Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film, The Contender.
DVD Review
The Contender, Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen, Gary Oldman, 1999
I have spilled much ink this year, in the wake of Jeff Bridges’ Oscar victory in the role of broken down country singer-songwriter, Bad Blake, in the film Crazy Hearts , arguing that he had been preparing for that role since he first broke out as the future good ol’ boy, Duane Jackson, in The Last Picture Show. I will argue here that his persona as the President in this film, The Contender, follows that same career path. Bridges plays the up front and in your face, wise, witty, populist-oriented, but also politically savvy good ol’ boy president to a tee, from his bowling in the White House basement to his plebeian culinary tastes. I will rest my case on those scenes.
What I will not rest my case on is the plot; liberal, feminist-friendly, democracy-friendly, and politically feel good that it turns out to be. Apparently, for some undisclosed reason, the then sitting Vice President dies leaving under the then (and now, as well) current constitutional amendment the need for the president to appoint a successor (and for Congress to approve of that appointment in some form). Of course, Bridges, as a second and final term president, has more candidates that he can shake a stick at, including one prominent recently heroic state governor. He, eventually, settles on an Ohio (naturally, the Midwest for balance and stability) woman Senator. Seems that good ol’ boy Bridges, carrying a secret progressive streak, like every president before him, starts to worry about his legacy and having appointed the first woman Vice President is where he will hang his hat.
That is the easy part. What transpires though is said (if you can believe this about anyone from Ohio) woman Senator has an allegedly shady sexual past, among other personal problems that pile up as the film progresses. Moreover, various Congressmen, including the chairman of the committee that will give its advice on the appointment, are gunning for said Senator for their own reasons. The bulk of the remainder of the film centers of the political fight to save the president’s appointment, led by the President himself and his trusty advisers (using all the powers at their disposal).
Hold on a minute, I can enjoy a political thriller just as well as the next guy but this whole thing has the quality of a science fiction thriller. What were those screenwriters in the year 1999 on anyway? Why? Simple. Anyone who has even glanced at a newspaper headline over the last twenty or so years (or checked out the Internet, for that matter) KNOWS that no sitting president, second term or not, legacy or not, would do anything but make the quickest withdrawal of the appointee in recorded history (or be pushed out the back door by his party’s leaders, they still have to make a living remember) the minute the facts of the Senator’s case were known. Even old stand up Bridges. So if you want to see Bad Blake in a science fiction thriller this is for you. Oh, as almost always is the case, Bridges is just fine here.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews
Click on the headline to link to a Marxist Internet Archive online copy of James Burnham & Max Shachtman's-Intellectuals in Retreat- A political analysis of the drift of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals from Marxism towards reformism. – A critique of Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Benjamin Stolberg, Charles Yale Harrison and other critics of Bolshevism, where they stand and where they are going. (January 1939). This will give added background to the tenor of the review below.
*****
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1987, pp 440, £12.95
We present two reviews of this book. Sam Levy investigates the political issues, and Sheila Lahr looks at the literary aspects.
The New York Intellectuals deals with a unique phenomenon, the emergence and development of an anti-Stalinist, mainly Trotskyist-influenced, left amongst the intellectuals. Fellow travelling as a major phenomenon arose as a consequence of the major slump of 1929 and the emergence of Fascism in all its brutal reality. Though fellow travelling existed before this period, it is after this time that it really flourished. David Caute’s The Fellow Travellers deals with the main beneficiary – Stalinism. Wald’s book, however, deals with that group of intellectuals who broke from Stalinism and went beyond it.
I have personal memories of this period, when, as a youngster, I first became involved in active politics and became a Trotskyist. The Moscow Trials and the Spanish Civil War acted as both a detonator and educator of my political development. I remember from 1937 going weekly to the Independent Labour Party bookshop at 35 St Bride Street, because only there could one get material that wasn’t Stalinist or Stalinist approved. Whilst one could buy cheap books and pamphlets in the Stalinist bookshops, particularly the Marxian classics, anything else was verboten. It was at 35 St Bride Street that one could buy material beyond the Stalinist hack work.
The most important material I acquired was Trotskyist, mainly from the USA. It was there that I first learnt about some of the many intellectuals dealt with by Wald, particularly those linked with the Socialist Workers Party, such as Max Shachtman, Felix Morrow, Albert Goldman and George Novack. They had a strong influence on me.
This book, however, goes beyond my recollections or even knowledge, as to the important roles played by the intellectuals. It gives an historical picture as well as biographical sketches of the leftward moving, though in many cases still young and unknown, intellectuals, whose geographical area was New York, the main centre of American intellectual life. Here was the start of a relatively large-scale movement of intellectuals to the left of Stalinism, whereas elsewhere those moving towards Trotskyism were few and far between, unstable and of often short-lived allegiance.
The rise of the US anti-Stalinist left was linked to the general rise of the left, the growth of industrial unionism and the rise of the CIO. Unlike in western Europe, the Stalinists could not dominate this rise. They grew, but segments of the struggles were not under their control, such as the Minneapolis Teamsters and the auto workers in Flint.
Whereas in Europe, where the class struggles were dominated by the Stalinists, the Trotskyists being marginalised, in the USA a different pattern emerged. Due to historic and certain economic factors, Stalinism was not all-powerful, and the Trotskyists had a small but creditable organisation with some working class base, which was involved in some of the biggest struggles of the time. They could therefore be a pole of attraction to the politicised intellectuals. The rô1e of Stalinism in Germany, the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War had left their mark on the young intellectuals who were coming out of the colleges after the Great Depression, and they passed by Stalinism to the left beyond it.
The book reveals the active and dynamic role played by these intellectuals in the advance of the left, particularly Trotskyists. Two examples convey the picture. Sidney Hook played a major rôle in the creation of the Muste group, in its fusion with the Trotskyists, and in pushing James Burnham along the same road. The intellectuals also took a key part in the fight against the Moscow Trials. Whilst the Stalinists’ cover-up was powerful, it was not as strong as in Europe. Likewise, the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky was strong enough in the USA to have some influence: sufficient to convince John Dewey to play an active investigatory part on it, whereas Bertrand Russell, with his personal and philosophical affinity with Dewey, was almost silent on this issue.
However, with war clouds growing and the slowing down of working class struggle, the first cracks started to appear. There’s always a ’reason’ for political moves. If it’s a serious move away from Marxism, it starts with philosophy, the two front runners being dialectics and the labour theory of value. It’s amazing that whenever one looks at those who start with ’marginal’ revisions, they tend to move to the far right of the political spectrum. Burnham admitted as much in his resignation letter to the Workers Party. Though not all travel that far, the trend is there.
Trotsky knew the signs from years of experience. After all, a major feature of European revisionism at the beginning of the century was preferring Kant to Marx, the categorical imperative to the class struggle. The trend was so powerful so early that an article by Burnham and Shachtman, Intellectuals in Retreat (New International, January 1939), was vindicated by its authors travelling that very road – first Burnham, then Shachtman.
That is why Trotsky realised, particularly after Dewey’s response to his Their Morals and Ours, that this movement away from Marxism was not just the idiosyncracies of Max Eastman, but a trend of a stratum of intellectuals. The raising by Trotsky in the faction fight in the SWP in 1939-40 of the question of dialectics was to attack the central core of this movement. He tried to educate his comrades, not in abstractions as is so often presented, but as a method of reasoning and as a method of application to the problems of society. He tried to counter the move away from Marxism, both personally (it seems that he was writing a major article on dialectical materialism when he was struck down), as well as delegating Novack and Jean van Heijenoort, whom he hoped would carry on the struggle against the revisionists. Both proved totally incapable. Van Heijenoort ended up rejecting the working class on the grounds that it was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. Novack turned out an intelligent hack and nothing else; today’s SWP proves this, a politically bankrupt bunch chasing after the golden mirages of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega.
For the anti-Stalinist intellectuals it was downhill all the way in the post-war period, although their individual progressions went at an uneven rate and in an uneven pattern. Their strengths became their weaknesses. Their ability to go beyond Stalinism and expose its rottenness itself became the instrument for them to move towards the most reactionary elements of capitalism. Unable to understand the relationship between Stalinism and the working class, and with their lack of confidence in the working class, they had only one direction in which to go – towards supporting US capitalism.
As these intellectuals moved further to the right, they had to jump a series of hurdles, their attitude to which gave a stamp both to their character and how far they were moving. First was the McCarthy era. They came out very badly, the overwhelming majority endorsing elements of McCarthyism or keeping quiet. The Stalinists have used this as an indictment of Trotskyism. Wald points out that McCarthyism penetrated all left wing and fellow travelling movements. Wald also points out that, ironically, McCarthyism rescued the Stalinists’ reputations:
Ignorance on the part of the 1960s New Leftists was not the sole reason that apologists for Stalinism such as Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, and the Hollywood Ten were resurrected as moral beacons; their rehabilitation was the logical by-product of the dismal record of all but a few of the founders of the intellectual anti-Stalinist left.
Robeson was one of the most vociferous denunciators of Trotskyism, supporting the imprisonment during the Second World War of the Trotskyists under the Smith Act. Only when he was himself being done under it did he fight against it. Hellman’s anti-Fascist credentials were glorified in the supposedly autobiographical film Julia, which was exposed by Mary McCarthy as a tissue of lies. The McCarthy period was not only a false indictment of Trotsky – through the rôle of the New York intellectuals – but it also permitted the glorification of some of the nastiest Stalinist hacks.
The next major hurdle they faced was the Vietnam War. Many more fell. This war was unique in American history, not in its objectives, but in its result. The heavy casualties and powerful opposition at home altered the outlook of large sections of American society. This war was a further marker in the rightward evolution of the old anti-Stalinist intellectuals. Some held back. Others, like Shachtman, whilst slow off the mark, rapidly overtook them, and went beyond them, defending the reactionary actions of an imperialist government.
This is dealt with by Wald, particularly the differences that emerged amongst the intellectuals, but one feels he does not deal adequately with it in the fundamental sense. The New Left was a major new force arising amongst the younger intellectuals, and whilst on the whole they were as confused a bunch as one could expect to see, they nevertheless correctly saw America’s rôle in that war. Wald, naturally, only touches slightly on them. They aren’t the main topic of his book, nevertheless the inter-relation between them and the older generation is missing. For my part, these New Leftists were the bastard children of the New York Intellectuals, whose disowning of their parentage is linked with the Vietnam war.
The main criticism I have of this book is that it does not give an adequate picture of the material and other conditions, such as the economy, the consciousness of the working class, the struggle of social systems, etc, from which flowed the ideological drift of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals, and the central ideological justification for the movement. Wald deals extensively with the intellectuals’ philosophical polemics, ending with what I feel is a correct observation:
The dialectical transcendence or sublation (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) of this debate is the sine qua non for the revival of Marxist theory and practice in the United States.
This gives an historical slant to the debate, not arguing how it affects present-day thinking in both the USA and Europe. I think a part of this is due to the lack of intertwining the two aspects.
Each period has a basic material and ideological foundation which consciously or unconsciously intertwine. No dominant ideas or philosophy arise out of a vacuum. The ideological movement from Marxism, in the first instance away from Marxist philosophy, reflected the period precisely in the new guru, not Kant (old hat), but pragmatism, and John Dewey in particular. The liberalism of exposition and outlook hid the deeper basic concept from which the philosophy flowed. Being developed in a period of developing US capitalism, with the concept of wide open spaces, intelligent activism became the core, drawing ideas from that core, using developing US capitalism and wide open spaces as the scale, all things became possible – many roads lead to socialism. The difference in this sense between Kant and Dewey is but a reflection of the different material roots.
The essence of Dewey’s thoughts is shown in his short but concrete reply to Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours in the New International (August 1938) He concludes:
Orthodox Marxism shares with orthodox religionism and with traditional idealism the belief that human ends are interwoven into the very texture and structure of existence – a concept inherited presumably from its Hegelian origin.
If that is the core of his criticism of Marxism extant, the real flavour of it is this:
Since the class struggle is regarded as the only means that will reach the end, and since the view that it is the only means is reached deductively and not by an inductive examination of means-consequence in their interdependence, the means, the class struggle, does not need to be critically examined with respect to its actual objective consequence.
What is posed here is an abstract argument, a universalist argument independent of reality, though liberal in form. This is counterposed to the narrow, therefore ‘religious’ concept of the class struggle. Whereas Trotsky tried to put a period scale on historical development in Their Morals and Ours, from capitalism to a new economic and social structure in which man would truly be free – Socialism – Dewey, on the contrary, tried to establish an absolute principle applicable to all periods under all conditions. He downgrades the class struggle in comparison to his many roads, under the banner of scientific thought and liberal content.
The accusation that the class struggle being the only means has been reached deductively, without scientific basis, is totally wrong. Most scientific discovery is based on deduction flowing from known facts. Again, the argument that class struggle as the only road is reached without critical examination, says more for the lack of knowledge of Marxism on the part of Dewey. Marx and Engels spent their lifetime analysing the economic and social structure of capitalism, from which arise the class struggle, examining the historical, social and economic developments. They made errors, but the structure on which they based their conclusions has stood the test of time.
The dominant characteristics of man are determined by the way he lives, his environment, and the social relations which arise from that. It is precisely the development of the various modes of production – economic and social relationships – that is the dominant (but not the only) characteristic of human development, and which determines the major relationships of classes, sub-classes and even groups. The emergence of capitalism – economically unconsciously and politically semi-consciously – reflected the various struggles of the lower classes – capitalists and workers, serfs and peasants – against the dominant class, which established both the political and the economic foundations of capitalism. The emergence of capitalism established the dominance of a new mode of production – production for the market.
This mode of production rests on certain fundamentals – the relationships to the production and distribution of commodities of those owning the capital, and those without capital but who produce the goods. It is a conflict of interests, based not on what Marx, the industrial proletariat, etc, wants or not, but on a permanent division at the point of production, independent of human consciousness. The class struggle exists, regardless of whether the workers are storming the barricades or believing that they have a common interest with their employers. Marxism arises in the consciousness, not in the class struggle itself.
Because modern human existence rest on the capitalist mode of production, other factors and relationships follow The class struggle becomes the key anc dominant force in social change. Fundamental social change means the destruction of capitalism by the elimination of the capitalists’ rôle in production transferring capitalist property to common ownership. Only the working class has a relationship with capital that enable this to be done. No other class can carry out this radical and necessary transformation.
To argue that the class struggle is central to modern society, does not, however, mean that there are not other forms of conflict, many predating capitalism, such as over the rô1e of women, and racial and religious prejudices, etc, or that many will not be a source of conflict, albeit declining, after the establishment of Socialism.
Dewey, on the contrary, blames the messenger, not the message. Dialectics does not create the class struggle, it is the method of showing and explaining the process. The scientific nature of the explanation is that, on the basis of the examination of capitalism, it cuts across the illusory desires of utopian Socialism. Its strength lies in showing – not postulating – that there is only one road to Socialism. It is Dewey who desires many roads and therefore becomes involved in abstract philosophical arguments independent of reality.
The post-war decline in working class consciousness, and the growing illusions in capitalism on the part of some workers, have been the material foundation of the adoption of a Deweyist outlook by some intellectuals and working class activists. That it first took shape amongst the anti-Stalinist left was no accident. They were brighter and more politically conscious. Nevertheless, today it permeates through the movement, from Euro-stalinists to trade union bureaucrats. The New Left, the bastard children of the New York intellectuals, revolted against their rightward-moving parents as a consequence of the Vietnam War, but took on as their basic creed that there are other means for radical social change, and thus downgraded the working class. With the student, black and women’s movements, struggles were diverted down blind alleys. And whilst many leading lights of the New Left of the 1960s have joined their elders in enjoying the fruits of capitalism, the philosophical basis remains. Many of the latest generation operate along the same lines, just adding new issues with corresponding movements, such as gays and the environment.
I think that Wald has illusions in the movement in Europe. The reality, however, is that Europeans merely imitate what’s happening in the USA, or develop similar themes. The flourishing of new movements at the expense of working class collective activity has become an impediment to developing conscious working class policies and struggle. The tendency to imitate the USA is ironic when one considers political developments there, with the fragmentation of the movement into small groups, some of which have so lost their basic class outlook that they support a black populist of the Democratic Party.
The growth of US capitalism has been a major factor in this development, but for Marxists these are factors to be fought. Whether they like it or not on the New Left, US capitalism is in decline, and to pick on aspects of the social problems in the USA instead of opposing US capitalism as a whole is a blind alley. The need for a total struggle, and in this perspective the re-emergence of the working class and its parties, is not only logical, but necessary.
To criticise the student, black or women’s movements, etc., is not to condemn the justifiable reaction of the disadvantaged, but to criticise their sectionalised outlook, as blacks, as women, independently of the class structure. One should fight for equal rights for women, blacks and gays, and take up ecological issues, but all this should be part of the central class struggle, under the working class and its parties.
I do not think that this has little to do with the New York intellectuals. It is the result of an historical development, of a process that started before the Second World War, the end result of the movement away from Marxism.
