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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The latter part shows Hirou in a much more free-thinking mode. However, anyone looking for revelations about the inner life of Lutte ouvrière will be disappointed. In recent years a flood of articles have appeared in France concerned to ‘expose’ LO’s effective leader, Hardy (Robert Barcia). Hirou had the elementary decency not to contribute to this process; while he knew that there are grave problems with LO, they were very different from the ones pointed to by ignorant and sensation-seeking journalists. In some ways he remained attached to LO; he supported Arlette Laguiller’s election campaigns, and noted that LO had, in general, made far smaller concessions to social democracy than either the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire or the Lambertistes. He was clearly deeply hurt at not being allowed to present his book to a forum at the LO fête. He took a deep interest in the various small splits from LO, hoping to engage them in political dialogue. But he was strongly critical of Hardy’s authoritarian style of leadership, and from his new, ‘libertarian’ standpoint, he regarded LO as being essentially centrist.
Hirou was a student in the period leading up to May 1968, and he has some interesting recollections of the movement. His memory of Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre in 1966, failing to sell a single copy of his magazine, will give a spark of hope to all frustrated paper-sellers. And he recalls something of which I for one had hitherto been unaware, that in June 1968 LO proposed to other far left groups that they should run a joint slate of candidates in the general elections. The idea came to nothing as everybody else was denouncing bourgeois elections. At the time, I should undoubtedly have rejected LO’s proposal, but in retrospect I think that LO were right; a revolutionary election campaign could have given a focus to the far left as the movement disintegrated.
Some of Hirou’s judgements of more recent events are more dubious. Thus he repeatedly refers to what he calls ‘Islamic’ fascism. This is not the playground abuse of a Hitchens or an Aaronovitch; he invokes the work of Daniel Guérin, whom he admired greatly, in support of his stance. Yet nowhere does he effectively make his case for believing that, for example, Osama bin Laden can meaningfully be described as a ‘fascist’. There are undoubtedly some very nasty Islamic fundamentalists, but many of them are hiding in caves while the equally nasty Christian fundamentalists are sitting in the Pentagon with nuclear weapons.
On his specialist area of French labour history, Hirou is much more perceptive. It is particularly good to read his devastating critique of Jaurès, a name still much admired on the reformist left. As Hirou argues, it was only the assassin’s bullet that saved Jaurès from joining Guesde and Hervé in support for the First World War. Like Charles Kennedy, Jaurès was against war until the fighting actually started: ‘Jaurès always clearly anticipated that his tactical “pacifism” would turn into fierce strategic warmongering as soon as a foreign army had crossed the frontier.’ Hirou claims that both Trotsky and Luxemburg (impressed by Jaurès’ powerful intelligence and formidable oratory) had illusions in him, and only Lenin clearly evaluated him for what he was.
But whatever specific agreements or divergences one may have, Hirou’s book shows an active mind using the past to understand the present and prepare the future. Today, as in the early years of the Comintern, the border-line between Marxism and ‘ultra-leftism’ of various varieties is becoming the locus of crucial debates in the movement. All the more pity that Hirou is not with us to contribute to them.
Over the years, Ridley developed into a secularist, free thinker, socialist writer, historian, political activist and speaker. On discovering Marxism, he adopted this, though not uncritically, for the rest of his long life. Disagreeing with the premise of ‘Socialism in One Country’, he was drawn towards Trotsky, and in 1929, together with Hugo Dewar, established the Marxian League. He wrote also for the American Trotskyist paper The Militant. Ridley corresponded with Trotsky, and Morrell covers the points on which they disagreed. However, in spite of these disagreements, following Trotsky’s murder by one of Stalin’s agents, Ridley penned a warm appreciation in which he described Trotsky as ‘the leader and prophet of the permanent revolution, that is, of the World Revolution on a universal scale against all ruling classes and against all forms of class rule everywhere’.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Ridley drew close to the anarchists, writing for War Commentary and Freedom Press. He labelled himself politically an Anarcho-Marxist to indicate that while he appreciated the freedom to be found in anarchism, he accepted Marxism. Later Ridley found a political home in the Independent Labour Party, but taking a stance that socialism and religion are incompatible, he disagreed with the Christian element within that body.
Morrell covers the differences within the Secular Society of which Ridley was President during 1951–62. When the term Humanism emerged, a conference was held at Conway Hall entitled The Challenge of Humanism, following which a strong protest was made to the BBC, which at that time was a ‘no-go’ area for secularists, for the BBC saw its role as the promotion of Christianity. This, and changing attitudes in society, resulted eventually in the BBC inviting a speaker from the Secular Society.
Frank Ridley had many attributes and talents, for not only was he a prolific writer, but an orator at Hyde Park and Tower Hill, and, of course, at indoor meetings.
Morrell tells Ridley’s story with some humour, for Ridley himself was a great humorist. Morrell writes that ‘his great sense of humour enabled him to enliven his audience … nobody dozed off when he was speaking’. Additionally, Ridley’s great knowledge is indicated by the bibliography at the end of this booklet. For those interested, I would tell you that Frank Ridley’s booklet Socialism and Religion has been reprinted and is available from the Freethought History Research Group for £2.00.
Morrell concludes that Ridley died a pauper, but his 2,500 or so articles, along with his books and booklets, have left the world a valuable and lasting legacy.
This pamphlet is available from the Freethought History Research Group at 83 Sowerby Close, Eltham, London SE9 6EZ.
The counter-revolutionary dictator Sulla, after he had rearranged the constitution in order to increase the powers of the slave-owning aristocracy, is said to have declared: ‘I have put the Senate in the saddle: let us see if it can ride.’ Unfortunately, that august assembly of ‘conscript fathers’ (patres conscripti) proved wholly unequal to the task. One of the chief merits of Parenti’s book is the way in which it brings out the sheer greed and short-sighted political intolerance of these Roman conservatives, the so-called ‘Optimates’ or ‘best men’. (A modern parallel appears in the inflated earnings of US corporate executives and entrepreneurs, and the ruthless methods used by their political representatives to defend these.) Despite the miseries caused by their policies, Messrs Senators absolutely refused to make any concessions to demands for reform backed by those less fortunately placed. They were particularly opposed to any plans for land reform – a necessary measure in order to protect the Roman peasants forced off the land in this period: on some eight separate occasions between 133 and 49 the Senate set its face against any land reform whatever – even for veterans who had contributed to Rome’s military victories and who were looking for means of support at the end of their period of service. The Romans had no police force to speak of, and, as far as I am aware, no regular policy of imprisonment for offences against the state: the traditional Roman aristocratic method of dealing with dangerous political opponents was one of assassination. As Parenti explains, ‘just about every leader of the Middle and Late Republics who took up the popular cause met a violent end’ (p. 81).
Maybe that was why Caesar decided, in the face of senatorial opposition to his compromise proposals, that he had no choice but to march on Rome in defiance of the constitution in 49.
Parenti is especially illuminating in what he has to say about the notorious ‘Conspiracy of Catiline’, which was supposedly extinguished by Cicero in 63. The Senators backed Cicero as a candidate for the consulship in the elections of 64 because Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina) had gone over to the popular party (such people were known as Populares) around 65 and his election had to be prevented. The Roman historian Q. Sallustius Crispus (otherwise known as Sallust) has left us an account of what followed, but Parenti shows that this account, which is based uncritically on Cicero’s contemporary accusations, is of questionable veracity and trustworthiness. A plausible alternative view is that Cicero invented the whole story of a succession of plots organised by Catiline and eventually forced him into rebellion. If so, the great orator and moralist was not above using what Plato would have called an ‘agathon pseudon’ or ‘noble lie’ in the defence of the Roman governing élite, into whose ranks he had been admitted.
Catiline’s alleged co-conspirators were condemned to death by the Senate, and were executed without trial. Among a minority opposing this unconstitutional motion was one C. Julius Caesar. In 60 BCE, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed a three-man alliance against the conservative Senators. As Parenti explains:
At this point, Caesar proposed a compromise: both he and Pompey should resign their commands, and the struggle could continue on the electoral front. The Senate initially approved the plan, but the conservative die-hards were not happy: they feared that Caesar would win the contest on these terms, and succeeded in persuading the Senate to pass an emergency decree calling on Caesar to disband his army forthwith. We all know the sequel.
The popular measures put through by Caesar in his last years are somewhat less well known. As Parenti tells us, he secured land for his veterans and distributed estates around Capua to some 20,000 poor Roman families. A programme of public works was begun, large landowners were required to reserve a third of their labour force for the employment of free Romans. Caesar pushed through rent reductions, obtained a decrease in payments wrung from the provinces, reduced debt burdens, granted Jews the right to practice their religion legally, and gave Roman citizenship to any foreign doctors or liberal arts professors wishing to reside in Rome. He took care that his measures were approved by the Comitia Tributa (the popular Assembly of Roman Tribes) and arranged for the publication of all Senatorial and Assembly decrees. He also granted to the citizens of Athens the right to restore their democratic constitution if they so desired.
Was Caesar aiming at monarchy? Parenti wisely leaves the question open, noting, however, aspects of the Julian regime which point in this direction, such as Caesar’s assumption of the post of Prefect of Morals (praefectus moribus) and his insistence on personally appointing half of Rome’s magistrates (bypassing the Senate, which had the constitutional right to appoint). He took care to institute a cult of his person, wearing regal attire, having coins stamped with his image, and so on (see page 163). But this evidence does not settle the issue. Nor does the episode of his being offered a crown and refusing it bear necessarily the interpretation given it by the conspirators in Shakespeare’s play: ‘for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it’ (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2, lines 237–8).
The scene, easy to rehearse, could have been designed as a test of public opinion, similar to a similar form of ‘opinion poll’ used in another of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III: ‘How now, my lord, what say the citizens?’
We shall never know for sure whether Caesar would have made himself king, because he was struck down before such a plan could be implemented. (Some interesting speculation as to the ease with which the assassination was carried out was voiced in a recent television programme this year, which carried the suggestion that Caesar was suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy at the end, and consequently, suffering as he was, deliberately failed to take measures to thwart the conspiracy.) The conspirators were not won over by Caesar’s conciliatory treatment of them as his former enemies: they could not forgive him for his popular measures, so they resorted to the time-honoured method used against the Gracchi and other dangerous opponents. But, having disposed of Caesar, they could not win over the populace: the result was another triumvirate (Octavian, Antonius and Lepidus), another civil war and the final extinction of republican liberty. As Parenti concludes, the slave-owners were ultimately prepared to accept one-man rule provided that the ruler was willing to protect their precious privileges, which was exactly what Augustus in practice did. In that respect he was thoroughly ‘sound’.
In 1954, French Trotskyism was scarcely in a position to meet the huge challenge presented by the Algerian insurrection. Of the 500 or so members of the main grouping in the immediate postwar period, a half were lost in an unnecessary split in 1948. The usual wear and tear of a difficult period took more, and in 1952 these was a major international split. That left two tiny groups, which for the sake of convenience we can call after their main leaders, the Frank group (‘Pabloites’) and the Lambert group. In the early years of the war, the total number of organised Trotskyists in France was around 100.
In the first year or so of the war, it was therefore the anarchists, with perhaps over 300 militants, who made the running. One of their activists, Pierre Morain, served a jail sentence for articles he published in opposition to the war. The conscript revolts of 1955, when there was a genuine possibility of large numbers refusing to fight, got no significant support from the organised left. The Communist Party (PCF) failed to support such action, invoking the allegedly ‘Leninist’ principle that revolutionaries should work inside the army. But while the Leninist tradition did oppose individual desertion and ‘conscientious objection’, mass revolt against war was a different matter; as long ago as Eugène Pottier’s Internationale (‘Appliquons la grève aux armées’) revolutionaries had called for mass disobedience in the armed forces.
There was a further complication in that the independence movement was split. The National Liberation Front (FLN) which launched the 1954 insurrection was a newly-formed organisation, challenging the more long-standing Algerian National Movement (MNA), led by the veteran Messali Hadj. The FLN, though hardly itself homogenous, was determined to impose its hegemony on the struggle, and there was a savage internecine struggle between the two movements.
While the Frank group backed the FLN, Lambert’s supporters lined up with the MNA, at least during the earlier part of the war. This was not some lambertiste aberration, as is often alleged; the MNA had an honourable history, a working-class base, especially in metropolitan France, and some sort of commitment to socialism. It was backed, not only by Lambert, but by the anarchists, the Shachtmanites and by such knowledgeable individuals as Daniel Guérin. The Frank group were justified by history, in that the FLN led the independence struggle to victory, while the MNA was increasingly weakened and politically disoriented. But the FLN’s campaign of brutality and murder against its rival is hardly the most glorious page of its history.
An additional problem for the Frank group was that, in accordance with the Pabloite perspective, many of its members were doing entry work in the Communist Party. Entrism in a Stalinist party was not like the same strategy in the British Labour Party, where one can say more or less what one likes provided one has no influence on policy. It required absolute clandestinity. An additional hazard was the rôle of the poisonous Michèle Mestre, a former Trotskyist leader from the 1940s pursuing her own entry tactic which would end up with enthusiastic support for the Russian tanks in Prague in 1968; she happily fingered to the bureaucracy any Trotskyist entrists she discovered.
In 1957, the 16-year-old Alain Krivine, a loyal and enthusiastic Communist Party member, was surprised that when he arranged a meeting with FLN representatives he was reprimanded by his own party (which had recently voted in favour of ‘special powers’ to pursue the war). What he didn’t know was that his two brothers (including his twin Hubert) were already secret Trotskyists working in the PCF.
The question of strategy led to a further split. After the Hungarian events of 1956, a small number of PCF members made a break with Stalinism. Other individuals were being drawn towards opposition to the war. Some members of the Frank group felt a broader organisation was required and joined with ex-Communists to form the journal La Voie communiste. This enjoyed some success in providing a public focus for opposition to the war as well as offering practical solidarity to the FLN. However, this involved a breach of discipline in the Frank group, and Denis Berger and others were expelled.
The Frank group had only a handful of industrial workers, but these played a specially noteworthy role, since they had to win support for opposition to the war among their fellow-workers, as well as giving what assistance they could to their Algerian comrades. Many Algerian militants worked in large factories, and the authorities found it easier to locate them there than in their homes, since they moved around constantly. Henri Benoîts, a member of the Frank group working at Renault-Billancourt, was able to give assistance to the FLN organisation within the factory. When an attempt was made to arrest a leading FLN militant at Renault, various trade union activists succeeded in causing a work stoppage which confused matters, and then hid the militant in the factory, later enabling him to escape … after collecting his pay! Later Benoîts was advised by his group to join the newly-formed Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), since this party contained many well-known journalists and politicians, and it was far harder for the authorities to victimise its members than isolated Trotskyists. Benoîts succeeded in winning over the PSU branch at Renault to support Algerian independence and practical support for the FLN, policies which the PSU majority rejected. When a group of intellectuals produced the Manifesto of 121, calling for support to the FLN, the Trotskyists gave out copies at the factory gates, often meeting physical violence from PCF members.
Nonetheless there were contradictions inherent in solidarity work. That revolutionaries should shelter Algerian militants on the run was an elementary act of solidarity. That they should ‘carry suitcases’ was equally natural, since white French people were far less likely to be searched and manhandled by the police than those of North African appearance. (The suitcases generally contained, not weapons, but money collected by the FLN from Algerian workers in France.) But such tasks could run counter to what should have been revolutionaries’ main priority, winning support in the workplaces for withdrawal of French troops.
The weakness of the Frank group’s strategy became clearer when other more ambitious solidarity actions were undertaken. Workers engaging in clandestine activity obviously had to make themselves inconspicuous, and this detracted from the primary task of campaigning publicly against the war. Pablo and Santen were jailed for forging money for the FLN. As practical aid to the FLN, this was legitimate if adventurist; but the hope that it might help to destabilise the French economy was pure fantasy. Later a group of Fourth International militants moved to Morocco to work in a factory making weapons for the FLN. Again a worthy action, but one which diverted from the main responsibility, especially when several of those concerned were skilled workers who could have played an important rôle in trade union activity. At the same time, Pablo and his associates nurtured illusions that there was a real and immediate socialist potential in the Algerian revolution.
The one serious omission from Pattieu’s account is the Socialisme ou barbarie group, which is dismissed as merely a grouping of intellectuals. But the group’s leading industrial militant, Daniel Mothé of the Renault factory, describes in his book Journal d’un ouvrier (1956–1958) how he attempted to organise against the war, meeting opposition from both employers and the PCF-dominated trade union. Meanwhile in the pages of Socialisme ou barbarie, Jean-François Lyotard was developing the most thorough analysis of the FLN and its potential to become a new ruling bureaucracy. (His writings are reprinted in the book La Guerre des Algériens.) A fuller treatment of this Trotskyist-derived group would have been very welcome.
Pattieu notes that the last years of the war produced ferment among students and the PCF youth, leading to the emergence of a new generation of revolutionaries. Just six years after the end of the war they were to become key cadres in the events of May–June 1968, helping to spark off the biggest general strike in human history. Let us hope that in this respect, if in no other, history repeats itself.
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Scheuer’s autobiography tells of the degeneration of the party. These are themes familiar to many readers of Revolutionary History, but we should never tire of hearing how it played out specifically for each participant. Scheuer includes fascinating details from this process. In December 1931, he travelled to Berlin for a revolutionary school students conference. There he meets a comrade who greets him not with the customary phrase ‘Rotfront’, but rather ‘Heil Moskau’. Contained in this greeting is a whole shift of policy. It is at this Berlin conference that Scheuer first learns about Trotsky’s politics, and he talks to comrades about the idea of the united front. Many are glad to hear his thoughts. Others are incensed.
