From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
*Our Flag Is Still Red -Markin comment:
This is a repost of 2008's (and the two previous years)commentary in honor of our international working class holiday. I would add that the comments made then still apply today. I would further add that these damn bourgeois presidential campaigns have taken most of the air out of the political atmosphere thus retarding our efforts. Notice the virtually total fade away of pro-immigration street demonstrations. To speak nothing of Iraq. What happens to these parliamentary reformists if they wake up on January 20th 2009 and one John McCain is getting ready to take the oath of office? Enough said-for now.
COMMENTARY
THIS YEAR(2010) MARKS THE 124TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAY DAY HAYMARKET FRAMEUPS. HONOR THE MEMORY OF AUGUST SPIES, ALBERT PARSONS, ADOLPH FISCHER, GEORGE ENGEL, LOUIS LINGG, MICHAEL SCHWAB, SAMUEL FIELDEN, OSCAR NEEBE- CLASS WAR VICTIMS OF AN EARLIER TIME. ALSO REMEMBER LUCY PARSONS WHO CARRIED ON THE STRUGGLE FOR VINDICATION AFTER HER HUSBAND’S EXECUTION. LET US REDOUBLE OUR EFFORTS TO FREE TODAY’S CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
Politically, the writer of these lines is far distance from those of the Haymarket Martyrs. Their flag was the black flag of anarchism, the writer’s is the red flag of communism. Notwithstanding those political differences, militants must stand under the old labor slogan that should underscore all labor defense work now as then- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. Unfortunately that principle has been honored far more in the breech than in the observance by working class organizations.
Additionally, in the case of the Haymarket Martyrs today’s militants must stand in solidarity and learn about the way those militants bravely conducted themselves before bourgeois society in the face of the witch hunt against them and their frame-up in the courts of so-called bourgeois ‘justice’. Not for the first time, and most probably not for the last, militants were railroaded by the capitalist state for holding unpopular and or/dangerous (to the capitalists) views. Moreover, it is no accident that most of the Haymarket Martyrs were foreigners (mainly Germans) not fully appreciative of the niceties of 19th century American ‘justice’. This same ‘justice’ system framed the heroic anarchist immigrant militants Sacco and Vanzetti in the early 20th century and countless other militants since then. As we struggle in the fight for full citizenship rights for immigrants today we should keep this in mind. Although, as we know, this American system of ‘justice’ will not forget the occasional uppity ‘native’ political dissenter either.
Most importantly, we must not forget that the Haymarket Martyrs at the time of their arrest were fighting for the establishment of a standardized eight hour work day. It is ironic that 120 years later this simple, rational, reasonable demand should, in effect, still be necessary to fight for by working people. All proportions taken into account since the 1880’s, a very high percentage of the working class still does not have this luxury- given the necessity of two wage-earner families, two job wage-earners, dramatic increases in commute time in order to gain employment, unpaid but mandatory work time (note especially the Walmartization of labor time) and a high rate of partially or fully unemployed able-bodied workers. To do justice to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs this generation of militants should dust off another old labor slogan that used to be part of the transitional demands of the socialist movement- 30 hours work for 40 hours pay. TODAY THIS IS A REASONABLE DEMAND.
Obviously such a demand cannot be implemented in isolation. To even propose such a demand means we need to build a workers party to fight for it. Moreover, and let us not have illusions about this; this capitalist state does not want to and will not grant such a demand. Therefore, we must fight for a workers government. That would be a true monument to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs.
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
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 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.
*******
The programmatic reason for the great split in the international working class movement was the issue of war, and, more particularly, the attitude to the First World War. It was not the other topics, such as colonialism or immigration, which divided the Second International at the Stuttgart conference of 1907, let alone the future organisation of the economy under a Socialist government, which was never discussed, that foreshadowed this great schism, while the issues of war and militarism were also the main topics at both the Copenhagen and Basel congresses that followed Stuttgart. It is therefore most welcome that the late Siegfried Kissin’s scholarly and well written study of this area has now been published. It consists of two volumes, the first being the attitude taken by the Socialist movement up to the final split in the International at the end of the ‘First Great War for Civilisation’ while the second takes the story up to the end of the Second World War and, among other things, deals with the debates in the Trotskyist movement on that issue.
The contents of the first volume should be almost unreservedly welcomed by the readers of Revolutionary History. Kissin tells us of the positions taken up by Marx and Engels on various nineteenth century conflicts and the debates among Socialists both before and during the First War. Marx and Engels had a very much more flexible and less intransigent view of the many wars in their time than we are now accustomed to think of as ‘Marxist’. They were seldom defeatist, and since many of us are only familiar with the later debate from a rather one-sided Leninist polemic, much of the material that Kissin introduces will be fresh and new. The position of the Founding Fathers in any particular case depended on an assessment of the effects of victory or defeat for the prospects of Socialism in a world context. Later the differences amongst those denounced by Lenin – differences which at the time might have appeared more important to the participants than those which divided the centre and moderate left from the Bolsheviks – are clearly brought out, and add a good deal to our understanding of the flavour and context of the dispute at the time. A final, if controversial piece looks at the differences between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the 1914-18 war, where Kissin seems to come down on Luxemburg’s side. Even in the First World War case, however, Kissin argues that in the parliamentary democracies of England and France it was not necessary to work actively for and desire the defeat of one’s own government, though he would denounce the ‘social-patriots’’ belief that the war meant a truce in the class struggle.
