From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
...it is always interesting to read material about British anarchism in the old days (Come Dark Dungeon-below) especially as a response to the labor party cretinism that rears its head every election period. When the next labor upsurge comes in Britain it is likely to be tinged with lots of old anarchist stuff like during the militant period after World War I except this time we better grab these militants and tell them what is what unlike previous times when they were allowed to burn out after their ideas proved insufficient to beat the bosses.
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http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Reviews
Charles Yelland, Dulcie Yelland, 1907-1987: A Socialist of Our Times, Gipton History Group, Leeds 1988, pp143, £2.50
This is an affectionate personal tribute by a retired printer to his late wife. It tells with wry humour and rich irony many reminiscences of their personal and political lives from the 1930s onwards. Here the picture is not of the Leeds working class deferentially accepting its lot, but of struggle in the labour, trade union and co-operative movements, centred on those past decades during which Labour could still hope to govern. Dulcie’s friends will not forget her humour and liveliness, of which the writer gives numerous reminders.
Yet, does not a book which opens with a foreword by Denis Healey, immediately followed by Dulcie’s favourite quotation from Trotsky (“Civilisation can be saved only by the proletarian revolution”) suggest unresolved problems?
Historians will do well not to overlook this unpretentious account. The author tells how Dulcie sympathised in the late 1930s with the Trotskyist view of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. But that is not the whole story. Dulcie was one of the early recruits whom Mary Archer won to the local cell of the Militant Group, which was then made up almost entirely of industrial workers, few of whose names history has recorded. She denounced the Moscow Trials when you needed courage to do so. But she understood that they raised political and not exclusively ‘moral’ questions, and campaigned as a Trotskyist, in the Labour Party, to ensure that the independence of the working class was not undermined by supporters either of ‘official’ Labour or of the Popular Front, or harnessed to the war aims of British imperialism.
Chapter Four does indeed describe, with relish, how during the Second World War, she organised into the trade union movement a series of engineering workplaces in Leeds, how wage rises were won and victimisations blocked, and how a notoriously anti-union boss had a heart attack. Her reputation as a shop steward lived on for many years.
But it omits to mention how she became a target for the Communist Party’s historic pamphlet, Clear out Hitler’s Agents, which in the event did not in the slightest weaken her support among her fellow workers.
She joined the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1938, supporting the leadership of Denzil Dean Harber and Starkey Jackson and, in the fusion of Spring 1944, joined the Revolutionary Communist Party, where she continued her mass activities.
Dulcie’s understanding of workers’ lives and minds contributed much to her immediate circle of comrades. After the war she tended, like many women militants, to turn back to family life after the separation and hardships; and, at the same time, the struggles among the Trotskyists for theoretical clarity in the largely unforeseen conditions of the late 1940s were going clown channels where she could not follow.
Unswerving in her sympathy for Trotsky’s ideas, she refused to be uprooted from the activity of her local Labour Party, in which she became absorbed for the benefit of the advancement of others in the apparatus rather than that of her own ideas. How often was she to hear that she could have commanded eminence – had she but had the ‘right’ rather than the ‘left’ ideas!
Chapter Six is a lively account of how Dulcie supported Vyvyan Mendelson’s motion at the 1957 Labour Party Conference. This sought to pledge a future Labour government to refuse to test, manufacture or use nuclear weapons, and took on not only the traditional pro-American right, but Aneurin Bevan and the Stalinists as well – but the book does not mention that the motion, from the Norwood Labour Party, was initiated by the ‘Healyites’, or that its attempt to place the workers’ movement in the leadership of the struggle against nuclear weapons was quickly followed by the interposition of CND.
It must be said that Dulcie, like her women comrades, did not let herself be over-impressed by leaders of either gender, however eminent or pretentious. There was no petty-bourgeois feminism among them. They took particular notice of the struggles of women workers, and they did not let men dominate them. But they saw the main enemy in the capitalist class and not in men as a gender.
On this political basis, Dulcie contributed frequently to the Newsletter in the later 1950s. The ‘turn’ of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) in 1964 out of the Labour Party was incomprehensible to her, but she continued to help the local comrades until the exclusion of close friends associated with Alan Thornett led her to distance herself from Healy’s apparatus. She had already become increasingly suspicious, not merely of the sectarian evolution of the SLL’s politics, but of the fabricated accounts of the history of Trotskyism in Britain on which he based his claim to predominance. From personal experience, Dulcie knew that these accounts were false, because they wrote out of history both the Workers International League (WIL) majority and all the experience of the tendency to which she had belonged.
