered between 14,000 and 15,000 volunteers; however, due to shortage of equipment and ammunition only around 5,000 were active. Collins later said that “in the whole of Ireland there were not more than 3,000 fighting men”.’ (pp. 94–5)
Elsewhere in the book Kostick gives figures for the strength of the British Army and police: ‘By the end of 1921 the total number of police was 17,000. The number of troops jumped by a third in June of that year, to over 80,000, with the cabinet discussing the possibility for a “decisive and systematic conquest of the country”.’ (p. 92)
Clearly on the basis of these figures, other factors were at work pushing the British authorities towards some kind of negotiated settlement. Kostick argues that these were ‘the structures of a new Irish state and, far more importantly, the activities of the Irish working class’ (p. 98).It became more and more difficult for the British to provide effective policing in rural areas, and the local courts began to be replaced de facto in many cases by republican ones. The rural poor began to seize land from the richer farmers, whilst the ITUC began organising agricultural workers. Against these threats wealthy farmers began to turn to the underground republican administration for help. But still more serious was the threat posed by the independent action of Irish workers (see Chapter 6, pp. 108–38).
Strikes and occupations mushroomed in the period 1918–23. Red flags appeared on numerous occasions, and occupations and other expressions of workers’ control occurred, called ‘soviets’ in obvious response to the momentous events of 1917 in Russia. In April 1919 Limerick City was declared to be under military control by the British authorities; Limerick’s workers, already angry at the treatment of republican prisoners in the area, answered with a general strike, and effectively ran the city for a fortnight. A year later, in April 1920, a number of republican prisoners in Mountjoy jail in Dublin went on hunger strike, and large crowds of people began gathering outside the prison. The ITUC, one of whose leaders, William O’Brien, had already been arrested and deported to England on trumped-up charges, issued a call for a general strike, which soon had the authorities reeling as locality after locality passed under the effective control of the strikers. The strike forced the release of republican prisoners in substantial numbers. Kostick argues:
‘The strike revealed that Irish workers had the power to defeat British rule. The two days of general strike, threatening to go on even further, did more to undermine British authority than months of armed struggle. Sinn Fein politicians were sidelined by the events, not wanting to be seen to oppose a popular strike against British injustice, but at the same time recognising that the working class’ independent activity was an implicit challenge for the leadership of the national movement.’ (pp. 127–8)
Finally, in May 1920 the railway workers decided to block the transport of military cargoes, including bodies of unarmed military in excess of 20 men, an action which lasted until almost the end of the year. Kostick argues – and his conclusions seem plausible given the parallel militancy of British workers up to April 1921 – that this working class resistance was an important factor in persuading the British government to abandon its plans for an all-out onslaught on the Irish rebels:
‘Looking back over the period ... it is clear that the British government were prepared to sanction an attempt at full military repression of Ireland. That they failed and started to look for a way out from the middle of 1920 was more a response to working class activity than any other force in Irish political life.’ (p. 137)
This working class activity was not only vitally important in bringing the Irish Free State into existence, but also revealed that Irish Labour, given the necessary leadership, could have made a bid for the establishment of a Workers’ Republic as desired by James Connolly. Unfortunately the Labour leaders who succeeded Connolly – William O’Brien, Thomas Johnson, Cathal O’Shannon and others – whilst paying lip-service to the goal of a Workers’ Republic, in practice lined up behind the apostles of national capital, aspiring to play the rôle of ‘loyal opposition’ after the manner of our own Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and similar individuals at the head of the Labour Party in Britain. The treacherous rôle of such people in a revolutionary situation is well documented by Kostick. Time after time, the leadership agreed to issue calls to action, only to seize on every excuse for calling it off as soon as ever they felt they had to and could do so. This was particularly evident in connection with the general strike in support of the republican prisoners in Mountjoy. In vain did Jim Larkin, stranded in America for the duration, urge independent action by the working class leaders, exclaiming: ‘I wish O’Brien and the others would declare themselves. Are they all turned Sinn Fein?’ (p. 148)
Such arguments, however, carried no weight with the Irish Labour leaders. As Kostick observes: ‘To have followed Larkin’s perspective would have been to endanger their own positions in a Socialist revolution. The Labour officials had found a home in their relationship with the nationalists.’ (p. 149) Their ‘neutrality’ over the 1921 Treaty (in fact it was an undercover pro-Treaty stance) deprived Irish workers of an effective political lead in the difficult situation following the split in Sinn Fein which led to the Civil War of 1922–23. According to Kostick, they even tried to block discussion of the question in trade union branches (p. 172). In April 1922 they issued a call for a general strike against ‘militarism’, which duly took place, but it failed to persuade the anti-Treaty republicans to concentrate on political rather than military opposition to the Treaty, and it did not really strengthen the workers either. The book contains abundant additional evidence of the inadequacies of the O’Brien-Johnson leadership, a leadership often denounced by Irish left wingers, yet not often so thoroughly and so convincingly.Kostick brings out yet another pernicious effect of these misguided policies: their effect on the situation in the North where the Six County regime was attempting to consolidate itself. Here the damage started already in 1918 with the refusal of the Irish Labour Party to stand candidates in the election, the decisive election which resulted in the return of 73 Sinn Fein candidates, six for the Irish Parliamentary Party and 26 Unionists in a total of 105 Irish seats (p. 46; see Dorothy MacArdle, The Irish Republic, p. 247). The result can only have served to reinforce a laager mentality, a sense of dangerous isolation in Ireland as a whole, felt by large numbers of Protestant workers in Ulster. Yet other political influences were at work in the North, as is shown by the Belfast engineering strike of 1919, to which Kostick devotes a most valuable section of the book (Chapter 3, pp. 51–69). However, here again the post-Connolly leadership missed the bus:
‘The passivity of the Southern leadership was noticeable – they made no protest at the movement of troops to Belfast, nor at their use in breaking the strike. This failure to act, even in a modest way, must have contributed to the feeling that Northern workers and Southern workers had different interests.’ (p. 64)
This made things worse for Socialists in the North, where the recession of 1920–21 led to increasing unemployment and short-time working, events that provided the excuse for a savage blow against the labour movement in Belfast – the shipyard expulsions and the driving of Catholics from other workplaces which occurred in July 1920. According to a contemporary estimate, 12,000 people, a quarter of whom were Protestant trade unionists, lost their jobs (cited, p. 155). This, said the perpetrators, was the answer to unemployment; however, unemployment persisted and actually rose.
The leaders of Irish Labour failed to learn the lessons of such events. Kostick quotes Thomas Johnson in 1921 as saying that the workers of Ireland were willing to sacrifice their own aspirations for political power if that would further the national cause. His comment is apposite and devastating: ‘Partition was inevitable so long as the movement of the Southern workers confined itself to a nationalist agenda.’ (p. 151)The book’s main virtue is the way it hints at the possibilities existing in the period whereby Irish Labour could have increased its influence by standing openly and fighting resolutely for a Workers’ Republic of all 32 Irish counties. This is illustrated by a statement issued by Galway Trades Council in April 1920, one of those statements of ringing defiance so characteristic of the Irish revolutionary tradition:
‘Well, the Workers’ Council is formed in Galway, and it’s here to stay. God speed the day when such Councils shall be established all over Erin and the world, control the natural resources of the country, the means of production and distribution, run them as the worker knows how to run them, for the good and welfare of the whole and not for the profits of a few bloated parasites. Up Galway!’ (cited, p. 122)
Such a policy would have involved a campaign in opposition to the 1921 Treaty and for a Workers’ Republic on both sides of the border, with no illusions in the anti-Treaty republican faction such as those exhibited by the fledgling Irish Communist Party, or participation in a futile armed struggle for a capitalist rather than a Socialist republic, as displayed in the Civil War. The call for a Workers’ Republic retains its relevance today, as Kostick notes in the conclusion to his absorbing study.
Chris Gray
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Fighting Back in Ukraine
Oleg Dubrovskii with Simon Pirani,
Fighting Back in Ukraine
Index Books, London 1996, pp. 67, £2.00
Fighting Back in Ukraine
Index Books, London 1996, pp. 67, £2.00
THIS BOOKLET is based around a series of tape-recorded interviews with Oleg Dubrovskii conducted by Simon Pirani in September 1995. Although much of the material it discusses falls outside the time-span with which Revolutionary History concerns itself, Dubrovskii’s account of political developments within the Stalinist regimes and the Former Soviet Union illustrates the power of Trotskyist ideas and analyses to a remarkable degree, and consequently it is not inappropriate to review it here.