In January 1933, Hitler assumed power in Germany. Scheuer notes that the given line was that it was impossible to see this as a defeat for the left. The Communists hoped that Hitler would fail, or that a revolution would take place. But the Nazis were confident right from the very first moments of their power. On 17 February, the Nazis tell all the police authorities (some of whom were still run by Social Democrats) to work directly with the SA, SS and Stahlhelm. A period of great persecution of the left begins. This spills over the border into Hitler’s Heimat. In Austria too, the workers’ movement is repressed. Dollfuss bans the May Day demonstration in 1933. Socialist and Communist groups are outlawed. The gallows are reintroduced. Scheuer withdrew in response, and turned to books – Lenin, for example – in order to understand what had occurred. But the workers’ movement had not been crushed. In February 1934, there was an armed uprising in Austria. This leads to another stint of feverish activity, as Communist underground cells multiply. Scheuer travels much in this period, visiting comrades, operating internationally. Trotsky continues to be a pole of attraction, and in Italy he finds Trotsky’s My Life on sale. He meets Karl Polzer, an old Left Oppositionist, and Bruno Grad, an old Trotskyist. His dissatisfaction with the Communists grows.
In 1935, he visits Paris and meets Jean Meichler and other Trotskyists. This leads him to form a new group, the Revolutionary Communists of Austria (RKÖ). But such activism does not go unnoticed. The political police arrest Scheuer and comrades in 1936, and he is accused of ‘high treason’. The activists are labelled Trotskyists, and sentenced to a hefty jail term. Two years later, in 1938, he is released, on the promise that he will not agitate against Austria. But he does, and it is deemed safer for him to leave, on the very day the country is annexed by Hitler. Scheuer finds exile in Prague (while his parents are dispossessed of their home), but moves quickly, because Prague is a dangerous place for Trotskyist sympathisers to be. He goes to France. His group, the RKÖ, is invited to participate, along with another comrade, Karl Fischer, in the founding conference of the Fourth International at Alfred Rosmer’s house in Perigny (though Rosmer is not present). Twenty-one representatives from 11 national sections of the left were there. But, Scheuer remarks, his group is deliberately given a later starting time than others, in order to exclude them from many of the discussions. Other sections were not invited at all, he notes bitterly. Ironically, he remembers Etienne, a.k.a. Marc Zborowski, later revealed as Stalin’s agent, sat in the middle, not a genuine participant, but actually spying and meddling. Afterwards there was a youth conference. Scheuer mentions young Americans with Trotsky goatees who were determined to enlighten their comrades as to the truth of the European situation. War is not imminent, they insist. Scheuer and comrades disagreed, and they presented very pessimistic perspectives about war, Spain, defeat and the strength of reaction. Shachtman attacked them as ultra-leftists, and asks them to consider whether they wish to remain in the International. They say thanks but no thanks, and leave, leaving behind them what they feel to be a rather shambolic organisation.
Upon war’s breakout, Scheuer and comrades are interned. Now begin several years of escapes and clandestine activities in France, such as falsifying identity papers and travelling into the Occupied Zone for political work. One escape involved pretending to be baggage handlers at Toulouse. Another was the busting of a comrade/lover from a Vichy Jail. This involved impersonating the Gestapo, with one of their number wearing a little swastika brooch made out of shiny paper, and playing on their Germanic accents. Scheuer survives the war, but on his return to Vienna he finds out that his parents did not. They were deported and murdered. He finds his mother’s sewing machine at the home of a family friend – memories flood in upon seeing this fragment of his past. The improvements promised to the workers of Vienna were snatched away – their possessions, their home, their lives. Such are the details that prick the reader, as they jump out of the broader story of political heroism and foolhardiness. The story ends in 1945. And bleakly, for many comrades have been lost – killed either by Nazis or by Stalinist agents. And a wider disappointment is felt at the lack of revolutionary upheaval at the end of the war. The book closes with responses to a series of questions posed to Scheuer. For example, why the religious chapter titles – Belief, Church, Heretics? When did he go over to the Trotskyists and why? And the question of the USSR? Until 1941, he thought that there was something worth defending in the USSR. In 1941, however, he had a ‘Russia discussion circle’ in the anti-fascist underground. The participants drew on documentation from Ante Ciliga, Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine. After this reading, he had to break with his illusions in the USSR. Scheuer’s book busts many illusions too, which is to say it brings reality in, in all its ghastliness, and it is not afraid to portray the errors that many made. It gives back flesh and blood to political action and debate. The whole story, and especially the ‘frequently asked questions’ at the end, read as if Scheuer is leaving a legacy for a younger generation, so that they might understand better the fundamental errors, and not repeat them.
Scheuer died in 1996. An obituary by Fritz Keller and Kurt Lhotzky appeared in Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 1, pp. 175–7.
Schiappa’s study is based, among other sources, on the study of 20,000 police files in the National Archives. By the remorseless accumulation of detail, he aims to show the true extent of the Babouvist organisation, and to make clear, in the words of Vovelle’s preface, that the conspiracy was not an ‘accident’ or an ‘insignificant epiphenomenon’. Moreover, Schiappa is not just a conscientious researcher; he is also an active socialist, and the whole work is infused with a sense that we are here recovering an important part of the authentic socialist tradition.
Schiappa shows that, contrary to the impression often given, the conspiracy was not a purely Parisian affair. He concludes that the conspiracy was ‘an attempt, very often a successful one, to build a communist organisation on the whole national territory’. Schiappa backs up the assertion with close analysis of different areas of France. He is scrupulous not to claim a more substantial implantation for the conspiracy than can be demonstrated, and admits that the picture across France was extremely uneven. (It is a pity that the publishers were not able to include maps which would have made the argument much easier to grasp.)
Thus the departments of Nord and the Pas-de Calais in North-Eastern France could legitimately be described as ‘bastions of Babouvist activity’; these were the areas most threatened with foreign invasion, there was a substantial and impoverished proletariat, and it was Babeuf’s own native region, where he had been active in the early years of the Revolution. But there was also substantial Babouvist influence in the South-East, organised around two main axes, one running along the Rhône from Lyon to Marseille through Avignon and other towns, the other running along the Mediterranean coast from Béziers and Montpellier to Toulon and Nice. In Marseille, he argues, ‘Babeuf’s friends, numerous and well-organised, formed a real political tendency with its own newspaper’. Other areas were much less affected. From the Pyrenees to the Massif Central, the conspiracy made little impact in South-Western France; there were no Babouvists in Toulouse, and very little influence in Bordeaux. To the North, Normandy was uneven, and Brittany untouched except in coastal areas.
Certainly the geography of Babouvism shows great weaknesses as well as strengths, but the overall picture is impressive. After all, in 1848 and in 1871, the militancy of Paris was largely isolated (there were Communes is several provincial cities, but none lasted more than two or three days).
Secondly, and even more interestingly, Schiappa draws out the links between the Babouvists and the emergent working class in revolutionary France. Drawing on the approach developed by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, Schiappa shows that during the revolutionary decade there was the significant development of a wage-earning class which began to act in its own class interests, and using its own characteristic means of struggle. There were significant concentrations of workers in both Paris and the provinces. Thus there were 2,400 workers in the Toulon arsenals; 800 workers from these arsenals and elsewhere in the area were reported to have gathered to hear reading from Babeuf’s journal.
Schiappa cites industrial disputes around particular problems posed by the revolutionary decade. In Dunkirk, workers demanded to be paid in bread rather than in the highly unstable currency of the time. At Sèvres workers voted for a day off every seven days rather than just once in the 10-day week imposed by the new revolutionary calendar. The strike weapon was widely deployed, often with a high level of consciousness. Schiappa cites a letter sent by printers to two scabs; it informs them that their names can be made public, so that they will find it difficult to get work in future, but since they are young and inexperienced they are being given a warning before the threat is implemented.
Schiappa shows from Babouvist literature that Babeuf and his followers were well aware of the particular situation and problems of wage workers. What is much more dubious is whether the Babouvists played any significant rôle in instigating or organising strike action. But even if they were unable to do so, it is still clear that Babouvism was clearly linked to the ideas and interests of an emergent class. Writing of strikes after Babeuf’s arrests, Schiappa goes so far as to claim: ‘It is probably the first time in history that there is a correlation between workers’ strikes and the communist endeavour.’
Schiappa also confronts the widespread argument that the main impetus behind Babouvism came from former Jacobins who had been ousted from power after Thermidor. Certainly there were links between Babeuf’s organisation and the former Jacobins (he needed allies), but Schiappa makes it clear that the Babouvists always stood firmly for their own principles, and placed no excessive trust in their allies. As Darthé put it, the former Jacobins ‘don’t want democracy, they want aristocracy for themselves and nothing more’. The Babouvist demand for the abolition of private property was a fundamental point of division on which there was no compromise. The language of socialism had not been developed as yet, but terms such as ‘common happiness’ were widely used to indicate a society without private property. Babouvist literature bore the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Common Happiness’, with the final term in larger characters.
Finally, Schiappa provides a great deal of detail about how the Babouvists actually organised. The ‘conspiracy’ was caught between contradictory pressures; state repression enforced clandestinity, yet the politics of Babouvism required popular involvement. But despite persecution, the centre succeeded not only in distributing propaganda, but in receiving reports of its impact. For the Babouvists, the ‘party’ did not aim to act on behalf of the people, but rather to show the people ‘where and how’ it should go. Schiappa is quite honest about the weaknesses of the conspiracy, and shows how, to a considerable extent, these derived from objective circumstances; as he puts it, the Babouvists ‘wanted to be like fish in water, but, quite simply, there was no more water left’. Since the Babouvists were the first grouping to take a clear step beyond Utopianism and organise to achieve their ends, this is of enormous interest. Certainly this was not a ‘conspiracy’ (as its enemies labelled it), but a broadly based popular movement.
Long before Lenin, Babeuf recognised the importance of the newspaper as an organiser. Schiappa has studied in detail the list of subscribers to Babeuf’s paper, Le Tribun du peuple, both in Paris and in the provinces. While this gives us important indications of how the organisation functioned, it is inadequate. Some key figures were not subscribers; some subscribers were inactive. Moreover, Le Tribun du peuple was both expensive and difficult to read. Many subscriptions were on behalf of whole groups of supporters. Cafés provided an important location for meetings, speeches and readings from journals. They were also a place for singing; songs were an important part of the Babouvist propaganda machine, especially for reaching those who could not read.
Schiappa is thus able to correct the judgements of historians from all parts of the spectrum. He undermines the claims of R.M. Andrews that the conspiracy had little support and made no real impact. As he points out, Andrews has the advantage of hindsight, from which it is easy to sneer at the ‘amateurism’ of the Babouvists, but such an approach fails to appreciate the situation of real human beings confronting the real difficulties of their own time. Schiappa also challenges the views of Communist historian Albert Soboul who underestimated the originality of Babouvism in relation to the struggles of 1793–94. It is, however, slightly disappointing that Schiappa cites Daniel Guérin’s 1946 study of class struggle during the First Republic only in order to point to mistakes. Certainly Guérin’s theses require correction in the light of fuller research, but he deserves credit for first developing the study of independent working-class action in the Revolution. Schiappa’s notion of a ‘working class in gestation’ is only a variant of Guérin’s metaphor of an embryonic working class.
It may seem churlish to wish a 600-page book even longer, but there are important omissions in the study. The section on the part played by women in the organisation – less than a page – is disappointingly short, especially in view of the fact that the Babouvists were one of the few groupings in the Revolution to advocate full citizenship for women. Schiappa makes very little use of the material from the Vendôme trial of 1797; this lasted 96 days, and the full stenographic record remains a rich resource to be exploited by historians. And he is surely wrong to refer to the ‘absolute silence’ of Darthé and Lapierre at Vendôme; Darthé indeed refused to cooperate with the procedures of the court, but he was able to make a substantial speech in defence of his position, while Lapierre led the defendants in song at the end of sessions.
These minor quibbles in no way detract from a recognition of the importance of Schiappa’s work. No future historian, of the Revolution or of the origins of socialism, can neglect Schiappa’s work without being seen as culpably ignorant.
But its relevance is not only to specialists. Schiappa shows clearly that Babouvism was not marginal or accidental, not the work of a few eccentrics. The French Revolution laid the foundations of the modern world of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Schiappa has shown beyond doubt that Babouvism was an integral and significant current within that Revolution. The system which we still face today was born within the presence of its gravediggers, and those gravediggers were not simply an oppressed mass, but already had a conscious doctrine of common ownership. To understand this fact about our past can only make us more confident of ultimate victory.
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In examining the failure of German writers to record these catastrophic events, Sebald writes that Heinrich Böll had written Der Engel Schwieg (The Angel was Silent) in the late 1940s which gave some idea of the depths of the horror which threatened those who really looked at the ruins around them, but Böll’s book was not published until 1992.
He considers that ‘the younger generation of writers who had just returned home were so intent on their own wartime experiences, described in a style constantly lapsing into maudlin sentimentality, that they hardly seemed to notice the horrors which at that time surrounded them on all sides’ (p. 9). Sebald writes that apart from Böll, only a few other authors – Herman Kasack, Hans Erich Nossack, Arno Schmidt and Peter de Mendelssohn – ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction, and they generally did so rather equivocally.
Kasack’s book Stadt Hinter dem Strom (The City Beyond the River) appeared in the spring of 1947. However, Sebald says that the novel ignores the appalling reality of the collective catastrophe, and the author writes very much in the style of his time by invoking pseudo-humanist and Far Eastern philosophical notions, with a great deal of symbolist jargon. Kasack’s novel encouraged Nossack to write Nekyia, but, Sebald remarks, he too succumbs to the temptation to make the real horrors of the time disappear through the artifice of abstraction and metaphysical fraudulence. But he praises Kasack for attempting to record the destruction of Hamburg and on the whole primarily concerning himself with plain facts – the season of the year, the weather, the drone of the approaching squadrons, the red firelight on the horizon, the physical and mental condition of refugees from the city.
Peter de Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedral lay unpublished for a long time – Sebald remarking ‘and a good thing too’. He continues:
Sebald chafes at such normality for he sees it as blindness in a population which cannot admit the truth of a catastrophe. He quotes from Alexander Kluge – ‘the most enlightened of writers’ – whom he says suspects that we are unable to learn from the misfortunes we bring upon ourselves, and that we will continue along the beaten tracks that bear some relation to the old road network. This puts me in mind of T.S. Eliot who wrote that humankind cannot bear too much reality.
From my own experience of the aerial bombing raids on London, I remember that following a raid shops with shattered windows proudly put up the sign ‘Business as Usual’, and the slogan was coined ‘Britain Can Take It’. Government, media and film all worked in concert to maintain what they called the morale of the population so that they accepted the war and raids almost as normality. Admittedly, the bombing was not so widespread or devastating as that which was directed at Germany – the Germans apparently lacking the technological means of the Allies – but it was bad enough, and in today’s terms would have called for counselling!
Sebald, himself German, born in Wertach im Allgäu in 1944, writes that he sees himself in his cot as an infant, while a pall of smoke is in the air all over Europe, East and West, over the ruins of German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt, deported to their deaths, people from Berlin and Frankfurt, from Wuppertal and Vienna, from Wierzburg and Kissengen, from Hilversum and the Hague, Naumur and Thionville, Lyon and Bordeaux, Kraków and Łódź, Szeged and Sarajevo, Salonika and Rhodes, Ferrara and Venice … He had seen memorial tablets even in the most remote villages on the island of Corsica reading ‘Morte à Auschwitz’. Because of this he sees the German people as suffering from vague feelings of guilt, and the majority feeling that they provoked the annihilation.
But Sebald is concerned that the generations born after the war who rely upon the testimony of writers would scarcely be able to form any idea of the extent, nature and consequences of the catastrophe inflicted on Germany by the air raids. I feel that he fears that if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. However, he considers that the population were actively dissuaded from recalling or learning from the past by governments, which were supported by the media. The government was intent upon the postwar Economic Miracle. Enormous sums had been invested in the country under the Marshall Plan. Outdated industrial complexes had been wiped out and all energies were to be put to reconstruction, the Germans having learned an unquestioning work ethic in a totalitarian society. Additionally, the Cold War broke out, Germany itself being divided between a Western and Eastern zone. Attention was directed away from the past and towards what was seen as fears for the future.
Therefore, it is no wonder that those books which dealt at length with the bombing of German cities which were brought to Sebald’s attention following the publication of lectures he had given in Zurich, have fallen into obscurity. The best of these were by Gert Ledig, who published Die Stalinorgel (The Stalin Organ) in 1955 and Die Vergeltung (Retribution) in 1956:
To those familiar with modern Darwinist science, and with leftist critiques of its implicit individualism, this may seem implausible. However, it is worth remembering that the Darwinism of The Origin of Species was not the well-defined paradigm of today, and that modern understanding owes much to later discoveries, particularly in genetics. As Darwin himself acknowledged, he had little understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance, and his work was thus open to many differing interpretations. In particular, the Darwinism of The Origin and his later Descent of Man was often open to the Lamarckian explanations that later ‘Darwinists’ have vehemently rejected: explanations based around ‘use and disuse’ and other essentially environmental explanations, summed up as ‘the inheritance of acquired characteristics’, and incompatible with modern understandings of natural selection as operating on random genetic variation. In this context, Darwinism was adaptable to a wide range of political ideologies: the right could rejoice in its Malthusian culling of the unfit, while the left saw its message of the impermanence of species as a message that political systems too could be superseded.