One fascinating aspect with contemporary echoes is his account of the debate on the Boer War, which for me has parallels with the Falklands campaign. Kissin makes the point that defeatism, as in the Boer War example, does not have to be revolutionary and that there maybe cases (Britain in the Falklands war was surely one), where the defeat of one’s own side would merely lead to a change from a conservative to a slightly more left wing government at the next election, rather than a revolution. This is nearly always the case in colonial wars where the nation’s existence is not perceived to be imperilled. In this event, as he says, there may well be liberals and pacifists who are thorough defeatists, though none of this makes the defeatist position incorrect. And just as it could be argued – as it was by Hyndman – that a British defeat would leave the South African Blacks enslaved by the Afrikaners, so, I suppose, it could be argued that in the Falklands British victory was a great benefit to the Argentine, if not to the British working class. In the event, the Blacks were enslaved anyway, and the end of the Junta has seen an even further fall in Argentine living standards. As the First World War showed, there could be more than one honest opinion on this. Indeed, one impression from reading Kissin about the German SPD in 1914 is how naive many of them were about their own government and how ‘wet’ they appear, faced with dissimulating noblemen who clearly did believe in the class war, made little distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ enemy and saw these nice SDP deputies as adversaries to be tricked and beaten like foreign foes. Distant Lenin saw far more clearly than the German Socialists what the game was about.
In Kissin’s three page conclusion in Volume One, he attempts to forecast what attitude Marx and Engels would have taken to the events in the early twentieth century, and here he sets them up in opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Of course, this is not the first time that this has been done, but at least he makes a good job in arguing his case. A more basic reservation that I have is that Kissin sees the issues of war and conflict in rather static terms, so that he approvingly quotes Luxemburg’s forecast of German nationalist revival and another war as a consequence of Germany’s defeat. But this was surely not an inevitable result of such a defeat, and it was a close-run thing between revolution and counter-revolution.
The second volume continues the story with a description of the positions taken on the many pre-Second World War conflicts by left wingers from both the Social Democratic and Communist traditions. Kissin tests the later Stalinist wrigglings against the classical Leninist position with damning conclusions. Finally, in the last part of the book he discusses the Trotskyists and, by printing a paper he submitted to the Edinburgh WIL in 1943, he makes his own position on the Second World War clear. He was an unabashed defencist, as he thought that the war was not primarily a national one, but a European civil war between the working class allied to a section of the bourgeoisie against Fascism, and the other bourgeois fraction. So, just as left wingers in Spain had supported Azana against Franco, in Britain they should stand with Churchill against Hitler. They should, of course, maintain a programme distinct from that of the conservative and Stalinist patriots. Such a programme would include the demand for independence for India and the colonies, constant fraternal appeals to the German workers and a guarantee of no vindictive Versailles peace, but a promise to integrate Germany into a peaceful Europe after the overthrow of the Nazis, together with demands for workers’ control of war production, election of officers tend so on. Such a position had much more in common with ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ of the SWP or the WIL than the RSL and other more pacifistic and abstentionist Trotskyists who were inclined to see the war as a re-run of 1914-18. He argues that victories for Hitler meant the smashing of all the gains from working class struggle, and the imposition of Fascist and authoritarian regimes in the occupied countries. In the event he was correct, as there was a greater left wing movement among the people of the Allied countries as a result of victory than among the populations of the defeated Axis.
The great value of the book is the immense range of evidence that Kissin has collected to illustrate his theme. There are some splendid choice items from the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact – in particular some statements by the late unlamented Walter Ulbricht and a fascinating account of how in 1939 the Labour Party leadership, which had started by declaring that the enemy was Hitler, not the German people, ended up in 1945 with a much more social-patriotic line which was only slightly more civilised than that of the Communists. The Labour lefts like Bevan stand out for their decency on this issue.
There are a number of omissions and inaccuracies in the book, above all in the final section on the Trotskyists, which probably arose as he seems to have researched it in isolation, perhaps not realising that there were a number of other people honestly seeking to understand this period. He does not seem to have been aware of Bornstein and Richardson’s War and the International, or of the debates in the United States between the Workers Party and the SWP on the problem of the war with Japan, which was much more purely an inter-imperialist conflict than the war in Europe. Indeed, Kissin thinks that the Workers Party quickly disappeared after the 1940 split, which was by no means the case. Neither has he read Guérin's analysis of Trotsky’s political evolution at the beginning of the war though this analysis has considerable similarities with his own. Furthermore, he does not mention the tiny group of French defeatists led by Barta, though today those in that tradition around the paper Lutte Ouvrière seem to be the largest Trotskyist tendency in France.
These are, however, minor blemishes. For those on the left who seek to understand the history of war and the Marxist attitude to it, and whatever disagreements one might have with the author’s judgements, these two volumes will be an invaluable source of information.
Ted Crawford
*******
Machajski and the group of ideas called Machaevism, which he brought together and defended from the turn of the century through into the Russian Revolution, played only a very minor rôle in the building of the Russian revolutionary movement. To this reviewer at any rate, the mention of his name merely stirred a vague memory of him being mentioned, although only briefly, by Trotsky in My Life when referring to some long forgotten debate among Tsardom’s Siberian exiles.
The book does not disguise the limitations of its subject matter. And yet ... this very fair and balanced history will undoubtedly leave many with an uneasy feeling. Even today, 64 years after his death, Machajski’s idea about the intelligentsia or middle strata, and its power to dominate the working class movement, will strike many as an advance warning of dangers which became only too real in the ruthless rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. To others it will seem to explain the reason why the working class movement has, as they see it, been betrayed by so many of its political leaderships.
Machajski was concerned with the growing reformist trends in Social Democracy, and with the untrustworthiness of the Russian intelligentsia. He presented an original and even Marxist-sounding explanation. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat pursued their own class interests, so it must also be regarded as natural and inevitable that the middle class strata, primarily composed of ‘intellectual workers’ would do likewise. Control by these groupings of the knowledge-ideas factors which are essential for commodity production and the administration of modern society, already gives them power and considerable rewards. How much better, however, to ensure that such power became ever more dominant and secure through a centrally planned society? Socialism or Social Democracy were not to be regarded as ideologies in the interests of the working class, but as ideologies founded on the interests of an already relatively favoured section of society, the middle strata or intelligentsia.