After about 55 years, the generation of New York intellectuals has nearly run its course. Such a book is necessary for a knowledge of the past, the rôle the intellectuals played, the weaknesses inherent in their situation, ideology, etc. As an historical documentation of the development of the New York intellectuals, the book is impressive. The hard work gone into it is clear for everyone to see. In that rôle it fulfills a first class function. It is in drawing the strands together and giving it a clear direction where the weaknesses arise, because it fails to draw the full implications of the effects of Deweyism on the working class, through its influence on the intellectuals. Nevertheless, I recommend without doubt this book to anyone who can afford it, because it advocates the need:
‘... to integrate the sort of theoretical consciousness about political strategy with careful empirical research into the experience of the previous generation of Marxists [i.e., Trotsky, Bukharin, etc.]. In that way we will be able to advance the recovery of our radical heritage, to correct the political amnesia that has marred our legacy.
And that is a job worth doing.
Sam Levy
*****
To the general reader who regards books as providing entertainment or information, the arguments between the various literary schools of the early and mid twentieth century may hold no interest. However, it should be remembered that Trotsky regarded the question of such importance that in 1923 he published Literature and Revolution, in which his concern was with the development of literature following the Russian Revolution. To this end, he gave consideration to the possibility of the unfolding of a proletarian culture following the Revolution, coming to the conclusion that while every ruling class creates its own culture, it also takes several hundred years for this to flower. Therefore, as the dictatorship of the proletariat was expected to last a comparatively short time only before giving way to the abolition of classes and the establishment of socialism, no far-reaching proletarian culture would develop.
Certainly Trotsky did not consider that proletarian culture could flourish within capitalist society. However, from the beginning of the 1930s the Stalinists propounded against all other literary schools proletarian literature or, as it was also called, ‘realism’, and this was supported by clubs named after John Reed. One of the foremost proponents of proletarian literature in America was the Stalinist Mike Gold, who set forth a number of stipulations for its practice, among which he demanded that the world of work be described with technical precision; it must provide a useful social function; be presented in as few words as possible in a simple vocabulary; that action should be swift, and that there should be no melodrama. (M. Gold, A Literary Anthology [Ed. M. Folsom], International Publishers, 1972).
As may be understood, those literary intellectuals of the 1930s who were to become the anti-Stalinist left of Wald’s book found this formula over-prescriptive, which led to two of their number, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, both members of the Communist Party and the John Reed Clubs, to advocate that proletarian literature be leavened by ‘modernism’. At that time, the best known writers in the modernist style were Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Stein, and it was their style of writing which came under fire from the Stalinist proletarian literature school. To provide an example of the type of polemic between modernists and ‘realists’ I can do no better than quote Brecht, who wrote to Lukács in 1956 in defence of James Joyce. Brecht writes that an interior monologue of a woman lying in bed in Ulysses had been rejected by ‘Marxists’ as ‘formalistic’ (formalist – the reduction of writing to etymology and syntax: See Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution). But the criticism had been made in such terms, that it left the impression that the monologue would have been acceptable had it been set in a session with a psychoanalyst. (Aesthetics and Politics – Debates between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Verso, 1980).
However, to return to Phillips and Rahv. With the support and assistance of established Communist cultural leaders, including Mike Gold, and financial support raised through a lecture by John Strachey, they launched the Partisan Review to concentrate primarily on cultural and literary questions, while leaving the New Masses to confine itself to the political and industrial. By 1937, when both Rahv and Phillips broke openly with the Stalinists, the Partisan Review had gathered around it most of the anti-Stalinist left and Trotskyists who are the subject of Wald’s book, and provided a central point of literary and cultural polemics.
However, Wald writes, although both Phillips and Rahv warned against the right wing dangers to writers “who seek to assimilate the Joyce-Eliot sensibility without a clear revolutionary purpose”, Rahv and Phillips held to elements of Elitism and a belief in High Culture. But they saw modernism as an avant-garde in literary protest against twentieth century commercialism. It is not pertinent that the modernist writers referred to above were not on the left in their politics, for their criticism of bourgeois culture in their works was seen as transcending their political views – an approach, Wald remarks, which recalls Marx and Engels’s treatment of Balzac and Lenin’s of Tolstoy. It must also be remembered that while Trotsky focused on the social aspects of literature in his criticism, he rigorously differentiated between his assessments of the political views of an author and his judgements of the artistic quality of the work.
Ironically, while these editors were gathering about them anti-Stalinist left intellectuals who accepted that “an error of leftism occurs from zeal to steep literature overnight in the programme of Communism, as this leads to sloganised and inorganic writing”, the Stalinists were abandoning their proletarian culture tactics in favour of the Popular Front and were closing down the John Reed Clubs!
Trotsky was now writing about the Moscow Trials, and, as he held a special appeal for radicalised literati which stemmed from his literary, historical and polemical achievements, left wing intellectuals increasingly became associated with the Partisan Review. As it happens, during the 1930s Trotsky had devoted extensive correspondence to the question of the significance of the American intellectuals for a small revolutionary workers’ party, for he saw the leftist intelligentsia, following the Russian revolution, as “binding its lot to the proletariat for the victorious revolution, but at the same time raising itself on the shoulders of the revolution”. He therefore urged that his followers exercise special precautionary measures when assimilating former Communist intellectuals who had gained an education in a Stalinist Party, and pressed that radical intellectuals and writers should strive for theoretical clarity. To what extent some, or all, of these left intellectuals sought the political clarity referred to by Trotsky at that time cannot be stated, but certainly a number of them had reservations with regard to Marxism and Leninism – Max Eastman, for instance, wanted to replace ‘mechanical Marxism’ with ‘social engineering’, and Sidney Hook with pragmatism. Perhaps one of the best known writers attracted to the group around the New Partisan Review was the novelist James T. Farrell (who was also a member of the Trotsky Defence Committee). Farrell’s novels presented Irish working class life in the first half of the twentieth century, and can be said to be written in the realist-naturalist school (examples of which are Zola and Dreiser) but Wald, possibly determined to find a modernist connection, states that he can be considered modernist because he allowed dreams and subconscious longings into his novels. He quotes as proof of this a vision seen by Studs Lonigan as he lies dying from the effects of bootleg liquor, to which he had turned to drown his frustrations and sorrows, instead of developing a class conscious response. As he lies on his sick-bed Studs dreams of a Communist led demonstration against unemployment in which are visible banners bearing slogans calling for revolutionary political action. Against Studs is posed Danny O’Neill “who breaks with the false consciousness perpetrated by (capitalist) society” to work his way through college. Not that this itself is a revolutionary act – in fact it can be quite the opposite!
However, by 1937 when a revamped Partisan Review was launched by Rahv and Phillips, the Moscow Trials, the Trotsky Defence Committee and the Dewey Commission had politicised a further group of young anti-Stalinist left-wing writers, and so Mary McCarthy who was a member of the Trotsky Defence Committee, and whose best known novel is probably The Group, and Dwight Macdonald, became members of the editorial board. Rahv and Phillips had remained intent upon the journal continuing its search for a Marxist aesthetic, and Phillips once again wrote that Trotsky was outstanding in that “he not only saw in literature a mirror of society, but was acutely conscious of those qualities which taken together make up the social vision of a work of art”. In fact, Wald writes that this revamped Partisan Review “was the most important cultural event following the Moscow Trials”.
Nevertheless, it did not last very long as a literary revolutionary catalyst, for within a few short years, as a response to the enthusiastic support of the Second World War by the Stalinists and the absence of a mass revolutionary movement, Rahv had come to the conclusion that the only way in which a writer could protest against the dominant values of ‘our time’ was by maintaining ‘intellectual integrity’. In this Rahv reflected the attitudes of an increasing number of anti-Stalinist left wing writers and intellectuals who had also become disappointed in, and disillusioned by, the failure of the working class to make a revolution. Of course, this process of disintegration was accelerated by Trotsky’s murder. Disillusionment with revolutionary politics brought forth a plethora of anti-socialist novels and stories from former left wing writers and Trotskyists who previously had included little of their revolutionary experience in their fiction. Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Joseph Howe all produced novels and stories, the purport of which was to illustrate the fallacy of attempting to change society by social theory and action. Wald writes that the fiction of the New York intellectuals in the 1940s must be read with a sense of irony, for the consistent theme of virtually every one of their important works published during and immediately after the Second World War proclaims the need for liberation from the ideologies of the radical movement. One might almost call this the school of anti-proletarian culture!
Insofar as ideology is concerned, Wald quotes the British Marxist Terry Eagleton, whose view of ideology is materialist as against that of the New York intellectuals’ philosophical pragmatism. Eagleton sees reality as “ideology’s homeland”. Therefore a work of art “has the potential of liberating us from ideological illusion. Inasmuch as a work of literature seizes upon, reshuffles and depicts experience it, too, resides in the realm of ideology”. (Criticism and Ideology, New Left Books, 1976)
As may well be understood, the opposition of many of these intellectuals to ‘radical ideology’ was to lead them during the ensuing years to support for American foreign policy, McCarthyism, Nixon and Reaganism.
With regard to ‘modernism’, it has become increasingly academic and the elite culture of an intellectual establishment “in which some of the New York intellectuals played a part”. Wald writes that the Marxist criticism of modernism of these intellectuals had never been more than a few penetrating insights “unlike the brilliant work of their European contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs”. It should therefore come as no surprise that today students of Critical Theory largely study the essays written by these Europeans.
Perhaps in the West the political discussion has changed from a debate of literary schools to that of the effects of mass culture, or the ‘commercialisation of culture’ which Farrell perceived as “creating a struggle between the desire of the artist to present an authentic vision of the world and the desire of the film-makers and publishers to make art marketable, which they achieve by standardisation, repetition and by promoting established authors”. (J.T. Farrell, The Fate of Writing in America, quoted by Wald, p.223).
However, in the East, the debate with regard to ‘proletarian culture’ continues and, in fact, has become part of the fabric of daily life, as witness a recent Channel 4 programme on the dissident Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who has served several terms in prison and whose plays are banned because they satirise the bureaucracy, the plays being presented in a modernist style. In this programme a Stalinist Director of Arts stated that “art has the duty to serve the health of society”, which recalls one of the prescriptions set out by Mike Gold.
In conclusion, I would add that this is a book which poses many questions to all those interested in the connection between politics and the development of a Marxist aesthetic.
What I found especially interesting was the contemplation of why, in America during the 1930s, there was such an active anti-Stalinist and Trotskyist intellectual left, while in Britain our own radicalised intellectuals for the most part continued to support Stalinism or moved directly to the right.
The book itself is written clearly and comprehensively, and apart from detailing the debates and polemics involved, provides potted biographies of a star-studded cast.
Sheila Lahr
*****
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1987, pp 440, £12.95
We present two reviews of this book. Sam Levy investigates the political issues, and Sheila Lahr looks at the literary aspects.
The New York Intellectuals deals with a unique phenomenon, the emergence and development of an anti-Stalinist, mainly Trotskyist-influenced, left amongst the intellectuals. Fellow travelling as a major phenomenon arose as a consequence of the major slump of 1929 and the emergence of Fascism in all its brutal reality. Though fellow travelling existed before this period, it is after this time that it really flourished. David Caute’s The Fellow Travellers deals with the main beneficiary – Stalinism. Wald’s book, however, deals with that group of intellectuals who broke from Stalinism and went beyond it.
I have personal memories of this period, when, as a youngster, I first became involved in active politics and became a Trotskyist. The Moscow Trials and the Spanish Civil War acted as both a detonator and educator of my political development. I remember from 1937 going weekly to the Independent Labour Party bookshop at 35 St Bride Street, because only there could one get material that wasn’t Stalinist or Stalinist approved. Whilst one could buy cheap books and pamphlets in the Stalinist bookshops, particularly the Marxian classics, anything else was verboten. It was at 35 St Bride Street that one could buy material beyond the Stalinist hack work.
The most important material I acquired was Trotskyist, mainly from the USA. It was there that I first learnt about some of the many intellectuals dealt with by Wald, particularly those linked with the Socialist Workers Party, such as Max Shachtman, Felix Morrow, Albert Goldman and George Novack. They had a strong influence on me.
This book, however, goes beyond my recollections or even knowledge, as to the important roles played by the intellectuals. It gives an historical picture as well as biographical sketches of the leftward moving, though in many cases still young and unknown, intellectuals, whose geographical area was New York, the main centre of American intellectual life. Here was the start of a relatively large-scale movement of intellectuals to the left of Stalinism, whereas elsewhere those moving towards Trotskyism were few and far between, unstable and of often short-lived allegiance.
The rise of the US anti-Stalinist left was linked to the general rise of the left, the growth of industrial unionism and the rise of the CIO. Unlike in western Europe, the Stalinists could not dominate this rise. They grew, but segments of the struggles were not under their control, such as the Minneapolis Teamsters and the auto workers in Flint.
Whereas in Europe, where the class struggles were dominated by the Stalinists, the Trotskyists being marginalised, in the USA a different pattern emerged. Due to historic and certain economic factors, Stalinism was not all-powerful, and the Trotskyists had a small but creditable organisation with some working class base, which was involved in some of the biggest struggles of the time. They could therefore be a pole of attraction to the politicised intellectuals. The rô1e of Stalinism in Germany, the Moscow Trials, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War had left their mark on the young intellectuals who were coming out of the colleges after the Great Depression, and they passed by Stalinism to the left beyond it.
The book reveals the active and dynamic role played by these intellectuals in the advance of the left, particularly Trotskyists. Two examples convey the picture. Sidney Hook played a major rôle in the creation of the Muste group, in its fusion with the Trotskyists, and in pushing James Burnham along the same road. The intellectuals also took a key part in the fight against the Moscow Trials. Whilst the Stalinists’ cover-up was powerful, it was not as strong as in Europe. Likewise, the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky was strong enough in the USA to have some influence: sufficient to convince John Dewey to play an active investigatory part on it, whereas Bertrand Russell, with his personal and philosophical affinity with Dewey, was almost silent on this issue.
However, with war clouds growing and the slowing down of working class struggle, the first cracks started to appear. There’s always a ’reason’ for political moves. If it’s a serious move away from Marxism, it starts with philosophy, the two front runners being dialectics and the labour theory of value. It’s amazing that whenever one looks at those who start with ’marginal’ revisions, they tend to move to the far right of the political spectrum. Burnham admitted as much in his resignation letter to the Workers Party. Though not all travel that far, the trend is there.
Trotsky knew the signs from years of experience. After all, a major feature of European revisionism at the beginning of the century was preferring Kant to Marx, the categorical imperative to the class struggle. The trend was so powerful so early that an article by Burnham and Shachtman, Intellectuals in Retreat (New International, January 1939), was vindicated by its authors travelling that very road – first Burnham, then Shachtman.
That is why Trotsky realised, particularly after Dewey’s response to his Their Morals and Ours, that this movement away from Marxism was not just the idiosyncracies of Max Eastman, but a trend of a stratum of intellectuals. The raising by Trotsky in the faction fight in the SWP in 1939-40 of the question of dialectics was to attack the central core of this movement. He tried to educate his comrades, not in abstractions as is so often presented, but as a method of reasoning and as a method of application to the problems of society. He tried to counter the move away from Marxism, both personally (it seems that he was writing a major article on dialectical materialism when he was struck down), as well as delegating Novack and Jean van Heijenoort, whom he hoped would carry on the struggle against the revisionists. Both proved totally incapable. Van Heijenoort ended up rejecting the working class on the grounds that it was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. Novack turned out an intelligent hack and nothing else; today’s SWP proves this, a politically bankrupt bunch chasing after the golden mirages of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega.
For the anti-Stalinist intellectuals it was downhill all the way in the post-war period, although their individual progressions went at an uneven rate and in an uneven pattern. Their strengths became their weaknesses. Their ability to go beyond Stalinism and expose its rottenness itself became the instrument for them to move towards the most reactionary elements of capitalism. Unable to understand the relationship between Stalinism and the working class, and with their lack of confidence in the working class, they had only one direction in which to go – towards supporting US capitalism.
As these intellectuals moved further to the right, they had to jump a series of hurdles, their attitude to which gave a stamp both to their character and how far they were moving. First was the McCarthy era. They came out very badly, the overwhelming majority endorsing elements of McCarthyism or keeping quiet. The Stalinists have used this as an indictment of Trotskyism. Wald points out that McCarthyism penetrated all left wing and fellow travelling movements. Wald also points out that, ironically, McCarthyism rescued the Stalinists’ reputations:
Ignorance on the part of the 1960s New Leftists was not the sole reason that apologists for Stalinism such as Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, and the Hollywood Ten were resurrected as moral beacons; their rehabilitation was the logical by-product of the dismal record of all but a few of the founders of the intellectual anti-Stalinist left.
Robeson was one of the most vociferous denunciators of Trotskyism, supporting the imprisonment during the Second World War of the Trotskyists under the Smith Act. Only when he was himself being done under it did he fight against it. Hellman’s anti-Fascist credentials were glorified in the supposedly autobiographical film Julia, which was exposed by Mary McCarthy as a tissue of lies. The McCarthy period was not only a false indictment of Trotsky – through the rôle of the New York intellectuals – but it also permitted the glorification of some of the nastiest Stalinist hacks.
