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.
********
Some of the best reportage in the book can be found in Chapter Five, where visits to India by certain British Trotskyists in uniform in the Second World War are described, such as, e.g. the following encounter:
Whatever one might think of the Fourth International’s 1938 Transitional Programme and its demands, there is no doubt that the BLPI’s 1942 Programme was a highly competent adaptation of such politics to the contemporary Indian situation, one which deserves serious study.
The author alludes to the possibility of a sequel to the work which would cover the period from the mid-1950s onwards. The appearance of such a volume would be very welcome.
Food rations were determined strictly by the work done by a particular prisoner. The Nazis had taken Marx’s notion of the reproduction of labour power to its logical conclusion. At one point Chauvin was assigned to a more strenuous task without an increase in his ration. He had to confront a foreman and demand an increase.
As a true internationalist, he was able to establish relations of solidarity with fellow-prisoners of many nationalities, and even, on occasion, establish some sort of human relationships with those supervising him. But as a Trotskyist he also faced particular dangers. On one occasion he was attacked by two Stalinists, who screamed at him that he was a “Hitlero-Trotskyist” and began to beat him. Fortunately he was rescued when two other Communist Party members came to his rescue. The Stalinists in the camp were by no means a monolithic body – for some the Moscow line predominated, for others their sense of class solidarity. But as he notes, in other cases Trotskyists were put to death by Stalinists in the camps.
In January 1945 Auschwitz was evacuated and Chauvin took part in the notorious “march of death” when thousands of prisoners were moved out on foot. One prisoner cut off his finger with an axe in the hope of avoiding the evacuation, but he was forced to march with the others. Many did not survive the journey.
Later he was evacuated from Buchenwald by train. Chauvin’s neighbour was leaning heavily on him, with his head on Chauvin’s shoulder, so he tried to wake the man, but realised that “he would never wake again”.
In retrospect it seems near miraculous that Chauvin should have lived to tell his story. He attributes his survival in some situations to the fact that he was fit and agile, having been a boxer and rugby player – a useful reminder to socialists who are disdainful of sport.
Chauvin has added one more to the set of Trotskyist autobiographies, of which a good number have appeared in France in recent years. [See my review of some of them in Historical Materialism, Vol. 13, No. 4. ] But the book is much more than just a personal memoir. Over the years Chauvin has found time to read and research widely on the question of concentration camps, and alongside his own story he gives a fascinating account of the history of this barbaric institution.
The earliest camps seem to have been set up by the Spanish general Weyler y Nicolau in Cuba, but much of the credit for developing them goes to the British (something not often recalled by those anxious to defend the “achievements” of the British Empire). He describes the use of the camps in the Boer War, and notes that Emily Hobhouse, who did so much to document the atrocious conditions in the camps where Boer prisoners were held, was not even allowed to visit the camps for black prisoners.
He gives an account of the Russian camps, from their origin in the late 1920s to the more brutal form they took under Stalin. He stresses the similarities between the Nazi and Stalinist camps and recalls the work done by such writers as Serge, Ciliga and Marcel Guiheneuf (Yvon) in publicising the camps when their very existence was denied by most of the left.
But as a revolutionary Chauvin knows the main enemy is at home, and he devotes some fascinating pages to the history of concentration camps in France. While the crimes of the Nazis on French soil are well documented, the camps set up in France before the German invasion have largely been written out of history. The first camps were those set up at the end of the Spanish civil war for the half million refugees who came over the Pyrenees, and who were less than welcome to the French government (still based on the Popular Front National Assembly elected with such hopes in 1936).They were initially simply herded onto the beaches, where some died of hunger and exhaustion; then they were redistributed to a number of camps in Southern France. At the outbreak of war, the government rounded up Germans, making the crude xenophobic assumption that all Germans (even German refugees who had fought against fascism in Spain) were on the side of Hitler. He notes in particular the internment of a group of nuns (obviously a serious threat to public order) on the grounds that they had been born in Alsace before 1919 when it was still ruled by Germany, and therefore were classified as German nationals! As he notes, there was much indignation in France when Pinochet used sporting stadiums for political prisoners, but France had done exactly the same in 1939.
Chauvin’s account is both depressing and inspiring, but perhaps the saddest chapter is the concluding one. Quite unbroken by his suffering, Chauvin immediately rejoined his Trotskyist comrades. The Second World War had been Trotskyism’s finest hour, when a small but courageous group of comrades had preserved the principles of proletarian internationalism.
Now there were new possibilities. Chauvin reproduces a document showing the precise membership figures for the Parti communiste internationaliste. In 1948 it had just 626 members, about one quarter of whom were industrial workers. Yet the press raised the spectre of “120,000 Trotskyists”. There was a real chance of the PCI uniting with the Socialist Party youth, who had been expelled from the party, and the ASR [Action socialiste et révolutionnaire], another split from the Socialist Party; the fused organisation could have several thousand members and made a real impact on French political life. But the majority of the organisation turned its back on the opportunities; there were two debilitating splits, one in 1948 (when Chauvin was expelled), and another in 1952. At the start of the Algerian war French Trotskyism was reduced to a bunch of tiny squabbling sects.
Chauvin’s concluding sentence is a melancholy one. But it is the fruit of tireless activism over eight decades, and may serve as a warning to the rest of us:
Debord and the other situationists are best read in the most banal of circumstances: the re-reading that led to this review was begun on the westbound platform of the Central Line at Liverpool Street, at 10:48 a.m. on 28/12/05. I was on the way to the Tate Modern to see the Rousseau exhibition – imaginary predators in imaginary jungles circling compassless in the Saatchi shark tanks. Part of the situationists’ legacy is an acute awareness of the contrast between the worthless everyday and the full human potential of life – its intensity and variety, contrast and brightness. Part of their failure lies in their inability to relate to this contrast with anything more political than (richly merited) contempt.
Debord took the trouble to provide the reader with a clarification of the term “panegyric”; it goes beyond “eulogy” in so far as it “entails neither blame nor criticism”. My Collins English Dictionary goes, if anything, a little further, in defining panegyric as a “formal public commendation”. Debord certainly succeeds in the aim of excluding “criticism” from his text; there is no attempt to evaluate or assess his own actions or refusals to act. (This may be more valuable than it seems on the surface – the refusal to act and to explain refusal may be a way through the pro-situ mind-game, in which experienced players challenged newcomers to set down their positions, and then queried their follow up action on the basis of individualistic judgement. Is your critique radical enough to bring down the universe? Then why have you not launched upon it? Is it not? Then why have you not thought far enough?) He intended, as he describes it in the early parts of Book 1, to say what he did, what he wanted, what he loved, and he expected that all else would follow. With only the stump of his work we cannot take a view on whether he might have succeeded in such an enormous task. And if it is unfair to judge the failure of the whole by the survival of the part, the writer (and destroyer) not the reader must accept the blame and criticism.
Over twenty years ago I made a series of photographs, in Epping and Hainault Forests, and in Greenwich Park, of old trees pollarded and coppiced. My idea was to try to show the thwarted rhythmical power of the parental parts of the tree in contrast with the scarred, sedimented (but ecologically enriched) survivor. In some cases these old trees had lived through nearly four centuries of “management”. Debord himself was responsible for the destruction of his own text and his stump promises much that later sections were intended to deliver.
It would be a Borgesian exercise to attempt to reconstruct a memoir from the surviving introduction and the often disputed biographical information, but we can point to certain significant absences as well as presences. Debord states very early “My method will be very simple. I will tell what I have loved, and, in this light, everything else will become evident and make itself well enough understood.”
He loved to drink, and his most lyrical section is devoted to the pleasures of drinking and of drunkenness (an important distinction). In a passage that deserves to be remembered, he writes “Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than many people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.” Some of the judgements arrived at after a lifetime of dedicated drinking seem to me to be open to dispute. To raise up Pilsen as the greatest of beers, above the monastery beers of the lowlands and the white beers of Germany creates a difference with him as severe as any that his politics might. But in concluding his chapter on drink he mourns the destruction of splendid local beers, spirits and wines by the expansion of industry, and their replacement by undistinguished multinational products. “The bottles, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail gives the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be – but not to drink them.” (The small group that used to foregather with me in the Bulldog in Oxford, following WSL national aggregates, to quaff the now extinct Courage Reading bitter will endorse vigorously.) Here is the theory of the spectacle, presented more concisely, concretely and movingly than in all the pages of his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle and his 1988 commentary thereon.
Alcohol seems to have been the only intoxicant from which he benefited. Hashish and opium, well known to the bohemian heroes of his youth, seem not to have appealed to him, and he writes nothing of the psychedelics, either synthetic or natural. At one point his mask slips and he describes some of his critics as “a group of English drug addicts”.
Larger absences from the collection of what Debord loved present themselves – the proletariat never engaged his emotion, nor yet did Marx, nor any of his collaborators in the SI or earlier in his career, among the Lettrists. Cinema, to which he contributed some characteristically difficult works, did not receive his love.
Debord expends a short chapter on the interests to be enjoyed in the study of war. He had invented a board game “Kriegspiel” that he considered to have enshrined the lessons of this study. Compared to the computer war games on the market, his invention seems simple to the point of superficiality. Having attempted a few times to play it, I can confirm that it presents one of the key aspects of war – surprise – more ruthlessly than any army of programmers have achieved. If R.C. Bell were able to update his classic Board and Table Games, then Kriegspiel would certainly receive a honourable description. To those jaded chess and go-moku players whose hearts have leapt with pleasure at encountering the Mancala or Owari games, I commend Debord’s invention. In the labyrinth of delights that men have invented to stroke their brains to glow, to parody the soul in a soulless world, it is a wondrous conurbation of blind alleys.
Book 1 then, promises much – it promises facts and precise details, none of which are delivered. The claims made for its “classical” style are not without merit – the language and style are dignified, spare and precise (also formal as befits the definition of panegyric) even when considering the author’s own mortality. The translator allows the jarring Americanism “every which way” into the text at one point, but otherwise does an excellent job. Debord remarks on page 8, “the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in a writer”. True enough. It was not always a virtue that Debord possessed.
In summary, much more of a memorial than a memoir. To have lost so much of the history in Debord’s final potlatch is very regrettable, and not to have had his definitive assessment of the central aspects of the whole situationist project is sad indeed. Towards the end of his text, Debord writes “no-one has twice roused Paris to revolt” – an historical insight from which Trotsky might have learned, if not gained. For his contribution to having once roused it, Debord should be remembered.
Assorted opinions on how to periodise the Comintern’s history are examined, the question of how much autonomy the parties enjoyed, the role of the Cadre Department, which was “an organ of surveillance … act(ing) in close coordination with the ECCI and the NKVD” (p. 21), the Russification process that meant decisions being first taken in the WKP(b) Politbureau. The process was possible, SDG informs us, resting upon a Russian source, “because no democratically conceived procedure for elections to the posts of Chairman, Secretary, General Secretary, members of the ECCI and the Presidium of the ECCI existed and their functions also were not clearly defined in the rules”. (p. 22) In discussing the repression in the Comintern, in which the ECCI was complicit, SDG refers to the resistance to it, which in my opinion was too little too late, and alternatives. The Pact, the Comintern’s dissolution, Stalin’s letter on Bolshevism’s history, are all brought in to the discussion prior to SDG going on to Indian communism vis-à-vis the new historiography.
Besides the Comintern archives, those of the CPGB provide a vital source for elaborating a reliable history of communism in India, as from the late 1920s it was through the CPGB that the Comintern related to the CPI, and from the mid-30s, India was represented in the Comintern officially by Ben Bradley, the other leading personality … in this connection being R. Palme Dutt. (pp. 35/6)
Apart from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, which has begun an ambitious publishing project on Indo-Russian relations, in collaboration with the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, SDG regards the response to the possibilities opened up by the access to these priceless archives as “dismal, if not puzzling”, characterised by “a strange apathy, if not resistance, towards exploration of this area”. (p. 36) In fact, “after the opening or the archives, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the leading party of the mainstream Left in India today, has published several volumes and commentaries containing documents on the history of Indian communism in the Comintern period (without reference to the archives or new research), resulting in a simple repeat of the official version of Party history ...” (p. 37)
M.N. Roy was the dominant figure vis-à-vis Comintern and Indian communism until the late 1920s, and helped shape policy on the National Question, but in his research SDG has been able to flesh out the views of other Indian currents that were not so dismissive of mainstream nationalism in India, namely, the Indian Revolutionary association located in Tashkent, and the grouping in Berlin. The former insisted that a proletarian revolution under CP leadership was not just around the corner in India, and that one had to take into account not just of nationalism(s) but religion, caste and community. Neither could one gain influence by pure hostility to Gandhi. The Berlin group favoured an anti-imperialist front perspective uniting communists and non-communist revolutionaries.
SDG was also able to find materials relating to the political and military training of Indian revolutionaries in Soviet Russia and the key role played by the Soviet Embassy in Kabul in transporting them back to India. Amir Amanullah of Afghanistan was friendly disposed towards Soviet Russia, and his relations with Britain were strained. The break-up of empires, emergence of new states; wars in the Caucasus, the Bolshevik appeal to Muslim and oriental peoples, all helped create fear regarding India. This led to literature from or about Soviet Russia or Lenin being seized at special checkposts set up all over India. Indian communists residing in Russia during the purges suffered from the terror, and SDG found out what had happened to prominent figures.
With the exit of M.N. Roy from Comintern in 1929, the CPGB became de-facto guardian of the CPI, and SDG examines the reason why no Indian was entrusted with Indian affairs there. This was problematic from the start, he discovered, as the CPGB, was, as were European parties in general, “Eurocentric”, and seemed to be indifferent to the colonial question, and moreover, tended to “boss” Indian communists. Documents were found from the 20s to the 40s in which CP leaders express exasperation at an “empire consciousness” present within the ranks of the party, whereby the plight of India was absent from their minds. One can imagine the existence of such a consciousness within the working class in general, perhaps among some party members, but I doubt that it was a common feature. Surely communists would have faced great difficulties advancing policies opposed to British imperialism, perhaps they chose to prioritise other matters and put India on the back-burner, The private papers of both Palme Dutt and Bradley confirm their vehement hostility towards Gandhi, continuing a line set out by Roy, which harmed the CPI. It turns out that the CPGB maintained a close link with Jawaharlal Nehru during the late 30s and 40s.
The ultra-left line imposed by the Comintern following the adoption of the programme in 1928, and its consequences for India, is also examined. The orientation for the colonies set out in his time by Lenin, and elaborated at the 4th Congress into the anti-imperialist united front, was junked and all nationalist forces were denounced as henchmen of imperialism, particularly those on the left. Not only Gandhi but Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose were labelled “agents of British imperialism”. Crazy instructions were sent to the CPI which, at that time, barely existed as a party.
Comintern directives, SDG discovered, were not as hitherto believed, accepted uncritically by the CPI, and if the ultra-left line created problems, the shift following the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935, proved difficult to gain acceptance, as the previous line, it was insisted, was not an error. With the Nazi-German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, WW2 underwent a change of character, the CPI had to be convinced to stop opposing British imperialism, which had ceased to be the most malign force on the planet, but to support this ally of the Soviet Union. This would have enormous repercussions for the CPI. These bizarre zig-zags of the Comintern seem to be all the more grotesque when imposed on the CP of a colony struggling for independence.
The book is divided into six chapters, the last of which discusses oppositional currents within the Comintern and what could have been, based on SDG’s analysis of the new research. For what it is worth I would agree with his general conclusions. The book has all the necessary scholarly attributes, including a bibliography and an index, and for ease the notes follow each chapter. There is an enormous amount of material packed into this study, of which I have only been able to give a flavour. It broadens our knowledge of the Comintern, Indian communism and the CPGB, as well as the relationship between them. One can only hope that the book gets a wider readership in India, where the communist movement is still an important political force, which could benefit from the knowledge contained within if discussed in an open fashion.
The book’s first and most obvious merit is that it exists at all. It has immediately assumed an important place among the wealth of Hungarian historiography devoted to the problems of the birth and early years of the new regime and of democracy. It is one of those rare works which attempts to summarise and synthesise the overall history of that period in a monograph. But it is also distinguished – advantageously in my view – by its concentration on a few short but decisive years in the formation of the new regime. The very few other monographic works that exist cover a much longer period of several decades, within which the short period which concerns us is necessarily proportionately reduced. Our author, on the other hand, considers the period concerned to be essential. By concentrating on a few brief years, Papp’s study is able not only to focus on a number of different topics in minute detail but also systematically to study historical development in its various components.
It is this very globality of investigations, embracing the wide variety of different subjects that go to make up the structure of historical development, which marks Papp’s book out from the majority of other Hungarian historical studies. Most, if not all, of the great wealth of historical writing devoted to the period in question tackles a number of different topics, events or developments taken in isolation.