But this perhaps is to miss the point. Stack argues that Darwinism was not just a convenient theory to be utilised in political argument, and that instead it had become part of ‘discursive space’, and a way of seeing the world. If anything, I would go further than Stack on this, and point out exactly where in ‘discursive space’ such Darwinism fitted into a location that, in any other sociocultural context, an anthropologist might expect a ‘creation myth’ to be found. Not mythical in a pejorative sense, as untrue, but in the sense of being known by all, and therefore the explanation for ‘how things began’ that is the starting point for authoritative discourse on ‘how things should be’. In any case, Darwinism in this context was more than just a metaphor, for left and right, and in the post-Darwin era, any theory of society – any political theory – had to accommodate itself to a Darwinian discourse.
This discourse essentially treated society as an organism. But not just a living organism (an old analogy: see Hobbes Leviathan), but as one which adapts and evolves through time. In such a context, ‘change’ and ‘evolution’ become one and the same, to be discussed in organic terms. Though Stack begins his exploration of Darwinist socialism with Alfred Russel Wallace (the oft-neglected co-discoverer of natural selection, a former Owenite who curiously intermingled his socialism with spiritualism), and later Edward Aveling, perhaps the first significantly influential ‘Darwinian leftist’ was that renegade Russian aristocrat-turned-anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin. For Kropotkin, as for Darwin, it was exploration of the natural world that led to the formulation of his concepts, and in particular to the publication of Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Though Kropotkin’s anarchism was perhaps out of place in his adopted British homeland, his cooperative version of Darwinism was well suited as a leftist alternative to the blood-soaked version of the right, and seems to have found a willing audience in the emerging socialist movement.
One perhaps needs to question, however, as to whether this was really a Darwinist discourse at all. It is worth recalling that the Darwinist mantra ‘survival of the fittest’ was first used by Herbert Spencer. As Stack notes, it was Spencer who popularised notions of social evolution, and constructed ‘a cosmology; a unifying principle of “cosmic evolution” that was applicable to all areas of social and natural science …’ I suspect that this is where Stack’s argument is at its weakest if he is to justify his claim that Darwinism as such was central to the emergence of modern socialism from radicalism. One might indeed ask whether if Darwin had drowned on the Beagle, and Wallace had met a similar unfortunate end, the discourse might have been much the same, and still framed in terms of an evolving social organism. Though Spencer is largely neglected today, he was evidently highly influential in his time, and may have been more responsible for the popularising of such ideas than Darwin, and in applying them in a political context.
Regardless of the origin of this particular species of discourse, it seems to have found a niche in the ideology of the left, one well suited to the purpose of Ramsay MacDonald, for example, whose socialism was ‘naught but Darwinism’, and framed in the appropriate language. I hardly think it will be necessary to remind readers of this review where MacDonald’s ‘socialism’ led him, but Stack makes a convincing case that MacDonald’s fall from grace was at least in part due to his organic and evolving view of society, one that ultimately rejected any attempt to expedite evolution as doomed to failure, and also one that could not comprehend the possibility that rather than Capitalism evolving seamlessly into Socialism, it was quite capable of collapsing around his ears, and throwing millions out of work in the process.
MacDonald had probably been much influenced by earlier Darwinist discourse within the left, and particularly by the debate around Revisionism within the German SPD. Again, most readers will probably be familiar with the leading players in this debate, and the issues at hand, but again Stack shows how Bernstein’s revisionism was phrased in organic language, and how he saw society as a unified whole rather than as riven by class conflict – for how can an organism be in conflict with itself? Ultimately, of course, though Bernstein lost the debate, under Kautsky the SPD revised itself thoroughly of Marxism in all but name, and reached much the same conclusions that MacDonald would later, again phrased in organic terms, but with even more unfortunate results.
Stack gives many further examples of the Darwinist influence on socialism, ranging from the dubious Nietzschean speculations of Jack London in The Iron Heel, to the seemingly bizarre argument for female emancipation put by one Olive Schreiner, who saw her gender as forced to be parasitic on the social organism, and such parasitism as evidence for social regression. To be fair to Schreiner, however, she saw evolution in Lamarckian terms, and saw equality for women as the cure: giving women a more active role in society would rid them of their parasitism and allow them to become a useful part of the organic whole.
Although one might take issue with some of the finer points of Stack’s analysis, his central case seems well proven: that Darwinism, or what was seen as Darwinism, had a strong influence on early socialism, and that this influence was largely, if not entirely, detrimental. As a counter-argument to any new ‘Darwinian Left’, Stack’s work would be of great significance, though whether such a political tendency has any real importance in contemporary politics is another question entirely: I would be more inclined to attack Singer and company’s ‘evolutionary psychology’ as bad science (if it is science at all, which is debatable), reinforcing an ahistorical, individualistic, view of humankind, rather than worry about its immediate effect on modern political discourse.
This, however, is in a sense the broader point to be taken from this study, that there is politics in all discourse, and that scientific debate is political debate, not least because scientific concepts are imbued with an authoritativeness accorded to few others in contemporary society. We are again living in a Darwinian age, but one where new knowledge, about genetics in particular, may make such Darwinism more immediate, and more personal: I show this below in my review of Kerr and Shakespeare’s Genetic Politics. To those of a Marxist inclination (Marx, according to Stack, being the last pre-Darwinian socialist, and the only one to emerge largely unscathed), none of this should really be that surprising, but further proof of the ideological nature of class struggle, a struggle often hidden in seemingly abstract debate.
The route to such understanding must begin with history, with previous attempts at ‘the perfection of humanity’ and elimination of supposedly undesirable characteristics.
The first such attempt at perfection arose with the eugenics movement, as founded by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin. Though mention of eugenics today is often associated with the policies of Nazi Germany, such ideas were mainstream amongst the more educated in Europe and America, and frequently subscribed to by those on the left. Furthermore, the most active in promoting eugenic ideas were those from the medical profession: physicians, psychiatrists and the like. Beyond this, one could compose a long list of notable figures who supported eugenics, from Marie Stopes to George Bernard Shaw. Eugenics, rather than being a fringe concept, was something one could read about in Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping. Broadly speaking, there were two strands of eugenic policy: ‘negative eugenics’, which aimed to discourage the ‘unfit’ from breeding, and ‘positive eugenics’, which intended to encourage the ‘best’ to procreate.
Though such ideas may have been mainstream, it took Hitler’s Germany to demonstrate their consequences: the positive eugenics that supposedly encouraged his ‘master race’ to breed, and the negative eugenics of the death camps. But rather than being an ahistorical aberration of eugenics, such policies differed only in degree from those advocated elsewhere, or came about in such small steps that what was once unthinkable became reality. As Kerr and Shakespeare document, the origins of the Nazi death camps lay in the hospitals for the mentally and physically ‘unfit’, where first involuntary sterilisation and then routine murder became the norm, as the technology for genocide was developed, and SS ‘nurses’ learned their trade. The first systematic victims of Nazi eugenics were those they categorised as ‘useless eaters’ and as ‘life unworthy of life’, supposedly on medical grounds, though in practice through a bureaucratic system that accepted without question the decisions of a medical profession that considered antisocial behaviour or even bed-wetting as grounds for ‘euthanasia’. Even by the standards of Nazi ideology the process was thus arbitrary and capricious, and ultimately such killing ceased to be official policy (the victims were after all, largely relatives of ‘Aryan’ German citizens), though ‘wild euthanasia’ continued, and the SS found fresh targets for their new technology.
The policies of Nazi Germany meant that eugenics became a dirty word, but in much of Europe, as well as in the United States, eugenic practices continued. Even in the late 1970s, black women in the US were sometimes threatened with withdrawal of welfare payments unless they consented to sterilisation: evidently being poor and black were sufficient grounds for a ‘medical’ procedure. Elsewhere, the grounds for sterilisation may sometimes have been better founded in terms of medical diagnosis, but were still predicated on the premise that society should prevent the ‘unfit’ (read undesirable) from being born.
This premise, as Kerr and Shakespeare show, has become the normative ideology of the medical profession, in Britain at least. With greater understanding of genetics, and with new diagnostic tools, it is now possible to perform prenatal tests for many hereditary diseases, and such tests have become routine. But few have questioned why such testing has become the norm, and why it has seemed so uncontroversial. Instead, it has been uncritically accepted as a medical advance, for the good of all. Uncritically accepted, one should say, by the mainstream, but not by everyone. Both the ‘pro-life’ movement, and disability activists, have for different reasons attempted to question the motivations for such testing, particularly where (as in most cases) such hereditary ‘defects’ cannot be cured, and the logic of testing is the termination of pregnancy where such defects are diagnosed.
As Kerr and Shakespeare argue, it seems apparent that such prenatal testing is accepted because the birth of a handicapped child is self-evidently seen as a bad thing to most people, and that ‘being handicapped’ is supposedly the worst thing that can happen to a person. But this is largely dangerous nonsense, based more on prejudice than knowledge, and is totally at odds with the experiences of many people with disabilities. Though some hereditary diseases may cause great suffering, many others do not, and many supposed ‘defects’ have little effect on those who inherit them: instead their ‘suffering’ is largely the consequence of the ignorance and hostility of a society that treats difference as a disease.
In this context, then, prenatal testing for hereditary defects can only be understood as driven by an eugenic ideology, and for all the attempts of the medical profession towards ‘non-directive’ counselling, the very fact that such testing is carried out indicates its prime purpose. Even if one ignores the open admission by some that cost-benefit analysis is used to justify such testing, the presumption of relative worth of human life is self-evident: a presumption that can only be reflected back on those already born with the disabilities (real or imagined) that society, and the medical profession in particular, is trying to eliminate.
Writing for a leftist audience, I suspect that many readers will here be confronting the same dilemma that Kerr and Shakespeare presented to me. The left has been at the forefront of the battle for women’s rights to abortion on demand, but here we may have to question the way such rights are utilised, and even whether talk of ‘rights’ is necessarily helpful in understanding the situation. In the medicalised context of prenatal diagnosis of hereditary disease, often relatively late in pregnancy, ‘choice’ may be driven more by the expectations of professionals than by any considered analysis of the situation.
Here, however, we have to deal with a significant ethical question. Is it right even to consider termination of pregnancy solely on the grounds of the perceived future ‘worth’ or lifestyle of a prospective human being? My gut feeling is certainly to say no, except in the fortunately very rare cases that extreme suffering for the new individual would inevitably result. But can this be reconciled with a ‘right to choose’? Clearly not. Kerr and Shakespeare concur with others who argue that one should distinguish between the right to choose ‘whether or not to be pregnant’, and the right to choose ‘which foetus be pregnant with’: a nice distinction, but one perhaps unenforceable without reading the mind of the woman confronted with such a choice? I will leave it to readers to consider their own position on this. Regardless of such ethical dilemmas, there are clearly ways to improve the situation. First and foremost, we need to confront the way society marginalises and devalues people with disabilities, and push for greater understanding, and greater integration. It is also necessary at least to question the motivation for automatic prenatal testing for hereditary disease, and perhaps ask, as Kerr and Shakespeare do, as to whether such tests should be carried out at all.
Such difficulties are not the only ones raised by the new genomic technology. Genetic tests for hereditary disease can be carried out at any age, on any individual, and the results of such tests can have significant consequences not just for the individual concerned, but for relatives who may share the same genes. This is not in itself a new problem, in that tests for some diseases have been around for many years, but the logic of biotechnological advance is that more and more such tests will become available, and where tests are available the medical profession (and given the opportunity, the insurance industry) will carry them out. But is it necessarily in the interest of an individual to be tested? I suspect that many of us would rather not know if we had genes for a fatal hereditary disease for which there was no cure (Huntingdon’s disease is the classic case for this), though knowing that a test for such a disease is available then confronts an individual with the question as to whether he or she should be tested in order to perhaps avoid passing on the gene to future generations.
Though Huntingdon’s disease is fortunately rare, the rise of genomic testing, and the rise of genetic explanations for difference, mean that all of us are liable to testing for other genetic ‘defects’ (and implicit ranking) not for our own benefit, but for the supposed benefits of society and the real profits of what can only be described as a medical-biotechnological complex which has emerged from the ‘public-private partnership’ in British healthcare, and elsewhere. All of this fits in only too well, as Kerr and Shakespeare note, with the hegemonic neo-liberal individualist ideology of the Western world. So long as difference can be unthinkingly described as disease, and disease blamed on the faulty genes of the individuals concerned, any consideration of social attitudes, and of what is driving this new technology, can be ignored.
There are many other issues raised by advances in human genomics, most of which are touched on by Kerr and Shakespeare’s work, and readers seeking further understanding will certainly find this a good starting place. The book raises questions that often have no easy answers, but instead demonstrate the interpenetration of social values, scientific advances, and politico-economic power relations in ways that defy glib simplicities. That, however is the reality of human experience, and, contrary to the convenient hegemonic ideology, there is more to a human being than DNA, and rather than trying to create ‘better people’ for the world, perhaps we should instead concentrate on building a better world for the people.
Since the overwhelming majority of the lives of Trotsky view him in a positive light, an attempt to redress the balance can only be welcomed. There are many aspects of Trotsky’s thinking that should come under question today. Was he correct to share Lenin’s view that we are living in the highest stage of capitalism? What is left of the theory of Permanent Revolution, now that the Soviet Union itself has evolved into a capitalist state? Was he justified in defining a society as a ‘workers’ state’, purely on the basis of public ownership? Unfortunately, the writer, who thinks that ‘it is doubtful whether Trotsky made any lasting contribution to Marxist thought’ (p. 215), has not taken him to task over these major questions, but prefers to subject him to a thousand pinpricks instead.
I leave it to others to judge as to whether they affect the book’s ‘readability’. But remarks such as that in 1905 Trotsky made ‘a limited impression at the time on the popular consciousness’ (p. 35) are flatly contradicted by Lenin’s own estimate, however opposed they then were to each other. There would seem to be little point in quoting Martov to the effect that he ‘made no special contribution at Zimmerwald’ (p. 76) if you have already admitted that he helped draw up its manifesto (p. 74), or in saying that it was Trotsky who claimed that ‘there was “no better Bolshevik” than he’ (p. 128) when you let the cat out of the bag 85 pages later by admitting that it was really Lenin who said it first (p. 213). A silly attempt is made to excuse Stalin’s support for the Provisional Government in February/March 1917 (p. 184) while asserting that ‘from Trotsky’s account of 1917 only he emerges with honour’ (p. 6). The thick file of pages in The First Five Years of the Communist International dealing with the French Communist Party, for which Trotsky assumed special responsibility, hardly bears out the contention that he ‘performed largely decorative functions only during the first years of the Third International’ (p. 110). Trotsky’s article On the National Question (In Defence of the Russian Revolution, pp. 175–82) shows that he was not ‘modest in his efforts’ on behalf of the Georgian Bolsheviks (p. 122). And since Lenin’s Testament proposed to solve the problem of a split between Stalin and Trotsky by removing Stalin from his post, it can scarcely be claimed that in it ‘Trotsky was put on a par with Stalin’ (p. 131).
And is there any need to be quite so subjective when trying to readjust the focus of Trotsky’s importance? His writings from the 1930s can only be described as ‘dull’ if, for example, you have not read the last paragraph of For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism, and as ‘inaccurate’ (p. 214) if you fail to remember that he expressed amazement that the Western powers should have allowed the Russians to penetrate their intelligence systems so deeply during the period of the Popular Front, while prophesying the exact how, when and why of the outbreak of the Second World War to within a month well over a year before. Of course, you have every right to regard Literature and Revolution as ‘a highly unsatisfactory work’ (p. 139) if you do not share its particular theory of Marxist aesthetics (which was also that of Serge, Voronsky and an impressive range of Russian and American writers), but only if you advance one of your own. Nor is there any justification for resorting to feminist demagogy. Trotsky’s Problems of Everyday Life shows just how false it is to charge him with being ‘dismissive of his female compatriots’ (pp. 137–8), and whether you regard ‘Alexander Kollantai’ as ‘much admired’ (p. 114) is very much a questionable judgement, both then and now. Was it really necessary to criticise the Old Man in such a nit-picking way?
As for ‘academic credibility’, it has to be admitted that one of the main faults of those who write history from inside university departments is their touching faith in the intellectual rigour of their colleagues elsewhere. For example, during the Russian Civil War, in spite of the fact that SRs and Mensheviks were still staffing several Whiteguard administrations, one G. Swain is cited to prove that ‘from the autumn of 1918 onwards, the non-Bolshevik Socialists (or “Greens” in its terminology) largely threw their weight behind the Reds’ (p. 100), and E. Mawdsley to the effect that ‘Bonch (Bruyevich) was even more important than Trotsky in laying the foundations of the Red Army’ (p. 101).
Even more extraordinary is the material Dr Thatcher draws upon to assert that during the Spanish Civil War ‘Trotsky also tended to overestimate the efficacy of a line of command running from the Kremlin to operatives on the ground’. Commenting upon the ugly operations of the Stalinists behind the scenes, he asserts that ‘there is no evidence to confirm Trotsky’s contention that Comintern tactics were dependent on Soviet diplomacy’, leaning on the neo-Stalinist apologetics of Tim Rees to claim that ‘the ferocity of the Spanish Communists’ move against native Trotskyists had as much to do with local rivalries … as with orders from Moscow’, since there was ‘little chance’ of a workers’ uprising in Spain (p. 204). Now the facts about this have been established for some time. Trotsky’s followers in Spain barely numbered 30 people; the scale of GPU operations shows that they were aimed at the whole of Spain’s mass left; the PCE’s General Secretary himself opposed the Russian provocation against the POUM, probably paying for it with his life in 1942; Moscow’s direct responsibility has now been confirmed by the release of some of its reports (Radosh, Habeck and Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed, p. xix, etc.).