The next major hurdle they faced was the Vietnam War. Many more fell. This war was unique in American history, not in its objectives, but in its result. The heavy casualties and powerful opposition at home altered the outlook of large sections of American society. This war was a further marker in the rightward evolution of the old anti-Stalinist intellectuals. Some held back. Others, like Shachtman, whilst slow off the mark, rapidly overtook them, and went beyond them, defending the reactionary actions of an imperialist government.
This is dealt with by Wald, particularly the differences that emerged amongst the intellectuals, but one feels he does not deal adequately with it in the fundamental sense. The New Left was a major new force arising amongst the younger intellectuals, and whilst on the whole they were as confused a bunch as one could expect to see, they nevertheless correctly saw America’s rôle in that war. Wald, naturally, only touches slightly on them. They aren’t the main topic of his book, nevertheless the inter-relation between them and the older generation is missing. For my part, these New Leftists were the bastard children of the New York Intellectuals, whose disowning of their parentage is linked with the Vietnam war.
The main criticism I have of this book is that it does not give an adequate picture of the material and other conditions, such as the economy, the consciousness of the working class, the struggle of social systems, etc, from which flowed the ideological drift of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals, and the central ideological justification for the movement. Wald deals extensively with the intellectuals’ philosophical polemics, ending with what I feel is a correct observation:
The dialectical transcendence or sublation (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) of this debate is the sine qua non for the revival of Marxist theory and practice in the United States.
This gives an historical slant to the debate, not arguing how it affects present-day thinking in both the USA and Europe. I think a part of this is due to the lack of intertwining the two aspects.
Each period has a basic material and ideological foundation which consciously or unconsciously intertwine. No dominant ideas or philosophy arise out of a vacuum. The ideological movement from Marxism, in the first instance away from Marxist philosophy, reflected the period precisely in the new guru, not Kant (old hat), but pragmatism, and John Dewey in particular. The liberalism of exposition and outlook hid the deeper basic concept from which the philosophy flowed. Being developed in a period of developing US capitalism, with the concept of wide open spaces, intelligent activism became the core, drawing ideas from that core, using developing US capitalism and wide open spaces as the scale, all things became possible – many roads lead to socialism. The difference in this sense between Kant and Dewey is but a reflection of the different material roots.
The essence of Dewey’s thoughts is shown in his short but concrete reply to Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours in the New International (August 1938) He concludes:
Orthodox Marxism shares with orthodox religionism and with traditional idealism the belief that human ends are interwoven into the very texture and structure of existence – a concept inherited presumably from its Hegelian origin.
If that is the core of his criticism of Marxism extant, the real flavour of it is this:
Since the class struggle is regarded as the only means that will reach the end, and since the view that it is the only means is reached deductively and not by an inductive examination of means-consequence in their interdependence, the means, the class struggle, does not need to be critically examined with respect to its actual objective consequence.
What is posed here is an abstract argument, a universalist argument independent of reality, though liberal in form. This is counterposed to the narrow, therefore ‘religious’ concept of the class struggle. Whereas Trotsky tried to put a period scale on historical development in Their Morals and Ours, from capitalism to a new economic and social structure in which man would truly be free – Socialism – Dewey, on the contrary, tried to establish an absolute principle applicable to all periods under all conditions. He downgrades the class struggle in comparison to his many roads, under the banner of scientific thought and liberal content.
The accusation that the class struggle being the only means has been reached deductively, without scientific basis, is totally wrong. Most scientific discovery is based on deduction flowing from known facts. Again, the argument that class struggle as the only road is reached without critical examination, says more for the lack of knowledge of Marxism on the part of Dewey. Marx and Engels spent their lifetime analysing the economic and social structure of capitalism, from which arise the class struggle, examining the historical, social and economic developments. They made errors, but the structure on which they based their conclusions has stood the test of time.
The dominant characteristics of man are determined by the way he lives, his environment, and the social relations which arise from that. It is precisely the development of the various modes of production – economic and social relationships – that is the dominant (but not the only) characteristic of human development, and which determines the major relationships of classes, sub-classes and even groups. The emergence of capitalism – economically unconsciously and politically semi-consciously – reflected the various struggles of the lower classes – capitalists and workers, serfs and peasants – against the dominant class, which established both the political and the economic foundations of capitalism. The emergence of capitalism established the dominance of a new mode of production – production for the market.
This mode of production rests on certain fundamentals – the relationships to the production and distribution of commodities of those owning the capital, and those without capital but who produce the goods. It is a conflict of interests, based not on what Marx, the industrial proletariat, etc, wants or not, but on a permanent division at the point of production, independent of human consciousness. The class struggle exists, regardless of whether the workers are storming the barricades or believing that they have a common interest with their employers. Marxism arises in the consciousness, not in the class struggle itself.
Because modern human existence rest on the capitalist mode of production, other factors and relationships follow The class struggle becomes the key anc dominant force in social change. Fundamental social change means the destruction of capitalism by the elimination of the capitalists’ rôle in production transferring capitalist property to common ownership. Only the working class has a relationship with capital that enable this to be done. No other class can carry out this radical and necessary transformation.
To argue that the class struggle is central to modern society, does not, however, mean that there are not other forms of conflict, many predating capitalism, such as over the rô1e of women, and racial and religious prejudices, etc, or that many will not be a source of conflict, albeit declining, after the establishment of Socialism.
Dewey, on the contrary, blames the messenger, not the message. Dialectics does not create the class struggle, it is the method of showing and explaining the process. The scientific nature of the explanation is that, on the basis of the examination of capitalism, it cuts across the illusory desires of utopian Socialism. Its strength lies in showing – not postulating – that there is only one road to Socialism. It is Dewey who desires many roads and therefore becomes involved in abstract philosophical arguments independent of reality.
The post-war decline in working class consciousness, and the growing illusions in capitalism on the part of some workers, have been the material foundation of the adoption of a Deweyist outlook by some intellectuals and working class activists. That it first took shape amongst the anti-Stalinist left was no accident. They were brighter and more politically conscious. Nevertheless, today it permeates through the movement, from Euro-stalinists to trade union bureaucrats. The New Left, the bastard children of the New York intellectuals, revolted against their rightward-moving parents as a consequence of the Vietnam War, but took on as their basic creed that there are other means for radical social change, and thus downgraded the working class. With the student, black and women’s movements, struggles were diverted down blind alleys. And whilst many leading lights of the New Left of the 1960s have joined their elders in enjoying the fruits of capitalism, the philosophical basis remains. Many of the latest generation operate along the same lines, just adding new issues with corresponding movements, such as gays and the environment.
I think that Wald has illusions in the movement in Europe. The reality, however, is that Europeans merely imitate what’s happening in the USA, or develop similar themes. The flourishing of new movements at the expense of working class collective activity has become an impediment to developing conscious working class policies and struggle. The tendency to imitate the USA is ironic when one considers political developments there, with the fragmentation of the movement into small groups, some of which have so lost their basic class outlook that they support a black populist of the Democratic Party.
The growth of US capitalism has been a major factor in this development, but for Marxists these are factors to be fought. Whether they like it or not on the New Left, US capitalism is in decline, and to pick on aspects of the social problems in the USA instead of opposing US capitalism as a whole is a blind alley. The need for a total struggle, and in this perspective the re-emergence of the working class and its parties, is not only logical, but necessary.
To criticise the student, black or women’s movements, etc., is not to condemn the justifiable reaction of the disadvantaged, but to criticise their sectionalised outlook, as blacks, as women, independently of the class structure. One should fight for equal rights for women, blacks and gays, and take up ecological issues, but all this should be part of the central class struggle, under the working class and its parties.
I do not think that this has little to do with the New York intellectuals. It is the result of an historical development, of a process that started before the Second World War, the end result of the movement away from Marxism.
After about 55 years, the generation of New York intellectuals has nearly run its course. Such a book is necessary for a knowledge of the past, the rôle the intellectuals played, the weaknesses inherent in their situation, ideology, etc. As an historical documentation of the development of the New York intellectuals, the book is impressive. The hard work gone into it is clear for everyone to see. In that rôle it fulfills a first class function. It is in drawing the strands together and giving it a clear direction where the weaknesses arise, because it fails to draw the full implications of the effects of Deweyism on the working class, through its influence on the intellectuals. Nevertheless, I recommend without doubt this book to anyone who can afford it, because it advocates the need:
‘... to integrate the sort of theoretical consciousness about political strategy with careful empirical research into the experience of the previous generation of Marxists [i.e., Trotsky, Bukharin, etc.]. In that way we will be able to advance the recovery of our radical heritage, to correct the political amnesia that has marred our legacy.
And that is a job worth doing.
Sam Levy
*****
To the general reader who regards books as providing entertainment or information, the arguments between the various literary schools of the early and mid twentieth century may hold no interest. However, it should be remembered that Trotsky regarded the question of such importance that in 1923 he published Literature and Revolution, in which his concern was with the development of literature following the Russian Revolution. To this end, he gave consideration to the possibility of the unfolding of a proletarian culture following the Revolution, coming to the conclusion that while every ruling class creates its own culture, it also takes several hundred years for this to flower. Therefore, as the dictatorship of the proletariat was expected to last a comparatively short time only before giving way to the abolition of classes and the establishment of socialism, no far-reaching proletarian culture would develop.
Certainly Trotsky did not consider that proletarian culture could flourish within capitalist society. However, from the beginning of the 1930s the Stalinists propounded against all other literary schools proletarian literature or, as it was also called, ‘realism’, and this was supported by clubs named after John Reed. One of the foremost proponents of proletarian literature in America was the Stalinist Mike Gold, who set forth a number of stipulations for its practice, among which he demanded that the world of work be described with technical precision; it must provide a useful social function; be presented in as few words as possible in a simple vocabulary; that action should be swift, and that there should be no melodrama. (M. Gold, A Literary Anthology [Ed. M. Folsom], International Publishers, 1972).
As may be understood, those literary intellectuals of the 1930s who were to become the anti-Stalinist left of Wald’s book found this formula over-prescriptive, which led to two of their number, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, both members of the Communist Party and the John Reed Clubs, to advocate that proletarian literature be leavened by ‘modernism’. At that time, the best known writers in the modernist style were Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Stein, and it was their style of writing which came under fire from the Stalinist proletarian literature school. To provide an example of the type of polemic between modernists and ‘realists’ I can do no better than quote Brecht, who wrote to Lukács in 1956 in defence of James Joyce. Brecht writes that an interior monologue of a woman lying in bed in Ulysses had been rejected by ‘Marxists’ as ‘formalistic’ (formalist – the reduction of writing to etymology and syntax: See Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution). But the criticism had been made in such terms, that it left the impression that the monologue would have been acceptable had it been set in a session with a psychoanalyst. (Aesthetics and Politics – Debates between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, Verso, 1980).
However, to return to Phillips and Rahv. With the support and assistance of established Communist cultural leaders, including Mike Gold, and financial support raised through a lecture by John Strachey, they launched the Partisan Review to concentrate primarily on cultural and literary questions, while leaving the New Masses to confine itself to the political and industrial. By 1937, when both Rahv and Phillips broke openly with the Stalinists, the Partisan Review had gathered around it most of the anti-Stalinist left and Trotskyists who are the subject of Wald’s book, and provided a central point of literary and cultural polemics.
However, Wald writes, although both Phillips and Rahv warned against the right wing dangers to writers “who seek to assimilate the Joyce-Eliot sensibility without a clear revolutionary purpose”, Rahv and Phillips held to elements of Elitism and a belief in High Culture. But they saw modernism as an avant-garde in literary protest against twentieth century commercialism. It is not pertinent that the modernist writers referred to above were not on the left in their politics, for their criticism of bourgeois culture in their works was seen as transcending their political views – an approach, Wald remarks, which recalls Marx and Engels’s treatment of Balzac and Lenin’s of Tolstoy. It must also be remembered that while Trotsky focused on the social aspects of literature in his criticism, he rigorously differentiated between his assessments of the political views of an author and his judgements of the artistic quality of the work.
Ironically, while these editors were gathering about them anti-Stalinist left intellectuals who accepted that “an error of leftism occurs from zeal to steep literature overnight in the programme of Communism, as this leads to sloganised and inorganic writing”, the Stalinists were abandoning their proletarian culture tactics in favour of the Popular Front and were closing down the John Reed Clubs!
Trotsky was now writing about the Moscow Trials, and, as he held a special appeal for radicalised literati which stemmed from his literary, historical and polemical achievements, left wing intellectuals increasingly became associated with the Partisan Review. As it happens, during the 1930s Trotsky had devoted extensive correspondence to the question of the significance of the American intellectuals for a small revolutionary workers’ party, for he saw the leftist intelligentsia, following the Russian revolution, as “binding its lot to the proletariat for the victorious revolution, but at the same time raising itself on the shoulders of the revolution”. He therefore urged that his followers exercise special precautionary measures when assimilating former Communist intellectuals who had gained an education in a Stalinist Party, and pressed that radical intellectuals and writers should strive for theoretical clarity. To what extent some, or all, of these left intellectuals sought the political clarity referred to by Trotsky at that time cannot be stated, but certainly a number of them had reservations with regard to Marxism and Leninism – Max Eastman, for instance, wanted to replace ‘mechanical Marxism’ with ‘social engineering’, and Sidney Hook with pragmatism. Perhaps one of the best known writers attracted to the group around the New Partisan Review was the novelist James T. Farrell (who was also a member of the Trotsky Defence Committee). Farrell’s novels presented Irish working class life in the first half of the twentieth century, and can be said to be written in the realist-naturalist school (examples of which are Zola and Dreiser) but Wald, possibly determined to find a modernist connection, states that he can be considered modernist because he allowed dreams and subconscious longings into his novels. He quotes as proof of this a vision seen by Studs Lonigan as he lies dying from the effects of bootleg liquor, to which he had turned to drown his frustrations and sorrows, instead of developing a class conscious response. As he lies on his sick-bed Studs dreams of a Communist led demonstration against unemployment in which are visible banners bearing slogans calling for revolutionary political action. Against Studs is posed Danny O’Neill “who breaks with the false consciousness perpetrated by (capitalist) society” to work his way through college. Not that this itself is a revolutionary act – in fact it can be quite the opposite!
However, by 1937 when a revamped Partisan Review was launched by Rahv and Phillips, the Moscow Trials, the Trotsky Defence Committee and the Dewey Commission had politicised a further group of young anti-Stalinist left-wing writers, and so Mary McCarthy who was a member of the Trotsky Defence Committee, and whose best known novel is probably The Group, and Dwight Macdonald, became members of the editorial board. Rahv and Phillips had remained intent upon the journal continuing its search for a Marxist aesthetic, and Phillips once again wrote that Trotsky was outstanding in that “he not only saw in literature a mirror of society, but was acutely conscious of those qualities which taken together make up the social vision of a work of art”. In fact, Wald writes that this revamped Partisan Review “was the most important cultural event following the Moscow Trials”.
Nevertheless, it did not last very long as a literary revolutionary catalyst, for within a few short years, as a response to the enthusiastic support of the Second World War by the Stalinists and the absence of a mass revolutionary movement, Rahv had come to the conclusion that the only way in which a writer could protest against the dominant values of ‘our time’ was by maintaining ‘intellectual integrity’. In this Rahv reflected the attitudes of an increasing number of anti-Stalinist left wing writers and intellectuals who had also become disappointed in, and disillusioned by, the failure of the working class to make a revolution. Of course, this process of disintegration was accelerated by Trotsky’s murder. Disillusionment with revolutionary politics brought forth a plethora of anti-socialist novels and stories from former left wing writers and Trotskyists who previously had included little of their revolutionary experience in their fiction. Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Joseph Howe all produced novels and stories, the purport of which was to illustrate the fallacy of attempting to change society by social theory and action. Wald writes that the fiction of the New York intellectuals in the 1940s must be read with a sense of irony, for the consistent theme of virtually every one of their important works published during and immediately after the Second World War proclaims the need for liberation from the ideologies of the radical movement. One might almost call this the school of anti-proletarian culture!
Insofar as ideology is concerned, Wald quotes the British Marxist Terry Eagleton, whose view of ideology is materialist as against that of the New York intellectuals’ philosophical pragmatism. Eagleton sees reality as “ideology’s homeland”. Therefore a work of art “has the potential of liberating us from ideological illusion. Inasmuch as a work of literature seizes upon, reshuffles and depicts experience it, too, resides in the realm of ideology”. (Criticism and Ideology, New Left Books, 1976)
As may well be understood, the opposition of many of these intellectuals to ‘radical ideology’ was to lead them during the ensuing years to support for American foreign policy, McCarthyism, Nixon and Reaganism.
With regard to ‘modernism’, it has become increasingly academic and the elite culture of an intellectual establishment “in which some of the New York intellectuals played a part”. Wald writes that the Marxist criticism of modernism of these intellectuals had never been more than a few penetrating insights “unlike the brilliant work of their European contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs”. It should therefore come as no surprise that today students of Critical Theory largely study the essays written by these Europeans.
Perhaps in the West the political discussion has changed from a debate of literary schools to that of the effects of mass culture, or the ‘commercialisation of culture’ which Farrell perceived as “creating a struggle between the desire of the artist to present an authentic vision of the world and the desire of the film-makers and publishers to make art marketable, which they achieve by standardisation, repetition and by promoting established authors”. (J.T. Farrell, The Fate of Writing in America, quoted by Wald, p.223).
