From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
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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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When it comes to dealing with the Russian influence, the author – who admits to joining the CPGB from the Labour Party and CND in the early 1960s ‘because it seemed to me at the time the only consistently revolutionary force in British society’ (p. 14) – is so staggeringly naive as to be almost beyond belief. ‘It would appear that by the mid-1930s direct Comintern subsidies had ceased and guidance and control had been much reduced’, he writes (p. 58), that ‘with Stalin’s death and the liquidation of the Cominform any remnants of direct Soviet supervision of the CPGB’s affairs came to an end’ (p. 10), and that after 1956 ‘there is no evidence that the subventions affected CPGB policy on other than minor matters’ (p. 112). Regarding the upper-class spies recruited to Soviet intelligence whilst at Cambridge by the policy of the Popular Front, ‘there is no evidence that the CP was in any way connected with their activities’ (p. 52). When dealing with the launching of the Daily Worker, it is noted that its editor had ‘virtually no journalistic experience’ (p. 50), but his real qualifications for the post are nowhere even hinted at, that he had already proved himself to be an unashamed liar in the service of the Soviet government as long ago as 1924, when he claimed that 700,000 workers and peasants in the Soviet Young Communist League had ‘unanimously’ condemned Trotsky’s political line (Workers Weekly, 12 December 1924). The ‘heroic effort and sacrifice’ of the British Communists that enabled the paper to appear receive due mention (p. 50), but not the rather more significant contributions of their Russian brethren, willing or otherwise. The curious will find an amusing account of what must have been nearer the true state of affairs here from the famous Chapter 22 of Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, but they will have to go to the Canadian version for it, for Pollitt managed to get that section largely suppressed by a lawsuit during the Second World War when ‘our heroic Soviet allies’ were doing their bit against Hitler.
A similar ingenuousness flows through the narrative when it comes to dealing with any ideological conflict in which the CPGB became embroiled. A fifth of the book is solely devoted to the low level factional squabbles of these latter years (pp. 170–217) whilst the party’s involvement in the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky receives one sentence and a footnote (p. 43, p. 225, n6). Again, we search in vain for any explanation, that it was precisely because of the party’s low theoretical level, and the absence of any significant political differences within it, that the CPGB was selected to be the instrument for Stalin’s purge of Trotsky and his supporters from the Executive Committee of the Communist International (cf. Against the Stream, p. 21). For the British leaders were a by-word in the Comintern for being ‘inept and stupid’ (H.M. Wicks, Eclipse of October, p. 135), their contributions at the plenums not infrequently being received by the other participants with their mouths behind their hands. And some of their starry-eyed attitude towards all things Russian appears to linger with our present writer. ‘Not even the collapse of the regime has fully resolved the question’ of the ‘purpose and motivation’ of the purges, he concludes, refusing even to commit himself about the assassination of Kirov, ‘whether or not engineered by Stalin’ (pp. 58–9). We are even reminded of their bare-faced cheek when confronted with the obvious fraud of the confessions, for footnote 53 on page 228 – ‘it is worth recollecting that individuals accused of terrorism in Britain in the 1970s were receiving life sentences on evidence no stronger than that adduced in the Moscow Trials’ – surely takes the biscuit here.
On the whole, however, the writer is a good deal harder on Soviet myths than he is upon the myths of his own party. Thus he explains Wal Hannington’s surviving the purge of the leadership at the Eleventh Congress in 1929 by ‘his great popularity as a mass leader of the unemployed’ (p. 45), apparently unaware that it was a recognised technique of the Comintern during the ‘Third Period’ to use the unemployed to attack the trade unions, apart from the fact that with its lumpenised and Bohemian clientele this was all the politics that was still open to the CPGB at the time. Joe Jacobs’ Out of the Ghetto is obviously not yet on respectable reading lists of Labour History studies, for Thompson can still repeat the story that ‘the Communist Party counter-attacked fiercely in 1936 and organised “the Battle of Cable Street”’ (p. 54). A little extra reading on the Spanish Civil War would also seem to be required, for the Soviet Union’s intervention there in favour of ‘a democratically elected, socially reforming republican government’ (p. 54) provided ‘the most reliable barrier against any further extension of Fascism’ (p. 58). He inverts the arguments of the CPGB and the Labour Party when he explains that the latter refused to accept the Popular Front because ‘its leaders were all too conscious that success required a far-reaching extension of Labour voting strength beyond its working-class base’. Anybody who has read Labour Monthly (e.g. July 1938, p. 417) and Herbert Morrison’s speeches at this time (cf. Conference Report, 1937, p. 163) can see that this is the reverse of the truth. He accepts on Noreen Branson’s authority that it was the CPGB which during the Blitz ‘assumed the lead in the campaign and direct action to have the London Underground stations used as bomb shelters’ (p. 70), whereas documentary evidence exists that this initiative came from the Trotskyist Workers International League. The Communists’ campaign against the Labour Party in 1945 in favour of another Churchill coalition government ‘could not be said to have been in any sense unprincipled’ (p. 73), and as far the electricians’ union ballot-rigging scandal is concerned, ‘the strong balance of probability is that the ETU officials acted independently of the CP leaders, who were not privy to their actions’ (p. 127).
Along with this ritual recital of hoary old falsehoods, we have some amazing feats of what can only be described as the historical equivalent of a case of waiter’s eyeballs. The pronounced and deliberate scabbing of the CPGB during 1941–45, which was so notorious that it inspired members of the Independent Labour Party to write scurrilous poems about it, is passed over in silence. No one would ever know that World News and Views had ever published the names of the leading Trotskyist entrists in the Labour Party so that Transport House would know whom to expel. The challenge of anyone to the left of the CPGB, or of any split-off from it to the left, is not even admitted until the 1960s. Not only are the original Balham Group and Eric Heffer’s opposition in the 1940s nowhere to be seen, but the narrative even manages to avoid mentioning that a substantial split from the CPGB after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 joined the Trotskyist movement. There is no effort to inform us that the reason all the Trotskyists were on the first Aldermaston March, but that the CPGB was absent and denounced it as ultra-leftist, was that the CPGB was supporting the Rapacki plan at the time. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that it is finally admitted that the CPGB only swung fully behind CND in 1960.
The main thesis of the book appears to be that the CPGB has always been a marginal organisation in this country, artificially founded due to events elsewhere, and that its history has been one of a slow realisation of the fact that its aims, objectives and actions had little in common with the traditions of the labour movement, until it happily came to terms with them with the formation of the present Democratic Left. There is a germ of truth in this, since the CPGB is, has been, and always was a sect, a term the writer is happy to apply to other organisations (pp. 165, 178), but denies with regard to his own (p. 15). This is all too evident when we turn to other factors not considered here, that for a very long time most members of the CPGB were born and not recruited into it, that its cadre have been for some years aging and aged, are overwhelmingly middle class, employ peculiar party language (‘progressives’, ‘the battle for peace’, ‘unstable elements’, etc.), and seem desperately anxious for respectability. But to attribute this from the start to Russian influence is to my mind mistaken. The sectarian character of the CPGB is shared by much of the rest of the Socialist thinking left in this country, which has no such record of standing to attention every time someone broke wind in the Kremlin, and is the authentic expression of the traditions of sectarian ‘Marxism’ in Britain going all the way back to the Social Democratic Federation, epitomised by the survival of the Socialist Party of Great Britain up to our own times. It is no more than the natural result of the domination of a mighty labour movement by the worst, the most myopic, the most unthinking and the most cowardly reformist leadership it is possible to imagine, proud of its insularity, its vulgarity, and its ignorance. But it was none other than Lenin who pointed the only way out of this impasse, of working for the creation of a revolutionary party by orienting towards the Labour Party. In this sense the British CPGB was not a ‘good old cause’ at all – it was a rotten effect.
In its early days, the ILP built up local support in Scotland, involving itself in trade unions, and it was largely due to this work that Glasgow, which had been a bastion of Liberalism in 1914, was by the 1920s dominated by Labour politics. Gradually, however, electioneering work took precedence, and, of course, by 1920 the ILP was rivalled on its left by the newly-formed Communist Party of Great Britain, and on its right by the Labour Party’s decision in 1918 to accept individual membership, with the result that the ILP steered a centre route between them, veering sometimes to the left, and at other times to the right. As early as 1919 John Paton, the ILP’s General Secretary, described his party as ‘a rudderless ship drifting at the mercy of all currents in the political seas’.
In his 1934 pamphlet The ILP and the Fourth International: In the Middle of the Road, Trotsky states that whilst the ILP had indubitably undergone a serious evolution to the left, standing on the left wing of the parties that adhered to the London-Amsterdam Bureau, its use of Marxist-Leninist phraseology without a Marxist understanding of society prevented its development as a revolutionary organisation, and resulted in it becoming an appendage of the Stalinised Communist International. No doubt this is the reason that following the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 – Arthur Henderson accused it of operating as ‘a party within a party’, a phrase which has continued to be used by the Labour Party against dissident left factions to this day – that the ILP steadily declined.
This book raises many questions appertaining to the present day with regard to revolutionary politics, organisation and the class struggle – which, after all, should be the reason we read such history. I could make some criticisms of the introductory and ultimate chapters in that they cover too wide a period in a sketchy manner, but for the student of labour history, this book is well worth reading.
The Spanish Civil War and
Contrary to the myth which was later cultivated, the union leaders supported the British government’s non-intervention policy which deprived the Spanish Republic of arms, whilst Franco’s forces were supplied by Germany and Italy. The response of ordinary trade unionists was much better, but the advocates of aid to the Spanish workers were almost completely ineffective. At the 1936 Labour Party conference, the trade union block vote lined up behind the leadership’s support for non-intervention, although the delegates rallied to the appeals of the Spanish fraternal delegates. Non-intervention was not rejected until 1937, when the war had been raging for a year.
Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was very appreciative of the support which the TUC and the Daily Herald gave to the government. The union leaders, in turn, were anxious that the government should issue statements which would give them some cover from rank and file criticisms. Both Bevin and Citrine lied systematically about their activities to give the impression that they were helping Spanish workers in ways that it would be indiscreet to mention. The National Union of Seamen actively scabbed, and persecuted its members who refused to sail to Franco-held territory, whilst Bevin sabotaged the attempts of Scandinavian seamen to black such cargoes.
Even the collection of money for humanitarian purposes (undertaken as a diversion from solidarity activity) was botched. The International Federation of Trade Unions originally wanted to hang on to the money which was raised until the war was over! The TUC found anti-Communism a useful weapon in justifying its inactivity. Any kind of support for Spain would play into the hands of the Reds. Yet the labour movement leaders’ attitude to the Communists was essentially pragmatic. In the early stages of the war, they were happy to ally with the Communists against Caballero and the Anarchists.
