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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Koba did at least force Amis’ old friend Christopher Hitchens into a brief and welcome spasm of protest. ‘Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann’, writes Amis. ‘Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.’ To which Hitchens replied by reminding Amis of the rôle played by Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition in documenting the murders. Hitchens also wrote of Serge and James, and of all the dissidents who fought to spread the news of the Terror. ‘The “Nobody” at the beginning of Amis’ sentences above is an insult’, Hitchens wrote, ‘pure and simple.’
Mention of Hitchens brings me to the second (and perhaps more interesting) theme of this book. The book was written as the second of Amis’ interventions into the field of autobiography. His previous book, Experience, modestly pointed out that the greatest of all British authors had all made this leap, and here Amis was good enough to name himself, in case any reader missed the point. Amis’ literary brilliance was manifested in such treats as a 2000-word section justifying the expense of his most recent visit to the dentist – too many Madeleines, perhaps? The same flaw is manifested in this book, not least in the section where Amis explains how he has been able to understand the pain of the gulag, because one night he caught his daughter crying and renamed her Butyrki, after the Moscow Prison (p. 260). Such is not empathy, but stupidity. The pain of Terror was more than a few sleepless nights. The bathos of this passage is pure Amis, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote combined. Unlike most novelists, he has a true sense of historical perspective, a feeling for issues that matter. Then he takes this gift, and wastes it, in the most extraordinary, arrogant manner. Such is the man.
Why should Amis bother to write a second-rate history of the Terror? Koba the Dread only makes sense if it is seen in the context of Experience, for both together represent a long hymn of praise to the virtue and sagacity of Amis’ father Kingsley. Amis senior left to posterity two legacies, one amusing novel, variously self-plagiarised after, and the personal example of a saloon-bar existence, spent in the delightful company of his equally sexist, racist and homophobic friend, Philip Larkin. Kingsley Amis would have been long forgotten, were it not for his son.
In Koba, Kingsley Amis is the invisible, central character. He appears at the beginning and the end. In the first pages, Martin quotes from his father’s student correspondence, when Kingsley was briefly a Communist. The last pages are a Letter to My Father’s Ghost, ending with the words, ‘Your middle child hails you and embraces you.’ It is depressing to see an author who once showed great potential succumb to his father’s mistakes.
But the growth of Fascism was far from irresistible, as the political and military experience of the Arditi del Popolo shows. Born in June 1921 after a split in the Arditi d’Italia, an alliance representing veterans in the Italian army shock-troops, the Arditi del Popolo association began life in Rome under Lieutenant Argo Secondari, an anarchist, to counter Fascist aggression using the latter’s means of a military organisation, war-like tactics and swift deployment, in order to provide the workers and their organisations and demonstrations with an armed defence. This anti-Fascist movement spread rapidly throughout Italy, uniting workers and leading figures in various parties and of differing shades of political opinion. Communists, anarchists, socialists, republicans, revolutionary syndicalists and sometimes even Catholics set up ‘arditi’ units in the workers’ districts of many Italian cities: ‘Socially the organisation was predominantly working-class, with a very high proportion of railway workers.’ (p. 62)
The actions of Arditi del Popolo made history in Italy thanks to a few massive mobilisations and battles, like the march in July 1921 in Rome’s Botanic Gardens, when over 2,000 Arditi organised a military parade and engaged in some fighting against the police, and again in the town of Sarzana, where 600 Fascists on a punitive action were successfully repelled, with the death of 18 Black Shirts and about 30 injured.
But in August 1921, just a few weeks after its establishment, the new association met a new obstacle to its growth: the ‘peace pact’ signed between the Italian government, the Fascists and the Socialist Party (PSI). With this move, the PSI distanced itself from this proletarian defence movement, and gave the repressive machine of the state its chance to disrupt the ranks of the Arditi del Popolo. It was only in a few cities that the organisation was able to sustain the onslaught and contain Mussolini’s violence against the workers. This happened in Parma during several days in August 1922, when the popular districts of the city, led by Guido Picelli and ‘his Arditi’, erected barricades and blockades, and managed to repel for five whole days an assault by thousands of Black Shirts who descended on Parma in their largest military operation before the March on Rome.
In the last chapters of his book, Behan rightly shows how it was the mistakes made by left-wing parties rather than state repression that undermined the strategy of the Arditi del Popolo. On the one hand, the Communist Party led by Amadeo Bordiga ordered their members to withdraw from the movement and to establish instead exclusively ‘communist’ squads; this strategy failed to take seriously the danger of an authoritarian turn on the part of the ruling class, and rejected the line of the Third International which favoured a ‘proletarian united front’. On the other hand, the PSI’s reformist leadership and the trade union movement asked from their members a pacifist and lame stance, while waiting for the ‘flash in the pan’ of Fascism to subside; in this case too their passive trust in the laws and institutions of the liberal state betrayed a profound lack of understanding of the phenomenon of the Fascist squads and their activities:
The inevitable contrast with the previous ‘in-house’ summary of the history of the movement, issuing from the pen of the lugubrious Pierre Frank, The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists (Ink Links, 1972), can be seen even in the chapter headings, viz.:
It only remains for me to add that the bibliography at the end of Bensaïd’s book is valuable in its own right, and to give the author’s conclusion, which I wholeheartedly endorse:
The most interesting chapters of this book are the early ones. In periods before the twentieth century, there was not quite the same professional barrier between historians and other writers as exists now. Novelists, pamphleteers and others offered their own grand theories as to what had gone wrong. My favourite villain is Thomas Carlyle, who complained that if the Saxons had indeed enjoyed an equal society, this showed how degenerate they were. Without the Norman Conquest, he wrote, the Saxons would have remained ‘a gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no grand combinations; lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity’. If only! The later chapters of Chibnall’s book suggest that with the increased specialisation of historical knowledge, such romantic accounts have been superseded. We have instead the micro-studies of linguists, philologists, numismatists and archaeologists, all divided into rival sub-disciplines, and protected by arcane and specialist jargon, whose main function is to shield the author from criticism. We know the Saxons differently, but do we understand them more?
In this same article, Cliff explicitly criticised the perspectives Trotsky outlined in 1938 and which were adopted by the founding conference of the Fourth International. Cliff argued:
When the second piece in this volume was written, in 1966, Harold Wilson’s Labour government had been elected, and was trying to deal with industrial militancy and the problems of the competitiveness of British industry on the international market through its incomes policy. The pamphlet Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards was addressed directly to industrial militants. With an introduction by Reg Birch, an ex-Communist Party then Maoist activist prominent in the AEU, it was published by the London Industrial Shop Stewards’ Defence Committee, and reflected the organisation’s turn towards work in industry. According to Colin Barker, who co-wrote the pamphlet with Cliff, it sold 10,000 copies, ‘most of them to workers, themselves often Communist Party militants’. It argued that profits and prices could not be controlled while capitalism continued, and that the Labour government’s ‘incomes policy’ amounted to nothing more than an attempt to hold down wages and involve the top union leadership in the disciplining of their own members by the imposition of penalties on unofficial strikers.
Cliff and his comrades saw a new form of reformism in the growth of unofficial strikes led by shop stewards in opposition to the official union machinery. It was replacing the old ‘reformism from above’, when workers relied on their leaders to implement reforms through parliament, by a ‘do it yourself reformism’ characterised by the workers’ direct struggles and increasing self-reliance and initiative.
The pamphlet noted two weaknesses. The struggles were fragmented, consisting of isolated local struggles on a factory basis with little link-up across industries or regions. Aims were largely restricted to the narrow horizon of economic, trade union demands (p. 91). The pamphlet argued the need for a link-up of shop stewards across industries and localities into a nation-wide movement, and the broadening of their horizons to take up the concerns of pensioners, nurses and other non-industrial sections of the working class.
Cliff and his comrades were optimistic that this industrial militancy and new ‘reformism from below’ would supersede the old reformism and develop into revolutionary socialism. But they said nothing on exactly how this transformation was to be achieved. As Colin Barker admits in his introduction: ‘… as experience would suggest, that vision was rather foreshortened. The politics of the movement were most certainly decisive, but there was no automatic link between rising militancy and revolutionary socialism.’ (p. xxi)
The next article, Labour’s Addiction to the Rubber Stamp, noted the growing irrelevance of parliament. ‘Government decisions are not made in parliament. They are made at the points of intersection of industry, finance and the civil service, in the cabinet, the new “planning” bodies and so on – anywhere, indeed, except parliament.’ (p. 124) Since parliament, and also the parliamentary Labour Party, were now mere rubber stamps, the implication was that extra-parliamentary struggle in the factories and in the streets was all important. ‘In the present stage of planned state-monopoly capitalism social democracy enters its third stage. It is neither socialist nor even authentic parliamentary reformist.’ (p. 127)
On Perspectives, written in 1969, sought to draw conclusions from the events of May 1968 in France. Cliff explained the explosive and unexpected nature of the student movement and especially of the workers’ general strike by the ‘deep alienation’ of workers from their organisations.
After the initial wage increase (to induce the workers to accept the deal), further wage increases were lower and often dependent on increased productivity. Often the deal did away with cost-of-living adjustments, bonuses, etc. The pamphlet warned that the aim of MDW was to reimpose management control over working conditions, and ‘eliminate traditional shopfloor bargaining and substitute bureaucratic joint bodies remote from shopfloor pressure’ (p. 178). This would reduce the rôle and influence of shop stewards, and increase that of ‘more reasonable’ full-time union officials.
The pamphlet focussed on the question of control, pointing out that most disputes, even the most mundane ones, for example, over tea breaks or washing hands time, were essential fights over control. Restrictive practices and craft demarcations (even those that seemed ridiculous) were at bottom an attempt by workers to retain some control over their working lives. Here the pamphlet tackled the difficult question of how socialists should deal with this. This was a problem I wrestled with myself during my short time as Industrial Organiser for Healy’s Club in Glasgow in the 1950s when discussing with shop stewards in the shipyards. The pamphlet argued that:
The International Socialists made valiant efforts to involve themselves in these struggles, and to build an industrial base. According to Jim Higgins, the IS membership had grown to 2,351 (of whom 613 were manual workers) by March 1972. By March 1974, they had 3,310 members, including 1,155 manual workers. The group decided to create factory-based branches. Cliff’s pamphlet Factory Branches, included in this selection of his writings, is an attempt to provide guidelines for the work of these branches. It too, as Cliff acknowledges, was the result of a collective effort. Cliff claimed some 32 factory branches at the time of his writing. Sections based on industries and trade union factions were also established. According to Higgins, there were, in 1971–72, six of the former and 10 of the latter and four rank-and-file papers with a print run just short of 12,000.
The next two articles, Ten Years On: 1969 to 1979 and The Balance of Class Forces, both written in 1979, review this decade. Cliff divides these years into two periods – 1969–74 and 1974–79:
The fluctuating course of the class struggle in this period, a mixture of victories and defeats, advances and retreats, took place against a background of expanding capitalism interspersed with recessions, and accompanied by general inflation. But what was the result in terms of workers’ standard of living? Cliff includes tables which show that ‘under the Labour government of 1964–70, notwithstanding the incomes policy, real wages continued to rise, even if slowly’ (p. 385). They continued to rise from 1969 to 1974 under the Tory government. Underlining Cliff’s comments that the Labour electoral victory of 1974, and the trade unions’ acceptance of the Social Contract had undermined the workers’ resistance, real wages went down by two per cent in 1974, by four per cent in 1975, and by five per cent in 1976. Cliff writes: ‘Of course the slashing of wages could not go on. Workers’ resistance had to rise. In the fourth year of the Labour government (March 1977 to March 1978) real wages went up by five per cent, and in its last year by a further seven per cent.’ (p386)
Reviewing the 10 years, Cliff wrote:
It seems that the IS reacted to the objective situation – the downturn in struggles from 1974 onward – and its inability to compete with the Communist Party and its LCDTU, by adopting an ultra-left sectarian attitude, thus negating the progress made until then.
However, let us return to Cliff’s writings. Despite his downbeat assessment of the IS’ situation in 1979, ‘its members isolated and holding on by their finger tips’, he ended on his usual optimistic note:
The next piece is a record of an interview in Socialist Review in 1986, in the seventh year of the Thatcher government. Asked how he would assess the balance of class forces after the defeat of the miners and now Wapping, where, according to the interviewer, ‘Murdoch has achieved more already than MacGregor did in a year’, Cliff gives an upbeat reply:
This verdict is substantiated by Eaden and Renton’s highly readable, amply peopled, typically sharp and occasionally wry analysis. They confirm incontrovertibly and elegantly that every strategic phase of the CPGB’s policy originated in Moscow and was adopted in Britain. In distinction to revisionists, who claim that important aspects of the Third Period had an English provenance, they conclude succinctly: ‘Whatever the popularity of Class Against Class among some younger Communists, the fact remains that the introduction of the policy was decided by external factors … This Third Period line became policy across every Communist Party in the world.’ (p. 33) The same went for the introduction of the Popular Front phase of Stalinism in 1934–35: ‘The policy may have reflected pressures from national sections of the Comintern but such demands were secondary in the minds of those who formulated it.’ (pp. xv, 50–2)
Well aware of the futility of the sectarianism and ultra-leftism which they had embraced only a few short years earlier, CPGB leaders were frantically seeking an escape route from extinction. As Trotsky pointed out, the Comintern’s national affiliates faced national pressures to adapt to their national polities and to make concessions to national reformism. After the locust years of isolation and revolutionary posturing, such pressures were particularly intense. They were not the crucial explanatory factor: the CPGB could only change course when Stalin gave his consigliere Dimitrov the thumbs-up to change course. Eaden and Renton are particularly good on the Popular Front. They cite Hugh Macdiarmid’s visceral class dismissal of the metropolitan bourgeois littérateurs who briefly embraced Stalinism. They join with Orwell in condemnation of ‘the nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of Rule Britannia’ (p. 55), not to say Liberals and ‘progressive’ Tories.
The book emphasises how after 1934 the opportunism, nationalism and reformism inherent in a strategy based on Stalin’s self-interested and supple anti-fascism and ‘socialism in one country’ permanently entered the soul of the CPGB. It blossomed after 1941, coexisted with Cold War leftism after 1947, and burgeoned once again in the pages of Marxism Today from the late 1970s, not to say in the partisan predilections of recent historians of the party. Unlike some of these authors, Eaden and Renton refuse to construct a sanitised, decontextualised English picture of the Popular Front based on uncomplicated anti-fascism, economic struggle in the factories, Merrie England, John Ball, Wat Tyler, and, in direct descent, Harry Pollitt as your stereotypical British trade unionist. Their account is integrated in world politics, in Stalin’s diplomatic manoeuvres, in opportunism towards Hitlerism, in the terrible terrain of ‘Midnight in the Century’, and in the physical and political dissolution of Bolshevism. The Moscow Trials and Stalin’s legalised murders as well as the approbation cordially accorded them by such CPGB leaders as Robin Page Arnot, Walter Holmes, Ivor Montagu and Pollitt himself – ‘a new triumph in the history of progress’ – are carefully and vividly recorded.
While the first 25 years of the CPGB have attracted most attention from historians, a strength of this text is that it stays the sometimes exhausting pace. Eaden and Renton acknowledge that once the ‘Uncle Joe levy’ and those who had joined the CPGB largely on the basis of Russia’s war effort had peeled away and British workers had, in 1945, decisively rejected a grand coalition of the CPGB, Labour and assorted Tory ‘progressives’ – a coalition in which Pollitt stood to the right of Attlee – for the CPGB the game was up. Nonetheless, they attend carefully to the Cold War, Hungary, the party’s rôle in the resurgence of industrial militancy from 1968, and finally to the ignominious collapse of the CPGB in 1991. As the great miners’ strike of 1984–85 demonstrated, whatever its strength on paper, the party staggered towards its quietus as a squabbling, impotent sect incapable of influencing the class struggle except, arguably, in justifying working-class retreat in both the unions and the Labour Party. Eaden and Renton’s material on industrial politics and the activities of CPGB members in the trade unions from the 1950s to the 1980s is extremely useful, if over-reliant on the press of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the expense of more rigorous assessments.
Transcending ‘on the one hand’ and then ‘on the other hand’ accounts, over here is a credit while over there is a debit approaches, historians need to engage with the difficult task of producing total histories which connect the CPGB’s support for class struggle with its advocacy of Russian dictatorship, its members’ support for the fight in workplace and union with the subordination of their party to politics based on the material interests of the rulers of Russia. Eaden and Renton powerfully evoke the power and élan of the CPGB’s involvement in anti-fascist struggles, the campaign over Spain, the fight in the unions and the mobilisation of the unemployed. They provide us with an understanding of why the CPGB attracted so many class-conscious militants. And at times they integrate the struggles of these militants with Stalinist politics. It was once fashionable to distance the CPGB from Stalinist Popular Frontism and terror in Spain on the grounds that the leadership of the small British party was not involved or did not know what was going on, while, even if some leaders had an inkling, the rank-and-file members remained ignorant. Today, work such as James Hopkins’ Into the Heart of the Fire has extended our view of what happened. While it presents an over-rigid division between heroic rank-and-filers and Stalinist leaders, it suggests that more CPGB activists than many have conceived were involved and knew, or certainly had the means to know what was going on. As Eaden and Renton conclude about the International Brigades in Spain: ‘Yet for all the spirit of the volunteers, theirs was a tarnished cause.’ (p61) Similarly, over time anti-fascism in Britain was facilitated or restricted by Stalinist policies. From 1929 to 1933, unemployed struggles bore the marks of the ‘social fascism’, self-imposed isolation from the labour movement, and the crude leftism which held that the jobless were tout court more radical than the factory worker and the other debris of the Third Period. Similarly with industrial politics: if the London busmen’s strikes of the 1930s are to be placed in the credit column (p. xix), they have to be related to the subsequent antagonism of the CPGB to rank-and-file movements (p. 56).
Inevitably this wide-ranging survey provokes some disagreements of emphasis and interpretation. For example, I would question the extent to which the period between 1920 and 1924, when Stalinism commenced its grim march, was a golden age of British Communism. The extent and influence of the formative cadre of trade unionists should not be exaggerated, while crucially, as Eaden and Renton point out, trade unionism commenced from 1921 a deep, progressive, if contested, decline. The CPGB’s fortunes in the unions nearly always followed the general trend of trade unionism: the party’s influence, whatever its quality, was stronger after 1934 in workplace and union than it was in the early 1920s. Moreover, after 1920, McManus, Murphy, Bell, Gallacher and Pollitt were all out of the industrial struggle. Without exception, they evolved rapidly into functionaries and mould-setting subordinates of Moscow. While the relationship between the CPGB and the Comintern in the early 1920s was more open and democratic than it was later – as might be expected with both feeling their way in a novel situation – the willed political subservience of British Communists was there almost from the start. Eaden and Renton’s perfunctory attempt to suggest some political reciprocity and their assertion that Murphy ‘shaped’ Comintern decisions (p. 21) are unconvincing. His rôle in the Comintern was always subsidiary and subordinate.
I also have problems with the authors’ interpretation of CPGB politics before and during the General Strike. It is correct to attribute the CPGB’s move to the right in 1925–26 and their sycophancy towards the TUC General Council left-wingers as a response to the party leaders’ perception of Russian interests, with which they identified their own. Its provenance lay in Moscow’s collapse of the United Front into politicking with the left-wing union leaders around the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. However, in the run-up to the General Strike, the advice from Moscow was that the union lefts would betray the workers and therefore should be criticised: it was the CPGB and not the Comintern which soft-pedalled. In the aftermath of the strike, Stalin took the position that full-blooded criticism of ‘the left traitors’ was necessary even if this led the British union leaders to withdraw from the committee. Of course, this was related to the Russian Opposition’s critique of the committee, and the committee itself was a without question a disorienting factor. But from the spring of 1926, Russian advice was intended, against CPGB resistance, to take the party to the left, and not to the right (see L.T. Lih, et al., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov).
Some students have found Eaden and Renton’s account of the birth of British Trotskyism (p. 45) confusing. This is partly because it was! As so often, the seeds of discontent in the oppositional Balham group were sown by the inability of the CPGB, armed with the new Third Period line, to make any progress, while, at least in the case of Reg Groves, there was concern that the party was deviating from the pure milk of Comintern ultra-leftism by countenancing work in ‘the lower organs’ of the unions as well as the workplace. However, the group’s position soon evolved into a critique of ‘Class Against Class’ centred on the necessity of the United Front, particularly in relation to Germany. British Trotskyism thus emerged in reaction to domestic and international issues, but ultimately in a critical response to the ultra-leftism of the Comintern. The expulsion of oppositional groups from the Trotskyists in the 1930s to the Maoists in the 1960s and the enduring prohibition of faction draws attention to the CPGB’s internal regime: despite its significance, the party’s pervasive bureaucratic centralism is scarcely mentioned in this book. Moreover, the SWP, whose regime as well as its politics are far from above criticism, is unobtrusively present in the text, implicitly contrasted with the CPGB as the exemplar of the healthy revolutionary party. In a volume devoted to a CPGB scarred by Stalinism, it is unfair, lacking in proportion and sometimes downright diversionary to demand a critique of the Trotskyist tradition. Any broader assessment of revolutionary politics in Britain must vigorously engage with its debilities.
A number of small errors are scattered through the book. It was Palme Dutt not Pollitt who took charge of the Workers’ Weekly in 1923 (p. 17). Pollitt never studied or worked at the Lenin School (p. 21). The United Clothing Workers did not expire when its leader Sam Elsbury was expelled from the CPGB in 1929, but lingered on until 1935 (p. 37). The CPGB breakaway in mining was the United Mineworkers of Scotland (p. 38). John Saville was not ‘an adult education teacher’, but a lecturer in the history department at Hull University (p. 122). It was Alex Moffat, not his brother Abe, who left the CPGB in 1956, while Bert Wynn was not a CPGB member in 1959 (p. 126). Reg Groves wrote The Balham Group, not Harry Wicks (p. 195). There are far too many typographical errors and misspellings for a work of this quality. Nonetheless, that quality makes it an indispensable text for readers of Revolutionary History.
Part II deals with the apogee of the movement in 1968–73, describing the several organisations as they formed and their various attempts to go beyond ‘pre-party formations’ either to regroupment, or to launching themselves as parties. I expected this part to take me into a foreign world, but in reality the political culture described is not that far from the culture of the Trotskyist organisations in the same period: commitment to more-or-less Stalinist (or at least post-1921) versions of Leninism, vigorous activism, and attempts to reach the mass of the class through campaigns and fronts.
Part III deals with the movement’s loss of the political initiative and slide into crisis between 1973 and 1981, triggered initially by the difficulties of class and race analysis in the Boston busing crisis of 1974, exacerbated by separate ‘party turns’ by the major organisations which ended the hope of a broad regroupment, and then by the Beijing CPC-PRC leadership’s open bloc with the USA against the USSR and those Third World movements influenced by Moscow, which triggered a divide between those trends in the movement which clung to Beijing and those which shifted towards more general Third Worldism.
Part IV discusses, more briefly, the involvement of Maoist and post-Maoist trends in the Rainbow Coalition, and the impact on these trends of the collapse of the USSR.
Finally, Part V contains a chapter discussing the ex-Maoists’ ‘adjustment to civilian life’, and Elbaum’s lessons and conclusions. These are, broadly speaking, that the movement had a foreshortened sense of the imminence of revolutionary crisis which made it ill-fitted for the long haul; that Maoism was massively damaging, particularly in creating a mind-set of ‘theory-as-orthodoxy’ and producing sectarianism and anti-democratic internal practices; but that, on the other hand, internationalism and anti-imperialism, anti-racism and the effort to form an activist cadre, remain fundamental to any effective left. At the end of the day, a critical conclusion is that ‘basing an organisation’s unity on an ideological system (say, Marxism-Leninism) rather than a political programme (say, socialism) is fraught with danger … The result is a strong pull not just toward dogmatism but toward constant suspicion of heresy.’ (p. 336)
Considered as a history, I found the book an interesting read, but in some ways disappointing. The problem is that in some ways, because of the range of organisations whose history he is trying to cover, Elbaum paints with a very broad brush, so that it is hard to get a strong sense of the effective relation of forces between the different organisations or of any of their specific ideological dynamics. At the same time, this is so much a participant history as to be almost myopic. World politics are seen through the eyes of the anti-imperialist US left and in particular its Maoist wing, and there is little sense of the dynamics of the post-1968 Leninist and semi-Leninist far left elsewhere (even, for example, of the Guevarist and other trends in Latin America who might have been the natural allies of the American ‘New Communist Movement’). At the same time, some of his lessons are very pertinent. The experience of the Trots in Britain has also been one of early 1970s dynamism, later 1970s inability to work out a clear path through more complex political problems, and repeated sectarian declarations of small groups as ‘the party’ (albeit the Socialist Labour League–Workers Revolutionary Party, International Socialists–Socialist Workers Party and Militant–Socialist Party were all vastly bigger and better implanted than any US Maoist group). Trotskyism has functioned just as much as an ideological system, as opposed to a programme, as Maoism. It’s worth a read, then, if only to see how much like ourselves the US Maoists were.
It has always been a bit of a mystery how such a marginal figure could have occupied such a key position in the events of February–March 1917 (pp. 29–30), and yet be so curiously ineffective in them. The clue to this must surely be that he was ‘a Mister Betwixt and Between’ (p. 19). He can only be regarded as ‘the ideologist of the February Revolution’ (Chapter 2, pp. 27–66) because his ideas were incoherent enough to be an accurate reflection of its confused early stages. On the one hand, he dreamed of a ‘vast unprecedented social content’ for the revolution (p. 29), whilst on the other supporting the minimum programme acceptable to both the Executive Committee of the Soviet and the Duma Committee, even going so far as to drop his Zimmerwald anti-war propaganda (pp. 22–5). His aim was to persuade the Executive Committee of the Soviet to support the Duma Committee forming a government, whilst preventing any socialist ministers from joining it. He believed that dual power was the start of the development of ‘uninterrupted’ revolution (p. 32), in which the state apparatus would be gradually taken over through the Soviet pressurising the government in the direction of reform by means of socialist experts in its sub-commissions (pp. 32–3). But he did not believe that the organisations of ‘Russia’s democracy’ had been given enough time, or were sufficiently differentiated or deep-rooted to be able to wield power yet (pp. 27–8). So he opposed the Menshevik and SR leaders going into the government because he thought it was necessary for a ‘united front’ of ‘the democracy’ to put pressure upon it from outside, and since he felt the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was ‘isolated from all the real, living forces of the democracy’ (p. 63), he opposed that as well. All this preconceived schema was utopian, couldn’t work, and in the event didn’t work. The only one of his proposals to get off the ground was the Contact Commission of the Soviet with the Provisional Government, in which Tsereteli easily outbid him and thrust him rudely aside, and which he used as a springboard into office.
Sukhanov’s experience of 1917 explains why he failed so lamentably as a politician whilst succeeding so splendidly in describing it. His history is detailed, accurate, vivid and lifelike, as chaotic and unfocussed as the events in which he was so deeply involved, a major source for the history writing of others. But it lacks analysis. It is history seen as misfortune, as a mistake, which is how he felt about it at the time.
Despite its title, this volume is a history in only a limited sense. The authors have not returned to the documents, nor have they interviewed participants in any systematic fashion. They have not elicited substantial new evidence. While Grant is of the school which locates the real advent of British Trotskyism in the birth of the WIL, and he carefully re-examines the events of 1949–50, overall he adds little to, and corrects little in, existing work such as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s Against the Stream and War and the International and Martin Upham’s unpublished PhD, History of British Trotskyism until 1949. Given his extensive experience, this could have been redeemed by extensive and conscious employment of recollection and critical reflection, by imaginative recuperation and probing exploration of the earlier lives Grant led in the foreign country of the past. But the book is autobiographical only in the most diffuse sense. The personal is largely suppressed, so that it is left to Sewell in his brief introduction to tell us a little about Grant’s family and his early life, and examples of pondering experience and self-reflection in the narrative are few. Even as memoirs (Sewell’s characterisation, p. 14) and in the face of invocation of Marx’s aphorism that individuals make history (p. 16), the text is reticent or restrained on people and their personalities. This is perhaps related to the book’s political sub-text: the austere assertion that the Socialist Appeal group is the direct descendant of Trotsky, the RCP and all that is best in the British revolutionary tradition, and that, suitably augmented and with a fair wind, it will go forward to build the party and make the revolution.
There are exceptions. Grant has some interesting new things to say about the work of the Trotskyists in the ILP, and he quotes extensively from a letter critical of the Marxist Group which, together with Harber and Stuart Kirby, he sent to the International Secretariat in 1935. He sheds new light on the creation of the WIL, arguing that the initial walk-out of Ralph Lee, Jock Haston, Grant and their comrades occurred with no thought of a split. This was prompted by Harber’s subsequent expulsion of those who condemned his circulation of Stalinist slanders concerning Lee’s handling of the funds of the South African Laundry Workers Union. He is educative and amusing on Cannon’s persistent but doomed attempts to weld the warring British factions into a united Trotskyist organisation in 1938. The authors have interviewed Millie Lee, and it is good to hear more about the life and work of this extraordinary woman. Grant usefully adds to the rehabilitation of Ralph Lee, the organisational dynamo who directed the initial success of the WIL. There are useful if brief snapshots and warm commendations of Lee, Haston and Jimmy Deane, all of whom were the objects of Grant’s admiration and affection.
The photographs which light the book are exemplary in evoking people, time and place, while Grant’s precise remembrances of Trotskyist songs lampooning the Popular Front (p. 48) and the Hitler-Stalin Pact (pp. 68–9) are invaluable in recalling the sensibility and structure of feeling of the time and preserving what otherwise might be lost forever. There is no derogation from the centrality of politics, but rather an attempt at deeper understanding of politics, involved in the attempt to illuminate and understand its protagonists, their characteristics and motivations and the social context in which politics is played out.
Several matters deserve further comment. Grant is correct favourably to contrast his rôle after 1945 in creatively attempting to grasp the transformations in capitalism, reformism and Stalinism with that of Pablo, Mandel, Cannon and Healy, who clung to dogma. Three points nevertheless require emphasis. Firstly, Grant’s arrogation to himself of the position of ‘principal theoretician of British Trotskyism’ (p. 193) is questionable, both for this and for later periods. A more persuasive reading of the embattled RCP leadership’s attempts to understand a changing world suggests collaboration and synergy rather than individualised theorising. Many remember Haston as a creative thinker who was no great shakes as a writer. Grant’s contribution, unassailable in itself, sometimes involved commitment of collectively elaborated ideas to paper. Overall it was made as part of a team. (See the exchange between ‘A Friend of George Edwards’ and Al Richardson, Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1980, pp. 55–6).
Secondly, we might expect some critical assessment, making due allowance for the constraints of the time, as to how well the theorising of the RCP has stood up to the subsequent march of history. There is little of that here. Grant believes that his depiction of Stalin’s East European conquests as deformed workers’ states, progressive as against capitalism, requiring only political revolution and critical defence by revolutionaries, was right then and is right now. Yet at least as early as 1948, when the RCP leadership heralded the Stalinist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia as a victory for the working class, it was possible to perceive the fundamental problems with Grant’s theory of proletarian-Bonapartism and the idea that Stalinist statification from above, rather than workers’ revolution from below, creates workers’ states, no matter what their degree of infirmity. Many did so, arguing not only from the timeless, indispensable conception of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class, institutionalising workers’ power and workers’ democracy, but also from the direct experience of the Czechoslovak Trotskyists. The belief that Grant developed through succeeding decades that not only China and Cuba but Cambodia, Laos and Benin were workers’ states, carried his theory away from the working class as the central agency of revolutionary history and into the substitutionist problematic. If he never succumbed to the conciliationism towards Stalinism of many Trotskyists, his theory, no more than that of his competitors, explained the dynamics of Russian despotism or its humiliating collapse. Yet there is no stocktaking here.
Thirdly, similar points can be made in relation to the limits of the RCP leadership’s estimation of the trajectory of capitalism after 1945. In contrast to the epigones’ prognostications of crisis, Grant admits that what he saw was a cyclical upturn rather than a quarter of a century’s-worth of boom. He is quite right to insist that nobody could have seen the future in 1944. But in succeeding years he nonetheless remained, unlike others, debilitatingly locked into Trotsky’s pre-war conceptions of terminal decline and impending crisis. If the slump was on the horizon rather than, as with Healy, just around the corner, it still structured his politics and obstructed understanding of the very real resilience of capitalism and its continued ability to remake itself and expand qualitatively. Already in 1957, Ted was announcing in the Draft Political Resolution at the RSL National Congress in 1957: ‘A new slump is absolutely inevitable in the next period. The consequences of the next slump can only be catastrophic from a capitalist standpoint. A new revolutionary wave will be the order of the day.’ And so it went on. Replacing Healy’s foaming at the bit with the patience of Job, the fatalism of impending crisis and its inevitable impact on the working class and the Labour Party were pivotal to Grant’s politics after the RCP. The coming slump would inevitably produce a powerful left wing and transform the Labour Party into a mass centrist organisation, paving the way for the ascendancy of the Marxists. What Stalinism was to Pablo, social democracy was to Grant.
This brings me to the perennial and vexed question of entrism. Grant asserts that he was entirely correct to oppose the RCP’s entry into the Labour Party from 1944 to 1949. The one mistake he will admit to is critically supporting entry in 1949 instead of sponsoring attempts to maintain the RCP as an open party. Thereafter, it seems, he has been consistently correct in supporting entry to this very day. His approach is questionable, and is based upon a partial invocation of Trotsky’s prescriptions for entrism, which, it goes without saying, must be treated as a very imperfect guide to a world the Old Man never lived in. Grant argues that the conditions which Trotsky used to justify the entry of the French section into the SFIO – conditions of capitalist crisis, workers turning towards social democracy in the context of a mass left-wing ferment within its ranks – were far from applicable to the Labour Party through the 1940s. It was therefore necessary to reject entrism and establish and maintain the RCP.
But Trotsky also adumbrated and applied, in specific relation to the British Trotskyists and the Labour Party, an approach to entry based fundamentally upon the weakness and isolation of the former and the potential of the latter in providing a sizeable audience for revolutionary ideas and the forging of organisational links with the labour movement. He argued, in his interview in 1936 with Sam Collins, that entry was necessary because of the fragility of the Marxist Group and the possibilities the mass reformist party of the working-class majority presented compared with the centrist ILP. The Old Man’s comments were particularly pertinent to the RCP, formed with around 500 members and enrolling only 350 a year or two later:
The practice of entrism receives little assessment in the book. Grant refers to the work of the RCP majority’s entrist group around Charlie Van Gelderen to suggest that Labour Party work after the war was unfruitful. But this was, on the whole, shallow and half-hearted entry, entry as an annexe to the open party based on selling both the open paper and the colourless Militant and passing contacts quickly on to the RCP. This was very different from Healy’s assimilationist and substitutionist operation, and indeed from Grant’s later approach. It is disappointing that there is little critical reflection on practice, given Grant possesses more than a half-a-century’s experience of Labour Party work. Yet many have been only too willing to criticise what they categorised, certainly after 1964, as a practice mingling sectarianism and opportunism, the combination of a fierce independence, rejection of alliances, and strident denunciation of other tendencies combined with the public insistence that a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism was a possibility, and the transformation of the Labour Party into the party of the revolution a racing certainty. Of course, entry requires, at least to a degree, that revolutionaries become part of the Labour Party’s left-wing bloodstream. The question is to what degree and precisely how. Militant’s self-imposed separateness from the left it originally aspired to work within, can be questioned. Of course entrism requires a degree of public political adaptation. If you take sustained Labour Party work seriously, you have to reject purism. You have to relate to the Labour left, the issue is again to what degree and how you do it. While Grant’s Sinn Féinism militated against such relating, his group, invoking Trotsky, transformed what had been perceived by Trotsky as a short-term tactic into a long-term strategy and adapted energetically to Labourist politics, not least in its distorted histories of Labour as a socialist party hijacked by the right. In a different way, but just as much as Healy, the Grant group sought to become the left wing.
Ted Grant lived through troubled times for revolutionaries. His endurance and his tenacity in grappling with complex and sometimes intractable difficulties demands our respect, our admiration and our criticism. Rob Sewell’s attempt to cover his progress over more than 50 years in little more than 30 pages is bound to suffer from incompleteness. Although it lays out a useful itinerary for future historians, it should be read together with Jens-Peter Steffen’s Militant Tendency (see Revolutionary History, Volume 6, no. 1, 1995–96, pp. 175–84). I will just make a few points. More credit should be given to those who picked Ted up off the floor in the early 1950s, not only the Deane family but Sam Levy and the now almost forgotten Bob and Pauline Peters who laboured mightily in repairing the damage done in different ways by Haston and Healy. No more than in Ted’s History is there any analysis of how Grant’s entrism changed qualitatively after the 1940s, and how one tactic in the difficult construction of building a revolutionary party evolved into long-term strategy, entrism without end, at least this side of the revolution. What is missing is not so much what was right and what was wrong according to sacred texts, as a critical accounting of how the group’s policies developed in the years after 1950.
It is doing less than justice to Peter Fryer, Brian Pearce, Ken Coates, Jim Higgins and many more – Alasdair McIntyre! – who joined Healy after 1956, simply to write them off as uninterested in ‘ideas, theories and principles’ (p. 202). At times, Healy and Pablo haunt the text like pantomime villains to the exclusion of consideration of why they attracted support and how they exploited the real weaknesses of their political opponents. There is surely more to be said about Militant’s break with the Labour Party, the creation of Militant Labour, the Socialist Party and the expulsion of Grant and his faction than the tabloid tale of Peter Taaffe’s sudden emergence as a composite of Healy, Pablo and Iago. There is no engagement with alternative accounts (see, for example, Peter Taaffe, The Rise of Militant, Militant Publications, 1994, pp. 445–52). If we allow that the Militant majority were succumbing to delusions of grandeur, there were new problems confronting the organisation inside the Labour Party. Are there not real limits to what can be achieved by entrism in the face of an electoral-based, reformist party and a powerful bureaucracy determined on moving it to the right? And was the faction fight not to some extent the product of the maturation of long-term tensions?
Several mistakes require correction. Healy hailed from Galway, not Donegal (p. 78). The Stalinist Pat Devine, when questioned by Jimmy Deane as to why he was accusing Deane of malingering when he was not himself in the forces, allegedly responded: ‘I’m doing my utmost. I’m a blood-donor.’ – not vice versa (p101). The Daily Worker claimed that the contribution of Haston, not Grant as stated here, to the labour movement in his native Edinburgh could be inscribed on the back of a postage stamp (p. 113). Everything Grant knew, the paper claimed, had been picked up on the veldt. Rally first appeared in 1949 in Birkenhead; its driving force was Alf Rose, who went with Healy. The version edited by Beryl Deane in Walton (p. 208) was a later incarnation. The story of Ted’s selection and removal as Labour candidate for Walton in 1954 – not 1955 – (p. 206) is a little more complicated than it appears here. Ted triumphed by a single vote after two tied votes against the former WIL supporter, Bob Briscoe. It was this that facilitated bureaucratic intervention. Had Ted initially won by a substantial margin, it is possible that, like George Macartney in 1959, he would have been allowed to stand. It was not Pablo but Sam Bornstein who placed the famous advert in Tribune for the journal Fourth International (p. 200).
There are a number of silly errors such as ‘Campbell Stevens’ instead of Campbell Stephen (p. 29), ‘Joseph Hanson’ instead of Joseph Hansen and ‘Poasadas’ instead of Posadas (p. 209). It is not clear who Charles Lockland is, presumably the Leeds ILPer, Charles Loughlin (p. 113). On the whole, however, this is a stimulating, well-produced and attractive book, selling at a very reasonable price. It should be required reading for all interested in revolutionary politics.
To continue with the religious angle, the persons presented in the book are dubbed either saints or sinner. The sinners are, of course, all those who disagreed with Ted. Even F.A. Ridley, a very honest man who lived all his adult life in poverty, is rubbished by being referred to as ‘middle-class’ – this being used as a pejorative term. Ridley was certainly no more middle-class than Ted, and probably less so as Ted had grown up as a white in a colonial country, South Africa. Ted refers to Healy’s minority as consisting of middle-class comrades (p. 170). Nothing could be further from the truth. Those members who formed half of the North London Branch until the dissolution were all working-class, having left school at the age of 14 years and working in industry. I would suggest that the contact of these early school leavers with Marxism and Trotskyism had been their first brush with abstract ideas. They must have been very proud at receiving what they saw as equivalent to an university education! However, if, unlike academia under capitalism, such ideas had been presented to them as incorporating their own life experience, instead of the bourgeois dichotomy between theory and practice remaining in place, the understanding of these comrades would have been vastly improved. Under bourgeois education, the student’s life experience is regarded as irrelevant, and within the Trotskyist movement at that time, it was generally regarded as ‘subjective’.
