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.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
*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
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, Autonomedia, Brooklyn 1988, pp363
Although the writer of this book is an Associate Professor of politics, the fact that he lacks a basic training in Marxism and writes for a milieu that has no concept of class politics at all means that what we have here is yet another non-political book written about political movements. The fact that the Trotskyist movement in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party, is just about the most theoretically wretched in the entire world cannot have helped matters. Add to that more than a dash of old-fashioned Stalinism and we have a very exotic mixture indeed.
His attempt to grapple with Trotskyism is deeply flawed. It cannot, of course, be understood without some command of either its basis within Bolshevism, or of its transitional methodology. On the first count Fields’ understanding of the conflict of Bolshevism and Stalinism seems to be limited to a remark about Trotsky’s propensity to blame all the bureaucratic deformations of the Soviet Union on Stalin (p.234), and so little is grasped about democracy within the party that he appears to believe that Trotsky’s support for democratic centralism and for factional rights at the same time is “inconsistent” (p.235). On the second count, believing as he does that the Transitional Programme is meant to pose “minimum demands” (p.239), he thinks that “Trotskyists in the United States place much more stress on the Transitional Program than do the French Trotskyists who are appealing to a much more radical working class” (p.181), and that “there is thus less a need for the Ligue to emphasise the Transitional Program in the more radicalised milieu of the French workers than there is for the SWP in the United States where the workers are more conservative” (p.158). Even workers’ control, apparently, is a “minimum demand” (p240). Oblivious of Lenin’s demand for Communist membership of the Labour Party, he assumes that the practice of entry is “not one which is clearly consistent with what most people would recognise as Leninism” (p.239), and even confuses it with left wing activists belonging to trade unions, for example those of the UJCML inside the CGT (p.92).
And whilst we can sympathise with anyone approaching the complexities of Trotskyist history from outside, the blunders he makes are monumental. Pierre Frank, apparently, is “still active” (p.42), Pablo was “General Secretary of the Fourth International in 1942” (pp.48-9), Lutte Ouvriere is “probably smaller” than both the LCR and the OCI (now PCI) (p.77), and the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was in 1939 (p.182). We are told in all seriousness that the Union Communiste dropped its claim to belong to the Fourth International, not because of a threatened lawsuit, but in order to “secure some sort of reform of the PCI and possible unification with it” (p.74). Most fatuous of all is the assertion that the American SWP “has been subjected to a severer and relentless repression by those who control the political system, the parallel of which can only be found in France during the World War II Occupation” (p.139).
He has also swallowed an ocean of Stalinist and Maoist nonsense. Although Stalin did not even know that the Netherlands were part of Benelux, his writings on the national question, apparently, “are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought” (p.219). Mao, whose works on dialectics were ghost written for him, and didn’t know Hegel from Harold Lloyd, “touched the philosophical basis of Marxism” (p.16), and during the Cultural Revolution, a noxious purge if ever there was one, he was really “attempting to mobilise the younger generation to control the bureaucracy” (p.9).
Most amusing, however, are his own dialectical meanderings, particularly in chapter six. He appears to operate using his own concept of the first, second and third levels of practice, which he nowhere relates to Marxism, and along with this comes all manner of sub-Althusserian claptrap. “Trotsky and the movements which have followed in his wake have played the role of international superego” and “like most superegos, Trotskyists are little appreciated and much repressed” (p.243), and since they are unwise enough to have a theory, it “becomes increasingly dysfunctional at the level of practice as the practitioners move away from a suggestive conception of theory and towards a rigidly scientist conception and a posture of vigilence [sic] against all political pragmatics” (pp.253-4). But beneath this elaborate smokescreen his own concept is really rather crude: that the Trotskyist and Maoist movements are split because they are not only at odd; with “the pecularities of the political culture in which the attempt to apply the theories is made” but that there are also “contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories themselves” (p.ix).
Although class concepts rarely intrude upon his analysis (at one point we are given the telling fact that only between eight and nine per cent of LCR member are factory workers, p.52), it is in fact only by using them that this extreme fragmentation both of organisation and of theory can be explained. Based as the groups are within essentially unstable strata that are caught between the primary contending classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class, ideological vacillation, sectarian sterility or opportunist adaptation are nor only to be expected, but are virtually inevitable. The very ideological freedom he recognises in French Maoism, for example, is surely because its romantic escapist Third World peasant ideology has only historic contact with France’s past, and not a great deal to offer it in the present. The romanticism of the middle class left (in Britain as well as in the USA and France) is only matched by its irrelevance.
We search in vain for any inkling as why this is so. But the marginal position which the left finds itself rests upon a real material basis, in the global defeat of the working class before and during the Second World War which, along with the long boom and the spread of Stalinism an ideology of peasant nationalism, could not fail to promote Stalinist and Social Democratic illusions, not only among masses but even among would-be revolutionaries.
To add to the distress of any innocent who might reach for this book as a guide to the maze of far left politics is the incredible violence done to the English language. Apart from verbal barbarisms such as “delegitimization” (p27) and “thusly” (pp.54, 95), organisations “operate at tight end of the continuum” (p.ix), social scientists “hypothesize” (p.35), Marx calls “to transform the social universe in an emancipatory direction” (p.ix), and we repeatedly encounter the mysterious “postures of vigilence against Marxist-Leninist pragmatics” (e.g. p.252). Oh dear!
