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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As one can imagine, each negotiation of a piecework time for a new job or an altered method on an existing job could be – and was – the source of disagreement, as was the ‘plus-up’ for ‘contingencies’ and rate of bonus. As a shop steward, most of my time was involved in negotiating piecework problems. Unfortunately, the authors give no figures for the proportion of the total number of strikes that arose from piecework disputes, but I would estimate that the majority of strikes, go-slows and lock-outs originated in disagreements over piecework. ‘Wages drift’, a result of a combination of piecework, the growth of shop-steward influence and unofficial shopfloor militancy, contributed greatly to the steady increase in real wages during the whole period covered by these volumes.
Another reason for the frequency of ‘unofficial’ strikes – particularly in engineering – was the York Memorandum – otherwise known as ‘The Procedure for Avoiding Disputes’ that was imposed on the unions following the 1922 lock-out, and which was still in operation in the 1960s. As the authors explain:
It is clear from the whole history of industrial relations during the period covered, from 1945 to 1979, that an important factor determining wages and conditions was not official union action, but rank-and-file activity and unofficial action, and that the shop stewards were the organisers, leaders and coordinators of these struggles. That they were effective is indicated by the ‘wages drift’ highlighted in Chapter 8.
Tables of the movement of real wages are included in these volumes. They show that in the 20 years covered in Volume 1, from 1945 to 1964, real wages rose in 14 of those years from an index of 87.9 in 1945 to 111.9 in 1964 (January 1956 = 100), that is, by 27.3 per cent, and by nearly 10 per cent between 1964 and 1979. Elsewhere, McIlroy and Campbell, basing themselves on different sources, give a much higher figure of some 30 per cent rise during 1964-78, which seems rather high if we are talking of real wages, taking inflation into account. Taking even the lowest figures, it is clear that the 35 years following the war saw a substantial increase in workers’ living standards.
The main factor making this increase possible was, of course, the general state of the economy, the prolonged postwar boom. However, even in times of rising profits, employers do not voluntarily grant wage increases unless they are forced to do so by either market forces (the supply and demand of labour) or the pressure of trade union activity and workers’ militancy. This is confirmed by the ‘wages drift’ already mentioned, which was mainly the result of workers’ pressure. An interesting fact unearthed by McIlroy and Campbell is that of ‘the wage differential between unionists and non-unionists increasing to the advantage of the former from 28 per cent in 1964 to 36 per cent by 1975’.
The ‘class struggle’, that is, the changing relationship of forces between workers and employers, and between trade unions and the state, and the overall political climate are all significant factors, within the context of the general economic situation, which affect the level of wages. This is demonstrated by the fact that the fluctuations in real wages up or down coincide with the course of political-industrial struggles. For example, 1977 was a year when real wages went down sharply, by over five per cent. McIlroy and Campbell ascribe this to ‘the deflating effect of the Social Contract in 1977… before being redressed by the strike wave of 1978-79’. Real wages rose again during this period by over four per cent.
The interventions of the state and the relations between the unions and the Conservative and Labour Parties and governments are covered in several chapters. These relations varied considerably. Obviously the relations between the unions and the Labour Party were very different from those between the unions and the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was created by the unions to be their political voice, and in fact they were an organic part of it at both local and national levels. The Conservative Party was identified with big business and landed interests. However, despite this important difference, they were both united in their commitment to managing a capitalist economy. And since the unions themselves accepted wholeheartedly that their task was not to overthrow capitalism but to work within it, this made collaboration possible. The parties approached the task in different ways, ranging from collaboration to confrontation with the unions. Naturally their different social bases affected the way they approached this task, but it would be over-simplistic to say that the relationship between Labour governments and unions was always one of collaboration, while that between Tory governments and unions was always one of confrontation. The employers and their political representatives employed a variety of strategies. For example, one of the main concerns of the Tories when they came to power in 1951 was to continue the collaboration between unions and state established during the war. In the chapter entitled ‘The Postwar Compromise’, the authors remark:
In all this the union leaderships’ rôle was a contradictory one. On the one hand, as the authors make abundantly clear, these leaderships, accepting the framework of capitalist social relations, were quite happy to accept the corporatist ideology, participate in tripartite bodies, and convince themselves that they were a valued part of the state machine. And so they were, as long as they were able to contain and police ‘irresponsible militants’ and leftists. On the other hand, even the most bureaucratised unions were still basically democratic institutions. For example, in one of the most bureaucratised, the Transport and General Workers Union, though all the officials are appointed for life (until they retire), the national, trade section and regional executives are composed of elected lay members. Thus they have to respond to and reflect rank-and-file opinion, and call official strikes and come into conflict with the employers and even the state, as the accounts in these volumes show.
I have one minor quibble. Describing the controversy over Order 1305, the authors write: ‘One of the last acts of the Labour government was revocation of Order 1305, at the behest of the TUC General Council, whose leaders had become concerned over their own ability to control their members’ propensity to strike illegally.’ They might have mentioned that the unofficial dock strike of 1951 and the failed prosecution of its leaders had a decisive effect on this decision, and also on Bevan’s decision to resign from the Cabinet (cf. Mark Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide, p. 83).
These books provide ample evidence for the effectiveness of trade union action in determining wages and conditions. However, they also highlight the limitations of trade union militancy, and provide no comfort for those on the Marxist left who believe that industrial struggles lead almost automatically to socialist consciousness and, if sufficiently extended, to a direct struggle for working-class power. In this respect, Chapters 8 and 9 in Volume 2 in which McIlroy views the industrial activities of the Communist Party, and of Trotskyist groups such as the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party and the Socialist Workers Party, provide food for thought. What stands out is that despite the fact that in many cases Communist Party and Trotskyist militants won substantial influence and support and led significant struggles, and achieved areas of influence in the unions, this influence and support was rarely reflected in political gains and membership. The Communist Party’s political influence in the country or the working class generally never matched its influence in the trade unions. Although the SWP over a period in the 1970s was very active in the trade unions, publishing rank-and-file papers for car workers, miners, hospital workers, teachers, NALGO, dock workers, building workers, GEC rank and file, etc., with print runs of several thousand, the party itself never became more than a fringe group in the broader political world. The same can be said of the SLL, which at one time had a very strong group in Oxford based on the Cowley factory; earlier on its progenitor, the ‘Club’, working in the Labour Party, won considerable influence on the docks, recruiting many of the unofficial leaders and in fact effectively led the ‘Blue Union’ dock strike in 1954. Yet here, too, they were not able to translate this support into political allegiance based on a conscious acceptance of a socialist ideology, Marxist or other, among more than a handful of workers.
No doubt it will be – indeed, is – argued that these failures to develop mass political influence were due to defeats in particular struggles (for example the Blue Union struggle), mistakes in strategy and tactics and to other factors, for example, the nefarious activities of one Gerry Healy or unhealthy internal regimes.
But in reality the explanation is much more general. Firstly, the general economic and political situation, the context of expanding capitalism, and a long postwar boom in which workers were able to win substantial improvements by industrial action, and during which governments, both Conservative and Labour, were anxious to preserve social peace by concessions and reform, was not propitious for revolutionary politics. True, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the deteriorating situation pushed governments to attempt to curb union power, and this provoked essentially ‘political’ strikes against the Wilson government’s In Place of Strife and the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Bill. But though they were political in the sense that they were directed against state policies, their aim was limited – to force the government of the day to retreat, not to overthrow it, or to demand that it carry out a completely socialist policy. Certainly they did not go anywhere near creating a situation of dual power in which grass-roots working-class institutions competed with the state machine for power. Even when the 1972 miners’ strike prompted the Heath government to resign and call an election, the only feasible replacement was a reformist Labour government, and the only generally accepted way of achieving this (even amongst the most militant miners) was by a parliamentary election.
The most overtly ‘political’ of all the industrial actions of the period was the Upper Clyde Shipyards (UCS) work-in of 1971–72 described by John Foster and Charles Woolfson in Chapter 10 of Volume 2.
The work-in posed, implicitly if not explicitly, the question of workers’ control of industry. Unfortunately, the authors have nothing to say on what actually went on inside the shipyards during the 15 months of occupation, on how work was continued on ships, on how steel and power were acquired and how paid for, etc. Perhaps we can outline the scenario which might have developed, and which no doubt many on the Marxist left were hoping would develop.
The UCS workers want to complete the partly-built ships and launch them (and even start on new ships already designed and commissioned). The employers and the state want to close down the yards: the workers are refused access to the bank accounts of the firms, refused credits, the managements of the steel works and other suppliers refuse to supply the necessary steel and other supplies, the electric power supply is cut, etc. The UCS workers appeal for support; the steel workers decide to supply the steel in defiance of their managers, the transport workers organise transport, using their lorries independently of their bosses, the power workers reconnect the electricity. Looking further ahead, there is the question of disposing of the ships built. Just as socialism cannot survive in a single country, so workers’ control of production cannot continue unless it spreads wider and wider. Such a development would have directly challenged property relations, and would have posed before the whole country the question of who runs the economy. It could not have been tolerated by the state, and would have led to violent confrontation, posing all sorts of political questions.
But developments never reached this stage. I have no detailed information to hand, but my understanding is that the shop stewards dealt with the liquidator – both in terms of bargaining over his attempt to sell off machinery and announce redundancies, and over the release of ships in relation to wages. Presumably steel and other supplies were regulated as part of this process.
The support for the UCS work-in was high within the working class, particularly in Scotland, expressed in two regional general strikes. The work-in also generated wide support beyond the organised labour movement. The authors write:
The Trotskyist groups all suffered from an over-optimistic view of the political consciousness of the working class and of what could be achieved, and from a simplistic idea of how industrial struggle would almost automatically develop into a political struggle for power. As McIlroy points out in relation to the International Socialists’ industrial policies, ‘the weakness lay in the absence of any political bridge between militant trade unionism today and socialism tomorrow’. If McIlroy implies a bridge could have been built, I would disagree with him, and argue that in the conditions of expanding capitalism and no terminal crisis – when socialism is not on the cards for tomorrow – it is impossible to build such a bridge. However, he shrewdly comments that failing to find or build that bridge – to revolutionary socialism – the International Socialists became economists:
The Trotskyist movement Cliff joined in Britain was only a little stronger than in Palestine, and was soon to fragment. In 1951, he led one such fragment, which eventually became the Socialist Workers Party. The tiny forces available and the slight audience for Marxist politics meant that there were very few socialist publications, so for some years Cliff’s output was not great. The gradual disintegration of the Communist Party after Stalin’s death created some space for revolutionary politics, so in 1959 Cliff was able to publish his pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg. Till then we had accepted a picture of her as a socialist martyr who had been hostile to ‘the party’ and had advocated something called ‘spontaneity’. The pamphlet is still well worth reading, in spite of the numerous books about Luxemburg which are now available. Cliff was extremely favourable to Luxemburg at that time, arguing that her ideas were a better guide than Lenin’s for Marxists in advanced industrial countries. The rise in class struggle during the 1960s caused Cliff to revise his estimate – or to adjust to changes in the market for ideas – so the 1968 reprint was changed, without acknowledgement, to give top marks to Lenin. Political opponents seized on that change to accuse him of opportunism, so every aspiring polemicist needed a copy of both pamphlets. The present edition includes both versions of the offending text, and as the main alteration amounts to only three lines, it is worth taking time to read the rest of the pamphlet. The radical student milieu of the late 1960s was much more receptive to Lenin’s ideas than Labour Party activists had been in the previous decade, so a different style was required. The argument on the nature of the party had no practical consequences, as Cliff always preferred an organisation resembling a religious fraternity to a political party. In expansionist times, membership cards were thrust on bystanders outside meetings. During ‘downturns’, members lived quieter lives, with activity geared to maintaining group morale. To ask whether Lenin’s or Luxemburg’s model was closer to Cliff’s is like enquiring which part of the planet is closer to the moon.
France: The Struggle Goes On, written with Ian Birchall, made a considerable impact, and compares well with anything produced following the events of May 1968. The authors understood the significance of the sudden rise of the student movement, but unlike some Marxists, they did not allow it to overwhelm them. Whereas Ernest Mandel briefly adopted student power as a replacement for working-class struggle, Cliff and Birchall saw the students as a detonator for that struggle, the only force which could overthrow capitalism. The French Communist Party’s efforts to contain the revolt are described, as were the reasons why they were able to do so. The PCF had gathered a cadre over years of struggle, and their rôle in the Resistance still brought them enormous respect. Although it had bailed out French capitalism at key points and had a poor record on anti-colonial struggle, its militants were fiercely committed to it, and when it moved against the students and striking workers, the revolutionary left forces were no match for it. France … had a considerable influence on left-wing students and workers in Britain. Cliff’s organisation, the International Socialists, grew rapidly as many radical students became convinced that they must turn to the working class. This enabled the IS to become more than a propaganda group.
Cliff’s pamphlet Portugal at the Crossroads, written as a response to the revolutionary developments following the coup of April 1974, highlighted the tension between the need for an accurate analysis and the building of an instrument which would lead the revolution. Published shortly after the IS’ influence in the British labour movement had peaked, it describes the colonial crisis, the structure of Portuguese industry and the activities of the various political organisations. At the time, Cliff was backing a group, the PR-PB, which had begun as an armed struggle tendency, with hardly a trace of Marxist understanding. It remained rather incoherent, containing a breathtaking mixture of incompatible tendencies. A few years later, in Spain, during the transition from the Franco regime, Cliff sought to win over the OIC, another bizarre creation, led by the charismatic Diego Fabregas. It seems absurd to imagine that such groups could be transformed into revolutionary parties. However, Cliff considered that as the Communist parties were reformist, bureaucratic and tightly controlled, and the Fourth International groups were weak and confused, there had to be another tendency which could be helped to provide revolutionary leadership, so disbelief had to be suspended.
The last item in the book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Lessons for Indonesia, summarises the lessons of 1917 and subsequent attempts at revolution elsewhere, and adds a couple of pages on Indonesia – ‘One size fits all.’ These lessons are of some value to people everywhere, not just in Indonesia. The need for a revolutionary party is stressed once more, but as an incantation rather than a guide to action. The article is not of the same quality as those on Palestine, written 60 years earlier.
Cliff’s unremitting effort over nearly seven decades evokes admiration and astonishment, when you consider that his interventions abroad had to be carried out through intermediaries or in writing, as the government never granted him citizenship, and he was not free to travel abroad. Subsequent volumes should describe his political activities in Britain, and present a more rounded picture of his political life. The present volume should be read in conjunction with his autobiography, A World To Win, written just before he died, which does describe his efforts to build a socialist organisation, firstly in Palestine, and then in Britain.
Cliff liked to remind us that theory is grey, while the tree of life is green, and it is sometimes difficult to understand what the relationship between his theory and practice was. He rejected Leninist organisation in practice, without actually saying so, understandably, given the odious outfits which have traded under that name. Certainly, no collection of articles can convey the impression given by his charm, energy and ability to inspire masses of people.
Thus he argues that ‘trade and industry commanded as little social prestige in the early nineteenth century as they had since the remotest times’, and that the real change came with the advent of the railways after 1840. He should follow Engels’ advice and study the novels of Balzac, where he will see just what an impact the Revolution had on the values of society, religion and the family.
He argues that there was no significance to Le Chapelier’s law to ban trade unions, because pre-Revolutionary governments had ‘never countenanced any form of workers’ organisations’. Why then was Le Chapelier, who had been President of the National Assembly in 1789, so anxious to insist that the Revolution was ‘finished’. Precisely because social relations were changing far more rapidly than he had envisaged; as Marge Piercy puts it in her brilliant novel City of Darkness, City of Light: ‘Enlightened gentlemen imagined a Revolution that would be vigorous but polite … They had never imagined that people who waited on them in stores and made boots for them, who carted off their waste and brought them water, would come to rule.’
He also claims that the Enlightenment was not hostile to the old regime, but was essentially reformist. This is to forget that the philosophic movement of the eighteenth century contained many different currents — rather like the pre-Blair Labour Party — from moderate reformers to militant atheists and utopian communists.
However, Doyle makes one telling point. He argues that ‘the overthrow of the Ancien Regime began in France because there centralised government had excluded everybody from all say in or experience of public affairs, and thereby deprived men of all sense of public duty’. Two centuries later, that analysis has a real resonance.
The Donald and Rees volume is a collection of essays by academics, based on a series of seminars; like many such collections, it enables contributors to fulfil the norms of a system increasingly based on piecework. But since each writer is concerned with his or her personal research, there is no unifying focus. Certainly, the book contains many interesting observations, and much useful empirical material. But there is no engagement of debate, and no confrontation of theory with practice, such as would be necessary to truly develop a scientific approach. It confirms the present reviewer’s view that the bourgeois universities will play an ever-decreasing rôle in the development of knowledge.
Several contributors are concerned to define exactly what constitutes a revolution. Thus there are chapters entitled Stalin’s Great Turn and The Nazi Revolution. The problem here is of not seeing the wood for the trees. In Marxist terms, a revolution is the self-emancipation of an oppressed class; the means must be revolutionary, since the institutions of society are in the hands of the oppressors, and cannot serve their victims. Once this basic insight is abandoned, and merely secondary features are considered, then it is indeed difficult to tell a revolution from a counter-revolution.
Several contributors are concerned by the ‘revolutions’ of 1989 in the Stalinist bloc, since these present an apparently new historical phenomenon. Yet again the danger is of looking too closely at their subject. The question as to how extensive and how significant popular uprisings were is certainly of great interest, but it is secondary. It is first necessary to establish the nature and causes of the events.
It is all too easy to be confused by the regimes’ self-description. But anyone who considers that the collapse of Stalinism constituted a defeat for the working class has entered a world of formalism and abstraction, in which the term ‘working class’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the women and men who actually work in factories, mines and offices. It is rather like announcing that the French Revolution was against the Will of God, since Louis XVI claimed to rule in God’s name.
Moreover, the detailed focus on national specifics by academic specialists leads them to miss the ultimate cause of the collapse of Stalinism, namely the fact that centralised state economies, which had achieved a certain brutal efficiency in rapid industrialisation, had become obsolete as world capitalism entered a more highly globalised form in which the Stalinist regimes were incapable of competing.
Yet the ghost of revolution still walks through the corridors of our universities. Many readers will doubtless agree with the concluding sentences of the book, by Krishan Kumar: ‘The end of revolution has been proclaimed on numerous occasions in the twentieth century, in the 1930s as well as the 1950s and the 1980s. In each case a surprise was in store. We will be surprised again; of that we can be sure.’
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The Arditi del Popolo, whose name roughly (and not very happily) translates as ‘the people’s shocktroops’, were active in Italy for a mere two years, but, on the one hand, represent yet another great missed opportunity in the history of the working class, and, on the other, still have many lessons that can be learnt and can benefit all Marxists today wishing to engage with the class, to bring about revolutionary outcomes.
The Arditi del Popolo were born of the deeply felt discontent among Italian soldiers in the aftermath of the First World War, when it soon became starkly clear that Italy, too, was not destined to be ‘a land fit for heroes’. At the very beginning, the Arditi d’Italia, as they were originally known, were born as élite corps charged with particularly daring and dangerous missions, and as such they comprised largely petit-bourgeois elements, often highly contradictory in their views, influenced by Futurism and opposed on the one hand to the established order, which they perceived as cowardly and conformist, and equally hostile to the working class, whom they saw as having little appetite for the conflict, and apathetically waiting to reap the benefits of the toil and suffering of the army in the trenches. However, while after the war a number of the Arditi did join Mussolini’s Fascist squads, the bulk of these highly-trained military men quickly realised that the ideals they were fighting for would not be realised: no new Italy was going to rise from the ashes of the old society. Rather, parliamentary compromise, political games and, generally, mediocrity, as they saw it, were set to stay, while economic and living conditions were everywhere rapidly deteriorating. The combination of all these factors, together with an instinctive repulsion faced with the cowardly methods employed by Mussolini’s thugs against individuals and organisations of the opposition, gradually helped to raise the consciousness of these men, who began to embrace more and more the plight of the Italian working class, thus contradicting the myth according to which all soldiers must by definition also be right-wing.
Some statistics can easily explain why the Arditi del Popolo were far from an élitist group of few individuals looking to make ‘symbolic gestures’. In the summer of 1921, the Arditi came to number approximately 55,000 members and 54 branches distributed throughout Italy. In their first and only national show of strength, about 3,000 Arditi paraded in full military attire in Rome, within an anti-Fascist demonstration numbering 50,000.
But the numerical membership is only half of the story. Its composition is far more important: the Arditi del Popolo were clearly a proletarian organisation, and included large numbers of railway workers, manual workers in general, metal workers, agricultural and shipyard workers as well as dockers, builders, printing workers, public transport workers and peasants. These people came from different political backgrounds (p. 66). They were not only socialists or Communists, indeed many of them were anarchists. Yet their common ground was, simply, the basic need to oppose Fascism as a class enemy. The most important factor to consider is that the Arditi del Popolo were essentially born out of the need for people to defend themselves physically, let alone politically, against the orgy of bloody Fascist violence which had begun to engulf Italy. This need for self-defence began to be more and more vital from the first months of 1919. There was simply no choice: either you managed to escape with your life, or the Fascists would kill you; witness the veritable bloodbath that the Italian working class and its organisations were to endure from then on.
This point was not at all lost on the Italian workers, who enthusiastically cooperated with the Arditi del Popolo in all their military operations, lending them their full support, and recognising them as ‘their’ defence force. Because the Arditi were comprised of highly-trained military men, they were to prove extremely problematic to Mussolini and his party, which was, after all, still in its infancy. A complete list of the Arditi’s operations in Italy goes far beyond the scope of this review (Francescangeli devotes the second part of his book to a very detailed region-by-region account of this), yet in their brief existence the Arditi proved victorious in several crucial battles against the Blackshirts, most notably in Sarzana in July 1921, and in Parma in August 1922.
In Sarzana, a largely agricultural town on the Tuscan-Ligurian border, 600 Fascists were sent on a punitive expedition to quell the opposition of a militant and historically highly-politicised peasant class. Yet, despite their superior numbers and military resources, the Fascists had to flee Sarzana in a hurry, leaving 18 dead and several wounded behind. This victory was possible, not only thanks to the Arditi’s military experience and tactical skills, but also to the high level of popular support they enjoyed wherever they engaged the Fascists, which allowed them to fight virtually house-to-house, and to rely on the highest loyalty from the population.
Faced with this embarrassing defeat, the Fascist party almost split. Its more intransigent wing wanted to escalate violence and repression, while Mussolini, fearful of engendering a mass and combative opposition, favoured compromise and an agreement with the largest working-class party, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and the trade union organisations. Mussolini had his way, but not before being forced to resign, in an attempt to avert an internal coup and to ensure his very political survival.
The battle of Parma took place barely two months before Fascism took power in Italy, yet the outcome could not have been more disastrous for the Blackshirts. Mussolini’s men were by now furious with the Arditi, who, despite being largely on the decline by now, still refused to go away, and – whenever they managed to find the necessary resources to engage the Fascists – still enjoyed a clear military superiority. In their biggest single punitive expedition, 20,000 Blackshirts descended on Parma, a large agricultural and small industrial town in the more prosperous Northern part of the country. The Arditi and the entire population of Parma rose to the challenge, in what was to become a full-scale four-day street battle. Popular participation was virtually universal, and a large number of women lent their support to the struggle. Moreover, the Italian royal army, the carabinieri, did not fight at all, as their commanders feared the possibility of fraternisation between their soldiers and the people of Parma. In the end, the Fascists suffered 40 dead and 150 wounded. They hastily retreated, and even their chief-in-command, Italo Balbo, admiringly commented on the Arditi’s feat: ‘Women and young boys take part in the action … Workers operate in shifts. Military discipline … War discipline ..… Many workers wear their ex-soldiers’ uniforms … Women from the local population take bread, wine, fruit, lard, potatoes to the anti-Fascists’ kitchens …’ (p. 136)
It should be clear therefore that the Arditi del Popolo were far from being a small and isolated group, but enjoyed the support of a class that had been quick in recognising the life-and-death nature of the struggle against Fascism and the absolute need for some form of self-defence. Moreover, the fact that the Arditi were primarily a military élite meant that, on purely military and practical grounds, they were repeatedly able to stop and defeat Fascist squads on the ground, at a crucial time when the latter still needed to establish themselves, and were thus far from invincible.
While it can be argued that the Arditi possessed serious limitations with their limited political horizons and that the Italian working class was still reeling from its heavy defeats in the factories, nothing can excuse the final crucial term of this equation, the single factor that ultimately decided the demise of the Arditi del Popolo and, with it, of any chance of working-class self-defence: the rôle played by the trade unions and the parties of the Italian working class.
The leadership of the PSI had long embraced reformism and parliamentary politics, and believed that the state, far from conniving with Fascism (as was clearly the case), would act as a buffer and stop Mussolini in his tracks using its machinery, the legislative system and so on. Turati and his party had essentially a view of royalty and parliament which dated back to the first ‘genteel’ times of liberal, enlightened socially-minded gentlemen conversing in elegant salons. Fascism was but an extremist aberration; rational politicians could always legislate against its worst excesses. Mussolini, therefore, found no difficulty in getting the PSI and the trade unions to sign a peace pact in August 1921. In exchange for ‘assurances’ from the Fascist party that the worst violence would now be curbed and that the Italian state would have a mediating rôle that the signatories of the pact would readily respect (this was based on the deeply flawed assumption that the state at the time was a neutral entity with respect to Fascism). It goes without saying that Mussolini had no intention of keeping his word. Not only did violence escalate, Turati and his party agreed to renounce all forms of organised workers’ defence, actively discouraging any form of direct involvement (or ‘provocation’, as they put it), and openly denouncing the Arditi del Popolo as an organisation alien to the working class and its interests: ‘The Socialist Party declares its dissociation from the organisation and the work of the “Arditi del Popolo” …’ (p. 82) This was to prove disastrous for the Arditi in this crucial stage of their development, for it isolated them and made them much more vulnerable to state repression, as they now openly became a criminal organisation.
But the Arditi were to find no better treatment at the hands of the Italian Communists. The Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I) was born of a split with the PSI in January 1921. Despite Gramsci expressing his sympathies on several occasions for the Arditi, and giving them column space on his Ordine Nuovo newspaper – ‘Are Communists against the movement of the Arditi del Popolo? Quite the opposite: they aspire to the arming of the proletariat, to the creation of a proletarian armed force able to defeat the bourgeoisie …’ (15 July 1921, quoted by Francescangeli, p. 91) – in the end he too had to be ‘tactical’ in his support, due to the political supremacy enjoyed by the then leader of the party, Amadeo Bordiga. So Gramsci wrote four days later that the Arditi del Popolo ‘have an objective which is not political but contingent, and cannot achieve what they’re aiming for if the working class, as a class and as a party, does not join the fray’ (quoted by Francescangeli, p. 98).
For the emerging Communist Party, Fascism was, just like Social Democracy, merely another form of bourgeois counter-revolution. Faced with a ‘revolutionary’ international situation, Fascism was to be seen as the final, useless push of a bourgeoisie by now on its deathbed. Totally discounting the mass aspect of Fascist reaction, which was able to take with it the discontented petit-bourgeoisie, the PCd’I underestimated the need for self-defence (pp. 89–90). Bordiga’s attitude towards the Arditi displays an utter lack of understanding of the dynamics of revolutionary politics and a very unhealthy sectarianism, which in fact attracted sharp criticism, both from Lenin and the Third International, especially on the question of the united front.
Bordiga opposed the Arditi because they were not members of the Communist Party. The leader of the Arditi was Argo Secondari, an ex-army lieutenant who, despite his great military skills, did not seem to have clear political allegiances, and who, despite welcoming within the Arditi ranks everyone who wanted to fight Fascism, was totally opposed to the creation of internal political factions. Faced with the terror that the working class was enduring daily under the blows of the Fascists’ clubs, many people and, crucially, many grassroots members of the PCd’I and the PSI rightly thought that it was correct to join forces with anyone opposed to Mussolini. Indeed, the only political force which understood this and quickly embraced and continued to support the Arditi to the bitter end was the Italian anarchist movement (on the libertarian contribution to the struggle, see Marco Rossi’s excellent Arditi, non gendarmi! Dall’arditismo di guerra agli arditi del popolo 1917–1922, Pisa 1997, p. 189).