The Communist Party appears les impressive in this book than in acounts written by its supporters. The formation of the International Brigade is given full credit, but the party’s alternative to the official line, the Popular Front, would have dissolved the labour movement into bourgeois formations. As workers’ organisations in Britain were not divided on religious or ideological grounds, as they were in France and Spain, the claims of the Popular Front to contribute to workers’ unity were never plausible. The party’s support for the Stalinist reign of terror in Catalonia alienated the best militants, notably in the Independent Labour Party.
Could the response of the official labour movement to Spain have been different? Buchanan seems to think not. Support for an insurgent working class would have implied a different attitude to the class struggle in Britain, and a strong movement of solidarity with Spanish workers would have created intolerable strains for the bureaucracy. It is chillingly clear that the labour leaders were only tangentially concerned with Spain. From their point of view, their handling of the issue was a success, as they emerged with their control of the trade union machinery intact from the challenge of both militant tendencies and the Communist Party’s attempt to return to Lib-Lab politics. The bright spots in an otherwise bleak picture are the descriptions of mainly local rank and file initiatives, but these never seriously threatened official control.
The TUC’s collaboration with the Conservative government on Spain was a step on the road to ever closer involvement with successive governments, which after 1945 was to lead it to collaborate in imperialist efforts to combat trade unionism within the colonies. Whilst pleas for solidarity with the Spanish workers could be avoided by claiming that events there must not distract attention from real trade union issues in Britain, there were no such reservations when British governments asked for help in dealing with colonial workers. Buchanan’s remarks on the reasons for the bureaucracy’s victory over the militants are relevant to issues other than Spain. Today, after more than two generations of further degeneration, the trade union bureaucracy retains its power, whilst most of the left tries either to infiltrate it or bypass it.
The Appeal to Reason raised a very loud voice against all this, and called for the long overdue fulfilment of the American dream. Ranged alongside it in 1912 were no less than eight foreign language and five English language Socialist dailies, 262 English and 36 foreign language weeklies, 20 Socialist state legislators, one Socialist congressman, and 79 Socialist mayors in 24 states. Eugene Debs, an editor of The Appeal to Reason, polled 900,000 votes (six per cent of the total) as the Socialist Party Presidential candidate in 1912, and 919,000 votes in 1920.
In Yours For the Revolution the reader will find in the extracts from day-to-day reporting of political events, strikes and living and working conditions in field, farm, mine and factory over the length and breadth of the USA, a picture of America from below quite unrivalled elsewhere. The cartoons are astonishingly vivid. The short fiction and poetry reproduced make fascinating reading. The contributors extend from Jack London and Upton Sinclair through Helen Keller, Scott Nearing and Stephen Crane, to J.A. Mitchell, later founding editor of Life magazine.
What, then, went wrong? Socialist opposition to the First World War brought down a great wave of repression. The Russian Revolution and its wealthy offshoot, the Communist Party of the USA, split the Socialist ranks from top to bottom. American Socialism never recovered from these combined blows.
One wonders. Will Communism in the Soviet Union in 60 years time seem as out of place as does Socialism in the USA at the present time? The Anabaptists of the Middle Ages struck fear into the hearts of the mighty throughout Europe. Who remembers the Anabaptists today?
There are some signs, however, that this toleration of the most deplorable standards of reportage and analysis of modern Albanian affairs is coming to an end. In his introductory essay Tom Winnifrith notes that Halliday’s edition of Enver Hoxha’s memoirs ‘has no pretensions to boring academic standards’ (p. 11), adding (a bland comment, if ever there was one) that ‘the execution of Coti Xoxe in 1948 and the suicide of Mehmet Shehu in 1981 are not mentioned by Mr Bland, but why should they be in his account of the improvement in Albanian standards?’ (p. 11).
We have more than once commented in this magazine (Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 1, Summer 1990, pp. 21–6; Volume 3, no. 4, Autumn 1991, pp. 37–9) that materials already exist to make a proper assessment of the Hoxha-Alia regime. Why is no modern scholar coming forward to do it?
The present pamphlet is not an account of that process, but a study of Marxist theories of the national question. Where ‘Bikilia’ draws on his own and his comrades’ experiences, he is if anything too critical. Lenin is defended against fashionable and ignorant criticisms which take no account of the constraints produced by imperialist invasion. However, an attempt to overcome what he sees as the inadequacies of Marxist orthodoxy on the national question leads him to examine the contribution of Otto Bauer. (Predictably, Rosa Luxemburg’s contribution is dismissed as ‘economistic’ and ‘hyperworkerist’.)
Although he criticises aspects of Bauer, and doubts that his nostrum of separating politics from culture would work, ‘Bikilia’ accepts Bauer’s claim that nations are generally the product of an extremely long evolution, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. Although he realises that Austro-Marxist theories served to maintain the Social Democratic Party and the Habsburg Empire on which it was based, he sees no need to junk the Bauer-Stalin picture of nations as a community of culture. In fact, the most successful nationalisms (Basque, Irish and now Baltic) flourish where a community of culture is absent.
A postscript describing the effects of the disintegration of the Stalinist system gives no guidance in understanding those events. Given the author’s openmindedness and wealth of experience, that says a lot about the tradition from which it comes.
The SLP was the first Socialist party in the USA. Out of its activity, and (it must also be said) directly or indirectly out of its continually recurring splits and divisions, came most of the other more famous radical organisations, including the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Morris Hillquit, and the Industrial Workers of the World of Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St John. Three thousand strong at its foundation, 7000 strong with 72 locals in 1878, at its peak around 1896, the SLP possessed some 250 locals in no less than 25 states. Its weekly organ, The People, launched on 5 April 1891, and still in existence, is by now the oldest Socialist journal in the world. In 1896 The People (which ran as a daily between 1900 and 1913) claimed a circulation of 6,000 copies an issue, a figure which many contemporary revolutionary sects might well envy.
The range of foreign language journals published at one time or another by the SLP is truly astonishing. Their kaleidescopic range included journals in the Flemish, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Mexican, Polish, Scandinavian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Yugoslav languages, with a further publication in Esperanto thrown in for good measure. Some of these publications were short lived. Others, such as the Hungarian A Munkas (The Worker), which began life in 1904, were still being published in 1960. Boris Reinstein, a longstanding member of the SLP, was present at the founding congress of the Communist International in 1919. The British SLP contributed an important contingent to the Communist Party of Great Britain at its foundation. Brother parties to the US SLP were founded in Canada and Australia, and it also had some influence in South Africa.
Daniel De Leon, the leading figure in the SLP from his recruitment in 1900 to his death in 1914, was an intellectual authority of some weight in the Marxist movement of his time. A ‘pure’ revolutionary of a somewhat sectarian hue, he gave the party a detailed doctrine of its own which his successors have kept in pristine purity up to the present day (a detailed elaboration will be found in my The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–1921). Although not formally ‘democratic centralist’ by constitution, the SLP seems nevertheless to have been run in an authoritarian fashion by its New York head office from the very early years. In the first 23 years of its existence, the SLP went through some 11 National Secretaries. Arnold Petersen, the SLP’s own ‘man of iron’, ruled the party as National Secretary for the next 55 years, and his successor Nathan Karp for a further 11. Was this because of a rigid adherence to a particular ‘Marxist’ doctrine? Or was there some hidden ‘bureaucratic’ reason? One would like to know.
The SLP currently has some 200 members. In some ways no more than a sectarian relic from a long forgotten past, the SLP may in other ways still have a lesson to teach. The SLP has waited for ‘The Revolution’ for a full hundred years, and ‘The Revolution’ has still to come. Yet De Leon, the prime theoretician of the SLP was no fool. He proposed in 1901 that the party disaffiliate from the Second International on the grounds of its reformist character, an insight that Lenin was not to share until over a decade later. What went wrong? The question is one we all ought to ponder.
If you want a copy of this most interesting book, contact Frank Girardi at 4568 Richmond NW, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49504, USA, telephone 616-453-0305.
Löwy is not particularly drawn to an engagement in current philosophical debates. He continues on his own track, seeking political relevance and guidance from Marx’s writings, as well as from anti-mechanistic and anti-Stalinist contributions to revolutionary theory and practice. Löwy criticises an anti-humanist, technocratic and nature-exploiting Marxism, which is seen to crop up in figures as diverse as Plekhanov and Althusser, and which calls for the uninhibited expansion of the productive forces. He rejects the contributions of scientific Socialism, structuralist Marxism, and poststructuralist and analytical Marxism.
The true heritage of Marx’s project – ‘the pitiless criticism of everything that exists’ – he insists, is dialectical, historicist, humanist, anti-positivist and anti-evolutionist. This tradition is seen to take its clues more authentically from Marx himself, drawing on his central concepts of praxis: dialectics, the analysis of commodity fetishism, alienation, workers’ revolutionary self-emancipation, and is inspired by the utopia of a classless, stateless society. Löwy’s ‘good’ tradition of Marxism is set up to provide theoretical models of practice, which overcome the ‘dilemma of impotence’ manifested, according to Lukács, in the neo-Kantian ethics of pure intentions, a moralism unable to theorise active working-class self-emancipation, and the positivist fatalism of the necessary working out of pure laws, which infected Second International Marxism.
Löwy uncovers a very specific Marxist tradition which developed critically out of or in opposition to the inevitabilistic Social Darwinist optimism of Social Democracy, with its metaphysics of progress. Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky are discussed as providers of varying but connected examples of a theoretical-practical break from this tradition. They emphasise conscious proletarian activity in the context of ‘open’ historical processes: Socialism is conceived by them not as an inevitable consequence of the development of the productive forces, but as the potential result of consciously executed action, given the precondition of economic and social development. The only ‘necessary’ component is the eventual onset of barbarism, given the absence of Socialist revolution.
A common node in the theoretical writings of many of Löwy’s protagonists is a romantic idealist-inspired critique of both soulless capitalist society and mechanistic Marxism. Marxist political culture and romanticism are reconciled by Löwy specifically in their common critique of the ‘humanly regressive aspect of capitalism’. Löwy desires to bring to the forefront both an ethical, conscious and activist moment in class politics, and the ‘hidden romantic moment’ in Marxist political philosophy. For Löwy, Marxism is primarily a protest against industrial bourgeois society in the name of romantic and non-conservative ‘precapitalist’ values. This is the root of the author’s recurrent interest in primitive Communism and early societies. For Löwy, both romanticism and Socialism draw on the qualitative values of a precapitalist past – use values, ethical and organic community, aesthetic and religious values – rather than the quantitative values of capitalism.