Al Richardson
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
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, Autonomedia, Brooklyn 1988, pp363
Although the writer of this book is an Associate Professor of politics, the fact that he lacks a basic training in Marxism and writes for a milieu that has no concept of class politics at all means that what we have here is yet another non-political book written about political movements. The fact that the Trotskyist movement in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party, is just about the most theoretically wretched in the entire world cannot have helped matters. Add to that more than a dash of old-fashioned Stalinism and we have a very exotic mixture indeed.
His attempt to grapple with Trotskyism is deeply flawed. It cannot, of course, be understood without some command of either its basis within Bolshevism, or of its transitional methodology. On the first count Fields’ understanding of the conflict of Bolshevism and Stalinism seems to be limited to a remark about Trotsky’s propensity to blame all the bureaucratic deformations of the Soviet Union on Stalin (p.234), and so little is grasped about democracy within the party that he appears to believe that Trotsky’s support for democratic centralism and for factional rights at the same time is “inconsistent” (p.235). On the second count, believing as he does that the Transitional Programme is meant to pose “minimum demands” (p.239), he thinks that “Trotskyists in the United States place much more stress on the Transitional Program than do the French Trotskyists who are appealing to a much more radical working class” (p.181), and that “there is thus less a need for the Ligue to emphasise the Transitional Program in the more radicalised milieu of the French workers than there is for the SWP in the United States where the workers are more conservative” (p.158). Even workers’ control, apparently, is a “minimum demand” (p240). Oblivious of Lenin’s demand for Communist membership of the Labour Party, he assumes that the practice of entry is “not one which is clearly consistent with what most people would recognise as Leninism” (p.239), and even confuses it with left wing activists belonging to trade unions, for example those of the UJCML inside the CGT (p.92).
And whilst we can sympathise with anyone approaching the complexities of Trotskyist history from outside, the blunders he makes are monumental. Pierre Frank, apparently, is “still active” (p.42), Pablo was “General Secretary of the Fourth International in 1942” (pp.48-9), Lutte Ouvriere is “probably smaller” than both the LCR and the OCI (now PCI) (p.77), and the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was in 1939 (p.182). We are told in all seriousness that the Union Communiste dropped its claim to belong to the Fourth International, not because of a threatened lawsuit, but in order to “secure some sort of reform of the PCI and possible unification with it” (p.74). Most fatuous of all is the assertion that the American SWP “has been subjected to a severer and relentless repression by those who control the political system, the parallel of which can only be found in France during the World War II Occupation” (p.139).
He has also swallowed an ocean of Stalinist and Maoist nonsense. Although Stalin did not even know that the Netherlands were part of Benelux, his writings on the national question, apparently, “are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought” (p.219). Mao, whose works on dialectics were ghost written for him, and didn’t know Hegel from Harold Lloyd, “touched the philosophical basis of Marxism” (p.16), and during the Cultural Revolution, a noxious purge if ever there was one, he was really “attempting to mobilise the younger generation to control the bureaucracy” (p.9).
Most amusing, however, are his own dialectical meanderings, particularly in chapter six. He appears to operate using his own concept of the first, second and third levels of practice, which he nowhere relates to Marxism, and along with this comes all manner of sub-Althusserian claptrap. “Trotsky and the movements which have followed in his wake have played the role of international superego” and “like most superegos, Trotskyists are little appreciated and much repressed” (p.243), and since they are unwise enough to have a theory, it “becomes increasingly dysfunctional at the level of practice as the practitioners move away from a suggestive conception of theory and towards a rigidly scientist conception and a posture of vigilence [sic] against all political pragmatics” (pp.253-4). But beneath this elaborate smokescreen his own concept is really rather crude: that the Trotskyist and Maoist movements are split because they are not only at odd; with “the pecularities of the political culture in which the attempt to apply the theories is made” but that there are also “contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories themselves” (p.ix).
Although class concepts rarely intrude upon his analysis (at one point we are given the telling fact that only between eight and nine per cent of LCR member are factory workers, p.52), it is in fact only by using them that this extreme fragmentation both of organisation and of theory can be explained. Based as the groups are within essentially unstable strata that are caught between the primary contending classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class, ideological vacillation, sectarian sterility or opportunist adaptation are nor only to be expected, but are virtually inevitable. The very ideological freedom he recognises in French Maoism, for example, is surely because its romantic escapist Third World peasant ideology has only historic contact with France’s past, and not a great deal to offer it in the present. The romanticism of the middle class left (in Britain as well as in the USA and France) is only matched by its irrelevance.
We search in vain for any inkling as why this is so. But the marginal position which the left finds itself rests upon a real material basis, in the global defeat of the working class before and during the Second World War which, along with the long boom and the spread of Stalinism an ideology of peasant nationalism, could not fail to promote Stalinist and Social Democratic illusions, not only among masses but even among would-be revolutionaries.
To add to the distress of any innocent who might reach for this book as a guide to the maze of far left politics is the incredible violence done to the English language. Apart from verbal barbarisms such as “delegitimization” (p27) and “thusly” (pp.54, 95), organisations “operate at tight end of the continuum” (p.ix), social scientists “hypothesize” (p.35), Marx calls “to transform the social universe in an emancipatory direction” (p.ix), and we repeatedly encounter the mysterious “postures of vigilence against Marxist-Leninist pragmatics” (e.g. p.252). Oh dear!