With regard to the Soviet Union, Ted states that while in the RCP he had claimed that Russia was a deformed workers’ state, while the East European states were proletarian Bonapartist. He returns to this at the end of the book in a republished document in which this time the USSR is referred to as ‘Bonapartist … resembling the Caesarism of Ancient Rome’ – whatever this might mean! I guess it doesn’t matter now, but to put the record straight, during all my time in the RCP we were told that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state and Eastern Europe consisted of deformed workers’ states. More than probably, this change of designation has assisted Ted in explaining the collapse of the USSR and its satellites, but these designations were not used at the time to which he refers.
A further criticism I have of this book is the incorporation of wads from documents written by Ted some years ago. Surely these could have been précised and an analysis made as to why the power continually being prepared for never came about? In fact, if I were ever tempted to write such a book, which is admittedly 100 per cent unlikely, I would begin at the present day and examine why we failed and the lessons to be learned from this. Possibly some of the reasons for failure may be the continual attempt to tell the future – the Nostradamus tendency – put forward as perspectives. Surely dialectics tells us, and should have informed Ted, that all in this world is in constant flux!
With regard to the Fourth International, it is certain that its members played a Machiavellian rôle, and encouraged Gerry Healy to do so. Ted puts this down to the spite of Cannon against the RCP, but is it possibly to destroy a movement because of one person’s spite? Ulterior motives there may have been, but they need to be researched in the light of the political and economic climate of that time.
In conclusion, I would say that the title of this book is over-ambitious, and in no way has it provided a history of the British Trotskyist movement.
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The Easter Rising was, despite the heroism of the participants, a military fiasco. Politically, however, it dealt the Home Rule party a tremendous blow and brought together all of its nationalist enemies, both republican and non-republican, into the Sinn Féin alliance. Re-formed in 1917 Sinn Féin was an unstable amalgam only held together by hostility to the Home Rulers and later by British intransigence. As Hopkinson observes, missing from the equation was revolutionary socialism, which never recovered from the loss of Connolly and was overwhelmed by the Sinn Féin tide.
As Hopkinson makes clear, the Irish Revolution ‘was not to be concerned with the redistribution of wealth’. Both Sinn Féin and the IRA were dominated ‘by the small farmer class and by artisans and traders’ with the working class, both rural and urban, ‘largely unrepresented in the Dáil’. Irish Labour’s decision to abstain in the 1918 general election was an historic mistake, one that it is hard to believe that Connolly, whatever his weaknesses as a military thinker, would have made. One consequence of this was that the Sinn Féin and IRA leaderships were able successfully to contain the stirrings of social revolution that manifested themselves during the conflict. Instead, Michael Collins and his comrades ‘hit upon … a mixture of guerrilla warfare and passive resistance with a high priority given to intelligence and propaganda and the sidelining of progressive social ideas’.
Hopkinson goes on to provide a detailed account of the war. He brings out the divisions within the revolutionary leadership with both Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera preferring passive resistance and diplomacy to Michael Collins’ guerrilla campaign. They were, however, all agreed on keeping the mass of the people out of the struggle. Indeed, one thing that Hopkinson brings out is the extent to which the shooting war was in practice the work of a few thousand men, operating by and large in Dublin and Munster. Arguably, he does not give enough attention to the widespread passive resistance, but what is particularly striking is the extent to which the great majority of the population, although voting for Sinn Féin and supporting the IRA, remained onlookers. There was no serious attempt to involve the mass of the people in the struggle through strikes, demonstrations, street clashes; indeed every effort was made to avoid such developments. There is no doubt that this was a political decision motivated by the fear that popular involvement would have radicalised the struggle, and this had to be avoided at all costs. There was no revolutionary left that could have challenged this. The men leading the labour movement were concerned with building a strong trade union movement, not with changing society.
Hopkinson is particularly scathing in respect of British government policy, but from a practical rather than anti-imperialist perspective. Instead of offering further concessions after 1918, Lloyd George’s Coalition attempted to impose Home Rule by force. It seems clear that if the British had offered the Free State settlement in 1918 or 1919, then the Sinn Féin alliance would have broken up then rather than in 1921, before the guerrilla war had even begun. Lloyd George, a prisoner of the Conservatives who dominated the Coalition government, did not, however, have the room to manoeuvre. Instead, he followed the Conservative lead until it was clear that coercion had failed, and only then were further concessions, enough to split Sinn Féin, forthcoming. Lloyd George was as much a party to the British policy of assassinations and reprisals as the most die-hard Conservatives. Even more damaging in Hopkinson’s account was his appeasement of the Ulster Unionists and acquiescence in the violence and brutalities that accompanied the establishment of the Northern Ireland state.
Hopkinson has written an interesting study that well repays reading, but in the end it is too much of a military history. What is missing is any exploration of the social dimension of the conflict, any political critique of the forces involved and any discussion of the War in the context of British Imperial history. Nevertheless, it is an essential book for anyone concerned with the fate of the Irish Revolution.
What of Joost Augusteijn’s collection? It has contributions from both the older and newer historians of the Irish Revolution ranging from veterans like Charles Townshend, Arthur Mitchell and Margaret Ward to younger iconoclasts like Peter Hart and Augusteijn himself. Supposedly it is an introduction to the cutting edge of contemporary historical research, but interestingly enough it is the contributions made by the veterans that have most substance. Peter Hart might well proclaim in his contribution that the Irish Revolution ‘needs to be reconceptualised and to have all the myriad assumptions underlying its standard narratives interrogated’, but in practice he seems content to place his research findings in an interpretative framework that derives in good part from a Unionist history published as long ago as 1923, W.A. Phillips, The Revolution in Ireland 1906–1923. There are important differences, of course, but the very interesting detail of Hart’s research is compromised by his particular counter-revolutionary stance. Even worse is Joost Augusteijn’s embarrassing encounter with post-modernism. The Irish, we are told, had a ‘perception’ that the British had raped and pillaged Ireland in the past and would do so again if given the chance. Consequently, what the British actually did was ‘irrelevant’. He goes on: ‘It is clear from the above that the rejection of the British right to rule Ireland was primarily built on a negative image of the British.’ Duh! This is so much nonsense, and although it is too much to expect an editor to reject his own contribution, on this occasion he should have. Somewhat surprisingly, Richard English’s contribution is not much better. Much more substantial are the contributions by Townsend, Mitchell, Ward and Hopkinson, but they have all published at greater length elsewhere. One depressing feature of the collection is the lack of a chapter on the Irish working class, which I would have thought inconceivable since the publication of Emmet O’Connor’s Syndicalism in Ireland 1917–1923 and Conor Kostik’s Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917–1922, but obviously not. Overall the book has the appearance of a failed provocation, and is likely to sink without trace.
Unfortunately, such inadequate research by Hunter makes me uneasy about other statements and conclusions made by him in this book.
To continue, in order to exhibit Rushton’s views, Hunter’s book contains pages of his poetry. Some of these were issued as broadsheets. Most of them exhibit the influence of hymns with their reliance on antique language – for example, thees and thous. I must compare the simplicity of language, if not of ideas, of Rushton’s exact contemporary, William Blake. On page 102, Hunter cites Eric Glasgow, who in his book Liverpool People put forward the view that Rushton’s poetry had not stood the test of time because ‘it belonged essentially to the political and social issues of his own time’. Hunter, in defence of Rushton, considers that poetic ability is secondary to the social and political ideas expressed. He posits Rushton’s adherence to principles as superior to Wordsworth’s poetic genius. However, it seems to me that if a man is presented as a poet, it is legitimate to make a critical assessment of his poetry. I would also point out that another contemporary of Edward Rushton, Percy Byshe Shelley, was not only a fine poet, but that his political poetry remains relevant to this day.
Hunter’s book contains an account of the Liverpool seaman’s revolt of 1775, and there is also information on press gangs and the rigours of the sailors’ lives. But it is a pity that the book as a whole is spoiled by the inaccuracies detailed above, for I am sure that Edward Rushton deserves to be remembered in print.
Three substantial essays of literary criticism are included on George Sand (L’Autre), Victor Hugo and Émile Zola (L’Argent). Though full of praise for Zola, as Fetscher points out, Lafargue criticises his lack of satire and humour, qualities which he himself used to great effect. In fact, Fetscher describes him as ‘the first socialist humorist and satirist’. This makes itself evident in two essays, A Solid Appetite and Mr Vulture. The first is about a rich gourmand whose stomach and digestive system cannot accommodate all the things he wants to consume so he hires a poor homeless person for the use of his body and organs instead. First published in Neue Zeit, the French edition appeared a decade and a half later in a fully revised version. It is this version that is included. The second is a polemic against land and housing owners in the urban centres and the power they wield over those forced to pay rent. It appeared first in L’Humanité, then as a pamphlet due to the wishes of its readers and SFIO members.
There are two essays on utopian socialism, Thomas Campanella and The Jesuit State in Paraguay, both from 1895 and included in Kautsky’s collection on utopian thinkers, in which his essay on Thomas Moore also appeared. Campanella (1568–1639) was a Dominican monk born in Calabria, in the kingdom of Naples, who authored Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun), a plan of a communist-type society. The essay discusses the heretical sects of the times as well as Campanella and his influence. Keller appends a commentary on the latter-day arguments over the essay. The French original text of the essay on the Jesuits in Paraguay was never published. A note informs the reader that in his foreword to the second edition of his Precursors of Modern Socialism (Stuttgart–Berlin 1922), Kautsky compares the Jesuit State with the Bolshevik regime, an idea he returned to in his reply to Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, From Democracy to State Slavery (Berlin 1921). It also notes that Himmler saw in the Jesuits and their state an historical prototype for the SS and its own external set-up. Appended is a part of Kautsky’s own essay on the subject.
A study entitled The French Language Before and After the Revolution, apparently only published by Neue Zeit in 1912 as a tribute to Lafargue following his death – written in 1894, it was considered that Neue Zeit’s proletarian readers lacked the necessary familiarity with the French language – is absolutely fascinating. It places changes in language within the context of changes in the mode of production and the usage by different social classes as society and their rôles within it change. In his appended commentary, Keller points out that this text achieved historical significance when in 1950 Stalin wrote a series of letters on linguistics, in which he, among other things, ‘refuted’ Lafargue’s analysis of a language revolution in France during 1789–94. Keller goes into the argument and its consequences, concluding that Lafargue became a sort of non-person from then on in the Russian sphere of influence.
The essays not dealt with here are just as interesting, but the ones above are particularly so to this reviewer. It would be excellent if English versions could be published, as we need not just intellectual stimulation but more humour in our lives. An enormous amount of work has obviously gone into this volume, and it deserves a wide readership. Keller has done us a big favour by bringing an original but almost forgotten Marxist thinker once more to our attention.
The tasks of the bourgeois revolution could not be reduced to a tick list: they differed according to place and circumstance, but generally consisted of eradicating autocracy and feudal vestiges, introducing representative government, national unification and democratic rights. Land redistribution was essential in countries where the impoverished peasants were excluded from civilised life. Given the understandable reluctance of the bourgeoisie to attack the traditional land-owning autocracy and put itself at the mercy of an emerging working class, the Social Democratic perspective was a fantasy. Although Trotsky’s early writings, 1905 and Results and Prospects were specifically about Russia, the theory was later extended as the Stalinist bureaucracy adopted its own version of Social Democratic theory: building socialism in a single country. In China, India and Spain it confided in a weak bourgeoisie, which had no wish to challenge the old order.
The very helpful editorial notes are confined to an examination of Trotsky’s works, and do not ask how the theory’s validity is affected by events in the six decades after his death. That would take another book. Such a work might examine how Marxists should assess the partial modernisations and achievement of limited independence and economic development carried out in semi-colonies by military figures such as Nasser and Perón. Nor do we yet have a Marxist analysis of societies such as those in the former Soviet Union which have regressed to a lower level of social and economic development.
Andy Croft contributes a readable commemoration of the CP poet, Randall Swingler. As with so much writing on Communist cultural figures, there is too little on his politics and involvement in Stalin’s British section. There is a similar problem with Gidon Cohen’s account of the CP lawyer, Jack Gaster: no attempt is made critically to assess his adherence to Stalinism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler–Stalin pact or the mendacity of the CP leadership. In their chapter entitled Miner Heroes, Campbell and McIlroy build up a valuable collective biography of three of the leaders of the Scottish miners, Willie Allan, David Proudfoot and Abe Moffat. The book concludes with an excellent piece by Barry McLoughlin, Visitors and Victims. While fewer British Communists suffered than their counterparts in many other countries, McLoughlin’s original research discloses how many British men and women who eagerly embraced Stalinism became its victims. The road which began so brightly with 1917 ended in the Gulag for loyal party members.
The differences between the editors are explicit in the Preface. While McIlroy and Campbell, in common with most rational historians, believe that Stalinism requires understanding, explaining and judging, Morgan disagrees. He ducks the issue by vacuously inquiring how judges acquire their authority, and he speciously invokes the relationship of Stalinism to other socialist traditions. He was not always so chary of judgement. The same writer once judged the British Stalinism of the Popular Front, the Moscow Trials and the Hitler–Stalin pact preferable to the critical socialism of the Labour Party left, the ILP and the Trotskyists (Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War, London 1989, p. 309). Many readers of Revolutionary History will remember both Morgan’s explicit neglect of Spain and the Moscow Trials on the grounds that they had already been extensively covered (!) and his unbalanced judgements of respected writers in the Trotskyist tradition such as Brian Pearce and the editor of this journal, judgements which, it has been reasonably remarked, raise more questions about Morgan’s integrity than that of those he judges (see Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 3, Spring 1991, pp. 50–1). It is clear from Morgan’s chapter on the uses of biography that this new-found reluctance to judge Stalinists – no similar amnesty is accorded Trotskyists, against whom snide shots are fired under the protective cover of the footnotes and Sheila Rowbotham’s skirts – is part of an attempt to whitewash the CP and its members. His comments on the activists whose stories are told in the book are anodyne and avoid the difficult questions. Gaster, he says, learned independence in the ILP and carried it over to the CP. If that is so, the question arises as to why Gaster went along with the show trials, the tailing of Nazi Germany, the subjugation of Eastern Europe, even Hungary, which admittedly he took time swallowing, and the suppression of independent thinking. All Morgan takes from Reade’s independence and coherent political stand against the CP and the Comintern is that he was ‘intellectually restless and socially conspicuous’ – not a word about the political issues involved or the monolithic orthodoxy of the CP that the story discloses. He cannot make much of sanitising a Stalinist hack like Rust except to remark that ‘even Rust was not without his complexities’. Which of us is not? What is the point? After the ‘complexities’ of Stalin and Beria, Pollitt and Rust, have been exhaustively discussed and related to their practice, what is the final political assessment?
The clear drift of Morgan’s resort to ‘complexity’, his slippery reasoning and his amorphous prose is towards the dilution of Stalinism, the distancing of the CP from the ideology and practice intrinsic to it, and the exculpation of CP members who embraced it. According to Morgan, the entire socialist tradition, ‘the tradition to which socialists themselves belong is deeply implicated’ in Stalinism (p. 25). He veers towards a discredited essentialism, which pays scant regard to ‘complexity’, claiming ‘Bolshevism was the progenitor of Stalinism’ (p. 21). He de-Stalinises the CP with the stroke of a pen: most members, he tells us, backing this sweeping distortion with not a shred of evidence, ‘had only the faintest regard for Stalinism’ (p. 26). He believes that the CP, richly resourced by the Russian state, was the ‘underdog’ – I wonder where that leaves the vilified, intimidated and sometimes assaulted ILP and the Trotskyists? – and that it deserves our ‘empathy’. Moreover, it should not be judged in Stalinist terms as it never had any chance of coming to power – partly thanks to the good sense of British socialists! This is special pleading from start to finish.
In rejecting Morgan’s apologetics and his tired rehash of ‘Mohammed was responsible for 11 September, indeed, perhaps all who venerate a supreme being are deeply implicated’, we remember the millions of socialists in the Labour Party, the ILP, the Trotskyist, anarchist and libertarian groups, the British proletarians who, from the 1920s to the 1940s, firmly rejected the CP and its fervent, defining Stalinism. Whatever we say about these very different socialist traditions – and none are above criticism – they should never, ever, be confused or conflated with Stalinism which, in contrast, is a fundamental perversion of socialism.
Eventually, Dora came to the conclusion that a social revolution was necessary, not only to improve the position of women, but the lot of working men. She wrote in From a Victorian to a Modern: ‘Not being myself a member of the working class, I must train my imagination and intelligence to see eye to eye with the workers in their class struggle in which they were so severely handicapped.’ Dora, born in 1851, came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Francis Fuller, had worked closely with Prince Albert to plan the Great Exhibition of 1851.
She first went out with Blatchford’s Clarion Vanners who took the socialist message to town and hamlet throughout the UK. She joined the Social Democratic Federation and its successor the British Socialist Party. But she also worked with the Independent Labour Party, Labour Parties and the Herald League.
She travelled the world, often as a delegate to international socialist conferences, addressing meetings, for she was able to speak several languages. She spoke against imperialism, and in Australia against Labour’s ‘White Australia’ policy. She was an able journalist, and wrote in a number of socialist journals. Dora was close to Clara Zetkin, and met Rosa Luxemburg, Tom Mann, Eugene Debs and Jim Larkin. One of Dora’s articles was published in Australia’s Workers’ Weekly, in which she gave sketches of friends and colleagues, including the above.
Dora met with tragedy in her own life. She was widowed early, and brought up her two children as a single parent. She first became interested in women’s rights when, on being widowed, a solicitor told her that if her husband had named anyone else as her children’s guardian she would have had no rights over them. A child had one parent only, the father.
While Dora had opposed the First World War as an imperialist conflict, her son had joined the army in Australia, served in France and died in 1921 from the effects of mustard gas. As Karen Hunt remarks, ‘Dora once again brought together the public and the private’, for she said that on joining up her son had been passed as a first-class life, but he was one of the millions of victims of imperial rivalries.
In the 1920s, when Dora was in her seventies, her health broke down and eventually she became blind. Karen Hunt wonders whether, if she had remained in good health, she would have continued to find the CP a congenial home. I like to think that she was too honest a person, and always her own woman, so that she would not have accepted the twists and turns of the CP as demanded by the Comintern. And yet, I am sure, that with the determination that she exhibited throughout her political life, she would have continued to be involved on the side of the workers in the class struggle. For, as Karen Hunt states, she was ‘a different Communist’.
The article by Andy Croft on Randall Swingler is entitled The Young Men Are Moving Together, from a poem by Swingler. He was one of a number of poets and literary figures attracted to the CP in the 1930s, at a time of economic recession, poverty and hunger marches.
Swingler was the godson of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, for he came from a solidly middle-class family with a history of service within the Church of England. As it happened, Swingler was to give away most of his inherited wealth to the CP and the Daily Worker.
He first became interested in politics as a student in 1930, when an organisation was formed following an extensive discussion in the literary weekly Everyman, on the revolt of youth – or lack of it. In the first instance, the organisation was aimed at the old men who were seen as likely to lead Britain into another war.
In 1934, Swingler was put in touch with the British Section of the Writers’ International, which followed the model of the John Reed Clubs in America and aimed at encouraging proletarian and revolutionary writing. Left Review was launched, and Swingler became its editor.
Unfortunately, Randall Swingler’s poetic and literary work is almost unknown today. However, hopefully, a biography of his life being written by Andy Croft will put this to rights. Excerpts from Swingler’s poems are published in Croft’s article, and I have been able to find three of his poems in Poetry of the Thirties published by Penguin Books in 1964 and edited by Robin Skelton. This book contains also poems by W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, who shared Swingler’s politics.
For 20 years, until he left the CP, Swingler was its best-known poet and one of its most prominent cultural spokesmen. Among his many activities, he reviewed books for the Daily Worker, together with Alan Bush he edited The Left Song Book in 1938, he contributed several plays to Unity Theatre and was active in the Workers’ Music association and in many groups covering writers and readers, poets and the theatre. In 1939, he and Bush organised the massive Festival of Music and the People, including an Albert Hall Pageant written by Swingler and starring Paul Robeson. Swingler together with Auden wrote the libretto for the premier of Britten’s Ballad of Heroes. Both Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten set Swingler’s works to music. Apart from this, Swingler wrote two novels and contributed reviews, stories and poems to all the most important literary magazines of the period.
In 1939, although opposed to the Comintern’s ‘imperialist war’ thesis, Swingler prosecuted the line in the Men and Books pages of the Daily Worker. When the Comintern called for the removal of Ralph Wright as Literary Editor, he was replaced by Swingler. When the Daily Worker was banned in 1941, Swingler went on a national speaking tour calling for the ban to be lifted.
Andy Croft writes that Swingler turned repeatedly to the idea that political commitment was unavoidable for his generation. This he expressed as a choice between rural living and the urban environment, for he saw himself as having exchanged the ‘idiocy of rural life’ for London and revolutionary politics. To Swingler, the urban environment revealed its potential for a different kind of beauty to that of the rural landscape.
In Entrance to the City, he begins by speaking of hills and valleys, and presents them as menacing. He continues:
I congratulate Andy Croft on pulling Randall Swingler from out of present-day obscurity, and I look forward to the biography.
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Victor Hugo once wrote a poem in which an evil Eastern ruler is brought to the Last Judgement and is saved despite his manifold crimes because he once showed pity and brushed the flies off a dying pig. There are no pigs in Marie’s narrative, not one good deed in an unremitting narrative of cruelty and degradation.
Marie has unearthed as much as it is possible to know about Stalin’s youth, a period obscured by Stalin’s own activities in rewriting his life-story. His family background was one of savage brutality, and the youth was undoubtedly brutalised for life by the violence he received from his parents and the harsh life at the seminary. His contempt for others was soon visible in his personal life; he fathered illegitimate children, but seems to have shown no concern for their mothers. Politically, he had a contemptuous attitude towards ordinary workers, and regarded the creation of soviets in 1905 with extreme distrust (p. 89). Intellectually, he was mediocre. During the First World War, he was deported. While Lenin was studying Hegel and planning a new orientation for the labour movement, Stalin slumped into passivity; his Works contain just five letters for a period of four years (p. 130).
Stalin was out of his element in 1917, a year of mass action. From March to October 1917, he spoke in public only three times. He had little liking for the unpredictability of mass meetings, preferring to bury himself in the party apparatus (p. 145). As Marie notes, his talent was an ability to wait; not much use in an insurrection, but much more valuable in period of downturn (p. 157).
The early years of the Revolution were a harsh time, and severe measures were needed. In a situation in which experienced cadres were hard to come by, Lenin recognised Stalin’s talents and gave him jobs where the brutal enforcement of authority and efficiency were necessary. However, he played no rôle in the International, where a degree of tact was required in dealing with revolutionaries from a variety of different traditions. Stalin always despised the Comintern, and did not even attend the Seventh Congress in 1935, when the Popular Front line was put through (p. 457).
In 1921, when his second wife gave birth to her first son, she was expelled from the party for ‘lack of interest’ in party affairs during her pregnancy. Lenin asked for her readmission; Stalin did nothing in her defence (p. 221).
After Lenin’s death, Stalin seized his opportunity. His skills at bullying and manoeuvring enabled him to overcome his opponents, not only the principled Trotsky, but men like Zinoviev who were more or less on the same moral level as Stalin, but not quite as good at it. Zinoviev did oppose ‘socialism in one country’, but from a perspective of bureaucratic voluntarism and putschism, rather than a commitment to building a world revolutionary movement. And as President of the Comintern, Zinoviev had a vested interest in defending ‘internationalism’ (p. 300). Stalin was quite happy for Zinoviev’s Leningrad party to claim unanimous support, as it opened the way for Stalin to make similar claims (p. 304).
From now on, it was downhill all the way. The absurd logic of the purges took over, with the precious human resources of the state being wasted. The harm done to Russia’s own interests was immense. It is ironic that Stalin’s latter-day fan club are often christened ‘tankies’, when it was Stalin who put to death Tukhachevsky, the one general in the Red Army who realised that the car, and its cousin the tank, had made the horse and hence cavalry obsolete (p. 493).
By 1938, Stalin saw the need to call a halt to the excesses of the purge. But he had his supporters – the bright young men, generally careerists with no political baggage from the revolutionary period, who took over the jobs of those purged; as Marie points out, this new generation ‘owed him everything, while he owed them nothing’ (p. 534). There was also an element of pure sadism in Stalin’s methods, for example in the way that in his last years his closest and most loyal collaborators, Andreev and Molotov, were forced to support the purging of their own (Jewish) wives (pp. 787–8, 817).
The Second World War is often seen as Stalin’s finest hour. Marie shows what a shambles it in fact was. He clung frantically onto hopes of maintaining his alliance with the Nazis, even when it was clear that German invasion threatened. He was quite happy to pay any political price – in April 1941 he was planning to dissolve the Comintern as a gesture to Hitler (pp. 605–6). He was even willing to sign the pact of the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan (p. 597).
When forced to fight Hitler, Stalin reacted with the only means he knew – terror. Russian losses in the war reached horrific proportions, but it should not be forgotten that a substantial number were victims of their own side. This was not ‘friendly fire’, in the American euphemism, but special NKVD forces situated behind the line to kill those retreating or deserting (p. 666). Giving a bizarre twist to the words of the Internationale which promise that ‘our bullets are for our own generals’, Stalin continued to execute his own senior officers; in 1942 no less than 30 generals were executed (p. 659). Doubtless, in Voltaire’s words, he wanted to ‘encourage the others’.
Certainly there was great heroism on the Russian side, but ultimately the war was not so much won by Russia as lost by Germany. Stalin’s regime was scarcely popular, but Nazi racial theories prevented the pursuit of a policy of encouraging collaboration, which had considerable success in such Western states as France. In the Ukraine the local peasants, sick of Stalin’s rule, welcomed German troops with flowers – and received vicious treatment in response (p. 634). Anticipating George Bush, the Wehrmacht declared that ‘Bolshevik soldiers’ had lost the right to be treated according to the Geneva Convention.
Stalin’s final years were squalid. Drink and lack of sleep had wrecked his body and mind. Estranged from his children, surrounded by piles of unopened correspondence (p. 852), he feared plots against him and became increasingly crude in his anti-Semitism (pp. 847–55). Most embarrassingly of all, his memory was in decline, and he could no longer remember who had been purged and who had not; on one occasion he proposed someone for a drama prize who was already in jail (p. 766).
The last glimpses we have of him show him slumped in his own urine, his eyelids too dry to close, with the Politbureau already preparing to fight for the succession. Yet there is no sense of tragedy; this was not a great talent gone astray, but a bullying mediocrity chosen by history to carry through a counter-revolution. There is one passage in Victor Serge’s magnificent Case of Comrade Tulayev where the author succeeds in making us feel sorry for Stalin, but Marie, for all his research, never achieves that feat.
At the end of all the loathsome detail, we are led to ask what purpose such a biography serves. When Marie published his first book on Stalin, it was still a work of some courage: the French Communist Party still revered Stalin and denied the validity of Khrushchev’s secret speech. Today those who still worship Stalin are so few in number that they will fit on Harpal Brar’s ‘Friends & Family’ application form.
It is true that many of the last century’s leading Marxists – Trotsky, Serge, Deutscher, Cliff, Broué – have used the biographical form to understand the Russian Revolution, precisely because the rôle of individuals was so crucial. But biography cannot answer all the key questions. Stalin’s brutalised childhood may explain his later brutality, but cannot explain how such a brute assumed total power in a so-called ‘workers’ state’. Today, the crucial problem is whether Leninism, or indeed the very fact of revolution, necessarily leads to dictatorship of the Stalinist type. And an account focusing on the individual personality of Stalin cannot provide an adequate response.
Stalin alone did not make Stalinism. Yet many of the other figures involved in the process remain relatively unknown. Marie writes of the rise of the ‘nomenklatura’, but most of them remain names behind which there is very little substance. To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious biography of Zinoviev. How much is known of Andrei Andreev, an old Bolshevik – described by Stalin as ‘an active Trotskyist in 1921’! (p. 511) – who became one of the chief agents of the purges of the 1930s? Why did Krupskaya, who initially stood up to Stalin, instead of gracefully retiring into obscurity, remain on the Central Committee until her death, voting for the expulsions which technically had to precede the arrest and execution of Central Committee members (see Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, Yale, 1999)?
Marie only touches on the social and economic context of Stalinism, and here his testimony is ambiguous. He insists that ‘planning’ coexisted with Stalin’s arbitrary rule, even claiming that it was the planned economy that ensured the defeat of Hitler (pp. 711–2) (rather than recognising that Germany was unlikely to triumph over the combined might of the USA, the USSR and the British Empire).
In fact, Marie shows us a blend of corruption, incompetence and terror which is a mockery of the very word ‘planning’. Even the purges were carried out according to the free market principle of competition between sections of the state apparatus for the most victims (p. 546). Terror undoubtedly increased the productivity of labour when sheer brute force was the main thing required; but it could not provide the innovation necessary for a more sophisticated industrial society. One does not invent the computer at gun point.
As Marie shows, far from being a higher stage of economic development, the Russian economy was dependent on its international competitors. Its scientists were required to imitate developments already made in the West, rather than pursue new ideas. Original scientific research was positively discouraged, while a massive and highly expensive espionage network was built up so that Western inventions could be copied (p. 725).
Stalinist ideology was a positive obstacle to progress. Stalin encouraged the absurd, unscientific theories of the charlatan Lysenko, even at the cost of many lives through famine (pp. 780–3). But at one point he pulled back. He originally wanted to denounce relativity and quantum physics as ‘bourgeois science’, but was firmly told that they were the basis of nuclear weapons (pp. 796–7). Even the old butcher himself could not resist the pressure of capitalist competition, mediated through the arms race.
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The LSSP tried to forge a united front with the other two left parties, the Ceylon Communist Party (CP) and the VLSSP led by Philip Gunawardena, the one-time leader of the LSSP who had broken away in 1950. But the CP–VLSSP combo imposed unacceptable conditions, namely that the LSSP refrain from criticising Stalinism. As a result, the LSSP and CP–VLSSP went their own ways on 12 August 1953. We Were Making History describes in vivid detail the events and the LSSP’s rôle. The first section of the book consists of an introduction by Vijaya Vidyasagara, a reprint of the LSSP’s 14-point programme, and a parliamentary speech by Dr N.M. Perera on the economic policy of the government. The second section, by far the biggest, reprints contemporary articles drawn from the bourgeois dailies and the LSSP press. The third section, which is the most analytical, gathers selections from several subsequent critiques of the Hartal. The book also reproduces more than two dozen photos, many for the first time.
The Hartal was an enormous success in its own terms. People turned out in the thousands for rallies and processions. Here and there crowds got unruly, and there were deadly clashes with the police. The level of militancy took the left leaders by surprise. The government, on the other hand, was prepared for the worse. The Cabinet of Ministers, led by Dudley Senanayake, took refuge on a British warship, HMS Newfoundland. But if there was fear of insurrection, that fear proved unfounded. At the end of the day, the left parties congratulated the masses and urged everyone to resume business as usual the next day. Nevertheless, in some areas, the protests continued and intensified.
Critics later argued that the Hartal could and should have been escalated. The late Edmund Samarakkody, for example, maintained that the Hartal was a missed revolutionary opportunity. In the Preface, the editors disagree: ‘Today there are some people who are of the view that the left leaders should have continued the Hartal until they captured state power from the ruling class. The book shows the fallacy of this contention.’ According to this view, the masses were not ready.
In my opinion, the opposite was the case. Based on the materials in this book, one could argue that it was the left leaders who were not ready. It is clear that the LSSP (and the CP–VLSSP, too) never expected the Hartal to be anything more than a one-day peaceful protest. As a result, the party’s cadres were caught off guard, and were incapable of providing revolutionary leadership on the spot.
My main criticism of this book is its narrow focus on the LSSP, or rather on the public face of the LSSP. I wish the editors had included material from the CP–VLSSP. If the truth be told, the government was more worried about the CP–VLSSP than the LSSP. Remember that the Stalinists had been in one of their ultra-left adventurist periods; the Communist Party of India had been on the warpath, leading armed struggle in Telengana. Philip Gunawardena was also breathing fire. His VLSSP is often described as an appendage of the CP. That was not true. If anything, the CP, embroiled in its own factional feuding, feared that Philip might upset the applecart and capture the party. That was not a prospect that the government relished.
Likewise, the book gives no hint that the LSSP, too, was deeply divided. The years since independence in 1948 had been hard on the LSSP. The bourgeois-nationalist UNP government enjoyed wide popular support, cultivated through generous social welfare programmes, like the rice subsidy, paid for by the boom in exports driven by the Korean War. The LSSP had its high hopes dashed at the polls in 1952. A section of the party, particularly some of the trade union leaders, moved to the right. A report by a representative of the Fourth International in Ceylon stated that ‘the election defeat had completely demoralised these opportunist elements… Internationally they searched the horizons for a Messiah to rescue them – obviously to Stalinism. Nationally, they similarly had themselves to believe in united fronts comprising all and sundry – most important that it should look “formidable” in scope.’ (Report by B.H., 20 October 1953) In other words, a substantial section of the LSSP had become ‘soft’ on the CP–VLSSP. ‘The Hartal ruined everything for them … During the Hartal their people, very naturally having no faith in the proletariat (due to their obsession with “broad fronts”), underestimated the possibilities and even chances of success … 12 August found these people asleep.’ Right after the Hartal, the LSSP split, with a significant chunk defecting to the CP–VLSSP camp.
The LSSP didn’t reap the rewards of its rôle in the Hartal at the next elections in 1956, as it had hoped. Sensing better than most which way the wind was blowing, Philip Gunawardena allied with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s populist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which campaigned on a demagogic platform of ‘Sinhalese socialism’. Swept into office, the Philip–SLFP popular front marginalised the LSSP, enacting popular reforms, such as Philip’s Paddy Lands Act.
The Hartal was the last great mass struggle that the LSSP led. After 1953, the forces of conservatism and parliamentary reformism, epitomised by Dr N.M. Perera, gained momentum. But that is another story.
My own criticism aside, I highly recommend this book as a significant contribution to the history of Sri Lankan Trotskyism. Wesley Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe have set a publishing standard which hopefully others will emulate. I, for one, eagerly await their next labour of love.
This said, it would be mistaken to assume that the book has no permanent value. The first chapter contains some fascinating information, much of it based upon personal interviews, dealing with the family backgrounds of Jean-René Chauvin (pp. 19–20), Pierre Avot, who obtained the paper for Pablo’s plan to forge banknotes during the Algerian war (pp. 21–2), Marcel Bleibtreu (pp. 23–5), Pierre Broué (pp. 29-–30) and Maurice Najman, who turns out to be related to Rosa Luxemburg (pp. 31–2). Contrary to the propaganda put out by the Stalinists during the 1960s that the Trotskyists were ‘fils à papa’ (rich men’s kids), Nick shows that Trotskyism is really ‘a very French phenomenon, very much ours, linked to our traditions’ (p. 15). But he also shows that he himself is just as faithful to the traditions of the French right, by making much of Trotskyism’s input from with freemasonry (pp. 20–1, 347–8), what he sees fit to call ‘revolutionary Yiddishland’ (pp. 31–7, 39–42) and Protestantism (pp. 41–2).
In spite of this slant, there is much of real value here, in particular in the chapter on the origins of Trotskyism in France (Chapter 5, pp. 174–216), which reproduces some fascinating data from the unpublished memoirs of Raymond Molinier now on deposit with CERMTRI (pp. 174–80, 204–7, 210–1; also 301–2). Equally exciting is the information provided on Pablo’s involvement in the Algerian War (pp. 382–433), which also shows the small part that the Fourth International occupied in his extensive and rather visionary diplomacy, a curious anticipation of the present politics of the American SWP. It also reveals the unpleasant way Frank and Mandel used to get rid of him (pp. 429–34), which was to become a well-worn methodology, since it was also practised upon the group to which I belonged half a dozen years later, even down to the identical trick of turning people away from world congresses on railway stations (p. 434).
The description of the street politics of the LCR in the 1970s (pp. 72–132) makes clear much that completely mystified me at the time. Where did the odd dancing, skipping and chanting come from when the IMG went on demonstrations? And why did they lead their members into set-piece street battles with the police, ostensibly to break up fascist meetings taking place indoors? It was all apparently borrowed from the increasingly confrontational, putschist and militaristic tactics adopted by the LCR after recruiting large numbers of students in 1968. Accustomed as they were to a high level of demonstration politics, the group’s weak implantation in the labour movement prevented them from being used in any other way. Needless to relate, this little piece of petit-bourgeois adventurism had tragic results in both countries at the same time, with the suicide of Michel Récanati on a railway line in France (p. 132) and the killing of Kevin Gately outside Conway Hall in Britain. Information is also provided on the strong-arm methods allegedly used by the Lambertists against their opponents in the movement (pp. 527–30, 533–6), which, if true, is deeply disturbing.
But as was to be expected, useful details are nonetheless mixed up with a great deal of dross. Jay Lovestone was not expelled from the American Communist Party for belonging to the Left Opposition (p. 369). Pablo was not officially delegated to the founding conference of the Fourth International (p. 327). Pierre Frank was certainly not boosted by the British Trotskyists after the war (p. 342). ‘Chatman’ turns out to be Max Shachtman (p. 347), and Healy gets the user-friendly name of ‘George’ (p. 374). Pierre Frank, whose name is misspelled throughout, inexplicably has his history of the Fourth International, originally written in French, quoted from at second-hand from an English translation (p. 314, n3). But these are trivial slips. Much worse is the misrepresentation of the activities of the Trotskyists during the Second World War, where a thin pretence is made at claiming that, although many of them were Jews, they were soft on fascism and indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews (pp. 302–5), an accusation even directed at Henri Molinier, who was himself killed by the Germans (pp. 305–7). This nasty stuff obviously goes all the way back to the unpleasant ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ propaganda of the French Communist Party, notoriously one of the most wretchedly servile Stalinist outfits in Europe.
So this is certainly a book to be recommended, but only to those who know a great deal about its subject to begin with: and for all the detail contained in it, it never rises from the level of anecdote to that of analysis.
As a leading advocate of the Popular Front, Zilliacus was on good terms with the Communist Party of Great Britain, but this relationship came under considerable strain after September 1939 once the party, in line with the Communist International’s obeying the logic of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, turned from supporting to opposing the Allies’ war against Germany. The scope of his anger was extended to Moscow itself after the invasion of Finland at the end of 1939, when he more-or-less accused the Soviet regime of using Nazi methods.
The rift between Zilliacus and Stalinism was largely patched up once the Soviet Union joined in the war after the German invasion in June 1941, and although Zilliacus declined the invitation to join the Communist Party as a clandestine member within the Labour Party, on the grounds that he had always been a Labour Party member and that to work within it as an agent of another party would be dishonest (Potts gives no indication that he had any political differences with Stalinism at this point), he remained on good terms with the Stalinists, and his material appeared intermittently in their Labour Monthly. Zilliacus was not a wholly uncritical admirer of the Soviet regime like D.N. Pritt, yet he went much further than most people in giving it the benefit of the doubt. Hence when a court case blew up in France over Viktor Kravchenko’s book I Chose Freedom, he went to Paris in early 1949 and publicly defended the Soviet regime against the charges made by the defector. Potts shows that he claimed that the purges ‘had rooted out a potential fifth column in the Soviet Union’, and that the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ‘had been used by Stalin to strengthen Soviet defences’, and he also notes that Zilliacus declared that another three decades would have to pass before the Soviet Union could enjoy the sort of civil liberties that existed in Britain (pp. 131–2). Zilliacus’ widow added that he deplored the existence of labour camps in the Soviet Union and looked forward to the day when they no longer existed, although one cannot ascertain from this book whether these sentiments were publicly expressed. Zilliacus’ pro-Soviet outlook and his sharp – and very much justified – criticisms of Labour’s increasingly fervid anti-communist foreign policy led to his expulsion from the Labour Party in 1948. Parenthetically, it is rather droll to see the citing of a certain T.G. Healey [sic] of Streatham CLP imploring the Labour Party conference in 1949 about ‘the right’ of party members ‘to speak, to differ, and to have their opinions democratically discussed without fear of expulsion and fear of threats’ (p. 140). Somewhat strangely, Potts misses the opportunity to point to the stark contrast between Gerry Healy’s plea for tolerance in the Labour Party and the tyrannical internal regime of any group that he controlled.
Then came more trouble. Zilliacus had become very enamoured with Tito, and he was rash enough to continue with his political and personal friendship with the Yugoslav leader after he had been excommunicated by Stalin. The lack of gratitude of the Stalinists for all Zilliacus’ enthusiastic work for them was shown when, in a particularly splenetic attack upon the Wall Street Glamour Boy in Belgrade, Ivor Montagu accused Zilliacus of ‘frantically treading water in an ocean of lies’ (Labour Monthly, December 1949). Yet even after being so cruelly knifed by his former Stalinist allies, his big book I Choose Peace, published in late 1949, was largely uncritical of the Soviet Union, and even softened some of his previous criticisms of Moscow’s actions during the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including heavily revising his assessment of the invasion of Finland. And then his name – along with those of Labour MPs Richard Crossman and George Wigg, Noël Coward (!) and the former Stalinist hack Claud Cockburn (who must have fallen out with Moscow over something or another) – appeared in the accusations uttered by the defendants in the show-trial of Slánský and other Czech leaders in 1952. Although he was greatly upset by all this, one gets the feeling that his criticisms of Stalinism were more often in a tone of regret and bewilderment than of anger, as if the Stalinists’ actions were more a matter of individual transgressions and accidental excesses than being systemic iniquities.