However, in the East, the debate with regard to ‘proletarian culture’ continues and, in fact, has become part of the fabric of daily life, as witness a recent Channel 4 programme on the dissident Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who has served several terms in prison and whose plays are banned because they satirise the bureaucracy, the plays being presented in a modernist style. In this programme a Stalinist Director of Arts stated that “art has the duty to serve the health of society”, which recalls one of the prescriptions set out by Mike Gold.
In conclusion, I would add that this is a book which poses many questions to all those interested in the connection between politics and the development of a Marxist aesthetic.
What I found especially interesting was the contemplation of why, in America during the 1930s, there was such an active anti-Stalinist and Trotskyist intellectual left, while in Britain our own radicalised intellectuals for the most part continued to support Stalinism or moved directly to the right.
The book itself is written clearly and comprehensively, and apart from detailing the debates and polemics involved, provides potted biographies of a star-studded cast.
Sheila Lahr
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Theses on the American Revolution (1946)
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
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Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Kurt Landau-The Spanish Revolution of 1936 and the German Revolution of 1918-19
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
Trotsky and the POUM
From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.
Despite Trotsky’s trenchant criticism of the political parties in the workers’ camp in Spain there were few people in Spain who were listening to him. A Spanish section of the International Left Opposition had been formed by Andres Nin after his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 1927. For two and a half years – from September 1930 to February 1933 – Trotsky corresponded with Nin who was virtually alone in Barcelona. Relations with other supporters in Madrid were slight, a fact which already revealed a chronic provincialism (an adaptation to Catalan nationalism) in Nin’s political make-up.
During these years Nin oriented himself almost exclusively to the Catalan Federation which was a split from the PCE. It was led by Joaquim Maurin who was a right-centrist who only objected to the ultra-leftist excesses of Stalinism. Nin refused to criticise Maurin openly and refused to build a left opposition faction within Maurin’s group. Indeed, Nin went further in his opportunism and even helped to write the Federation’s documents and edit its paper.
Trotsky’s political ties with Nin were effectively broken in 1933 although Nin did not publicly break with Trotsky until 1935 when he joined forces with Maurin to form the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In the intervening period Trotsky upbraided Nin for failing to enter the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Party) and its union (UGT) whose rank and file were undergoing massive radicalisation in 1934 and 1935.
Despite these failings Trotsky recognised that the POUM, small as it was, organised some of the best vanguard elements in the Catalan working class. (Its influence outside this region was negligible.) It was a lone voice in Spain in unmasking the crimes of the Stalinists in the Moscow Trials. Also during 1935 the POUM developed the best formal criticisms of the Popular Front and the Second Republic in the pages of its paper La Batalla. Its leftism earned it the hostility of even the CNT and UGT leaders who sought to exclude POUMists from their unions.
The POUM was small. Before the Civil War estimates of its size vary from 3000 to 8000. Like most of the left groups it grew during the Civil War and by September 1936, it was about 30 000 strong, with l0 000 in its own militia. Yet much more than to contribute to its numerical growth, the Popular Front government and the Civil War cruelly exposed the centrist politics of the POUM leaders. Capable of left criticisms, the POUM consistently refused to carry through a break with the leaders of the CNT and UGT. Fearful above all of ‘isolation’ from these leaders they diplomatically refused to be critical of their practice. Worse still, they acted as a ‘loyal opposition’ in the Popular Front, often arguing against the PCE’s proposals but accepting to abide by them and even taking responsibility for them when they were defeated.
It is for this reason that Trotsky ruthlessly called the POUM ‘the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party’. Unlike Stalinism, which refused for a second to adapt to the revolutionary impulses of the masses after July 1936 and instead derailed and destroyed all radical initiatives, the POUM wanted revolution, proclaimed its necessity and even on occasion proposed correct tactics. However, it did this alongside covering-up the weaknesses and betrayals of the anarchist, socialist and even Stalinist leaders. For one whole year La Batalla refused to criticise the CNT leadership!
The best example of the POUM’s centrism was to be found in its attitude to the Popular Front itself. Before the February 1936 elections the POUM campaigned against any coalition with the republican bourgeoisie. Then, on the very eve of the elections, they actually entered the Popular Front – only to renounce it again when the elections were over. However, Nin’s criticism of the Popular Front after February was not that it tied the workers’ organisations to the programme of the bourgeoisie but that it was not genuinely a Popular Front. La Batalla of 17 July 1936 on the eve of the Civil War, called for ‘an authentic government of the Popular Front, with the direct participation of the Socialist and Communist parties’.
Yet, when the Civil War erupted and the initiative was with the masses, the POUM shifted direction sharply and gave voice to the demands of the socialist revolution. In those early weeks the POUM exercised the leadership in the Lerida revolutionary committee. It was the only committee in Catalonia to refuse to have a representative of the republican bourgeoisie on it.
But even here the POUM stopped halfway. It could and should have used its revolutionary influence in towns like Lerida and Gerona to agitate for the formation of district and provincial Soviet-type bodies which would have developed into a decisive challenge to the authority of the Generalidad.
Not only did they refuse this road but Nin went out of his way to explain at great length that Soviet-type bodies were unnecessary and ‘alien’ to Spain. This unforgivable rationalisation for the prejudices and libertarian localism of the anarcho-syndicalist masses was typical of the POUM. Instead of ‘saying what is’, the POUM tried at every turn of events to minimise the differences and above all to conciliate with the leaders of the CNT.
Nin was to get his wish for a ‘genuine’ Popular Front in September 1936. Up until 7 September La Batalla denounced ‘bourgeois ministers’, unlike the PCE which heaped praise upon them. But once the Caballero cabinet was formed (ie, the PSOE leader and the leftist face of the bourgeoisie) in Madrid and the offer was made to the POUM of a seat in the provincial government in Catalonia, all this ceased.
In its place Nin assured the readers of La Batalla that a revolutionary orientation was ‘assured’ whenever there was a majority of ‘socialists’ in the government. Nin went so far as to define the dictatorship of the proletariat as a united front of workers’ parties and trade union leaders who assume governmental power! Nin ‘forgot’ the little matter of the democratic control and accountability of the mass of workers and poor peasants!
Once the POUM took its seat in the Catalan government it also took responsibility for the measures of the government. Of course, the POUM proposed radical measures to its Stalinist and bourgeois allies: an industrial and credit bank; no compensation to factory owners, etc. But these were rejected and the POUM remained respectfully silent. Worse, when the government proposed that there should be a government agent in each factory, or that there should be no further elections of factory councils for two years, the POUM agreed.
Worse even than that – indeed criminal – was Nin’s readiness to accompany President Companys on a tour of Lerida to convince the workers that the powers of the revolutionary committees should be dissolved. Nin argued:
These revolutionary committees, whether Popular Executive Committees, or Committees of Public Safety, represent only part of the workers’ organisations, or else represent them in incorrect proportions ... Obviously, the suppression of their revolutionary initiative is to be regretted, but one must recognise the need to codify ... the various municipal organisations, as much with the aim of replacing them uniformly as of setting them under the authority of the new General Council.
After having performed these valuable services for the bourgeoisie, on 16 December 1936 Nin was kicked out of the government. The POUM’s usefulness was at an end. Trotsky commented:
In the heat of the revolutionary war between classes Nin entered a bourgeois government whose goal it was to destroy the workers’ committees, the foundation of proletarian government. When this goal was reached, Nin was driven out of the bourgeois government.
Postscript
Despite the record of Trotsky’s criticism of the POUM it is sad to reflect that the British Trotskyists grouped around Reg Groves, the Marxist League, and their paper the Red Flag tended to obscure these criticisms and parade the POUM as a revolutionary organisation. The September 1936 Red Flag argued that ‘upon the rapid evolution of POUM into a Bolshevik Party depends the fate of the Spanish Revolution’. This does not reflect Trotsky’s own view of the POUM at the time. The Bolshevik-Leninists of Spain were only formed in the spring of l937 but they were formed in opposition to the POUM.
Keith Hassell
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
Trotsky and the POUM
From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.
Despite Trotsky’s trenchant criticism of the political parties in the workers’ camp in Spain there were few people in Spain who were listening to him. A Spanish section of the International Left Opposition had been formed by Andres Nin after his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 1927. For two and a half years – from September 1930 to February 1933 – Trotsky corresponded with Nin who was virtually alone in Barcelona. Relations with other supporters in Madrid were slight, a fact which already revealed a chronic provincialism (an adaptation to Catalan nationalism) in Nin’s political make-up.
During these years Nin oriented himself almost exclusively to the Catalan Federation which was a split from the PCE. It was led by Joaquim Maurin who was a right-centrist who only objected to the ultra-leftist excesses of Stalinism. Nin refused to criticise Maurin openly and refused to build a left opposition faction within Maurin’s group. Indeed, Nin went further in his opportunism and even helped to write the Federation’s documents and edit its paper.
Trotsky’s political ties with Nin were effectively broken in 1933 although Nin did not publicly break with Trotsky until 1935 when he joined forces with Maurin to form the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In the intervening period Trotsky upbraided Nin for failing to enter the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Party) and its union (UGT) whose rank and file were undergoing massive radicalisation in 1934 and 1935.
Despite these failings Trotsky recognised that the POUM, small as it was, organised some of the best vanguard elements in the Catalan working class. (Its influence outside this region was negligible.) It was a lone voice in Spain in unmasking the crimes of the Stalinists in the Moscow Trials. Also during 1935 the POUM developed the best formal criticisms of the Popular Front and the Second Republic in the pages of its paper La Batalla. Its leftism earned it the hostility of even the CNT and UGT leaders who sought to exclude POUMists from their unions.
The POUM was small. Before the Civil War estimates of its size vary from 3000 to 8000. Like most of the left groups it grew during the Civil War and by September 1936, it was about 30 000 strong, with l0 000 in its own militia. Yet much more than to contribute to its numerical growth, the Popular Front government and the Civil War cruelly exposed the centrist politics of the POUM leaders. Capable of left criticisms, the POUM consistently refused to carry through a break with the leaders of the CNT and UGT. Fearful above all of ‘isolation’ from these leaders they diplomatically refused to be critical of their practice. Worse still, they acted as a ‘loyal opposition’ in the Popular Front, often arguing against the PCE’s proposals but accepting to abide by them and even taking responsibility for them when they were defeated.
It is for this reason that Trotsky ruthlessly called the POUM ‘the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party’. Unlike Stalinism, which refused for a second to adapt to the revolutionary impulses of the masses after July 1936 and instead derailed and destroyed all radical initiatives, the POUM wanted revolution, proclaimed its necessity and even on occasion proposed correct tactics. However, it did this alongside covering-up the weaknesses and betrayals of the anarchist, socialist and even Stalinist leaders. For one whole year La Batalla refused to criticise the CNT leadership!
The best example of the POUM’s centrism was to be found in its attitude to the Popular Front itself. Before the February 1936 elections the POUM campaigned against any coalition with the republican bourgeoisie. Then, on the very eve of the elections, they actually entered the Popular Front – only to renounce it again when the elections were over. However, Nin’s criticism of the Popular Front after February was not that it tied the workers’ organisations to the programme of the bourgeoisie but that it was not genuinely a Popular Front. La Batalla of 17 July 1936 on the eve of the Civil War, called for ‘an authentic government of the Popular Front, with the direct participation of the Socialist and Communist parties’.
Yet, when the Civil War erupted and the initiative was with the masses, the POUM shifted direction sharply and gave voice to the demands of the socialist revolution. In those early weeks the POUM exercised the leadership in the Lerida revolutionary committee. It was the only committee in Catalonia to refuse to have a representative of the republican bourgeoisie on it.
But even here the POUM stopped halfway. It could and should have used its revolutionary influence in towns like Lerida and Gerona to agitate for the formation of district and provincial Soviet-type bodies which would have developed into a decisive challenge to the authority of the Generalidad.
Not only did they refuse this road but Nin went out of his way to explain at great length that Soviet-type bodies were unnecessary and ‘alien’ to Spain. This unforgivable rationalisation for the prejudices and libertarian localism of the anarcho-syndicalist masses was typical of the POUM. Instead of ‘saying what is’, the POUM tried at every turn of events to minimise the differences and above all to conciliate with the leaders of the CNT.
Nin was to get his wish for a ‘genuine’ Popular Front in September 1936. Up until 7 September La Batalla denounced ‘bourgeois ministers’, unlike the PCE which heaped praise upon them. But once the Caballero cabinet was formed (ie, the PSOE leader and the leftist face of the bourgeoisie) in Madrid and the offer was made to the POUM of a seat in the provincial government in Catalonia, all this ceased.
In its place Nin assured the readers of La Batalla that a revolutionary orientation was ‘assured’ whenever there was a majority of ‘socialists’ in the government. Nin went so far as to define the dictatorship of the proletariat as a united front of workers’ parties and trade union leaders who assume governmental power! Nin ‘forgot’ the little matter of the democratic control and accountability of the mass of workers and poor peasants!
Once the POUM took its seat in the Catalan government it also took responsibility for the measures of the government. Of course, the POUM proposed radical measures to its Stalinist and bourgeois allies: an industrial and credit bank; no compensation to factory owners, etc. But these were rejected and the POUM remained respectfully silent. Worse, when the government proposed that there should be a government agent in each factory, or that there should be no further elections of factory councils for two years, the POUM agreed.
Worse even than that – indeed criminal – was Nin’s readiness to accompany President Companys on a tour of Lerida to convince the workers that the powers of the revolutionary committees should be dissolved. Nin argued:
These revolutionary committees, whether Popular Executive Committees, or Committees of Public Safety, represent only part of the workers’ organisations, or else represent them in incorrect proportions ... Obviously, the suppression of their revolutionary initiative is to be regretted, but one must recognise the need to codify ... the various municipal organisations, as much with the aim of replacing them uniformly as of setting them under the authority of the new General Council.
After having performed these valuable services for the bourgeoisie, on 16 December 1936 Nin was kicked out of the government. The POUM’s usefulness was at an end. Trotsky commented:
In the heat of the revolutionary war between classes Nin entered a bourgeois government whose goal it was to destroy the workers’ committees, the foundation of proletarian government. When this goal was reached, Nin was driven out of the bourgeois government.
Postscript
Despite the record of Trotsky’s criticism of the POUM it is sad to reflect that the British Trotskyists grouped around Reg Groves, the Marxist League, and their paper the Red Flag tended to obscure these criticisms and parade the POUM as a revolutionary organisation. The September 1936 Red Flag argued that ‘upon the rapid evolution of POUM into a Bolshevik Party depends the fate of the Spanish Revolution’. This does not reflect Trotsky’s own view of the POUM at the time. The Bolshevik-Leninists of Spain were only formed in the spring of l937 but they were formed in opposition to the POUM.
Keith Hassell
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
***Out In Those Mean Urban Neon Wilderness Streets- “Midnight Cowboy”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the movie trailer for Midnight Cowboy.
DVD Review
Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, 1969
Recently in a review of Bonnie and Clyde, a film that also deals tragic-comically with lumpen life, in that case the mock heroics of bank robbery in the popular imaginations of an earlier generation, that of the Great Depression, I noted that I was familiar, too familiar with that place where the lumpenproletariat, the dregs of society, intersects and intermingles with the working poor. And also of the dreams, sometimes the plain, old ordinary get-rich-quick dreams to get out from under that inflame those who have nothing and have no way of getting more than nothing.
In Midnight Cowboy we get a very solid sense of the convergence of those two sets of social interactions. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, small town Texas twisted, second-hand dreams of making it in big time, big apple, New York as a hustler out in the neon wilderness of Times Square. And, Dustin Hoffman’s Ratzo Rizzo, home-grown boy, already on those mean streets scratching for nickels and dimes to keep body and soul together. And to get out the hell out of killer New York, as long as he does not have work to do so. Work, in real life, is the curse of this segment of society. I have known more than my fair share, and have had more than my fill of real Ratzos, including in my own extended family, complete with that bizarre logic that says black is white, as matter of course, and visa versa that drives their skimpy lives.
That said, this is a buddy story, in this case a male buddy film, that was a cinematic trend back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and at that level the movie works as old Joe Buck is ready to go to the mat, in the end, to get old Ratzo out of cold-hearted New York. But here is the “skinny” from personal experience, it is usually too little too late. And so it proved here. This film, moreover, despite my “high sociology” screed above is worth seeing for the outstanding performances of these two actors early on in their careers.
DVD Review
Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, 1969
Recently in a review of Bonnie and Clyde, a film that also deals tragic-comically with lumpen life, in that case the mock heroics of bank robbery in the popular imaginations of an earlier generation, that of the Great Depression, I noted that I was familiar, too familiar with that place where the lumpenproletariat, the dregs of society, intersects and intermingles with the working poor. And also of the dreams, sometimes the plain, old ordinary get-rich-quick dreams to get out from under that inflame those who have nothing and have no way of getting more than nothing.