Dulcie has been greatly missed by many, not least among militants far younger than herself. In 1983 she was one of the principal speakers at the memorial meeting in Leeds for Mary Archer, who had been her close personal friend for 45 years – and at least half of her audience were under thirty!
Charlie’s book is interestingly written, well produced and very reasonably priced. It is not merely a piece of local working class history ‘from below’; it raises questions which some may find at first disturbing and may feel moved to follow up. Dulcie may have relied heavily on her precious gifts of intuition and imaginative sympathy, which, alas, by themselves are no substitute for Marxism. But the spark which was ready in 1937-38 for Trotsky’s ideas to light, never burnt out.
John Archer
(The Gipton History Group can be contacted at 103 Gipton Gate East, Leeds LS9 6SU)**********
Reviews
John Taylor Caldwell, Come Dungeons Dark: The Life and Times of Guy Aldred, Glasgow Anarchist, Luath Press, Barr, 1988, pp290, £6.95
Guy Aldred was born in 1886 and, having been brought up by a radical liberal grandfather, his heroes were, and remained, the libertarians of the early nineteenth century who had struggled for free speech and organisation. In fact, Aldred emulated those, such as Carlisle and Paine, by suffering imprisonment for the principle of free speech and free publication. In 1909 he was sentenced to one year’s hard labour for publishing a banned Indian nationalist paper, The Indian Sociologist, and in 1922 he was given a sentence of one year for referring in a pamphlet to his support for the “Sinn Fein tactic”. By this Aldred, an anti-parliamentarian, meant making use of elections as a Socialist platform, but refusing to take a seat if elected (a tactic still operated by Sinn Fein insofar as the British parliament is concerned). Later, in 1931, Aldred was prosecuted for speaking to a meeting on Glasgow Green, a campaign for free speech in which John McGovern, then of the Independent Labour Party, and Harry McShane, at that time a Stalinist, were involved. This prosecution resulted in a fine.
From the first Aldred had seen his task as a proselytiser and pamphleteer, at 17 as a boy preacher with his own brand of Christianity, then at 19 years as an atheist conducting a Freethought ‘Mission’ – all his life Aldred was to adapt the terminology of Christianity to his own uses – and it was as an atheist that he was to break with Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. This was because the elders of the SDF were opposed to Aldred preaching atheism from their platform, seeing it as confusing the argument for Socialism. Aldred, on the other hand, at that time a materialist, considered atheism to be an integral part of revolutionary Socialism.
The differences between Socialists during this period related largely to syndicalism as against parliamentarianism. As readers will be aware, the ILP had been formed in 1893 and the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 (to become the Labour Party in 1906, and to admit individual members in 1918) for the express purpose of sending working class representatives into parliament. The syndicalists, on the other hand (not all of whom were Anarchists), regarded parliament as incapable of representing working class interests, and advocated the formation of communes, or soviets. Of course, it must be remembered that the Paris Commune was within living memory and the Labour Party had little representation in parliament. However, this argument must have become increasingly academic, for the extension of the franchise during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the struggle for female suffrage, obviously resulted in working class support for ‘parliamentary socialism’.
As it happened, Aldred from the first saw the Labour Party as an organisation for careerists and opportunists intent upon joining the establishment, and by the end of the First World War he was confirmed in this view for he, together with a great many young Socialists, had suffered as Conscientious Objectors, a number dying or becoming permanent invalids due to ill-treatment at the hands of the authorities. The Labour Party and trade unions, on the other hand, had supported the war and had been rewarded in 1915 by three ministries in the Coalition Government.
At the time of the Russian Revolution Aldred was confined to prison as a CO, but on his release in 1919 he welcomed the Revolution with enthusiasm, becoming an organiser of the newly formed Communist League, and editor of its paper, The Communist. This League gained 17 federated groups, including the Glasgow Anarchist Group, and had intentions of becoming the British Section of the Third International. However, Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Socialist Federation declared itself as the British Section, and the matter was eventually settled by Lenin, who, at the Second Congress, appealed to William Gallacher and Ramsay to found a British Communist Party, and the CPGB came into being in January 1921 with the resultant withering of these groups remaining outside. Apart from disagreeing with the Communist Party’s pro-parliamentary policy, Aldred regarded it from the outset as over-centralised and over-disciplined. Stalinism, of course, confirmed his worst fears. Henry Sara, a former colleague of Aldred’s, had found his way from Stalinism to Trotskyism, but Aldred remained outside these struggles and became increasingly isolated.