The monograpic character of Papp’s study of the whole range of historical development as well as its concentration and focus on two or three essential years give this book an intrinsic value which marks it out favourably from almost everything that has been produced in the way of Hungarian history. These qualities place the work in the front rank amongst them.
What makes it particularly valuable is that it was published, not in Hungarian, an isolated language and one not easily accessible to non-speakers, i.e. to the vast majority of historians and political activists interested in history, but in French. It thus fills a significant gap in our knowledge (or rather quasi-ignorance) of the history of that part of Europe.
And there is much more. Most, if not all, the Hungarian historians who have tackled this subject in one way or another have been subjected to considerable influences, first and foremost those of the Stalinists in power, at least in the modified form of Janos Kadar. Others – very often the same people – have been ensnared by the mirage of the various kinds of historical writing guided by newer political modes and imperatives. Consequently the independent role of the popular masses and their organs, however present and visible they were, has been unceremoniously downplayed, not to say entirely suppressed. To say the least it has been obscured and distorted. In this, Stalinist state power under Rakosi and then Kadar as well as the democratic regime which followed have inspired exactly the same attitude amongst a range of different authors.
As far as I know, apart from one or two notable but very isolated exceptions, only Papp’s work has restored them their rightful pre-eminent role and function in the country’s quasi-revolutionary transformation from fascist dictatorship to democracy. Moreover, he is the only one to have clearly and unequivocally pointed out how prominent they were in these decisive developments. Workers, peasants, the popular masses as a whole in their spontaneously-formed committees, occupy a primordial place here in the whole historical development.
The author not only presents their birth, their composition and their activity in detail – he devotes more than a third of the book to this! – but also considers them to be the principal actors, the axis and pivot of democratic transformation. As he says in the Introduction:
Precisely because they set out to establish and organise a new democratic regime. Papp explains, the people in action and their spontaneous organs collided with the installation and re-inforcement of the new state power: not only with reactionary forces from the past – strong remnants of the fascist administration as well as exponants and defenders of bourgeois social relations, mixed with living relics of feudalism – but also no less violently with the organisations and representatives of the new rulers, above all the Stalinists.
The author shows and fully documents how the latter did everything they could to maintain the old social relations and keep bourgeois political forces – however modified – in a coalition of parties representing the new democracy and its state. In doing so, the coalition of parties faithfully reflected the wartime allied powers. Apart from drawing spheres of influence, none of these powers – including and above all the Soviet Union – had any plan prepared for the social order in Hungary or, indeed, the general shape of the new democracy born of the outcome of the war. The author demonstrates that, by common agreement, these powers tried to preserve the preceding bourgeois order in broad outline, including its state administration, virtually intact.
In their role of occupiers, the allied powers forcibly imposed this policy, the USSR well to the fore and playing a particular role. The author lays bare their arrogance and their insistance on making the country pay not only excessive war reparations but also the daily costs of the occupation and its various bodies. One reads with amazement how the politico-military and diplomatic bodies (and not just those of the USSR) made a Hungary bled white by war pay not only onerous reparations but also for their occupiers’ personal luxuriess, such as flowers! Presenting the enormous financial burden imposed on the country in detail, the author makes no bones about saying that “… the cost of the upkeep of the ACC (Allied Control Commission) and the (Soviet) army of occupation took Hungary to the very limit of what she could manage”. (p. 73)
But the author affirms that the main grievance against the the allied occupation forces was political. And he presents in minute detail their continual and daily interference in political life in order to shore up the coalition against the concrete and permanent threat presented by the committees. In particular Papp shows the Soviet Commission’s systematic efforts as the main occupation force led by Marshal Voroshilov to channel the country in that direction – both as the main occupying army but also through its local agents, the Hungarian Communist Party.
The non-communist parties in the coalition constantly appealed to the Allied Control Commission – and especially it main Soviet component – to intervene in order to “regularise” the situation by restraining the committees’ revolutionary zeal.
The committees did indeed show impressive power and energy. The author presents the three different forms which they took: factory committees, land committees and finally national committees. The first took direct charge of the factories at the end of the war, when the majority of the owners fled or were scared. These spontaneous workers’ organs took complete control of the factories. In fact what they wanted was not ownership of the plant but a share in the way they were managed. Papp shows that in this way they achieved genuine workers’ control. The Hungarian Communist Party worked up a hysterical campaign and a constant struggle against them, resolutely siding with the bourgeois owners and their organisations which, although still weak, grew ever stronger bolder thanks to that support. This was despite the fact that the great majority of committees were communist or social democrat, and that “all” they wanted was workers’ control. Even so, they represented an enormous threat to class collaboration. Not for nothing was the Communist Party’s main and permanent propaganda and political campaign – how vividly I still remember it to this day – directed against the “men of 1919”, referring to the short-lived Hungarian soviet republic of 1919! The workers really did not understand the class-collaboration with the bourgeoisie forced on the masses by those in power. And the author describes those years as a period of “latent civil war”. (p. 58)
In parallel with this development and immediately after the cessation of hostilities, there began the occupation and expropriation of the land on quite a large scale and the appearance of committees of – landless – peasants. Although it was a less important phenomenon than the factory committees, it was nevertheless very widespread and general. In any case the serious pressure they exerted forced a radical distribution of the land, a quasi-revolutionary act which quickly and officially did away with the great agricultural estates. Despite any difficulties it may have caused them, all the coalition partners quickly agreed the radical terms of the land reform in order to avoid a major social upheaval.
As for the national committees, they arose to replace the state administration, which had completely collapsed and fragmented and a large part of whose members had fled abroad. A network of these committees covered the entire country and took over local government. They replaced the missing state administration and like the other committees, with the participation of rank-and-file members of various parties, particularly workers’ parties, they took control locally, just as the soviets did in their day.
This veritable network of committees, which in reality was council rule in embryo, also very quickly collided with attempts by the coalition government to reorganise a central state power. The Communist Party appeared to defend these committees, but only as organs of the coalition of parties. At the same time it stated openly that they “could not constitute a second organ of power side by side with the government authorities.” (p. 190) The author quotes Rakosi’s own memoirs to show how frequent the conflicts were between the Budapest committee and the government: “… from the simple fact that the government was far to the right of the national committee which was under the influence of the (Buda) Pest workers.” (p. 188)
One way to neutralise the committees as a whole (factory committees, land committees and the local committees) was quickly and artificially to centralise them under the almost total domination of the Communist Party. Papp writes: “… the party only embraced the movement in order all the better to strangle it”. (p. 177) Thus centralising them on a national level was only a prelude to their early death, since it was essentially designed and carried out by the Communist Party.
To convey the character of the permanent conflict between the coalition’s emerging central power and the committees, the author quotes a speech made decades later by Ferenc Donáth (under secretary to the minister of agriculture, Imre Nagy’s assistant in 1945). He said: “Nothing demonstrates better the strength and social significance of the popular desire to exercise public authority than the attitude of the new central power, which opposed it in practice from the very first moment of its existence and which did everything it could to stifle it … In this respect, there was no difference between left and right in the coalition … the strength of the popular movement shattered against the massive and unyielding wall of the coalition.” (p. 194) This same Donáth wrote, of the factory councils: “All of us who participated in the leadership at the time … did what we could to limit and, as soon as we could, suppress democracy in the factories, the institution of factory councils.” (p. 195)
How clear and eloquent. I must say that, alongside Imre Nagy, Donáth became one of the leaders of the communist opposition and then of the revolution of 1956. But he was not the only one. In his book Papp also quotes the opinion of István Bibó who, as a prominent member of (as it happens) the peasant party in 1944–1947 stated his fervent support for the committees. Or one could mention István Márkus, a young sociologist who wrote important studies devoted to the committees.
In fact – although the author doesn’t say a word about this – I can personally state that between 1944 and 1947 Hungary saw the unfolding and then the rapid stifling of the permanent revolution as worked out by Trotsky. In his view, the bourgeois democratic revolution in a backward country can, in our epoch, only be brought about under the leadership of the proletariat. And so in Hungary – as the author actually tells us – all the demands of bourgeois democracy were achieved under constant pressure from the working class and the peasantry, including the radical and revolutionary land distribution. All the Communist Party itself could do was at best to follow a movement which went far beyond what it wanted. In doing so, it took great care to strangle the autonomous organs of that revolution.
Prospects for and limitations upon the Political and Social Revolution is the title the author gives to one section of the book – the longest one, and the backbone of the whole work. His great merit is to show us this permanent revolution in progress, channelled and finally strangled by the USSR and the Stalinist Communist Party. Although the author never uses the adjective “permanent” in relation to the revolution then underway, and does not use Trotsky’s name, his book talks constantly about the direct democracy of the masses and does involuntary hommage to the theoretician of permanent revolution.
Papp’s main thesis, which he develops and documents very well, is that although the revolution was stifled, channelled and deformed, it largely, not to say decisively, dictated the political path the international protagonists finally followed. The USSR and the Hungarian Communist Party were obliged to go much further than they wanted to in bringing about and establishing a “socialism” which, it is true, was in their image and shaped in their very largely deformed and falsified way. But they had to do it despite their initial intentions. After all, the bourgeois western Allies, in line with their agreements with the USSR at Yalta and Potsdam, had given Moscow a free hand to sort out the threatening revolution – while of course maintaining the appearance of being “defenders of democracy”.
Papp uses the tools of historical science to prove that, in the course of this process, the USSR and the Hungarian Communist Party were obliged to change their initial programme. Instead of participating in the peaceful formation of a bourgeois democracy, as they planned in advance, they were confronted with the birth and superabundant activity of the popular masses’ direct democracy. Even though they were able to withstand them and ultimately suppress their organs, they nevertheless had, while establishing their own anti-popular dictatorship, to expropriate the bourgeoisie and introduce essential reforms, all, of course, in their own repulsive and fundamentally anti-democratic image. Of course the author says nothing about this poisoned fruit of the conflict between the committees and the authorities in those years. But his book enables us to understand how the path to it was traced by the struggle the Hungarian Communist Party and the USSR waged against the committees.
The author also says nothing about the revolution of 1956. However, reading his book, one inevitably thinks of the rapid and widespread formation of workers’ councils and other popular committees in which the revolutionary people spontaneously and very quickly found the logical and obvious successors to its post-war committees. The Hungarian workers were inspired not only by their fathers’ struggle for the Hungarian soviet republic in 1919, not only by the Russian Revolution, but also and to a great extent by their own struggles in 1944–1947. In the speed with which their councils appeared and the vigour which they displayed, should we not see the living inspiration provided by these post-war committees? I certainly think so. It is no accident that all the prominent politicians whom Papp quotes as acknowledging the fundamental role the committees played in those years themselves participated actively in events and later played an leading and important role in 1956; men like Donáth, Bibó and Márkus.
I must mention that this author is a historian and not an ideologue. He examines all the components and aspects of historical development in detail, from the profound devastation of the war, through the persecution and massive and atrocious extermination of the Jews and the role of abject anti-Semitism, the inhuman population transfers and the establishment and role of military and diplomatic occupation, to the re-constitution of a central power, the state and its organs. It is a vast overall picture that Papp presents which even a reader familiar with the subject can study with interest and also pleasure. The very occasional omissions or mistakes easily recede in the face of this book’s many merits and virtues.
Not the least among them is the impressive apparatus at the end supporting the book. The footnotes and references on each page alone provide a rich and varied documentation to accompany the text. The author enumerates in an extensive summary the archives and materials consulted and the many books and articles referred to. They are presented in an impressive way and moreover introduce the reader to a mass of original sources and a rich and varied literature on the subject. A short biographical resumé of the main actors and events and an index of names and places usefully completes the book.
To summarise: a significant and precious contribution which enriches the historiography of contemporary Europe. A translation into English would fill a significant gap in the historical material available to the English reader.
Born to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family, Grossman became a socialist in his teens. His campaigning life reached an early peak in May 1905, just weeks after Grossman’s 24th birthday, when a Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia was launched. Grossman authored the group’s first pamphlet, on the Jewish Question. For the next three years, he was the party’s unofficial leader. Although Galicia was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the majority language in the region was Polish. The JSDP was strongly influenced by the main trends of Russian socialism, including both Bundism and Bolshevism. The mass strikes seen in Russia and Poland in 1905 spread, and Grossman was soon addressing marches of up to 50,000 people. The JSDP grew, reaching its highest membership of around 3,000. For the next two years, he threw himself into party activity. Only slowly did the upturn subside. Grossman left for Vienna in 1908, but was re-elected to the party’s executive, in absentia, for several years following his departure.
From a period as a revolutionary agitator, Grossman settled into the very different life of a university academic. He spent the 1914–18 war working for the Austrian government as a statistician. Travelling to Poland in 1919, he was appointed to a professorship on economic policy and joined the Communist Party. Later Grossman settled in Germany, where he became the Frankfurt School’s leading economist. It was from this post in 1929 that he published his best-known book The Law of Accumulation and the Collapse of the Capitalist System. For most readers today, Grossman is known if at all through the Pluto 1992 edition of this study: an incomplete text which misses out the entire last chapter of Grossman’s work.
The Law of Accumulation was a polemic with at least three targets in mind. The first was Edward Bernstein’s claim, from thirty years’ previously, that capitalism was an economic system marked by increasing order and stability. Grossman disagreed. A second target was Rosa Luxemburg, the woman seen by most of Grossman’s contemporaries as the heroine of their generation. Luxemburg’s considered response to Bernstein was to argue that capitalist reproduction depended on the expansion of market relationships to the countries of the non-capitalist world. At some point, this task would be finished, and capitalism would be incapable of further expansion. Grossman argued that such a method had in essence little in common with Marx, who located the key contradictions of capitalism not in circulation but in production. A third target was the parliamentary socialist Otto Bauer, who had used a simplified version of the calculations set out in the second volume of Marx’s Capital, to show that so long as the state regularly intervened to stabilise capitalism (by maintaining the correct ratio of outputs between means of production and means of consumption), the system could go on forever without crisis.
Grossman disagreed. His basic premise was as follows: in a system of competitive exchange, producers will invest in new machinery in an attempt to achieve an advantage over their rivals. For a single producer, investment will enable the same or a rising quantity of goods to be produced with a falling labour cost. Investment enables the sole manufacturer to produce more cheaply. The same processes, however, multiplied across the system as a whole, result in a general process whereby total output grows, but so does the proportion of total spending taken up by new machinery. The ratio of constant capital (machinery) to variable capital (wages) tends to rise in favour of the former. In a passage in the third volume of Capital, whose prominence in Marxist discussions since 1929 is largely Grossman’s doing, Marx describes this process as the tendency for the organic composition of capital to rise. Bauer acknowledged that the rate of profit might decline, but argued that this process was not fatal to the system, so long as some profit was made. Decline could be offset by state investment. Grossman took the same equations, ran them for a longer period, and used them to show that where the rate of profit declines inexorably, the result is inevitably a crisis to the system. By year 35 of Bauer’s model, there was no longer any surplus either for investment or even for private consumption. The system could run no further.
There is all the difference in the world, of course, between showing that a model of private economic exchange must lead to crisis, and showing that the same dynamics are manifest not in a intellectual model, but in the real economy. In the concluding chapters of his book, Grossman listed the countervailing tendencies that might result in sustained expansion. Among these he mentioned decreases in world commodity prices, decreases in the unit cost of labour power, more efficient transport, the emergence of new commodities, even war, one of whose consequences was the destruction of capital value on a giant scale. Conversely, he identified the struggle for reforms as a major impediment to indefinite expansion: where workers could increase the unit price of labour, inevitably this placed greater costs on the system, and brought closer the possibility of social transformation.
How relevant is this model to contemporary Green thinking? While the detail of each model is different, the outline is similar. A system familiar to us as one of dynamic reproduction contains beneath its surface elements of both movement and inertia. Over time, the static becomes increasingly significant, with the result that the machine comes eventually to a halt. This breakdown is not a peaceful, natural process. It is accompanied either (to Grossman’s mind) by bitter strikes and labour tumults or (in contemporary ecological thought) by drowned cities, plains lost to the desert, the inexorable expansion of wasteland, by migration, hunger and poverty. The successful avoidance of this catastrophe will require a pooling of great collective effort, and an extraordinary redistribution of human ingenuity. In that long process, Grossman’s politics will surely seem more relevant than ever.