Two pages later Geoff Roberts (who seems to spend most of his out-of-seminar hours writing books trying to rehabilitate one or another aspect of Stalin’s foreign policy) is called upon to support the view that ‘the Nazi-Soviet Pact was the outcome of a last-minute decision’, and that Trotsky was ‘in gross error to claim that the USSR always preferred an alliance with Germany’ (p. 206). When we recall that by signing the Treaty of Berlin, Stalin’s Russia was the first state to recognise the legality of the Nazi regime, that pourparlers had been going on between the two as early as the time of the Reichstag Fire Trial, that dissident Communists had been ending up in the hands of the Gestapo for some time, and that Stalin had dissolved and massacred the Polish Communist Party over a year before, mental gymnastics of this sort can only strike us as frivolous. Two pages further on we encounter another argument drawn from Rees’ symposium that during the Second World War, Soviet operatives in Britain were ‘worried about the threat posed to Moscow’s domination of rank-and-file hearts by Left Opposition activists’ (p. 208). Now it has long been known that the reports in question were the method by which the Stalinists supplied British intelligence with precise names and details of those who opposed the war by instructing Communist Party activists to send them in to King Street in the full knowledge that their mail would be opened before it got there. How can anyone place any weight at all on such academic jerry building?
With this in mind, there would seem to be little point in complaining about sundry other remarks of the same kidney, such as that Trotsky ‘lost his nerve’ at Brest-Litovsk (p. 98: compare Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 375–6), that the majority of the Communist Youth opposed Trotsky, and that their leaders ‘remained in post partly because they supported Stalin’ (p. 129: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 117, 254), or that Trotsky’s failure to be present at Lenin’s funeral was due to ‘his preference for continuing his journey south for rest and recuperation’ (p. 131: Broué, Trotsky, pp. 399–400).
Considering the mad scramble of the younger generation of historians to leap onto the bandwagon of ‘revisionism’, especially as in this case it has suspicious links with a long-discredited orthodoxy, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Trotsky came in for this sort of treatment. But I still feel disappointment that so poor a product should have come from the pen of so promising a scholar. It might be added that the author has some important things to say during the earlier phases of Trotsky’s career, when he relies squarely upon his own research, but that the majority of the questionable remarks to which I have drawn attention relate to the period after the mid-1920s, when he relies more heavily upon that of others.
However, in both cases the tone is uniformly negative. If all were to be brought to the bar of History in this way, ‘Who would ’scape a whipping?’ Perhaps it is not the wisest course to write biographies of people you don’t like.
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.
********
Ian Birchall
From Trotskyism to Libertarian Communism
(2004)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 4, 2004, pp.288–9.
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-Pierre Hirou
Du trotskysme au communisme libertaire
Editions Acratie, La Bussière 2003, pp. 279, Є25
Du trotskysme au communisme libertaire
Editions Acratie, La Bussière 2003, pp. 279, Є25
JEAN-PIERRE Hirou, whose obituary appeared in Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no. 2 (2002), joined Voix ouvrière, the predecessor of Lutte ouvrière, in 1963 at the age of 15, and soon became a regular contributor to the organisation’s paper. He and his partner Michèle left LO in 1979, and he subsequently called himself a ‘libertarian communist’, though he never again joined an organisation. He was best known for his insightful book on the pre-1914 French left, Parti socialiste ou CGT? (1905–1914) (Editions Acratie, 1995), which savagely undermines some widespread myths about the pre-1914 French left. He died at the shockingly early age of 53. His comrades have edited this collection of articles and letters as a tribute to his memory and as a contribution to continuing debates on the left.
The first section, consisting of articles published in Lutte ouvrière, is the least interesting. The articles, mainly on international and historical topics, are of the sort to be found in the left press the world over – clear, well-researched commentaries on current events, but basically second-hand accounts with few new insights. Since Hirou was a member of a tendency that considers innovatory analyses of the world as petit-bourgeois self-indulgence, this is no surprise. Many of the articles end with the familiar refrain that a revolutionary party is absent – undoubtedly true, but equally undoubtedly inadequate. However, the article on socialist election strategy before 1914 shows a scholarship rare in this kind of left journalism, while a piece on child torture reveals a controlled anger that gives us a glimpse of what made Hirou a revolutionary in the first place.The latter part shows Hirou in a much more free-thinking mode. However, anyone looking for revelations about the inner life of Lutte ouvrière will be disappointed. In recent years a flood of articles have appeared in France concerned to ‘expose’ LO’s effective leader, Hardy (Robert Barcia). Hirou had the elementary decency not to contribute to this process; while he knew that there are grave problems with LO, they were very different from the ones pointed to by ignorant and sensation-seeking journalists. In some ways he remained attached to LO; he supported Arlette Laguiller’s election campaigns, and noted that LO had, in general, made far smaller concessions to social democracy than either the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire or the Lambertistes. He was clearly deeply hurt at not being allowed to present his book to a forum at the LO fête. He took a deep interest in the various small splits from LO, hoping to engage them in political dialogue. But he was strongly critical of Hardy’s authoritarian style of leadership, and from his new, ‘libertarian’ standpoint, he regarded LO as being essentially centrist.
Hirou was a student in the period leading up to May 1968, and he has some interesting recollections of the movement. His memory of Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre in 1966, failing to sell a single copy of his magazine, will give a spark of hope to all frustrated paper-sellers. And he recalls something of which I for one had hitherto been unaware, that in June 1968 LO proposed to other far left groups that they should run a joint slate of candidates in the general elections. The idea came to nothing as everybody else was denouncing bourgeois elections. At the time, I should undoubtedly have rejected LO’s proposal, but in retrospect I think that LO were right; a revolutionary election campaign could have given a focus to the far left as the movement disintegrated.
Some of Hirou’s judgements of more recent events are more dubious. Thus he repeatedly refers to what he calls ‘Islamic’ fascism. This is not the playground abuse of a Hitchens or an Aaronovitch; he invokes the work of Daniel Guérin, whom he admired greatly, in support of his stance. Yet nowhere does he effectively make his case for believing that, for example, Osama bin Laden can meaningfully be described as a ‘fascist’. There are undoubtedly some very nasty Islamic fundamentalists, but many of them are hiding in caves while the equally nasty Christian fundamentalists are sitting in the Pentagon with nuclear weapons.
On his specialist area of French labour history, Hirou is much more perceptive. It is particularly good to read his devastating critique of Jaurès, a name still much admired on the reformist left. As Hirou argues, it was only the assassin’s bullet that saved Jaurès from joining Guesde and Hervé in support for the First World War. Like Charles Kennedy, Jaurès was against war until the fighting actually started: ‘Jaurès always clearly anticipated that his tactical “pacifism” would turn into fierce strategic warmongering as soon as a foreign army had crossed the frontier.’ Hirou claims that both Trotsky and Luxemburg (impressed by Jaurès’ powerful intelligence and formidable oratory) had illusions in him, and only Lenin clearly evaluated him for what he was.
But whatever specific agreements or divergences one may have, Hirou’s book shows an active mind using the past to understand the present and prepare the future. Today, as in the early years of the Comintern, the border-line between Marxism and ‘ultra-leftism’ of various varieties is becoming the locus of crucial debates in the movement. All the more pity that Hirou is not with us to contribute to them.
Dog Days
James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman, Leon Trotsky and Others
Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931–1933
Prometheus Research Library, New York 2002, pp. 715, $19.95
THIS collection reprints a hefty chunk of the internal documentation of the American Trotskyist movement from the early 1930s, and this alone demands the attention of those interested in the history of the revolutionary movement. However, the accompanying introductory and explanatory material attempts to frame it in the context of a theory of the apostolic succession of American Trotskyism, intended to justify the Spartacists’ posture of dictating Permanent Revolution to the rest of the world. It derives its inspiration from the idea that ‘the ICL, like the ILO, is a fighting communist propaganda group’ (p. 9), by which they mean attempting to create revolutionary parties by purely polemical means, as opposed to real intervention in the labour movement. They even take this notion to the extent of criticising the Socialist Workers Party, and by implication Trotsky (and indeed Marx himself), for maintaining the formulation ‘“labor party” instead of using workers’ party to distinguish itself from British Labour Party reformism’ (p. 616). So what we have here is an illustration of the transformation of politics into religion, for the documents that went to make up the New Testament canon of the early church were edited and selected in exactly the same way, and for aims that were not greatly dissimilar.
For example, in spite of the fact that Cannon’s supporters included Oehler, Stamm and Blackwell, shortly to break away, the dubious claim is made that the differences among the leadership of the American Trotskyists were along the same lines as those of the split of 1939–40 (p. 4). Fragments of Trotsky’s letters talking about Shachtman are introduced under such tendentious titles as You Were Never on Our Side (p. 133). Indeed, little that redounds to the opposition’s credit is included, and to adjust the picture we must refer to Verso’s publication of Shachtman’s Race and Revolution written at the same time, a far more impressive and rewarding piece of socialist analysis than anything included here. For much of what this book has is what delights the Spartacists today – politics with the politics taken out, the small change of factional hair-splitting and the small beer of personal innuendo. Fortunately, most of Cannon’s speeches and articles intended for the public during this time have been freely available for nearly 20 years in the Monad collections, The Left Opposition in the US, 1928–31 and The Communist League of America, 1931–34, which do him far more credit than anything printed here.
If we make the simple historical substitution of New York for Rome, we can see that the orthodoxy that is being constructed here is as economical with the truth as that of the early church, and it appears on the very first page. The examples of France, Vietnam, Ceylon and so many other places are brushed aside in the claim that ‘the US Trotskyists were the only national group of the FI to have augmented their forces through regroupment with a centrist formation … and through short-term entry’. In spite of the fact that Cannon was still expressing his admiration for Zinoviev over 20 years later (The First Ten Years of American Communism, pp. 186–7), Shachtman’s charge that Cannon was ‘an unrepentant Zinovievist’ is dismissed as having ‘little basis’ (p. 7). Cannon’s previous support for Stalin and Zinoviev is excused on the grounds that ‘previous Opposition documents available in English were only partial, and Cannon may not have even read them’ (p. 51), though the editors were unwise enough to print Shachtman’s remarks later on that ‘the principal material was available in the US and in Moscow for those of the group’s representatives who visited it periodically’ (p. 253). Are we really expected to believe that a leading member of the American Communist Party had not been reading Inprecorr for the previous four years? Cannon had certainly been reading enough of it to have been an ardent supporter of ‘Bolshevisation’ under Zinoviev (p. 357), and of the Third Period when that came along as well. For as Shachtman points out, the Cannon group did not have ‘the slightest relationship with the views of the Left Opposition’, and supported ultra-leftist politics in the American party ‘against which the Russian Opposition had been contending since 1925’ (p. 253; see p. 129). The plain fact of the matter is, of course, that far from Cannon’s group being the first to reveal the struggle of the Left Opposition to the rest of the world, that honour falls to Max Eastman and to members of the French Communist Party (see parts 1 and 2 of Alfred Rosmer et al., Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism, and Boris Souvarine, What Became of the Revolution?, pp. 78–90), and Cannon had consistently opposed those who tried to do the same in the United States. And although it is well known that it was George Weston who smuggled out Trotsky’s critique of the Draft Programme of the Comintern, the long-discredited lie is repeated that this was done by Cannon and Maurice Spector (p. 10).
Maintaining the mythology that the credit for spreading the ideas of the Left Opposition outside the USSR belongs almost exclusively to Cannon’s group also involves some unpleasant smears over the memory of Trotsky’s early collaborators. Alfred Rosmer, who struggled so manfully against the stream during the First World War, is described as ‘unable to function as a leader of a small propaganda group’, ‘expelled from the French party in December 1924 before the issues in dispute in the Russian party were clear internationally’ (p. 13), and, in spite of his incessant travels around Europe organising the Opposition, as doing ‘nothing to make the international center a reality’ (p. 23). Kurt Landau, who was tortured to death for his support for the Spanish revolution, appears as ‘an unprincipled cliquist and adventurer’ (p. 20), and is even criticised for wanting to expel the Sobolevicius brothers ‘unjustly’ for the Stalinist agents that they were (p. 21). And we might add that Trotsky (Writings, 1938–39, p. 255) was very much of the opinion that Naville’s long service to the movement deserves a fairer verdict than ‘personalism’ (p. 55).
As Trotsky’s grandson observed about the sect that publishes this book, ‘these methods and procedures must be banished from the workers’ movement’. And Trotsky himself more than once expressed the opinion that spite generally plays the basest rôle in politics, for it is not at all coincidental that Harpal Brar’s ludicrous 600-odd page book defending the Moscow Trials (Trotskyism or Leninism?) borrows massive chunks from the arsenal of the Spartacists to attack the rest of the Trotskyist movement.
For if we are to accept the principle of the cult of personality in politics, how are we to judge between one personality cult and another? It is high time the Trotskyist movement took a sledgehammer to its own personality cults. Infallibility and purity of descent are repugnant to atheists and materialists, and cannot be reconciled with socialism or the movement of the working class. And while it is true that Trotsky later used the SWP to initiate policy in the Fourth International, the attempts by Cannon, Pablo and Healy to carry on in the same way have proved disastrous since. Especially destructive has been the theory promoted by the American SWP, as Ernie Tate once expressed it to me, that a revolutionary organisation must first ‘hegemonise’ the left by an endless succession of factional warfare, intrigue, stunts and desperate adaptations and then, and only then, would it be ready to point itself like a revolver at the head of the working class. While ever this idea of ‘party building’ persists, we will all remain in what this book’s title describes as the ‘dog days’. For real socialist ideas take shape, not through the mere exchange of factional insults, but in cross-fertilisation with the activity of the working class.
Al Richardson
***********
Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931–1933
Prometheus Research Library, New York 2002, pp. 715, $19.95
Review
Lebensraum and the Holocaust
Martyn Housden
Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Holocaust
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2003, pp. 328, £55
MARTYN Housden is a historian best known for his work on resistance in Nazi Germany. His new book is a biography of Hans Frank, a prominent Nazi lawyer, who became the Governor General of occupied Poland and was hanged following the Nuremberg Trials. Frank is interesting for several reasons. Involved in the decisions leading up to the Holocaust, he wrote an 11,000 page personal diary, which has been used as a key source for many different accounts of this period. Charged at the Nuremberg Tribunal, Frank’s life also enables the historian to reverse one drawback with much of the English-language literature, a concentration on the period leading up to 1933, to the exclusion of the later years of genocide and decline.
For all these reasons, Housden’s book is a welcome addition to the academic literature. Unfortunately, it suffers from a series of structural weaknesses, which are likely to restrict its interest to all but specialists. One problem is that the biographer has been unable to gather any information of substance about Hans Frank’s first 20 years. The story begins with an impressionistic young bourgeois, romantic and slightly histrionic, and amenable to fascism. It is hard for the reader to contextualise Frank’s politics, or to imagine that any other options were open to him. The next problem is a consistent tone of surprise, which Housden adopts at Frank’s conversion to fascism. As an educated man, we are repeatedly told, Frank should have been immune to such politics. The idea that the educated should have been uniquely immune to fascism seems to have nothing much more behind it than the biographer’s own self-identification as a member of the same group.
Housden avoids the sex-and-scandal style of biography, but his adoption of a dry, distant style actually reduces the interest of the narrative. For example, Housden generally avoids quoting directly from Frank’s diaries. This choice denies him the opportunity to make critical or ironic use of Frank’s self-important worldview.
Such decisions become problematic as we approach the key events of Frank’s life. Lacking any sense of rival understandings, it is the biographer’s own choices that are made to seem problematic. On the one hand, Housden wishes to argue that Frank was a minor Nazi dissident, a ‘loyal opponent’ of Adolf Hitler’s arbitrary rule. On the other hand, Housden is rightly critical of Hans Frank’s later self-defence, the argument he gave at Nuremberg, that as a relatively junior official unconcerned with matters of policing or state policy he could not be blamed for the events of the Holocaust which took place in territories under his purely nominal control.
The evidence for Frank’s opposition stems from the summer of 1942, when, caught up with increasing intra-party criticism of his own lavish lifestyle, and that of his friends, Frank feared for his own political future. Hans Frank responded by returning to Germany, touring the Universities of Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Heidelberg, lecturing on the status of German law. The theme of his lectures was the necessary independence of the legal system, which should remain free of external control. ‘It was an amazing episode’, Housden writes, ‘in a bizarre time.’ Yet for all the undoubted stress and trauma of this episode, Housden has more difficulty in demonstrating that any single member of Frank’s audience perceived his speeches as the staking out of an alternative politics. Contrary to Housden, what seems to have happened is that Frank’s speeches were received as the repetition of standard Nazi clichés. The tension was all in his head. There may have been the hints of coded disagreements in his speeches, but to magnify these to the status of ‘opposition’ (as Housden does) is a disservice to Hitler’s genuine opponents.
Housden’s judgement of Frank’s involvement in the Holocaust is more persuasive. He cites Frank boasting that one way of solving food shortages would be to end the provision of rations to 1.2 million Polish Jews. He demonstrates the lawyer’s involvement in the process of genocide. Yet the style of the book remains distant, choices are presented outside Frank’s terms of reference, and his own voice is curiously absent. Just as biography, I suspect the book would be more interesting, if only Housden had taken seriously Frank’s claims to have missed key decisions, and therefore by taking his self-deception seriously, if Housden had showed how far Frank had lied to himself. Reading this book, a comparison came to mind with Richard Evans’ recent demolition of David Irving. Sometimes it is necessary to take such charlatans seriously, just in order to show how far they have lied.
