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 history of the communist movement in Canada is little known. We have the story of Maurice Spector and his overnight conversion (along with James P. Cannon) to Trotskyism, of course. But the only history of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) has been the tendentious writing of the Stalinist Tim Buck. Buck’s Lenin and Canada can still be stumbled upon by the unwary, in the seedier corners of second-hand book dealers. Angus’ first edition contained a extensive demolition of Buck’s misrepresentations and distortions. In the new edition, this material is organised into appendices, which improves the narrative flow.
The origins of the CPC lay in the social democratic parties and in the émigré groups (notably Ukrainians). In this respect, Canada resembled the USA (see Cannon’s The First Ten Years of American Communism), and the most important struggle was to unify the forces. However, Canada was under British imperialist rule, and this led to the vigorous suppression of anti-war socialists during the First World War. German, Jewish and East European émigrés were particularly victimised.
The overthrow of the Tsar of Russia coincided with an upsurge in industrial militancy (which grew out of severe manpower shortages) to give a great boost to the movement. Trotsky’s War and the International achieved huge sales across Canada. The movement became polarised between social democrats who favoured the Labour Party in Britain as their model, and those who identified themselves with ‘the Bolsheviki programme’. Many of the latter organised themselves into the Socialist Party of North America (SPNA) that launched a drive towards a united communist party.
The state was not to sit idle while the workers created a revolutionary movement. In September and October 1918, all the significant left organisations were banned. Fines and imprisonment followed all across the country. Immigrants were subjected to mass internment. Although the workers counter-attacked with strikes, demonstrations and petitions, the movement was seriously impeded by this repression.
The ending of the war and the German revolution of 1919 triggered a revival, with widespread demands for an end to wartime repression and the liberation of the prisoners and internees. An underground Communist Party of Canada came into existence, issuing revolutionary leaflets. Angus provides a fascinating dissection of how this movement came about, and the leading personalities involved.
Despite further waves of arrests, the communists drove roots deep into the rich soil of the working class. There were important mass strikes in several cities during 1919. The defeat of these strikes posed the most central questions of leadership and programme for the workers. The route to unification was difficult, and it took until 1922. By then, however, the communists had organised the majority of the militant workers; Angus estimates it at 90 per cent of the former membership of the SDP. The social democrats were reduced to an ineffective rump. Deep entrists take note!
It is during this phase that the leading characters emerge who dominate the rest of the story – Spector, MacDonald and Buck. Other very interesting figures are also sketched for us, such as Florence Custance and Jack Kavanagh (who later became General Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia and subsequently a Trotskyist). MacDonald was born in Falkirk, where he won his spurs as an industrial organiser. Disappointingly, there is no mention of MacDonald in James D. Young’s new history of Falkirk.
It was Spector, MacDonald and Custance who attended the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, and on their return they completed the liquidation of the ‘underground’ CPC which had been operating through the Workers Party of Canada. Thus in 1924, there emerged onto the political stage the unified, open and legal CPC, when the WPC changed its name.
The communists applied their local version of Lenin’s tactic of seeking to work with the Labour Party. The Canadian Labour Party had been formed by an alliance of trade unions in 1917. It was too amorphous to present problems of programme to the communists, and they made successful moves towards a working-class united front in municipal and provincial elections. In 1923, they took a full and leading part in the creation of a Labour Representation Political Association, which brought them into contact with a wide range of working-class organisations.
During this same period, the communists dug deep into the trade unions. Angus gives us a detailed account of their work, led by MacDonald, among the coal miners of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
The party was less sure-footed through the major period of decline in the labour movement during the mid-1920s through to 1930. Following Lenin’s illness and death in 1923, the traumatic change of line imposed by Stalin – ‘socialism in one country’, ‘social fascism’, etc. – the party remained loyal, swallowing the defeats of the Chinese revolution and the British general strike. They got themselves into entertaining twists in relation to Canadian independence moves, looking through Stalinist telescopes to seek out the ‘progressive bourgeois’.
It was in early 1924 that Spector arrived in Moscow, having observed the defeat of the German revolutionary movement in 1923. Witnessing the style and manner of the Russian Communist Party against Trotsky and the Left Opposition, he decided to do what he could to prevent this being echoed in Canada. Buck attended the Fifth Comintern Congress and came to the opposite decision. Initially, Spector held the ground. The Canadian delegate Moriarty at the Comintern Executive Committee in 1924 was the only one who refused to condemn the Opposition. By 1927, Buck was able to drive the Stalinist line through leadership meetings of the CPC, leaving Spector isolated in his support for Trotsky, while MacDonald concentrated on local matters of organisation.
It was downhill all the way from there. Buck conducted what was in effect a purge of the party, and vigorously pursued the Moscow line on every question. Membership declined disastrously. Spector was expelled, MacDonald later resigned. The small Trotskyist movement was never able to win the influence that the CPC had achieved and thrown away.
The earlier parts of the book I found the more interesting in that they dealt with the historically-specific Canadian factors, and brought out the story of a surprisingly successful communist party. The story of Stalinist erosion of the communist parties has an international dreariness about it.
Ian Angus’ account is well supported by documentary sources at every stage, and his overthrow of the official Buck history is an important contribution to the theoretical rearmament of the class in Canada and throughout the world. We look forward to the eventual publication of his work in progress on the history of the Trotskyists in Canada.
Rose Cohen, Pearla Rimel and Freda Utley were not much older than myself. Their faces are full of the hope that so many of us had in the 1930s – that humanity had at last found a found a way forward, out of the cruelty and injustice of capitalism, and was rebuilding at least one country on socialist lines. They went to the Soviet Union to help in that rebuilding. (In 1939, when I was 19, I was about to visit the Soviet Union. The imminence of war prevented that journey. Otherwise I might have been a character in this book.)
The fourth woman on the cover, Rosa Rust, did not choose to go to Russia. She was taken there by her communist parents. But she, too, had her illusions. Brought up to love and trust the Soviet state at the outbreak of war, she believed what the radio told her. The Soviet Army would at once make mincemeat of Hitler’s forces …
Her life after that was hard, but it is the least tragic of those recounted here. After nearly starving to death and coming through the terrible wartime journey from Murmansk, she settled down in England with a loving husband, and had four children. Her sudden death six years ago came after she had told her story at length, first to me and then to Francis Beckett.
The other three women had to live long, agonising days of not knowing whether their husbands were dead or alive. Rose Cohen had the suspense cut short by being shot. Pearl Rimel – still a beautiful woman when I met her, in her forties – never quite gave up the hope that her beloved George would walk through the door. Freda Utley seems to have taken a more realistic view.
These women were not the only British victims. Francis Beckett has discovered some completely new to me. The earliest seems to have been the 22-year-old Abraham Landau, sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain to work for the Communist Youth International in Moscow. He was arrested in his room at the Lux Hotel in Moscow and shot two weeks later. Two weeks? What was Lenin’s hurry? Lenin’s, not Stalin’s – this happened at the beginning of 1923.
Stalin’s first British victim may have been William Wheldon, who was arrested in 1927, and is thought to have been executed in the same year. He was the brother-in-law of Arthur McManus, a British communist leader so highly regarded in Moscow that, after he died in 1928, his ashes were embedded in the walls of the Kremlin. If he made any effort to save his brother-in-law, no record of it has yet come to light.
Patrick Breslin died in a slave labour camp in Kazan in 1941. George Hanna was arrested in the late 1940s and released in 1967. (So, for most of his time in the Gulag, he was not Stalin’s prisoner, but Khrushchev’s.)
Some British people who became part of the communist establishment did time in Soviet jails, but said little or nothing about their experiences. One, whom I knew in his old age, was the man who moved the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist International, J.T. Murphy. He was living in Moscow in the 1920s and working for the Profintern, a long-forgotten organisation which attempted to set up ‘red’ trade unions everywhere, in opposition to the existing trade unions. What, I asked, had he thought when he found himself inside?
Murphy’s answer was remarkable. He did not admit to thinking that it had been a mistake to come to Moscow. No; his mistake was to work for a trade union organisation. Trade unions had no political influence in Russia. In future he would work for the Communist International.
We are talking about the 1920s, not the 1930s. The authorities admitted they had no case against Murphy, and released him. He did in fact work inside the Communist International; he became the British delegate there. That was how he came to be moving the expulsion of Trotsky. His own expulsion took place after he had returned to England and could no longer be carted off to the Gulag. He enjoyed a comfortable old age, much of it spent in colourful reminiscence.
Being British was some protection for some of Stalin’s victims. How slowly and reluctantly the Foreign Office intervened in the case of Rose Cohen is shown in this book. But Britain did accept responsibility for the repatriation of Rosa Rust. Freda Utley was able to return to London with her two-year-old son.
People from fascist countries had nowhere to turn for protection. Rosa Rust’s mother lived with a German communist in Moscow. One night the secret police came for him. Like thousands of other German refugees, he was never seen again. Those who were seen again, such as Ernst Fischer, have written books available in English. Less well known here are the sufferings of the Italian refugees. One of them, Dante Corneli, reached his native town, Tivoli, years after everyone had given him up for dead. The local communist boss turned up to tell him the good news. His expulsion from the party had been rescinded.
Corneli told the man to get lost. He spent his old age on a wonderful job of research. Almost single-handed, with no resources but a small state pension, he tracked down his Italian companions in the Gulag, and established what had happened to a great many of them. The results of his labours filled several volumes. I have read Corneli’s work in Italian; so far as I can discover, it has never been translated.
People in the English-speaking countries take very little interest in the fate of those who, it is generally felt, should have known better. Why did they ever put themselves into Stalin’s power?
This attitude may hamper the sales of Francis Beckett’s excellent work. I hope I am wrong about this, and that it will be reprinted. If it is, he should correct a few errors. Camberwell, where Bill Rust was born, is not in the East End. The Spanish Civil War did not break out until 1936, and could have had no place in people’s decisions in 1931. He has put Stalingrad in the wrong place. And I am 10 years younger than he thinks; I wrote The Death of Uncle Joe in my seventies, not my eighties.
However, Bukharin relied heavily on the backing of Joseph Stalin, who had wrested control of the party apparatus not long after Lenin’s death. Long before Bukharin had been arrested, the same kind of arbitrary and repressive measures had been meted out to Trotsky and his followers.
In the late 1920s, as the growth of market relations in the countryside would begin to threaten the socialist underpinnings of the economy, Stalin lurched leftwards – apparently converted to Trotsky’s rapid industrialisation proposals. However, his Five Year Plans and agrarian collectivisation schemas were carried out in such a haphazard and brutal fashion that the Soviet economy would ultimately face a deep crisis. As criticisms began to be mounted against the breakneck pace and helter-skelter character of Stalin’s measures, he resorted to the wholesale repression that would characterise his regime and ultimately undermine socialism. Bukharin was probably the best-known victim of these police state tactics after Trotsky, his erstwhile leftist opponent.