David Renton
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Second, there is the issue of no matter how many materials one reads what counts is what sort of questions one asks of documents, i.e., one’s methodology is key. Here attention focuses on the use of ‘revisionism and post-modernism’ and the ‘totalitarian controversy’. Keep acknowledges that there are nuances within these ‘schools’ and that there can be a fair amount of overlap between different methodologies. The conclusion however that ‘all approaches are valid and there is something to learn from each’ (p. 99) is just bland and all too typical of the type of ‘critical analysis’ engaged in throughout the text. The authorial judgements are brief and passed on very brief summaries. I wonder, for example, of the use to anybody to know that Keep wonders whether ‘the sub-title of her study (Melanie Ilic’s Women Workers in the Soviet InterWar Economy: From ‘Protection’ to ‘Equality’) is appropriately worded’ (p. 141). The only way to reach one’s own view is to read the work itself, but then this is true of every work mentioned.
Third, the issue of morality and moral stances is clearly of import for both authors. For Litvin, ‘state socialism turned out to be rotten at the core and eventually collapsed. This means that there can be no excuse for the Terror either: it is in fact unpardonable from every point of view. In the Soviet era, its only defenders were the people responsible for it; the rest just went along with them out of fear.’ (p. 69) For Keep, ‘licensed and arbitrary violence was the principal characteristic of Stalinist rule … “Stalinist civilization” is a phenomenon of our own age and has to be judged by contemporary criteria of right and wrong’ (pp. 214–215). For Keep the lesson that Russians must draw is how wrong the USSR was to take Russia from the path of capitalist, liberal democracy. A study of Stalinism should help Russians ‘to promote the development of a mature civic society, democracy and the rule of law, and to make industrial enterprises more efficient and internationally competitive, for in today’s globalized world market increased trade (preferably not just in raw materials) and foreign investment are the surest means of improving popular living standards’ (p. 216).
Such ‘liberal morality’ is no doubt shared by most authors considered in this book for ultimately one is struck by how little an understanding of Stalinism is promoted by modern scholarship. Stalin did not operate in this moral universe. Rather his rule was the outcome of battles won and lost within the revolutionary movement. It is this movement that seems to be completely forgotten by modern scholars – a reason no doubt that Keep did not consider any of the volumes of Revolutionary History in his survey of recent Western literature on Stalinism. Rather than trouble oneself with the modern academe, readers are better advised to go back to the classics of contemporary Marxism, particularly Trotsky and even the Menshevik observers around The Socialist Herald. My failure to connect with revolutionary politics is a flaw of my Trotsky biography and reading this book has helped me to understand that better if nothing else.
What united the various works about him, owing to the requirement to know one’s way about in the appropriate countries and languages, and above all due to the inaccessibility of the Soviet archives, was the obligation for a long time to limit them to investigating only a part of his life, mostly the years connected to Germany. The (partial) opening of the Moscow archives has at least removed the greatest hindrance. It has then, however, taken still more years until one found in the Genevan Jean-Francois Fayet someone who also possessed the linguistic preconditions. As a result of his many years of research; not only but mainly in Moscow, there now exists an extensive biography, of which one can say in advance that it has everything in order to become the standard work on Radek.
Introduced with short explanations about the fate of Radek’s personal archive – what can be found where again today in Moscow, and what could possibly be in archives still inaccessible today – the author develops his presentation in a fairly chronological way. Although Fayet has his own quite particular interests, he considers in a suitable manner; which constitutes the great value of this biography, all Radek’s biographical periods, in which the latter, as is known, was active in very different political contexts and places.
He begins with a detailed portrayal of Radek’s – or more precisely Karl Sobelsohn’s – youth in an “enlightened” Jewish parental home. Born in Lemberg in 1885, following the early death of his father, his mother brought him up alone in Tarnow. Versed in the traditions of the Polish struggle for freedom from his earliest youth, his “political socialisation” then followed at Krakau university. Though German was the language of the empire and thus represented an offer of assimilation for a developed Jewish middle-class, it also influenced Radek from his childhood. The road to social democracy was thus, in a sense, sketched out, and led him into the revolutionary grouping around Rosa Luxemburg, the SDKPiL, which gave the national struggle no great importance – rather saw it as a distraction from the class struggle. This first chapter about his “apprenticeship years” comprises a tenth of the volume and ends with the Russian revolution, his relatively short participation and firm establishment in the SDKPiL, then the next comprises almost double the length.
It is almost entirely devoted to the “Radek Affair” which lasted until the outbreak of war and would influence his image just as his journalistic brilliance which he very quickly demonstrated in the SPD press. Radek was not only the discerning analyst of imperialism; who was so to speak “at home” in every world conflict. He entangled himself in trench-warfare with his closest comrades in arms in the SDKPiL, above all with Rosa Luxemburg. This rebounded into the SPD, when the right-wing enthusiastically seized upon it, and reverberated into the Russian social-democracy, due to the numerous double and cross-memberships of the different protagonists. That this was really politically based is also put in doubt by Fayet’s detailed presentation. Though here he follows, in part, terrain already explored long ago in the various works of the SPD or the SDKPiL about Rosa Luxemburg. It is a shame that the author does not examine so intensively Radek’s analysis of imperialism, also in relation to the whole discussion in the party and the International.
Out of this “affair” however; an initial contact with the Bolsheviks resulted, that after the outbreak of war then led to Radek’s adherence while in his Swiss sanctuary, which soon made him into the leading Bolshevik propagandist on the international stage. Firstly in the Zimmerwald movement, but then above all, as during 1917 they first became a mass party and then a state party. Here the rational discussion by Fayet of the rumour, which has circulated for decades; about their financing by the German government, the accusation of being agents, is particularly worth stressing (pp. 210–219). He analyses the various versions and traces back the alleged signs to their real significance. Everything else remains hypothetical in his view. [5]
It was then the October revolution that brought Radek back to Germany as its envoy, and which now, in the correlation between Russia and Germany allowed him to pursue what one could somewhat solemnly describe as his “true destiny”. That included his involvement in the creation of a mass communist party, as well as his appearances in the salons of the new republic, in order to promote an “Eastern Alliance” between the states. For him however, this was undoubtedly only a stage towards the world revolution; it would have transferred its centre from Moscow to Berlin. Here too the terrain is not entirely unknown; his role in these first years of the KPD and also simultaneously in the leadership of the Communist International, above all in the dispute with the KPD leader Paul Levi and over the development of the United Front policy, is already thoroughly evaluated in the existing literature. Fayet however once more succeeds in adding new facets to the portrayal from his abundant source studies. One can though make critical comments on two points. Radek’s aversion to collaborating with the syndicalists which the Bolsheviks had striven for, a key to the creation of mass communist parties in southern Europe, brought him into conflict which here is only touched on in relation to the “ultra-left” split from the KPD, the Communist Workers Party (KAP) (pp. 351–353). Yet due to his leading position in the Comintern in 1920, he was occupied quite generally with the “trade union question”, on which he reported at the second Comintern congress, and offended the syndicalist representatives as well, wholly in the style of the pre-war social democracy, for whom (even including most of the left) syndicalism was the greatest possible conceivable “deviation”. [6]
In addition there is also an alternative interpretation of his dismissal as Comintern secretary in August 1920 (although that would in fact turn out to be meaningless). Fayet attributes it to the dispute over the KAP, whereas Branko Lazitch and Milorad Drachkovitch suspected that this “punishment” was due to his critical position towards the Red Army advance on Poland in the summer of 1920. [7] The high point of Radek’s “German mission” was the year 1923 with the crisis caused by the Ruhr occupation. Here Radek’s name will above all be linked to his “Schlageter speech” at the session of the Comintern Executive Committee in June, that has to suffer again and again for the attempt “to push the KPD into an alliance with radical rightists groups in the course of the Ruhr struggle” as one of the best experts on the KPD’s history, Hermann Weber, writes. This problem is also fully dissected by Fayet (pp. 445–467). He comes to a substantially more refined picture of an attempt at recruiting and influencing a milieu that, however, yielded little but instead harmed the party’s image, though without the party having abandoned its fundamental hostility towards the radical rightist milieu. Radek’s role as the chief Soviet delegate during the attempted KPD uprising, the “German October”, was much less precisely known. There were hardly any documents on it, mainly just memoirs and similar material. Since the opening of the archives in 1993 successive single documents were made public and at last a documentation as well as a recent monograph, though it arrived too late for Fayet. [8] He has thought himself seen a good part of the material in the archives, and his presentation also leaves no doubt about it, that Radek had good grounds to prevent the KPD from launching an isolated attack that October.
With that Radek was of course also made responsible for the “defeat”. The more so as already for some months the struggle had broken out in the Soviet party between – briefly described – the Troika Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev on one side, and Trotsky on the other, and Radek had clearly placed himself behind the latter. The years now following until his death during the Stalinist terror represent the most interesting part of the book. As the relevant details were the least known prior to the opening of the archives, more than 150 pages are devoted to his activity in the opposition, and a further hundred to the years after his capitulation to Stalin in 1929, whom he then served until the latter got rid of him.
In the ranks of the opposition, he was especially prominent in the debate over the second Chinese revolution, which was underway between 1925 and 1927. Since he had been branded as the one “most guilty” for the disaster in Germany in early 1924, he had been shunted off to the leadership of the Sun Yat Sen University, which had been set up in Moscow. What had been regarded as marginal suddenly, wholly unforeseen by the party leadership, owing to world history took on significance and Radek, with his own intellectual energy and enthusiasm for world affairs, threw himself into this problem. By means of Radek’s internal correspondence with key leaders of the opposition, above all Trotsky, never previously made full use of, Fayet can describe in detail numerous new aspects of the opposition’s struggle, and particularly its internal arguments, in which Radek occupied a leading – and vacillating – role. After he had first pressed for a sharp demarcation, as far as a break in an “ultra-left” manner, particularly after the expulsion from the party and banishment in early 1928; in 1929 he executed a turn, as Stalin broke with Bukharin and the “right” and using “left” rhetoric introduced the course towards forced collectivisation and hurried industrialisation.
Radek was the most prominent of the “capitulators”; and with this step almost caused the collapse of the opposition; which was by then essentially reduced to a few thousand in banishment or prison. What many passed off as a type of arrangement (or perhaps better: as self-justification), in order to save the revolution in view of internal and external threats, whereby one chose to only show the Stalinist party leadership a verbal reverence, was though in Radek’s case a deeply rooted change of mind, a “reconversion” (p. 594). He knew what was now demanded of him, was Stalin’s hagiographer (after he had years previously sung hymns of praise to “Trotsky as the organiser of the victory”), adhered to Stalin’s notorious verdict against the left around Rosa Luxemburg, was a propagandist of “socialist realism” and from 1933 won Stalin’s trust as a foreign policy advisor. A special body was created for him, that was formally attached to the CC, so that it was directly subordinate to Stalin, and by which the latter, besides the official foreign policy of the Foreign Commissariat under Litvinov, could conduct an informal additional foreign policy, in order if possible to have two cards in play. So in 1933, Radek explored the possibility of a deepening of Polish-Soviet relations; or during the visit to Moscow of the then Königsberg professor (and later minister under Adenauer) Theodor Uberländer, met with him hoping by this, surely in an error of judgement, to establish a “back channel” to the nazi leadership. Radek wrote numerous memoranda of which one must however suspect, that they are still not all accessible and many still lie among Stalin’s papers in the Kremlin archives. Radek also gave his name to the so-called Stalin constitution of 1936, on the eve of the great terror. Pseudo-democratically veiled; his authorship however, due to its waiving of world revolutionary goals, was essentially a signal abroad, where Radek – similarly Bukharin – was still the Soviet representative of choice. Interestingly though, Fayet found no evidence at all among the papers of the constitutional commission of any real participation by Radek.
Actually Radek may already have been aware for some time that there was little chance of escape. He dealt with the strain under which he stood – according to eye-witness reports – in his own way. Whereas he previously seldom touched alcohol; he became a heavy drinker. Even his public support for the first show trial in the August (against Zinoviev and Kamenev, the “Trotskyist Centre”), no longer helped him. A month later he was arrested. Yet it is a waste of time seeking out a direct cause, as Fayet does. Stalin wanted to root out the whole old generation of Bolsheviks, and Radek occupied one of the most prominent places among them. After a relatively short time he had been softened up in order to appear in the second show trial of January 1937 (against the “parallel Trotskyist Centre”). There are many rumours, which have not all been able to be verified, that he wrote much of the script himself. Actually he gave the cue not only for further trials (against the “right”, and the military leadership around Marshal Tukhachevsky) but also, which for the most part is not recognised, for the hunt for “Trotskyists” in Spain that ensued in the following months. He strove at his trial, like Bukharin in 1938, in Aesopian language, to give clues as to the real context, obviously with a view to his place in history, but also in relation to his family, who were eventually not spared the persecution too. Though his collaboration saved him from immediate execution, he vanished in the Gulag where, in May 1938, surely not without instruction from above, he was killed by criminal fellow prisoners. Despite this, for a long time a rumour existed, that he had somehow been spared and secretly worked for the Soviet government.
Fayet has produced a comprehensively documented biography, not without sympathy for its “hero”, at least until the time where, with his submission to Stalin, he ceased to be “un homme defendable” (p. 721). He has extensively contextualised the biography, so that the development of the Soviet state also, from its roots in the left of the social democracy prior to the first world war up to Stalin’s bloody settling of accounts with the Bolshevik old guard is distinct. If in his last messages to his family, Radek apparently believed the revolution would be able – in later generations – to supercede its results, then he was, as is known, mistaken. For the first years of the revolution hardly anyone else could have been a better representative on the international stage, “As a Galician Jew raised in the socialist movements of Galicia, Poland, Germany and Russia together, hardly anyone else could better represent their internationalist pretensions. Though all in all he proved to be more an improviser (than) a theoretician”. He has argued so much with the historiography concerning Radek, though the interest is aimed at his contemporary deeds and not least on his political journalism as the interpretation of the juncture. He inspired no sort of “Marxist school” at all. With the present work of Jean-Francois Fayet, Radek has undoubtedly found his historian.
It is to be regretted – in these times of turbo-matriculation standards and short studies with correspondingly receding knowledge of foreign languages – that this work only exists in French though undoubtedly it is no longer possible to take a position on questions of central and eastern European history in which Radek was involved without referring to it. Perhaps an institution or publisher does exist that is not put off by the high cost of translation for a German or English version and thus makes it available for the first time for a wider audience of interested readers.
If they had become bigger a force following the main events described, then the book would carry more weight. Having said that, the Italian historiographical tradition needs to redress the balance: Trotskyism has been much maligned on the left due to the previous dominance of Stalinism and the strength of autonomism today – where Trotskyism came from certainly needs to be explained.
As with his previous book on the Arditi del popolo [see review in previous issue of Revolutionary History], this book is the result of intensive work in left-wing and state archives.
Although Francescangeli’s story really begins with the Stalinist turn to ‘social fascism’ of 1929–30, the Italian Communist Party had intrinsic qualities that led it towards sectarian isolation. At the Fifth congress of the International in July 1924 party leader Amadeo Bordiga declared, in typical fashion: ‘we cannot wait that the two methods of bourgeois offensive to create a synthesis, and that together social democrats and fascists lead a violent offensive against the revolutionary movement’. (p. 24)
The Italian delegation concurred, which is not particularly surprising. The PCI leadership was Bordighist, by and large, or had been until recently. So the sectarian ultra-left rejection of socialists and others therefore went unchallenged. This feeling was very much part of the party’s DNA for many years.
However this ultra-left lunacy would take on a more systematic form four years later, with the notions of ‘class against class’ and ‘social-fascism’ launched at the Sixth Congress of the International in July 1928, a meeting that heralded the move into its ‘third period’.
Apparently there was a ‘radicalisation of the masses’ – but above all social democracy had become the main enemy. In many ways, the closer a political force was ideologically, the more it had to be mistrusted and fought.
This virulent denunciation of any perceived political heresy meant ideological purging within individual communist parties. The first bomb was dropped at a meeting of the Third International executive committee in December 1928, when Stalin attacked the PCI representative, Angelo Tasca, and Jules Humbert-Droz for ‘opportunism’. Tasca in particular, Stalin said, was like ‘those lawyers in the provinces who try to prove that black is white and white is black’. (p. 42)
The problem for Italian communists was now this: what position to take in the face of Stalin’s attack? They criticised Tasca.
But Tasca wasn’t for backing down. The following month he wrote to Palmiro Togliatti, who was emerging as party leader: ‘The entire situation rotates around Stalin. The International doesn’t exist; the USSR CP doesn’t exist; Stalin is the “lord and master” who moves everything. […] With this policy and methods Stalin is advance guard of the counter-revolution; he is the liquidator of the spirit of October.’ (p. 43)
This was very much Trotsky’s view, for a while, but Tasca was still the Italians’ man in Moscow, and was on the International’s executive committee. For other Italian communist leaders, agreeing with Tasca meant attacking Stalin and Moscow – and by implication agreeing with Trotsky. But if they didn’t agree with him that had to take their first major Stalinist step – expel him. The leadership first agreed to remove Tasca from the CC, and to demand a public retraction of his views.