Zilliacus was permitted to rejoin the Labour Party in February 1952, and he became the MP for Gorton in Manchester in 1955. He continued to stand on the left of the party to the end of his life in 1967, and although he was seen as too pro-Soviet by many Labour left-wingers, he worked with them in the Victory for Socialism campaign. He continued to oppose the Cold War orientation of the Labour leadership, was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposed the Vietnam War, and re-established friendly relations with Stalinism as the post-Stalin thaw took hold.
There are quite a few minor slips in the text. Some are simple spelling errors. The appalling Russia correspondent of The Times at the time of the revolution was Robert Wilton, not ‘Wilson’; Stalin’s cultural ideologue was Andrei Zhdanov, not ‘Zhadanov’, the socialist historian was Julius Braunthal, not ‘Brauthal’; the Conservative friend of Tito was Fitzroy Maclean, not ‘McClean’; the Conservative leader was Alec Douglas-Home, not ‘Douglas-Hume’; the Trotskyist leader was Gerry Healy, not ‘Healey’, and the Japanese protectorate in Manchuria was Manchukuo, not ‘Manchukao’. Others are a result of the commonplace British disease of ignoring diacriticals that can be applied these days with modern computerised typesetting. The Spanish Republican Premier was Negrín, not ‘Negrin’; the Czech President was Eduard Beneš, not ‘Benes’, and other Czechs mentioned were Rudolf Slánský, not ‘Slansky’, Antonín Novotný, not ‘Novotny’, and Alexander Dubček, not ‘Dubcek’; the Polish Stalinist leader was Władisław Gomułka, not ‘Wladislaw Gomulka’, and the Yugoslav writer whom Zilliacus helped was Jovan Običan, not ‘Obican’ or ‘Orbican’.
More important, however, is that our author accepts without question many of Zilliacus’ assumptions. Potts makes no criticism of the analysis promoted by Zilliacus that the majority of the Tories opposed collective security because they were putting their class interests before the interests of the nation. This idea, also subscribed to by the Stalinists – in 1938, Harry Pollitt condemned Chamberlain for ‘betraying the national interests of the British people’ (For Peace and Plenty, p. 26) – is bizarre, as it assumes that in a capitalist country there is a national interest standing above the class interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Elements within the bourgeoisie can make incorrect judgements of how their class interests are to be defended, but as it is their nation, it is hard to see how they could have a class interest separate from a ‘national’ interest.
It was not purely anti-communist prejudice that dissuaded many British bourgeois politicians, commentators and analysts from advocating a collective security agreement with the Soviet Union. There was a feeling, noted by Potts, although he refrains from expanding upon it, that an Anglo-Franco-Soviet bloc aimed at containing Germany would rapidly lead to an armed confrontation. There was also a widespread feeling, one which Potts does not mention, that the purges and trials indicated that there was much amiss in the Soviet Union, and that a regime which exterminated its most talented military officers was not exactly a reliable military ally. What is called ‘appeasement’ was not a case of surreptitiously backing Hitler, nor of putting class interests before those of ‘the nation’, but an attempt to play for time, to gain a couple of years so that Britain’s in-depth rearmament scheme could get going before war came. The process which led to the coining of the biggest political insult in the British political lexicon was an attempt by Chamberlain and his colleagues to defend the interests of British capitalism, which, after all, was what their job was all about.
Ultimately, Potts fails to make a critical appraisal of Zilliacus’ career. Whilst readers of this journal would appreciate the manner in which Zilliacus maintained a critique of the pro-US, pro-Cold War and pro-capitalist Labour Party right-wingers, it is essential to point out that defending the interests of the working class both in Britain and in the wider world also required establishing a healthy distance from Stalinism. Zilliacus was an intelligent man. He was not afraid of standing out against the stream of orthodoxy, and we have seen that he faced sharp attacks from both right-wing Labourites and Stalinists. Yet his conception of socialism was essentially élitist. Looking at his two major works, I Choose Peace and A New Birth of Freedom?: World Communism After Stalin of 1957, one can find precious little indication of any recognition on his part of the idea of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. We should not be too surprised at this, as the ‘Marxism’ to which he was attracted in the 1930s was the Stalinised distortion popularised by the likes of John Strachey that both paralleled and reflected the consolidation of the Soviet bureaucracy into a self-conscious ruling élite. It is telling that this, the most crucial factor of Zilliacus’ political approach for three long and eventful decades, gets not one word of criticism in this book.
Indeed, even Souvarine’s much later anti-Communist writings are a measure of his abilities, as particularly the transcripts of a series of six radio talks he gave in 1957, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, testify. These, which make up the second section of the book, are in content harsh and ahistorical indictments of the early Bolshevik regime, an index of Souvarine’s political regression and degeneration. It also has to be said that in their form of argumentation, their systematic treatment of the subject and their linking of arguments in a systematised train of causality, they bear a great deal of resemblance in form to some sort of Marxist polemic.
Even in his anti-Bolshevik degeneration, as a mitigating factor, Souvarine does not appear to evidence the anti-democratic, rampant fear and contempt for the working class that many anti-Bolshevik writers ooze in every pore of their writings. Rather, Souvarine engages in a critique of the Bolsheviks on the grounds of their alleged lack of democratic legitimacy and support, using as the centrepiece of his argument a disputation of the really representative character of the soviets as 1917 went on, and their allegedly increasingly irregular character and lack of clear demarcation as to whom they represented, etc.; the point of this being simply a lead-up to his main point of the characterisation of the October Revolution as merely a coup, carried out by the Bolsheviks with the support of allegedly merely a radicalised section of the working masses, and not the broad masses themselves.
Souvarine cites Lenin as stating that under the Provisional Government, Russia was now ‘the freest country … in the world’, and then proceeds to attempt to analyse how the Bolsheviks allegedly exploited this freedom in order to destroy it. He does not, however, manage to address the one glaring question that arises from this contention: why, if this freedom was inherent in the ‘democratic’ bourgeois regime he is polemically defending, the masses were not prepared to lift a finger to defend this freedom against the ‘unrepresentative’ Bolsheviks and the soviets which they had hegemonised by the time of October. In reality, the freedom to which Souvarine was appealing against the revolution was not a product of the bourgeois regime, but rather of the revolution itself and of the power of the masses to defend their freedom against the bourgeoisie, a situation that could only continue as long as the masses continued to possess the power to do this, a power which no bourgeoisie can tolerate for more than an historical moment. Thus the logical outcome of this freedom, which eventually was a product of the existence of dual power through the Soviets, was its consolidation through the removal of the bourgeoisie from state power, which of course happened when the Military Revolutionary Committee seized power as the military arm of the Bolshevik-dominated soviets at the end of October 1917.
Souvarine’s anti-Bolshevik argumentation ranges the whole gamut, from the suppression of the Constituent Assembly, to the withering of the soviets, the undeniable contradictions between the Bolsheviks’ pre-revolutionary promises on war and peace, the problem of non-Russian nationalities, etc. The eloquence of his argumentation on these questions, again, is considerable; what however is missing is the real class context. Souvarine by this time was a firm supporter of Anglo-Gallic-American ‘democratic’ imperialism, and he reads back into history his own illusions in the inherently democratic nature of these powers, the core of the Entente, in order to make an argument that the Bolsheviks had, for instance, promised to offer to the world a democratic peace, and even to wage a revolutionary war if their offers were spurned, and were then forced into the ‘shameful’ Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Souvarine argues, from the standpoint of a French Social Democrat, that this treaty only became a dead-letter when the Entente powers defeated Germany – empirically true, of course, but rather a non-argument, as the treaty was of course imposed on the Bolsheviks with the support of German Social Democrats who had exactly the same servile attitude to their own ruling class’ ‘democratic’ pretensions. Of course, in a later period this ‘tragic’ disagreement between Social Democrats about which imperialist gang had been the most ‘democratic’ was swept under the carpet in the interests of the Cold War. For all the eloquence of his anti-Bolshevik polemic, Souvarine, like other former Marxists, such as James Burnham, who have attempted to use some of the rational analytical tools of Marxism against Marxism itself, is forced by the very nature of his political thrust to ignore crucial facts and distort the real meaning and context of historical events in order to make reality fit his own regressive political programme.
Other material in the book, however, gives a very different picture of Souvarine. He was the author of a useful pamphlet, The Third International, published by the British Socialist Party in 1920, which gives a propagandistic and historical treatment of the origins of – and necessity for – the Comintern. One assumes the publication of this work must have been part of the preparation for the unification of the various forces that stood with the Comintern in Britain into a unified Communist Party later the same year. As indeed his series of articles on building a Communist Party in France throws considerable light on his rôle as certainly the most forceful, politically far-sighted and evidently able of the leaders of the early French Communist Party – he was effectively the political centrepiece of its left wing, which fought internally and at the time against the petit-bourgeois, centrist nature of the many of the PCF’s initial cadre. Indeed, the capacity, demonstrated in these contemporaneous writings, of Souvarine for intransigent struggle despite temporary political isolation is so remarkable that it really underlines the tragic waste of his later career, when he was robbed of his revolutionary commitment and outlook as a result of the burgeoning monstrosities of Stalinism. In this, of course, Souvarine was one of many; unfortunately, he was one of the most able.
The selection of his writings on Stalinism that makes up part four of the collection also makes quite interesting reading. His 1978 essay Stalin: Why and How? purports to offer an analysis of how Leninism led to Stalinism through Lenin’s utilisation of Stalin’s organisational talents to suppress dissent within the party in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Souvarine’s explanation of this contains at least elements of truth in terms of the imperceptible shift of the Bolsheviks away from the democratic aspirations which animated the party before it took power. It undoubtedly adds to the corpus of material on the origins of the power of Stalin in the party apparatus that he later was able to use with such effect against his factional opponents. Its subtle conclusion, of Stalin as Lenin’s ‘illegitimate son’, however, illustrates the programmatic distance Souvarine himself had travelled. While it makes a reference to Lenin being the ‘practical creator’ of ‘a verbal pseudo-Marxism, simplistic and caricatural’, allegedly the starting point of Stalinist ideology, it offers not even the hint of a positive attempt to put things right in terms of unfalsifying Marxism. Since Souvarine had by then convinced himself that the Entente was the fount of progressive development in those days, this is hardly surprising.
A fairly nondescript piece on the NEP and the later ‘New Course’, and its implications for the PCF, shows Souvarine in his days as an early supporter of the original Russian Left Opposition, to the extent of echoing the Opposition’s defence of the Bolsheviks’ 1921 ban on factions. This contrasts somewhat with a later (1930) essay on the Five Year Plan. Showing Souvarine in political motion, the essay is scathing about the economic adventurism and atrocious consequences of what was in fact the decisive event in transforming the USSR from a recognisable, if badly damaged and decomposed, product of a proletarian revolution into something qualitatively different and historically unprecedented. Be that as it may, Souvarine also directs his fire at the Left Opposition’s position of giving critical support to Stalin’s alleged ‘left turn’, which of course laid the basis for many capitulations of oppositionists to Stalin, and certainly was a reflection of an understandable, but comprehensive, misunderstanding of the situation. As a renegade, Souvarine’s insights are not without value in casting light on these events.
The collection rounds off with a short biographical sketch of the Bolshevik party’s veteran archivist, David Riazanov, and a piece on the work of the Marx-Engels Institute that Riazanov founded in Moscow. Again from the early 1930s, before Souvarine’s rightward motion had fully unfolded, it gives another glimpse of the intimate connections of Souvarine with the most historically grounded, most cultured elements of the revolutionary Comintern.
All in all, this little collection has much to recommend it in illuminating the career of this contradictory and historically quite important figure, and in once more making useful material on the origins of French Communism available to an English-speaking readership.
In the introduction, Al draws some critical conclusions about what became Trotskyism, either from his own experience and study, or from the content of the first two sections of this book. They include the mythology of a continuity of Trotskyism from 1923, when in fact the first wave of Trotskyists outside Russia largely vanished. Neither was it Trotskyist as such, which also applies to the Russian 1923 opposition, nor was Trotsky a part of the latter, and he specifically repudiated the former. ‘The modern international Trotskyist movement … goes back to a second wave originating in the Joint Opposition in the USSR. The majority of its personnel were Zinovievists …’ (p. 13) These were the people who had expelled the first wave, promoted ‘Bolshevisation’, helped construct ‘Leninism’ and ‘Trotskyism’, proclaimed the latter, along with ‘Luxemburgism’ and ‘Brandlerism’, a deviation akin to ‘Menshevism’, and all in the service of denigrating Trotsky and removing him as a potential successor to Lenin. ‘Bolshevisation’ destroyed the democratic structures of the Communist parties, imposing a top-down command system, as well as instituting unquestionable rule over them by Moscow. It did the groundwork for Stalinisation. Al refers to the unpleasant features common to the Trotskyist organisations, describing them as bearing ‘more than a passing resemblance to Stalinism’ (p. 13). This can be attributed to the origins of the second wave in the Zinovievist political school.
The first essay by Fabrol, The Prelude to Stalinism, explains what ‘Bolshevisation’ was in the French Communist Party (PCF), and its consequences. A key figure in this process was Alfred Lepetit, the Comintern representative, who must have been sent to France following his stint as Zinoviev’s mouthpiece in the German Communist Party (KPD) Central Committee, where he was known as August Kleine or Guralsky. Once his boss decided to scapegoat Brandler and Thalheimer for the absence of an uprising in October 1923, to link Trotsky with them via Radek, in order to shift any blame from the ECCI and to discredit Trotsky, Guralsky was mobilised to help. He wrote this gem in the KPD’s theoretical organ in March 1924: ‘The alliance between Brandler–Thalheimer and Radek–Trotsky in the German question is no coincidence. It concerns the fundamental questions: de-Bolshevisation of the RCP [Russian Communist Party] and the European parties or retaining the Bolshevik tutelage in the RCP [sic!] and Bolshevising the European parties.’ Guralsky’s rôle in Germany is not mentioned in the book.
The piece by Clavez, entitled The Bureaucratisation and Destruction of the Party, shows how Zinoviev got Albert Treint to head the PCF, and how the Zinovievists began ‘ridding the party of all the elements who had accumulated any experience’, in order to replace them with ‘recent members… incapable of questioning the correctness of the general line’ (p. 38). He quotes Trotsky on Treint from 1929, stating that ‘Zinovievism was a mixture of extreme leftism and centrism’, and accusing him of wanting ‘to apply Zinovievist methods within the framework of the opposition’ (pp. 41–2). Trotsky’s definition is false. The leftism of the Zinovievists (advancing revolution as the only solution, no serious work in the mass organisations, then gross opportunism when forced to take a stand – that is, the rejection of transitional politics) is merely one variety of centrism, and one can observe it in the practice of the Trotskyists most of the time. In fact Clavez sees James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party as ‘the Trotskyist group where Zinovievist influence is most striking’ (p. 43), and illustrates it by quoting from the appalling book The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. Of course, Cannon trained a whole strand of the British Trotskyist movement, and to them his book was a sort of bible.
Fabrol’s second essay, The French Communist Party and Trotsky, focuses on how ‘Bolshevisation’ changed the PCF, both in composition and its leadership, and how an apparatus was also created. He recounts the struggle over Trotsky in the RCP and its echo inside the PCF, where he was very popular. It mentions the discovery by the Bolshevisers of an ‘international Right’, which conveniently included, not genuine right-wingers, plentiful in the PCF leadership, but all those whom Zinoviev needed to remove from the leadership of the parties who had come out in support of Trotsky, protested against the denigration of him within the RCP, were suspected of support for him while also blaming the ECCI for the failure of the October 1923 uprising in Germany, and had opposed the scapegoating of Brandler and Thalheimer. Fabrol blames the ECCI for the failure, pointing out how Zinoviev first justified the retreat of the KPD, only to condemn it later, and sees ‘Bolshevisation’ as being one of its main consequences. He quotes from an article, probably authored by Guralsky, in the PCF’s theoretical organ, on the new ideology of ‘Leninism’: ‘… only the theory, tactics and practice provided by Lenin and applied by his pupils are truly correct … any other methods and theories developed even by the best revolutionaries (like Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg) are false, and are only survivals of the old methods and theories of the social democratic left’ (p. 54). The removal of all opposition and creation of ideological conformity undertaken by Treint was also going on elsewhere, he writes, naming Ruth Fischer in Germany. Actually the first task was in the hands of Anton Grylewicz, assisted by Werner Scholem, in the KPD’s Orgbüro. The former led the minority of the Leninbund which fused with the rump Wedding Opposition in March 1930 to create the German Trotskyist grouping, while the latter had a relationship with the Trotskyists during the 1930s. Scores of workers’ leaders, old Spartacists, were expelled by them.
Boris Souvarine’s How I Came to be Regarded as a Trotskyist begins the second section. It was written many years later when he was an anti-Communist, but it is very useful anyway, and it also criticises some of Trotsky’s inconsistencies. One can usually get some mental stimulation from Souvarine’s writing.
Next comes the Second Letter to the Members of the Communist Party: The Reply of the Three Expelled, by Delagarde, Monatte and Rosmer. It informs party members of what has gone on and why. Looking at the Zinovievist concept of the party, it makes the crucial point that its policy ‘in no way lies in developing the class consciousness of the proletariat, but in creating the greatest possible number of conformists, bootlickers and sluggards’ (p. 88). It looks at the wrecking of the trade union work and how ‘the great task of preparing a current of opinion favourable to international trade union unity was sabotaged even more’ (p90). We see a description of the centrism with a leftist face referred to above. It also insists that ‘we are not acquainted with “Leninism” or “Trotskyism”’.
Rosmer’s About the “Final Warning” Given to Trotsky: The Myth of Trotskyism follows. In it Rosmer explains the debate in the RCP in 1923, its causes and consequences. In the conclusion, he insists ‘we are not Trotskyists, since there is no such thing as “Trotskyism”’ (p. 113). In A Ridiculous Gesture, Rosmer explains why the PCF leadership attacked Max Eastman’s Since Lenin Died, a book they had not yet read, describing its contents and why the RCP leadership required that it be condemned by the sections of the Communist International.
This section ends with The Reply of the “Nucleus” to Trotsky’s Two Requests, which is the answer of Rosmer and his comrades to Trotsky’s asking of them to close down their journal La Révolution Prolétarienne and to appeal to the ECCI against their expulsions from the PCF. It is worth giving a few key extracts:
Rosmer and the others saw ‘Bolshevisation’ as ‘the departure point for a break with the previous policy of the Communist International, and it amounts to a return to social democracy. It has substituted a sickly and extravagant boastfulness for revolutionary realism.’ (p. 128) They saw no point in appealing to it, and saw a need to maintain La Révolution Prolétarienne.
These texts should contribute to some rethinking and demystification regarding Communist history, particularly concerning the so-called Trotskyist current. Perhaps a subtitle should have indicated that the contents intended to clarify and demystify rather than perpetuate the post-1929 version. One could go on from here to examine what came from Zinovievism apart from the unpleasant regimes and methods of the Trotskyist groups. The Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927, for example, heavily influenced by Zinoviev’s group, expresses support for the Urbahns–Fischer–Maslow group, by then expelled from the KPD, which it saw as embracing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of old worker Bolsheviks. Yet the platform of the Left Opposition of the KPD was leftist, as was the Letter of the 700 before it. For example, it saw the KPD leadership as being in the hands of the right wing, as did the Platform of the Joint Opposition. Was Thälmann’s leadership right-wing? By the late 1920s, Trotsky had no support outside the Soviet Union, apart from tiny groups and individuals, and with the capitulation of the Zinoviev group he ended up inheriting those of the latter’s supporters abroad, as well as elements even more sectarian. His position on the German October shifted from blaming the ECCI – that is, Zinoviev – to adopting his scapegoating of Brandler. Needless to say, neither he nor his German adherents ever made an analysis. He also adopted the label ‘Left’ for his current and took over the Bolshevisers’ hostility to the ‘Right’, when he had never been nor was ever regarded as a leftist, and the label which had previously described sectarians had now become a virtue. Rosmer et al. saw ‘the most “leftist” leftism’ of the Zinovievists as an abandonment of ‘revolutionary realism’, that is, transitional politics, and ‘a return to social democracy’, whereas I see it as a variety of centrism. Nobody would deny the fact that Trotsky was a revolutionary realist, but his movement ended up heavily influenced by Zinovievist ‘leftism’. More research needs doing following up these texts.
From original and contemporary French sources, these texts only touch on events beyond France, but August Thalheimer, one of the those identified as scapegoats for the German retreat in 1923, wrote a substantial text both analysing the Fifth Comintern Congress and subjecting it along with ‘Bolshevisation’ to a thorough critique. It was sent to the organs of the KPD and Comintern organs, but was suppressed, only being published in 1993 in Germany. It looks at the debate over Trotsky, the German events, and the removal of the Communist party leaderships, not just in France and Germany, but in the Polish and Czechoslovak parties. It examines the ideas of ‘Bolshevisation’, the installing of ‘blank pages’ untainted by a past in the social democracy, who would receive instructions by the ‘tried and tested’ Bolsheviks in Moscow, the universalisation of Russian experience, etc. Then it deals with the ‘United Front from Below’, the Workers’ Government as a pseudonym for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, among other things. An English translation is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming edition of Revolutionary History.
In other respects, too, Sagan is not a dedicated follower of fashion, and remains loyal to his own intellectual formation as an East Coast Jewish intellectual coming to maturity in the late 1940s, influenced by Marx and Freud, repelled by McCarthyism but accepting the overall framework of the Cold War, and situating himself on ‘the left wing of the possible’ (p. 554), in a way that the generation of renegade ‘68ers so prominent in our own universities would have massive difficulty in understanding. Accordingly, Sagan has none of the modish hostility towards the Enlightenment so prominent in most recent academic work influenced by Foucault and post-modernism. Despite his considerable reservations about Rousseau, he has a very positive view of the Enlightenment as a whole, remarking, for instance, that ‘the Enlightenment was one of the great achievements of the Early Modern Age’ (p. 4). Moreover, he has no time for post-modernism, contemptuously remarking that ‘the notion that we live in a post-modern world is the latest manifestation of the triumph of the wish for omnipotence over reality’ (p. 551).
Far from being opposed to ‘grand narratives’ like so many recent critics of Marxist historiography, Sagan has a ‘grand narrative’ of his own about the ‘struggle for modernity’, and a large portion of the book is devoted to an exercise in historical sociology influenced by Marxism, but trying to supersede it. Whilst the primary focus is on France, attempts, sometimes flawed ones, are made at comparisons and serious engagement with the giants of classical bourgeois sociology, Durkheim and Weber, as well as a continuing dialogue with Tocqueville, which enliven a text which draws much empirical detail from the recent historiography of eighteenth-century France. Inevitably, an attempt is made to downgrade the role of both class struggle and economic developments in favour of intellectual and cultural factors, but the bourgeois character of the French Revolution is accepted, and the positive rôle of many ideas about liberty and equality that it put on the agenda for the first time is acknowledged. In short, this section cannot be condemned out of hand as reactionary or sensationalist, and has some interest for those concerned with the history of the modern world.
However, the book eventually seems to lose its balance in a way that makes the earlier chapters seem irrelevant, and closes down genuine debate. One problem is that the relatively nuanced and calm discussion in the earlier chapters is not sustained whenever references are made to the events of 1793–94, and once the book shifts its main focus to the Terror (pp. 327–507), the text becomes much more of a politically-engaged polemic than a reasonably detached exercise in historical sociology, as well as switching away from long-term trends – sometimes over several centuries – towards very short-term developments – sometimes a matter of days. Moreover, although a close reading of the early chapters would reveal intermittent traces of ideas derived from psychoanalysis within the more frequent and more conventional sociological concepts, in Chapters 15–22 psychoanalysis suddenly becomes the overwhelmingly dominant mode of explanation as a sort of deus ex machina. Although Sagan’s own attempts to link theories about paranoia and borderline personalities to vivid case-studies of figures like Robespierre and Rousseau are actually quite readable, and are by and large quite convincing, on occasions we get subjected to lengthy quotations from psychoanalysts like Kernberg, whose turgid and mind-numbingly repetitive prose is reminiscent of Stalin on a particularly bad day. Whilst it seems quite likely that Robespierre ended up close to psychosis in the last months of his life – indeed I am sure that I am not alone in feeling Sagan is far too cautious in his qualifications here, as Robespierre’s last speech seems completely demented – the attempts to explain general trends in this fashion are far less convincing.
This is not just a question of extravagant rhetoric, although the use of the word ‘Cannibals’ in the book’s title seems a little excessive – and sensationalist – despite Sagan’s sincere attempts to draw analogies with literal cannibalism, about which he wrote in an earlier book – Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (1993). Barbaric as it may have been, the display of severed heads, on pikes or otherwise, was not unique to the French Revolution. The demonisation of the Jacobins and the idealisation of the Girondins in which Sagan engages in this section seem to mirror the paranoid ‘splitting’ into ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ he diagnoses in Robespierre. Even on the evidence that Sagan presents earlier in the book, one is bound to conclude that each faction aimed to eliminate the other, and that the Girondins had no more conception of a ‘loyal opposition’ than the Jacobins. The fratricidal struggle between former comrades is closer in character to that between the Parcham and Khalq factions of the Afghan Communist Party in the 1970s than to the rivalries of a modern parliamentary democracy. Once one accepts that neither faction was playing by any rules, it seems reasonable to judge them on the basis of their policies and the social composition of their support base. Since Sagan is not really a conservative, he is intermittently disingenuous about the extent to which the Girondins were linked to the propertied élite and the Jacobins to the urban poor, desperately trying to obfuscate the rational basis of the struggle on the ground in favour of a focus on the more paranoid elements of political discourse (which did indeed equal anything produced by the Stalinists in the late 1930s).
There is very little mention of the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 in the book (and, in contrast to the other French revolutionary constitutions, it is totally absent from the index). He admits ‘only the constitution of 1793, adopted but never actually put into practice, written after the coup d’état of May–June that created the Jacobin dictatorship – only this could be considered as establishing a radical democracy, wherein there was full male equality of political rights’ (p. 40). He then claims that ‘the Jacobin dictatorship, of course, had no actual intention that le peuple should rule, just as the Stalinists in the 1930s, with their glorious, liberal, egalitarian constitution, did not expect that the sovereignty of the people would become a reality’ (p. 40). The comparison with the Stalin Constitution of 1936 seems far-fetched; the Stalin Constitution was a nod in the direction of alien bourgeois constitutions during the Popular Front period, whilst the 1793 Constitution differed radically from all existing ones, and did not add to the regime’s respectability vis-à-vis internal élites or foreign powers. The 1793 Constitution was the first constitution anywhere in the world to call for universal male suffrage, and inspired generations of radical democrats both in France and elsewhere until its implementation in practice, however briefly, in 1848. Sagan himself also has to confess that ‘it was only the third and most radical of the Revolutions [the Jacobin of June 1793 to July 1794] that was passionate enough on this issue to risk the abolition of slavery itself’ (p. 65). By the time Sagan gets round to looking at the Terror in detail, ‘the third and most radical of the Revolutions’ has been downgraded to a mere coup, and, unsurprisingly, the major difference between Jacobins and Girondins in relation to slavery is never reiterated. It is of course true that the Girondins were far more sympathetic to the rights of women than the Jacobins, and that the Jacobins repressed the pro-Girondin women’s organisations, so Sagan makes much of this (pp. 391–3) – the only issue on which the Girondins could be said to be to the ‘left’ of the Jacobins. Sagan’s praise for Danton is tiresome; he was undoubtedly a corrupt, unprincipled careerist opportunist who never had any moral qualms about sending others to the guillotine, and one suspects he was the Jeffrey Archer of his day, not the Jacobin equivalent of Nikolai Bukharin (although Sagan, for whom even Bukharin would be an ‘ideological terrorist’, does not make the analogy). Conversely, Sagan’s failure to show any similar sympathy for the ‘non-bourgeois radical Hébert’ (p. 125), who seems to have been a more consistent friend of the sans-culottes than Robespierre, suggests that Sagan’s intermittent pose of sympathy for the sans-culottes exploited and betrayed by the Jacobins is little more than a rhetorical device.
Sagan is inevitably not content to act as an intellectual apologist for Thermidor, and to leave it at that. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to find a parallel drawn between Jacobins and Leninists, that Lenin and Trotsky are branded ‘ideological terrorists’ and that the ‘latest revelations about Lenin’ (p. 411), the precise nature of which, confusingly, are never specified by Sagan, prove that he was no better than Stalin. One could go on arguing with this enthusiast for the Girondins and the Mensheviks, but to what end? Although I can easily guess the political and psychological labels he would pin on me, there is in the end something very sad about old Sagan, who genuinely wishes that the USA had a progressive income tax and a proper welfare state, and consistently opposed the Vietnam War (albeit without understanding that the only way it differed from numerous other wars of American imperialist aggression was in its employment of a massive number of ground troops), but ends up preferring the ‘Conservative dictators’ Franco and Mussolini to the ‘ideological terrorist’ Lenin.
Demonstrating Chamberlain’s opposition to a collective security alignment is not a difficult job; indeed, it would be very hard to rake up any evidence to the contrary. The idea of a growing feeling within Britain’s political élite in favour of collective security is credible – my own research demonstrates the existence of similar sentiments running well beyond the Popular Front milieu – although it has been disputed; Philip Bell reckons that there was ‘only scattered opposition’ to Chamberlain’s policies in the Foreign Office (The Second World War in Europe, Harlow 1977). However, trying to demonstrate that the Soviet government was serious about physically confronting Germany in 1938–39, particularly over Czechoslovakia, is quite another question. Shaw takes as given Moscow’s willingness to engage in a collective security bloc. She cites Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov telling R.A. Butler during the Czech crisis that ‘if France acted the Soviet would act too’; this she claims was a ‘wholly unambiguous answer’ (p. 39). Shaw also declares that Geoff Roberts ‘argues convincingly’ in his The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (Basingstoke 1995) that (in Roberts’ words) the Soviet regime ‘made it crystal clear that they would fulfil their mutual assistance obligations’ to Czechoslovakia, ‘and agitated for France to do the same’ (p. 38).
This is very thin stuff. Litvinov’s statement was not ‘wholly unambiguous’; he was saying that Moscow would only move if France did so, and there were considerable doubts whether it would. Six months before the Czech crisis, in March 1938, Litvinov told the US ambassador to the Soviet Union that ‘France has no confidence in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union has no confidence in France’. With the Czech drama in full swing, Litvinov told the League of Nations Assembly that the Czech government had insisted upon Soviet aid being conditional upon French moves in support of Czechoslovakia, and added: ‘Thus, the Soviet government had no obligations to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her.’ This information is hardly inaccessible, it has been in the public domain for over five decades, having appeared in the late 1940s in the second volume of Max Beloff’s The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929–1941 (London 1949).
As for Roberts, Shaw is either unaware of or wishes to avoid mentioning the fact that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and that his book was part of the efforts of Stalinists to rescue what fragments that they imagined were recoverable from the general wreckage of the official communist experience, one of which was the idea of Moscow’s quest for a collective security deal. Roberts’ book, like his previous work Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler (Bloomington 1989), of which sizeable chunks are repeated almost word-for-word in his later volume, is not, unlike Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy (London 1958), exactly a whitewash of Soviet policy in the Popular Front period, but it does promote the idea that the Soviet regime wished above all to forge an anti-German alliance with Britain and France, but was unable to do so on account of the obduracy of the powers-that-be in London and Paris. For all this, however, Roberts shows considerably less optimism about the possibilities of successful collective action in defence of Czechoslovakia than Shaw reckons he does, as he realises that it was not likely when official attitudes in France and Britain were taken into consideration. He also notes that when Romania’s government finally agreed to allow Soviet troops to traverse its territory, there were tight restrictions upon the numbers it would allow through. Roberts adds that Soviet historians always maintained that the USSR would have fought alongside Czechoslovakia and that an offer of unilateral aid was made, then declares that ‘they were strangely vague and contradictory as to when and how this offer was made and never produced any hard evidence to confirm their assertions’. Roberts states that the Soviet Union probably would have unilaterally supported Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack at the time of Munich, but even were this the case – and in my opinion it is an extremely big ‘if’ – he considers that there is little it could have practically done.
Shaw might have profited by investigating some of the other analyses of Soviet foreign policy objectives in general and Moscow’s behaviour over Czechoslovakia in particular before putting all her money on Roberts. Just because an opinion is accepted by a majority of observers does not necessarily mean that it is correct. Nonetheless, the idea that Stalin was not serious about confronting Germany over Czechoslovakia has been argued by various analysts – for instance, Beloff’s aforementioned work and Robert Tucker’s Stalin in Power (New York 1990) – in a far more convincing manner than Roberts’ contention that he was willing to stand up to Hitler.
Shaw gives but a cursory look at one extremely authoritative statement on Soviet foreign policy, Stalin’s address to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 10 March 1939, and prefers merely to repeat what Roberts says about it. A careful perusal of the text would show that Stalin discounted any idea of German designs on the Soviet Union. He noted that ‘the majority of the non-aggressive countries, particularly England and France’, had ‘rejected the policy of collective security’, yet he made no call for a Soviet alliance with them, and only vaguely stated that he would support nations which were ‘victims of aggression’. Whilst admitting that the ‘non-aggressive states’ were ‘making concession after concession to the aggressors’, he declared that the Soviet Union was continuing its ‘policy of peace and of strengthening business relations with all countries’, and intended ‘to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them’. This was intended to warn the Western democracies that they could not necessarily rely upon the automatic support of the Soviet Union in any future European war. In short, Stalin was publicly making the none-too-subtle implication that he could well conclude some form of deal with Germany. Stalin’s speech certainly does not sustain Roberts’ contention that he was still pushing the collective security line, and Shaw and Robert’s bland words on the speech – merely that it condemned the Western powers for abandoning collective security, and warned that Moscow would not sacrifice itself for the sake of others – overlook the very real hints that are not only obvious in retrospect, but were recognised for what they were at the time by certain perspicacious observers.
Shaw correctly points out that the anti-communist stance shared by many right-wingers, that Moscow was hoping for a war between Germany and the West European democracies so it could launch a revolution across a war-devastated Europe in the aftermath, was an absurdity. Nonetheless, one cannot leap, as Shaw does, from that assumption to conclude that Moscow was essentially sincere in its negotiations with Britain and France over collective security. Stalin wanted above all to avoid being dragged into a war. So long as he believed in the possibility of a collective security bloc that could contain Germany, he went along with the idea, on condition that he felt that it would not lead to war. His minions could therefore spout all manner of commitments about standing by Czechoslovakia because he was pretty certain that the determining factor in the situation – the French guarantee to Czechoslovakia – was worthless. He could hold the moral high ground without actually doing anything about it.
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Chamberlain and his colleagues were extremely chary about an alliance with Moscow, which is why the mission to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 was arranged in such a deliberately insulting way, one can argue that the Soviet proposals for collective security earlier that year were framed in such a manner, particularly in respect of the Soviet ideas about what constituted ‘indirect aggression’ (which British officials not inaccurately considered were Moscow’s veiled intentions to move into the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe under the guise that it could be threatened through rather than by them), that the Soviet leadership knew that they would almost inevitably be rejected by Chamberlain. The fact is that any meaningful collective security arrangement would eventually have brought a confrontation with Germany a lot closer, and that is something that Stalin wished to avoid. In the cold dawn of the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the former US fellow-traveller Louis Fischer stated that Stalin signed that pact when he realised that Britain and France were serious about taking on Germany. An agreement with Britain and France would have meant war with Germany; an agreement with Germany had allowed him to avoid a war and find some pickings in Eastern Europe (Stalin and Hitler: The Reasons for the Results of the Nazi-Bolshevik Pact, Harmondsworth 1940). This seems a reasonable deduction, particularly when one considers Stalin’s extreme caution during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which culminated in his instructions to avoid doing anything that could be construed by the Germans as a provocation a mere two hours before the Wehrmacht stormed into Soviet territory on 22 June 1941. It is thus fair to conclude that Stalin’s main aim was avoiding a war. If the sight of the mighty German war machine massing at the western border of his own country could not bring Stalin to prepare his forces to resist an invasion, how can anyone honestly expect him to have taken action over a country whose borders were not contiguous with those of the Soviet Union, and whose continued existence was not absolutely vital to the survival of his regime?
To conclude, this is not a satisfactory book. The evidence that Shaw uses as proof of her contention that Moscow was serious about forging a collective security bloc is inadequate, and has long been challenged by writers who have provided a different and much more convincing picture of Stalin’s intentions. This undermines her basic thesis, for even had the British government adopted a collective security policy, it would have been of little consequence had Moscow in one way or another blocked it. There are also a few minor slips in the text. It seems unlikely that people thought that ‘the Soviet Union wanted to exploit the crisis in Czechoslovakia to expand eastwards’ (p. 38), the name of the Czech President Beneš is incorrectly rendered as ‘Benes’ throughout the book, and the initials of Yezhov, Beria and Vyshinsky are strangely rendered as ‘MNI’, ‘MLP’ and ‘MA’ in the text and (in the latter two cases) in the index. Finally, although this is not aimed specifically at Shaw, would it not be a good idea for historians to move away from using the terms ‘appeaser’, which since the period under discussion has become perhaps the strongest insult in the British political lexicon? Even in the 1930s, this term was distinctly loaded with the implication of treachery, which, whatever one may think of Chamberlain’s political outlook and tactical acumen, cannot be laid at his door.
What makes this particular exhibition so rewarding is the opening sections, with posters rich in the imagery of class against class, spanning a whole wall. The colouring is vivid: contrasting, conflicting hues of red and black give additional focus, conveying the sharp contradictions present within post-revolutionary society. In an early poster, three rotund, overweight top-hatted bankers depict the bourgeoisie. They sit on top of a heap of human figures; many of them are prostrate. Their semi-clothed bodies contrast sharply with the well-tailored raiment of the capitalists – exploitation is raw and explicit. Each one of the three capitalists wear his own national flag of imperialism: one British, one French, and one American. They represent the real combined threat to the Russian Revolution and the international working class. In this straightforward but simple way, the workers’ need for internationalism across the world is graphically portrayed.
The use of posters is deliberate. In a large country, with little in the way of a modern communication system and a population that was often semi-literate or even illiterate, the image could sum up much that was full of great meaning. It was a way of keying into the symbolic system of thought which all human beings use as a reference point in their intellectual journey of reasoning and reflection. For all of us, the image is full of meaning, it is our collective inheritance of oppression and liberation, often communicating more than a volume of text. Even if you could not read, you could at least see, you could at least visualise what was being intended, and in so doing understand. This form of comprehension allowed the process of education to be more than political, once the connection between the image and the slogan had been made. Then a case for functional literacy was being made to a mass audience that had so often been denied even a basic grounding in the tools necessary for the accessing of knowledge.
In this way, the illiterate peasant could apprehend the policy of the Bolshevik government in faraway Moscow, or feel the support of the revolutionary workers of Petrograd. The revolution animated and energised society in a way that the passive party politics of a bourgeois representative democracy never can. The direct, accountable election of workers’ delegates to factory committees and the local soviet broke the bonds of machine politics. This in itself required new more direct and open forms of communication and reasoning. The traditional intelligentsia could just not keep pace with the rapidly changing forms of discourse, unless they also changed and moved with the new contemporary currents. This some of them did willingly, for in a new revolutionary public democracy new forms of thought breathed new life into communications, and the public wall poster became one way to express this.
In certain cases, actual campaigns were organised through the medium of posters. The problem of starting up a mass literacy drive was linked to the need to increase production. In the countryside, rural literacy campaigns were organised via the dual symbols of the book and the sickle. Better education and improved grain output promised improvements throughout society.
In a lithograph by an unknown artist from 1921, entitled Red Soldier! Attack Disorder, the Civil War is set alongside the attempts to revive a collapse in the economy. The military front is transposed, and the failures in the economy are viewed as a new enemy, sapping the strength of the working class and its alliance with the peasantry. Posters were also used in an auxiliary manner, to advertise other visual media through which the revolution was working. As Russian film companies toured the countryside with mobile cinemas, the directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein used the new techniques of montage, repetition and superimposition.
The posters on display are a real memory bank of struggle, a legacy of collective capital based on the rise and decay of the Russian Revolution. The drive to industrialise is well represented, with the famous slogan of ‘Soviets plus Electrification’ blazoned across one poster, alongside the inevitable poster of Lenin. In this way, the inner workings of the revolution is charted through its twists and turns. The posters seem to become more and more lifeless as the 1920s and 1930s roll on, something which in my view is not unconnected to changing political atmosphere. As the witch-hunts and victimisations build up in a crescendo under Socialism in One Country, the process of mass purges expands into the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Millions die as great victories for socialism are proclaimed. Rather like the government-sponsored campaigns, the posters become wooden and mechanical, stripped of movement and life.
