AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, April 28, 2011

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Walter Seeland and the German Brandlerites

No More Wisconsins!-Anti-Union “Mission Creep” In Massachusetts- State House Of Representatives Votes To Eliminate Bargaining Over Health Care

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe article, dated April 26, 2011, detailing a vote on a bill by the State House of Representatives essentially eliminating heath care issues as bargaining items in public union contracts.

Markin comment:

Okay, one more time by the numbers. Unions exist to bargain over wages, conditions of work, and benefits. Bargain in good or bad faith, but bargain. The defeat in Wisconsin over the right to collectively bargain on, in reality, anything has found echoes in other states using a slow fuse method to attain the same results-break the unions’ task as bargaining agent and go back to the good old days of workers taking what you get, and like it. The Massachusetts House of Representatives recent vote, in a so-called liberal, pro-labor state, on a bill to essentially take heath care issues off the bargaining table is a prime example of this latter strategy. If we do not want unions, public and private, to become mere company unions (or mere dues-paying fraternal organizations, like the Elks)then we had better do a better job of fighting to save the collective bargaining process before there is nothing left. And work under the slogan- No More Wisconsins! No More Massachusetts’! An injury to one is an injury to all!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

From The Boston May Day Committee-Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park-All Out In Boston On Our International Working Class Holiday!-Honor The Haymarket Martyrs!

From The Boston May Day Committee-Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park-All Out In Boston On Our International Working Class Holiday!-Honor The Haymarket Martyrs!

When: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 12:00 pm

Where: Rose Kennedy Greenway Park • Cross St. and Hanover St. • across from the Haymarket T Station corner • Boston

Start: 2011 May 1 - 12:00pm
*******

Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park
Let's commemorate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park, across from the Haymarket T Station, in the corner of Cross and Hanover streets in Boston.

After the rally we will take the T to East Boston to join in the East Boston March to the May 1 rally in Chelsea.

We demand:

1. Stop attacks on workers!

2. Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!

3. No racist profiling Secure Communities programs!

4. Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!

5. Unity of all workers to defend our rights!

6. International unity for immigrant rights.

Special performance by the radical theater group Bread and Puppet

This event is initiated and sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee.

For organizational endorsements please write to info[@]bostonmayday.org

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-"The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy"

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Introduction to C.L.R. James' "World Revolution 1917-1936"

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” 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.
********
Introduction to World Revolution 1917-1936

This Introduction for the new edition of World Revolution 1917-1936 by C.L.R. James was written by Al Richardson the editor of Revolutionary History. The new edition was published by Humanities Press in 1993.

Introduction to World Revolution

C.L.R. James’ World Revolution, here presented in a new edition, was one of the few attempts made at the time to synthesise the experience of the revolutionary movement following the First World War. In judging its significance, both in its own time and for ours, it is worth bearing in mind the circumstances that gave rise to it.

The sheer weight of the apparatus of the Soviet Union and of the Comintern had established a virtual monopoly over Marxist thought by the mid 1930s. Dissident currents, whether of ‘right’ (Bukharinist or Brandlerite) or of ‘left’ coloration (Bordigist, Korschite or Trotskyist) had been successfully marginalised and reduced to small group existence by massive propaganda, gangsterism or terror.

Early in 1934 a dozen or so members of the Communist League, the first British Trotskyist organisation, at the instigation of Denzil Harber and Stewart Kirby and with Trotsky’s support, had left the parent body to set up a faction, later called the Marxist Group, inside the Independent Labour Party, which had itself parted company with the Labour Party a couple of years earlier. By this time C.L.R. James had already arrived in Britain and had made contact with members of the Labour Party in Nelson in Lancashire, but when he came down to live in Boundary Road in north west London he was recruited into the Trotskyist movement and joined the Marxist Group working in the ILP.1

In both groups the British Trotskyists were very few in number at the time he encountered them, and whilst the main body had with difficulty been able to sustain a monthly printed paper from 1933 onwards, the entrist organisation in the ILP had only been able to issue a few duplicated pamphlets, and, to put over their viewpoint, had been obliged to sell the Militant, a journal published by their American co-thinkers.