Dubrovskii is a prime example of a militant worker whose experience spans the period from the Stalinist regime to Yeltsin’s attempts to introduce market capitalism, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. As such, he is of great interest to us in attempting to understand the present state of the workers’ movement in the countries of the FSU.Dubrovskii’s political learning began when he studied the reports of the congresses of the CPSU, as part of his preparation for joining the party, during military service in the early 1970s. Here he read the original speeches of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and, at later congresses, of Bukharin and the Right Opposition. This is very interesting; he became aware of revolutionary positions from material available during the Brezhnev regime. We can reasonably ask ourselves then, why does Dubrovskii seem to be so unusual in responding to it?
By 1975 he had concluded that the Workers Opposition of 1920 best represented the interests of the workers, and he arrived at a position that trade unionism was the form through which the workers could best organise. The ‘party’, as manifest in the CPSU, was something he rejected.
In the early 1980s Dubrovskii adopted Solidarnosc as the model form of workers’ organisation against Stalinism, and moved from the Workers Opposition to a more clearly defined Anarcho-Syndicalist programme. His agitation in the major factories of Dnipropetrovsk (for example, against unpaid Sunday working) through the Andropov period attracted the attention of the KGB, but he was not arrested.
After 1987 it was possible to state open political disagreements with the regime, and Dubrovskii was able to force his programme onto the agenda of the factory political education class. He was elected to the union committee against party candidates.
After a series of attempts to establish independent trade unions, he and his Anarcho-Syndicalist comrades concluded that the key strategy was to work in the official unions, to transform them from tools of management into being weapons of working class struggle. Whatever the logic of this shift, it put Dubrovskii in a position where he was elected Chairman of a strike committee to protest against price increases after 1991 and the independence of Ukraine.
By 1994 Dubrovskii shifted to a Trotskyist position, after being able to read The Revolution Betrayed and other books previously unavailable in Russia.
The final sections of the booklet describe another wave of strikes against the failure of the employers to pay wages. In the course of this struggle, new movements to democratise the unions and other workers’ organisations began to develop. Dubrovskii concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of a new working class party emerging from such movements, and from the wider circulation of Trotskyist ideas amongst the workers. He sees educating workers in the history of the Russian Revolution as a key part in this process, making clear what were its ideas, and showing how they were perverted by the Stalinists.
Simon Pirani is a man who takes his internationalism seriously, and conducts it with practical determination. He has previously contributed substantially to our knowledge of the revolutionary movement in Vietnam (through his own publications and his preparation of Ngo Van’s book). His reports from Russia and the FSU, especially from the mining districts, have provided important source material, and this booklet adds more.
J.J. Plant
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Adventures of the Communist Manifesto
Hal Draper
The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto
Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, 1994, pp. 344
The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto
Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, 1994, pp. 344
THIS BOOK is a rare commodity; it is not only highly useful and authoritative, but lively and entertaining as well. It provides a new translation, publishing history (1848–1895), and textual analysis of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, although as Draper makes very clear, ‘the probability is great that the actual text of the Manifesto was solely from Marx’s pen, however much weight we give to Engels’ contributions preliminary to the final draft’. In this he does not seem to be going quite as far as David McLennan in his well-known biography of Marx, which states categorically that ‘the actual writing of the Communist Manifesto was done exclusively by Marx’.
Prior to Draper’s book there was only one work which explored the detailed history of the Manifesto as a publication – Bert Andreas’ Le Manifest Communiste de Marx et Engels. Histoire et Bibliographie 1848–1918 (Milan 1963). It is bibliographical, and not in narrative form, but Draper pays it considerable tribute, clearly stating where he differs in his conclusions. ‘The Adventures’, he states, ‘has been mined and quarried from its pages.’In later years, despite many requests, Marx refused to rewrite the original Manifesto, as he termed it ‘an historic document’ that he did not feel he had the right to change. This was not because he held that it was true for all time, but that it related to a particular set of historical circumstances, and that in crucial ways his thought had progressed, although he continued to endorse its principles. This was clearly shown in the first of seven prefaces that Marx and Engels produced (although only two were signed by Marx) for Liebknecht’s ‘fake’ German edition of 1872: ‘No matter how much conditions have changed in the last 25 years, the general principles set forth in this Manifesto still on the whole retain their complete correctness today ... The practical application of these principles – so the Manifesto itself states – will depend everywhere and every time on the historically existing state of affairs.’ Incidentally, the edition was ‘fake’ because, although Marx and Engels used its papers to send to other countries for translations, it was never distributed in Germany itself. The story of how this happened is just one of the many ‘adventures’ of the Manifesto well chronicled by Draper in a very useful first section.
That Marx’s approach is essentially undogmatic comes through clearly. It was not published as the Manifesto of the Communist League, the organisation that commissioned it, but with its original title of Manifesto of the Communist Party, although no Communist Party existed at the time. As Draper states: ‘The decision to issue a manifesto not of the League itself but of the Communist point of view in general, reflected an attitude looking away from sectarianism ... The title of the Manifesto was an advance notice of the de-emphasis of the sect ... So when the manifesto was to be written, it was not a manifesto of the Communist League, but a manifesto presented on behalf of a broader aspect of politics than was contained in the organisational walls of any league.’ This was completely in line with Marx’s view that ‘the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties’, a point that is always worth repeating. (It was the German edition mentioned above which first used Communist Manifesto as the official title, as ideas were erroneously perceived as less likely to be banned at the time than a document purporting to come from a political party.)
Most of Draper’s book is taken up by parallel texts of three English translations of the Manifesto – the original translation by Helen Macfarlane of 1850 (starting with the infamous ‘a frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe’), the Authorised English Translation of 1888, and a New English Version, as well as the 1848 original in German. There are copious annotations bringing out significant differences which are often extremely illuminating. Like the original German version, the 1888 translation by Moore stands by right as an ‘historic document’, as it was the only one in which Engels had complete involvement, and its particular phrases have longed seeped into Socialist consciousness in the English-speaking world. In no way does the new translation given in Draper’s book seek to claim superiority – its aim is to be supplementary, often setting down ‘another alternative – not necessarily because it is better, let alone more “correct” – but simply to show the differences’.
It is instructive to see some of the assumptions behind the 1888 translation. Draper states that Engels’ expectation that the ideas of the Manifesto could penetrate Anglo-Saxon skulls only ‘with difficulty’ was going to have an important effect on the formulations in the English translation. Marx and Engels both believed that German workers were more amenable to revolutionary theory than those in America or England, and for them ‘plainer fare’ was needed. Thus ‘forms of consciousness’ is usually rendered as ‘general ideas’ for the simpler English mind, while ‘relations of production’ is regularly translated as ‘conditions of production’, which is not the same at all. At best, it becomes ‘social forms springing from ...’, etc.
Draper notes that a line-by-line comparison with the original German text produces an interesting characteristic. The Authorised English Translation is ‘either extremely literal or else boldly revisionary’. There are few sentences that are in the grey area between the two. He deduces from this that Moore provided the literal bits, and that the revisions were made by Engels, who ultimately controlled the translation. He rightly concludes that Moore would not have made such revisions on his own initiative. A most valuable part of the book is the complete list and explanation of the changes. Draper does not attempt an interpretation of Marx’s ideas – this is not the purpose of the book. His explanations, however, inevitably do throw light on Marx’s ideas, and are of more value than many an explicit interpretation of the Manifesto.
There have been other English translations. In 1928 Eden and Cedar Paul produced one for Martin Lawrence (later Lawrence and Wishart), which Draper ironically comments had higher literacy qualities than the Authorised English Translation of 1888. However, translating it on the same basis as a novel makes the whole work an extremely risky base from which to draw conclusions about Marx’s ideas.
Lawrence and Wishart followed this up with another edition around 1935 which purported to be the Authorised English Translation, but with key unacknowledged changes (Draper notes at least 56). This was perhaps the largest ever mass production of the work; there were hundreds and thousands of copies. Some changes are stylistic, others, such as the change of the Authorised English Translation’s ‘win the battle of democracy’ to ‘establish democracy’ were clearly done to support the Communist Party’s Popular Front politics of the time, although Draper does draw back from making this obvious point. Indeed, this is the joy of the book; there is so much raw material from which readers can draw their own conclusions. There is later a very interesting discussion of how best to translate the ‘winning of democracy’ from the German original, concluding that Marx was in many ways hedging his bets with the expression, and that the Authorised English Translation version had at least the merit of being as ‘virtually as cryptic’ as the original German. The ambiguity towards the concept of representative institutions of parliamentary democracy within the Marxist movement has continued ever since.