In Midnight Cowboy we get a very solid sense of the convergence of those two sets of social interactions. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, small town Texas twisted, second-hand dreams of making it in big time, big apple, New York as a hustler out in the neon wilderness of Times Square. And, Dustin Hoffman’s Ratzo Rizzo, home-grown boy, already on those mean streets scratching for nickels and dimes to keep body and soul together. And to get out the hell out of killer New York, as long as he does not have work to do so. Work, in real life, is the curse of this segment of society. I have known more than my fair share, and have had more than my fill of real Ratzos, including in my own extended family, complete with that bizarre logic that says black is white, as matter of course, and visa versa that drives their skimpy lives.
That said, this is a buddy story, in this case a male buddy film, that was a cinematic trend back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and at that level the movie works as old Joe Buck is ready to go to the mat, in the end, to get old Ratzo out of cold-hearted New York. But here is the “skinny” from personal experience, it is usually too little too late. And so it proved here. This film, moreover, despite my “high sociology” screed above is worth seeing for the outstanding performances of these two actors early on in their careers.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
******
Reviews
Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941 , Norton, New York, 1992, pp707, £19.95
RECENTLY ISSUED in paperback, this is the second instalment of Robert Tucker’s Stalin trilogy, the first being Stalin as Revolutionary, which covered his life until 1929. It develops the thesis presented in the first volume which bases Stalin’s political career upon a combination of mes-sianic Russian nationalism and a self-perceived role as Lenin’s only genuine successor. The period covered in Stalin in Power is, of course, when he put into practice the scheme which was to transform the Soviet Union, and would provide the model for the so-called ‘Socialist’ world, the demise of which we are now witnessing.
As in Stalin as Revolutionary, Tucker adopts a psychological approach to discover what made Stalin act in the manner he did. This centres around Stalin’s identification with his own conception of Lenin as a revolutionary hero—a conception that Lenin would have found highly disturbing, as it more than anything resembled a Caucasian mountain chieftain—and with his own self-hatred, which was based upon his recognition of his inability to match up to his mythical Lenin, and the knowledge that others recog-nised his shortcomings as well.
Although the consequences of these factors had been visible prior to 1929, their real significance only became evident once he had won out over his party rivals, and inaugurated his own ‘October’ with the First Five Year Plan. Tucker correctly says that ‘Stalin at the outset of the 1930s was not yet a dictator’, his supporters were ‘with exceptions, no collection of sycophantic yes-men’, and ‘he was not beyond having to contend with criticism, dissent and outright opposition in the Communist Party’ (pp120-1). Thus having established the ascendancy of his faction, he had to deal with dissent within it. The emergence of the Riutin opposition must have been all the more disturbing, as must have been the growing unease amongst other previously staunch supporters, such as Kirov and Ordzhonikidze, who were concerned at the grave problems caused by the collectivisation and industrialisation drives.
Tucker sees the Seventeenth CPSU Congress of 1934, the so-called Congress of Victors (or Victims, as he wittily puts it), as the breaking point. Although Stalin was almost smothered with sycophantic adulation, over 100 delegates voted against him (and his closest allies like Molotov and Kagan-ovich), and Kirov appeared as the most popular speaker.
All this was too much. For a long time, as Tucker puts it, ‘Stalin’s mental world was... sharply split into trustworthy friends and villainous enemies—the former being those who affirmed his idealised self-concept, the latter, those who negated it’ (p164). Now those who had ‘affirmed his idealised self-concept’ were turning against him. And as he personified the new Soviet state and the Communist movement, those who opposed him were opposing him as that leader:
‘Unable to relinquish or scale down his view of himself as a Lenin-like genius of revolutionary politics, his only possible response was to see the critics and oppositionists as being, behind their appearance of loyalty to the party-state, conspiring enemies of it aiming to wreck the revolutionary cause by removing him as its successful leader.’ (p318)
Not only did Stalin feel obliged to have his opponents publicly branded as being guilty of all manner of heinous crimes, he actually had to believe in their guilt:
‘Only by believing in the victims’ treasonous designs or deeds could he come to terms with their failure to share his grandiose beliefs about himself, their actual or suspected disbelief in his supreme greatness as the party-state’s leader of genius., (p476)
Stalin was fully aware of the difference between how he wanted to appear and wanted others to see him, and what he and others knew he really was. Stalin had ‘to blot out of his mind the disparities between the idealised Stalin with whom he identified himself and the scheming, bungling, blemished, evil-doing Stalin that he very often had been and still was, never before so vilely as now’ (p477). And so ‘their confessions were an imperatively needed support for Stalin’s inner personality cult’ (p477). This is what Tucker sees as the basis for the grotesque procession of trials, each with its array of confessing defendants. Stalin’s extraordinary vengefulness was based upon his trait of projecting his own faults onto his enemies. Tucker explains how a person’s feelings of self-condemnation and self-hatred can be ‘so painfully disturbing that the individual feels driven to relieve himself by turning his self-hate outward against others whom he can freely denounce, accuse, despise, condemn and possibly punish’, to the extent that the person ‘actually experiences his own failings as those of others and his own self-condemnation as condemnation of others’ (pp162-3). The victims of Stalin’s terror were accused, either at show trials or in the NKVD’s cells, of wishing to destroy the party, cause economic havoc, encourage terror, and weaken the country’s defences. All this was being done alright—but by Stalin.
These factors cannot be discounted. The characteristics of an individual can have considerable impact upon a given situation, especially in a society in which social tensions are mediated through one particular person, who therefore exercises considerable power. Few would disagree that Stalin possessed particularly unpleasant personal characteristics. He must have experienced a profound crisis of confidence during the First Five Year Plan, when opposition amongst the population to the appalling conditions they were enduring came to his notice, and when members of his cohort started to criticise and even oppose him as they saw the consequences of his policies. The attempt to remove him as General Secretary at the Seventeenth Congress must have been the final straw, which set him on course for the Great Terror of 1936-38.
And yet there is a major problem with basing the features of Stalinism upon the psychology of the man himself. However much he personified his system, other Stalinist states have shared those basic features. The self--development of the leader cult, the nationalism, purges, denunciations, trials and the other self-justifying features which Tucker ascribes to Stalin’s personality have been replicated throughout the Stalinist world, usually in a depressingly similar form. It is true that the official Communist movement was a product of the Stalin era, and was modelled upon Stalin’s CPSU. However, the proliferation of national Stalinist cults based upon people with quite different backgrounds and personalities, and the basic similarities of Stalinist state systems, show that what lies behind Stalinism is a social formation, and not the phenomenalisation of the features of one, albeit very powerful, man.
This leads us on to consider Stalin’s concept of Soviet development. Tucker correctly places much significance upon Stalin’s Russian national-ism. Lenin and other Bolsheviks saw the Russian Revolution as merely the start of the global transformation to Socialism, in which Russia, whilst at first taking the lead, would become a less significant factor once revolutions occurred in more advanced countries. They regarded the backwardness and brutality of Tsarist Russia with undisguised repulsion. Stalin, however, saw Russia in an almost messianic manner. He harked back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and saw their brutal methods of modernisation as a model for his industrial and agricultural plans.
Generally speaking, Tucker considers Stalin acted along well thought--out lines rather than improvising on a pragmatic basis. If anything, this gives Stalin rather too much credit. Rather than working to some kind of worked--out schema, Stalin’s entire political thought gives a real impression of improvisation.
Tucker considers that by the mid-1920s Stalin was already thinking of his ‘October’ a ‘second revolution’, whilst being in a ‘tactical alliance’ with Bukharin (p59). If this be the case, why then did he ally himself with the moderate wing around Bukharin? It was the Left Opposition which called for collectivisation and industrialisation, and Stalin’s criticisms of it differed little from those of Bukharin. It was surely not merely tactics that caused Stalin in April 1926 to ridicule the concept of the Dneprostroi hydro--electric scheme.
Tucker says that Stalin jockeyed for position, not bringing the full implications of his policy into the open, and as late as November 1928 making ‘no explicit mention of an impending revolution from above’ or of being ready to resort to terror (p85). This was to ensure the support of his Central Committee colleagues, who as late as April 1929 ‘still did not perceive the necessity or possibility of wholesale collectivisation... whereas Stalin, inspired by his urge to go down in history as a combination of Lenin and Peter the Great, did’ (p86).
Stalin may have had from the early 1920s ideas about collectivisation and industrialisation, but it is unlikely that they went beyond vague thoughts. To hold messianic visions and grandiose intentions is one thing, to think about putting them into practice, let alone doing it, is quite another. Rather than seeing Stalin as tactically hiding behind Bukharin to defeat the Left Opposition, and then revealing his real programme in 1929, I would consider that Stalin, faced with the crisis of the NEP, leapt into the First Five Year Plan. It was certainly launched with a messianic fervour, but there were no properly thought-out plans, nor could there have been.
I think that Stalin gradually came around to seeing the necessity of industrialisation and collectivisation after the mid-1920s. The problem was not merely grain procurement. The Left Opposition had long recognised that the impressive growth figures under the NEP were due mainly to the return into operation of idle machinery, and that any further advance required real investment, and considered that Bukharin’s strategy of un-trammelled market relations would not be able to provide a large enough base for real economic advance. Anyway, by 1927 even Bukharin was starting to adopt some of the measures previously demanded by the Left Opposition.
Collectivisation was an emergency response to the peasants’ refusal to sell grain when there were limited manufactured products available in exchange. Tucker’s implication that grain procurement and goods sales prices were manipulated to ensure the peasants’ dissatisfaction, and thus provided an excuse for an attack upon them, does not preclude the fact that the regime was facing an incipient crisis in the countryside. Whilst there was little immediate danger of the emergence of a politically conscious capitalist class based upon the NEP, a crisis was emerging over the division of the total social surplus between the capitalist elements and the state sector.
Rather than being some kind of fully elaborated scheme, the continuous rewriting and upward adjustment of the First Five Year Plan prior to its implementation, the unplanned, ad hoc nature of the move into the Plan, the dramatic boosting of its targets, and the chaotic, uncontrolled nature of the whole affair, which Tucker outlines, all point to the improvisatory essence of it all.
Today more than ever the horrors of Stalinism are considered to be the logical and only possible outcome of Leninism. The most recent recruits to this melancholy chorus are former Stalinists in both the East and West, as they look with bemusement at the wreckage of the country on which they had looked so fondly, and give up on any hope of human liberation. One of the strengths of Tucker is that he—no friend of the Marxian project—shows the differences between the approaches of Lenin and Stalin. Whilst accept-ing that Lenin was not averse to using coercion during the first stages of the Soviet republic, Tucker considers that Lenin ‘would have opposed Stalin’s coercive peasant policy of 1928-29 and the forcible mass collectivisation that followed’ (p87).
The Marxian critique of Stalinist industrialisation and collectivisation is not, however, merely based upon the rejection of its coercive aspects, but is centred upon the absence of workers’ democracy. The question of working class democracy is crucial. Marxists are in favour of workers’ democracy not because it is a nice idea, but because it is essential to the replacement of capitalism by a rationally regulated society. The market can only be replaced by planning, and that is impossible without workers’ democracy.
Although the concept of workers’ democracy had never been high on the Bolsheviks’ agenda (after all, until 1917, seizing power had been seen as a distant objective), and Lenin’s own writings on the subject do not add up to a cohesive whole, workers’ democracy—the essence of a Socialist society—was never part of Stalin’s approach. Stalin could never have written State and Revolution .
As the book’s title shows, Tucker sees the great change of 1929 as a revolution. The First Five Year Plan was ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that it transformed Soviet society. But it was not revolutionary in the Marxian sense. It did not replace the state capitalist society of the NEP by a society run along the lines of workers’ management. It produced a social formation ruled by a bureaucratic elite that, despite the prodigious quantitative development, could not advance in a genuinely qualitative sense the forces of production. With neither the market nor democratic planning, the Soviet economy was essentially unregulated and out of control. What passed as ‘planning’ was a pathetic caricature. The social formation which emerged from the First Five Year Plan was not able to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism—a fact that should now be obvious.
And this is where the book fails. Tucker’s descriptions of the social, political and cultural aspects of the 1930s are excellent, even if one does not accept his psychological explanations. However, the economic results of the great change are covered in a few pages, and the nature of the Soviet social formation as it emerged from Stalin’s ‘October’ is not discussed at all. For it was in the 1930s that the image emerged of the Soviet Union as an historically viable economic colossus. This was not merely the case with the venal or gullible fellow travellers and Stalinists abroad, but with many who were critical of Stalin’s political regime from a liberal outlook, or, like Trotsky, from the viewpoint of revolutionary Marxism.
There was some excuse for this sort of outlook in the 1930s, especially as the capitalist world was experiencing a chronic slump whilst the Soviet economy was expanding. But over the last decade it became increasingly clear that the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt, and that this tendency towards stagnation was rooted in the very nature of the Soviet social formation, which can now be seen as historically unviable. As this social formation was the essential product of Stalin’s ‘October’, the lack of any discussion in this book of its economic basis, especially of the structure of the command economy, leaves an unfortunate gap in what is certainly one of the best biographies of Stalin.
Paul Flewers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
******
Reviews
Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941 , Norton, New York, 1992, pp707, £19.95
RECENTLY ISSUED in paperback, this is the second instalment of Robert Tucker’s Stalin trilogy, the first being Stalin as Revolutionary, which covered his life until 1929. It develops the thesis presented in the first volume which bases Stalin’s political career upon a combination of mes-sianic Russian nationalism and a self-perceived role as Lenin’s only genuine successor. The period covered in Stalin in Power is, of course, when he put into practice the scheme which was to transform the Soviet Union, and would provide the model for the so-called ‘Socialist’ world, the demise of which we are now witnessing.
As in Stalin as Revolutionary, Tucker adopts a psychological approach to discover what made Stalin act in the manner he did. This centres around Stalin’s identification with his own conception of Lenin as a revolutionary hero—a conception that Lenin would have found highly disturbing, as it more than anything resembled a Caucasian mountain chieftain—and with his own self-hatred, which was based upon his recognition of his inability to match up to his mythical Lenin, and the knowledge that others recog-nised his shortcomings as well.
Although the consequences of these factors had been visible prior to 1929, their real significance only became evident once he had won out over his party rivals, and inaugurated his own ‘October’ with the First Five Year Plan. Tucker correctly says that ‘Stalin at the outset of the 1930s was not yet a dictator’, his supporters were ‘with exceptions, no collection of sycophantic yes-men’, and ‘he was not beyond having to contend with criticism, dissent and outright opposition in the Communist Party’ (pp120-1). Thus having established the ascendancy of his faction, he had to deal with dissent within it. The emergence of the Riutin opposition must have been all the more disturbing, as must have been the growing unease amongst other previously staunch supporters, such as Kirov and Ordzhonikidze, who were concerned at the grave problems caused by the collectivisation and industrialisation drives.
Tucker sees the Seventeenth CPSU Congress of 1934, the so-called Congress of Victors (or Victims, as he wittily puts it), as the breaking point. Although Stalin was almost smothered with sycophantic adulation, over 100 delegates voted against him (and his closest allies like Molotov and Kagan-ovich), and Kirov appeared as the most popular speaker.
All this was too much. For a long time, as Tucker puts it, ‘Stalin’s mental world was... sharply split into trustworthy friends and villainous enemies—the former being those who affirmed his idealised self-concept, the latter, those who negated it’ (p164). Now those who had ‘affirmed his idealised self-concept’ were turning against him. And as he personified the new Soviet state and the Communist movement, those who opposed him were opposing him as that leader:
‘Unable to relinquish or scale down his view of himself as a Lenin-like genius of revolutionary politics, his only possible response was to see the critics and oppositionists as being, behind their appearance of loyalty to the party-state, conspiring enemies of it aiming to wreck the revolutionary cause by removing him as its successful leader.’ (p318)
Not only did Stalin feel obliged to have his opponents publicly branded as being guilty of all manner of heinous crimes, he actually had to believe in their guilt:
‘Only by believing in the victims’ treasonous designs or deeds could he come to terms with their failure to share his grandiose beliefs about himself, their actual or suspected disbelief in his supreme greatness as the party-state’s leader of genius., (p476)
Stalin was fully aware of the difference between how he wanted to appear and wanted others to see him, and what he and others knew he really was. Stalin had ‘to blot out of his mind the disparities between the idealised Stalin with whom he identified himself and the scheming, bungling, blemished, evil-doing Stalin that he very often had been and still was, never before so vilely as now’ (p477). And so ‘their confessions were an imperatively needed support for Stalin’s inner personality cult’ (p477). This is what Tucker sees as the basis for the grotesque procession of trials, each with its array of confessing defendants. Stalin’s extraordinary vengefulness was based upon his trait of projecting his own faults onto his enemies. Tucker explains how a person’s feelings of self-condemnation and self-hatred can be ‘so painfully disturbing that the individual feels driven to relieve himself by turning his self-hate outward against others whom he can freely denounce, accuse, despise, condemn and possibly punish’, to the extent that the person ‘actually experiences his own failings as those of others and his own self-condemnation as condemnation of others’ (pp162-3). The victims of Stalin’s terror were accused, either at show trials or in the NKVD’s cells, of wishing to destroy the party, cause economic havoc, encourage terror, and weaken the country’s defences. All this was being done alright—but by Stalin.