In several senses, this analysis is consistent with his longstanding interest in questions concerning the peasantry and Third World revolutions. He responds favourably to those Marxists who have appealed to the peasantry and have, furthermore, politically integrated them as activists into a proletarian-led party. An essay in this collection on Marxism and the national question illustrates this concern. Löwy tends to judge the politics of Marxists by their assessment of the peasantry. One of the book’s few criticisms of Luxemburg (annoyingly called Rosa) disparages her underestimation of the revolutionary role of the peasantry and the oppressed. Connected with this concern is Löwy’s insistence that Marxism must take on the challenges of the new social movements.
Löwy’s important service is to write against the current academic mode which states that ‘Marxism is definitely dead for humanity’. He uncovers this attitude to have been a proposition floated by intellectuals recurrently throughout this century. Löwy’s retort is unambiguous and literal. He writes: ‘Socialism is not yet dead for the good reason that it is not yet born.’ The Soviet-orbit societies are analysed as non-capitalist, having existed without the central mechanism of private property, but also non-Socialist, because their political systems were undemocratic, and failed to empower the working class. He makes little structural study of the Eastern Bloc. He locates the degeneration of the Soviet Union and the deformation of the satellite states, but makes few comments about the specifics of their economic and political formation. He hints at how the isolated and impoverished situation of the early Soviet Union encouraged the development of a vicious bureaucratic caste, and asserts that Eastern Bloc societies were authoritarian, bureaucratic command economies, but economic-political reconstruction is not his aim. His essays serve rather more as manifesto-type writings which insist on the importance of utopia, the redemption of Marx, and an underground Marxist tradition of heretics, subversion and opposition to the bureaucracy, in the face of a newly-born, generalised ‘post-dictatorship over needs’ faith in the market.
The author tags himself onto the tradition of heretics who row against the streams of both inherited orthodox Marxism, now deeply wounded, and bourgeois ideology, which gleefully imagines the death of Marxism. He is keen to point out identities between revolutionary utopias and heretical forms of religion, including Jewish-German messianic culture and Latin American liberation theology.
On the whole, Löwy does not write about anyone he does not like. In this sense, the essays are generally affirmative pieces, engaged in bringing out a certain continuous tradition. In some ways, despite the author’s protestations against homogenising, the whole project of the book is to forge a firm tradition of good Marxism, and squeezes into profile differences between selected Marxists, rather than emphasising differences between them. Löwy tries, for example, to bring Lenin back closer to Luxemburg by minimising their differences. In similar fashion, he reconciles Weber with Marx in a discussion of Weber’s famous refutation of economistic historical materialism in The Protestant Ethic. Löwy, however, is forced to admit that the tradition he wishes to unearth is difficult to conceptualise. This comes out, for example, in his struggle with language. Running up against the limits of expression in language, borrowing a new word from Teodor Shanin – the ‘alternativity’ of history – demonstrates that the adequacy of language to practice is itself refracted through the importance of practice itself. If there is no concept for a practice, it is because for us that concept has had no practice. Sadly enough, Löwy’s ‘good’ Marxist tradition has often been shunted away from the terrain of actual political practice.
Benjamin becomes the most subtle exponent of Löwy’s alternative tradition of ‘warm Marxism’ (Bloch), and the four essays on German messianic Marxism are among the most passionate in the collection. Benjamin, read most passionately as a political philosopher, rather than as a cultural critic, is seen to undertake a ‘modern critique of modernity’. This consists in his rejection of modernity’s technological progress and the optimistic fatalism of the Second International, combined with an insistence on the necessity of revolution in the name of the sold-out values of equality, democracy and freedom, values of the first modern revolution, the French Revolution, whose tokens have yet to be cashed in.
Benjamin is recognised as an early prophet of two most pressing contemporary dangers: ecological disaster and military technological immolation. The author romanticises Benjamin somewhat, de-dialecticising Benjamin’s grasp of forces and relations of technological production, making him actually more anti-technology and more nature-loving than evidence from Benjamin’s writings actually yields. Löwy takes to heart a number of Benjamin’s powerful allegories, none more ardently perhaps than the notion of revolution as interruption, as the conscious and desperate grasp to the emergency brake to halt the unremitting surge of technological ‘progress’ which signals social regress. Löwy’s and Benjamin’s revolution looks nothing like Plekhanov’s locomotive forging without cessation down the one-way track of historical progress. Löwy insists repeatedly on the continuing relevance of the phrase ‘Socialism or barbarism’, and attempts to show that whether one or the other becomes our historical reality is purely a matter of the state of class struggle, and the commitment of revolutionaries to that struggle as well as to the conservation of nature.
Since the official ‘Fourth Internationals’ have studiously avoided mentioning our existence, readers of this magazine will be gratified to see the entry for Revolutionary History, though whether those whose corns have been trodden on by it would agree that it is a ‘non-partisan journal’ is a different matter (p. 232, no. 1375).
Amazing to relate, bibliographers seem to be fired by an almost Messianic sense of mission. In this case the compiler appears to believe that he has established proprietorial rights over the publications of the Trotskyist movement, deluding himself into thinking that he has every right to bombard those who lead busy enough lives already with incessant correspondence about them. Lubitz’s remarks about the ‘ignorance, stubbornness and idleness’ of some of those thus vexed (p. xxi) are no doubt aimed at such as John Archer and myself, who refused our cooperation on account of Lubitz’s objectionable habit of identifying the pseudonyms of living revolutionaries without so much as a by-your-leave, which he continues to do in this collection. Irritating as it may seem, Lubitz should realise that he is, after all, dealing with a living movement, however much it may look like a case of museum exhibits to him.
Romanian Trotskyists in Paris were also members of the ILO’s French section, the Ligue Communiste. Three of them – under the pseudonyms of ‘Cristian’, ‘Martin’ and ‘Victor’ – broke with the latter to take part in the creation of the Union Communiste in October 1933. Later that month the Union Communiste hoped to start ‘Romanian work’, which would have been carried on by its Romanian ‘groupe de langue’ (Procès-verbal de la réunion du Comité du 20-X-33, Archives G. Davoust), the activity of which was to have been oriented to Romania (Comité du 29-X-33, Archives G. Davoust). Two months later the Union Communiste united with the Gauche Communiste – which had emerged from the unification of three small groups in the aftermath of the Conference Politique de l’Opposition Communiste de Gauche organised in April-June 1933 by the Davoust-led Groupe de la Banlieue Ouest – whilst keeping the old name of the Union Communiste, and it is quite likely that by that time all attempts at starting ‘Romanian work’ were virtually dropped.
In the meantime, in November 1933 a young member of the Romanian Communist Party, David Korner, travelled to Paris for the first time. On that occasion, or on subsequent visits, he established contacts with the French Ligue, and became a Trotskyist. Under the pseudonym of ‘Barta’ he was among the founders – together with his companion ‘Louise’ and Nelu Grunberg, better known as ‘Nicholas Spoulber’ or ‘Marcoux’ – of the Bucharest BLG in 1935, which distinguished itself by its campaign against the Communist International’s Popular Front policy, and had to face police and Stalinist-Social Democratic persecution. (For further details, see Richard Moyon, Barta, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 49, January 1993, pp. 8-10, as well as the collection of Korner’s writings, Textes d’avant-guerre 1935-1939, Publications du GET, Fontenay-aux-Roses 1993).
As a result of the July 1936 events in Spain, ‘Barta’, ‘Louise’, ‘Marcoux’ and the latter’s companion decided to participate in the Spanish revolution. On their way to Spain, however, they decided to stop in Paris in October 1936, and were to remain there as members of the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, the new name adopted by the French section of the Fourth Internationalist movement. Their decision undoubtedly weakened the Bucharest BLG, which nevertheless seems to have survived until the time of the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938. This was, so to speak, the ‘second wave’ of Romanian Trotskyism – and the last one, as far as we know.
In the second chapter, entitled Victor Serge and the New York Anti-Stalinist Left, in which he considers Serge’s writings and political development over the years, Wald cites an observation made by Daniel Singer (author of The Road to Gdansk, 1982): ‘To bury Stalinism really means to revive the idea of Socialism, and to begin its construction all over again.’
In an essay repudiating a reference made by the historian Paul Buhle to ‘an undying revolutionary “faith”‘, Wald says: ‘What is required is the constant rethinking and reworking of data and ideas so as to approximate as closely as possible what has happened in the past and what we may expect in the future.’ Wald is possibly referring to the method of George Breitman, for five decades an activist in the US Trotskyist movement, and to whom Wald pays tribute in the last chapter of Part III of the book for his uncompromising interrogation of all empirical data, and his repudiation of Socialist groups which lacked an interest in the past, except inasmuch as they could use it to validate their own political line.
The Stalinists, of course, were past masters in the distortion of politics, economics and culture in support of a specific and temporary tactic, and in Chapter three of Part I, in reviewing recent books by three authors, Wald touches again on the matters discussed in his The New York Intellectuals (reviewed in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Autumn 1989), once again giving consideration to the Stalinist John Reed Clubs and the era of ‘proletarian culture’ during which unknown working-class writers were promoted, until the turn to the Popular Front dictated the dissolution of the John Reed Clubs in favour of the courting of well-known anti-Marxist writers such as Hemingway and Macleish, resulting in James T. Farrell and other Marxist writers who had condemned the Moscow Trials being denounced as ‘gangsters of the pen’.
In the same vein, Wald writes on the career of Howard Fast, whom many Socialists will know for his early books, Freedom Road, Conceived in Liberty and Citizen Tom Paine. Fast was a supporter of the Popular Front in the late 1930s, and joined the Communist Party during the Second World War. Unfortunately, the promise of his earlier books never flowered, because the ideology of the Popular Front ‘inculcated him with the notion that radical politics could be transmitted to a large audience in the garb of liberal sentiments and idealised patriotism all aimed at a reader imagined to represent the “common man”‘. Wald concludes that if Fast had been formed in a different period of American culture or had been subject to different influences after achieving his initial success in the 1940s, he might have made a contribution to our literature that would have commanded more respect, even if it had resulted in fewer sales.
In Chapter 19 of Part IV, Continuity in Working-class Literary Movements, Wald compares the 1930s ‘proletarian’ literature with the publications of Singlejack, a little press set up in the late 1970s by three West Coast longshoremen, the catalyst being Stan Weir, a leader of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party in the 1940s and 1950s. These books by workers are aimed at providing for workers images of themselves in the workplace, as these images are not being provided by popular literature or the media. Wald writes that whilst ‘proletarian’ literature dealt little with the actual process of work, but was devoted to depicting the social consequences of capitalism by showing down-and-outs, demoralised victims of unemployment, working-class solidarity in strikes, inspiring international developments such as the struggle against Fascism in Spain, ‘club-swinging cops, placards with Communist slogans, and the singing of the Internationale‘, the Singlejack books rarely offer working-class writers dramatising militant class struggles, or exhort readers to engage in revolutionary politics, although in at least one story, Night Shift in a Pickle Factory (1980), Wald considers that the writer, Steve Turner, subtly interweaves a number of Marxist economic concepts incorporating various strategies by capitalists to increase their profits and surplus value, so that Wald writes: ‘It is unlikely that one will come away from this story without a strong sense of the seething rebelliousness that lies beneath the surface of the US workforce – a rebelliousness awaiting leadership and focus.’