At a time when capitalism is finally reaching world-wide domination with the consequent widening gap between rich and poor predicted by Marx evident even in the most advanced industrial societies, the Marxist analysis of capitalism becomes increasingly relevant. In such a context it is important to go back to the classic texts of Marx and Engels unencumbered by later, and often spurious, interpretations. Thus, a book like Draper’s is to be very much welcomed. It is very much a labour of love, but one that is not, as so often, clouded by a preconceived ideological position.
One small quibble: Draper points out that it was impossible to use a grammar or spell checker on the Macfarlane translation, in order to preserve the original misprints and slips. However, it would perhaps have been a good idea to use one on other parts of the text where no such constraints apply. For example, on page 43 we finds two strangers called ‘EngelsLafargue’ and ‘Bakounine’, and on page 44 an odd sort of social institution called a ‘Commmune’ appears.
Chris Matthews
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How the NKVD Framed the POUM
Jesús Hernández
How the NKVD Framed the POUM
Pitt Productions, London 1995, pp. 27, £2.00
How the NKVD Framed the POUM
Pitt Productions, London 1995, pp. 27, £2.00
THIS PAMPHLET, which consists of excerpts translated from the memoirs of Jesús Hernández, is an insiders’ view of the repression of the POUM by the Stalinist secret services during the Spanish Civil War, and, as such, will be welcomed by all those concerned with the fate of the Spanish Revolution. The autobiography of Hernández has frequently been impugned; he was a founding member of the Spanish Communist Party in 192l, joining the Politbureau in the early 1930s, before serving as a loyal apparachik during the Civil War. Having proven his Stalinist credentials, in the immediate postwar years in exile, Hernández found his desire to become party leader thwarted by the old guard, and, as a frustrated arribista, embraced Titoism. Although Hernández wrote with the characteristic fury of a scorned bureaucrat, his account of the repression of the POUM, and in particular his version of the brutal interrogation, torture and eventual murder of former party leader and ex-Trotskyist Andreu Nin at the hands of the NKVD, has since been confirmed both by the memoirs of other Spanish Republican leaders, and by the most recent research conducted in the Moscow archives. This pamphlet, therefore, is a corrective to the hypocrisy of those apologists who, as Bob Pitt indicates in his valuable introduction, continue to obscure the nature of Stalinist terror by talking of Nin’s ‘disappearance’, which is little more than a euphemism for the scurrilous and groundless accusation that Nin fled Spain for exile in Fascist territory. Moreover, despite the leitmotifs of Comintern policy in Spain – the public celebration of unity and petit-bourgeois Republican legality – the memoirs of Hernández highlight the willingness of the Stalinists to spread disunity amongst the anti-Francoist forces, and to perpetrate bloody terror against their rivals on the left.
But it must also be recognised that Hernández’s testimony cannot be accepted uncritically. Firstly, it is extremely likely that Hernández exaggerated his opposition to the repression of the POUM. If he initially resisted the NKVD to the extent he claims, it is difficult to explain his recklessness in leaving for the USSR at the end of the Civil War, let alone how he survived his spell there. Secondly, his tendency to blame counter-revolutionary terror in Spain almost exclusively on the malign personality of Stalin – a view which received new currency in the 1970s following Santiago Carrillo’s conversion to Eurocommunism – ignores the manifest guilt of both the Spanish and Catalan Communist Parties in the repression of the POUM. Indeed, at times, the testimony of Hernández attenuates the fierce invective directed at Poumistas by local Stalinists to such a degree that the reader is left with the impression that fraternal relations existed between the official and dissident Communist Parties; in fact it was the unrelenting and virulent political campaign against the POUM in the Spanish and Catalan Stalinist press which was instrumental in creating the climate in which the physical and political elimination of Spanish anti-Stalinists could take place. Nevertheless, this does not detract from the unquestionable value of a pamphlet that reveals how the international isolation of the Republic and its dependency upon Soviet supplies facilitated the exportation of NKVD police terror to Spain and the murder of Nin.The scale of Stalinist power in Spain during the Civil War is emphasised if we look at an earlier attempt to frame Nin. I am referring here to a little known episode in 1933, when Nin, then a leader of the Trotskyist Izquierda Comunista de España, was detained by the Republican police in Barcelona and charged with possession of explosives. At the time, Nin was highly respected in Catalan cultural circles for his translations of Russian classics, including the major works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. His arrest was, therefore, greeted with widespread consternation and indignation, and prompted a spirited defence campaign, which led to his release in a matter of days. What is noticeable here was the support lent to Nin by leading Catalan intellectuals and academics, not to mention some petit-bourgeois Republican politicians who, though as anti-Communist as the unreconstructed monarchist police, knew that Nin was a professional revolutionary in the Bolshevik mould, and not a backstreet Anarchist bomber of the sort that abounded in Barcelona at the time, and which provided the main inspiration for police stereotypes of revolutionaries.
The arrest of Nin in 1937 provides a sharp contrast. The charges – that a lifelong revolutionary was a Fascist agent in the pay of German big business – and the ‘evidence’ – that Nin, despite his long experience of clandestine organisation, had personally signed a secret message to Franco with his own name – were far more preposterous than those in 1933. Despite all this, not a single Catalan academic or intellectual publicly denounced the arrest of Nin, nor were there serious protests from Republican politicians. Later on, when it was too late, and with Nin almost certainly dead, some Republican and Anarchist leaders did ask some ‘awkward’ questions, but these were always muted by the need to appease Soviet ‘advisors’ at any price, a price which included the repression of the POUM by the forces of Stalinism in defence of the bourgeois republic.
Chris Ealham
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Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England
Alastair MacLachlan
The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England
Macmillan, Basingstoke 1996, pp. 431
The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England
Macmillan, Basingstoke 1996, pp. 431
DOES ENGLAND have a revolutionary tradition? MacLachlan thinks not. He argues that the radical left of the 1930s and 1940s merely tried to reinvent a tradition of an English revolution in their analyses of seventeenth century history, and especially the period of Cromwell and Charles I.
This book is centred on an assessment of the influence of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group. MacLachlan contrasts the early Marxist interpretations of Christopher Hill and others with their later works. It is a periodised review which assesses the ‘battle of ideas’ for a revolutionary past in the Communist Party between Marxist theory and peoples’ history. He traces the shifting ground on which the Marxist historians have rethought their positions in a post-Stalinist era. MacLachlan dovetails the historical analyses of the period with the contemporary political developments in the Communist Party and the New Left.MacLachlan begins with an overview of the earlier historical studies which ‘rediscovered’ the Radical, Leveller and Ranter movements. Historians such as Guizot wrote convincingly of the similarities between the English and French Revolutions. The traditionalist Whig view of England’s ‘Great Rebellion’, as a defence of ancient rights against the alien innovations of the Stuarts, came under increasing attack. The Marxist model of structural contradiction, class conflict and revolution became more influential. The Civil War became a bourgeois class struggle involving a transition from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one. The Victorian period saw Cromwell resurrected in Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches. Even the definitive works of Whig narrative written by Gardiner recognised a ‘Puritan revolution’ in the events of the seventeenth century. The stage was set for the Marxists to ‘reclaim the revolution’ for history.
MacLachlan’s chapter Reclaiming the Revolution explores the high profile given to the Leveller and Digger movements and the figure of Winstanley in the works of the 1930s and 1940s. The Putney Debates of Cromwell’s Army were compared with the Eighth Army ‘parliament’ of 1941. The development of a ‘Peoples History of England’ is traced, in which Hill’s work explained the Civil War as a class conflict involving a bourgeois attack on the hierarchical order. The chapter is also of interest for giving examples of the bitter doctrinal disputes for which the Communist Party was justly infamous, as Robin Page Arnott, Rajani Palme Dutt and others strove to impose a party line on the work of the Historians’ Group. The chapter on Marxist history in a Cold War era reveals how Stalin’s Cominform led to greater central control over the meetings of the Historians’ Group. Despite the Cold War polemics, the Group’s work was not deformed beyond recovery. Historians like Hill and Eric Hobsbawm were felt to be able to take an ‘intellectual disengagement from Stalinism’. MacLachlan believes the Marxist model was beginning to come apart just as their political decay accelerated.