These factors cannot be discounted. The characteristics of an individual can have considerable impact upon a given situation, especially in a society in which social tensions are mediated through one particular person, who therefore exercises considerable power. Few would disagree that Stalin possessed particularly unpleasant personal characteristics. He must have experienced a profound crisis of confidence during the First Five Year Plan, when opposition amongst the population to the appalling conditions they were enduring came to his notice, and when members of his cohort started to criticise and even oppose him as they saw the consequences of his policies. The attempt to remove him as General Secretary at the Seventeenth Congress must have been the final straw, which set him on course for the Great Terror of 1936-38.
And yet there is a major problem with basing the features of Stalinism upon the psychology of the man himself. However much he personified his system, other Stalinist states have shared those basic features. The self--development of the leader cult, the nationalism, purges, denunciations, trials and the other self-justifying features which Tucker ascribes to Stalin’s personality have been replicated throughout the Stalinist world, usually in a depressingly similar form. It is true that the official Communist movement was a product of the Stalin era, and was modelled upon Stalin’s CPSU. However, the proliferation of national Stalinist cults based upon people with quite different backgrounds and personalities, and the basic similarities of Stalinist state systems, show that what lies behind Stalinism is a social formation, and not the phenomenalisation of the features of one, albeit very powerful, man.
This leads us on to consider Stalin’s concept of Soviet development. Tucker correctly places much significance upon Stalin’s Russian national-ism. Lenin and other Bolsheviks saw the Russian Revolution as merely the start of the global transformation to Socialism, in which Russia, whilst at first taking the lead, would become a less significant factor once revolutions occurred in more advanced countries. They regarded the backwardness and brutality of Tsarist Russia with undisguised repulsion. Stalin, however, saw Russia in an almost messianic manner. He harked back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and saw their brutal methods of modernisation as a model for his industrial and agricultural plans.
Generally speaking, Tucker considers Stalin acted along well thought--out lines rather than improvising on a pragmatic basis. If anything, this gives Stalin rather too much credit. Rather than working to some kind of worked--out schema, Stalin’s entire political thought gives a real impression of improvisation.
Tucker considers that by the mid-1920s Stalin was already thinking of his ‘October’ a ‘second revolution’, whilst being in a ‘tactical alliance’ with Bukharin (p59). If this be the case, why then did he ally himself with the moderate wing around Bukharin? It was the Left Opposition which called for collectivisation and industrialisation, and Stalin’s criticisms of it differed little from those of Bukharin. It was surely not merely tactics that caused Stalin in April 1926 to ridicule the concept of the Dneprostroi hydro--electric scheme.
Tucker says that Stalin jockeyed for position, not bringing the full implications of his policy into the open, and as late as November 1928 making ‘no explicit mention of an impending revolution from above’ or of being ready to resort to terror (p85). This was to ensure the support of his Central Committee colleagues, who as late as April 1929 ‘still did not perceive the necessity or possibility of wholesale collectivisation... whereas Stalin, inspired by his urge to go down in history as a combination of Lenin and Peter the Great, did’ (p86).
Stalin may have had from the early 1920s ideas about collectivisation and industrialisation, but it is unlikely that they went beyond vague thoughts. To hold messianic visions and grandiose intentions is one thing, to think about putting them into practice, let alone doing it, is quite another. Rather than seeing Stalin as tactically hiding behind Bukharin to defeat the Left Opposition, and then revealing his real programme in 1929, I would consider that Stalin, faced with the crisis of the NEP, leapt into the First Five Year Plan. It was certainly launched with a messianic fervour, but there were no properly thought-out plans, nor could there have been.
I think that Stalin gradually came around to seeing the necessity of industrialisation and collectivisation after the mid-1920s. The problem was not merely grain procurement. The Left Opposition had long recognised that the impressive growth figures under the NEP were due mainly to the return into operation of idle machinery, and that any further advance required real investment, and considered that Bukharin’s strategy of un-trammelled market relations would not be able to provide a large enough base for real economic advance. Anyway, by 1927 even Bukharin was starting to adopt some of the measures previously demanded by the Left Opposition.
Collectivisation was an emergency response to the peasants’ refusal to sell grain when there were limited manufactured products available in exchange. Tucker’s implication that grain procurement and goods sales prices were manipulated to ensure the peasants’ dissatisfaction, and thus provided an excuse for an attack upon them, does not preclude the fact that the regime was facing an incipient crisis in the countryside. Whilst there was little immediate danger of the emergence of a politically conscious capitalist class based upon the NEP, a crisis was emerging over the division of the total social surplus between the capitalist elements and the state sector.
Rather than being some kind of fully elaborated scheme, the continuous rewriting and upward adjustment of the First Five Year Plan prior to its implementation, the unplanned, ad hoc nature of the move into the Plan, the dramatic boosting of its targets, and the chaotic, uncontrolled nature of the whole affair, which Tucker outlines, all point to the improvisatory essence of it all.
Today more than ever the horrors of Stalinism are considered to be the logical and only possible outcome of Leninism. The most recent recruits to this melancholy chorus are former Stalinists in both the East and West, as they look with bemusement at the wreckage of the country on which they had looked so fondly, and give up on any hope of human liberation. One of the strengths of Tucker is that he—no friend of the Marxian project—shows the differences between the approaches of Lenin and Stalin. Whilst accept-ing that Lenin was not averse to using coercion during the first stages of the Soviet republic, Tucker considers that Lenin ‘would have opposed Stalin’s coercive peasant policy of 1928-29 and the forcible mass collectivisation that followed’ (p87).
The Marxian critique of Stalinist industrialisation and collectivisation is not, however, merely based upon the rejection of its coercive aspects, but is centred upon the absence of workers’ democracy. The question of working class democracy is crucial. Marxists are in favour of workers’ democracy not because it is a nice idea, but because it is essential to the replacement of capitalism by a rationally regulated society. The market can only be replaced by planning, and that is impossible without workers’ democracy.
Although the concept of workers’ democracy had never been high on the Bolsheviks’ agenda (after all, until 1917, seizing power had been seen as a distant objective), and Lenin’s own writings on the subject do not add up to a cohesive whole, workers’ democracy—the essence of a Socialist society—was never part of Stalin’s approach. Stalin could never have written State and Revolution .
As the book’s title shows, Tucker sees the great change of 1929 as a revolution. The First Five Year Plan was ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that it transformed Soviet society. But it was not revolutionary in the Marxian sense. It did not replace the state capitalist society of the NEP by a society run along the lines of workers’ management. It produced a social formation ruled by a bureaucratic elite that, despite the prodigious quantitative development, could not advance in a genuinely qualitative sense the forces of production. With neither the market nor democratic planning, the Soviet economy was essentially unregulated and out of control. What passed as ‘planning’ was a pathetic caricature. The social formation which emerged from the First Five Year Plan was not able to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism—a fact that should now be obvious.
And this is where the book fails. Tucker’s descriptions of the social, political and cultural aspects of the 1930s are excellent, even if one does not accept his psychological explanations. However, the economic results of the great change are covered in a few pages, and the nature of the Soviet social formation as it emerged from Stalin’s ‘October’ is not discussed at all. For it was in the 1930s that the image emerged of the Soviet Union as an historically viable economic colossus. This was not merely the case with the venal or gullible fellow travellers and Stalinists abroad, but with many who were critical of Stalin’s political regime from a liberal outlook, or, like Trotsky, from the viewpoint of revolutionary Marxism.
There was some excuse for this sort of outlook in the 1930s, especially as the capitalist world was experiencing a chronic slump whilst the Soviet economy was expanding. But over the last decade it became increasingly clear that the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt, and that this tendency towards stagnation was rooted in the very nature of the Soviet social formation, which can now be seen as historically unviable. As this social formation was the essential product of Stalin’s ‘October’, the lack of any discussion in this book of its economic basis, especially of the structure of the command economy, leaves an unfortunate gap in what is certainly one of the best biographies of Stalin.
Paul Flewers
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606
This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.
Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.
When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...
McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
**********
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg Between The Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, pp606
This big book, written by a serious scholar (at the University of Stirling) on the basis of immense research, is a fine contribution to the growing literature on the social history of the Russian Revolution. This social history is not, of course, Trevelyan’s “history with the politics left out”!
McKean provides much information about the working class of St Petersburg – its distribution, composition and so on – in the period he has chosen, between the reactionary ‘coup d’état’ which closed the revolutionary epoch begun in 1905 and the onset of the February Revolution in 1917. In his analysis and commentary he challenges some widely accepted notions. For instance, he finds no evidence for the usual connexion made between the size of industrial enterprise and the degree of workers’ militancy:
Medium-sized engineering factories rather than gigantic enterprises were to the fore in terms of protest, in part precisely due to the fact that their intermediate size facilitated prompt mobilisation of employees.
Again, although the new workers who swarmed into the capital from the countryside as a result of Stolypin’s land policy have often been supposed to be a primitive, ignorant lot, McKean shows that they mostly came from areas with a relatively high level of literacy.
The author’s investigation leads him to the conclusion that the key to St Petersburg’s special rôle in the Russian labour movement is to be found in the concentration here of large numbers of young, male, skilled workers, with the particular importance of the city’s Vyborg District being due to the high proportion of them in its population. The metalworkers were outstanding in this respect – whereas there was a “relative paucity of Socialist cells” in the printing trade, even though this was a highly skilled trade, with the highest rate of literacy.
‘Social history’ is sometimes understood to mean, nowadays, history which plays down the rôle of elites and stresses the self-activity of ‘the masses’. While McKean certainly shows how little actual influence the emigré leaderships of the Socialist parties exerted in the movement on the ground in Russia during most of this period, he highlights the significance of what he calls the ‘sub-elite’, the praktiki, who were active in the factory committees, trade unions, insurance societies, educational clubs and so on. These men (and a few women) appear as the real achievers. They were often without guidance from their nominal leaders abroad. Thus, the author points out, with regard to the remarkable gains made by the Bolsheviks in 1913-14, that Lenin wrote nothing about trade union affairs in this period, and there is no evidence in the archives of any correspondence with Bolshevik trade unionists.
The Bolsheviks' commitment to a national political general strike from the summer of 1913, the electoral strategy in the Tsarist Duma elections, the decision to launch an attack on Menshevik union positions in the spring of 1913 and the resurrection of the slogan of a soviet in October 1915 were all cases where the activists took the lead. Lenin either gave them retrospective sanction or opposed them in vain.
When the local grassroots leaders considered a slogan sent to them from abroad to be inappropriate to their task, they would simply ignore it:
A textual analysis of 47 leaflets and appeals published illegally by Bolshevik militants between January 1915 and 22 February 1917 is most illuminating. Not a single leaflet mentioned the essential Leninist slogan of the defeat of Russia being the lesser evil ...
McKean has made especially thorough use of the records of the Okhrana, the secret police. Their reports supply, he says, “an invaluable corrective” to exaggerations and slanted accounts in contemporary newspapers and later memoirs. In particular they often expose the falsity of claims by Soviet historians that the Bolsheviks were responsible for some strike or demonstration. There was a great deal more cooperation on the ground between members of different Socialist parties and tendencies than official Soviet history would have us believe, and among the Okhrana’s chief concerns was the promotion of splits. It is startling how many agents and informers the police had in the labour movement: this information helps to explain the success of repressive measures taken at certain moments.
Prominent in many strike demands was a call for “polite address”. The constant insults to workers’ human dignity by their employers reflected the crude, “un-European” style of management in many factories – this although some of the most important employers were from the West (French, British, Swedish, etc). To autocracy in the state corresponded autocracy in the workplace. The St Petersburg bosses were notoriously a harder lot than their colleagues in Moscow.
In February 1917, however, they loosened their grip. McKean notes that when the troubles began, no thought seems to have been given to lockouts, with the result that revolutionary workers were able to use factory yards as meeting places, information centres and so on. Some of the industrialists may have sympathised with the movement at this stage. The author stresses the rôle of wartime conditions in making possible the fall of Tsardom. The foolish stubbornness of the military command in refusing to consider civilian needs, which resulted in severe shortages of goods in the cities by 1916, brought about, he thinks, a readiness on the part of sections of the middle classes to go along with the workers in the great demonstrations, in marked contrast to their indifference or hostility to the prewar labour unrest. McKean comes down strongly in support of the view that it was the World War that was crucial in settling the fall of the Romanov regime. He contrasts what happened in February 1917 with the crushing of the strike in July 1914 (sometimes presented as proof that Russia was already “on the brink of revolution” before the war began): in those days “the ancien regime in state and industry still retained sufficient cohesion and confidence in itself and the armed forces’ loyalty to act decisively and brutally”.
The book is, on the whole, well produced but it is a pity that the maps of St Petersburg provided were reprinted from another book, because the nomenclature of the city’s districts shown in them differs from that used in the text. Thus, the reader will look in vain in these maps for the ‘First Town’ and ‘Second Town’ districts often mentioned in the course of the author’s close examination of working class life in the capital.
Brian Pearce
**********
*Don't Tell Anyone This But "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Has Got To Go-By Any Means Necessary
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe, dated October 13, 2010, article detailing the legal situation now that a federal judge has granted an injunction to stop the military from discharging open gays from the various branches of the service.
Markin comment:
Look, we anti-imperialist, anti-warriors hate the American imperial military. We hate to see people getting dragged into the military, one way or another. Yet we have to insist that those selfsame military personnel have the same rights as the civilian population has (or that the civilian population should have), including openly (or not) expressing their own sexual preferences. Under conditions of our communist future this would have been a "no-brainer." But we will take our positive social steps forward anyway we can get them. Here, under the auspices of a federal judge, who simply just read the terms of their bourgeois constitution correctly, the right thing is being done. Kudos to the judge on that one.
Markin comment:
Look, we anti-imperialist, anti-warriors hate the American imperial military. We hate to see people getting dragged into the military, one way or another. Yet we have to insist that those selfsame military personnel have the same rights as the civilian population has (or that the civilian population should have), including openly (or not) expressing their own sexual preferences. Under conditions of our communist future this would have been a "no-brainer." But we will take our positive social steps forward anyway we can get them. Here, under the auspices of a federal judge, who simply just read the terms of their bourgeois constitution correctly, the right thing is being done. Kudos to the judge on that one.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Correspondence Concerning the Workers Party Unity Proposal to the Socialist Workers Party
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
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Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
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*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, Transaction Books, 1988, pp323, £35.
This is a thoroughly interesting and very detailed book, which must set our knowledge of the fascinating history of the POUM on a far firmer basis than ever before. Among a wealth of material we are told that Salvador Dali flirted briefly with Maurin's Bloque Obrera y Campesino (p.30), that it was Brandler and Willi Brandt who tried to persuade the POUM not to criticise the Moscow Trials (p.133), that the Edinburgh Revolutionary Socialist Party, later to become Trotskyist, attended the international Congress Against War and Fascism in Brussels organised by the London Bureau in the autumn of 1936 (p.156), and that strong suspicions remain that the Orlov who defected to the USA and Nin’s torturer were the same person (p.276, n6). An especially tasty morsel for British readers, now that the Communist Party is finally collapsing under the weight of its own infamy, is the note that the Daily Worker even ‘reported’ that the Monarchist flag had been raised alongside that of the POUM over the town halls occupied by the latter (p.204).
This said, a venomous anti-Trotskyist prejudice runs through the book from start to finish, distorting its analysis and even affecting its factual accuracy. Disregarding the history of Stalinist agents fanning the factional squabbles inside the International Left Opposition, we are told that the Landaus, Rosmer and Nin “had been driven away from the official Trotskyist movement by the sectarian suspicions of Trotsky himself” (p.283). Not that the authors are any partisans of Nin, clearly preferring Maurin to him, in spite of the fact that the modern reprint of the theoretical magazine of the Communist Left shows that they were streets ahead of anything the Bloque could produce. At one point before the fusion that created the POUM we are given a full summary of a speech by Maurin to the Madrid Ateneo; he was followed by Nin, not a word of whose speech is even hinted at (p.33).
After the formation of the POUM Nin is even attacked for the invitation to bring Trotsky to Spain (p.166). Felix Morrow’s superb book is described as “mainly remarkable for its Trotskyist biases” (p.290), and “based exclusively on notes amassed by Charles and Lois Orr” (p199). Doubt is cast upon the veracity of Paul and Clara Thalmann’s memoirs for being “Trotskyist”, without the authors feeling obliged to tell us that they subsequently became Anarchists, or even to substantiate their criticisms of them (pp.296-97). What the writers are pleased to call “the lethargic milieu of the small Trotskyist groupings” (p.40) were guilty, apparently, of exaggerating the “success of the official Communists in suppressing the POUM” (p.222), and of wasting “more ink and saliva attacking the POUM than they did the official Communist Party” (p.220). A side-swipe at the postwar Trotskyists castigates them for the failure of their movement in Vietnam, Bolivia and Sri Lanka (p.222), in the hope that we will not notice that these failures were precisely the result of following policies that were practically identical with those of the POUM itself in 1936.
Unable to answer Trotsky’s critique of the POUM, the authors subject him to continuous denigration. His struggle to reform the Comintern before 1933 is described as “infiltrating the official Communist apparatus” (p.89). Kronstadt, where he was not even present at the time, he apparently “brutally suppressed” (p.8) and “drowned in blood” (p.124). Although as commander of the army Trotsky accepted political responsibility for the suppression of the revolt, in fact he “stepped aside completely and demonstrably from the affair” (More on the Suppression of Kronstadt, 6 July 1938). In case we missed their first assertion, that Trotsky had a “real lack of knowledge” of what he was talking about in Spain (p.88), the writers feel the need to reassert it on at least three other occasions (pp.89, 130, 223).