However, Wald concludes that although the Singlejack project is in certain ways more authentic than the 1930s ‘proletarian’ literature, as a natural expression of the need for workers to write, the publishing house to date has yet to make a mark with a memorable work of drama, vision and, especially, characterisation. Conversely, some of the 1930s ‘proletarian’ writing shows that memorable art could still triumph over dubious programmes. Wald refers to Ben Field’s Cow (in Proletarian Literature of the United States), in which the radical is characterised powerfully and ultimately as of heroic stature, probably as a result of the writer’s own radicalism and in accord with the visionary zeal of the 1930s movement as a whole, which are elements considerably tempered in the Singlejack books. However, whilst I agree that memorable literature requires strong characterisation, I am doubtful of the need for heroes – even radical heroes – and I tend to agree with Brecht: ‘Unhappy is the land which needs heroes.’ It has to be remembered that the Singlejack books are written and published in an age of disillusionment in which ‘heroes’ are knocked flat on their backs every day of the week, the current need being ‘to revive the idea of Socialism, and to begin its construction all over again’ …
With regard to ‘the constant rethinking and reworking of data’, Wald reviews Maurice Isserman’s Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown 1982). Isserman is one of the younger US historians, such as Paul Buhle, Roger Keeran, Mark Naison and Kenneth Waltzer, who are challenging the traditional histories of US Communism (for example, Theodor Draper’s Fund for the Republic’s Project on Communism and American Life, and Howe and Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History). Isserman’s book covers roughly the same period as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s Two Steps Back (Ilford 1982), but whereas the latter examines the record of the British party from an uncompromising revolutionary Socialist position, it seems from Wald’s review that Isserman is intent on defending Earl Browder’s policies from June 1941, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Isserman goes as far as to call the CPUSA’s support for the no-strike pledge ‘a difficult but principled stand’, and attempts to refute the criticism that Communists ‘abandoned’ or ‘suspended entirely’ the struggle for black equality during the war, by claiming that all it did was to limit ‘its struggle for black rights to those areas it believed benefited the war effort’.
Browder was expelled by Moscow in 1945, only a year after he had abolished the CPUSA to replace it with the Communist Political Association, which was formed in anticipation of an expected postwar class harmony. Following his expulsion, the party was reorganised under the leadership of William Z. Foster, and Isserman, searching for a basis for the unity of the left, centres his defence around the pre-Foster party and especially ‘the generation that left the party in 1956’. They, he states, showed that ‘the American left could not be built on foreign models: that civil liberties and democratic institutions should be at the centre of any vision of the American Socialist future’. To me, this smacks of ‘Socialism in One Country’ all over again, and, as Wald asks, what does Isserman mean by the ambiguous term ‘democratic Socialist’, and what type of unity of the left does he actually advocate? Whilst it is obvious that the whole question of Stalinism became muddied for liberals during the McCarthy era and through the intensity of the Cold War in the USA, with Communists being seen as victims of a right-wing establishment, it is clear that for Socialists an adequate historical interpretation demands an understanding of Marxism.
In Chapter four of Part I, Wald reviews CLR James: The Artist as Revolutionary by Paul Buhle, a leading figure in the US New Left and a founding editor of Radical America. In tracing James’ political history and development, Wald says that eventually James’ stature will surpass that of most Marxist theorists of his generation, even though his theories were mostly partial, if provocative, insights, for Jamesian theory is sufficiently profound to rebound among ‘larger circles of left activists, and will live on as a constructive and ineradicable component of the revolutionary left tradition’. Because James used the Marxist sensibility and imagination variously and creatively, Wald sees Buhle’s subtitle The Artist as Revolutionary as appropriate. However, whilst Buhle has written a book which carries out the almost impossible task of reconstructing a career defying a conventional notion of shape or form, Wald criticises him for assessing and valorising James in opposition to much of the broader left movement from which he emerged, and of which he remained a part.
The most serious deficiency in Buhle’s work, Wald states, is the lack of a serious summary or criticism of James’ theory of state capitalism and his eccentric interpretation of dialectics. Buhle also apparently praises James’ anti-party viewpoint, stating that ‘amid the Hungarian Revolution [of 1956] he would find his vindication in the substitution of the mass for the party of any kind’. As Wald points out, the revolt of the Hungarian workers and students might well have gone further with an organised instrument of leadership. This, of course, can be said about the rest of Eastern Europe in view of what has happened in the past few years!
In Part III much consideration is given to the fight against racism, and in Chapter 10 Wald discusses the 1960s liberal notions that racial minorities should have the ‘freedom’ to acculturate to Euro-American values – a doomed effort, Wald points out, for one of the hallmarks of Euro-American culture is its deep-rooted racism. He quotes from Robert Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America and Mario Bomera’s Race and Class in the South-West, stating that the colonised minorities – native American peoples, the descendants of slaves brought from Africa, populations of Mexico and south-west states invaded by Euro-Americans – differ from the European immigrant ethnic minorities, in that the colonised minorities were incorporated into the nation by force and violence, and their cultures and religions suppressed. In the same way, there is a difference between the nationalism of the oppressor and the oppressed, and Wald quotes Amilcar Cabral ‘that for a colonised people the cultural struggle is inherently political’.
Translating this into the situation in Britain, whilst our ‘colonised minorities’ arrived here as immigrants, their transfer has been as a result of British imperialism, which makes their situation doubly difficult, for this immigration is mistaken by many for a free choice. With regard to their cultures, it is of interest to note that the previous policies of multiculturalism which took root in the 1960s have now been abandoned by the Tory government, in favour of the imparting of standard English middle-class mores. In Britain we have been through a similar process in education to that described in Chapter 18 of Part IV, in which Wald reviews Ira Shor’s Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 (1986). Shor writes that in response to the ‘leftist’ challenge of the 1960s, the Nixon and then Reagan administrations launched a three phase political counter-attack, masking itself as concern over educational issues. The first attack was the emphasis on ‘career’ (vocational) education. The second was based on a perceived crisis in literacy, requiring a return to basic education, and ‘most recently conservative policies have been instituted under the guise of “excellence” against “mediocrity”’. The result has been an ideological war waged continuously in the education system. Wald remarks that Shor identifies the problem, but gives no answer, but of course there is no answer except militant action against the straitjacketing of education, such as that taken by teachers and many parents in Britain against the tests in schools, which hopefully will lead to a discussion on the purpose of education, followed by political action. Wald also discusses how to fight racism on campus, and the position of Socialist academics, concluding that movements from below must be supported, for strictures operated from above rebound onto areas of student freedom, and are used against the left.
The essays in this book cover a wide area, and it is not possible to review them all individually. But surely the questions raised by Wald add to the discussions which must take place if we are to construct Socialism once more.
This peasantry laboured at the behest of an all-powerful administration. Dr Strouhal comments:
Moving on to crisis theory, the author explains the collapse of the Old Kingdom (about 2195BC) by a failure of the system of state granaries due to ‘a breakdown in the central administration at critical moments when a worsening climate coincided with inadequate floods’, resulting in ‘famine, civil war or invasion, and general chaos’ (p. 134). Again, this would seem to be a rather sweeping conclusion to draw from a single set piece rhetorical text which may not apply to this period at all (cf. Van Seters, The Hyksos, 1966), especially as similar collapses were to take place on two subsequent occasions separated by several centuries, and would seem to be part of the laws of motion of this particular type of society.
The book certainly deserves careful study, especially as it represents the current consensus of scholarship on the subject of Egyptian life, and is beautifully produced, in spite of the odd slip in translation here and there (for example, papyrus texts in the New Kingdom are certainly not to be read ‘from left to right’ (p. 216)). But its interest as far as Marxists are concerned lies in the fact that institutions which were to become part of the future of all mankind — of class, state, social and work organisation — here appear in their earliest, unexpected forms, especially as history seems to suggest that societies dominated by all-powerful states are extremely inflexible, and can only develop their economies to a certain point before coming to the brink of collapse. Or perhaps it is better put the other way round: that there is a limit to which such economies will allow the despotic state to develop, before it collapses in its turn.
The
Lessons Of The Spanish Civil War- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky
BOOK REVIEW
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION, 1931-39,
LEON TROTSKY, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1973
THE CRISIS OF REVOLUTIONARY
LEADERSHIP
AS WE APPROACH THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR MILITANTS NEED TO LEARN THE LESSONS
FOR THE DEFEAT OF THAT REVOLUTION.
I have been interested, as a
pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was a teenager. What
initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate
struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization
of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the
romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the
American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.
Underlying my interests has always
been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working
class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and
the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e.
the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class
revolutions after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of
success. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted that the political class
consciousness of the Spanish proletariat at that time was higher than that of
the Russian proletariat in 1917. Yet it failed in Spain. Trotsky's writings on
this period represent a provocative and thoughtful approach to an understanding
of the causes of that failure. Moreover, with all proper historical proportions
considered, his analysis has continuing value as the international working
class struggles against the seemingly one-sided class war being waged by the
international bourgeoisie today.
The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939
has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and
military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from
those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican
side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat.
Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which make up the
volume reviewed here is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene
in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution
that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or
believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of
fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize
the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the
unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution.
Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a
roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to
victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.
The central question Trotsky
addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of
revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in
short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist
program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several
revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been
successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was
necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of
revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight
to the finish.
This underlying premise was the
continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle
to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the
mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend
that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question
for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the
various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those
forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the
question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved
by the international working class.
Trotsky's polemics in this volume
are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his
definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the
Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the
Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary
leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with
Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those
conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an
unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right
Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political
support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by
its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry
in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a
hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally,
an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.
Trotsky had no illusions about the
roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist,
Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite
being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an
intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin
(key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the
Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.
The most compelling example of this
failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to
oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the
defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially
the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left.
Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that
development by an entry, called the ‘French turn’, into those parties. Nin and
the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result
the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This
accretion formed the basic for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of
its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising,
suppress the more left ward organizations. For more such examples of the
results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book.