Such a theory immediately calls into question any possibility of ever formulating an ideology which conforms to objective reality. According to Machajski’s logic, all attempts at evolving such an ideology would be doomed to distortion by the sectional or class interests of those intellectual workers responsible for producing it. As Shatz points out, Machajski never faced up to this contradiction. His main conclusion was to set up a group called the Workers’ Conspiracy which, according to Shatz, played little practical rôle in its short existence. Presumably it was to contain some intellectuals such as Machajski, although how these were to be identified as trustworthy and unbiased was left unclear.
To this vague idea he added the equally vague concept of a self-led working class in an upsurge that would claim the entire surplus of society after inflicting a massive defeat on both bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Oddly enough, he also pressed for one relatively simple and almost reformist demand. Workers should ensure that any surplus wealth they appropriated from society be used for the full-time advanced education of all workers’ children. This argument came close to being market based – if everyone were to be intellectually trained, no one would be able to claim the special privileges that the middle strata had always been able to command.
The question of how ideologies, and, in particular, Socialist ideologies do or can arise is not addressed by this book. Shatz is writing about Machaevism and not about such philosophical issues. What the book does do is to report on the debates in Russian society about the nature and functions of their middle strata.
Machajski’s ideas sprang from his analysis and experience of the specific Russian intelligentsia, expressing, as he saw it, the interests of the Russian middle class. This book brings out very well the need to be clear about the exact structures and the continually varying nature of the middle layers of society. The author outlines the diffuse nature of the Russian middle classes, stretching from the remains of the gentry who had been partially dispossessed by the earlier land reforms inaugurated by Tsardom, the small but growing industrial-based sector, to the expanding professions and the restless students. All these groupings were hemmed in by the autocracy. Politically they evolved few ideas of their own beyond the terrorist bomb and slavish legalism. Their incoherence and frustrations were compounded by the flooding in of Western ideologies whether appropriate or inappropriate to their society. Machajski himself, moved from a Polish nationalism tinged with Socialism, through a form of Marxism to a ‘workerist’ criticism of both European Social Democracy and Russia's intelligentsia – and finally moved on to his own anti-Socialist form of Socialist-Anarchism!
The book continually reasserts the Russian based starting point but tentatively explores how far such ideas can be applied to other times and other places. In fact one of Shatz’s most thought provoking sections deals with the near-extermination of the pre-1917 intelligentsia in the purges of the 1930s, and its replacement by a new ex-worker become apparatchik-intelligentsia. Khrushchev perhaps best embodied the nature of the changeover. His personal manners may well have identified his working class origins. They did not define the social function he was actually performing.
This book should be regarded as more than a specialist biography of an obscure Socialist responsible for an even more obscure sect. Marshall Shatz writes clearly and with very few preconceptions. The central ideas of Machajski may well prove to point to yet one more dead end, but in a period when the Marxist movement must face up to a massive self-questioning we have to check and recheck virtually all our ideas to see where the Socialist enterprise started to go so terribly wrong. We may have to go further back than we expect. It was not merely 1917 that was a blind turning. Revolutionary History must increasingly be a history of such ideas rather than of people and groupings.
Planning this review produced 10 pages of notes including a number of awkward questions still to be answered. How, indeed, do we avoid the distortion of Socialist theory by the unconscious bias of the intellectuals, who must of necessity be involved in its evolution? What are the intellectual disciplines needed constantly to check that Socialist ideology both accords with reality and is acceptable to a clear majority of the population? How should intellectual workers and manual workers (if this is a valid dividing line) relate to each other in existing labour movements? How do we break down the unconscious middle class arrogance of a very high proportion of the present labour movement?
This book presents a good starting point for asking some of the right questions and for asking them without the harsh polemical style which unfortunately came to dominate Socialist histories. Getting the answers, however, is going to be more difficult.
Frank Ward
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Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, Bookmarks, London, Third Edition, 1988, pp373, £7.95
Alan M. Wald, The Revolutionary Imagination, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Mill and London, pp247
Apart from its tortuous construction, the first could have been written in prose as part of a political polemic, while the second is there with the workers, and brings to the surface their thoughts and feelings.
Generally, the construction and vocabulary of Wheelwright’s poems are more involved than the above, but he also is intent upon presenting in poetry a vision of society in which the rôle of the working class is central.
Wheelwright’s poem Skulls as Drums, for instance, was written as an answer to Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem Beat! Beat! Drums! Whitman’s poem calls upon the populace to sink all their individual activities and interests into the war. Wheelwright’s poem, on the other hand, counterposes resistance and reflection by all citizens in order to determine the appropriate response to war. Whereas Whitman’s poem commences each of the three stanzas with a stirring “Beat! Beat drums! Blow! Bugles! Blow!”, Wheelwright disperses the references to these irregularly throughout the poem, so as to indicate that they are outside of the true interests of the population and also includes images of First World War battlefields and marching corpses:
While Wheelwright’s poems differ in their accessibility to the general reader, there is no doubt that from a reading of the poems from Wheelwright’s Collected Poems, New Directions, 1972, that he achieved what Wald refers to as “a public poetry ... a distinct rhetorical voice, colloquialisms, jolts and other devices aspiring to evoke a revolutionary myth”. Wheelwright himself writes in his notes entitled Argument that he had found no way of turning with scientific Socialism “from a mechanical to an organic form of life than to draw from moral mythology as well as from revolutionary myth”.
Mangan, on the other hand, Wald writes, was unable to forge the poetic myths necessary to poetry. From my limited reading of Mangan’s work, for I have been unable to obtain any apart from the poems and prose reproduced in Wald’s book, it is clear that he was a very different writer from Wheelwright. Wald provides two extracts from Mangan’s prose writings which I see as highly satirical and very funny in a Monty Pythonish sort of way. The first concerns a performer of the Indian rope trick who no longer wants to put dye on his face so as to appear Indian. The quick-witted proprietor brings him on in an oxygen tent and tells the audience he is dying but “the show must go on”! The second shows a man absentmindedly playing pat-a-cake with buildings as he looks out of his 14-storey apartment. Hitting at one too hard, he accordions it so that he has to grab its cornices, but even then it shoots up to send the man cartwheeling over the city. Wald says that Mangan assaults the pseudo-rationality of bourgeois society by making pseudo-irrationality or ironic ‘insanity’ a central theme of his work. Mangan undoubtedly had a gift for irony, and the poems included in the book which exclude this sense of the ridiculous, are readable, but pedestrian.