Al Richardson
*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
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique, Glasgow, 1987, pp 220, £8.00
But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter the Slav Sonderbund [alliance], and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.' (F. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, January 1849)
Rosdolsky correctly notes that Engels’ position on the Austrian Slavs has been irrevocably refuted by “the severest critic of all critics – history”. The “reactionary peoples” condemned by Engels are the Czechs and Slovaks that today populate Czechoslovakia, the Serbs and Croats who help make up Yugoslavia, and the Galician Ukrainians who now live in the Western Ukraine. These peoples have recently emerged from the collapsing Stalinist Eastern Bloc only to be thrown once again into the cauldron of insurrection and ethnic conflict. For that reason, the recent publication in English of this 40-year-old study of Engels’ peculiar attitude towards the nationalities of Eastern Europe in 1849 is timely, and to be welcomed.
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality. (p.185)
In his book, Rosdolsky sets out Engels’ justification for his position at length. Briefly, both Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois revolutions that broke out from February 1848 throughout Europe as the necessary precursors to the Socialist revolution, which they erroneously expected to be imminent. However, the revolutionary fervour of the bourgeoisie soon evaporated, and the forces of reaction rallied, particularly in Metternich’s Austria. In October 1848 the bloody suppression of the Vienna rising marked the turning point of the insurrections, and the revolutionary forces were thrown back everywhere from then onwards. What motivated Engels to write his vituperative articles was the Austrian Slavs’ rejection of their chance to win freedom from the oppressive rule of the Habsburgs, and their enthusiastic participation in Metternich’s counter-revolution.
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. (Democratic Pan-Slavism, February 1849)
Rosdolsky links Engels’ adoption of this conception directly to Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic people’. In his Philosophy of Mind, the German philosopher held that only those peoples that could – thanks to inherent “natural and spiritual abilities” – establish a state were to be the bearers of historical progress: “A nation with no state formation ... has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.” As a result, those who were indifferent about possessing their own state would soon stop being a people. The reactionary implications of Hegel’s theory are clear: he thought that some peoples will always be uncivilised, no matter what. For instance, in 1830 Hegel wrote off Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa ... it is an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.”
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
The [Ukrainian] question cannot be solved as long as the Ukrainians have not achieved full – and not merely formal ’ independence with or without federation with the Russians. (p.165)
This hint of pro-nationalist sentiments indicates that, while Rosdolsky formally accepted Lenin’s approach, he retained reservations in practice.
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
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
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique, Glasgow, 1987, pp 220, £8.00
But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter the Slav Sonderbund [alliance], and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.' (F. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, January 1849)
Rosdolsky correctly notes that Engels’ position on the Austrian Slavs has been irrevocably refuted by “the severest critic of all critics – history”. The “reactionary peoples” condemned by Engels are the Czechs and Slovaks that today populate Czechoslovakia, the Serbs and Croats who help make up Yugoslavia, and the Galician Ukrainians who now live in the Western Ukraine. These peoples have recently emerged from the collapsing Stalinist Eastern Bloc only to be thrown once again into the cauldron of insurrection and ethnic conflict. For that reason, the recent publication in English of this 40-year-old study of Engels’ peculiar attitude towards the nationalities of Eastern Europe in 1849 is timely, and to be welcomed.
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality. (p.185)
In his book, Rosdolsky sets out Engels’ justification for his position at length. Briefly, both Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois revolutions that broke out from February 1848 throughout Europe as the necessary precursors to the Socialist revolution, which they erroneously expected to be imminent. However, the revolutionary fervour of the bourgeoisie soon evaporated, and the forces of reaction rallied, particularly in Metternich’s Austria. In October 1848 the bloody suppression of the Vienna rising marked the turning point of the insurrections, and the revolutionary forces were thrown back everywhere from then onwards. What motivated Engels to write his vituperative articles was the Austrian Slavs’ rejection of their chance to win freedom from the oppressive rule of the Habsburgs, and their enthusiastic participation in Metternich’s counter-revolution.
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. (Democratic Pan-Slavism, February 1849)
Rosdolsky links Engels’ adoption of this conception directly to Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic people’. In his Philosophy of Mind, the German philosopher held that only those peoples that could – thanks to inherent “natural and spiritual abilities” – establish a state were to be the bearers of historical progress: “A nation with no state formation ... has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.” As a result, those who were indifferent about possessing their own state would soon stop being a people. The reactionary implications of Hegel’s theory are clear: he thought that some peoples will always be uncivilised, no matter what. For instance, in 1830 Hegel wrote off Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa ... it is an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.”
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
The [Ukrainian] question cannot be solved as long as the Ukrainians have not achieved full – and not merely formal ’ independence with or without federation with the Russians. (p.165)
This hint of pro-nationalist sentiments indicates that, while Rosdolsky formally accepted Lenin’s approach, he retained reservations in practice.
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
*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
Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158
This is a fascinating and most disturbing book, disturbing because it is written by an American army colonel who appears to be a good deal more aware of the problems of Socialist insurrection – a key aspect of Leon Trotsky’s thought – than the vast majority of those who call themselves Trotskyists. The author has used the Russian edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works, published in 12 volumes in Moscow between 1925 and 1927 and cites these references, which makes crosschecking with the far more limited English and French language material available to this reviewer difficult. Essentially the work divides into three: firstly and most novel to me, Trotsky’s rôle in the debates among revolutionaries after 1905 about the tactics necessary to overcome the Tsarist army, involving the complex and subtle interaction of politics and military technique; secondly, the comments and analyses on the Balkan wars and the First World War of Trotsky the brilliant journalist; and finally an account of the way in which Trotsky mobilised and commanded the Bolshevik seizure of power – all clearly and well written in less than 200 pages.