Revised-June 19, 2006
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
The Good Old Cause
Willie Thompson,
The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920-1991,
Pluto Press, London, 1992, pp. 258, £12.95
The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920-1991,
Pluto Press, London, 1992, pp. 258, £12.95
INTERESTED readers who wondered why Pluto Press failed to keep its undertaking to reprint Sam Bornstein’s and my Against the Stream have received their answer in this book, which has all the appearance of having been syndicated to celebrate the launching of the ‘Democratic Left’. The main critique of the Communist Party of Great Britain sustained in it seems to be the contention that it was not founded in conformity with the conditions of the British labour movement, a mistake the Democratic Left presumably intends to rectify. The author, the editor of its history journal and a lecturer in Glasgow Polytechnic, claims to have used original source material in the Gallacher and Marx Memorial Libraries, but a glance at the footnotes shows all the marks of polytechnic Labour History teaching, heavily dependent at second hand upon the researches of others.
By ‘others’, we mean of course some others. For whilst mentioning standard non-Communist texts like Henry Pelling and Walter Kendall (which would appear on any college reading list) could not be avoided, anything written by anybody at all to the left of the CPGB drops into oblivion (pp. 12–4), including full-length books by Hugo Dewar, Joe Jacobs, Robin Blick and others. Party myths about the writing of its history are assiduously maintained, such as when he attributes the withdrawal of Tom Bell’s book, The British Communist Party: A Short History to its ‘meandering style and numerous factual errors’ (p. 220, n16), and the fact that ‘the party was trying to attract the widest possible sympathy’ (p. 12), whereas the truth of the matter is that it fell victim to a successful libel action by Sam Elsbury, the clothing workers’ leader, whose gross betrayal by the CPGB is rather coyly alluded to on page 48 (cf. A.B. Elsbury, Stalinist Corruption Exposed, Fight, May 1938; S.W. Lerner, Breakaway Unions and the Small Trade Union, pp. 102–36). Thompson’s sole and frequently praised (pp. 13, 238, n27) source of information on the Trotskyist movement is the work of John Callaghan, which makes his treatment of it quite laughable.When it comes to dealing with the Russian influence, the author – who admits to joining the CPGB from the Labour Party and CND in the early 1960s ‘because it seemed to me at the time the only consistently revolutionary force in British society’ (p. 14) – is so staggeringly naive as to be almost beyond belief. ‘It would appear that by the mid-1930s direct Comintern subsidies had ceased and guidance and control had been much reduced’, he writes (p. 58), that ‘with Stalin’s death and the liquidation of the Cominform any remnants of direct Soviet supervision of the CPGB’s affairs came to an end’ (p. 10), and that after 1956 ‘there is no evidence that the subventions affected CPGB policy on other than minor matters’ (p. 112). Regarding the upper-class spies recruited to Soviet intelligence whilst at Cambridge by the policy of the Popular Front, ‘there is no evidence that the CP was in any way connected with their activities’ (p. 52). When dealing with the launching of the Daily Worker, it is noted that its editor had ‘virtually no journalistic experience’ (p. 50), but his real qualifications for the post are nowhere even hinted at, that he had already proved himself to be an unashamed liar in the service of the Soviet government as long ago as 1924, when he claimed that 700,000 workers and peasants in the Soviet Young Communist League had ‘unanimously’ condemned Trotsky’s political line (Workers Weekly, 12 December 1924). The ‘heroic effort and sacrifice’ of the British Communists that enabled the paper to appear receive due mention (p. 50), but not the rather more significant contributions of their Russian brethren, willing or otherwise. The curious will find an amusing account of what must have been nearer the true state of affairs here from the famous Chapter 22 of Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, but they will have to go to the Canadian version for it, for Pollitt managed to get that section largely suppressed by a lawsuit during the Second World War when ‘our heroic Soviet allies’ were doing their bit against Hitler.
A similar ingenuousness flows through the narrative when it comes to dealing with any ideological conflict in which the CPGB became embroiled. A fifth of the book is solely devoted to the low level factional squabbles of these latter years (pp. 170–217) whilst the party’s involvement in the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky receives one sentence and a footnote (p. 43, p. 225, n6). Again, we search in vain for any explanation, that it was precisely because of the party’s low theoretical level, and the absence of any significant political differences within it, that the CPGB was selected to be the instrument for Stalin’s purge of Trotsky and his supporters from the Executive Committee of the Communist International (cf. Against the Stream, p. 21). For the British leaders were a by-word in the Comintern for being ‘inept and stupid’ (H.M. Wicks, Eclipse of October, p. 135), their contributions at the plenums not infrequently being received by the other participants with their mouths behind their hands. And some of their starry-eyed attitude towards all things Russian appears to linger with our present writer. ‘Not even the collapse of the regime has fully resolved the question’ of the ‘purpose and motivation’ of the purges, he concludes, refusing even to commit himself about the assassination of Kirov, ‘whether or not engineered by Stalin’ (pp. 58–9). We are even reminded of their bare-faced cheek when confronted with the obvious fraud of the confessions, for footnote 53 on page 228 – ‘it is worth recollecting that individuals accused of terrorism in Britain in the 1970s were receiving life sentences on evidence no stronger than that adduced in the Moscow Trials’ – surely takes the biscuit here.
On the whole, however, the writer is a good deal harder on Soviet myths than he is upon the myths of his own party. Thus he explains Wal Hannington’s surviving the purge of the leadership at the Eleventh Congress in 1929 by ‘his great popularity as a mass leader of the unemployed’ (p. 45), apparently unaware that it was a recognised technique of the Comintern during the ‘Third Period’ to use the unemployed to attack the trade unions, apart from the fact that with its lumpenised and Bohemian clientele this was all the politics that was still open to the CPGB at the time. Joe Jacobs’ Out of the Ghetto is obviously not yet on respectable reading lists of Labour History studies, for Thompson can still repeat the story that ‘the Communist Party counter-attacked fiercely in 1936 and organised “the Battle of Cable Street”’ (p. 54). A little extra reading on the Spanish Civil War would also seem to be required, for the Soviet Union’s intervention there in favour of ‘a democratically elected, socially reforming republican government’ (p. 54) provided ‘the most reliable barrier against any further extension of Fascism’ (p. 58). He inverts the arguments of the CPGB and the Labour Party when he explains that the latter refused to accept the Popular Front because ‘its leaders were all too conscious that success required a far-reaching extension of Labour voting strength beyond its working-class base’. Anybody who has read Labour Monthly (e.g. July 1938, p. 417) and Herbert Morrison’s speeches at this time (cf. Conference Report, 1937, p. 163) can see that this is the reverse of the truth. He accepts on Noreen Branson’s authority that it was the CPGB which during the Blitz ‘assumed the lead in the campaign and direct action to have the London Underground stations used as bomb shelters’ (p. 70), whereas documentary evidence exists that this initiative came from the Trotskyist Workers International League. The Communists’ campaign against the Labour Party in 1945 in favour of another Churchill coalition government ‘could not be said to have been in any sense unprincipled’ (p. 73), and as far the electricians’ union ballot-rigging scandal is concerned, ‘the strong balance of probability is that the ETU officials acted independently of the CP leaders, who were not privy to their actions’ (p. 127).
Along with this ritual recital of hoary old falsehoods, we have some amazing feats of what can only be described as the historical equivalent of a case of waiter’s eyeballs. The pronounced and deliberate scabbing of the CPGB during 1941–45, which was so notorious that it inspired members of the Independent Labour Party to write scurrilous poems about it, is passed over in silence. No one would ever know that World News and Views had ever published the names of the leading Trotskyist entrists in the Labour Party so that Transport House would know whom to expel. The challenge of anyone to the left of the CPGB, or of any split-off from it to the left, is not even admitted until the 1960s. Not only are the original Balham Group and Eric Heffer’s opposition in the 1940s nowhere to be seen, but the narrative even manages to avoid mentioning that a substantial split from the CPGB after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 joined the Trotskyist movement. There is no effort to inform us that the reason all the Trotskyists were on the first Aldermaston March, but that the CPGB was absent and denounced it as ultra-leftist, was that the CPGB was supporting the Rapacki plan at the time. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that it is finally admitted that the CPGB only swung fully behind CND in 1960.
The main thesis of the book appears to be that the CPGB has always been a marginal organisation in this country, artificially founded due to events elsewhere, and that its history has been one of a slow realisation of the fact that its aims, objectives and actions had little in common with the traditions of the labour movement, until it happily came to terms with them with the formation of the present Democratic Left. There is a germ of truth in this, since the CPGB is, has been, and always was a sect, a term the writer is happy to apply to other organisations (pp. 165, 178), but denies with regard to his own (p. 15). This is all too evident when we turn to other factors not considered here, that for a very long time most members of the CPGB were born and not recruited into it, that its cadre have been for some years aging and aged, are overwhelmingly middle class, employ peculiar party language (‘progressives’, ‘the battle for peace’, ‘unstable elements’, etc.), and seem desperately anxious for respectability. But to attribute this from the start to Russian influence is to my mind mistaken. The sectarian character of the CPGB is shared by much of the rest of the Socialist thinking left in this country, which has no such record of standing to attention every time someone broke wind in the Kremlin, and is the authentic expression of the traditions of sectarian ‘Marxism’ in Britain going all the way back to the Social Democratic Federation, epitomised by the survival of the Socialist Party of Great Britain up to our own times. It is no more than the natural result of the domination of a mighty labour movement by the worst, the most myopic, the most unthinking and the most cowardly reformist leadership it is possible to imagine, proud of its insularity, its vulgarity, and its ignorance. But it was none other than Lenin who pointed the only way out of this impasse, of working for the creation of a revolutionary party by orienting towards the Labour Party. In this sense the British CPGB was not a ‘good old cause’ at all – it was a rotten effect.
Al Richardson
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Reviews
The ILP on Clydeside
Alan McKinlay and R.J. Morris (eds.),
The ILP on Clydeside 1893–1932: From Foundation to Disintegration,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1991, pp244, £30.00
The ILP on Clydeside 1893–1932: From Foundation to Disintegration,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1991, pp244, £30.00
EACH chapter, written by a different author, takes a specific era in the history of the Independent Labour Party within the context of the political, economic and industrial struggles of the working class. The chapters dovetail, so that the book reads as a whole. Well-researched, the authors also debate conceptions made and propositions put forward by previous historians.
It is perhaps ironic that the vagaries of history demanded that the Scottish labour movement sought representatives in its own right, due to the fact that the weakness of trade union organisation in Scotland resulted in the Liberals refusing to recognise trade union or working-class candidates, known in England as ‘Lib-Labs’. The forerunner of the ILP was the Scottish Labour Party, founded in 1888, with which the ILP fused in 1894. The ILP was, of course, a national organisation, but its main strength continued to lie in Scotland, which in 1922 returned several MPs, among them James Maxton, David Kirkwood, John Wheatley and John McGovern, who gave to the Clydeside the appellation ‘Red’.In its early days, the ILP built up local support in Scotland, involving itself in trade unions, and it was largely due to this work that Glasgow, which had been a bastion of Liberalism in 1914, was by the 1920s dominated by Labour politics. Gradually, however, electioneering work took precedence, and, of course, by 1920 the ILP was rivalled on its left by the newly-formed Communist Party of Great Britain, and on its right by the Labour Party’s decision in 1918 to accept individual membership, with the result that the ILP steered a centre route between them, veering sometimes to the left, and at other times to the right. As early as 1919 John Paton, the ILP’s General Secretary, described his party as ‘a rudderless ship drifting at the mercy of all currents in the political seas’.
