From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
Commentary
This is the 75th Anniversary of the fall of Madrid and Barcelona (essentially unopposed militarily by the Republican forces)in the Spanish Civil War. That event effectively ended the war and started the forty year Franco “night of the long knives”. Normally, we of the international workers movement do not ‘celebrate’ such abject failures as defeat in Spain. However, as noted in many entries in this space, the lessons of Spain should be etched into the brain of every serious militant. Why? We could have won there and changed the whole course of history, at least Western history. The reasons for that failure are legion but I would urge every serious militant and every radical to read, for starters, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s “Lessons of The Spanish Civil War” at his Marxist Internet Archive site. We can argue out our differences on strategy from there.
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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.
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This is a thoroughly interesting and very detailed book, which must set our knowledge of the fascinating history of the POUM on a far firmer basis than ever before. Among a wealth of material we are told that Salvador Dali flirted briefly with Maurin's Bloque Obrera y Campesino (p.30), that it was Brandler and Willi Brandt who tried to persuade the POUM not to criticise the Moscow Trials (p.133), that the Edinburgh Revolutionary Socialist Party, later to become Trotskyist, attended the international Congress Against War and Fascism in Brussels organised by the London Bureau in the autumn of 1936 (p.156), and that strong suspicions remain that the Orlov who defected to the USA and Nin’s torturer were the same person (p.276, n6). An especially tasty morsel for British readers, now that the Communist Party is finally collapsing under the weight of its own infamy, is the note that the Daily Worker even ‘reported’ that the Monarchist flag had been raised alongside that of the POUM over the town halls occupied by the latter (p.204).
This said, a venomous anti-Trotskyist prejudice runs through the book from start to finish, distorting its analysis and even affecting its factual accuracy. Disregarding the history of Stalinist agents fanning the factional squabbles inside the International Left Opposition, we are told that the Landaus, Rosmer and Nin “had been driven away from the official Trotskyist movement by the sectarian suspicions of Trotsky himself” (p.283). Not that the authors are any partisans of Nin, clearly preferring Maurin to him, in spite of the fact that the modern reprint of the theoretical magazine of the Communist Left shows that they were streets ahead of anything the Bloque could produce. At one point before the fusion that created the POUM we are given a full summary of a speech by Maurin to the Madrid Ateneo; he was followed by Nin, not a word of whose speech is even hinted at (p.33).
After the formation of the POUM Nin is even attacked for the invitation to bring Trotsky to Spain (p.166). Felix Morrow’s superb book is described as “mainly remarkable for its Trotskyist biases” (p.290), and “based exclusively do notes amassed by Charles and Lois Orr” (p199). Doubt is cast upon the veracity of Paul and Clara Thalmann’s memoirs for being “Trotskyist”, without the authors feeling obliged to tell us that they subsequently became Anarchists, or even to substantiate their criticisms of them (pp.296-97). What the writers are pleased to call “the lethargic milieu of the small Trotskyist groupings” (p.40) were guilty, apparently, of exaggerating the “success of the official Communists in suppressing the POUM” (p.222), and of wasting “more ink and saliva attacking the POUM than they did the official Communist Party” (p.220). A side-swipe at the postwar Trotskyists castigates them for the failure of their movement in Vietnam, Bolivia and Sri Lanka (p.222), in the hope that we will not notice that these failures were precisely the result of following policies that were practically identical with those of the POUM itself in 1936.
Unable to answer Trotsky’s critique of the POUM, the authors subject him to continuous denigration. His struggle to reform the Comintern before 1933 is described as “infiltrating the official Communist apparatus” (p.89). Kronstadt, where he was not even present at the time, he apparently “brutally suppressed” (p.8) and “drowned in blood” (p.124). Although as commander of the army Trotsky accepted political responsibility for the suppression of the revolt, in fact he “stepped aside completely and demonstrably from the affair” (More on the Suppression of Kronstadt, 6 July 1938). In case we missed their first assertion, that Trotsky had a “real lack of knowledge” of what he was talking about in Spain (p.88), the writers feel the need to reassert it on at least three other occasions (pp.89, 130, 223).
Why this oversensitive concern? The answer glares at us from every page, that out of touch Trotsky might have been, but he was considerably less out of touch than the POUM. The POUM’s prissy sectarianism emerges at every point in the crisis. When dealing with the move of the PSOE to the left after 1934 the writers note that “if its radicalisation had been more extensive and prolonged” (p.113) something positive might have come of it. But what was the POUM’s attitude to this radicalisation? It was to keep itself apart from it and preach abstract Marxist purity at it from outside. This failure to enter the Socialist Party when its mass left was in ferment in effect handed over its youth to Stalinism, and the POUM to its executioners, not a few of whom came from precisely this milieu, or even from the Bloque’s own miseducated ranks (e.g. Rodriguez Salas, p.92). Trotsky’s repeated pleas for them to take the situation seriously and enter the PSOE youth are refuted by a series of laughable Talmudic devices, such as that the Socialist Party was itself “one of the initiators of the People’s Front” (p.223), or that to do so would have been to solve the problem in an “artificial” (p.41) or a “mechanical” way (p.89) (in spite of the fact that it was the Socialist Left that was specifically asking them to enter), and even on the grounds that to have gone in would have lost the Bloque’s own youth to Stalinism (p.82)! Yet the authors have the gall to castigate Trotsky for refusing “to countenance the slightest organisational flexibility in Spain” (p.90)! As to who was really “flexible” in the circumstances can easily be gauged by the fact that Trotsky advised the POUM to liquidate its own trade union chain, the FOUS, in order to enter the CNT and influence its ranks then in mass revolutionary ferment, whereas the POUM in fact entered the UGT and handed control over its unions to Stalinism, the springboard for counter-revolution in Catalonia. In the face of these facts the writers of this book first try to blame the CNT for this state of affairs (pp.129-30), and then try to use as an excuse for the POUM’s impotence in 1936 the fact that the POUM found itself, then, two months after the beginning of the revolution, without a base in the unions (p.130). And yet but a few pages later we are solemnly informed that “for political motives – and also later, for psychological and even for personal security reasons, the POUM had to get closer to the CNT” (p.173).
Dogmatic and rigid where it should have been “flexible”, on organisational matters, the POUM was “flexible” where it should have been principled, over the political ones. “To remain outside the People’s Front”, we are told, “would mean to swim against the stream to no profit, to lose the possibility of gaining a parliamentary tribune, to remain without contact with the masses, and to accept isolation. The POUM had not been founded simply to become a sect.” (p.97) In spite of their argument that the Popular Front was merely an electoral pact, and not a commitment to a bourgeois government in the middle of a workers’ revolution, the uncomfortable fact emerges that Maurin’s speech on the inauguration of Azana’s government began “by saying that this time the representative of the POUM will vote confidence in the government of Senor Azana” (p.100). Even more lame is the apology for Nin’s entry into the Council of the Catalan Generalitat. On 8 September 1936 Nin had declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat already virtually existed in Catalonia. Just over two weeks later he joined the government, and a fortnight after that it dissolved the local committees of the militias, and Nin himself had to go down to Lerida and persuade the local POUM to hand over its power to the municipality (p.140). Yet again the POUM justified its actions by an appeal to exceptional circumstances (as if a revolution in itself is not an ‘exceptional circumstance’): “the new government will have a working class majority ... but with some representatives of the petty bourgeoisie ... an original, and not long-lasting kind of revolutionary transition” (p.135). This blatant rejection of the Marxist analysis of the nature of labour politicians’ participation in a bourgeois state is supported by the most spectacular of theoretical contortions it is possible to read. “For the POUM the question was not one of principle, as far as government per se was concerned”, we are told. “As a Marxist party, it believed in the necessity of taking power. But could entry into a Generalitat administration be the same as taking power?” (p.l34) This is a good question, but it does not a good answer: “The real question was not whether it was correct to enter the Generalitat administration, but whether this should replace or be replaced by the Committee for Militias as an organ of working class power. But with nobody outside the POUM viewing the problem in these terms ...” (pp.135-36) “Nobody”? For the benefit of our writers, it should be quite clearly stated that the question during a revolution is precisely whose institutions should wield power, those of the working class or of the bourgeoisie. Not only were there those in the POUM who saw this clearly – the ‘Cell 72’ opposition led by Jose Rebull in Barcelona (whose views are censored completely out of this narrative) – but the much-maligned Leon Trotsky spent practically the whole of his time available trying to point this out. And that is the whole point.
It was indeed over the fundamental questions of Marxism that the Maurin Bloque, which ideologically dominated the POUM, was so lamentable. Its two-tier organisation (pp.24-25) shows that it was far from Bolshevist, and outside of conditions of extreme illegality it is certainly not the case that “cells of five members at the base” is an “organic structure typical of Leninist parties” (p.27). Its very name (Workers and Peasants Bloc) assumes that it is possible to have parties representing two classes at once, what Trotsky called the purest “Kuomintangism” transplanted onto Spanish soil. All its basic political assumptions were stagist, and Stalinist. The very speech of Maurin referred to above at the Madrid Ateneo “affirmed that Spain at that moment needed a ‘Jacobin’ republic”. “We believe Spain has begun its revolution”, said Maurin, “and that every effective revolution has two stages: the democratic revolution and the Socialist revolution. Without the first the second is impossible.” (p.33, cf. also p.29) Thus the confused statement of the basic position of the POUM in 1936 had a long history: “The Spanish Revolution is a revolution of the democratic socialist type.” (p.94) The command of Marxism by both the Bloque and its POUM offspring can be assessed by the repeated assertion that the petty bourgeoisie are capable of wielding state power as a class; Azana’s first government was described as such by Maurin (p.43), and this was repeated for Company’s Generalitat by Nin (p.139). But whereas Nin had forgotten the Marxism he once knew, there is little evidence that Maurin had ever learned it in the first place, having first declared that “in 1931 the CNT-FAI occupied, in their own way, a historical place comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917” (p.31), and then that he was “in favour of a seizure of power by factory committees” (p.44).