The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the failure of the leadership of the Communist Party to admit the faults of the Stalinist era created a party crisis in 1956–57. This had a devastating effect on the Historians’ Group. Over half of its membership, including Hill, resigned from the Communist Party.
The analysis of the period of the 1950s to the 1970s is viewed as one in which Hill, Lawrence Stone and others tried to ‘save appearances’ in a retreat from the earlier position of class struggle and bourgeois revolution to one of a more ideological revolution. The change of approach was consistent with the contemporary movement away from an authoritative Soviet model of change to one in which Britain would reach Socialism by its own road. The revolutionary struggle of the 1640s was progressively broadened out by Hill into a longer process, as evidenced in the title of his book A Century of Revolution.
Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down showed his increasing interest in the history of the ‘common people’. The revolution was redefined through its radical legacy – a process MacLachlan labels as ‘levelling out the revolution’. Hill’s book became a radical text – a map of past experiences which broadened the scope of the English Revolution.
Hill’s work increasingly focused on ‘what went wrong’ with the English Revolution. Hill wrote in his book God’s Englishmen of the contradiction of Cromwell’s quest for a settlement after 1649, but he continued to defend the revolutionary consolidation achieved by the Protectorate.
MacLachlan explores the debate between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson on the place of the seventeenth century revolution within England’s past, and the more overtly revisionist studies popularised in the 1970s and 1980s. He traces the developments in the New Left and its treatment of history in a period of its own political disarray. During the 1980s history departments all over the country witnessed the retreat of the revolutionary version of England’s history. MacLachlan argues that the Marxists’ inability to come to terms with the normative features of most societies critically weakened their credibility. Yet the new revisionism didn’t resolve issues, and by 1993 Hill wrote of a return to a more social interpretation of the period. In the chapter entitled Revolution as Text and Discourse, MacLachlan shows how Hill’s works on the life of Milton reasserted that the key to his life was to be found in his revolutionary politics and radical religious ideas. Hill’s work on Milton helped to ‘hold the line’ against the general move to the right.
The concluding chapter, The End of the Line, provides an historical retrospect on the Marxist historians’ views in modern Britain. MacLachlan claims to balance a critical analysis with a sympathetic reappraisal of their rhetorical worth. He briefly refers to the Socialist Workers Party’s analyses in International Socialism, and particularly their criticism of Hill, Hobsbawm, et al. for failing to identify a revolutionary bourgeoisie and for defending the rôle of Cromwell, the ‘revolutionary Stalin’. The final chapter is anecdotal, with references to the implosion of the Soviet Union, and to Hobsbawm’s latter-day description of the October Revolution as a ‘vast detour in world history’.
MacLachlan concludes that Isaac Deutscher’s perception of an academic ‘red decade’ of the 1960s declined rapidly into revisionism in a period of political conservatism. He argues that the enlightened and grand narrative approach of Marxism in seeking to explain events in seventeenth century England has failed. Yet he argues that the New Right has not succeeded in imposing itself on social and historical thinking. Against this background, MacLachlan believes that Hill’s work in particular will remain of interest, despite his failure to fashion an indigenous revolutionary past.
Those on the left will find some uncomfortable reminders of their own decline in contemporary influence mirrored in the modern ‘non-revolutionary’ interpretations of seventeenth century English history. Yet the failure of the New Right’s approach provides the left with an opportunity for recovery. MacLachlan’s book reminds us that for long periods of history the progressive rôle played by Cromwell, the Protectorate and the various radical and revolutionary groups of the period was hidden from view. In more auspicious times, the importance of their contribution becomes more accepted. With this in mind, the work of Hill and others of the Historians’ Group should retain their central place on the bookshelves of those interested in understanding English history, and particularly the Civil War period.
Peter Swingler
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Long March of Trotskyism
Dario Renzi
La lunga marcia del trotskismo: 1. Dalle sconfitte delle rivoluzioni al dopoguerra
Prospettiva Edizioni, Rome 1992, pp. 148, Lit12 000
La lunga marcia del trotskismo: 1. Dalle sconfitte delle rivoluzioni al dopoguerra
Prospettiva Edizioni, Rome 1992, pp. 148, Lit12 000
Piero Neri
Nahuel Moreno
Prospettiva Edizioni, Rome, 1994, pp. 178, Lit20 000
Nahuel Moreno
Prospettiva Edizioni, Rome, 1994, pp. 178, Lit20 000
THESE TWO books, published by Socialismo Rivoluzionario, the Italian Trotskyist organisation, are by their leader, Dario Renzi, and by one of their founder members, Piero Neri, respectively. Established in 1990, SR was born of the Lega Socialista Rivoluzionaria, itself dating back to 1976. The LSR and its offspring organisation have had long-standing relations with Moreno and, later, with the LIT, hence the dedication of Renzi’s book to the memory of Moreno, and the inclusion of the Argentine Trotskyist in the SR’s series of monographs entitled Ritratti di Famiglia (Family Portraits).
Both books try to analyse the history and development of Trotskyism internationally, roughly beginning with Trotsky’s exile from the USSR, and, within this context, also situate the contribution of SR in Italy as part of the Fourth International. All quotations are my translation, and where possibly, the authorised English translations have been given. This review will concentrate for two reasons on a number of key theoretical issues largely common to both books, firstly, because it is only in this light that the relevance and contradictions of these works can come to the fore, and, secondly, because a more interesting picture of the theoretical debate will emerge, pointing to the marked differences between the frameworks adopted by two exponents of the same organisation.The declared aim of Renzi’s book is, as he repeatedly states, that of emphasising the continuity of the struggle and activities of Trotskyism internationally towards the goal of a future revolution, albeit through moments of crisis and setback. This ‘march of Trotskyism’ was, and is, however, based on a core of shared principles and purposes, with successive generations of Trotskyists worldwide who have taken the struggle on from their founder since 1938, and continued along the same path. Renzi’s book goes up to the years following the Second World War. Despite some good initial intentions and a certain degree of objectivity on Renzi’s part, who, in the chapter devoted to the Left Opposition in the USSR, could still concede that Trotsky might have been mistaken in his excessive hopes in the self-reforming capabilities of the party apparatus, and in hesitating in taking the reins of the Opposition. But by the final chapter, on the Trotskyist movement, Trotsky has become ‘the creative disciple of Marx and Lenin’ (p. 105). In the intervening chapters, Renzi stresses the absolute convergence of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Marxism, with good old Rosa Luxemburg thrown in for good measure to complete the ‘triad’. Trotsky himself, while still vulnerable to error in the first half of the book, from 1938 onwards becomes almost infallible and, above all, a misunderstood figure by the ‘less flexible’ and ‘more dogmatic’ sections of the Fourth International.
These, however, are not merely Renzi’s methodological problems. They are the necessary consequences of the comforting but increasingly contradictory story he tries to tell, and they should be understood in this light. The theoretical shortcomings of Renzi are indicative of the main issues being debated by Trotskyism for decades. The factual content of this book is well established, and offers little new data. Renzi himself recognises the problem, and calls for its rectification. In the introduction we read that, especially in the light of the disclosure of new sources of information after the ‘epochal turning point of the August 1989 revolution in the USSR’ (p. 10), and ‘proportionally to the development of democratic revolutions in the East’ (p. 12), there still is an almost complete silence on the ‘historical and critical assessment by the various currents within Trotskyism as to their history. This, too, is a sign of the political retardation which afflicts the movement itself.’ (p. 13) In this light, therefore, SR’s willingness to discuss the history of Trotskyism is to be applauded, but unfortunately its failure lies precisely in its incapacity to open a debate on the strongest-held convictions of Trotskyism before and after the war.
Some of Renzi’s shortcomings will be pointed out by Piero Neri in his book on Moreno, so we will leave them until later. The wide subject of inquiry of Renzi’s work makes it impossible to stress all the potential difficulties in this short review, but three issues will serve to illustrate the point: the debate on the nature of the Soviet Union, the actions and line to follow on the eve of the Second World War, and the understanding of the nature and rôle of the Communist International. The more difficult and contradictory nature of some of Trotsky’s proposals in these respects, formulated towards the end of his life and in exile, and Renzi’s unwillingness to cast doubt on their validity and theoretical value, are also worthy of note, and it is a shame that Renzi’s entire and otherwise worthy enterprise is founded upon manifestations of Trotsky’s theoretical involution.