Therefore, for the rest of his life until he died in 1963, Aldred remained on the periphery of working class politics, bringing out his various broadsheets, taking up various causes, and at times having strange ‘bedfellows’, such as the non-Socialist pacifist Duke of Bedford, who was to write a column in Aldred’s last paper, The Word, for several years.
In his later years Aldred, who had been born in Islington, London, won a kind of fame as a well-known Glasgow eccentric, but his ideas became increasingly inconsistent, swinging from left to right and back again, often at the same time. Caldwell has obviously such a regard and affection for Aldred that the book, including that part which deals with Aldred’s personal life, presents itself through Aldred’s eyes only. The two women, Jenny Patrick and Ethel Macdonald, who served him politically for so many years, sharing his poverty, and Rose Witcop, an interesting person in her own right, with whom for some years Aldred had a ‘free union’, never came alive for me, and appeared to be regarded as no more than Aldred’s appendages.
However, this book is an easy read, and I would recommend it to young comrades looking for a not-too-difficult introduction to the period, and to old comrades whose Socialism has become a reading and quoting of the ‘Holy Writ’, for at least it does place the struggle for Socialism within a human context.
Sheila Lahr
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Reviews
Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Fortress Books, London 1988, pp.95, £2.50
This is a brief introduction to its subject, wholly derivative and based upon no firsthand research whatsoever. The standard snobbish language about the ‘sects’ and the polemic against Chris Harman’s The Lost Revolution (pp.33-34) show that it was written for internal consumption, to confirm the faithful in their prejudices. The author is blissfully unaware of Broué’s massive contribution, apart from the extensive publication of original source material in Germany.
A number of left wing myths are perpetuated, and even disinterred. Valtin’s Out of the Night is described as an “autobiography” without qualification (p.16) and there is no attempt to understand the positions on the war of both Bernstein (pp.13, 17) and Kautsky (p.10), who are described as having moved from national defence to pacifism without any qualification (cf. M. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky, pp.181ff., 204, etc.). A better proof-reading of the quotations, for example the one from Lenin on p.25, would have made the text more accurate, but not more original.
Al Richardson
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Reviews
Rachel Stella (ed.), Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret, Atlas, London 1988, pp.219, £6.50
The paucity of Péret’s works available in English is partially corrected by the publication of this volume. Contained here are some of his principal Surrealist poems and fictions, including the short novel from which the book takes its title. But of particular interest to the readers of this journal will be the dozen or so political letters – including several from the Spanish Civil War (in which Péret fought with the POUM, then with the Durruti Division), and the substantial biographical essay by the editor. The latter is an invaluable and accessible source of information on Péret’s long involvement with the Trotskyist movement, which started when he joined the Left Opposition at the end of the 1920s and continued, almost unbroken, until his death in 1959.
As a Trotskyist militant Péret was active, at various times, in Brazil and Mexico (where he was a leader of the group around Grandizo Munis in the 1940s) as well as his native France. It was a life of revolutionary distinction, and perhaps one episode from it, above all others, sums up the sheer proletarian spirit of the man. During the Second World War, Péret was called up to the French Army and given, unbelievably, the job of registering political suspects in the Nantes area (where he was also organising a clandestine Trotskyist cell). Péret took to the job with glee. He deleted all the names of the leftists – and inserted all the names of the local priests.
Péret was a great writer, and an outstanding revolutionary. It can only be hoped that more of his prolific writings, political as well as fictional, will be made available in English soon.
Jon E. Lewis
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Reviews
Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, Gower, Aldershot 1987, pp.216, £17.50
The Mensheviks, Russia’s moderate Marxists, were completely marginalised in the summer of 1917, when the course of history found itself at odds with their strategy of building a parliamentary Socialist opposition within a capitalist society. Faced with the choice of a military coup or the transfer of power to the workers’ councils, the Bolsheviks led a successful bid for state power.
What could have been a useful study of reformism in a revolutionary period is spoiled by Broido’s preoccupation with the trials and tribulations suffered by the Mensheviks during the first few years of the Soviet republic. Half the book is a depressing catalogue of arrests, jailings and exiles. Things aren't helped by Broido blaming the stern features of the young Soviet republic, not on the prevailing objective conditions, but on the original sin of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
The Russian masses rallied to the Bolsheviks during a period of dramatic upsurge. In the retreat that followed with the deprivation and destruction of the civil war of 1918-20, the old parties, the Mensheviks and the populist Social Revolutionaries, regained some support. This strained the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasantry. Knowing that they were the only alternative to capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention, the Bolsheviks held on, awaiting the European revolutions upon which all depended, and refused to countenance any challenge to their rule.