Finally, the Great Patriotic War: a poster taken from the window of the TASS building and made by the Kukrinksy Collective. It is made of gouache on paper and is entitled Thunderbolt. A threatening all-black background represents the darkened sky of Russia in the winter of 1942–43. An outline sketch of Hitler, together with Nazi tanks covered in swastikas, cower under a reign of three thunderbolts bearing down on them from the sky above. Each one of three streaks of lightening is depicted in national colours, one American, one British and one Russian. The revolutionary edge of anti-fascism is blunted in true Popular Front style.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Koba the Dread
Martin Amis
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, pp. 306
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, pp. 306
THERE are two parts to this book, which are worth distinguishing. The first, which has excited the greatest media interest, is also the most straightforward. Martin Amis uses this book as an opportunity to settle his accounts with any sort of left-wing history of 1917. Amis raids the published books of Dmitri Volkogonov, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes to argue that the Bolsheviks were all murderers, their party was every bit as bad as Hitler’s, and that anyone who ever displayed the slightest sympathy for Bolshevism was in fact a self-deceiving fan of dictatorship. This study is only different from previous accounts in that it is more didactic, more laboured, and less well-informed. Such writers as Figes, for all their many faults, do at least make a pretence of familiarity with the counter-arguments. In Koba, by contrast, there are no references, just assertion, special pleading and bile.
Martin Amis boasts instead of never having read Isaac Deutscher or Leon Trotsky. ‘Trotsky’s History is worthless as history, as historiography, as writing.’ Why? Because ‘truth, like all other human values is indefinitely postponable’. In effect, Amis states that Trotsky could not have written a fundamentally true book, because of the dishonest part he played in Russian life. What strikes me most is the infuriating, obvious hypocrisy – which must have been evident to Amis himself – a harsh test of truth – and does our author live up to it? Historians, at least, are charged with guilt when we get our facts wrong. There is no danger, however, of Amis ever feeling the same regret. Hitler had a five-year plan (p. 36). No Mart, four. All Russia’s anarchists, we learn, were eliminated by Lenin in 1918 (p. 26). Even Makhno? ‘Lenin’s famine’ of 1921–22 killed five million people. A partial truth here. The numbers are plausible, but not the fault. Not even Richard Pipes, armed with all his footnotes culled from Black Hundred newspapers, claims that. As for the absent sources, we might as well add Lenin to the list, judging by the way Amis ‘quotes’ The State and Revolution as saying that socialism depended on ‘unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person’. Read, Mart, please.Koba did at least force Amis’ old friend Christopher Hitchens into a brief and welcome spasm of protest. ‘Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann’, writes Amis. ‘Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.’ To which Hitchens replied by reminding Amis of the rôle played by Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition in documenting the murders. Hitchens also wrote of Serge and James, and of all the dissidents who fought to spread the news of the Terror. ‘The “Nobody” at the beginning of Amis’ sentences above is an insult’, Hitchens wrote, ‘pure and simple.’
Mention of Hitchens brings me to the second (and perhaps more interesting) theme of this book. The book was written as the second of Amis’ interventions into the field of autobiography. His previous book, Experience, modestly pointed out that the greatest of all British authors had all made this leap, and here Amis was good enough to name himself, in case any reader missed the point. Amis’ literary brilliance was manifested in such treats as a 2000-word section justifying the expense of his most recent visit to the dentist – too many Madeleines, perhaps? The same flaw is manifested in this book, not least in the section where Amis explains how he has been able to understand the pain of the gulag, because one night he caught his daughter crying and renamed her Butyrki, after the Moscow Prison (p. 260). Such is not empathy, but stupidity. The pain of Terror was more than a few sleepless nights. The bathos of this passage is pure Amis, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote combined. Unlike most novelists, he has a true sense of historical perspective, a feeling for issues that matter. Then he takes this gift, and wastes it, in the most extraordinary, arrogant manner. Such is the man.
Why should Amis bother to write a second-rate history of the Terror? Koba the Dread only makes sense if it is seen in the context of Experience, for both together represent a long hymn of praise to the virtue and sagacity of Amis’ father Kingsley. Amis senior left to posterity two legacies, one amusing novel, variously self-plagiarised after, and the personal example of a saloon-bar existence, spent in the delightful company of his equally sexist, racist and homophobic friend, Philip Larkin. Kingsley Amis would have been long forgotten, were it not for his son.
In Koba, Kingsley Amis is the invisible, central character. He appears at the beginning and the end. In the first pages, Martin quotes from his father’s student correspondence, when Kingsley was briefly a Communist. The last pages are a Letter to My Father’s Ghost, ending with the words, ‘Your middle child hails you and embraces you.’ It is depressing to see an author who once showed great potential succumb to his father’s mistakes.
Dave Renton
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Review
The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini
Tom Behan
The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini
Bookmarks, London and Sydney 2003, pp. 134, £8
The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini
Bookmarks, London and Sydney 2003, pp. 134, £8
TOM Behan’s study is part of the renewed political and cultural debate on the history of the Arditi del Popolo. For a number of years now, the Arditi, the very first Italian anti-Fascist organisation, has been the subject of new historical research, as demonstrated in the works published by Ivan Fuschini, Marco Rossi, Eros Francescangeli (whose Arditi del Popolo was reviewed by Barbara Rossi in the last issue of Revolutionary History) and Luigi Balsamini. This interest is further enlivened by this latest volume, mainly written for a British audience, which retraces the development of social struggles in Italy from the Great War to the events of October 1922, with the March on Rome and the appointment of Benito Mussolini, leader of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, to the head of the Italian state.
After an introductory chapter dealing with the specific features of the Italian workers’ movement, Behan’s engrossing book starts analysing the merits of the workers’ and peasants’ struggles in the Italian Biennio Rosso of 1919–20, when in the aftermath of the October Revolution and the traumatic experience of trench warfare, the Italian proletariat also began to fight for better working and living conditions. It was then that socialist, trade unionist and political organisations started to find a wider consensus, increased their mobilising capabilities and took on a novel radical character, both in their slogans – ‘Fare come in Russia!’ (‘Let’s do what the Russians did!’) – and in the struggle on a practical level, such as the demonstrations by manual workers, the armed clashes against the Royal Constabulary and the factory occupations in September 1920. The Italian ruling class was quick to react, however, and the ‘great fear’ of revolution pushed to bourgeoisie – especially the big landowners – to finance the Fascists and their squads (the Fasci di combattimento) in their punitive and ‘anti-Bolshevik’ actions. The Fascist movement was created in March 1919 as an heterogeneous movement, in an attempt to keep anti-bourgeois nationalist feelings allied with the more anti-socialist conservative circles, and it showed its true face as a staunch defender of the established order. In their beatings of striking workers, arson attacks against union branches and workers’ papers, assaults against left-wing municipal offices and murders of several trade unionists, the Black Shirts were often actively encouraged by the state machine, with tacit agreement or even concrete support with weapons, resources and men: ‘police forces would not only lend weapons to Fascists, turning a blind eye to their attacks – they also fought alongside Fascists in attacks on the left’ (p. 47). The Italian liberal state regarded Fascism as the ‘healthy force of our nation’, a political movement which was indispensable to defeat proletarian organisations and put an end to their ‘insolence’ towards bourgeois power.But the growth of Fascism was far from irresistible, as the political and military experience of the Arditi del Popolo shows. Born in June 1921 after a split in the Arditi d’Italia, an alliance representing veterans in the Italian army shock-troops, the Arditi del Popolo association began life in Rome under Lieutenant Argo Secondari, an anarchist, to counter Fascist aggression using the latter’s means of a military organisation, war-like tactics and swift deployment, in order to provide the workers and their organisations and demonstrations with an armed defence. This anti-Fascist movement spread rapidly throughout Italy, uniting workers and leading figures in various parties and of differing shades of political opinion. Communists, anarchists, socialists, republicans, revolutionary syndicalists and sometimes even Catholics set up ‘arditi’ units in the workers’ districts of many Italian cities: ‘Socially the organisation was predominantly working-class, with a very high proportion of railway workers.’ (p. 62)
The actions of Arditi del Popolo made history in Italy thanks to a few massive mobilisations and battles, like the march in July 1921 in Rome’s Botanic Gardens, when over 2,000 Arditi organised a military parade and engaged in some fighting against the police, and again in the town of Sarzana, where 600 Fascists on a punitive action were successfully repelled, with the death of 18 Black Shirts and about 30 injured.
But in August 1921, just a few weeks after its establishment, the new association met a new obstacle to its growth: the ‘peace pact’ signed between the Italian government, the Fascists and the Socialist Party (PSI). With this move, the PSI distanced itself from this proletarian defence movement, and gave the repressive machine of the state its chance to disrupt the ranks of the Arditi del Popolo. It was only in a few cities that the organisation was able to sustain the onslaught and contain Mussolini’s violence against the workers. This happened in Parma during several days in August 1922, when the popular districts of the city, led by Guido Picelli and ‘his Arditi’, erected barricades and blockades, and managed to repel for five whole days an assault by thousands of Black Shirts who descended on Parma in their largest military operation before the March on Rome.
In the last chapters of his book, Behan rightly shows how it was the mistakes made by left-wing parties rather than state repression that undermined the strategy of the Arditi del Popolo. On the one hand, the Communist Party led by Amadeo Bordiga ordered their members to withdraw from the movement and to establish instead exclusively ‘communist’ squads; this strategy failed to take seriously the danger of an authoritarian turn on the part of the ruling class, and rejected the line of the Third International which favoured a ‘proletarian united front’. On the other hand, the PSI’s reformist leadership and the trade union movement asked from their members a pacifist and lame stance, while waiting for the ‘flash in the pan’ of Fascism to subside; in this case too their passive trust in the laws and institutions of the liberal state betrayed a profound lack of understanding of the phenomenon of the Fascist squads and their activities:
It is obvious that the ADP represented a clear alternative to the inadequacies of both PCI and the PSI. And it was an alternative that many rank-and-file communists and socialists instinctively wanted to be part of. The tragedy for all concerned was that the communist and socialist left never came together around an enlarged ADP to form a united front against Fascist attacks. (p. 108)
Behan’s book analyses in depth this particular issue and shows that even within the leadership of the PCI opinions and views differed. Bordiga’s sectarian directives contrasted with the position taken by Antonio Gramsci, who, in line with the analysis elaborated by the Third International, looked with interest at this ex-soldiers’ movement, from the point of view of both the Arditi’s determined armed resistance against Fascism, and its proletarian composition. But even Gramsci, and with him the editorial board of the Ordine Nuovo in Turin, was not immune from contempt for the PSI, thus demonstrating the enduring effect of the divisions of the Biennio Rosso and the split in the Communist Party in 1921. But at times, in some cities and when faced with Fascist violence, the PCI’s grassroots instinctively went beyond the short-sighted sectarianism of their leaders. The anti-Fascist victory in Parma is very symbolic in this sense: young communists there entered the ranks of the Arditi del Popolo with their party squads. They then worked together with the Arditi for over a year and built the armed defence for Parma in August 1922. But this united front during the ‘days of Parma’ was an isolated experience, and at the end of October 1922 Mussolini was finally able to form his first government. The Fascists’ rise to power, achieved with the support of the ruling classes and the monarchy, marked the start of a new phase in Italian and international history: within the space of a few years, this new totalitarian regime became the reference and model for Hitler’s Nazis and more generally for other reactionary states in the twentieth century.
Tom Behan does not shy away from exposing the political errors made by the workers’ movement in the early 1920s, and he uncovers their historic reasons, with a final and explicit reference to the current political situation, where he suggests that many useful lessons can and should be drawn by modern anti-fascist movements from the experience of the Arditi. For while it is true that neo-fascists can be defeated in the first instance, as a result of workers’ united action, in the long run we can only defeat fascism if we also defeat the capitalist society that harbours and supports it.
William Gambetta
******************Trotskyisms
Daniel Bensaïd
Les Trotskysmes
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2002, pp. 128
Les Trotskysmes
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2002, pp. 128
IT is refreshing to read a book like this one, not because it can be said to rank as a great classic, but because, as regards general histories of the movement which is named after Leon Trotsky, as opposed to studies of particular events or countries, it is exceedingly difficult to find any work which can be trusted as a reliable statement of historical fact. Of course, any piece of historical writing must inevitably be biased, but in this area the bias has been more obtrusive than it should have been, I guess, in most cases. Daniel Bensaïd, however, does not see it as his duty to defend every position and turn of the tendency which he supports, remarking: ‘As far as our heritage is concerned, filial piety is not always the best gauge of fidelity, and one often finds more fidelity present in critical infidelity than in dogmatic intolerance.’ (p. 5) Admirable sentiments!
The author’s honesty is also evident from the title he chooses: ‘Trotskyisms’ as opposed to the singular. The furious debates in the movement and the numerous different tendencies to which it has given birth make the plural highly suitable. Bensaïd, indeed, goes further than identifying the major divisions and split-offs – there is an intriguing diagram on page 4 which attempts to represent these – by recognising ‘an Anglo-Saxon Trotskyism …, a European (mainly French-speaking) Trotskyism …, a Latin-American Trotskyism, or, again, an Asiatic Trotskyism (in China, Vietnam, Japan and Sri Lanka)’ (p. 7). This latter view is not substantiated in the text, but perhaps a case could be made out for it.The inevitable contrast with the previous ‘in-house’ summary of the history of the movement, issuing from the pen of the lugubrious Pierre Frank, The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists (Ink Links, 1972), can be seen even in the chapter headings, viz.:
- The Baggage of Exodus
- Trotsky’s Last Struggle
- Heritage without Directions for Use
- The Scattered Tribes
- Waiting for Godot
- Entrism, or How To Get Out?
- History Bites Us in the Neck
- A New Epoch
- End, or Continuation.
Pierre Frank would never have used such headings: their evident irreverence was totally foreign to him. Frank’s history covers the period of 1923 to 1968, whereas Bensaïd’s goes from 1923 to the Thirteenth World Reunification Congress of January 1991 – the subsequent 10 years are briefly treated in the book’s last chapter. We have a chance, then, of comparing both authors up to 1968 – which is why it would be a mistake to chuck Pierre Frank’s book in the dustbin, despite its uninspiring tone. For example, an interesting point of comparison is the European Conference of 1944, held under the Nazi occupation, and the position of the French Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, one of the three Trotskyist organisations operating in France in the Second World War. Here Bensaïd gives some details of Marcel Hic’s Theses on the National Question (July 1942) – Hic was one of the leaders of the POI and was also responsible for the operation of the International Secretariat at that time. Hic’s theses argued for support for the right of distinct linguistic communities (such as the Bretons, Basques, Flemings, Walloons, etc.) to be governed, to dispense justice and to receive an education in their own language. Nonetheless, both Frank and Bensaïd seem to agree on the ‘social-patriotic deviation’ (in Frank’s words) of the POI in the Second World War. (On the French Trotskyists in the Second World War and the Fourth International in general therein, see Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no. 3, Autumn 1988, and Volume 3, no. 4, Autumn 1991. See also Ian Birchall, With the Masses, Against the Stream: French Trotskyism in the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no. 4, Winter 1988–89, pp. 34–38.) Another more dramatic comparison between the two authors can be seen in their respective attitudes to the non-fulfilment of Trotsky’s optimistic predictions concerning the likely results of the Second World War, that is, his expectation of revolutionary upheavals in the ‘advanced countries’ and the downfall of the Soviet bureaucracy (see Trotsky’s Writings 1935–36, p. 260, for one example of this prediction). Bensaïd states candidly:
Rather than revise the pre-war analyses in the light of unforeseen factors such as the balance of atomic terror, the predominant view among the leaders of the International, in Europe as well as in the US, was to consider the postwar period as a pause or interval in a war which was bound to continue in various different forms. (p. 58)
A valuable admission – one which the complacent Pierre Frank does not care to make. For Bensaïd: ‘The unforeseen turn of world events in 1947–48 would have demanded a more radical redefinition of the International’s project.’ (p. 64)
Precisely, and it is here that Bensaïd locates the source of the fissiparous tendencies (as expressed in the old joke: ‘two Trotskyists, three factions’) which took shape in the 1953 split and on other occasions (page 64 yet again). It is interesting to compare this judgement with the recent verdict of Phil Sharpe, who also links the fractures and fissions to the fate of Trotsky’s pre-war perspective:
What was the alternative to this catastrophist perspective of war–revolution (which seemed to be realised with the Korean War), was it to adjust to capitalism and reformism? No, it was necessary to transform the catastrophe perspective and accept the stabilisation of Stalinism and capitalism, and to become propaganda organisations that developed Marxist theory and attempted to develop Marxist culture within the proletariat. This would represent the theoretical preparation for future class struggle. Instead of this, the short-term failure of the catastrophe perspective led to splits in the Fourth International and adaptation to Stalinism as revolutionary by the majority sections. The minority led by the American SWP had the catastrophist perspective of the American Theses and held that America was the imminent centre of world revolution. This prediction was not sustainable and when the Cuban revolution occurred the US SWP adapted to it as the centre of non-Stalinist world revolution. (Further Studies in Dialectical Materialism, n.d. [2002], p. 151)
There is more in Bensaïd’s book that can be chalked up on the credit side. Discussing the 1953 split, he questions, for example, the advisability of compelling French and US comrades to vote on electoral tactics or priority tasks in Bolivia, and vice versa (p. 84). This is not to say that comrades in one country should not give advice to those in another, but that the different national sections should be allowed a degree of autonomy. There are some useful observations on entrism (p. 92), where the author highlights the danger of reducing political work to operating within a non-revolutionary organisation and confining oneself to ‘giving advice’ to the leadership thereof. Bensaïd has a fluent style, and parts of the work, such as the sections on the purges in the USSR, Trotsky in exile and Vorkuta, are movingly written, but perhaps the best pages in the book are those dealing with the results of attempting to carry out a strategy of guerrilla warfare in Latin America in the wake of the Cuban revolution – a tactic which ended in the death or incarceration of many good comrades. There is also a useful discussion of the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 (pp. 113–4), where, in opposition to predictable tendencies within Trotskyist ranks calling for support for the presence of Russian troops or, alternatively, condemning their operations there outright, a minority including such figures as Tariq Ali, Gilbert Achcar and Michel Lequesne took the view that the way forward was to call for withdrawal of the troops together with support for the most progressive elements of the Afghan resistance (presumably this meant Ahmad Shah Masoud and his forces). Finally, as one might expect, Bensaïd has a lot to tell about developments in Western Europe (outside the UK) from 1940 onwards – especially from 1968 onwards – and the information he gives here is a principal reason why someone should undertake to translate the book into English.
Despite having the above virtues, it must be said that this work is not the definitive history of the movement that we need, for a number of reasons. To take the least serious defect first, there is very little on the UK – which from one point of view is just as well! Anyone wishing to appreciate developments in these islands would do well to begin with Ted Grant’s recently published History of British Trotskyism (Wellred Publications, 2002) plus the writings of Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson. There is a brief mention in Les Trotkysmes of Natalia Trotsky’s denunciation of the postwar Fourth International (pp. 66–7), which could have been given more emphasis and content (Natalia’s letter is reprinted in The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the IS: Some Documents, Pluto Press, 1971, pp. 100–4). Finally, but by no means least, it is surely impossible to write an authoritative history of the Fourth International without dealing with the experiences of its supporters in those countries where they succeeded in gaining the most significant support, namely, the USSR, China, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Chile (in the 1930s) and Bolivia.It only remains for me to add that the bibliography at the end of Bensaïd’s book is valuable in its own right, and to give the author’s conclusion, which I wholeheartedly endorse:
The collapse of ‘really non-existent socialism’ has freed the new generation from those anti-models that clamped down on the imagination and compromised the very idea of communism. But the alternative to the barbarism of capital will not appear without a serious assessment being made of the terrible century which has just ended. In this sense, at least a certain Trotskyism, or a certain Trotskyist spirit, is by no means outmoded. Its heritage without directions for use is probably insufficient, but nonetheless necessary in order to demolish the equation of Stalinism with communism, to free the living from the weight of the dead generations, and to turn the page of disillusionment.
Bien dit, camarade! Bravo!
Chris Gray
****************
The Norman Conquest
Marjorie Chibnall
The Debate on the Norman Conquest
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 168, £12.99
The Debate on the Norman Conquest
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 168, £12.99
ONE of the oldest radical ideas, in England anyway, is the claim that before 1066 Britain had been some sort of democratic or classless utopia, which was then destroyed by the Norman Conquest. In the seventeenth century, the Levellers and Diggers used this claim to argue that the property of the rich was no more ‘god-given’ than the poverty of the rest. Fifty years ago, Christopher Hill demonstrated that such ‘Norman Yoke’ myths had lasted from the fourteenth at least until the nineteenth century. The one demand of the Chartists in the 1840s that was never achieved was the campaign for annual parliaments. This idea was supposed to go back to Saxon precedent, but had actually entered into the radical dictionary through the ‘historical’ work of such eighteenth-century republicans as Major Cartwright.
Was there ever anything more than myth to this view? Chibnall’s book is an account of the different attempts made by historians to judge the Norman Conquest. One long-held view was that King William had been responsible for introducing ‘feudalism’. Historians used this latter word in a narrow sense, to refer simply to the social relationships between landowners. In the legal theory of the Middle Ages, the king supposedly owned the land, and the lords occupied it temporarily, offering military services (or taxation) in return for the temporary right of possession. Such a theory was criticised in the early 1990s by Susan Reynolds, who demonstrated that the relationships between members of the aristocracy were hardly changed by the Conquest. Different lords occupied the land before and after 1066, but the relationships between them were similar. Reynolds also made the case that such a legal definition of feudalism described little of what matters from the period. Far more important, she suggested, was the relationship between lord and peasant. No historian has recently suggested that class divisions began with the Conquest.The most interesting chapters of this book are the early ones. In periods before the twentieth century, there was not quite the same professional barrier between historians and other writers as exists now. Novelists, pamphleteers and others offered their own grand theories as to what had gone wrong. My favourite villain is Thomas Carlyle, who complained that if the Saxons had indeed enjoyed an equal society, this showed how degenerate they were. Without the Norman Conquest, he wrote, the Saxons would have remained ‘a gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no grand combinations; lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity’. If only! The later chapters of Chibnall’s book suggest that with the increased specialisation of historical knowledge, such romantic accounts have been superseded. We have instead the micro-studies of linguists, philologists, numismatists and archaeologists, all divided into rival sub-disciplines, and protected by arcane and specialist jargon, whose main function is to shield the author from criticism. We know the Saxons differently, but do we understand them more?
Dave Renton
***************
In the Thick of Workers’ Struggles
Tony Cliff,
In the Thick of Workers’ Struggles: Selected Writings, Volume Two,
Bookmarks, London 2002 pp. 453, £14.99
In the Thick of Workers’ Struggles: Selected Writings, Volume Two,
Bookmarks, London 2002 pp. 453, £14.99
THIS is the second volume of the late Tony Cliff’s selected writings. The first was reviewed in Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no. 2. Unlike the first, which ranged over the whole international scene, this second volume is focussed almost entirely on Britain.
The first article, The Labour Party in Perspective, was written in 1962. The Socialist Review Group, of which Cliff was the leading light, had originated as a split from Gerry Healy’s ‘Club’ in the Labour Party. The basic political differences had been over the nature of the Soviet Union, which the Club considered a degenerated workers’ state, still to be defended, while Cliff’s group considered it a state-capitalist regime. I have in the past expressed the opinion that these theoretical differences did not justify a split, and could have continued to be debated within one organisation. In fact, it was the intolerance of Healy that was the main cause of the split, although it is also evident that Cliff and his supporters were not sorry to part company with the Club. Both the Club and the ‘State Caps’ (as Cliff’s group became known) were still committed to working in the Labour Party. Both groups advocated similar policies – extension of nationalisation under workers’ control and without compensation, freedom for the colonies, support of workers’ industrial struggles, etc. The immediate cause of the split was the Korean War which broke out in 1950. But though the Healyites were for the defence of North Korea as a deformed workers’ state, while Cliff’s group was not defencist, both were united on the immediate issue, opposition to the war and demanding the withdrawal of British troops from Korea. However The Labour Party in Perspective indicates clearly that, by 1962 anyway, the differences were on more than the nature of the Soviet Union, but encompassed a completely different analysis of the current objective situation in Britain and the capitalist world – particularly on the question of reformism. The Healy group, denying the reality of the postwar boom, continued year after year to proclaim the imminence of the revolutionary crisis, the imminent collapse of reformism, and the equally imminent (if not actual) radicalisation of the working class. The revolution was for tomorrow, and the building of the revolutionary party to lead it could not wait. In contrast, Cliff’s article was a sober assessment of the real situation. Acknowledging the continued hold of reformism on the working class, Cliff wrote: ‘So long as capitalism is expanding and the conditions of the workers are improving, and are seen to be able to be ameliorated within the framework of the present social system, reformism has stronger roots than revolutionary socialism.’ (p. 11)In this same article, Cliff explicitly criticised the perspectives Trotsky outlined in 1938 and which were adopted by the founding conference of the Fourth International. Cliff argued:
During the 1930s, in the face of the deep world slump, unemployment and fascism, it looked as if the foundations of reformism were undermined for good. In that period and making a prognosis for the future, Trotsky wrote ‘In the epoch of dying capitalism, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards, when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petit-bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.’ If serious social reforms are no longer possible under capitalism, then the knell of bourgeois parliamentary democracy is sounded and the end of reformism is at hand. The war, as a sharpener of contradictions in capitalism, would, according to Trotsky, lead to the acceleration of these processes. But the obituary was written too soon. War and the permanent war economy gave a new lease of life to capitalism and hence to reformism in many of the Western capitalist countries. (p. 10)
One may question whether the theory of the permanent war economy was a sufficient explanation in itself for the continued growth of capitalism. But the rest of Cliff’s argument cannot be faulted. It is in sharp contrast to the parrot-like repetition of the 1938 Transitional Programme as if it were received wisdom for all time.
Cliff, in this article, also rejected Lenin’s argument that reformism had its roots in a ‘labour aristocracy’ bought over by crumbs from the imperialist exploitation of the colonies, and representing a minority of the working class. Cliff asserts that:
… the history of reformism in Britain, the United States and elsewhere over the past half-century – its solidity, its spread throughout the working class, frustrating and largely isolating all revolutionary minorities – makes it abundantly clear that the economic and social roots of reformism are not in ‘an infinitesimal minority of the proletariat and the working masses’, as Lenin argued. (p. 10)
Cliff’s explanation of reformism and its hold on the working class is still true today.
When Cliff wrote this article in 1962, the level of industrial struggle was relatively low, Cliff’s group consisted of only 60 or so members, and Cliff could see no other milieu to work in than the Labour Party. The next decade saw an intensification of industrial struggles and attempts by both Labour and Tory governments to tame the unions through legislation, which triggered mass strikes and protests. Cliff’s group changed its name to the International Socialists. There was no specific decision to leave the Labour Party, just a pragmatic realisation that there were more promising fields outside it, among the students and in industry. But the problem of combating reformism and overcoming the isolation of revolutionary socialists continued.When the second piece in this volume was written, in 1966, Harold Wilson’s Labour government had been elected, and was trying to deal with industrial militancy and the problems of the competitiveness of British industry on the international market through its incomes policy. The pamphlet Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards was addressed directly to industrial militants. With an introduction by Reg Birch, an ex-Communist Party then Maoist activist prominent in the AEU, it was published by the London Industrial Shop Stewards’ Defence Committee, and reflected the organisation’s turn towards work in industry. According to Colin Barker, who co-wrote the pamphlet with Cliff, it sold 10,000 copies, ‘most of them to workers, themselves often Communist Party militants’. It argued that profits and prices could not be controlled while capitalism continued, and that the Labour government’s ‘incomes policy’ amounted to nothing more than an attempt to hold down wages and involve the top union leadership in the disciplining of their own members by the imposition of penalties on unofficial strikers.
Cliff and his comrades saw a new form of reformism in the growth of unofficial strikes led by shop stewards in opposition to the official union machinery. It was replacing the old ‘reformism from above’, when workers relied on their leaders to implement reforms through parliament, by a ‘do it yourself reformism’ characterised by the workers’ direct struggles and increasing self-reliance and initiative.
The pamphlet noted two weaknesses. The struggles were fragmented, consisting of isolated local struggles on a factory basis with little link-up across industries or regions. Aims were largely restricted to the narrow horizon of economic, trade union demands (p. 91). The pamphlet argued the need for a link-up of shop stewards across industries and localities into a nation-wide movement, and the broadening of their horizons to take up the concerns of pensioners, nurses and other non-industrial sections of the working class.
Cliff and his comrades were optimistic that this industrial militancy and new ‘reformism from below’ would supersede the old reformism and develop into revolutionary socialism. But they said nothing on exactly how this transformation was to be achieved. As Colin Barker admits in his introduction: ‘… as experience would suggest, that vision was rather foreshortened. The politics of the movement were most certainly decisive, but there was no automatic link between rising militancy and revolutionary socialism.’ (p. xxi)
The next article, Labour’s Addiction to the Rubber Stamp, noted the growing irrelevance of parliament. ‘Government decisions are not made in parliament. They are made at the points of intersection of industry, finance and the civil service, in the cabinet, the new “planning” bodies and so on – anywhere, indeed, except parliament.’ (p. 124) Since parliament, and also the parliamentary Labour Party, were now mere rubber stamps, the implication was that extra-parliamentary struggle in the factories and in the streets was all important. ‘In the present stage of planned state-monopoly capitalism social democracy enters its third stage. It is neither socialist nor even authentic parliamentary reformist.’ (p. 127)
On Perspectives, written in 1969, sought to draw conclusions from the events of May 1968 in France. Cliff explained the explosive and unexpected nature of the student movement and especially of the workers’ general strike by the ‘deep alienation’ of workers from their organisations.
If the workers in France had been accustomed to participate in the branch life of the trade unions or the Communist Party, these institutions would have served both as an aid and as a ballast preventing the rapid uncontrolled spread of the strike movement. The concept of apathy is not a static concept. At a certain stage of development – when the path of individual reforms is being narrowed or closed – apathy can transform into its opposite, swift mass action. (p. 134)
Unlike some of the other gurus on the left, he did not see the May events as the harbinger of imminent revolution. He continues: ‘By itself apathy, or a declining interest in the traditional reformist organisations (the Labour Party, Communist Party, trade unions, etc.), does not mean the overcoming of reformist ideology. For this a long struggle is necessary …’ (p. 134)
Comparing the revolutionary events in Russia in 1905 with those of France in 1968, Cliff quotes statistics showing that following 1905 wages in Russia rose rapidly from 1906 until 1908. He goes on to comment that on the basis of the Russian experience, Lenin concluded that ‘reforms are possible only as a by-product of revolutionary class struggle … of a movement that is completely free of all narrowness of reformism …’ Cliff adds:
Yet the stabilisation of Western capitalism … made it possible for reforms to be achieved over a long period independent of revolutionary politics. This is the basic difference between the background to 1968 France and 1905 Russia. This is the main objective factor making it possible for the PCF and CGT leadership to transmute a revolutionary general strike into a series of wage demands. The new phenomenon, the May–June mass struggle, has not wiped out the inheritance of 20 years … The new, the revolutionary, grew upon the general period of fragmentation, political lull and apathy. This explains, basically, how the greatest revolutionary struggle was channelled into the struggle for such puny, reformist aims. (pp. 133–4)
This sober assessment by Cliff compares well with the super-optimistic proclamations of other left currents, which saw May 1968 as a precursor to an imminent October 1917. Nevertheless, I wonder whether, despite all his reservations, Cliff was right in applying the adjective ‘revolutionary’ to the workers’ strikes. Were they really striking for revolution? If so, why did the movement subside so rapidly and France experience more years of relative stability? Was 1968 merely an interlude, though a dramatic one, in the long period of postwar capitalist expansion? It is true that every general strike of such magnitude has ‘revolutionary potential’. Certainly de Gaulle thought so, but there is quite a large gap between ‘potential’ and ‘actual’, and the constant use of the adjectives ‘revolutionary’ and ‘crisis’ to describe every blip on the graph of class struggle devalues the meaning of the words. How will we be able to describe the real ‘revolutionary’ situations and the real ‘crises’ when they actually occur?
In the 1970 general election, the Tories were returned to power. Wilson’s Labour government had been forced by the workers’ opposition to withdraw its In Place of Strife policies. The new government attempted to tackle the problem of industrial militancy by enacting an Industrial Relations Bill. The years of 1970–74 saw the most intense industrial struggles in Britain since 1910–14 and the 1926 General Strike. They also saw the most successful attempt by the International Socialists to develop bases in industry. In 1970, the IS produced a pamphlet, reprinted in this collection, The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them. Although written under Cliff’s name, it was a very collective effort based on numerous discussions and interviews with shop stewards and industrial militants. According to Colin Barker:
The book proved to be an immense success among working-class militants. Around 20,000 copies were sold, most of them to shop stewards, often in bundles of anything between five and fifty. Across Britain, Cliff and other IS members were able to speak to sizeable audiences of militant rank-and-file workers, some of whom were attracted to the IS group itself, laying the basis for the development of workplace-based branches. (p. xxii)
The Times of 25 March 1970 carried a half-page review under the title Militants’ Handbook. It is reproduced in this volume.
It is in my opinion one of the best pamphlets addressed to industrial workers. It is obviously well-researched, and it exposes in detail the aims of the employers behind the introduction of productivity deals and ‘measured daywork’. It is worth summarising the arguments. The pamphlet, continuing the theme of the previous pamphlet Incomes Policy, explained how, during the war and postwar period, the workers had, by strong organisation and militancy, turned piece-work to their advantage. Nationally negotiated agreements between the top union officials and the employers’ associations fixed only the general and basic rates of pay. But piece-work prices and bonuses were negotiated on a departmental or factory basis. The shop stewards and the workers, their confidence boosted by full employment, were often able to dictate prices and conditions. This resulted in ‘wage drift’. This was the tendency for actual earnings to rise well above the nationally negotiated rates. It also meant that the employers were losing control of the work process at the point of production. The balance of forces did not allow them to regain control by direct confrontation. Hence the ‘productivity deals’ favoured by employers and governments both Labour and Tory. In exchange for abandoning piece-work and agreeing to flexibility, the elimination of ‘restrictive practices’, concessions on manning, etc., the employers offered immediate wage increases, quite substantial in many cases. The pamphlet warned workers against being taken in. In return for wage increases, which, in some cases, they could have got anyway, workers were being asked to sign away concessions won in the past, agree to speed up, loss of bonuses, extension of shift working, etc. ‘Measured day work’ (MDW) was being introduced to replace piece-work. MDW was defined thus: ‘A fixed hourly rate payment system based on quantified performance standards which have been established by work measurement techniques. When operators fail to reach standards through their own faults, this becomes a question for discipline or retraining.’ Quoting extensively from statistics and verbal and written evidence, the pamphlet explained how this increased exploitation: ‘The workers often received less than half of the savings resulting from the increased productivity.’ (p. 161) It quoted an example given to the Donovan Commission of an agreement reached at CAV Ltd: ‘This bargain was very satisfactory to the company. It reduced the labour force by 17 per cent – one fifth of the savings secured as a result were paid out in the form of extra wages.’ (p. 162)After the initial wage increase (to induce the workers to accept the deal), further wage increases were lower and often dependent on increased productivity. Often the deal did away with cost-of-living adjustments, bonuses, etc. The pamphlet warned that the aim of MDW was to reimpose management control over working conditions, and ‘eliminate traditional shopfloor bargaining and substitute bureaucratic joint bodies remote from shopfloor pressure’ (p. 178). This would reduce the rôle and influence of shop stewards, and increase that of ‘more reasonable’ full-time union officials.
The pamphlet focussed on the question of control, pointing out that most disputes, even the most mundane ones, for example, over tea breaks or washing hands time, were essential fights over control. Restrictive practices and craft demarcations (even those that seemed ridiculous) were at bottom an attempt by workers to retain some control over their working lives. Here the pamphlet tackled the difficult question of how socialists should deal with this. This was a problem I wrestled with myself during my short time as Industrial Organiser for Healy’s Club in Glasgow in the 1950s when discussing with shop stewards in the shipyards. The pamphlet argued that:
… it would be wrong, however, to make a fetish of every traditional practice employed by workers … In essence, the institution of the craft sets a section of workers apart from all others, as an ‘aristocracy’ with exclusive rights to a narrowly defined area of work, which must be jealously defended against the rest of the class … Clearly the objective for socialists should be the elimination of artificial barriers between different crafts and between craftsman and labourer … But equally clearly, this principle cannot be mechanically applied when the attempt to remove ‘craft restrictions’ is made by the employers as part of a productivity deal … Here the opposition to the employers’ attack must be unqualified. But such opposition must not take the form of unprincipled opportunism. Socialists must base their opposition firmly on class rather than craft arguments … To summarise, the following test should be applied … Workers must ask themselves, does this practice help make conditions more bearable? Does it help maintain our earnings or make our employment more secure? Does it add to our control on the shopfloor? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then naturally any concession would be dangerous … But if the practice serves no important defensive purpose, then there is no reason of principle to fight to retain it – though clearly workers will want to get the highest possible price for abandoning it. (pp. 194–5)
This passage is typical of the attempt to deal with real problems in a realistic way, in clear language and without sloganising. The same approach is used in discussing how militants should react in practice to productivity deals and MDW.
The pamphlet recognised the difficulties militants had in opposing the deals which often seemed very attractive to workers. ‘We have seen’, Cliff writes, ‘how many employers are ready to give really large wage increases in return for a seemingly worthless piece of paper that commits shop stewards to no more than future talks on “productivity”.’ (p. 296) Also in some cases, MDW, with its promise of doing away with large fluctuations of earnings from week to week under previous payment systems, ‘appealed to workers’ urge for security’ (p. 297). All this, the pamphlet says:
… builds up pressure on stewards to at least ‘have a look at’ a proposed productivity deal and to a situation where they have to consider the details of the productivity bargain … an inflexible rejection of any productivity deal can lead to a catastrophic division between the stewards and their membership which will be eagerly exploited by the employer and may lead in the end to the acceptance of a far worse deal than was necessary … Once we are forced to consider the details of a proposed deal the question arises of how to maintain the offensive, and how to destroy the worst aspect of the deal in the process. (p. 304)
The pamphlet goes on to describe guidelines elaborated in long discussions with many militants from various industries who had faced numerous productivity deals. The emphasis is on unity, organisation and combativity which can enable workers to fight back successfully; as was done by the Ford workers’ strike which forced the management to abandon penalty clauses and won considerable improvements in the deal (p. 197). All in all, this was a very good pamphlet, which well merited The Times’ description of it as a militants’ handbook.
The publication of this pamphlet, The Employers’ Offensive, in 1970 came at an appropriate time, the beginning of five years of the most intensive and extensive industrial struggles. These included a national building workers’ strike, the first ever national hospital workers’ strike, the first national teachers’ strike, an engineers’ strike against the Tory Industrial Relations Bill, and the Upper Clyde shipyards occupation which forced a government retreat. There were two national miners’ strikes. The first, in 1972, roused widespread solidarity action, including the famous strike and demonstration of thousands of Birmingham engineers that closed the Saltley coal depot. The second, in 1974, forced the resignation of the Heath government. There was the unofficial dockers’ strike that freed five imprisoned dockers (the Pentonville strike). This was followed by an official dock strike lasting three weeks. There were official and unofficial mass strikes and demonstrations against the Tory government’s Industrial Relations Bill in December 1970 and February 1971, and two official strikes in March 1971 by over a million workers. Two hundred separate factory occupations were recorded in these five years.The International Socialists made valiant efforts to involve themselves in these struggles, and to build an industrial base. According to Jim Higgins, the IS membership had grown to 2,351 (of whom 613 were manual workers) by March 1972. By March 1974, they had 3,310 members, including 1,155 manual workers. The group decided to create factory-based branches. Cliff’s pamphlet Factory Branches, included in this selection of his writings, is an attempt to provide guidelines for the work of these branches. It too, as Cliff acknowledges, was the result of a collective effort. Cliff claimed some 32 factory branches at the time of his writing. Sections based on industries and trade union factions were also established. According to Higgins, there were, in 1971–72, six of the former and 10 of the latter and four rank-and-file papers with a print run just short of 12,000.
The real success story of the year 1971–72 was Socialist Worker. Over the period the average print order had gone up from 13,000 to 28,000, with a paid sale of around 70 per cent. It was calculated that the readership was in excess of 50,000. (Jim Higgins, More Years for the Locust, p. 95)
Even though most of the factory branches did not last long, as Colin Barker pointed out in his introduction, and even though the influence of IS, and the Rank and File Movement it inaugurated, never matched the influence of the Communist Party and its Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU), it was nevertheless great progress for a group that had numbered less than a hundred only a few years before.