In view of this damning testimony, freely available from the book itself, the claim of the POUM to represent any sort of Marxism at all must remain in deep doubt: It is thus beside the point to grumble at incidental silly remarks, such as that the country of the classic Canovas system of rigged parliamentarism had “democratic traditions” (p.223), or to complain about the authors’ propensity to import fashionable modern feminist concerns into their discussion of the work of women revolutionaries in Spain (pp.285ff.). There are also signs that the documentary evidence has not been considered as closely as it should have been. Although they are acquainted with Negrete’s letters (pp.294-96), they show no knowledge at all of the whole pamphlet devoted to the May days in Barcelona written by Hugo Oehler (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.2, Summer 1988, pp23-29), and they prefer Munis’ opinion about the lack of contact between Bolshevik-Leninists and the Friends of Durruti during this crisis to that of ‘Casanovas’, even though he was there at the time leading the former group and Munis was abroad (p.199).
But however we evaluate the POUM, the Spanish Civil War in general, and the attitude revolutionaries should take up towards them, what is clear is that it cannot be done without a serious and careful consideration of this book. What a shame that its price places it only within reach of the respectable classes in society!
Al Richardson
The first and larger section of this book is written by Victor Alba, an old member of the POUM, and a participant in many of the events. He was there. The second and lesser part is by Stephen Schwartz.
Alba writes what amounts to a lenient obituary of the POUM. Somewhat bemused and puzzled by the fate of that party, he puts forward several reasons for its failure, one being that Joaquim Maurin, a leader of the party who was trapped in the Franco area at the commencement of the civil war, might have been a better leader than Andres Nin. Although Maurin survived the civil war and lived until 1973, and published several books on that war, Alba is unable to give us one quotation from them that proves he had a better understanding and position than Nin.
The main error of the POUM – its entry into the bourgeois Republican government, which proceeded to disband the Workers’ Militias – is excused on the ground that if it had failed to enter it, it would have lost support.
The effect of the POUM in damping down the leftward movement of its members is revealed in the following quotation: “It is worth recalling, 50 years later some facts that are nowhere in print, but which every POUM member knew at that time. The first is that the executive served as a brake where it could, on the most radical and sharp position of the local committees, especially those in Barcelona and Lleida and in the party youth organisation.” (p.120). In spite of what Alba says here, these facts were well known at the time and constituted the basis of the criticism of the POUM by the left.
The feebleness of the POUM in the second workers’ uprising in May 1937 is excused on the grounds of not wishing to respond to the provocation of the Stalinists. The authors’ use of “refusal to respond to provocation” reminds one of the character in the oft told story of two persons being shot by the Gestapo, in which one refuses to wear a blindfold and the other says “why do you have to cause trouble?”.
There is an incredibly rambling chapter on the Workers’ Militias, in which the author, 50 years after the events, fails to realise their importance, an importance the republican government revealed in its drive to disarm and suppress them.
Alba makes the remarkable statement that Grandizo Munis, the leader of the Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Leninists, “did not even know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti, until the events [of 3 May 1937 – ER] took place” (p.199). This statement is supported by a footnote which refers to “Munis in conversation with Stephen Schwartz”. The following would seem to prove otherwise. In Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution (North Carolina Press, 1979), we are told that the Friends of Durruti were officially constituted in mid-March. The organisation increased its membership, according to Balius (vice secretary) to between four and five thousand by the beginning of May. He also quotes Munis: “We worked fraternally with the workers of the Friends of Durruti and they helped us in the sale and distribution of our newspaper”. (Unser Wort, early May 1939, >in Bolloten, p.394).
Bolloten goes on to quote a leading member of the POUM, Juan Andrade, as saying: “In the last days of April, they, the Friends of Durruti, plastered Barcelona with their slogans.” (p.401) Negrete published in the Hugo Oehler’s Fourth International of June 1937 a report of the first public meeting, on Sunday 18 April 1937, of the Friends of Durruti. So Alba and Schwartz ask us to believe that Munis did not know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti until 3 May, although they came into official existence in the middle of March, held their first public meeting on 18 April, and plastered Barcelona with their slogans at the end of April. This item alone indicates the carelessness and unreliability of the authors.
Alba does endeavour, however inadequately, to deal with the facts and the errors of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. Schwartz is different, and would appear to be a journalist with literary ambitions. For him, the Spanish Civil War is not a battle of the classes for the future domination of Europe, in which all the parties and groupings are on trial, but rather a picturesque event giving rise to various styles of Belles Letters; of reminiscences, some sentimental, others abrasive, and some even bilious. For Schwartz, the issues in the Spanish Civil War for which so many fought and died were only a ‘miasma’. For example, Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Note Book, dealing with the first six months of the Revolution and the Civil War, is treated as a feminist and sentimental account. As the following excerpt proves, Mary Low’s account was far from being sentimental.
Schwartz refers to the many persons with whom Negrete had discussions whilst in Barcelona. One person to whom he does not refer is August Thalheimer. The Leninist League of Glasgow, which was a member of the Oehlerite International Contact Commission, received from Negrete, posted at Perpignan, on the French side of the frontier, a code for communication to and from Barcelona. The first document we had to use it on was a lengthy thesis on the Spanish situation by Thalheimer, which Negrete had typed out.
Schwartz quotes a Charles Orr as a reference for Hugo Oehler. Who Charles Orr is that he should be used as a reference for Oehler, we are not told. Schwartz either doesn’t know, or does not wish anyone else to know, that Oehler fought on the barricades on 3 May, and wrote one of the most authoritative reports of chat struggle.
Schwartz says that Negrete “met frequently with the Greek Archeiomarxist leader about whom we know little”. Witte, as he was known then, whose real name was Demetrios Giotopoulos, had been a leading member of the Trotskyist International Communist League. There is a 5,000 word account by him on the situation in the British section. In 1933 he broke with Trotsky over the entry into the Second International. He was the Greek representative on the London Bureau, and claimed to represent over 20,000 workers. During Easter 1938, representing the Leninist League of Glasgow, I had a long discussion with Witte in Paris. He had just been served his third expulsion order as an undesirable alien. In 1945, while awaiting trial in a London prison for political offences during the war, I met three Greek sailors charged with ‘mutiny on the high seas’. They told me that Witte had been beaten to death in a police cell in Athens.
On this trip I briefly met Gorkin at the headquarters of the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan, the French sister party, around which the POUM refugees were grouped. The Union Communiste group of G. Davoust, publisher of L’International, with whom I had a discussion at this time, played the same role with Friends of Durruti. At that time I was mainly interested in the Union Communiste’s connection with the print workers of Paris, in which they had a big influence. After the war I heard that Davoust had been tortured by the Gestapo, and was very ill.
The few survivors of those who picketed the US State Department and the Spanish Embassy will be surprised to hear that, according to Schwartz, “thanks to pressure from the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull”, Negrete was released from his Spanish jail. Negrete would have regretted the absence from the list of those who helped to secure his release the name of the Anarchist, Carlo Tresca. (See my letter on the Negrete-Blackwell Defence Committee, Revolutionary History, volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988.)
I note that AI Richardson’s review of this book replies to Alba’s criticism of Trotsky. Whatever Trotsky may have said of the Spanish situation in general, the fact remains that the Trotskyist forces in Spain were down to a group of seven, and of that seven two were reputed to be police spies. One does not need to have read the complete works of Lenin. The biblical adage “by their fruits ye shall know them” is sufficient to appraise this fact. In 1936, according to Negrete, the Trotskyist group comprised approximately 30 persons. In the period up to 1937 the POUM increased its membership by tens of thousands, and the Communist Party by hundreds of thousands. This was a revolutionary situation, a situation, as Trotsky pointed out, in which the masses were on a higher level than those of Russia in 1917. The Trotskyist forces dwindled to vanishing point. To say they were hampered by being infiltrated by police spies won’t do. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was riddled with police spies. The leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was a police agent. In spite of this the Bolsheviks increased their membership and support by leaps and bounds. All the revolutionary rhetoric of Trotsky on Spain ended in three applications, by the Bolshevik Leninists, for membership of the POUM. The last application was made after the May day events, i.e. after the POUM “had entered the dustbin of history’. These facts are hardly known by the Trotskyist movement, and have certainly never to my knowledge been assessed.
Pierre Broué, who is by way of being an ‘official Trotskyist’ historian, in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, written in conjunction with Emile Temime, a work of 591 pages in the English translation, does not once mention the Bolshevik Leninists and their fate. Orwell, Oehler, Negrete, Morrow, Thomas and Alba all do. This silence on the part of Broué says more than words.
Ernest Rogers
Editor’s note: Ernie was misinformed by his sailor friends. Witte died in 1965.
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Melograni’s book, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts. The author has read widely, and generally speaking shows a mastery of his source material This, however, varies greatly in quality; excellent on many occasions, it is of most slender worth in others. The text, first published in Italy during 1985, clearly shows signs of its original purpose, a polemic directed against the PCI. The theme starkly stated on the dust cover is startlingly simple: “Lenin did not want world revolution, but rather ... conceived the idea of ‘Socialism in only one country’ from the moment he took power”. Further, “the Third International ... in fact was not founded to export revolution, but simply to defend one state” (p.xii). The text, we are told, “evoked lively criticism in the Italian press”. The Italian Communists, however, made no comment, and “chose to remain silent”. Where caution bade the million strong PCI to avoid the fray, this reviewer will now plunge headlong.