The second of these three themes, that of Trotsky the war correspondent, is the least politically controversial, and can be dealt with first of all. Whether it was his Marxist training or his own natural genius, Trotsky was able to perceive as closely as any civilian could both the way in which total war involved total society and – though forbidden proximity to the front – the nature of the stresses on humans in twentieth century battle. In this sense he foreshadows the work of academic authors like John Keegan or Michael Howard who, with the advantage of hindsight over two tremendous military convulsions this century, systematise much of what Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in a small war in a god-forsaken corner of Europe. What was incredibly original then is now part of conventional wisdom, and indeed Michael Howard once said to me that “We are all Marxists now”, by which I understand him to mean that many of Marx’s insights about society have passed into the general consciousness of good historians. So Marxists seeking to understand war might all start by reading the Face of Battle by Keegan and the Franco-Prussian War by Howard.
Trotsky’s feat was the more amazing when one glances at what passed for military science in those days, such as the work of Bernhardi or, on a more specialised level, the documents submitted to the Cabinet by the Committee of Imperial Defence, let alone the attempts of Hilaire Belloc to explain war to a civilian readership in early 1915. On a simple strategic plane Trotsky was more than competent, though I have some doubt myself as to whether Nelson is correct in believing that the former’s strategy would have enabled the Bulgarian army to take Constantinople and avoid the costly battle of Lule Burgas. Indeed a Marxist – and not only a Marxist – analysis would tend to see costly savage battles as inevitable between enemies who were more or less equally well-equipped. Some clever little manoeuvre could not avoid this, and it would be all the more true when, as Trotsky pointed out, the technical conditions of the day favoured the defence. However reactionary he may be, an historian like John Terraine is surely right about the need for fighting in order to win, and Nelson’s surprising admiration for his subject has carried his judgement away. Chauvinists amongst us might assert that the American military expects to win without fighting – simply by technologically brilliant massacre.
One interesting aperçu that Nelson does not develop is that after his Balkan War experience, Trotsky became convinced that partisan warfare was not suited to a Socialist revolution, though he thought that guerrillas could be useful to a nationalist movement. [1] Perhaps it is a pity that many Trotskyists in the late ’sixties and ’seventies did not appear to be familiar with this judgement. It also raises an interesting question about Nelson’s view of the Vietnam war in which he served. Perhaps he does not think Vietnam is Socialist, in which case he may judge it to be capitalist or state capitalist! But the author’s Vietnam experience seems to have marked him in other ways, since he chooses not to mention Trotsky’s furious denunciation of the atrocities of the Bulgarian army and their habit of killing enemy wounded which, since Turkish army units contained up to 25 per cent Christian soldiers – either Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and so on, resulted in the murder of many men who would have been delighted to join the victorious allies. Such behaviour was therefore militarily counter-productive, as well as barbarous. But perhaps for a serving American officer in an army which had, as a matter of policy, bombed Vietcong hospitals to break their opponents’ morale, it would be too delicate ’ not to say handicapping for promotion prospects ’ to praise Trotsky for this. (Their legal experts said that the Vietcong wounded were not covered by the Geneva convention, since they were not members of a state’s armed forces.)
Trotsky’s writings on the First World War continue with his search to understand the psychological and social stresses on the front line soldier in greater depth, and there is even a remarkable sentence that foresees the invention of the tank. Yet the psychological aspect on which he insisted is one, if not the main, reason why generals today wish to put their troops in armoured vehicles. If that is done, their soldiers can be carried forward into danger against their will like the crew of a warship. Unlike the Prussian soldier of Frederick the Great, imprisoned by ferocious brutal discipline in the regiment, modern servicemen can be imprisoned in the steel walls of their weapons and so are both forced to fight and not to fraternise. The most extreme example of this is in naval operations – the bureaucratic mechanised mode of warfare par excellence. So the technical solution, armour, arises in part from the psychological needs of the death-avoiding soldier in opposition to the desire of the general to control this impulse. Here Trotsky’s sharp intellect seems to be on the right lines.
For Socialists the main interest of this book will surely lie in the debates in which Trotsky participated after 1905 concerning the tactics to be used to overthrow the Tsar’s army – the concentrated essence of the autocratic state. This argument boiled down as to how far the army could be overthrown militarily or subverted internally, and Nelson deals with this clearly, concisely and subtly. The weakness of the book here is that the author concentrates overmuch on Trotsky, the military hero, though this whole dispute should be seen in rather broader context, and the documents of the SRs and both the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party might have been looked at. Indeed the question could be broadened further and the whole debate on ‘People’s Armies’, in which. western Socialists such as Jaures took part, could be examined in order to understand the context of the Russian quarrel. On Nelson’s evidence the Bolsheviks, at one time, do seem to have had a very ultra-left and triumphalist attitude, believing that they could smash the Tsarist army by means of a workers’ insurrection, and justifying individual acts of terrorism. Nelson fails to point out that after the excesses of some Bolshevik bank robbers Lenin changed his mind. A matter that many sectarians today do not understand is that a working class party develops its programme, not in one thunderous stroke of genius by the revolutionary leadership, but by a process of class struggle, trial and error. The working class and its leaders learn from experience and each other in a dialectical way, and though it is equally true that some understanding of the past may save them from dreadful mistakes, historical knowledge alone may not provide any clear answers to present day problems. So the Bolsheviks and Lenin learnt and looked at events and the consequences of their own actions, and they did not merely tell people what to do.