Bordiga was extremely suspicious of the Arditi, whom he regarded as shady characters at best, or Fascist agents at worst. Francescangeli quotes at length from the PCd’I’s documents of the time, and it is really instructive to follow the curve of Bordiga’s closure against the Arditi, in the face of the growing support from his party grassroots. So, in July 1921, in the pages of Il Comunista, Bordiga emphasised that ‘a revolutionary military enrolment must be based on the party … so Communists cannot and should not take part in such initiatives proposed by other parties or, at any rate, originating outside their party …’ (p. 100). Later in the same month, faced with its members’ unwillingness to follow party lines, the PCd’I belatedly established its own Squadre comuniste d’azione in direct competition with the Arditi, specifying that ‘no member of the party or its youth federation can become part of other similar organisations …’ (p. 100). Finally, at the end of July, in the pages of the Ordine Nuovo, the party outlined clear disciplinary actions. So, because ‘the Arditi del Popolo seemingly wish … to bring about a proletarian reaction to the excesses of Fascism, with the aim to establish once more “order and the normality of social life” [while] Communists … want to continue the proletarian struggle up to the victory for the revolution … we cannot but deplore those Communist comrades who have forged contacts with the organisers of the “Arditi del Popolo” in Rome to offer their services and ask for directives. If this should happen again, the most severe measures shall be adopted.’ (p. 101)
In August, all those insisting on having relations with the Arditi were to receive official warnings. And although some party branches disobeyed the party line, in general most, albeit reluctantly, fell into line with the leadership’s instructions (p. 102).
Lenin himself criticised the leadership of the PCd’I on several occasions, because of their clear isolationism. He referred to the anti-Fascist demonstration in Rome in July 1921 as a great show of strength of the working class, although, unfortunately, at the time Lenin believed that the Italian party had organised and supported that demonstration (p. 103).
By now it should be clear that, had the PCd’I and the PSI supported the Arditi and joined forces with them, then the ‘restricted’ political horizons of the Arditi too could be greatly widened, and, in all probability, thanks to the many highly capable cadres these parties had, revolutionary politics could have gained the upper hand among the Arditi.
All this was when trade union branches were being burned to the ground, party branches destroyed, printing presses smashed up, political activists prosecuted, beaten up and killed, and when the working class was terrorised into submission.
Perhaps Francescangeli summarises perfectly the lessons to be drawn from the Arditi del Popolo, when he says:
The Asturian Uprising
Early in 1933, the Workers and Peasants Bloc of Joaquín Maurín, convened a meeting in Barcelona to set up a Workers Alliance against the growing menace of fascism both abroad and in Spain. At first, there were few takers, the Communist Left (Trotskyists) and some left anarchists, but when the Nazis took power in Germany the need for the Workers Alliance became much clearer to many others. All workers’ organisations, political and trade union, were entitled to join and to place a representative on the committee. For Maurín, this was, despite certain differences, the Spanish expression of the soviet, a pure example of a class organisation. The Catalan Socialist Union was forced to withdraw from the Alliance because of its support for the bourgeois Catalan Generalitat. This wise exclusion policy was one that Maurín would have done well to remember when a few short years later he joined the bourgeois parties in a Popular Front government during the Civil War. The immediate cause of the uprising was the inclusion of three members of the extreme right in the national government. This was seen as a first significant opening to fascism. On 4 October 1934, the Asturian Committee of the Workers Alliance took the decision for the uprising. Despite the cache of Portuguese weaponry, the workers were not well armed. Hunting guns, and farm implements were freely available, but the miners’ weapon of choice was sticks of dynamite. It was readily available in the mines, and the miners were highly skilled in its use. In the battle for Oviedo, the dynamiters induced panic in the defenders, and were decisive in winning the day.
In Catalonia, the Generalitat presided over by Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist, declared a Catalan state within the Spanish Federal Republic. The workers confidently expected that Companys would open the armouries and distribute the weapons them. Their confidence was misplaced, and the Generalitat put up no resistance to a force of 50 men and a general. Catalonia, the birthplace of the Workers Alliance, played no further part in the struggle.
Despite its isolation, the uprising enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Asturian workers. Throughout the 15 days, the shortage of arms was a continuing problem. If they possessed the artillery, the shells had no fuses. They set about manufacturing what they could. Their home-made hand grenades were apparently of such high quality that not one failed to explode. They produced a device for lobbing their grenades into enemy trenches that proved wonderfully effective on several occasions. They developed a method of armour-plating trains, wagons and vehicles.
As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making. For example, they armoured an entire train with the exception of the engine, an oversight that proved fatal as soon as it came in range of enemy cannon. More importantly, having taken the radio station in Oviedo, they failed to broadcast any appeals for help and solidarity action to the Spanish or the world’s workers, on the spurious grounds that if they told the other Spanish workers of their struggle and successes, they would not send them help. This is just the sort of decision that a committee might well make in a demented moment of stress. In the end, of course, all the innovative weaponry and courage could not overcome the facts. Asturias was alone, they could not effectively arm themselves against the growing tide of the reactionary forces, in particular the air power of their adversaries. In Mieres the entire revolutionary committee decamped, with the exception of Manuel Grossi. Surprisingly, with the opposition advancing steadily, the workers’ spirit was not dampened, and at the end they could have had more men under arms if they only had the guns to give them.
The victory of the reaction was accompanied by indiscriminate slaughter and jailing of thousands; indeed, one of the demands that secured victory for the Popular Front in 1936 was for the release of the Asturian workers. Until the end, apart from some typical Stalinist sectarianism, the Workers’ Alliance worked well, it owed nothing, and made no concessions to any bourgeois liberal allies, for it had none. It was a serious and courageous attempt to pre-empt the fascist menace with socialism, a policy decision that the Comintern, the German Communist Party and German Social Democracy had been unable to make in 1933, a failure for which we all subsequently paid, and are still paying, the price.
In Poland, just a little less than 10 years after the Asturian uprising, in July 1944 things were not going well for the German army. The Russians were advancing on a broad front, and the Germans in Warsaw were frantically loading booty onto westward-moving transport, and building defences to face the oncoming Russians. By 29 July, the Russians were already on the left bank of the Vistula, just a few kilometres from Warsaw. Enthused by the closeness of the Russian forces, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of that day the Poles attacked the Germans. Surprise and the enthusiasm of the assault brought significant success, but as soon as they had overcome the initial shock, the Germans brought up men artillery and tanks to suppress the insurgency. Despite initial fears, the Poles developed a useful method for disabling Tiger tanks using petrol ignited by hand grenades. Interestingly enough, the Poles, like the Asturian workers before them, made their own hand grenades with explosive from captured shells. They also made a catapult device for firing their grenades at the Germans.
The similarity, unfortunately, does not end there. Throughout the struggle the Poles were always short of armaments. There is no greater tragedy than to have far more ready fighters than there are guns to go around. That they should have been short of weapons while the Russian army was 20 kilometres from Warsaw is a disgrace and another of the crimes to be laid at Stalin’s door. British, Canadian and Polish pilots flew a number arms runs to the insurgents, but the attrition rate was heavy, and they were refused landing facilities behind the Russian lines that would have eased the situation. All of this was well known to Stalin, who was lobbied by Churchill and Mikołajczyk, the Polish premier-in-exile, among several others. It was all to no avail, Stalin lied, evaded and finally put it about that these were irresponsible elements and reactionaries. For Stalin, a successful uprising by native Poles would have put in jeopardy the spoils that he expected to enjoy after the defeat of Hitler. At the time many were convinced by Stalin’s accusations because they could not believe that “Uncle Joe” would be so calculating as to consign thousands of anti-fascist fighters to death at the hands of the Germans. We, of course, who now know that this same “Uncle Joe” would, in his tireless pursuit of the interests of the world’s workers, give up entire Sundays to sit with his chum Molotov signing death sentences; if this is not actually the ultimate sacrifice, it certainly shows what he was made of.
After two months, the Warsaw commune surrendered. For two months it had held out despite the overwhelming force of the Germans and the treachery of Stalin. Its programme of nationalisation and workers’ control were as anathema to Stalin as they would be to any other counter-revolutionary.
Neither of the events detailed in these two excellent pamphlets lasted for long, although you might well say that given the difficulties it is a wonder they lasted as long as they did. It is always a tragedy when the good ones lose, as Albert Camus wrote somewhere: “Men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.” Nevertheless, to understand the difficulty is not to give up the desire for the same end that the Asturian miners and the Warsaw workers were struggling to achieve.
*************
The Asturian Uprising
Early in 1933, the Workers and Peasants Bloc of Joaquín Maurín, convened a meeting in Barcelona to set up a Workers Alliance against the growing menace of fascism both abroad and in Spain. At first, there were few takers, the Communist Left (Trotskyists) and some left anarchists, but when the Nazis took power in Germany the need for the Workers Alliance became much clearer to many others. All workers’ organisations, political and trade union, were entitled to join and to place a representative on the committee. For Maurín, this was, despite certain differences, the Spanish expression of the soviet, a pure example of a class organisation. The Catalan Socialist Union was forced to withdraw from the Alliance because of its support for the bourgeois Catalan Generalitat. This wise exclusion policy was one that Maurín would have done well to remember when a few short years later he joined the bourgeois parties in a Popular Front government during the Civil War. The immediate cause of the uprising was the inclusion of three members of the extreme right in the national government. This was seen as a first significant opening to fascism. On 4 October 1934, the Asturian Committee of the Workers Alliance took the decision for the uprising. Despite the cache of Portuguese weaponry, the workers were not well armed. Hunting guns, and farm implements were freely available, but the miners’ weapon of choice was sticks of dynamite. It was readily available in the mines, and the miners were highly skilled in its use. In the battle for Oviedo, the dynamiters induced panic in the defenders, and were decisive in winning the day.
In Catalonia, the Generalitat presided over by Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist, declared a Catalan state within the Spanish Federal Republic. The workers confidently expected that Companys would open the armouries and distribute the weapons them. Their confidence was misplaced, and the Generalitat put up no resistance to a force of 50 men and a general. Catalonia, the birthplace of the Workers Alliance, played no further part in the struggle.
Despite its isolation, the uprising enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Asturian workers. Throughout the 15 days, the shortage of arms was a continuing problem. If they possessed the artillery, the shells had no fuses. They set about manufacturing what they could. Their home-made hand grenades were apparently of such high quality that not one failed to explode. They produced a device for lobbing their grenades into enemy trenches that proved wonderfully effective on several occasions. They developed a method of armour-plating trains, wagons and vehicles.
As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making. For example, they armoured an entire train with the exception of the engine, an oversight that proved fatal as soon as it came in range of enemy cannon. More importantly, having taken the radio station in Oviedo, they failed to broadcast any appeals for help and solidarity action to the Spanish or the world’s workers, on the spurious grounds that if they told the other Spanish workers of their struggle and successes, they would not send them help. This is just the sort of decision that a committee might well make in a demented moment of stress. In the end, of course, all the innovative weaponry and courage could not overcome the facts. Asturias was alone, they could not effectively arm themselves against the growing tide of the reactionary forces, in particular the air power of their adversaries. In Mieres the entire revolutionary committee decamped, with the exception of Manuel Grossi. Surprisingly, with the opposition advancing steadily, the workers’ spirit was not dampened, and at the end they could have had more men under arms if they only had the guns to give them.
The victory of the reaction was accompanied by indiscriminate slaughter and jailing of thousands; indeed, one of the demands that secured victory for the Popular Front in 1936 was for the release of the Asturian workers. Until the end, apart from some typical Stalinist sectarianism, the Workers’ Alliance worked well, it owed nothing, and made no concessions to any bourgeois liberal allies, for it had none. It was a serious and courageous attempt to pre-empt the fascist menace with socialism, a policy decision that the Comintern, the German Communist Party and German Social Democracy had been unable to make in 1933, a failure for which we all subsequently paid, and are still paying, the price.
In Poland, just a little less than 10 years after the Asturian uprising, in July 1944 things were not going well for the German army. The Russians were advancing on a broad front, and the Germans in Warsaw were frantically loading booty onto westward-moving transport, and building defences to face the oncoming Russians. By 29 July, the Russians were already on the left bank of the Vistula, just a few kilometres from Warsaw. Enthused by the closeness of the Russian forces, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of that day the Poles attacked the Germans. Surprise and the enthusiasm of the assault brought significant success, but as soon as they had overcome the initial shock, the Germans brought up men artillery and tanks to suppress the insurgency. Despite initial fears, the Poles developed a useful method for disabling Tiger tanks using petrol ignited by hand grenades. Interestingly enough, the Poles, like the Asturian workers before them, made their own hand grenades with explosive from captured shells. They also made a catapult device for firing their grenades at the Germans.
The similarity, unfortunately, does not end there. Throughout the struggle the Poles were always short of armaments. There is no greater tragedy than to have far more ready fighters than there are guns to go around. That they should have been short of weapons while the Russian army was 20 kilometres from Warsaw is a disgrace and another of the crimes to be laid at Stalin’s door. British, Canadian and Polish pilots flew a number arms runs to the insurgents, but the attrition rate was heavy, and they were refused landing facilities behind the Russian lines that would have eased the situation. All of this was well known to Stalin, who was lobbied by Churchill and Mikołajczyk, the Polish premier-in-exile, among several others. It was all to no avail, Stalin lied, evaded and finally put it about that these were irresponsible elements and reactionaries. For Stalin, a successful uprising by native Poles would have put in jeopardy the spoils that he expected to enjoy after the defeat of Hitler. At the time many were convinced by Stalin’s accusations because they could not believe that “Uncle Joe” would be so calculating as to consign thousands of anti-fascist fighters to death at the hands of the Germans. We, of course, who now know that this same “Uncle Joe” would, in his tireless pursuit of the interests of the world’s workers, give up entire Sundays to sit with his chum Molotov signing death sentences; if this is not actually the ultimate sacrifice, it certainly shows what he was made of.
After two months, the Warsaw commune surrendered. For two months it had held out despite the overwhelming force of the Germans and the treachery of Stalin. Its programme of nationalisation and workers’ control were as anathema to Stalin as they would be to any other counter-revolutionary.
Neither of the events detailed in these two excellent pamphlets lasted for long, although you might well say that given the difficulties it is a wonder they lasted as long as they did. It is always a tragedy when the good ones lose, as Albert Camus wrote somewhere: “Men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.” Nevertheless, to understand the difficulty is not to give up the desire for the same end that the Asturian miners and the Warsaw workers were struggling to achieve.
************
The revolutionary’s story will always be unfinished; there will always be a sense that the major tasks lie ahead, and not in what has been achieved. This makes it impossible to compose an autobiography as a rounded, finished work. The themes are stated, then contested by counter-themes, variations are developed, and the piece comes to an end, necessarily unresolved.
These problems are particularly acute in Bill Hunter’s book. Like Harry Ratner (and so many others), Hunter was a victim of Gerry Healy’s disruption of the most important attempt at building the revolutionary party in the UK. Unlike Ratner (and too many others), he remains convinced of the need for and the possibility of the revolution. Not for him the resigned minor key, the bleak decrescendo – he sets himself the task of making an honest political assessment of the lessons of his life. His record and contribution are such that he deserves to be reviewed with a method consistent with the scale of his objective. (This reviewer does not set himself up as having achieved such an aim.)
A Marxist revolutionary’s autobiography will be different from anybody else’s, for the same reasons that a revolutionary’s life is different from everybody else’s, but with an additional twist or fold of complexity. A bourgeois minister, or even a non-Marxist proletarian, might wrestle, with varying degree of success (and it is rarely done well) with the problem of extracting conclusions – ‘lessons’ – from the interactions between his life and his times, and his consciousness and his being. If this were all there was to be done, the Marxist autobiography would only have to deal with the problems of lack of historical resolution, and especially that the revolution appears as far away, or further, now than at the beginning of the story – more difficulties than enough for any writer.
But the Marxist is called upon to attack the same problem with an additional dimension – that of how to reflect upon the movement of his own consciousness, and to try to perceive its expansion and its simultaneous grasping of and impact on reality. He begins with an incomparable advantage – his recognition of the truly revolutionary potential of human consciousness, the most incomparable innovation in the whole of history; and the driving force from which all human qualities and weaknesses spring. But in itself, this is insufficient to allow the autobiographer to overcome the key problem – that of grasping and reflecting on the changes in his own consciousness when that consciousness is transformed by the very act of grasping itself. This is not a political but a literary problem, and is in fact a problem which cannot be solved in its own terms. It is hardly surprising that the autobiographies I have referred to bypass it.
In his Introduction, Hunter refers to his book both as an autobiography and as memoirs. It is in fact much more the latter than the former. Its points of interest are clustered around the political personalities and activities he encountered, much more than around the ways in which he responded to them, overcame doubts and irresolutions, determined upon actions and positions, and assessed them in retrospect.
Hunter’s account of his early involvement with the Wicks–Dewar group illustrates this difficulty well. With very little political background, he happened to hear Wicks attacking the Communist Party at a meeting, and made contact with them. (All of us live on the Damascus Road, of course, and chance events can assume enormous significance in every life.) With Wicks’ encouragement, he undertook a campaign of reading. It is impossible not to be amused at his description of barricading himself into his room to read Their Morals and Ours while a house party roared around him, but such adroit moments are too few in the book. What I wanted, but didn’t get from this section was to learn just what Hunter found convincing or attractive at this point in his life about the Wicks-Dewar group, and about Trotsky’s texts. He appears to assume that his readers share his enthusiasms, and came to their revolutionary convictions by a route so similar that the individual experience involved is insignificant.
This section is followed by the story of the origins of the Wicks–Dewar group, but disappointingly, this does not consist of original material, or even of recollected accounts given to him by the participants. Next come some personal notes about Wicks and Dewar themselves, which add something to the previously published materials.
Hunter gives an account of the group’s activity in the working class, which adds to what we previously knew by describing some of the agitation and propaganda that cannot be learned about from the group’s documents. But there is too little about how decisions were arrived at, or how and why Hunter and the group made the choices that they did. It is as if the group’s ideas and writings were sufficient to understand what happened and what they did. But if this were the case, why did the group never exceed a membership of between 25 and 30? It is essential to understand why some people joined, in order to understand why so many thousands more did not. (And my instinct is, when I am given rough membership numbers like that, to demand all the names that I can get from the informant. I don’t think I could put together more than 10 names of Wicks–Dewar group members from the information I have to hand.)
The first instance of some personal response to political reality is where Hunter describes (p. 39) his impatience with Reg Groves’ passivity as a leader. But this germ-cell does not develop into a consideration of how he dealt with the problem, politically or personally, nor of how to struggle with the imperfections of leaders. Perhaps this is too painful a territory for a former ‘Healyite’ to venture onto. Instead, his line of recollection is cut off with a political generalisation, to the effect that Groves ‘could not break from’ British exceptionalism and a certain opportunism. Probably this is so, but here Hunter appears to mirror Groves’ passivity with his own.
These discontinuities in styles of thinking pervade the book. Too frequently he turns aside from describing his own experiences; too frequently he arrives too quickly at a generalised political conclusion.
Sometimes the same process appears in reverse. In an excellent chapter in which he rehabilitates Morrow and Goldman against the sterile programme chanting of Cannon and Cochran, as well as ably defending the Greek section against Pablo, the first person singular pronoun appears only once, and then only to concede that he missed the significance of the discussion in the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Regrettably, Hunter has not been adequately served by those of his comrades who undertook the typesetting, proof-reading and other technical tasks in the production of the book. The indexing is particularly at fault. By page 200, it is one page out of register, and the error grows to three pages by page 400. There are altogether too many errors of syntax and spelling that the average home computer provides tools to detect. Among the sadder errors, Widelin, the hero of the wartime fraternisation with the German troops occupying France, becomes ‘Eidelin’. Brian Pearce is represented as ‘Pierce’, no doubt not for the first time. John Archer’s thesis is referred to as ‘unpublished’, without even a mention of the university at which it can be accessed. A missing comma on page 240 sent me searching for a ‘Dave Lawrence’, seemingly a brother of Harry Finch. The reference to page 157 in the index in respect of the very interesting figure of Jack Pemberton cannot be found, either there or on any adjoining page.
Hunter’s chapter on the end of the RCP provides a great deal of valuable primary material. He rebuts Bob Pitt’s account of the expulsion of Ted Grant with personal recollection of the events. This presentation of the evidence is preferable to his (too frequent) dismissive asides against Pitt’s important series of articles on Healy. The survivors of the Healy movement have now had over a dozen years since Clapham Ragnarok in which to digest and report on their experiences, and cannot justly complain if the best accounts do not take account of their knowledge. However, one cannot refuse to savour Hunter’s description of Pitt’s series ‘which strung incidents together one after another like cracked beads on a frayed string’. Rarely has the proverbial advice to glasshouse residents been so stylishly disregarded.
There are some instances of reticence in Hunter’s book that merit attention. These especially concern his decisions about which group to work in. We read nothing about why he stayed with the static Wicks–Dewar group when the Harber current (Militant/Revolutionary Socialist League) appears to have been much more dynamic. On the formation of the Workers International League, Hunter maintains that it was a question of Ralph Lee’s subjective or even ‘personal’ split. Here we have an echo of his caution in respect of Groves’ leadership. It would seem that for Hunter, as for so many, any question of how the leadership chooses to abuse its position is ‘subjective’, not even registering on his political seismometer. His decision to join the RCP in 1944, he writes (p. 136), resulted from discussions with V. Sastry, an RCP Central Committee member. But we do not learn what the content of these discussions was, nor what was convincing about the RCP’s positions at this time, nor even what was unsatisfactory about the Wicks-Dewar group at this time. By this time, Hunter had been associated with the Wicks-Dewar group for five years, but we learn nothing about the end of this political relationship.
Elsewhere, Hunter provides some valuable corrections and additions to the reports in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson. His first-hand description of Jock Haston’s descent into uncertainty and doubt is pure gold. However, his section on Healy during the Second World War fails to mention the leadership’s flight into Hibernia, and the notorious Post Office book.
The discussion of the Proletarian Military Policy is disappointing, drawing entirely upon available documents, and not on personal recollections of the discussions at the time. It does reveal, however, that the discussion on the PMP hardly registered on the RSL membership, to such an extent that when he came to write his famous article on the war in 1958, he did not find it necessary even to mention the PMP. This contrasts starkly with Sam Levy’s references to the intense debate within the WIL, and is not entirely consistent with Harry Ratner’s account of the debates within the RSL on transitional demands and Air Raid Precautions.
Much could (and in my view should) have been written about the discussion on the nature of the East European states after the war. In this chapter, Hunter gives a too rare example of exactly how his political thinking developed, leading eventually to his important document The IS and Eastern Europe. I have always regarded this discussion as one of the great achievements of Trotskyism in Britain. The richness and breadth of independent thinking that flowed out of a small group with an overwhelmingly proletarian composition surpasses anything in the history of the movement in this country. Hunter, however, now takes a less enthusiastic view; he looks back on it as ‘academic’ and ‘abstract’.
To continue with a chapter by chapter commentary would exhaust the reader’s patience, not to mention the editor’s budget. While not hesitating to recommend this book for purchase by anybody who wants to form a conception of Trotskyism in Britain, some conclusion must be drawn. It is this – it seems to me that the revolutionary discipline of Hunter’s life has become a straightjacket that restricts his ability to write about his own experiences in a way that creates resonances with the reader. This is at odds with other aspects of Hunter’s life story. His book provides more than adequate evidence of his effectiveness as a workers’ leader in several workplaces. And nobody who has heard him speak could deny his ability to communicate convincingly. I await the second volume of this work keenly.
The Comintern agents’ depiction of an heroic Communist party fighting against the sinister concealed powers of Trotsky/fascism approaches insanity. Every difficulty was ascribed to those dark forces, as if there were no cock-ups due to real-world inexperience, ignorance or chance. For example, ‘General Walter’ (Karol Sverchevsky) described in a report to Voroshilov in August 1938 the extensive Trotskyist sabotage campaign consisting of spreading rumours, deliberately losing weapons and feeding troops poisoned chocolates. He pleaded for help from the NKVD as his investigations were obstructed by the saboteurs’ powerful friends. Even Harry Pollitt played the Trotskyist game by spiriting away a spy to a British destroyer in Barcelona. Unluckily for ‘Walter’, another ‘spy’ he had arrested died at the hands of an over-enthusiastic interrogator before he could disclose the extent of the plot.
The POUM was often described as Trotskyist by Stalinists and others, but here the label is extended to include anarchists, supporters of Caballero and even the conservative Catholic Basque nationalist Manuel Irujo. There must have been an element of cynicism by agents providing their superiors with the misinformation they demanded, but the hysterical tone of their reports suggests they did believe in the Trotskyist/fascist conspiracy. After all, Communist party members were required to believe that the Old Bolsheviks accused in the Moscow Trials were Hitler’s agents. If all the other tendencies were infiltrated by Trotskyists, why should the PCE and other Communist parties be immune? In such an atmosphere, there was no limit to suspicion, and few of the agents liked each other. Many of the ‘advisors’, including Rosenberg and Antonov-Ovseenko, were victims of Stalin’s purges when they were recalled to the Soviet Union, just as many accusers ended up joining their victims in the dock in show trials in the Peoples’ Democracies of the 1950s.
The Spanish Republic’s war effort faced many real problems. Local nationalisms and the central government were uneasy allies, troops did not have the level of training which would be usual in a professional army, there were long-standing conflicts between anarchists and socialists, and regular officers were widely suspected of Francoist sympathies, as the army had been an instrument for suppressing internal dissent and colonial revolt rather than fighting a modern war. But, in the Stalinist world view, real difficulties were produced by fascist/Trotskyist sabotage. The scarcity of actual Trotskyists was not a disadvantage, as a witch-hunt does not require the existence of real witches. The leaders of the POUM did not fully appreciate that the Moscow Trials were an historical turning point, but their courage in defending Trotsky against Stalinist slanders was exemplary. It is not possible to list all of the questions which are cleared up by these documents. Jesús Hernández’s claim that he opposed the murder of Nin, made in his book, Yo fui un ministro de Stalin, written after he had lost out to Ibárruri in the fight to be the Communist Party’s General Secretary, is clearly false. A report by the Comintern agent ‘Cid’ recounts that at a meeting of the council of ministers in July 1937 Hernández attacked the Socialist minister Zugazagoitia for questioning the Communist story that Nin had been freed by a detachment of fascists, and demanded that he pursue those ‘criminals’ rather than slander the Russians.
Political establishments need historians to provide them with a usable past, but that will vary from one country to another. The editors of this volume are soldiers in the ‘history wars’ being fought in the United States between Cold War and revisionist academics. (Rumour has it that later volumes in the Annals of Communism series will be edited by alternate teams of revisionists and cold warriors.) In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the editors of this volume are, understandably, elated that not just Stalinism, but socialism – and even liberalism? – have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The authorities they cite include Paul Johnson, François Fejtö and Robert Alexander, rather than the contemporary Spanish scholars one might expect. That is not because academic orthodoxy in Spain favours either the left or Stalinism. Spain also has its ‘history wars’, but the line-up there is rather different. The prevailing academic orthodoxy, represented by Bizcarrondo, Elorza and Casanova among others, not mentioned by the editors of Spain Betrayed, defends the Republic, but attacks the Stalinist repression as a hideous stain on it, while criticising the ‘excesses’ of the anarchists and the POUM. The revolutionary tradition is defended by the left-wing historians grouped around the manifesto Combate por la Historia.
Noting that all the various views of modern historians, whether in Russia, China or in the West, are oversimplifications (pp. 1–5), the writer dispels one myth after another. The view that Stalin deliberately sabotaged the Second Chinese Revolution in the interests of the struggle against the Left Opposition within Russia and British imperialism abroad is very firmly dealt with (pp. 2–3). Analysing the clash between Stalin and Trotsky over China step by step, he concludes that ‘the disagreements concerned tactics rather than strategy. All Bolshevik leaders tried their best to lead the Chinese Communists to a victory aimed at transforming China into a socialist or “non-capitalist” state.’ (p. 210) However, he does demonstrate that Stalin broke with Lenin’s position, ‘perhaps unconsciously convincing himself that he was simply developing Lenin’s line’, and locates Stalin’s mistakes in his adherence ‘to the concept of a “multi-class party”’ (p. 211), a policy unfortunately shared by all too many Trotskyists now (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 3, p. 111, and no. 4, p. 212).
For there was all the difference between this and Lenin’s strategy, which was ‘a manoeuvre aimed at helping unsophisticated Communist activists to use their potential foes temporarily for their own purposes’ (p. 211). The original decision to join the Guomindang was an ‘“entrist policy” … on Comintern instructions Voitinsky explained to the Chinese Communist leaders that work inside the GMD was not an end in itself but a means of strengthening the CCP and preparing it for the future struggle outside and against the GMD’ (p. 66). In fact, the anti-imperialist united front was intended to operate in the same way as the workers’ united front in Europe – to expose the inability of both reformists and bourgeois nationalists to advance the interests of the toilers. As the Theses on the Eastern Question of the Fourth Comintern Congress put it, ‘just as in the West the slogan of the workers’ united front has helped and is still helping to expose the social democrats’ sell-out of proletarian interests, so the slogan of an anti-imperialist united front will help to expose the vacillations of the various bourgeois-nationalist groups’ (B. Hessel [ed.], Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, London 1980, p. 415).