Despite the efforts of Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon to portray a fictionalised Bukharin as a victim of what amounts to a self-immolation, there is little doubt that Bukharin’s confessions were an exchange for the survival of his wife and young child. As Helena Sheehan points out in her exemplary introduction to Philosophical Arabesques, his confession was marked by subordinate clauses that virtually contradicted the main assertions: ‘I plead guilty to … the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organisation, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took part in, any particular act.’ Lewis Carroll could not have put it better!
Although Bukharin was prevented by his jailers from criticising the Stalinist regime, he nonetheless made implicit criticisms by defending classical Marxism. He certainly must have understood that communists everywhere would see the stark contrast between his own understanding of dialectical materialism and the cant being churned out of the Soviet academy with Stalin’s blessing.
As a work of Marxist philosophy, Philosophical Arabesques can rank with such classics as Engels’ Anti-Dühring or Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. It is an attempt to defend Marxism as a philosophy against a wide range of opponents, from nineteenth-century idealism to the kind of obscurantist mysticism that was being churned up by capitalism in its death throes. As Bukharin put it in his introduction:
Any attempt to essentialise a nation or a people does violence to the historical record. This is obviously the case of Jews being demonised the 1930s. But it is also wrong to essentialise the Germans themselves as an anti-Semitic race after the fashion of the ‘Goldhagen thesis’. All nations and peoples are governed by historical laws that explain their behaviour and reputation in a given moment in time rather than by some sort of inherent psychology, including the Germans. Bukharin writes:
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The crucial element in Britain’s state-making in South Africa was the construction of a despotic state which denied freedom of movement and freedom of contract to the vast mass of gold-mining labourers who were tribal Africans. True, the gold-mining capitalists of the Rand had forced a pass law upon the reluctant Boer republics in the years immediately before the war. But the Boer republics – based on Afrikaner farmers who wanted unfettered access to African labour for themselves, largely outside of market conditions – were both unable and unwilling to enforce it. Thus the war, prosecuted by the High Commissioner Alfred (later Lord) Milner in South Africa and the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, in London. It was above all a war for gold. Its outcome was that parliamentary Britain created the tyranny of apartheid South Africa, with Britain’s pass laws the lynch-pin to the whole structure, holding the huge majority of South African workers in servitude.
In this sense, J.A. Hobson was right to see South Africa of the early twentieth century as an exemplar to the system as a whole. The construction of a modern state which abrogated the conditions of civil society for the vast mass of the population, in particular the labourers in the gold mines, anticipated by three decades the abrogation of civil society in Germany and then almost the whole of Europe itself.
By the beginning of the World War in 1939, however – the terminal period in Robert Edgar’s The Making of an African Communist: Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and the Communist Party of South Africa 1927–1939 – the disbursement of gold to the world financial system had been joined by another protagonist, which became second only to South Africa in the quantity of its gold production yet ahead of South Africa in its enslavement of its poor souls, the gold-mining labourers.
This was the Soviet Union, where working to death – not merely to exhaustion, but working to death – was the rule, in ‘frozen Auschwitzes of the North’, as the poet Galanskov (who died in the camps) described the land of Kolyma, at the opposite pole of the globe to South Africa: the ‘pole of cold and cruelty’ of the whole of Stalin’s system, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, who also laboured in the Gulag. At Kolyma, to the misfortune of several millions of unfortunate human beings, the gold lay not – as in South Africa – in steep, diagonally sloping hard quartzitic reefs, where only vast sums of capital and the most modern technology could accompany simple labour in its extraction, but lay close to the surface, where the most primitive pick and hammer and dynamite could extract it with human sweat and blood … from the frozen Arctic. And there they perished.
The purges … the purges shovelled in vast hecatombs of fresh bodies to dig the stuff out of the frozen ground for the benefit of the Soviet central bank, as rapidly as each previous tranche got finished off. Thus capital acquired the hard core of the central banks and the schmuck of ladies’ jewellery in the Depression, the War and afterwards. These celestial golden twins: South Africa and the land of the Soviets, united in their enslavement of the producers of gold. It was estimated, wrote Robert Conquest, that every kilogram of gold from Kolyma cost one human life …
Robert Edgar’s slim volume is focused on the life of a leading African member of the old Communist Party of South Africa, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana (1899–1995), with particular focus on his Moscow years, 1932–34. Contemporary South Africa in the year of 2006 – the year after the publication of Edgar’s book – is now run by individuals of whom many spent most of their adult lives as members of the South African Communist Party, successor-party to the CPSA, and lifelong admirers of the Soviet system. President Thabo Mbeki was for many years a member of the Politburo of the SACP in exile: his father Govan Mbeki was already a member of the CPSA towards the end of the period in question, and loyal to its Stalinist heritage to his dying day. He named his son after Mofutsanyana.
Edgar’s book drives home the point with its photographs: a very elderly Mofutsanyana and Joe Slovo at a meeting of SACP headquarters in Johannesburg in 1992, Mofutsanyana with Joe Slovo with his arm around him on the same occasion, Mofutsanyana with Chris Hani – Secretary General of the SACP prior to his murder by a white racist the following year, and the most active commander in the suppression of the pro-democracy mutiny in the ANC army in exile in 1984, after which dissidents were sent to labour in the principal Gulag of the ANC and the SACP in Africa, Quatro.
One may appreciate that a country run by people of the above pedigree does not breathe free, despite their having come to office in a society with a functioning market, press, judiciary and … academe, the domain of Professor Edgar.
The problem for Edgar, now professor of African Studies (so rich a subject!) at Howard University in Washington, DC, is that Kolyma … is a world too far away for him. It doesn’t exist, it never existed. It disappears from history as if it had been airbrushed out in Comrade Stalin’s photo album, though he does once mention discretely ‘concentration camps in the eastern Soviet Union’ in referring to the deaths in the Gulag of three leaders of the CPSA, two shot.
His difficulty is that any discussion of the interrelation between the CPSA/SACP with the big boss in Moscow could not be adequate if it did not explore the manner in which the Communist Party in South Africa misrepresented the land of Kolyma to the workers of South Africa as a paradise for labour. A systemic misrepresentation of the nature of the USSR and its relation to the gold-slaves of the Rand is a staple of left-leaning and right-leaning studies in South Africa. With very, very few exceptions, the left obscured the nature of the USSR, while the right obscured the nature of South Africa. The inter-relation, the symmetry even, was suppressed by both.
It is at this point that the dishonesty of Professor Edgar’s book becomes explicit, despite its valuable archival material. For one thing, in addition to the G- and K-words, the book suppresses also the H-word, where H stands for Hirson. There is no reference at all in the book to the pioneering historical studies of the South African left carried out by my late colleague, Dr Baruch Hirson, who paid for his graduation as an historian with nine years in Pretoria Local Prison, where he was also an alumnus of the University of South Africa (Unisa), the publisher of Edgar’s book and a correspondence institution that was the only provider of university studies to political prisoners permitted by the regime (and very thankful we were for it, though also often frustrated by it).
For instance, Hirson’s article on the ‘Black Republic’ slogan of 1928 (within the time-remit of Edgar’s book) appearing in issues three and four of the banned journal that he and I edited in exile in London, Searchlight South Africa (July 1989, February 1990), focused centrally on the turmoil caused to the CPSA by the changed orientation forced on it by Stalin and Bukharin at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern. As an historian, like the physicist he had been in his previous professional life, prior to his arrest and imprisonment, Hirson was scrupulous about accuracy and sources. Interpretation was one thing, faithfulness to historical fact was another. As a result, while rich in dissident interpretation and analysis, Hirson was read with care and respect even by his adversaries. His archives were open to any serious student. I remember the grey eminence of SACP in London, Brian Bunting, British correspondent for the TASS news agency, whose father had both helped found the CPSA and been expelled from it because of his disagreement with the Stalin/Bukharin line, coming to Baruch’s house in London – the house of the most eminent South African Trotskyist! – to read Baruch’s archival material concerning his late father.
Edgar is no such historian, despite the value of his biographical interviews with Mofutsanyana. There is no reference to Hirson’s article. Just as with the late apartheid regime, Edgar’s South African readers are kept in ignorance of Hirson’s contribution on the subject of the CPSA.
As for Mofutsanyana, he was briefly General Secretary of the CPSA when the purges in the USSR were at their most manic, and had been a student in Moscow for two and a half years, between 1932 and 1934: when gold production in Kolyma got shoved into overdrive. The ‘most troubling issue’ he had to cope with in the USSR, according to Edgar, was the death in Moscow in January 1934 of his colleague and friend, Albert Nzula, the first African General Secretary of the CPSA. Nzula was an alcoholic, and this proved fatal.
Here Edgar cannot, however, avoid touching on the central political issue of the Soviet Union. He writes that ‘Mofutsanyana did confirm that Nzula’s drinking contributed to his problems with Soviet officials. When he was on drinking binges, Nzula would vent his criticisms of the Soviet Union and his opinion that Stalin was not a good leader.’ Having received a ‘first-hand view of the Soviet Union’, Nzula had revised his previous criticism while in South Africa of the idea that ‘in the Soviet Union it was Stalin, not workers, who owned all the cars …’ In the USSR in the 1930s, that opinion was not conducive to a long life.
Edgar dismisses the idea, as did the elderly Mofutsanyana, that Nzula’s criticism of Stalin had led to his death, even though Mofutsanyana recalled that ‘Nzula’s heresies drew the attention of Comintern officials’.
Edgar does not mention my own article The Death of Albert Nzula and the Silence of George Padmore which appeared in the first issue of Searchlight South Africa (September 1988), and which drew explicitly in part on Edgar’s interviews with Mofutsanyana appearing in the International Journal of African Historical Studies (Volume 16, no. 4, 1983).
In particular, he neglects to address every one of the issues raised in a passage I quoted from a published account by the South African Trotskyist, Charlie Van Gelderen, who wrote:
The editors of the two-volume South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History (A. Davidson, et al. [eds.], Frank Cass, London 2003), a major study based on previously classified records after the downfall of the Soviet Union, concluded that Nzula had in fact died an alcoholic’s death in the January snow in Moscow. The fears of black activists then in Moscow – Jomo Kenyatta (on whom C.L.R. James’ view was based), George Padmore and the South African, Beyers – needed specific and explicit attention from Edgar, though, not least Padmore’s report to Van Gelderen of Nzula’s warning telegram, an act that may well have saved Padmore’s life. The perception of these black activists in Moscow, above all of Nzula, that a tyranny prevailed in the Soviet Union was at least as important as Mofutsanyana’s dismissal of this view. It was a perception that Edgar fails to address. The tragic figure of Nzula, torn between alcoholism and an acute personal honesty, continues to fail to find the appreciation that is his due.