Dave Renton
Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Holocaust
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2003, pp. 328, £55
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Gentle Revolutionary
Robert Morrell
The Gentle Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Frank Ridley: Socialist and Secularist
Freethought History Research Group, 2003, pp. 26, £2.00
The Gentle Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Frank Ridley: Socialist and Secularist
Freethought History Research Group, 2003, pp. 26, £2.00
ROBERT Morrell’s essay follows Francis Ambrose Ridley (known as Frank) from birth on 22 February 1897 to his death on 27 March 1994. Brought up by adoptive parents, the Reverend Charles William Ridley and his wife, Frank Ridley was reared in a religious environment. On leaving school, he was accepted for training for the Anglican priesthood at Salisbury Theological College, and was awarded a Licentiate in Theology by University College, Durham. Therefore, Ridley’s life could have followed a very different course to that which it was to take. It was while he was at Durham that he encountered Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, and this made him question his religious beliefs. He was a founder member of the Thomas Paine Society, and he became its Vice-President in 1966.
Ridley claimed also that a serious head injury which he had suffered in 1916, and which left a permanent dent in his skull, had stimulated his brain cells!Over the years, Ridley developed into a secularist, free thinker, socialist writer, historian, political activist and speaker. On discovering Marxism, he adopted this, though not uncritically, for the rest of his long life. Disagreeing with the premise of ‘Socialism in One Country’, he was drawn towards Trotsky, and in 1929, together with Hugo Dewar, established the Marxian League. He wrote also for the American Trotskyist paper The Militant. Ridley corresponded with Trotsky, and Morrell covers the points on which they disagreed. However, in spite of these disagreements, following Trotsky’s murder by one of Stalin’s agents, Ridley penned a warm appreciation in which he described Trotsky as ‘the leader and prophet of the permanent revolution, that is, of the World Revolution on a universal scale against all ruling classes and against all forms of class rule everywhere’.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Ridley drew close to the anarchists, writing for War Commentary and Freedom Press. He labelled himself politically an Anarcho-Marxist to indicate that while he appreciated the freedom to be found in anarchism, he accepted Marxism. Later Ridley found a political home in the Independent Labour Party, but taking a stance that socialism and religion are incompatible, he disagreed with the Christian element within that body.
Morrell covers the differences within the Secular Society of which Ridley was President during 1951–62. When the term Humanism emerged, a conference was held at Conway Hall entitled The Challenge of Humanism, following which a strong protest was made to the BBC, which at that time was a ‘no-go’ area for secularists, for the BBC saw its role as the promotion of Christianity. This, and changing attitudes in society, resulted eventually in the BBC inviting a speaker from the Secular Society.
Frank Ridley had many attributes and talents, for not only was he a prolific writer, but an orator at Hyde Park and Tower Hill, and, of course, at indoor meetings.
Morrell tells Ridley’s story with some humour, for Ridley himself was a great humorist. Morrell writes that ‘his great sense of humour enabled him to enliven his audience … nobody dozed off when he was speaking’. Additionally, Ridley’s great knowledge is indicated by the bibliography at the end of this booklet. For those interested, I would tell you that Frank Ridley’s booklet Socialism and Religion has been reprinted and is available from the Freethought History Research Group for £2.00.
Morrell concludes that Ridley died a pauper, but his 2,500 or so articles, along with his books and booklets, have left the world a valuable and lasting legacy.
This pamphlet is available from the Freethought History Research Group at 83 Sowerby Close, Eltham, London SE9 6EZ.
Sheila Lahr
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The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Michael Parenti
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome
New Press, New York, 2003, pp276, £12.95
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome
New Press, New York, 2003, pp276, £12.95
THIS is a gem of a book. Michael Parenti presents the main outlines of the last years of the Roman Republic, covering the period from Tiberius Gracchus’ election as tribune in 133 BCE (Before the Christian Era) to the assumption of power by Augustus (Julius Caesar’s nephew) in 27. In the process, he gives an account of the major social struggles that took place, and he provides a balanced assessment of Julius Caesar’s role as defender of the lower orders in the Roman state. I cannot remember reading a better introduction to this decisive phase of ancient Roman history: the book deserves an honoured place alongside Daniel de Leon’s Two Pages from Roman History, F.A. Ridley’s Spartacus, and the chapter on Rome in GEM de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Duckworth, 1983, chapter 6, pp. 327–408).
As one surveys the events leading up to Augustus’ elevation to the office of Princeps, that is, of the Roman imperial power, one is bound to ask what caused the overthrow of the Republic. Our ‘gentleman historians’ – the phrase is Parenti’s – tend to confine themselves to identifying the members of the First Triumvirate (or Gang of Three) – Caesar, Pompey and Crassus – and emphasise Caesar’s personal ambition. There is no doubt that Julius Caesar had a high opinion of his own capacities (not without reason), but who was it who allowed the Triumvirs to seize power in the first place, and who forced Caesar to cross the Rubicon in 49 BCE? To answer these questions, we need to look at the role of the Roman governing classes in the period under review.The counter-revolutionary dictator Sulla, after he had rearranged the constitution in order to increase the powers of the slave-owning aristocracy, is said to have declared: ‘I have put the Senate in the saddle: let us see if it can ride.’ Unfortunately, that august assembly of ‘conscript fathers’ (patres conscripti) proved wholly unequal to the task. One of the chief merits of Parenti’s book is the way in which it brings out the sheer greed and short-sighted political intolerance of these Roman conservatives, the so-called ‘Optimates’ or ‘best men’. (A modern parallel appears in the inflated earnings of US corporate executives and entrepreneurs, and the ruthless methods used by their political representatives to defend these.) Despite the miseries caused by their policies, Messrs Senators absolutely refused to make any concessions to demands for reform backed by those less fortunately placed. They were particularly opposed to any plans for land reform – a necessary measure in order to protect the Roman peasants forced off the land in this period: on some eight separate occasions between 133 and 49 the Senate set its face against any land reform whatever – even for veterans who had contributed to Rome’s military victories and who were looking for means of support at the end of their period of service. The Romans had no police force to speak of, and, as far as I am aware, no regular policy of imprisonment for offences against the state: the traditional Roman aristocratic method of dealing with dangerous political opponents was one of assassination. As Parenti explains, ‘just about every leader of the Middle and Late Republics who took up the popular cause met a violent end’ (p. 81).
Maybe that was why Caesar decided, in the face of senatorial opposition to his compromise proposals, that he had no choice but to march on Rome in defiance of the constitution in 49.
Parenti is especially illuminating in what he has to say about the notorious ‘Conspiracy of Catiline’, which was supposedly extinguished by Cicero in 63. The Senators backed Cicero as a candidate for the consulship in the elections of 64 because Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina) had gone over to the popular party (such people were known as Populares) around 65 and his election had to be prevented. The Roman historian Q. Sallustius Crispus (otherwise known as Sallust) has left us an account of what followed, but Parenti shows that this account, which is based uncritically on Cicero’s contemporary accusations, is of questionable veracity and trustworthiness. A plausible alternative view is that Cicero invented the whole story of a succession of plots organised by Catiline and eventually forced him into rebellion. If so, the great orator and moralist was not above using what Plato would have called an ‘agathon pseudon’ or ‘noble lie’ in the defence of the Roman governing élite, into whose ranks he had been admitted.
Catiline’s alleged co-conspirators were condemned to death by the Senate, and were executed without trial. Among a minority opposing this unconstitutional motion was one C. Julius Caesar. In 60 BCE, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed a three-man alliance against the conservative Senators. As Parenti explains:
Pompey had the prestige of a war hero and presumably the backing of his veterans, Crassus had the money, and Caesar had the support of the plebs [lower citizenry]. Together they challenged the optimates and emerged for a time as the dominant political force. (p. 120)
The Triumvirs ruled the roost until 53 when Crassus was killed waging war against Parthia. At this point it was not Caesar’s ambitions which caused problems, but someone else’s. In Shakespeare’s words: ‘The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious … Knew you not Pompey?’ (Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 2, lines 78–9, and Act I, Scene 1, line 37)
Pompey (who conferred on himself the epithet ‘Magnus’) let himself be won over by the conservatives, who persuaded the Senate to designate him sole consul – another violation of the constitution – in 52, and extended his command in Spain for a further five years. Thus each side had armed forces at its disposal should they be needed – Caesar was still proconsul in Gaul.At this point, Caesar proposed a compromise: both he and Pompey should resign their commands, and the struggle could continue on the electoral front. The Senate initially approved the plan, but the conservative die-hards were not happy: they feared that Caesar would win the contest on these terms, and succeeded in persuading the Senate to pass an emergency decree calling on Caesar to disband his army forthwith. We all know the sequel.
The popular measures put through by Caesar in his last years are somewhat less well known. As Parenti tells us, he secured land for his veterans and distributed estates around Capua to some 20,000 poor Roman families. A programme of public works was begun, large landowners were required to reserve a third of their labour force for the employment of free Romans. Caesar pushed through rent reductions, obtained a decrease in payments wrung from the provinces, reduced debt burdens, granted Jews the right to practice their religion legally, and gave Roman citizenship to any foreign doctors or liberal arts professors wishing to reside in Rome. He took care that his measures were approved by the Comitia Tributa (the popular Assembly of Roman Tribes) and arranged for the publication of all Senatorial and Assembly decrees. He also granted to the citizens of Athens the right to restore their democratic constitution if they so desired.
Was Caesar aiming at monarchy? Parenti wisely leaves the question open, noting, however, aspects of the Julian regime which point in this direction, such as Caesar’s assumption of the post of Prefect of Morals (praefectus moribus) and his insistence on personally appointing half of Rome’s magistrates (bypassing the Senate, which had the constitutional right to appoint). He took care to institute a cult of his person, wearing regal attire, having coins stamped with his image, and so on (see page 163). But this evidence does not settle the issue. Nor does the episode of his being offered a crown and refusing it bear necessarily the interpretation given it by the conspirators in Shakespeare’s play: ‘for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it’ (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2, lines 237–8).
The scene, easy to rehearse, could have been designed as a test of public opinion, similar to a similar form of ‘opinion poll’ used in another of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III: ‘How now, my lord, what say the citizens?’
We shall never know for sure whether Caesar would have made himself king, because he was struck down before such a plan could be implemented. (Some interesting speculation as to the ease with which the assassination was carried out was voiced in a recent television programme this year, which carried the suggestion that Caesar was suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy at the end, and consequently, suffering as he was, deliberately failed to take measures to thwart the conspiracy.) The conspirators were not won over by Caesar’s conciliatory treatment of them as his former enemies: they could not forgive him for his popular measures, so they resorted to the time-honoured method used against the Gracchi and other dangerous opponents. But, having disposed of Caesar, they could not win over the populace: the result was another triumvirate (Octavian, Antonius and Lepidus), another civil war and the final extinction of republican liberty. As Parenti concludes, the slave-owners were ultimately prepared to accept one-man rule provided that the ruler was willing to protect their precious privileges, which was exactly what Augustus in practice did. In that respect he was thoroughly ‘sound’.
Chris Gray
***********
Ian Birchall
During the Algerian War
(2004)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 4, 2004, pp.294–6.
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).
Sylvain Pattieu
Les camarades des frères: trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie
Editions Syllepse, Paris 2002, pp. 292, Є19.50
Les camarades des frères: trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie
Editions Syllepse, Paris 2002, pp. 292, Є19.50
THE ‘civilising mission’ of an imperialist power pitted against Islamic nationalism; a treacherous and arrogant social democratic leader spearheading a colonial war; guerrilla warfare, terrorism and torture. The Algerian war for national independence (1954–62) has many parallels with our own day, as is shown by the impact which Pontecorvo’s movie The Battle of Algiers still has on audiences born long after the events it depicts took place.
There have been a number of studies of the courageous French men and women who gave material support to those fighting for independence, notably Hamon and Rotman’s Les Porteurs de valises and Martin Evans’ The Memory of Resistance. But Pattieu’s is the first full account of the rôle played by the French Trotskyists. It is a thorough and well-balanced account, based on extensive documentation as well as on interviews with a number of the key survivors. It thus provides an important addition to our knowledge of anti-imperialist struggles in metropolitan countries.In 1954, French Trotskyism was scarcely in a position to meet the huge challenge presented by the Algerian insurrection. Of the 500 or so members of the main grouping in the immediate postwar period, a half were lost in an unnecessary split in 1948. The usual wear and tear of a difficult period took more, and in 1952 these was a major international split. That left two tiny groups, which for the sake of convenience we can call after their main leaders, the Frank group (‘Pabloites’) and the Lambert group. In the early years of the war, the total number of organised Trotskyists in France was around 100.
In the first year or so of the war, it was therefore the anarchists, with perhaps over 300 militants, who made the running. One of their activists, Pierre Morain, served a jail sentence for articles he published in opposition to the war. The conscript revolts of 1955, when there was a genuine possibility of large numbers refusing to fight, got no significant support from the organised left. The Communist Party (PCF) failed to support such action, invoking the allegedly ‘Leninist’ principle that revolutionaries should work inside the army. But while the Leninist tradition did oppose individual desertion and ‘conscientious objection’, mass revolt against war was a different matter; as long ago as Eugène Pottier’s Internationale (‘Appliquons la grève aux armées’) revolutionaries had called for mass disobedience in the armed forces.
There was a further complication in that the independence movement was split. The National Liberation Front (FLN) which launched the 1954 insurrection was a newly-formed organisation, challenging the more long-standing Algerian National Movement (MNA), led by the veteran Messali Hadj. The FLN, though hardly itself homogenous, was determined to impose its hegemony on the struggle, and there was a savage internecine struggle between the two movements.
While the Frank group backed the FLN, Lambert’s supporters lined up with the MNA, at least during the earlier part of the war. This was not some lambertiste aberration, as is often alleged; the MNA had an honourable history, a working-class base, especially in metropolitan France, and some sort of commitment to socialism. It was backed, not only by Lambert, but by the anarchists, the Shachtmanites and by such knowledgeable individuals as Daniel Guérin. The Frank group were justified by history, in that the FLN led the independence struggle to victory, while the MNA was increasingly weakened and politically disoriented. But the FLN’s campaign of brutality and murder against its rival is hardly the most glorious page of its history.
An additional problem for the Frank group was that, in accordance with the Pabloite perspective, many of its members were doing entry work in the Communist Party. Entrism in a Stalinist party was not like the same strategy in the British Labour Party, where one can say more or less what one likes provided one has no influence on policy. It required absolute clandestinity. An additional hazard was the rôle of the poisonous Michèle Mestre, a former Trotskyist leader from the 1940s pursuing her own entry tactic which would end up with enthusiastic support for the Russian tanks in Prague in 1968; she happily fingered to the bureaucracy any Trotskyist entrists she discovered.
In 1957, the 16-year-old Alain Krivine, a loyal and enthusiastic Communist Party member, was surprised that when he arranged a meeting with FLN representatives he was reprimanded by his own party (which had recently voted in favour of ‘special powers’ to pursue the war). What he didn’t know was that his two brothers (including his twin Hubert) were already secret Trotskyists working in the PCF.
The question of strategy led to a further split. After the Hungarian events of 1956, a small number of PCF members made a break with Stalinism. Other individuals were being drawn towards opposition to the war. Some members of the Frank group felt a broader organisation was required and joined with ex-Communists to form the journal La Voie communiste. This enjoyed some success in providing a public focus for opposition to the war as well as offering practical solidarity to the FLN. However, this involved a breach of discipline in the Frank group, and Denis Berger and others were expelled.
The Frank group had only a handful of industrial workers, but these played a specially noteworthy role, since they had to win support for opposition to the war among their fellow-workers, as well as giving what assistance they could to their Algerian comrades. Many Algerian militants worked in large factories, and the authorities found it easier to locate them there than in their homes, since they moved around constantly. Henri Benoîts, a member of the Frank group working at Renault-Billancourt, was able to give assistance to the FLN organisation within the factory. When an attempt was made to arrest a leading FLN militant at Renault, various trade union activists succeeded in causing a work stoppage which confused matters, and then hid the militant in the factory, later enabling him to escape … after collecting his pay! Later Benoîts was advised by his group to join the newly-formed Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), since this party contained many well-known journalists and politicians, and it was far harder for the authorities to victimise its members than isolated Trotskyists. Benoîts succeeded in winning over the PSU branch at Renault to support Algerian independence and practical support for the FLN, policies which the PSU majority rejected. When a group of intellectuals produced the Manifesto of 121, calling for support to the FLN, the Trotskyists gave out copies at the factory gates, often meeting physical violence from PCF members.
Nonetheless there were contradictions inherent in solidarity work. That revolutionaries should shelter Algerian militants on the run was an elementary act of solidarity. That they should ‘carry suitcases’ was equally natural, since white French people were far less likely to be searched and manhandled by the police than those of North African appearance. (The suitcases generally contained, not weapons, but money collected by the FLN from Algerian workers in France.) But such tasks could run counter to what should have been revolutionaries’ main priority, winning support in the workplaces for withdrawal of French troops.
The weakness of the Frank group’s strategy became clearer when other more ambitious solidarity actions were undertaken. Workers engaging in clandestine activity obviously had to make themselves inconspicuous, and this detracted from the primary task of campaigning publicly against the war. Pablo and Santen were jailed for forging money for the FLN. As practical aid to the FLN, this was legitimate if adventurist; but the hope that it might help to destabilise the French economy was pure fantasy. Later a group of Fourth International militants moved to Morocco to work in a factory making weapons for the FLN. Again a worthy action, but one which diverted from the main responsibility, especially when several of those concerned were skilled workers who could have played an important rôle in trade union activity. At the same time, Pablo and his associates nurtured illusions that there was a real and immediate socialist potential in the Algerian revolution.