For the Bolsheviks the military question was complicated by the fact that the army was overwhelmingly recruited from the peasant masses rather than from the working class, where the RSDLP was influential. Things were even more complicated as the different arms were raised from different social groups, the engineers and gunners being more likely to be workers than the infantry. But it was the peasant infantry who were used for repression. In the First World War the socially backward infantry were misused by their commanders and so slaughtered in ill-considered offensives that they became temporarily very advanced politically, and the problem was resolved. It was the military defeat of the army by the Germans, rather than the revolutionaries, that opened the way to its subversion and the seizure of power. When the revolutionaries went on the military offensive the subverted army collapsed with scarcely any resistance. Earlier, when the Russian Socialists debated the military question in the prewar period, it had been noted that attacks on the army had often resulted in a hardening of attitudes against the revolutionaries among the soldiers.
It may be relevant here to note that attempts to do agitational work in the army in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s met with very limited success, and that the few soldiers and NCOs contacted – however advanced in other ways – were always very hostile to the rather pro-IRA line put forward by the agitators from a Trotskyist group. The soldiers perceived the Irish problem as a fight between two reactionary groups of Irish people, not a struggle for national liberation, and it is at least arguable that they, not the revolutionaries, were the more correct. The British army today, like that of the United States and unlike the Russian, is composed of long service volunteers and, in Britain at least, it contains a strong janissary element. [2] Agitation here will take place on unpromising terrain, though if the units have been thinned out in an unsuccessful war the situation would change, as it did in Russia among the peasant levies of Tsar Nicholas. And if such a war arises it will do so because of a political crisis facing the regime, as did the little Falklands affair, which surely owed its outbreak to the internal problems of the British and Argentine governments of the day. Such crises, and the consequent opportunities, will doubtless continue to arrive.
Much of the final section of Nelson’s book dealing with the seizure of power will be broadly familiar to readers who know Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. It is nevertheless very well done and worth reading. I return to the point with which I began by asking myself how it comes about that an American Colonel can deal with this field so very competently. What ‘being’ has determined his ‘consciousness’? I can only assume that his experience in Vietnam, and those of his fellow officers at the War College, when they saw their own army disintegrate before their eyes, despite a casualty rate that was tiny by the standards of World War One, has made them exceedingly sensitive to the problem of the social cohesion of the armed services. Events in Iran, too, where there were many US military advisers, may have had an impact. These instances underline the fact that those very few American Trotskyists who during the Vietnam war maintained that, rather than running away to Canada, revolutionaries should allow themselves to be drafted to work into the army, were correct. Alas, they had but tiny resources while the Woodstock generation, which was their milieu, proved an unpromising layer from which to recruit a Bolshevik party willing to undertake that hardest task of all for Marxists – agitation in the regiments. Nevertheless the modern army, despite the vastly enhanced technical ability of military power in the modern capitalist state, is far from invulnerable to its own working class. And, as this excellent book indirectly bears witness – they know it.
Ted Crawford
Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Judith Shapiro who went to considerable trouble to check the Russian language references for this review. However she was quite unable to find the quote which Nelson puts in inverted commas on p.66 citing Sochineniia, Volume 6, p225. I had thought that it was from a passage from Kievskaya Mysl no.293, of October 1912, which seems thematically related to this topic and which can be found on p.234 of The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, 1980. Even if the citation has been muddled it seems to be either a not unjustified paraphrase of Trotsky’s thought on this issue or may indeed appear somewhere else.
2. By ‘janissary’ I mean individuals who have been torn out of society and lack even family links with it, let alone trade union ones. In Britain this is the case with almost all the many boy recruits, about a third of the infantry, who join at sixteen, the vast majority being from broken homes who do not get on with their step-fathers. Like the janissaries their only home is the regiment. The statistics concerning the background of these lads are, of course, an ‘official secret’ – perhaps with good reason.
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
Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158
This is a fascinating and most disturbing book, disturbing because it is written by an American army colonel who appears to be a good deal more aware of the problems of Socialist insurrection – a key aspect of Leon Trotsky’s thought – than the vast majority of those who call themselves Trotskyists. The author has used the Russian edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works, published in 12 volumes in Moscow between 1925 and 1927 and cites these references, which makes crosschecking with the far more limited English and French language material available to this reviewer difficult. Essentially the work divides into three: firstly and most novel to me, Trotsky’s rôle in the debates among revolutionaries after 1905 about the tactics necessary to overcome the Tsarist army, involving the complex and subtle interaction of politics and military technique; secondly, the comments and analyses on the Balkan wars and the First World War of Trotsky the brilliant journalist; and finally an account of the way in which Trotsky mobilised and commanded the Bolshevik seizure of power – all clearly and well written in less than 200 pages.
The second of these three themes, that of Trotsky the war correspondent, is the least politically controversial, and can be dealt with first of all. Whether it was his Marxist training or his own natural genius, Trotsky was able to perceive as closely as any civilian could both the way in which total war involved total society and – though forbidden proximity to the front – the nature of the stresses on humans in twentieth century battle. In this sense he foreshadows the work of academic authors like John Keegan or Michael Howard who, with the advantage of hindsight over two tremendous military convulsions this century, systematise much of what Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in a small war in a god-forsaken corner of Europe. What was incredibly original then is now part of conventional wisdom, and indeed Michael Howard once said to me that “We are all Marxists now”, by which I understand him to mean that many of Marx’s insights about society have passed into the general consciousness of good historians. So Marxists seeking to understand war might all start by reading the Face of Battle by Keegan and the Franco-Prussian War by Howard.