Trotskyism was not a popular standpoint during the mid 1930s in Britain. The wider Labour movement was more defensive than ever and was still recovering painfully from the split in the Labour Party at the time of the formation of the National Government in 1931. At the same time the Communist party was itself just recuperating from its reduction to the rank of a tiny sect during the “Third Period” of the Comintern, and was enjoying a period of rapid growth. The increase in the power of Nazi Germany made the USSR seem an attractive ally, even in some establishment circles, and the adoption of the policy of the Popular Front enabled the party to make a far wider appeal than it had ever done before, setting the tone for the ideological life of the left for the next decade. The Communist Party was able to infiltrate or take over existing organisations, such as the Labour Party’s student and youth groups, and to form a number of satellite bodies catering for the different interest groups in society.

The most effective of these was the Left Book Club, which came to enjoy a circulation of 57,000 and which was founded in May 1936 in partnership with the publisher Gollancz. Many of its titles were pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious, and of a virulently anti-Trotskyist character into the bargain, such books as Dudley Collard’s Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, and J.R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and Its Critics.

The Club’s major programmatic book justifying the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, World Politics, 1918-1936, written by the Communist Party’s most cynical theorist, R. Palme Dutt, appeared in 1936. Unable to match anything like these resources, the British Trotskyists felt very much on the defensive, so C.L.R. James decided to use his contacts with a rival publisher to try to mount a counter-operation. As he later described it,

“There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time I said ‘Why haven’t we a book in English?’, and they said that it was about time they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg ... I told Warburg and he thought that there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not C.P. So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months”.2

Although oral tradition in South Wales in the 1960s still pointed to a house where allegedly James worked on the book while campaigning down there for the ILP at the time of the Abyssinian War, it was largely put together, as he says, on the south coast. The local Communist Party bookshop in Brighton served as the basis for some of his material, though for many of his earlier sources he had to rely upon French and American non-Stalinist Marxists, and particularly upon the rich collection brought back by Harry Wicks from his course at the Lenin School in Moscow, whose expertise he thanks in his preface.3

The book finally came out in early 19374 to a less than enthusiastic reception. In the press dominated by them the Communist Party refused even to allow advertisements for it5 and, where in the nature of the case they were obliged to recognise its existence, such as in Gollancz’s Left Book Club, they attacked it with great hostility.6 No less hostile was the reaction of the British colonial authorities, who forbade the export of copies to India.7 This did not prevent it from being smuggled in and exercising some influence. G Selvarajatnan, later leader of the great strike in the Madras textile mills was converted to Trotskyism upon reading it, and Leslie Goonewardene’s Rise and Fall of the Comintern published ten years afterwards in Bombay was largely based on it.8

It has continued to suffer from neglect, being the least disseminated and commented upon of all James’ full length works, and the residue of Stalinist hostility towards it remains, even in New Left circles who are otherwise inclined to idolise its author. For James’ biographer, Paul Buhl, it is “James’ least original major work”, its “dogmatic weakness” being that it makes Stalinism “the deus ex machina for the failure of world revolution”.9

Such criticisms are based upon the view that World Revolution is largely a summary of the world view of Trotsky and the movement that followed him, Buhl for example seeing only in James’ treatment of the German crisis any differences with Trotsky.10 As a matter of fact, the book is far more original than it is given credit for, and neither James nor Trotsky regarded themselves as being in agreement over the basic argument contained in it. As James himself recalled,

“When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, ‘when we read your book World Revolution we said that it won’t be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement’. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told, ‘James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go’”.11

These doubts were also shared by Trotsky himself. Whilst calling World Revolution “a very good book”, he criticised it for “a lack of dialectical approach”, considering that James’ theory of the development of Soviet politics wanted “to begin with the degeneration complete”. Whilst James’ chapter on the German events of 1923 is entitled Stalin Kills the German Revolution, Trotsky argued to the contrary that “the German revolution had more influence on Stalin than Stalin on the German Revolution. In 1923 the whole party was in a fever over the coming revolution”. Whilst considering the incredible policy of the German Communist Party during the accession of Hitler to power ten years later, James asks himself “Why did Stalin persist in this policy? How could the Soviet bureaucracy possibly conceive that any useful purpose could be served by letting Hitler into Power?”. Trotsky on the other hand argued that in fact “Stalin hoped that the German Communist Party would win a victory, and to think that he had a ‘plan’ to allow Fascism to come to power is absurd”.12 This suggestion, that the blunders of the Comintern and the KPD during 1930-3 were part of a deliberate plan was to occasion considerable embarrassment to the British Trotskyists, for it was immediately seized upon by their Communist opponents to discredit the book.13 Trotsky thus considered that the weakness of James’ book consisted in its not allowing for the development of Soviet politics, of allowing no movement within them, and of telescoping effect and intention, a sort of historical post hoc propter hoc argument.