So this first volume in a series called ‘Hidden Histories’, edited by Raymond Suttner of the SACP and the ANC, is written in such a way that they must continue to remain hidden. And even at Howard U, in the US of A, in the shadow of the White House, the Stalin School of Obfuscation continues, a corpse with its fingernails still growing.
Suggested further reading:
Paul Flewers recruits for his collection a number of lively contributors, John Molyneux, John Newsinger, Paul O’Flinn, Peter Sedgwick and Ian Birchall. With the exceptions of the brief essay by the latter, all the pieces here have been previously published, the majority of them in the International Socialism journal or its predecessor. Still, the collection is justified: if only because the two most memorable pieces, Sedgwick’s and O’Flinn’s are respectively 35 and 20 years old: many veterans of the movement will have copies of them somewhere, few new activists will even know that they exist.
It is worth asking why Paul Flewers has selected his contributors from this relatively narrow source. Flewers’ own training was in a very different party, Frank Füredi’s Revolutionary Communist Party. (I, too, was briefly in its orbit: when I explained to my handler that I’d joined them from a background in CND and from reading Orwell, she replied, carefully, that such politics as those were the very opposite of socialism. Two weeks later, I’m proud to say, I’d left.)
Flewers’ introduction cites a very wide range of left-wing analyses, before settling on the Socialist Workers Party because ‘this organisation has taken Orwell seriously and has dealt with his works and historical legacy with a skill and sensitivity that has often been absent amongst other sections on the left’. If that is true, then it would still be interesting to ask why? The first explanation that struck me was the presence within the SWP and its forerunners of several talented journalists, including Laurie Flynn, Roger Protz, Nigel Fountain and above all Paul Foot, who may have encouraged their colleagues to think about the significance of radical journalism. Yet the SWP was hardly alone in this boon: you need to think only of Peter Fryer. Have the Workers Revolutionary Party’s successors produced nothing of quality on Orwell? Or has the SWP been in some other way better equipped to deal with the duality of Orwell’s contribution?
The two most memorable pieces here (beyond Paul Flewers’ own) are those of Sedgwick and O’Flinn. The former gains from the unmatchable Sedgwick style, including his familiar stock of psychological metaphors. ‘The shifts and constancies of Orwell’s politics reflect, anticipate, and may be used to cure’, Sedgwick writes, ‘the moodiness of Marxism.’ Reading Sedgwick again, it is striking to see how carefully he reads Orwell’s politics not through the prism of revolutionary Barcelona (the too-obvious starting point), but through the preceding history of the British left: identifying Orwell not as a ‘literary Trotskyist’ (another recent formulation), but as a loyalist and also critic of a particular Independent Labour Party socialism, with the contributors to The Adelphi magazine providing the closest thing to an Orwell generation. ‘In the files of The Adelphi’, Sedgwick writes, ‘themes constantly recur, which detected in Orwell’s work alone, have come to be thought of as peculiarly his.’
O’Flinn’s essay is something different: the contribution of someone who has worked for many years teaching English in a university. He has fine shots at the GCSE-syllabus, probably most readers’ first introduction to Orwell, and the emphasis it puts on the pseudo-science of reading a novel, asking abstract and meaningless questions such as: ‘Is Orwell’s style appropriate to the subject matter?’ The right and necessary criticisms are made: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the main a reactionary book.’ How many other socialist reviewers have fallen shy of writing that sentence, for fearing of appearing too obvious, too Dave Spart? O’Flinn’s antithesis is not between different readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four (‘a guide to what can happen to a potentially revolutionary politics at a time when it thrashes around in despair looking for and failing to find a base’). Instead O’Flinn contrasts this, Orwell’s most despairing book, to the earlier, more optimistic period: ‘We still have access to another Orwell, an earlier Orwell not blundering in detached fantasy in that way, but one whose work was motivated and informed by participation in actual battles for socialism.’
At Julien’s restaurant in Manhattan, dinner à l’Hitchens means baked squab. A squab, I learn from my dictionary, is ‘an inexperienced young bird’. That seems right for Hitchens: the very personification of Churchill’s jibe about people progressing from socialism in their twenties to Conservatism in old age. Orwell as ‘youth’ speaks also to my own experience of the writer: as practically the only discussion of socialist politics that was allowed in the school syllabus, the Orwell of the Collected Journalism and of the first half of Animal Farm. Reading and transcending Orwell was for me a fast road to activism. So which, then, is the authentic figure: the young Hitchens or the old Hitchens, the young Orwell or the old Orwell? In Flewers’ lively collection, the most persuasive brief answer is provided by Ian Birchall: ‘Orwell is one of those writers like Camus, Bernard Shaw, etc., who has one foot in the socialist camp and one somewhere quite different … If centrism is unambiguously pernicious on the political level, it is much more productive in literary terms. It is a strange dialectician who is afraid of contradictions.’
This was true above all of Marxism. Marxism was precisely a system of thought that could be applied to Stalin’s USSR in a critical manner, but it was precisely this type of Marxism that was suppressed. In its place was put an empty phraseology that failed, over time, to command allegiance or respect. In Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London 1975), Lewin outlined how, in the post-Stalin period, Soviet scholarship was beginning to develop a critique of Stalinism and to offer alternatives. The scholars of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s turned to the alternatives to Stalin of the 1920s and early 1930s.
For in his earlier studies Lewin was clear that there were real alternatives to Stalin and Stalinism. In fact, Stalin represented the worst possible outcome. Lewin admitted that Bolshevism faced a fundamental dilemma in building socialism in an overwhelmingly peasant country. There would have to be modernisation and industrialisation, but how? For Lewin, Preobrazhensky, Trotsky and Bukharin, as well as a host of economists working in state economic agencies, had far more sensible, developed and rational responses to the problems of economic construction. They also offered prophetic warnings of the ills, from economic chaos to near civil war that would issue from rapid mass collectivisation and industrialisation. Lewin, for example, is fond of two quotes from Bukharin. The first with reference to over-investment and taught planning: ‘One cannot build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks.’ The second in relation to rapid and mass collectivisation: ‘[Stalin] … will have to drown the risings in blood.’ Stalin triumphed, for Lewin, not because he had the best understanding of policy and theory, but because he was better at politics and political in-fighting.
Stalin was also aided by the broader political context. The Bolshevik party was very different from its pre-1917 version. The vast majority of its members joined in the Civil War. They were not intellectuals but fighters, used to administrative and dictatorial methods. In the 1920s, much of the ordinary cadres simply did not understand the programmes of the Left and Right Oppositions. The ordinary cadres were more content to follow the orders of the administrative centre, controlled by Stalin.
Stalin’s victory was thus not inevitable, but it is explicable. It was, in Lewin’s words, ‘not a direct outgrowth of Bolshevism but rather an autonomous and parallel phenomenon and, at the same time, its gravedigger’. (The Making of the Soviet System, London 1985, p. 9) Thus gone were the traditions of debate and discussion in which even Lenin had to struggle to convince comrades through argument. Factionalism was normal and healthy in Lenin’s Bolshevism, it was always perceived as a threat and sabotage in Stalin’s Bolshevism. Lewin does not equate Stalinism solely with Stalin’s personality. There were, he makes clear, broader factors at play: ‘Economic, social, and cultural phenomena have to be introduced into the analysis, even if the object of study is a powerful and arbitrary destructive despot.’ (The Making of the Soviet System, p. 288) At the same time, Lewin was well aware of the personal element: ‘Stalin was less burdened with either theoretical or moral scruples … he was a master-builder of bureaucratic structures, and this it was that determined his conceptions and his methods.’ (Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, p. 517)
In one of his most famous books, Lewin recounted how Lenin came to realise the dangers of Stalin’s personality and Stalin’s methods. Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York 1968) focused upon the narrow period from December 1921, when Lenin first fell ill, to 10 March 1923, after which the first Soviet leader was left incapable of further political activity following a new stroke. It was during this crucial 15 months or so that, for Lewin, Lenin made an incredibly honest attempt to evaluate the negative aspects of the regime and to offer viable solutions. Lewin finds in Lenin’s last writings a ‘vast programme’, an example of his ‘intellectual honesty and political courage’. (Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 86) Lenin was struggling in particular with the problems of the state bureaucracy and with Stalin’s ‘Great Russian Nationalism’ in riding roughshod over the democratic rights of, in this case, the Georgian republic, to defend its independence. When, in January 1923, Lenin added an addendum to his famous Testament of December 1922 that Stalin should be removed from the post of General Secretary, Lewin argues that Lenin was not motivated by reports of Stalin’s rudeness to his wife Krupskaya. No, the ever politically-minded Lenin was simply revolted by what he had discovered about Stalin’s ill-treatment of Georgian comrades. Lenin was soon to conclude a pact with Trotsky to struggle against bureaucracy in the party and government and to finish with Stalin politically. Had the Lenin–Trotsky pact been carried through to fruition, the future history of the USSR would have been much better. Lenin and Trotsky, for example, would have ‘enabled a rational use of the best cadres, instead of their elimination’. (ibid., p. 139) Lenin’s emphasis upon a gradual transition and a ‘considered policy’ would have avoided the silly excesses of Stalin’s economics. Lenin’s incapacitation and death unfortunately gave Stalin the opportunity to bypass all of Lenin’s timely recommendations. Alone, Trotsky lacked the political skill to outmanoeuvre Stalin: ‘Lenin disappeared and Stalin was assured of victory.’ (Ibid., p. 141)
Lewin is now able to revisit his earlier works, theories and conceptions, with the historian’s benefit of hindsight, as well as access to more primary materials and contemporary Russian scholarship than previously possible. It is, to begin with, a challenging title: The Soviet Century??? But this is not an epitaph for the twentieth century, but a cry to understand better one of its most important aspects that ‘remains an ill-understood system’. (p. viii)
Lewin retains much of his earlier historical analysis. Stalin and Stalinism, constructed during 1928–39, represented a sharp break with Lenin and Bolshevism of the period up to 1924. Lenin’s final period of active politics, 1921–23, was an honest attempt by a flexible and honest communist to come to terms with the realities of a gradual transition to building socialism. It was also a crucial and wide-ranging battle between Lenin and Stalin for the future direction of policy. In opposition to Lenin’s model, Stalin sought to control the party and state to implement a dictatorial forced pattern of modernisation. Lenin’s death and the incompetent politics of the old Bolsheviks enabled Stalin to win power and crush Bolshevism.
Although as a good social historian, Lewin continues to emphasise the broader context that supported Stalin’s authoritarianism, there is much more weight put on Stalin’s character. Reference is made to Stalin’s desire for absolute power, to be recognised as the indisputable authority on history, politics, ideology, etc., that lay behind the decision to destroy the Bolshevik Old Guard and indeed anyone whose historical memory might undermine Stalin’s version of events. Lewin claims that Stalin had the Great Terror of 1936–38 in mind as early as 1933. The references to Stalin’s ‘mania’, ‘paranoia’, ‘political pathology’ and their impact on the system more generally brought Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to mind. The Secret Speech is often presented as an élite cynical ploy to lay systemic failings at an individual’s door and to give a rationale for continuing to believe in the USSR. However, Lewin’s reading of events may lead us to see the Secret Speech as an honest attempt to understand what really happened in the change from Lenin’s leadership to Stalin’s.