The treatment meted out to the Mensheviks was often gratuitously harsh, but the Bolsheviks’ mistrust of them was understandable. Hadn’t they supported the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917, hadn’t some leading Mensheviks colluded in the vile slandering of Lenin as an agent of the Kaiser? Had not the Menshevik government in Georgia persecuted the revolutionaries and openly stated that they preferred the imperialists of the west to the ‘fanatics’ of the east? None of this could have endeared the Mensheviks to those who had led the revolution and were intent on defending it.
The Mensheviks were finally suppressed in the early 1920s as the Soviet government reintroduced limited capitalist measures under the New Economic Policy. Despite, or rather because of, the similarities between the NEP and the Mensheviks’ economic programme, the Bolsheviks could no longer chance any political opposition. Yet this final clampdown had a cruelly ironic sequel. The European revolutions failed, the gulf between the masses and the Bolsheviks continued to deepen, arid conservative and bureaucratic trends emerged within the ruling party. Within a few years the degeneration was such that the party’s revolutionary wing, the Left Opposition, was itself marginalised, harassed, jailed and exiled like the Mensheviks, only on a far worse scale.
The Mensheviks were not consigned to the dustbin of history (to use Trotsky’s apt term) because of Bolshevik mendacity. Slaves to a dogmatic Marxism which held that the revolution of February 1917 heralded a long period of capitalist development with all the trappings of bourgeois democracy, they foundered in the storms of that year. They had been rendered obsolete. As we know, Bolshevism, beleaguered and isolated, succumbed soon after. But Bolshevism remains of great significance to this day whereas Menshevism is but of historical interest. However, Broido’s book is of little value for those who wish to learn about the Mensheviks and their place in history.
Paul Flewers
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Reviews
M.I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp.l52, £8.50
In these lectures Sir Moses Finley reflects upon the material he has brought together in his well-known books on the economics and politics of classical civilisation. A frank and honest tone is brought to the discussion throughout, and despite the real gulf separating our times from theirs, a real attempt is made to interpret the problems for us. The interest for the Marxist, acquainted from a different direction with some of them (for example C.L.R. James’ pamphlet on Greek democracy and its relevance) cannot fail to be quickened by his fourth chapter on Popular Participation (pp.70ff.) which shows quite plainly the real meaning of direct participatory democracy as opposed to the vapid electoralism which we moderns associate with the word. The Greeks, of course, would not have identified our system with a democracy at all, but with an electoral oligarchy by which the citizenry is allowed the dubious advantage of choosing by vote every few years from different sections of its ruling class a committee to whom it hands over all its sovereign power.
At the same time, it is difficult not to feel that some of the differences Finley has with G.E.M. de Ste Croix are due to terminological vagueness. Commenting upon his previous argument in The Ancient Economy that ‘status’ and ‘order’ were preferable to class for understanding ancient society (p.l0 n29), but that in the present book he is returning to ‘class’, he notes significantly that this does not imply a change of view. Whilst complaining that Ste Croix has “turned Aristotle into a Marxist” (n26), he equally condemns “the current bad habit of pinning the Marxist label on any and every political analysis that employs a concept of class” (pp.9-10). Marx, of course, denied being the discoverer of the class struggle; in that sense he has every right to stand inside the Western tradition that includes Aristotle in using it as an analytical tool. Moreover, Sir Moses appears to think that the Marxist concept was that classes encountered each other in conflict in their purest form throughout the struggle between them. But any state in which this took place would be rent by unbearable conflict and could not exist at this level of tension. To supply a mediating mechanism between the classes in conflict is precisely the role of the state itself. When Finley says that ”political stability rested on the acceptance in all classes of the legitimacy of status and status-inequality” (p.27) he does not appear to be aware that he is echoing the Marxist truism that in normal conditions the ideas that dominate society are those of the ruling class, who cannot continue to rule unless substantial sections of the lower classes accept them.
Whatever we think of Finley’s own ideas, his direct assault upon mystifications of these points can only delight and inform. He begins by approving of the remark about Aristotle that “the constitution of a state has its roots in ... its social system” (p.l), points out that Solon acknowledged the centrality of “classes and class conflict” (p.2) and says quite openly that “Roman orators and writers were so explicitly class-conscious that only the most blinkered modern historian can maintain total silence about class divisions” (p.3). Every page contains some such arresting statement, making the book a joy to read, as well as an ideal appetiser for Finley’ previous books around the same topic.
Al Richardson