On the question of the Communist Party and the LCDTU, Cliff gives it credit for its positive rôle in organising the unofficial movements against the Wilson government’s attempts at wage freeze and the Tory Industrial Relations Bill (p. 413). Elsewhere he is critical of the CP’s and the Broad Left’s concentration on winning positions in the union hierarchy and its ambivalent attitude to ‘left’ union leaders, especially over their acceptance of the ‘Social Contract’ introduced by the Labour government of 1974–79.The next two articles, Ten Years On: 1969 to 1979 and The Balance of Class Forces, both written in 1979, review this decade. Cliff divides these years into two periods – 1969–74 and 1974–79:
If one compares the years 1969–74 with even the best period of militancy in Britain of 1900–14 there is no question that this time the struggle was on a much higher level, much more generalised, and the hatred of the government was all prevailing. This chapter ended abruptly with the victory of Labour in February 1974. The next five years were radically different. We did not have one national strike in any key section of the class, although we had national strikes of bakers, of lorry drivers and of provincial journalists. The struggle was incomparably more fragmented; the level was far lower. (p. 369)
Cliff asks why. He answers that the generalising and unifying element of the struggles of 1969–74 was a deep anti-Tory feeling. The alternative to the Tories was the Labour Party: ‘Once Labour was in power that general opposition collapsed.’ However, we should note that only five years had elapsed since 90,000 workers had been striking against the previous Labour government’s In Place of Strife. This implies that either the working class had short memories, or that it was unable, as yet, to break out of the system of the two parties alternating in power; with Labour being seen as the only alternative to the Tories despite all its anti-working class measures. Later, Cliff mentions the workers’ ‘loyalty to Labour even when Labour attacked workers’ living standards’ as being one of the factors explaining the workers’ retreat and the lower level of industrial struggle in the first three years of the 1974–79 Labour government; that is, until the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–79. Should not this have prompted a re-examination of the advisability of Marxists abandoning work through the Labour Party?
Instead, the International Socialists decided to transform themselves into the Socialist Workers Party, seeking to present themselves as an alternative to both Tories and Labour, as well as the Liberal Democrats.The fluctuating course of the class struggle in this period, a mixture of victories and defeats, advances and retreats, took place against a background of expanding capitalism interspersed with recessions, and accompanied by general inflation. But what was the result in terms of workers’ standard of living? Cliff includes tables which show that ‘under the Labour government of 1964–70, notwithstanding the incomes policy, real wages continued to rise, even if slowly’ (p. 385). They continued to rise from 1969 to 1974 under the Tory government. Underlining Cliff’s comments that the Labour electoral victory of 1974, and the trade unions’ acceptance of the Social Contract had undermined the workers’ resistance, real wages went down by two per cent in 1974, by four per cent in 1975, and by five per cent in 1976. Cliff writes: ‘Of course the slashing of wages could not go on. Workers’ resistance had to rise. In the fourth year of the Labour government (March 1977 to March 1978) real wages went up by five per cent, and in its last year by a further seven per cent.’ (p386)
Reviewing the 10 years, Cliff wrote:
In the first five-year period the International Socialists (at present the Socialist Workers Party) expanded from a group of a few hundred – mainly students and white collar – to an organisation of 3,000 to 4,000 members. Something like a third of these were manual workers. We managed to implant ourselves in a number of factories, in a whole number of trade unions … We were involved in the establishment of a whole number of rank-and-file groups, with rank-and-file papers … In the second five years the SWP found the going much tougher. With the Social Contract, not only the trade union leaders, but also the Communist Party – the main organisation of the left in industry – veered strongly to the right. The SWP decided quite rightly to steer to the left. The organisation was kept intact but quite a heavy price was paid. Its members found themselves very often isolated and they had to hold on by their finger tips to their positions in the movement. (p. 372)
It is at this point that we have to relate what was being written by Cliff and his co-thinkers at the time, reproduced in this book, with what was actually happening in his organisation according to other participants. It seems that up till then the IS had been one of the healthier Trotskyist, or neo-Trotskyist, groups. It had a democratic internal regime allowing genuine differences of opinion to be expressed. And it certainly had grown and was beginning to establish roots in the working class and unions, stimulating genuine rank-and-file movements and papers in various industries. Then, it seems, everything started going wrong. According to Jim Higgins, at one time National Secretary of the IS, and other people such as Roger Protz (one-time editor of Socialist Worker), the IS became riven by factional fighting, and there was a move to undemocratic centralism and the expulsion of oppositions. For an account of this, the reader should study Higgins’ book More Years for the Locust (London 1997) and various articles in New Interventions and What Next? by former members. One should be cautious and not accept these versions uncritically; after all they did have an axe to grind. But there is a sufficient weight of evidence to indicate that all was not well. It is a pity that this selection of writings does not deal with the questions that divided Cliff from the main opposition – ‘the IS Opposition’ – except for a reference to one issue.
This issue was whether IS should continue to aim at recruiting shop stewards and convenors and experienced union militants, or target relatively inexperienced youths. We have read how from the 1960s Cliff and the IS placed great hopes on shop stewards as the moving force in the workers’ militancy, providing leadership in the struggle against both bosses and the union bureaucracy. By the mid-1970s, it seems from Cliff’s writings that he now saw them, and particularly convenors, as becoming integrated into the union machinery. For example, on page 399 he mentions as factors in the worsening balance of class forces ‘the weakening of the independence of convenors and shop stewards’ as a result of productivity deals, and their integration into the trade union structure. Elsewhere, he mentions how full-time convenors, permanently away from the shopfloor in their offices with phones, constantly negotiating with management, enjoying perks and expense-paid trips, become alienated from their worker constituents (pp. 405–6). Therefore the IS and Socialist Worker should now concentrate their efforts on recruiting and approaching ‘young workers with very little political tradition, and quite often even with very little trade union experience’ (Cliff in Internal Bulletin, May 1974, quoted in Higgins, p. 151). In the next Internal Bulletin, a critic, Ruth Nelson, described this as a radical departure from previous policies. She argued:
IS had a clear answer to these questions. We must relate to the thin layer of politically experienced and class conscious militants, primarily shop stewards and convenors, who can in turn relate our politics to broader layers of workers … For revolutionaries a key part of the task of penetrating the advanced layer of militants is through engaging in joint activity with those militants who are in the CP or still looking to it for guidance. (Cited in Higgins, p. 152)
The IS Opposition also criticised the attempts to control the newly launched Rank and File Movement as if it was the property of the IS, and attempts ‘to call for actions which the National Rank and File Movement cannot play some part in implementing’, and which ‘can only serve to discredit it’ (cited in Higgins, p. 166).
To illustrate the point made by Ruth Nelson, the IS had 20 members in the AUEW in Birmingham, organised in two factory branches and an industrial branch. Among them were 10 shop stewards, two convenors of big factories, and six members of the AUEW District Committee – one of whom was the District President. All of them had several years’ membership of IS, and most were veterans of hard-fought strikes. Higgins relates how this promising group were expelled when they refused to obey an instruction from the centre to break an existing commitment to support a Broad Left candidate for the post of National Organiser in the AUEW and support the belated candidature of an IS member (Higgins, pp. 119ff.).It seems that the IS reacted to the objective situation – the downturn in struggles from 1974 onward – and its inability to compete with the Communist Party and its LCDTU, by adopting an ultra-left sectarian attitude, thus negating the progress made until then.
However, let us return to Cliff’s writings. Despite his downbeat assessment of the IS’ situation in 1979, ‘its members isolated and holding on by their finger tips’, he ended on his usual optimistic note:
The Socialist Workers Party is much better poised at present to take a part in the new advance of the class struggle than it has ever been before … Now when the Tories are back in power, even if their policies are not harsher than those of Callaghan, they will raise incomparably more anger than he has done. The government, as the enemy, will help generalise the struggle. With the increasing and deepening crisis of world capitalism [where have we heard this before? – HR], the attack on workers is bound to come. The possibility of once more building a rank-and-file movement, far more independent of the union bureaucracy than in 1969–74, is with us. (p. 372)
Cliff was partly right. The attacks on the workers did come. The miners, the print workers and the steel workers were taken on by the Thatcher government and were defeated, but only after bitter struggles. Unfortunately, the rest of Cliff’s hopes were dashed. It’s true that Margaret Thatcher and the Tory government have been replaced. But by whom and what? Tony Blair and New Labour! We shall have to look at subsequent articles to discover how Cliff explained this outcome.
In The Balance of Class Forces, Cliff wrestles with the basic problem facing revolutionary socialists. In contrast to the orthodox Trotskyist insistence on seeing the crisis of humanity being merely one of leadership, he sees it also as a crisis of ideas. Quoting Marx and Engels’ assertion that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the dominant ideas, Cliff writes:
Hence the overwhelming majority of workers have always believed in the ‘national interest’ … if one accepts without question that the rights of private property should apply to the means of production, the rules of capitalism must be accepted. Once one accepts the rights of owners of industry to dispose of their capital then the view that the workers are fundamentally dependent on their employers follows with inescapable logic. If capitalist ownership is sacrosanct then of course ‘there must be profit’ and if there is no profit there cannot be jobs. The concepts of ‘profitability’, ‘efficiency’, ‘viability’ appear as immutable, natural, common-sense rules. The fact that the profit system is natural and necessarily beneficial to the workers seems in contradiction to the fact that this same system brings mass unemployment and suffering. But the majority of workers have never seen the causal relationship between the capitalist system on the one hand and slumps and mass unemployment on the other … (pp. 415–6)
Cliff points out that this does not prevent the workers from going on strike. He points out that during the Second World War workers still went on strike despite supporting the war, and that workers’ loyalty to Labour in no way prevented them going on strike while Labour was in power. But this was because the workers were fighting what they saw as injustices within the system – unfair divisions between wages and profit, unfair relative wages, etc. And this explains the rational behind trade union leaders’ acceptance of compromises and cooperation between unions, employers and the state. It also underlies the workers’ continued support of Labour.
Referring again to the workers’ offensive on the economic front in 1970–74, Cliff recognises that ‘alas there is no automatic transition from economic to political struggle’ (p. 415). And one might add, alas, that we have a long way to go yet to overcome the crisis of ideas.The next piece is a record of an interview in Socialist Review in 1986, in the seventh year of the Thatcher government. Asked how he would assess the balance of class forces after the defeat of the miners and now Wapping, where, according to the interviewer, ‘Murdoch has achieved more already than MacGregor did in a year’, Cliff gives an upbeat reply:
Up to now the workers have lost individual battles. Steel in 1980, hospitals and ASLEF in 1982, the NGA in 1983, the miners in 1984–85, now, even worse, Wapping in 1986. But it doesn’t mean that the Tories are winning. By and large the unions are still there. There are still 10 million trade unionists. There are still 300,000 shop stewards. [Even though they have since 1974 become corrupted and alienated from the rank and file? – HR] So at the end of the day the ruling class are not sure they are going to win the war. (p. 424)
Asked about the shift to the right of the whole movement and how he thought ideas would develop in the next few years, Cliff replied:
When it comes to a perspective there are two things a Marxist can do well – look at the very long term or the short term. If you come to the medium term – 10 years – it is much more difficult to guess. In the long term the crisis of capitalism is deeper and more fundamental than any crisis of consciousness in the class, or crisis of leadership … In the final analysis we know there will be a rebellion of the working class. All the talk of Eric Hobsbawm that the working class is finished is stupidity. (p. 425)
Asked what he would say to those people who stay inside the Labour Party, and what he thought of the future of the Labour left, Cliff replied: ‘The left in the Labour Party are dreamers, utopians, completely unrealistic… The Labour Party cannot be changed.’ (p. 427) Asked about the prospects of building a revolutionary party, Cliff replied:
We are going to mark time to a large extent … We can increase our membership marginally. We can’t increase it very much because to the extent that people say we are on the margins of the class they are right. In Russia the Bolsheviks were shaped during the period of reaction after 1905. Things were very tough. There were 10 members in Ivanovo Voznesensk in March 1917 – in July 5,440. Now there is no guarantee that the 10 will turn into 5,440, because you don’t know in advance there will be a revolution. But without the 10 you won’t get anything. (pp. 428–9)
Somebody once coined the phrase ‘Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect’. This well sums up the Cliff attitude expressed here and throughout the book. Also somebody (I think it was George Orwell) opined in the dark days of the 1940s that one should be pessimistic in the short term but optimistic in the long. Cliff must have taken this advice to heart.
Nine years later, in the article In the Balance written in 1995, Cliff expressed the same optimism:
Above all, we have to create a network of rank-and-file socialists in the workplace. Any individual who plays a small rôle now will play a massive rôle when the struggle picks up … Now we are at a much higher level. Capitalism is in a much deeper crisis than it was in the 1970s so the struggle will be much sharper and more political. We are also in a much better strategic position, because in the 1970s the rank and file was organised by the CP, which hardly exists today. Therefore we will be in a much better position when the upturn comes. (p. 436)
The final article, Change is Going to Come: But How?, was written in June 1997 immediately after Labour’s electoral victory, and maintains the same optimism. Cliff asserts that in 1997 as in 1945 Labour voters voted for a radical change, that Blair promised (and would deliver) very little, and that the mass of the people were to the left of Blair on many issues. After analysing the contradictions in working-class consciousness, Cliff concluded:
But the contradictions that exist in the grey matter are less fundamental than those in the material world. To put it simply, because capitalism is in a deep crisis, in the final analysis this crisis will demonstrate the bankruptcy of reformism and show the need for a socialist alternative … The period ahead is very promising for socialists and very challenging for the whole working class. People not only want change, they want a vision of a better society. (p. 442)
Whether the policies adopted by Cliff and his organisation are the best for realising this vision cannot be ascertained merely from the writings reviewed here. As stated, they are ‘selected’ writings and only a fragment of a much larger whole. Also how they were selected must have been effected by the impression of Cliff they were intended to convey. To arrive at a more definite judgement requires a study of the whole of his works and how they match his actions and those of the IS–SWP. Bearing this reservation in mind, this volume is an important contribution to this understanding. We must hope that the future will vindicate him. This selection of writings is a worthwhile contribution to understanding Cliff and the political current he inspired.
Harry Ratner
**************
The Communist Party of Great Britain
James Eaden and David Renton,
The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920,
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 220, £40.00
The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920,
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 220, £40.00
JAMES Eaden and David Renton are professional historians and socialist activists whose work on fascism will be well known to many readers of this journal. Turning their attention to new fields, they have set out to write a rigorous introductory text on British Communism, ‘a committed socialist history of the party sympathetic to the views of the founders, critical of the husk that the Communist Party became’ (p. xvi). While their sampling of documentary sources in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) archive and the Public Record Office are sprinkled through the book, it is substantially based on a critical synthesis of secondary sources. The authors acknowledge its limitations: in the less than 190 pages that constitute the corpus of the text, many aspects of party life must perforce go unexamined. Nonetheless, Eaden and Renton have largely achieved their objectives. For this reviewer, their book supersedes relatively recent work – Willie Thompson’s The Good Old Cause (1992), Francis Beckett’s Enemy Within (1995) and Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy’s Under the Red Flag (1999) – as an accessible but scholarly one-volume history of the CPGB.
The fundamental argument, scarcely novel but recently questioned by academics, is that the political development of the CPGB was inextricably bound up with the fate of 1917. Founded at a time when a vigorous, healthy workers’ revolution acted as the beacon to the world’s working class, the CPGB degenerated as Stalinism developed from 1924 and cumulatively consolidated its hold over the Russian party, the Soviet state and the Comintern into the 1930s. For Eaden and Renton, the Russian dimension is decisive; overwhelmingly negative, it moulded the party’s development into the 1970s. Thus they take issue with the dominant trend in recent writing on the CPGB. This trend embodies what is essentially a ‘Little Englander’ historiography. As such, it systematically deflates the Russian dimension, inflates the CPGB’s autonomy, and at best relegates Stalinism to the sidelines. One of the most prominent purveyors of this ‘Rule Britannia’ brand of Communist history, Nina Fishman, is taken to task with terse but convincing restraint: ‘She underestimates the continued influence of the foreign policy concerns of the Soviet state, the Comintern and the British party leadership on the political culture of Communist activists.’ (p. xiv) Andrew Thorpe’s Anglo-centric assertion that the CPGB significantly determined its own political positions is demolished simply by putting the straightforward question which revisionists have never been able to answer: if that is so, why did not just the British CPGB but every Communist party across the globe change its policies on the United Front, the Third Period, the Popular Front, the Second World War and the Cold War almost simultaneously? (See page. xix.) Kevin Morgan’s very British belief that, at least in the first 20 years of the CPGB, the Russian dimension was a subsidiary element in the lives of rank-and-file party members is compellingly answered by the authors’ summation of their own studies: ‘Support and admiration of the Soviet Union and everything Soviet ran like a thick red thread through the entire being of the British Communist Party.’ (p. 82)This verdict is substantiated by Eaden and Renton’s highly readable, amply peopled, typically sharp and occasionally wry analysis. They confirm incontrovertibly and elegantly that every strategic phase of the CPGB’s policy originated in Moscow and was adopted in Britain. In distinction to revisionists, who claim that important aspects of the Third Period had an English provenance, they conclude succinctly: ‘Whatever the popularity of Class Against Class among some younger Communists, the fact remains that the introduction of the policy was decided by external factors … This Third Period line became policy across every Communist Party in the world.’ (p. 33) The same went for the introduction of the Popular Front phase of Stalinism in 1934–35: ‘The policy may have reflected pressures from national sections of the Comintern but such demands were secondary in the minds of those who formulated it.’ (pp. xv, 50–2)
Well aware of the futility of the sectarianism and ultra-leftism which they had embraced only a few short years earlier, CPGB leaders were frantically seeking an escape route from extinction. As Trotsky pointed out, the Comintern’s national affiliates faced national pressures to adapt to their national polities and to make concessions to national reformism. After the locust years of isolation and revolutionary posturing, such pressures were particularly intense. They were not the crucial explanatory factor: the CPGB could only change course when Stalin gave his consigliere Dimitrov the thumbs-up to change course. Eaden and Renton are particularly good on the Popular Front. They cite Hugh Macdiarmid’s visceral class dismissal of the metropolitan bourgeois littérateurs who briefly embraced Stalinism. They join with Orwell in condemnation of ‘the nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of Rule Britannia’ (p. 55), not to say Liberals and ‘progressive’ Tories.
The book emphasises how after 1934 the opportunism, nationalism and reformism inherent in a strategy based on Stalin’s self-interested and supple anti-fascism and ‘socialism in one country’ permanently entered the soul of the CPGB. It blossomed after 1941, coexisted with Cold War leftism after 1947, and burgeoned once again in the pages of Marxism Today from the late 1970s, not to say in the partisan predilections of recent historians of the party. Unlike some of these authors, Eaden and Renton refuse to construct a sanitised, decontextualised English picture of the Popular Front based on uncomplicated anti-fascism, economic struggle in the factories, Merrie England, John Ball, Wat Tyler, and, in direct descent, Harry Pollitt as your stereotypical British trade unionist. Their account is integrated in world politics, in Stalin’s diplomatic manoeuvres, in opportunism towards Hitlerism, in the terrible terrain of ‘Midnight in the Century’, and in the physical and political dissolution of Bolshevism. The Moscow Trials and Stalin’s legalised murders as well as the approbation cordially accorded them by such CPGB leaders as Robin Page Arnot, Walter Holmes, Ivor Montagu and Pollitt himself – ‘a new triumph in the history of progress’ – are carefully and vividly recorded.
While the first 25 years of the CPGB have attracted most attention from historians, a strength of this text is that it stays the sometimes exhausting pace. Eaden and Renton acknowledge that once the ‘Uncle Joe levy’ and those who had joined the CPGB largely on the basis of Russia’s war effort had peeled away and British workers had, in 1945, decisively rejected a grand coalition of the CPGB, Labour and assorted Tory ‘progressives’ – a coalition in which Pollitt stood to the right of Attlee – for the CPGB the game was up. Nonetheless, they attend carefully to the Cold War, Hungary, the party’s rôle in the resurgence of industrial militancy from 1968, and finally to the ignominious collapse of the CPGB in 1991. As the great miners’ strike of 1984–85 demonstrated, whatever its strength on paper, the party staggered towards its quietus as a squabbling, impotent sect incapable of influencing the class struggle except, arguably, in justifying working-class retreat in both the unions and the Labour Party. Eaden and Renton’s material on industrial politics and the activities of CPGB members in the trade unions from the 1950s to the 1980s is extremely useful, if over-reliant on the press of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the expense of more rigorous assessments.
Transcending ‘on the one hand’ and then ‘on the other hand’ accounts, over here is a credit while over there is a debit approaches, historians need to engage with the difficult task of producing total histories which connect the CPGB’s support for class struggle with its advocacy of Russian dictatorship, its members’ support for the fight in workplace and union with the subordination of their party to politics based on the material interests of the rulers of Russia. Eaden and Renton powerfully evoke the power and élan of the CPGB’s involvement in anti-fascist struggles, the campaign over Spain, the fight in the unions and the mobilisation of the unemployed. They provide us with an understanding of why the CPGB attracted so many class-conscious militants. And at times they integrate the struggles of these militants with Stalinist politics. It was once fashionable to distance the CPGB from Stalinist Popular Frontism and terror in Spain on the grounds that the leadership of the small British party was not involved or did not know what was going on, while, even if some leaders had an inkling, the rank-and-file members remained ignorant. Today, work such as James Hopkins’ Into the Heart of the Fire has extended our view of what happened. While it presents an over-rigid division between heroic rank-and-filers and Stalinist leaders, it suggests that more CPGB activists than many have conceived were involved and knew, or certainly had the means to know what was going on. As Eaden and Renton conclude about the International Brigades in Spain: ‘Yet for all the spirit of the volunteers, theirs was a tarnished cause.’ (p61) Similarly, over time anti-fascism in Britain was facilitated or restricted by Stalinist policies. From 1929 to 1933, unemployed struggles bore the marks of the ‘social fascism’, self-imposed isolation from the labour movement, and the crude leftism which held that the jobless were tout court more radical than the factory worker and the other debris of the Third Period. Similarly with industrial politics: if the London busmen’s strikes of the 1930s are to be placed in the credit column (p. xix), they have to be related to the subsequent antagonism of the CPGB to rank-and-file movements (p. 56).
Inevitably this wide-ranging survey provokes some disagreements of emphasis and interpretation. For example, I would question the extent to which the period between 1920 and 1924, when Stalinism commenced its grim march, was a golden age of British Communism. The extent and influence of the formative cadre of trade unionists should not be exaggerated, while crucially, as Eaden and Renton point out, trade unionism commenced from 1921 a deep, progressive, if contested, decline. The CPGB’s fortunes in the unions nearly always followed the general trend of trade unionism: the party’s influence, whatever its quality, was stronger after 1934 in workplace and union than it was in the early 1920s. Moreover, after 1920, McManus, Murphy, Bell, Gallacher and Pollitt were all out of the industrial struggle. Without exception, they evolved rapidly into functionaries and mould-setting subordinates of Moscow. While the relationship between the CPGB and the Comintern in the early 1920s was more open and democratic than it was later – as might be expected with both feeling their way in a novel situation – the willed political subservience of British Communists was there almost from the start. Eaden and Renton’s perfunctory attempt to suggest some political reciprocity and their assertion that Murphy ‘shaped’ Comintern decisions (p. 21) are unconvincing. His rôle in the Comintern was always subsidiary and subordinate.
I also have problems with the authors’ interpretation of CPGB politics before and during the General Strike. It is correct to attribute the CPGB’s move to the right in 1925–26 and their sycophancy towards the TUC General Council left-wingers as a response to the party leaders’ perception of Russian interests, with which they identified their own. Its provenance lay in Moscow’s collapse of the United Front into politicking with the left-wing union leaders around the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. However, in the run-up to the General Strike, the advice from Moscow was that the union lefts would betray the workers and therefore should be criticised: it was the CPGB and not the Comintern which soft-pedalled. In the aftermath of the strike, Stalin took the position that full-blooded criticism of ‘the left traitors’ was necessary even if this led the British union leaders to withdraw from the committee. Of course, this was related to the Russian Opposition’s critique of the committee, and the committee itself was a without question a disorienting factor. But from the spring of 1926, Russian advice was intended, against CPGB resistance, to take the party to the left, and not to the right (see L.T. Lih, et al., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov).
Some students have found Eaden and Renton’s account of the birth of British Trotskyism (p. 45) confusing. This is partly because it was! As so often, the seeds of discontent in the oppositional Balham group were sown by the inability of the CPGB, armed with the new Third Period line, to make any progress, while, at least in the case of Reg Groves, there was concern that the party was deviating from the pure milk of Comintern ultra-leftism by countenancing work in ‘the lower organs’ of the unions as well as the workplace. However, the group’s position soon evolved into a critique of ‘Class Against Class’ centred on the necessity of the United Front, particularly in relation to Germany. British Trotskyism thus emerged in reaction to domestic and international issues, but ultimately in a critical response to the ultra-leftism of the Comintern. The expulsion of oppositional groups from the Trotskyists in the 1930s to the Maoists in the 1960s and the enduring prohibition of faction draws attention to the CPGB’s internal regime: despite its significance, the party’s pervasive bureaucratic centralism is scarcely mentioned in this book. Moreover, the SWP, whose regime as well as its politics are far from above criticism, is unobtrusively present in the text, implicitly contrasted with the CPGB as the exemplar of the healthy revolutionary party. In a volume devoted to a CPGB scarred by Stalinism, it is unfair, lacking in proportion and sometimes downright diversionary to demand a critique of the Trotskyist tradition. Any broader assessment of revolutionary politics in Britain must vigorously engage with its debilities.
A number of small errors are scattered through the book. It was Palme Dutt not Pollitt who took charge of the Workers’ Weekly in 1923 (p. 17). Pollitt never studied or worked at the Lenin School (p. 21). The United Clothing Workers did not expire when its leader Sam Elsbury was expelled from the CPGB in 1929, but lingered on until 1935 (p. 37). The CPGB breakaway in mining was the United Mineworkers of Scotland (p. 38). John Saville was not ‘an adult education teacher’, but a lecturer in the history department at Hull University (p. 122). It was Alex Moffat, not his brother Abe, who left the CPGB in 1956, while Bert Wynn was not a CPGB member in 1959 (p. 126). Reg Groves wrote The Balham Group, not Harry Wicks (p. 195). There are far too many typographical errors and misspellings for a work of this quality. Nonetheless, that quality makes it an indispensable text for readers of Revolutionary History.
John McIlroy
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Revolution in the Air
Max Elbaum
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che
Verso, London 2002, £20
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che
Verso, London 2002, £20
THIS book is a history of the Maoist-Guevarist organisations which came out of the youth and student radicalisation in the USA in the late 1960s, from their origins to their eventual collapse in the 1990s. Elbaum’s reasons for writing it are in part to draw lessons for any revival of the left in the USA, and partly to polemicise against the ‘good sixties, bad sixties’ analysis of Todd Gitlin’s Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987).
The book is structured in five parts. Part I deals with the antecedents of the ‘New Communist Movement’ in the process of radicalisation in the late 1960s, and the reasons for the unattractiveness of the ‘old left’ to the newly-radicalising forces. The latter are gravely overstated, since it is quite clear that outside the Far East Maoism only attained the sort of strength it attained in the USA in those countries where the Trotskyists were either very weak to start with, or deliberately abstained from involvement in the far left of the student radicalisation (as happened in the USA and a few other countries).Part II deals with the apogee of the movement in 1968–73, describing the several organisations as they formed and their various attempts to go beyond ‘pre-party formations’ either to regroupment, or to launching themselves as parties. I expected this part to take me into a foreign world, but in reality the political culture described is not that far from the culture of the Trotskyist organisations in the same period: commitment to more-or-less Stalinist (or at least post-1921) versions of Leninism, vigorous activism, and attempts to reach the mass of the class through campaigns and fronts.
Part III deals with the movement’s loss of the political initiative and slide into crisis between 1973 and 1981, triggered initially by the difficulties of class and race analysis in the Boston busing crisis of 1974, exacerbated by separate ‘party turns’ by the major organisations which ended the hope of a broad regroupment, and then by the Beijing CPC-PRC leadership’s open bloc with the USA against the USSR and those Third World movements influenced by Moscow, which triggered a divide between those trends in the movement which clung to Beijing and those which shifted towards more general Third Worldism.
Part IV discusses, more briefly, the involvement of Maoist and post-Maoist trends in the Rainbow Coalition, and the impact on these trends of the collapse of the USSR.
Finally, Part V contains a chapter discussing the ex-Maoists’ ‘adjustment to civilian life’, and Elbaum’s lessons and conclusions. These are, broadly speaking, that the movement had a foreshortened sense of the imminence of revolutionary crisis which made it ill-fitted for the long haul; that Maoism was massively damaging, particularly in creating a mind-set of ‘theory-as-orthodoxy’ and producing sectarianism and anti-democratic internal practices; but that, on the other hand, internationalism and anti-imperialism, anti-racism and the effort to form an activist cadre, remain fundamental to any effective left. At the end of the day, a critical conclusion is that ‘basing an organisation’s unity on an ideological system (say, Marxism-Leninism) rather than a political programme (say, socialism) is fraught with danger … The result is a strong pull not just toward dogmatism but toward constant suspicion of heresy.’ (p. 336)
Considered as a history, I found the book an interesting read, but in some ways disappointing. The problem is that in some ways, because of the range of organisations whose history he is trying to cover, Elbaum paints with a very broad brush, so that it is hard to get a strong sense of the effective relation of forces between the different organisations or of any of their specific ideological dynamics. At the same time, this is so much a participant history as to be almost myopic. World politics are seen through the eyes of the anti-imperialist US left and in particular its Maoist wing, and there is little sense of the dynamics of the post-1968 Leninist and semi-Leninist far left elsewhere (even, for example, of the Guevarist and other trends in Latin America who might have been the natural allies of the American ‘New Communist Movement’). At the same time, some of his lessons are very pertinent. The experience of the Trots in Britain has also been one of early 1970s dynamism, later 1970s inability to work out a clear path through more complex political problems, and repeated sectarian declarations of small groups as ‘the party’ (albeit the Socialist Labour League–Workers Revolutionary Party, International Socialists–Socialist Workers Party and Militant–Socialist Party were all vastly bigger and better implanted than any US Maoist group). Trotskyism has functioned just as much as an ideological system, as opposed to a programme, as Maoism. It’s worth a read, then, if only to see how much like ourselves the US Maoists were.
Mike Macnair
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Chronicler of the Russian Revolution
Israel Getzler
Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 226.
Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 226.
THIS is an interesting study of a man who played a curiously ambivalent rôle during the Russian Revolution and after, who was close enough to observe and understand the main events, but was rarely central to them. He set the political tone for the first Executive Committee of the Soviet, only to be brushed aside easily by Tsereteli. The final plans for the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power were made in his own flat, though he was totally unaware of it at the time. An unmitigated failure as a politician during the revolution, he is unsurpassed as a source of information about it. It is a matter for regret that the only English translation of his history, that edited by Joel Carmichael (Princeton UP, 1983), contains only half of it. This book gives us some splendid examples of Sukhanov’s vivid and accurate descriptions (Chapter 3, pp. 67–103), whilst an appendix (pp. 191–4) supplies us with his view of the most controversial historical problem relating to this period, whether ‘the July Days’ really were a premature Bolshevik attempt to seize power (for the contrary view, cf. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, London 1965, pp. 572–95).
This biography, by the author of the definitive study of Martov, supplies all the information needed for understanding Sukhanov’s curious political trajectory – an agricultural theorist for the Socialist Revolutionaries (pp. 7–20) who developed into a left Menshevik, the main writer against the First World War left behind in Russia (pp. 21–5), who then became the most influential spokesman for the new-born Soviet (pp. 27–38), then an opponent of the Bolsheviks’ seizure and exercise of power (pp. 63–6, 99–126, 191–4) and finally an early protagonist of collectivisation (pp. 127–41), ending up with his purge and murder in 1930–40 (pp. 143–87).It has always been a bit of a mystery how such a marginal figure could have occupied such a key position in the events of February–March 1917 (pp. 29–30), and yet be so curiously ineffective in them. The clue to this must surely be that he was ‘a Mister Betwixt and Between’ (p. 19). He can only be regarded as ‘the ideologist of the February Revolution’ (Chapter 2, pp. 27–66) because his ideas were incoherent enough to be an accurate reflection of its confused early stages. On the one hand, he dreamed of a ‘vast unprecedented social content’ for the revolution (p. 29), whilst on the other supporting the minimum programme acceptable to both the Executive Committee of the Soviet and the Duma Committee, even going so far as to drop his Zimmerwald anti-war propaganda (pp. 22–5). His aim was to persuade the Executive Committee of the Soviet to support the Duma Committee forming a government, whilst preventing any socialist ministers from joining it. He believed that dual power was the start of the development of ‘uninterrupted’ revolution (p. 32), in which the state apparatus would be gradually taken over through the Soviet pressurising the government in the direction of reform by means of socialist experts in its sub-commissions (pp. 32–3). But he did not believe that the organisations of ‘Russia’s democracy’ had been given enough time, or were sufficiently differentiated or deep-rooted to be able to wield power yet (pp. 27–8). So he opposed the Menshevik and SR leaders going into the government because he thought it was necessary for a ‘united front’ of ‘the democracy’ to put pressure upon it from outside, and since he felt the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was ‘isolated from all the real, living forces of the democracy’ (p. 63), he opposed that as well. All this preconceived schema was utopian, couldn’t work, and in the event didn’t work. The only one of his proposals to get off the ground was the Contact Commission of the Soviet with the Provisional Government, in which Tsereteli easily outbid him and thrust him rudely aside, and which he used as a springboard into office.
Sukhanov’s experience of 1917 explains why he failed so lamentably as a politician whilst succeeding so splendidly in describing it. His history is detailed, accurate, vivid and lifelike, as chaotic and unfocussed as the events in which he was so deeply involved, a major source for the history writing of others. But it lacks analysis. It is history seen as misfortune, as a mistake, which is how he felt about it at the time.
Al Richardson
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History of British Trotskyism
Ted Grant
History of British Trotskyism
Well Red Publications, London, 2002, pp. 303, £9.99
History of British Trotskyism
Well Red Publications, London, 2002, pp. 303, £9.99
TED Grant has been a major figure in British Trotskyism for 60 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was a significant actor in the internal politics of the Labour Party. Born Isaac Blank, the son of immigrants from Russia and France, in Germiston, Johannesburg, in 1914, he joined the emerging South African Trotskyists in the early 1930s. He came to Britain in 1934, and was subsequently a member of the Marxist Group in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Militant Group led by Denzil Harber in the Labour Party. He came to prominence after the breakaway of the Workers International League (WIL) from the Harber group in 1938, and he was subsequently in the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the International Socialist Group and the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) in the 1950s. After 1964, he led the RSL around the Militant newspaper. Having played an animating rôle in what became the most powerful current in the history of British Trotskyism, he was expelled by those he had politically fostered in January 1992. Today he remains active as leader of the small Socialist Appeal group.
The substance of this book consists of a 190-page essay by Grant tracing the fortunes of British Trotskyism from 1924 until the collapse of the RCP in 1949–50, and a postscript of some 30 pages by Rob Sewell sketching events in the life of the Grant tendency over the last half-century. The authors have done us all a service by putting between covers documents well-known to historians but relatively inaccessible, such as the wartime report of the Home Office and the security services on the Trotskyist movement, the account from 1943 of Gerry Healy’s expulsion from the WIL, programmatic statements by Grant, and a moving portrait of the RCP militant Olwyn Hughes by Alan Woods. There is also a useful appendix of biographical notes.Despite its title, this volume is a history in only a limited sense. The authors have not returned to the documents, nor have they interviewed participants in any systematic fashion. They have not elicited substantial new evidence. While Grant is of the school which locates the real advent of British Trotskyism in the birth of the WIL, and he carefully re-examines the events of 1949–50, overall he adds little to, and corrects little in, existing work such as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s Against the Stream and War and the International and Martin Upham’s unpublished PhD, History of British Trotskyism until 1949. Given his extensive experience, this could have been redeemed by extensive and conscious employment of recollection and critical reflection, by imaginative recuperation and probing exploration of the earlier lives Grant led in the foreign country of the past. But the book is autobiographical only in the most diffuse sense. The personal is largely suppressed, so that it is left to Sewell in his brief introduction to tell us a little about Grant’s family and his early life, and examples of pondering experience and self-reflection in the narrative are few. Even as memoirs (Sewell’s characterisation, p. 14) and in the face of invocation of Marx’s aphorism that individuals make history (p. 16), the text is reticent or restrained on people and their personalities. This is perhaps related to the book’s political sub-text: the austere assertion that the Socialist Appeal group is the direct descendant of Trotsky, the RCP and all that is best in the British revolutionary tradition, and that, suitably augmented and with a fair wind, it will go forward to build the party and make the revolution.
There are exceptions. Grant has some interesting new things to say about the work of the Trotskyists in the ILP, and he quotes extensively from a letter critical of the Marxist Group which, together with Harber and Stuart Kirby, he sent to the International Secretariat in 1935. He sheds new light on the creation of the WIL, arguing that the initial walk-out of Ralph Lee, Jock Haston, Grant and their comrades occurred with no thought of a split. This was prompted by Harber’s subsequent expulsion of those who condemned his circulation of Stalinist slanders concerning Lee’s handling of the funds of the South African Laundry Workers Union. He is educative and amusing on Cannon’s persistent but doomed attempts to weld the warring British factions into a united Trotskyist organisation in 1938. The authors have interviewed Millie Lee, and it is good to hear more about the life and work of this extraordinary woman. Grant usefully adds to the rehabilitation of Ralph Lee, the organisational dynamo who directed the initial success of the WIL. There are useful if brief snapshots and warm commendations of Lee, Haston and Jimmy Deane, all of whom were the objects of Grant’s admiration and affection.
The photographs which light the book are exemplary in evoking people, time and place, while Grant’s precise remembrances of Trotskyist songs lampooning the Popular Front (p. 48) and the Hitler-Stalin Pact (pp. 68–9) are invaluable in recalling the sensibility and structure of feeling of the time and preserving what otherwise might be lost forever. There is no derogation from the centrality of politics, but rather an attempt at deeper understanding of politics, involved in the attempt to illuminate and understand its protagonists, their characteristics and motivations and the social context in which politics is played out.
Several matters deserve further comment. Grant is correct favourably to contrast his rôle after 1945 in creatively attempting to grasp the transformations in capitalism, reformism and Stalinism with that of Pablo, Mandel, Cannon and Healy, who clung to dogma. Three points nevertheless require emphasis. Firstly, Grant’s arrogation to himself of the position of ‘principal theoretician of British Trotskyism’ (p. 193) is questionable, both for this and for later periods. A more persuasive reading of the embattled RCP leadership’s attempts to understand a changing world suggests collaboration and synergy rather than individualised theorising. Many remember Haston as a creative thinker who was no great shakes as a writer. Grant’s contribution, unassailable in itself, sometimes involved commitment of collectively elaborated ideas to paper. Overall it was made as part of a team. (See the exchange between ‘A Friend of George Edwards’ and Al Richardson, Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1980, pp. 55–6).
Secondly, we might expect some critical assessment, making due allowance for the constraints of the time, as to how well the theorising of the RCP has stood up to the subsequent march of history. There is little of that here. Grant believes that his depiction of Stalin’s East European conquests as deformed workers’ states, progressive as against capitalism, requiring only political revolution and critical defence by revolutionaries, was right then and is right now. Yet at least as early as 1948, when the RCP leadership heralded the Stalinist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia as a victory for the working class, it was possible to perceive the fundamental problems with Grant’s theory of proletarian-Bonapartism and the idea that Stalinist statification from above, rather than workers’ revolution from below, creates workers’ states, no matter what their degree of infirmity. Many did so, arguing not only from the timeless, indispensable conception of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class, institutionalising workers’ power and workers’ democracy, but also from the direct experience of the Czechoslovak Trotskyists. The belief that Grant developed through succeeding decades that not only China and Cuba but Cambodia, Laos and Benin were workers’ states, carried his theory away from the working class as the central agency of revolutionary history and into the substitutionist problematic. If he never succumbed to the conciliationism towards Stalinism of many Trotskyists, his theory, no more than that of his competitors, explained the dynamics of Russian despotism or its humiliating collapse. Yet there is no stocktaking here.
Thirdly, similar points can be made in relation to the limits of the RCP leadership’s estimation of the trajectory of capitalism after 1945. In contrast to the epigones’ prognostications of crisis, Grant admits that what he saw was a cyclical upturn rather than a quarter of a century’s-worth of boom. He is quite right to insist that nobody could have seen the future in 1944. But in succeeding years he nonetheless remained, unlike others, debilitatingly locked into Trotsky’s pre-war conceptions of terminal decline and impending crisis. If the slump was on the horizon rather than, as with Healy, just around the corner, it still structured his politics and obstructed understanding of the very real resilience of capitalism and its continued ability to remake itself and expand qualitatively. Already in 1957, Ted was announcing in the Draft Political Resolution at the RSL National Congress in 1957: ‘A new slump is absolutely inevitable in the next period. The consequences of the next slump can only be catastrophic from a capitalist standpoint. A new revolutionary wave will be the order of the day.’ And so it went on. Replacing Healy’s foaming at the bit with the patience of Job, the fatalism of impending crisis and its inevitable impact on the working class and the Labour Party were pivotal to Grant’s politics after the RCP. The coming slump would inevitably produce a powerful left wing and transform the Labour Party into a mass centrist organisation, paving the way for the ascendancy of the Marxists. What Stalinism was to Pablo, social democracy was to Grant.