Wald writes that he has written this book to “perform ... function of enriching the vision of the revolutionary Marxist political and cultural tradition”, and I would say from my reading that this aim has been largely achieved. The book is of especial interest to us in this country where 1930s poets, such as Spender and Auden, were attracted to Stalinism and, on disillusionment, turned away from politics altogether, or moved to the right. Therefore, it is good to find Trotskyist poets such as Wheelwright and Mangan. Wheelwright was run down and killed by a drunken driver in 1940 at the age of 43. This was at a time when, as Gregory and Zatureska write, Wheelwright’s mature life as a poet had just begun. (A History of American Poetry 1900-1940, Gordian Press, 1969.) So, it is difficult to know what his future development, both politically and poetically, would have been. Mangan remained a Trotskyist to the end of his life and during the Cold War period sacrificed both financial security and health to the movement. He died in abject poverty in 1961 at the age of 57 years.
Sheila Lahr
However gifted a poet he may have been, Mangan left very much of a mixed legacy to the revolutionary movement.
On the one side there is his fine reportage, among the best the movement has ever produced. His description of the arrival in France of Spain’s left refugees in 1939 conveys not only the atmosphere, but even the entire essence of the tragedy of the politics of the Spanish Civil War. [1] His account of the fall of Paris to Hitler’s armies must rank with the most profound narrations ever to be composed upon the theme of fallen glory. [2]
Unfortunately, his belief that he was a Marxist political leader was at some distance from the facts. There was always something theatrical about him, like “a sort of upper class boy scout”, as Sam Bornstein put it. We have it on good authority from Haston that the famous revolver at the 1946 Pre-Conference contained no bullets at all [3], the same, no doubt, that he delighted in showing to John Goffe beneath his pillow in a room in one of London’s top hotels.
His conception of his international rôle lay somewhere in the mists where the ghosts of Bela Kun, Valtin and Zinoviev converse with each other. The repeated failure of the unifications that he glued together on no discernible political basis whatsoever does not appear to have broken him of the habit. The catch-all unity he created in Argentina in 1941 not only fell apart on the spot, but his article in Fortune magazine cost the Fourth International entire sections in Latin America, and allowed its critics there to associate it with Yankee imperialism for years to come. [4] As midwife to the RCP in Britain his obstetrics were so Byzantine that he not only produced a group that was half entry and half open, but it even had within it a secret faction with no political basis that ultimately tore it apart. [5] His career as International Secretary was crowned by the comic opera adventure of the April 1946 Pre-Conference. [6]
There can be no doubt that he was sincere. Perhaps he might have not done so much damage if he had not been. He should have stuck to poetry and reporting.
Al Richardson
1. Wald, p.184; S. Mangan (Terence Phelan), Spanish Militants Describe Escape from Barcelona, in Socialist Appeal (USA), 3 March 1939. To be republished with other material on the Spanish Civil War later this year by Socialist Platform Ltd.
Andy Johnston, James Larraghy, Edward McWilliams, Connolly: A Marxist Analysis, Irish Workers Group, Dublin 1990, pp72, £3.75
*Our Flag Is Still Red -Markin comment:
This is a repost of 2008's (and the two previous years)commentary in honor of our international working class holiday. I would add that the comments made then still apply today. I would further add that these damn bourgeois presidential campaigns have taken most of the air out of the political atmosphere thus retarding our efforts. Notice the virtually total fade away of pro-immigration street demonstrations. To speak nothing of Iraq. What happens to these parliamentary reformists if they wake up on January 20th 2009 and one John McCain is getting ready to take the oath of office? Enough said-for now.
COMMENTARY
THIS YEAR(2010) MARKS THE 124TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAY DAY HAYMARKET FRAMEUPS. HONOR THE MEMORY OF AUGUST SPIES, ALBERT PARSONS, ADOLPH FISCHER, GEORGE ENGEL, LOUIS LINGG, MICHAEL SCHWAB, SAMUEL FIELDEN, OSCAR NEEBE- CLASS WAR VICTIMS OF AN EARLIER TIME. ALSO REMEMBER LUCY PARSONS WHO CARRIED ON THE STRUGGLE FOR VINDICATION AFTER HER HUSBAND’S EXECUTION. LET US REDOUBLE OUR EFFORTS TO FREE TODAY’S CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
Politically, the writer of these lines is far distance from those of the Haymarket Martyrs. Their flag was the black flag of anarchism, the writer’s is the red flag of communism. Notwithstanding those political differences, militants must stand under the old labor slogan that should underscore all labor defense work now as then- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. Unfortunately that principle has been honored far more in the breech than in the observance by working class organizations.
Additionally, in the case of the Haymarket Martyrs today’s militants must stand in solidarity and learn about the way those militants bravely conducted themselves before bourgeois society in the face of the witch hunt against them and their frame-up in the courts of so-called bourgeois ‘justice’. Not for the first time, and most probably not for the last, militants were railroaded by the capitalist state for holding unpopular and or/dangerous (to the capitalists) views. Moreover, it is no accident that most of the Haymarket Martyrs were foreigners (mainly Germans) not fully appreciative of the niceties of 19th century American ‘justice’. This same ‘justice’ system framed the heroic anarchist immigrant militants Sacco and Vanzetti in the early 20th century and countless other militants since then. As we struggle in the fight for full citizenship rights for immigrants today we should keep this in mind. Although, as we know, this American system of ‘justice’ will not forget the occasional uppity ‘native’ political dissenter either.