The reason for this difference becomes apparent when we examine the secondary sources used by James in the construction of the book, and the major models that influenced his thought world at the time. We can dismiss straight away the suggestion made in Paul Buhl’s book, that he was indebted in any way to the “proletarian science” developed in the British Communist Party.14 These were precisely the people against whom he was polemicising. His main historical models were the classical historians, and the great modern historians of the classical world, such as Grote, whose works remained upon his bookshelf up to his death. They also included the classic Marxist histories, particularly The Eighteenth Brumaire which James regarded as “an indispensable book for the student of any period of History” (p.32n.1 below), and Trotsky’s My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution. We know that at the same time he was reading the works of the great French radical historians about the revolution of 1789 as preliminary research for his own future book, Black Jacobins (cf. pp.22-5 below). He must also have been acquainted with the historical labours of FA Ridley, for whom he maintained an affection to the end of his life, since they were both being published by Secker and Warburg at about the same time.

But it is the literature of the French and American non-Stalinist and non-Trotskyist left that supplies the key to understanding the distinctive features of World Revolution in that it shares the common assumption that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began much earlier and proceeded at a more rapid rate that Trotsky would allow. One reference shows that James was acquainted with the literature of the Que Faire15 group, and we may note that Souvarine’s book, which he often cites, supported the Kronstadt insurrection against Soviet power as early as 1921.16 We know from other indications that at this time James was already acquainted with the “State Capitalist” theories about the USSR held by the French Union Communiste group led by Henri Chazé,17 as well as being in touch with some of BJ Field’s supporters in Canada, and conversant with the material of Weisbord, Oehler, and Erwin Ackernecht.18 James was particularly open to theories of the sort dismissed at the time by Trotskyists as “ultra left”, for after a long and sterile experience with entry activity within the ILP he had come to reject the tactic of entry altogether, refused to join the group that was pursuing such a course in the Labour Party, and had entered into a dispute with the Trotskyist International Secretariat on this basis.19 After a fragile unity was forced upon the British groups in 1938 he was sent to the USA, partly to give a free run to his longstanding opponent Denzil Harber, and partly to “straighten him out”.20 The distinctive position of World Revolution thus lies in the fact that its author was already in the process of rejecting Trotskyism, and his ideas were about to evolve towards the position he assumed during the Cannon-Shachtman conflict of 1939-40, and later in his State Capitalism and World Revolution of 1950, a political stance described by Robin Blackburn as “Anarcho-Bolshevism” (whatever that means).21 During the period that James was writing this book, there was, in fact, in both the United States and France, an entire left-wing thought world of groups who vied with each other to place the degeneration of Bolshevism and Marxism as early in time as possible (Oehlerites, Stammites, Eiffelites, Marlenites, etc, in the USA and in France, Cahiers Spartacus, Que Faire and the Union Communiste). It was a natural result of the disillusion produced among the left at the time by the rise of both Stalinism and Nazism, a pessimistic feeling that there was something deeply wrong with Marxism as they had inherited it. Although World Revolution is still quite close to the more recognisably ‘Trotskyist’ approach to these questions, it shows significant influences from this spectrum of ideas, and in effect stands at the beginning of C.L.R. James’ own gradual evolution in this direction.