These three issues are, of course, closely interlinked. The story begins on familiar ground. The Bolsheviks allowed ‘free and dialectical confrontation on all major issues of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and the revolution worldwide’ (p. 20). However, Lenin and Trotsky increasingly understood that ‘the revolution could serve as no substitute for the necessary preparation of the revolutionary forces’ (p. 22), and founded the Communist International in 1919. This new International included the best exponents of international Marxism, but ‘coming from different experiences and backgrounds, with consequent fragility’ (p. 25). Meanwhile, in Russia the New Economic Policy was an ‘audacious and indispensable’ measure to save the soviets (p. 31), and by the mid-1920s the internal debate in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party had greatly diminished, partly due to Lenin’s ‘error in ratifying politically a practically necessary measure, that is, the temporary ban on internal factions’ (p. 34). Increasingly, a bureaucratic caste was on the rise, which would ultimately expropriate the workers and take power in the USSR (p. 41). The reasons for this process are, according to Renzi, the weakening of proletarian forces and their state and party political representatives; the rise of counter-revolutionary forces in Russian society, infiltrating the party and soviets; the rise of the ‘NEP men’; the proletariat’s exhaustion; the accommodation of some Bolshevik leaders to the new situation (as in the case of Bukharin); and, obviously, the failed revolution on the international plane. For Renzi, ‘there is a very close cause-effect relationship between the defeats suffered by the revolution and the collapse of the revolutionary leadership, its beating heart’ (p. 42). To counter this, in 1926 the Joint Opposition stressed the need to revert to a ‘truly international policy, to restore party democracy, to put an end to the concessions granted to rich peasants at the expense of the working class, and to pursue a serious planning of the economy’ (p. 51). Undoubtedly, these facts are objectively true, but no attempt is made to link these consequences to any underlying causative reason. We are therefore left largely in the dark as to how the situation in Russia should so swiftly deteriorate. As for Trotsky, ‘despite from the point of view of theory, politics and – above all – practice, the ruling bureaucratic faction moved closer and closer to imperialism, it had nevertheless not totally crossed the class divide’ (p. 71). Trotsky, motivated by ‘various and complex reasons’ (p. 74), continued to maintain a policy of ‘reform’. In 1933 the first conference of the International Left Opposition ‘reconfirmed its character of faction, not party’ in the official Communist movement (p. 78), and in the August of that same year the Plenum of the Opposition stated that it would defend the USSR in the event of war. Renzi admits that ‘with the exception of the Left Opposition in the American Communist Party ... the real building work for Opposition groups in other countries did not begin until the 1930s (p. 81). These attempts, followed in 1933 by the Declaration of the Four, failed because of the ‘limitations of the other signatories ... deep sectarianism and the poor tactical flexibility of Trotsky’s colleagues’ (p. 87). This ‘lack of flexibility’, which resurfaced towards Trotsky’s entrist policies, which were ‘not understood, or rejected, or badly applied’ (p. 88), is sharply condemned, despite Renzi’s admission that the Communist leadership had become the strongest obstacle to workers’ emancipation and to future revolutions, and that this strength derived precisely from the revolutionary tradition. Nevertheless, Trotsky, convinced that ‘his reasons were the reasons of Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and above all the international proletariat’ (p. 80), fought against strong opposition within the Fourth International and the American Socialist Workers Party, and argued for support for the USSR. If the reader should begin to see a problem here, Renzi comes to the rescue: ‘To attribute this situation to any errors or intrinsic limitations in our project would mean totally to fail to comprehend the great laws governing revolutionary policy, and hence also its organisation. Obviously many errors were made and many limitations existed, but they must be considered within the worldwide context of the prevailing tendencies of the time.’ (p. 90)
On the eve of the war the ‘fundamental problem for the Fourth International, and which – in different terms – we still find today, is the enormous disparity between the socio-economic and the political conditions for the Socialist revolution’ (p. 93). In this respect, Trotsky’s ‘vision of war’ and of the tasks of revolutionaries was an attempt to understand the specific character of the new world conflict. Crucial to these proposals were, once again, the nature of the Soviet state, and some of Trotsky’s practical strategies, such as the entry of revolutionaries into the imperialist armies. Renzi sharply accuses the Fourth International for ‘relative inertia’, which did not allow it to exploit the ‘colossal opportunities’ offered by the imperialist slaughter. In this section of Renzi’s book the quotations from Trotsky become several pages long. For our purposes, it is significant that the ‘colossal opportunities’ offered by the doubtful prospects of having governments pay to train militarily workers and the granting of workers’ officers, trained at their places of work, not to speak of the possibility of military training for workers under their control (see Trotsky, On The Question of Workers’ Self-Defence), amounted to a ‘navy fraction’ of the American SWP, approximately 150-strong, whose activity was ‘necessarily only one of propaganda’ (p. 110).
As for the defence of the USSR, here Renzi is at his most creative, and following his arguments will prove instructive. Incredibly, it seems that we won, and we do not even know it. The author informs us:
‘The events and consequences of the war were to show without the shadow of a doubt that the Old Revolutionary got it essentially right. It could seem as if he underestimated the resourcefulness and capacities for recuperation of Stalinism, which came triumphant out of the War, as the world bulwark against Fascism. However, if we analyse events with a minimum of depth, we can immediately understand that this success, achieved despite the systematic betrayal of the interests of world revolution, fundamentally depended on the extraordinary response of the Soviet proletariat faced with the Nazi invasion. With immense sacrifices and overcoming all obstacles, including Stalin’s war crimes, the cost of which in human lives cannot even be quantified, the Russian people repelled Hitler, and gave Stalin the chance to become victor. So, precisely that “defence of the Socialist fatherland” supported by Trotsky had won.’ (pp. 108–9)
Oh well, that’s alright, then.
Taking the discussion further, to Pablo, Mandel and the situation in the 1950s, the question of the nature of the USSR returns when tackling the processes involving the countries of Eastern Europe, most notably Yugoslavia. Here, Renzi accuses the Fourth International of formalism, of relying on ‘established revolutionary Marxist norms, rather than on the new events’ of the current situation (p. 117, original emphasis). Trotsky, by the way, had somehow predicted this too, when facing opposition on the workers’ state analysis of the USSR. However, what Renzi does is to oppose to this supposed formalism yet more formalism by Trotsky. In the longest quotation of this book, he reproduces verbatim Trotsky’s analogy between a workers’ state and a liver poisoned by malaria (see Trotsky, Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?), which amounts to nothing else than an equation between state ownership of the means of production and the Socialist nature of the state. If we follow Trotsky, who also proposed that trade unions with policies directly opposed to the interests of the proletariat (in his specific example, the AFL) are nevertheless trade unions, we would be left with formalism indeed, as if the name determined the substance of an organisation, and as if having the word ‘Socialist’ or ‘Labour’ in a name were a guarantee of revolutionary intent (just ask any Liverpool docker).Renzi’s ‘march’ comes to an end leaving more questions unanswered than solved. What is most disappointing about his work is not so much the content, which is no better or worse than in many other ‘official’ histories of Trotskyism, but that events, choices, directions are simply stated as given or supposedly determined by outside events, without any attempt to clarify the possible causative relations between them. We are none the wiser as to the nature and structure that the International should take, or the internal development of the Bolshevik party, and we are ultimately left with a sense of defensiveness and powerlessness against each new enemy, be it Stalinism, Nazism, Pabloism or the enemies of the future, only doomed to repeat past errors and take the best remedial action.