So Pantsov does not accept the views of 1960s and 1970s Soviet historians who ‘placed the highest value on the “moderation” of Lenin and the ECCI, emphasising Lenin’s belief in genuine national revolution in the East and contrasting his views with the Comintern’s ultra-leftists’ (p. 4). He shows that Lenin never deviated from the policy of Permanent Revolution as applied to Asia after 1917. He points out the extent of Lenin’s plans to spread the Russian Revolution by armed conquest in the Caucasus (1920–21) and Mongolia (1921), his ‘plans for capturing Constantinople’ (1921) and what he calls ‘Soviet aggression in Persia’ (p. 210). He agrees that in Russia in 1917 ‘Lenin altered his point of view and advocated a course towards socialist (that is, permanent) revolution’, a position that ‘wholly coincided with Trotsky’s’ (pp. 14–5), and reminds us that ‘during the first years after the October Revolution, Trotsky’s Results and Prospects was reprinted several times – including foreign-language editions – as a theoretical rationale of the October Revolution’ (p. 15).
Nor is the writer disposed to accept the myths of vulgar Trotskyism current in the West, that Trotsky opposed the entry of the CCP into the Guomindang on principle as early as 1923. ‘Not a single Soviet leader in the period immediately following the “coup”’ (that is, Chiang Kai-Shek’s of 1926), he points out, ‘proposed that the Communists leave the Guomindang. At a session of the Politburo discussing reports from Guangzhou that some Chinese Communists were contemplating anti-Chiang Kai-Shek actions, even Trotsky proposed a resolution condemning such “insurrectionary” intentions. It was not until some time later, in the second half of April 1926, that Trotsky proposed to the Politburo that the CCP withdraw from the Guomindang.’ (p. 92; cf. p. 212) ‘The issue is not as simple as Trotsky’s claim implies’, he continues, ‘one problem is that there are several inconsistencies in Trotsky’s well-known later accounts (written and published while he was in defeat and exile) of his position on this question – inconsistencies that no-one up to now seems to have noticed.’ (p. 102) It is a shame that here he does not give the credit where it is due, to Paolo Casciola, who analysed this question long ago (Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Foligno 1990; cf. the preface to the reprint of C.L.R. James, World Revolution, New Jersey, 1993, p. xvii and n29, and Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 269–71). It is equally unfortunate that Greg Benton, who learned this at the Wupperthal Conference, forgot to acquaint him with it.
At the same time, Pantsov shares Benton’s view that Mao’s ultimate success was due to ‘basically the same policy that Lenin put forward in 1920’ (p. 5), and that during 1937–49 ‘the Chinese Communists actually turned back to that concept and made it the foundation of their tactical course’ (p. 214). Now this reversion to pre-Plekhanov peasant socialism can only be accepted by those who have blurred the distinction between workers and peasants in their own minds, or who believe that the CCP was right to turn its back on the working class, for there is every difference between Lenin’s concept of a workers’ party taking power in alliance with the peasantry, and a military clique basing itself upon that class because it has led the workers’ movement to annihilation in the first place.
The appearance of this book, the work of Vadim Rogovin, and the rich memoirs of the survivors of the terror show just what could be accomplished once Russian scholars were allowed free interchange with the rest of the world, even if international Trotskyism’s contribution to this ferment has been so far disappointing. Let us hope that this splendid book will make some impact upon it.
However, it cannot be said that Lovell’s political judgement was always faultless. It took him 20 years to realise where all the SWP’s adulation of Castro was leading (pp. 177, 292), and he was in complete agreement with George Breitman’s uncritical views on black nationalism (pp. 264, 270–1). And although he saw that the Second World War was ‘the dividing line’ in the history of the Trotskyist movement (p. 133), ‘a great divide, like a chasm caused by an earthquake of unimaginable force’ (p. 135), he failed to see the Cochran split as a crucial stage in the SWP’s loss of its class direction that followed logically from it, and he led the struggle against Cochran in the Detroit branch (p. 25). Although he was the party’s Industrial Organiser at the time the Proletarian Orientation Tendency and Dave Fender began their thankless task of trying to point it back in the direction of the working class, he dismissed their struggle as ‘silly stuff’ (p. 63). We can therefore question if ‘he never gave up on the workers’ (p. 40), even if he finally came round to admit that it was the influx of middle-class youth ‘that lay [sic] the social basis on which Barnes was able to carry through his abandonment of the historic Trotskyist program’ (p. 63, cf. p. 339). Yet curiously, the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, which was heavily influenced by the American SWP, to this day locates the degeneration of that organisation in its belated turn towards the working class, and not in its previous turn away from it.
Unfortunately, whilst Lovell admitted his mistakes in the long run, the same cannot be said for one of this book’s editors, who still sees fit to criticise him for ‘thinking unconsciously of “the working class” as essentially meaning white male union members’ (p. 38), an inadmissible concession to the politically correct white terror now rampaging through the American universities.
Be that as it may, whilst we still look forward eagerly to a definitive history of the American Trotskyist movement, our thanks must go to the editors of this book for laying down some of the necessary foundations for it.
One of the longer pieces, Pro Segundo Manifiesto Comunista, is, as its title suggests, an attempt at a Communist Manifesto for the twentieth century. It makes general statements of principle and advocates specific demands, but there is no indication of how the workers would implement the proposals, or agitate around them. Munis’ main theme was that the entire labour movement was counter-revolutionary. He did not see it as his task to examine the economy or struggles between the various tendencies in the labour movement, so inevitably there is considerable repetition and a certain monotony to his writing. There is little examination of how the counter-revolution developed, and none on how supporters of non-revolutionary positions might be persuaded to question their allegiance to Stalinism, social democracy or other tendencies. Munis was associated with a journal, Alarma, and an organisation, Fomento, but his writing style suggests a solitary effort. It would be interesting to know how many people read his works, and whether they emerged from solitary cogitation or from discussion with others. As this volume does not describe that background, we are thrown back on Ernie Rogers’ account of meeting him in Paris in the 1960s (Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 53) which gives a lively picture of a Quixotic figure who talked continually, and who did not allow interruptions.
It would be interesting to know more of his life, most of it spent either in exile or prison, but Munis would have seen little point in autobiography. His best known work, Jalones de Derrota, gives a sustained narrative account of the Spanish revolution and Civil War. In the present volume, he is not constrained by chronological narrative, so the story is less focussed.
It must have taken incredible stubbornness to resist so long in isolation, but Munis had fought against the stream, since joining the Communist Left as a youth, being framed in a Stalinist trial in 1938, followed by exile in Mexico and France and imprisonment Franco’s Spain. Given that background, the harsh conditions of his last exile must have seemed relatively easy.
Van left his village to work in a metallurgical factory in Saigon, at that time the scene of massive demonstrations and strikes against the French colonial power by workers, students and young nationalists demanding freedom of assembly, of the press, of travel and of education. The country had already seen decades of peasant revolts, accompanied by executions (often by guillotine) of leading activists, or their deportation to the infamous penal colony of Poulo Condore.
Coolies working on the mosquito-infested rubber plantations (Michelin was one of the worst employers) were demanding improved conditions. They were hired under virtual slave contracts, and their appalling working conditions meant that 40 per cent died every year. Paddy-field workers were seizing their employers’ stocks of rice to feed their starving families. In some villages, peasants were setting up soviets to organise collective cultivation of the land and literacy campaigns.
Hardship had compelled Van to curtail his formal education, but, enrolling under a false name, he read Marx in the Saigon municipal library after work. He soon came into contact with the left opposition group in the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI), who were stressing the importance of a movement based on the working class, and of building a mass party. This flew in the face of the official CPI policy, which was much more oriented towards the peasantry, and, influenced by those who had been trained in Moscow, was built on the concept of the ‘professional revolutionary’. A show trial in 1933 of the core of CPI ‘professionals’ who had led the peasant movement condemned them all to death, or to long periods in the penal colony. The peasant movement was effectively beheaded.
In Saigon, Trotskyists and Stalinists joined together for three years under the banner of the journal La Lutte, published weekly in French to escape laws banning publications in the vernacular. Their candidates were elected to seats on the municipal council. But after the signing of the Stalin-Laval pact in May 1935, and the consequent failure of the French, and soon the Indochinese, Communist parties to oppose the militarism and colonialism of the French state, Van and other Trotskyists decided to end collaboration with the Stalinists and to form the Ligue des communistes internationalistes pour la construction de la IV Internationale. Van learned to set type, and the small group published clandestinely.
Van also began to organise the apparently passive workforce in his factory, who met under the guise of wedding and birthday parties (all gatherings of more than 19 people were illegal), and found himself their spokesman when a strike for better wages broke out.
Militant friends were arrested one after the other, and the longer Van remained at liberty, the more acutely he appreciated their courage under torture. But his turn came, and, at the age of 24, he was arrested in the factory storeroom, where he secretly discussed anti-colonialist campaigns with other young activists, and where he hid underground literature and revolutionary publications from abroad.
The young Van was imprisoned in the dreaded Maison Centrale, the police headquarters in Saigon, where he was tortured, as were thousands of others. Both Stalinist and Trotskyist prisoners were held together. Relations between them were wary, writes Van, but civil, to avoid provoking tension to the advantage of the common enemy. He joined in a hunger strike demanding political prisoner status equal to that in France. As a consequence, the prisoners were occasionally allowed French newspapers. This was how they learned about the Moscow Trials.
The Trotskyists were ‘overcome with a profound unease, and a thousand questions without answers kept going round in our heads’. In 1937, the Stalinists, under orders from Moscow, abruptly left the La Lutte group, and denounced the Trotskyists as ‘the ally, the agent, of fascism’. Van tells of the confusion this spread among many supporters, who had no idea of the political differences between the Third and the Fourth Internationals.
The working class in Vietnam was small, but Trotskyist activists were influential in the important industries. They agitated for joint councils of peasants and workers to take over the banks and the industries, and, eventually, to form an Asian Soviet Federation. Van captures the excitement when, in April 1939, the whole Fourth International list was elected to the local council in Saigon. The CPI candidates were defeated.
Van and his comrades were constantly being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, and then briefly freed once more. Once, he was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment simply for recommending books by Trotsky to a friend in a letter, and greeting in the street the well-known Trotskyist Ta thu Thau. Exiled to at the end of 1940 Travinh, on an island in the Mekong delta, he found himself in the middle of a peasant uprising that engulfed western Cochinchina. Almost 6,000 were arrested and over 200 were publicly executed, and thousands more were killed by the bombing authorised by the Vichy Governor General, Decoux. At about this time, Van discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis.
In March 1945 came a declaration of martial law under the Japanese, who, Van comments, ‘replaced the French at the head of the oppressive regime, while presenting themselves as liberators’. Saigon was bombarded by Allied forces. The Trotskyists spoke out against the Viet minh, who by this time controlled north Vietnam, for spreading the illusion that it was possible to form an entente with French and Allied imperialism to achieve ‘national liberation’. By contrast, the supporters of the Fourth International called on workers and peasants to rise up against all imperialist oppressors, of whatever nationality. Van and his comrades were elated when 30,000 miners in the Hon gai–Cam pha region set up elected councils to run the mines, public services and transport, and organised a literacy campaign.
In one of the most dramatic sections of the book, Van describes how the Viet minh seized power in the south. A big nationalist demonstration was held in Saigon in August 1945. The Trotskyists marched under their own banners: ‘Arm the people! For people’s councils! Land to the peasants! Workers’ control of the factories!’ That same night, loudspeaker vans drove through the city calling: ‘Everyone behind the Viet minh!’ Their leaflets said: ‘The Viet minh fully supported the Allies against the [Vichy] French and the Japanese. It will be easy for us to secure independence!’ Leading nationalists, sensing that the Viet minh had the wind in its sails, switched allegiance, bringing with them the quasi-fascist extreme nationalist youth movement. The radical religious sects also pledged allegiance to the Viet minh. The next day, a banner in front of the Saigon town hall announced the formation of a Viet minh government. At the press conference held by the new regime, the Trotskyist Tran van Thach asked who had elected the government. Van describes the reaction: the self-styled president, Tran van Giau, ‘beside himself with fury, answered: “We have provisionally assumed the government, which we will hand over in due course. As for my political answer …”, he fingered his revolver, “I will give you that elsewhere.”’ Two months later, Tran van Thach was shot by Tran van Giau’s men.
In Saigon, popular committees sprang up spontaneously. The Trotskyists opened an office where meetings, protected by armed workers, could be held by committee delegates, who put out statements condemning any attempt by the Viet minh to repress their autonomy. In the provinces, some peasants were taking control of the land, lynching Stalinists who stood in their way. But shortly afterwards, many Trotskyists active in the people’s committees were arrested by the Stalinists, who were attempting to ingratiate themselves with the new regime under the British General Gracey, who was ordering Ghurkas to join with the French militias to put down popular uprisings and destroy barricades. Two hundred Trotskyists were massacred by the French at the Thi Nghe bridge. Van and his friends were now on the run from both the Anglo-French troops and the Stalinists, and escaped from Saigon by boat, under a hail of bullets. Lying low, Van comments wryly, they could only ‘try to follow what was happening, and wait to see which sauce we’d be served up with’.
The miners’ commune that had been set up in the Tonkin region was disbanded by the troops of Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government, and the workers’ councils were replaced by a new Viet minh hierarchy. Peasants who had been inspired to expropriate their landlords by remembering the CPI slogan of 1930, ‘the land to those who work it’, were rudely disabused. The Viet minh regional government restored the land to the landowners.
In the Hanoi Communist Party’s publication, Drapeau de la Liberation for 23 October 1945, a call was issued to exterminate Trotskyists: ‘The Trotskyist gang must be cut down immediately.’ And between 1945 and 1951, CPI activists systematically assassinated any Trotskyists who fell into their hands. Van is able to document the fate of many of the men and women who were leading supporters of the Fourth International, including Ta thu Thau, whose murder was raised with Ho Chi Minh in an interview by Daniel Guérin in 1946 in Paris. Ho replied: ‘All those who do not follow my policies will be broken.’
The small proletariat, with as yet scarcely any revolutionary consciousness, was not able to take the lead in the liberation movement in Vietnam. The Stalinist party came to power through the terrible suffering and sacrifice of millions of peasants, who were rewarded by their renewed enslavement to the nationalist bureaucracy, as a workforce necessary for the accumulation of capital for the sole profit of a new variety of exploiters.
Van reluctantly decided to leave Vietnam in the spring of 1948. It was impossible for him to return to the countryside ‘where the twin terrors were in control – that of the French and that of the Viet minh’. He learned later that in 1950, three comrades he had left behind had been led into a Viet minh trap. They were invited to a secret conference supposedly held by Trotskyist sympathisers, where they were captured and horribly tortured. The two women were hung by their thumbs, their calves cut open and petrol-soaked cotton stuffed into the wounds. Their death was announced on the Viet minh radio as that of ‘agents of French imperialism’. By this time, there was scarcely one oppositionist still alive in the country.
Van’s book is a salutary reminder of these forgotten men and women of history, particularly for those of us in so-called ‘Trotskyist’ parties in the West that uncritically supported Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. But it is also an invaluable record of the period, strikingly illuminated by vivid visual detail (an indication of Van’s talent as a painter) and informed by an unsentimental but deep-going humanity.
This book can be obtained from L’Isomniaque, 63 rue de Saint-Mandé, 93100 Montreuil, France for 60 francs including postage.
The first thing to hit us is the extent of control exercised by the state over what would appear to be the simplest and most basic production. With stone and other minerals, ‘the king seems to have operated a virtual monopoly on the quarrying and mining of many raw materials’ (p. 5); as opposed to faience, glass appears to have been ‘a royal monopoly throughout the New Kingdom’ (p. 196), and ‘ivory-working would have been carried out under centralised control, whether in temple or p–alace workshops’ (p. 328). Egypt’s home-grown wood is so poor that the royal monopoly on logwood trade from abroad must have amounted to much the same thing. Whereas pottery for household use was a village craft, there was an ‘apparent centralisation of production or distribution’ of some types of pottery during the Old Kingdom, which ‘broke down with the political fragmentation of the First Intermediate Period, and that regional styles developed, which appear to correspond to known political boundaries of the period’ (p. 138), which Dr Bouuriau has elsewhere shown was also true of the Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period, at least as regards types intended for funerary use. There is also some evidence from the New Kingdom that the state may have attempted to keep some sort of control over the supply of copper, since the royal necropolis workmen of Deir el-Medineh had to account for the exact weight of copper tools issued to them at the end of the job. It is thus of some interest that when in the first millennium BC iron production increases dramatically in the rest of the Near East, ‘the exception appears to be Egypt’, and ‘the supremacy of iron weapons over copper-alloy ones has been seen as a major factor in the Persian conquest of Egypt’ (p. 168).
As to personal consumption, whereas ‘beer was brewed at domestic level by most Egyptians for daily use … wine appears to have been largely produced for royalty, the upper classes and the funerary requirements of the élite’ (pp. 577–8), even if ‘on special occasions, common people also enjoyed wine’ (p. 578). Unlike wheatfields, vineyards were walled (p. 582), and apart from a Third Dynasty notable called Metjen, and some of the suppliers of wine to royal palaces at Malkata and Amarna, ‘the wine-making facilities themselves were primarily owned by the king or members of his family with little record, to date, of the private ownership of vineyards’ (p. 578). And whilst the mass of the population appears to have eaten meat, fish or fowl ‘at least once or twice a week’ (p. 669), the meat from large animals ‘was not a regular item in the diet of most Egyptians’ (p. 637). Most of the professional butchers named in inscriptions ‘were either associated with the pharaoh or with a temple. It is possible that professional butchers only existed in conjunction with these two institutions, as they were responsible for the provision of most of the country’s meat supply.’ (p. 669)
However, Egypt’s economy was based upon cereals, which Rome was careful enough to earmark as its own after its conquest of the country. Here the writer notes that ‘textual sources indicate that much of the land was owned by the state and temples, though private individuals could also rent and own land’ (p. 515), even if we may doubt whether ‘most of the harvested grain belonged to the state and not to the individual farmers who had to relinquish much of their yield to the granary system’ (p. 528), a more reasonable estimate of the tax/rent yield being about 30 per cent (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1990, p. 48). Nonetheless, the extent of bureaucratic control over grain production can only be compared with the modern European Union. One of the most common motifs in tomb reliefs shows the beating of peasants to extract the surplus, ‘scenes in New Kingdom tombs tend to emphasise the assessment of cereals for taxation purposes’ (p. 527), and ‘prior to the harvest, cereal fields were also surveyed using pre-measured cords to determine the amount of tax to be paid on the estimated yield, later to be compared with the actual yield after threshing. Textual sources indicate that this task was conducted by a government body known to have existed since at least the Second Dynasty.’ (p. 520) ‘Artistic and textual evidence show that, after the winnowing and sieving operations, grain was measured using containers of known quantity and the amounts were then recorded by scribes prior to grain storage’ (p. 527), notes Dr Murray, and ‘archaeological evidence indicates that large storage facilities were attached to temples and palaces’ (p. 528). Needless to add, the two examples of temples she cites, the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu (p. 527), were both walled, the latter massively so, and the arrow heads dug in its west gate show that it was subjected to a siege at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. For the whole social and economic system depended upon this central control of the cereal surplus, since ‘emmer was the primary cereal used for the payment of wages and taxes at that time’ (p. 512), and ‘emmer and barley formed an integral part of a complex administrative system of wages and taxation which played a critically important rôle in the development and relative stability of the economically successful Egyptian state throughout this time’ (p506). So whilst ‘possible episodes of famine in ancient Egypt have been documented … other sources also indicate that for the most part, the state and temple system of grain storage was sufficient to feed the population during lean years’, and ‘the ancient Egyptian hierarchy of grain storage was one of the many secrets of its success as a cereal producer’ (p. 528).
However suggestive all this may sound in the context of Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel’s further development of it into the hydraulic theory receives no support from the available evidence. Agreeing with Butzer’s book of 1976, Dr Murray holds that ‘throughout the Pharaonic period, the construction and maintenance of the irrigation system evidently remained a local responsibility rather than one controlled by a centralised administrative body’ (p. 515):
This city, Nojpeten, with a population of about 5,000 (p. 67) and a temple tower apparently copied from the Castillo at Chichen Itza (p. 74), was divided into quarters, echoed by the present street plan of Flores (pp. 68–9), which corresponded to the four cardinally arranged provinces, the capital itself counting as a fifth. Each province, including the capital, was governed by two rulers, four of whom represented their respective territories and resided in the four divisions of the capital, with the members of each pair standing in a ‘senior-junior relationship with one another’ (p. 60). Each of the four territories in turn had at least one provincial capital in it (p. 64). The whole structure was firmly grounded in and sanctioned by ritual, reflecting ‘an association of territory with a quadripartite cosmos and the four associated cardinal directions, the year-ending and year beginning rituals associated with the cardinal directions, and a host of other cosmological and ritual meanings’ (p. 94). The governing council consisted of the king, his junior priestly partner, the senior and junior partners representing the four provinces, the representatives of the main urban centres within them, and some of the leaders of the tribes they dominated (p. 83).
What is interesting here is not so much how closely this political set-up resembles other states in central America – not only in neighbouring Yucatan (p. 96) and Akalan (p. 31) as might be expected, but from as far away as Tenochtitlan (n2 p. 441) – but the strange echoes we seem to have from the city state organisation of classical Greece, not so much in the more compact Dorian cities, but such as ancient Athens before the reform of Cleisthenes. Here also were four basic Ionian tribes, divided into three phratries made up of clans and guilds. The number of clans was fixed when the city state was set up, membership of them was hereditary, land ownership was vested in the clan, and each phratry and each clan formed a state within a state, with its own rituals. There were smaller centres outside the main city (the later demes), and territorial divisions, even if they did not fit the tribal patterns. Particular families had vestigial royal rights, there was a governing council, and a rotating system of the central city administration, as in Maya Yucatan (p. 96).
What must remain uncertain, however, is how much of the Itza social and political structure was inherited from the Classic period of the Maya, and how much of it is due to innovation or reversion once that society collapsed. The succession in Classic Maya society clearly came down through the male line, even if ‘some recent research, however, suggests that matrilinear principles may also have been at work in succession to office in the Maya lowlands from Classic through colonial times’ (p. 78). The late Linda Schele and David Freidel argued that the ‘dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles’ which happened towards the end of the histories of Tikal, Copan and Yaxchilan, was a ‘fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years’ (p. 105). So the problem about what is new and what is old in this remarkable tribal/city state system still remains to be solved.
In the end, a Marxist must ask the question: which of these two models, the self-contained territory or the city state, laid the basis for further human social and economic development? A simple answer would be that whereas Spanish imperialism brought an abrupt end to the last of the Maya city states, the Chinese empire lasted almost to modern times. The city state of classical Greece, which succeeded a society of the palace-distribution type, did indeed develop into a slave society, a much more dynamic social structure, only to be gobbled up by the Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire. The city states of ancient Mesopotamia, on the other hand, more or less formed part of one empire or another from the time of the First Dynasty of Babylon onwards. And neither of them can be said to have laid any of the real basis for the rise of feudalism. This alone should put us on our guard against linear theories of human development, whether it be the sophistication of Kautsky’s views or the bonehead crudity of Stalin’s.
Healy’s long history shows a determination to dominate whichever group he was in. His ruthless tactics ensured his dominance of various groups from about 1950 onwards. The price was paid by the membership, the Trotskyist movement and the broader labour movement. Grant’s dominance of his corner of Trotskyism has been less spectacular than Healy’s, but probably just as damaging.
The authors point to a phenomenon that has long puzzled me. The sects are generally a bookish lot. They each have a body of ideas that can explain everything and answer all the world’s problems. And yet when they talk to outsiders, these highly able and articulate people can explain little. They reduce all problems to a few simple ones, and are strikingly narrow. Mostly they are uninterested in serious discussion of the development of their ideas. It seems that sectarianism screws you up in all sorts of ways.
This level of cooperation is not easy. The Socialist Party found it too challenging and wandered off in December 2001. Sect life for the Taffeites is preferable to the peculiar threats of joint work around a broad programme.
The Socialist Workers Party has dominated the Socialist Alliance, but in a very odd way. Most of the effective debate in the Socialist Alliance around policy and the nature of socialism in e-mail discussion passes with no comment from the SWP leaders (although some ordinary members join in). The SWP appears to be incapable of working out its relationship with the Socialist Alliance. Dancing too close would lead members off into the broad movement and out of the sect. Keeping too distant means that the Socialist Alliance will either fall into crisis or reduce the SWP to a large but marginal player. Whether sectarian organisations walk out or try to be back-seat drivers, their whole existence is undermined by a broad socialist movement.
The rise of a broad socialist movement can only be rooted in the revival of independent working-class political activity. A rising tide of activity will put enormous pressure on the sectarians. In the long run, it is the only force that can lead to the defeat of the cults, but leaders and supporters of such groups will fight hard to defend their movements and ideologies.
Is this book worth a read? Yes it is. The issues raised need to be dealt with by the left, even if readers come to different conclusions from those reached by Tourish and Wohlforth. There are clearly problems with the larger thesis. Too much rests on drawing direct links from psychology to politics. The authors’ fears that cults will do great damage to society at large are undermined by their demonstration of the distinct limits of the cults’ own capacities.
The book argues that the set of beliefs held by cultic movements is of little importance. These are bodies with the simple goals of defence and advance of the group. This is an intriguing idea. As evidence, Tourish and Wohlforth look at groups that have shifted from the radical left to the neo-fascist right. However, very few groups make that sort of journey.
Behind the firm ideological statements of the groups, the thinking is often very inconsistent. Thus the Militant made the words of Trotsky central to its life, but increasingly that life was devoted to Labour Party activity and a thirst for elected office. Healy’s supporters could fiercely denounce leaders of many countries for blocking off social revolution, while they received money from such regimes. The SWP’s Marxism has enabled it to vary its strategy from refusing to contest elections to going overboard for a chance to stand for office. As referred to earlier, neo-fascist groups are no more consistent. Despite all this, surely ideas play some rôle. The great majority of ex-members of these groups have moved on after political disagreements. The gulf between the groups’ words and deeds have mattered to the members. No simple formula answers the problem, but ideas are more important than this work seems to suggest.
With all the above criticisms, the book should to be read as a contribution to debate, and not as an end to discussion.
Weissman’s aim is to draw out the main trends of Serge’s politics and to comprehend his understanding of the degeneration of the Soviet regime into Stalinism. One of the key aspects of Serge’s political approach – at least from the late 1920s – was that democracy and socialism are inseparable, and that revolutionary socialists are obliged to have a strong moral basis for their political activity, not a morality based upon one sort or another of eternal norms, but one which can help form the basis of a communist society. Rotten means can pervert worthy end by starting off a process of moral corruption, and Serge pointed out that some of the methods used by the Bolsheviks in their desperate struggle for survival undermined their good intentions and helped to pave the way towards Stalinism. Weissman ably demonstrates this central aspect of Serge’s politics, and shows how his willingness to subject to criticism of some of the events of the earlier years of the Soviet republic – not least the suppression of Kronstadt in 1921 – led him to clash with Trotsky, and how their disagreements were exacerbated by Stalinist agents like Mark Zborowski into a full-blown breach.
However, there is a real problem in assessing Serge, in that we are, as Weissman notes, very reliant upon his memoirs in respect of what he thought and did during the crucial early years of the Soviet republic, as contemporary documentation is often limited or non-existent, or did not raise any criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ actions and theories from which he later demurred. We do not know what Serge thought at the time about ‘emerging authoritarian practices’, the Cheka, War Communism and the rise of bureaucratism and nationalism in the Soviet party-state apparatus. As a result, the reader is left wondering how much of Serge’s reminiscences coincided with his actual thoughts at the time. I agree with Weissman that Serge was an honest man, but one must take into account that in looking back he may well have unconsciously brought in nuances and adjustments to what he originally said and thought.
I do have a few criticisms of this book, many of which, mainly in respect of textual repetition, biographical details and explanatory notes, could have been put right with some judicious sub-editing. The most important problem, however, is political. Most readers will know of Serge’s letter to André Malraux in 1947 in which he assured the Gaulleist leader that he backed his movement. Weissman says that this was a ruse in order to get Malraux to help him enter France, and that Serge remained an intransigent socialist until his death. I am inclined to endorse Weissman’s opinion here, but we must also ask: what sort of socialist?
By his final exile in Mexico, Serge had come to view the Soviet Union as a totalitarian étatised society (this magazine ran one of his later pieces on this subject, Planned Economies and Democracy, Revolutionary History, Volume 5 no. 3). Serge’s views were by no means uncommon. From the early 1930s, commentators and analysts of various stripes and in many countries had been making comparisons between Stalinism and fascism, and, particularly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 1939, the idea that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were essentially identical social formations was expressed from the far left to the far right. Similarly, the idea that society as a whole, in its fascist, Stalinist and liberal democratic manifestations, was heading towards a collectivist future was commonplace with all manner of people, and many pages were also devoted to the topic of whether democracy of either a liberal or proletarian nature could survive in such an étatised world. Weissman shows that Serge was greatly concerned with these matters.