In his 1934 pamphlet The ILP and the Fourth International: In the Middle of the Road, Trotsky states that whilst the ILP had indubitably undergone a serious evolution to the left, standing on the left wing of the parties that adhered to the London-Amsterdam Bureau, its use of Marxist-Leninist phraseology without a Marxist understanding of society prevented its development as a revolutionary organisation, and resulted in it becoming an appendage of the Stalinised Communist International. No doubt this is the reason that following the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 – Arthur Henderson accused it of operating as ‘a party within a party’, a phrase which has continued to be used by the Labour Party against dissident left factions to this day – that the ILP steadily declined.
This book raises many questions appertaining to the present day with regard to revolutionary politics, organisation and the class struggle – which, after all, should be the reason we read such history. I could make some criticisms of the introductory and ultimate chapters in that they cover too wide a period in a sketchy manner, but for the student of labour history, this book is well worth reading.
Sheila Lahr
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Reviews
The Spanish Civil War and
the British Labour Movement
Tom Buchanan,
The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp250, £30.00
The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp250, £30.00
DO we need yet another book on the British labour movement’s response to the Spanish Civil War? Buchanan justifies his study by arguing that previous books have concentrated on the response of its political wing, the Labour Party, despite the fact that the trade unions were the dominant part of the alliance in the 1930s. His access to the previously unavailable TUC archives provides him with a wealth of new material, so, far from being a rehash of a familiar story, this study is valuable for both information and interpretation.
Overall, the story is terribly bleak. The trade union bureaucracy saw the revolution and civil war as a horrible embarrassment. Providing assistance to the Spanish working class was never one of their priorities, and the defeat of the Republic came as a great relief, allowing ‘business as usual’ to be continued.Contrary to the myth which was later cultivated, the union leaders supported the British government’s non-intervention policy which deprived the Spanish Republic of arms, whilst Franco’s forces were supplied by Germany and Italy. The response of ordinary trade unionists was much better, but the advocates of aid to the Spanish workers were almost completely ineffective. At the 1936 Labour Party conference, the trade union block vote lined up behind the leadership’s support for non-intervention, although the delegates rallied to the appeals of the Spanish fraternal delegates. Non-intervention was not rejected until 1937, when the war had been raging for a year.
Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was very appreciative of the support which the TUC and the Daily Herald gave to the government. The union leaders, in turn, were anxious that the government should issue statements which would give them some cover from rank and file criticisms. Both Bevin and Citrine lied systematically about their activities to give the impression that they were helping Spanish workers in ways that it would be indiscreet to mention. The National Union of Seamen actively scabbed, and persecuted its members who refused to sail to Franco-held territory, whilst Bevin sabotaged the attempts of Scandinavian seamen to black such cargoes.
Even the collection of money for humanitarian purposes (undertaken as a diversion from solidarity activity) was botched. The International Federation of Trade Unions originally wanted to hang on to the money which was raised until the war was over! The TUC found anti-Communism a useful weapon in justifying its inactivity. Any kind of support for Spain would play into the hands of the Reds. Yet the labour movement leaders’ attitude to the Communists was essentially pragmatic. In the early stages of the war, they were happy to ally with the Communists against Caballero and the Anarchists.
The Communist Party appears les impressive in this book than in acounts written by its supporters. The formation of the International Brigade is given full credit, but the party’s alternative to the official line, the Popular Front, would have dissolved the labour movement into bourgeois formations. As workers’ organisations in Britain were not divided on religious or ideological grounds, as they were in France and Spain, the claims of the Popular Front to contribute to workers’ unity were never plausible. The party’s support for the Stalinist reign of terror in Catalonia alienated the best militants, notably in the Independent Labour Party.
Could the response of the official labour movement to Spain have been different? Buchanan seems to think not. Support for an insurgent working class would have implied a different attitude to the class struggle in Britain, and a strong movement of solidarity with Spanish workers would have created intolerable strains for the bureaucracy. It is chillingly clear that the labour leaders were only tangentially concerned with Spain. From their point of view, their handling of the issue was a success, as they emerged with their control of the trade union machinery intact from the challenge of both militant tendencies and the Communist Party’s attempt to return to Lib-Lab politics. The bright spots in an otherwise bleak picture are the descriptions of mainly local rank and file initiatives, but these never seriously threatened official control.
The TUC’s collaboration with the Conservative government on Spain was a step on the road to ever closer involvement with successive governments, which after 1945 was to lead it to collaborate in imperialist efforts to combat trade unionism within the colonies. Whilst pleas for solidarity with the Spanish workers could be avoided by claiming that events there must not distract attention from real trade union issues in Britain, there were no such reservations when British governments asked for help in dealing with colonial workers. Buchanan’s remarks on the reasons for the bureaucracy’s victory over the militants are relevant to issues other than Spain. Today, after more than two generations of further degeneration, the trade union bureaucracy retains its power, whilst most of the left tries either to infiltrate it or bypass it.
John Sullivan
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Reviews
Yours For the Revolution
John Graham (ed.),
Yours For the Revolution: The Appeal to Reason, 1895–1922,
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990, pp330, £18.95
Yours For the Revolution: The Appeal to Reason, 1895–1922,
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990, pp330, £18.95
SOCIALISM in the United States? Icebergs in the tropics. The one idea seems as absurd as the other in the present age. Yet it was not always so. James Connolly worked full time as an organiser for the Socialist Party of the USA. The Appeal to Reason, America’s leading Socialist newspaper, mailed 760,000 copies of each issue to prepaid subscribers each week in 1913. Special numbers reached two, three and even four million copies. These figures have never been matched by any other Socialist journal in the English-speaking world.
The astonishing efflorescence of American Socialism which editor John Graham brings to life in this volume of extracts from The Appeal to Reason over the years 1895–1922, finds its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War. America went into the ‘War Between the States’ as a nation of small farmers and self-employed artisans living amongst a network of small country towns. A generation later, once the ‘Open Frontier’ was closed, the centres of power were predominantly urban, and a new corporate America of railroad barons, steel kings, financial overlords and large manufacturers had emerged. The self-employed artisan found himself downgraded to the status of wage labourer, and the once independent farmer was now at the mercy of the railroads and financiers who controlled access to distant markets.The Appeal to Reason raised a very loud voice against all this, and called for the long overdue fulfilment of the American dream. Ranged alongside it in 1912 were no less than eight foreign language and five English language Socialist dailies, 262 English and 36 foreign language weeklies, 20 Socialist state legislators, one Socialist congressman, and 79 Socialist mayors in 24 states. Eugene Debs, an editor of The Appeal to Reason, polled 900,000 votes (six per cent of the total) as the Socialist Party Presidential candidate in 1912, and 919,000 votes in 1920.
In Yours For the Revolution the reader will find in the extracts from day-to-day reporting of political events, strikes and living and working conditions in field, farm, mine and factory over the length and breadth of the USA, a picture of America from below quite unrivalled elsewhere. The cartoons are astonishingly vivid. The short fiction and poetry reproduced make fascinating reading. The contributors extend from Jack London and Upton Sinclair through Helen Keller, Scott Nearing and Stephen Crane, to J.A. Mitchell, later founding editor of Life magazine.
What, then, went wrong? Socialist opposition to the First World War brought down a great wave of repression. The Russian Revolution and its wealthy offshoot, the Communist Party of the USA, split the Socialist ranks from top to bottom. American Socialism never recovered from these combined blows.
One wonders. Will Communism in the Soviet Union in 60 years time seem as out of place as does Socialism in the USA at the present time? The Anabaptists of the Middle Ages struck fear into the hearts of the mighty throughout Europe. Who remembers the Anabaptists today?
Walter Kendall
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Reviews
Perspectives on Albania
Tom Winnifrith (ed.),
Perspectives on Albania,
MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1992, pp. 140, £40.00
Perspectives on Albania,
MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1992, pp. 140, £40.00
THIS book consists of a collection of essays by serious scholars providing an overview of the development of Albanian history, and a comic epilogue from Bill Bland. Mr Bland’s qualifications for contributing would appear to be his position as Secretary of the Albanian Society. The older generation of left activists will remember that previous to this he was one of the leaders of the Committee to Defeat Communism for Revisionist Unity (or was it the other way round?) who switched his support from Mao Zedong to Liu Shao-Ch’i in the process of discovering his earthly paradise in the Balkans. He has previously imposed upon the public a bibliography of Albania in which he plugged the official view of the Hoxha regime, and called in question the far more truthful accounts coming from the Yugoslavs wherever there was a conflict of evidence between them. A rosy picture of the country was all set to emerge with the present piece, but alas, the regime foundered before the book came out, leaving the debris of economic misery and bureaucratic tyranny strewn around for all to see.
Although Albanians may fail to be amused, it is with some merriment that we learn from Mr Bland’s presentation that ‘the standard of living of the lowest paid stratum of the Albanian working people is now higher than that of the lowest paid stratum of the British working class’ (p. 135), and that ‘income differentials are limited by law to 2:1’, which ‘makes Albania the most egalitarian society in the world’ (p. 134).There are some signs, however, that this toleration of the most deplorable standards of reportage and analysis of modern Albanian affairs is coming to an end. In his introductory essay Tom Winnifrith notes that Halliday’s edition of Enver Hoxha’s memoirs ‘has no pretensions to boring academic standards’ (p. 11), adding (a bland comment, if ever there was one) that ‘the execution of Coti Xoxe in 1948 and the suicide of Mehmet Shehu in 1981 are not mentioned by Mr Bland, but why should they be in his account of the improvement in Albanian standards?’ (p. 11).
We have more than once commented in this magazine (Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 1, Summer 1990, pp. 21–6; Volume 3, no. 4, Autumn 1991, pp. 37–9) that materials already exist to make a proper assessment of the Hoxha-Alia regime. Why is no modern scholar coming forward to do it?
Al Richardson
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Reviews
Do The Workers Have A Country?
José Iriarte ‘Bikilia’,
Do The Workers Have A Country?,
Notebooks For Study and Research Series, Amsterdam, 1992, pp. 43, £2.50
Do The Workers Have A Country?,
Notebooks For Study and Research Series, Amsterdam, 1992, pp. 43, £2.50
FEW writers on the national question can match the practical involvement of ‘Bikilia’ in a movement where ethnic differences present great difficulties for Socialists. The author was a member of ETA, the Basque nationalist organisation formed by middle-class Basque radicals opposed to what they saw as a Spanish invasion.