In a parallel with what had happened earlier in Russia with many of Stalin’s allies in the mid-1920s, in many respects it was Pietro Tresso who led the charge against Tasca – a man who would later pay the ultimate price.
Tasca was deemed guilty of denying the ‘fascistisation of social democracy’. In the leadership meeting which decided his expulsion, which Tasca attended, Togliatti chillingly argued: ‘The working class can only move forward by passing over the body of social democracy. […] Just as we must pass over the body of social democracy, in the same way we must pass over the body of opportunists’. (p. 63) The political bureau (a smaller organ, higher than the CC) voted to expel Tasca because he refused to ‘recant’.
The vote was unanimous. Once again, in the near future there were to be echoes of the fate suffered by Stalin’s allies. Three of the political bureau who voted for expulsion (Leonetti, Ravazzoli and Tresso), created the precedent for their own expulsion as ‘the Three’ in little more than a year.
Indeed at the core of the book is the huge bloodletting within the party’s political bureau – during 1929–31 five of its eight members would be expelled: Alfonso Leonetti, Paolo Ravazzoli, Ignazio Silone, Angelo Tasca and Pietro Tresso. (Although Francescangeli does debate the case of Ignazio Silone, due to both his own political evolution and his torment at being a police informer, his expulsion was quite a different political event.)
The next crisis came with a meeting of the Italian leadership in September 1929, in which it was proposed to set up an ‘internal headquarters’ by sending leaders back into Italy – given that a revolution was apparently more or less imminent. Perhaps it was also justifiable self-interest which led Paolo Ravazzoli to counter: ‘I’m more than willing to accept this if it can be shown that the results which could derive from it would make it worthwhile. Yet you can’t obtain many results when you’d just be speaking to three or four comrades.’ (p. 60)
The Stalinist machine was now in full flight: two months later another report argued, given that the revolutionary situation was apparently so ripe, for the removal of the entire organisation and leadership from France to Italy in a matter of weeks.
The reality was that over a thousand communist party members were in Italian jails, including Antonio Gramsci. Pietro Tresso wrote a counter-proposal, which also included spelling out reality: ‘In these three years of special laws our Federations and branches have been swept away three, four or five times.’ (pp. 70–1) In a further twist, he added that the real party leadership – which had been formed in years of struggle – was now in jail.
After Ravazzoli and Tresso came Alfonso Leonetti, the last in the group which became known as ‘the Three’: ‘where is the mass movement today?’ (p. 75) Not only were the Three guilty of pessimism – their worst heresy was expressing outright dissent.
In the leadership meeting called to expel them, Tresso voiced an excellent put-down of the wily Togliatti, also present at the meeting: ‘I believe that he has always been absolutely determined in his oscillating.’ (p. 86)
Yet the weakness in the tale recounted by Franscescangeli is what happened next. When ‘the Three’ were expelled their perspective was one of ‘reforming’ the PCI: this made it difficult to attract activists to their cause, also because they didn’t even have a newspaper for nearly a year after their expulsion, and when it did start it had a print run of just 300. They claimed the PCI had 2,500 members, but also admitted that it was in a terrible state, given the nature of fascism. All their contacts were with Italians living in France. Furthermore they also had an image problem, having voted for both Bordiga’s and Tasca’s expulsion, and had signed up to criticise Silone.
One very stark factor was the practical meaning for Italian communists to be expelled from the Italian Communist Party in France during the 1930s. It meant that the party you had previously built now violently attacked you. It was common for the Stalinist press in France to name Trotskyists publicly, thus leaving illegal Italian immigrants liable to arrest and even deportation back to Italy. The false documents activists carried were provided by the PCI, who would no longer help them on their expulsion.
And if you became a Trotskyist in fascist Italy the party would automatically attack you, accuse you of being in league with fascists – in essence you ran even greater risk of being picked up by the police because of all the fuss that was made about you. And if you ended up in jail, Stalinists would often physically attack you.
A different horizon opened up after 1933, to some degree. The failure of the German left to seriously oppose Hitler’s rise to power had shown Trotsky that the Third International could not be saved – a notion that caused huge instability among small groups.
The move towards ‘entryism’ into mass organisations which followed soon after was also a wasted opportunity. The activities recounted by Francescangeli list meeting after meeting, definition after definition, denunciation after denunciation – there is very little discussion about changing events in the real world. When all Italian Trotskyists joined the French Socialist Party, Angelo Tasca haughtily wrote of them: ‘Their spirit is sectarian and loud-mouthed. All they deal in is high politics, with composite motions, extracts from resolutions, etc.’ (p. 199) The first General Council of the French SFIO proved him right: Tresso and another Italian presented their own separate motions, which gained one vote each – their own.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia Tresso’s group wrote a document demanding ‘strikes, street demonstrations, armed attacks on town halls, fascist offices and bosses’ clubs’. (p. 204) It was just wishful thinking: not only did none of this happen, Italian Trotskyists in exile had no hope of influencing events. These individuals were subject to the same desperation which had led Trotksy to proclaim the Fourth International – the experience of living through epoch-making events without being able to influence them.
One of the more positive discoveries of Francescangeli’s research is the discovery of close relations between these Trotskyists and Justice and Liberty – a radical left grouping led by Carlo Rosselli. Up until now, most Trotskyists had denied these links because Justice and Liberty was considered too moderate. Similarly it had been denied by many scholars of Justice and Liberty, anxious to present it in as moderate as light as possible – yet the links were so close in some cases that joint membership of both organisations was not uncommon.
Although the organisation’s politics were perhaps too idealistic, the practical nature of their collaboration was again found wanting. In three years of intense discussions, just one edition of a newspaper was the result. Yet the attraction was real – Paolo Ravazzoli ended up joining the organisation.
Francescangeli refreshingly criticises Trotsky, and points out his sectarian attitude towards Justice and Liberty leader Carlo Rosselli, who was told by Trotsky when they met in spring 1934: ‘I know you … We got rid of all you counter-revolutionaries like you in Russia’. (p. 13)
Yet both men would be murdered by counter-revolutionaries – Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in 1940, and Rosselli by French fascists in 1937.
Stalinists behaved appallingly towards these small band of Trotskyists – for example Alfonso Leonetti was severely beaten up in 1933, and in all probability the people who murdered Pietro Tresso in 1943 were Stalinist agents. The historical facts show that more Italian communists died at Stalinist hands than through fascist acts during the 1930s. Other attacks were more personal – ‘the Three’ were also accused of ‘socialising’ the personal relationships between their partners.
For all these reasons, Italian Trotskyism was very weak at its birth, suffering all the bad habits of exile politics. And by 1945 the communist party’s activity in the anti-fascist Resistance had created a mass party which would soon have a million and a half members. Such was the weakness of Italian Trotskyism compared to other European countries that the first edition of The Transitional Program was only published in Italian in 1972.
Francescangeli illustrates this forgotten page of the Italian left well. The problem is that these brave individuals left very little behind them.
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.
********
Tomorrow is Ours
Charles Wesley Ervin,
Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935–48,
Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo 2006, pp367, £10 [1]
Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935–48,
Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo 2006, pp367, £10 [1]
THIS book has grown from an article in Revolutionary History entitled Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War II (1935–45) (RH, Vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1988–89, pp. 22–34). But it is more than just a history of Indian Trotskyism, however illuminating. As the author explains,
The first chapter attempts to briefly summarize how the British conquered and transformed India, how the Indian nationalists responded, and how the Marxists analyzed and intervened in that long, complex and fascinating process. (p. iv)
As such it forms, with the rest of the book, an admirable introduction to the history of modern India. A lucid exposition of the actions and effects of British imperialism in India in the 19th Century CE is followed by a succinct summary of the rise of Indian nationalism and the responses of European socialists to the “colonial question”. There is an excellent section (pp. 29–38) on the work of the neglected Indian Marxist M.N.Roy, who
showed that the Indian bourgeoisie emerged not in opposition to the landed aristocracy, as in Europe, but through the system of landlordism that the British created. (p. 33)
(This fact goes far to account for the subsequent political development of this class). Also included is a lot of useful material (plus extensive bibliographical references) on the question of the exact mode of production prevailing in India prior to its appropriation by the British Raj, i.e. the ongoing dispute between those who view this as a form of feudalism and those who see it as an example of the so-called “Asiatic Mode of Production”. Various facts adduced by Charles Wesley Ervin would appear to support the latter contention.
The bulk of the book deals with the early leaders of the LSSP, its formation and subsequent history up to 1948, but in the context of the decision to found the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) in 1941. Philip Gunawardena and his co-thinkers reasoned that an effective working class movement against the Raj needed to be organized on a sub-continental basis. The party was launched in time to intervene in the mass struggles which developed around Gandhi’s call to the British to “quit India”, which he issued following the dramatic victories won by the Japanese against Britain in 1942. The party urged support for any action against imperialism decided upon by Congress, but warned (correctly) that Gandhi might compromise. (Reading the descriptions of Gandhi’s relations with the Indian masses throughout the period covered by the book, one is reminded of James Connolly’s observations on Daniel O’Connell in Labour in Irish History.) There was, on the part of certain comrades, however, a tendency towards an exaggerated optimism – see Ervin’s comments on an article by Ajit Roy in 1943. (p. 130)Some of the best reportage in the book can be found in Chapter Five, where visits to India by certain British Trotskyists in uniform in the Second World War are described, such as, e.g. the following encounter:
Later that day Manickam took Scott to meet some of the party’s sympathizers from the Perambur railway workshops. They met in a hut in the slums. None of the Tamil workers could speak English. Manickam translated. Scott saw what it meant to be a Trotskyist in India. Here, in a hovel, lit only by flickering candles, the BLPI was teaching Marxism to illiterate workers who had just come off a 12-hour shift. (p. 150)
However, the author rightly refuses to confine himself to mere description of events, but makes criticisms where he believes they are justified, such as, for example, in the run-up to independence in 1947, when quite clearly the danger threatened of a deal between Gandhi and Congress, on the one hand, and the British Labour Government on the other, over the heads of the masses. Ervin writes
The Trotskyists wanted Congress to ‘return to the road of struggle’. But Nehru cast his lot with Gandhi. The BLPI directed biting propaganda at the Congress Socialists, pointing out their contradictions. The Socialists wanted struggle, but refused to break with the ‘bourgeois’ Congress. But these barbs, fired from afar, carried little sting. If the Trotskyists had been working in the Congress Socialist Party, as Philip Gunawardena had urged all along, they might have been able to influence a chunk of the Congress left. (pp. 173–4)
I really do not wish to say much more about this wonderful book: read it yourself, and learn, and decide. The only other thing I would like to draw attention to is Appendix B, which contains the 1942 Programme of the BLPI. This, in my view, is an educational document of very great importance. An introductory section on early European capitalist penetration of India leads into a discussion of British imperialism and its effects in India, leading to the conclusion that
The industrialization of India, on which her future depends, cannot be carried out without the overthrow of Imperialism and a sweeping transformation of agrarian relations. (p. 286)
This is followed by a survey of the various Indian social classes. The programme is then summarized in five points (p. 310) and set out in detail in the succeeding section (The Programme of Transitional Demands). The document concludes with a section devoted to international issues – the imperialist war, the Soviet Union and the various existing internationals.
Particularly useful is the section on trade unions, which surveys the whole range of institutions developed by the working class in this field up to and including sit-down strikes, factory committees and directly political soviets. (see pp. 317–324).Whatever one might think of the Fourth International’s 1938 Transitional Programme and its demands, there is no doubt that the BLPI’s 1942 Programme was a highly competent adaptation of such politics to the contemporary Indian situation, one which deserves serious study.
The author alludes to the possibility of a sequel to the work which would cover the period from the mid-1950s onwards. The appearance of such a volume would be very welcome.
Chris Gray
Note
1. Available from C. Chrysostom, 43 Harrold House, Finchley Road, London NW3 6JX.
**********
Ian Birchall
A Trotskyist in the Nazi hell
(2008)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2008, pp. 333–36.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Jean-René Chauvin
Un Trotskiste dans l’enfer nazi
Editions Syllepse, Paris 2006, pp. 245, €20
Un Trotskiste dans l’enfer nazi
Editions Syllepse, Paris 2006, pp. 245, €20
JEAN-René Chauvin became a Trotskyist in 1937. For seventy years he has remained true to his original commitment. In the 1940s he was a leading activist in Sartre and Rousset’s Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. During the Algerian war he was active in the Voie Communiste, and in the 1960s in the Parti socialiste unifié, after which he joined the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire. When I met him in Paris a few years ago he was, aged nearly eighty, visiting schools in Paris to tell of his experiences in the Nazi camps and to warn of the danger of the far right.
Now at the age of eighty-eight he has published an account of the most remarkable time of his life, his two years as a prisoner of the Nazis. He must be one of the few people alive who could write the staggering sentence about arriving in Buchenwald: “After being in Auschwitz and Mauthausen, the atmosphere there seemed to me to be much more relaxed.” Chauvin evokes vividly the nature of everyday life in the camps – the squalor, the lice, the hunger, the backbreaking work. He recalls how prisoners were awakened at 5.00 a.m. to go to work by a guard banging a hammer on a piece of rail. He cites an account of a Chinese concentration camp where prisoners were awakened in the same fashion – but at 4.00 a.m.Food rations were determined strictly by the work done by a particular prisoner. The Nazis had taken Marx’s notion of the reproduction of labour power to its logical conclusion. At one point Chauvin was assigned to a more strenuous task without an increase in his ration. He had to confront a foreman and demand an increase.
As a true internationalist, he was able to establish relations of solidarity with fellow-prisoners of many nationalities, and even, on occasion, establish some sort of human relationships with those supervising him. But as a Trotskyist he also faced particular dangers. On one occasion he was attacked by two Stalinists, who screamed at him that he was a “Hitlero-Trotskyist” and began to beat him. Fortunately he was rescued when two other Communist Party members came to his rescue. The Stalinists in the camp were by no means a monolithic body – for some the Moscow line predominated, for others their sense of class solidarity. But as he notes, in other cases Trotskyists were put to death by Stalinists in the camps.
In January 1945 Auschwitz was evacuated and Chauvin took part in the notorious “march of death” when thousands of prisoners were moved out on foot. One prisoner cut off his finger with an axe in the hope of avoiding the evacuation, but he was forced to march with the others. Many did not survive the journey.
Later he was evacuated from Buchenwald by train. Chauvin’s neighbour was leaning heavily on him, with his head on Chauvin’s shoulder, so he tried to wake the man, but realised that “he would never wake again”.
In retrospect it seems near miraculous that Chauvin should have lived to tell his story. He attributes his survival in some situations to the fact that he was fit and agile, having been a boxer and rugby player – a useful reminder to socialists who are disdainful of sport.
Chauvin has added one more to the set of Trotskyist autobiographies, of which a good number have appeared in France in recent years. [See my review of some of them in Historical Materialism, Vol. 13, No. 4. ] But the book is much more than just a personal memoir. Over the years Chauvin has found time to read and research widely on the question of concentration camps, and alongside his own story he gives a fascinating account of the history of this barbaric institution.
The earliest camps seem to have been set up by the Spanish general Weyler y Nicolau in Cuba, but much of the credit for developing them goes to the British (something not often recalled by those anxious to defend the “achievements” of the British Empire). He describes the use of the camps in the Boer War, and notes that Emily Hobhouse, who did so much to document the atrocious conditions in the camps where Boer prisoners were held, was not even allowed to visit the camps for black prisoners.
He gives an account of the Russian camps, from their origin in the late 1920s to the more brutal form they took under Stalin. He stresses the similarities between the Nazi and Stalinist camps and recalls the work done by such writers as Serge, Ciliga and Marcel Guiheneuf (Yvon) in publicising the camps when their very existence was denied by most of the left.
But as a revolutionary Chauvin knows the main enemy is at home, and he devotes some fascinating pages to the history of concentration camps in France. While the crimes of the Nazis on French soil are well documented, the camps set up in France before the German invasion have largely been written out of history. The first camps were those set up at the end of the Spanish civil war for the half million refugees who came over the Pyrenees, and who were less than welcome to the French government (still based on the Popular Front National Assembly elected with such hopes in 1936).They were initially simply herded onto the beaches, where some died of hunger and exhaustion; then they were redistributed to a number of camps in Southern France. At the outbreak of war, the government rounded up Germans, making the crude xenophobic assumption that all Germans (even German refugees who had fought against fascism in Spain) were on the side of Hitler. He notes in particular the internment of a group of nuns (obviously a serious threat to public order) on the grounds that they had been born in Alsace before 1919 when it was still ruled by Germany, and therefore were classified as German nationals! As he notes, there was much indignation in France when Pinochet used sporting stadiums for political prisoners, but France had done exactly the same in 1939.