In support of his argument Melograni draws on sources hitherto little known in Italy, sources of which left wing historiography in this country fails to take proper note even today. Some of this material is touched upon in my Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921. Much of the rest is examined in my forthcoming volume on the Communist International, which has yet to see the light of day. These sources bear on the earliest days of the Comintern, the dark and shrouded history of the relations between Germany and the Bolsheviks both before and after the Communist seizure of power, and the secret diplomatic exchanges between the Soviet government and the former Entente powers in the years between 1918 and 1920. In my own view Melograni handles this material reasonably well. On occasion he seems to stretch the argument further than the documentation will warrant, for example, on Lloyd George’s wish “to revise the Versailles Treaty” (p.113), “the talks were proceeding in a cordial atmosphere” (p.117); or to use highly partisan evidence as though it were impartial, for example, Field Marshal Henry Wilson (not “General Wilson”) (p.117); or to be wrong on a point of fact, “Lloyd George did not expel the leader of the Soviet delegation” (p.119), on which cf Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement ..., p.254 n138, p.415; or to use a fairly worthless source to establish an important point, the FIAT evidence (p.105), the testimony of “former Trade Commissar Bronski” (pp.120-21), the tale “I was told” retailed by the “American journalist Frazier Hunt” (pp.49-50); or even to give an impression quite the reverse of the truth, for example the quotation to the effect that already in 1920 Soviet Russia had achieved “a formal peace with all the Western states”, whereas the first states to accord diplomatic recognition to the USSR were Italy and Britain, and this only in 1924, whilst so powerful a nation as the United States did not accord recognition until 1933. Nevertheless, many polemicists before have done the same, as will many more who will come after. The discerning reader will need to be wary. If he does that he will not go far wrong.
There remains the vexed question of Bolshevik-German relations, the most accessible introduction to which is Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867-1924, London, 1965. ‘Parvus’, it will be remembered, was Trotsky’s close mentor and associate, and with him the original author of the theory of the Permanent Revolution. Did the Kaiser’s Germany subsidise would-be secessionists and revolutionaries inside and outside the Tsar's Russia during the First World War? Was the outcome of the revolutionary struggles between March and October 1917 materially affected by the buckets of Allied and German gold sloshing around in Petrograd at that time? Did close relations between Bolshevik leaders (especially Lenin) and the German ruling elite continue between March and October 1918 and even beyond? My own view, as one who has deeply pondered the material involved over a long period of time, is that the answers to each of these questions is ‘Yes’. Readers of Revolutionary History will need to make up their own minds, and check out Melograni’s references for themselves.
Melograni sets out his thesis in a highly compact form – 20 chapters, some only four to five pages long, which traverse the whole period from the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 1918) to the Russian advance on Warsaw (July-August 1920), in a total of little more than 120 pages. This polished performance makes for accessibility to the general reader, although it leaves the specialist seeking more documentation than the text itself supplies. What then of Melograni’s thesis? Did Lenin and the Bolsheviks genuinely seek ‘world revolution’ between 1917 and 1920? Or was their aim merely the short to medium term survival of Bolshevik hegemony over the Soviet state, for which aim all talk of ‘world revolution’ was but a smoke screen and nothing more?
In regard to the German question, I find the charge of German support for the Bolsheviks both before and after 1917 amply proven. Without German support the October coup would never successfully have taken place, nor without it could Bolshevik rule have continued thereafter. Both then and subsequently (up to and including the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact) Soviet foreign policy continually sought an alliance with the pro-Eastern, anti-Versailles wing of the German bourgeoisie, and from Trotsky onwards contracted its own mutual arrangements for mutual aid with the German military, until Hitler cut them off after 1933. Since German Social Democrats leant to the ‘West’ rather than to the ‘East’ they became the bête noir of the Russian state, Comintern and KPD, as in the end ‘Social Fascism’ itself bore out. (This ground is traversed in Chapters 1, 4, 11 and 12 in particular.)
Bolshevism’s struggle for an accommodation with defeated Germany did not at all prevent it working also for an accommodation with the victorious Entente as well. At the time of the near victorious advance on Warsaw in mid-summer 1920, the secret diplomatic manoeuvrings of Kamenev and Krassin with Lloyd George in London, as Melograni argues, were conducted in terms and tactics quite at odds with the slogans advanced by the Comintern and its parties both in Britain and elsewhere at the same time. The Comintern’s “turn to the East”, its Baku Congress of the Peoples of the Orient, and Roy’s subsequent revolutionary expedition to the very frontiers of Afghanistan, were indeed intended in part as a “diversion in Asia”, to ease pressure on the revolution more near at home. The Bolsheviks did indeed negotiate to trade these ventures off against diplomatic recognition, and to some extent, in the end, actually did so (Chapters 9, 14-19). On the other hand the Hungarian Revolution did seek to promote revolution in Austria (where a coup was in fact attempted), in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and Melograni’s endeavour to suggest that this was done against Lenin’s will is quite unconvincing (Chapter 10).
On balance then, I find the case for Melograni’s thesis unproven. What is quite clear from his evidence, and it may be that no one has ever made it quite so clear before, is that the Bolsheviks were continually running ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ policies at the same time. If the Russian advance reached Warsaw and the outcome was a new European settlement, well and good. If the Polish puppet government, constituted at Lublin out of Comintern cadres, took over the state, and another puppet government constituted out of German cadres held over from the Second World Congress of the Comintern, invited the Red Army to ‘protect’ the German Revolution in Berlin, so much the better. In the same fashion Bolshevik delegates negotiating with the British did promise to call off revolutionary propaganda abroad. So, in Asia, to some extent they did. More often the Russian state pleaded helplessness, explaining that the Communist Party and the Comintern were agencies outside its own control. A large measure of cynical manipulation and deliberate lying were thus integral parts of Bolshevik behaviour from the very beginning. The Comintern sprang from the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda at the Soviet Foreign Office, this at a time when Soviet foreign policy was ‘genuinely’ revolutionary, albeit that it was bound hand and foot to the Soviet Political Bureau from the very beginning. When Soviet home and foreign policy changed, Comintern policy, often after lengthy procedural and frictional delays, changed in line. Looked at in the light of history, it seems strange, 70 years later, that matters could ever have been seen in any other light. The Comintern, with it the Communist parties, signified the attempt to apply an aberrant Russian solution to what was primarily a European and Asian problem. As we can now see from the turmoil and wreckage of once Communist-ruled Central and Eastern Europe, that was an enterprise doomed from the start.
Melograni’s book does, however, raise contemporary issues which go far beyond the scope of its own brief pages. In particular it now behoves us to look more closely at the very issue of world revolution itself.
The Comintern at its foundation in March 1919 held that the “collapse of the Second International”, the havoc wrought by the First World War, and above all the October Revolution, signalled the irreparable decay of capitalism and the arrival of an era of world revolution. This ‘final crisis’ was so deep that capitalism was no longer able to maintain, still less to increase, the means of production. The political superstructure was now a barrier to any further increase of the productive forces. Only a revolution could release mankind from the crisis, and allow it to find a new way forward. World revolution was inevitable, not because people wanted it, but because without world revolution man could find no way forward. The ‘objective factors’ for revolution were complete. All that was lacking was the subjective factor, the necessary revolutionary ‘leadership’. The worldwide struggle for revolution required a unitary world leadership which was to be provided by the highly centralised national sections of the Comintern, each closely supervised and led by the yet more highly centralised ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’, the Executive Committee of the Communist International – ECCI – in Moscow. These were the propositions upon which the world Communist movement was founded. They were taken over intact as the fundamental basis of the Trotskyist movement, and remain its founding principles up to the present day.
Where stands this notion of world revolution more than 70 years later? It is clear that the world revolution has not yet arrived. Trotsky provided his own explanation. The Communist parties had become Stalinist, abandoned world revolution for the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, had thus become “counter revolutionary”. A new revolutionary leadership, a new, revolutionary Transitional Programme was required. Trotsky himself drafted the programme. The Fourth International was founded on his initiative during 1938. A further half a century and more has now elapsed. After 53 years the Fourth International is no more the ‘leadership’ of the world proletariat than it was at the beginning. Nor are any of the myriad Trotskyist ‘parties’, groups or sects markedly better placed.
Now the failures of this or that revolutionary sect or leadership cadre can very well be explained away by ‘subjective’ failings. But the failure of all such groups, over a whole historical era, can in no way be dealt with in this same fashion. Such an extended failure, over so prolonged a period of time, must surely be due to objective factors, not to subjective factors at all. It would seem, on the basis of the evidence, that we have critically to examine the notion of world revolution.
If world revolution was imminent in 1919, why has it not come about almost three quarters of a century later? The question cannot properly be evaded. A revolutionary epoch, after all, is one in which revolutions are on the order of the day. If we find ourselves in an epoch in which the great (Socialist) revolutions do not take place, in what sense may we legitimately term this a revolutionary era? One might, I suppose, once have argued in desperation that there were after all great revolutions, but in a degenerated form. At a time when the Soviet Union is clearly coming apart at the seams, at a time in which we have seen one by one, over the past 12 months, first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria break free of Communist rule, a total of some 110 million people, this would scarcely seem feasible any more.
What then went wrong? We have, I feel, to return to the original Marxian revolutionary syllogism to find the answer. People make revolutions not because they want to, but because they have to. They have to in the grand historical schema because the existing mode of production has become a fetter on the growth of the productive forces. The original expectation of the Comintern, the hidden premise upon which all else was founded, was the notion that twentieth century capitalism could no longer develop the productive forces. Even the quickest glance at the economic statistics covering the last 70 years will show that manifestly this is not the case. In point of fact the growth of productive forces in the twentieth century has been far greater than in the nineteenth century.