Certainly Lewin charts the very real changes that affected the USSR post-1953. With Stalin out of the way and, under Khrushchev, out of the Mausoleum, there was no return to Stalinism. The destruction of the Gulag, the proclamation of new legal and workers’ rights, and a new mode of operation for the security services, did herald real and genuine changes in the Soviet Union. It did become a more open and freer society, even if there were obvious limits. What post-Stalinism lacked, however, was a genuine impetus for reform.
Repeating points that were made in Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Lewin outlines the excellent analyses of the failings of the Soviet system produced by Soviet academics from the 1950s onwards. The opportunities for a root-and-branch overhaul of the Soviet economy were however missed. This was partly due to the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy, whose privileges were bound up with the maintenance of the state’s management of the economy. It was also a consequence of the atrophy of the CPSU. This was, Lewin argues, a non-political party. It had no genuine role to play in policy formation and execution. It had no debates, no elections and no alternative platforms. It was moribund. But an independent political force was essential if the bureaucracy was to be defeated. Trotsky was thus quite right to call for a political revolution against the bureaucracy before a genuine social revolution could take place. It was also the reason why, although Lewin does not make this point explicitly, that Gorbachev had to link economic and political reform.
With sensible reform blocked, the system was always likely to run into a terminal crisis of its own accord. There was, in the finish, no need to overthrow Soviet communism. A ‘moth-eaten’ CPSU simply faded away ‘without any need for a strong jolt or storm’ (p. 350): ‘The regime was not toppled: it died after exhausting its inner resources and collapsed under its own weight.’ (p. 326) What disappeared was clearly not socialism. For Lewin socialism means an extension of democracy under society’s ownership of the means of production. Neither point held in the bureaucratic-dominated authoritarian post-Lenin USSR. Ultimately Stalin and the bureaucracy drew more inspiration from the Tsarist past than from Marxism. Like the Tsars, the system of government proved inadequate for a modernising society. An unbridgeable gap formed between state and society, in which the state was a fetter upon progress. Therefore the government did not last.
There is much food for thought in this book, even if Lewin is mainly restating earlier propositions. It is not a general history of the USSR, even if it offers a periodisation of the Soviet Union’s history (at its most basic Lenin, Stalin, post-Stalinism) and an explanation for its downfall. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic. There is next to nothing on the Gorbachev period, but there is a lengthy section on Andropov and a call for a better understanding of his reform programme. Brezhnev is simply dismissed as an example of one of the USSR’s numerous useless leaders. Lewin prefers to focus upon the brighter minds of the Brezhnev period from the academic institutes. But then there is more on Solzhenitsyn than the more interesting Sakharov. There are thus large gaps and chapters in which one has to be prepared simply to follow Lewin’s obsessions. This book should probably be read as a transition to the ‘more systematic future work’ that Lewin says that he has in mind. (p. viii). For all that, it is well worth reading.
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.
********
Canadian Bolsheviks
Ian Angus
Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada
Trafford Publishing, Victoria 2004, pp. 339
THE appearance of a revised and updated edition provides a welcome opportunity to draw Angus’ work to the attention of our readers. It would also be appropriate for us to record our appreciation of and interest in the work led by the same author as Director of the Socialist History Project in Canada (see www.socialisthistory.ca).Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada
Trafford Publishing, Victoria 2004, pp. 339
The history of the communist movement in Canada is little known. We have the story of Maurice Spector and his overnight conversion (along with James P. Cannon) to Trotskyism, of course. But the only history of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) has been the tendentious writing of the Stalinist Tim Buck. Buck’s Lenin and Canada can still be stumbled upon by the unwary, in the seedier corners of second-hand book dealers. Angus’ first edition contained a extensive demolition of Buck’s misrepresentations and distortions. In the new edition, this material is organised into appendices, which improves the narrative flow.
The origins of the CPC lay in the social democratic parties and in the émigré groups (notably Ukrainians). In this respect, Canada resembled the USA (see Cannon’s The First Ten Years of American Communism), and the most important struggle was to unify the forces. However, Canada was under British imperialist rule, and this led to the vigorous suppression of anti-war socialists during the First World War. German, Jewish and East European émigrés were particularly victimised.
The overthrow of the Tsar of Russia coincided with an upsurge in industrial militancy (which grew out of severe manpower shortages) to give a great boost to the movement. Trotsky’s War and the International achieved huge sales across Canada. The movement became polarised between social democrats who favoured the Labour Party in Britain as their model, and those who identified themselves with ‘the Bolsheviki programme’. Many of the latter organised themselves into the Socialist Party of North America (SPNA) that launched a drive towards a united communist party.
The state was not to sit idle while the workers created a revolutionary movement. In September and October 1918, all the significant left organisations were banned. Fines and imprisonment followed all across the country. Immigrants were subjected to mass internment. Although the workers counter-attacked with strikes, demonstrations and petitions, the movement was seriously impeded by this repression.
The ending of the war and the German revolution of 1919 triggered a revival, with widespread demands for an end to wartime repression and the liberation of the prisoners and internees. An underground Communist Party of Canada came into existence, issuing revolutionary leaflets. Angus provides a fascinating dissection of how this movement came about, and the leading personalities involved.
Despite further waves of arrests, the communists drove roots deep into the rich soil of the working class. There were important mass strikes in several cities during 1919. The defeat of these strikes posed the most central questions of leadership and programme for the workers. The route to unification was difficult, and it took until 1922. By then, however, the communists had organised the majority of the militant workers; Angus estimates it at 90 per cent of the former membership of the SDP. The social democrats were reduced to an ineffective rump. Deep entrists take note!
It is during this phase that the leading characters emerge who dominate the rest of the story – Spector, MacDonald and Buck. Other very interesting figures are also sketched for us, such as Florence Custance and Jack Kavanagh (who later became General Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia and subsequently a Trotskyist). MacDonald was born in Falkirk, where he won his spurs as an industrial organiser. Disappointingly, there is no mention of MacDonald in James D. Young’s new history of Falkirk.
It was Spector, MacDonald and Custance who attended the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, and on their return they completed the liquidation of the ‘underground’ CPC which had been operating through the Workers Party of Canada. Thus in 1924, there emerged onto the political stage the unified, open and legal CPC, when the WPC changed its name.
The communists applied their local version of Lenin’s tactic of seeking to work with the Labour Party. The Canadian Labour Party had been formed by an alliance of trade unions in 1917. It was too amorphous to present problems of programme to the communists, and they made successful moves towards a working-class united front in municipal and provincial elections. In 1923, they took a full and leading part in the creation of a Labour Representation Political Association, which brought them into contact with a wide range of working-class organisations.
During this same period, the communists dug deep into the trade unions. Angus gives us a detailed account of their work, led by MacDonald, among the coal miners of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
The party was less sure-footed through the major period of decline in the labour movement during the mid-1920s through to 1930. Following Lenin’s illness and death in 1923, the traumatic change of line imposed by Stalin – ‘socialism in one country’, ‘social fascism’, etc. – the party remained loyal, swallowing the defeats of the Chinese revolution and the British general strike. They got themselves into entertaining twists in relation to Canadian independence moves, looking through Stalinist telescopes to seek out the ‘progressive bourgeois’.
It was in early 1924 that Spector arrived in Moscow, having observed the defeat of the German revolutionary movement in 1923. Witnessing the style and manner of the Russian Communist Party against Trotsky and the Left Opposition, he decided to do what he could to prevent this being echoed in Canada. Buck attended the Fifth Comintern Congress and came to the opposite decision. Initially, Spector held the ground. The Canadian delegate Moriarty at the Comintern Executive Committee in 1924 was the only one who refused to condemn the Opposition. By 1927, Buck was able to drive the Stalinist line through leadership meetings of the CPC, leaving Spector isolated in his support for Trotsky, while MacDonald concentrated on local matters of organisation.
It was downhill all the way from there. Buck conducted what was in effect a purge of the party, and vigorously pursued the Moscow line on every question. Membership declined disastrously. Spector was expelled, MacDonald later resigned. The small Trotskyist movement was never able to win the influence that the CPC had achieved and thrown away.
The earlier parts of the book I found the more interesting in that they dealt with the historically-specific Canadian factors, and brought out the story of a surprisingly successful communist party. The story of Stalinist erosion of the communist parties has an international dreariness about it.
Ian Angus’ account is well supported by documentary sources at every stage, and his overthrow of the official Buck history is an important contribution to the theoretical rearmament of the class in Canada and throughout the world. We look forward to the eventual publication of his work in progress on the history of the Trotskyists in Canada.
J.J. Plant
************
Stalin’s British Victims
Francis Beckett
Stalin’s British Victims
Sutton Publishing, Thrupp 2005, pp. 256, £20
Stalin’s British Victims
Sutton Publishing, Thrupp 2005, pp. 256, £20
THIS is a short book. Almost any country could produce a longer list of young enthusiasts who fell foul of Stalin. But, by concentrating on the lives of four women, Francis Beckett has given us, in close, warm, intimate detail, the reality of that suffering.
They look out at us from the dust jacket – four young faces, full of naive confidence in justice and fair play. (Even Rosa Rust, who was brought up in Russia, had that; otherwise she would not have dared to argue with a militiaman in uniform.) Also on the dust jacket is a blurred picture of slave labourers on the White Sea Canal. There the extreme cold, the futility of hacking with hand-tools at frozen soil, are remote from our experience; they cannot move us as those four faces do.Rose Cohen, Pearla Rimel and Freda Utley were not much older than myself. Their faces are full of the hope that so many of us had in the 1930s – that humanity had at last found a found a way forward, out of the cruelty and injustice of capitalism, and was rebuilding at least one country on socialist lines. They went to the Soviet Union to help in that rebuilding. (In 1939, when I was 19, I was about to visit the Soviet Union. The imminence of war prevented that journey. Otherwise I might have been a character in this book.)
The fourth woman on the cover, Rosa Rust, did not choose to go to Russia. She was taken there by her communist parents. But she, too, had her illusions. Brought up to love and trust the Soviet state at the outbreak of war, she believed what the radio told her. The Soviet Army would at once make mincemeat of Hitler’s forces …
Her life after that was hard, but it is the least tragic of those recounted here. After nearly starving to death and coming through the terrible wartime journey from Murmansk, she settled down in England with a loving husband, and had four children. Her sudden death six years ago came after she had told her story at length, first to me and then to Francis Beckett.