The one serious omission from Pattieu’s account is the Socialisme ou barbarie group, which is dismissed as merely a grouping of intellectuals. But the group’s leading industrial militant, Daniel Mothé of the Renault factory, describes in his book Journal d’un ouvrier (1956–1958) how he attempted to organise against the war, meeting opposition from both employers and the PCF-dominated trade union. Meanwhile in the pages of Socialisme ou barbarie, Jean-François Lyotard was developing the most thorough analysis of the FLN and its potential to become a new ruling bureaucracy. (His writings are reprinted in the book La Guerre des Algériens.) A fuller treatment of this Trotskyist-derived group would have been very welcome.
Pattieu notes that the last years of the war produced ferment among students and the PCF youth, leading to the emergence of a new generation of revolutionaries. Just six years after the end of the war they were to become key cadres in the events of May–June 1968, helping to spark off the biggest general strike in human history. Let us hope that in this respect, if in no other, history repeats itself.
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Only Fools Fear Nothing
Georg Scheuer
Seuls les fous n’ont pas peur
Syllepse, Paris 2002, pp. 288, Є19.5
Seuls les fous n’ont pas peur
Syllepse, Paris 2002, pp. 288, Є19.5
GEORG Scheuer’s autobiography Only Fools Fear Nothing has recently appeared in a French edition, translated by Geneviève Hess and Christa Scheuer-Weyl. The original is in German and is entitled Nur Narren Fürchten Nichts, and was published by the Verlag für Gesellschaftkritk in Vienna in 1991. The title stems from a poem by Heinrich Heine called Enfant perdu, printed at the start of Scheuer’s memoirs, and dedicated to his comrades from those days. Scheuer has much in common with Heine. Both are German-speakers who take exile in France. Heine’s exile is just over 100 years before Scheuer’s. Both have critical political sensibilities. Heine was a Saint-Simonian and Republican, Scheuer a Marxist – for this they both suffered repression and censorship at home. Heine’s poem, in which he speaks of the fearless fools, is about a soldier. It begins with the lines:
Lost posts in the war of liberation
I faithfully held for thirty years I fought without hope of victory I knew I would not return home in one piece. |
The poem ends with a death scene. The narrator’s wounds are bleeding:
Yet, I am unconquered when I die and my weapons
are not broken – only my heart is broken. |
The poem casts a sombre shadow across the book, whose subtitle is Scenes from a Thirty Year War, 1915–1945. From Scheuer’s perspective, there is no peace after the First World War, but rather continuing oppression, class warfare and fratricide. It becomes clear on reading the book that this 30-year war is not just that between bourgeoisie and proletariat, imperialist and anti-imperialist, left and right, or communist and fascist, but also, tragically, within the ranks of the left itself. Thirty years of warring, then. And these years – 1915–1945 – are the first 30 years of Scheuer’s life, and half of them were spent in political action, which was mainly clandestine and risky. His autobiography is honest and shocking – shocking because events are so monstrous. After its appearance in German and French, a translation into English would confirm for anglophone readers much that we already know about the Stalinist left in the 1930s, and would add much texture to our picture of what it was like to live as a revolutionary in such miserable times.
Scheuer’s book begins at his beginning. Scheuer was born in Vienna during the First World War. His father worked for an official news agency. His mother was from Timosoara in Hungary (now Romania). They lived in a modest proletarian flat. His first memory, ‘his beginning’, involves standing at a window in the tiny flat, staring into the grey street and watching troops and munitions and provisions being transported across the city, while soldiers march past and sing military and patriotic songs. The children join in. War greets his arrival in the world. But life seems to improve slowly. One sign of this is his mother’s sewing machine. Another sign is the family’s move to a ‘better’ district. After this opening, the scene quickly changes to Scheuer’s growing politicisation and the arguments with his father, who, despite social democratic inclinations, tended towards conformity. As an adolescent, Scheuer joins a left-wing youth group and attends a summer camp. One day, on the way to school, he picks up a leaflet, but it is a Nazi leaflet, designed to appeal at first glance to the left-leaning school-kids. Political divisions are manifesting themselves – the veritable ‘battle for hearts and minds’ is on. At the age of 16 in 1931, he joins the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ). The book gives vivid descriptions of the smoky interior of 69 Alsterstraße, the party headquarters of the KPÖ. Scheuer’s comments on his first days in the party reveal an early discontent with the deification of Stalin. Scheuer has a good memory for details, and it is fascinating to read of the methods of flyposting or making multiple copies of leaflets in the early 1930s, or descriptions of how and where political discussions took place and how meetings were conducted. But these depictions of a milieu are interrupted by Scheuer’s increasing disillusionment with the party. He attends a meeting where no dissent is allowed, and where all sorts of fighting talk is voiced. After the meeting the police attack them, but, despite the cries of other comrades for all to stay put, the comrades disperse and flee. So too do the shouting comrades, even as they shout. Scheuer is not impressed at this gap between word and deed.Scheuer’s autobiography tells of the degeneration of the party. These are themes familiar to many readers of Revolutionary History, but we should never tire of hearing how it played out specifically for each participant. Scheuer includes fascinating details from this process. In December 1931, he travelled to Berlin for a revolutionary school students conference. There he meets a comrade who greets him not with the customary phrase ‘Rotfront’, but rather ‘Heil Moskau’. Contained in this greeting is a whole shift of policy. It is at this Berlin conference that Scheuer first learns about Trotsky’s politics, and he talks to comrades about the idea of the united front. Many are glad to hear his thoughts. Others are incensed.
In January 1933, Hitler assumed power in Germany. Scheuer notes that the given line was that it was impossible to see this as a defeat for the left. The Communists hoped that Hitler would fail, or that a revolution would take place. But the Nazis were confident right from the very first moments of their power. On 17 February, the Nazis tell all the police authorities (some of whom were still run by Social Democrats) to work directly with the SA, SS and Stahlhelm. A period of great persecution of the left begins. This spills over the border into Hitler’s Heimat. In Austria too, the workers’ movement is repressed. Dollfuss bans the May Day demonstration in 1933. Socialist and Communist groups are outlawed. The gallows are reintroduced. Scheuer withdrew in response, and turned to books – Lenin, for example – in order to understand what had occurred. But the workers’ movement had not been crushed. In February 1934, there was an armed uprising in Austria. This leads to another stint of feverish activity, as Communist underground cells multiply. Scheuer travels much in this period, visiting comrades, operating internationally. Trotsky continues to be a pole of attraction, and in Italy he finds Trotsky’s My Life on sale. He meets Karl Polzer, an old Left Oppositionist, and Bruno Grad, an old Trotskyist. His dissatisfaction with the Communists grows.
In 1935, he visits Paris and meets Jean Meichler and other Trotskyists. This leads him to form a new group, the Revolutionary Communists of Austria (RKÖ). But such activism does not go unnoticed. The political police arrest Scheuer and comrades in 1936, and he is accused of ‘high treason’. The activists are labelled Trotskyists, and sentenced to a hefty jail term. Two years later, in 1938, he is released, on the promise that he will not agitate against Austria. But he does, and it is deemed safer for him to leave, on the very day the country is annexed by Hitler. Scheuer finds exile in Prague (while his parents are dispossessed of their home), but moves quickly, because Prague is a dangerous place for Trotskyist sympathisers to be. He goes to France. His group, the RKÖ, is invited to participate, along with another comrade, Karl Fischer, in the founding conference of the Fourth International at Alfred Rosmer’s house in Perigny (though Rosmer is not present). Twenty-one representatives from 11 national sections of the left were there. But, Scheuer remarks, his group is deliberately given a later starting time than others, in order to exclude them from many of the discussions. Other sections were not invited at all, he notes bitterly. Ironically, he remembers Etienne, a.k.a. Marc Zborowski, later revealed as Stalin’s agent, sat in the middle, not a genuine participant, but actually spying and meddling. Afterwards there was a youth conference. Scheuer mentions young Americans with Trotsky goatees who were determined to enlighten their comrades as to the truth of the European situation. War is not imminent, they insist. Scheuer and comrades disagreed, and they presented very pessimistic perspectives about war, Spain, defeat and the strength of reaction. Shachtman attacked them as ultra-leftists, and asks them to consider whether they wish to remain in the International. They say thanks but no thanks, and leave, leaving behind them what they feel to be a rather shambolic organisation.
Upon war’s breakout, Scheuer and comrades are interned. Now begin several years of escapes and clandestine activities in France, such as falsifying identity papers and travelling into the Occupied Zone for political work. One escape involved pretending to be baggage handlers at Toulouse. Another was the busting of a comrade/lover from a Vichy Jail. This involved impersonating the Gestapo, with one of their number wearing a little swastika brooch made out of shiny paper, and playing on their Germanic accents. Scheuer survives the war, but on his return to Vienna he finds out that his parents did not. They were deported and murdered. He finds his mother’s sewing machine at the home of a family friend – memories flood in upon seeing this fragment of his past. The improvements promised to the workers of Vienna were snatched away – their possessions, their home, their lives. Such are the details that prick the reader, as they jump out of the broader story of political heroism and foolhardiness. The story ends in 1945. And bleakly, for many comrades have been lost – killed either by Nazis or by Stalinist agents. And a wider disappointment is felt at the lack of revolutionary upheaval at the end of the war. The book closes with responses to a series of questions posed to Scheuer. For example, why the religious chapter titles – Belief, Church, Heretics? When did he go over to the Trotskyists and why? And the question of the USSR? Until 1941, he thought that there was something worth defending in the USSR. In 1941, however, he had a ‘Russia discussion circle’ in the anti-fascist underground. The participants drew on documentation from Ante Ciliga, Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine. After this reading, he had to break with his illusions in the USSR. Scheuer’s book busts many illusions too, which is to say it brings reality in, in all its ghastliness, and it is not afraid to portray the errors that many made. It gives back flesh and blood to political action and debate. The whole story, and especially the ‘frequently asked questions’ at the end, read as if Scheuer is leaving a legacy for a younger generation, so that they might understand better the fundamental errors, and not repeat them.
Scheuer died in 1996. An obituary by Fritz Keller and Kurt Lhotzky appeared in Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 1, pp. 175–7.
Esther Leslie
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Ian Birchall
The Babouvists
(2004)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 4, 2004, pp.299–302.
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 Marc Schiappa
Les babouvistes
Les Amis de Gracchus Babeuf, Saint-Quentin 2003, pp. 606, Є55
Les babouvistes
Les Amis de Gracchus Babeuf, Saint-Quentin 2003, pp. 606, Є55
OVER 200 years on from the French Revolution it would seem impossible to say anything new on the subject. The currently fashionable revisionist historians largely content themselves with recycling what was said much better by de Tocqueville. But Jean Marc Schiappa’s new book undoubtedly breaks new ground in the study of one of the most significant episodes of the Revolution, the so-called ‘conspiracy’ of Babeuf in 1796. The distinguished historian Michel Vovelle has hailed it as marking ‘a turning-point in the understanding of Babouvism’.
The book is based on Schiappa’s doctoral thesis, presented in 1992, and is published, fittingly, by the ‘Friends of Gracchus Babeuf’, a group of historians independent of any academic institution based in Saint-Quentin, Babeuf’s home-town, who in 1997 organised a splendid conference to celebrate Babeuf’s bicentenary.Schiappa’s study is based, among other sources, on the study of 20,000 police files in the National Archives. By the remorseless accumulation of detail, he aims to show the true extent of the Babouvist organisation, and to make clear, in the words of Vovelle’s preface, that the conspiracy was not an ‘accident’ or an ‘insignificant epiphenomenon’. Moreover, Schiappa is not just a conscientious researcher; he is also an active socialist, and the whole work is infused with a sense that we are here recovering an important part of the authentic socialist tradition.
Schiappa shows that, contrary to the impression often given, the conspiracy was not a purely Parisian affair. He concludes that the conspiracy was ‘an attempt, very often a successful one, to build a communist organisation on the whole national territory’. Schiappa backs up the assertion with close analysis of different areas of France. He is scrupulous not to claim a more substantial implantation for the conspiracy than can be demonstrated, and admits that the picture across France was extremely uneven. (It is a pity that the publishers were not able to include maps which would have made the argument much easier to grasp.)
Thus the departments of Nord and the Pas-de Calais in North-Eastern France could legitimately be described as ‘bastions of Babouvist activity’; these were the areas most threatened with foreign invasion, there was a substantial and impoverished proletariat, and it was Babeuf’s own native region, where he had been active in the early years of the Revolution. But there was also substantial Babouvist influence in the South-East, organised around two main axes, one running along the Rhône from Lyon to Marseille through Avignon and other towns, the other running along the Mediterranean coast from Béziers and Montpellier to Toulon and Nice. In Marseille, he argues, ‘Babeuf’s friends, numerous and well-organised, formed a real political tendency with its own newspaper’. Other areas were much less affected. From the Pyrenees to the Massif Central, the conspiracy made little impact in South-Western France; there were no Babouvists in Toulouse, and very little influence in Bordeaux. To the North, Normandy was uneven, and Brittany untouched except in coastal areas.
Certainly the geography of Babouvism shows great weaknesses as well as strengths, but the overall picture is impressive. After all, in 1848 and in 1871, the militancy of Paris was largely isolated (there were Communes is several provincial cities, but none lasted more than two or three days).
Secondly, and even more interestingly, Schiappa draws out the links between the Babouvists and the emergent working class in revolutionary France. Drawing on the approach developed by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, Schiappa shows that during the revolutionary decade there was the significant development of a wage-earning class which began to act in its own class interests, and using its own characteristic means of struggle. There were significant concentrations of workers in both Paris and the provinces. Thus there were 2,400 workers in the Toulon arsenals; 800 workers from these arsenals and elsewhere in the area were reported to have gathered to hear reading from Babeuf’s journal.
Schiappa cites industrial disputes around particular problems posed by the revolutionary decade. In Dunkirk, workers demanded to be paid in bread rather than in the highly unstable currency of the time. At Sèvres workers voted for a day off every seven days rather than just once in the 10-day week imposed by the new revolutionary calendar. The strike weapon was widely deployed, often with a high level of consciousness. Schiappa cites a letter sent by printers to two scabs; it informs them that their names can be made public, so that they will find it difficult to get work in future, but since they are young and inexperienced they are being given a warning before the threat is implemented.
Schiappa shows from Babouvist literature that Babeuf and his followers were well aware of the particular situation and problems of wage workers. What is much more dubious is whether the Babouvists played any significant rôle in instigating or organising strike action. But even if they were unable to do so, it is still clear that Babouvism was clearly linked to the ideas and interests of an emergent class. Writing of strikes after Babeuf’s arrests, Schiappa goes so far as to claim: ‘It is probably the first time in history that there is a correlation between workers’ strikes and the communist endeavour.’
Schiappa also confronts the widespread argument that the main impetus behind Babouvism came from former Jacobins who had been ousted from power after Thermidor. Certainly there were links between Babeuf’s organisation and the former Jacobins (he needed allies), but Schiappa makes it clear that the Babouvists always stood firmly for their own principles, and placed no excessive trust in their allies. As Darthé put it, the former Jacobins ‘don’t want democracy, they want aristocracy for themselves and nothing more’. The Babouvist demand for the abolition of private property was a fundamental point of division on which there was no compromise. The language of socialism had not been developed as yet, but terms such as ‘common happiness’ were widely used to indicate a society without private property. Babouvist literature bore the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Common Happiness’, with the final term in larger characters.
Finally, Schiappa provides a great deal of detail about how the Babouvists actually organised. The ‘conspiracy’ was caught between contradictory pressures; state repression enforced clandestinity, yet the politics of Babouvism required popular involvement. But despite persecution, the centre succeeded not only in distributing propaganda, but in receiving reports of its impact. For the Babouvists, the ‘party’ did not aim to act on behalf of the people, but rather to show the people ‘where and how’ it should go. Schiappa is quite honest about the weaknesses of the conspiracy, and shows how, to a considerable extent, these derived from objective circumstances; as he puts it, the Babouvists ‘wanted to be like fish in water, but, quite simply, there was no more water left’. Since the Babouvists were the first grouping to take a clear step beyond Utopianism and organise to achieve their ends, this is of enormous interest. Certainly this was not a ‘conspiracy’ (as its enemies labelled it), but a broadly based popular movement.
Long before Lenin, Babeuf recognised the importance of the newspaper as an organiser. Schiappa has studied in detail the list of subscribers to Babeuf’s paper, Le Tribun du peuple, both in Paris and in the provinces. While this gives us important indications of how the organisation functioned, it is inadequate. Some key figures were not subscribers; some subscribers were inactive. Moreover, Le Tribun du peuple was both expensive and difficult to read. Many subscriptions were on behalf of whole groups of supporters. Cafés provided an important location for meetings, speeches and readings from journals. They were also a place for singing; songs were an important part of the Babouvist propaganda machine, especially for reaching those who could not read.
Schiappa is thus able to correct the judgements of historians from all parts of the spectrum. He undermines the claims of R.M. Andrews that the conspiracy had little support and made no real impact. As he points out, Andrews has the advantage of hindsight, from which it is easy to sneer at the ‘amateurism’ of the Babouvists, but such an approach fails to appreciate the situation of real human beings confronting the real difficulties of their own time. Schiappa also challenges the views of Communist historian Albert Soboul who underestimated the originality of Babouvism in relation to the struggles of 1793–94. It is, however, slightly disappointing that Schiappa cites Daniel Guérin’s 1946 study of class struggle during the First Republic only in order to point to mistakes. Certainly Guérin’s theses require correction in the light of fuller research, but he deserves credit for first developing the study of independent working-class action in the Revolution. Schiappa’s notion of a ‘working class in gestation’ is only a variant of Guérin’s metaphor of an embryonic working class.