Serge shared with the postwar right-wing totalitarian theorists the idea that a totalitarian state was by its very nature expansionist. His left-wing variety of totalitarian theory held that the Soviet Union and Stalinism posed an especially pernicious threat to the prospects of socialism. It would not be a great move from there to see Stalinism as the main enemy in the world, and there is evidence, presented in Alan Wald’s piece in the Critique collection, that in certain respects Serge did think that. Julián Gorkín’s assertion that ‘Serge passed away just when we needed him most’ – in other words, when Cold War socialism required an intelligent and powerful apostate from revolutionary Marxism – cannot be written off as wishful thinking on his part. Serge died defending, in a critical manner to be sure, but definitely defending Marxism and the October Revolution, whilst at the same time expressing signs of Stalinophobia that could have pushed him into forsaking both that defence and the necessary political independence from both Stalinism and capitalism. He may not have slid into Cold War socialism, one hopes that he would have held fast against that, but Weissman’s rejection of the possibility of such an evolution is to me more a reflection of her wishes than of a dispassionate analysis.
I doubt if any readers of this journal would disagree with Weissman’s statement that ‘rediscovering the revolutionary but resolutely independent thought of Victor Serge contributes to the reconstitution of a usable past for a radically different future’, although some would agree with me that Serge’s political legacy is not as clear and uncomplicated as Weissman claims. Altogether, despite my criticisms, this book is valuable because, by and large, it ably presents the importance of Serge’s political approach and activity. Weissman clearly draws out the centrality of Serge’s insistence upon the essential interconnection between socialism and democracy. When one looks at the history of socialism, it is all to clear that many people claiming to be socialists have so often proved to be deficient when it came to the question of democracy. Here, we are not talking about social democrats, whose idea of democracy is no more than the limited scope of bourgeois parliamentarism, nor to the Stalinists, whose idea of democracy was of state-run plebiscites, but to the revolutionary left, Trotskyist or otherwise, whose organisational shenanigans and petty manoeuvrings would be tragic if they weren’t so funny. There is little of the genuinely human society envisaged by Marx in the nasty treatment of dissident members and the guru worship typical of so many left-wing groups. Serge realised more than most left-wingers that communism could not be realised through means and methods that degraded and demeaned people. Whatever his faults, that is something that all revolutionary socialists should take to heart.
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.
********
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics
Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman, John McIlroy
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Volume 1: The Postwar Compromise 1945–64
Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999, pp335, £26.00
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Volume 1: The Postwar Compromise 1945–64
Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999, pp335, £26.00
Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman, John McIlroy
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Volume 2: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79
Ashgate, Aldershot 1999, pp. 389, £26.00
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Volume 2: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79
Ashgate, Aldershot 1999, pp. 389, £26.00
THESE volumes are part of a series commissioned by the Society for the Study of Labour History, and deal with a multitude of aspects of industrial struggle and its associated politics from 1945 to 1979. They are of particular interest to this reviewer for two reasons. One is that as a shop steward and union branch president for many years, he was an active participant in the industrial disputes and politics described. The other is that as a Trotskyist industrial militant, he has, over the years, sought to understand the reasons for the failure of the various Trotskyist groups to transform the hard work of their industrial militants into a more significant political influence. These volumes provide plenty of empirical evidence and analysis that enable the reader either to confirm or modify existing conclusions.
These volumes highlight the importance of unofficial rank-and-file activity, while not neglecting the rôle of official trade union leaderships and policies. In Chapter 8 of Volume 1, Alan McKinley and Joseph Melling draw attention to ‘wages drift’ in the engineering industry. This was the tendency for actual wages to creep ahead of officially and nationally negotiated rates. ‘Wages drift’ was reflected in the increasing importance of supplementary payments. By 1959, these payments accounted for 27 per cent of earnings in the metalworking and chemical industries, and 14.5 per cent in food, drink and tobacco. This was the result of the increasing introduction of piecework and productivity bonuses. By their nature, they could not be part of nationally negotiated agreements. Being negotiated on a factory level, they inevitably involved shop stewards, not national or regional officials – and were the main source of shopfloor and unofficial rank-and-file action.As one can imagine, each negotiation of a piecework time for a new job or an altered method on an existing job could be – and was – the source of disagreement, as was the ‘plus-up’ for ‘contingencies’ and rate of bonus. As a shop steward, most of my time was involved in negotiating piecework problems. Unfortunately, the authors give no figures for the proportion of the total number of strikes that arose from piecework disputes, but I would estimate that the majority of strikes, go-slows and lock-outs originated in disagreements over piecework. ‘Wages drift’, a result of a combination of piecework, the growth of shop-steward influence and unofficial shopfloor militancy, contributed greatly to the steady increase in real wages during the whole period covered by these volumes.
Another reason for the frequency of ‘unofficial’ strikes – particularly in engineering – was the York Memorandum – otherwise known as ‘The Procedure for Avoiding Disputes’ that was imposed on the unions following the 1922 lock-out, and which was still in operation in the 1960s. As the authors explain:
The humiliating terms of settlement imposed on the engineering unions after the seminal dispute of 1922 remained the foundation stone of collective bargaining after 1946: the management’s unilateral right to alter work processes and payment systems remained the cornerstone of employer ideology, unchanged from the late nineteenth century.
Regrettably, the authors do not describe exactly what restraints were put on union action. They were considerable. Under the terms of the York Memo, no union could take strike action until a lengthy procedure had been exhausted. If no agreement was reached at shop level, the matter was referred to the Works Committee at factory or enterprise level. If ‘failure to agree’ was registered there, the matter went to a Local Conference involving the district union officials and the local employers’ organisation. If ‘failure to agree’ was registered at the Local Conference, the matter could be referred back to the factory, or referred to a National Conference. This took place monthly at York between the national representatives of the employers’ federation and unions. And there was no guarantee that the matter in dispute would be resolved at York at the first monthly meeting. It might take months for a dispute to be resolved through the procedure – a procedure from which the direct representatives of the workers or the factory involved, the shop stewards, were excluded. So if the dispute was about some worsening of conditions unilaterally imposed by the management, a sacking or victimisation of a trade union member, the management’s unilateral decision took effect immediately, and had to be accepted. There was no question of the disputed change being postponed while the procedure was gone through. If the aggrieved and impatient workers demanded action from the union officials, they would reply that ‘their hands were tied’. No union could call an official strike until the whole lengthy and wearisome procedure had been exhausted. Instead of the York Memo being called ‘a procedure for avoiding disputes’, it would have been more accurate to describe it as ‘a procedure for avoiding strikes’.
No wonder that in these circumstances the workers and shop stewards avoided getting involved in this lengthy procedure and took strike action – which by definition was unofficial, and which the unions had to condemn if they were not to breach the terms of the York Memo. Thus the atmosphere that prevailed in engineering factories was one of lack of confidence in the official union structures and reliance on action from below, led by shop stewards, in defiance of full-time union officials. This led to the development of attempts by shop stewards to develop inter-factory coordination on a combine-wide and industry-wide basis. For example, this reviewer was secretary of a combine committee comprising shop stewards from 10 factories in the textile machinery makers combine. There were similar committees in the motor industry. But these were not recognised either by the unions or by the employers.It is clear from the whole history of industrial relations during the period covered, from 1945 to 1979, that an important factor determining wages and conditions was not official union action, but rank-and-file activity and unofficial action, and that the shop stewards were the organisers, leaders and coordinators of these struggles. That they were effective is indicated by the ‘wages drift’ highlighted in Chapter 8.
Tables of the movement of real wages are included in these volumes. They show that in the 20 years covered in Volume 1, from 1945 to 1964, real wages rose in 14 of those years from an index of 87.9 in 1945 to 111.9 in 1964 (January 1956 = 100), that is, by 27.3 per cent, and by nearly 10 per cent between 1964 and 1979. Elsewhere, McIlroy and Campbell, basing themselves on different sources, give a much higher figure of some 30 per cent rise during 1964-78, which seems rather high if we are talking of real wages, taking inflation into account. Taking even the lowest figures, it is clear that the 35 years following the war saw a substantial increase in workers’ living standards.
The main factor making this increase possible was, of course, the general state of the economy, the prolonged postwar boom. However, even in times of rising profits, employers do not voluntarily grant wage increases unless they are forced to do so by either market forces (the supply and demand of labour) or the pressure of trade union activity and workers’ militancy. This is confirmed by the ‘wages drift’ already mentioned, which was mainly the result of workers’ pressure. An interesting fact unearthed by McIlroy and Campbell is that of ‘the wage differential between unionists and non-unionists increasing to the advantage of the former from 28 per cent in 1964 to 36 per cent by 1975’.
The ‘class struggle’, that is, the changing relationship of forces between workers and employers, and between trade unions and the state, and the overall political climate are all significant factors, within the context of the general economic situation, which affect the level of wages. This is demonstrated by the fact that the fluctuations in real wages up or down coincide with the course of political-industrial struggles. For example, 1977 was a year when real wages went down sharply, by over five per cent. McIlroy and Campbell ascribe this to ‘the deflating effect of the Social Contract in 1977… before being redressed by the strike wave of 1978-79’. Real wages rose again during this period by over four per cent.
The interventions of the state and the relations between the unions and the Conservative and Labour Parties and governments are covered in several chapters. These relations varied considerably. Obviously the relations between the unions and the Labour Party were very different from those between the unions and the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was created by the unions to be their political voice, and in fact they were an organic part of it at both local and national levels. The Conservative Party was identified with big business and landed interests. However, despite this important difference, they were both united in their commitment to managing a capitalist economy. And since the unions themselves accepted wholeheartedly that their task was not to overthrow capitalism but to work within it, this made collaboration possible. The parties approached the task in different ways, ranging from collaboration to confrontation with the unions. Naturally their different social bases affected the way they approached this task, but it would be over-simplistic to say that the relationship between Labour governments and unions was always one of collaboration, while that between Tory governments and unions was always one of confrontation. The employers and their political representatives employed a variety of strategies. For example, one of the main concerns of the Tories when they came to power in 1951 was to continue the collaboration between unions and state established during the war. In the chapter entitled ‘The Postwar Compromise’, the authors remark:
Churchill hoped ‘to work with the trade unions in a loyal and friendly spirit’ while the TUC in its turn stated its intention of treating the new government on its merits. Favourable experience of wartime collaboration predisposed the Conservatives to make the maintenance of an open relationship with the unions a priority and Churchill ordered his Minister of Labour, Walter Monckton, ‘to preserve industrial peace’.
In fact, so concerned were Tory governments to ‘preserve industrial peace’ that during the 1957 national engineering and shipbuilding strike (which coincided with a railwaymen’s wage claim), Macmillan’s government leant on the Engineering Employers Federation to soften its hard-line opposition to the union’s claim and to reach a compromise. Nina Fishman, in a chapter on this strike, quotes the brief supplied by Macleod to Macmillan for a meeting with the employers:
[It] … was designed to bring maximum pressure on the employers and he couched the Prime Minister’s appeal in appropriately spine-chilling terms. [It]… reveals how desperately anxious Ministers were to avert industrial conflict on a scale that was likely to jeopardise the fragile confidence in sterling. The employers were pressed into accepting that the government’s support for ‘sensible, realistic’ wage settlements had to be subordinated to the wider national interest.
The general ideology of both Conservative and Labour governments right from the end of the war to the 1970s was one of corporatism, an attempt to involve employers, unions and government in tripartite institutions. In particular, this involved an attempt to integrate the unions into the establishment; hoping that in exchange for concessions on social issues such as pensions, food subsidies, rent controls, etc, and the feeling that they were involved in decisions on high-level policy, the unions would moderate wage claims, and control their own rank and file.
However, by the late 1960s this was coming apart. A combination of growing difficulties for industry in competition with foreign rivals and the inability of the unions to curb rank-and-file militancy (resulting in the ‘wage drift’ mentioned above) forced both Labour and Conservative governments to attempt to curb wild-cat strikes. The Wilson government’s proposals embodied in the White Paper In Place of Strife was the first attempt. Andrew Thorpe, in his chapter on the Labour Party and the unions, summarises what happened.
One result was a degree of union militancy directed squarely at the White Paper. This came at all levels. By the end of April 1969, 14 union executives had supported a call for a special Trades Union Congress to be held to condemn the plans. There were demonstrations and strikes… it was the more militant sections of the rank and file rather than the union leadership that initiated the main challenge to In Place of Strife. But the repercussions were felt at the very highest levels, with political humiliation for Castle, and severe embarrassment for Wilson, who had supported her. On 17 June, the Cabinet, at a ‘very, very tense meeting’, decided against the Prime Minister’s opposition to abandon the plans. Next day a face-saving agreement was reached, with the union leaders promising to do all they could to contain unofficial strikes.
When the Tory government succeeded Labour in 1970, it also embarked on an attempt to police the unions. But its Industrial Relations Act was met with the same opposition as had In Place of Strife, failed to curb union militancy, and was repealed by the 1974 Labour government.
It was only after the period covered by these volumes that the confrontation with the unions led by Margaret Thatcher, resulting in the defeats of the printers and the miners, finally drastically swung the balance of power against the unions and in favour of the employers.In all this the union leaderships’ rôle was a contradictory one. On the one hand, as the authors make abundantly clear, these leaderships, accepting the framework of capitalist social relations, were quite happy to accept the corporatist ideology, participate in tripartite bodies, and convince themselves that they were a valued part of the state machine. And so they were, as long as they were able to contain and police ‘irresponsible militants’ and leftists. On the other hand, even the most bureaucratised unions were still basically democratic institutions. For example, in one of the most bureaucratised, the Transport and General Workers Union, though all the officials are appointed for life (until they retire), the national, trade section and regional executives are composed of elected lay members. Thus they have to respond to and reflect rank-and-file opinion, and call official strikes and come into conflict with the employers and even the state, as the accounts in these volumes show.
I have one minor quibble. Describing the controversy over Order 1305, the authors write: ‘One of the last acts of the Labour government was revocation of Order 1305, at the behest of the TUC General Council, whose leaders had become concerned over their own ability to control their members’ propensity to strike illegally.’ They might have mentioned that the unofficial dock strike of 1951 and the failed prosecution of its leaders had a decisive effect on this decision, and also on Bevan’s decision to resign from the Cabinet (cf. Mark Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide, p. 83).
These books provide ample evidence for the effectiveness of trade union action in determining wages and conditions. However, they also highlight the limitations of trade union militancy, and provide no comfort for those on the Marxist left who believe that industrial struggles lead almost automatically to socialist consciousness and, if sufficiently extended, to a direct struggle for working-class power. In this respect, Chapters 8 and 9 in Volume 2 in which McIlroy views the industrial activities of the Communist Party, and of Trotskyist groups such as the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party and the Socialist Workers Party, provide food for thought. What stands out is that despite the fact that in many cases Communist Party and Trotskyist militants won substantial influence and support and led significant struggles, and achieved areas of influence in the unions, this influence and support was rarely reflected in political gains and membership. The Communist Party’s political influence in the country or the working class generally never matched its influence in the trade unions. Although the SWP over a period in the 1970s was very active in the trade unions, publishing rank-and-file papers for car workers, miners, hospital workers, teachers, NALGO, dock workers, building workers, GEC rank and file, etc., with print runs of several thousand, the party itself never became more than a fringe group in the broader political world. The same can be said of the SLL, which at one time had a very strong group in Oxford based on the Cowley factory; earlier on its progenitor, the ‘Club’, working in the Labour Party, won considerable influence on the docks, recruiting many of the unofficial leaders and in fact effectively led the ‘Blue Union’ dock strike in 1954. Yet here, too, they were not able to translate this support into political allegiance based on a conscious acceptance of a socialist ideology, Marxist or other, among more than a handful of workers.
No doubt it will be – indeed, is – argued that these failures to develop mass political influence were due to defeats in particular struggles (for example the Blue Union struggle), mistakes in strategy and tactics and to other factors, for example, the nefarious activities of one Gerry Healy or unhealthy internal regimes.
But in reality the explanation is much more general. Firstly, the general economic and political situation, the context of expanding capitalism, and a long postwar boom in which workers were able to win substantial improvements by industrial action, and during which governments, both Conservative and Labour, were anxious to preserve social peace by concessions and reform, was not propitious for revolutionary politics. True, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the deteriorating situation pushed governments to attempt to curb union power, and this provoked essentially ‘political’ strikes against the Wilson government’s In Place of Strife and the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Bill. But though they were political in the sense that they were directed against state policies, their aim was limited – to force the government of the day to retreat, not to overthrow it, or to demand that it carry out a completely socialist policy. Certainly they did not go anywhere near creating a situation of dual power in which grass-roots working-class institutions competed with the state machine for power. Even when the 1972 miners’ strike prompted the Heath government to resign and call an election, the only feasible replacement was a reformist Labour government, and the only generally accepted way of achieving this (even amongst the most militant miners) was by a parliamentary election.
The most overtly ‘political’ of all the industrial actions of the period was the Upper Clyde Shipyards (UCS) work-in of 1971–72 described by John Foster and Charles Woolfson in Chapter 10 of Volume 2.
The work-in posed, implicitly if not explicitly, the question of workers’ control of industry. Unfortunately, the authors have nothing to say on what actually went on inside the shipyards during the 15 months of occupation, on how work was continued on ships, on how steel and power were acquired and how paid for, etc. Perhaps we can outline the scenario which might have developed, and which no doubt many on the Marxist left were hoping would develop.
The UCS workers want to complete the partly-built ships and launch them (and even start on new ships already designed and commissioned). The employers and the state want to close down the yards: the workers are refused access to the bank accounts of the firms, refused credits, the managements of the steel works and other suppliers refuse to supply the necessary steel and other supplies, the electric power supply is cut, etc. The UCS workers appeal for support; the steel workers decide to supply the steel in defiance of their managers, the transport workers organise transport, using their lorries independently of their bosses, the power workers reconnect the electricity. Looking further ahead, there is the question of disposing of the ships built. Just as socialism cannot survive in a single country, so workers’ control of production cannot continue unless it spreads wider and wider. Such a development would have directly challenged property relations, and would have posed before the whole country the question of who runs the economy. It could not have been tolerated by the state, and would have led to violent confrontation, posing all sorts of political questions.
But developments never reached this stage. I have no detailed information to hand, but my understanding is that the shop stewards dealt with the liquidator – both in terms of bargaining over his attempt to sell off machinery and announce redundancies, and over the release of ships in relation to wages. Presumably steel and other supplies were regulated as part of this process.
The support for the UCS work-in was high within the working class, particularly in Scotland, expressed in two regional general strikes. The work-in also generated wide support beyond the organised labour movement. The authors write:
The ploy of ‘working-in’, which forced the government to accept the continuance of the yards as a going concern, immediately ranged behind the workers the 700 creditor firms which stood to lose all they were owed as well as the custom they depended on for the future. It forced local authorities, even the Conservative/Progressive-controlled Glasgow Council to confront the dilemma of supporting ‘their communities’ or the government. It took leadership of the dispute out of the hands of the official movement and temporarily neutralised a Scottish press which tended towards the Conservative Party (Herald and Scottish Daily Express) or right-wing Labour (Record) This response, of seeking to work upon and include the specific interests of local business and the professions in the regional economy, was based precisely on what [Jimmy] Reid reported to the CP national executive; an analysis of the specific contradictions of monopoly capitalism.
Despite all this, the movement came nowhere near bringing about a social overturn. The struggle for workers’ control did not spread to the steel mills and power stations. But the work-in did force major concessions out of the government. In July 1971, the 8,000 took possession of the shipyards and held them for 15 months. As the authors point out:
By October 1972 when the sit-in ended they had forced the Conservative government to abandon almost all its original objectives. Most of the 8000 jobs remained. Four yards were in operation. Worse still for the government, it had been pushed into a much wider reversal of regional policy. Its original intention in ending credits to the publicly-owned Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) had been to demonstrate its determination to stop support for all ailing industries. Now it had to reverse its entire regional policy and pay for a massive refloatment on the Clyde.
Unfortunately, we have to note that 27 years later the jobs and the yards saved no longer exist. But nevertheless 8,000 workers were kept in employment for longer than they would have been.
Trotskyist critics attacked the Communist Party leadership of the work-in for selling out and betraying because they limited the struggle. They did not press for the extension of work-ins and workers’ control as envisaged in the scenario detailed above. These criticisms were unjustified. Reid and Fairlie may be criticised for wrong tactics. But they cannot be criticised for settling for what was possible, given the relationship of forces and the general level of consciousness and organisation of the labour movement at the time, instead of indulging in ‘revolutionary’ gestures.The Trotskyist groups all suffered from an over-optimistic view of the political consciousness of the working class and of what could be achieved, and from a simplistic idea of how industrial struggle would almost automatically develop into a political struggle for power. As McIlroy points out in relation to the International Socialists’ industrial policies, ‘the weakness lay in the absence of any political bridge between militant trade unionism today and socialism tomorrow’. If McIlroy implies a bridge could have been built, I would disagree with him, and argue that in the conditions of expanding capitalism and no terminal crisis – when socialism is not on the cards for tomorrow – it is impossible to build such a bridge. However, he shrewdly comments that failing to find or build that bridge – to revolutionary socialism – the International Socialists became economists:
Revolutionary realism became economism. More militancy of the same kind became the answer to everything, to economic problems, to sexism, to racism, to national divisions. As workers became concerned about the inability of militancy to solve the problems of inflation, IS still rejected transitional politics: ‘the best advice we have to give now, apart from “put in a big claim and fight for it” is “establish the right to put in another claim whenever the workers decide”’ … The political and practical benefits of militancy were overestimated, the real problems that it caused for many workers underplayed.
The other main Trotskyist groups, the Militant Tendency and the SLL/WRP, were also unable to build that bridge. Looking at the state of the movement at the start of the twenty-first century, we can see how the hard work and sacrifices of not only the Communist Party’s industrial militants but also the Trotskyist cadres have not brought about mass influence. The Communist Party is no more, and its offshoots are marginalised. The WRP has imploded, and the SWP stagnates. The left remains split into dozens of sectarian groups. As McIlroy points out:
If our account affirms the limits of the revolutionary potential of the twentieth-century working class in Britain and the rooted nature of its acceptance of capitalism, it nevertheless suggests something more substantial and enduring could have been constructed in these years. If, and it is a very big if, a more patient, propagandistic, inclusive approach to constructing socialist networks had been deployed, organisations more organic to the tempo and ethos of British trade unionism might have been constructed.
Other important issues examined in these volumes concern women in the unions, and how immigration and racism were dealt with. Unfortunately, reasons of space preclude a discussion of these themes in this review. Hopefully they will be commented on elsewhere.
It is a pity the high price of these volumes put them out of the reach of many political and trade union activists, for they provide a useful overall view of the period dealt with. And – whether one agrees with all the authors’ conclusions or not – they provide much useful food for thought.
Harry Ratner
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International Struggle
Tony Cliff
International Struggle and the Marxist Tradition: Selected Writings, Volume One
Bookmarks, London, 2001, pp314, £14.99
International Struggle and the Marxist Tradition: Selected Writings, Volume One
Bookmarks, London, 2001, pp314, £14.99
THIS book contains a selection of Cliff’s writings on international themes over six decades. The first article dates from 1938, when he was barely out of his teens, and the last is a study of the Indonesian workers’ struggle published in 1998. Some are now of mainly historical interest, while others are still relevant.
British Policy in Palestine, The Jewish-Arab Conflict and Class Politics in Palestine were all published in the American Trotskyist journal The New International. The Jewish-Arab Conflict describes how the reactionary positions of both Arab and Jewish leaders prevented working-class unity. The Arab leaders, who were the traditional landlords, used anti-Jewish religious sentiments, and looked to the fascist powers for support. The Zionists’ main objective was to drive out Arab labour, so they mounted picket lines to force Jewish employers to sack Arab workers. The ‘left’ Zionists in Hashomer Hatzair, who considered themselves to be Marxists, would have allowed some well-established Arab workers to remain in Jewish establishments. Neither the Arab nor the Zionist leaders demanded that the British rulers introduce democratic rights. Cliff outlined a programme of democratic and transitional demands in an effort to unite a bitterly divided working class. It was a thoughtful attempt to tackle a horrendous problem, but unfortunately there was no sizeable force prepared to support it. Such frustrations led Cliff to leave for England in 1946, but before doing so he had written a book on imperialism and the Middle East, a chapter of which is published here. It shows his ability as a researcher, but one cannot imagine him ever wishing to be an academic. Whether he was writing an agitational pamphlet or researching economic statistics, Cliff was always a man of action.The Trotskyist movement Cliff joined in Britain was only a little stronger than in Palestine, and was soon to fragment. In 1951, he led one such fragment, which eventually became the Socialist Workers Party. The tiny forces available and the slight audience for Marxist politics meant that there were very few socialist publications, so for some years Cliff’s output was not great. The gradual disintegration of the Communist Party after Stalin’s death created some space for revolutionary politics, so in 1959 Cliff was able to publish his pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg. Till then we had accepted a picture of her as a socialist martyr who had been hostile to ‘the party’ and had advocated something called ‘spontaneity’. The pamphlet is still well worth reading, in spite of the numerous books about Luxemburg which are now available. Cliff was extremely favourable to Luxemburg at that time, arguing that her ideas were a better guide than Lenin’s for Marxists in advanced industrial countries. The rise in class struggle during the 1960s caused Cliff to revise his estimate – or to adjust to changes in the market for ideas – so the 1968 reprint was changed, without acknowledgement, to give top marks to Lenin. Political opponents seized on that change to accuse him of opportunism, so every aspiring polemicist needed a copy of both pamphlets. The present edition includes both versions of the offending text, and as the main alteration amounts to only three lines, it is worth taking time to read the rest of the pamphlet. The radical student milieu of the late 1960s was much more receptive to Lenin’s ideas than Labour Party activists had been in the previous decade, so a different style was required. The argument on the nature of the party had no practical consequences, as Cliff always preferred an organisation resembling a religious fraternity to a political party. In expansionist times, membership cards were thrust on bystanders outside meetings. During ‘downturns’, members lived quieter lives, with activity geared to maintaining group morale. To ask whether Lenin’s or Luxemburg’s model was closer to Cliff’s is like enquiring which part of the planet is closer to the moon.
France: The Struggle Goes On, written with Ian Birchall, made a considerable impact, and compares well with anything produced following the events of May 1968. The authors understood the significance of the sudden rise of the student movement, but unlike some Marxists, they did not allow it to overwhelm them. Whereas Ernest Mandel briefly adopted student power as a replacement for working-class struggle, Cliff and Birchall saw the students as a detonator for that struggle, the only force which could overthrow capitalism. The French Communist Party’s efforts to contain the revolt are described, as were the reasons why they were able to do so. The PCF had gathered a cadre over years of struggle, and their rôle in the Resistance still brought them enormous respect. Although it had bailed out French capitalism at key points and had a poor record on anti-colonial struggle, its militants were fiercely committed to it, and when it moved against the students and striking workers, the revolutionary left forces were no match for it. France … had a considerable influence on left-wing students and workers in Britain. Cliff’s organisation, the International Socialists, grew rapidly as many radical students became convinced that they must turn to the working class. This enabled the IS to become more than a propaganda group.
Cliff’s pamphlet Portugal at the Crossroads, written as a response to the revolutionary developments following the coup of April 1974, highlighted the tension between the need for an accurate analysis and the building of an instrument which would lead the revolution. Published shortly after the IS’ influence in the British labour movement had peaked, it describes the colonial crisis, the structure of Portuguese industry and the activities of the various political organisations. At the time, Cliff was backing a group, the PR-PB, which had begun as an armed struggle tendency, with hardly a trace of Marxist understanding. It remained rather incoherent, containing a breathtaking mixture of incompatible tendencies. A few years later, in Spain, during the transition from the Franco regime, Cliff sought to win over the OIC, another bizarre creation, led by the charismatic Diego Fabregas. It seems absurd to imagine that such groups could be transformed into revolutionary parties. However, Cliff considered that as the Communist parties were reformist, bureaucratic and tightly controlled, and the Fourth International groups were weak and confused, there had to be another tendency which could be helped to provide revolutionary leadership, so disbelief had to be suspended.
The last item in the book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Lessons for Indonesia, summarises the lessons of 1917 and subsequent attempts at revolution elsewhere, and adds a couple of pages on Indonesia – ‘One size fits all.’ These lessons are of some value to people everywhere, not just in Indonesia. The need for a revolutionary party is stressed once more, but as an incantation rather than a guide to action. The article is not of the same quality as those on Palestine, written 60 years earlier.
Cliff’s unremitting effort over nearly seven decades evokes admiration and astonishment, when you consider that his interventions abroad had to be carried out through intermediaries or in writing, as the government never granted him citizenship, and he was not free to travel abroad. Subsequent volumes should describe his political activities in Britain, and present a more rounded picture of his political life. The present volume should be read in conjunction with his autobiography, A World To Win, written just before he died, which does describe his efforts to build a socialist organisation, firstly in Palestine, and then in Britain.
Cliff liked to remind us that theory is grey, while the tree of life is green, and it is sometimes difficult to understand what the relationship between his theory and practice was. He rejected Leninist organisation in practice, without actually saying so, understandably, given the odious outfits which have traded under that name. Certainly, no collection of articles can convey the impression given by his charm, energy and ability to inspire masses of people.