The other three women had to live long, agonising days of not knowing whether their husbands were dead or alive. Rose Cohen had the suspense cut short by being shot. Pearl Rimel – still a beautiful woman when I met her, in her forties – never quite gave up the hope that her beloved George would walk through the door. Freda Utley seems to have taken a more realistic view.
These women were not the only British victims. Francis Beckett has discovered some completely new to me. The earliest seems to have been the 22-year-old Abraham Landau, sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain to work for the Communist Youth International in Moscow. He was arrested in his room at the Lux Hotel in Moscow and shot two weeks later. Two weeks? What was Lenin’s hurry? Lenin’s, not Stalin’s – this happened at the beginning of 1923.
Stalin’s first British victim may have been William Wheldon, who was arrested in 1927, and is thought to have been executed in the same year. He was the brother-in-law of Arthur McManus, a British communist leader so highly regarded in Moscow that, after he died in 1928, his ashes were embedded in the walls of the Kremlin. If he made any effort to save his brother-in-law, no record of it has yet come to light.
Patrick Breslin died in a slave labour camp in Kazan in 1941. George Hanna was arrested in the late 1940s and released in 1967. (So, for most of his time in the Gulag, he was not Stalin’s prisoner, but Khrushchev’s.)
Some British people who became part of the communist establishment did time in Soviet jails, but said little or nothing about their experiences. One, whom I knew in his old age, was the man who moved the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist International, J.T. Murphy. He was living in Moscow in the 1920s and working for the Profintern, a long-forgotten organisation which attempted to set up ‘red’ trade unions everywhere, in opposition to the existing trade unions. What, I asked, had he thought when he found himself inside?
Murphy’s answer was remarkable. He did not admit to thinking that it had been a mistake to come to Moscow. No; his mistake was to work for a trade union organisation. Trade unions had no political influence in Russia. In future he would work for the Communist International.
We are talking about the 1920s, not the 1930s. The authorities admitted they had no case against Murphy, and released him. He did in fact work inside the Communist International; he became the British delegate there. That was how he came to be moving the expulsion of Trotsky. His own expulsion took place after he had returned to England and could no longer be carted off to the Gulag. He enjoyed a comfortable old age, much of it spent in colourful reminiscence.
Being British was some protection for some of Stalin’s victims. How slowly and reluctantly the Foreign Office intervened in the case of Rose Cohen is shown in this book. But Britain did accept responsibility for the repatriation of Rosa Rust. Freda Utley was able to return to London with her two-year-old son.
People from fascist countries had nowhere to turn for protection. Rosa Rust’s mother lived with a German communist in Moscow. One night the secret police came for him. Like thousands of other German refugees, he was never seen again. Those who were seen again, such as Ernst Fischer, have written books available in English. Less well known here are the sufferings of the Italian refugees. One of them, Dante Corneli, reached his native town, Tivoli, years after everyone had given him up for dead. The local communist boss turned up to tell him the good news. His expulsion from the party had been rescinded.
Corneli told the man to get lost. He spent his old age on a wonderful job of research. Almost single-handed, with no resources but a small state pension, he tracked down his Italian companions in the Gulag, and established what had happened to a great many of them. The results of his labours filled several volumes. I have read Corneli’s work in Italian; so far as I can discover, it has never been translated.
People in the English-speaking countries take very little interest in the fate of those who, it is generally felt, should have known better. Why did they ever put themselves into Stalin’s power?
This attitude may hamper the sales of Francis Beckett’s excellent work. I hope I am wrong about this, and that it will be reprinted. If it is, he should correct a few errors. Camberwell, where Bill Rust was born, is not in the East End. The Spanish Civil War did not break out until 1936, and could have had no place in people’s decisions in 1931. He has put Stalingrad in the wrong place. And I am 10 years younger than he thinks; I wrote The Death of Uncle Joe in my seventies, not my eighties.
Alison MacLeod
*************Philosophical Arabesques
Nikolai Bukharin
Philosophical Arabesques
Monthly Review Press, New York 2005, pp. 407, $49.95
Philosophical Arabesques
Monthly Review Press, New York 2005, pp. 407, $49.95
PHILOSOPHICAL Arabesques is one of four books that Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin wrote in prison from the time of his arrest in February 1937 until his execution 13 months later. Another was the roman à clef titled How It All Began that was reviewed in the 3 February 2003 edition of Swans. Based on the outstanding quality of Bukharin’s thought in this twilight period of his life, when despair might have robbed ordinary mortals of their creativity, one can only hope that the remaining two – Socialism and Its Culture and The Transformation of the World – will eventually find a publisher as well.
Although Bukharin has emerged from the shadows in recent years as a result of Stephen Cohen’s definitive biography and the efforts of reform elements in the USSR to resuscitate a kind of Marxism consistent with their own market-oriented experiments, a word or two of introduction might be in order. In the 1920s, there was a fierce struggle between elements of the Communist Party who favoured a slow and incremental transition to socialism based on market relations, particularly in farming, and those who favoured a much more rapid pace with an emphasis upon industrialisation. The two key leaders associated with each side are Bukharin and Trotsky, respectively.However, Bukharin relied heavily on the backing of Joseph Stalin, who had wrested control of the party apparatus not long after Lenin’s death. Long before Bukharin had been arrested, the same kind of arbitrary and repressive measures had been meted out to Trotsky and his followers.
In the late 1920s, as the growth of market relations in the countryside would begin to threaten the socialist underpinnings of the economy, Stalin lurched leftwards – apparently converted to Trotsky’s rapid industrialisation proposals. However, his Five Year Plans and agrarian collectivisation schemas were carried out in such a haphazard and brutal fashion that the Soviet economy would ultimately face a deep crisis. As criticisms began to be mounted against the breakneck pace and helter-skelter character of Stalin’s measures, he resorted to the wholesale repression that would characterise his regime and ultimately undermine socialism. Bukharin was probably the best-known victim of these police state tactics after Trotsky, his erstwhile leftist opponent.
Despite the efforts of Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon to portray a fictionalised Bukharin as a victim of what amounts to a self-immolation, there is little doubt that Bukharin’s confessions were an exchange for the survival of his wife and young child. As Helena Sheehan points out in her exemplary introduction to Philosophical Arabesques, his confession was marked by subordinate clauses that virtually contradicted the main assertions: ‘I plead guilty to … the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organisation, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took part in, any particular act.’ Lewis Carroll could not have put it better!
Although Bukharin was prevented by his jailers from criticising the Stalinist regime, he nonetheless made implicit criticisms by defending classical Marxism. He certainly must have understood that communists everywhere would see the stark contrast between his own understanding of dialectical materialism and the cant being churned out of the Soviet academy with Stalin’s blessing.
As a work of Marxist philosophy, Philosophical Arabesques can rank with such classics as Engels’ Anti-Dühring or Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. It is an attempt to defend Marxism as a philosophy against a wide range of opponents, from nineteenth-century idealism to the kind of obscurantist mysticism that was being churned up by capitalism in its death throes. As Bukharin put it in his introduction:
Today’s working-class hero is totally unlike the young ignoramus in Fonvizin, who asked, ‘Why do I need to know geography, when carriage drivers exist?’ [A reference to an eighteenth-century play.] It is the workers’ enemies who are playing the role of ignoramus. It is they who are increasingly turning their backs on the intellect, which refuses to serve their ends. It is they who snatch up stone axes, the swastika, the horoscope. It is they who are starting to read haltingly from the book of history, sounding it out syllable by syllable. It is they who pray to stone goddesses and idols. It is they who have turned their backs on the future, and like Heine’s dog, to which they have fitted an historical muzzle, they now bark with their backsides, while history in turn shows them only its a posteriori. Fine battles are now breaking out amid the grandiose festivities, and conflict envelops all areas.
In everyday language, idealism is a good thing. When you are an idealist, you live by your convictions and not by mercenary considerations of private gain. In philosophical and political terms, idealism has an entirely different meaning. It is simply the system of thought that Plato introduced and that has held sway until Marx’s materialist challenge of the mid-nineteenth century. Fundamentally, idealism posits a world of transcendent ideals or essences that exists independently of the material world. The job of the philosopher is to penetrate into this higher reality, just as it is the job of the politician to shape society after its hallowed image.
Throughout the book Bukharin pays tribute to Hegel, who, despite being in the idealist tradition, understood that the Ideal was constantly changing as history moved forward. It was not static, but was something that was subject to an unfolding dialectic. Despite Hegel’s refusal to take the logical next step and challenge the fundamental precepts of idealism itself, he opened the door to Marx and Engels, who saw the material world as having primacy over ideas and not the other way around. Bukharin put it this way:
The dialectical movement of ideas that is found in Hegel, and that reflects real movement in idealist form, contains elements that are highly valuable. These are the ideas of universal relationship, of movement, of change, and the forms of this movement; here the division, or self-differentiation, of the whole, the revealing of opposites and their interpenetration, serve as the motivating principle. This is the great revolutionary side of Hegel that is restricted and smothered by the elements of idealism and by the idealist conception of the world. All form is understood here in its movement, that is, in its rise, development, downfall and extinction, in its contradictions and the resolution of contradictions, in the rise of new forms and the revealing of new contradictions, in the peculiarities and qualities of new forms, which again and again become subject to the process of change. The great contribution made by Hegel lies in this fearlessness of thought that encompasses the objective dialectic of being, nature and history. The basic dialectical contradiction of Hegel’s own system, a contradiction noted by Engels, led to the system’s collapse, and gave rise to a new historical unity, at a new stage of historical development, in the dialectical materialism of Marx.
In recalling the cultural and psychological mood of the period of Bukharin’s final years, it is important to note the utter collapse of scientific and rationalist thinking across the board. While a belief in Platonic ideals might in and of itself be harmless, the rancid offshoots of idealist thought defended by fascist intellectuals demanded a rebuttal. The collapse of the capitalist economy and the failure of socialist revolution in Europe provided a fertile ground for all sorts of reactionary mystification. Bukharin’s arguments were like a bracing glass of cold water thrown in the face of a dying culture, as Christopher Caudwell, a casualty of the Spanish Civil War, would put it.
In the chapter entitled On So-Called Racial Thought, Bukharin takes aim at fascist ideology in the same manner that left-oriented scientists have taken on the notions of a ‘bell curve’ or any other racial supremacy doctrines. The only way effectively to challenge such theories is to be grounded in a materialist understanding of society that disposes of any essentialist notions of race or blood. Bukharin saw fascist ideology as an outgrowth of idealist mysticism, which introduced ‘greater and greater does of inborn and unchanging mystical virtues to their warrior-gangster conception replacing the chemical composition of the blood with the “voice of the blood” …’Any attempt to essentialise a nation or a people does violence to the historical record. This is obviously the case of Jews being demonised the 1930s. But it is also wrong to essentialise the Germans themselves as an anti-Semitic race after the fashion of the ‘Goldhagen thesis’. All nations and peoples are governed by historical laws that explain their behaviour and reputation in a given moment in time rather than by some sort of inherent psychology, including the Germans. Bukharin writes:
At one time, during the French Revolution, the Germans were regarded as barbarians. Then they were transformed into a nation of dreamers, inhabiting a country of poets and philosophers. When railroads were first being built it was written of the Germans that they were not fit for commercial–industrial life, and that railroads would conflict with the calm patriarchal–melancholic constitution and character of the German people. The Germans, it was remarked, were not Italians, with their banks, commerce, overseas operations, industry, and so forth. Later, the German national character became that of the most industry-oriented people in Europe. Now the fascists are fostering militarism, the barracks, bloodthirsty predatory bellicosity, and so on. The country of poets and thinkers has been transformed into a country of mercenaries and praetorians.