It may seem churlish to wish a 600-page book even longer, but there are important omissions in the study. The section on the part played by women in the organisation – less than a page – is disappointingly short, especially in view of the fact that the Babouvists were one of the few groupings in the Revolution to advocate full citizenship for women. Schiappa makes very little use of the material from the Vendôme trial of 1797; this lasted 96 days, and the full stenographic record remains a rich resource to be exploited by historians. And he is surely wrong to refer to the ‘absolute silence’ of Darthé and Lapierre at Vendôme; Darthé indeed refused to cooperate with the procedures of the court, but he was able to make a substantial speech in defence of his position, while Lapierre led the defendants in song at the end of sessions.
These minor quibbles in no way detract from a recognition of the importance of Schiappa’s work. No future historian, of the Revolution or of the origins of socialism, can neglect Schiappa’s work without being seen as culpably ignorant.
But its relevance is not only to specialists. Schiappa shows clearly that Babouvism was not marginal or accidental, not the work of a few eccentrics. The French Revolution laid the foundations of the modern world of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Schiappa has shown beyond doubt that Babouvism was an integral and significant current within that Revolution. The system which we still face today was born within the presence of its gravediggers, and those gravediggers were not simply an oppressed mass, but already had a conscious doctrine of common ownership. To understand this fact about our past can only make us more confident of ultimate victory.
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Natural History of Destruction
W.G. Sebald
On the Natural History of Destruction
Penguin, Harmondsworth 2003, pp. 205, £16.99
On the Natural History of Destruction
Penguin, Harmondsworth 2003, pp. 205, £16.99
W.G. SEBALD wrote the above book in order to examine why, following the Second World War, German writers were silent on the suffering resulting from the mass destruction of German cities. He took the title for the English translation of Luftkrieg und Literatur (first published in German in 1999) from a proposed article for Horizon by Solly Zuckerman following a visit to Cologne shortly after the war. However, this article never came to fruition for Zuckerman decided that his first view of the destroyed Cologne demanded a more eloquent piece than he could ever have written.
Kurt Vonnegut, the American writer, suffered the same difficulties in writing about the aerial bombing of Dresden. During the bombing he had been one of a number of prisoners of war in Dresden, housed in a slaughterhouse. When he came to write Slaughterhouse Five ostensibly about the fire bombing, he sidestepped into science fiction and took refuge on the fictional planet Tralfamadore. He says:
I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. But not many words about Dresden came from my mind … and not many words come now, either. Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what book I’m working on and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
During the last years of the war, a million tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on 131 German towns and cities. As a result, 600,000 civilians died and 3.5 million homes were destroyed. This bombing, sanctioned by the British government in 1943, was ‘to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population and in particular the industrial workers’. It was sustained even when selective attacks could be made from the air with far greater precision on targets like factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions and the main transport arteries, operations, which Albert Speer was later to comment, ‘would very soon have paralysed the entire system of production’.
In 1952, during an interview with a Halberstadt journalist, Brigadier L. Anderson of the US Eighth Army Airforce, a discussion took place as to whether the hoisting of a white flag made from six sheets would have saved the city. Brigadier Anderson replied that bombs were expensive items and could not have been dropped over mountains or open country after so much labour had gone into making them at home. As we know, under capitalism production and destruction are entwined.In examining the failure of German writers to record these catastrophic events, Sebald writes that Heinrich Böll had written Der Engel Schwieg (The Angel was Silent) in the late 1940s which gave some idea of the depths of the horror which threatened those who really looked at the ruins around them, but Böll’s book was not published until 1992.
He considers that ‘the younger generation of writers who had just returned home were so intent on their own wartime experiences, described in a style constantly lapsing into maudlin sentimentality, that they hardly seemed to notice the horrors which at that time surrounded them on all sides’ (p. 9). Sebald writes that apart from Böll, only a few other authors – Herman Kasack, Hans Erich Nossack, Arno Schmidt and Peter de Mendelssohn – ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction, and they generally did so rather equivocally.
Kasack’s book Stadt Hinter dem Strom (The City Beyond the River) appeared in the spring of 1947. However, Sebald says that the novel ignores the appalling reality of the collective catastrophe, and the author writes very much in the style of his time by invoking pseudo-humanist and Far Eastern philosophical notions, with a great deal of symbolist jargon. Kasack’s novel encouraged Nossack to write Nekyia, but, Sebald remarks, he too succumbs to the temptation to make the real horrors of the time disappear through the artifice of abstraction and metaphysical fraudulence. But he praises Kasack for attempting to record the destruction of Hamburg and on the whole primarily concerning himself with plain facts – the season of the year, the weather, the drone of the approaching squadrons, the red firelight on the horizon, the physical and mental condition of refugees from the city.
Peter de Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedral lay unpublished for a long time – Sebald remarking ‘and a good thing too’. He continues:
It would be difficult to surpass the page after page of embarrassing writing. The egomaniacal viewpoint in this novel about the aftermath of an air-raid concerns itself with the arrogance of technological man and borrowed its grandiose triviality from the mega-production Metropolis. (p. 54)
To this day, Sebald writes, ‘the real scenes of horror … still have an aura of the forbidden about it, even of voyeurism’. So he was not surprised when he was told by a man that when a boy in the immediate postwar years, ‘photographs of corpses lying in the streets’ were ‘brought out from under the counter of a Hamburg bookshop, to be fingered and examined in a way usually reserved for pornography’ (p. 99).
Sebald considers that when in the later years local and amateur war historians began documenting the fall of the German cities, their studies did not alter the fact that the image of this horrifying chapter have never really crossed into the national consciousness. He sees no understanding in a community that seemed to have emerged from a war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment. Instead, and with remarkable speed, social life revived. People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. Therefore, Frau Schroder, employed at a local cinema, gets to work with a shovel immediately after the bomb falls, hoping to clear the rubble away before the two o’clock matinee. Down in the cellar where she finds various cooked body parts, she tidies up by dumping them in the washhouse boiler for the time being. Another woman cleans the windows of a building that stood alone and undamaged in the middle of the desert of ruins.Sebald chafes at such normality for he sees it as blindness in a population which cannot admit the truth of a catastrophe. He quotes from Alexander Kluge – ‘the most enlightened of writers’ – whom he says suspects that we are unable to learn from the misfortunes we bring upon ourselves, and that we will continue along the beaten tracks that bear some relation to the old road network. This puts me in mind of T.S. Eliot who wrote that humankind cannot bear too much reality.
From my own experience of the aerial bombing raids on London, I remember that following a raid shops with shattered windows proudly put up the sign ‘Business as Usual’, and the slogan was coined ‘Britain Can Take It’. Government, media and film all worked in concert to maintain what they called the morale of the population so that they accepted the war and raids almost as normality. Admittedly, the bombing was not so widespread or devastating as that which was directed at Germany – the Germans apparently lacking the technological means of the Allies – but it was bad enough, and in today’s terms would have called for counselling!
Sebald, himself German, born in Wertach im Allgäu in 1944, writes that he sees himself in his cot as an infant, while a pall of smoke is in the air all over Europe, East and West, over the ruins of German cities, over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt, deported to their deaths, people from Berlin and Frankfurt, from Wuppertal and Vienna, from Wierzburg and Kissengen, from Hilversum and the Hague, Naumur and Thionville, Lyon and Bordeaux, Kraków and Łódź, Szeged and Sarajevo, Salonika and Rhodes, Ferrara and Venice … He had seen memorial tablets even in the most remote villages on the island of Corsica reading ‘Morte à Auschwitz’. Because of this he sees the German people as suffering from vague feelings of guilt, and the majority feeling that they provoked the annihilation.
But Sebald is concerned that the generations born after the war who rely upon the testimony of writers would scarcely be able to form any idea of the extent, nature and consequences of the catastrophe inflicted on Germany by the air raids. I feel that he fears that if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. However, he considers that the population were actively dissuaded from recalling or learning from the past by governments, which were supported by the media. The government was intent upon the postwar Economic Miracle. Enormous sums had been invested in the country under the Marshall Plan. Outdated industrial complexes had been wiped out and all energies were to be put to reconstruction, the Germans having learned an unquestioning work ethic in a totalitarian society. Additionally, the Cold War broke out, Germany itself being divided between a Western and Eastern zone. Attention was directed away from the past and towards what was seen as fears for the future.
Therefore, it is no wonder that those books which dealt at length with the bombing of German cities which were brought to Sebald’s attention following the publication of lectures he had given in Zurich, have fallen into obscurity. The best of these were by Gert Ledig, who published Die Stalinorgel (The Stalin Organ) in 1955 and Die Vergeltung (Retribution) in 1956:
These went beyond anything the Germans were willing to read about their recent past. His deliberately uncompromising style, designed to evoke disgust and revulsion, once again conjured up the ghost of anarchy at a time when the economic miracle was already on its way … (p. 97)
In reviewing this book, I have followed the main themes, but there is very much more and it is unfortunate that Sebald, who was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, was killed in a car crash in Norwich in 2001. Had he lived, I am sure he would have written many more interesting and thought-provoking books. I have to say that included at the end of this volume are assessments of three German writers: Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. I have not read these writers, and so do not feel competent to comment.
Sheila Lahr
**********
Genetic Politics
David Stack
The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859–1914
New Clarion Press, Cheltenham 2003, pp. 149
The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859–1914
New Clarion Press, Cheltenham 2003, pp. 149
Anne Kerr and Tom Shakespeare
Genetic Politics: From Eugenics To Genome
New Clarion Press, Cheltenham 2002, pp. 211
Genetic Politics: From Eugenics To Genome
New Clarion Press, Cheltenham 2002, pp. 211
FRIEDRICH Engels, in his graveside eulogy to Karl Marx, famously compared Marx’s achievements to those of Charles Darwin, who ‘discovered the law of development of organic nature’, as ‘Marx discovered the law of development of human history …’ Given the context, one might see this as hyperbole, or at least as an attempt to confer the legitimacy on Marx’s theories that had been granted to Darwin’s. However, as David Stack’s The First Darwinian Left demonstrates, the relationship between left-wing ideology and Darwinism is more subtle than that: indeed, if Stack is correct in his arguments, Darwinism has had a profound influence on socialist thought in general, and British socialism in particular.
Though Stack’s work is historical, his motivation for producing it is contemporary – the publication in 1999 of Peter Singer’s The Darwinian Left. Evidently, Singer’s ‘Darwinism’ is too compatible with Blairite Third Way politics for Stack’s taste, and symptomatic of the further dilution of socialist principles under ‘New Labour’. As Stack shows, Darwinism is embedded in the roots of socialism, and the intervention of Singer’s ‘evolutionary psychology’ is thus nothing new. Indeed, if one accepts Stack’s thesis, Darwinism, broadly defined, was one of the things that separated socialism from earlier radicalist ideology. Though this may seem a strong claim to make, the evidence seems to back it up, with figures ranging from Annie Besant to Ramsay MacDonald ascribing their socialism to a Darwinist understanding of the world: as Stack suggests, there appear to have been ‘two permeable systems’ for such theorists, in which Darwinian science and socialist politics were intertwined, almost to the extent that they became indistinguishable.To those familiar with modern Darwinist science, and with leftist critiques of its implicit individualism, this may seem implausible. However, it is worth remembering that the Darwinism of The Origin of Species was not the well-defined paradigm of today, and that modern understanding owes much to later discoveries, particularly in genetics. As Darwin himself acknowledged, he had little understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance, and his work was thus open to many differing interpretations. In particular, the Darwinism of The Origin and his later Descent of Man was often open to the Lamarckian explanations that later ‘Darwinists’ have vehemently rejected: explanations based around ‘use and disuse’ and other essentially environmental explanations, summed up as ‘the inheritance of acquired characteristics’, and incompatible with modern understandings of natural selection as operating on random genetic variation. In this context, Darwinism was adaptable to a wide range of political ideologies: the right could rejoice in its Malthusian culling of the unfit, while the left saw its message of the impermanence of species as a message that political systems too could be superseded.
But this perhaps is to miss the point. Stack argues that Darwinism was not just a convenient theory to be utilised in political argument, and that instead it had become part of ‘discursive space’, and a way of seeing the world. If anything, I would go further than Stack on this, and point out exactly where in ‘discursive space’ such Darwinism fitted into a location that, in any other sociocultural context, an anthropologist might expect a ‘creation myth’ to be found. Not mythical in a pejorative sense, as untrue, but in the sense of being known by all, and therefore the explanation for ‘how things began’ that is the starting point for authoritative discourse on ‘how things should be’. In any case, Darwinism in this context was more than just a metaphor, for left and right, and in the post-Darwin era, any theory of society – any political theory – had to accommodate itself to a Darwinian discourse.
This discourse essentially treated society as an organism. But not just a living organism (an old analogy: see Hobbes Leviathan), but as one which adapts and evolves through time. In such a context, ‘change’ and ‘evolution’ become one and the same, to be discussed in organic terms. Though Stack begins his exploration of Darwinist socialism with Alfred Russel Wallace (the oft-neglected co-discoverer of natural selection, a former Owenite who curiously intermingled his socialism with spiritualism), and later Edward Aveling, perhaps the first significantly influential ‘Darwinian leftist’ was that renegade Russian aristocrat-turned-anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin. For Kropotkin, as for Darwin, it was exploration of the natural world that led to the formulation of his concepts, and in particular to the publication of Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Though Kropotkin’s anarchism was perhaps out of place in his adopted British homeland, his cooperative version of Darwinism was well suited as a leftist alternative to the blood-soaked version of the right, and seems to have found a willing audience in the emerging socialist movement.
One perhaps needs to question, however, as to whether this was really a Darwinist discourse at all. It is worth recalling that the Darwinist mantra ‘survival of the fittest’ was first used by Herbert Spencer. As Stack notes, it was Spencer who popularised notions of social evolution, and constructed ‘a cosmology; a unifying principle of “cosmic evolution” that was applicable to all areas of social and natural science …’ I suspect that this is where Stack’s argument is at its weakest if he is to justify his claim that Darwinism as such was central to the emergence of modern socialism from radicalism. One might indeed ask whether if Darwin had drowned on the Beagle, and Wallace had met a similar unfortunate end, the discourse might have been much the same, and still framed in terms of an evolving social organism. Though Spencer is largely neglected today, he was evidently highly influential in his time, and may have been more responsible for the popularising of such ideas than Darwin, and in applying them in a political context.
Regardless of the origin of this particular species of discourse, it seems to have found a niche in the ideology of the left, one well suited to the purpose of Ramsay MacDonald, for example, whose socialism was ‘naught but Darwinism’, and framed in the appropriate language. I hardly think it will be necessary to remind readers of this review where MacDonald’s ‘socialism’ led him, but Stack makes a convincing case that MacDonald’s fall from grace was at least in part due to his organic and evolving view of society, one that ultimately rejected any attempt to expedite evolution as doomed to failure, and also one that could not comprehend the possibility that rather than Capitalism evolving seamlessly into Socialism, it was quite capable of collapsing around his ears, and throwing millions out of work in the process.
MacDonald had probably been much influenced by earlier Darwinist discourse within the left, and particularly by the debate around Revisionism within the German SPD. Again, most readers will probably be familiar with the leading players in this debate, and the issues at hand, but again Stack shows how Bernstein’s revisionism was phrased in organic language, and how he saw society as a unified whole rather than as riven by class conflict – for how can an organism be in conflict with itself? Ultimately, of course, though Bernstein lost the debate, under Kautsky the SPD revised itself thoroughly of Marxism in all but name, and reached much the same conclusions that MacDonald would later, again phrased in organic terms, but with even more unfortunate results.
Stack gives many further examples of the Darwinist influence on socialism, ranging from the dubious Nietzschean speculations of Jack London in The Iron Heel, to the seemingly bizarre argument for female emancipation put by one Olive Schreiner, who saw her gender as forced to be parasitic on the social organism, and such parasitism as evidence for social regression. To be fair to Schreiner, however, she saw evolution in Lamarckian terms, and saw equality for women as the cure: giving women a more active role in society would rid them of their parasitism and allow them to become a useful part of the organic whole.
Although one might take issue with some of the finer points of Stack’s analysis, his central case seems well proven: that Darwinism, or what was seen as Darwinism, had a strong influence on early socialism, and that this influence was largely, if not entirely, detrimental. As a counter-argument to any new ‘Darwinian Left’, Stack’s work would be of great significance, though whether such a political tendency has any real importance in contemporary politics is another question entirely: I would be more inclined to attack Singer and company’s ‘evolutionary psychology’ as bad science (if it is science at all, which is debatable), reinforcing an ahistorical, individualistic, view of humankind, rather than worry about its immediate effect on modern political discourse.
This, however, is in a sense the broader point to be taken from this study, that there is politics in all discourse, and that scientific debate is political debate, not least because scientific concepts are imbued with an authoritativeness accorded to few others in contemporary society. We are again living in a Darwinian age, but one where new knowledge, about genetics in particular, may make such Darwinism more immediate, and more personal: I show this below in my review of Kerr and Shakespeare’s Genetic Politics. To those of a Marxist inclination (Marx, according to Stack, being the last pre-Darwinian socialist, and the only one to emerge largely unscathed), none of this should really be that surprising, but further proof of the ideological nature of class struggle, a struggle often hidden in seemingly abstract debate.