This brings me to the perennial and vexed question of entrism. Grant asserts that he was entirely correct to oppose the RCP’s entry into the Labour Party from 1944 to 1949. The one mistake he will admit to is critically supporting entry in 1949 instead of sponsoring attempts to maintain the RCP as an open party. Thereafter, it seems, he has been consistently correct in supporting entry to this very day. His approach is questionable, and is based upon a partial invocation of Trotsky’s prescriptions for entrism, which, it goes without saying, must be treated as a very imperfect guide to a world the Old Man never lived in. Grant argues that the conditions which Trotsky used to justify the entry of the French section into the SFIO – conditions of capitalist crisis, workers turning towards social democracy in the context of a mass left-wing ferment within its ranks – were far from applicable to the Labour Party through the 1940s. It was therefore necessary to reject entrism and establish and maintain the RCP.
But Trotsky also adumbrated and applied, in specific relation to the British Trotskyists and the Labour Party, an approach to entry based fundamentally upon the weakness and isolation of the former and the potential of the latter in providing a sizeable audience for revolutionary ideas and the forging of organisational links with the labour movement. He argued, in his interview in 1936 with Sam Collins, that entry was necessary because of the fragility of the Marxist Group and the possibilities the mass reformist party of the working-class majority presented compared with the centrist ILP. The Old Man’s comments were particularly pertinent to the RCP, formed with around 500 members and enrolling only 350 a year or two later:
While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group with a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. (Trotsky’s Writings on Britain, New Park, 1974, p. 141)
Grant accepted this advice in 1936. Throughout this book he insistently urges us to keep a sense of proportion. If we do so, we discern that the RCP was never a party in Trotsky’s terms. Given the weakness of revolutionaries and the resilient allegiance which even advanced workers gave to Labour, entrism was the realistic option at least from 1944. This is not pipe-dreaming: although matters were certainly complex, this approach was urged at the time and the mistaken perspectives on which some of its advocates based their case did not completely detract from the cogency of the essential prescription. The RCP leadership, understandably, was carried away by their positive experience in the very specific conditions of wartime, and disoriented by their inability to grasp the reformist dynamic of Attlee’s government, as well as the problem of British Stalinism’s turn to the left from 1947.
The book’s account of the events of 1949–50 suggests that Ted was wrong (most explicitly stated by Sewell, p. 195) to stake everything on preserving the leadership around Haston by accepting the latter’s turn to entrism against the open party faction. But does this mean that Grant’s subsequent acceptance of entrism was mistaken and that the open party tactic was the one to apply in the 1950s? The best complexion we can put on things is that after the collapse of the RCP and the Open Party Faction, entrism was the only option that was left, although at one point Grant asserts that it didn’t really matter much whether the Trotskyists were inside or outside the Labour Party. Sewell then goes on to justify entrism in the 1950s – although we should not overlook the toying with the open party approach in the revamped RSL after 1956. He does so by partly rejecting the criteria which Grant applied in the 1940s, adopting a variant of Trotsky’s approach in the interview with Collins and then putting the two together. Thus while the Grant group was in the Labour Party in the early 1950s through their own weakness and the more favourable possibilities that work inside the party provided, this version of entrism ab debilitatio is not to be confused with entrism proper. It was rather what the French called entrism au Clifford Odets and the Americans Waiting for Lefty. The Grant group was, on its own account, in the Labour Party waiting for entrism, waiting for the crisis to arrive and create the indispensable conditions laid down by Trotsky at the time of the French turn.The practice of entrism receives little assessment in the book. Grant refers to the work of the RCP majority’s entrist group around Charlie Van Gelderen to suggest that Labour Party work after the war was unfruitful. But this was, on the whole, shallow and half-hearted entry, entry as an annexe to the open party based on selling both the open paper and the colourless Militant and passing contacts quickly on to the RCP. This was very different from Healy’s assimilationist and substitutionist operation, and indeed from Grant’s later approach. It is disappointing that there is little critical reflection on practice, given Grant possesses more than a half-a-century’s experience of Labour Party work. Yet many have been only too willing to criticise what they categorised, certainly after 1964, as a practice mingling sectarianism and opportunism, the combination of a fierce independence, rejection of alliances, and strident denunciation of other tendencies combined with the public insistence that a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism was a possibility, and the transformation of the Labour Party into the party of the revolution a racing certainty. Of course, entry requires, at least to a degree, that revolutionaries become part of the Labour Party’s left-wing bloodstream. The question is to what degree and precisely how. Militant’s self-imposed separateness from the left it originally aspired to work within, can be questioned. Of course entrism requires a degree of public political adaptation. If you take sustained Labour Party work seriously, you have to reject purism. You have to relate to the Labour left, the issue is again to what degree and how you do it. While Grant’s Sinn Féinism militated against such relating, his group, invoking Trotsky, transformed what had been perceived by Trotsky as a short-term tactic into a long-term strategy and adapted energetically to Labourist politics, not least in its distorted histories of Labour as a socialist party hijacked by the right. In a different way, but just as much as Healy, the Grant group sought to become the left wing.
Ted Grant lived through troubled times for revolutionaries. His endurance and his tenacity in grappling with complex and sometimes intractable difficulties demands our respect, our admiration and our criticism. Rob Sewell’s attempt to cover his progress over more than 50 years in little more than 30 pages is bound to suffer from incompleteness. Although it lays out a useful itinerary for future historians, it should be read together with Jens-Peter Steffen’s Militant Tendency (see Revolutionary History, Volume 6, no. 1, 1995–96, pp. 175–84). I will just make a few points. More credit should be given to those who picked Ted up off the floor in the early 1950s, not only the Deane family but Sam Levy and the now almost forgotten Bob and Pauline Peters who laboured mightily in repairing the damage done in different ways by Haston and Healy. No more than in Ted’s History is there any analysis of how Grant’s entrism changed qualitatively after the 1940s, and how one tactic in the difficult construction of building a revolutionary party evolved into long-term strategy, entrism without end, at least this side of the revolution. What is missing is not so much what was right and what was wrong according to sacred texts, as a critical accounting of how the group’s policies developed in the years after 1950.
It is doing less than justice to Peter Fryer, Brian Pearce, Ken Coates, Jim Higgins and many more – Alasdair McIntyre! – who joined Healy after 1956, simply to write them off as uninterested in ‘ideas, theories and principles’ (p. 202). At times, Healy and Pablo haunt the text like pantomime villains to the exclusion of consideration of why they attracted support and how they exploited the real weaknesses of their political opponents. There is surely more to be said about Militant’s break with the Labour Party, the creation of Militant Labour, the Socialist Party and the expulsion of Grant and his faction than the tabloid tale of Peter Taaffe’s sudden emergence as a composite of Healy, Pablo and Iago. There is no engagement with alternative accounts (see, for example, Peter Taaffe, The Rise of Militant, Militant Publications, 1994, pp. 445–52). If we allow that the Militant majority were succumbing to delusions of grandeur, there were new problems confronting the organisation inside the Labour Party. Are there not real limits to what can be achieved by entrism in the face of an electoral-based, reformist party and a powerful bureaucracy determined on moving it to the right? And was the faction fight not to some extent the product of the maturation of long-term tensions?
Several mistakes require correction. Healy hailed from Galway, not Donegal (p. 78). The Stalinist Pat Devine, when questioned by Jimmy Deane as to why he was accusing Deane of malingering when he was not himself in the forces, allegedly responded: ‘I’m doing my utmost. I’m a blood-donor.’ – not vice versa (p101). The Daily Worker claimed that the contribution of Haston, not Grant as stated here, to the labour movement in his native Edinburgh could be inscribed on the back of a postage stamp (p. 113). Everything Grant knew, the paper claimed, had been picked up on the veldt. Rally first appeared in 1949 in Birkenhead; its driving force was Alf Rose, who went with Healy. The version edited by Beryl Deane in Walton (p. 208) was a later incarnation. The story of Ted’s selection and removal as Labour candidate for Walton in 1954 – not 1955 – (p. 206) is a little more complicated than it appears here. Ted triumphed by a single vote after two tied votes against the former WIL supporter, Bob Briscoe. It was this that facilitated bureaucratic intervention. Had Ted initially won by a substantial margin, it is possible that, like George Macartney in 1959, he would have been allowed to stand. It was not Pablo but Sam Bornstein who placed the famous advert in Tribune for the journal Fourth International (p. 200).
There are a number of silly errors such as ‘Campbell Stevens’ instead of Campbell Stephen (p. 29), ‘Joseph Hanson’ instead of Joseph Hansen and ‘Poasadas’ instead of Posadas (p. 209). It is not clear who Charles Lockland is, presumably the Leeds ILPer, Charles Loughlin (p. 113). On the whole, however, this is a stimulating, well-produced and attractive book, selling at a very reasonable price. It should be required reading for all interested in revolutionary politics.
John McIlroy
Sheila Lahr adds that in an attack upon reformists, Ted Grant writes ‘as the Bible says: you cannot serve two masters; you cannot serve God and Mammon’ (p. 46). And a reading of Rob Sewell’s appendix takes this religious analogy further, for Ted is referred to as Great Leader and Teacher (p. 210). In this book, or should I call it gospel, Trotsky is God and Ted is his prophet! Certainly, Ted cannot err, or if he admits an error he reclaims it on a later page.
For instance, with regard to the dissolution of the RCP – at which I was present – he states that he opposed the Open Party faction, of which I was a member, because of the necessity to preserve the RCP leadership. Ted, apparently, had entertained a cosy picture of the majority faction of the RCP entering in its entirety into the Labour Party to form a unit under its previous leadership. When the Open Party faction pointed out that any entry into the Labour Party would be under the leadership of Healy, Ted accuses them of political spite! But surely Ted must have known that in view of the support given to Healy by the International, this would be the case. When the International insists that to remain in the Fourth International, the dissolved RCP must accept Healy’s leadership in the Labour Party, Ted holds up his hands in horror. Following which, he boasts that although at the conference he supported dissolution and entry, he voted against accepting Healy’s leadership; while ‘the Open Party faction voted for it’! Thus Ted hedges his bets! He certainly put forward no plan for the dissolved RCP to enter the Labour Party as a separate non-Fourth International faction (pp. 185–6).To continue with the religious angle, the persons presented in the book are dubbed either saints or sinner. The sinners are, of course, all those who disagreed with Ted. Even F.A. Ridley, a very honest man who lived all his adult life in poverty, is rubbished by being referred to as ‘middle-class’ – this being used as a pejorative term. Ridley was certainly no more middle-class than Ted, and probably less so as Ted had grown up as a white in a colonial country, South Africa. Ted refers to Healy’s minority as consisting of middle-class comrades (p. 170). Nothing could be further from the truth. Those members who formed half of the North London Branch until the dissolution were all working-class, having left school at the age of 14 years and working in industry. I would suggest that the contact of these early school leavers with Marxism and Trotskyism had been their first brush with abstract ideas. They must have been very proud at receiving what they saw as equivalent to an university education! However, if, unlike academia under capitalism, such ideas had been presented to them as incorporating their own life experience, instead of the bourgeois dichotomy between theory and practice remaining in place, the understanding of these comrades would have been vastly improved. Under bourgeois education, the student’s life experience is regarded as irrelevant, and within the Trotskyist movement at that time, it was generally regarded as ‘subjective’.
With regard to the Soviet Union, Ted states that while in the RCP he had claimed that Russia was a deformed workers’ state, while the East European states were proletarian Bonapartist. He returns to this at the end of the book in a republished document in which this time the USSR is referred to as ‘Bonapartist … resembling the Caesarism of Ancient Rome’ – whatever this might mean! I guess it doesn’t matter now, but to put the record straight, during all my time in the RCP we were told that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state and Eastern Europe consisted of deformed workers’ states. More than probably, this change of designation has assisted Ted in explaining the collapse of the USSR and its satellites, but these designations were not used at the time to which he refers.
A further criticism I have of this book is the incorporation of wads from documents written by Ted some years ago. Surely these could have been précised and an analysis made as to why the power continually being prepared for never came about? In fact, if I were ever tempted to write such a book, which is admittedly 100 per cent unlikely, I would begin at the present day and examine why we failed and the lessons to be learned from this. Possibly some of the reasons for failure may be the continual attempt to tell the future – the Nostradamus tendency – put forward as perspectives. Surely dialectics tells us, and should have informed Ted, that all in this world is in constant flux!
With regard to the Fourth International, it is certain that its members played a Machiavellian rôle, and encouraged Gerry Healy to do so. Ted puts this down to the spite of Cannon against the RCP, but is it possibly to destroy a movement because of one person’s spite? Ulterior motives there may have been, but they need to be researched in the light of the political and economic climate of that time.
In conclusion, I would say that the title of this book is over-ambitious, and in no way has it provided a history of the British Trotskyist movement.
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The Irish Revolution
Michael Hopkinson
The Irish War of Independence
Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 2002, pp. 274
The Irish War of Independence
Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 2002, pp. 274
Joost Augusteijn
The Irish Revolution 1913–1923
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 248
The Irish Revolution 1913–1923
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 248
HOW was it that the Irish Revolution, begun by a leadership that included James Connolly, resulted in a repressive right-wing government, arguably more so than the Ulster Unionists, that used British arms to crush the republican movement and successfully broke the second wave of Irish syndicalism? As Kevin O’Higgins famously remarked, the Irish revolutionaries were the most conservative of revolutionaries. This is the key question that confronts students of the period, and both the books under review must be judged, at least in part, by the extent to which they contribute to an answer.
In his new history of the War of Independence, Michael Hopkinson decisively cuts through the romantic mythology that still surrounds the 1916 Easter Rising. The rebels had ‘a hopelessly confused plan’, they made the mistake of occupying ‘prominent buildings, and at that not the most appropriate ones’, and they failed ‘to block the communication route for British reinforcements’. They positively invited disaster. The ‘slipshod planning’ that he quite rightly castigates was, however, only the half of it. They mounted a military challenge to the British Empire without any popular support for the enterprise. The Easter Rising was a classic putsch, and Lenin’s later defence of it was seriously misconceived. A more instructive exercise for those still enamoured of 1916 is to compare Connolly’s military writings with Trotsky’s account of the 1905 Revolution and the Moscow insurrection. Connolly does not come out of it at all well.The Easter Rising was, despite the heroism of the participants, a military fiasco. Politically, however, it dealt the Home Rule party a tremendous blow and brought together all of its nationalist enemies, both republican and non-republican, into the Sinn Féin alliance. Re-formed in 1917 Sinn Féin was an unstable amalgam only held together by hostility to the Home Rulers and later by British intransigence. As Hopkinson observes, missing from the equation was revolutionary socialism, which never recovered from the loss of Connolly and was overwhelmed by the Sinn Féin tide.
As Hopkinson makes clear, the Irish Revolution ‘was not to be concerned with the redistribution of wealth’. Both Sinn Féin and the IRA were dominated ‘by the small farmer class and by artisans and traders’ with the working class, both rural and urban, ‘largely unrepresented in the Dáil’. Irish Labour’s decision to abstain in the 1918 general election was an historic mistake, one that it is hard to believe that Connolly, whatever his weaknesses as a military thinker, would have made. One consequence of this was that the Sinn Féin and IRA leaderships were able successfully to contain the stirrings of social revolution that manifested themselves during the conflict. Instead, Michael Collins and his comrades ‘hit upon … a mixture of guerrilla warfare and passive resistance with a high priority given to intelligence and propaganda and the sidelining of progressive social ideas’.
Hopkinson goes on to provide a detailed account of the war. He brings out the divisions within the revolutionary leadership with both Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera preferring passive resistance and diplomacy to Michael Collins’ guerrilla campaign. They were, however, all agreed on keeping the mass of the people out of the struggle. Indeed, one thing that Hopkinson brings out is the extent to which the shooting war was in practice the work of a few thousand men, operating by and large in Dublin and Munster. Arguably, he does not give enough attention to the widespread passive resistance, but what is particularly striking is the extent to which the great majority of the population, although voting for Sinn Féin and supporting the IRA, remained onlookers. There was no serious attempt to involve the mass of the people in the struggle through strikes, demonstrations, street clashes; indeed every effort was made to avoid such developments. There is no doubt that this was a political decision motivated by the fear that popular involvement would have radicalised the struggle, and this had to be avoided at all costs. There was no revolutionary left that could have challenged this. The men leading the labour movement were concerned with building a strong trade union movement, not with changing society.
Hopkinson is particularly scathing in respect of British government policy, but from a practical rather than anti-imperialist perspective. Instead of offering further concessions after 1918, Lloyd George’s Coalition attempted to impose Home Rule by force. It seems clear that if the British had offered the Free State settlement in 1918 or 1919, then the Sinn Féin alliance would have broken up then rather than in 1921, before the guerrilla war had even begun. Lloyd George, a prisoner of the Conservatives who dominated the Coalition government, did not, however, have the room to manoeuvre. Instead, he followed the Conservative lead until it was clear that coercion had failed, and only then were further concessions, enough to split Sinn Féin, forthcoming. Lloyd George was as much a party to the British policy of assassinations and reprisals as the most die-hard Conservatives. Even more damaging in Hopkinson’s account was his appeasement of the Ulster Unionists and acquiescence in the violence and brutalities that accompanied the establishment of the Northern Ireland state.
Hopkinson has written an interesting study that well repays reading, but in the end it is too much of a military history. What is missing is any exploration of the social dimension of the conflict, any political critique of the forces involved and any discussion of the War in the context of British Imperial history. Nevertheless, it is an essential book for anyone concerned with the fate of the Irish Revolution.
What of Joost Augusteijn’s collection? It has contributions from both the older and newer historians of the Irish Revolution ranging from veterans like Charles Townshend, Arthur Mitchell and Margaret Ward to younger iconoclasts like Peter Hart and Augusteijn himself. Supposedly it is an introduction to the cutting edge of contemporary historical research, but interestingly enough it is the contributions made by the veterans that have most substance. Peter Hart might well proclaim in his contribution that the Irish Revolution ‘needs to be reconceptualised and to have all the myriad assumptions underlying its standard narratives interrogated’, but in practice he seems content to place his research findings in an interpretative framework that derives in good part from a Unionist history published as long ago as 1923, W.A. Phillips, The Revolution in Ireland 1906–1923. There are important differences, of course, but the very interesting detail of Hart’s research is compromised by his particular counter-revolutionary stance. Even worse is Joost Augusteijn’s embarrassing encounter with post-modernism. The Irish, we are told, had a ‘perception’ that the British had raped and pillaged Ireland in the past and would do so again if given the chance. Consequently, what the British actually did was ‘irrelevant’. He goes on: ‘It is clear from the above that the rejection of the British right to rule Ireland was primarily built on a negative image of the British.’ Duh! This is so much nonsense, and although it is too much to expect an editor to reject his own contribution, on this occasion he should have. Somewhat surprisingly, Richard English’s contribution is not much better. Much more substantial are the contributions by Townsend, Mitchell, Ward and Hopkinson, but they have all published at greater length elsewhere. One depressing feature of the collection is the lack of a chapter on the Irish working class, which I would have thought inconceivable since the publication of Emmet O’Connor’s Syndicalism in Ireland 1917–1923 and Conor Kostik’s Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917–1922, but obviously not. Overall the book has the appearance of a failed provocation, and is likely to sink without trace.
John Newsinger
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Forgotten Hero
Bill Hunter
Forgotten Hero: The Life and Times Of Edward Rushton: Liverpool’s Blind Poet: Revolutionary Republican and Anti-Slavery Fighter
Living History Library, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 119, £6.00
Forgotten Hero: The Life and Times Of Edward Rushton: Liverpool’s Blind Poet: Revolutionary Republican and Anti-Slavery Fighter
Living History Library, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 119, £6.00
THIS book roams over Liverpool’s connection with the slave trade in the eighteenth century, quoting from various sources. Unfortunately, the wrong conclusion is drawn in a number of cases. For instance, Hunter cites the first verse of the poet William Cowper’s Pity For Poor Africans (p. 19) as an indication of Cowper’s, and by association John Newton’s, support for the slave trade. Hunter does not appear to understand that the poem is satirical. Cowper was in fact writing against the slave trade a good decade before the matter was taken up seriously in Parliament. In the late 1780s, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade approached Cowper, through John Newton, to write campaigning songs as broadsheets, and he did so, with his songs becoming very popular. As for John Newton, while he had been the captain of a slave ship, he repented and entered the church. William Wilberforce was a member of his congregation.
Additionally, Hunter states that Thomas Paine was unsympathetic to Rushton’s plea that they campaign together against slavery, from which it is concluded that Paine ‘cared valiantly for the freedom of the white man, but not of the negro’ (p. 50). As it happens, the introduction to a 1939 edition of Paine’s Age of Reason contains a quotation from the Pennsylvania Magazine which reads ‘Paine … the first to urge the principles of independence to the enslaved negro’, and the Introduction continues that the first anti-slavery association in America was formed following this. An earlier edition of the Age of Reason published by Watts & Co also makes this point. In this, the biographical introduction by the Rt Hon J.M. Robertson states: ‘An anti-slavery essay was Paine’s first composition for publication … and 35 days after Paine’s paper, the first American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Philadelphia.’Unfortunately, such inadequate research by Hunter makes me uneasy about other statements and conclusions made by him in this book.
To continue, in order to exhibit Rushton’s views, Hunter’s book contains pages of his poetry. Some of these were issued as broadsheets. Most of them exhibit the influence of hymns with their reliance on antique language – for example, thees and thous. I must compare the simplicity of language, if not of ideas, of Rushton’s exact contemporary, William Blake. On page 102, Hunter cites Eric Glasgow, who in his book Liverpool People put forward the view that Rushton’s poetry had not stood the test of time because ‘it belonged essentially to the political and social issues of his own time’. Hunter, in defence of Rushton, considers that poetic ability is secondary to the social and political ideas expressed. He posits Rushton’s adherence to principles as superior to Wordsworth’s poetic genius. However, it seems to me that if a man is presented as a poet, it is legitimate to make a critical assessment of his poetry. I would also point out that another contemporary of Edward Rushton, Percy Byshe Shelley, was not only a fine poet, but that his political poetry remains relevant to this day.
Hunter’s book contains an account of the Liverpool seaman’s revolt of 1775, and there is also information on press gangs and the rigours of the sailors’ lives. But it is a pity that the book as a whole is spoiled by the inaccuracies detailed above, for I am sure that Edward Rushton deserves to be remembered in print.
Sheila Lahr
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Review
Paul Lafargue
Fritz Keller (ed.)
Paul Lafargue, Essays zur Geschichte, Kultur and Politik
Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2002, pp. 392
Paul Lafargue, Essays zur Geschichte, Kultur and Politik
Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2002, pp. 392
THIS volume is a part of Fritz Keller’s continuing efforts to provide German readers with the quite rare but valuable contributions of Paul Lafargue to various fields of Marxist analysis. It complements his volume on women and their emancipation, and his biography of Lafargue, part of the latter but also issued separately. This volume includes all of Lafargue’s essential essays on cultural and religious questions. Of the 14 essays, some are quite short, while others are of pamphlet or booklet length. Some are provided with an appended commentary that adds supplementary information and gives a critical evaluation or otherwise useful comment. Iring Fetscher provides a short but interesting foreword. Notes are more than adequate, and an index is provided, as are abstracts in a variety of languages. In an editorial note, Keller informs the reader that he has modernised the German translation when taken from Neue Zeit (edited by Kautsky Senior and Junior), as some terms are considered pejorative today, the terminology has changed since the nineteenth century, or even the content has a different sense in French and German. When it concerns terms like ‘race’ and ‘nation’ being substituted for ‘tribe’ and ‘people’ with regard to pre-capitalist society indigenous peoples, it is scientifically speaking more correct, but to modernise on the basis of so-called ‘political correctness’ can be a slippery slope to censorship. It’s better to add a note pointing out the common usage of a term now considered offensive.
In his foreword, Iring Fetscher writes that Lafargue’s significance in no way corresponds to the availability of his works today. Even in France, there is no edition of his collected works. Most of his writings – newspaper articles, magazine essays and pamphlets/booklets – are only available either in the original or as a reprint. His book The Right to be Lazy unleashed a storm of protest among his German party friends. Attacking the glorification of labour and diligence, he insisted that the true aim of the process of emancipation was the possibility of a happy and satisfying life. One understands why this outlook wouldn’t endear Lafargue to those of his contemporaries whose socialism was, as Fetscher puts it, of the ascetic and disciplined barrack-room type. What appeared to Lafargue’s German comrades as his hedonism was, Fetscher believes, wholly in the sense of Marx, inasmuch as one struggles against the capitalist relations of production for the aim of a better life, including a level of consumption that makes one happy. The suicide of the Lafargues resulted from this outlook. There is a quote from the suicide note explaining that the ageing process would bit by bit remove the joy of existence, thus making him a burden to himself and to others.Three substantial essays of literary criticism are included on George Sand (L’Autre), Victor Hugo and Émile Zola (L’Argent). Though full of praise for Zola, as Fetscher points out, Lafargue criticises his lack of satire and humour, qualities which he himself used to great effect. In fact, Fetscher describes him as ‘the first socialist humorist and satirist’. This makes itself evident in two essays, A Solid Appetite and Mr Vulture. The first is about a rich gourmand whose stomach and digestive system cannot accommodate all the things he wants to consume so he hires a poor homeless person for the use of his body and organs instead. First published in Neue Zeit, the French edition appeared a decade and a half later in a fully revised version. It is this version that is included. The second is a polemic against land and housing owners in the urban centres and the power they wield over those forced to pay rent. It appeared first in L’Humanité, then as a pamphlet due to the wishes of its readers and SFIO members.
There are two essays on utopian socialism, Thomas Campanella and The Jesuit State in Paraguay, both from 1895 and included in Kautsky’s collection on utopian thinkers, in which his essay on Thomas Moore also appeared. Campanella (1568–1639) was a Dominican monk born in Calabria, in the kingdom of Naples, who authored Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun), a plan of a communist-type society. The essay discusses the heretical sects of the times as well as Campanella and his influence. Keller appends a commentary on the latter-day arguments over the essay. The French original text of the essay on the Jesuits in Paraguay was never published. A note informs the reader that in his foreword to the second edition of his Precursors of Modern Socialism (Stuttgart–Berlin 1922), Kautsky compares the Jesuit State with the Bolshevik regime, an idea he returned to in his reply to Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, From Democracy to State Slavery (Berlin 1921). It also notes that Himmler saw in the Jesuits and their state an historical prototype for the SS and its own external set-up. Appended is a part of Kautsky’s own essay on the subject.
A study entitled The French Language Before and After the Revolution, apparently only published by Neue Zeit in 1912 as a tribute to Lafargue following his death – written in 1894, it was considered that Neue Zeit’s proletarian readers lacked the necessary familiarity with the French language – is absolutely fascinating. It places changes in language within the context of changes in the mode of production and the usage by different social classes as society and their rôles within it change. In his appended commentary, Keller points out that this text achieved historical significance when in 1950 Stalin wrote a series of letters on linguistics, in which he, among other things, ‘refuted’ Lafargue’s analysis of a language revolution in France during 1789–94. Keller goes into the argument and its consequences, concluding that Lafargue became a sort of non-person from then on in the Russian sphere of influence.
The essays not dealt with here are just as interesting, but the ones above are particularly so to this reviewer. It would be excellent if English versions could be published, as we need not just intellectual stimulation but more humour in our lives. An enormous amount of work has obviously gone into this volume, and it deserves a wide readership. Keller has done us a big favour by bringing an original but almost forgotten Marxist thinker once more to our attention.
Mike Jones
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Permanent Revolution
La Teoría de la Revolución Permanente
Centro de Estudios y pubilicaciones León Trotsky (CEIP), Buenos Aires 2000, pp. 606
Centro de Estudios y pubilicaciones León Trotsky (CEIP), Buenos Aires 2000, pp. 606
THIS extensive Spanish collection of Trotsky’s writing on Permanent Revolution includes, besides Results and Perspectives and Permanent Revolution, articles published from 1904 to 1940 from Trotsky’s other works, reminding us of how central the concept was to his political thought. The book draws heavily on Trotsky’s polemics with the Stalinist bureaucracy over the policies pursued by the Communist International, especially in China. The editors have collected and translated familiar works, mainly from French and English publications, but have also found material until now available only on the Internet, for example letters to Radek on the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, written in 1926. Reading these extracts in a single publication shows the development of the concept of Permanent Revolution, from observations on the failed revolution of 1905 to the sabotage of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. The editors, rightly, see Permanent Revolution as a theory/programme which produced victory in 1917, and when not applied, as in China and Spain, brought disaster. No selection on the topic can be fully comprehensive. A case could be made for the inclusion of the chapter Peculiarities of Russia’s Development from the History of the Russian Revolution, but that would make the book unwieldy: it already has 606 pages, plus biographical notes.
Trotsky argued that in undeveloped countries the bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out the tasks once accomplished by its equivalents in the advanced countries, and that the ‘orthodox’ Social Democratic leaders were utopian in expecting the bourgeoisie to do so, thereby bequeathing them the conditions to introduce socialism. He demonstrated how the bourgeoisie in economically and politically backward countries was incapable of repeating the achievements of their British and French predecessors. Nowhere has it carried out the instructions of the ‘Marxist’ pedants.The tasks of the bourgeois revolution could not be reduced to a tick list: they differed according to place and circumstance, but generally consisted of eradicating autocracy and feudal vestiges, introducing representative government, national unification and democratic rights. Land redistribution was essential in countries where the impoverished peasants were excluded from civilised life. Given the understandable reluctance of the bourgeoisie to attack the traditional land-owning autocracy and put itself at the mercy of an emerging working class, the Social Democratic perspective was a fantasy. Although Trotsky’s early writings, 1905 and Results and Prospects were specifically about Russia, the theory was later extended as the Stalinist bureaucracy adopted its own version of Social Democratic theory: building socialism in a single country. In China, India and Spain it confided in a weak bourgeoisie, which had no wish to challenge the old order.
The very helpful editorial notes are confined to an examination of Trotsky’s works, and do not ask how the theory’s validity is affected by events in the six decades after his death. That would take another book. Such a work might examine how Marxists should assess the partial modernisations and achievement of limited independence and economic development carried out in semi-colonies by military figures such as Nasser and Perón. Nor do we yet have a Marxist analysis of societies such as those in the former Soviet Union which have regressed to a lower level of social and economic development.
John Sullivan
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Party People
John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds.)
Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography
Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2001, pp. 256, £15.00
Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography
Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2001, pp. 256, £15.00
THIS book is a collection of short lives of a number of Communist Party (CP) members of the interwar years which stems from the editors’ work on an Economic and Social Research Council project at Manchester University on the collective biography of British Communists. The nine important chapters are of varying quality. Karen Hunt provides a useful if uncritical survey of the life of Dora Montefiore. The stress is on Montefiore as a woman, rather than as a representative of the politics of the British Socialist Party and what they became. There is nothing about Montefiore’s reaction to the decisions of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in the shadow of which A.E. Reade took up the banner of opposition to Zinoviev and Stalin in Britain. John McIlroy provides a vivid account of the political evolution of Reade using different material and a more personal approach than in his recent essay in Revolutionary History. Unlike Montefiore, Reade is portrayed critically.
Andrew Flinn’s chapter on the Stalinist bureaucrat William Rust is one of the best in the book. It demonstrates how careful research can uncover the rôle Britain’s Stalinists played in the crimes of their creed. Rust’s activities in the terror against the left in Spain and his surveillance of CP members suggest he had the makings of a British Yezhov. Gisela Chan Mang Fong contributes a worthwhile essay on the activities of Rose Smith as a CP organiser in the 1920s and 1930s. The same cannot be said of Nina Fishman’s chapter on the harrying of Arthur Horner, one of the most interesting of the British Communists, by the CP leadership during the disastrous Third Period of 1928–34. The presence of this piece in the collection is strange, for its interpretations have already been devastated by two of the editors in a fashion which raises fundamental questions about Fishman’s use of historical evidence (see John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, The Heresy of Arthur Horner, Llafur, Volume 8, no. 2, 2001).Andy Croft contributes a readable commemoration of the CP poet, Randall Swingler. As with so much writing on Communist cultural figures, there is too little on his politics and involvement in Stalin’s British section. There is a similar problem with Gidon Cohen’s account of the CP lawyer, Jack Gaster: no attempt is made critically to assess his adherence to Stalinism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler–Stalin pact or the mendacity of the CP leadership. In their chapter entitled Miner Heroes, Campbell and McIlroy build up a valuable collective biography of three of the leaders of the Scottish miners, Willie Allan, David Proudfoot and Abe Moffat. The book concludes with an excellent piece by Barry McLoughlin, Visitors and Victims. While fewer British Communists suffered than their counterparts in many other countries, McLoughlin’s original research discloses how many British men and women who eagerly embraced Stalinism became its victims. The road which began so brightly with 1917 ended in the Gulag for loyal party members.
The differences between the editors are explicit in the Preface. While McIlroy and Campbell, in common with most rational historians, believe that Stalinism requires understanding, explaining and judging, Morgan disagrees. He ducks the issue by vacuously inquiring how judges acquire their authority, and he speciously invokes the relationship of Stalinism to other socialist traditions. He was not always so chary of judgement. The same writer once judged the British Stalinism of the Popular Front, the Moscow Trials and the Hitler–Stalin pact preferable to the critical socialism of the Labour Party left, the ILP and the Trotskyists (Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War, London 1989, p. 309). Many readers of Revolutionary History will remember both Morgan’s explicit neglect of Spain and the Moscow Trials on the grounds that they had already been extensively covered (!) and his unbalanced judgements of respected writers in the Trotskyist tradition such as Brian Pearce and the editor of this journal, judgements which, it has been reasonably remarked, raise more questions about Morgan’s integrity than that of those he judges (see Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 3, Spring 1991, pp. 50–1). It is clear from Morgan’s chapter on the uses of biography that this new-found reluctance to judge Stalinists – no similar amnesty is accorded Trotskyists, against whom snide shots are fired under the protective cover of the footnotes and Sheila Rowbotham’s skirts – is part of an attempt to whitewash the CP and its members. His comments on the activists whose stories are told in the book are anodyne and avoid the difficult questions. Gaster, he says, learned independence in the ILP and carried it over to the CP. If that is so, the question arises as to why Gaster went along with the show trials, the tailing of Nazi Germany, the subjugation of Eastern Europe, even Hungary, which admittedly he took time swallowing, and the suppression of independent thinking. All Morgan takes from Reade’s independence and coherent political stand against the CP and the Comintern is that he was ‘intellectually restless and socially conspicuous’ – not a word about the political issues involved or the monolithic orthodoxy of the CP that the story discloses. He cannot make much of sanitising a Stalinist hack like Rust except to remark that ‘even Rust was not without his complexities’. Which of us is not? What is the point? After the ‘complexities’ of Stalin and Beria, Pollitt and Rust, have been exhaustively discussed and related to their practice, what is the final political assessment?
The clear drift of Morgan’s resort to ‘complexity’, his slippery reasoning and his amorphous prose is towards the dilution of Stalinism, the distancing of the CP from the ideology and practice intrinsic to it, and the exculpation of CP members who embraced it. According to Morgan, the entire socialist tradition, ‘the tradition to which socialists themselves belong is deeply implicated’ in Stalinism (p. 25). He veers towards a discredited essentialism, which pays scant regard to ‘complexity’, claiming ‘Bolshevism was the progenitor of Stalinism’ (p. 21). He de-Stalinises the CP with the stroke of a pen: most members, he tells us, backing this sweeping distortion with not a shred of evidence, ‘had only the faintest regard for Stalinism’ (p. 26). He believes that the CP, richly resourced by the Russian state, was the ‘underdog’ – I wonder where that leaves the vilified, intimidated and sometimes assaulted ILP and the Trotskyists? – and that it deserves our ‘empathy’. Moreover, it should not be judged in Stalinist terms as it never had any chance of coming to power – partly thanks to the good sense of British socialists! This is special pleading from start to finish.
In rejecting Morgan’s apologetics and his tired rehash of ‘Mohammed was responsible for 11 September, indeed, perhaps all who venerate a supreme being are deeply implicated’, we remember the millions of socialists in the Labour Party, the ILP, the Trotskyist, anarchist and libertarian groups, the British proletarians who, from the 1920s to the 1940s, firmly rejected the CP and its fervent, defining Stalinism. Whatever we say about these very different socialist traditions – and none are above criticism – they should never, ever, be confused or conflated with Stalinism which, in contrast, is a fundamental perversion of socialism.
Stefan Cholewka
Sheila Lahr adds the following on the essays on Dora Montefiore and Randall Swingler.
It is only when the material problem of the provision of food, shelter, warmth and clothing for everyone is solved that we can begin the real struggle for the higher life of the spirit … it is in the faith that the workers will eventually accomplish their mission that I have lived and done my day’s work in the world.
So wrote Dora Montefiore at the end of her autobiography From a Victorian to a Modern, published by my parents in 1927 under my mother’s name of E. Archer.
Karen Hunt writes of Dora Montefiore’s progression towards the Communist Party at the Unity Conference which founded the CP in the summer of 1920. However, the greater part of Dora’s work took place in the years before 1920, firstly in the women’s suffrage movement in both Australia and England. Before her house in England hung a bright red banner reading: ‘Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.’ This banner greeted the bailiffs on three consecutive years when they distrained upon her goods in payment of income tax. Dora paid rates because, as she said, women were allowed a Municipal vote, for both Borough and County Council elections and also for the election of Guardians (the poor relief system at that time).Eventually, Dora came to the conclusion that a social revolution was necessary, not only to improve the position of women, but the lot of working men. She wrote in From a Victorian to a Modern: ‘Not being myself a member of the working class, I must train my imagination and intelligence to see eye to eye with the workers in their class struggle in which they were so severely handicapped.’ Dora, born in 1851, came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Francis Fuller, had worked closely with Prince Albert to plan the Great Exhibition of 1851.
She first went out with Blatchford’s Clarion Vanners who took the socialist message to town and hamlet throughout the UK. She joined the Social Democratic Federation and its successor the British Socialist Party. But she also worked with the Independent Labour Party, Labour Parties and the Herald League.
She travelled the world, often as a delegate to international socialist conferences, addressing meetings, for she was able to speak several languages. She spoke against imperialism, and in Australia against Labour’s ‘White Australia’ policy. She was an able journalist, and wrote in a number of socialist journals. Dora was close to Clara Zetkin, and met Rosa Luxemburg, Tom Mann, Eugene Debs and Jim Larkin. One of Dora’s articles was published in Australia’s Workers’ Weekly, in which she gave sketches of friends and colleagues, including the above.
Dora met with tragedy in her own life. She was widowed early, and brought up her two children as a single parent. She first became interested in women’s rights when, on being widowed, a solicitor told her that if her husband had named anyone else as her children’s guardian she would have had no rights over them. A child had one parent only, the father.
While Dora had opposed the First World War as an imperialist conflict, her son had joined the army in Australia, served in France and died in 1921 from the effects of mustard gas. As Karen Hunt remarks, ‘Dora once again brought together the public and the private’, for she said that on joining up her son had been passed as a first-class life, but he was one of the millions of victims of imperial rivalries.
In the 1920s, when Dora was in her seventies, her health broke down and eventually she became blind. Karen Hunt wonders whether, if she had remained in good health, she would have continued to find the CP a congenial home. I like to think that she was too honest a person, and always her own woman, so that she would not have accepted the twists and turns of the CP as demanded by the Comintern. And yet, I am sure, that with the determination that she exhibited throughout her political life, she would have continued to be involved on the side of the workers in the class struggle. For, as Karen Hunt states, she was ‘a different Communist’.
The article by Andy Croft on Randall Swingler is entitled The Young Men Are Moving Together, from a poem by Swingler. He was one of a number of poets and literary figures attracted to the CP in the 1930s, at a time of economic recession, poverty and hunger marches.
Swingler was the godson of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, for he came from a solidly middle-class family with a history of service within the Church of England. As it happened, Swingler was to give away most of his inherited wealth to the CP and the Daily Worker.
He first became interested in politics as a student in 1930, when an organisation was formed following an extensive discussion in the literary weekly Everyman, on the revolt of youth – or lack of it. In the first instance, the organisation was aimed at the old men who were seen as likely to lead Britain into another war.
In 1934, Swingler was put in touch with the British Section of the Writers’ International, which followed the model of the John Reed Clubs in America and aimed at encouraging proletarian and revolutionary writing. Left Review was launched, and Swingler became its editor.