A proper assessment of the value of the book can only be made in the light of historical experience, both of that which took place at the time and of later developments, for this is the only valid test of any social theory. Like any other book it is by no means infallible and our increased understanding of some of these past events inevitably shows shortcomings. In spite of the views of some modern commentators22 the subsequent history of the German USPD shows that Rosa Luxemburg was not “mistaken” in arguing that the Spartakists should remain inside it.23 James’ description of the foundation of the Comintern (p.112-3) can no longer be accepted as it stands. Whilst admitting that “the delegates were dissatisfied”, and that it was formed “due primarily to Lenin”, he comes to the strange conclusion that, at the time, “Lenin had almost been betrayed against his better judgement into a weak and vacillating position”. In the light of evidence that has since emerged it now seems clear that the dramatic appearance and speech of Gruber (Steinhardt) had been arranged in order to stampede the delegates into reaching the required decision.24 James’ endorsement of the Comintern’s verdict upon Paul Levi, because the latter condemned the 1921 “March Action” as a putsch, does that revolutionary less than justice.25 James’ view that Stalin was responsible for holding back the German Communist Party no longer receives uncritical support from historians of the Comintern,26 and there is some evidence that Trotsky himself came to have doubts about fixing the blame for any national errors on Brandler for the failure of October 1923 (p.187).27 Another of the myths of vulgar Trotskyism repeated here is that it was the Troika who were responsible for sending the Chinese Communist Party into the Guomindang, that “had Lenin been sitting as Chairman such an entry would never have taken place”28, and that Trotsky had voted against it from the very first (pp.236-7, 248).29 Count Stenbock-Fermoy, (p.331) a great-nephew of Prince Kropotkin, wrote to Trotsky to deny that he had joined the working-class movement to promote revanchist ideas.30 James’ description of Nin, Maurin and Andrade as “prominent leaders of the Spanish Revolution” (p.308) would in retrospect appear over optimistic.31 His acceptance of the production figures of the first Five Year Plan (p.292) appears as naive in hindsight, while time has dealt rather harshly with his remark that “if ever the Soviet Union goes down, that is to say back to capitalism, collective ownership has demonstrated how much capitalism retards the possibility of production”. Here however he was in good company, for not merely most socialists thought this but even a conservative such as Harold Macmillan, as late as 1961, feared the dynamism of the Soviet economy.

Much more problematic remains James’ view that the leaders of the Soviet Union were, as already noted above, carrying through a conscious policy in encouraging the suicidal behaviour of the German Communist Party in 1930-3. James links the deliberate policy of undermining Social Democracy to the fact that its foreign policy orientation was favourable to the “western” powers (p.337), whereas, as is well known, traditionally it is the more right wing elements in German society who have favoured an alliance with Russia. This is the view still supported by some historians - admittedly a minority, today.32

On the other hand when we consider the knowledge available at the time, the basic thesis supported by the book stands up surprisingly well. Its opponents of the day, Dutt, Strachey and the Webbs, could not be reprinted today without courting immediate ridicule. Scarcely half a dozen of the huge output of the Left Book Club during the same period is worth the shelf space in any Socialist library, and generally they pile up in the dustier sections of second hand bookshops where they remain unsold. James’ careful handling of his documentation stands him in good stead. At one point he notes, “the writer has used an (sic) Mss translation. Many of the most important articles by Lenin, written after 1918, have to be tracked down in obscure publications or translated afresh. The present Soviet regime does not publish them, or, when it does so, truncates them” (p.132n.1). Since the revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956 we are much better informed about these documents.33 Yet a comparison of James’ account of Lenin’s last conflict with Stalin and any modern treatment of the same subject, such as those of Moshe Lewin or Marcel Liebman34 would not modify the picture presented by James (pp.134-140) in any substantial way. He perceptively defines Trotskyism as a creation of Stalinism (p.151), and marshals his facts carefully to establish the existence of the massive famine caused by forced collectivisation (p.303), denied by virtually the entire range of left wing thought at the time.

Even some of his short-term predictions are found to be surprisingly accurate. “The long cold vistas of Siberia opened before Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky” he notes in 1929 (p.296), and, a year before the Trial of the Twenty-One, he asks “what insurance company would risk a penny on Bukharin’s life?” (p.199) Only a month after the appearance of World Revolution the events of the first week of May 1937 in Barcelona bore out his contention that “the day is near when the Stalinists will join reactionary governments in shooting revolutionary workers. They cannot avoid it” (p.389). The first section of the introduction to the book bears the subtitle The Coming War,35 and he prophesies that Trotsky “may be murdered in Mexico” (p.407). Many of the main events that come later in the wartime and post-war periods are sketched out quite adequately, such as that “the victory of Fascism in Germany would mean inevitably war against the Soviet Union” (p.320) and that “British capitalism, may despite all its efforts, be drawn into a war against Germany side by side with the Soviet Union” (p.408). The end of the Comintern is accurately foreseen as

“Stalin may even liquidate it altogether to assure the bourgeoisie that he will leave them alone, if only they will leave him and his bureaucracy in peace. But he dare not do this while Trotsky guides the Fourth International” (p.403).