Trotsky’s feat was the more amazing when one glances at what passed for military science in those days, such as the work of Bernhardi or, on a more specialised level, the documents submitted to the Cabinet by the Committee of Imperial Defence, let alone the attempts of Hilaire Belloc to explain war to a civilian readership in early 1915. On a simple strategic plane Trotsky was more than competent, though I have some doubt myself as to whether Nelson is correct in believing that the former’s strategy would have enabled the Bulgarian army to take Constantinople and avoid the costly battle of Lule Burgas. Indeed a Marxist – and not only a Marxist – analysis would tend to see costly savage battles as inevitable between enemies who were more or less equally well-equipped. Some clever little manoeuvre could not avoid this, and it would be all the more true when, as Trotsky pointed out, the technical conditions of the day favoured the defence. However reactionary he may be, an historian like John Terraine is surely right about the need for fighting in order to win, and Nelson’s surprising admiration for his subject has carried his judgement away. Chauvinists amongst us might assert that the American military expects to win without fighting – simply by technologically brilliant massacre.
One interesting aperçu that Nelson does not develop is that after his Balkan War experience, Trotsky became convinced that partisan warfare was not suited to a Socialist revolution, though he thought that guerrillas could be useful to a nationalist movement. [1] Perhaps it is a pity that many Trotskyists in the late ’sixties and ’seventies did not appear to be familiar with this judgement. It also raises an interesting question about Nelson’s view of the Vietnam war in which he served. Perhaps he does not think Vietnam is Socialist, in which case he may judge it to be capitalist or state capitalist! But the author’s Vietnam experience seems to have marked him in other ways, since he chooses not to mention Trotsky’s furious denunciation of the atrocities of the Bulgarian army and their habit of killing enemy wounded which, since Turkish army units contained up to 25 per cent Christian soldiers – either Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and so on, resulted in the murder of many men who would have been delighted to join the victorious allies. Such behaviour was therefore militarily counter-productive, as well as barbarous. But perhaps for a serving American officer in an army which had, as a matter of policy, bombed Vietcong hospitals to break their opponents’ morale, it would be too delicate ’ not to say handicapping for promotion prospects ’ to praise Trotsky for this. (Their legal experts said that the Vietcong wounded were not covered by the Geneva convention, since they were not members of a state’s armed forces.)
Trotsky’s writings on the First World War continue with his search to understand the psychological and social stresses on the front line soldier in greater depth, and there is even a remarkable sentence that foresees the invention of the tank. Yet the psychological aspect on which he insisted is one, if not the main, reason why generals today wish to put their troops in armoured vehicles. If that is done, their soldiers can be carried forward into danger against their will like the crew of a warship. Unlike the Prussian soldier of Frederick the Great, imprisoned by ferocious brutal discipline in the regiment, modern servicemen can be imprisoned in the steel walls of their weapons and so are both forced to fight and not to fraternise. The most extreme example of this is in naval operations – the bureaucratic mechanised mode of warfare par excellence. So the technical solution, armour, arises in part from the psychological needs of the death-avoiding soldier in opposition to the desire of the general to control this impulse. Here Trotsky’s sharp intellect seems to be on the right lines.
For Socialists the main interest of this book will surely lie in the debates in which Trotsky participated after 1905 concerning the tactics to be used to overthrow the Tsar’s army – the concentrated essence of the autocratic state. This argument boiled down as to how far the army could be overthrown militarily or subverted internally, and Nelson deals with this clearly, concisely and subtly. The weakness of the book here is that the author concentrates overmuch on Trotsky, the military hero, though this whole dispute should be seen in rather broader context, and the documents of the SRs and both the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party might have been looked at. Indeed the question could be broadened further and the whole debate on ‘People’s Armies’, in which. western Socialists such as Jaures took part, could be examined in order to understand the context of the Russian quarrel. On Nelson’s evidence the Bolsheviks, at one time, do seem to have had a very ultra-left and triumphalist attitude, believing that they could smash the Tsarist army by means of a workers’ insurrection, and justifying individual acts of terrorism. Nelson fails to point out that after the excesses of some Bolshevik bank robbers Lenin changed his mind. A matter that many sectarians today do not understand is that a working class party develops its programme, not in one thunderous stroke of genius by the revolutionary leadership, but by a process of class struggle, trial and error. The working class and its leaders learn from experience and each other in a dialectical way, and though it is equally true that some understanding of the past may save them from dreadful mistakes, historical knowledge alone may not provide any clear answers to present day problems. So the Bolsheviks and Lenin learnt and looked at events and the consequences of their own actions, and they did not merely tell people what to do.
For the Bolsheviks the military question was complicated by the fact that the army was overwhelmingly recruited from the peasant masses rather than from the working class, where the RSDLP was influential. Things were even more complicated as the different arms were raised from different social groups, the engineers and gunners being more likely to be workers than the infantry. But it was the peasant infantry who were used for repression. In the First World War the socially backward infantry were misused by their commanders and so slaughtered in ill-considered offensives that they became temporarily very advanced politically, and the problem was resolved. It was the military defeat of the army by the Germans, rather than the revolutionaries, that opened the way to its subversion and the seizure of power. When the revolutionaries went on the military offensive the subverted army collapsed with scarcely any resistance. Earlier, when the Russian Socialists debated the military question in the prewar period, it had been noted that attacks on the army had often resulted in a hardening of attitudes against the revolutionaries among the soldiers.