Most importantly, we must not forget that the Haymarket Martyrs at the time of their arrest were fighting for the establishment of a standardized eight hour work day. It is ironic that 120 years later this simple, rational, reasonable demand should, in effect, still be necessary to fight for by working people. All proportions taken into account since the 1880’s, a very high percentage of the working class still does not have this luxury- given the necessity of two wage-earner families, two job wage-earners, dramatic increases in commute time in order to gain employment, unpaid but mandatory work time (note especially the Walmartization of labor time) and a high rate of partially or fully unemployed able-bodied workers. To do justice to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs this generation of militants should dust off another old labor slogan that used to be part of the transitional demands of the socialist movement- 30 hours work for 40 hours pay. TODAY THIS IS A REASONABLE DEMAND.
Obviously such a demand cannot be implemented in isolation. To even propose such a demand means we need to build a workers party to fight for it. Moreover, and let us not have illusions about this; this capitalist state does not want to and will not grant such a demand. Therefore, we must fight for a workers government. That would be a true monument to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Reviews
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95This 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
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Reviews
Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158This 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.
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Reviews
S.F. Kissim, War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars, Volumes One and Two, Andre Deutsch, London, 1988 and 1989, pp291 and 262, £17.96 eachThe programmatic reason for the great split in the international working class movement was the issue of war, and, more particularly, the attitude to the First World War. It was not the other topics, such as colonialism or immigration, which divided the Second International at the Stuttgart conference of 1907, let alone the future organisation of the economy under a Socialist government, which was never discussed, that foreshadowed this great schism, while the issues of war and militarism were also the main topics at both the Copenhagen and Basel congresses that followed Stuttgart. It is therefore most welcome that the late Siegfried Kissin’s scholarly and well written study of this area has now been published. It consists of two volumes, the first being the attitude taken by the Socialist movement up to the final split in the International at the end of the ‘First Great War for Civilisation’ while the second takes the story up to the end of the Second World War and, among other things, deals with the debates in the Trotskyist movement on that issue.
The contents of the first volume should be almost unreservedly welcomed by the readers of Revolutionary History. Kissin tells us of the positions taken up by Marx and Engels on various nineteenth century conflicts and the debates among Socialists both before and during the First War. Marx and Engels had a very much more flexible and less intransigent view of the many wars in their time than we are now accustomed to think of as ‘Marxist’. They were seldom defeatist, and since many of us are only familiar with the later debate from a rather one-sided Leninist polemic, much of the material that Kissin introduces will be fresh and new. The position of the Founding Fathers in any particular case depended on an assessment of the effects of victory or defeat for the prospects of Socialism in a world context. Later the differences amongst those denounced by Lenin – differences which at the time might have appeared more important to the participants than those which divided the centre and moderate left from the Bolsheviks – are clearly brought out, and add a good deal to our understanding of the flavour and context of the dispute at the time. A final, if controversial piece looks at the differences between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the 1914-18 war, where Kissin seems to come down on Luxemburg’s side. Even in the First World War case, however, Kissin argues that in the parliamentary democracies of England and France it was not necessary to work actively for and desire the defeat of one’s own government, though he would denounce the ‘social-patriots’’ belief that the war meant a truce in the class struggle.
One fascinating aspect with contemporary echoes is his account of the debate on the Boer War, which for me has parallels with the Falklands campaign. Kissin makes the point that defeatism, as in the Boer War example, does not have to be revolutionary and that there maybe cases (Britain in the Falklands war was surely one), where the defeat of one’s own side would merely lead to a change from a conservative to a slightly more left wing government at the next election, rather than a revolution. This is nearly always the case in colonial wars where the nation’s existence is not perceived to be imperilled. In this event, as he says, there may well be liberals and pacifists who are thorough defeatists, though none of this makes the defeatist position incorrect. And just as it could be argued – as it was by Hyndman – that a British defeat would leave the South African Blacks enslaved by the Afrikaners, so, I suppose, it could be argued that in the Falklands British victory was a great benefit to the Argentine, if not to the British working class. In the event, the Blacks were enslaved anyway, and the end of the Junta has seen an even further fall in Argentine living standards. As the First World War showed, there could be more than one honest opinion on this. Indeed, one impression from reading Kissin about the German SPD in 1914 is how naive many of them were about their own government and how ‘wet’ they appear, faced with dissimulating noblemen who clearly did believe in the class war, made little distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ enemy and saw these nice SDP deputies as adversaries to be tricked and beaten like foreign foes. Distant Lenin saw far more clearly than the German Socialists what the game was about.
In Kissin’s three page conclusion in Volume One, he attempts to forecast what attitude Marx and Engels would have taken to the events in the early twentieth century, and here he sets them up in opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Of course, this is not the first time that this has been done, but at least he makes a good job in arguing his case. A more basic reservation that I have is that Kissin sees the issues of war and conflict in rather static terms, so that he approvingly quotes Luxemburg’s forecast of German nationalist revival and another war as a consequence of Germany’s defeat. But this was surely not an inevitable result of such a defeat, and it was a close-run thing between revolution and counter-revolution.
The second volume continues the story with a description of the positions taken on the many pre-Second World War conflicts by left wingers from both the Social Democratic and Communist traditions. Kissin tests the later Stalinist wrigglings against the classical Leninist position with damning conclusions. Finally, in the last part of the book he discusses the Trotskyists and, by printing a paper he submitted to the Edinburgh WIL in 1943, he makes his own position on the Second World War clear. He was an unabashed defencist, as he thought that the war was not primarily a national one, but a European civil war between the working class allied to a section of the bourgeoisie against Fascism, and the other bourgeois fraction. So, just as left wingers in Spain had supported Azana against Franco, in Britain they should stand with Churchill against Hitler. They should, of course, maintain a programme distinct from that of the conservative and Stalinist patriots. Such a programme would include the demand for independence for India and the colonies, constant fraternal appeals to the German workers and a guarantee of no vindictive Versailles peace, but a promise to integrate Germany into a peaceful Europe after the overthrow of the Nazis, together with demands for workers’ control of war production, election of officers tend so on. Such a position had much more in common with ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ of the SWP or the WIL than the RSL and other more pacifistic and abstentionist Trotskyists who were inclined to see the war as a re-run of 1914-18. He argues that victories for Hitler meant the smashing of all the gains from working class struggle, and the imposition of Fascist and authoritarian regimes in the occupied countries. In the event he was correct, as there was a greater left wing movement among the people of the Allied countries as a result of victory than among the populations of the defeated Axis.