Why this oversensitive concern? The answer glares at us from every page, that out of touch Trotsky might have been, but he was considerably less out of touch than the POUM. The POUM’s prissy sectarianism emerges at every point in the crisis. When dealing with the move of the PSOE to the left after 1934 the writers note that “if its radicalisation had been more extensive and prolonged” (p.113) something positive might have come of it. But what was the POUM’s attitude to this radicalisation? It was to keep itself apart from it and preach abstract Marxist purity at it from outside. This failure to enter the Socialist Party when its mass left was in ferment in effect handed over its youth to Stalinism, and the POUM to its executioners, not a few of whom came from precisely this milieu, or even from the Bloque’s own miseducated ranks (e.g. Rodriguez Salas, p.92). Trotsky’s repeated pleas for them to take the situation seriously and enter the PSOE youth are refuted by a series of laughable Talmudic devices, such as that the Socialist Party was itself “one of the initiators of the People’s Front” (p.223), or that to do so would have been to solve the problem in an “artificial” (p.41) or a “mechanical” way (p.89) (in spite of the fact that it was the Socialist Left that was specifically asking them to enter), and even on the grounds that to have gone in would have lost the Bloque’s own youth to Stalinism (p.82)! Yet the authors have the gall to castigate Trotsky for refusing “to countenance the slightest organisational flexibility in Spain” (p.90)! As to who was really “flexible” in the circumstances can easily be gauged by the fact that Trotsky advised the POUM to liquidate its own trade union chain, the FOUS, in order to enter the CNT and influence its ranks then in mass revolutionary ferment, whereas the POUM in fact entered the UGT and handed control over its unions to Stalinism, the springboard for counter-revolution in Catalonia. In the face of these facts the writers of this book first try to blame the CNT for this state of affairs (pp.129-30), and then try to use as an excuse for the POUM’s impotence in 1936 the fact that the POUM found itself, then, two months after the beginning of the revolution, without a base in the unions (p.130). And yet but a few pages later we are solemnly informed that “for political motives – and also later, for psychological and even for personal security reasons, the POUM had to get closer to the CNT” (p.173).
Dogmatic and rigid where it should have been “flexible”, on organisational matters, the POUM was “flexible” where it should have been principled, over the political ones. “To remain outside the People’s Front”, we are told, “would mean to swim against the stream to no profit, to lose the possibility of gaining a parliamentary tribune, to remain without contact with the masses, and to accept isolation. The POUM had not been founded simply to become a sect.” (p.97) In spite of their argument that the Popular Front was merely an electoral pact, and not a commitment to a bourgeois government in the middle of a workers’ revolution, the uncomfortable fact emerges that Maurin’s speech on the inauguration of Azana’s government began “by saying that this time the representative of the POUM will vote confidence in the government of Senor Azana” (p.100). Even more lame is the apology for Nin’s entry into the Council of the Catalan Generalitat. On 8 September 1936 Nin had declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat already virtually existed in Catalonia. Just over two weeks later he joined the government, and a fortnight after that it dissolved the local committees of the militias, and Nin himself had to go down to Lerida and persuade the local POUM to hand over its power to the municipality (p.140). Yet again the POUM justified its actions by an appeal to exceptional circumstances (as if a revolution in itself is not an ‘exceptional circumstance’): “the new government will have a working class majority ... but with some representatives of the petty bourgeoisie ... an original, and not long-lasting kind of revolutionary transition” (p.135). This blatant rejection of the Marxist analysis of the nature of labour politicians’ participation in a bourgeois state is supported by the most spectacular of theoretical contortions it is possible to read. “For the POUM the question was not one of principle, as far as government per se was concerned”, we are told. “As a Marxist party, it believed in the necessity of taking power. But could entry into a Generalitat administration be the same as taking power?” (p.l34) This is a good question, but it does not a good answer: “The real question was not whether it was correct to enter the Generalitat administration, but whether this should replace or be replaced by the Committee for Militias as an organ of working class power. But with nobody outside the POUM viewing the problem in these terms ...” (pp.135-36) “Nobody”? For the benefit of our writers, it should be quite clearly stated that the question during a revolution is precisely whose institutions should wield power, those of the working class or of the bourgeoisie. Not only were there those in the POUM who saw this clearly – the ‘Cell 72’ opposition led by Jose Rebull in Barcelona (whose views are censored completely out of this narrative) – but the much-maligned Leon Trotsky spent practically the whole of his time available trying to point this out. And that is the whole point.
It was indeed over the fundamental questions of Marxism that the Maurin Bloque, which ideologically dominated the POUM, was so lamentable. Its two-tier organisation (pp.24-25) shows that it was far from Bolshevist, and outside of conditions of extreme illegality it is certainly not the case that “cells of five members at the base” is an “organic structure typical of Leninist parties” (p.27). Its very name (Workers and Peasants Bloc) assumes that it is possible to have parties representing two classes at once, what Trotsky called the purest “Kuomintangism” transplanted onto Spanish soil. All its basic political assumptions were stagist, and Stalinist. The very speech of Maurin referred to above at the Madrid Ateneo “affirmed that Spain at that moment needed a ‘Jacobin’ republic”. “We believe Spain has begun its revolution”, said Maurin, “and that every effective revolution has two stages: the democratic revolution and the Socialist revolution. Without the first the second is impossible.” (p.33, cf. also p.29) Thus the confused statement of the basic position of the POUM in 1936 had a long history: “The Spanish Revolution is a revolution of the democratic socialist type.” (p.94) The command of Marxism by both the Bloque and its POUM offspring can be assessed by the repeated assertion that the petty bourgeoisie are capable of wielding state power as a class; Azana’s first government was described as such by Maurin (p.43), and this was repeated for Company’s Generalitat by Nin (p.139). But whereas Nin had forgotten the Marxism he once knew, there is little evidence that Maurin had ever learned it in the first place, having first declared that “in 1931 the CNT-FAI occupied, in their own way, a historical place comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917” (p.31), and then that he was “in favour of a seizure of power by factory committees” (p.44).
In view of this damning testimony, freely available from the book itself, the claim of the POUM to represent any sort of Marxism at all must remain in deep doubt: It is thus beside the point to grumble at incidental silly remarks, such as that the country of the classic Canovas system of rigged parliamentarism had “democratic traditions” (p.223), or to complain about the authors’ propensity to import fashionable modern feminist concerns into their discussion of the work of women revolutionaries in Spain (pp.285ff.). There are also signs that the documentary evidence has not been considered as closely as it should have been. Although they are acquainted with Negrete’s letters (pp.294-96), they show no knowledge at all of the whole pamphlet devoted to the May days in Barcelona written by Hugo Oehler (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.2, Summer 1988, pp23-29), and they prefer Munis’ opinion about the lack of contact between Bolshevik-Leninists and the Friends of Durruti during this crisis to that of ‘Casanovas’, even though he was there at the time leading the former group and Munis was abroad (p.199).
But however we evaluate the POUM, the Spanish Civil War in general, and the attitude revolutionaries should take up towards them, what is clear is that it cannot be done without a serious and careful consideration of this book. What a shame that its price places it only within reach of the respectable classes in society!
Al Richardson
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The first and larger section of this book is written by Victor Alba, an old member of the POUM, and a participant in many of the events. He was there. The second and lesser part is by Stephen Schwartz.
Alba writes what amounts to a lenient obituary of the POUM. Somewhat bemused and puzzled by the fate of that party, he puts forward several reasons for its failure, one being that Joaquim Maurin, a leader of the party who was trapped in the Franco area at the commencement of the civil war, might have been a better leader than Andres Nin. Although Maurin survived the civil war and lived until 1973, and published several books on that war, Alba is unable to give us one quotation from them that proves he had a better understanding and position than Nin.
The main error of the POUM – its entry into the bourgeois Republican government, which proceeded to disband the Workers’ Militias – is excused on the ground that if it had failed to enter it, it would have lost support.
The effect of the POUM in damping down the leftward movement of its members is revealed in the following quotation: “It is worth recalling, 50 years later some facts that are nowhere in print, but which every POUM member knew at that time. The first is that the executive served as a brake where it could, on the most radical and sharp position of the local committees, especially those in Barcelona and Lleida and in the party youth organisation.” (p.120). In spite of what Alba says here, these facts were well known at the time and constituted the basis of the criticism of the POUM by the left.
The feebleness of the POUM in the second workers’ uprising in May 1937 is excused on the grounds of not wishing to respond to the provocation of the Stalinists. The authors’ use of “refusal to respond to provocation” reminds one of the character in the oft told story of two persons being shot by the Gestapo, in which one refuses to wear a blindfold and the other says “why do you have to cause trouble?”.
There is an incredibly rambling chapter on the Workers’ Militias, in which the author, 50 years after the events, fails to realise their importance, an importance the republican government revealed in its drive to disarm and suppress them.
Alba makes the remarkable statement that Grandizo Munis, the leader of the Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Leninists, “did not even know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti, until the events [of 3 May 1937 – ER] took place” (p.199). This statement is supported by a footnote which refers to “Munis in conversation with Stephen Schwartz”. The following would seem to prove otherwise. In Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution (North Carolina Press, 1979), we are told that the Friends of Durruti were officially constituted in mid-March. The organisation increased its membership, according to Balius (vice secretary) to between four and five thousand by the beginning of May. He also quotes Munis: “We worked fraternally with the workers of the Friends of Durruti and they helped us in the sale and distribution of our newspaper”. (Unser Wort, early May 1939, >in Bolloten, p.394).
Bolloten goes on to quote a leading member of the POUM, Juan Andrade, as saying: “In the last days of April, they, the Friends of Durruti, plastered Barcelona with their slogans.” (p.401) Negrete published in the Hugo Oehler’s Fourth International of June 1937 a report of the first public meeting, on Sunday 18 April 1937, of the Friends of Durruti. So Alba and Schwartz ask us to believe that Munis did not know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti until 3 May, although they came into official existence in the middle of March, held their first public meeting on 18 April, and plastered Barcelona with their slogans at the end of April. This item alone indicates the carelessness and unreliability of the authors.
Alba does endeavour, however inadequately, to deal with the facts and the errors of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. Schwartz is different, and would appear to be a journalist with literary ambitions. For him, the Spanish Civil War is not a battle of the classes for the future domination of Europe, in which all the parties and groupings are on trial, but rather a picturesque event giving rise to various styles of Belles Letters; of reminiscences, some sentimental, others abrasive, and some even bilious. For Schwartz, the issues in the Spanish Civil War for which so many fought and died were only a ‘miasma’. For example, Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Note Book, dealing with the first six months of the Revolution and the Civil War, is treated as a feminist and sentimental account. As the following excerpt proves, Mary Low’s account was far from being sentimental.
We were not long in the Generality. Things were rapidly moving to a different solution and the bourgeois democratic element became stronger every day. Nin was pushed out of the Ministry of Justice ... During the time when the crisis was coming to a head, we saw Nin every night at the newspaper office. “Will they manage to push us out?”, we invariably asked. Nin shook his head: “I don’t think so, Companys said today he’d resign the Presidency if the POUM went.” Since he had been in the Generality he had always been optimistic, perhaps too diplomatic. “It’s only a matter of hanging on now,” he would say. “If we can hold on these next two or three days we’ll weather it. It’s bound to come to an end.” ...In the end they made us go, thanks to the pressure exerted by Moscow. (pp.210-1)
Schwartz reports how Russell N. Blackwell (Rosalio Negrete) obtained a Spanish passport and stowed away on a ship to France. He does not point out why. The US State Department refused to issue passports valid for Spain, and any passports they did issue were stamped “Not valid for Spain”.
Schwartz refers to the many persons with whom Negrete had discussions whilst in Barcelona. One person to whom he does not refer is August Thalheimer. The Leninist League of Glasgow, which was a member of the Oehlerite International Contact Commission, received from Negrete, posted at Perpignan, on the French side of the frontier, a code for communication to and from Barcelona. The first document we had to use it on was a lengthy thesis on the Spanish situation by Thalheimer, which Negrete had typed out.
Schwartz quotes a Charles Orr as a reference for Hugo Oehler. Who Charles Orr is that he should be used as a reference for Oehler, we are not told. Schwartz either doesn’t know, or does not wish anyone else to know, that Oehler fought on the barricades on 3 May, and wrote one of the most authoritative reports of that struggle.
Schwartz says that Negrete “met frequently with the Greek Archeiomarxist leader about whom we know little”. Witte, as he was known then, whose real name was Demetrios Giotopoulos, had been a leading member of the Trotskyist International Communist League. There is a 5,000 word account by him on the situation in the British section. In 1933 he broke with Trotsky over the entry into the Second International. He was the Greek representative on the London Bureau, and claimed to represent over 20,000 workers. During Easter 1938, representing the Leninist League of Glasgow, I had a long discussion with Witte in Paris. He had just been served his third expulsion order as an undesirable alien. In 1945, while awaiting trial in a London prison for political offences during the war, I met three Greek sailors charged with ‘mutiny on the high seas’. They told me that Witte had been beaten to death in a police cell in Athens.
On this trip I briefly met Gorkin at the headquarters of the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan, the French sister party, around which the POUM refugees were grouped. The Union Communiste group of G. Davoust, publisher of L’International, with whom I had a discussion at this time, played the same role with Friends of Durruti. At that time I was mainly interested in the Union Communiste’s connection with the print workers of Paris, in which they had a big influence. After the war I heard that Davoust had been tortured by the Gestapo, and was very ill.
The few survivors of those who picketed the US State Department and the Spanish Embassy will be surprised to hear that, according to Schwartz, “thanks to pressure from the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull”, Negrete was released from his Spanish jail. Negrete would have regretted the absence from the list of those who helped to secure his release the name of the Anarchist, Carlo Tresca. (See my letter on the Negrete-Blackwell Defence Committee, Revolutionary History, volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988.)
I note that AI Richardson’s review of this book replies to Alba’s criticism of Trotsky. Whatever Trotsky may have said of the Spanish situation in general, the fact remains that the Trotskyist forces in Spain were down to a group of seven, and of that seven two were reputed to be police spies. One does not need to have read the complete works of Lenin. The biblical adage “by their fruits ye shall know them” is sufficient to appraise this fact. In 1936, according to Negrete, the Trotskyist group comprised approximately 30 persons. In the period up to 1937 the POUM increased its membership by tens of thousands, and the Communist Party by hundreds of thousands. This was a revolutionary situation, a situation, as Trotsky pointed out, in which the masses were on a higher level than those of Russia in 1917. The Trotskyist forces dwindled to vanishing point. To say they were hampered by being infiltrated by police spies won’t do. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was riddled with police spies. The leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was a police agent. In spite of this the Bolsheviks increased their membership and support by leaps and bounds. All the revolutionary rhetoric of Trotsky on Spain ended in three applications, by the Bolshevik Leninists, for membership of the POUM. The last application was made after the May day events, i.e. after the POUM “had entered the dustbin of history’. These facts are hardly known by the Trotskyist movement, and have certainly never to my knowledge been assessed.
Pierre Broué, who is by way of being an ‘official Trotskyist’ historian, in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, written in conjunction with Emile Temime, a work of 591 pages in the English translation, does not once mention the Bolshevik Leninists and their fate. Orwell, Oehler, Negrete, Morrow, Thomas and Alba all do. This silence on the part of Broué says more than words.
Ernest Rogers
Editor’s note: Ernie was misinformed by his sailor friends. Witte died in 1965.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, Transaction Books, 1988, pp323, £35.
This is a thoroughly interesting and very detailed book, which must set our knowledge of the fascinating history of the POUM on a far firmer basis than ever before. Among a wealth of material we are told that Salvador Dali flirted briefly with Maurin's Bloque Obrera y Campesino (p.30), that it was Brandler and Willi Brandt who tried to persuade the POUM not to criticise the Moscow Trials (p.133), that the Edinburgh Revolutionary Socialist Party, later to become Trotskyist, attended the international Congress Against War and Fascism in Brussels organised by the London Bureau in the autumn of 1936 (p.156), and that strong suspicions remain that the Orlov who defected to the USA and Nin’s torturer were the same person (p.276, n6). An especially tasty morsel for British readers, now that the Communist Party is finally collapsing under the weight of its own infamy, is the note that the Daily Worker even ‘reported’ that the Monarchist flag had been raised alongside that of the POUM over the town halls occupied by the latter (p.204).
This said, a venomous anti-Trotskyist prejudice runs through the book from start to finish, distorting its analysis and even affecting its factual accuracy. Disregarding the history of Stalinist agents fanning the factional squabbles inside the International Left Opposition, we are told that the Landaus, Rosmer and Nin “had been driven away from the official Trotskyist movement by the sectarian suspicions of Trotsky himself” (p.283). Not that the authors are any partisans of Nin, clearly preferring Maurin to him, in spite of the fact that the modern reprint of the theoretical magazine of the Communist Left shows that they were streets ahead of anything the Bloque could produce. At one point before the fusion that created the POUM we are given a full summary of a speech by Maurin to the Madrid Ateneo; he was followed by Nin, not a word of whose speech is even hinted at (p.33).