John Sullivan
*************
Ian Birchall
The Ancien Regime and Revolution
(2002)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2002, pp.25–50.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
William Doyle
The Ancien Regime
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2001, pp. 66
The Ancien Regime
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2001, pp. 66
Moira Donald and Tim Rees (eds.)
Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2001, pp. 242
Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2001, pp. 242
IN one sense, the reform or revolution debate has moved on. Today nobody, except for a handful of deep entrists in the Labour Party, even pretends to believe that socialism could come through parliament. Yet, as October 1917 recedes into the past, the notion of what a revolution would actually look like becomes more obscure. But the old mole is not dead, and these two volumes reveal that even the academic world has to face the problem.
Doyle is a well-known revisionist on the question of the French Revolution; and in this guide for students he tries to belittle the importance of the Revolution by stressing the continuities between the old regime and post-Revolutionary society. In this, he is indebted to Tocqueville, one of the few genuinely intelligent conservative thinkers, to whom the present crop of anti-revolutionaries return again and again.Thus he argues that ‘trade and industry commanded as little social prestige in the early nineteenth century as they had since the remotest times’, and that the real change came with the advent of the railways after 1840. He should follow Engels’ advice and study the novels of Balzac, where he will see just what an impact the Revolution had on the values of society, religion and the family.
He argues that there was no significance to Le Chapelier’s law to ban trade unions, because pre-Revolutionary governments had ‘never countenanced any form of workers’ organisations’. Why then was Le Chapelier, who had been President of the National Assembly in 1789, so anxious to insist that the Revolution was ‘finished’. Precisely because social relations were changing far more rapidly than he had envisaged; as Marge Piercy puts it in her brilliant novel City of Darkness, City of Light: ‘Enlightened gentlemen imagined a Revolution that would be vigorous but polite … They had never imagined that people who waited on them in stores and made boots for them, who carted off their waste and brought them water, would come to rule.’
He also claims that the Enlightenment was not hostile to the old regime, but was essentially reformist. This is to forget that the philosophic movement of the eighteenth century contained many different currents — rather like the pre-Blair Labour Party — from moderate reformers to militant atheists and utopian communists.
However, Doyle makes one telling point. He argues that ‘the overthrow of the Ancien Regime began in France because there centralised government had excluded everybody from all say in or experience of public affairs, and thereby deprived men of all sense of public duty’. Two centuries later, that analysis has a real resonance.
The Donald and Rees volume is a collection of essays by academics, based on a series of seminars; like many such collections, it enables contributors to fulfil the norms of a system increasingly based on piecework. But since each writer is concerned with his or her personal research, there is no unifying focus. Certainly, the book contains many interesting observations, and much useful empirical material. But there is no engagement of debate, and no confrontation of theory with practice, such as would be necessary to truly develop a scientific approach. It confirms the present reviewer’s view that the bourgeois universities will play an ever-decreasing rôle in the development of knowledge.
Several contributors are concerned to define exactly what constitutes a revolution. Thus there are chapters entitled Stalin’s Great Turn and The Nazi Revolution. The problem here is of not seeing the wood for the trees. In Marxist terms, a revolution is the self-emancipation of an oppressed class; the means must be revolutionary, since the institutions of society are in the hands of the oppressors, and cannot serve their victims. Once this basic insight is abandoned, and merely secondary features are considered, then it is indeed difficult to tell a revolution from a counter-revolution.
Several contributors are concerned by the ‘revolutions’ of 1989 in the Stalinist bloc, since these present an apparently new historical phenomenon. Yet again the danger is of looking too closely at their subject. The question as to how extensive and how significant popular uprisings were is certainly of great interest, but it is secondary. It is first necessary to establish the nature and causes of the events.
It is all too easy to be confused by the regimes’ self-description. But anyone who considers that the collapse of Stalinism constituted a defeat for the working class has entered a world of formalism and abstraction, in which the term ‘working class’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the women and men who actually work in factories, mines and offices. It is rather like announcing that the French Revolution was against the Will of God, since Louis XVI claimed to rule in God’s name.
Moreover, the detailed focus on national specifics by academic specialists leads them to miss the ultimate cause of the collapse of Stalinism, namely the fact that centralised state economies, which had achieved a certain brutal efficiency in rapid industrialisation, had become obsolete as world capitalism entered a more highly globalised form in which the Stalinist regimes were incapable of competing.
Yet the ghost of revolution still walks through the corridors of our universities. Many readers will doubtless agree with the concluding sentences of the book, by Krishan Kumar: ‘The end of revolution has been proclaimed on numerous occasions in the twentieth century, in the 1930s as well as the 1950s and the 1980s. In each case a surprise was in store. We will be surprised again; of that we can be sure.’
*************
Arditi del Popolo
Eros Francescangeli
Arditi del Popolo – Argo Secondari e la prima organizzazione antifascista (1917–1922)
Odradek, Rome 2000, pp. 319
Arditi del Popolo – Argo Secondari e la prima organizzazione antifascista (1917–1922)
Odradek, Rome 2000, pp. 319
THERE often are periods in history that may perhaps be quite brief, but the weight of which continues to be felt long after they come to an end. In Italy, such was the period from 1919 to 1922. The first two years have become known as the biennio rosso (the two red years), which saw a revolutionary working-class upsurge fuelled by inspiration from the Russian Revolution, culminating in the occupation of the factories in the industrialised North. The next two years witnessed the growth of Fascism and the ever-increasing violence with which Mussolini’s squads would finally manage to silence all the working-class organisations in Italy.
However, this period should also be remembered thanks to another very important historical event, one which is, however, very little known even in Italy today: the birth and ascent of the very first and most successful mass and class-based military organisation opposed to Fascism. Francescangeli, a young Trotskyist historian, has had the great merit of making this story known with this thoroughly researched book.The Arditi del Popolo, whose name roughly (and not very happily) translates as ‘the people’s shocktroops’, were active in Italy for a mere two years, but, on the one hand, represent yet another great missed opportunity in the history of the working class, and, on the other, still have many lessons that can be learnt and can benefit all Marxists today wishing to engage with the class, to bring about revolutionary outcomes.
The Arditi del Popolo were born of the deeply felt discontent among Italian soldiers in the aftermath of the First World War, when it soon became starkly clear that Italy, too, was not destined to be ‘a land fit for heroes’. At the very beginning, the Arditi d’Italia, as they were originally known, were born as élite corps charged with particularly daring and dangerous missions, and as such they comprised largely petit-bourgeois elements, often highly contradictory in their views, influenced by Futurism and opposed on the one hand to the established order, which they perceived as cowardly and conformist, and equally hostile to the working class, whom they saw as having little appetite for the conflict, and apathetically waiting to reap the benefits of the toil and suffering of the army in the trenches. However, while after the war a number of the Arditi did join Mussolini’s Fascist squads, the bulk of these highly-trained military men quickly realised that the ideals they were fighting for would not be realised: no new Italy was going to rise from the ashes of the old society. Rather, parliamentary compromise, political games and, generally, mediocrity, as they saw it, were set to stay, while economic and living conditions were everywhere rapidly deteriorating. The combination of all these factors, together with an instinctive repulsion faced with the cowardly methods employed by Mussolini’s thugs against individuals and organisations of the opposition, gradually helped to raise the consciousness of these men, who began to embrace more and more the plight of the Italian working class, thus contradicting the myth according to which all soldiers must by definition also be right-wing.
Some statistics can easily explain why the Arditi del Popolo were far from an élitist group of few individuals looking to make ‘symbolic gestures’. In the summer of 1921, the Arditi came to number approximately 55,000 members and 54 branches distributed throughout Italy. In their first and only national show of strength, about 3,000 Arditi paraded in full military attire in Rome, within an anti-Fascist demonstration numbering 50,000.
But the numerical membership is only half of the story. Its composition is far more important: the Arditi del Popolo were clearly a proletarian organisation, and included large numbers of railway workers, manual workers in general, metal workers, agricultural and shipyard workers as well as dockers, builders, printing workers, public transport workers and peasants. These people came from different political backgrounds (p. 66). They were not only socialists or Communists, indeed many of them were anarchists. Yet their common ground was, simply, the basic need to oppose Fascism as a class enemy. The most important factor to consider is that the Arditi del Popolo were essentially born out of the need for people to defend themselves physically, let alone politically, against the orgy of bloody Fascist violence which had begun to engulf Italy. This need for self-defence began to be more and more vital from the first months of 1919. There was simply no choice: either you managed to escape with your life, or the Fascists would kill you; witness the veritable bloodbath that the Italian working class and its organisations were to endure from then on.
This point was not at all lost on the Italian workers, who enthusiastically cooperated with the Arditi del Popolo in all their military operations, lending them their full support, and recognising them as ‘their’ defence force. Because the Arditi were comprised of highly-trained military men, they were to prove extremely problematic to Mussolini and his party, which was, after all, still in its infancy. A complete list of the Arditi’s operations in Italy goes far beyond the scope of this review (Francescangeli devotes the second part of his book to a very detailed region-by-region account of this), yet in their brief existence the Arditi proved victorious in several crucial battles against the Blackshirts, most notably in Sarzana in July 1921, and in Parma in August 1922.
In Sarzana, a largely agricultural town on the Tuscan-Ligurian border, 600 Fascists were sent on a punitive expedition to quell the opposition of a militant and historically highly-politicised peasant class. Yet, despite their superior numbers and military resources, the Fascists had to flee Sarzana in a hurry, leaving 18 dead and several wounded behind. This victory was possible, not only thanks to the Arditi’s military experience and tactical skills, but also to the high level of popular support they enjoyed wherever they engaged the Fascists, which allowed them to fight virtually house-to-house, and to rely on the highest loyalty from the population.
Faced with this embarrassing defeat, the Fascist party almost split. Its more intransigent wing wanted to escalate violence and repression, while Mussolini, fearful of engendering a mass and combative opposition, favoured compromise and an agreement with the largest working-class party, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and the trade union organisations. Mussolini had his way, but not before being forced to resign, in an attempt to avert an internal coup and to ensure his very political survival.
The battle of Parma took place barely two months before Fascism took power in Italy, yet the outcome could not have been more disastrous for the Blackshirts. Mussolini’s men were by now furious with the Arditi, who, despite being largely on the decline by now, still refused to go away, and – whenever they managed to find the necessary resources to engage the Fascists – still enjoyed a clear military superiority. In their biggest single punitive expedition, 20,000 Blackshirts descended on Parma, a large agricultural and small industrial town in the more prosperous Northern part of the country. The Arditi and the entire population of Parma rose to the challenge, in what was to become a full-scale four-day street battle. Popular participation was virtually universal, and a large number of women lent their support to the struggle. Moreover, the Italian royal army, the carabinieri, did not fight at all, as their commanders feared the possibility of fraternisation between their soldiers and the people of Parma. In the end, the Fascists suffered 40 dead and 150 wounded. They hastily retreated, and even their chief-in-command, Italo Balbo, admiringly commented on the Arditi’s feat: ‘Women and young boys take part in the action … Workers operate in shifts. Military discipline … War discipline ..… Many workers wear their ex-soldiers’ uniforms … Women from the local population take bread, wine, fruit, lard, potatoes to the anti-Fascists’ kitchens …’ (p. 136)
It should be clear therefore that the Arditi del Popolo were far from being a small and isolated group, but enjoyed the support of a class that had been quick in recognising the life-and-death nature of the struggle against Fascism and the absolute need for some form of self-defence. Moreover, the fact that the Arditi were primarily a military élite meant that, on purely military and practical grounds, they were repeatedly able to stop and defeat Fascist squads on the ground, at a crucial time when the latter still needed to establish themselves, and were thus far from invincible.
While it can be argued that the Arditi possessed serious limitations with their limited political horizons and that the Italian working class was still reeling from its heavy defeats in the factories, nothing can excuse the final crucial term of this equation, the single factor that ultimately decided the demise of the Arditi del Popolo and, with it, of any chance of working-class self-defence: the rôle played by the trade unions and the parties of the Italian working class.
The leadership of the PSI had long embraced reformism and parliamentary politics, and believed that the state, far from conniving with Fascism (as was clearly the case), would act as a buffer and stop Mussolini in his tracks using its machinery, the legislative system and so on. Turati and his party had essentially a view of royalty and parliament which dated back to the first ‘genteel’ times of liberal, enlightened socially-minded gentlemen conversing in elegant salons. Fascism was but an extremist aberration; rational politicians could always legislate against its worst excesses. Mussolini, therefore, found no difficulty in getting the PSI and the trade unions to sign a peace pact in August 1921. In exchange for ‘assurances’ from the Fascist party that the worst violence would now be curbed and that the Italian state would have a mediating rôle that the signatories of the pact would readily respect (this was based on the deeply flawed assumption that the state at the time was a neutral entity with respect to Fascism). It goes without saying that Mussolini had no intention of keeping his word. Not only did violence escalate, Turati and his party agreed to renounce all forms of organised workers’ defence, actively discouraging any form of direct involvement (or ‘provocation’, as they put it), and openly denouncing the Arditi del Popolo as an organisation alien to the working class and its interests: ‘The Socialist Party declares its dissociation from the organisation and the work of the “Arditi del Popolo” …’ (p. 82) This was to prove disastrous for the Arditi in this crucial stage of their development, for it isolated them and made them much more vulnerable to state repression, as they now openly became a criminal organisation.
But the Arditi were to find no better treatment at the hands of the Italian Communists. The Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I) was born of a split with the PSI in January 1921. Despite Gramsci expressing his sympathies on several occasions for the Arditi, and giving them column space on his Ordine Nuovo newspaper – ‘Are Communists against the movement of the Arditi del Popolo? Quite the opposite: they aspire to the arming of the proletariat, to the creation of a proletarian armed force able to defeat the bourgeoisie …’ (15 July 1921, quoted by Francescangeli, p. 91) – in the end he too had to be ‘tactical’ in his support, due to the political supremacy enjoyed by the then leader of the party, Amadeo Bordiga. So Gramsci wrote four days later that the Arditi del Popolo ‘have an objective which is not political but contingent, and cannot achieve what they’re aiming for if the working class, as a class and as a party, does not join the fray’ (quoted by Francescangeli, p. 98).
For the emerging Communist Party, Fascism was, just like Social Democracy, merely another form of bourgeois counter-revolution. Faced with a ‘revolutionary’ international situation, Fascism was to be seen as the final, useless push of a bourgeoisie by now on its deathbed. Totally discounting the mass aspect of Fascist reaction, which was able to take with it the discontented petit-bourgeoisie, the PCd’I underestimated the need for self-defence (pp. 89–90). Bordiga’s attitude towards the Arditi displays an utter lack of understanding of the dynamics of revolutionary politics and a very unhealthy sectarianism, which in fact attracted sharp criticism, both from Lenin and the Third International, especially on the question of the united front.
Bordiga opposed the Arditi because they were not members of the Communist Party. The leader of the Arditi was Argo Secondari, an ex-army lieutenant who, despite his great military skills, did not seem to have clear political allegiances, and who, despite welcoming within the Arditi ranks everyone who wanted to fight Fascism, was totally opposed to the creation of internal political factions. Faced with the terror that the working class was enduring daily under the blows of the Fascists’ clubs, many people and, crucially, many grassroots members of the PCd’I and the PSI rightly thought that it was correct to join forces with anyone opposed to Mussolini. Indeed, the only political force which understood this and quickly embraced and continued to support the Arditi to the bitter end was the Italian anarchist movement (on the libertarian contribution to the struggle, see Marco Rossi’s excellent Arditi, non gendarmi! Dall’arditismo di guerra agli arditi del popolo 1917–1922, Pisa 1997, p. 189).
Bordiga was extremely suspicious of the Arditi, whom he regarded as shady characters at best, or Fascist agents at worst. Francescangeli quotes at length from the PCd’I’s documents of the time, and it is really instructive to follow the curve of Bordiga’s closure against the Arditi, in the face of the growing support from his party grassroots. So, in July 1921, in the pages of Il Comunista, Bordiga emphasised that ‘a revolutionary military enrolment must be based on the party … so Communists cannot and should not take part in such initiatives proposed by other parties or, at any rate, originating outside their party …’ (p. 100). Later in the same month, faced with its members’ unwillingness to follow party lines, the PCd’I belatedly established its own Squadre comuniste d’azione in direct competition with the Arditi, specifying that ‘no member of the party or its youth federation can become part of other similar organisations …’ (p. 100). Finally, at the end of July, in the pages of the Ordine Nuovo, the party outlined clear disciplinary actions. So, because ‘the Arditi del Popolo seemingly wish … to bring about a proletarian reaction to the excesses of Fascism, with the aim to establish once more “order and the normality of social life” [while] Communists … want to continue the proletarian struggle up to the victory for the revolution … we cannot but deplore those Communist comrades who have forged contacts with the organisers of the “Arditi del Popolo” in Rome to offer their services and ask for directives. If this should happen again, the most severe measures shall be adopted.’ (p. 101)
In August, all those insisting on having relations with the Arditi were to receive official warnings. And although some party branches disobeyed the party line, in general most, albeit reluctantly, fell into line with the leadership’s instructions (p. 102).
Lenin himself criticised the leadership of the PCd’I on several occasions, because of their clear isolationism. He referred to the anti-Fascist demonstration in Rome in July 1921 as a great show of strength of the working class, although, unfortunately, at the time Lenin believed that the Italian party had organised and supported that demonstration (p. 103).
By now it should be clear that, had the PCd’I and the PSI supported the Arditi and joined forces with them, then the ‘restricted’ political horizons of the Arditi too could be greatly widened, and, in all probability, thanks to the many highly capable cadres these parties had, revolutionary politics could have gained the upper hand among the Arditi.
All this was when trade union branches were being burned to the ground, party branches destroyed, printing presses smashed up, political activists prosecuted, beaten up and killed, and when the working class was terrorised into submission.
Perhaps Francescangeli summarises perfectly the lessons to be drawn from the Arditi del Popolo, when he says:
Having subordinated the political to the military is perhaps the greatest weakness of the arditi-popular organisation, but – as we have seen – between 1921 and 1922, very few of the ‘theorists’ of the workers’ movement in Italy were able to see Fascism for what it really was. And among them, only a very small minority attempted to point to a way out of the crisis. A theory which does not produce an ensuing praxis is just as unsatisfactory – if not more so – than a praxis which is not supported by a rigorous analysis. (p. 164)
Yet this lesson seems far from understood even today. In the aftermath of Genoa in Italy, and on the wave of the upsurge in trade union and working-class activity and struggles which Italy is currently witnessing, and for which Genoa has acquired a highly symbolic status, faced with the increasing polarisation provoked by Berlusconi, Fini, Bossi & Co, there are still those in the Bordigist tradition who, rather than working together with the class and within the class, see it fit to denounce the anti-capitalist movement, still in its infancy, as a petit-bourgeois deviation from the ‘real’ struggle, and refuse point blank to engage with it and try to influence its best elements to more revolutionary positions. Doubtlessly they would have seen many ‘deviations’ in the Arditi del Popolo too in 1921. Yet the class knew instinctively who to trust and who to turn to in its hour of need. And they will know as well the next time around.
Barbara Rossi
*************
Jim Higgins
The Asturian Uprising
and the Warsaw Commune
(2002)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2002.
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.
Manuel Grossi
The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution
Socialist Platform, London, 2000, pp140, £5.00
Zygmunt Zaremba
The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler
Socialist Platform, London, 1997, pp45, £3.00
The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution
Socialist Platform, London, 2000, pp140, £5.00
Zygmunt Zaremba
The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler
Socialist Platform, London, 1997, pp45, £3.00
TO have been a socialist through a large chunk of the twentieth century was not all unalloyed pleasure. Of course, there were high spots, although I was not around during the “ten days that shook the world” or the nine days of the General Strike, they were certainly times to stir men’s souls. Harry Wicks, who was alive during both of these seminal events, could recreate in words the events of those few golden days that would give renewed enthusiasm to the most jaded of socialists. In particular, Harry’s stories of the General Strike, in which he was a committed and enthusiastic participant, gave an intimation of the power and excitement when virtually an entire class is on the move. In their different styles, Manuel Grossi and Zygmunt Zaremba give equally graphic accounts by people who were there in the thick of it.
Unfortunately, with all the inevitability of a sweep hand, nine days becomes ten and the high hopes of day one give way to regrets that last for years. The Asturian uprising was another of those episodes which testify to the courage, daring and inventiveness of the working class when it operates collectively in its own fundamental interest. Alas it is another of those events measured in days, just 15, brief maybe, but a fortnight to cherish. The working class of Asturias in 1933 was acknowledged to be the best organised in Spain. The close communities of the miners, who made up nearly half of the Asturian working class, gave a powerful boost to social, industrial and political solidarity. The main union organisation, the Sindicato de obreros mineres de Asturias (SMA), was closely linked to the Socialist Federation, highly bureaucratised in the social democratic manner, and despite its name recruited workers whether miners or not. In a rather inspired piece of opportunism in 1928, the SMA acquired a coal mine and, because the state guaranteed to buy the output, a useful source of income. In 1934, the money came in handy to purchase arms from Portuguese revolutionaries. This is a novel deviation from the social democratic norms as we know them in Britain, where it is usually the individual who starts out radical and ends up rich.Early in 1933, the Workers and Peasants Bloc of Joaquín Maurín, convened a meeting in Barcelona to set up a Workers Alliance against the growing menace of fascism both abroad and in Spain. At first, there were few takers, the Communist Left (Trotskyists) and some left anarchists, but when the Nazis took power in Germany the need for the Workers Alliance became much clearer to many others. All workers’ organisations, political and trade union, were entitled to join and to place a representative on the committee. For Maurín, this was, despite certain differences, the Spanish expression of the soviet, a pure example of a class organisation. The Catalan Socialist Union was forced to withdraw from the Alliance because of its support for the bourgeois Catalan Generalitat. This wise exclusion policy was one that Maurín would have done well to remember when a few short years later he joined the bourgeois parties in a Popular Front government during the Civil War. The immediate cause of the uprising was the inclusion of three members of the extreme right in the national government. This was seen as a first significant opening to fascism. On 4 October 1934, the Asturian Committee of the Workers Alliance took the decision for the uprising. Despite the cache of Portuguese weaponry, the workers were not well armed. Hunting guns, and farm implements were freely available, but the miners’ weapon of choice was sticks of dynamite. It was readily available in the mines, and the miners were highly skilled in its use. In the battle for Oviedo, the dynamiters induced panic in the defenders, and were decisive in winning the day.
In Catalonia, the Generalitat presided over by Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist, declared a Catalan state within the Spanish Federal Republic. The workers confidently expected that Companys would open the armouries and distribute the weapons them. Their confidence was misplaced, and the Generalitat put up no resistance to a force of 50 men and a general. Catalonia, the birthplace of the Workers Alliance, played no further part in the struggle.
Despite its isolation, the uprising enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Asturian workers. Throughout the 15 days, the shortage of arms was a continuing problem. If they possessed the artillery, the shells had no fuses. They set about manufacturing what they could. Their home-made hand grenades were apparently of such high quality that not one failed to explode. They produced a device for lobbing their grenades into enemy trenches that proved wonderfully effective on several occasions. They developed a method of armour-plating trains, wagons and vehicles.
As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making. For example, they armoured an entire train with the exception of the engine, an oversight that proved fatal as soon as it came in range of enemy cannon. More importantly, having taken the radio station in Oviedo, they failed to broadcast any appeals for help and solidarity action to the Spanish or the world’s workers, on the spurious grounds that if they told the other Spanish workers of their struggle and successes, they would not send them help. This is just the sort of decision that a committee might well make in a demented moment of stress. In the end, of course, all the innovative weaponry and courage could not overcome the facts. Asturias was alone, they could not effectively arm themselves against the growing tide of the reactionary forces, in particular the air power of their adversaries. In Mieres the entire revolutionary committee decamped, with the exception of Manuel Grossi. Surprisingly, with the opposition advancing steadily, the workers’ spirit was not dampened, and at the end they could have had more men under arms if they only had the guns to give them.
The victory of the reaction was accompanied by indiscriminate slaughter and jailing of thousands; indeed, one of the demands that secured victory for the Popular Front in 1936 was for the release of the Asturian workers. Until the end, apart from some typical Stalinist sectarianism, the Workers’ Alliance worked well, it owed nothing, and made no concessions to any bourgeois liberal allies, for it had none. It was a serious and courageous attempt to pre-empt the fascist menace with socialism, a policy decision that the Comintern, the German Communist Party and German Social Democracy had been unable to make in 1933, a failure for which we all subsequently paid, and are still paying, the price.
In Poland, just a little less than 10 years after the Asturian uprising, in July 1944 things were not going well for the German army. The Russians were advancing on a broad front, and the Germans in Warsaw were frantically loading booty onto westward-moving transport, and building defences to face the oncoming Russians. By 29 July, the Russians were already on the left bank of the Vistula, just a few kilometres from Warsaw. Enthused by the closeness of the Russian forces, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of that day the Poles attacked the Germans. Surprise and the enthusiasm of the assault brought significant success, but as soon as they had overcome the initial shock, the Germans brought up men artillery and tanks to suppress the insurgency. Despite initial fears, the Poles developed a useful method for disabling Tiger tanks using petrol ignited by hand grenades. Interestingly enough, the Poles, like the Asturian workers before them, made their own hand grenades with explosive from captured shells. They also made a catapult device for firing their grenades at the Germans.
The similarity, unfortunately, does not end there. Throughout the struggle the Poles were always short of armaments. There is no greater tragedy than to have far more ready fighters than there are guns to go around. That they should have been short of weapons while the Russian army was 20 kilometres from Warsaw is a disgrace and another of the crimes to be laid at Stalin’s door. British, Canadian and Polish pilots flew a number arms runs to the insurgents, but the attrition rate was heavy, and they were refused landing facilities behind the Russian lines that would have eased the situation. All of this was well known to Stalin, who was lobbied by Churchill and Mikołajczyk, the Polish premier-in-exile, among several others. It was all to no avail, Stalin lied, evaded and finally put it about that these were irresponsible elements and reactionaries. For Stalin, a successful uprising by native Poles would have put in jeopardy the spoils that he expected to enjoy after the defeat of Hitler. At the time many were convinced by Stalin’s accusations because they could not believe that “Uncle Joe” would be so calculating as to consign thousands of anti-fascist fighters to death at the hands of the Germans. We, of course, who now know that this same “Uncle Joe” would, in his tireless pursuit of the interests of the world’s workers, give up entire Sundays to sit with his chum Molotov signing death sentences; if this is not actually the ultimate sacrifice, it certainly shows what he was made of.
After two months, the Warsaw commune surrendered. For two months it had held out despite the overwhelming force of the Germans and the treachery of Stalin. Its programme of nationalisation and workers’ control were as anathema to Stalin as they would be to any other counter-revolutionary.
Neither of the events detailed in these two excellent pamphlets lasted for long, although you might well say that given the difficulties it is a wonder they lasted as long as they did. It is always a tragedy when the good ones lose, as Albert Camus wrote somewhere: “Men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.” Nevertheless, to understand the difficulty is not to give up the desire for the same end that the Asturian miners and the Warsaw workers were struggling to achieve.
*************
Jim Higgins
The Asturian Uprising
and the Warsaw Commune
(2002)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2002.
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.
Manuel Grossi
The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution
Socialist Platform, London, 2000, pp140, £5.00
Zygmunt Zaremba
The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler
Socialist Platform, London, 1997, pp45, £3.00
The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution
Socialist Platform, London, 2000, pp140, £5.00
Zygmunt Zaremba
The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler
Socialist Platform, London, 1997, pp45, £3.00
TO have been a socialist through a large chunk of the twentieth century was not all unalloyed pleasure. Of course, there were high spots, although I was not around during the “ten days that shook the world” or the nine days of the General Strike, they were certainly times to stir men’s souls. Harry Wicks, who was alive during both of these seminal events, could recreate in words the events of those few golden days that would give renewed enthusiasm to the most jaded of socialists. In particular, Harry’s stories of the General Strike, in which he was a committed and enthusiastic participant, gave an intimation of the power and excitement when virtually an entire class is on the move. In their different styles, Manuel Grossi and Zygmunt Zaremba give equally graphic accounts by people who were there in the thick of it.