Chauvin’s account is both depressing and inspiring, but perhaps the saddest chapter is the concluding one. Quite unbroken by his suffering, Chauvin immediately rejoined his Trotskyist comrades. The Second World War had been Trotskyism’s finest hour, when a small but courageous group of comrades had preserved the principles of proletarian internationalism.
Now there were new possibilities. Chauvin reproduces a document showing the precise membership figures for the Parti communiste internationaliste. In 1948 it had just 626 members, about one quarter of whom were industrial workers. Yet the press raised the spectre of “120,000 Trotskyists”. There was a real chance of the PCI uniting with the Socialist Party youth, who had been expelled from the party, and the ASR [Action socialiste et révolutionnaire], another split from the Socialist Party; the fused organisation could have several thousand members and made a real impact on French political life. But the majority of the organisation turned its back on the opportunities; there were two debilitating splits, one in 1948 (when Chauvin was expelled), and another in 1952. At the start of the Algerian war French Trotskyism was reduced to a bunch of tiny squabbling sects.
Chauvin’s concluding sentence is a melancholy one. But it is the fruit of tireless activism over eight decades, and may serve as a warning to the rest of us:
In my humble opinion it [the failure to unite] was due to the difference between the weakness of our forces and the exaggerated picture that both sides had of the extent of our opportunities, as well as to the passion for polemic, whereas all political decisions should be taken coolly.
***********Panegyric
DEBORD remains known to the English reader, if at all, as one of the leaders of the tiny Situationist International (SI), a body that produced some almost completely incomprehensible texts and exerted a temporary influence over a group of students during the May 1968 uprising in France. Having presided over the inner life of an “international” that consisted to a large degree of expelling its members for minuscule political deviations and thereafter producing supremely obscure texts denouncing them, Debord went on to dissolve the rump of the SI in a self-conscious parody of Marx’s winding up of the First International. The dissolution more closely paralleled the break-up of the Beatles, with the main lyricists’ parts being taken by Debord and his long time collaborator Raoul Vaneigem. Out of this career of wreckage and refusal, through processes that are difficult to understand, Debord became a kind of image of a certain kind of revolutionary attitude. In fact he became everything he must have hated to become – a projection not a person, projected by those who hated what they thought he wrote while failing to understand it, projected onto those who sought a cipher of revolution without wishing to make the effort to understand it.
The volume in review here consists of Books 1 and 2 of a projected larger work. Book 3 was said to be completed, and material in progress existed for other sections. This remaining material however was destroyed at or around the time Debord killed himself, at the end of November 1994, either by Debord or according to his expressed wishes. Book 2 is a collection of photographs and images that bear a relation to the text of Book 1, with some additional captions and quotations. Standing alone, it would carry no value. Discounting the pages of Book 2, we have about 65 pages of text that are to represent Debord’s account of himself, his times, his actions and refusals to act.Debord and the other situationists are best read in the most banal of circumstances: the re-reading that led to this review was begun on the westbound platform of the Central Line at Liverpool Street, at 10:48 a.m. on 28/12/05. I was on the way to the Tate Modern to see the Rousseau exhibition – imaginary predators in imaginary jungles circling compassless in the Saatchi shark tanks. Part of the situationists’ legacy is an acute awareness of the contrast between the worthless everyday and the full human potential of life – its intensity and variety, contrast and brightness. Part of their failure lies in their inability to relate to this contrast with anything more political than (richly merited) contempt.
Debord took the trouble to provide the reader with a clarification of the term “panegyric”; it goes beyond “eulogy” in so far as it “entails neither blame nor criticism”. My Collins English Dictionary goes, if anything, a little further, in defining panegyric as a “formal public commendation”. Debord certainly succeeds in the aim of excluding “criticism” from his text; there is no attempt to evaluate or assess his own actions or refusals to act. (This may be more valuable than it seems on the surface – the refusal to act and to explain refusal may be a way through the pro-situ mind-game, in which experienced players challenged newcomers to set down their positions, and then queried their follow up action on the basis of individualistic judgement. Is your critique radical enough to bring down the universe? Then why have you not launched upon it? Is it not? Then why have you not thought far enough?) He intended, as he describes it in the early parts of Book 1, to say what he did, what he wanted, what he loved, and he expected that all else would follow. With only the stump of his work we cannot take a view on whether he might have succeeded in such an enormous task. And if it is unfair to judge the failure of the whole by the survival of the part, the writer (and destroyer) not the reader must accept the blame and criticism.
Over twenty years ago I made a series of photographs, in Epping and Hainault Forests, and in Greenwich Park, of old trees pollarded and coppiced. My idea was to try to show the thwarted rhythmical power of the parental parts of the tree in contrast with the scarred, sedimented (but ecologically enriched) survivor. In some cases these old trees had lived through nearly four centuries of “management”. Debord himself was responsible for the destruction of his own text and his stump promises much that later sections were intended to deliver.
It would be a Borgesian exercise to attempt to reconstruct a memoir from the surviving introduction and the often disputed biographical information, but we can point to certain significant absences as well as presences. Debord states very early “My method will be very simple. I will tell what I have loved, and, in this light, everything else will become evident and make itself well enough understood.”
He loved to drink, and his most lyrical section is devoted to the pleasures of drinking and of drunkenness (an important distinction). In a passage that deserves to be remembered, he writes “Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than many people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.” Some of the judgements arrived at after a lifetime of dedicated drinking seem to me to be open to dispute. To raise up Pilsen as the greatest of beers, above the monastery beers of the lowlands and the white beers of Germany creates a difference with him as severe as any that his politics might. But in concluding his chapter on drink he mourns the destruction of splendid local beers, spirits and wines by the expansion of industry, and their replacement by undistinguished multinational products. “The bottles, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail gives the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be – but not to drink them.” (The small group that used to foregather with me in the Bulldog in Oxford, following WSL national aggregates, to quaff the now extinct Courage Reading bitter will endorse vigorously.) Here is the theory of the spectacle, presented more concisely, concretely and movingly than in all the pages of his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle and his 1988 commentary thereon.
Alcohol seems to have been the only intoxicant from which he benefited. Hashish and opium, well known to the bohemian heroes of his youth, seem not to have appealed to him, and he writes nothing of the psychedelics, either synthetic or natural. At one point his mask slips and he describes some of his critics as “a group of English drug addicts”.
Larger absences from the collection of what Debord loved present themselves – the proletariat never engaged his emotion, nor yet did Marx, nor any of his collaborators in the SI or earlier in his career, among the Lettrists. Cinema, to which he contributed some characteristically difficult works, did not receive his love.
Debord expends a short chapter on the interests to be enjoyed in the study of war. He had invented a board game “Kriegspiel” that he considered to have enshrined the lessons of this study. Compared to the computer war games on the market, his invention seems simple to the point of superficiality. Having attempted a few times to play it, I can confirm that it presents one of the key aspects of war – surprise – more ruthlessly than any army of programmers have achieved. If R.C. Bell were able to update his classic Board and Table Games, then Kriegspiel would certainly receive a honourable description. To those jaded chess and go-moku players whose hearts have leapt with pleasure at encountering the Mancala or Owari games, I commend Debord’s invention. In the labyrinth of delights that men have invented to stroke their brains to glow, to parody the soul in a soulless world, it is a wondrous conurbation of blind alleys.
Book 1 then, promises much – it promises facts and precise details, none of which are delivered. The claims made for its “classical” style are not without merit – the language and style are dignified, spare and precise (also formal as befits the definition of panegyric) even when considering the author’s own mortality. The translator allows the jarring Americanism “every which way” into the text at one point, but otherwise does an excellent job. Debord remarks on page 8, “the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in a writer”. True enough. It was not always a virtue that Debord possessed.
In summary, much more of a memorial than a memoir. To have lost so much of the history in Debord’s final potlatch is very regrettable, and not to have had his definitive assessment of the central aspects of the whole situationist project is sad indeed. Towards the end of his text, Debord writes “no-one has twice roused Paris to revolt” – an historical insight from which Trotsky might have learned, if not gained. For his contribution to having once roused it, Debord should be remembered.
J.J. Plant
Note
1. Translated by James Brook and John McHale.
***********Communism in India
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta
Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India 1919–1943
Seribaan, Kolkata 2006, pp. 329
Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India 1919–1943
Seribaan, Kolkata 2006, pp. 329
THE author is a professor of political science at Calcutta University, a historian of Marxist ideas, as well as of the movement inspired by them. His sympathies lie, however, not with officialdom and its interpretation of the movement’s history, but with the critical evaluations produced since the archives became more accessible, and the dissenting, even oppositional, figures who advanced alternative strategies and programmes. In this spirit the author set to work examining Indian communism during the life of the Comintern. In the course of a decade’s research he used, among many other sources, the archives of the Comintern (Moscow), the CPGB (Manchester), and valuable collections of a noted GDR scholar and an anonymous Indian communist leader. In the preface Sobhanlal Datta Gupta (henceforth SDG) describes his task as having been “challenging”, due to the left in India being “still heavily dominated by the spirit of Stalinism”, but hopes that, by attempting “to understand the moments of crisis which communism in India has encountered and examining the possible alternatives”, the book will “encourage critical thinking and thus assist the left in finding a way forward”. (p. xx)
The first chapter sets out key issues for investigation vis-à-vis Comintern and the new historiography, and SDG points out that prior to the opening of the archives to Soviet scholars in 1987, and internationally in 1991, it was not possible to make an objective evaluation of the Comintern, one had the official view on one hand, or ones tending to subjective judgements, as evidence was lacking. Initially critical scholars attempting to reassess Comintern were met with resistance both in Russia and the GDR. The Stalin-Hitler Pact, the sectarian line towards social democracy, the repression meted out to political emigrants in the USSR, for example, investigated by the likes of F. Firsov and A. Vatlin, threatened to undermine the SED’s fundamentals. While party historians tried to shore-up the Stalinist view, it was Kurt Hager of all people, the SED’s chief ideologue, who came out for a reassessment. This encouraged Erwin Lewin to reassess the Comintern and the Pact, which “had led to severe downplaying of anti-fascist propaganda ... seriously hamper(ing) the resistance of the KPD … since not fascism, but British imperialism and its accomplice, namely, the leadership of Social Democracy, came to be targeted as the main forces responsible for the war”. (p. 11)Assorted opinions on how to periodise the Comintern’s history are examined, the question of how much autonomy the parties enjoyed, the role of the Cadre Department, which was “an organ of surveillance … act(ing) in close coordination with the ECCI and the NKVD” (p. 21), the Russification process that meant decisions being first taken in the WKP(b) Politbureau. The process was possible, SDG informs us, resting upon a Russian source, “because no democratically conceived procedure for elections to the posts of Chairman, Secretary, General Secretary, members of the ECCI and the Presidium of the ECCI existed and their functions also were not clearly defined in the rules”. (p. 22) In discussing the repression in the Comintern, in which the ECCI was complicit, SDG refers to the resistance to it, which in my opinion was too little too late, and alternatives. The Pact, the Comintern’s dissolution, Stalin’s letter on Bolshevism’s history, are all brought in to the discussion prior to SDG going on to Indian communism vis-à-vis the new historiography.
Besides the Comintern archives, those of the CPGB provide a vital source for elaborating a reliable history of communism in India, as from the late 1920s it was through the CPGB that the Comintern related to the CPI, and from the mid-30s, India was represented in the Comintern officially by Ben Bradley, the other leading personality … in this connection being R. Palme Dutt. (pp. 35/6)
Apart from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, which has begun an ambitious publishing project on Indo-Russian relations, in collaboration with the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, SDG regards the response to the possibilities opened up by the access to these priceless archives as “dismal, if not puzzling”, characterised by “a strange apathy, if not resistance, towards exploration of this area”. (p. 36) In fact, “after the opening or the archives, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the leading party of the mainstream Left in India today, has published several volumes and commentaries containing documents on the history of Indian communism in the Comintern period (without reference to the archives or new research), resulting in a simple repeat of the official version of Party history ...” (p. 37)
M.N. Roy was the dominant figure vis-à-vis Comintern and Indian communism until the late 1920s, and helped shape policy on the National Question, but in his research SDG has been able to flesh out the views of other Indian currents that were not so dismissive of mainstream nationalism in India, namely, the Indian Revolutionary association located in Tashkent, and the grouping in Berlin. The former insisted that a proletarian revolution under CP leadership was not just around the corner in India, and that one had to take into account not just of nationalism(s) but religion, caste and community. Neither could one gain influence by pure hostility to Gandhi. The Berlin group favoured an anti-imperialist front perspective uniting communists and non-communist revolutionaries.
SDG was also able to find materials relating to the political and military training of Indian revolutionaries in Soviet Russia and the key role played by the Soviet Embassy in Kabul in transporting them back to India. Amir Amanullah of Afghanistan was friendly disposed towards Soviet Russia, and his relations with Britain were strained. The break-up of empires, emergence of new states; wars in the Caucasus, the Bolshevik appeal to Muslim and oriental peoples, all helped create fear regarding India. This led to literature from or about Soviet Russia or Lenin being seized at special checkposts set up all over India. Indian communists residing in Russia during the purges suffered from the terror, and SDG found out what had happened to prominent figures.
With the exit of M.N. Roy from Comintern in 1929, the CPGB became de-facto guardian of the CPI, and SDG examines the reason why no Indian was entrusted with Indian affairs there. This was problematic from the start, he discovered, as the CPGB, was, as were European parties in general, “Eurocentric”, and seemed to be indifferent to the colonial question, and moreover, tended to “boss” Indian communists. Documents were found from the 20s to the 40s in which CP leaders express exasperation at an “empire consciousness” present within the ranks of the party, whereby the plight of India was absent from their minds. One can imagine the existence of such a consciousness within the working class in general, perhaps among some party members, but I doubt that it was a common feature. Surely communists would have faced great difficulties advancing policies opposed to British imperialism, perhaps they chose to prioritise other matters and put India on the back-burner, The private papers of both Palme Dutt and Bradley confirm their vehement hostility towards Gandhi, continuing a line set out by Roy, which harmed the CPI. It turns out that the CPGB maintained a close link with Jawaharlal Nehru during the late 30s and 40s.
The ultra-left line imposed by the Comintern following the adoption of the programme in 1928, and its consequences for India, is also examined. The orientation for the colonies set out in his time by Lenin, and elaborated at the 4th Congress into the anti-imperialist united front, was junked and all nationalist forces were denounced as henchmen of imperialism, particularly those on the left. Not only Gandhi but Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose were labelled “agents of British imperialism”. Crazy instructions were sent to the CPI which, at that time, barely existed as a party.
Comintern directives, SDG discovered, were not as hitherto believed, accepted uncritically by the CPI, and if the ultra-left line created problems, the shift following the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935, proved difficult to gain acceptance, as the previous line, it was insisted, was not an error. With the Nazi-German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, WW2 underwent a change of character, the CPI had to be convinced to stop opposing British imperialism, which had ceased to be the most malign force on the planet, but to support this ally of the Soviet Union. This would have enormous repercussions for the CPI. These bizarre zig-zags of the Comintern seem to be all the more grotesque when imposed on the CP of a colony struggling for independence.
The book is divided into six chapters, the last of which discusses oppositional currents within the Comintern and what could have been, based on SDG’s analysis of the new research. For what it is worth I would agree with his general conclusions. The book has all the necessary scholarly attributes, including a bibliography and an index, and for ease the notes follow each chapter. There is an enormous amount of material packed into this study, of which I have only been able to give a flavour. It broadens our knowledge of the Comintern, Indian communism and the CPGB, as well as the relationship between them. One can only hope that the book gets a wider readership in India, where the communist movement is still an important political force, which could benefit from the knowledge contained within if discussed in an open fashion.
Mike Jones
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Free Hungary
Julien Papp
La Hongrie libérée; Etat, pouvoir et société après la défaite du nazisme (Septembre 1944–Septembre 1947)
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006, pp. 363
La Hongrie libérée; Etat, pouvoir et société après la défaite du nazisme (Septembre 1944–Septembre 1947)
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006, pp. 363
READING this book gave me many intense pleasures. And so too does the opportunity to present it to a wider readership. For one thing, the author is a friend, a former optical technician and Hungarian exile who by sheer courage and determination completed a long and difficult course of university study as an external student to become a French secondary school history teacher and a talented historian. For another, he has taken on the not inconsiderable difficulties and complexities of the immediate post-war period in a country previously dominated by an archaic social system, Hitler’s last satellite.