After the formation of the POUM Nin is even attacked for the invitation to bring Trotsky to Spain (p.166). Felix Morrow’s superb book is described as “mainly remarkable for its Trotskyist biases” (p.290), and “based exclusively on notes amassed by Charles and Lois Orr” (p199). Doubt is cast upon the veracity of Paul and Clara Thalmann’s memoirs for being “Trotskyist”, without the authors feeling obliged to tell us that they subsequently became Anarchists, or even to substantiate their criticisms of them (pp.296-97). What the writers are pleased to call “the lethargic milieu of the small Trotskyist groupings” (p.40) were guilty, apparently, of exaggerating the “success of the official Communists in suppressing the POUM” (p.222), and of wasting “more ink and saliva attacking the POUM than they did the official Communist Party” (p.220). A side-swipe at the postwar Trotskyists castigates them for the failure of their movement in Vietnam, Bolivia and Sri Lanka (p.222), in the hope that we will not notice that these failures were precisely the result of following policies that were practically identical with those of the POUM itself in 1936.
Unable to answer Trotsky’s critique of the POUM, the authors subject him to continuous denigration. His struggle to reform the Comintern before 1933 is described as “infiltrating the official Communist apparatus” (p.89). Kronstadt, where he was not even present at the time, he apparently “brutally suppressed” (p.8) and “drowned in blood” (p.124). Although as commander of the army Trotsky accepted political responsibility for the suppression of the revolt, in fact he “stepped aside completely and demonstrably from the affair” (More on the Suppression of Kronstadt, 6 July 1938). In case we missed their first assertion, that Trotsky had a “real lack of knowledge” of what he was talking about in Spain (p.88), the writers feel the need to reassert it on at least three other occasions (pp.89, 130, 223).
Why this oversensitive concern? The answer glares at us from every page, that out of touch Trotsky might have been, but he was considerably less out of touch than the POUM. The POUM’s prissy sectarianism emerges at every point in the crisis. When dealing with the move of the PSOE to the left after 1934 the writers note that “if its radicalisation had been more extensive and prolonged” (p.113) something positive might have come of it. But what was the POUM’s attitude to this radicalisation? It was to keep itself apart from it and preach abstract Marxist purity at it from outside. This failure to enter the Socialist Party when its mass left was in ferment in effect handed over its youth to Stalinism, and the POUM to its executioners, not a few of whom came from precisely this milieu, or even from the Bloque’s own miseducated ranks (e.g. Rodriguez Salas, p.92). Trotsky’s repeated pleas for them to take the situation seriously and enter the PSOE youth are refuted by a series of laughable Talmudic devices, such as that the Socialist Party was itself “one of the initiators of the People’s Front” (p.223), or that to do so would have been to solve the problem in an “artificial” (p.41) or a “mechanical” way (p.89) (in spite of the fact that it was the Socialist Left that was specifically asking them to enter), and even on the grounds that to have gone in would have lost the Bloque’s own youth to Stalinism (p.82)! Yet the authors have the gall to castigate Trotsky for refusing “to countenance the slightest organisational flexibility in Spain” (p.90)! As to who was really “flexible” in the circumstances can easily be gauged by the fact that Trotsky advised the POUM to liquidate its own trade union chain, the FOUS, in order to enter the CNT and influence its ranks then in mass revolutionary ferment, whereas the POUM in fact entered the UGT and handed control over its unions to Stalinism, the springboard for counter-revolution in Catalonia. In the face of these facts the writers of this book first try to blame the CNT for this state of affairs (pp.129-30), and then try to use as an excuse for the POUM’s impotence in 1936 the fact that the POUM found itself, then, two months after the beginning of the revolution, without a base in the unions (p.130). And yet but a few pages later we are solemnly informed that “for political motives – and also later, for psychological and even for personal security reasons, the POUM had to get closer to the CNT” (p.173).
Dogmatic and rigid where it should have been “flexible”, on organisational matters, the POUM was “flexible” where it should have been principled, over the political ones. “To remain outside the People’s Front”, we are told, “would mean to swim against the stream to no profit, to lose the possibility of gaining a parliamentary tribune, to remain without contact with the masses, and to accept isolation. The POUM had not been founded simply to become a sect.” (p.97) In spite of their argument that the Popular Front was merely an electoral pact, and not a commitment to a bourgeois government in the middle of a workers’ revolution, the uncomfortable fact emerges that Maurin’s speech on the inauguration of Azana’s government began “by saying that this time the representative of the POUM will vote confidence in the government of Senor Azana” (p.100). Even more lame is the apology for Nin’s entry into the Council of the Catalan Generalitat. On 8 September 1936 Nin had declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat already virtually existed in Catalonia. Just over two weeks later he joined the government, and a fortnight after that it dissolved the local committees of the militias, and Nin himself had to go down to Lerida and persuade the local POUM to hand over its power to the municipality (p.140). Yet again the POUM justified its actions by an appeal to exceptional circumstances (as if a revolution in itself is not an ‘exceptional circumstance’): “the new government will have a working class majority ... but with some representatives of the petty bourgeoisie ... an original, and not long-lasting kind of revolutionary transition” (p.135). This blatant rejection of the Marxist analysis of the nature of labour politicians’ participation in a bourgeois state is supported by the most spectacular of theoretical contortions it is possible to read. “For the POUM the question was not one of principle, as far as government per se was concerned”, we are told. “As a Marxist party, it believed in the necessity of taking power. But could entry into a Generalitat administration be the same as taking power?” (p.l34) This is a good question, but it does not a good answer: “The real question was not whether it was correct to enter the Generalitat administration, but whether this should replace or be replaced by the Committee for Militias as an organ of working class power. But with nobody outside the POUM viewing the problem in these terms ...” (pp.135-36) “Nobody”? For the benefit of our writers, it should be quite clearly stated that the question during a revolution is precisely whose institutions should wield power, those of the working class or of the bourgeoisie. Not only were there those in the POUM who saw this clearly – the ‘Cell 72’ opposition led by Jose Rebull in Barcelona (whose views are censored completely out of this narrative) – but the much-maligned Leon Trotsky spent practically the whole of his time available trying to point this out. And that is the whole point.
It was indeed over the fundamental questions of Marxism that the Maurin Bloque, which ideologically dominated the POUM, was so lamentable. Its two-tier organisation (pp.24-25) shows that it was far from Bolshevist, and outside of conditions of extreme illegality it is certainly not the case that “cells of five members at the base” is an “organic structure typical of Leninist parties” (p.27). Its very name (Workers and Peasants Bloc) assumes that it is possible to have parties representing two classes at once, what Trotsky called the purest “Kuomintangism” transplanted onto Spanish soil. All its basic political assumptions were stagist, and Stalinist. The very speech of Maurin referred to above at the Madrid Ateneo “affirmed that Spain at that moment needed a ‘Jacobin’ republic”. “We believe Spain has begun its revolution”, said Maurin, “and that every effective revolution has two stages: the democratic revolution and the Socialist revolution. Without the first the second is impossible.” (p.33, cf. also p.29) Thus the confused statement of the basic position of the POUM in 1936 had a long history: “The Spanish Revolution is a revolution of the democratic socialist type.” (p.94) The command of Marxism by both the Bloque and its POUM offspring can be assessed by the repeated assertion that the petty bourgeoisie are capable of wielding state power as a class; Azana’s first government was described as such by Maurin (p.43), and this was repeated for Company’s Generalitat by Nin (p.139). But whereas Nin had forgotten the Marxism he once knew, there is little evidence that Maurin had ever learned it in the first place, having first declared that “in 1931 the CNT-FAI occupied, in their own way, a historical place comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917” (p.31), and then that he was “in favour of a seizure of power by factory committees” (p.44).
In view of this damning testimony, freely available from the book itself, the claim of the POUM to represent any sort of Marxism at all must remain in deep doubt: It is thus beside the point to grumble at incidental silly remarks, such as that the country of the classic Canovas system of rigged parliamentarism had “democratic traditions” (p.223), or to complain about the authors’ propensity to import fashionable modern feminist concerns into their discussion of the work of women revolutionaries in Spain (pp.285ff.). There are also signs that the documentary evidence has not been considered as closely as it should have been. Although they are acquainted with Negrete’s letters (pp.294-96), they show no knowledge at all of the whole pamphlet devoted to the May days in Barcelona written by Hugo Oehler (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.2, Summer 1988, pp23-29), and they prefer Munis’ opinion about the lack of contact between Bolshevik-Leninists and the Friends of Durruti during this crisis to that of ‘Casanovas’, even though he was there at the time leading the former group and Munis was abroad (p.199).
But however we evaluate the POUM, the Spanish Civil War in general, and the attitude revolutionaries should take up towards them, what is clear is that it cannot be done without a serious and careful consideration of this book. What a shame that its price places it only within reach of the respectable classes in society!
Al Richardson
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The first and larger section of this book is written by Victor Alba, an old member of the POUM, and a participant in many of the events. He was there. The second and lesser part is by Stephen Schwartz.
Alba writes what amounts to a lenient obituary of the POUM. Somewhat bemused and puzzled by the fate of that party, he puts forward several reasons for its failure, one being that Joaquim Maurin, a leader of the party who was trapped in the Franco area at the commencement of the civil war, might have been a better leader than Andres Nin. Although Maurin survived the civil war and lived until 1973, and published several books on that war, Alba is unable to give us one quotation from them that proves he had a better understanding and position than Nin.
The main error of the POUM – its entry into the bourgeois Republican government, which proceeded to disband the Workers’ Militias – is excused on the ground that if it had failed to enter it, it would have lost support.
The effect of the POUM in damping down the leftward movement of its members is revealed in the following quotation: “It is worth recalling, 50 years later some facts that are nowhere in print, but which every POUM member knew at that time. The first is that the executive served as a brake where it could, on the most radical and sharp position of the local committees, especially those in Barcelona and Lleida and in the party youth organisation.” (p.120). In spite of what Alba says here, these facts were well known at the time and constituted the basis of the criticism of the POUM by the left.
The feebleness of the POUM in the second workers’ uprising in May 1937 is excused on the grounds of not wishing to respond to the provocation of the Stalinists. The authors’ use of “refusal to respond to provocation” reminds one of the character in the oft told story of two persons being shot by the Gestapo, in which one refuses to wear a blindfold and the other says “why do you have to cause trouble?”.
There is an incredibly rambling chapter on the Workers’ Militias, in which the author, 50 years after the events, fails to realise their importance, an importance the republican government revealed in its drive to disarm and suppress them.
Alba makes the remarkable statement that Grandizo Munis, the leader of the Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Leninists, “did not even know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti, until the events [of 3 May 1937 – ER] took place” (p.199). This statement is supported by a footnote which refers to “Munis in conversation with Stephen Schwartz”. The following would seem to prove otherwise. In Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution (North Carolina Press, 1979), we are told that the Friends of Durruti were officially constituted in mid-March. The organisation increased its membership, according to Balius (vice secretary) to between four and five thousand by the beginning of May. He also quotes Munis: “We worked fraternally with the workers of the Friends of Durruti and they helped us in the sale and distribution of our newspaper”. (Unser Wort, early May 1939, >in Bolloten, p.394).
Bolloten goes on to quote a leading member of the POUM, Juan Andrade, as saying: “In the last days of April, they, the Friends of Durruti, plastered Barcelona with their slogans.” (p.401) Negrete published in the Hugo Oehler’s Fourth International of June 1937 a report of the first public meeting, on Sunday 18 April 1937, of the Friends of Durruti. So Alba and Schwartz ask us to believe that Munis did not know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti until 3 May, although they came into official existence in the middle of March, held their first public meeting on 18 April, and plastered Barcelona with their slogans at the end of April. This item alone indicates the carelessness and unreliability of the authors.
Alba does endeavour, however inadequately, to deal with the facts and the errors of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. Schwartz is different, and would appear to be a journalist with literary ambitions. For him, the Spanish Civil War is not a battle of the classes for the future domination of Europe, in which all the parties and groupings are on trial, but rather a picturesque event giving rise to various styles of Belles Letters; of reminiscences, some sentimental, others abrasive, and some even bilious. For Schwartz, the issues in the Spanish Civil War for which so many fought and died were only a ‘miasma’. For example, Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Note Book, dealing with the first six months of the Revolution and the Civil War, is treated as a feminist and sentimental account. As the following excerpt proves, Mary Low’s account was far from being sentimental.
We were not long in the Generality. Things were rapidly moving to a different solution and the bourgeois democratic element became stronger every day. Nin was pushed out of the Ministry of Justice ... During the time when the crisis was coming to a head, we saw Nin every night at the newspaper office. “Will they manage to push us out?”, we invariably asked. Nin shook his head: “I don’t think so, Companys said today he’d resign the Presidency if the POUM went.” Since he had been in the Generality he had always been optimistic, perhaps too diplomatic. “It’s only a matter of hanging on now,” he would say. “If we can hold on these next two or three days we’ll weather it. It’s bound to come to an end.” ...In the end they made us go, thanks to the pressure exerted by Moscow. (pp.210-1)
Schwartz reports how Russell N. Blackwell (Rosalio Negrete) obtained a Spanish passport and stowed away on a ship to France. He does not point out why. The US State Department refused to issue passports valid for Spain, and any passports they did issue were stamped “Not valid for Spain”.
Schwartz refers to the many persons with whom Negrete had discussions whilst in Barcelona. One person to whom he does not refer is August Thalheimer. The Leninist League of Glasgow, which was a member of the Oehlerite International Contact Commission, received from Negrete, posted at Perpignan, on the French side of the frontier, a code for communication to and from Barcelona. The first document we had to use it on was a lengthy thesis on the Spanish situation by Thalheimer, which Negrete had typed out.
Schwartz quotes a Charles Orr as a reference for Hugo Oehler. Who Charles Orr is that he should be used as a reference for Oehler, we are not told. Schwartz either doesn’t know, or does not wish anyone else to know, that Oehler fought on the barricades on 3 May, and wrote one of the most authoritative reports of that struggle.
Schwartz says that Negrete “met frequently with the Greek Archeiomarxist leader about whom we know little”. Witte, as he was known then, whose real name was Demetrios Giotopoulos, had been a leading member of the Trotskyist International Communist League. There is a 5,000 word account by him on the situation in the British section. In 1933 he broke with Trotsky over the entry into the Second International. He was the Greek representative on the London Bureau, and claimed to represent over 20,000 workers. During Easter 1938, representing the Leninist League of Glasgow, I had a long discussion with Witte in Paris. He had just been served his third expulsion order as an undesirable alien. In 1945, while awaiting trial in a London prison for political offences during the war, I met three Greek sailors charged with ‘mutiny on the high seas’. They told me that Witte had been beaten to death in a police cell in Athens.
On this trip I briefly met Gorkin at the headquarters of the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan, the French sister party, around which the POUM refugees were grouped. The Union Communiste group of G. Davoust, publisher of L’International, with whom I had a discussion at this time, played the same role with Friends of Durruti. At that time I was mainly interested in the Union Communiste’s connection with the print workers of Paris, in which they had a big influence. After the war I heard that Davoust had been tortured by the Gestapo, and was very ill.
The few survivors of those who picketed the US State Department and the Spanish Embassy will be surprised to hear that, according to Schwartz, “thanks to pressure from the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull”, Negrete was released from his Spanish jail. Negrete would have regretted the absence from the list of those who helped to secure his release the name of the Anarchist, Carlo Tresca. (See my letter on the Negrete-Blackwell Defence Committee, Revolutionary History, volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988.)
I note that AI Richardson’s review of this book replies to Alba’s criticism of Trotsky. Whatever Trotsky may have said of the Spanish situation in general, the fact remains that the Trotskyist forces in Spain were down to a group of seven, and of that seven two were reputed to be police spies. One does not need to have read the complete works of Lenin. The biblical adage “by their fruits ye shall know them” is sufficient to appraise this fact. In 1936, according to Negrete, the Trotskyist group comprised approximately 30 persons. In the period up to 1937 the POUM increased its membership by tens of thousands, and the Communist Party by hundreds of thousands. This was a revolutionary situation, a situation, as Trotsky pointed out, in which the masses were on a higher level than those of Russia in 1917. The Trotskyist forces dwindled to vanishing point. To say they were hampered by being infiltrated by police spies won’t do. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was riddled with police spies. The leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was a police agent. In spite of this the Bolsheviks increased their membership and support by leaps and bounds. All the revolutionary rhetoric of Trotsky on Spain ended in three applications, by the Bolshevik Leninists, for membership of the POUM. The last application was made after the May day events, i.e. after the POUM “had entered the dustbin of history’. These facts are hardly known by the Trotskyist movement, and have certainly never to my knowledge been assessed.
Pierre Broué, who is by way of being an ‘official Trotskyist’ historian, in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, written in conjunction with Emile Temime, a work of 591 pages in the English translation, does not once mention the Bolshevik Leninists and their fate. Orwell, Oehler, Negrete, Morrow, Thomas and Alba all do. This silence on the part of Broué says more than words.
Ernest Rogers
Editor’s note: Ernie was misinformed by his sailor friends. Witte died in 1965.
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