In the late 1960s, ETA enjoyed great prestige, but it was trapped in the blind alley of individual armed struggle, based upon Third World models. ‘Bikilia’, a leader of ETA’s Workers Front, was part of the leadership which transformed ETA from a movement advocating guerrilla war to one carrying out serious work in the clandestine labour movement amongst both Basque and ‘Spanish’ workers. The movement enjoyed considerable success, as in 1973, after considerable internal struggle, ETA-VI joined the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and the proportion of Trotskyists in the Basque population was greater than anywhere else in the world.The present pamphlet is not an account of that process, but a study of Marxist theories of the national question. Where ‘Bikilia’ draws on his own and his comrades’ experiences, he is if anything too critical. Lenin is defended against fashionable and ignorant criticisms which take no account of the constraints produced by imperialist invasion. However, an attempt to overcome what he sees as the inadequacies of Marxist orthodoxy on the national question leads him to examine the contribution of Otto Bauer. (Predictably, Rosa Luxemburg’s contribution is dismissed as ‘economistic’ and ‘hyperworkerist’.)
Although he criticises aspects of Bauer, and doubts that his nostrum of separating politics from culture would work, ‘Bikilia’ accepts Bauer’s claim that nations are generally the product of an extremely long evolution, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. Although he realises that Austro-Marxist theories served to maintain the Social Democratic Party and the Habsburg Empire on which it was based, he sees no need to junk the Bauer-Stalin picture of nations as a community of culture. In fact, the most successful nationalisms (Basque, Irish and now Baltic) flourish where a community of culture is absent.
A postscript describing the effects of the disintegration of the Stalinist system gives no guidance in understanding those events. Given the author’s openmindedness and wealth of experience, that says a lot about the tradition from which it comes.
John Sullivan
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Reviews
The Socialist Labour Party
Frank Girard and Ben Perry,
The Socialist Labour Party 1876–1991: A Short History,
Livra Books, Philadelphia, 1991, pp. 108, $10.00
The Socialist Labour Party 1876–1991: A Short History,
Livra Books, Philadelphia, 1991, pp. 108, $10.00
We are the select and chosen few,
The rest of you are damned. There’s room enough in Hell for you, We don’t want Heaven crammed. |
THESE memorable lines were written about the Socialist Labour Party of Britain, and they describe equally well its ‘father party’, the Socialist Labour Party of the USA. Founded in 1876, the SLP has now been in existence for more than 117 years. After the German SPD, the SLP is the second oldest Socialist party in the world. Yet until now it has lacked any concise history of its own. Frank Girard and Ben Perry, two former SLP militants, neither an historian by profession, have now filled the gap. We are all in their debt as a result. The authors tell the story of the SLP in an engaging fashion, and complete the whole tale in little more than 100 pages. The text is illustrated by most evocative photographs and illustrations.
Readers of Revolutionary History will be surprised to learn that the SLP ran its own candidate in every Presidential election from 1892 to 1976. Girard and Perry give us in a precise statistical table the candidate and the result for every one. The text also includes a most useful book list for all who wish to learn more about this veteran organisation. The outcome is a valuable work of reference for the history of Socialism in the USA, and one which no well-educated Socialist, or for that matter no serious labour movement library, ought to be without.The SLP was the first Socialist party in the USA. Out of its activity, and (it must also be said) directly or indirectly out of its continually recurring splits and divisions, came most of the other more famous radical organisations, including the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Morris Hillquit, and the Industrial Workers of the World of Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St John. Three thousand strong at its foundation, 7000 strong with 72 locals in 1878, at its peak around 1896, the SLP possessed some 250 locals in no less than 25 states. Its weekly organ, The People, launched on 5 April 1891, and still in existence, is by now the oldest Socialist journal in the world. In 1896 The People (which ran as a daily between 1900 and 1913) claimed a circulation of 6,000 copies an issue, a figure which many contemporary revolutionary sects might well envy.
The range of foreign language journals published at one time or another by the SLP is truly astonishing. Their kaleidescopic range included journals in the Flemish, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Mexican, Polish, Scandinavian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Yugoslav languages, with a further publication in Esperanto thrown in for good measure. Some of these publications were short lived. Others, such as the Hungarian A Munkas (The Worker), which began life in 1904, were still being published in 1960. Boris Reinstein, a longstanding member of the SLP, was present at the founding congress of the Communist International in 1919. The British SLP contributed an important contingent to the Communist Party of Great Britain at its foundation. Brother parties to the US SLP were founded in Canada and Australia, and it also had some influence in South Africa.
Daniel De Leon, the leading figure in the SLP from his recruitment in 1900 to his death in 1914, was an intellectual authority of some weight in the Marxist movement of his time. A ‘pure’ revolutionary of a somewhat sectarian hue, he gave the party a detailed doctrine of its own which his successors have kept in pristine purity up to the present day (a detailed elaboration will be found in my The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–1921). Although not formally ‘democratic centralist’ by constitution, the SLP seems nevertheless to have been run in an authoritarian fashion by its New York head office from the very early years. In the first 23 years of its existence, the SLP went through some 11 National Secretaries. Arnold Petersen, the SLP’s own ‘man of iron’, ruled the party as National Secretary for the next 55 years, and his successor Nathan Karp for a further 11. Was this because of a rigid adherence to a particular ‘Marxist’ doctrine? Or was there some hidden ‘bureaucratic’ reason? One would like to know.
The SLP currently has some 200 members. In some ways no more than a sectarian relic from a long forgotten past, the SLP may in other ways still have a lesson to teach. The SLP has waited for ‘The Revolution’ for a full hundred years, and ‘The Revolution’ has still to come. Yet De Leon, the prime theoretician of the SLP was no fool. He proposed in 1901 that the party disaffiliate from the Second International on the grounds of its reformist character, an insight that Lenin was not to share until over a decade later. What went wrong? The question is one we all ought to ponder.
If you want a copy of this most interesting book, contact Frank Girardi at 4568 Richmond NW, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49504, USA, telephone 616-453-0305.
Walter Kendall
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Reviews
On Changing the World
Michael Löwy,
On Changing the World,
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1993, pp. 189, $39.35
On Changing the World,
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1993, pp. 189, $39.35
THIS collection of essays by Michael Löwy, on subjects ranging from Marx’s analyses of the French Revolution, interconnections between Gramsci and Lukács, Marxist attitudes to the national question, and the revolutionary credentials of liberation theology, gathers together articles previously published in New Left Review, Critique, Telos and Social Compass, as well as a couple of pieces written specially for the book. The book is printed on a yellowish paper, lending it the feel of an old delicate document from the archives, and thus of historical rather than contemporary interest. Many detractors will indeed view it as a worthless dabbling in a past that is best left forgotten, given the fact that the book’s main aim is to defend the continuing validity of Marx’s Marxism against the accusations of general failure now levelled at the Marxist project.
Löwy writes in order to level his own accusations; primarily at ‘actually existing Socialism’, whose recent collapse, he asserts, has now opened up a space for the critical excavation of its excluded other: humanistic, anti-Stalinist and ecology-conscious Marxism. The book seeks to exonerate a certain selected Marxist ‘tradition’, largely defeated in actuality during the 1920s and 1930s by the twin totalitarianisms, Stalinism and Fascism. The subtitle of the book, Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, signals Löwy’s agenda, which traces a continuity directly from Marx to Benjamin. Löwy insists on Benjamin’s cardinal place in his alternative pantheon of Marxist heroes, alongside political activists – Luxemburg, the early Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci and Trotsky – as well as more theoretical Marxists – Marcuse and Bloch.Löwy is not particularly drawn to an engagement in current philosophical debates. He continues on his own track, seeking political relevance and guidance from Marx’s writings, as well as from anti-mechanistic and anti-Stalinist contributions to revolutionary theory and practice. Löwy criticises an anti-humanist, technocratic and nature-exploiting Marxism, which is seen to crop up in figures as diverse as Plekhanov and Althusser, and which calls for the uninhibited expansion of the productive forces. He rejects the contributions of scientific Socialism, structuralist Marxism, and poststructuralist and analytical Marxism.
The true heritage of Marx’s project – ‘the pitiless criticism of everything that exists’ – he insists, is dialectical, historicist, humanist, anti-positivist and anti-evolutionist. This tradition is seen to take its clues more authentically from Marx himself, drawing on his central concepts of praxis: dialectics, the analysis of commodity fetishism, alienation, workers’ revolutionary self-emancipation, and is inspired by the utopia of a classless, stateless society. Löwy’s ‘good’ tradition of Marxism is set up to provide theoretical models of practice, which overcome the ‘dilemma of impotence’ manifested, according to Lukács, in the neo-Kantian ethics of pure intentions, a moralism unable to theorise active working-class self-emancipation, and the positivist fatalism of the necessary working out of pure laws, which infected Second International Marxism.
Löwy uncovers a very specific Marxist tradition which developed critically out of or in opposition to the inevitabilistic Social Darwinist optimism of Social Democracy, with its metaphysics of progress. Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky are discussed as providers of varying but connected examples of a theoretical-practical break from this tradition. They emphasise conscious proletarian activity in the context of ‘open’ historical processes: Socialism is conceived by them not as an inevitable consequence of the development of the productive forces, but as the potential result of consciously executed action, given the precondition of economic and social development. The only ‘necessary’ component is the eventual onset of barbarism, given the absence of Socialist revolution.
A common node in the theoretical writings of many of Löwy’s protagonists is a romantic idealist-inspired critique of both soulless capitalist society and mechanistic Marxism. Marxist political culture and romanticism are reconciled by Löwy specifically in their common critique of the ‘humanly regressive aspect of capitalism’. Löwy desires to bring to the forefront both an ethical, conscious and activist moment in class politics, and the ‘hidden romantic moment’ in Marxist political philosophy. For Löwy, Marxism is primarily a protest against industrial bourgeois society in the name of romantic and non-conservative ‘precapitalist’ values. This is the root of the author’s recurrent interest in primitive Communism and early societies. For Löwy, both romanticism and Socialism draw on the qualitative values of a precapitalist past – use values, ethical and organic community, aesthetic and religious values – rather than the quantitative values of capitalism.
In several senses, this analysis is consistent with his longstanding interest in questions concerning the peasantry and Third World revolutions. He responds favourably to those Marxists who have appealed to the peasantry and have, furthermore, politically integrated them as activists into a proletarian-led party. An essay in this collection on Marxism and the national question illustrates this concern. Löwy tends to judge the politics of Marxists by their assessment of the peasantry. One of the book’s few criticisms of Luxemburg (annoyingly called Rosa) disparages her underestimation of the revolutionary role of the peasantry and the oppressed. Connected with this concern is Löwy’s insistence that Marxism must take on the challenges of the new social movements.