Looking beyond the end of the Second World War James notes wisely that “the last war brought the partial freedom of Ireland, a loosening of the chains of Egypt and an upheaval in India which has seriously crippled the merciless exploitation of centuries. How long could Britain’s grip on India survive another war?” (p.10) For a brief moment the veil of the future is even drawn aside for China, Korea and Indo-China: “in China and the Far East, where Britain has so much at stake, capitalism is more unstable than anywhere else in the world” (ibid.).

Finally James’ analysis of the Soviet Union bears an amazing freshness in view of the events of the last three years. Speaking of the Soviet economy, he comments, “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased productivity of labour ... if Lenin returned today, he would not waste a minute on Stalin’s propaganda, but would calculate the income and expenditure per head of population and from it grasp at once the social and political character of the regime” (p.122). Examining the presuppositions behind Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he goes on to say:

“If capitalism proved to be still progressive, then the Soviet Union was premature and would undoubtedly fail. It was simple Marxism that the new Society could not exist for any length of time unless the old had reached its limits. But the conflict was not a conflict of entities already fixed. Capitalism in decay might still be powerful enough to overthrow the first Socialist State, whence it would gain a longer lease of life” (pp.119-120).

We can only await the confirmation (or otherwise) of the grim prophecy that flows from this: “If the Soviet Union goes down, then Socialism receives a blow which will cripple it for a generation” (pp.418-19).

Thus it emerges that a book dismissed for its “dogmatic weakness”, despite being written fifty-five years ago, still has lessons to teach us today if we read it in a fresh and critical spirit, and we warmly recommend a careful study of it as we place it in the hands of a public that, we are sure, will give it a better reception than when it first appeared.

Al Richardson

Footnotes
1. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview, London, 1987, p.1. An amusing picture of James’ influence upon middle class opinion in the ILP at this time is to be found in Ethel Mannin, Comrade, O Comrade, ch.x, pp.133-5.

2. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism, p.1. Among the non-Stalinist books that James was able to influence Warburg to publish at this time were, in addition to his own, his translation of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin (1939), Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Notebook, recently republished unfortunately without James’ original preface, Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) and Albert Weisbord’s Conquest of Power (1938). Warburg of course, far more than Gollancz, was open to texts which came from the general left or ILP milieu and among his list at this period were Brockway’s Workers Front and both Next Year’s War and the Papacy and Fascism by F.A. Ridley, as well as the first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which Gollancz had rejected as being too critical of the Communist Party’s line

3. Below, p.xii; cf. Harry Wicks, 1905-1989: A Memorial, London 1989, pp.3, 8, & 14. For examples of the sort of material provided, cf. below, p.132n.1 and 179n.1.

4. It is advertised in Fight, Vol.i, no.5 for April 1937.

5. Martin Secker and Warburg, “Letter to the Editor”, 30th April 1937, in Fight, Vol.i, no.7, June 1937.

6. R.F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein), “Leninism Trotskified” in Left News, June 1937, pp.291-8. Gollancz’s own opinion was that “a Trotskyist book falls as obviously outside the scope of the Club’s publications as does a Nazi or Fascist book” (New Leader, vol.xxi, new series no.178, 11th June, 1937).

7. George Padmore, letter to Tribune, 10th September, 1937, p.13.

8. K. Tilak, Rise and Fall of the Comintern, Spark Syndicate, Bombay, December 1947.

9. Paul Buhl C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, London 1988, pp.51-2. Contrast with this James comment on p.159, below: “There is a tendency among Trotskyists to exaggerate the economic and social influences at work in the Trotsky-Stalin struggle in 1923”. Other examples of Buhl’s anti-Trotskyist bias need not detain us here (“A paroxysm of rage at Stalin”, “overly subjective, obsessed with details at the expense of the larger picture”, “with minor possible exceptions such as Trotskyists in Ceylon, only the activity of James himself forcefully joined anti-imperialism with Trotskyism”, etc). They have been commented upon by Charles van Gelderen in C.L.R., Socialist Outlook, April 1989.

10. op. cit., Note 9 above, p.52.