The great value of the book is the immense range of evidence that Kissin has collected to illustrate his theme. There are some splendid choice items from the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact – in particular some statements by the late unlamented Walter Ulbricht and a fascinating account of how in 1939 the Labour Party leadership, which had started by declaring that the enemy was Hitler, not the German people, ended up in 1945 with a much more social-patriotic line which was only slightly more civilised than that of the Communists. The Labour lefts like Bevan stand out for their decency on this issue.
There are a number of omissions and inaccuracies in the book, above all in the final section on the Trotskyists, which probably arose as he seems to have researched it in isolation, perhaps not realising that there were a number of other people honestly seeking to understand this period. He does not seem to have been aware of Bornstein and Richardson’s War and the International, or of the debates in the United States between the Workers Party and the SWP on the problem of the war with Japan, which was much more purely an inter-imperialist conflict than the war in Europe. Indeed, Kissin thinks that the Workers Party quickly disappeared after the 1940 split, which was by no means the case. Neither has he read Guérin's analysis of Trotsky’s political evolution at the beginning of the war though this analysis has considerable similarities with his own. Furthermore, he does not mention the tiny group of French defeatists led by Barta, though today those in that tradition around the paper Lutte Ouvrière seem to be the largest Trotskyist tendency in France.
These are, however, minor blemishes. For those on the left who seek to understand the history of war and the Marxist attitude to it, and whatever disagreements one might have with the author’s judgements, these two volumes will be an invaluable source of information.
Ted Crawford
*******
Reviews
Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia, University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1989, pp251, $29.95Machajski and the group of ideas called Machaevism, which he brought together and defended from the turn of the century through into the Russian Revolution, played only a very minor rôle in the building of the Russian revolutionary movement. To this reviewer at any rate, the mention of his name merely stirred a vague memory of him being mentioned, although only briefly, by Trotsky in My Life when referring to some long forgotten debate among Tsardom’s Siberian exiles.
The book does not disguise the limitations of its subject matter. And yet ... this very fair and balanced history will undoubtedly leave many with an uneasy feeling. Even today, 64 years after his death, Machajski’s idea about the intelligentsia or middle strata, and its power to dominate the working class movement, will strike many as an advance warning of dangers which became only too real in the ruthless rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. To others it will seem to explain the reason why the working class movement has, as they see it, been betrayed by so many of its political leaderships.
Machajski was concerned with the growing reformist trends in Social Democracy, and with the untrustworthiness of the Russian intelligentsia. He presented an original and even Marxist-sounding explanation. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat pursued their own class interests, so it must also be regarded as natural and inevitable that the middle class strata, primarily composed of ‘intellectual workers’ would do likewise. Control by these groupings of the knowledge-ideas factors which are essential for commodity production and the administration of modern society, already gives them power and considerable rewards. How much better, however, to ensure that such power became ever more dominant and secure through a centrally planned society? Socialism or Social Democracy were not to be regarded as ideologies in the interests of the working class, but as ideologies founded on the interests of an already relatively favoured section of society, the middle strata or intelligentsia.
Such a theory immediately calls into question any possibility of ever formulating an ideology which conforms to objective reality. According to Machajski’s logic, all attempts at evolving such an ideology would be doomed to distortion by the sectional or class interests of those intellectual workers responsible for producing it. As Shatz points out, Machajski never faced up to this contradiction. His main conclusion was to set up a group called the Workers’ Conspiracy which, according to Shatz, played little practical rôle in its short existence. Presumably it was to contain some intellectuals such as Machajski, although how these were to be identified as trustworthy and unbiased was left unclear.
To this vague idea he added the equally vague concept of a self-led working class in an upsurge that would claim the entire surplus of society after inflicting a massive defeat on both bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Oddly enough, he also pressed for one relatively simple and almost reformist demand. Workers should ensure that any surplus wealth they appropriated from society be used for the full-time advanced education of all workers’ children. This argument came close to being market based – if everyone were to be intellectually trained, no one would be able to claim the special privileges that the middle strata had always been able to command.
The question of how ideologies, and, in particular, Socialist ideologies do or can arise is not addressed by this book. Shatz is writing about Machaevism and not about such philosophical issues. What the book does do is to report on the debates in Russian society about the nature and functions of their middle strata.
Machajski’s ideas sprang from his analysis and experience of the specific Russian intelligentsia, expressing, as he saw it, the interests of the Russian middle class. This book brings out very well the need to be clear about the exact structures and the continually varying nature of the middle layers of society. The author outlines the diffuse nature of the Russian middle classes, stretching from the remains of the gentry who had been partially dispossessed by the earlier land reforms inaugurated by Tsardom, the small but growing industrial-based sector, to the expanding professions and the restless students. All these groupings were hemmed in by the autocracy. Politically they evolved few ideas of their own beyond the terrorist bomb and slavish legalism. Their incoherence and frustrations were compounded by the flooding in of Western ideologies whether appropriate or inappropriate to their society. Machajski himself, moved from a Polish nationalism tinged with Socialism, through a form of Marxism to a ‘workerist’ criticism of both European Social Democracy and Russia's intelligentsia – and finally moved on to his own anti-Socialist form of Socialist-Anarchism!
The book continually reasserts the Russian based starting point but tentatively explores how far such ideas can be applied to other times and other places. In fact one of Shatz’s most thought provoking sections deals with the near-extermination of the pre-1917 intelligentsia in the purges of the 1930s, and its replacement by a new ex-worker become apparatchik-intelligentsia. Khrushchev perhaps best embodied the nature of the changeover. His personal manners may well have identified his working class origins. They did not define the social function he was actually performing.