Unfortunately, with all the inevitability of a sweep hand, nine days becomes ten and the high hopes of day one give way to regrets that last for years. The Asturian uprising was another of those episodes which testify to the courage, daring and inventiveness of the working class when it operates collectively in its own fundamental interest. Alas it is another of those events measured in days, just 15, brief maybe, but a fortnight to cherish. The working class of Asturias in 1933 was acknowledged to be the best organised in Spain. The close communities of the miners, who made up nearly half of the Asturian working class, gave a powerful boost to social, industrial and political solidarity. The main union organisation, the Sindicato de obreros mineres de Asturias (SMA), was closely linked to the Socialist Federation, highly bureaucratised in the social democratic manner, and despite its name recruited workers whether miners or not. In a rather inspired piece of opportunism in 1928, the SMA acquired a coal mine and, because the state guaranteed to buy the output, a useful source of income. In 1934, the money came in handy to purchase arms from Portuguese revolutionaries. This is a novel deviation from the social democratic norms as we know them in Britain, where it is usually the individual who starts out radical and ends up rich.Early in 1933, the Workers and Peasants Bloc of Joaquín Maurín, convened a meeting in Barcelona to set up a Workers Alliance against the growing menace of fascism both abroad and in Spain. At first, there were few takers, the Communist Left (Trotskyists) and some left anarchists, but when the Nazis took power in Germany the need for the Workers Alliance became much clearer to many others. All workers’ organisations, political and trade union, were entitled to join and to place a representative on the committee. For Maurín, this was, despite certain differences, the Spanish expression of the soviet, a pure example of a class organisation. The Catalan Socialist Union was forced to withdraw from the Alliance because of its support for the bourgeois Catalan Generalitat. This wise exclusion policy was one that Maurín would have done well to remember when a few short years later he joined the bourgeois parties in a Popular Front government during the Civil War. The immediate cause of the uprising was the inclusion of three members of the extreme right in the national government. This was seen as a first significant opening to fascism. On 4 October 1934, the Asturian Committee of the Workers Alliance took the decision for the uprising. Despite the cache of Portuguese weaponry, the workers were not well armed. Hunting guns, and farm implements were freely available, but the miners’ weapon of choice was sticks of dynamite. It was readily available in the mines, and the miners were highly skilled in its use. In the battle for Oviedo, the dynamiters induced panic in the defenders, and were decisive in winning the day.
In Catalonia, the Generalitat presided over by Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist, declared a Catalan state within the Spanish Federal Republic. The workers confidently expected that Companys would open the armouries and distribute the weapons them. Their confidence was misplaced, and the Generalitat put up no resistance to a force of 50 men and a general. Catalonia, the birthplace of the Workers Alliance, played no further part in the struggle.
Despite its isolation, the uprising enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Asturian workers. Throughout the 15 days, the shortage of arms was a continuing problem. If they possessed the artillery, the shells had no fuses. They set about manufacturing what they could. Their home-made hand grenades were apparently of such high quality that not one failed to explode. They produced a device for lobbing their grenades into enemy trenches that proved wonderfully effective on several occasions. They developed a method of armour-plating trains, wagons and vehicles.
As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making. For example, they armoured an entire train with the exception of the engine, an oversight that proved fatal as soon as it came in range of enemy cannon. More importantly, having taken the radio station in Oviedo, they failed to broadcast any appeals for help and solidarity action to the Spanish or the world’s workers, on the spurious grounds that if they told the other Spanish workers of their struggle and successes, they would not send them help. This is just the sort of decision that a committee might well make in a demented moment of stress. In the end, of course, all the innovative weaponry and courage could not overcome the facts. Asturias was alone, they could not effectively arm themselves against the growing tide of the reactionary forces, in particular the air power of their adversaries. In Mieres the entire revolutionary committee decamped, with the exception of Manuel Grossi. Surprisingly, with the opposition advancing steadily, the workers’ spirit was not dampened, and at the end they could have had more men under arms if they only had the guns to give them.
The victory of the reaction was accompanied by indiscriminate slaughter and jailing of thousands; indeed, one of the demands that secured victory for the Popular Front in 1936 was for the release of the Asturian workers. Until the end, apart from some typical Stalinist sectarianism, the Workers’ Alliance worked well, it owed nothing, and made no concessions to any bourgeois liberal allies, for it had none. It was a serious and courageous attempt to pre-empt the fascist menace with socialism, a policy decision that the Comintern, the German Communist Party and German Social Democracy had been unable to make in 1933, a failure for which we all subsequently paid, and are still paying, the price.
In Poland, just a little less than 10 years after the Asturian uprising, in July 1944 things were not going well for the German army. The Russians were advancing on a broad front, and the Germans in Warsaw were frantically loading booty onto westward-moving transport, and building defences to face the oncoming Russians. By 29 July, the Russians were already on the left bank of the Vistula, just a few kilometres from Warsaw. Enthused by the closeness of the Russian forces, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of that day the Poles attacked the Germans. Surprise and the enthusiasm of the assault brought significant success, but as soon as they had overcome the initial shock, the Germans brought up men artillery and tanks to suppress the insurgency. Despite initial fears, the Poles developed a useful method for disabling Tiger tanks using petrol ignited by hand grenades. Interestingly enough, the Poles, like the Asturian workers before them, made their own hand grenades with explosive from captured shells. They also made a catapult device for firing their grenades at the Germans.
The similarity, unfortunately, does not end there. Throughout the struggle the Poles were always short of armaments. There is no greater tragedy than to have far more ready fighters than there are guns to go around. That they should have been short of weapons while the Russian army was 20 kilometres from Warsaw is a disgrace and another of the crimes to be laid at Stalin’s door. British, Canadian and Polish pilots flew a number arms runs to the insurgents, but the attrition rate was heavy, and they were refused landing facilities behind the Russian lines that would have eased the situation. All of this was well known to Stalin, who was lobbied by Churchill and Mikołajczyk, the Polish premier-in-exile, among several others. It was all to no avail, Stalin lied, evaded and finally put it about that these were irresponsible elements and reactionaries. For Stalin, a successful uprising by native Poles would have put in jeopardy the spoils that he expected to enjoy after the defeat of Hitler. At the time many were convinced by Stalin’s accusations because they could not believe that “Uncle Joe” would be so calculating as to consign thousands of anti-fascist fighters to death at the hands of the Germans. We, of course, who now know that this same “Uncle Joe” would, in his tireless pursuit of the interests of the world’s workers, give up entire Sundays to sit with his chum Molotov signing death sentences; if this is not actually the ultimate sacrifice, it certainly shows what he was made of.
After two months, the Warsaw commune surrendered. For two months it had held out despite the overwhelming force of the Germans and the treachery of Stalin. Its programme of nationalisation and workers’ control were as anathema to Stalin as they would be to any other counter-revolutionary.
Neither of the events detailed in these two excellent pamphlets lasted for long, although you might well say that given the difficulties it is a wonder they lasted as long as they did. It is always a tragedy when the good ones lose, as Albert Camus wrote somewhere: “Men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.” Nevertheless, to understand the difficulty is not to give up the desire for the same end that the Asturian miners and the Warsaw workers were struggling to achieve.
************
Lifelong Apprenticeship
Bill Hunter
Lifelong Apprenticeship: Life and Times of a Revolutionary, Volume 1: 1920–1959
Porcupine Press, London, 2000, pp434
Lifelong Apprenticeship: Life and Times of a Revolutionary, Volume 1: 1920–1959
Porcupine Press, London, 2000, pp434
STUDIES of the history of the Trotskyist movement in the UK have benefited in recent years from a growth in the number of political autobiographies available. Harry Wicks, Harry Ratner, Alan Thornett and others have contributed major primary source documents to the record.
The political autobiography is a very difficult kind of book to write (and only a little easier to review seriously). Can it be anything more than a repository for recollections, to be worked over by the diligent, in search of nuggets of information with which to triangulate onto other records? To resolve the tensions between the political content of such a work and its intensely personal form is a task that challenges even the most skilled of writers – Trotsky’s My Life does not satisfactorily achieve the task, and is better remembered for its sketches than for its big picture. Voronsky’s published chapters, perhaps one of the best attempts at the form, cover only his early years in the movement, avoiding any problems with the Stalinist censors.The revolutionary’s story will always be unfinished; there will always be a sense that the major tasks lie ahead, and not in what has been achieved. This makes it impossible to compose an autobiography as a rounded, finished work. The themes are stated, then contested by counter-themes, variations are developed, and the piece comes to an end, necessarily unresolved.
These problems are particularly acute in Bill Hunter’s book. Like Harry Ratner (and so many others), Hunter was a victim of Gerry Healy’s disruption of the most important attempt at building the revolutionary party in the UK. Unlike Ratner (and too many others), he remains convinced of the need for and the possibility of the revolution. Not for him the resigned minor key, the bleak decrescendo – he sets himself the task of making an honest political assessment of the lessons of his life. His record and contribution are such that he deserves to be reviewed with a method consistent with the scale of his objective. (This reviewer does not set himself up as having achieved such an aim.)
A Marxist revolutionary’s autobiography will be different from anybody else’s, for the same reasons that a revolutionary’s life is different from everybody else’s, but with an additional twist or fold of complexity. A bourgeois minister, or even a non-Marxist proletarian, might wrestle, with varying degree of success (and it is rarely done well) with the problem of extracting conclusions – ‘lessons’ – from the interactions between his life and his times, and his consciousness and his being. If this were all there was to be done, the Marxist autobiography would only have to deal with the problems of lack of historical resolution, and especially that the revolution appears as far away, or further, now than at the beginning of the story – more difficulties than enough for any writer.
But the Marxist is called upon to attack the same problem with an additional dimension – that of how to reflect upon the movement of his own consciousness, and to try to perceive its expansion and its simultaneous grasping of and impact on reality. He begins with an incomparable advantage – his recognition of the truly revolutionary potential of human consciousness, the most incomparable innovation in the whole of history; and the driving force from which all human qualities and weaknesses spring. But in itself, this is insufficient to allow the autobiographer to overcome the key problem – that of grasping and reflecting on the changes in his own consciousness when that consciousness is transformed by the very act of grasping itself. This is not a political but a literary problem, and is in fact a problem which cannot be solved in its own terms. It is hardly surprising that the autobiographies I have referred to bypass it.
In his Introduction, Hunter refers to his book both as an autobiography and as memoirs. It is in fact much more the latter than the former. Its points of interest are clustered around the political personalities and activities he encountered, much more than around the ways in which he responded to them, overcame doubts and irresolutions, determined upon actions and positions, and assessed them in retrospect.
Hunter’s account of his early involvement with the Wicks–Dewar group illustrates this difficulty well. With very little political background, he happened to hear Wicks attacking the Communist Party at a meeting, and made contact with them. (All of us live on the Damascus Road, of course, and chance events can assume enormous significance in every life.) With Wicks’ encouragement, he undertook a campaign of reading. It is impossible not to be amused at his description of barricading himself into his room to read Their Morals and Ours while a house party roared around him, but such adroit moments are too few in the book. What I wanted, but didn’t get from this section was to learn just what Hunter found convincing or attractive at this point in his life about the Wicks-Dewar group, and about Trotsky’s texts. He appears to assume that his readers share his enthusiasms, and came to their revolutionary convictions by a route so similar that the individual experience involved is insignificant.
This section is followed by the story of the origins of the Wicks–Dewar group, but disappointingly, this does not consist of original material, or even of recollected accounts given to him by the participants. Next come some personal notes about Wicks and Dewar themselves, which add something to the previously published materials.
Hunter gives an account of the group’s activity in the working class, which adds to what we previously knew by describing some of the agitation and propaganda that cannot be learned about from the group’s documents. But there is too little about how decisions were arrived at, or how and why Hunter and the group made the choices that they did. It is as if the group’s ideas and writings were sufficient to understand what happened and what they did. But if this were the case, why did the group never exceed a membership of between 25 and 30? It is essential to understand why some people joined, in order to understand why so many thousands more did not. (And my instinct is, when I am given rough membership numbers like that, to demand all the names that I can get from the informant. I don’t think I could put together more than 10 names of Wicks–Dewar group members from the information I have to hand.)
The first instance of some personal response to political reality is where Hunter describes (p. 39) his impatience with Reg Groves’ passivity as a leader. But this germ-cell does not develop into a consideration of how he dealt with the problem, politically or personally, nor of how to struggle with the imperfections of leaders. Perhaps this is too painful a territory for a former ‘Healyite’ to venture onto. Instead, his line of recollection is cut off with a political generalisation, to the effect that Groves ‘could not break from’ British exceptionalism and a certain opportunism. Probably this is so, but here Hunter appears to mirror Groves’ passivity with his own.
These discontinuities in styles of thinking pervade the book. Too frequently he turns aside from describing his own experiences; too frequently he arrives too quickly at a generalised political conclusion.
Sometimes the same process appears in reverse. In an excellent chapter in which he rehabilitates Morrow and Goldman against the sterile programme chanting of Cannon and Cochran, as well as ably defending the Greek section against Pablo, the first person singular pronoun appears only once, and then only to concede that he missed the significance of the discussion in the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Regrettably, Hunter has not been adequately served by those of his comrades who undertook the typesetting, proof-reading and other technical tasks in the production of the book. The indexing is particularly at fault. By page 200, it is one page out of register, and the error grows to three pages by page 400. There are altogether too many errors of syntax and spelling that the average home computer provides tools to detect. Among the sadder errors, Widelin, the hero of the wartime fraternisation with the German troops occupying France, becomes ‘Eidelin’. Brian Pearce is represented as ‘Pierce’, no doubt not for the first time. John Archer’s thesis is referred to as ‘unpublished’, without even a mention of the university at which it can be accessed. A missing comma on page 240 sent me searching for a ‘Dave Lawrence’, seemingly a brother of Harry Finch. The reference to page 157 in the index in respect of the very interesting figure of Jack Pemberton cannot be found, either there or on any adjoining page.
Hunter’s chapter on the end of the RCP provides a great deal of valuable primary material. He rebuts Bob Pitt’s account of the expulsion of Ted Grant with personal recollection of the events. This presentation of the evidence is preferable to his (too frequent) dismissive asides against Pitt’s important series of articles on Healy. The survivors of the Healy movement have now had over a dozen years since Clapham Ragnarok in which to digest and report on their experiences, and cannot justly complain if the best accounts do not take account of their knowledge. However, one cannot refuse to savour Hunter’s description of Pitt’s series ‘which strung incidents together one after another like cracked beads on a frayed string’. Rarely has the proverbial advice to glasshouse residents been so stylishly disregarded.
There are some instances of reticence in Hunter’s book that merit attention. These especially concern his decisions about which group to work in. We read nothing about why he stayed with the static Wicks–Dewar group when the Harber current (Militant/Revolutionary Socialist League) appears to have been much more dynamic. On the formation of the Workers International League, Hunter maintains that it was a question of Ralph Lee’s subjective or even ‘personal’ split. Here we have an echo of his caution in respect of Groves’ leadership. It would seem that for Hunter, as for so many, any question of how the leadership chooses to abuse its position is ‘subjective’, not even registering on his political seismometer. His decision to join the RCP in 1944, he writes (p. 136), resulted from discussions with V. Sastry, an RCP Central Committee member. But we do not learn what the content of these discussions was, nor what was convincing about the RCP’s positions at this time, nor even what was unsatisfactory about the Wicks-Dewar group at this time. By this time, Hunter had been associated with the Wicks-Dewar group for five years, but we learn nothing about the end of this political relationship.
Elsewhere, Hunter provides some valuable corrections and additions to the reports in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson. His first-hand description of Jock Haston’s descent into uncertainty and doubt is pure gold. However, his section on Healy during the Second World War fails to mention the leadership’s flight into Hibernia, and the notorious Post Office book.
The discussion of the Proletarian Military Policy is disappointing, drawing entirely upon available documents, and not on personal recollections of the discussions at the time. It does reveal, however, that the discussion on the PMP hardly registered on the RSL membership, to such an extent that when he came to write his famous article on the war in 1958, he did not find it necessary even to mention the PMP. This contrasts starkly with Sam Levy’s references to the intense debate within the WIL, and is not entirely consistent with Harry Ratner’s account of the debates within the RSL on transitional demands and Air Raid Precautions.
Much could (and in my view should) have been written about the discussion on the nature of the East European states after the war. In this chapter, Hunter gives a too rare example of exactly how his political thinking developed, leading eventually to his important document The IS and Eastern Europe. I have always regarded this discussion as one of the great achievements of Trotskyism in Britain. The richness and breadth of independent thinking that flowed out of a small group with an overwhelmingly proletarian composition surpasses anything in the history of the movement in this country. Hunter, however, now takes a less enthusiastic view; he looks back on it as ‘academic’ and ‘abstract’.
To continue with a chapter by chapter commentary would exhaust the reader’s patience, not to mention the editor’s budget. While not hesitating to recommend this book for purchase by anybody who wants to form a conception of Trotskyism in Britain, some conclusion must be drawn. It is this – it seems to me that the revolutionary discipline of Hunter’s life has become a straightjacket that restricts his ability to write about his own experiences in a way that creates resonances with the reader. This is at odds with other aspects of Hunter’s life story. His book provides more than adequate evidence of his effectiveness as a workers’ leader in several workplaces. And nobody who has heard him speak could deny his ability to communicate convincingly. I await the second volume of this work keenly.
J.J. Plant
**************
Spain Betrayed
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck & Grigory Sevostianov
Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War
Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, pp. 537, £27.50
Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War
Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, pp. 537, £27.50
THIS collection of documents from the Moscow archives on the Soviet rôle in the Spanish Civil War shows that from the beginning Comintern ‘advisors’ were directing the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and eventually much of the state’s repressive machinery. Clearly, liberal historians such as Paul Preston and Gabriel Jackson have underestimated the extent of the Comintern’s power. Only six days after Franco’s rising, José Diaz, the PCE’s Secretary, was instructed ‘not to exceed the limits of a struggle for a truly democratic republic’. A report by André Marty in October 1936 shows that he, Codovilla, the Argentine Communist leader, and Ernö Gerö, a future dictator of Hungary, were the party’s real leaders. By November, the Comintern had more than 700 military ‘advisors’, many of whom were commanding troops in the field. In October, the military attaché, Vladimir Gorev, emphasised the need for secrecy over the extent of Russian involvement. Marty claims that Codovilla even wrote the editorials for the PCE’s paper, the Mundo Obrero. By September 1937, Palmiro Togliatti favoured less control and criticised the detailed interference by Comintern agents, arguing that the PCE leaders should do more themselves, noting approvingly that Dolores Ibárruri had actually written a political document without help from the ‘advisors’.
These documents give conclusive proof of the Comintern’s part in the repression against the left. A report to Litvinov in February 1937 by Marchenko, the plenipotentiary in Spain, which calls for the smashing of the POUM in order to facilitate an accommodation with the anarchists, provides the background to the struggle in May 1937 which toppled the Caballero government and led to the murder of Andrés Nin. In April 1937, Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador, told Litvinov, his foreign minister, that Caballero must be removed from office. In April, Dimitrov sent Voroshilov a report from an informant, probably André Marty, expanding on that theme. Clearly, the Stalinist seizure of the Barcelona telephone exchange, which provoked the street fighting that was the turning point of the struggle to secure Stalinist domination, was not accidental, but the consequence of those decisions.The Comintern agents’ depiction of an heroic Communist party fighting against the sinister concealed powers of Trotsky/fascism approaches insanity. Every difficulty was ascribed to those dark forces, as if there were no cock-ups due to real-world inexperience, ignorance or chance. For example, ‘General Walter’ (Karol Sverchevsky) described in a report to Voroshilov in August 1938 the extensive Trotskyist sabotage campaign consisting of spreading rumours, deliberately losing weapons and feeding troops poisoned chocolates. He pleaded for help from the NKVD as his investigations were obstructed by the saboteurs’ powerful friends. Even Harry Pollitt played the Trotskyist game by spiriting away a spy to a British destroyer in Barcelona. Unluckily for ‘Walter’, another ‘spy’ he had arrested died at the hands of an over-enthusiastic interrogator before he could disclose the extent of the plot.
The POUM was often described as Trotskyist by Stalinists and others, but here the label is extended to include anarchists, supporters of Caballero and even the conservative Catholic Basque nationalist Manuel Irujo. There must have been an element of cynicism by agents providing their superiors with the misinformation they demanded, but the hysterical tone of their reports suggests they did believe in the Trotskyist/fascist conspiracy. After all, Communist party members were required to believe that the Old Bolsheviks accused in the Moscow Trials were Hitler’s agents. If all the other tendencies were infiltrated by Trotskyists, why should the PCE and other Communist parties be immune? In such an atmosphere, there was no limit to suspicion, and few of the agents liked each other. Many of the ‘advisors’, including Rosenberg and Antonov-Ovseenko, were victims of Stalin’s purges when they were recalled to the Soviet Union, just as many accusers ended up joining their victims in the dock in show trials in the Peoples’ Democracies of the 1950s.
The Spanish Republic’s war effort faced many real problems. Local nationalisms and the central government were uneasy allies, troops did not have the level of training which would be usual in a professional army, there were long-standing conflicts between anarchists and socialists, and regular officers were widely suspected of Francoist sympathies, as the army had been an instrument for suppressing internal dissent and colonial revolt rather than fighting a modern war. But, in the Stalinist world view, real difficulties were produced by fascist/Trotskyist sabotage. The scarcity of actual Trotskyists was not a disadvantage, as a witch-hunt does not require the existence of real witches. The leaders of the POUM did not fully appreciate that the Moscow Trials were an historical turning point, but their courage in defending Trotsky against Stalinist slanders was exemplary. It is not possible to list all of the questions which are cleared up by these documents. Jesús Hernández’s claim that he opposed the murder of Nin, made in his book, Yo fui un ministro de Stalin, written after he had lost out to Ibárruri in the fight to be the Communist Party’s General Secretary, is clearly false. A report by the Comintern agent ‘Cid’ recounts that at a meeting of the council of ministers in July 1937 Hernández attacked the Socialist minister Zugazagoitia for questioning the Communist story that Nin had been freed by a detachment of fascists, and demanded that he pursue those ‘criminals’ rather than slander the Russians.
Political establishments need historians to provide them with a usable past, but that will vary from one country to another. The editors of this volume are soldiers in the ‘history wars’ being fought in the United States between Cold War and revisionist academics. (Rumour has it that later volumes in the Annals of Communism series will be edited by alternate teams of revisionists and cold warriors.) In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the editors of this volume are, understandably, elated that not just Stalinism, but socialism – and even liberalism? – have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The authorities they cite include Paul Johnson, François Fejtö and Robert Alexander, rather than the contemporary Spanish scholars one might expect. That is not because academic orthodoxy in Spain favours either the left or Stalinism. Spain also has its ‘history wars’, but the line-up there is rather different. The prevailing academic orthodoxy, represented by Bizcarrondo, Elorza and Casanova among others, not mentioned by the editors of Spain Betrayed, defends the Republic, but attacks the Stalinist repression as a hideous stain on it, while criticising the ‘excesses’ of the anarchists and the POUM. The revolutionary tradition is defended by the left-wing historians grouped around the manifesto Combate por la Historia.
John Sullivan
*************
The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution
Alexander Pantsov,
The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927,
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2000, pp324, £29.95
The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927,
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2000, pp324, £29.95
READERS whose interest was aroused by Pantsov’s articles From Students to Dissidents: The Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia (The Marxist Monthly, August 1994–February/March 1995) will be delighted by the appearance of this book, which for the first time combines the material available in both Russian and Chinese to make up a coherent picture.
The sheer wealth of information, backed by the most careful documentation, makes it a joy to read. The writer begins by reminding us of China’s proper place in Marxist historiography, in the Asiatic mode that Stalin was so anxious to outlaw (pp. 23–5). Speaking of the China of that time, he notes that ‘poor Chinese commoners dreamed of returning to a sacramental model of Oriental despotism’, and that ‘all of China’s peasant revolts … aimed to turn society back to the past’ (p. 25). He credits Radek with starting the unfortunate tradition of applying the schemas of Western Marxism to Chinese history, identifying the period of the Warring States as ‘feudal’ (pp. 120–1; cf the preface to Robert Louzon, China: Three Thousand Years of History, Fifty Years of Revolution, pp. ii–iii). In this context it is interesting to note that, along with other modern Russian thinkers, Pantsov holds that ‘the suppression of capitalist development of Russia thus turned out to lead the country to the construction of a society that would have become alternative, but not post-capitalist … thrown back into the epoch of an Asian mode of production, or so-called Oriental despotism’ (p. 76), which echoes Umberto Melotti’s suggestions in Marx and the Third World (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 2, p. 251). The penetration of Marxist ideas and writings into China itself is fully catalogued (pp. 25–36). We are left in no doubt that a majority of the first leaders of the Chinese Communist Party joined the Guomindang only reluctantly (Part 2, Chapter 4, pp. 53–69), and that in this sense ‘their revival of Trotskyism would not be a result of their negative attitude to Leninist tactics in China, but rather a reaction to Stalin’s shift in the Comintern policy toward the Chinese revolutionary movement’ (p. 69). The last part of the book tells the tragic story of the purges and murders of the Chinese revolutionaries left stranded in Russia (pp. 163–208).Noting that all the various views of modern historians, whether in Russia, China or in the West, are oversimplifications (pp. 1–5), the writer dispels one myth after another. The view that Stalin deliberately sabotaged the Second Chinese Revolution in the interests of the struggle against the Left Opposition within Russia and British imperialism abroad is very firmly dealt with (pp. 2–3). Analysing the clash between Stalin and Trotsky over China step by step, he concludes that ‘the disagreements concerned tactics rather than strategy. All Bolshevik leaders tried their best to lead the Chinese Communists to a victory aimed at transforming China into a socialist or “non-capitalist” state.’ (p. 210) However, he does demonstrate that Stalin broke with Lenin’s position, ‘perhaps unconsciously convincing himself that he was simply developing Lenin’s line’, and locates Stalin’s mistakes in his adherence ‘to the concept of a “multi-class party”’ (p. 211), a policy unfortunately shared by all too many Trotskyists now (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 3, p. 111, and no. 4, p. 212).
For there was all the difference between this and Lenin’s strategy, which was ‘a manoeuvre aimed at helping unsophisticated Communist activists to use their potential foes temporarily for their own purposes’ (p. 211). The original decision to join the Guomindang was an ‘“entrist policy” … on Comintern instructions Voitinsky explained to the Chinese Communist leaders that work inside the GMD was not an end in itself but a means of strengthening the CCP and preparing it for the future struggle outside and against the GMD’ (p. 66). In fact, the anti-imperialist united front was intended to operate in the same way as the workers’ united front in Europe – to expose the inability of both reformists and bourgeois nationalists to advance the interests of the toilers. As the Theses on the Eastern Question of the Fourth Comintern Congress put it, ‘just as in the West the slogan of the workers’ united front has helped and is still helping to expose the social democrats’ sell-out of proletarian interests, so the slogan of an anti-imperialist united front will help to expose the vacillations of the various bourgeois-nationalist groups’ (B. Hessel [ed.], Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, London 1980, p. 415).
So Pantsov does not accept the views of 1960s and 1970s Soviet historians who ‘placed the highest value on the “moderation” of Lenin and the ECCI, emphasising Lenin’s belief in genuine national revolution in the East and contrasting his views with the Comintern’s ultra-leftists’ (p. 4). He shows that Lenin never deviated from the policy of Permanent Revolution as applied to Asia after 1917. He points out the extent of Lenin’s plans to spread the Russian Revolution by armed conquest in the Caucasus (1920–21) and Mongolia (1921), his ‘plans for capturing Constantinople’ (1921) and what he calls ‘Soviet aggression in Persia’ (p. 210). He agrees that in Russia in 1917 ‘Lenin altered his point of view and advocated a course towards socialist (that is, permanent) revolution’, a position that ‘wholly coincided with Trotsky’s’ (pp. 14–5), and reminds us that ‘during the first years after the October Revolution, Trotsky’s Results and Prospects was reprinted several times – including foreign-language editions – as a theoretical rationale of the October Revolution’ (p. 15).
Nor is the writer disposed to accept the myths of vulgar Trotskyism current in the West, that Trotsky opposed the entry of the CCP into the Guomindang on principle as early as 1923. ‘Not a single Soviet leader in the period immediately following the “coup”’ (that is, Chiang Kai-Shek’s of 1926), he points out, ‘proposed that the Communists leave the Guomindang. At a session of the Politburo discussing reports from Guangzhou that some Chinese Communists were contemplating anti-Chiang Kai-Shek actions, even Trotsky proposed a resolution condemning such “insurrectionary” intentions. It was not until some time later, in the second half of April 1926, that Trotsky proposed to the Politburo that the CCP withdraw from the Guomindang.’ (p. 92; cf. p. 212) ‘The issue is not as simple as Trotsky’s claim implies’, he continues, ‘one problem is that there are several inconsistencies in Trotsky’s well-known later accounts (written and published while he was in defeat and exile) of his position on this question – inconsistencies that no-one up to now seems to have noticed.’ (p. 102) It is a shame that here he does not give the credit where it is due, to Paolo Casciola, who analysed this question long ago (Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Foligno 1990; cf. the preface to the reprint of C.L.R. James, World Revolution, New Jersey, 1993, p. xvii and n29, and Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 269–71). It is equally unfortunate that Greg Benton, who learned this at the Wupperthal Conference, forgot to acquaint him with it.