World output of inanimate energy, measured in million megawatt hour equivalent stood at 1,078 in 1860, rose to 6,089 in 1900, more than doubled again to 15,882 in 1940, and more than trebled to 53,206 in 1970. World output of steel, one million tons in 1870, stood at 29 million tons in 1900, and rose to 380 million tons by 1960. Industrial output per capita in Western Europe and the United States grew between 1900 and 1960, as shown in the following table:
If we turn to the United Kingdom we find that Gross Domestic Product at constant factor cost increased between 1855 and 1965 (taking 1913 as 100) as follows:
If we look instead to consumer expenditure in the United Kingdom we discover that this stood (at constant 1984 prices) at £58,543 million in 1900, and had increased to £194,673 by 1984. Food expenditure increased from £15,495 million to £28,448 million over the same period, expenditure on clothing from £3,415 million to £13,158 million, expenditure on consumer durables from £1,639 million to £19,241 million.
Clearly then, if revolutions are inevitable only when existing society can no longer develop the productive forces, and if existing capitalist society plainly does this, and does it very well, then surely all the expectations of ‘inevitable’ revolution, upon which ‘Trotskyism’ no less than ‘Communism’ have rested, simply fly straight out of the window.
Nor is that all. The notion that the ‘Socialist’ Stalinoid plan system, the command economy, is innately superior to that of advanced industrial capitalism can no longer be maintained either. The present economic crisis which threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union has clearly been brought about as a direct result of the failings of the ‘planned economy’ itself. The same holds true of every one of the other ‘planned economies’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Stalinist command economy, in the Soviet Union after 60 years (and despite all the appalling ‘sacrifices’), and Stalinist ‘planned economy’ in Eastern Europe after 40 years, have proved equally a failure. Most recent estimates put productivity in East Germany (the most advanced economy in the former Bloc) at one half or less than that of the Federal Republic.
Clearly there exists a problem as to where we go from here.
Walter Kendall
Note
1. My figures are taken from Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, pp.59, 75, 76; A.H. Halsey (Ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900, pp.146, 149; C.H. Feinstein, National Expenditure and Output in the United Kingdom 1855-1965, pp.T14, T19.
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For an organisation that has for over four decades paraded its patriotic virtues, the Communist Party of Great Britain must find the period of October 1939 to June 1941, when, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of Augus 1939, it opposed the Second World War somewhat embarrassing to recall Morgan’s detailed account of the CP’s activities and propaganda during those 21 months is, therefore, welcome, not least because it demolishes the commonplace myth that the CP reverted to a long forgotten Leninist orthodoxy during the anti-war period, and shows that it continued with a Popular Front approach, notwithstanding the dramatic policy changes
Although the classic Popular Front that the party was attempting to construct the late 1930s fragmented when the people attracted to it on a narrow anti-Fascist, patriotic basis split away when the switched to oppose the war, the party did not dispense with the Popular Front approach. Throughout this period, the CP called for a “people’s government”, although just what this represented and how it was to be achieved were never explicitly or consistently explained. Nor did it stop appealing to the usual Popular Front types, notwithstanding its reduced attraction to them. Morgan shows that in doing this, the CP often adapted to pacifism, and CP members downplayed their politics, protesting about the harsh consequences of the war, rather than making much propaganda about the war itself.
From mid-1940 the party’s main activity was promoting the People’s Convention. The Daily Worker carried statements of support from “engineers, railwaymen, academics, clergymen, pacifists, disenchanted supporters of the Conservative and Liberal Parties” as well as Labour Party activists and Communists, not to mention bandleaders, composers, sculptors, actors and actresses, a “well-known wrestler” and a bloke who could “do anything with a piano accordion” (pp.209-10).
The People’s Convention was held on 12 January 1941, and attracted 2,234 delegates reputedly representing 1.2 million people from 1,304 organisations. Its populist programme called vaguely for higher wages, the defence of democratic rights, emergency powers to take over the banks and large industries, ‘friendship’ with the Soviet Union, freedom for India, a ‘people’s government’ and a ‘people’s peace’, and made no direct reference to the imperialist nature of the war. And as Morgan notes, “the People’s Convention came at last to rest its hopes on the formation of a patriotic opposition within Parliament” (p.225), calling in May 1941 on MPs of all parties to rally behind its banner.
Any serious study of a Communist party must take into account the domestic pressures upon it, its own relationship with Moscow and the relationship between its nation state and the Kremlin. Morgan correctly states that “if the CP was unquestionably a genuine British working class party responsive to the British political situation, it was also, from another aspect, an ‘agent’ of Soviet foreign policy”, and adds that “possibly the main problem in writing Communist Party history (s to comprehend the sometimes complex relationship between the two” (pp.116-7). Moreover, he admits that “the broad lines of Communist policy were determined not by a rational appraisal of what was possible in British conditions but by the erratic directives of the distant heads of world Communism who could not have cared less about the fate of the British working class, nor of the British Communist Party for that matter” (p.51).
And yet in his introduction Morgan aims some sharp barbs at Trotskyist historians of the CP, complaining that their studies treat the party “as the disembodied incarnation of a political ‘line’ ... formulated in Moscow”, leading “inevitably to the conclusion that the paramount question posed by a study of the CP – of any CP – was to ascertain how the Soviet leadership arrived at a particular policy” (p.7), and that “an intelligent appreciation of the changing political environment – the objective framework – in which the CP operated is thus ruled out” (p.5).
Accusing ̵ and by no means fairly – the Trotskyists of ignoring the domestic influences upon the CP, Morgan, whatever his calls for a balanced appraisal, accentuates those influences almost to the exclusion of the general control of the Soviet bureaucracy over the official Communist movement, which leads him into adopting a one-sided approach, overestimating the domestic pressures upon the CP during both the Popular Front and the anti-war periods.
As a description of Communist policies and activities, Against Fascism and War is well worth reading, and is superior to anything produced by the party’s own historians. However, I cannot accept Morgan’s arguments, comparing the CP's ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric with its non-revolutionary practice, which he considers to be a sensible, albeit unconscious, recognition that conditions in prewar and wartime Britain were unlikely to develop into a revolutionary situation, and that its programme was, in fact, utopian.
Morgan’s conception of a peculiarly British brand of Communism does not stand up to the facts. The course of the British party, and the increasing nationalism and moderation during the Popular Front period, were common to the movement as a whole – even where class conflict was approaching a revolutionary level (as in France and Spain) – as were the ensuing twists and turns during the war. Differences between Communist parties were minor local variations on policies handed down by the Soviet bureaucracy. The Communists’ downplaying of their politics was not an implicit recognition of British political realities, but good old-fashioned opportunism. Neither hawking Hitler’s –peace’ offers in their daily paper, nor having to put up with constant jibes about their sharp policy reverses, could have been conducive to political discourse in the workplace or street.
Finally, Morgan asks us to “consider the hunger marches, the growth of the shop stewards’ movement, the untiring campaigns against appeasement and on behalf of Spain, consider the Birmingham rent strike, consider even the People’s Convention”, and concludes that “the balance will be found rather in the CP’s favour than against it” (p.309).
Nobody can doubt the integrity of people who joined the CP, especially when many of the activities in which Communists were involved took a great deal of courage. But the CP, like all Communist parties, spent an inordinate amount of its time and energy defending Stalin’s terror, repeating all the slanders of the Moscow Trials, blind to the convincing refutations and counter-evidence issued by other political trends at the time. Nothing can excuse those in responsible positions in the CP for this, nor for the slanders and violence against others in the labour movement. By making the word Communism synonymous with ties, slander, duplicity, repression, labour camps and mass murder, the official Communist movement has done incalculable damage to the cause of human progress and freedom. The ‘balance’ is not “in the CP’s favour” here.
Morgan’s attack on Trotskyist historians doesn’t stop at their “parody” of a Marxist approach. He says that Brian Pearce “deliberately misleads the reader into thinking that the CP” during the Popular Front period “opposed strikes ‘as inimical to the true interests of the working class’”. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, “with similar intent”, are condemned for devoting a mere 11 lines to the CP’s industrial activities between 1935 and 1941, compared to 36 pages on its opposition to strikes in the latter part of the Second World War (p.7).
A look at Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (p.205) shows that Pearce is referring to the Communist movement as a whole, not just Britain, and points to the moderating influence of the French Communist Party during the stormy times of the late 1930s. As for Bornstein and Richardson’s Two Steps Back, to quote from page ix: “this little book is not, and has no pretensions to be, a history of the Communist Party”, but is intended to look at it as part of the background for their two books on the history of British Trotskyism. The clash between Trotskyism and Stalinism on the industrial front only took off after June 1941, when the CP refused to back strikes, and the Trotskyists took a leading role in supporting the working class against the Churchill government. Prior to then, their main points of conflict with the CP were on other issues.
Morgan is naturally entitled to his opinions, but to say that Pearce, Bornstein and Richardson “deliberately” mislead their readers is quite unacceptable, and puts a question mark over Morgan’s own intentions and integrity.
Morgan’s claim that the CP continued with a Popular Front approach during its anti-war period is rather contentious, although perhaps not to readers of this journal. The evidence that he has presented is very useful for anyone studying the history of the CP. But, however much they may endear him to the Stalinist academics who seem to run the British labour movement history industry, his analysis and conclusions and, especially, his intemperate attacks upon other historians will not enhance his reputation amongst serious students of British working class history.
Paul Flewers
Commentary
This is the 75th Anniversary of the fall of Madrid and Barcelona (essentially unopposed militarily by the Republican forces)in the Spanish Civil War. That event effectively ended the war and started the forty year Franco “night of the long knives”. Normally, we of the international workers movement do not ‘celebrate’ such abject failures as defeat in Spain. However, as noted in many entries in this space, the lessons of Spain should be etched into the brain of every serious militant. Why? We could have won there and changed the whole course of history, at least Western history. The reasons for that failure are legion but I would urge every serious militant and every radical to read, for starters, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s “Lessons of The Spanish Civil War” at his Marxist Internet Archive site. We can argue out our differences on strategy from there.