Piero Neri’s biography of Nahuel Moreno is an altogether better book, in more ways than one. Neri knew Moreno personally, having been the delegate of the Italian LSR at the founding meeting of the LIT in Bogota (on which occasion the LSR broke from Moreno’s current, re-establishing relations only in 1986), and during Moreno’s stay in Italy in 1986, shortly before his death. This personal involvement on the author’s part, whose warm friendship and respect for Moreno are plain to see, does not prevent him from presenting a highly critical picture of the Argentine Trotskyist, in which no merit is denied, but no blame is spared. Moreover, the value of this book lies in the fact that such criticisms are not confined to Moreno’s activities, but are put in a direct relation with the general theoretical difficulties of the movement – as well as Moreno’s own shortcomings – and therefore acquire relevance for anyone wishing to avoid the repetition of the past. Neri defines Moreno as ‘the best leader produced by the Trotskyist movement from the aftermath of the war until now’ (p. 11). In his view, we can legitimately speak of ‘Moreno’s Marxism’, thanks to a ‘constructive revisionism’ (p. 14) which combined firmness of principles with theoretical originality, and was characterised by an attempt to maintain the independence of the programme and policies of revolutionary Marxism, while building its concrete expressions, that is, revolutionary organisations and the Fourth International (pp. 12–13). Moreno attempted to overcome the deep separation between theory and practice seen in Trotskyism after the war (p. 21). The entire activity of Moreno towards this goal consisted in ‘analysing and characterising the situation, elaborating a line and a political orientation, and then synthesising this in passwords’ (p. 43), so as to break with that ‘minority mentality and intellectualistic “philosophy” embraced by the great majority of the Trotskyist movement after the war’ (p. 43), ‘culminating in the 1950s in an “entrist” policy in reformist organisations, which continued for decades’ (p. 44). Moreno tried to ‘analyse revolutionary processes, in an attempt to derive lessons and generalisations from them’ (p. 74). This attempt brought him into conflict with the ‘international left bureaucracy’. He also maintained a polemic against large sections of the revolutionary left which, by calling for the support of the Cuban or Chinese revolutions, identified themselves as Maoist or Castroist. Moreno criticised the attempt to describe guerrillaism and Sandinism as ‘new surrogates for Marxism’ (p. 90).
This work by Moreno took on various forms, and he waged various battles with the Fourth International over the years. Moreno’s entire enterprise, however, was undermined by his erroneous understanding of revolutionary activity aiming to establish Socialism internationally, and this incorrect understanding, in turn, was to result in Moreno’s mistaken view of the rôle of the party and the International. Neri locates a few of the roots of Moreno’s mistakes in some general errors of the Trotskyist movement. Central to these issues is the analysis of bureaucratic states as ‘workers’ states’, since, according to Neri, their planned economy was given a Socialist, if limited, content. This, says Neri, mainly amounted to an arbitrary generalisation of some, in fact few, of Trotsky’s positions on the USSR in the 1930s, for example, the need to defend the Soviet workers’ state in the event of an imperialist attack, or to the contradiction posed between the existence of a political superstructure to fight – the totalitarian state – and an economic base to defend – Soviet planning (p. 13).
More specifically in the case of Moreno, Neri points to a serious limitation, again shared by the whole movement: that of the exclusion of Rosa Luxemburg’s current. Significantly, Moreno stated in his Actualización del programa de transición: ‘The existence of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party guaranteed the victory of the October Revolution, while in Germany the absence of a Lenin and a Trotsky ensured the failure of a Socialist revolution.’ (Cited on p. 22) In Moreno, this initial error of interpretation became a profound theoretical shortcoming. The reduction of historical revolutionary Marxism to Bolshevism distorted the relation between it as a current and theory, and also facilitated superficial simplifications and the rise of intolerance (p. 23). Moreno ‘considered Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Marxism far more homogeneous than they actually were. Trotsky’s decisive contributions after Lenin did not constitute an “evolution” of Leninism in Trotskyism.’ (p. 24) Trotsky, therefore, is not seen by Neri as the highest expression of historical Marxism, and he also points to a further consequence of this understanding, that is, the use of historical analogy by Moreno. In fact, he came to see the 1917 revolution and the Socialism of the first stage of Soviet power as the model for all future revolutionary developments. The adoption of this model, furthermore, conditioned the dynamic of Moreno’s understanding of the ‘relationship between political, social and economic change’ (p. 28). This is despite the Bolsheviks’ appeal to their comrades to do better than they could do in 1917.
Moreno’s concept of revolution evolved further, and led to a division of the revolutionary process into stages, which therefore does not constitute a truly dialectical model. In the first stage, the rising and ascent to power are envisaged, whereas the Socialist revolution in its proper sense only begins later. In this framework:
‘... socialisation ... is removed or postponed to a distant future, and so becomes separated from revolution, and is subordinated to the consolidation of state power. The state is conceived as a guarantor of socialisation, and this leads – not coincidentally – to a confusion between socialisation and nationalisation. [Moreno] ... sees the birth of Socialism as characterised by the consolidation of the workers’ state – with an important guarantee being given by the revolutionary party – and by the nationalisation of the means of production. But this dynamic is different from integral socialisation, and certainly does not necessarily initiate it.’ (pp. 30–1)
Moreno gives absolute priority to the state as opposed to society in the struggle for Socialism, often identifying it with ‘the struggle to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and a revolutionary workers’ state ... Therefore, he calls for a strengthening of state institutions for an entire, long phase, until the international resolution of the fight with imperialism.’ (p. 31) Neri is quick to note that this amounts to the inescapable logic of all forms of nationalisations, and that this future state would be far too similar to an overthrown bourgeois state (p. 31). In Moreno’s Socialism, therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat basically signifies party dictatorship (again, based on his model of the Bolshevik party). Perhaps the most serious consequence of this interpretation, as Neri rightly stresses, is that the Socialist consciousness of revolution is reduced to the revolutionary party, with a process in which just one of the methods of Marxist activity becomes absolutised. Moreno’s conception of Marxist activity and elaboration is thus an exclusively political one (pp. 44–5), with an increasing importance being given to agitation work as the crucial revolutionary activity. Thus, as Moreno puts it in his El partido y la revolución, Leninist-Trotskyist parties should:
‘... mobilise the masses, not the vanguard ... With the transitional programme ... the party must give those passwords that mobilise the masses against their exploiters, starting from their immediate needs and consciousness, and must continue to elevate the level of these passwords proportionally to the growth of the masses’ consciousness and the creation of new needs brought about by this very same mobilisation, up to the final password and struggle for power.’ (Cited on p. 51)
This accommodation to the level of the masses’ consciousness sees theory becoming little more than a tool for tactics and politics, and also goes firmly against the grain of Trotsky’s theory as presented, for example, in his Transitional Programme.
Historical analogies emerge again in Moreno’s understanding of revolution. We have already pointed to his understanding of revolution ‘by stages’. One of Moreno’s strongest-held conviction was in fact that revolutions are endlessly dissimilar in their development and dynamics, and that the task of Marxists was to strive to understand them in all their manifestations. Ironically, however, his correct fight within the Fourth International at the time of the Nicaraguan revolution (as the Bolshevik Tendency and, later, as the Bolshevik Faction) found no parallels when theorising revolution itself. The Russian revolutions of 1917 became once again Moreno’s terms of reference. This time, ‘February’ and ‘October’ were turned into universal categories which could, by themselves, be the sole analytical tools sufficient to explain any new revolutionary process. In his Actualización Moreno explained: ‘The February revolution is an unconsciously Socialist revolution, while the October revolution is consciously Socialist. Paraphrasing Hegel and Marx, we could say that the former is a revolution in itself, while the latter is a revolution for itself.’ (Cited on p. 79, original emphasis) So, for example, the 1974 Portuguese revolution was ‘a great February revolution which did not develop into an October’ (p. 93). It would follow that the world has seen various types of ‘Februaries’ but, presumably, no ‘Octobers’ since 1917, on Moreno’s own definition (p. 80).When faced with the issue of the tasks of the International, these instances of formalisation and contradiction remain firmly in place. In particular, between 1974 and 1979 Moreno’s current (the BT, later to become the BF) initiated a lively polemic, among others, with the American SWP. This led to a break with the United Secretariat, which had never recognised ‘Moreno’s Argentine current as an official organisation’, and which had ‘isolated it as a result of various differences’ (p. 97). The BF then began a disastrous but mercifully brief experiment with the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste headed by Pierre Lambert, and two years later, in 1982, established the LIT. The Italian LSR, until then part of Moreno’s international current, did not join, and broke with the LIT until 1986. Among the points of disagreement was precisely Moreno’s concept of the International.