My personal satisfaction is all the greater in that I myself lived through those times. Young as I was, I participated actively in the struggles described in this book. My knowledge of them is intimate, however circumscribed its scope. Moreover, I read this book with the feelings and fervour of a committed contemporary.The book’s first and most obvious merit is that it exists at all. It has immediately assumed an important place among the wealth of Hungarian historiography devoted to the problems of the birth and early years of the new regime and of democracy. It is one of those rare works which attempts to summarise and synthesise the overall history of that period in a monograph. But it is also distinguished – advantageously in my view – by its concentration on a few short but decisive years in the formation of the new regime. The very few other monographic works that exist cover a much longer period of several decades, within which the short period which concerns us is necessarily proportionately reduced. Our author, on the other hand, considers the period concerned to be essential. By concentrating on a few brief years, Papp’s study is able not only to focus on a number of different topics in minute detail but also systematically to study historical development in its various components.
It is this very globality of investigations, embracing the wide variety of different subjects that go to make up the structure of historical development, which marks Papp’s book out from the majority of other Hungarian historical studies. Most, if not all, of the great wealth of historical writing devoted to the period in question tackles a number of different topics, events or developments taken in isolation.
The monograpic character of Papp’s study of the whole range of historical development as well as its concentration and focus on two or three essential years give this book an intrinsic value which marks it out favourably from almost everything that has been produced in the way of Hungarian history. These qualities place the work in the front rank amongst them.
What makes it particularly valuable is that it was published, not in Hungarian, an isolated language and one not easily accessible to non-speakers, i.e. to the vast majority of historians and political activists interested in history, but in French. It thus fills a significant gap in our knowledge (or rather quasi-ignorance) of the history of that part of Europe.
And there is much more. Most, if not all, the Hungarian historians who have tackled this subject in one way or another have been subjected to considerable influences, first and foremost those of the Stalinists in power, at least in the modified form of Janos Kadar. Others – very often the same people – have been ensnared by the mirage of the various kinds of historical writing guided by newer political modes and imperatives. Consequently the independent role of the popular masses and their organs, however present and visible they were, has been unceremoniously downplayed, not to say entirely suppressed. To say the least it has been obscured and distorted. In this, Stalinist state power under Rakosi and then Kadar as well as the democratic regime which followed have inspired exactly the same attitude amongst a range of different authors.
As far as I know, apart from one or two notable but very isolated exceptions, only Papp’s work has restored them their rightful pre-eminent role and function in the country’s quasi-revolutionary transformation from fascist dictatorship to democracy. Moreover, he is the only one to have clearly and unequivocally pointed out how prominent they were in these decisive developments. Workers, peasants, the popular masses as a whole in their spontaneously-formed committees, occupy a primordial place here in the whole historical development.
The author not only presents their birth, their composition and their activity in detail – he devotes more than a third of the book to this! – but also considers them to be the principal actors, the axis and pivot of democratic transformation. As he says in the Introduction:
My approach aims to restore the workers, peasants and other ‘little people’ of Hungary to their true place as protagonists, which dominant memories have never ceased to distort and efface since the Stalinist turn of September 1947. (p. 10)
As he sums up in his Conclusions: “It was the minorities most interested in social transformation” (actually the great majority – B.N.) “who were led to take in hand the cause of bourgeois democracy …” (p. 305) And Papp has no hesitation in seeing in this “in a sense the delayed action of the Russian revolution, its social ‘momentum’!” (p. 304)
Here lies the book’s fundamental interest and its main merit. The author provides a detailed account of the struggles of workers and peasants who gathered together spontaneously. They organised committees which arose as the the whole socio-political system of the old regime and its state collapsed. More than that: he puts the whole activity of these committees at the centre of his book and his analyses, without, however, betraying his commitment as a historian or, indeed, forgetting other aspects of the country’s life and the unfolding of its history.Precisely because they set out to establish and organise a new democratic regime. Papp explains, the people in action and their spontaneous organs collided with the installation and re-inforcement of the new state power: not only with reactionary forces from the past – strong remnants of the fascist administration as well as exponants and defenders of bourgeois social relations, mixed with living relics of feudalism – but also no less violently with the organisations and representatives of the new rulers, above all the Stalinists.
The author shows and fully documents how the latter did everything they could to maintain the old social relations and keep bourgeois political forces – however modified – in a coalition of parties representing the new democracy and its state. In doing so, the coalition of parties faithfully reflected the wartime allied powers. Apart from drawing spheres of influence, none of these powers – including and above all the Soviet Union – had any plan prepared for the social order in Hungary or, indeed, the general shape of the new democracy born of the outcome of the war. The author demonstrates that, by common agreement, these powers tried to preserve the preceding bourgeois order in broad outline, including its state administration, virtually intact.
In their role of occupiers, the allied powers forcibly imposed this policy, the USSR well to the fore and playing a particular role. The author lays bare their arrogance and their insistance on making the country pay not only excessive war reparations but also the daily costs of the occupation and its various bodies. One reads with amazement how the politico-military and diplomatic bodies (and not just those of the USSR) made a Hungary bled white by war pay not only onerous reparations but also for their occupiers’ personal luxuriess, such as flowers! Presenting the enormous financial burden imposed on the country in detail, the author makes no bones about saying that “… the cost of the upkeep of the ACC (Allied Control Commission) and the (Soviet) army of occupation took Hungary to the very limit of what she could manage”. (p. 73)
But the author affirms that the main grievance against the the allied occupation forces was political. And he presents in minute detail their continual and daily interference in political life in order to shore up the coalition against the concrete and permanent threat presented by the committees. In particular Papp shows the Soviet Commission’s systematic efforts as the main occupation force led by Marshal Voroshilov to channel the country in that direction – both as the main occupying army but also through its local agents, the Hungarian Communist Party.
The non-communist parties in the coalition constantly appealed to the Allied Control Commission – and especially it main Soviet component – to intervene in order to “regularise” the situation by restraining the committees’ revolutionary zeal.
The committees did indeed show impressive power and energy. The author presents the three different forms which they took: factory committees, land committees and finally national committees. The first took direct charge of the factories at the end of the war, when the majority of the owners fled or were scared. These spontaneous workers’ organs took complete control of the factories. In fact what they wanted was not ownership of the plant but a share in the way they were managed. Papp shows that in this way they achieved genuine workers’ control. The Hungarian Communist Party worked up a hysterical campaign and a constant struggle against them, resolutely siding with the bourgeois owners and their organisations which, although still weak, grew ever stronger bolder thanks to that support. This was despite the fact that the great majority of committees were communist or social democrat, and that “all” they wanted was workers’ control. Even so, they represented an enormous threat to class collaboration. Not for nothing was the Communist Party’s main and permanent propaganda and political campaign – how vividly I still remember it to this day – directed against the “men of 1919”, referring to the short-lived Hungarian soviet republic of 1919! The workers really did not understand the class-collaboration with the bourgeoisie forced on the masses by those in power. And the author describes those years as a period of “latent civil war”. (p. 58)
In parallel with this development and immediately after the cessation of hostilities, there began the occupation and expropriation of the land on quite a large scale and the appearance of committees of – landless – peasants. Although it was a less important phenomenon than the factory committees, it was nevertheless very widespread and general. In any case the serious pressure they exerted forced a radical distribution of the land, a quasi-revolutionary act which quickly and officially did away with the great agricultural estates. Despite any difficulties it may have caused them, all the coalition partners quickly agreed the radical terms of the land reform in order to avoid a major social upheaval.
As for the national committees, they arose to replace the state administration, which had completely collapsed and fragmented and a large part of whose members had fled abroad. A network of these committees covered the entire country and took over local government. They replaced the missing state administration and like the other committees, with the participation of rank-and-file members of various parties, particularly workers’ parties, they took control locally, just as the soviets did in their day.
This veritable network of committees, which in reality was council rule in embryo, also very quickly collided with attempts by the coalition government to reorganise a central state power. The Communist Party appeared to defend these committees, but only as organs of the coalition of parties. At the same time it stated openly that they “could not constitute a second organ of power side by side with the government authorities.” (p. 190) The author quotes Rakosi’s own memoirs to show how frequent the conflicts were between the Budapest committee and the government: “… from the simple fact that the government was far to the right of the national committee which was under the influence of the (Buda) Pest workers.” (p. 188)
One way to neutralise the committees as a whole (factory committees, land committees and the local committees) was quickly and artificially to centralise them under the almost total domination of the Communist Party. Papp writes: “… the party only embraced the movement in order all the better to strangle it”. (p. 177) Thus centralising them on a national level was only a prelude to their early death, since it was essentially designed and carried out by the Communist Party.
To convey the character of the permanent conflict between the coalition’s emerging central power and the committees, the author quotes a speech made decades later by Ferenc Donáth (under secretary to the minister of agriculture, Imre Nagy’s assistant in 1945). He said: “Nothing demonstrates better the strength and social significance of the popular desire to exercise public authority than the attitude of the new central power, which opposed it in practice from the very first moment of its existence and which did everything it could to stifle it … In this respect, there was no difference between left and right in the coalition … the strength of the popular movement shattered against the massive and unyielding wall of the coalition.” (p. 194) This same Donáth wrote, of the factory councils: “All of us who participated in the leadership at the time … did what we could to limit and, as soon as we could, suppress democracy in the factories, the institution of factory councils.” (p. 195)
How clear and eloquent. I must say that, alongside Imre Nagy, Donáth became one of the leaders of the communist opposition and then of the revolution of 1956. But he was not the only one. In his book Papp also quotes the opinion of István Bibó who, as a prominent member of (as it happens) the peasant party in 1944–1947 stated his fervent support for the committees. Or one could mention István Márkus, a young sociologist who wrote important studies devoted to the committees.
In fact – although the author doesn’t say a word about this – I can personally state that between 1944 and 1947 Hungary saw the unfolding and then the rapid stifling of the permanent revolution as worked out by Trotsky. In his view, the bourgeois democratic revolution in a backward country can, in our epoch, only be brought about under the leadership of the proletariat. And so in Hungary – as the author actually tells us – all the demands of bourgeois democracy were achieved under constant pressure from the working class and the peasantry, including the radical and revolutionary land distribution. All the Communist Party itself could do was at best to follow a movement which went far beyond what it wanted. In doing so, it took great care to strangle the autonomous organs of that revolution.
Prospects for and limitations upon the Political and Social Revolution is the title the author gives to one section of the book – the longest one, and the backbone of the whole work. His great merit is to show us this permanent revolution in progress, channelled and finally strangled by the USSR and the Stalinist Communist Party. Although the author never uses the adjective “permanent” in relation to the revolution then underway, and does not use Trotsky’s name, his book talks constantly about the direct democracy of the masses and does involuntary hommage to the theoretician of permanent revolution.
Papp’s main thesis, which he develops and documents very well, is that although the revolution was stifled, channelled and deformed, it largely, not to say decisively, dictated the political path the international protagonists finally followed. The USSR and the Hungarian Communist Party were obliged to go much further than they wanted to in bringing about and establishing a “socialism” which, it is true, was in their image and shaped in their very largely deformed and falsified way. But they had to do it despite their initial intentions. After all, the bourgeois western Allies, in line with their agreements with the USSR at Yalta and Potsdam, had given Moscow a free hand to sort out the threatening revolution – while of course maintaining the appearance of being “defenders of democracy”.
Papp uses the tools of historical science to prove that, in the course of this process, the USSR and the Hungarian Communist Party were obliged to change their initial programme. Instead of participating in the peaceful formation of a bourgeois democracy, as they planned in advance, they were confronted with the birth and superabundant activity of the popular masses’ direct democracy. Even though they were able to withstand them and ultimately suppress their organs, they nevertheless had, while establishing their own anti-popular dictatorship, to expropriate the bourgeoisie and introduce essential reforms, all, of course, in their own repulsive and fundamentally anti-democratic image. Of course the author says nothing about this poisoned fruit of the conflict between the committees and the authorities in those years. But his book enables us to understand how the path to it was traced by the struggle the Hungarian Communist Party and the USSR waged against the committees.
The author also says nothing about the revolution of 1956. However, reading his book, one inevitably thinks of the rapid and widespread formation of workers’ councils and other popular committees in which the revolutionary people spontaneously and very quickly found the logical and obvious successors to its post-war committees. The Hungarian workers were inspired not only by their fathers’ struggle for the Hungarian soviet republic in 1919, not only by the Russian Revolution, but also and to a great extent by their own struggles in 1944–1947. In the speed with which their councils appeared and the vigour which they displayed, should we not see the living inspiration provided by these post-war committees? I certainly think so. It is no accident that all the prominent politicians whom Papp quotes as acknowledging the fundamental role the committees played in those years themselves participated actively in events and later played an leading and important role in 1956; men like Donáth, Bibó and Márkus.
I must mention that this author is a historian and not an ideologue. He examines all the components and aspects of historical development in detail, from the profound devastation of the war, through the persecution and massive and atrocious extermination of the Jews and the role of abject anti-Semitism, the inhuman population transfers and the establishment and role of military and diplomatic occupation, to the re-constitution of a central power, the state and its organs. It is a vast overall picture that Papp presents which even a reader familiar with the subject can study with interest and also pleasure. The very occasional omissions or mistakes easily recede in the face of this book’s many merits and virtues.
Not the least among them is the impressive apparatus at the end supporting the book. The footnotes and references on each page alone provide a rich and varied documentation to accompany the text. The author enumerates in an extensive summary the archives and materials consulted and the many books and articles referred to. They are presented in an impressive way and moreover introduce the reader to a mass of original sources and a rich and varied literature on the subject. A short biographical resumé of the main actors and events and an index of names and places usefully completes the book.
To summarise: a significant and precious contribution which enriches the historiography of contemporary Europe. A translation into English would fill a significant gap in the historical material available to the English reader.
Balazs Nagy
Translated by Bob Archer
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Henryk Grossman
Rick Kuhn
Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism
University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2006, pp. 333
Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism
University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2006, pp. 333
IN a Smithian world of abstract trade, it would be easy to imagine that a bag of apples might be taken to a market and sold there at a profit. This simple process of production and market exchange should be capable of infinite reproduction. But add contemporary capitalism, and the apple will be grown from copyrighted seeds, sprayed with insecticide manufactured by one of two or three giant producers, grown to tasteless colours and anodyne proportions, waxed, bagged, and probably binned uneaten at the end in a dump where (due to inadequate airing), the apple itself might be preserved for a hundred years without rotting. Capital is accumulated, wages are made, but finite resources (oil, land, time) are wasted indefinitely.
The widespread environmental consciousness that capitalism is an economic order barely compatible with human sustainability reminds us of an earlier set of economic arguments, which also portrayed capitalism as breakdown system. In his sixties, living in America far from the Austria into which he had been born, the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman explained to his friend the novelist Christian Stead why he had become a Marxist: ‘I feel as if I saw a dangerous badly made deadly machine running down the street, when it gets to that corner it is going to explode and kill everyone and I must stop it. Once you feel this it gives you great strength, you have no idea, there is no limit to the strength it gives you.’ The publication of Rick Kuhn’s biography is a timely opportunity to show that such insights were not accidental to Grossman’s life but in fact intrinsic to his whole way of thinking.Born to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family, Grossman became a socialist in his teens. His campaigning life reached an early peak in May 1905, just weeks after Grossman’s 24th birthday, when a Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia was launched. Grossman authored the group’s first pamphlet, on the Jewish Question. For the next three years, he was the party’s unofficial leader. Although Galicia was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the majority language in the region was Polish. The JSDP was strongly influenced by the main trends of Russian socialism, including both Bundism and Bolshevism. The mass strikes seen in Russia and Poland in 1905 spread, and Grossman was soon addressing marches of up to 50,000 people. The JSDP grew, reaching its highest membership of around 3,000. For the next two years, he threw himself into party activity. Only slowly did the upturn subside. Grossman left for Vienna in 1908, but was re-elected to the party’s executive, in absentia, for several years following his departure.
From a period as a revolutionary agitator, Grossman settled into the very different life of a university academic. He spent the 1914–18 war working for the Austrian government as a statistician. Travelling to Poland in 1919, he was appointed to a professorship on economic policy and joined the Communist Party. Later Grossman settled in Germany, where he became the Frankfurt School’s leading economist. It was from this post in 1929 that he published his best-known book The Law of Accumulation and the Collapse of the Capitalist System. For most readers today, Grossman is known if at all through the Pluto 1992 edition of this study: an incomplete text which misses out the entire last chapter of Grossman’s work.