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.
********
Reviews
Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, Transaction Books, 1988, pp323, £35.This is a thoroughly interesting and very detailed book, which must set our knowledge of the fascinating history of the POUM on a far firmer basis than ever before. Among a wealth of material we are told that Salvador Dali flirted briefly with Maurin's Bloque Obrera y Campesino (p.30), that it was Brandler and Willi Brandt who tried to persuade the POUM not to criticise the Moscow Trials (p.133), that the Edinburgh Revolutionary Socialist Party, later to become Trotskyist, attended the international Congress Against War and Fascism in Brussels organised by the London Bureau in the autumn of 1936 (p.156), and that strong suspicions remain that the Orlov who defected to the USA and Nin’s torturer were the same person (p.276, n6). An especially tasty morsel for British readers, now that the Communist Party is finally collapsing under the weight of its own infamy, is the note that the Daily Worker even ‘reported’ that the Monarchist flag had been raised alongside that of the POUM over the town halls occupied by the latter (p.204).
This said, a venomous anti-Trotskyist prejudice runs through the book from start to finish, distorting its analysis and even affecting its factual accuracy. Disregarding the history of Stalinist agents fanning the factional squabbles inside the International Left Opposition, we are told that the Landaus, Rosmer and Nin “had been driven away from the official Trotskyist movement by the sectarian suspicions of Trotsky himself” (p.283). Not that the authors are any partisans of Nin, clearly preferring Maurin to him, in spite of the fact that the modern reprint of the theoretical magazine of the Communist Left shows that they were streets ahead of anything the Bloque could produce. At one point before the fusion that created the POUM we are given a full summary of a speech by Maurin to the Madrid Ateneo; he was followed by Nin, not a word of whose speech is even hinted at (p.33).
After the formation of the POUM Nin is even attacked for the invitation to bring Trotsky to Spain (p.166). Felix Morrow’s superb book is described as “mainly remarkable for its Trotskyist biases” (p.290), and “based exclusively do notes amassed by Charles and Lois Orr” (p199). Doubt is cast upon the veracity of Paul and Clara Thalmann’s memoirs for being “Trotskyist”, without the authors feeling obliged to tell us that they subsequently became Anarchists, or even to substantiate their criticisms of them (pp.296-97). What the writers are pleased to call “the lethargic milieu of the small Trotskyist groupings” (p.40) were guilty, apparently, of exaggerating the “success of the official Communists in suppressing the POUM” (p.222), and of wasting “more ink and saliva attacking the POUM than they did the official Communist Party” (p.220). A side-swipe at the postwar Trotskyists castigates them for the failure of their movement in Vietnam, Bolivia and Sri Lanka (p.222), in the hope that we will not notice that these failures were precisely the result of following policies that were practically identical with those of the POUM itself in 1936.
Unable to answer Trotsky’s critique of the POUM, the authors subject him to continuous denigration. His struggle to reform the Comintern before 1933 is described as “infiltrating the official Communist apparatus” (p.89). Kronstadt, where he was not even present at the time, he apparently “brutally suppressed” (p.8) and “drowned in blood” (p.124). Although as commander of the army Trotsky accepted political responsibility for the suppression of the revolt, in fact he “stepped aside completely and demonstrably from the affair” (More on the Suppression of Kronstadt, 6 July 1938). In case we missed their first assertion, that Trotsky had a “real lack of knowledge” of what he was talking about in Spain (p.88), the writers feel the need to reassert it on at least three other occasions (pp.89, 130, 223).
Why this oversensitive concern? The answer glares at us from every page, that out of touch Trotsky might have been, but he was considerably less out of touch than the POUM. The POUM’s prissy sectarianism emerges at every point in the crisis. When dealing with the move of the PSOE to the left after 1934 the writers note that “if its radicalisation had been more extensive and prolonged” (p.113) something positive might have come of it. But what was the POUM’s attitude to this radicalisation? It was to keep itself apart from it and preach abstract Marxist purity at it from outside. This failure to enter the Socialist Party when its mass left was in ferment in effect handed over its youth to Stalinism, and the POUM to its executioners, not a few of whom came from precisely this milieu, or even from the Bloque’s own miseducated ranks (e.g. Rodriguez Salas, p.92). Trotsky’s repeated pleas for them to take the situation seriously and enter the PSOE youth are refuted by a series of laughable Talmudic devices, such as that the Socialist Party was itself “one of the initiators of the People’s Front” (p.223), or that to do so would have been to solve the problem in an “artificial” (p.41) or a “mechanical” way (p.89) (in spite of the fact that it was the Socialist Left that was specifically asking them to enter), and even on the grounds that to have gone in would have lost the Bloque’s own youth to Stalinism (p.82)! Yet the authors have the gall to castigate Trotsky for refusing “to countenance the slightest organisational flexibility in Spain” (p.90)! As to who was really “flexible” in the circumstances can easily be gauged by the fact that Trotsky advised the POUM to liquidate its own trade union chain, the FOUS, in order to enter the CNT and influence its ranks then in mass revolutionary ferment, whereas the POUM in fact entered the UGT and handed control over its unions to Stalinism, the springboard for counter-revolution in Catalonia. In the face of these facts the writers of this book first try to blame the CNT for this state of affairs (pp.129-30), and then try to use as an excuse for the POUM’s impotence in 1936 the fact that the POUM found itself, then, two months after the beginning of the revolution, without a base in the unions (p.130). And yet but a few pages later we are solemnly informed that “for political motives – and also later, for psychological and even for personal security reasons, the POUM had to get closer to the CNT” (p.173).
Dogmatic and rigid where it should have been “flexible”, on organisational matters, the POUM was “flexible” where it should have been principled, over the political ones. “To remain outside the People’s Front”, we are told, “would mean to swim against the stream to no profit, to lose the possibility of gaining a parliamentary tribune, to remain without contact with the masses, and to accept isolation. The POUM had not been founded simply to become a sect.” (p.97) In spite of their argument that the Popular Front was merely an electoral pact, and not a commitment to a bourgeois government in the middle of a workers’ revolution, the uncomfortable fact emerges that Maurin’s speech on the inauguration of Azana’s government began “by saying that this time the representative of the POUM will vote confidence in the government of Senor Azana” (p.100). Even more lame is the apology for Nin’s entry into the Council of the Catalan Generalitat. On 8 September 1936 Nin had declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat already virtually existed in Catalonia. Just over two weeks later he joined the government, and a fortnight after that it dissolved the local committees of the militias, and Nin himself had to go down to Lerida and persuade the local POUM to hand over its power to the municipality (p.140). Yet again the POUM justified its actions by an appeal to exceptional circumstances (as if a revolution in itself is not an ‘exceptional circumstance’): “the new government will have a working class majority ... but with some representatives of the petty bourgeoisie ... an original, and not long-lasting kind of revolutionary transition” (p.135). This blatant rejection of the Marxist analysis of the nature of labour politicians’ participation in a bourgeois state is supported by the most spectacular of theoretical contortions it is possible to read. “For the POUM the question was not one of principle, as far as government per se was concerned”, we are told. “As a Marxist party, it believed in the necessity of taking power. But could entry into a Generalitat administration be the same as taking power?” (p.l34) This is a good question, but it does not a good answer: “The real question was not whether it was correct to enter the Generalitat administration, but whether this should replace or be replaced by the Committee for Militias as an organ of working class power. But with nobody outside the POUM viewing the problem in these terms ...” (pp.135-36) “Nobody”? For the benefit of our writers, it should be quite clearly stated that the question during a revolution is precisely whose institutions should wield power, those of the working class or of the bourgeoisie. Not only were there those in the POUM who saw this clearly – the ‘Cell 72’ opposition led by Jose Rebull in Barcelona (whose views are censored completely out of this narrative) – but the much-maligned Leon Trotsky spent practically the whole of his time available trying to point this out. And that is the whole point.
It was indeed over the fundamental questions of Marxism that the Maurin Bloque, which ideologically dominated the POUM, was so lamentable. Its two-tier organisation (pp.24-25) shows that it was far from Bolshevist, and outside of conditions of extreme illegality it is certainly not the case that “cells of five members at the base” is an “organic structure typical of Leninist parties” (p.27). Its very name (Workers and Peasants Bloc) assumes that it is possible to have parties representing two classes at once, what Trotsky called the purest “Kuomintangism” transplanted onto Spanish soil. All its basic political assumptions were stagist, and Stalinist. The very speech of Maurin referred to above at the Madrid Ateneo “affirmed that Spain at that moment needed a ‘Jacobin’ republic”. “We believe Spain has begun its revolution”, said Maurin, “and that every effective revolution has two stages: the democratic revolution and the Socialist revolution. Without the first the second is impossible.” (p.33, cf. also p.29) Thus the confused statement of the basic position of the POUM in 1936 had a long history: “The Spanish Revolution is a revolution of the democratic socialist type.” (p.94) The command of Marxism by both the Bloque and its POUM offspring can be assessed by the repeated assertion that the petty bourgeoisie are capable of wielding state power as a class; Azana’s first government was described as such by Maurin (p.43), and this was repeated for Company’s Generalitat by Nin (p.139). But whereas Nin had forgotten the Marxism he once knew, there is little evidence that Maurin had ever learned it in the first place, having first declared that “in 1931 the CNT-FAI occupied, in their own way, a historical place comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917” (p.31), and then that he was “in favour of a seizure of power by factory committees” (p.44).