Unfortunately, Randall Swingler’s poetic and literary work is almost unknown today. However, hopefully, a biography of his life being written by Andy Croft will put this to rights. Excerpts from Swingler’s poems are published in Croft’s article, and I have been able to find three of his poems in Poetry of the Thirties published by Penguin Books in 1964 and edited by Robin Skelton. This book contains also poems by W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, who shared Swingler’s politics.
For 20 years, until he left the CP, Swingler was its best-known poet and one of its most prominent cultural spokesmen. Among his many activities, he reviewed books for the Daily Worker, together with Alan Bush he edited The Left Song Book in 1938, he contributed several plays to Unity Theatre and was active in the Workers’ Music association and in many groups covering writers and readers, poets and the theatre. In 1939, he and Bush organised the massive Festival of Music and the People, including an Albert Hall Pageant written by Swingler and starring Paul Robeson. Swingler together with Auden wrote the libretto for the premier of Britten’s Ballad of Heroes. Both Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten set Swingler’s works to music. Apart from this, Swingler wrote two novels and contributed reviews, stories and poems to all the most important literary magazines of the period.
In 1939, although opposed to the Comintern’s ‘imperialist war’ thesis, Swingler prosecuted the line in the Men and Books pages of the Daily Worker. When the Comintern called for the removal of Ralph Wright as Literary Editor, he was replaced by Swingler. When the Daily Worker was banned in 1941, Swingler went on a national speaking tour calling for the ban to be lifted.
Andy Croft writes that Swingler turned repeatedly to the idea that political commitment was unavoidable for his generation. This he expressed as a choice between rural living and the urban environment, for he saw himself as having exchanged the ‘idiocy of rural life’ for London and revolutionary politics. To Swingler, the urban environment revealed its potential for a different kind of beauty to that of the rural landscape.
In Entrance to the City, he begins by speaking of hills and valleys, and presents them as menacing. He continues:
… and I thought for a time
I was alone and joined with this delectable Land. But I was wrong. The mountains then become rolling trains of smoke, furnaces glare like lions … Denser than any wind in the summer grass. |
The poem concludes:
… and I knew
That I was not alone. |
In Left Review, Swingler wrote:
It is the function of art to resolve problems, not to evade them, and the creed of socialism is a great deal more than a political programme … the artist is not a special sort of being, inhabiting a rarefied atmosphere beyond the exigencies of common life. Rather it lies in his essence to have more than usual in common with the generality of men.
While Swingler did not leave the CP until 1956, when the Russian tanks crushed the Hungarian revolt, he was not the only honest member of the CP to deceive himself as to the intentions of the Russian leaders and the slavish following of the line by the leaders of the party.
I was interested to discover that in 1946 Randall Swingler had a brush with George Orwell, which resulted in both Randall and his brother, the Labour MP Stephen Swingler, being included on Orwell’s ‘little list’. Randall had replied in the magazine Polemic to Orwell’s The Prevention of Literature. While he agreed with Orwell that a writer must dare to be a Daniel against the enemies of intellectual liberty, he asked what Orwell was worried about, as he appeared to be getting more space than any other journalist to report the truth. His posture of lonely rebel hounded by monstrous pro-Soviet monopolists did not ring true. Randall Swingler was shortly afterwards blacklisted by the BBC, and his extra-mural class was closed.I congratulate Andy Croft on pulling Randall Swingler from out of present-day obscurity, and I look forward to the biography.
*************
Ian Birchall
Stalin
(2003)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 3, 2003, pp.340–4.
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).
Jean-Jacques Marie
Staline
Fayard, Paris, 2001, pp. 870, Є30
Staline
Fayard, Paris, 2001, pp. 870, Є30
JEAN-JACQUES Marie has devoted a lifetime to the study of Stalin. His first book on the subject (Staline, Editions du Seuil), published in 1967, ran to 297 pages. The present work, the culmination of 40 years of research, has 870. Not all the archives are yet open, and there may be new discoveries, but they are unlikely to change the overall picture much. This book should last for some considerable time as containing all anyone could reasonably want to know about ‘the father of the peoples’.
Biographers are supposed to have sympathy with their subjects. Marie, with a long history on the anti-Stalinist left, has nothing but contempt and loathing for his. Yet he retains a scientific objectivity. Myths and legends accrete around a figure as notorious as Stalin; Marie carefully dismisses those for which he cannot find documentary evidence, on the sound principle that what Stalin did was quite bad enough, without accusing him of things that he didn’t in fact do. Thus it seems unlikely that Stalin had Zhdanov murdered – not because of any tender-heartedness, but because Zhdanov had a bad heart and he didn’t need to (pp. 784–5). Marie gives no credence to the notion that Stalin may have been a police agent in the pre-revolutionary period (pp. 60–1). This has been a comforting myth for many – ‘Stalin was never a proper revolutionary’. The reality – that revolutionaries can go terribly wrong – is rather more unsettling. And it even appears dubious whether he ever enquired ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ (pp. 703, 947).Victor Hugo once wrote a poem in which an evil Eastern ruler is brought to the Last Judgement and is saved despite his manifold crimes because he once showed pity and brushed the flies off a dying pig. There are no pigs in Marie’s narrative, not one good deed in an unremitting narrative of cruelty and degradation.
Marie has unearthed as much as it is possible to know about Stalin’s youth, a period obscured by Stalin’s own activities in rewriting his life-story. His family background was one of savage brutality, and the youth was undoubtedly brutalised for life by the violence he received from his parents and the harsh life at the seminary. His contempt for others was soon visible in his personal life; he fathered illegitimate children, but seems to have shown no concern for their mothers. Politically, he had a contemptuous attitude towards ordinary workers, and regarded the creation of soviets in 1905 with extreme distrust (p. 89). Intellectually, he was mediocre. During the First World War, he was deported. While Lenin was studying Hegel and planning a new orientation for the labour movement, Stalin slumped into passivity; his Works contain just five letters for a period of four years (p. 130).
Stalin was out of his element in 1917, a year of mass action. From March to October 1917, he spoke in public only three times. He had little liking for the unpredictability of mass meetings, preferring to bury himself in the party apparatus (p. 145). As Marie notes, his talent was an ability to wait; not much use in an insurrection, but much more valuable in period of downturn (p. 157).
The early years of the Revolution were a harsh time, and severe measures were needed. In a situation in which experienced cadres were hard to come by, Lenin recognised Stalin’s talents and gave him jobs where the brutal enforcement of authority and efficiency were necessary. However, he played no rôle in the International, where a degree of tact was required in dealing with revolutionaries from a variety of different traditions. Stalin always despised the Comintern, and did not even attend the Seventh Congress in 1935, when the Popular Front line was put through (p. 457).
In 1921, when his second wife gave birth to her first son, she was expelled from the party for ‘lack of interest’ in party affairs during her pregnancy. Lenin asked for her readmission; Stalin did nothing in her defence (p. 221).
After Lenin’s death, Stalin seized his opportunity. His skills at bullying and manoeuvring enabled him to overcome his opponents, not only the principled Trotsky, but men like Zinoviev who were more or less on the same moral level as Stalin, but not quite as good at it. Zinoviev did oppose ‘socialism in one country’, but from a perspective of bureaucratic voluntarism and putschism, rather than a commitment to building a world revolutionary movement. And as President of the Comintern, Zinoviev had a vested interest in defending ‘internationalism’ (p. 300). Stalin was quite happy for Zinoviev’s Leningrad party to claim unanimous support, as it opened the way for Stalin to make similar claims (p. 304).
From now on, it was downhill all the way. The absurd logic of the purges took over, with the precious human resources of the state being wasted. The harm done to Russia’s own interests was immense. It is ironic that Stalin’s latter-day fan club are often christened ‘tankies’, when it was Stalin who put to death Tukhachevsky, the one general in the Red Army who realised that the car, and its cousin the tank, had made the horse and hence cavalry obsolete (p. 493).
By 1938, Stalin saw the need to call a halt to the excesses of the purge. But he had his supporters – the bright young men, generally careerists with no political baggage from the revolutionary period, who took over the jobs of those purged; as Marie points out, this new generation ‘owed him everything, while he owed them nothing’ (p. 534). There was also an element of pure sadism in Stalin’s methods, for example in the way that in his last years his closest and most loyal collaborators, Andreev and Molotov, were forced to support the purging of their own (Jewish) wives (pp. 787–8, 817).
The Second World War is often seen as Stalin’s finest hour. Marie shows what a shambles it in fact was. He clung frantically onto hopes of maintaining his alliance with the Nazis, even when it was clear that German invasion threatened. He was quite happy to pay any political price – in April 1941 he was planning to dissolve the Comintern as a gesture to Hitler (pp. 605–6). He was even willing to sign the pact of the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan (p. 597).
When forced to fight Hitler, Stalin reacted with the only means he knew – terror. Russian losses in the war reached horrific proportions, but it should not be forgotten that a substantial number were victims of their own side. This was not ‘friendly fire’, in the American euphemism, but special NKVD forces situated behind the line to kill those retreating or deserting (p. 666). Giving a bizarre twist to the words of the Internationale which promise that ‘our bullets are for our own generals’, Stalin continued to execute his own senior officers; in 1942 no less than 30 generals were executed (p. 659). Doubtless, in Voltaire’s words, he wanted to ‘encourage the others’.
Certainly there was great heroism on the Russian side, but ultimately the war was not so much won by Russia as lost by Germany. Stalin’s regime was scarcely popular, but Nazi racial theories prevented the pursuit of a policy of encouraging collaboration, which had considerable success in such Western states as France. In the Ukraine the local peasants, sick of Stalin’s rule, welcomed German troops with flowers – and received vicious treatment in response (p. 634). Anticipating George Bush, the Wehrmacht declared that ‘Bolshevik soldiers’ had lost the right to be treated according to the Geneva Convention.
Stalin’s final years were squalid. Drink and lack of sleep had wrecked his body and mind. Estranged from his children, surrounded by piles of unopened correspondence (p. 852), he feared plots against him and became increasingly crude in his anti-Semitism (pp. 847–55). Most embarrassingly of all, his memory was in decline, and he could no longer remember who had been purged and who had not; on one occasion he proposed someone for a drama prize who was already in jail (p. 766).
The last glimpses we have of him show him slumped in his own urine, his eyelids too dry to close, with the Politbureau already preparing to fight for the succession. Yet there is no sense of tragedy; this was not a great talent gone astray, but a bullying mediocrity chosen by history to carry through a counter-revolution. There is one passage in Victor Serge’s magnificent Case of Comrade Tulayev where the author succeeds in making us feel sorry for Stalin, but Marie, for all his research, never achieves that feat.
At the end of all the loathsome detail, we are led to ask what purpose such a biography serves. When Marie published his first book on Stalin, it was still a work of some courage: the French Communist Party still revered Stalin and denied the validity of Khrushchev’s secret speech. Today those who still worship Stalin are so few in number that they will fit on Harpal Brar’s ‘Friends & Family’ application form.
It is true that many of the last century’s leading Marxists – Trotsky, Serge, Deutscher, Cliff, Broué – have used the biographical form to understand the Russian Revolution, precisely because the rôle of individuals was so crucial. But biography cannot answer all the key questions. Stalin’s brutalised childhood may explain his later brutality, but cannot explain how such a brute assumed total power in a so-called ‘workers’ state’. Today, the crucial problem is whether Leninism, or indeed the very fact of revolution, necessarily leads to dictatorship of the Stalinist type. And an account focusing on the individual personality of Stalin cannot provide an adequate response.
Stalin alone did not make Stalinism. Yet many of the other figures involved in the process remain relatively unknown. Marie writes of the rise of the ‘nomenklatura’, but most of them remain names behind which there is very little substance. To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious biography of Zinoviev. How much is known of Andrei Andreev, an old Bolshevik – described by Stalin as ‘an active Trotskyist in 1921’! (p. 511) – who became one of the chief agents of the purges of the 1930s? Why did Krupskaya, who initially stood up to Stalin, instead of gracefully retiring into obscurity, remain on the Central Committee until her death, voting for the expulsions which technically had to precede the arrest and execution of Central Committee members (see Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, Yale, 1999)?
Marie only touches on the social and economic context of Stalinism, and here his testimony is ambiguous. He insists that ‘planning’ coexisted with Stalin’s arbitrary rule, even claiming that it was the planned economy that ensured the defeat of Hitler (pp. 711–2) (rather than recognising that Germany was unlikely to triumph over the combined might of the USA, the USSR and the British Empire).
In fact, Marie shows us a blend of corruption, incompetence and terror which is a mockery of the very word ‘planning’. Even the purges were carried out according to the free market principle of competition between sections of the state apparatus for the most victims (p. 546). Terror undoubtedly increased the productivity of labour when sheer brute force was the main thing required; but it could not provide the innovation necessary for a more sophisticated industrial society. One does not invent the computer at gun point.
As Marie shows, far from being a higher stage of economic development, the Russian economy was dependent on its international competitors. Its scientists were required to imitate developments already made in the West, rather than pursue new ideas. Original scientific research was positively discouraged, while a massive and highly expensive espionage network was built up so that Western inventions could be copied (p. 725).
Stalinist ideology was a positive obstacle to progress. Stalin encouraged the absurd, unscientific theories of the charlatan Lysenko, even at the cost of many lives through famine (pp. 780–3). But at one point he pulled back. He originally wanted to denounce relativity and quantum physics as ‘bourgeois science’, but was firmly told that they were the basis of nuclear weapons (pp. 796–7). Even the old butcher himself could not resist the pressure of capitalist competition, mediated through the arms race.
******************
We Were Making History
Wesley S. Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe (eds.)
We Were Making History: Saga of the Hartal of August 1953
Young Socialist Publications, Colombo 2002, pp. 525
We Were Making History: Saga of the Hartal of August 1953
Young Socialist Publications, Colombo 2002, pp. 525
THE indefatigable duo, Wesley Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe, have produced another impressive tome devoted to legendary episodes in the history of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the official section of the Fourth International in Sri Lanka until its expulsion in 1964. This time they have turned out a 525-page documentary history of the famous Hartal of 12 August 1953. Their earlier monographs included Britain, World War 2 and the Samasamajists (1996) and The Bracegirdle Affair (1998). Entitled We Were Making History, the book is a compilation of contemporary accounts of the massive anti-government protest. Overall, we commend the editors. One has to marvel at the hundreds of hours that must have been spent just retyping all this material.
The left parties in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) called for the Hartal to protest against the government’s cutbacks, notably the withdrawal of the rice subsidy, the increase in the prices of rice and sugar, the abolition of free lunches in the schools, and the rise in rail fares and postal rates. At the outset, it’s important to clarify the meaning of hartal. The word, borrowed from the Indian independence struggle, is often translated as ‘general strike’. That is not really accurate. A hartal was a form of Gandhian ‘non-cooperation’, a call to boycott normal public activities.The LSSP tried to forge a united front with the other two left parties, the Ceylon Communist Party (CP) and the VLSSP led by Philip Gunawardena, the one-time leader of the LSSP who had broken away in 1950. But the CP–VLSSP combo imposed unacceptable conditions, namely that the LSSP refrain from criticising Stalinism. As a result, the LSSP and CP–VLSSP went their own ways on 12 August 1953. We Were Making History describes in vivid detail the events and the LSSP’s rôle. The first section of the book consists of an introduction by Vijaya Vidyasagara, a reprint of the LSSP’s 14-point programme, and a parliamentary speech by Dr N.M. Perera on the economic policy of the government. The second section, by far the biggest, reprints contemporary articles drawn from the bourgeois dailies and the LSSP press. The third section, which is the most analytical, gathers selections from several subsequent critiques of the Hartal. The book also reproduces more than two dozen photos, many for the first time.
The Hartal was an enormous success in its own terms. People turned out in the thousands for rallies and processions. Here and there crowds got unruly, and there were deadly clashes with the police. The level of militancy took the left leaders by surprise. The government, on the other hand, was prepared for the worse. The Cabinet of Ministers, led by Dudley Senanayake, took refuge on a British warship, HMS Newfoundland. But if there was fear of insurrection, that fear proved unfounded. At the end of the day, the left parties congratulated the masses and urged everyone to resume business as usual the next day. Nevertheless, in some areas, the protests continued and intensified.
Critics later argued that the Hartal could and should have been escalated. The late Edmund Samarakkody, for example, maintained that the Hartal was a missed revolutionary opportunity. In the Preface, the editors disagree: ‘Today there are some people who are of the view that the left leaders should have continued the Hartal until they captured state power from the ruling class. The book shows the fallacy of this contention.’ According to this view, the masses were not ready.
In my opinion, the opposite was the case. Based on the materials in this book, one could argue that it was the left leaders who were not ready. It is clear that the LSSP (and the CP–VLSSP, too) never expected the Hartal to be anything more than a one-day peaceful protest. As a result, the party’s cadres were caught off guard, and were incapable of providing revolutionary leadership on the spot.
My main criticism of this book is its narrow focus on the LSSP, or rather on the public face of the LSSP. I wish the editors had included material from the CP–VLSSP. If the truth be told, the government was more worried about the CP–VLSSP than the LSSP. Remember that the Stalinists had been in one of their ultra-left adventurist periods; the Communist Party of India had been on the warpath, leading armed struggle in Telengana. Philip Gunawardena was also breathing fire. His VLSSP is often described as an appendage of the CP. That was not true. If anything, the CP, embroiled in its own factional feuding, feared that Philip might upset the applecart and capture the party. That was not a prospect that the government relished.
Likewise, the book gives no hint that the LSSP, too, was deeply divided. The years since independence in 1948 had been hard on the LSSP. The bourgeois-nationalist UNP government enjoyed wide popular support, cultivated through generous social welfare programmes, like the rice subsidy, paid for by the boom in exports driven by the Korean War. The LSSP had its high hopes dashed at the polls in 1952. A section of the party, particularly some of the trade union leaders, moved to the right. A report by a representative of the Fourth International in Ceylon stated that ‘the election defeat had completely demoralised these opportunist elements… Internationally they searched the horizons for a Messiah to rescue them – obviously to Stalinism. Nationally, they similarly had themselves to believe in united fronts comprising all and sundry – most important that it should look “formidable” in scope.’ (Report by B.H., 20 October 1953) In other words, a substantial section of the LSSP had become ‘soft’ on the CP–VLSSP. ‘The Hartal ruined everything for them … During the Hartal their people, very naturally having no faith in the proletariat (due to their obsession with “broad fronts”), underestimated the possibilities and even chances of success … 12 August found these people asleep.’ Right after the Hartal, the LSSP split, with a significant chunk defecting to the CP–VLSSP camp.
The LSSP didn’t reap the rewards of its rôle in the Hartal at the next elections in 1956, as it had hoped. Sensing better than most which way the wind was blowing, Philip Gunawardena allied with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s populist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which campaigned on a demagogic platform of ‘Sinhalese socialism’. Swept into office, the Philip–SLFP popular front marginalised the LSSP, enacting popular reforms, such as Philip’s Paddy Lands Act.
The Hartal was the last great mass struggle that the LSSP led. After 1953, the forces of conservatism and parliamentary reformism, epitomised by Dr N.M. Perera, gained momentum. But that is another story.
My own criticism aside, I highly recommend this book as a significant contribution to the history of Sri Lankan Trotskyism. Wesley Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe have set a publishing standard which hopefully others will emulate. I, for one, eagerly await their next labour of love.
Charles Wesley Ervin
****************
The Trotskyists
Christophe Nick
Les Trotskistes
Fayard, Paris 2002, pp. 615, Є23
Les Trotskistes
Fayard, Paris 2002, pp. 615, Є23
THIS book is a by-product of the successful recent campaign by the right to discredit Jospin in the French presidential elections, when he was caught out trying to deny that he had once been a Lambertist entrist within the French Socialist Party. So its main theme is entrism (particularly Chapter 6, pp. 218–64), and the book’s very first words are that ‘the Trotskyists are everywhere’. Trotskyists, apparently, ‘identify themselves with the mole, and venerate this animal’ (p. 12), and ‘entrism is a technique peculiar to the Trotskyists, a case unique in the annals of politics, an ethnological curiosity’ (p. 217). But the plain fact of the matter is that there was originally no connection between all this talk about ‘moles’ and the practice of entrism at all. ‘Mole’ was a word used by Marx to explain the slow, unnoticed progress of the revolution itself before crisis brought it to the surface. A simple perusal of the press of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, which first took up this odd obsession with moles in the late 1960s, in fact shows that it adopted this language after it had abandoned what entry work it had been doing in the first place, which in France, at least, appears to have been largely carried out among Stalinist students (pp. 228–9). And nowhere are we shown the real origins of the entry tactic, in Marx’s methods for constructing revolutionary parties, or in Trotsky’s theory of the united front from within. But for a journalist this is all good stuff, for it enables him to keep up the pretence at great length that he is really revealing something exotic, exciting and deeply mysterious, while at the same time doing his bit towards the collapse of the old left in France. Nor are the Socialists his only target: personal details included about Daniel Gluckstein, then standing for the Parti des Travailleurs in the presidential election (pp. 32–3, 39–40) have already formed the basis of an action at law (Agence France Presse, 26 February 2002; Informations ouvrières, 20 February, 27 February and 3 April 2002).
The book can thus be regarded as a work of the moment, and its peculiar structure and preoccupations bear all the marks of exposé-style journalism. There is no good historical reason, for example, why an outline of Trotsky’s life should follow a sketch of the early lives of the French Trotskyist leaders, or why his death should come four chapters after a description of the street politics of the LCR in the 1970s. Some chapters (for example, Chapter 6, on ‘moles’ and entrism) are obviously meant to lend an air of mystery, others (such as Chapter 8, on the Second World War) quite simply have the aim of belittling the Trotskyist movement, while yet others (Chapter 3, the LCR and insurrection) seem to be aiming at some sort of sensationalism.This said, it would be mistaken to assume that the book has no permanent value. The first chapter contains some fascinating information, much of it based upon personal interviews, dealing with the family backgrounds of Jean-René Chauvin (pp. 19–20), Pierre Avot, who obtained the paper for Pablo’s plan to forge banknotes during the Algerian war (pp. 21–2), Marcel Bleibtreu (pp. 23–5), Pierre Broué (pp. 29-–30) and Maurice Najman, who turns out to be related to Rosa Luxemburg (pp. 31–2). Contrary to the propaganda put out by the Stalinists during the 1960s that the Trotskyists were ‘fils à papa’ (rich men’s kids), Nick shows that Trotskyism is really ‘a very French phenomenon, very much ours, linked to our traditions’ (p. 15). But he also shows that he himself is just as faithful to the traditions of the French right, by making much of Trotskyism’s input from with freemasonry (pp. 20–1, 347–8), what he sees fit to call ‘revolutionary Yiddishland’ (pp. 31–7, 39–42) and Protestantism (pp. 41–2).
In spite of this slant, there is much of real value here, in particular in the chapter on the origins of Trotskyism in France (Chapter 5, pp. 174–216), which reproduces some fascinating data from the unpublished memoirs of Raymond Molinier now on deposit with CERMTRI (pp. 174–80, 204–7, 210–1; also 301–2). Equally exciting is the information provided on Pablo’s involvement in the Algerian War (pp. 382–433), which also shows the small part that the Fourth International occupied in his extensive and rather visionary diplomacy, a curious anticipation of the present politics of the American SWP. It also reveals the unpleasant way Frank and Mandel used to get rid of him (pp. 429–34), which was to become a well-worn methodology, since it was also practised upon the group to which I belonged half a dozen years later, even down to the identical trick of turning people away from world congresses on railway stations (p. 434).
The description of the street politics of the LCR in the 1970s (pp. 72–132) makes clear much that completely mystified me at the time. Where did the odd dancing, skipping and chanting come from when the IMG went on demonstrations? And why did they lead their members into set-piece street battles with the police, ostensibly to break up fascist meetings taking place indoors? It was all apparently borrowed from the increasingly confrontational, putschist and militaristic tactics adopted by the LCR after recruiting large numbers of students in 1968. Accustomed as they were to a high level of demonstration politics, the group’s weak implantation in the labour movement prevented them from being used in any other way. Needless to relate, this little piece of petit-bourgeois adventurism had tragic results in both countries at the same time, with the suicide of Michel Récanati on a railway line in France (p. 132) and the killing of Kevin Gately outside Conway Hall in Britain. Information is also provided on the strong-arm methods allegedly used by the Lambertists against their opponents in the movement (pp. 527–30, 533–6), which, if true, is deeply disturbing.
But as was to be expected, useful details are nonetheless mixed up with a great deal of dross. Jay Lovestone was not expelled from the American Communist Party for belonging to the Left Opposition (p. 369). Pablo was not officially delegated to the founding conference of the Fourth International (p. 327). Pierre Frank was certainly not boosted by the British Trotskyists after the war (p. 342). ‘Chatman’ turns out to be Max Shachtman (p. 347), and Healy gets the user-friendly name of ‘George’ (p. 374). Pierre Frank, whose name is misspelled throughout, inexplicably has his history of the Fourth International, originally written in French, quoted from at second-hand from an English translation (p. 314, n3). But these are trivial slips. Much worse is the misrepresentation of the activities of the Trotskyists during the Second World War, where a thin pretence is made at claiming that, although many of them were Jews, they were soft on fascism and indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews (pp. 302–5), an accusation even directed at Henri Molinier, who was himself killed by the Germans (pp. 305–7). This nasty stuff obviously goes all the way back to the unpleasant ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ propaganda of the French Communist Party, notoriously one of the most wretchedly servile Stalinist outfits in Europe.
So this is certainly a book to be recommended, but only to those who know a great deal about its subject to begin with: and for all the detail contained in it, it never rises from the level of anecdote to that of analysis.
Al Richardson
*************
Life for Peace and Socialism
Archie Potts
Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism
Merlin, London, 2002, pp. 227, £14.95
Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism
Merlin, London, 2002, pp. 227, £14.95
KONNI Zilliacus is one of the lost names of British socialism. The Tyneside labour historian Archie Potts has provided us with the first biography of Zilliacus’ eventful life. Born in 1894, the son of a peripatetic gun-running Finnish nationalist, his contacts during the First World War with Norman Angell and G. Lowes Dickinson of the Union of Democratic Control drew him into politics, and he become very much influenced by the UDC’s ideas, which envisaged the maintenance of world peace through the framework of an international institution. He then became the intelligence and cipher officer for General Alfred Knox in the British expedition in Siberia, and started seriously to question Westminster’s intentions when British forces were kept in Russia after the Central Powers had surrendered in 1918. Although he hardly considered himself a socialist at the time, he joined the Labour Party in December 1918. With a broad knowledge of international affairs and a remarkable ability with languages, he worked in the Secretariat of the League of Nations, and, as a result of the close links between the League and the Labour and Socialist International, he came increasingly into contact with the leaders of the Labour Party to the degree that by the early 1930s he was writing foreign policy documents for them.
Potts states that as the 1930s drew by and the international scene became more threatening, Zilliacus combined his existing outlook with Marxism, and became a leading advocate of collective security, that is to say, a call for an alliance of Britain, France and other bourgeois democracies and the Soviet Union against the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Although collective security was promoted by its supporters as a means of preventing war, its opponents, mainly Trotskyists and anarchists on the left and Conservatives and fascists on the right, insisted that the encirclement of Germany which it inferred was more likely to lead to war. It is interesting that Potts notes that Zilliacus realised that not only could confronting fascist states lead to war, but that such a move might have to be openly contemplated and supported. This, however, was acceptable, as Zilliacus pointed out that ‘the entry of the Soviet Union into the League had transformed it from a purely capitalist organisation’ (p. 42). Not surprisingly, Zilliacus became a leading supporter in the Labour Party of the Popular Front campaign of the late 1930s, and had several books on international affairs published by the Left Book Club. He was adopted as the Labour Party candidate for Gateshead in the summer of 1939, although he was not to become its MP until the general election in 1945.As a leading advocate of the Popular Front, Zilliacus was on good terms with the Communist Party of Great Britain, but this relationship came under considerable strain after September 1939 once the party, in line with the Communist International’s obeying the logic of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, turned from supporting to opposing the Allies’ war against Germany. The scope of his anger was extended to Moscow itself after the invasion of Finland at the end of 1939, when he more-or-less accused the Soviet regime of using Nazi methods.
The rift between Zilliacus and Stalinism was largely patched up once the Soviet Union joined in the war after the German invasion in June 1941, and although Zilliacus declined the invitation to join the Communist Party as a clandestine member within the Labour Party, on the grounds that he had always been a Labour Party member and that to work within it as an agent of another party would be dishonest (Potts gives no indication that he had any political differences with Stalinism at this point), he remained on good terms with the Stalinists, and his material appeared intermittently in their Labour Monthly. Zilliacus was not a wholly uncritical admirer of the Soviet regime like D.N. Pritt, yet he went much further than most people in giving it the benefit of the doubt. Hence when a court case blew up in France over Viktor Kravchenko’s book I Chose Freedom, he went to Paris in early 1949 and publicly defended the Soviet regime against the charges made by the defector. Potts shows that he claimed that the purges ‘had rooted out a potential fifth column in the Soviet Union’, and that the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ‘had been used by Stalin to strengthen Soviet defences’, and he also notes that Zilliacus declared that another three decades would have to pass before the Soviet Union could enjoy the sort of civil liberties that existed in Britain (pp. 131–2). Zilliacus’ widow added that he deplored the existence of labour camps in the Soviet Union and looked forward to the day when they no longer existed, although one cannot ascertain from this book whether these sentiments were publicly expressed. Zilliacus’ pro-Soviet outlook and his sharp – and very much justified – criticisms of Labour’s increasingly fervid anti-communist foreign policy led to his expulsion from the Labour Party in 1948. Parenthetically, it is rather droll to see the citing of a certain T.G. Healey [sic] of Streatham CLP imploring the Labour Party conference in 1949 about ‘the right’ of party members ‘to speak, to differ, and to have their opinions democratically discussed without fear of expulsion and fear of threats’ (p. 140). Somewhat strangely, Potts misses the opportunity to point to the stark contrast between Gerry Healy’s plea for tolerance in the Labour Party and the tyrannical internal regime of any group that he controlled.
Then came more trouble. Zilliacus had become very enamoured with Tito, and he was rash enough to continue with his political and personal friendship with the Yugoslav leader after he had been excommunicated by Stalin. The lack of gratitude of the Stalinists for all Zilliacus’ enthusiastic work for them was shown when, in a particularly splenetic attack upon the Wall Street Glamour Boy in Belgrade, Ivor Montagu accused Zilliacus of ‘frantically treading water in an ocean of lies’ (Labour Monthly, December 1949). Yet even after being so cruelly knifed by his former Stalinist allies, his big book I Choose Peace, published in late 1949, was largely uncritical of the Soviet Union, and even softened some of his previous criticisms of Moscow’s actions during the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including heavily revising his assessment of the invasion of Finland. And then his name – along with those of Labour MPs Richard Crossman and George Wigg, Noël Coward (!) and the former Stalinist hack Claud Cockburn (who must have fallen out with Moscow over something or another) – appeared in the accusations uttered by the defendants in the show-trial of Slánský and other Czech leaders in 1952. Although he was greatly upset by all this, one gets the feeling that his criticisms of Stalinism were more often in a tone of regret and bewilderment than of anger, as if the Stalinists’ actions were more a matter of individual transgressions and accidental excesses than being systemic iniquities.
Zilliacus was permitted to rejoin the Labour Party in February 1952, and he became the MP for Gorton in Manchester in 1955. He continued to stand on the left of the party to the end of his life in 1967, and although he was seen as too pro-Soviet by many Labour left-wingers, he worked with them in the Victory for Socialism campaign. He continued to oppose the Cold War orientation of the Labour leadership, was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposed the Vietnam War, and re-established friendly relations with Stalinism as the post-Stalin thaw took hold.
There are quite a few minor slips in the text. Some are simple spelling errors. The appalling Russia correspondent of The Times at the time of the revolution was Robert Wilton, not ‘Wilson’; Stalin’s cultural ideologue was Andrei Zhdanov, not ‘Zhadanov’, the socialist historian was Julius Braunthal, not ‘Brauthal’; the Conservative friend of Tito was Fitzroy Maclean, not ‘McClean’; the Conservative leader was Alec Douglas-Home, not ‘Douglas-Hume’; the Trotskyist leader was Gerry Healy, not ‘Healey’, and the Japanese protectorate in Manchuria was Manchukuo, not ‘Manchukao’. Others are a result of the commonplace British disease of ignoring diacriticals that can be applied these days with modern computerised typesetting. The Spanish Republican Premier was Negrín, not ‘Negrin’; the Czech President was Eduard Beneš, not ‘Benes’, and other Czechs mentioned were Rudolf Slánský, not ‘Slansky’, Antonín Novotný, not ‘Novotny’, and Alexander Dubček, not ‘Dubcek’; the Polish Stalinist leader was Władisław Gomułka, not ‘Wladislaw Gomulka’, and the Yugoslav writer whom Zilliacus helped was Jovan Običan, not ‘Obican’ or ‘Orbican’.
More important, however, is that our author accepts without question many of Zilliacus’ assumptions. Potts makes no criticism of the analysis promoted by Zilliacus that the majority of the Tories opposed collective security because they were putting their class interests before the interests of the nation. This idea, also subscribed to by the Stalinists – in 1938, Harry Pollitt condemned Chamberlain for ‘betraying the national interests of the British people’ (For Peace and Plenty, p. 26) – is bizarre, as it assumes that in a capitalist country there is a national interest standing above the class interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Elements within the bourgeoisie can make incorrect judgements of how their class interests are to be defended, but as it is their nation, it is hard to see how they could have a class interest separate from a ‘national’ interest.
It was not purely anti-communist prejudice that dissuaded many British bourgeois politicians, commentators and analysts from advocating a collective security agreement with the Soviet Union. There was a feeling, noted by Potts, although he refrains from expanding upon it, that an Anglo-Franco-Soviet bloc aimed at containing Germany would rapidly lead to an armed confrontation. There was also a widespread feeling, one which Potts does not mention, that the purges and trials indicated that there was much amiss in the Soviet Union, and that a regime which exterminated its most talented military officers was not exactly a reliable military ally. What is called ‘appeasement’ was not a case of surreptitiously backing Hitler, nor of putting class interests before those of ‘the nation’, but an attempt to play for time, to gain a couple of years so that Britain’s in-depth rearmament scheme could get going before war came. The process which led to the coining of the biggest political insult in the British political lexicon was an attempt by Chamberlain and his colleagues to defend the interests of British capitalism, which, after all, was what their job was all about.
Ultimately, Potts fails to make a critical appraisal of Zilliacus’ career. Whilst readers of this journal would appreciate the manner in which Zilliacus maintained a critique of the pro-US, pro-Cold War and pro-capitalist Labour Party right-wingers, it is essential to point out that defending the interests of the working class both in Britain and in the wider world also required establishing a healthy distance from Stalinism. Zilliacus was an intelligent man. He was not afraid of standing out against the stream of orthodoxy, and we have seen that he faced sharp attacks from both right-wing Labourites and Stalinists. Yet his conception of socialism was essentially élitist. Looking at his two major works, I Choose Peace and A New Birth of Freedom?: World Communism After Stalin of 1957, one can find precious little indication of any recognition on his part of the idea of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. We should not be too surprised at this, as the ‘Marxism’ to which he was attracted in the 1930s was the Stalinised distortion popularised by the likes of John Strachey that both paralleled and reflected the consolidation of the Soviet bureaucracy into a self-conscious ruling élite. It is telling that this, the most crucial factor of Zilliacus’ political approach for three long and eventful decades, gets not one word of criticism in this book.
Paul Flewers
**************
What Became of the Revolution
Al Richardson (ed.)
What Became of the Revolution: Selected Writings of Boris Souvarine
Socialist Platform, London, 2002, pp. 150, £5.00
What Became of the Revolution: Selected Writings of Boris Souvarine
Socialist Platform, London, 2002, pp. 150, £5.00
THIS smallish collection of Souvarine’s writings provides a rather useful glimpse into the early years of French Communism and Trotskyism. It also throws more light onto the political evolution of Souvarine, the senior French Communist cadre of Ukrainian origins, a man of evidently great ability, whose evolution away from Communism into, in the words of Trotsky, a ‘gangrenous sceptic’ and later ‘democratic’ Cold Warrior was yet another of the many great personal tragedies occasioned by the rise of Stalinism.
The collection begins with a couple of small pieces (and some later commentary), based on an exchange Souvarine had with Lenin on questions of war, ‘defence of the fatherland’ and other related questions when he was a young, 20-year-old supporter of the Kautskyist ‘centre’ in Social Democracy during the First World War. This fills in some of the background surrounding Lenin’s Open Letter to Boris Souvarine of 1915, part of his continuing political struggle against the centrist and concilationist tendencies within the left wing of social democracy during the period immediately before the Russian Revolution and the foundation of the Third International. The regard Lenin held for Souvarine’s ability and potential at that time is evidenced by the friendly, pedagogical tone in which he addressed Souvarine’s criticisms.Indeed, even Souvarine’s much later anti-Communist writings are a measure of his abilities, as particularly the transcripts of a series of six radio talks he gave in 1957, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, testify. These, which make up the second section of the book, are in content harsh and ahistorical indictments of the early Bolshevik regime, an index of Souvarine’s political regression and degeneration. It also has to be said that in their form of argumentation, their systematic treatment of the subject and their linking of arguments in a systematised train of causality, they bear a great deal of resemblance in form to some sort of Marxist polemic.
Even in his anti-Bolshevik degeneration, as a mitigating factor, Souvarine does not appear to evidence the anti-democratic, rampant fear and contempt for the working class that many anti-Bolshevik writers ooze in every pore of their writings. Rather, Souvarine engages in a critique of the Bolsheviks on the grounds of their alleged lack of democratic legitimacy and support, using as the centrepiece of his argument a disputation of the really representative character of the soviets as 1917 went on, and their allegedly increasingly irregular character and lack of clear demarcation as to whom they represented, etc.; the point of this being simply a lead-up to his main point of the characterisation of the October Revolution as merely a coup, carried out by the Bolsheviks with the support of allegedly merely a radicalised section of the working masses, and not the broad masses themselves.
Souvarine cites Lenin as stating that under the Provisional Government, Russia was now ‘the freest country … in the world’, and then proceeds to attempt to analyse how the Bolsheviks allegedly exploited this freedom in order to destroy it. He does not, however, manage to address the one glaring question that arises from this contention: why, if this freedom was inherent in the ‘democratic’ bourgeois regime he is polemically defending, the masses were not prepared to lift a finger to defend this freedom against the ‘unrepresentative’ Bolsheviks and the soviets which they had hegemonised by the time of October. In reality, the freedom to which Souvarine was appealing against the revolution was not a product of the bourgeois regime, but rather of the revolution itself and of the power of the masses to defend their freedom against the bourgeoisie, a situation that could only continue as long as the masses continued to possess the power to do this, a power which no bourgeoisie can tolerate for more than an historical moment. Thus the logical outcome of this freedom, which eventually was a product of the existence of dual power through the Soviets, was its consolidation through the removal of the bourgeoisie from state power, which of course happened when the Military Revolutionary Committee seized power as the military arm of the Bolshevik-dominated soviets at the end of October 1917.
Souvarine’s anti-Bolshevik argumentation ranges the whole gamut, from the suppression of the Constituent Assembly, to the withering of the soviets, the undeniable contradictions between the Bolsheviks’ pre-revolutionary promises on war and peace, the problem of non-Russian nationalities, etc. The eloquence of his argumentation on these questions, again, is considerable; what however is missing is the real class context. Souvarine by this time was a firm supporter of Anglo-Gallic-American ‘democratic’ imperialism, and he reads back into history his own illusions in the inherently democratic nature of these powers, the core of the Entente, in order to make an argument that the Bolsheviks had, for instance, promised to offer to the world a democratic peace, and even to wage a revolutionary war if their offers were spurned, and were then forced into the ‘shameful’ Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Souvarine argues, from the standpoint of a French Social Democrat, that this treaty only became a dead-letter when the Entente powers defeated Germany – empirically true, of course, but rather a non-argument, as the treaty was of course imposed on the Bolsheviks with the support of German Social Democrats who had exactly the same servile attitude to their own ruling class’ ‘democratic’ pretensions. Of course, in a later period this ‘tragic’ disagreement between Social Democrats about which imperialist gang had been the most ‘democratic’ was swept under the carpet in the interests of the Cold War. For all the eloquence of his anti-Bolshevik polemic, Souvarine, like other former Marxists, such as James Burnham, who have attempted to use some of the rational analytical tools of Marxism against Marxism itself, is forced by the very nature of his political thrust to ignore crucial facts and distort the real meaning and context of historical events in order to make reality fit his own regressive political programme.