In previous years, Moreno’s current had come to propose an equation between the International and the need for international centralisation. This centralisation, which we have already witnessed in the importance given by Moreno to the party at the national level, is here generalised in a concept of a ‘world party’. This need, moreover, was felt to be an a priori condition, so that this ‘world party’ should be firmly in place before the dynamic of class struggle and revolutionary developments could come into being. Moreno thus argued that a political current should become a faction. Possibly by generalising the actual situation of his own current, he then went on to theorise an ‘International Faction’ (p. 98), and by the time of the establishment of the LIT the International fundamentally envisaged a preliminary stage, a victory in Argentina after the fall of the dictatorship, which due to the perceived importance of that country and the southern region of Latin America, was to become the axis around which the entire International would orbit. Neri rightly stresses the ‘self-affirming and defensive character’ of this formulation (pp. 100–1), and also casts doubt on Moreno’s arguments as to the frictionless continuity among the four Internationals, which the LIT used to postulate its ‘iron law’ of the absolute priority of the International and its leadership. As is often the case, after the death of its leader this organisation exacerbated the elements of formalism present in his thought, and came to think of the existence of the International and its leadership as the automatic guarantee of revolution. Neri, however, reminds us that, in the history of all the Internationals, if anything it was disagreements, not conformism, which had allowed the more meaningful revolutionary developments to occur. Ultimately, Moreno’s understanding of the International as a ‘chief of staff’ to coordinate and allocate resources and activities according to the specific situations in various countries, amounts to the transfer to the international plane of his previous subordination of the tasks of the International to mere agitation in the national sphere, again at the expense of theory. Internally, this International would be governed by ‘democratic centralism’, elevated by Moreno to ‘a principle denoting the revolutionary programme itself, at the national and international levels’ (p. 111).
While all these developments should not be seen in isolation or as examples of individual deviance, but as part of a general problem within the entire Fourth International, Neri admits that some limitations are nevertheless unquestionably attributable to Moreno.
Once again, therefore, these two books serve, on the one hand, as a strong reminder of the absolute necessity for complete openness and honesty when faced with the past, and, on the other, of the disastrous consequences of a separation between theory and practice for revolutionary Marxism, and of the non-existence and futility of ‘short cuts’ or dogmatism in the task of building the necessary theoretical basis for a Socialist revolution.
Barbara Rossi
Back in Time
Nadezhda A. JoffeBack in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch
Labor Publications, Detroit 1995, pp. 245
Labor Publications, Detroit 1995, pp. 245
THE WRITING of memoirs has a special place in the culture of Russia, and the growth of literacy that was achieved under the Bolshevik regime encouraged the practice. The Central Museum of the Revolution, in Moscow’s Tverskaya, houses a large collection of manuscript memoirs assembled from many sources. (The work of mining this irreplaceable resource will take many decades, and historians concerned with the task of understanding and interpreting the October Revolution ought to be as concerned with the regular threats to the budget of this museum from the Yeltsin regime as they are to the problems of the more prestigious venues such as the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Lenin Library.) Often during the Stalin terror, revolutionaries were granted a stay of execution in order to be able to write their memoirs, even when there was no hope of them emerging from the capacious files of the Lubyanka. The destruction of memoirs by the forces of the state has always been regarded as an especially vile crime. (Larina’s memoirs were seized and burned several times, and the fate of the manuscripts seized from Serge and Rakovsky remains a subject of active speculation.)
These memoirs serve many purposes, personal, political and literary. For the survivors of the Stalin terror, it has been particularly important to set the record straight, to rescue and preserve the memories and knowledge which Stalin and his regime set out to expunge, and to name the criminals and collaborators who thought the Stalinist regime would last forever.In his foreword to Nadezhda Joffe’s memoirs, David North points out that the ‘survivor of Stalinism memoirs’ have become a literary genre. Here he echoes Stephen Cohen’s introduction to Larina’s memoirs. And the same point has been validly made elsewhere, in relation to volumes by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Irina Ratushinskaya and all too many others (curiously, North’s list of examples excludes the memoirs of Maria Joffe, One Long Night).
The regime created by Stalin to defeat the October Revolution marked one of the most extreme points of savagery and repression that humanity has ever perpetrated and suffered. It ranks with the Nazi holocaust, the slave trade and the century-long war between the ‘mongol hordes’ and China.
The memoirs of survivors of the Stalin terror are central in shedding personal light on the process of the long civil war which Stalin waged against the revolution. They illuminate and add force to the historical research of writers such as Conquest and Rogovin. But they do more than this. They can, at their best, demonstrate the survival of some tiny kernel of humanity in the face of the most immeasurable oppression. In this sense, Joffe’s memoirs, and others of their kind, go beyond the range with which a revolutionary historical journal is directly concerned, to some of the questions that call up the revolutionary spirit.
It is proper to consider the book in the first instance as historical material. It has to be said that the notes are sadly inadequate, pointing only to well-known public sources. They cannot be the author’s own notes, since the memoirs are dated 1971–72, but the notes refer to later material such as Trepper (1979) and Carr (1981), or to material to which Joffe is unlikely to have had access in Moscow (Trotsky, Deutscher). Of course, there would have been good reason for reticence in the early 1970s, but not in notes prepared for an English edition in 1994. There is also a curious reference (p. 39) to one of Broué’s books on Trotsky. Was this material really available in Moscow in 1972? In another indication that the text was revised later than the 1971–72 sign-off date, she refers to the publication of the Riutin platform. I have not traced any publication of the platform before 1990 in Russia (it is clear from the context that Joffe is not referring to any of the fragmentary publications of 1932).
Joffe’s own words and recollections provide some useful information. The early chapters deal with her early life, and give an account of her father’s life and career. Adolf Joffe was a figure of exceptional importance in the revolution, and in the development of the Opposition. As the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, he met important personalities, including Mehring. Nadezhda also met Rakovsky, Bukharin and Dzerzhinsky, and recalls these giants as daily visitors during her childhood. She also recollects Trotsky as a warm, friendly individual who had a good rapport with children (contradicting Larina’s description of him as a cold, frightening figure).
She also provides us with an all-too-brief glimpse of the dazzling intellectual life of revolutionary Moscow – meeting Lunacharsky, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. She witnessed the famous Lunacharsky-Vvedensky debate, and tells a tale of Lunacharsky delivering a brilliant lecture on Campanella without notes or preparation. These bright days were to come to an early end. Joffe happened to be present for Krupskaya’s announcement of Lenin’s death.
We do not get an analysis from Joffe of the rise of the Opposition – she was very young in the early 1920s. Almost the first we hear from her is her voting against a resolution in 1926 condemning Trotsky. She begins her political material from the death of her father, denied access to overseas medical treatment by the vindictive party bureaucracy. The translation of Trotsky’s funeral oration for Joffe differs from that in the Pathfinder collection Portraits Political and Personal, but does not seem to change any of Trotsky’s meaning.
She also presents the full text of Joffe’s final letter to Trotsky, and adds a few details to the account of Joffe’s funeral – the booing and shouting down of Riutin (the Central Committee representative).
She reminds us of Sedova’s work in preserving antiquities and monuments after the revolution, especially the old quarter between Red Square and the old city wall. Most of this was later cleared by Stalin, and eventually became the site for the huge, hideous and cockroach-infested Hotel Moskva. But little of this is first hand. She was, after all, a teenage girl at the time. She sets down a few memorised fragments of poems dedicated to Trotsky, which were probably excluded from the history of Soviet literature entirely by the mid-1920s.
The beginning of her oppositional activity is briefly described, from the autumn of 1927 in her third year at the Plekhanov Institute (apparently a year after her 1926 vote ended her ‘party career’). She even quotes from a leaflet she wrote for distribution by the Moscow Komsomol Centre – how was this preserved? She shows that when Radek, Preobrazhensky and Smilga began the first wave of capitulations in May 1929, this was not simply an individual political realignment. It triggered a vast new wave of repressions against the Opposition. (They would have known that this would be the consequence of their action, since the same thing had happened a year earlier when Zinoviev and Kamenev ‘repented’.) For Joffe, this resulted in her first arrest in the spring of 1929, leading to exile in Krasnoyarsk in the summer. There she met some notable oppositionists, including Dumbadze (Serge campaigned in his defence after being expelled from the USSR. He cannot have been at Krasnoyarsk long, as a letter published in Cahiers Léon Trotsky refers to him at the Cheliabinsk isolator in the autumn of 1929) and A.S. Yenukidze, but we don’t get any details on their politics or their activities.