In view of this damning testimony, freely available from the book itself, the claim of the POUM to represent any sort of Marxism at all must remain in deep doubt: It is thus beside the point to grumble at incidental silly remarks, such as that the country of the classic Canovas system of rigged parliamentarism had “democratic traditions” (p.223), or to complain about the authors’ propensity to import fashionable modern feminist concerns into their discussion of the work of women revolutionaries in Spain (pp.285ff.). There are also signs that the documentary evidence has not been considered as closely as it should have been. Although they are acquainted with Negrete’s letters (pp.294-96), they show no knowledge at all of the whole pamphlet devoted to the May days in Barcelona written by Hugo Oehler (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.2, Summer 1988, pp23-29), and they prefer Munis’ opinion about the lack of contact between Bolshevik-Leninists and the Friends of Durruti during this crisis to that of ‘Casanovas’, even though he was there at the time leading the former group and Munis was abroad (p.199).
But however we evaluate the POUM, the Spanish Civil War in general, and the attitude revolutionaries should take up towards them, what is clear is that it cannot be done without a serious and careful consideration of this book. What a shame that its price places it only within reach of the respectable classes in society!
Al Richardson
The first and larger section of this book is written by Victor Alba, an old member of the POUM, and a participant in many of the events. He was there. The second and lesser part is by Stephen Schwartz.
Alba writes what amounts to a lenient obituary of the POUM. Somewhat bemused and puzzled by the fate of that party, he puts forward several reasons for its failure, one being that Joaquim Maurin, a leader of the party who was trapped in the Franco area at the commencement of the civil war, might have been a better leader than Andres Nin. Although Maurin survived the civil war and lived until 1973, and published several books on that war, Alba is unable to give us one quotation from them that proves he had a better understanding and position than Nin.
The main error of the POUM – its entry into the bourgeois Republican government, which proceeded to disband the Workers’ Militias – is excused on the ground that if it had failed to enter it, it would have lost support.
The effect of the POUM in damping down the leftward movement of its members is revealed in the following quotation: “It is worth recalling, 50 years later some facts that are nowhere in print, but which every POUM member knew at that time. The first is that the executive served as a brake where it could, on the most radical and sharp position of the local committees, especially those in Barcelona and Lleida and in the party youth organisation.” (p.120). In spite of what Alba says here, these facts were well known at the time and constituted the basis of the criticism of the POUM by the left.
The feebleness of the POUM in the second workers’ uprising in May 1937 is excused on the grounds of not wishing to respond to the provocation of the Stalinists. The authors’ use of “refusal to respond to provocation” reminds one of the character in the oft told story of two persons being shot by the Gestapo, in which one refuses to wear a blindfold and the other says “why do you have to cause trouble?”.
There is an incredibly rambling chapter on the Workers’ Militias, in which the author, 50 years after the events, fails to realise their importance, an importance the republican government revealed in its drive to disarm and suppress them.
Alba makes the remarkable statement that Grandizo Munis, the leader of the Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Leninists, “did not even know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti, until the events [of 3 May 1937 – ER] took place” (p.199). This statement is supported by a footnote which refers to “Munis in conversation with Stephen Schwartz”. The following would seem to prove otherwise. In Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution (North Carolina Press, 1979), we are told that the Friends of Durruti were officially constituted in mid-March. The organisation increased its membership, according to Balius (vice secretary) to between four and five thousand by the beginning of May. He also quotes Munis: “We worked fraternally with the workers of the Friends of Durruti and they helped us in the sale and distribution of our newspaper”. (Unser Wort, early May 1939, >in Bolloten, p.394).
Bolloten goes on to quote a leading member of the POUM, Juan Andrade, as saying: “In the last days of April, they, the Friends of Durruti, plastered Barcelona with their slogans.” (p.401) Negrete published in the Hugo Oehler’s Fourth International of June 1937 a report of the first public meeting, on Sunday 18 April 1937, of the Friends of Durruti. So Alba and Schwartz ask us to believe that Munis did not know of the existence of the Friends of Durruti until 3 May, although they came into official existence in the middle of March, held their first public meeting on 18 April, and plastered Barcelona with their slogans at the end of April. This item alone indicates the carelessness and unreliability of the authors.
Alba does endeavour, however inadequately, to deal with the facts and the errors of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. Schwartz is different, and would appear to be a journalist with literary ambitions. For him, the Spanish Civil War is not a battle of the classes for the future domination of Europe, in which all the parties and groupings are on trial, but rather a picturesque event giving rise to various styles of Belles Letters; of reminiscences, some sentimental, others abrasive, and some even bilious. For Schwartz, the issues in the Spanish Civil War for which so many fought and died were only a ‘miasma’. For example, Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Note Book, dealing with the first six months of the Revolution and the Civil War, is treated as a feminist and sentimental account. As the following excerpt proves, Mary Low’s account was far from being sentimental.
We were not long in the Generality. Things were rapidly moving to a different solution and the bourgeois democratic element became stronger every day. Nin was pushed out of the Ministry of Justice ... During the time when the crisis was coming to a head, we saw Nin every night at the newspaper office. “Will they manage to push us out?”, we invariably asked. Nin shook his head: “I don’t think so, Companys said today he’d resign the Presidency if the POUM went.” Since he had been in the Generality he had always been optimistic, perhaps too diplomatic. “It’s only a matter of hanging on now,” he would say. “If we can hold on these next two or three days we’ll weather it. It’s bound to come to an end.” ...In the end they made us go, thanks to the pressure exerted by Moscow. (pp.210-1)Schwartz reports how Russell N. Blackwell (Rosalio Negrete) obtained a Spanish passport and stowed away on a ship to France. He does not point out why. The US State Department refused to issue passports valid for Spain, and any passports they did issue were stamped “Not valid for Spain”.
Schwartz refers to the many persons with whom Negrete had discussions whilst in Barcelona. One person to whom he does not refer is August Thalheimer. The Leninist League of Glasgow, which was a member of the Oehlerite International Contact Commission, received from Negrete, posted at Perpignan, on the French side of the frontier, a code for communication to and from Barcelona. The first document we had to use it on was a lengthy thesis on the Spanish situation by Thalheimer, which Negrete had typed out.
Schwartz quotes a Charles Orr as a reference for Hugo Oehler. Who Charles Orr is that he should be used as a reference for Oehler, we are not told. Schwartz either doesn’t know, or does not wish anyone else to know, that Oehler fought on the barricades on 3 May, and wrote one of the most authoritative reports of chat struggle.
Schwartz says that Negrete “met frequently with the Greek Archeiomarxist leader about whom we know little”. Witte, as he was known then, whose real name was Demetrios Giotopoulos, had been a leading member of the Trotskyist International Communist League. There is a 5,000 word account by him on the situation in the British section. In 1933 he broke with Trotsky over the entry into the Second International. He was the Greek representative on the London Bureau, and claimed to represent over 20,000 workers. During Easter 1938, representing the Leninist League of Glasgow, I had a long discussion with Witte in Paris. He had just been served his third expulsion order as an undesirable alien. In 1945, while awaiting trial in a London prison for political offences during the war, I met three Greek sailors charged with ‘mutiny on the high seas’. They told me that Witte had been beaten to death in a police cell in Athens.
On this trip I briefly met Gorkin at the headquarters of the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan, the French sister party, around which the POUM refugees were grouped. The Union Communiste group of G. Davoust, publisher of L’International, with whom I had a discussion at this time, played the same role with Friends of Durruti. At that time I was mainly interested in the Union Communiste’s connection with the print workers of Paris, in which they had a big influence. After the war I heard that Davoust had been tortured by the Gestapo, and was very ill.
The few survivors of those who picketed the US State Department and the Spanish Embassy will be surprised to hear that, according to Schwartz, “thanks to pressure from the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull”, Negrete was released from his Spanish jail. Negrete would have regretted the absence from the list of those who helped to secure his release the name of the Anarchist, Carlo Tresca. (See my letter on the Negrete-Blackwell Defence Committee, Revolutionary History, volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988.)
I note that AI Richardson’s review of this book replies to Alba’s criticism of Trotsky. Whatever Trotsky may have said of the Spanish situation in general, the fact remains that the Trotskyist forces in Spain were down to a group of seven, and of that seven two were reputed to be police spies. One does not need to have read the complete works of Lenin. The biblical adage “by their fruits ye shall know them” is sufficient to appraise this fact. In 1936, according to Negrete, the Trotskyist group comprised approximately 30 persons. In the period up to 1937 the POUM increased its membership by tens of thousands, and the Communist Party by hundreds of thousands. This was a revolutionary situation, a situation, as Trotsky pointed out, in which the masses were on a higher level than those of Russia in 1917. The Trotskyist forces dwindled to vanishing point. To say they were hampered by being infiltrated by police spies won’t do. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was riddled with police spies. The leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was a police agent. In spite of this the Bolsheviks increased their membership and support by leaps and bounds. All the revolutionary rhetoric of Trotsky on Spain ended in three applications, by the Bolshevik Leninists, for membership of the POUM. The last application was made after the May day events, i.e. after the POUM “had entered the dustbin of history’. These facts are hardly known by the Trotskyist movement, and have certainly never to my knowledge been assessed.
Pierre Broué, who is by way of being an ‘official Trotskyist’ historian, in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, written in conjunction with Emile Temime, a work of 591 pages in the English translation, does not once mention the Bolshevik Leninists and their fate. Orwell, Oehler, Negrete, Morrow, Thomas and Alba all do. This silence on the part of Broué says more than words.
Ernest Rogers
Editor’s note: Ernie was misinformed by his sailor friends. Witte died in 1965.