11. op. cit., Note 1 above, p.9.

12. L.D. Trotsky “On the History of the Left Opposition”, April 1939 in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, pp.260-66. cf. C.L.R. James below, pp.164-201, 335.

13. JR Campbell, in Controversy, vol.i, no.8, May 1937, p.36.

14. Buhl, op. cit., Note 9 above, pp.45-47. Here, as is evident from his preface, he has been misled by his English informants, principally Robin Blackburn of New Left Review. Even less relevant are references (p.58) to Christopher Hill, who in spite of his expressed admiration for Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution today (Sunday Times, 18 August, 1985), was busy, at the time indicated, writing a book about Lenin and the Russian Revolution which effectively censored Trotsky out of it.

15. The Que Faire group was formed in France in 1934 from ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists, such as Kurt Landau, and set out to trace back the degeneration of the Russian Revolution from its earliest stages. The group finally united with Social Democracy in 1939.

16. Souvarine talks about the “Kronstadt commune” and “the legitimate character of the rebels’ claims” on pp.276 and 279 of Stalin. Trotsky described Souvarine’s theory as a “search for an independent line running directly from Marx to himself, bypassing Lenin and Bolshevism” (letter to Victor Serge, 29th April, 1936, in Writings of Leon Trotsky: A Supplement, 1934-40, New York, 1979, p.659), and Souvarine himself as the archetype of a “gangrenous sceptic”. James himself notes Souvarine’s “anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat” (below p.140n.2; cf. also p.309).

17. Description of a meeting with C.L.R. James on 10th October, 1937 by Ernie Rogers, “Letter to Jimmy Allen” in The Trotskyist Movement and the Leninist League, London, 1986, p.7.

18. Op. cit., Note 17 above; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson Against the Stream, London, 1986, pp.256, 287.

19. Op. cit., Note 17 above: “there would have to be a struggle in the International League; efforts would have to be made to alter the line of the I(nternational) S(ecretariat). I told him that this had already been attempted and had been met with Stalinist methods; suppression, hooliganism. He (James) interjected and said that there was nothing we could say against the I.S. with which he could not agree. He knew all about them ... He asked Frost (Max Basch), a member of the EC, to provide him with the documents published by Oehler on the question, also the internal bulletin published by the Sec. on the French turn”.

20. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson War and the International, London, 1986, p.24.

21. Robin Blackburn, C.L.R. James (Obituary), in The Independent, 2nd June, 1989. Cf. the remark made by James about Trotsky’s rejection of democratic centralism in 1903 on p.49 below: “He has since admitted that he was wrong; too generously, for the question is not so simple”. In view of Trotsky’s stated opinion about this conflict, the whole discussion that follows this comment (p.49-53) shows how far James was, already by 1937, at variance with Trotsky.

22. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923, London, 1982, pp.19-20, 88, 95.

23. Cf. Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London 1988, pp.33-4; Mike Jones, The Decline, Disorientation and Decomposition of a Leadership: The German Communist Party; From Revolutionary Marxism to Centrism, in Revolutionary History, Vol.ii, no.3, p.2. Cf. below, p.95.

24. Referring to Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann Arbour, 1968, pp.69-70, Walter Kendall comes to the conclusion that “the whole affair is so dramatic as to suggest stage management” (The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921, London, 1969, p.226). The case is established beyond all reasonable doubt in his as yet unpublished MSS, World Revolution: The Russian Revolution and the Communist International, 1898-1935, to which I am greatly indebted.

25. “Mere condemnation of thousands of proletarians who risk their lives against the bourgeoisie has never been tolerated by Marxists”, p.169 below. Cf. Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23 above pp.5-7.

26. Pierre Broué, The Communist International and the German Crisis of 1923, address to the AGM of Revolutionary History, 20th May, 1989 (as yet unpublished); cf. LD Trotsky, op. cit., Note 12 above, p.260.

27. Cf Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23, pp.8-9; He refers to Jacob Walcher’s Notes on Discussions with Trotsky, 17th-20th August 1933, published in the Oeuvres, vol.ii. This text recently came to light in the SAP archives in Sweden and only became known after the publication of the Pathfinder English edition of the works of Trotsky’s last exile. It is hoped to put an English translation into general circulation in the near future. For Trotsky’s later return to his original opinion, cf. On the History of the Left Opposition, April 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, p.261.