It may be relevant here to note that attempts to do agitational work in the army in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s met with very limited success, and that the few soldiers and NCOs contacted – however advanced in other ways – were always very hostile to the rather pro-IRA line put forward by the agitators from a Trotskyist group. The soldiers perceived the Irish problem as a fight between two reactionary groups of Irish people, not a struggle for national liberation, and it is at least arguable that they, not the revolutionaries, were the more correct. The British army today, like that of the United States and unlike the Russian, is composed of long service volunteers and, in Britain at least, it contains a strong janissary element. [2] Agitation here will take place on unpromising terrain, though if the units have been thinned out in an unsuccessful war the situation would change, as it did in Russia among the peasant levies of Tsar Nicholas. And if such a war arises it will do so because of a political crisis facing the regime, as did the little Falklands affair, which surely owed its outbreak to the internal problems of the British and Argentine governments of the day. Such crises, and the consequent opportunities, will doubtless continue to arrive.
Much of the final section of Nelson’s book dealing with the seizure of power will be broadly familiar to readers who know Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. It is nevertheless very well done and worth reading. I return to the point with which I began by asking myself how it comes about that an American Colonel can deal with this field so very competently. What ‘being’ has determined his ‘consciousness’? I can only assume that his experience in Vietnam, and those of his fellow officers at the War College, when they saw their own army disintegrate before their eyes, despite a casualty rate that was tiny by the standards of World War One, has made them exceedingly sensitive to the problem of the social cohesion of the armed services. Events in Iran, too, where there were many US military advisers, may have had an impact. These instances underline the fact that those very few American Trotskyists who during the Vietnam war maintained that, rather than running away to Canada, revolutionaries should allow themselves to be drafted to work into the army, were correct. Alas, they had but tiny resources while the Woodstock generation, which was their milieu, proved an unpromising layer from which to recruit a Bolshevik party willing to undertake that hardest task of all for Marxists – agitation in the regiments. Nevertheless the modern army, despite the vastly enhanced technical ability of military power in the modern capitalist state, is far from invulnerable to its own working class. And, as this excellent book indirectly bears witness – they know it.
Ted Crawford
Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Judith Shapiro who went to considerable trouble to check the Russian language references for this review. However she was quite unable to find the quote which Nelson puts in inverted commas on p.66 citing Sochineniia, Volume 6, p225. I had thought that it was from a passage from Kievskaya Mysl no.293, of October 1912, which seems thematically related to this topic and which can be found on p.234 of The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, 1980. Even if the citation has been muddled it seems to be either a not unjustified paraphrase of Trotsky’s thought on this issue or may indeed appear somewhere else.
2. By ‘janissary’ I mean individuals who have been torn out of society and lack even family links with it, let alone trade union ones. In Britain this is the case with almost all the many boy recruits, about a third of the infantry, who join at sixteen, the vast majority being from broken homes who do not get on with their step-fathers. Like the janissaries their only home is the regiment. The statistics concerning the background of these lads are, of course, an ‘official secret’ – perhaps with good reason.
*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
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).
It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
************
This is an entry from the American Left History blog
Saturday, August 11, 2007
*ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LOOK AT LEON TROTSKY-Albert Glotzer's View
Click on title to link to the Albert Glotzer Internet Archive for samples of his writing while was in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s and later after he split from that party in the famous Shachtman-led exit in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. That was the touchstone issue for his, and later generations, and one can see in the later writing the slip-slide into the defense of "democratic" imperialism. A cautionary tale, for sure.
BOOK REVIEW
TROTSKY-MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, ALBERT GLOTZER, PROMETHEUS BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1989
THIS MONTH MARKS THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF LEON TROTSKY BY A STALINIST AGENT-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY
As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I have noted elsewhere that I believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies, or in this a case a memoir and critique (naturally-the memoir alone in this case would not sustain a book) on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Mr. Glotzer’s take on Trotsky’s legacy is a classic post World War II social democratic one driven by the effect of the ravages of American imperialism during the Cold War on the right wing of that international political tendency. The post war period was not kind to those who fell away from the politics that sparked their communist youth, but more on that at another time.
Despite our extreme politic differences Mr. Glotzer’s reminiscences of how he became a communist are welcome. I am always fascinated by how those who came to political maturity a couple of generations before me and who are the real living links to the Russian Revolution felt about that event. Moreover, Mr. Glotzer is no mere chronicler of Trotsky’s life. During the 1930’s before the political temperature in the American left intellectual milieu got too hot for some of them Mr. Glotzer was part of the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement and was a key lieutenant, factional operative and personal friend of a central founder- one Max Shachtman. That these two, along with another “Young Turk” one Martin Abern, spent as much time plotting for organizational control of the movement against the wily ‘bureaucratic’ old timer and founder James P. Cannon during that time as in constructive political work is a separate issue. Needless to say only a few cryptic references to that experience surface in this work- a very selective memoir, as is usually the case. For more on that political struggle read Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and make up your own mind.
As always the critique of Trotsky, or more correctly, Bolshevism is centered on the question of the organizational principles of that party. That is democratic- centralism or as the critics would have it bureaucratic-centralism-long on the bureaucratic, short on the democratic. Trotsky is seen here to have escaped that bad practice until he linked up with the Bolsheviks in 1917. This is his 'original sin' in the eyes of liberals and social democrats like Glotzer. The reduction of an organizational principle of a political party to the decisive reason for the degeneration of a revolution defies belief.