The Law of Accumulation was a polemic with at least three targets in mind. The first was Edward Bernstein’s claim, from thirty years’ previously, that capitalism was an economic system marked by increasing order and stability. Grossman disagreed. A second target was Rosa Luxemburg, the woman seen by most of Grossman’s contemporaries as the heroine of their generation. Luxemburg’s considered response to Bernstein was to argue that capitalist reproduction depended on the expansion of market relationships to the countries of the non-capitalist world. At some point, this task would be finished, and capitalism would be incapable of further expansion. Grossman argued that such a method had in essence little in common with Marx, who located the key contradictions of capitalism not in circulation but in production. A third target was the parliamentary socialist Otto Bauer, who had used a simplified version of the calculations set out in the second volume of Marx’s Capital, to show that so long as the state regularly intervened to stabilise capitalism (by maintaining the correct ratio of outputs between means of production and means of consumption), the system could go on forever without crisis.
Grossman disagreed. His basic premise was as follows: in a system of competitive exchange, producers will invest in new machinery in an attempt to achieve an advantage over their rivals. For a single producer, investment will enable the same or a rising quantity of goods to be produced with a falling labour cost. Investment enables the sole manufacturer to produce more cheaply. The same processes, however, multiplied across the system as a whole, result in a general process whereby total output grows, but so does the proportion of total spending taken up by new machinery. The ratio of constant capital (machinery) to variable capital (wages) tends to rise in favour of the former. In a passage in the third volume of Capital, whose prominence in Marxist discussions since 1929 is largely Grossman’s doing, Marx describes this process as the tendency for the organic composition of capital to rise. Bauer acknowledged that the rate of profit might decline, but argued that this process was not fatal to the system, so long as some profit was made. Decline could be offset by state investment. Grossman took the same equations, ran them for a longer period, and used them to show that where the rate of profit declines inexorably, the result is inevitably a crisis to the system. By year 35 of Bauer’s model, there was no longer any surplus either for investment or even for private consumption. The system could run no further.
There is all the difference in the world, of course, between showing that a model of private economic exchange must lead to crisis, and showing that the same dynamics are manifest not in a intellectual model, but in the real economy. In the concluding chapters of his book, Grossman listed the countervailing tendencies that might result in sustained expansion. Among these he mentioned decreases in world commodity prices, decreases in the unit cost of labour power, more efficient transport, the emergence of new commodities, even war, one of whose consequences was the destruction of capital value on a giant scale. Conversely, he identified the struggle for reforms as a major impediment to indefinite expansion: where workers could increase the unit price of labour, inevitably this placed greater costs on the system, and brought closer the possibility of social transformation.
How relevant is this model to contemporary Green thinking? While the detail of each model is different, the outline is similar. A system familiar to us as one of dynamic reproduction contains beneath its surface elements of both movement and inertia. Over time, the static becomes increasingly significant, with the result that the machine comes eventually to a halt. This breakdown is not a peaceful, natural process. It is accompanied either (to Grossman’s mind) by bitter strikes and labour tumults or (in contemporary ecological thought) by drowned cities, plains lost to the desert, the inexorable expansion of wasteland, by migration, hunger and poverty. The successful avoidance of this catastrophe will require a pooling of great collective effort, and an extraordinary redistribution of human ingenuity. In that long process, Grossman’s politics will surely seem more relevant than ever.
David Renton
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Stalinism
Alter Litvin and John Keep,
Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millenium,
Routledge, London 2005, pp. 48
Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millenium,
Routledge, London 2005, pp. 48
THIS is an odd review to write. It is a review of a review, or rather of an extended review of recent Russian and Western (defined as British, American, French and German) writings on Stalinism. The authors aim to illustrate ‘what has been achieved of late by professional historians’, ‘to take stock of this literature, to offer encouragement or constructive criticism where it seems to be called for, and to indicate how the gaps in our knowledge might best be filled by future researchers’ (p. vii). The book is divided into two parts, the first a survey of Russian writings by a Russian (Alter Litvin of Kazan) and the second a survey of Western writings by a Westerner (John Keep of Bern). The surveys are of necessity confined to certain key works related to ‘political, economic, social and cultural matters, and even so have had to be selective’ (p. ix). The division of labour is all too obvious. Might it perhaps have been better to treat ‘knowledge’ as complete whatever its point of origin and had a genuinely co-authored book; or why not have had Litvin comment on the West and Keep on the East? As it stands the book is a reflection of current world politics in that Russia is included but marginalised, with Keep writing the bulk of the material plus the conclusion. Nevertheless the authors do provide what they promise, especially when all of the relevant qualifications have been put in place. The book can therefore be consulted for a flavour of what has been said by professional historians with comments from our authors. There also emerges a picture of what trends have dominated recent writings from those on offer.
First the status of the archives and archival research. Litvin begins the first chapter on sources thus: ‘The quest for truth about the Stalin era must begin with a look at the situation in Russian archives’ (p. 3), and by ‘situation’ he means issues of access, bemoaning the fact that ‘it used to be much easier to gain access to sensitive material under Boris Yeltsin than it is today’ (p. 3). This no doubt tells us something about the changing political situation from Yeltsin to Putin but even with complete and open access to the archives we should be clear that ‘truth’ would not leap out at us. This is partly because the archives were not kept with the intention that one day they would reveal the truth to curious historians. It is important to understand how archives were established, at what time and by whom. How was material stored and has it undergone any reorganisations? This comment relates in particular to local archives targeted by some historians in the expectation that they provide a ‘view from the periphery’ but often ignoring the fact that local archives were modelled on or affected by the central archivists. It is also because documents are only ever a partial reflection of individuals, groups, movements, institutions, and historical and social processes. One may thus read every document in the Trotsky archive at Harvard and still not know ‘the full Trotsky’. Keep’s comment that even after the opening of the archives ‘the inner recesses of Stalin’s mind (and it was he who took the decisions) still invite speculation’ (p. 192) can come as a surprise only to anyone who thought that the archives would reveal the inner recesses of Stalin’s mind. Of course they will not!Second, there is the issue of no matter how many materials one reads what counts is what sort of questions one asks of documents, i.e., one’s methodology is key. Here attention focuses on the use of ‘revisionism and post-modernism’ and the ‘totalitarian controversy’. Keep acknowledges that there are nuances within these ‘schools’ and that there can be a fair amount of overlap between different methodologies. The conclusion however that ‘all approaches are valid and there is something to learn from each’ (p. 99) is just bland and all too typical of the type of ‘critical analysis’ engaged in throughout the text. The authorial judgements are brief and passed on very brief summaries. I wonder, for example, of the use to anybody to know that Keep wonders whether ‘the sub-title of her study (Melanie Ilic’s Women Workers in the Soviet InterWar Economy: From ‘Protection’ to ‘Equality’) is appropriately worded’ (p. 141). The only way to reach one’s own view is to read the work itself, but then this is true of every work mentioned.
Third, the issue of morality and moral stances is clearly of import for both authors. For Litvin, ‘state socialism turned out to be rotten at the core and eventually collapsed. This means that there can be no excuse for the Terror either: it is in fact unpardonable from every point of view. In the Soviet era, its only defenders were the people responsible for it; the rest just went along with them out of fear.’ (p. 69) For Keep, ‘licensed and arbitrary violence was the principal characteristic of Stalinist rule … “Stalinist civilization” is a phenomenon of our own age and has to be judged by contemporary criteria of right and wrong’ (pp. 214–215). For Keep the lesson that Russians must draw is how wrong the USSR was to take Russia from the path of capitalist, liberal democracy. A study of Stalinism should help Russians ‘to promote the development of a mature civic society, democracy and the rule of law, and to make industrial enterprises more efficient and internationally competitive, for in today’s globalized world market increased trade (preferably not just in raw materials) and foreign investment are the surest means of improving popular living standards’ (p. 216).
Such ‘liberal morality’ is no doubt shared by most authors considered in this book for ultimately one is struck by how little an understanding of Stalinism is promoted by modern scholarship. Stalin did not operate in this moral universe. Rather his rule was the outcome of battles won and lost within the revolutionary movement. It is this movement that seems to be completely forgotten by modern scholars – a reason no doubt that Keep did not consider any of the volumes of Revolutionary History in his survey of recent Western literature on Stalinism. Rather than trouble oneself with the modern academe, readers are better advised to go back to the classics of contemporary Marxism, particularly Trotsky and even the Menshevik observers around The Socialist Herald. My failure to connect with revolutionary politics is a flaw of my Trotsky biography and reading this book has helped me to understand that better if nothing else.
Ian D. Thatcher
Karl Radek
Jean-François Fayet
Karl Radek (1885–1939), Biographie politique
Peter Lang, Bern 2004, pp. 813
Karl Radek (1885–1939), Biographie politique
Peter Lang, Bern 2004, pp. 813
KARL Radek has fascinated historians again and again. With his linguistic ability to move in the different cultural spaces and just as nimbly on the political terrain between Russia and Germany, or the level of the established state power as of the Communist International, the Jewish intellectual from Galicia was made into the prototype of the professional communist revolutionary This was particularly valid for Germany, the country that surely stood most strongly at the centre of his interest. Although the first comprehensive biography came from the USA [1], it was soon followed by a series of studies devoted to his activities concerning Germany. [2] The occupation with his biography then finally took a turn into fiction. [3]
Without doubt he embodied in a graphic way the rise, and equally the decline of the communist movement, as early as the thirties, expressed in the mass terror. His reputation as an intriguer and a not very trustworthy person too, belonged to the picture of him presented already by his contemporaries. As the Swiss social-democrat Robert Grimm; who collaborated with him in the Zimmerwald movement, discretely put it, “Radek a very experienced journalist in colonial questions, but not an outstanding character”. [4]What united the various works about him, owing to the requirement to know one’s way about in the appropriate countries and languages, and above all due to the inaccessibility of the Soviet archives, was the obligation for a long time to limit them to investigating only a part of his life, mostly the years connected to Germany. The (partial) opening of the Moscow archives has at least removed the greatest hindrance. It has then, however, taken still more years until one found in the Genevan Jean-Francois Fayet someone who also possessed the linguistic preconditions. As a result of his many years of research; not only but mainly in Moscow, there now exists an extensive biography, of which one can say in advance that it has everything in order to become the standard work on Radek.
Introduced with short explanations about the fate of Radek’s personal archive – what can be found where again today in Moscow, and what could possibly be in archives still inaccessible today – the author develops his presentation in a fairly chronological way. Although Fayet has his own quite particular interests, he considers in a suitable manner; which constitutes the great value of this biography, all Radek’s biographical periods, in which the latter, as is known, was active in very different political contexts and places.
He begins with a detailed portrayal of Radek’s – or more precisely Karl Sobelsohn’s – youth in an “enlightened” Jewish parental home. Born in Lemberg in 1885, following the early death of his father, his mother brought him up alone in Tarnow. Versed in the traditions of the Polish struggle for freedom from his earliest youth, his “political socialisation” then followed at Krakau university. Though German was the language of the empire and thus represented an offer of assimilation for a developed Jewish middle-class, it also influenced Radek from his childhood. The road to social democracy was thus, in a sense, sketched out, and led him into the revolutionary grouping around Rosa Luxemburg, the SDKPiL, which gave the national struggle no great importance – rather saw it as a distraction from the class struggle. This first chapter about his “apprenticeship years” comprises a tenth of the volume and ends with the Russian revolution, his relatively short participation and firm establishment in the SDKPiL, then the next comprises almost double the length.
It is almost entirely devoted to the “Radek Affair” which lasted until the outbreak of war and would influence his image just as his journalistic brilliance which he very quickly demonstrated in the SPD press. Radek was not only the discerning analyst of imperialism; who was so to speak “at home” in every world conflict. He entangled himself in trench-warfare with his closest comrades in arms in the SDKPiL, above all with Rosa Luxemburg. This rebounded into the SPD, when the right-wing enthusiastically seized upon it, and reverberated into the Russian social-democracy, due to the numerous double and cross-memberships of the different protagonists. That this was really politically based is also put in doubt by Fayet’s detailed presentation. Though here he follows, in part, terrain already explored long ago in the various works of the SPD or the SDKPiL about Rosa Luxemburg. It is a shame that the author does not examine so intensively Radek’s analysis of imperialism, also in relation to the whole discussion in the party and the International.
Out of this “affair” however; an initial contact with the Bolsheviks resulted, that after the outbreak of war then led to Radek’s adherence while in his Swiss sanctuary, which soon made him into the leading Bolshevik propagandist on the international stage. Firstly in the Zimmerwald movement, but then above all, as during 1917 they first became a mass party and then a state party. Here the rational discussion by Fayet of the rumour, which has circulated for decades; about their financing by the German government, the accusation of being agents, is particularly worth stressing (pp. 210–219). He analyses the various versions and traces back the alleged signs to their real significance. Everything else remains hypothetical in his view. [5]
It was then the October revolution that brought Radek back to Germany as its envoy, and which now, in the correlation between Russia and Germany allowed him to pursue what one could somewhat solemnly describe as his “true destiny”. That included his involvement in the creation of a mass communist party, as well as his appearances in the salons of the new republic, in order to promote an “Eastern Alliance” between the states. For him however, this was undoubtedly only a stage towards the world revolution; it would have transferred its centre from Moscow to Berlin. Here too the terrain is not entirely unknown; his role in these first years of the KPD and also simultaneously in the leadership of the Communist International, above all in the dispute with the KPD leader Paul Levi and over the development of the United Front policy, is already thoroughly evaluated in the existing literature. Fayet however once more succeeds in adding new facets to the portrayal from his abundant source studies. One can though make critical comments on two points. Radek’s aversion to collaborating with the syndicalists which the Bolsheviks had striven for, a key to the creation of mass communist parties in southern Europe, brought him into conflict which here is only touched on in relation to the “ultra-left” split from the KPD, the Communist Workers Party (KAP) (pp. 351–353). Yet due to his leading position in the Comintern in 1920, he was occupied quite generally with the “trade union question”, on which he reported at the second Comintern congress, and offended the syndicalist representatives as well, wholly in the style of the pre-war social democracy, for whom (even including most of the left) syndicalism was the greatest possible conceivable “deviation”. [6]
In addition there is also an alternative interpretation of his dismissal as Comintern secretary in August 1920 (although that would in fact turn out to be meaningless). Fayet attributes it to the dispute over the KAP, whereas Branko Lazitch and Milorad Drachkovitch suspected that this “punishment” was due to his critical position towards the Red Army advance on Poland in the summer of 1920. [7] The high point of Radek’s “German mission” was the year 1923 with the crisis caused by the Ruhr occupation. Here Radek’s name will above all be linked to his “Schlageter speech” at the session of the Comintern Executive Committee in June, that has to suffer again and again for the attempt “to push the KPD into an alliance with radical rightists groups in the course of the Ruhr struggle” as one of the best experts on the KPD’s history, Hermann Weber, writes. This problem is also fully dissected by Fayet (pp. 445–467). He comes to a substantially more refined picture of an attempt at recruiting and influencing a milieu that, however, yielded little but instead harmed the party’s image, though without the party having abandoned its fundamental hostility towards the radical rightist milieu. Radek’s role as the chief Soviet delegate during the attempted KPD uprising, the “German October”, was much less precisely known. There were hardly any documents on it, mainly just memoirs and similar material. Since the opening of the archives in 1993 successive single documents were made public and at last a documentation as well as a recent monograph, though it arrived too late for Fayet. [8] He has thought himself seen a good part of the material in the archives, and his presentation also leaves no doubt about it, that Radek had good grounds to prevent the KPD from launching an isolated attack that October.
With that Radek was of course also made responsible for the “defeat”. The more so as already for some months the struggle had broken out in the Soviet party between – briefly described – the Troika Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev on one side, and Trotsky on the other, and Radek had clearly placed himself behind the latter. The years now following until his death during the Stalinist terror represent the most interesting part of the book. As the relevant details were the least known prior to the opening of the archives, more than 150 pages are devoted to his activity in the opposition, and a further hundred to the years after his capitulation to Stalin in 1929, whom he then served until the latter got rid of him.
In the ranks of the opposition, he was especially prominent in the debate over the second Chinese revolution, which was underway between 1925 and 1927. Since he had been branded as the one “most guilty” for the disaster in Germany in early 1924, he had been shunted off to the leadership of the Sun Yat Sen University, which had been set up in Moscow. What had been regarded as marginal suddenly, wholly unforeseen by the party leadership, owing to world history took on significance and Radek, with his own intellectual energy and enthusiasm for world affairs, threw himself into this problem. By means of Radek’s internal correspondence with key leaders of the opposition, above all Trotsky, never previously made full use of, Fayet can describe in detail numerous new aspects of the opposition’s struggle, and particularly its internal arguments, in which Radek occupied a leading – and vacillating – role. After he had first pressed for a sharp demarcation, as far as a break in an “ultra-left” manner, particularly after the expulsion from the party and banishment in early 1928; in 1929 he executed a turn, as Stalin broke with Bukharin and the “right” and using “left” rhetoric introduced the course towards forced collectivisation and hurried industrialisation.