28. On the strategy as a whole cf. Michael Cox’s verdict: “The general strategy developed by the Comintern by 1923 and 1924 was unambiguously bourgeois democratic. I can find no suggestion of any serious attempt to pose or even discuss the possibility of proletarian dictatorship, as a solution to the tasks of the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies. That is, a well developed stages conception of the colonial revolution preceded Stalinism”, See The National and Colonial Question - The First Five Years on the Comintern, 1919-22, in Searchlight South Africa, no.4, February 1990, p.38.

29. Trotsky himself put various dates upon his support for the withdrawal of the Chinese Communists from the Guomindang. In a letter written in December 1930 he claimed that he had done so “from the very beginning, that is, from 1923” (Letter to Max Shachtman, 10th December 1930 in Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, p.490), but in My Life written a year earlier he says that it was “since 1925” (Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.552). “As a matter of fact” notes Paolo Casciola, “despite these assertions, no documents preceding the spring of 1927 are available in which Trotsky called for a withdrawal of the Chinese Communist Party from the Kuomintang” Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Centro Pietro Tresso, Foligno, 1990, pp.11-12.

30. Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.36, Dec 1968, pp.51-3.

31. Cf. The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left, Socialist Platform, 1992, for rather damning counter evidence.

32. Thomas Wiengartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers, Berlin 1970, cf. the references given in A. Westoby, Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, p.410n.28, especially Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, London, 1975, vol.ii, pp.749-55, 858-60.

33. Mostly to be found in vol.xxxiii of the 1966 English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, along with the material in L. Fotieva’s Pages from Lenin’s Life, Moscow, 1960.

34. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, London, 1969; Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, London 1975, pp.417-25.

35. Obviously many of these forecasts derive from the common stock of analyses James had at his disposal in the Trotskyist movement. We should remind ourselves that Trotsky himself, two years before the Second World War broke out, prophesied its outbreak to within a month (Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War part.ii, in Revolutionary History, vol.iii, no.4, p.13), and that other writers acquainted with Trotskyist ideas such as F.A. Ridley, had sketched out the main lines of the coming conflict in such books as Next Years’s War, which Secker and Warburg had published a year before James’ book appeared.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” 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.
********
C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism

Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other CLR James texts. Standard american spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication

The following article by C.L.R. James appeared under a pseudonym in the 7 April 1947 issue of LABOR ACTION, newspaper of the Workers Party of the United States.

Negroes and Bolshevism
The American government is today building up its campaign against the Communist Party, “the Reds.” Readers of LABOR ACTION know that the Workers Party has been the unswerving foe of the Communist Party. But we oppose the Communist Party because it betrays the revolutionary struggle. We attack it because, in its slavish subservience to the Moscow bureaucracy, it uses Negroes and the American labor movement purely to advance the projects and policies of Russia. Many Negroes know this. And they are filled with a deep skepticism of political movements which are in any way radical. At this time it will be useful to recall exactly what Bolshevism was and will always be. There are many lessons for Negroes, not only in judging political parties in general but in judging and forming organizations of their own.

Mass Action

First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle. All other political parties depend on parliamentary means, on petitions, telegrams to Senators, mass meetings at which “important” and “distinguished” politicians speak. Bolshevism does not disdain parliamentary means. But fundamentally it relies upon mass action – mass demonstrations of workers, strikes, picketing, mobilizing workers in order to bring the pressure of organized labor and its allies upon the capitalist states. Let us illustrate the difference by an example. In the years before World War I, the Bolsheviks elected about half a dozen members to the Duma – the Russian Parliament. These elected representatives at once became very active about bills, the budget, parliamentary procedure, etc. They went for advice to Lenin, who was living in exile. Lenin laughed heartily and told them what amounted to this:

“Don’t bother about their bills and their budget and their parliamentary procedure. When you turn comes stand up and tell them about the lives of the workers, tell them about all the exploitation and oppression by the classes they represent and then tell them that it would not be long before the workers will rise in their revolutionary wrath and sweep capitalism and its dishonest thieving parliaments into the dustbin.”

Something at once becomes clear. The Bolshvik deputies were not begging the capitalist politicians and the capitalist state for anything. They were not even speaking to the parliamentarians. They were speaking to the workers outside. They were using the Parliament as a forum to make revolutionary propaganda, to force the attention of the more backward workers, to make the middle classes listen, to expose the fraud of parliamentarism. Naturally the revolutionary party holds its own meetings, etc.