Although it would be premature to describe the current government in Washington, DC as fascist, there are obvious affinities between Nazism and the Republican Right. Just as a manufactured hatred and fear of Jewry and international Bolshevism allowed the Nazi state to run rampant over rights once regarded as sacrosanct to the German citizenry, so has Bush whittled away at freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to privacy. Instead of Jews and communists, the national security state tries to enforce political discipline through a fear of Islamic radicals and terrorism.
As part of the political and ideological superstructure of the Republican Right, hostility toward science and Darwinian science in particular has become a fixture. It should not come as a big surprise that Bukharin had to confront the same sort of challenge. In a chapter simply titled Evolution, he defends the idea of social and biological evolution against any attempts to superimpose teleological or theological schemas on living history. If Bukharin were alive today, one could imagine him picking up his pen (or sitting down at his keyboard) to mock the whole idea of ‘intelligent design’. Interestingly enough, Bukharin seems to have anticipated Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, long before the Marxist palaeontologist considered it:
The dialectical interpretation of development thus includes both gradualness and leaps, in their transition from one into another and in their unity. The real historical process, whether in nature or in society, presupposes both gradualness and leaps, and Saint-Simon already divided epochs into ‘organic’ and ‘critical’. Is it really the case that the history of the earth, its geological history, has been without catastrophes, ice ages, earthquakes, ‘inundations’, the disappearance of dry land beneath the sea, the vanishing of water, and so forth? Is it true that the universe does not know the collision of planets and stars with one another? Has human society not witnessed the downfall of whole civilisations? Has it not known wars and revolutions? Of course, we look closely at Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Does it, despite the gradualness of evolution, really exclude leaps? Let us take the appearance of the adaptive feature, the concrete peculiarity, which selection ‘seizes upon’. This peculiarity appears ‘by chance’; Darwin’s law is a law of selection, necessity that includes fortuity. But how does it occur, the appearance of such a feature? As a mutation, that is, a leap. Furthermore, the process of selection includes struggle. When, for example, a war between ants takes place, and one ant colony destroys another, is this not a leap? And so on to infinity.
Above and beyond the importance of Bukharin’s analysis for the 1930s and for our own epoch, there is the power of his expression. Bukharin, along with Leon Trotsky, was one of the great prose stylists of twentieth-century Marxism. Even if you find it difficult to accept a rigorous defence of the much-maligned dialectical materialist method which has been linked to official Soviet doctrine, Bukharin will captivate the reader through his biting irony and his passion.
Unlike Trotsky, Bukharin never had a movement created after his example. While the Fourth International was seen as the alternative to Stalinism following Trotsky’s expulsion from the USSR, there has never been that much of an effort to come to terms with Bukharin’s Marxism. This is unfortunate, since his highly flexible and deeply humanitarian approach would seem to resonate with recent directions taken by the Cuban government. In trying to assess his long-term contribution, the publication of books such as Philosophical Arabesques will play an invaluable role.
Louis Proyect
This review first appeared on the Swans website, www.swans.com. It has been reproduced here with permission.
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The Making of an African Communist
Robert Edgar
The Making of an African Communist: Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and the Communist Party of South Africa 1927–1939
University of South Africa, Pretoria 2005, pp. 58
The Making of an African Communist: Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and the Communist Party of South Africa 1927–1939
University of South Africa, Pretoria 2005, pp. 58
WHAT happens when an historian writes about the Communist Party in the years from 1927 to 1939, with the period of 1932–34 focused centrally on the Soviet Union, and includes not a single proper reference to the G-word, or – this being mainly a biography of a General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa – the K-word, where G stands for Gulag and K stands for Kolyma?
During the years 1927–39, South Africa was – as it remained for several decades more – the biggest producer of gold in the world for disbursement to the international financial system as the material of the money reserve. This was the role for which a unified, modern state had been established by Britain in the South African War of 1899–1902, when rapid and intensive development of deep-level mining followed the discovery of gold in the hard quartzitic rock beneath the Witwatersrand in 1886.The crucial element in Britain’s state-making in South Africa was the construction of a despotic state which denied freedom of movement and freedom of contract to the vast mass of gold-mining labourers who were tribal Africans. True, the gold-mining capitalists of the Rand had forced a pass law upon the reluctant Boer republics in the years immediately before the war. But the Boer republics – based on Afrikaner farmers who wanted unfettered access to African labour for themselves, largely outside of market conditions – were both unable and unwilling to enforce it. Thus the war, prosecuted by the High Commissioner Alfred (later Lord) Milner in South Africa and the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, in London. It was above all a war for gold. Its outcome was that parliamentary Britain created the tyranny of apartheid South Africa, with Britain’s pass laws the lynch-pin to the whole structure, holding the huge majority of South African workers in servitude.
In this sense, J.A. Hobson was right to see South Africa of the early twentieth century as an exemplar to the system as a whole. The construction of a modern state which abrogated the conditions of civil society for the vast mass of the population, in particular the labourers in the gold mines, anticipated by three decades the abrogation of civil society in Germany and then almost the whole of Europe itself.
By the beginning of the World War in 1939, however – the terminal period in Robert Edgar’s The Making of an African Communist: Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana and the Communist Party of South Africa 1927–1939 – the disbursement of gold to the world financial system had been joined by another protagonist, which became second only to South Africa in the quantity of its gold production yet ahead of South Africa in its enslavement of its poor souls, the gold-mining labourers.
This was the Soviet Union, where working to death – not merely to exhaustion, but working to death – was the rule, in ‘frozen Auschwitzes of the North’, as the poet Galanskov (who died in the camps) described the land of Kolyma, at the opposite pole of the globe to South Africa: the ‘pole of cold and cruelty’ of the whole of Stalin’s system, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, who also laboured in the Gulag. At Kolyma, to the misfortune of several millions of unfortunate human beings, the gold lay not – as in South Africa – in steep, diagonally sloping hard quartzitic reefs, where only vast sums of capital and the most modern technology could accompany simple labour in its extraction, but lay close to the surface, where the most primitive pick and hammer and dynamite could extract it with human sweat and blood … from the frozen Arctic. And there they perished.
The purges … the purges shovelled in vast hecatombs of fresh bodies to dig the stuff out of the frozen ground for the benefit of the Soviet central bank, as rapidly as each previous tranche got finished off. Thus capital acquired the hard core of the central banks and the schmuck of ladies’ jewellery in the Depression, the War and afterwards. These celestial golden twins: South Africa and the land of the Soviets, united in their enslavement of the producers of gold. It was estimated, wrote Robert Conquest, that every kilogram of gold from Kolyma cost one human life …
Robert Edgar’s slim volume is focused on the life of a leading African member of the old Communist Party of South Africa, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana (1899–1995), with particular focus on his Moscow years, 1932–34. Contemporary South Africa in the year of 2006 – the year after the publication of Edgar’s book – is now run by individuals of whom many spent most of their adult lives as members of the South African Communist Party, successor-party to the CPSA, and lifelong admirers of the Soviet system. President Thabo Mbeki was for many years a member of the Politburo of the SACP in exile: his father Govan Mbeki was already a member of the CPSA towards the end of the period in question, and loyal to its Stalinist heritage to his dying day. He named his son after Mofutsanyana.
Edgar’s book drives home the point with its photographs: a very elderly Mofutsanyana and Joe Slovo at a meeting of SACP headquarters in Johannesburg in 1992, Mofutsanyana with Joe Slovo with his arm around him on the same occasion, Mofutsanyana with Chris Hani – Secretary General of the SACP prior to his murder by a white racist the following year, and the most active commander in the suppression of the pro-democracy mutiny in the ANC army in exile in 1984, after which dissidents were sent to labour in the principal Gulag of the ANC and the SACP in Africa, Quatro.
One may appreciate that a country run by people of the above pedigree does not breathe free, despite their having come to office in a society with a functioning market, press, judiciary and … academe, the domain of Professor Edgar.
The problem for Edgar, now professor of African Studies (so rich a subject!) at Howard University in Washington, DC, is that Kolyma … is a world too far away for him. It doesn’t exist, it never existed. It disappears from history as if it had been airbrushed out in Comrade Stalin’s photo album, though he does once mention discretely ‘concentration camps in the eastern Soviet Union’ in referring to the deaths in the Gulag of three leaders of the CPSA, two shot.
His difficulty is that any discussion of the interrelation between the CPSA/SACP with the big boss in Moscow could not be adequate if it did not explore the manner in which the Communist Party in South Africa misrepresented the land of Kolyma to the workers of South Africa as a paradise for labour. A systemic misrepresentation of the nature of the USSR and its relation to the gold-slaves of the Rand is a staple of left-leaning and right-leaning studies in South Africa. With very, very few exceptions, the left obscured the nature of the USSR, while the right obscured the nature of South Africa. The inter-relation, the symmetry even, was suppressed by both.
It is at this point that the dishonesty of Professor Edgar’s book becomes explicit, despite its valuable archival material. For one thing, in addition to the G- and K-words, the book suppresses also the H-word, where H stands for Hirson. There is no reference at all in the book to the pioneering historical studies of the South African left carried out by my late colleague, Dr Baruch Hirson, who paid for his graduation as an historian with nine years in Pretoria Local Prison, where he was also an alumnus of the University of South Africa (Unisa), the publisher of Edgar’s book and a correspondence institution that was the only provider of university studies to political prisoners permitted by the regime (and very thankful we were for it, though also often frustrated by it).
For instance, Hirson’s article on the ‘Black Republic’ slogan of 1928 (within the time-remit of Edgar’s book) appearing in issues three and four of the banned journal that he and I edited in exile in London, Searchlight South Africa (July 1989, February 1990), focused centrally on the turmoil caused to the CPSA by the changed orientation forced on it by Stalin and Bukharin at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern. As an historian, like the physicist he had been in his previous professional life, prior to his arrest and imprisonment, Hirson was scrupulous about accuracy and sources. Interpretation was one thing, faithfulness to historical fact was another. As a result, while rich in dissident interpretation and analysis, Hirson was read with care and respect even by his adversaries. His archives were open to any serious student. I remember the grey eminence of SACP in London, Brian Bunting, British correspondent for the TASS news agency, whose father had both helped found the CPSA and been expelled from it because of his disagreement with the Stalin/Bukharin line, coming to Baruch’s house in London – the house of the most eminent South African Trotskyist! – to read Baruch’s archival material concerning his late father.