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Reviews
Piero Melograni, Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State 1917-1920, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1990, 02.95Melograni’s book, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts. The author has read widely, and generally speaking shows a mastery of his source material This, however, varies greatly in quality; excellent on many occasions, it is of most slender worth in others. The text, first published in Italy during 1985, clearly shows signs of its original purpose, a polemic directed against the PCI. The theme starkly stated on the dust cover is startlingly simple: “Lenin did not want world revolution, but rather ... conceived the idea of ‘Socialism in only one country’ from the moment he took power”. Further, “the Third International ... in fact was not founded to export revolution, but simply to defend one state” (p.xii). The text, we are told, “evoked lively criticism in the Italian press”. The Italian Communists, however, made no comment, and “chose to remain silent”. Where caution bade the million strong PCI to avoid the fray, this reviewer will now plunge headlong.
In support of his argument Melograni draws on sources hitherto little known in Italy, sources of which left wing historiography in this country fails to take proper note even today. Some of this material is touched upon in my Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921. Much of the rest is examined in my forthcoming volume on the Communist International, which has yet to see the light of day. These sources bear on the earliest days of the Comintern, the dark and shrouded history of the relations between Germany and the Bolsheviks both before and after the Communist seizure of power, and the secret diplomatic exchanges between the Soviet government and the former Entente powers in the years between 1918 and 1920. In my own view Melograni handles this material reasonably well. On occasion he seems to stretch the argument further than the documentation will warrant, for example, on Lloyd George’s wish “to revise the Versailles Treaty” (p.113), “the talks were proceeding in a cordial atmosphere” (p.117); or to use highly partisan evidence as though it were impartial, for example, Field Marshal Henry Wilson (not “General Wilson”) (p.117); or to be wrong on a point of fact, “Lloyd George did not expel the leader of the Soviet delegation” (p.119), on which cf Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement ..., p.254 n138, p.415; or to use a fairly worthless source to establish an important point, the FIAT evidence (p.105), the testimony of “former Trade Commissar Bronski” (pp.120-21), the tale “I was told” retailed by the “American journalist Frazier Hunt” (pp.49-50); or even to give an impression quite the reverse of the truth, for example the quotation to the effect that already in 1920 Soviet Russia had achieved “a formal peace with all the Western states”, whereas the first states to accord diplomatic recognition to the USSR were Italy and Britain, and this only in 1924, whilst so powerful a nation as the United States did not accord recognition until 1933. Nevertheless, many polemicists before have done the same, as will many more who will come after. The discerning reader will need to be wary. If he does that he will not go far wrong.
There remains the vexed question of Bolshevik-German relations, the most accessible introduction to which is Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867-1924, London, 1965. ‘Parvus’, it will be remembered, was Trotsky’s close mentor and associate, and with him the original author of the theory of the Permanent Revolution. Did the Kaiser’s Germany subsidise would-be secessionists and revolutionaries inside and outside the Tsar's Russia during the First World War? Was the outcome of the revolutionary struggles between March and October 1917 materially affected by the buckets of Allied and German gold sloshing around in Petrograd at that time? Did close relations between Bolshevik leaders (especially Lenin) and the German ruling elite continue between March and October 1918 and even beyond? My own view, as one who has deeply pondered the material involved over a long period of time, is that the answers to each of these questions is ‘Yes’. Readers of Revolutionary History will need to make up their own minds, and check out Melograni’s references for themselves.
Melograni sets out his thesis in a highly compact form – 20 chapters, some only four to five pages long, which traverse the whole period from the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 1918) to the Russian advance on Warsaw (July-August 1920), in a total of little more than 120 pages. This polished performance makes for accessibility to the general reader, although it leaves the specialist seeking more documentation than the text itself supplies. What then of Melograni’s thesis? Did Lenin and the Bolsheviks genuinely seek ‘world revolution’ between 1917 and 1920? Or was their aim merely the short to medium term survival of Bolshevik hegemony over the Soviet state, for which aim all talk of ‘world revolution’ was but a smoke screen and nothing more?
In regard to the German question, I find the charge of German support for the Bolsheviks both before and after 1917 amply proven. Without German support the October coup would never successfully have taken place, nor without it could Bolshevik rule have continued thereafter. Both then and subsequently (up to and including the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact) Soviet foreign policy continually sought an alliance with the pro-Eastern, anti-Versailles wing of the German bourgeoisie, and from Trotsky onwards contracted its own mutual arrangements for mutual aid with the German military, until Hitler cut them off after 1933. Since German Social Democrats leant to the ‘West’ rather than to the ‘East’ they became the bête noir of the Russian state, Comintern and KPD, as in the end ‘Social Fascism’ itself bore out. (This ground is traversed in Chapters 1, 4, 11 and 12 in particular.)
Bolshevism’s struggle for an accommodation with defeated Germany did not at all prevent it working also for an accommodation with the victorious Entente as well. At the time of the near victorious advance on Warsaw in mid-summer 1920, the secret diplomatic manoeuvrings of Kamenev and Krassin with Lloyd George in London, as Melograni argues, were conducted in terms and tactics quite at odds with the slogans advanced by the Comintern and its parties both in Britain and elsewhere at the same time. The Comintern’s “turn to the East”, its Baku Congress of the Peoples of the Orient, and Roy’s subsequent revolutionary expedition to the very frontiers of Afghanistan, were indeed intended in part as a “diversion in Asia”, to ease pressure on the revolution more near at home. The Bolsheviks did indeed negotiate to trade these ventures off against diplomatic recognition, and to some extent, in the end, actually did so (Chapters 9, 14-19). On the other hand the Hungarian Revolution did seek to promote revolution in Austria (where a coup was in fact attempted), in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and Melograni’s endeavour to suggest that this was done against Lenin’s will is quite unconvincing (Chapter 10).
On balance then, I find the case for Melograni’s thesis unproven. What is quite clear from his evidence, and it may be that no one has ever made it quite so clear before, is that the Bolsheviks were continually running ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ policies at the same time. If the Russian advance reached Warsaw and the outcome was a new European settlement, well and good. If the Polish puppet government, constituted at Lublin out of Comintern cadres, took over the state, and another puppet government constituted out of German cadres held over from the Second World Congress of the Comintern, invited the Red Army to ‘protect’ the German Revolution in Berlin, so much the better. In the same fashion Bolshevik delegates negotiating with the British did promise to call off revolutionary propaganda abroad. So, in Asia, to some extent they did. More often the Russian state pleaded helplessness, explaining that the Communist Party and the Comintern were agencies outside its own control. A large measure of cynical manipulation and deliberate lying were thus integral parts of Bolshevik behaviour from the very beginning. The Comintern sprang from the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda at the Soviet Foreign Office, this at a time when Soviet foreign policy was ‘genuinely’ revolutionary, albeit that it was bound hand and foot to the Soviet Political Bureau from the very beginning. When Soviet home and foreign policy changed, Comintern policy, often after lengthy procedural and frictional delays, changed in line. Looked at in the light of history, it seems strange, 70 years later, that matters could ever have been seen in any other light. The Comintern, with it the Communist parties, signified the attempt to apply an aberrant Russian solution to what was primarily a European and Asian problem. As we can now see from the turmoil and wreckage of once Communist-ruled Central and Eastern Europe, that was an enterprise doomed from the start.
Melograni’s book does, however, raise contemporary issues which go far beyond the scope of its own brief pages. In particular it now behoves us to look more closely at the very issue of world revolution itself.
The Comintern at its foundation in March 1919 held that the “collapse of the Second International”, the havoc wrought by the First World War, and above all the October Revolution, signalled the irreparable decay of capitalism and the arrival of an era of world revolution. This ‘final crisis’ was so deep that capitalism was no longer able to maintain, still less to increase, the means of production. The political superstructure was now a barrier to any further increase of the productive forces. Only a revolution could release mankind from the crisis, and allow it to find a new way forward. World revolution was inevitable, not because people wanted it, but because without world revolution man could find no way forward. The ‘objective factors’ for revolution were complete. All that was lacking was the subjective factor, the necessary revolutionary ‘leadership’. The worldwide struggle for revolution required a unitary world leadership which was to be provided by the highly centralised national sections of the Comintern, each closely supervised and led by the yet more highly centralised ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’, the Executive Committee of the Communist International – ECCI – in Moscow. These were the propositions upon which the world Communist movement was founded. They were taken over intact as the fundamental basis of the Trotskyist movement, and remain its founding principles up to the present day.
Where stands this notion of world revolution more than 70 years later? It is clear that the world revolution has not yet arrived. Trotsky provided his own explanation. The Communist parties had become Stalinist, abandoned world revolution for the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, had thus become “counter revolutionary”. A new revolutionary leadership, a new, revolutionary Transitional Programme was required. Trotsky himself drafted the programme. The Fourth International was founded on his initiative during 1938. A further half a century and more has now elapsed. After 53 years the Fourth International is no more the ‘leadership’ of the world proletariat than it was at the beginning. Nor are any of the myriad Trotskyist ‘parties’, groups or sects markedly better placed.
Now the failures of this or that revolutionary sect or leadership cadre can very well be explained away by ‘subjective’ failings. But the failure of all such groups, over a whole historical era, can in no way be dealt with in this same fashion. Such an extended failure, over so prolonged a period of time, must surely be due to objective factors, not to subjective factors at all. It would seem, on the basis of the evidence, that we have critically to examine the notion of world revolution.
If world revolution was imminent in 1919, why has it not come about almost three quarters of a century later? The question cannot properly be evaded. A revolutionary epoch, after all, is one in which revolutions are on the order of the day. If we find ourselves in an epoch in which the great (Socialist) revolutions do not take place, in what sense may we legitimately term this a revolutionary era? One might, I suppose, once have argued in desperation that there were after all great revolutions, but in a degenerated form. At a time when the Soviet Union is clearly coming apart at the seams, at a time in which we have seen one by one, over the past 12 months, first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria break free of Communist rule, a total of some 110 million people, this would scarcely seem feasible any more.