This book should be regarded as more than a specialist biography of an obscure Socialist responsible for an even more obscure sect. Marshall Shatz writes clearly and with very few preconceptions. The central ideas of Machajski may well prove to point to yet one more dead end, but in a period when the Marxist movement must face up to a massive self-questioning we have to check and recheck virtually all our ideas to see where the Socialist enterprise started to go so terribly wrong. We may have to go further back than we expect. It was not merely 1917 that was a blind turning. Revolutionary History must increasingly be a history of such ideas rather than of people and groupings.
Planning this review produced 10 pages of notes including a number of awkward questions still to be answered. How, indeed, do we avoid the distortion of Socialist theory by the unconscious bias of the intellectuals, who must of necessity be involved in its evolution? What are the intellectual disciplines needed constantly to check that Socialist ideology both accords with reality and is acceptable to a clear majority of the population? How should intellectual workers and manual workers (if this is a valid dividing line) relate to each other in existing labour movements? How do we break down the unconscious middle class arrogance of a very high proportion of the present labour movement?
This book presents a good starting point for asking some of the right questions and for asking them without the harsh polemical style which unfortunately came to dominate Socialist histories. Getting the answers, however, is going to be more difficult.
Frank Ward
Note
Name spelling and even people’s initials can vary when anglicised from the Polish or Russian. Machajski can appear as Makhaiski, Machajskii and his initials as KV as well as JW.***********
Reviews
Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, Bookmarks, London, Third Edition, 1988, pp373, £7.95
This is the third edition of Chris Harman’s book on the ‘People's Democracies’, being a revision of the book previously issued under the title of Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe. It differs from the original 1974 edition by the extension of a chapter on Poland into the ’eighties, and the addition of a third part on theory and perspectives. Like the original, it is a very useful compendium of facts set into a handy historical framework, and displays an impressive command of the source material.
However, this was an advantage already enjoyed by the first edition, and it cannot be said that the additional material has made it into a better book. Quite the reverse.
For a start, it shows a studied neglect of contributions written by Socialists and Communists of other persuasions, a fault not quite so glaring in the previous edition. Among the works to which no reference at all has been made are the mass of material now available on the post-war purges (e.g. Loebl and Slingova) François Manuel and Bill Lomax on Hungary, Pelikan, Broué and Karalasingham on Czechoslovakia, and the collections of Czech material in Voices of Czechoslovak Socialists and Coates’ Czechoslovakia and Socialism, not to mention the extensive writing on Poland. And the author is very selective in his polemics, making no attempt to answer those who argue for the working class character of these states. Trotskyists are bracketed along with Stalinists as “people who still had illusions, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Socialist (or at least workers' state) character of Eastern Europe” (p.321) and Mandel is only quoted to show his mistakes (p.102), the writer preferring easier targets (p.321). But some of the arguments used to affirm the capitalist nature of these set-ups are very flimsy indeed. When the Soviet Union conquered these countries in 1944-45 we were told that “the old ruling classes were in no condition to put up resistance to Russian demands” (p.20). Why should they? The evidence shows clearly that Stalin was desperately trying to reanimate them, an endeavour in which he had to admit his failure. The attempt to distinguish between the top bureaucracies of these states and the ‘intermediate strata’ rests upon no more solid class criterion than ‘control’ (p.143ff.). To prove the existence of capitalism there at one point we are given the decisive argument that “a working class is a peculiar feature of capitalist societies” (p.321). Does the writer believe, then, that it is possible to abolish wage labour the day after a revolution – even in backward countries? And wouldn’t this criterion prove that Lenin’s Russia was as ‘capitalist’ as Stalin’s, then? But the choicest piece, surely, in view of present happenings in these countries, must be the remark on page 142: “It is hardly likely, therefore, that old-style, private capital would even consider breaking up Hungarian industry into small competing units ...”
Secondly, a comparison of the present edition with that of 1974 shows a distinct development of the party pretensions of the organisation that has produced it. Although the necessity for Marxist parties in these states is a lesson that can be (and is) drawn throughout, we are suddenly introduced to an extended advertisement for ‘the Revolutionary Party’ in the context of Poland in the ’eighties (pp.312ff.), which, to tell the truth, fits no better there than anywhere else, except in the sense that it is near the end of the narrative part of the book, and might well never be read if it had been simply consigned to the theoretical bit at the back.
So whilst being useful compendia of factual matter, the chief value of the different editions of the book, as with Tony Cliff’s Rosa Luxemburg, lies less in their analysis of the events and more in the mathematical exactitude by which they measure the ascent of the SWP into sectarian self-proclamation as ‘the Revolutionary Party’.
Al Richardson
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Reviews
Alan M. Wald, The Revolutionary Imagination, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Mill and London, pp247
The modernist poets John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan were part of the move to the left in America of many middle and upper class intellectuals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was a result of the Great Depression which brought with it sudden doubt as to the efficacy of the capitalist system. However, unlike most of their contemporaries, neither Mangan nor Wheelwright succumbed to Stalinism, and therefore did not come under the censure of bureaucrats authorised to limit their literary opinions. Nor did they have to go through the traumas of writers such as Phillips, Rahv and others who eventually broke away from Stalinism in the first instance because of the Communist Party’s antagonism to literary and artistic modernism. (See the review of Alan M Wald’s The New York Intellectuals, Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no.2). Instead, both Mangan and Wheelwright from the first supported Trotsky, and became members of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party.
With regard to writing, the difference Wald draws between the two men is that, whereas Wheelwright regarded the making of poetry as his revolutionary contribution, Mangan shelved his need to write poetry and redirected his creative impulse into missions and work for the Fourth International. In fact Wheelwright considered part of his revolutionary activity to be reciting his poems to proletarian groups, such as Workmen’s Circles, the WPA Writers’ Group, the Young People’s Socialist League of Boston, the Chelsea Labor Lyceum and at branches of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party. A quotation from a letter written by John Wheelwright at the beginning of the book reads: “be a Socialist painter, as another is a Socialist cook, mechanic, lemon picker or as with Engels, manufacturer”. Mangan, on the other hand, made a dichotomy between art and politics, and in a letter also quoted by Wald states: “Even though revolutionary politics are an honourable occupation, it's poetry I still love best”.