Edgar is no such historian, despite the value of his biographical interviews with Mofutsanyana. There is no reference to Hirson’s article. Just as with the late apartheid regime, Edgar’s South African readers are kept in ignorance of Hirson’s contribution on the subject of the CPSA.
As for Mofutsanyana, he was briefly General Secretary of the CPSA when the purges in the USSR were at their most manic, and had been a student in Moscow for two and a half years, between 1932 and 1934: when gold production in Kolyma got shoved into overdrive. The ‘most troubling issue’ he had to cope with in the USSR, according to Edgar, was the death in Moscow in January 1934 of his colleague and friend, Albert Nzula, the first African General Secretary of the CPSA. Nzula was an alcoholic, and this proved fatal.
Here Edgar cannot, however, avoid touching on the central political issue of the Soviet Union. He writes that ‘Mofutsanyana did confirm that Nzula’s drinking contributed to his problems with Soviet officials. When he was on drinking binges, Nzula would vent his criticisms of the Soviet Union and his opinion that Stalin was not a good leader.’ Having received a ‘first-hand view of the Soviet Union’, Nzula had revised his previous criticism while in South Africa of the idea that ‘in the Soviet Union it was Stalin, not workers, who owned all the cars …’ In the USSR in the 1930s, that opinion was not conducive to a long life.
Edgar dismisses the idea, as did the elderly Mofutsanyana, that Nzula’s criticism of Stalin had led to his death, even though Mofutsanyana recalled that ‘Nzula’s heresies drew the attention of Comintern officials’.
Edgar does not mention my own article The Death of Albert Nzula and the Silence of George Padmore which appeared in the first issue of Searchlight South Africa (September 1988), and which drew explicitly in part on Edgar’s interviews with Mofutsanyana appearing in the International Journal of African Historical Studies (Volume 16, no. 4, 1983).
In particular, he neglects to address every one of the issues raised in a passage I quoted from a published account by the South African Trotskyist, Charlie Van Gelderen, who wrote:
According to C.L.R. James, Nzula was forcibly removed from a meeting in full view of the participants by two men working for the Soviet security services and never seen again. This agrees with what this reviewer [Van Gelderen, then in London] was told personally by [the former Soviet official, George] Padmore in 1935. Padmore also told me that just before his expulsion [from the American Communist Party] he was summoned to Moscow. While making preparations to go, he received a cable from Nzula, smuggled out through Latvia, which read: ‘George for God’s sake don’t come.’
A young black South African, Beyers, who was in Moscow at the same time attending the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, shared these suspicions … Beyers told this writer that when fortified with vodka, which was pretty often, Nzula did not hide his hatred of Stalinism. His views must have been known to the GPU.
The historian who suppresses proper discussion of this kind of evidence does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Without citing these references at all, Edgar dismisses an unspecified ‘charge by Trotskyite writer C.L.R. James that Nzula died at the hands of the Comintern’, and makes only a single reference to Padmore in another context (pp. 22–23, neither name appearing in the index). This does not do an historian’s work.The editors of the two-volume South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History (A. Davidson, et al. [eds.], Frank Cass, London 2003), a major study based on previously classified records after the downfall of the Soviet Union, concluded that Nzula had in fact died an alcoholic’s death in the January snow in Moscow. The fears of black activists then in Moscow – Jomo Kenyatta (on whom C.L.R. James’ view was based), George Padmore and the South African, Beyers – needed specific and explicit attention from Edgar, though, not least Padmore’s report to Van Gelderen of Nzula’s warning telegram, an act that may well have saved Padmore’s life. The perception of these black activists in Moscow, above all of Nzula, that a tyranny prevailed in the Soviet Union was at least as important as Mofutsanyana’s dismissal of this view. It was a perception that Edgar fails to address. The tragic figure of Nzula, torn between alcoholism and an acute personal honesty, continues to fail to find the appreciation that is his due.
So this first volume in a series called ‘Hidden Histories’, edited by Raymond Suttner of the SACP and the ANC, is written in such a way that they must continue to remain hidden. And even at Howard U, in the US of A, in the shadow of the White House, the Stalin School of Obfuscation continues, a corpse with its fingernails still growing.
Suggested further reading:
- Baruch Hirson, A History of the Left in South Africa, IB Taurus, London 2005.
- R.W. Johnson, South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 2004.
- Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Penguin, London 1994.
- Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Oxford University Press, 1979.
Paul Trewhela
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Enigmatic Socialist
Paul Flewers (ed.)
George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist
Socialist Platform, London, 2005, pp192, £6.00
George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist
Socialist Platform, London, 2005, pp192, £6.00
I RECENTLY returned from a week in New York. Invited to lunch by a friend, he chose to treat me at an expensive French restaurant. The walls were decorated with images of film stars, artists and musicians, including Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, each of whom had dined at the seats where we now sat. The largest, signed photograph was a 20-year-old image of the once-radical Christopher Hitchens. Indeed Hitch even had a dish on the menu, named in his honour. It was the most expensive meal you could buy. I start with Hitchens because of the strong danger that the George Orwell who goes down in history will be the Orwell of Hitchens’ recent book Orwell’s Victory: the anti-Stalinist who epitomised anti-Stalinism both left and right, the author who exposed the hypocrisies of a counter-revolution that would not speak its own name and the dying misanthropist who named Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells to an agent of British intelligence as fellow-travellers of communism and therefore to be watched. Squish together both Orwells, and it is the right-wing one who risks dominating: how many copies have been sold of Homage to Catalonia and how many of Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The Hitchenses and the Cohenses and all their ilk want an Orwell shorn of paradox, who excuses their own journey from left to right. There are as many Marxist theories of Orwell as there are Marxist theories of anything else, but common to the best of them is a sense of Orwell’s dual character, and that must mean a lingering on the moments of Orwell’s real achievement: the brilliance, for example, of Orwell’s essay Not Counting Niggers, which explained that the author could not simply support Britain in war, not when ‘Britain’ meant the British Empire, which had perfected repression not just at home but right across the world. I still remember reading the piece for the first time 15 years ago and being shocked by its simple truth.Paul Flewers recruits for his collection a number of lively contributors, John Molyneux, John Newsinger, Paul O’Flinn, Peter Sedgwick and Ian Birchall. With the exceptions of the brief essay by the latter, all the pieces here have been previously published, the majority of them in the International Socialism journal or its predecessor. Still, the collection is justified: if only because the two most memorable pieces, Sedgwick’s and O’Flinn’s are respectively 35 and 20 years old: many veterans of the movement will have copies of them somewhere, few new activists will even know that they exist.
It is worth asking why Paul Flewers has selected his contributors from this relatively narrow source. Flewers’ own training was in a very different party, Frank Füredi’s Revolutionary Communist Party. (I, too, was briefly in its orbit: when I explained to my handler that I’d joined them from a background in CND and from reading Orwell, she replied, carefully, that such politics as those were the very opposite of socialism. Two weeks later, I’m proud to say, I’d left.)
Flewers’ introduction cites a very wide range of left-wing analyses, before settling on the Socialist Workers Party because ‘this organisation has taken Orwell seriously and has dealt with his works and historical legacy with a skill and sensitivity that has often been absent amongst other sections on the left’. If that is true, then it would still be interesting to ask why? The first explanation that struck me was the presence within the SWP and its forerunners of several talented journalists, including Laurie Flynn, Roger Protz, Nigel Fountain and above all Paul Foot, who may have encouraged their colleagues to think about the significance of radical journalism. Yet the SWP was hardly alone in this boon: you need to think only of Peter Fryer. Have the Workers Revolutionary Party’s successors produced nothing of quality on Orwell? Or has the SWP been in some other way better equipped to deal with the duality of Orwell’s contribution?
The two most memorable pieces here (beyond Paul Flewers’ own) are those of Sedgwick and O’Flinn. The former gains from the unmatchable Sedgwick style, including his familiar stock of psychological metaphors. ‘The shifts and constancies of Orwell’s politics reflect, anticipate, and may be used to cure’, Sedgwick writes, ‘the moodiness of Marxism.’ Reading Sedgwick again, it is striking to see how carefully he reads Orwell’s politics not through the prism of revolutionary Barcelona (the too-obvious starting point), but through the preceding history of the British left: identifying Orwell not as a ‘literary Trotskyist’ (another recent formulation), but as a loyalist and also critic of a particular Independent Labour Party socialism, with the contributors to The Adelphi magazine providing the closest thing to an Orwell generation. ‘In the files of The Adelphi’, Sedgwick writes, ‘themes constantly recur, which detected in Orwell’s work alone, have come to be thought of as peculiarly his.’
O’Flinn’s essay is something different: the contribution of someone who has worked for many years teaching English in a university. He has fine shots at the GCSE-syllabus, probably most readers’ first introduction to Orwell, and the emphasis it puts on the pseudo-science of reading a novel, asking abstract and meaningless questions such as: ‘Is Orwell’s style appropriate to the subject matter?’ The right and necessary criticisms are made: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the main a reactionary book.’ How many other socialist reviewers have fallen shy of writing that sentence, for fearing of appearing too obvious, too Dave Spart? O’Flinn’s antithesis is not between different readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four (‘a guide to what can happen to a potentially revolutionary politics at a time when it thrashes around in despair looking for and failing to find a base’). Instead O’Flinn contrasts this, Orwell’s most despairing book, to the earlier, more optimistic period: ‘We still have access to another Orwell, an earlier Orwell not blundering in detached fantasy in that way, but one whose work was motivated and informed by participation in actual battles for socialism.’
At Julien’s restaurant in Manhattan, dinner à l’Hitchens means baked squab. A squab, I learn from my dictionary, is ‘an inexperienced young bird’. That seems right for Hitchens: the very personification of Churchill’s jibe about people progressing from socialism in their twenties to Conservatism in old age. Orwell as ‘youth’ speaks also to my own experience of the writer: as practically the only discussion of socialist politics that was allowed in the school syllabus, the Orwell of the Collected Journalism and of the first half of Animal Farm. Reading and transcending Orwell was for me a fast road to activism. So which, then, is the authentic figure: the young Hitchens or the old Hitchens, the young Orwell or the old Orwell? In Flewers’ lively collection, the most persuasive brief answer is provided by Ian Birchall: ‘Orwell is one of those writers like Camus, Bernard Shaw, etc., who has one foot in the socialist camp and one somewhere quite different … If centrism is unambiguously pernicious on the political level, it is much more productive in literary terms. It is a strange dialectician who is afraid of contradictions.’