What then went wrong? We have, I feel, to return to the original Marxian revolutionary syllogism to find the answer. People make revolutions not because they want to, but because they have to. They have to in the grand historical schema because the existing mode of production has become a fetter on the growth of the productive forces. The original expectation of the Comintern, the hidden premise upon which all else was founded, was the notion that twentieth century capitalism could no longer develop the productive forces. Even the quickest glance at the economic statistics covering the last 70 years will show that manifestly this is not the case. In point of fact the growth of productive forces in the twentieth century has been far greater than in the nineteenth century.
World output of inanimate energy, measured in million megawatt hour equivalent stood at 1,078 in 1860, rose to 6,089 in 1900, more than doubled again to 15,882 in 1940, and more than trebled to 53,206 in 1970. World output of steel, one million tons in 1870, stood at 29 million tons in 1900, and rose to 380 million tons by 1960. Industrial output per capita in Western Europe and the United States grew between 1900 and 1960, as shown in the following table:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
| 1901 | ||
| 1937 | ||
| 1960 |
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
| 1855 | ||||
| 1875 | ||||
| 1900 |
Clearly then, if revolutions are inevitable only when existing society can no longer develop the productive forces, and if existing capitalist society plainly does this, and does it very well, then surely all the expectations of ‘inevitable’ revolution, upon which ‘Trotskyism’ no less than ‘Communism’ have rested, simply fly straight out of the window.
Nor is that all. The notion that the ‘Socialist’ Stalinoid plan system, the command economy, is innately superior to that of advanced industrial capitalism can no longer be maintained either. The present economic crisis which threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union has clearly been brought about as a direct result of the failings of the ‘planned economy’ itself. The same holds true of every one of the other ‘planned economies’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Stalinist command economy, in the Soviet Union after 60 years (and despite all the appalling ‘sacrifices’), and Stalinist ‘planned economy’ in Eastern Europe after 40 years, have proved equally a failure. Most recent estimates put productivity in East Germany (the most advanced economy in the former Bloc) at one half or less than that of the Federal Republic.
Clearly there exists a problem as to where we go from here.
Walter Kendall
Note
1. My figures are taken from Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, pp.59, 75, 76; A.H. Halsey (Ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900, pp.146, 149; C.H. Feinstein, National Expenditure and Output in the United Kingdom 1855-1965, pp.T14, T19.
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Reviews
Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-41, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989, pp328, £40For an organisation that has for over four decades paraded its patriotic virtues, the Communist Party of Great Britain must find the period of October 1939 to June 1941, when, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of Augus 1939, it opposed the Second World War somewhat embarrassing to recall Morgan’s detailed account of the CP’s activities and propaganda during those 21 months is, therefore, welcome, not least because it demolishes the commonplace myth that the CP reverted to a long forgotten Leninist orthodoxy during the anti-war period, and shows that it continued with a Popular Front approach, notwithstanding the dramatic policy changes
Although the classic Popular Front that the party was attempting to construct the late 1930s fragmented when the people attracted to it on a narrow anti-Fascist, patriotic basis split away when the switched to oppose the war, the party did not dispense with the Popular Front approach. Throughout this period, the CP called for a “people’s government”, although just what this represented and how it was to be achieved were never explicitly or consistently explained. Nor did it stop appealing to the usual Popular Front types, notwithstanding its reduced attraction to them. Morgan shows that in doing this, the CP often adapted to pacifism, and CP members downplayed their politics, protesting about the harsh consequences of the war, rather than making much propaganda about the war itself.
From mid-1940 the party’s main activity was promoting the People’s Convention. The Daily Worker carried statements of support from “engineers, railwaymen, academics, clergymen, pacifists, disenchanted supporters of the Conservative and Liberal Parties” as well as Labour Party activists and Communists, not to mention bandleaders, composers, sculptors, actors and actresses, a “well-known wrestler” and a bloke who could “do anything with a piano accordion” (pp.209-10).
The People’s Convention was held on 12 January 1941, and attracted 2,234 delegates reputedly representing 1.2 million people from 1,304 organisations. Its populist programme called vaguely for higher wages, the defence of democratic rights, emergency powers to take over the banks and large industries, ‘friendship’ with the Soviet Union, freedom for India, a ‘people’s government’ and a ‘people’s peace’, and made no direct reference to the imperialist nature of the war. And as Morgan notes, “the People’s Convention came at last to rest its hopes on the formation of a patriotic opposition within Parliament” (p.225), calling in May 1941 on MPs of all parties to rally behind its banner.
Any serious study of a Communist party must take into account the domestic pressures upon it, its own relationship with Moscow and the relationship between its nation state and the Kremlin. Morgan correctly states that “if the CP was unquestionably a genuine British working class party responsive to the British political situation, it was also, from another aspect, an ‘agent’ of Soviet foreign policy”, and adds that “possibly the main problem in writing Communist Party history (s to comprehend the sometimes complex relationship between the two” (pp.116-7). Moreover, he admits that “the broad lines of Communist policy were determined not by a rational appraisal of what was possible in British conditions but by the erratic directives of the distant heads of world Communism who could not have cared less about the fate of the British working class, nor of the British Communist Party for that matter” (p.51).
And yet in his introduction Morgan aims some sharp barbs at Trotskyist historians of the CP, complaining that their studies treat the party “as the disembodied incarnation of a political ‘line’ ... formulated in Moscow”, leading “inevitably to the conclusion that the paramount question posed by a study of the CP – of any CP – was to ascertain how the Soviet leadership arrived at a particular policy” (p.7), and that “an intelligent appreciation of the changing political environment – the objective framework – in which the CP operated is thus ruled out” (p.5).
Accusing ̵ and by no means fairly – the Trotskyists of ignoring the domestic influences upon the CP, Morgan, whatever his calls for a balanced appraisal, accentuates those influences almost to the exclusion of the general control of the Soviet bureaucracy over the official Communist movement, which leads him into adopting a one-sided approach, overestimating the domestic pressures upon the CP during both the Popular Front and the anti-war periods.
As a description of Communist policies and activities, Against Fascism and War is well worth reading, and is superior to anything produced by the party’s own historians. However, I cannot accept Morgan’s arguments, comparing the CP's ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric with its non-revolutionary practice, which he considers to be a sensible, albeit unconscious, recognition that conditions in prewar and wartime Britain were unlikely to develop into a revolutionary situation, and that its programme was, in fact, utopian.
Morgan’s conception of a peculiarly British brand of Communism does not stand up to the facts. The course of the British party, and the increasing nationalism and moderation during the Popular Front period, were common to the movement as a whole – even where class conflict was approaching a revolutionary level (as in France and Spain) – as were the ensuing twists and turns during the war. Differences between Communist parties were minor local variations on policies handed down by the Soviet bureaucracy. The Communists’ downplaying of their politics was not an implicit recognition of British political realities, but good old-fashioned opportunism. Neither hawking Hitler’s –peace’ offers in their daily paper, nor having to put up with constant jibes about their sharp policy reverses, could have been conducive to political discourse in the workplace or street.
Finally, Morgan asks us to “consider the hunger marches, the growth of the shop stewards’ movement, the untiring campaigns against appeasement and on behalf of Spain, consider the Birmingham rent strike, consider even the People’s Convention”, and concludes that “the balance will be found rather in the CP’s favour than against it” (p.309).
Nobody can doubt the integrity of people who joined the CP, especially when many of the activities in which Communists were involved took a great deal of courage. But the CP, like all Communist parties, spent an inordinate amount of its time and energy defending Stalin’s terror, repeating all the slanders of the Moscow Trials, blind to the convincing refutations and counter-evidence issued by other political trends at the time. Nothing can excuse those in responsible positions in the CP for this, nor for the slanders and violence against others in the labour movement. By making the word Communism synonymous with ties, slander, duplicity, repression, labour camps and mass murder, the official Communist movement has done incalculable damage to the cause of human progress and freedom. The ‘balance’ is not “in the CP’s favour” here.
Morgan’s attack on Trotskyist historians doesn’t stop at their “parody” of a Marxist approach. He says that Brian Pearce “deliberately misleads the reader into thinking that the CP” during the Popular Front period “opposed strikes ‘as inimical to the true interests of the working class’”. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, “with similar intent”, are condemned for devoting a mere 11 lines to the CP’s industrial activities between 1935 and 1941, compared to 36 pages on its opposition to strikes in the latter part of the Second World War (p.7).
A look at Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (p.205) shows that Pearce is referring to the Communist movement as a whole, not just Britain, and points to the moderating influence of the French Communist Party during the stormy times of the late 1930s. As for Bornstein and Richardson’s Two Steps Back, to quote from page ix: “this little book is not, and has no pretensions to be, a history of the Communist Party”, but is intended to look at it as part of the background for their two books on the history of British Trotskyism. The clash between Trotskyism and Stalinism on the industrial front only took off after June 1941, when the CP refused to back strikes, and the Trotskyists took a leading role in supporting the working class against the Churchill government. Prior to then, their main points of conflict with the CP were on other issues.
Morgan is naturally entitled to his opinions, but to say that Pearce, Bornstein and Richardson “deliberately” mislead their readers is quite unacceptable, and puts a question mark over Morgan’s own intentions and integrity.
Morgan’s claim that the CP continued with a Popular Front approach during its anti-war period is rather contentious, although perhaps not to readers of this journal. The evidence that he has presented is very useful for anyone studying the history of the CP. But, however much they may endear him to the Stalinist academics who seem to run the British labour movement history industry, his analysis and conclusions and, especially, his intemperate attacks upon other historians will not enhance his reputation amongst serious students of British working class history.
Paul Flewers
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