As I noted above, we are now living in an age where technological advances once again raise issues that the left needs to confront, and questions that often have no simple answers. The Human Genome Project has supposedly mapped out the essence of humanity, and the first cloned human being may soon be more than just the wild imagining of fringe science. If unconstrained, the technology will soon exist for creating ‘designer babies’ almost at will, and for the elimination of ‘undesirable genes’ from the gene pool. Meanwhile, those of us not in possession of designer genes may form the beginnings of a genetic underclass: or so the newspaper headlines tell us. If there is a spirit haunting the biotechnology laboratories of the world, it is evidently the spirit of Dr Frankenstein.
But perhaps a note of scepticism is not out of place here. Though the technology may be new, the issues raised are not. And as Kerr and Shakespeare’s work demonstrates, the real issues to be confronted are more social and political than technological, and any knee-jerk anti-technological reaction is unlikely to be productive. What instead is needed is a clear understanding of what this technology is, what it can achieve, and why it is being developed.The route to such understanding must begin with history, with previous attempts at ‘the perfection of humanity’ and elimination of supposedly undesirable characteristics.
The first such attempt at perfection arose with the eugenics movement, as founded by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin. Though mention of eugenics today is often associated with the policies of Nazi Germany, such ideas were mainstream amongst the more educated in Europe and America, and frequently subscribed to by those on the left. Furthermore, the most active in promoting eugenic ideas were those from the medical profession: physicians, psychiatrists and the like. Beyond this, one could compose a long list of notable figures who supported eugenics, from Marie Stopes to George Bernard Shaw. Eugenics, rather than being a fringe concept, was something one could read about in Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping. Broadly speaking, there were two strands of eugenic policy: ‘negative eugenics’, which aimed to discourage the ‘unfit’ from breeding, and ‘positive eugenics’, which intended to encourage the ‘best’ to procreate.
Though such ideas may have been mainstream, it took Hitler’s Germany to demonstrate their consequences: the positive eugenics that supposedly encouraged his ‘master race’ to breed, and the negative eugenics of the death camps. But rather than being an ahistorical aberration of eugenics, such policies differed only in degree from those advocated elsewhere, or came about in such small steps that what was once unthinkable became reality. As Kerr and Shakespeare document, the origins of the Nazi death camps lay in the hospitals for the mentally and physically ‘unfit’, where first involuntary sterilisation and then routine murder became the norm, as the technology for genocide was developed, and SS ‘nurses’ learned their trade. The first systematic victims of Nazi eugenics were those they categorised as ‘useless eaters’ and as ‘life unworthy of life’, supposedly on medical grounds, though in practice through a bureaucratic system that accepted without question the decisions of a medical profession that considered antisocial behaviour or even bed-wetting as grounds for ‘euthanasia’. Even by the standards of Nazi ideology the process was thus arbitrary and capricious, and ultimately such killing ceased to be official policy (the victims were after all, largely relatives of ‘Aryan’ German citizens), though ‘wild euthanasia’ continued, and the SS found fresh targets for their new technology.
The policies of Nazi Germany meant that eugenics became a dirty word, but in much of Europe, as well as in the United States, eugenic practices continued. Even in the late 1970s, black women in the US were sometimes threatened with withdrawal of welfare payments unless they consented to sterilisation: evidently being poor and black were sufficient grounds for a ‘medical’ procedure. Elsewhere, the grounds for sterilisation may sometimes have been better founded in terms of medical diagnosis, but were still predicated on the premise that society should prevent the ‘unfit’ (read undesirable) from being born.
This premise, as Kerr and Shakespeare show, has become the normative ideology of the medical profession, in Britain at least. With greater understanding of genetics, and with new diagnostic tools, it is now possible to perform prenatal tests for many hereditary diseases, and such tests have become routine. But few have questioned why such testing has become the norm, and why it has seemed so uncontroversial. Instead, it has been uncritically accepted as a medical advance, for the good of all. Uncritically accepted, one should say, by the mainstream, but not by everyone. Both the ‘pro-life’ movement, and disability activists, have for different reasons attempted to question the motivations for such testing, particularly where (as in most cases) such hereditary ‘defects’ cannot be cured, and the logic of testing is the termination of pregnancy where such defects are diagnosed.
As Kerr and Shakespeare argue, it seems apparent that such prenatal testing is accepted because the birth of a handicapped child is self-evidently seen as a bad thing to most people, and that ‘being handicapped’ is supposedly the worst thing that can happen to a person. But this is largely dangerous nonsense, based more on prejudice than knowledge, and is totally at odds with the experiences of many people with disabilities. Though some hereditary diseases may cause great suffering, many others do not, and many supposed ‘defects’ have little effect on those who inherit them: instead their ‘suffering’ is largely the consequence of the ignorance and hostility of a society that treats difference as a disease.
In this context, then, prenatal testing for hereditary defects can only be understood as driven by an eugenic ideology, and for all the attempts of the medical profession towards ‘non-directive’ counselling, the very fact that such testing is carried out indicates its prime purpose. Even if one ignores the open admission by some that cost-benefit analysis is used to justify such testing, the presumption of relative worth of human life is self-evident: a presumption that can only be reflected back on those already born with the disabilities (real or imagined) that society, and the medical profession in particular, is trying to eliminate.
Writing for a leftist audience, I suspect that many readers will here be confronting the same dilemma that Kerr and Shakespeare presented to me. The left has been at the forefront of the battle for women’s rights to abortion on demand, but here we may have to question the way such rights are utilised, and even whether talk of ‘rights’ is necessarily helpful in understanding the situation. In the medicalised context of prenatal diagnosis of hereditary disease, often relatively late in pregnancy, ‘choice’ may be driven more by the expectations of professionals than by any considered analysis of the situation.
Here, however, we have to deal with a significant ethical question. Is it right even to consider termination of pregnancy solely on the grounds of the perceived future ‘worth’ or lifestyle of a prospective human being? My gut feeling is certainly to say no, except in the fortunately very rare cases that extreme suffering for the new individual would inevitably result. But can this be reconciled with a ‘right to choose’? Clearly not. Kerr and Shakespeare concur with others who argue that one should distinguish between the right to choose ‘whether or not to be pregnant’, and the right to choose ‘which foetus be pregnant with’: a nice distinction, but one perhaps unenforceable without reading the mind of the woman confronted with such a choice? I will leave it to readers to consider their own position on this. Regardless of such ethical dilemmas, there are clearly ways to improve the situation. First and foremost, we need to confront the way society marginalises and devalues people with disabilities, and push for greater understanding, and greater integration. It is also necessary at least to question the motivation for automatic prenatal testing for hereditary disease, and perhaps ask, as Kerr and Shakespeare do, as to whether such tests should be carried out at all.
Such difficulties are not the only ones raised by the new genomic technology. Genetic tests for hereditary disease can be carried out at any age, on any individual, and the results of such tests can have significant consequences not just for the individual concerned, but for relatives who may share the same genes. This is not in itself a new problem, in that tests for some diseases have been around for many years, but the logic of biotechnological advance is that more and more such tests will become available, and where tests are available the medical profession (and given the opportunity, the insurance industry) will carry them out. But is it necessarily in the interest of an individual to be tested? I suspect that many of us would rather not know if we had genes for a fatal hereditary disease for which there was no cure (Huntingdon’s disease is the classic case for this), though knowing that a test for such a disease is available then confronts an individual with the question as to whether he or she should be tested in order to perhaps avoid passing on the gene to future generations.
Though Huntingdon’s disease is fortunately rare, the rise of genomic testing, and the rise of genetic explanations for difference, mean that all of us are liable to testing for other genetic ‘defects’ (and implicit ranking) not for our own benefit, but for the supposed benefits of society and the real profits of what can only be described as a medical-biotechnological complex which has emerged from the ‘public-private partnership’ in British healthcare, and elsewhere. All of this fits in only too well, as Kerr and Shakespeare note, with the hegemonic neo-liberal individualist ideology of the Western world. So long as difference can be unthinkingly described as disease, and disease blamed on the faulty genes of the individuals concerned, any consideration of social attitudes, and of what is driving this new technology, can be ignored.
There are many other issues raised by advances in human genomics, most of which are touched on by Kerr and Shakespeare’s work, and readers seeking further understanding will certainly find this a good starting place. The book raises questions that often have no easy answers, but instead demonstrate the interpenetration of social values, scientific advances, and politico-economic power relations in ways that defy glib simplicities. That, however is the reality of human experience, and, contrary to the convenient hegemonic ideology, there is more to a human being than DNA, and rather than trying to create ‘better people’ for the world, perhaps we should instead concentrate on building a better world for the people.
Andrew West
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Trotsky
Ian D. Thatcher
Trotsky
Routledge, London 2003, pp. 240, £9.99
Trotsky
Routledge, London 2003, pp. 240, £9.99
THIS is the first full-length life of Trotsky attempted since Pierre Broué’s comprehensive study of 1988, which still awaits an English publisher. It forms part of a series aimed at providing ‘readable and academically credible biographies’. Unfortunately, given the state of academe today, it is not always possible to reconcile these two aims in one book.
Strictly speaking, it is not a biography in the sense of telling a life story, as for example Deutscher’s classic is: rather it is an exercise in academic reappraisal. This does not mean that it does not contain real strengths. Attempting to provide a counterblast to Trotskyist hagiography on the one side and Stalinist demonology on the other can only be regarded as a commendable aim. There is an excellent summary of modern Russian historiography about Trotsky (pp. 18–22), and a very interesting analysis of two early biographies of him by G. Ziv and M. Smolensky (pp. 4–5). The writer’s discussion of Trotsky’s views of the events of 1905 and following (pp. 40–4) is the best at present in print. Well worth careful study is the section about Trotsky as an ‘historian of the Revolution’ (pp. 182–7). There is an honest description of Trotsky’s attempts to militarise labour and organise the railways in 1920 (pp. 104–8), episodes that are all too often passed over in embarrassed silence by Trotskyist commentators. The resulting debate over the trade unions is competently dealt with (pp. 108–9), even if space prevents the author from providing the background for us to judge just how artificial it really was on all sides (by then Russia barely possessed a working class, as the production figures show). And it is fascinating to learn how recent archival research has confirmed the ‘widespread social interest’ Souvarine reported in 1924 among the Russian working class for Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin (p. 127).Since the overwhelming majority of the lives of Trotsky view him in a positive light, an attempt to redress the balance can only be welcomed. There are many aspects of Trotsky’s thinking that should come under question today. Was he correct to share Lenin’s view that we are living in the highest stage of capitalism? What is left of the theory of Permanent Revolution, now that the Soviet Union itself has evolved into a capitalist state? Was he justified in defining a society as a ‘workers’ state’, purely on the basis of public ownership? Unfortunately, the writer, who thinks that ‘it is doubtful whether Trotsky made any lasting contribution to Marxist thought’ (p. 215), has not taken him to task over these major questions, but prefers to subject him to a thousand pinpricks instead.
I leave it to others to judge as to whether they affect the book’s ‘readability’. But remarks such as that in 1905 Trotsky made ‘a limited impression at the time on the popular consciousness’ (p. 35) are flatly contradicted by Lenin’s own estimate, however opposed they then were to each other. There would seem to be little point in quoting Martov to the effect that he ‘made no special contribution at Zimmerwald’ (p. 76) if you have already admitted that he helped draw up its manifesto (p. 74), or in saying that it was Trotsky who claimed that ‘there was “no better Bolshevik” than he’ (p. 128) when you let the cat out of the bag 85 pages later by admitting that it was really Lenin who said it first (p. 213). A silly attempt is made to excuse Stalin’s support for the Provisional Government in February/March 1917 (p. 184) while asserting that ‘from Trotsky’s account of 1917 only he emerges with honour’ (p. 6). The thick file of pages in The First Five Years of the Communist International dealing with the French Communist Party, for which Trotsky assumed special responsibility, hardly bears out the contention that he ‘performed largely decorative functions only during the first years of the Third International’ (p. 110). Trotsky’s article On the National Question (In Defence of the Russian Revolution, pp. 175–82) shows that he was not ‘modest in his efforts’ on behalf of the Georgian Bolsheviks (p. 122). And since Lenin’s Testament proposed to solve the problem of a split between Stalin and Trotsky by removing Stalin from his post, it can scarcely be claimed that in it ‘Trotsky was put on a par with Stalin’ (p. 131).
And is there any need to be quite so subjective when trying to readjust the focus of Trotsky’s importance? His writings from the 1930s can only be described as ‘dull’ if, for example, you have not read the last paragraph of For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism, and as ‘inaccurate’ (p. 214) if you fail to remember that he expressed amazement that the Western powers should have allowed the Russians to penetrate their intelligence systems so deeply during the period of the Popular Front, while prophesying the exact how, when and why of the outbreak of the Second World War to within a month well over a year before. Of course, you have every right to regard Literature and Revolution as ‘a highly unsatisfactory work’ (p. 139) if you do not share its particular theory of Marxist aesthetics (which was also that of Serge, Voronsky and an impressive range of Russian and American writers), but only if you advance one of your own. Nor is there any justification for resorting to feminist demagogy. Trotsky’s Problems of Everyday Life shows just how false it is to charge him with being ‘dismissive of his female compatriots’ (pp. 137–8), and whether you regard ‘Alexander Kollantai’ as ‘much admired’ (p. 114) is very much a questionable judgement, both then and now. Was it really necessary to criticise the Old Man in such a nit-picking way?
As for ‘academic credibility’, it has to be admitted that one of the main faults of those who write history from inside university departments is their touching faith in the intellectual rigour of their colleagues elsewhere. For example, during the Russian Civil War, in spite of the fact that SRs and Mensheviks were still staffing several Whiteguard administrations, one G. Swain is cited to prove that ‘from the autumn of 1918 onwards, the non-Bolshevik Socialists (or “Greens” in its terminology) largely threw their weight behind the Reds’ (p. 100), and E. Mawdsley to the effect that ‘Bonch (Bruyevich) was even more important than Trotsky in laying the foundations of the Red Army’ (p. 101).
Even more extraordinary is the material Dr Thatcher draws upon to assert that during the Spanish Civil War ‘Trotsky also tended to overestimate the efficacy of a line of command running from the Kremlin to operatives on the ground’. Commenting upon the ugly operations of the Stalinists behind the scenes, he asserts that ‘there is no evidence to confirm Trotsky’s contention that Comintern tactics were dependent on Soviet diplomacy’, leaning on the neo-Stalinist apologetics of Tim Rees to claim that ‘the ferocity of the Spanish Communists’ move against native Trotskyists had as much to do with local rivalries … as with orders from Moscow’, since there was ‘little chance’ of a workers’ uprising in Spain (p. 204). Now the facts about this have been established for some time. Trotsky’s followers in Spain barely numbered 30 people; the scale of GPU operations shows that they were aimed at the whole of Spain’s mass left; the PCE’s General Secretary himself opposed the Russian provocation against the POUM, probably paying for it with his life in 1942; Moscow’s direct responsibility has now been confirmed by the release of some of its reports (Radosh, Habeck and Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed, p. xix, etc.).
Two pages later Geoff Roberts (who seems to spend most of his out-of-seminar hours writing books trying to rehabilitate one or another aspect of Stalin’s foreign policy) is called upon to support the view that ‘the Nazi-Soviet Pact was the outcome of a last-minute decision’, and that Trotsky was ‘in gross error to claim that the USSR always preferred an alliance with Germany’ (p. 206). When we recall that by signing the Treaty of Berlin, Stalin’s Russia was the first state to recognise the legality of the Nazi regime, that pourparlers had been going on between the two as early as the time of the Reichstag Fire Trial, that dissident Communists had been ending up in the hands of the Gestapo for some time, and that Stalin had dissolved and massacred the Polish Communist Party over a year before, mental gymnastics of this sort can only strike us as frivolous. Two pages further on we encounter another argument drawn from Rees’ symposium that during the Second World War, Soviet operatives in Britain were ‘worried about the threat posed to Moscow’s domination of rank-and-file hearts by Left Opposition activists’ (p. 208). Now it has long been known that the reports in question were the method by which the Stalinists supplied British intelligence with precise names and details of those who opposed the war by instructing Communist Party activists to send them in to King Street in the full knowledge that their mail would be opened before it got there. How can anyone place any weight at all on such academic jerry building?
With this in mind, there would seem to be little point in complaining about sundry other remarks of the same kidney, such as that Trotsky ‘lost his nerve’ at Brest-Litovsk (p. 98: compare Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 375–6), that the majority of the Communist Youth opposed Trotsky, and that their leaders ‘remained in post partly because they supported Stalin’ (p. 129: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 117, 254), or that Trotsky’s failure to be present at Lenin’s funeral was due to ‘his preference for continuing his journey south for rest and recuperation’ (p. 131: Broué, Trotsky, pp. 399–400).
Considering the mad scramble of the younger generation of historians to leap onto the bandwagon of ‘revisionism’, especially as in this case it has suspicious links with a long-discredited orthodoxy, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Trotsky came in for this sort of treatment. But I still feel disappointment that so poor a product should have come from the pen of so promising a scholar. It might be added that the author has some important things to say during the earlier phases of Trotsky’s career, when he relies squarely upon his own research, but that the majority of the questionable remarks to which I have drawn attention relate to the period after the mid-1920s, when he relies more heavily upon that of others.
However, in both cases the tone is uniformly negative. If all were to be brought to the bar of History in this way, ‘Who would ’scape a whipping?’ Perhaps it is not the wisest course to write biographies of people you don’t like.
Al Richardson