It is not uncommon for revolutionaries to consider the political tasks in hand as too important for them to spend time on the arts and literature, although Trotsky never took this view. Trotsky would no doubt have agreed with Wald that the discourse of poetry works on the emotional, aesthetic, imaginative and moral senses, which can result in a leap in understanding from the subconscious to then conscious. In this way, a poet imaginatively reworks experience in order to communicate a new form of consciousness. Certainly, Wald’s concern is to what extent Wheelwright and Mangan were able to use the lives and experiences of the working class in poems to transform their vision to a Socialist society, for poetic discourse is not bound by the: same limitations as political discourse.
Therefore, the Socialist poet need not use the rationality of prose. As an example of this, Wald provides two simple poems to compare from the Communist Party’s 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States. The first, by Maxwell Bodenheim, in short lines states the horrors of Tsarist Russia and the glories of the Soviet Union, four lines of which read:
And in the Russia of today
Men and women proud of work hours
Take their summer vacations
On the steppes in cleaner games.
Against this he posits Langston Hughes’ Sharecroppers, an ironic work-song in simple nursery rhyme metre, which illustrates the rhythm of working, of which four lines read:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
| When the cotton’s picked And the work is done Boss man take the money And we get none. |
Generally, the construction and vocabulary of Wheelwright’s poems are more involved than the above, but he also is intent upon presenting in poetry a vision of society in which the rôle of the working class is central.
Wheelwright’s poem Skulls as Drums, for instance, was written as an answer to Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem Beat! Beat! Drums! Whitman’s poem calls upon the populace to sink all their individual activities and interests into the war. Wheelwright’s poem, on the other hand, counterposes resistance and reflection by all citizens in order to determine the appropriate response to war. Whereas Whitman’s poem commences each of the three stanzas with a stirring “Beat! Beat drums! Blow! Bugles! Blow!”, Wheelwright disperses the references to these irregularly throughout the poem, so as to indicate that they are outside of the true interests of the population and also includes images of First World War battlefields and marching corpses:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
| Gaze on the corpse, pre-mortified – gas bloated – of Mars. And on the fearful helm of Suicide Inc, drum, drum, drum drum louder to drum up more fear. |
Mangan, on the other hand, Wald writes, was unable to forge the poetic myths necessary to poetry. From my limited reading of Mangan’s work, for I have been unable to obtain any apart from the poems and prose reproduced in Wald’s book, it is clear that he was a very different writer from Wheelwright. Wald provides two extracts from Mangan’s prose writings which I see as highly satirical and very funny in a Monty Pythonish sort of way. The first concerns a performer of the Indian rope trick who no longer wants to put dye on his face so as to appear Indian. The quick-witted proprietor brings him on in an oxygen tent and tells the audience he is dying but “the show must go on”! The second shows a man absentmindedly playing pat-a-cake with buildings as he looks out of his 14-storey apartment. Hitting at one too hard, he accordions it so that he has to grab its cornices, but even then it shoots up to send the man cartwheeling over the city. Wald says that Mangan assaults the pseudo-rationality of bourgeois society by making pseudo-irrationality or ironic ‘insanity’ a central theme of his work. Mangan undoubtedly had a gift for irony, and the poems included in the book which exclude this sense of the ridiculous, are readable, but pedestrian.
Wald writes that he has written this book to “perform ... function of enriching the vision of the revolutionary Marxist political and cultural tradition”, and I would say from my reading that this aim has been largely achieved. The book is of especial interest to us in this country where 1930s poets, such as Spender and Auden, were attracted to Stalinism and, on disillusionment, turned away from politics altogether, or moved to the right. Therefore, it is good to find Trotskyist poets such as Wheelwright and Mangan. Wheelwright was run down and killed by a drunken driver in 1940 at the age of 43. This was at a time when, as Gregory and Zatureska write, Wheelwright’s mature life as a poet had just begun. (A History of American Poetry 1900-1940, Gordian Press, 1969.) So, it is difficult to know what his future development, both politically and poetically, would have been. Mangan remained a Trotskyist to the end of his life and during the Cold War period sacrificed both financial security and health to the movement. He died in abject poverty in 1961 at the age of 57 years.
Sheila Lahr
However gifted a poet he may have been, Mangan left very much of a mixed legacy to the revolutionary movement.
On the one side there is his fine reportage, among the best the movement has ever produced. His description of the arrival in France of Spain’s left refugees in 1939 conveys not only the atmosphere, but even the entire essence of the tragedy of the politics of the Spanish Civil War. [1] His account of the fall of Paris to Hitler’s armies must rank with the most profound narrations ever to be composed upon the theme of fallen glory. [2]
Unfortunately, his belief that he was a Marxist political leader was at some distance from the facts. There was always something theatrical about him, like “a sort of upper class boy scout”, as Sam Bornstein put it. We have it on good authority from Haston that the famous revolver at the 1946 Pre-Conference contained no bullets at all [3], the same, no doubt, that he delighted in showing to John Goffe beneath his pillow in a room in one of London’s top hotels.
His conception of his international rôle lay somewhere in the mists where the ghosts of Bela Kun, Valtin and Zinoviev converse with each other. The repeated failure of the unifications that he glued together on no discernible political basis whatsoever does not appear to have broken him of the habit. The catch-all unity he created in Argentina in 1941 not only fell apart on the spot, but his article in Fortune magazine cost the Fourth International entire sections in Latin America, and allowed its critics there to associate it with Yankee imperialism for years to come. [4] As midwife to the RCP in Britain his obstetrics were so Byzantine that he not only produced a group that was half entry and half open, but it even had within it a secret faction with no political basis that ultimately tore it apart. [5] His career as International Secretary was crowned by the comic opera adventure of the April 1946 Pre-Conference. [6]
There can be no doubt that he was sincere. Perhaps he might have not done so much damage if he had not been. He should have stuck to poetry and reporting.
Al Richardson
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