She describes meeting Rakovsky in Moscow after his readmission to the party. He convinced her that there existed a layer in the party that could, gradually and carefully, be influenced. She added her signature to his political statement. She tells us nothing more about activity in the Opposition, or how this legal ‘influencing’ in the party was carried out.
She may have maintained some level of activity which even in the 1970s could not safely be written about, because when she was arrested for the second time, in 1936, her flat contained ‘seditious literature’, including Trotsky’s Collected Works. She was charged only in relation to her earlier oppositional work up to 1927.
At this point, the Opposition as such disappears from her account, although we get information about some individual oppositionists that she meets. We are now on grimly familiar territory, the dismal details of interrogations, the bleak architecture of the Butyrka and other prisons, and the dehumanised and dehumanising administration of the gulags.
Along this desolate road, in Magadan, Joffe met Trotsky’s first wife Aleksandrovna Lvovna Bronstein (née Sokolovskaya), and carried her parting message of defiance across the decades: ‘If you ever read somewhere or hear that I have confessed to being guilty, don’t believe it. This will never happen, no matter what they do to me.’ This is probably the last sighting of Sokolovskaya. Joffe was later returned to Magadan, but learned that Sokolovskaya had been moved to central Siberia. A small enough historical detail perhaps, but as an example of indomitable courage and determination, this last message from Sokolovskaya to the future is of incomparable value.
The case of Olga Ivanovna Grebner, whom Joffe met in Kolyma, sheds another grim sidelight on the Stalin regime’s morbid fear of Trotsky’s ideas. Grebner received a five year sentence. Her ‘crime’ was that her husband’s niece had been the first wife of Sergei Sedov, Trotsky’s younger son. Grebner herself had hardly even met Sedov, but even this remote link was enough to strike fear into the regime.
As late as 1938 there are occasional signs of oppositional activity. Joffe met a young Leningrad student who had learned from ‘seditious literature’ how all of Lenin’s closest collaborators had been purged as ‘enemies of the people’, and had been imprisoned for this knowledge. But even before this, most of the Opposition had been stamped out. The mass arrests of 1937, according to Joffe, brought to the camps not Trotskyists but loyal Stalinists with records of action against the Trotskyists, who were sentenced more harshly than previous waves of accused (in fact as early as May 1936 Serge had warned Trotsky that the mass arrests were not of new oppositional elements).
Much of the rest of Joffe’s account is concerned with her eventual release (she long struggled to be reunited with her daughters), her peremptory rehabilitation, and her restoration of her father’s grave at the historic Novodevichy Convent site. (It is only in relation to the grave of A.A. Joffe that she mentions his second wife, Maria – author of another excellent gulag memoir, One Long Night). There is no indication that Joffe took any part in any of the oppositional movements of the 1960s or 1970s, focusing on samizdat publications and occasional illegal demonstrations, and she expresses no opinion on them. (In an undated introduction, presumably prepared for the English edition, she does remark that she expected her memoirs only ever to be read in samizdat form.) This would have been difficult in the early 1970s, of course, but it would have been possible for the publishers in 1994 to ask her for a supplementary comment, which would have added substantially to the value of the book.
To summarise, as a work of history, Joffe’s memoirs add some valuable details to our knowledge of the Opposition, but change nothing of substance. As a personal memoir, they present an inspiring example of courage and determination to hold onto whatever can be retained of humanity and decency through one of the most appalling periods of history. And perhaps, too, there is the suggestion that we should not judge those we too casually refer to as ‘capitulators’ too harshly.
J.J. Plant
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Notebooks for the Grandchildren
Mikhail Baitalsky
Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp. 427
Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp. 427
‘LIFE HAS become better, comrades, life has become more joyful’, announced slogans on the walls of the labour camp barracks at Vorkuta for badly-fed, badly-housed prisoners to read each day as they went to and from forced labour in the mines. These phrases were taken from a speech by Stalin.
Baitalsky, a member of the Komsomol in the 1920s, who as a boy had fought against Denikin, the leader of the counter-revolution in Southern Russia during the Civil War, was later to be arrested three times as a supporter of the Trotskyist opposition (even after the Trotskyists in Russia had all been murdered). He served two terms in Vorkuta labour camp with others dubbed ‘enemies of the people’, referred to as Trotskyists, which had become a general term of abuse. It was not difficult to become an ‘enemy of the people’, for anyone making an irreverent joke about the Stalinist bureaucracy, organising a school on Marxism or Leninism without permission, being related to an ‘enemy of the people’, falling foul of the local bureaucracy – all these could result in a sentence of from five to 25 years in the camps. This was in addition to those accused of sabotage, largely engineers, because they had failed to complete a five year plan in the stated time. And, as we know, those Russian servicemen captured by the Germans during the Second World War returned not as heroes, but also to be incarcerated. With regard to prisoners of war, Baitalsky states that the Nazis knew that the Geneva Convention need not apply to captured Russians, because Stalin’s government would make no complaint at their treatment. In the camps also were members of foreign Communist parties disbanded by Moscow. Baitalsky claims that at any one time the camps held at least 15 million prisoners. There were also common criminals in the camps, but these (as in the Nazi concentration camps) were given trusted positions over the other prisoners, and generally had shorter sentences.The members of the bureaucracy and petty bureaucracy, in competition with each other in the finding of ‘enemies of the people’, were as likely as anyone else to end up as prisoners in the camps. Baitalsky tells of the executions at Vorkuta, prisoners hurried across melting rivers to be shot down by machine-guns, 50 men at a time. Later, the bureaucrat in charge of these executions was himself arrested and was heard screaming from a window of the Kotlas prison where he awaited execution: ‘Tell the people that I am Kashketin! I am the one who shot all the enemies of the people at Vorkuta!’ Baitalsky remarks: ‘And when these Moors had done their duty, they were charged with exceeding their authority and shot.’ In this way Stalin wiped his hands clean of the terror.
Baitalsky remained a Leninist, having read Lenin’s Testament 30 years before it became generally available. With regard to Trotskyism, he was unaware at that time as to whether any remained anywhere in the world. However, he raises some important questions for us with regard to the nationalisation of property. Nationalisation of the means of production has always been regarded by us as more efficient than production in private hands, in that planning should result in a higher standing of living for the population. However, as Baitalsky points out, the nationalised economy of the Soviet Union became distorted because it was harnessed firstly to the needs of the state – the large bureaucracy (which required private clinics, private shops, private schools, etc), the security services, the military, ‘show’ or status projects, such as space exploration, and so on. Therefore, the standard of living continually lagged behind that of the Western world. To allay discontent, shortages were blamed upon ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘Trotskyists’ who were sabotaging Socialist development.
Apart from this distortion of the economy, it is a fact that technological invention requires intellectual freedom, which did not exist in the Soviet Union. Baitalsky spent some of his imprisonment in the First Circle (also written about by Solzhenitsyn). In this prison were gathered engineers and others with technological knowledge, instructed to ‘invent’ within a specified time an object of technology already in use in the West. Trade magazines from the West were treated as blueprints, and were locked away in a safe.
Baitalsky speaks also of the changing face of the working class in a peasant country. Following the forced collectivisation, starving peasants poured into the towns, and sat begging homeless in the streets. Stalin met this problem by reintroducing the Tsarist pass laws, which resulted in these dispossessed peasants being forced ‘home’ to starve. An added advantage to Stalin of these pass laws was that peasants, without any working class experience, could be introduced into the workforce in an organised manner.
Baitalsky also writes of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and claims that after the Second World War when the Nazi concentration camps were revealed to the world, the population of the Soviet Union were not told that Jews were the main victims. Every nationality was stated to have been found in the camps, but not Jews, but by this time ‘cosmopolitanism’ had also become a dirty word in Russia. This meant that Jews had relatives and other contacts outside Russia, and were therefore suspect.
In the light of the present war by Russia against the Chechens, it is of interest to know that there is a history relating to this, for the Chechens were one of five peoples deported from their homelands as ‘unreliable’ when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War. History might not always repeat itself, but it certainly colours events. For instance, Baitalsky states that one of Stalin’s great heroes was Ivan the Terrible!
Baitalsky writes also of his private life, his first wife and the mother of his two children, whom he met in the Komsomol, but who became a committed Stalinist, and his friends from Komsomol days who disappeared into the camps, or who lived in poverty. This is a book that’s well worth reading, it’s thought-provoking, and poses many questions on the nature of bureaucracy and the state.
Sheila Lahr