David Renton
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The Soviet Century
Moshe Lewin
The Soviet Century
Verso, London 2005, pp. 416, £25
The Soviet Century
Verso, London 2005, pp. 416, £25
MOSHE Lewin is best known to students of Soviet history for several original monographs on the period from 1917 to 1940. His particular interest lay in the years of 1928–34, for it was precisely here, most notably in the policies of collectivisation and industrialisation, that Stalinism was formed. Lewin had little sympathy for this project. It was, he argued, ‘audacious to the point of madness … seldom was any government to wreak such havoc in its own country’ (Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, London 1968, pp. 446, 515). It was driven by a set of political decisions that were presented as truth and codified in dogmatic fashion: ‘growth rates as the ultimate criterion of progress … equated with the quantity of productive forces … priority for the needs of heavy industry’. (ibid., p. 374) It was a wasteful and damaging period, in which the government lacked a basic understanding of the needs of its majority peasant population, not to mention the support of the urban working class.
The Five-Year Plans were not really plans in any meaningful sense. Stalin had no conception of the likely results of his policies. Once underway, he reacted rather than led, proceeding in fits and starts. The planners were constantly taken by surprise and had to reissue targets and prices on a continual basis. The Soviet economy was out of control, in a condition of extreme disequilibrium, suffering from shortages, semi-completed projects, hidden inflation, poor quality, and low labour productivity. The consequences for the Soviet Union were severe and long-term. This was so not only in relation to the restoration of the economy. There was also a vast administrative structure, a privileged bureaucracy that stood above and to a large extent against society. Not surprisingly the political élite sought to repress freedom of expression and any signs of critical, democratic activity.This was true above all of Marxism. Marxism was precisely a system of thought that could be applied to Stalin’s USSR in a critical manner, but it was precisely this type of Marxism that was suppressed. In its place was put an empty phraseology that failed, over time, to command allegiance or respect. In Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London 1975), Lewin outlined how, in the post-Stalin period, Soviet scholarship was beginning to develop a critique of Stalinism and to offer alternatives. The scholars of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s turned to the alternatives to Stalin of the 1920s and early 1930s.
For in his earlier studies Lewin was clear that there were real alternatives to Stalin and Stalinism. In fact, Stalin represented the worst possible outcome. Lewin admitted that Bolshevism faced a fundamental dilemma in building socialism in an overwhelmingly peasant country. There would have to be modernisation and industrialisation, but how? For Lewin, Preobrazhensky, Trotsky and Bukharin, as well as a host of economists working in state economic agencies, had far more sensible, developed and rational responses to the problems of economic construction. They also offered prophetic warnings of the ills, from economic chaos to near civil war that would issue from rapid mass collectivisation and industrialisation. Lewin, for example, is fond of two quotes from Bukharin. The first with reference to over-investment and taught planning: ‘One cannot build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks.’ The second in relation to rapid and mass collectivisation: ‘[Stalin] … will have to drown the risings in blood.’ Stalin triumphed, for Lewin, not because he had the best understanding of policy and theory, but because he was better at politics and political in-fighting.
Stalin was also aided by the broader political context. The Bolshevik party was very different from its pre-1917 version. The vast majority of its members joined in the Civil War. They were not intellectuals but fighters, used to administrative and dictatorial methods. In the 1920s, much of the ordinary cadres simply did not understand the programmes of the Left and Right Oppositions. The ordinary cadres were more content to follow the orders of the administrative centre, controlled by Stalin.
Stalin’s victory was thus not inevitable, but it is explicable. It was, in Lewin’s words, ‘not a direct outgrowth of Bolshevism but rather an autonomous and parallel phenomenon and, at the same time, its gravedigger’. (The Making of the Soviet System, London 1985, p. 9) Thus gone were the traditions of debate and discussion in which even Lenin had to struggle to convince comrades through argument. Factionalism was normal and healthy in Lenin’s Bolshevism, it was always perceived as a threat and sabotage in Stalin’s Bolshevism. Lewin does not equate Stalinism solely with Stalin’s personality. There were, he makes clear, broader factors at play: ‘Economic, social, and cultural phenomena have to be introduced into the analysis, even if the object of study is a powerful and arbitrary destructive despot.’ (The Making of the Soviet System, p. 288) At the same time, Lewin was well aware of the personal element: ‘Stalin was less burdened with either theoretical or moral scruples … he was a master-builder of bureaucratic structures, and this it was that determined his conceptions and his methods.’ (Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, p. 517)
In one of his most famous books, Lewin recounted how Lenin came to realise the dangers of Stalin’s personality and Stalin’s methods. Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York 1968) focused upon the narrow period from December 1921, when Lenin first fell ill, to 10 March 1923, after which the first Soviet leader was left incapable of further political activity following a new stroke. It was during this crucial 15 months or so that, for Lewin, Lenin made an incredibly honest attempt to evaluate the negative aspects of the regime and to offer viable solutions. Lewin finds in Lenin’s last writings a ‘vast programme’, an example of his ‘intellectual honesty and political courage’. (Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 86) Lenin was struggling in particular with the problems of the state bureaucracy and with Stalin’s ‘Great Russian Nationalism’ in riding roughshod over the democratic rights of, in this case, the Georgian republic, to defend its independence. When, in January 1923, Lenin added an addendum to his famous Testament of December 1922 that Stalin should be removed from the post of General Secretary, Lewin argues that Lenin was not motivated by reports of Stalin’s rudeness to his wife Krupskaya. No, the ever politically-minded Lenin was simply revolted by what he had discovered about Stalin’s ill-treatment of Georgian comrades. Lenin was soon to conclude a pact with Trotsky to struggle against bureaucracy in the party and government and to finish with Stalin politically. Had the Lenin–Trotsky pact been carried through to fruition, the future history of the USSR would have been much better. Lenin and Trotsky, for example, would have ‘enabled a rational use of the best cadres, instead of their elimination’. (ibid., p. 139) Lenin’s emphasis upon a gradual transition and a ‘considered policy’ would have avoided the silly excesses of Stalin’s economics. Lenin’s incapacitation and death unfortunately gave Stalin the opportunity to bypass all of Lenin’s timely recommendations. Alone, Trotsky lacked the political skill to outmanoeuvre Stalin: ‘Lenin disappeared and Stalin was assured of victory.’ (Ibid., p. 141)
Lewin is now able to revisit his earlier works, theories and conceptions, with the historian’s benefit of hindsight, as well as access to more primary materials and contemporary Russian scholarship than previously possible. It is, to begin with, a challenging title: The Soviet Century??? But this is not an epitaph for the twentieth century, but a cry to understand better one of its most important aspects that ‘remains an ill-understood system’. (p. viii)
Lewin retains much of his earlier historical analysis. Stalin and Stalinism, constructed during 1928–39, represented a sharp break with Lenin and Bolshevism of the period up to 1924. Lenin’s final period of active politics, 1921–23, was an honest attempt by a flexible and honest communist to come to terms with the realities of a gradual transition to building socialism. It was also a crucial and wide-ranging battle between Lenin and Stalin for the future direction of policy. In opposition to Lenin’s model, Stalin sought to control the party and state to implement a dictatorial forced pattern of modernisation. Lenin’s death and the incompetent politics of the old Bolsheviks enabled Stalin to win power and crush Bolshevism.
Although as a good social historian, Lewin continues to emphasise the broader context that supported Stalin’s authoritarianism, there is much more weight put on Stalin’s character. Reference is made to Stalin’s desire for absolute power, to be recognised as the indisputable authority on history, politics, ideology, etc., that lay behind the decision to destroy the Bolshevik Old Guard and indeed anyone whose historical memory might undermine Stalin’s version of events. Lewin claims that Stalin had the Great Terror of 1936–38 in mind as early as 1933. The references to Stalin’s ‘mania’, ‘paranoia’, ‘political pathology’ and their impact on the system more generally brought Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to mind. The Secret Speech is often presented as an élite cynical ploy to lay systemic failings at an individual’s door and to give a rationale for continuing to believe in the USSR. However, Lewin’s reading of events may lead us to see the Secret Speech as an honest attempt to understand what really happened in the change from Lenin’s leadership to Stalin’s.
Certainly Lewin charts the very real changes that affected the USSR post-1953. With Stalin out of the way and, under Khrushchev, out of the Mausoleum, there was no return to Stalinism. The destruction of the Gulag, the proclamation of new legal and workers’ rights, and a new mode of operation for the security services, did herald real and genuine changes in the Soviet Union. It did become a more open and freer society, even if there were obvious limits. What post-Stalinism lacked, however, was a genuine impetus for reform.
Repeating points that were made in Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates, Lewin outlines the excellent analyses of the failings of the Soviet system produced by Soviet academics from the 1950s onwards. The opportunities for a root-and-branch overhaul of the Soviet economy were however missed. This was partly due to the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy, whose privileges were bound up with the maintenance of the state’s management of the economy. It was also a consequence of the atrophy of the CPSU. This was, Lewin argues, a non-political party. It had no genuine role to play in policy formation and execution. It had no debates, no elections and no alternative platforms. It was moribund. But an independent political force was essential if the bureaucracy was to be defeated. Trotsky was thus quite right to call for a political revolution against the bureaucracy before a genuine social revolution could take place. It was also the reason why, although Lewin does not make this point explicitly, that Gorbachev had to link economic and political reform.
With sensible reform blocked, the system was always likely to run into a terminal crisis of its own accord. There was, in the finish, no need to overthrow Soviet communism. A ‘moth-eaten’ CPSU simply faded away ‘without any need for a strong jolt or storm’ (p. 350): ‘The regime was not toppled: it died after exhausting its inner resources and collapsed under its own weight.’ (p. 326) What disappeared was clearly not socialism. For Lewin socialism means an extension of democracy under society’s ownership of the means of production. Neither point held in the bureaucratic-dominated authoritarian post-Lenin USSR. Ultimately Stalin and the bureaucracy drew more inspiration from the Tsarist past than from Marxism. Like the Tsars, the system of government proved inadequate for a modernising society. An unbridgeable gap formed between state and society, in which the state was a fetter upon progress. Therefore the government did not last.
There is much food for thought in this book, even if Lewin is mainly restating earlier propositions. It is not a general history of the USSR, even if it offers a periodisation of the Soviet Union’s history (at its most basic Lenin, Stalin, post-Stalinism) and an explanation for its downfall. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic. There is next to nothing on the Gorbachev period, but there is a lengthy section on Andropov and a call for a better understanding of his reform programme. Brezhnev is simply dismissed as an example of one of the USSR’s numerous useless leaders. Lewin prefers to focus upon the brighter minds of the Brezhnev period from the academic institutes. But then there is more on Solzhenitsyn than the more interesting Sakharov. There are thus large gaps and chapters in which one has to be prepared simply to follow Lewin’s obsessions. This book should probably be read as a transition to the ‘more systematic future work’ that Lewin says that he has in mind. (p. viii). For all that, it is well worth reading.
Ian D. Thatcher