The model for all European social democratic parties, including both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century was the German party. One does not have to read to far into the history of that party to know that even without state power to buttress its organizational practice that party was as bureaucratically run as any Stalinist party cell. The real question then is not the principle of democratic centralism but the question of a ‘vanguard party’ versus a ‘party of the whole class’. In the end that was what the dispute in the Russian social democracy turned on. And later on the international movement, as well. History has demonstrated, if it has demonstrated anything on this question, that a ‘party of the whole class’ with its implication of inclusiveness toward socially backward workers can never take state power, if that was the idea of those who argued for this type of party in the first place. All of the above said, the question of bureaucracy in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism is one that has, in the light of the history of Stalinism, has to be taken as a real question. There are no a priori guarantees on the bumpy road to socialism but that is hardly the decisive question for now.
The rest of Glotzer’s critique is a more or less quick gloss on his politics and a rather annoying gloating over what proved to be the incorrectness of some of Trotsky’s predictions. The central argument Glotzer presents here is that capitalism rather than being in its death throes as Trotsky (and before him, Lenin) suggested still had, and has, a life and is not ready to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, those social democrats, like Glotzer, did more than their fair share of ideological work of behalf of preserving the imperialist status quo. Perhaps he would have been better off if he had ended his memoirs in his Communist youth in the 1930’s when he helped to try to create an international Trotskyist youth movement -that is the Glotzer who interests me. The rest I have heard a million times before.
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
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).
It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
************
This is an entry from the American Left History blog
Saturday, August 11, 2007
*ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LOOK AT LEON TROTSKY-Albert Glotzer's View
Click on title to link to the Albert Glotzer Internet Archive for samples of his writing while was in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s and later after he split from that party in the famous Shachtman-led exit in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. That was the touchstone issue for his, and later generations, and one can see in the later writing the slip-slide into the defense of "democratic" imperialism. A cautionary tale, for sure.
BOOK REVIEW
TROTSKY-MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, ALBERT GLOTZER, PROMETHEUS BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1989
THIS MONTH MARKS THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF LEON TROTSKY BY A STALINIST AGENT-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY
As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I have noted elsewhere that I believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies, or in this a case a memoir and critique (naturally-the memoir alone in this case would not sustain a book) on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Mr. Glotzer’s take on Trotsky’s legacy is a classic post World War II social democratic one driven by the effect of the ravages of American imperialism during the Cold War on the right wing of that international political tendency. The post war period was not kind to those who fell away from the politics that sparked their communist youth, but more on that at another time.
Despite our extreme politic differences Mr. Glotzer’s reminiscences of how he became a communist are welcome. I am always fascinated by how those who came to political maturity a couple of generations before me and who are the real living links to the Russian Revolution felt about that event. Moreover, Mr. Glotzer is no mere chronicler of Trotsky’s life. During the 1930’s before the political temperature in the American left intellectual milieu got too hot for some of them Mr. Glotzer was part of the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement and was a key lieutenant, factional operative and personal friend of a central founder- one Max Shachtman. That these two, along with another “Young Turk” one Martin Abern, spent as much time plotting for organizational control of the movement against the wily ‘bureaucratic’ old timer and founder James P. Cannon during that time as in constructive political work is a separate issue. Needless to say only a few cryptic references to that experience surface in this work- a very selective memoir, as is usually the case. For more on that political struggle read Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and make up your own mind.
As always the critique of Trotsky, or more correctly, Bolshevism is centered on the question of the organizational principles of that party. That is democratic- centralism or as the critics would have it bureaucratic-centralism-long on the bureaucratic, short on the democratic. Trotsky is seen here to have escaped that bad practice until he linked up with the Bolsheviks in 1917. This is his 'original sin' in the eyes of liberals and social democrats like Glotzer. The reduction of an organizational principle of a political party to the decisive reason for the degeneration of a revolution defies belief.
The model for all European social democratic parties, including both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century was the German party. One does not have to read to far into the history of that party to know that even without state power to buttress its organizational practice that party was as bureaucratically run as any Stalinist party cell. The real question then is not the principle of democratic centralism but the question of a ‘vanguard party’ versus a ‘party of the whole class’. In the end that was what the dispute in the Russian social democracy turned on. And later on the international movement, as well. History has demonstrated, if it has demonstrated anything on this question, that a ‘party of the whole class’ with its implication of inclusiveness toward socially backward workers can never take state power, if that was the idea of those who argued for this type of party in the first place. All of the above said, the question of bureaucracy in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism is one that has, in the light of the history of Stalinism, has to be taken as a real question. There are no a priori guarantees on the bumpy road to socialism but that is hardly the decisive question for now.
The rest of Glotzer’s critique is a more or less quick gloss on his politics and a rather annoying gloating over what proved to be the incorrectness of some of Trotsky’s predictions. The central argument Glotzer presents here is that capitalism rather than being in its death throes as Trotsky (and before him, Lenin) suggested still had, and has, a life and is not ready to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, those social democrats, like Glotzer, did more than their fair share of ideological work of behalf of preserving the imperialist status quo. Perhaps he would have been better off if he had ended his memoirs in his Communist youth in the 1930’s when he helped to try to create an international Trotskyist youth movement -that is the Glotzer who interests me. The rest I have heard a million times before.
*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
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
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
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
*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
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
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
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
*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
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
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
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
*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
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
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
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
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