At the same time, Pantsov shares Benton’s view that Mao’s ultimate success was due to ‘basically the same policy that Lenin put forward in 1920’ (p. 5), and that during 1937–49 ‘the Chinese Communists actually turned back to that concept and made it the foundation of their tactical course’ (p. 214). Now this reversion to pre-Plekhanov peasant socialism can only be accepted by those who have blurred the distinction between workers and peasants in their own minds, or who believe that the CCP was right to turn its back on the working class, for there is every difference between Lenin’s concept of a workers’ party taking power in alliance with the peasantry, and a military clique basing itself upon that class because it has led the workers’ movement to annihilation in the first place.
The appearance of this book, the work of Vadim Rogovin, and the rich memoirs of the survivors of the terror show just what could be accomplished once Russian scholars were allowed free interchange with the rest of the world, even if international Trotskyism’s contribution to this ferment has been so far disappointing. Let us hope that this splendid book will make some impact upon it.
Al Richardson
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Revolutionary Labor Socialist
Paul Le Blanc & Thomas Barrett
Revolutionary Labor Socialist: The Life, Ideas and Comrades of Frank Lovell
Smyrna Press, Union City 2000, pp. 352, $25.00
Revolutionary Labor Socialist: The Life, Ideas and Comrades of Frank Lovell
Smyrna Press, Union City 2000, pp. 352, $25.00
THIS is a well-deserved tribute brought together to mark the passing of a remarkably courageous man (for example, p. 75). Shortly after gaining a degree in philosophy at Berkeley, Lovell joined the American Workers Party of A.J. Muste and James P. Cannon, and became a seaman in the aftermath of the San Francisco General Strike (p. 12). In between trips, he found time to collaborate with Sherry Mangan in writing the excellent book Maritime, which Pioneer published under the pseudonym of ‘Frederick J. Lang’ (p. 100). It was at this time that the Socialist Workers Party used its comrades in the merchant marine to keep contact with the Trotskyists abroad caught up in the Second World War, and they even slipped propaganda into Russia. On a return voyage from the Murmansk run, Frank’s ship hit a German mine, and he was one of the few to survive, receiving a congratulatory address from the Russian government (p. 13). Witch-hunted out of the Sailors Union of the Pacific in 1949, he got a job in General Motors, and ran a brave electoral campaign for Mayor of Detroit at the height of McCarthyism. In 1969, he moved to New York to direct the SWP’s work among the trade unions, and wrote a regular column on labour affairs for The Militant. Like so many of what remained of Cannon’s working-class base, he was expelled from the SWP in 1983 when the Jack Barnes leadership decided to junk the old Trotskyism and go in for unrestrained Castro worship. He attempted to keep a group going in solidarity with the Mandel Fourth International, and he supported the recent attempts to form an American Labour Party.
The book is divided into three sections, the first collecting together the tributes made at his death (pp. 12–96), the second the articles written by him over the years (pp. 99–242), and the third pen portraits by himself and others of some of his contemporaries in the Trotskyist movement (pp. 247–352). If we disregard such nonsense as The Struggle for Revolutionary Continuity (pp. 20–2, 69–71) and The Cannon Tradition of American Trotskyism (pp. 27–32), it all goes to make up a treasure house of materials for assessing the political history of the Trotskyists in the USA, and even though any selection is bound to be uneven in quality, there are some very interesting essays, by Lovell on Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge (pp. 107–26) and on ‘Cecil’ (Frank) Glass (pp. 303–4), by George Shriver on Lovell himself (pp. 60–8), and by Paul Le Blanc and Michael Steven Smith on Morris Lewit (pp. 272–94).However, it cannot be said that Lovell’s political judgement was always faultless. It took him 20 years to realise where all the SWP’s adulation of Castro was leading (pp. 177, 292), and he was in complete agreement with George Breitman’s uncritical views on black nationalism (pp. 264, 270–1). And although he saw that the Second World War was ‘the dividing line’ in the history of the Trotskyist movement (p. 133), ‘a great divide, like a chasm caused by an earthquake of unimaginable force’ (p. 135), he failed to see the Cochran split as a crucial stage in the SWP’s loss of its class direction that followed logically from it, and he led the struggle against Cochran in the Detroit branch (p. 25). Although he was the party’s Industrial Organiser at the time the Proletarian Orientation Tendency and Dave Fender began their thankless task of trying to point it back in the direction of the working class, he dismissed their struggle as ‘silly stuff’ (p. 63). We can therefore question if ‘he never gave up on the workers’ (p. 40), even if he finally came round to admit that it was the influx of middle-class youth ‘that lay [sic] the social basis on which Barnes was able to carry through his abandonment of the historic Trotskyist program’ (p. 63, cf. p. 339). Yet curiously, the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, which was heavily influenced by the American SWP, to this day locates the degeneration of that organisation in its belated turn towards the working class, and not in its previous turn away from it.
Unfortunately, whilst Lovell admitted his mistakes in the long run, the same cannot be said for one of this book’s editors, who still sees fit to criticise him for ‘thinking unconsciously of “the working class” as essentially meaning white male union members’ (p. 38), an inadmissible concession to the politically correct white terror now rampaging through the American universities.
Be that as it may, whilst we still look forward eagerly to a definitive history of the American Trotskyist movement, our thanks must go to the editors of this book for laying down some of the necessary foundations for it.
Al Richardson
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Theory and Practice
G. Munis
Teoría y práctica de la lucha de clases, Volume 2
Editores Extremeños, Spain 2001
Teoría y práctica de la lucha de clases, Volume 2
Editores Extremeños, Spain 2001
THIS book is the second volume of the collected works of Grandizo Munis (1912–1989), who is best known as the leader of one of the two Trotskyist groups in Catalonia during the revolution and Civil War, and a defendant in the frame-up trial mounted by the Stalinists in 1938 (see Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 1/2). Franco’s victory interrupted the trial, and Munis and his comrades were able to escape to France. He subsequently visited Trotsky in Mexico. He was close to Natalia Sedova and supported her denunciation of the American Socialist Workers Party for continuing to regard the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state. Most of his remaining life was spent in France, but he returned to Spain following the Barcelona tramway strike in 1951, where he was arrested for his clandestine work in support of that struggle, and was jailed until 1961.
By that time, Munis had long abandoned Trotskyism for what is generally described as ultra-leftism, having come to regard trade unions and left parties as instruments of capital. These writings, which date from 1961 to 1986, do not describe that transition, so it would be interesting to know if he adopted those positions in the 1940s or later. They were, of course, common among the earlier ultra-left, notably the followers of Bordiga. Curiously, Munis continued to have a high opinion of Trotsky, and regarded his ideas on the USSR, the united front, trade unions, etc., as merely mistaken or outmoded, and not counter-revolutionary.One of the longer pieces, Pro Segundo Manifiesto Comunista, is, as its title suggests, an attempt at a Communist Manifesto for the twentieth century. It makes general statements of principle and advocates specific demands, but there is no indication of how the workers would implement the proposals, or agitate around them. Munis’ main theme was that the entire labour movement was counter-revolutionary. He did not see it as his task to examine the economy or struggles between the various tendencies in the labour movement, so inevitably there is considerable repetition and a certain monotony to his writing. There is little examination of how the counter-revolution developed, and none on how supporters of non-revolutionary positions might be persuaded to question their allegiance to Stalinism, social democracy or other tendencies. Munis was associated with a journal, Alarma, and an organisation, Fomento, but his writing style suggests a solitary effort. It would be interesting to know how many people read his works, and whether they emerged from solitary cogitation or from discussion with others. As this volume does not describe that background, we are thrown back on Ernie Rogers’ account of meeting him in Paris in the 1960s (Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 53) which gives a lively picture of a Quixotic figure who talked continually, and who did not allow interruptions.
It would be interesting to know more of his life, most of it spent either in exile or prison, but Munis would have seen little point in autobiography. His best known work, Jalones de Derrota, gives a sustained narrative account of the Spanish revolution and Civil War. In the present volume, he is not constrained by chronological narrative, so the story is less focussed.
It must have taken incredible stubbornness to resist so long in isolation, but Munis had fought against the stream, since joining the Communist Left as a youth, being framed in a Stalinist trial in 1938, followed by exile in Mexico and France and imprisonment Franco’s Spain. Given that background, the harsh conditions of his last exile must have seemed relatively easy.
John Sullivan
********
In the Land of the Cracked Bell
Ngo Van
Au Pays de la Cloche Fêléé: tribulations d’un Cochinchinois à l’époque coloniale
L’Isomniaque, Montreuil 2000, pp. 238, FF60
Au Pays de la Cloche Fêléé: tribulations d’un Cochinchinois à l’époque coloniale
L’Isomniaque, Montreuil 2000, pp. 238, FF60
‘I ONLY believe the history of which all the witnesses died.’ Ngo Van opens the foreword to his autobiography with these words of Pascal, underlining his acute and painful awareness that he is one of the very few survivors of those Vietnamese who fought colonialism with a passionate internationalist vision. Born in 1913 into a peasant family in a village near Saigon, Van started work at the age of 14, and from 1932 was active in the revolutionary anti-colonial movement. During the 1930s and 1940s, he participated as a Trotskyist militant in workers’ and peasants’ demonstrations, strikes and protests.
In 1948, Van was forced into exile in Paris, where he still lives. There he spent many years researching the history of the anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam, resulting in the publication in 1995 of Revolutionaries They Could Not Break: The Fight for the Fourth International in Vietnam (from articles in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, Index Books, London), and, later, Vietnam 1920-1945: revolution et contre-revolution sous la domination coloniale (L’Insomniaque, 1996, and Nautilus, 2000). Both are invaluable records, and they are now complemented most vividly by the story of his own life up to 1948, the title of which translates as In the Country of the Cracked Bell: The Struggles of a Vietnamese During the Colonial Era. Van had to be persuaded to write this book; he was doubtful of the value, he said, of relating purely personal experience. In fact, his autobiography is the most powerful of his writings on Vietnam so far.Van left his village to work in a metallurgical factory in Saigon, at that time the scene of massive demonstrations and strikes against the French colonial power by workers, students and young nationalists demanding freedom of assembly, of the press, of travel and of education. The country had already seen decades of peasant revolts, accompanied by executions (often by guillotine) of leading activists, or their deportation to the infamous penal colony of Poulo Condore.
Coolies working on the mosquito-infested rubber plantations (Michelin was one of the worst employers) were demanding improved conditions. They were hired under virtual slave contracts, and their appalling working conditions meant that 40 per cent died every year. Paddy-field workers were seizing their employers’ stocks of rice to feed their starving families. In some villages, peasants were setting up soviets to organise collective cultivation of the land and literacy campaigns.
Hardship had compelled Van to curtail his formal education, but, enrolling under a false name, he read Marx in the Saigon municipal library after work. He soon came into contact with the left opposition group in the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI), who were stressing the importance of a movement based on the working class, and of building a mass party. This flew in the face of the official CPI policy, which was much more oriented towards the peasantry, and, influenced by those who had been trained in Moscow, was built on the concept of the ‘professional revolutionary’. A show trial in 1933 of the core of CPI ‘professionals’ who had led the peasant movement condemned them all to death, or to long periods in the penal colony. The peasant movement was effectively beheaded.
In Saigon, Trotskyists and Stalinists joined together for three years under the banner of the journal La Lutte, published weekly in French to escape laws banning publications in the vernacular. Their candidates were elected to seats on the municipal council. But after the signing of the Stalin-Laval pact in May 1935, and the consequent failure of the French, and soon the Indochinese, Communist parties to oppose the militarism and colonialism of the French state, Van and other Trotskyists decided to end collaboration with the Stalinists and to form the Ligue des communistes internationalistes pour la construction de la IV Internationale. Van learned to set type, and the small group published clandestinely.
Van also began to organise the apparently passive workforce in his factory, who met under the guise of wedding and birthday parties (all gatherings of more than 19 people were illegal), and found himself their spokesman when a strike for better wages broke out.
Militant friends were arrested one after the other, and the longer Van remained at liberty, the more acutely he appreciated their courage under torture. But his turn came, and, at the age of 24, he was arrested in the factory storeroom, where he secretly discussed anti-colonialist campaigns with other young activists, and where he hid underground literature and revolutionary publications from abroad.
The young Van was imprisoned in the dreaded Maison Centrale, the police headquarters in Saigon, where he was tortured, as were thousands of others. Both Stalinist and Trotskyist prisoners were held together. Relations between them were wary, writes Van, but civil, to avoid provoking tension to the advantage of the common enemy. He joined in a hunger strike demanding political prisoner status equal to that in France. As a consequence, the prisoners were occasionally allowed French newspapers. This was how they learned about the Moscow Trials.
The Trotskyists were ‘overcome with a profound unease, and a thousand questions without answers kept going round in our heads’. In 1937, the Stalinists, under orders from Moscow, abruptly left the La Lutte group, and denounced the Trotskyists as ‘the ally, the agent, of fascism’. Van tells of the confusion this spread among many supporters, who had no idea of the political differences between the Third and the Fourth Internationals.
The working class in Vietnam was small, but Trotskyist activists were influential in the important industries. They agitated for joint councils of peasants and workers to take over the banks and the industries, and, eventually, to form an Asian Soviet Federation. Van captures the excitement when, in April 1939, the whole Fourth International list was elected to the local council in Saigon. The CPI candidates were defeated.
Van and his comrades were constantly being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, and then briefly freed once more. Once, he was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment simply for recommending books by Trotsky to a friend in a letter, and greeting in the street the well-known Trotskyist Ta thu Thau. Exiled to at the end of 1940 Travinh, on an island in the Mekong delta, he found himself in the middle of a peasant uprising that engulfed western Cochinchina. Almost 6,000 were arrested and over 200 were publicly executed, and thousands more were killed by the bombing authorised by the Vichy Governor General, Decoux. At about this time, Van discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis.
In March 1945 came a declaration of martial law under the Japanese, who, Van comments, ‘replaced the French at the head of the oppressive regime, while presenting themselves as liberators’. Saigon was bombarded by Allied forces. The Trotskyists spoke out against the Viet minh, who by this time controlled north Vietnam, for spreading the illusion that it was possible to form an entente with French and Allied imperialism to achieve ‘national liberation’. By contrast, the supporters of the Fourth International called on workers and peasants to rise up against all imperialist oppressors, of whatever nationality. Van and his comrades were elated when 30,000 miners in the Hon gai–Cam pha region set up elected councils to run the mines, public services and transport, and organised a literacy campaign.
In one of the most dramatic sections of the book, Van describes how the Viet minh seized power in the south. A big nationalist demonstration was held in Saigon in August 1945. The Trotskyists marched under their own banners: ‘Arm the people! For people’s councils! Land to the peasants! Workers’ control of the factories!’ That same night, loudspeaker vans drove through the city calling: ‘Everyone behind the Viet minh!’ Their leaflets said: ‘The Viet minh fully supported the Allies against the [Vichy] French and the Japanese. It will be easy for us to secure independence!’ Leading nationalists, sensing that the Viet minh had the wind in its sails, switched allegiance, bringing with them the quasi-fascist extreme nationalist youth movement. The radical religious sects also pledged allegiance to the Viet minh. The next day, a banner in front of the Saigon town hall announced the formation of a Viet minh government. At the press conference held by the new regime, the Trotskyist Tran van Thach asked who had elected the government. Van describes the reaction: the self-styled president, Tran van Giau, ‘beside himself with fury, answered: “We have provisionally assumed the government, which we will hand over in due course. As for my political answer …”, he fingered his revolver, “I will give you that elsewhere.”’ Two months later, Tran van Thach was shot by Tran van Giau’s men.
In Saigon, popular committees sprang up spontaneously. The Trotskyists opened an office where meetings, protected by armed workers, could be held by committee delegates, who put out statements condemning any attempt by the Viet minh to repress their autonomy. In the provinces, some peasants were taking control of the land, lynching Stalinists who stood in their way. But shortly afterwards, many Trotskyists active in the people’s committees were arrested by the Stalinists, who were attempting to ingratiate themselves with the new regime under the British General Gracey, who was ordering Ghurkas to join with the French militias to put down popular uprisings and destroy barricades. Two hundred Trotskyists were massacred by the French at the Thi Nghe bridge. Van and his friends were now on the run from both the Anglo-French troops and the Stalinists, and escaped from Saigon by boat, under a hail of bullets. Lying low, Van comments wryly, they could only ‘try to follow what was happening, and wait to see which sauce we’d be served up with’.
The miners’ commune that had been set up in the Tonkin region was disbanded by the troops of Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government, and the workers’ councils were replaced by a new Viet minh hierarchy. Peasants who had been inspired to expropriate their landlords by remembering the CPI slogan of 1930, ‘the land to those who work it’, were rudely disabused. The Viet minh regional government restored the land to the landowners.
In the Hanoi Communist Party’s publication, Drapeau de la Liberation for 23 October 1945, a call was issued to exterminate Trotskyists: ‘The Trotskyist gang must be cut down immediately.’ And between 1945 and 1951, CPI activists systematically assassinated any Trotskyists who fell into their hands. Van is able to document the fate of many of the men and women who were leading supporters of the Fourth International, including Ta thu Thau, whose murder was raised with Ho Chi Minh in an interview by Daniel Guérin in 1946 in Paris. Ho replied: ‘All those who do not follow my policies will be broken.’
The small proletariat, with as yet scarcely any revolutionary consciousness, was not able to take the lead in the liberation movement in Vietnam. The Stalinist party came to power through the terrible suffering and sacrifice of millions of peasants, who were rewarded by their renewed enslavement to the nationalist bureaucracy, as a workforce necessary for the accumulation of capital for the sole profit of a new variety of exploiters.
Van reluctantly decided to leave Vietnam in the spring of 1948. It was impossible for him to return to the countryside ‘where the twin terrors were in control – that of the French and that of the Viet minh’. He learned later that in 1950, three comrades he had left behind had been led into a Viet minh trap. They were invited to a secret conference supposedly held by Trotskyist sympathisers, where they were captured and horribly tortured. The two women were hung by their thumbs, their calves cut open and petrol-soaked cotton stuffed into the wounds. Their death was announced on the Viet minh radio as that of ‘agents of French imperialism’. By this time, there was scarcely one oppositionist still alive in the country.
Van’s book is a salutary reminder of these forgotten men and women of history, particularly for those of us in so-called ‘Trotskyist’ parties in the West that uncritically supported Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. But it is also an invaluable record of the period, strikingly illuminated by vivid visual detail (an indication of Van’s talent as a painter) and informed by an unsentimental but deep-going humanity.
This book can be obtained from L’Isomniaque, 63 rue de Saint-Mandé, 93100 Montreuil, France for 60 francs including postage.
Hilary Horrocks
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Ancient Egypt & the Mayas
Paul T. Nicholson & Ian Shaw (eds.)
Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp702, £95.00
Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp702, £95.00
Grant D. JonesThe Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, pp568, £14.95
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, pp568, £14.95
BRUCE Trigger has shown (Early Civilisations, Cairo 1993) that there are two basic models for the emergence of ancient civilisation and ordered class society, the self-contained territorial or imperial state, and the city state. In very different ways, and in widely differing geographical and temporal contexts, these two splendid books have a great deal to say on the internal social, economic and political structures of both of them.
The main aim of Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries is to replace the previous standard textbook by Lucas as revised by Harris with a far more comprehensive treatment, in which ‘new technological and socio-economic questions are now being asked of the archaeological data’ (p. 1). Drawing on the skills of over 30 specialists in their different fields, the result is a book that will dominate its subject for years to come.The first thing to hit us is the extent of control exercised by the state over what would appear to be the simplest and most basic production. With stone and other minerals, ‘the king seems to have operated a virtual monopoly on the quarrying and mining of many raw materials’ (p. 5); as opposed to faience, glass appears to have been ‘a royal monopoly throughout the New Kingdom’ (p. 196), and ‘ivory-working would have been carried out under centralised control, whether in temple or p–alace workshops’ (p. 328). Egypt’s home-grown wood is so poor that the royal monopoly on logwood trade from abroad must have amounted to much the same thing. Whereas pottery for household use was a village craft, there was an ‘apparent centralisation of production or distribution’ of some types of pottery during the Old Kingdom, which ‘broke down with the political fragmentation of the First Intermediate Period, and that regional styles developed, which appear to correspond to known political boundaries of the period’ (p. 138), which Dr Bouuriau has elsewhere shown was also true of the Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period, at least as regards types intended for funerary use. There is also some evidence from the New Kingdom that the state may have attempted to keep some sort of control over the supply of copper, since the royal necropolis workmen of Deir el-Medineh had to account for the exact weight of copper tools issued to them at the end of the job. It is thus of some interest that when in the first millennium BC iron production increases dramatically in the rest of the Near East, ‘the exception appears to be Egypt’, and ‘the supremacy of iron weapons over copper-alloy ones has been seen as a major factor in the Persian conquest of Egypt’ (p. 168).
As to personal consumption, whereas ‘beer was brewed at domestic level by most Egyptians for daily use … wine appears to have been largely produced for royalty, the upper classes and the funerary requirements of the élite’ (pp. 577–8), even if ‘on special occasions, common people also enjoyed wine’ (p. 578). Unlike wheatfields, vineyards were walled (p. 582), and apart from a Third Dynasty notable called Metjen, and some of the suppliers of wine to royal palaces at Malkata and Amarna, ‘the wine-making facilities themselves were primarily owned by the king or members of his family with little record, to date, of the private ownership of vineyards’ (p. 578). And whilst the mass of the population appears to have eaten meat, fish or fowl ‘at least once or twice a week’ (p. 669), the meat from large animals ‘was not a regular item in the diet of most Egyptians’ (p. 637). Most of the professional butchers named in inscriptions ‘were either associated with the pharaoh or with a temple. It is possible that professional butchers only existed in conjunction with these two institutions, as they were responsible for the provision of most of the country’s meat supply.’ (p. 669)
However, Egypt’s economy was based upon cereals, which Rome was careful enough to earmark as its own after its conquest of the country. Here the writer notes that ‘textual sources indicate that much of the land was owned by the state and temples, though private individuals could also rent and own land’ (p. 515), even if we may doubt whether ‘most of the harvested grain belonged to the state and not to the individual farmers who had to relinquish much of their yield to the granary system’ (p. 528), a more reasonable estimate of the tax/rent yield being about 30 per cent (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1990, p. 48). Nonetheless, the extent of bureaucratic control over grain production can only be compared with the modern European Union. One of the most common motifs in tomb reliefs shows the beating of peasants to extract the surplus, ‘scenes in New Kingdom tombs tend to emphasise the assessment of cereals for taxation purposes’ (p. 527), and ‘prior to the harvest, cereal fields were also surveyed using pre-measured cords to determine the amount of tax to be paid on the estimated yield, later to be compared with the actual yield after threshing. Textual sources indicate that this task was conducted by a government body known to have existed since at least the Second Dynasty.’ (p. 520) ‘Artistic and textual evidence show that, after the winnowing and sieving operations, grain was measured using containers of known quantity and the amounts were then recorded by scribes prior to grain storage’ (p. 527), notes Dr Murray, and ‘archaeological evidence indicates that large storage facilities were attached to temples and palaces’ (p. 528). Needless to add, the two examples of temples she cites, the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu (p. 527), were both walled, the latter massively so, and the arrow heads dug in its west gate show that it was subjected to a siege at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. For the whole social and economic system depended upon this central control of the cereal surplus, since ‘emmer was the primary cereal used for the payment of wages and taxes at that time’ (p. 512), and ‘emmer and barley formed an integral part of a complex administrative system of wages and taxation which played a critically important rôle in the development and relative stability of the economically successful Egyptian state throughout this time’ (p506). So whilst ‘possible episodes of famine in ancient Egypt have been documented … other sources also indicate that for the most part, the state and temple system of grain storage was sufficient to feed the population during lean years’, and ‘the ancient Egyptian hierarchy of grain storage was one of the many secrets of its success as a cereal producer’ (p. 528).
However suggestive all this may sound in the context of Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel’s further development of it into the hydraulic theory receives no support from the available evidence. Agreeing with Butzer’s book of 1976, Dr Murray holds that ‘throughout the Pharaonic period, the construction and maintenance of the irrigation system evidently remained a local responsibility rather than one controlled by a centralised administrative body’ (p. 515):
Geomorphological and climatic evidence … indicate that there was little need for artificial irrigation during much of the Old Kingdom … In the various textual sources for the Old Kingdom, no mention is made of the use of canals for irrigation purposes … nor is there evidence directly related to the bureaucracy of irrigation in the more than 2,000 administrative titles known from the period … It is not until the Middle Kingdom that terms directly related to irrigation first appear, and two types of land, low-lying and high-lying, are distinguished. (p. 515)
So the massive power of the Egyptian state would seem to have rested upon tight control exercised over the labour of others, rather than on any contribution it may have made to the wealth of society on its own account.
It is only when societies organised on divergent social and economic lines come up against each other that they become aware of just how deeply different they are. In that sense, the whole of the modern science of anthropology is a by-product of missionary endeavour and imperial conquest. Now here, for the last time in history, we have a close encounter between an imperial power and the last of the ancient tribal/city states. The second book under review is an impressive piece of documentary and anthropological research into the last Maya polity to resist the Spanish conquest. Whereas the Aztec and Inca were overthrown comparatively easily, the Maya put up a stiff resistance to the first attacks on Yucatan, and this last Maya state, the Itza with their capital at Nojpeten (known as Tayasal in the older literature) did not fall to the Spaniards until 1697. A by-product of this is a wealth of material about Maya society that takes us right to the heart of tribal and city state organisation in Central America, which this analysis has put to excellent use.
The Itza appear to have emigrated from Chichen Itza to Guatemala about 1461, to be followed by their Kowoj neighbours from Mayapan in about 1520–43, shortly before the Spaniards arrived. They first made the acquaintance of European power when Cortes passed briefly through their land in 1525, but by skilful methods of conquest, domination, diplomacy, and by exploiting the native opposition to the encomienda system and the jungle terrain they managed to maintain the full apparatus of a Maya tribal city-state for another 170 years. So whilst the Spanish motives in all this are all too obvious, Professor Jones’ ‘major challenge’ was ‘to understand the Itzas as independent actors who faced would-be Spanish conquerors with strategies of self-preservation developed over nearly two centuries of European domination of the lands surrounding Itza territory’ (p. xxi). He points out:
Even as early as their first encounter with Europeans in 1525, the Itza rulers at Nojpeten pursued aggressive political and military strategies that protected them against the colonial conquest methods that had been so successful through most of the rest of the Americas. Their principal strategy was to create a wide buffer zone, which they accomplished by punishing those native peoples living along their frontiers who accepted Spaniards in their midst and sometimes by incorporating such groups into a wider alliance by engaging them as rebels against the colonies. (pp. 58–9)
‘The Itza were not, therefore, naïve “untouched” native peoples’, he concludes, ‘their historical experience with Europeans emerges instead as a series of encounters, often violent, that demonstrated a sophistication achievable only through long-term, intensive study of the European enemy.’ (p. 59) The end only came when the king, Ajaw Kan Ek’, tried to come to terms with the Spaniards to stave off a challenge to his own authority from the chief of the northern Itza province, allied with the Kowojs (pp. 167–75), ‘intrafratricidal succession to the Itza rulership that turned brother against brother in a struggle against acceding to Spanish demands’ (p. 45). We need hardly add that the result of their final defeat was a 88 per cent drop in population during the first decade of Spanish rule (p. 68).
But most interesting for us here must surely be Chapter 3, Itza Society and Kingship on the Eve of the Conquest (pp. 60–107). For although Maya society is now finally coming into closer focus with the progress made in the decipherment of the script, the monumental records of ancient states only identify so much of the social structure as can serve as a mark of status. Here the detailed Spanish reports show that although the Itza were exogamous, marrying out of the male line (p. 78), and ‘patrilinear descent remained the most important organizing principle’, they also brought from Yucatan (pp. 79–8) ‘a complex lineage system that stressed both maternal and paternal links’ and ‘a limited form of matrilinear descent may have constituted the critical marker of the nobility’s right to rule’, whereby ‘the ruling Kan matrilineage controlled, at least symbolically, the governance of the capital and four territorial quarters that were also associated with the four quarters of the capital’ (p. xxiii, cf. p. 75).This city, Nojpeten, with a population of about 5,000 (p. 67) and a temple tower apparently copied from the Castillo at Chichen Itza (p. 74), was divided into quarters, echoed by the present street plan of Flores (pp. 68–9), which corresponded to the four cardinally arranged provinces, the capital itself counting as a fifth. Each province, including the capital, was governed by two rulers, four of whom represented their respective territories and resided in the four divisions of the capital, with the members of each pair standing in a ‘senior-junior relationship with one another’ (p. 60). Each of the four territories in turn had at least one provincial capital in it (p. 64). The whole structure was firmly grounded in and sanctioned by ritual, reflecting ‘an association of territory with a quadripartite cosmos and the four associated cardinal directions, the year-ending and year beginning rituals associated with the cardinal directions, and a host of other cosmological and ritual meanings’ (p. 94). The governing council consisted of the king, his junior priestly partner, the senior and junior partners representing the four provinces, the representatives of the main urban centres within them, and some of the leaders of the tribes they dominated (p. 83).