Radek was the most prominent of the “capitulators”; and with this step almost caused the collapse of the opposition; which was by then essentially reduced to a few thousand in banishment or prison. What many passed off as a type of arrangement (or perhaps better: as self-justification), in order to save the revolution in view of internal and external threats, whereby one chose to only show the Stalinist party leadership a verbal reverence, was though in Radek’s case a deeply rooted change of mind, a “reconversion” (p. 594). He knew what was now demanded of him, was Stalin’s hagiographer (after he had years previously sung hymns of praise to “Trotsky as the organiser of the victory”), adhered to Stalin’s notorious verdict against the left around Rosa Luxemburg, was a propagandist of “socialist realism” and from 1933 won Stalin’s trust as a foreign policy advisor. A special body was created for him, that was formally attached to the CC, so that it was directly subordinate to Stalin, and by which the latter, besides the official foreign policy of the Foreign Commissariat under Litvinov, could conduct an informal additional foreign policy, in order if possible to have two cards in play. So in 1933, Radek explored the possibility of a deepening of Polish-Soviet relations; or during the visit to Moscow of the then Königsberg professor (and later minister under Adenauer) Theodor Uberländer, met with him hoping by this, surely in an error of judgement, to establish a “back channel” to the nazi leadership. Radek wrote numerous memoranda of which one must however suspect, that they are still not all accessible and many still lie among Stalin’s papers in the Kremlin archives. Radek also gave his name to the so-called Stalin constitution of 1936, on the eve of the great terror. Pseudo-democratically veiled; his authorship however, due to its waiving of world revolutionary goals, was essentially a signal abroad, where Radek – similarly Bukharin – was still the Soviet representative of choice. Interestingly though, Fayet found no evidence at all among the papers of the constitutional commission of any real participation by Radek.
Actually Radek may already have been aware for some time that there was little chance of escape. He dealt with the strain under which he stood – according to eye-witness reports – in his own way. Whereas he previously seldom touched alcohol; he became a heavy drinker. Even his public support for the first show trial in the August (against Zinoviev and Kamenev, the “Trotskyist Centre”), no longer helped him. A month later he was arrested. Yet it is a waste of time seeking out a direct cause, as Fayet does. Stalin wanted to root out the whole old generation of Bolsheviks, and Radek occupied one of the most prominent places among them. After a relatively short time he had been softened up in order to appear in the second show trial of January 1937 (against the “parallel Trotskyist Centre”). There are many rumours, which have not all been able to be verified, that he wrote much of the script himself. Actually he gave the cue not only for further trials (against the “right”, and the military leadership around Marshal Tukhachevsky) but also, which for the most part is not recognised, for the hunt for “Trotskyists” in Spain that ensued in the following months. He strove at his trial, like Bukharin in 1938, in Aesopian language, to give clues as to the real context, obviously with a view to his place in history, but also in relation to his family, who were eventually not spared the persecution too. Though his collaboration saved him from immediate execution, he vanished in the Gulag where, in May 1938, surely not without instruction from above, he was killed by criminal fellow prisoners. Despite this, for a long time a rumour existed, that he had somehow been spared and secretly worked for the Soviet government.
Fayet has produced a comprehensively documented biography, not without sympathy for its “hero”, at least until the time where, with his submission to Stalin, he ceased to be “un homme defendable” (p. 721). He has extensively contextualised the biography, so that the development of the Soviet state also, from its roots in the left of the social democracy prior to the first world war up to Stalin’s bloody settling of accounts with the Bolshevik old guard is distinct. If in his last messages to his family, Radek apparently believed the revolution would be able – in later generations – to supercede its results, then he was, as is known, mistaken. For the first years of the revolution hardly anyone else could have been a better representative on the international stage, “As a Galician Jew raised in the socialist movements of Galicia, Poland, Germany and Russia together, hardly anyone else could better represent their internationalist pretensions. Though all in all he proved to be more an improviser (than) a theoretician”. He has argued so much with the historiography concerning Radek, though the interest is aimed at his contemporary deeds and not least on his political journalism as the interpretation of the juncture. He inspired no sort of “Marxist school” at all. With the present work of Jean-Francois Fayet, Radek has undoubtedly found his historian.
It is to be regretted – in these times of turbo-matriculation standards and short studies with correspondingly receding knowledge of foreign languages – that this work only exists in French though undoubtedly it is no longer possible to take a position on questions of central and eastern European history in which Radek was involved without referring to it. Perhaps an institution or publisher does exist that is not put off by the high cost of translation for a German or English version and thus makes it available for the first time for a wider audience of interested readers.
Reiner Tosstorff
Notes
1. See Warren Lamer, Radek: The Last Internationalist, Stanford 1970.
2. E.g. Marie-Luise Goldbach, Karl Radek und die deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1918–1923, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1973; Dietrich Möller, Revolutionär, Intrigant, Diplomat: Karl Radek in Deutschland, Köln 1976.
3. Jochen Steffen & Adalbert Wiemers, Auf zum letzten Verhör. Erkenntnisse des verantwortlichen Hofnarren der Revolution Karl Radek, München 1995.
4. Cited in Jules Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale. Die Konferenzen von Zimmerwald und Kienthal, Wien 1964, p. 131.
5. In comparison e.g. the very latest Gerd Koener, Der Russland-Komplex. Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945, München 2005, by chance pp. 92–97 and 119–126, wheresoever it, faute de mieux, says “would seem”, “appears ...” In this work Radek not for the last time with a glance at the time to come, is one of the central figures.
6. According to the representative of the revolutionary syndicalist anti-war opposition from France, Alfred Rosmer, Moskau zu Lenins Zeiten, Frankfurt 1989, p. 78: “He tackled this difficult question with the mentality of a German social-democrat, for whom the subordinate role of the trade unions was obvious, and discussing it not worth while.”
7. Branko Lazitch & Milorad Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern, Vol. 1, Stanford 1972, p. 274.
8. See n. 8 for the documentation; Harald Jentsch, Die KPD und der “Deutsche Oktober’’ 1923, Rostock 2005.
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The Anvil and the Hammer
Eros Francescangeli
L’incudine e il Martello. Aspetti pubblici e privati del trockismo italiano tra antifascismo e antistalinismo (1929–1939)
Morlacchi Editore, Perugia 2005
L’incudine e il Martello. Aspetti pubblici e privati del trockismo italiano tra antifascismo e antistalinismo (1929–1939)
Morlacchi Editore, Perugia 2005
This is a book about a small number of Italian men and women who stood against the tide, placing themselves between the anvil of fascist secret agents who probably wanted to kill them, and the hammer of Stalinists who often wanted to do the same. (The title translates as: ‘The Hammer and the Anvil. Public and private aspects of Italian Trotskyism between anti-fascism and anti-Stalinism’.)
So it is a book about a tiny number of Italian Trotskyists living in exile in France seventy years ago. What can it offer to readers of Revolutionary History? Not that much I fear – this is not to criticise the analysis and research of the author, merely the subject matter he has chosen to deal with.If they had become bigger a force following the main events described, then the book would carry more weight. Having said that, the Italian historiographical tradition needs to redress the balance: Trotskyism has been much maligned on the left due to the previous dominance of Stalinism and the strength of autonomism today – where Trotskyism came from certainly needs to be explained.
As with his previous book on the Arditi del popolo [see review in previous issue of Revolutionary History], this book is the result of intensive work in left-wing and state archives.
Although Francescangeli’s story really begins with the Stalinist turn to ‘social fascism’ of 1929–30, the Italian Communist Party had intrinsic qualities that led it towards sectarian isolation. At the Fifth congress of the International in July 1924 party leader Amadeo Bordiga declared, in typical fashion: ‘we cannot wait that the two methods of bourgeois offensive to create a synthesis, and that together social democrats and fascists lead a violent offensive against the revolutionary movement’. (p. 24)
The Italian delegation concurred, which is not particularly surprising. The PCI leadership was Bordighist, by and large, or had been until recently. So the sectarian ultra-left rejection of socialists and others therefore went unchallenged. This feeling was very much part of the party’s DNA for many years.
However this ultra-left lunacy would take on a more systematic form four years later, with the notions of ‘class against class’ and ‘social-fascism’ launched at the Sixth Congress of the International in July 1928, a meeting that heralded the move into its ‘third period’.
Apparently there was a ‘radicalisation of the masses’ – but above all social democracy had become the main enemy. In many ways, the closer a political force was ideologically, the more it had to be mistrusted and fought.
This virulent denunciation of any perceived political heresy meant ideological purging within individual communist parties. The first bomb was dropped at a meeting of the Third International executive committee in December 1928, when Stalin attacked the PCI representative, Angelo Tasca, and Jules Humbert-Droz for ‘opportunism’. Tasca in particular, Stalin said, was like ‘those lawyers in the provinces who try to prove that black is white and white is black’. (p. 42)
The problem for Italian communists was now this: what position to take in the face of Stalin’s attack? They criticised Tasca.
But Tasca wasn’t for backing down. The following month he wrote to Palmiro Togliatti, who was emerging as party leader: ‘The entire situation rotates around Stalin. The International doesn’t exist; the USSR CP doesn’t exist; Stalin is the “lord and master” who moves everything. […] With this policy and methods Stalin is advance guard of the counter-revolution; he is the liquidator of the spirit of October.’ (p. 43)
This was very much Trotsky’s view, for a while, but Tasca was still the Italians’ man in Moscow, and was on the International’s executive committee. For other Italian communist leaders, agreeing with Tasca meant attacking Stalin and Moscow – and by implication agreeing with Trotsky. But if they didn’t agree with him that had to take their first major Stalinist step – expel him. The leadership first agreed to remove Tasca from the CC, and to demand a public retraction of his views.
In a parallel with what had happened earlier in Russia with many of Stalin’s allies in the mid-1920s, in many respects it was Pietro Tresso who led the charge against Tasca – a man who would later pay the ultimate price.
Tasca was deemed guilty of denying the ‘fascistisation of social democracy’. In the leadership meeting which decided his expulsion, which Tasca attended, Togliatti chillingly argued: ‘The working class can only move forward by passing over the body of social democracy. […] Just as we must pass over the body of social democracy, in the same way we must pass over the body of opportunists’. (p. 63) The political bureau (a smaller organ, higher than the CC) voted to expel Tasca because he refused to ‘recant’.
The vote was unanimous. Once again, in the near future there were to be echoes of the fate suffered by Stalin’s allies. Three of the political bureau who voted for expulsion (Leonetti, Ravazzoli and Tresso), created the precedent for their own expulsion as ‘the Three’ in little more than a year.
Indeed at the core of the book is the huge bloodletting within the party’s political bureau – during 1929–31 five of its eight members would be expelled: Alfonso Leonetti, Paolo Ravazzoli, Ignazio Silone, Angelo Tasca and Pietro Tresso. (Although Francescangeli does debate the case of Ignazio Silone, due to both his own political evolution and his torment at being a police informer, his expulsion was quite a different political event.)
The next crisis came with a meeting of the Italian leadership in September 1929, in which it was proposed to set up an ‘internal headquarters’ by sending leaders back into Italy – given that a revolution was apparently more or less imminent. Perhaps it was also justifiable self-interest which led Paolo Ravazzoli to counter: ‘I’m more than willing to accept this if it can be shown that the results which could derive from it would make it worthwhile. Yet you can’t obtain many results when you’d just be speaking to three or four comrades.’ (p. 60)
The Stalinist machine was now in full flight: two months later another report argued, given that the revolutionary situation was apparently so ripe, for the removal of the entire organisation and leadership from France to Italy in a matter of weeks.
The reality was that over a thousand communist party members were in Italian jails, including Antonio Gramsci. Pietro Tresso wrote a counter-proposal, which also included spelling out reality: ‘In these three years of special laws our Federations and branches have been swept away three, four or five times.’ (pp. 70–1) In a further twist, he added that the real party leadership – which had been formed in years of struggle – was now in jail.
After Ravazzoli and Tresso came Alfonso Leonetti, the last in the group which became known as ‘the Three’: ‘where is the mass movement today?’ (p. 75) Not only were the Three guilty of pessimism – their worst heresy was expressing outright dissent.
In the leadership meeting called to expel them, Tresso voiced an excellent put-down of the wily Togliatti, also present at the meeting: ‘I believe that he has always been absolutely determined in his oscillating.’ (p. 86)
Yet the weakness in the tale recounted by Franscescangeli is what happened next. When ‘the Three’ were expelled their perspective was one of ‘reforming’ the PCI: this made it difficult to attract activists to their cause, also because they didn’t even have a newspaper for nearly a year after their expulsion, and when it did start it had a print run of just 300. They claimed the PCI had 2,500 members, but also admitted that it was in a terrible state, given the nature of fascism. All their contacts were with Italians living in France. Furthermore they also had an image problem, having voted for both Bordiga’s and Tasca’s expulsion, and had signed up to criticise Silone.
One very stark factor was the practical meaning for Italian communists to be expelled from the Italian Communist Party in France during the 1930s. It meant that the party you had previously built now violently attacked you. It was common for the Stalinist press in France to name Trotskyists publicly, thus leaving illegal Italian immigrants liable to arrest and even deportation back to Italy. The false documents activists carried were provided by the PCI, who would no longer help them on their expulsion.
And if you became a Trotskyist in fascist Italy the party would automatically attack you, accuse you of being in league with fascists – in essence you ran even greater risk of being picked up by the police because of all the fuss that was made about you. And if you ended up in jail, Stalinists would often physically attack you.
A different horizon opened up after 1933, to some degree. The failure of the German left to seriously oppose Hitler’s rise to power had shown Trotsky that the Third International could not be saved – a notion that caused huge instability among small groups.
The move towards ‘entryism’ into mass organisations which followed soon after was also a wasted opportunity. The activities recounted by Francescangeli list meeting after meeting, definition after definition, denunciation after denunciation – there is very little discussion about changing events in the real world. When all Italian Trotskyists joined the French Socialist Party, Angelo Tasca haughtily wrote of them: ‘Their spirit is sectarian and loud-mouthed. All they deal in is high politics, with composite motions, extracts from resolutions, etc.’ (p. 199) The first General Council of the French SFIO proved him right: Tresso and another Italian presented their own separate motions, which gained one vote each – their own.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia Tresso’s group wrote a document demanding ‘strikes, street demonstrations, armed attacks on town halls, fascist offices and bosses’ clubs’. (p. 204) It was just wishful thinking: not only did none of this happen, Italian Trotskyists in exile had no hope of influencing events. These individuals were subject to the same desperation which had led Trotksy to proclaim the Fourth International – the experience of living through epoch-making events without being able to influence them.
One of the more positive discoveries of Francescangeli’s research is the discovery of close relations between these Trotskyists and Justice and Liberty – a radical left grouping led by Carlo Rosselli. Up until now, most Trotskyists had denied these links because Justice and Liberty was considered too moderate. Similarly it had been denied by many scholars of Justice and Liberty, anxious to present it in as moderate as light as possible – yet the links were so close in some cases that joint membership of both organisations was not uncommon.
Although the organisation’s politics were perhaps too idealistic, the practical nature of their collaboration was again found wanting. In three years of intense discussions, just one edition of a newspaper was the result. Yet the attraction was real – Paolo Ravazzoli ended up joining the organisation.
Francescangeli refreshingly criticises Trotsky, and points out his sectarian attitude towards Justice and Liberty leader Carlo Rosselli, who was told by Trotsky when they met in spring 1934: ‘I know you … We got rid of all you counter-revolutionaries like you in Russia’. (p. 13)
Yet both men would be murdered by counter-revolutionaries – Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in 1940, and Rosselli by French fascists in 1937.
Stalinists behaved appallingly towards these small band of Trotskyists – for example Alfonso Leonetti was severely beaten up in 1933, and in all probability the people who murdered Pietro Tresso in 1943 were Stalinist agents. The historical facts show that more Italian communists died at Stalinist hands than through fascist acts during the 1930s. Other attacks were more personal – ‘the Three’ were also accused of ‘socialising’ the personal relationships between their partners.
For all these reasons, Italian Trotskyism was very weak at its birth, suffering all the bad habits of exile politics. And by 1945 the communist party’s activity in the anti-fascist Resistance had created a mass party which would soon have a million and a half members. Such was the weakness of Italian Trotskyism compared to other European countries that the first edition of The Transitional Program was only published in Italian in 1972.
Francescangeli illustrates this forgotten page of the Italian left well. The problem is that these brave individuals left very little behind them.
Tom Behan