But its main interest in the capitalist Parliament was to use it for mobilizing the workers against capitalism and all its works.

Policy for Negroes

The Negroes of the United States would do wonderfully if they could impose upon any Congress or municipal candidate exactly some such policy. “You want to go to Congress by our vote. What do you propose to do there? Are you going to maneuver with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Are you going to waste your time and our votes by arguing with Bilbo and Pappy O’Daniel and Taft and Pepper, that liberal from Florida who gets into Congress by preaching white supremacy? You are of no use to us. Go there not to convince and bargain with them, but to say loudly what we want and say it so that the nationa and all the world will hear. Then you will get our vote. Otherwise we have no use for you.” Bolshevism carried to an extraordinary pitch of skill this use of parliaments for revolutionary purposes. For example, the federal government every years passes financial bills for the salaries of a system ridden by Jim Crow. Would a Bolshevik vote for this? No, he would denounce the system and refuse to give his vote for this iniquitous measure. But if during the discussion of details of the bill, there was a division over whether the lowest ranks of government employees should have an increase of ten percent or not, a Bolshevik would speak in favor and vote in favor.

If parliamentary procedure allowed he would move for the reduction of all cabinet members’ salaries, just in order to expose the injustices of the system. If it were possible to get such motion passed, he would vote for it. But then, when it came to the final vote, he would vote a loud and resounding “No,” indicating thereby his repudiation of the whole system. That is the Bolshevik method. There is absolutely no reason why a Congressman elected by Negroes should not carry it out. The appropriations for war? No. And not a mere vote but a detailed exposure of the whole system. And having made these speeches and carried out these actions in Congress, the Congressman who acted in this way on behalf of the Negro people would do more good for Negroes than the whole Democratic Party.

Don’t Need “Friends”

Exactly the same policy is the Bolshevik policy for a labor Congressman. “Friends of labor” in Congress are no good to thw working class movement. “Friends of Negroes” are no good in Congress to the Negro people. They are no good on City Councils. All they do is to confuse and corrupt the people’s political thinking. Now we ask the Negroes: has this or anything like this been the policy of Ben Davis, for example, the Communist Party member on the New York City Council? One year he is supporting Leham and Mead. Then comes an upheaval in the Communist Party. Browder is thrown out. Foster comes in, a new policy is announced and – Ben Davis supports Mead and Lehman! A genuine Bolshevik is distinguished by the consistency of his opposition to all aspects of the capitalist system. He votes for or supports only those specific things which benefit the workers and the oppressed and he opposes everything else. Now it seems to us that a Negro community like Harlem would create a stir that would be felt in all parts of the country if it demanded of its candidate that his main task in and out of Congress or municipality was to denounce the system and use parliamentary forms and practices as a tribune for the education of the people. The great crime of the Communist Party is that it has prostituted the very name of Bolshevism in the service of Moscow, The American capitalist class is out to break these Stalinists. Negroes cannot stand aside and see this happen without protest. It is an invasion [sic] of democratic rights. But our way of defeating these corrupting rats is to put forward labor and Negro candidates who, by a genuinely revolutionary policy, will educate the people both as to the crimes of American imperialism and the betrayals of the Moscow stooges.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Marxist C.L.R.James On The Russian Question-1941

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” 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.
********
C.L.R. James on the Russian Question

Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.

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Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.

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Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction

For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.

Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.

Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.

2. The Marxian Theory of Society

Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.

“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”

These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.

Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.

No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.

3. The Theory of Capitalist Society

Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:

(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.

Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.

The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.

“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”

This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.

All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.

Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.

But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.

This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.

The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.

4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation

That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.

Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.

The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.

That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.

But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:

“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”

Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.

5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.

“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”

The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.

“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”

Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.

If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.

Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.

An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.

To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.

This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.

6. The Theory of Imperialism

Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.

But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.

7. Fascism

If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.

Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.

The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.

Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.

If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.

It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.

8. Socialism

The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:

(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.

(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.

(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.

It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.

9. Political Conclusions

On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.

They are:

(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.

The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.

(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.

It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.

(c) Propaganda for socialism.

The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.

(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.

September 19, 1941