What is interesting here is not so much how closely this political set-up resembles other states in central America – not only in neighbouring Yucatan (p. 96) and Akalan (p. 31) as might be expected, but from as far away as Tenochtitlan (n2 p. 441) – but the strange echoes we seem to have from the city state organisation of classical Greece, not so much in the more compact Dorian cities, but such as ancient Athens before the reform of Cleisthenes. Here also were four basic Ionian tribes, divided into three phratries made up of clans and guilds. The number of clans was fixed when the city state was set up, membership of them was hereditary, land ownership was vested in the clan, and each phratry and each clan formed a state within a state, with its own rituals. There were smaller centres outside the main city (the later demes), and territorial divisions, even if they did not fit the tribal patterns. Particular families had vestigial royal rights, there was a governing council, and a rotating system of the central city administration, as in Maya Yucatan (p. 96).
What must remain uncertain, however, is how much of the Itza social and political structure was inherited from the Classic period of the Maya, and how much of it is due to innovation or reversion once that society collapsed. The succession in Classic Maya society clearly came down through the male line, even if ‘some recent research, however, suggests that matrilinear principles may also have been at work in succession to office in the Maya lowlands from Classic through colonial times’ (p. 78). The late Linda Schele and David Freidel argued that the ‘dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles’ which happened towards the end of the histories of Tikal, Copan and Yaxchilan, was a ‘fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years’ (p. 105). So the problem about what is new and what is old in this remarkable tribal/city state system still remains to be solved.
In the end, a Marxist must ask the question: which of these two models, the self-contained territory or the city state, laid the basis for further human social and economic development? A simple answer would be that whereas Spanish imperialism brought an abrupt end to the last of the Maya city states, the Chinese empire lasted almost to modern times. The city state of classical Greece, which succeeded a society of the palace-distribution type, did indeed develop into a slave society, a much more dynamic social structure, only to be gobbled up by the Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire. The city states of ancient Mesopotamia, on the other hand, more or less formed part of one empire or another from the time of the First Dynasty of Babylon onwards. And neither of them can be said to have laid any of the real basis for the rise of feudalism. This alone should put us on our guard against linear theories of human development, whether it be the sophistication of Kautsky’s views or the bonehead crudity of Stalin’s.
Al Richardson
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On the Edge
Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth
On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left
ME Sharpe, New York 2000, pp. 250
On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left
ME Sharpe, New York 2000, pp. 250
REVOLUTIONARY History has quoted Robert Conquest, the well-known historian of Soviet Russia, on its back cover. Conquest says of Revolutionary History: ‘What distinguishes the Trotskyite tradition of which I am speaking is its scepticism, its acceptance of the principle of critical thought.’ The book under review here examines something quite different. It is an attempt to present a number of political groups which are doggedly sectarian and unable to treat themselves critically.
This work argues that a number of movements at opposite poles on the political spectrum share common characteristics. The authors are, of course, not alone in drawing together organisations which sharply oppose each other. Trotsky, for example, pointed to Stalinism’s similarity to fascism:
… the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. (L.D. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 278)
What is the basis of the similarities? Ultimately they are rooted in the nature of the groups. Thus they tend to have rigid belief systems, with beliefs that are immune to falsification. The members live under authoritarian inner-party regimes in which the leader has arbitrary powers. The organisations deify their leaders (dead or alive). A key technique to keep members in the loop is to insist on intense activism. This helps to break off members from other interests, and thereby increase their dependence on the group. But why should anyone join an organisation like that? The argument that you would have to be mad to join is rejected by the authors. However, the key seems to be in psychology. A central fact is that continuing cults draw in potential members using skilfully baited psychological hooks.
The book examines a number of cults which, despite the title, really form three distinct groups. These are right-wing cults, leftist political/psychotherapy groups and left-wing organisations.
Eyes Right: The first group are right-wing organisations. Christian Identity, Posse Comitatus and Aryan Nations are all included. These are made up of people gripped by racist ideologies and paranoid conspiracy theories. They love their guns in a way that few people here, even in the Countryside Alliance, could imagine. The gun culture and extreme anti-statism frequently bring these groups up against the public authorities. Their admiration of Hitler and their enthusiasm for the trappings of the Third Reich are of interest. Note, however, that what they get from Hitler is racism, a cult figure, symbols and regalia. They are wildly opposed to any government beyond the most local, and they seem ignorant of the extreme enthusiasm of prewar fascism for the state.
The most interesting right-wing group is the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). This is headed by Lyndon LaRouche. His group’s name betrays its origins on the political left. LaRouche has shifted a long way since his decision to join the American Socialist Workers Party in 1947. He has journeyed to a neo-fascist position. LaRouche is important for our authors, partly because he seems to have been a cultist wherever he has been on the political spectrum. He illustrates a key point. This is that cultists are primarily interested in the organisation for its own sake, rather than the political positions it holds.
It’s all in the mind: A group of cults have combined leftist politics with psychotherapy. Just as plain political cults share many positions with more normal movements, so the groups linked to psychotherapy share something with the conventional psychotherapists. However, they are ultimately very different sorts of movements. Whatever our views of normal psychotherapy, readers will recoil in horror at the damage done by these movements. They are worth studying, mainly because they bring to the fore many of the techniques used by cults to win obedience. For example, Gerry Healy, Chairman Mao and many others have found that the sensible notions of criticism and self-criticism can be used to devastate internal critics and to undermine the independence of members. The well-known thought that the personal is the political is abused to mould the personal to the requirements of the sect.
Children of the Revolution: Readers of Revolutionary History will (like the authors) feel on surer ground when dealing with left-wing sects. We have all come across them, and all too many have inside knowledge of them. They all exhibit similar characteristics. They inhabit a curiously closed world in which the full-time party worker has special status. Policy disputes are generally settled by reference to a text by a long-dead great thinker. The thinker is normally Trotsky, but is sometimes Lenin. Although the word ‘Marxist’ appears in titles, poor old Karl is a second- or third-rate runner in the great quotations race.
Since Lenin and Trotsky have been dead for a goodly time, they need a more recent interpreter. Soon the interpreters act as the dead guru’s messenger on earth. Two of the classic left cult leaders, Gerry Healy and Ted Grant, and their organisations are each given a chapter. It is worth remarking here that Healy’s organisation exploded over the issue of his sexual exploitation of a large number of women. Here Tourish and Wohlforth show a surprising lack of touch. They say of Healy that ‘he transformed his cult into a personal brothel’ (p. 172). Interestingly, after 1985, a number of women in Cliff Slaughter’s organisation discussed the issue of Healy’s exploitation with an incest support group. Although Healy was not committing incest, his relationship with his victims had an incestuous aspect. He used the special relationship he had developed as the party’s special guru to abuse vulnerable women. The phrase ‘personal brothel’ demeans his victims.Healy’s long history shows a determination to dominate whichever group he was in. His ruthless tactics ensured his dominance of various groups from about 1950 onwards. The price was paid by the membership, the Trotskyist movement and the broader labour movement. Grant’s dominance of his corner of Trotskyism has been less spectacular than Healy’s, but probably just as damaging.
Left Cults and their Ideology: Lenin’s early ideas are very suitable for sects. What is to be Done? exists as the classic élitist reading of Marxism. Its demand for a close-knit group of leaders clutching the magic key of Marxism is ideal for other-worldly sect chieftains. An interesting comment here is that although Trotsky was never convinced of the validity of What is to be Done?, most of the Trotskyist groups are. The book’s formal ideas are too good to miss. Indeed even as LaRouche has moved to the far right, he has found a useful crutch in Lenin’s organisational schemas.
Behind the Cults: Why do political movements degenerate into weird cults? The answer seems to be in part that each has a certainty which meets a broader world that is not in tune with its ideas. The right-wing racists find that integration and acceptance of difference are tending to grow. The mood of the times is strongly against extreme authoritarianism. Going off to the mountains, armed to the teeth, and living in a peculiarly perverse variant of a utopian community seems a possible way out.
Several of the left sects flowed from the break-up of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1949. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson comment on the decline of Trotskyism into the ideology and justification of a sectarian group (The War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937–1949, London 1986, p. 239). However, once such groups have so declined and ideology has replaced politics and autocracy has replaced democratic leadership, they may rise again. The organisations now appear in a new form. A key warning from our authors is that cults can be successful despite the fact that they often hold views that are irrational and are defended with a mixture of circular thinking and paranoia. We can think of the influence of Militant in Liverpool and in the Parliamentary Labour Party as an example. The leader has contradictory goals. He or she needs both a large body of supporters and control of the organisation. Thus: ‘The more supporters he or she [the leader] has, the harder it is to maintain control. Binges of recruitment alternate with bloody purges, in an exhausting spiral of effort that sees the group ascend to fresh peaks of demoralisation.’ (p. 31) Ultimately, the leader normally prefers control to numbers. The groups’ developments thus come to very little.The authors point to a phenomenon that has long puzzled me. The sects are generally a bookish lot. They each have a body of ideas that can explain everything and answer all the world’s problems. And yet when they talk to outsiders, these highly able and articulate people can explain little. They reduce all problems to a few simple ones, and are strikingly narrow. Mostly they are uninterested in serious discussion of the development of their ideas. It seems that sectarianism screws you up in all sorts of ways.
Cults in Crisis: Marx saw sects in the workers’ movement in a way that was similar to Bornstein and Richardson. In commenting on Ferdinand Lassalle, who combined charisma, considerable political skills and deep opportunism, Marx said:
Like everyone who maintains that he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, he gave his agitation from the outset a religious and sectarian character. Every sect is in fact religious … instead of looking among the genuine elements of the class for the real basis of his agitation, he wanted to prescribe the course to be followed by this movement according to a certain doctrinaire recipe … The sect sees the justification for its existence and its point of honour not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from the movement. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, pp. 257–8)
Today the sects flowing from the death of the RCP in 1949 are winding up. The implosion of the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985–86 has been followed by the fragmentation of the remnants of that group. Grant is now brooding outside the mainstream of the organisation he founded.
The Socialist Alliance is significant because it has become the centre for a kind of regrouping. The various sects around the Trotskyist left have joined up, along with one of the fragments of the old Communist Party. They have come together with a variety of independent forces. Although it is clearly not the final curtain for the sects, it is certainly something new. Sects have to talk to each other and work together around a broad platform (they have long found it possible to cooperate in single-issue movements).This level of cooperation is not easy. The Socialist Party found it too challenging and wandered off in December 2001. Sect life for the Taffeites is preferable to the peculiar threats of joint work around a broad programme.
The Socialist Workers Party has dominated the Socialist Alliance, but in a very odd way. Most of the effective debate in the Socialist Alliance around policy and the nature of socialism in e-mail discussion passes with no comment from the SWP leaders (although some ordinary members join in). The SWP appears to be incapable of working out its relationship with the Socialist Alliance. Dancing too close would lead members off into the broad movement and out of the sect. Keeping too distant means that the Socialist Alliance will either fall into crisis or reduce the SWP to a large but marginal player. Whether sectarian organisations walk out or try to be back-seat drivers, their whole existence is undermined by a broad socialist movement.
The rise of a broad socialist movement can only be rooted in the revival of independent working-class political activity. A rising tide of activity will put enormous pressure on the sectarians. In the long run, it is the only force that can lead to the defeat of the cults, but leaders and supporters of such groups will fight hard to defend their movements and ideologies.
Is this book worth a read? Yes it is. The issues raised need to be dealt with by the left, even if readers come to different conclusions from those reached by Tourish and Wohlforth. There are clearly problems with the larger thesis. Too much rests on drawing direct links from psychology to politics. The authors’ fears that cults will do great damage to society at large are undermined by their demonstration of the distinct limits of the cults’ own capacities.
The book argues that the set of beliefs held by cultic movements is of little importance. These are bodies with the simple goals of defence and advance of the group. This is an intriguing idea. As evidence, Tourish and Wohlforth look at groups that have shifted from the radical left to the neo-fascist right. However, very few groups make that sort of journey.
Behind the firm ideological statements of the groups, the thinking is often very inconsistent. Thus the Militant made the words of Trotsky central to its life, but increasingly that life was devoted to Labour Party activity and a thirst for elected office. Healy’s supporters could fiercely denounce leaders of many countries for blocking off social revolution, while they received money from such regimes. The SWP’s Marxism has enabled it to vary its strategy from refusing to contest elections to going overboard for a chance to stand for office. As referred to earlier, neo-fascist groups are no more consistent. Despite all this, surely ideas play some rôle. The great majority of ex-members of these groups have moved on after political disagreements. The gulf between the groups’ words and deeds have mattered to the members. No simple formula answers the problem, but ideas are more important than this work seems to suggest.
With all the above criticisms, the book should to be read as a contribution to debate, and not as an end to discussion.
Geoff Barr
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Victor Serge
Susan Weissman
Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope
Verso, London 2001, pp. 364, £22.00
Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope
Verso, London 2001, pp. 364, £22.00
VICTOR Serge was one of the most interesting characters in left-wing politics during the first half of the twentieth century, and it is telling that it is only now, over half a century since his death, that a full-length study of him has appeared. Serge has been frightfully overlooked at all points of the political spectrum. This is not surprising, as his heartfelt defence of the October Revolution put him beyond the pale of most social democrats and anarchists, his active participation in the Left Opposition did likewise with Stalinists, and his clashes with Trotsky and often heretical views led him to be looked on with suspicion by many if not most Trotskyists. Lastly, his marvellous fictional accounts of Soviet life have been sadly neglected in the Soviet studies arena in favour of greatly inferior works by Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, almost certainly because of Serge’s refusal to disavow Bolshevism.
The task of rescuing Serge from obscurity and putting him in his proper historical place has fallen largely to those on the left who stand in the tradition of Bolshevism and the Left Opposition but who maintain a respectable distance from ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism. Suzi Weissman has been a leading advocate of Serge for many years, and edited a valuable collection of essays on him, The Ideas of Victor Serge, Critique Books, 1999.Weissman’s aim is to draw out the main trends of Serge’s politics and to comprehend his understanding of the degeneration of the Soviet regime into Stalinism. One of the key aspects of Serge’s political approach – at least from the late 1920s – was that democracy and socialism are inseparable, and that revolutionary socialists are obliged to have a strong moral basis for their political activity, not a morality based upon one sort or another of eternal norms, but one which can help form the basis of a communist society. Rotten means can pervert worthy end by starting off a process of moral corruption, and Serge pointed out that some of the methods used by the Bolsheviks in their desperate struggle for survival undermined their good intentions and helped to pave the way towards Stalinism. Weissman ably demonstrates this central aspect of Serge’s politics, and shows how his willingness to subject to criticism of some of the events of the earlier years of the Soviet republic – not least the suppression of Kronstadt in 1921 – led him to clash with Trotsky, and how their disagreements were exacerbated by Stalinist agents like Mark Zborowski into a full-blown breach.
However, there is a real problem in assessing Serge, in that we are, as Weissman notes, very reliant upon his memoirs in respect of what he thought and did during the crucial early years of the Soviet republic, as contemporary documentation is often limited or non-existent, or did not raise any criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ actions and theories from which he later demurred. We do not know what Serge thought at the time about ‘emerging authoritarian practices’, the Cheka, War Communism and the rise of bureaucratism and nationalism in the Soviet party-state apparatus. As a result, the reader is left wondering how much of Serge’s reminiscences coincided with his actual thoughts at the time. I agree with Weissman that Serge was an honest man, but one must take into account that in looking back he may well have unconsciously brought in nuances and adjustments to what he originally said and thought.
I do have a few criticisms of this book, many of which, mainly in respect of textual repetition, biographical details and explanatory notes, could have been put right with some judicious sub-editing. The most important problem, however, is political. Most readers will know of Serge’s letter to André Malraux in 1947 in which he assured the Gaulleist leader that he backed his movement. Weissman says that this was a ruse in order to get Malraux to help him enter France, and that Serge remained an intransigent socialist until his death. I am inclined to endorse Weissman’s opinion here, but we must also ask: what sort of socialist?
By his final exile in Mexico, Serge had come to view the Soviet Union as a totalitarian étatised society (this magazine ran one of his later pieces on this subject, Planned Economies and Democracy, Revolutionary History, Volume 5 no. 3). Serge’s views were by no means uncommon. From the early 1930s, commentators and analysts of various stripes and in many countries had been making comparisons between Stalinism and fascism, and, particularly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 1939, the idea that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were essentially identical social formations was expressed from the far left to the far right. Similarly, the idea that society as a whole, in its fascist, Stalinist and liberal democratic manifestations, was heading towards a collectivist future was commonplace with all manner of people, and many pages were also devoted to the topic of whether democracy of either a liberal or proletarian nature could survive in such an étatised world. Weissman shows that Serge was greatly concerned with these matters.
Serge shared with the postwar right-wing totalitarian theorists the idea that a totalitarian state was by its very nature expansionist. His left-wing variety of totalitarian theory held that the Soviet Union and Stalinism posed an especially pernicious threat to the prospects of socialism. It would not be a great move from there to see Stalinism as the main enemy in the world, and there is evidence, presented in Alan Wald’s piece in the Critique collection, that in certain respects Serge did think that. Julián Gorkín’s assertion that ‘Serge passed away just when we needed him most’ – in other words, when Cold War socialism required an intelligent and powerful apostate from revolutionary Marxism – cannot be written off as wishful thinking on his part. Serge died defending, in a critical manner to be sure, but definitely defending Marxism and the October Revolution, whilst at the same time expressing signs of Stalinophobia that could have pushed him into forsaking both that defence and the necessary political independence from both Stalinism and capitalism. He may not have slid into Cold War socialism, one hopes that he would have held fast against that, but Weissman’s rejection of the possibility of such an evolution is to me more a reflection of her wishes than of a dispassionate analysis.
I doubt if any readers of this journal would disagree with Weissman’s statement that ‘rediscovering the revolutionary but resolutely independent thought of Victor Serge contributes to the reconstitution of a usable past for a radically different future’, although some would agree with me that Serge’s political legacy is not as clear and uncomplicated as Weissman claims. Altogether, despite my criticisms, this book is valuable because, by and large, it ably presents the importance of Serge’s political approach and activity. Weissman clearly draws out the centrality of Serge’s insistence upon the essential interconnection between socialism and democracy. When one looks at the history of socialism, it is all to clear that many people claiming to be socialists have so often proved to be deficient when it came to the question of democracy. Here, we are not talking about social democrats, whose idea of democracy is no more than the limited scope of bourgeois parliamentarism, nor to the Stalinists, whose idea of democracy was of state-run plebiscites, but to the revolutionary left, Trotskyist or otherwise, whose organisational shenanigans and petty manoeuvrings would be tragic if they weren’t so funny. There is little of the genuinely human society envisaged by Marx in the nasty treatment of dissident members and the guru worship typical of so many left-wing groups. Serge realised more than most left-wingers that communism could not be realised through means and methods that degraded and demeaned people. Whatever his faults, that is something that all revolutionary socialists should take to heart.
Paul Flewers
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Many of the protests took place in small villages. Andy Wood reveals a sympathetic understanding of the complexities of local politics. Many readers of this journal would subscribe to the claim that the most important historical process for understanding this period is the triumph of a nascent bourgeoisie. Wood emphasises instead the ability of individuals to choose with which great interest they should be associated. Such an emphasis on complexity – cloying when applied by post-modern sociologists – comes alive when the historian has green fingers. I especially enjoyed Wood’s discussion of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. This huge protest has often been described as a Catholic uprising, but Wood’s account ends by emphasising the grassroots demands of the rioters: ‘Caught by a group of rebels in October 1536, the gentleman Henry Sais was ordered to swear the rebel oath to be true to God, the King and the “true” Commons. Answering that he would swear to the first two, one of the rebels retorted “and not to us?”.’
Wood enjoys telling the story of the sixteenth-century rebels, examining their protests with a lively contempt for court sources. There is a valuable discussion of the use of the ‘middling sort’ to explain the events of 1649. The only thing which is missing is a real explanation of why so many protests did take place between the 1520s and the 1540s! Alone this book will not transform our understanding of early modern protest. But the task which the author set himself was more modest – to reawaken interest in a still under-examined period from the history of protest – and in this goal he succeeds. Perhaps the long-dormant habits of academic interest in socialist history are stirring again.
But it doesn’t serve only an academic purpose – in Woods’s own words: ‘The history of Bolshevism provides us with a model of how this [socialism] can be achieved.’ (p. 13) It is also full of anecdotes – some of them very amusing, others deeply moving – that help bring the early revolutionary movement to life. Here we learn of the creativity and bravery required in order to deceive the police of the Tsarist regime: the letters and pamphlets written in invisible ink in prison, the newspapers produced abroad and smuggled into the country, and so on.
The development of the Bolshevik party was not, of course, a question of a gradual rise in numbers and influence, but of an intense political and ideological struggle within the Marxist movement. One of the best examples of this is the long fight between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party until the final split in 1913; but the other important polemical battles are all here – with the Legal Marxists led by Struve, the Revisionists led by Bernstein, and the Economists in the second half of 1890s. Woods has the merit of being able to see the issues in perspective, pointing out, for example, that ‘Plekhanov’s formulations … had played a progressive rôle in the struggle against Narodnism, but were out of place in the new stage of the class struggle in Russia’. (p. 132)
But although Woods gives an absorbing and even-handed account of all the discussions, he is not so clear when it comes to explaining the evolution of Lenin’s thinking. In this book, theory takes second place to gripping narrative.
The book is an orthodox Trotskyist view of the history of the Bolshevik party, in that it defends the centrality of the vanguard Leninist party for the future socialist revolution. For example, Woods criticises Orlando Figes’ anti-Bolshevik history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, which describes the seizure of power by Bolsheviks as a ‘conspiracy, a coup, a drunken rampage’ (p. 22).
However, Woods is not uncritical of Lenin. He devotes a chapter to What Is To Be Done?, in which he says that ‘whilst correctly polemicising against the Economists’ slavish worship of “spontaneity”, Lenin allowed himself to fall into the error of exaggerating a correct idea and turning it into its opposite’(p. 121). Woods describes Lenin’s view that socialist consciousness has to be brought to the working class from outside as ‘one sided and erroneous’, citing Chartism, the Paris Commune and the soviets in 1905 as examples of the working class spontaneously exceeding trade union consciousness.
The book’s highest achievement is the way it charts the relationship between the RSDLP/Bolshevik party and the mood of the working class, both in times of reaction and times of an upsurge in the class struggle. Woods highlights the ability of Lenin to analyse the objective situation and develop tactics that enabled the party to reach the working class.
Whatever the reader thinks about the author’s defence of the classic model of a Leninist party, it would be unfair not to recognise the authority of this book. The history of the Bolshevik party contains valuable lessons for today’s struggle for socialism, and Alan Woods has performed a service by making this history accessible to a new generation of militants.
*****************
Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics
Andy Wood
Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. 227, £15.99
Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. 227, £15.99
ONE of the remaining mysteries of British history is the proliferation of urban and rural uprisings in the early-to-mid-sixteenth century. These near-insurrections include the anti-tax tumults of 1525, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, and the Kett and Cornish rebellions, both of which took place in 1549. In all of these episodes, plebeian rebels succeeded in holding whole counties despite the attempts of the authorities to crush them. In the most successful protest, led by Robert and William Kett, rebels succeeded in capturing the important cities of England’s most developed region, East Anglia, and only succumbed after three days of street-fighting in Norwich. Even if it is accepted that the history of all class societies has been a history of class struggle, there is still no agreed law to explain the chronological distribution of struggles, or why insurrections have occurred at one moment, and not the next.
In this context, socialist historians can only welcome the publication of Wood’s book. The author of Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics employs a form of Marxist historical analysis, based loosely on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and openly expresses his debt to other left-wing historians, including E.P. Thompson and Brian Manning. The book is accessible. Written like a good textbook, it does not assume too much prior knowledge of academic controversy on the part of its readers. It also makes the original point that early-modern protest has a continuous history, leading from the troubles of the sixteenth century, through the revolution of 1649, to the later rural protests that accompanied enclosures.Many of the protests took place in small villages. Andy Wood reveals a sympathetic understanding of the complexities of local politics. Many readers of this journal would subscribe to the claim that the most important historical process for understanding this period is the triumph of a nascent bourgeoisie. Wood emphasises instead the ability of individuals to choose with which great interest they should be associated. Such an emphasis on complexity – cloying when applied by post-modern sociologists – comes alive when the historian has green fingers. I especially enjoyed Wood’s discussion of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. This huge protest has often been described as a Catholic uprising, but Wood’s account ends by emphasising the grassroots demands of the rioters: ‘Caught by a group of rebels in October 1536, the gentleman Henry Sais was ordered to swear the rebel oath to be true to God, the King and the “true” Commons. Answering that he would swear to the first two, one of the rebels retorted “and not to us?”.’
Wood enjoys telling the story of the sixteenth-century rebels, examining their protests with a lively contempt for court sources. There is a valuable discussion of the use of the ‘middling sort’ to explain the events of 1649. The only thing which is missing is a real explanation of why so many protests did take place between the 1520s and the 1540s! Alone this book will not transform our understanding of early modern protest. But the task which the author set himself was more modest – to reawaken interest in a still under-examined period from the history of protest – and in this goal he succeeds. Perhaps the long-dormant habits of academic interest in socialist history are stirring again.
David Renton
***************
The Road to Revolution
Alan Woods
Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution
Wellred Publications, London 1999, pp. 636, £15
Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution
Wellred Publications, London 1999, pp. 636, £15
THIS is a detailed history of the Bolshevik party from its earliest beginnings up to the October Revolution, written by a leading member of the Socialist Appeal group. It will be a welcome addition to any Marxist’s bookshelf because, as Alan Woods himself points out: ‘With a few honourable exceptions, such as the work done by the French Marxist historians Pierre Broué and Marcel Liebman, it is impossible to find a history of the Bolshevik Party worth the trouble of reading.’ (p. 16) One could add that Broué’s Le Parti Bolchevique covers a longer time-span and so doesn’t deal in the same depth with the period of the party’s formation.
As a record of the events, this is a very authoritative book, which has obviously been meticulously researched. It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that it took the author 30 years to collect the material. He uses primary sources such as Trotsky’s Sochineniya (works in Russian), minutes of central committee meetings, and eyewitness reports. As Woods points out, ‘the old Stalinist histories are virtually worthless as sources’ (p. 24).But it doesn’t serve only an academic purpose – in Woods’s own words: ‘The history of Bolshevism provides us with a model of how this [socialism] can be achieved.’ (p. 13) It is also full of anecdotes – some of them very amusing, others deeply moving – that help bring the early revolutionary movement to life. Here we learn of the creativity and bravery required in order to deceive the police of the Tsarist regime: the letters and pamphlets written in invisible ink in prison, the newspapers produced abroad and smuggled into the country, and so on.
The development of the Bolshevik party was not, of course, a question of a gradual rise in numbers and influence, but of an intense political and ideological struggle within the Marxist movement. One of the best examples of this is the long fight between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party until the final split in 1913; but the other important polemical battles are all here – with the Legal Marxists led by Struve, the Revisionists led by Bernstein, and the Economists in the second half of 1890s. Woods has the merit of being able to see the issues in perspective, pointing out, for example, that ‘Plekhanov’s formulations … had played a progressive rôle in the struggle against Narodnism, but were out of place in the new stage of the class struggle in Russia’. (p. 132)
But although Woods gives an absorbing and even-handed account of all the discussions, he is not so clear when it comes to explaining the evolution of Lenin’s thinking. In this book, theory takes second place to gripping narrative.
The book is an orthodox Trotskyist view of the history of the Bolshevik party, in that it defends the centrality of the vanguard Leninist party for the future socialist revolution. For example, Woods criticises Orlando Figes’ anti-Bolshevik history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, which describes the seizure of power by Bolsheviks as a ‘conspiracy, a coup, a drunken rampage’ (p. 22).
However, Woods is not uncritical of Lenin. He devotes a chapter to What Is To Be Done?, in which he says that ‘whilst correctly polemicising against the Economists’ slavish worship of “spontaneity”, Lenin allowed himself to fall into the error of exaggerating a correct idea and turning it into its opposite’(p. 121). Woods describes Lenin’s view that socialist consciousness has to be brought to the working class from outside as ‘one sided and erroneous’, citing Chartism, the Paris Commune and the soviets in 1905 as examples of the working class spontaneously exceeding trade union consciousness.
The book’s highest achievement is the way it charts the relationship between the RSDLP/Bolshevik party and the mood of the working class, both in times of reaction and times of an upsurge in the class struggle. Woods highlights the ability of Lenin to analyse the objective situation and develop tactics that enabled the party to reach the working class.
Whatever the reader thinks about the author’s defence of the classic model of a Leninist party, it would be unfair not to recognise the authority of this book. The history of the Bolshevik party contains valuable lessons for today’s struggle for socialism, and Alan Woods has performed a service by making this history accessible to a new generation of militants.
Alejandra Ríos