Other material in the book, however, gives a very different picture of Souvarine. He was the author of a useful pamphlet, The Third International, published by the British Socialist Party in 1920, which gives a propagandistic and historical treatment of the origins of – and necessity for – the Comintern. One assumes the publication of this work must have been part of the preparation for the unification of the various forces that stood with the Comintern in Britain into a unified Communist Party later the same year. As indeed his series of articles on building a Communist Party in France throws considerable light on his rôle as certainly the most forceful, politically far-sighted and evidently able of the leaders of the early French Communist Party – he was effectively the political centrepiece of its left wing, which fought internally and at the time against the petit-bourgeois, centrist nature of the many of the PCF’s initial cadre. Indeed, the capacity, demonstrated in these contemporaneous writings, of Souvarine for intransigent struggle despite temporary political isolation is so remarkable that it really underlines the tragic waste of his later career, when he was robbed of his revolutionary commitment and outlook as a result of the burgeoning monstrosities of Stalinism. In this, of course, Souvarine was one of many; unfortunately, he was one of the most able.
The selection of his writings on Stalinism that makes up part four of the collection also makes quite interesting reading. His 1978 essay Stalin: Why and How? purports to offer an analysis of how Leninism led to Stalinism through Lenin’s utilisation of Stalin’s organisational talents to suppress dissent within the party in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Souvarine’s explanation of this contains at least elements of truth in terms of the imperceptible shift of the Bolsheviks away from the democratic aspirations which animated the party before it took power. It undoubtedly adds to the corpus of material on the origins of the power of Stalin in the party apparatus that he later was able to use with such effect against his factional opponents. Its subtle conclusion, of Stalin as Lenin’s ‘illegitimate son’, however, illustrates the programmatic distance Souvarine himself had travelled. While it makes a reference to Lenin being the ‘practical creator’ of ‘a verbal pseudo-Marxism, simplistic and caricatural’, allegedly the starting point of Stalinist ideology, it offers not even the hint of a positive attempt to put things right in terms of unfalsifying Marxism. Since Souvarine had by then convinced himself that the Entente was the fount of progressive development in those days, this is hardly surprising.
A fairly nondescript piece on the NEP and the later ‘New Course’, and its implications for the PCF, shows Souvarine in his days as an early supporter of the original Russian Left Opposition, to the extent of echoing the Opposition’s defence of the Bolsheviks’ 1921 ban on factions. This contrasts somewhat with a later (1930) essay on the Five Year Plan. Showing Souvarine in political motion, the essay is scathing about the economic adventurism and atrocious consequences of what was in fact the decisive event in transforming the USSR from a recognisable, if badly damaged and decomposed, product of a proletarian revolution into something qualitatively different and historically unprecedented. Be that as it may, Souvarine also directs his fire at the Left Opposition’s position of giving critical support to Stalin’s alleged ‘left turn’, which of course laid the basis for many capitulations of oppositionists to Stalin, and certainly was a reflection of an understandable, but comprehensive, misunderstanding of the situation. As a renegade, Souvarine’s insights are not without value in casting light on these events.
The collection rounds off with a short biographical sketch of the Bolshevik party’s veteran archivist, David Riazanov, and a piece on the work of the Marx-Engels Institute that Riazanov founded in Moscow. Again from the early 1930s, before Souvarine’s rightward motion had fully unfolded, it gives another glimpse of the intimate connections of Souvarine with the most historically grounded, most cultured elements of the revolutionary Comintern.
All in all, this little collection has much to recommend it in illuminating the career of this contradictory and historically quite important figure, and in once more making useful material on the origins of French Communism available to an English-speaking readership.
Ian Donovan
*************
Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism
Alfred Rosmer, Boris Souvarine, Emile Fabrol, Antoine Clavez
Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism
Francis Boutle, London, 2002, pp250, £10.00
THIS book is divided into three sections, the first of which consists of two essays by Emile Fabrol and one by Antoine Clavez, translated from the French magazine Prométhée, as are all but one of those in the second section, which are the documents written at the time by Rosmer, Souvarine and their comrades. The third section is Rosmer’s continuation of Trotsky’s My Life from 1929 until his murder. To do this, Rosmer used excerpts from Trotsky’s own writings. One can only agree with Al Richardson’s comment in his introduction: ‘Our admiration for Rosmer’s conscientiousness and fidelity to his subject can only increase when we realise that at the time he was selecting them [the excerpts] he no longer shared Trotsky’s views.’ (p. 12) It was taken from the CERMTRI website. Reading Rosmer’s texts, one senses his devotion to the cause of communism, his loyalty to his friend Trotsky, and his thoroughgoing integrity faced with assorted rogues then coming to the fore. Each section is annotated, and an index is provided.Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism
Francis Boutle, London, 2002, pp250, £10.00
In the introduction, Al draws some critical conclusions about what became Trotskyism, either from his own experience and study, or from the content of the first two sections of this book. They include the mythology of a continuity of Trotskyism from 1923, when in fact the first wave of Trotskyists outside Russia largely vanished. Neither was it Trotskyist as such, which also applies to the Russian 1923 opposition, nor was Trotsky a part of the latter, and he specifically repudiated the former. ‘The modern international Trotskyist movement … goes back to a second wave originating in the Joint Opposition in the USSR. The majority of its personnel were Zinovievists …’ (p. 13) These were the people who had expelled the first wave, promoted ‘Bolshevisation’, helped construct ‘Leninism’ and ‘Trotskyism’, proclaimed the latter, along with ‘Luxemburgism’ and ‘Brandlerism’, a deviation akin to ‘Menshevism’, and all in the service of denigrating Trotsky and removing him as a potential successor to Lenin. ‘Bolshevisation’ destroyed the democratic structures of the Communist parties, imposing a top-down command system, as well as instituting unquestionable rule over them by Moscow. It did the groundwork for Stalinisation. Al refers to the unpleasant features common to the Trotskyist organisations, describing them as bearing ‘more than a passing resemblance to Stalinism’ (p. 13). This can be attributed to the origins of the second wave in the Zinovievist political school.
The first essay by Fabrol, The Prelude to Stalinism, explains what ‘Bolshevisation’ was in the French Communist Party (PCF), and its consequences. A key figure in this process was Alfred Lepetit, the Comintern representative, who must have been sent to France following his stint as Zinoviev’s mouthpiece in the German Communist Party (KPD) Central Committee, where he was known as August Kleine or Guralsky. Once his boss decided to scapegoat Brandler and Thalheimer for the absence of an uprising in October 1923, to link Trotsky with them via Radek, in order to shift any blame from the ECCI and to discredit Trotsky, Guralsky was mobilised to help. He wrote this gem in the KPD’s theoretical organ in March 1924: ‘The alliance between Brandler–Thalheimer and Radek–Trotsky in the German question is no coincidence. It concerns the fundamental questions: de-Bolshevisation of the RCP [Russian Communist Party] and the European parties or retaining the Bolshevik tutelage in the RCP [sic!] and Bolshevising the European parties.’ Guralsky’s rôle in Germany is not mentioned in the book.
The piece by Clavez, entitled The Bureaucratisation and Destruction of the Party, shows how Zinoviev got Albert Treint to head the PCF, and how the Zinovievists began ‘ridding the party of all the elements who had accumulated any experience’, in order to replace them with ‘recent members… incapable of questioning the correctness of the general line’ (p. 38). He quotes Trotsky on Treint from 1929, stating that ‘Zinovievism was a mixture of extreme leftism and centrism’, and accusing him of wanting ‘to apply Zinovievist methods within the framework of the opposition’ (pp. 41–2). Trotsky’s definition is false. The leftism of the Zinovievists (advancing revolution as the only solution, no serious work in the mass organisations, then gross opportunism when forced to take a stand – that is, the rejection of transitional politics) is merely one variety of centrism, and one can observe it in the practice of the Trotskyists most of the time. In fact Clavez sees James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party as ‘the Trotskyist group where Zinovievist influence is most striking’ (p. 43), and illustrates it by quoting from the appalling book The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. Of course, Cannon trained a whole strand of the British Trotskyist movement, and to them his book was a sort of bible.
Fabrol’s second essay, The French Communist Party and Trotsky, focuses on how ‘Bolshevisation’ changed the PCF, both in composition and its leadership, and how an apparatus was also created. He recounts the struggle over Trotsky in the RCP and its echo inside the PCF, where he was very popular. It mentions the discovery by the Bolshevisers of an ‘international Right’, which conveniently included, not genuine right-wingers, plentiful in the PCF leadership, but all those whom Zinoviev needed to remove from the leadership of the parties who had come out in support of Trotsky, protested against the denigration of him within the RCP, were suspected of support for him while also blaming the ECCI for the failure of the October 1923 uprising in Germany, and had opposed the scapegoating of Brandler and Thalheimer. Fabrol blames the ECCI for the failure, pointing out how Zinoviev first justified the retreat of the KPD, only to condemn it later, and sees ‘Bolshevisation’ as being one of its main consequences. He quotes from an article, probably authored by Guralsky, in the PCF’s theoretical organ, on the new ideology of ‘Leninism’: ‘… only the theory, tactics and practice provided by Lenin and applied by his pupils are truly correct … any other methods and theories developed even by the best revolutionaries (like Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg) are false, and are only survivals of the old methods and theories of the social democratic left’ (p. 54). The removal of all opposition and creation of ideological conformity undertaken by Treint was also going on elsewhere, he writes, naming Ruth Fischer in Germany. Actually the first task was in the hands of Anton Grylewicz, assisted by Werner Scholem, in the KPD’s Orgbüro. The former led the minority of the Leninbund which fused with the rump Wedding Opposition in March 1930 to create the German Trotskyist grouping, while the latter had a relationship with the Trotskyists during the 1930s. Scores of workers’ leaders, old Spartacists, were expelled by them.
Boris Souvarine’s How I Came to be Regarded as a Trotskyist begins the second section. It was written many years later when he was an anti-Communist, but it is very useful anyway, and it also criticises some of Trotsky’s inconsistencies. One can usually get some mental stimulation from Souvarine’s writing.
Next comes the Second Letter to the Members of the Communist Party: The Reply of the Three Expelled, by Delagarde, Monatte and Rosmer. It informs party members of what has gone on and why. Looking at the Zinovievist concept of the party, it makes the crucial point that its policy ‘in no way lies in developing the class consciousness of the proletariat, but in creating the greatest possible number of conformists, bootlickers and sluggards’ (p. 88). It looks at the wrecking of the trade union work and how ‘the great task of preparing a current of opinion favourable to international trade union unity was sabotaged even more’ (p90). We see a description of the centrism with a leftist face referred to above. It also insists that ‘we are not acquainted with “Leninism” or “Trotskyism”’.
Rosmer’s About the “Final Warning” Given to Trotsky: The Myth of Trotskyism follows. In it Rosmer explains the debate in the RCP in 1923, its causes and consequences. In the conclusion, he insists ‘we are not Trotskyists, since there is no such thing as “Trotskyism”’ (p. 113). In A Ridiculous Gesture, Rosmer explains why the PCF leadership attacked Max Eastman’s Since Lenin Died, a book they had not yet read, describing its contents and why the RCP leadership required that it be condemned by the sections of the Communist International.
This section ends with The Reply of the “Nucleus” to Trotsky’s Two Requests, which is the answer of Rosmer and his comrades to Trotsky’s asking of them to close down their journal La Révolution Prolétarienne and to appeal to the ECCI against their expulsions from the PCF. It is worth giving a few key extracts:
Denunciations of an ‘international Right’ and the slogan of ‘Bolshevising the Parties’ made their appearance at the beginning of 1924, at a time when two important events – the October defeat in Germany and Lenin’s death – coming at a time when his party was going through a serious internal crisis, weighed heavily upon the international workers’ movement … Now it was after these two important events that we saw men trusted by the leadership appear in the International’s sections, bearing the slogan of ‘Bolshevisation’ and denouncing an ‘international Right’ … It was necessary to condemn without delay the opposition that had appeared within the Russian Communist Party as counter-revolutionary, to place all the responsibility for the German setback upon some men who were identified as scapegoats, and to denounce the ‘international Right’, not the real one … but an imaginary ‘Right’, especially created for the occasion. (p. 122)
It mentions the ‘catastrophic situation created in Germany by the Ruth Fischer–Maslow group’, ‘the well-nigh total elimination of Communist influence in the trade unions’, and asks why the Communist International put these people at the head of the KPD, answering thus: ‘Because it needed them to combat Radek and Brandler. The finishing off of these two comrades by Ruth Fischer at the Fifth Congress … was the linchpin of the essential work of the congress – a nauseating display of scalps.’ (p. 124)
The wreckage was greatest in Germany, but it could also be seen elsewhere, including France, where Trotsky would find ‘the most “leftist” leftism and the shallowest opportunism’. The RCP had ‘heaped up difficulties for itself the day it asked the sections of the Communist International to pronounce upon the crisis it was going through without their understanding it, whilst dictating to them the response they should make’ (p. 127). And ‘if Ruth Fischer has shown that she understands nothing of the trade union movement, then Treint and his ilk understand it no better’ in relation to trade union unity: ‘They sabotaged a movement that stood out in their favour and have messed up the exceptionally favourable situation created by the formation of a left within the Amsterdam International.’ (p. 127) The third Profintern congress in July 1924 had decided to campaign for a fusion with the IFTU, and this had generated enormous enthusiasm in Germany and Scandinavia. It was this movement to which Rosmer et al. referred, not the Anglo-Russian Committee, as the note states (p. 137). The ARC emerged out of this campaign which saw a left favouring fusion and a right opposing it within the IFTU. The campaign had ebbed when the ARC was established, and it revived the unity movement. Factional interests in the RCP summit resulted in the Profintern languishing for another decade before being wound up.Rosmer and the others saw ‘Bolshevisation’ as ‘the departure point for a break with the previous policy of the Communist International, and it amounts to a return to social democracy. It has substituted a sickly and extravagant boastfulness for revolutionary realism.’ (p. 128) They saw no point in appealing to it, and saw a need to maintain La Révolution Prolétarienne.
These texts should contribute to some rethinking and demystification regarding Communist history, particularly concerning the so-called Trotskyist current. Perhaps a subtitle should have indicated that the contents intended to clarify and demystify rather than perpetuate the post-1929 version. One could go on from here to examine what came from Zinovievism apart from the unpleasant regimes and methods of the Trotskyist groups. The Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927, for example, heavily influenced by Zinoviev’s group, expresses support for the Urbahns–Fischer–Maslow group, by then expelled from the KPD, which it saw as embracing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of old worker Bolsheviks. Yet the platform of the Left Opposition of the KPD was leftist, as was the Letter of the 700 before it. For example, it saw the KPD leadership as being in the hands of the right wing, as did the Platform of the Joint Opposition. Was Thälmann’s leadership right-wing? By the late 1920s, Trotsky had no support outside the Soviet Union, apart from tiny groups and individuals, and with the capitulation of the Zinoviev group he ended up inheriting those of the latter’s supporters abroad, as well as elements even more sectarian. His position on the German October shifted from blaming the ECCI – that is, Zinoviev – to adopting his scapegoating of Brandler. Needless to say, neither he nor his German adherents ever made an analysis. He also adopted the label ‘Left’ for his current and took over the Bolshevisers’ hostility to the ‘Right’, when he had never been nor was ever regarded as a leftist, and the label which had previously described sectarians had now become a virtue. Rosmer et al. saw ‘the most “leftist” leftism’ of the Zinovievists as an abandonment of ‘revolutionary realism’, that is, transitional politics, and ‘a return to social democracy’, whereas I see it as a variety of centrism. Nobody would deny the fact that Trotsky was a revolutionary realist, but his movement ended up heavily influenced by Zinovievist ‘leftism’. More research needs doing following up these texts.
From original and contemporary French sources, these texts only touch on events beyond France, but August Thalheimer, one of the those identified as scapegoats for the German retreat in 1923, wrote a substantial text both analysing the Fifth Comintern Congress and subjecting it along with ‘Bolshevisation’ to a thorough critique. It was sent to the organs of the KPD and Comintern organs, but was suppressed, only being published in 1993 in Germany. It looks at the debate over Trotsky, the German events, and the removal of the Communist party leaderships, not just in France and Germany, but in the Polish and Czechoslovak parties. It examines the ideas of ‘Bolshevisation’, the installing of ‘blank pages’ untainted by a past in the social democracy, who would receive instructions by the ‘tried and tested’ Bolsheviks in Moscow, the universalisation of Russian experience, etc. Then it deals with the ‘United Front from Below’, the Workers’ Government as a pseudonym for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, among other things. An English translation is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming edition of Revolutionary History.
Mike Jones
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Citizens and Cannibals
Eli Sagan
Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity and the Origins of Ideological Terror
Rowan and Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford 2001, pp. 624, £27.00
Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity and the Origins of Ideological Terror
Rowan and Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford 2001, pp. 624, £27.00
CITIZENS and Cannibals is a rather idiosyncratic book. It is the sixth book of an elderly man with theories about a wide range of topics of which many are not at first sight immediately relevant to the French Revolution, and the text alone – not counting notes, bibliography and index – runs to 554 pages. Given the obsession of British publishers with short books – often leading to the mutilation of valuable monographs based on thoroughly researched doctoral theses – it is rather surprising to find an American publisher so reluctant to edit the work of so prolix an author. The sheer length of this tome is bound to deter readers, especially general readers, and since Sagan has not done any primary research on the French Revolution, and has no previous background in that area, it is probable that many specialists will treat it with disdain. It is therefore likely that if this work gains any currency at all, it will be used instrumentally and selectively because of the sustenance that parts of it give to the standard right-wing claim – particularly popular in the USA – that revolutionaries are always terrorists.
However, it would be excessively reductive to dismiss it as merely a part of the right-wing historiographical assault on the French Revolution that has gathered pace since 1989 when Simon Schama’s Citizens with its sensationalist Dickensian approach to the French Revolution reached a receptive Anglo-American audience, eager to denigrate rather than to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution, months before the collapse of the Eastern European Stalinist regimes, a collapse which gave a further boost to Schama’s debunking. Despite the prominent use of ‘Citizens’ in the title, Sagan makes only one passing reference to Schama (pp. 386–7) in connection with a very general contention about the relationship between revolutionary violence and modernisation rather than any of the specifics of the Terror. Given the copious references to recent historical work on the French Revolution in Sagan’s 36 pages of notes, one is bound to suspect that such reticence is actually an implicit indication that he does not rate Schama particularly highly, at least as an historian of the French Revolution.In other respects, too, Sagan is not a dedicated follower of fashion, and remains loyal to his own intellectual formation as an East Coast Jewish intellectual coming to maturity in the late 1940s, influenced by Marx and Freud, repelled by McCarthyism but accepting the overall framework of the Cold War, and situating himself on ‘the left wing of the possible’ (p. 554), in a way that the generation of renegade ‘68ers so prominent in our own universities would have massive difficulty in understanding. Accordingly, Sagan has none of the modish hostility towards the Enlightenment so prominent in most recent academic work influenced by Foucault and post-modernism. Despite his considerable reservations about Rousseau, he has a very positive view of the Enlightenment as a whole, remarking, for instance, that ‘the Enlightenment was one of the great achievements of the Early Modern Age’ (p. 4). Moreover, he has no time for post-modernism, contemptuously remarking that ‘the notion that we live in a post-modern world is the latest manifestation of the triumph of the wish for omnipotence over reality’ (p. 551).
Far from being opposed to ‘grand narratives’ like so many recent critics of Marxist historiography, Sagan has a ‘grand narrative’ of his own about the ‘struggle for modernity’, and a large portion of the book is devoted to an exercise in historical sociology influenced by Marxism, but trying to supersede it. Whilst the primary focus is on France, attempts, sometimes flawed ones, are made at comparisons and serious engagement with the giants of classical bourgeois sociology, Durkheim and Weber, as well as a continuing dialogue with Tocqueville, which enliven a text which draws much empirical detail from the recent historiography of eighteenth-century France. Inevitably, an attempt is made to downgrade the role of both class struggle and economic developments in favour of intellectual and cultural factors, but the bourgeois character of the French Revolution is accepted, and the positive rôle of many ideas about liberty and equality that it put on the agenda for the first time is acknowledged. In short, this section cannot be condemned out of hand as reactionary or sensationalist, and has some interest for those concerned with the history of the modern world.
However, the book eventually seems to lose its balance in a way that makes the earlier chapters seem irrelevant, and closes down genuine debate. One problem is that the relatively nuanced and calm discussion in the earlier chapters is not sustained whenever references are made to the events of 1793–94, and once the book shifts its main focus to the Terror (pp. 327–507), the text becomes much more of a politically-engaged polemic than a reasonably detached exercise in historical sociology, as well as switching away from long-term trends – sometimes over several centuries – towards very short-term developments – sometimes a matter of days. Moreover, although a close reading of the early chapters would reveal intermittent traces of ideas derived from psychoanalysis within the more frequent and more conventional sociological concepts, in Chapters 15–22 psychoanalysis suddenly becomes the overwhelmingly dominant mode of explanation as a sort of deus ex machina. Although Sagan’s own attempts to link theories about paranoia and borderline personalities to vivid case-studies of figures like Robespierre and Rousseau are actually quite readable, and are by and large quite convincing, on occasions we get subjected to lengthy quotations from psychoanalysts like Kernberg, whose turgid and mind-numbingly repetitive prose is reminiscent of Stalin on a particularly bad day. Whilst it seems quite likely that Robespierre ended up close to psychosis in the last months of his life – indeed I am sure that I am not alone in feeling Sagan is far too cautious in his qualifications here, as Robespierre’s last speech seems completely demented – the attempts to explain general trends in this fashion are far less convincing.
This is not just a question of extravagant rhetoric, although the use of the word ‘Cannibals’ in the book’s title seems a little excessive – and sensationalist – despite Sagan’s sincere attempts to draw analogies with literal cannibalism, about which he wrote in an earlier book – Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (1993). Barbaric as it may have been, the display of severed heads, on pikes or otherwise, was not unique to the French Revolution. The demonisation of the Jacobins and the idealisation of the Girondins in which Sagan engages in this section seem to mirror the paranoid ‘splitting’ into ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ he diagnoses in Robespierre. Even on the evidence that Sagan presents earlier in the book, one is bound to conclude that each faction aimed to eliminate the other, and that the Girondins had no more conception of a ‘loyal opposition’ than the Jacobins. The fratricidal struggle between former comrades is closer in character to that between the Parcham and Khalq factions of the Afghan Communist Party in the 1970s than to the rivalries of a modern parliamentary democracy. Once one accepts that neither faction was playing by any rules, it seems reasonable to judge them on the basis of their policies and the social composition of their support base. Since Sagan is not really a conservative, he is intermittently disingenuous about the extent to which the Girondins were linked to the propertied élite and the Jacobins to the urban poor, desperately trying to obfuscate the rational basis of the struggle on the ground in favour of a focus on the more paranoid elements of political discourse (which did indeed equal anything produced by the Stalinists in the late 1930s).
There is very little mention of the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 in the book (and, in contrast to the other French revolutionary constitutions, it is totally absent from the index). He admits ‘only the constitution of 1793, adopted but never actually put into practice, written after the coup d’état of May–June that created the Jacobin dictatorship – only this could be considered as establishing a radical democracy, wherein there was full male equality of political rights’ (p. 40). He then claims that ‘the Jacobin dictatorship, of course, had no actual intention that le peuple should rule, just as the Stalinists in the 1930s, with their glorious, liberal, egalitarian constitution, did not expect that the sovereignty of the people would become a reality’ (p. 40). The comparison with the Stalin Constitution of 1936 seems far-fetched; the Stalin Constitution was a nod in the direction of alien bourgeois constitutions during the Popular Front period, whilst the 1793 Constitution differed radically from all existing ones, and did not add to the regime’s respectability vis-à-vis internal élites or foreign powers. The 1793 Constitution was the first constitution anywhere in the world to call for universal male suffrage, and inspired generations of radical democrats both in France and elsewhere until its implementation in practice, however briefly, in 1848. Sagan himself also has to confess that ‘it was only the third and most radical of the Revolutions [the Jacobin of June 1793 to July 1794] that was passionate enough on this issue to risk the abolition of slavery itself’ (p. 65). By the time Sagan gets round to looking at the Terror in detail, ‘the third and most radical of the Revolutions’ has been downgraded to a mere coup, and, unsurprisingly, the major difference between Jacobins and Girondins in relation to slavery is never reiterated. It is of course true that the Girondins were far more sympathetic to the rights of women than the Jacobins, and that the Jacobins repressed the pro-Girondin women’s organisations, so Sagan makes much of this (pp. 391–3) – the only issue on which the Girondins could be said to be to the ‘left’ of the Jacobins. Sagan’s praise for Danton is tiresome; he was undoubtedly a corrupt, unprincipled careerist opportunist who never had any moral qualms about sending others to the guillotine, and one suspects he was the Jeffrey Archer of his day, not the Jacobin equivalent of Nikolai Bukharin (although Sagan, for whom even Bukharin would be an ‘ideological terrorist’, does not make the analogy). Conversely, Sagan’s failure to show any similar sympathy for the ‘non-bourgeois radical Hébert’ (p. 125), who seems to have been a more consistent friend of the sans-culottes than Robespierre, suggests that Sagan’s intermittent pose of sympathy for the sans-culottes exploited and betrayed by the Jacobins is little more than a rhetorical device.
Sagan is inevitably not content to act as an intellectual apologist for Thermidor, and to leave it at that. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to find a parallel drawn between Jacobins and Leninists, that Lenin and Trotsky are branded ‘ideological terrorists’ and that the ‘latest revelations about Lenin’ (p. 411), the precise nature of which, confusingly, are never specified by Sagan, prove that he was no better than Stalin. One could go on arguing with this enthusiast for the Girondins and the Mensheviks, but to what end? Although I can easily guess the political and psychological labels he would pin on me, there is in the end something very sad about old Sagan, who genuinely wishes that the USA had a progressive income tax and a proper welfare state, and consistently opposed the Vietnam War (albeit without understanding that the only way it differed from numerous other wars of American imperialist aggression was in its employment of a massive number of ground troops), but ends up preferring the ‘Conservative dictators’ Franco and Mussolini to the ‘ideological terrorist’ Lenin.
Tobias Abse
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The British Political Élite and the Soviet Union
Louise Grace Shaw
The British Political Élite and the Soviet Union
Frank Cass, London 2003, pp. 210
The British Political Élite and the Soviet Union
Frank Cass, London 2003, pp. 210
THIS book is a contribution to the long-running debate over a key moment in British foreign policy, the question of whether a collective security agreement involving Britain, France and the Soviet Union to forestall any aggressive moves by Nazi Germany in the late 1930s was a desirable or possible course for the British government to have adopted. Dr Shaw’s thesis is simple and direct. Firstly, it would have been a desirable policy option, as ‘the combined efforts of Britain, France and the Soviet Union would have posed serious, and very possibly, successful resistance to Germany in 1938 and 1939’ (p. 16). Secondly, she considers that it would have been perfectly possible were it not for certain prominent people within Britain’s political élite, most notably the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who refused to countenance any governmental adoption of an Anglo-Franco-Soviet bloc in the run-up to the Second World War.
Shaw notes the growing trend of ‘anti-appeasement’ sentiments amongst prominent Conservative politicians, most notably Churchill, Eden and Vansittart, who, despite their dislike of Soviet politics and behaviour, were keen on the idea of a collective security bloc that would, in their view, provide a substantial opposition to the expansionist intentions of Nazi Germany. She notes that during the Czech crisis of September 1938 and over the following months, there was a growing demand within Britain’s political élite for such a bloc, even though there still remained considerable wariness about Moscow’s intentions, and deep concerns that Stalin’s purges had seriously impaired the Soviet Union’s military capability. She claims that although many leading Conservatives, military chiefs and diplomatic staff were able to put to one side their own anti-communist sentiments, Chamberlain, with his strong anti-communist viewpoint that considered the Soviet Union to be a revolutionary menace to Europe and denied that Moscow and Berlin could ever be reconciled, was able, through concealing military evidence, deliberately misinforming the Cabinet and taking decisions without consulting others, to prevent such a bloc from becoming official British policy.Demonstrating Chamberlain’s opposition to a collective security alignment is not a difficult job; indeed, it would be very hard to rake up any evidence to the contrary. The idea of a growing feeling within Britain’s political élite in favour of collective security is credible – my own research demonstrates the existence of similar sentiments running well beyond the Popular Front milieu – although it has been disputed; Philip Bell reckons that there was ‘only scattered opposition’ to Chamberlain’s policies in the Foreign Office (The Second World War in Europe, Harlow 1977). However, trying to demonstrate that the Soviet government was serious about physically confronting Germany in 1938–39, particularly over Czechoslovakia, is quite another question. Shaw takes as given Moscow’s willingness to engage in a collective security bloc. She cites Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov telling R.A. Butler during the Czech crisis that ‘if France acted the Soviet would act too’; this she claims was a ‘wholly unambiguous answer’ (p. 39). Shaw also declares that Geoff Roberts ‘argues convincingly’ in his The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (Basingstoke 1995) that (in Roberts’ words) the Soviet regime ‘made it crystal clear that they would fulfil their mutual assistance obligations’ to Czechoslovakia, ‘and agitated for France to do the same’ (p. 38).
This is very thin stuff. Litvinov’s statement was not ‘wholly unambiguous’; he was saying that Moscow would only move if France did so, and there were considerable doubts whether it would. Six months before the Czech crisis, in March 1938, Litvinov told the US ambassador to the Soviet Union that ‘France has no confidence in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union has no confidence in France’. With the Czech drama in full swing, Litvinov told the League of Nations Assembly that the Czech government had insisted upon Soviet aid being conditional upon French moves in support of Czechoslovakia, and added: ‘Thus, the Soviet government had no obligations to Czechoslovakia in the event of French indifference to an attack on her.’ This information is hardly inaccessible, it has been in the public domain for over five decades, having appeared in the late 1940s in the second volume of Max Beloff’s The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929–1941 (London 1949).
As for Roberts, Shaw is either unaware of or wishes to avoid mentioning the fact that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and that his book was part of the efforts of Stalinists to rescue what fragments that they imagined were recoverable from the general wreckage of the official communist experience, one of which was the idea of Moscow’s quest for a collective security deal. Roberts’ book, like his previous work Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler (Bloomington 1989), of which sizeable chunks are repeated almost word-for-word in his later volume, is not, unlike Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy (London 1958), exactly a whitewash of Soviet policy in the Popular Front period, but it does promote the idea that the Soviet regime wished above all to forge an anti-German alliance with Britain and France, but was unable to do so on account of the obduracy of the powers-that-be in London and Paris. For all this, however, Roberts shows considerably less optimism about the possibilities of successful collective action in defence of Czechoslovakia than Shaw reckons he does, as he realises that it was not likely when official attitudes in France and Britain were taken into consideration. He also notes that when Romania’s government finally agreed to allow Soviet troops to traverse its territory, there were tight restrictions upon the numbers it would allow through. Roberts adds that Soviet historians always maintained that the USSR would have fought alongside Czechoslovakia and that an offer of unilateral aid was made, then declares that ‘they were strangely vague and contradictory as to when and how this offer was made and never produced any hard evidence to confirm their assertions’. Roberts states that the Soviet Union probably would have unilaterally supported Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack at the time of Munich, but even were this the case – and in my opinion it is an extremely big ‘if’ – he considers that there is little it could have practically done.
Shaw might have profited by investigating some of the other analyses of Soviet foreign policy objectives in general and Moscow’s behaviour over Czechoslovakia in particular before putting all her money on Roberts. Just because an opinion is accepted by a majority of observers does not necessarily mean that it is correct. Nonetheless, the idea that Stalin was not serious about confronting Germany over Czechoslovakia has been argued by various analysts – for instance, Beloff’s aforementioned work and Robert Tucker’s Stalin in Power (New York 1990) – in a far more convincing manner than Roberts’ contention that he was willing to stand up to Hitler.
Shaw gives but a cursory look at one extremely authoritative statement on Soviet foreign policy, Stalin’s address to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 10 March 1939, and prefers merely to repeat what Roberts says about it. A careful perusal of the text would show that Stalin discounted any idea of German designs on the Soviet Union. He noted that ‘the majority of the non-aggressive countries, particularly England and France’, had ‘rejected the policy of collective security’, yet he made no call for a Soviet alliance with them, and only vaguely stated that he would support nations which were ‘victims of aggression’. Whilst admitting that the ‘non-aggressive states’ were ‘making concession after concession to the aggressors’, he declared that the Soviet Union was continuing its ‘policy of peace and of strengthening business relations with all countries’, and intended ‘to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them’. This was intended to warn the Western democracies that they could not necessarily rely upon the automatic support of the Soviet Union in any future European war. In short, Stalin was publicly making the none-too-subtle implication that he could well conclude some form of deal with Germany. Stalin’s speech certainly does not sustain Roberts’ contention that he was still pushing the collective security line, and Shaw and Robert’s bland words on the speech – merely that it condemned the Western powers for abandoning collective security, and warned that Moscow would not sacrifice itself for the sake of others – overlook the very real hints that are not only obvious in retrospect, but were recognised for what they were at the time by certain perspicacious observers.
Shaw correctly points out that the anti-communist stance shared by many right-wingers, that Moscow was hoping for a war between Germany and the West European democracies so it could launch a revolution across a war-devastated Europe in the aftermath, was an absurdity. Nonetheless, one cannot leap, as Shaw does, from that assumption to conclude that Moscow was essentially sincere in its negotiations with Britain and France over collective security. Stalin wanted above all to avoid being dragged into a war. So long as he believed in the possibility of a collective security bloc that could contain Germany, he went along with the idea, on condition that he felt that it would not lead to war. His minions could therefore spout all manner of commitments about standing by Czechoslovakia because he was pretty certain that the determining factor in the situation – the French guarantee to Czechoslovakia – was worthless. He could hold the moral high ground without actually doing anything about it.
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Chamberlain and his colleagues were extremely chary about an alliance with Moscow, which is why the mission to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 was arranged in such a deliberately insulting way, one can argue that the Soviet proposals for collective security earlier that year were framed in such a manner, particularly in respect of the Soviet ideas about what constituted ‘indirect aggression’ (which British officials not inaccurately considered were Moscow’s veiled intentions to move into the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe under the guise that it could be threatened through rather than by them), that the Soviet leadership knew that they would almost inevitably be rejected by Chamberlain. The fact is that any meaningful collective security arrangement would eventually have brought a confrontation with Germany a lot closer, and that is something that Stalin wished to avoid. In the cold dawn of the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the former US fellow-traveller Louis Fischer stated that Stalin signed that pact when he realised that Britain and France were serious about taking on Germany. An agreement with Britain and France would have meant war with Germany; an agreement with Germany had allowed him to avoid a war and find some pickings in Eastern Europe (Stalin and Hitler: The Reasons for the Results of the Nazi-Bolshevik Pact, Harmondsworth 1940). This seems a reasonable deduction, particularly when one considers Stalin’s extreme caution during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which culminated in his instructions to avoid doing anything that could be construed by the Germans as a provocation a mere two hours before the Wehrmacht stormed into Soviet territory on 22 June 1941. It is thus fair to conclude that Stalin’s main aim was avoiding a war. If the sight of the mighty German war machine massing at the western border of his own country could not bring Stalin to prepare his forces to resist an invasion, how can anyone honestly expect him to have taken action over a country whose borders were not contiguous with those of the Soviet Union, and whose continued existence was not absolutely vital to the survival of his regime?
To conclude, this is not a satisfactory book. The evidence that Shaw uses as proof of her contention that Moscow was serious about forging a collective security bloc is inadequate, and has long been challenged by writers who have provided a different and much more convincing picture of Stalin’s intentions. This undermines her basic thesis, for even had the British government adopted a collective security policy, it would have been of little consequence had Moscow in one way or another blocked it. There are also a few minor slips in the text. It seems unlikely that people thought that ‘the Soviet Union wanted to exploit the crisis in Czechoslovakia to expand eastwards’ (p. 38), the name of the Czech President Beneš is incorrectly rendered as ‘Benes’ throughout the book, and the initials of Yezhov, Beria and Vyshinsky are strangely rendered as ‘MNI’, ‘MLP’ and ‘MA’ in the text and (in the latter two cases) in the index. Finally, although this is not aimed specifically at Shaw, would it not be a good idea for historians to move away from using the terms ‘appeaser’, which since the period under discussion has become perhaps the strongest insult in the British political lexicon? Even in the 1930s, this term was distinctly loaded with the implication of treachery, which, whatever one may think of Chamberlain’s political outlook and tactical acumen, cannot be laid at his door.
Paul Flewers
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States of Illusion
States of Illusion: Soviet Graphics
Tate Modern Poster Exhibition, 2002
Tate Modern Poster Exhibition, 2002
ON the fifth floor of the Tate Modern Gallery, Bankside, there is an exhibition that readers of Revolutionary History really should find time to visit. The display of posters gathered there combines art with politics, filling the room with a record of political and international events that span more than 70 years, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the collapse of Stalinism in 1981. This unique display apparently warrants little in the way of publicity or promotion by its host. This is in spite of its interesting and representative interpretations of a modern period, and in a medium so often neglected and misused.
The images range from dramatic expressions of a living revolution, attempting to communicate its political message to a mass audience of workers and peasants, right the way through to the monotonous, mind-numbing dullness of Stalinist cultism, and hero-worship of the most bureaucratic type. The exhibits number 62 in all, and can only be but a small selection of the total number held in the personnel collection of their owner, David King.What makes this particular exhibition so rewarding is the opening sections, with posters rich in the imagery of class against class, spanning a whole wall. The colouring is vivid: contrasting, conflicting hues of red and black give additional focus, conveying the sharp contradictions present within post-revolutionary society. In an early poster, three rotund, overweight top-hatted bankers depict the bourgeoisie. They sit on top of a heap of human figures; many of them are prostrate. Their semi-clothed bodies contrast sharply with the well-tailored raiment of the capitalists – exploitation is raw and explicit. Each one of the three capitalists wear his own national flag of imperialism: one British, one French, and one American. They represent the real combined threat to the Russian Revolution and the international working class. In this straightforward but simple way, the workers’ need for internationalism across the world is graphically portrayed.
The use of posters is deliberate. In a large country, with little in the way of a modern communication system and a population that was often semi-literate or even illiterate, the image could sum up much that was full of great meaning. It was a way of keying into the symbolic system of thought which all human beings use as a reference point in their intellectual journey of reasoning and reflection. For all of us, the image is full of meaning, it is our collective inheritance of oppression and liberation, often communicating more than a volume of text. Even if you could not read, you could at least see, you could at least visualise what was being intended, and in so doing understand. This form of comprehension allowed the process of education to be more than political, once the connection between the image and the slogan had been made. Then a case for functional literacy was being made to a mass audience that had so often been denied even a basic grounding in the tools necessary for the accessing of knowledge.
In this way, the illiterate peasant could apprehend the policy of the Bolshevik government in faraway Moscow, or feel the support of the revolutionary workers of Petrograd. The revolution animated and energised society in a way that the passive party politics of a bourgeois representative democracy never can. The direct, accountable election of workers’ delegates to factory committees and the local soviet broke the bonds of machine politics. This in itself required new more direct and open forms of communication and reasoning. The traditional intelligentsia could just not keep pace with the rapidly changing forms of discourse, unless they also changed and moved with the new contemporary currents. This some of them did willingly, for in a new revolutionary public democracy new forms of thought breathed new life into communications, and the public wall poster became one way to express this.
In certain cases, actual campaigns were organised through the medium of posters. The problem of starting up a mass literacy drive was linked to the need to increase production. In the countryside, rural literacy campaigns were organised via the dual symbols of the book and the sickle. Better education and improved grain output promised improvements throughout society.
In a lithograph by an unknown artist from 1921, entitled Red Soldier! Attack Disorder, the Civil War is set alongside the attempts to revive a collapse in the economy. The military front is transposed, and the failures in the economy are viewed as a new enemy, sapping the strength of the working class and its alliance with the peasantry. Posters were also used in an auxiliary manner, to advertise other visual media through which the revolution was working. As Russian film companies toured the countryside with mobile cinemas, the directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein used the new techniques of montage, repetition and superimposition.
The posters on display are a real memory bank of struggle, a legacy of collective capital based on the rise and decay of the Russian Revolution. The drive to industrialise is well represented, with the famous slogan of ‘Soviets plus Electrification’ blazoned across one poster, alongside the inevitable poster of Lenin. In this way, the inner workings of the revolution is charted through its twists and turns. The posters seem to become more and more lifeless as the 1920s and 1930s roll on, something which in my view is not unconnected to changing political atmosphere. As the witch-hunts and victimisations build up in a crescendo under Socialism in One Country, the process of mass purges expands into the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Millions die as great victories for socialism are proclaimed. Rather like the government-sponsored campaigns, the posters become wooden and mechanical, stripped of movement and life.
Finally, the Great Patriotic War: a poster taken from the window of the TASS building and made by the Kukrinksy Collective. It is made of gouache on paper and is entitled Thunderbolt. A threatening all-black background represents the darkened sky of Russia in the winter of 1942–43. An outline sketch of Hitler, together with Nazi tanks covered in swastikas, cower under a reign of three thunderbolts bearing down on them from the sky above. Each one of three streaks of lightening is depicted in national colours, one American, one British and one Russian. The revolutionary edge of anti-fascism is blunted in true Popular Front style.
Glyn Beagley