Löwy’s important service is to write against the current academic mode which states that ‘Marxism is definitely dead for humanity’. He uncovers this attitude to have been a proposition floated by intellectuals recurrently throughout this century. Löwy’s retort is unambiguous and literal. He writes: ‘Socialism is not yet dead for the good reason that it is not yet born.’ The Soviet-orbit societies are analysed as non-capitalist, having existed without the central mechanism of private property, but also non-Socialist, because their political systems were undemocratic, and failed to empower the working class. He makes little structural study of the Eastern Bloc. He locates the degeneration of the Soviet Union and the deformation of the satellite states, but makes few comments about the specifics of their economic and political formation. He hints at how the isolated and impoverished situation of the early Soviet Union encouraged the development of a vicious bureaucratic caste, and asserts that Eastern Bloc societies were authoritarian, bureaucratic command economies, but economic-political reconstruction is not his aim. His essays serve rather more as manifesto-type writings which insist on the importance of utopia, the redemption of Marx, and an underground Marxist tradition of heretics, subversion and opposition to the bureaucracy, in the face of a newly-born, generalised ‘post-dictatorship over needs’ faith in the market.
The author tags himself onto the tradition of heretics who row against the streams of both inherited orthodox Marxism, now deeply wounded, and bourgeois ideology, which gleefully imagines the death of Marxism. He is keen to point out identities between revolutionary utopias and heretical forms of religion, including Jewish-German messianic culture and Latin American liberation theology.
On the whole, Löwy does not write about anyone he does not like. In this sense, the essays are generally affirmative pieces, engaged in bringing out a certain continuous tradition. In some ways, despite the author’s protestations against homogenising, the whole project of the book is to forge a firm tradition of good Marxism, and squeezes into profile differences between selected Marxists, rather than emphasising differences between them. Löwy tries, for example, to bring Lenin back closer to Luxemburg by minimising their differences. In similar fashion, he reconciles Weber with Marx in a discussion of Weber’s famous refutation of economistic historical materialism in The Protestant Ethic. Löwy, however, is forced to admit that the tradition he wishes to unearth is difficult to conceptualise. This comes out, for example, in his struggle with language. Running up against the limits of expression in language, borrowing a new word from Teodor Shanin – the ‘alternativity’ of history – demonstrates that the adequacy of language to practice is itself refracted through the importance of practice itself. If there is no concept for a practice, it is because for us that concept has had no practice. Sadly enough, Löwy’s ‘good’ Marxist tradition has often been shunted away from the terrain of actual political practice.
Benjamin becomes the most subtle exponent of Löwy’s alternative tradition of ‘warm Marxism’ (Bloch), and the four essays on German messianic Marxism are among the most passionate in the collection. Benjamin, read most passionately as a political philosopher, rather than as a cultural critic, is seen to undertake a ‘modern critique of modernity’. This consists in his rejection of modernity’s technological progress and the optimistic fatalism of the Second International, combined with an insistence on the necessity of revolution in the name of the sold-out values of equality, democracy and freedom, values of the first modern revolution, the French Revolution, whose tokens have yet to be cashed in.
Benjamin is recognised as an early prophet of two most pressing contemporary dangers: ecological disaster and military technological immolation. The author romanticises Benjamin somewhat, de-dialecticising Benjamin’s grasp of forces and relations of technological production, making him actually more anti-technology and more nature-loving than evidence from Benjamin’s writings actually yields. Löwy takes to heart a number of Benjamin’s powerful allegories, none more ardently perhaps than the notion of revolution as interruption, as the conscious and desperate grasp to the emergency brake to halt the unremitting surge of technological ‘progress’ which signals social regress. Löwy’s and Benjamin’s revolution looks nothing like Plekhanov’s locomotive forging without cessation down the one-way track of historical progress. Löwy insists repeatedly on the continuing relevance of the phrase ‘Socialism or barbarism’, and attempts to show that whether one or the other becomes our historical reality is purely a matter of the state of class struggle, and the commitment of revolutionaries to that struggle as well as to the conservation of nature.
Esther Leslie
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Reviews
Trotskyist Serials Bibliography
Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz (eds),
Trotskyist Serials Bibliography,
KG Saur, Munich, 1993, pp. 475, DM 198
Trotskyist Serials Bibliography,
KG Saur, Munich, 1993, pp. 475, DM 198
THIS book forms a sequel to the Trotsky bibliography edited by Lubitz and brought out by the same publisher, and together they form an indispensable research tool for academics. With a diligence little short of amazing he has collected together some 1926 different journals, carefully listing the places where they can be consulted, a real testimony to the lively ferment of ideas animating the Trotskyist movement. This second volume is also interesting because, based as it is largely upon libraries in Europe and the USA, it shows just how limited is the contact of European Trotskyists with their co-thinkers in the rest of the world, for all the talk of internationalism and Fourth Internationals. Despite the existence of quite large groups in Japan only their English language publications are cited at all, and not even all of these, for the Gakushu series edited in California by Larry Moyes, a major source for understanding the development of the Kuroda group and its offshoots, does not appear. And apart from Mexico, there is practically nothing from South America, because ‘it proved impossible to obtain suitable data for bibliographical record within reasonable time’ (p. xix, n22). Since Latin America has some of the largest as well as the most influential Trotskyist organisations in the world, this is a real loss, and limits the value of this catalogue considerably.
It also suffers from a lack of focus at times. For example, the series Documents on the History of the Fourth International (p. 76, no. 0447) was issued in runs of no more than 40 copies purely for discussion among those who were undertaking the preparatory research for Against the Stream and War and the International. The items in it were run off to help work out the basic methodology of these books, and were in no way intended for public consumption, so their place among so many real journals is an anomalous one. And such information as that Spartacist circulates in editions of 8,500 copies (p. 274, no. 1640) should be told to the marines, if not to the students, who appear to be its mass readership.Since the official ‘Fourth Internationals’ have studiously avoided mentioning our existence, readers of this magazine will be gratified to see the entry for Revolutionary History, though whether those whose corns have been trodden on by it would agree that it is a ‘non-partisan journal’ is a different matter (p. 232, no. 1375).
Amazing to relate, bibliographers seem to be fired by an almost Messianic sense of mission. In this case the compiler appears to believe that he has established proprietorial rights over the publications of the Trotskyist movement, deluding himself into thinking that he has every right to bombard those who lead busy enough lives already with incessant correspondence about them. Lubitz’s remarks about the ‘ignorance, stubbornness and idleness’ of some of those thus vexed (p. xxi) are no doubt aimed at such as John Archer and myself, who refused our cooperation on account of Lubitz’s objectionable habit of identifying the pseudonyms of living revolutionaries without so much as a by-your-leave, which he continues to do in this collection. Irritating as it may seem, Lubitz should realise that he is, after all, dealing with a living movement, however much it may look like a case of museum exhibits to him.
Al Richardson
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Reviews
International Trotskyism
Robert J. Alexander,
International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement,
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, pp1125, $165.00
International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement,
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, pp1125, $165.00
The text below continues from the general review of this book, and the addenda on New Zealand and South African Trotskyism, which appeared in Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 4.
DESPITE its subtitle, Professor Alexander’s latest work is not very well documented with regard to the history of Trotskyism in several countries. As I thumbed through this ponderous book, my eye fell on a single page devoted to Trotskyism in Romania. I found this section so short and inadequate as to require some additions and clarifications.
Alexander implies that Romanian Trotskyism started in April 1935 with the founding of a small Bolshevik-Leninist Group (BLG) in Bucharest. As a matter of fact, however, Trotskyism began to take shape and put down roots in Romania at least three years before, that is to say, in early 1932. In February that year the International Secretariat of the International Left Opposition (ILO) discussed a letter which came from Romanian oppositionists, and approved a reply to them prepared by ‘Bauer’ (Erwin Ackernecht) (IS Minutes, 7 February 1932, Trotsky’s exile papers, 16437). Contacts with the Romanians were maintained, in one way or another, until mid-1933. It was at this time that a Romanian Trotskyist group started functioning in Paris (IS Minutes, 9 July 1933, Trotsky’s exile papers, 16471).Romanian Trotskyists in Paris were also members of the ILO’s French section, the Ligue Communiste. Three of them – under the pseudonyms of ‘Cristian’, ‘Martin’ and ‘Victor’ – broke with the latter to take part in the creation of the Union Communiste in October 1933. Later that month the Union Communiste hoped to start ‘Romanian work’, which would have been carried on by its Romanian ‘groupe de langue’ (Procès-verbal de la réunion du Comité du 20-X-33, Archives G. Davoust), the activity of which was to have been oriented to Romania (Comité du 29-X-33, Archives G. Davoust). Two months later the Union Communiste united with the Gauche Communiste – which had emerged from the unification of three small groups in the aftermath of the Conference Politique de l’Opposition Communiste de Gauche organised in April-June 1933 by the Davoust-led Groupe de la Banlieue Ouest – whilst keeping the old name of the Union Communiste, and it is quite likely that by that time all attempts at starting ‘Romanian work’ were virtually dropped.
In the meantime, in November 1933 a young member of the Romanian Communist Party, David Korner, travelled to Paris for the first time. On that occasion, or on subsequent visits, he established contacts with the French Ligue, and became a Trotskyist. Under the pseudonym of ‘Barta’ he was among the founders – together with his companion ‘Louise’ and Nelu Grunberg, better known as ‘Nicholas Spoulber’ or ‘Marcoux’ – of the Bucharest BLG in 1935, which distinguished itself by its campaign against the Communist International’s Popular Front policy, and had to face police and Stalinist-Social Democratic persecution. (For further details, see Richard Moyon, Barta, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 49, January 1993, pp. 8-10, as well as the collection of Korner’s writings, Textes d’avant-guerre 1935-1939, Publications du GET, Fontenay-aux-Roses 1993).
As a result of the July 1936 events in Spain, ‘Barta’, ‘Louise’, ‘Marcoux’ and the latter’s companion decided to participate in the Spanish revolution. On their way to Spain, however, they decided to stop in Paris in October 1936, and were to remain there as members of the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, the new name adopted by the French section of the Fourth Internationalist movement. Their decision undoubtedly weakened the Bucharest BLG, which nevertheless seems to have survived until the time of the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938. This was, so to speak, the ‘second wave’ of Romanian Trotskyism – and the last one, as far as we know.
Paolo Casciola
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Reviews
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Alan Wald,
The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment,
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1992, pp239, £35.00
The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment,
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1992, pp239, £35.00
THIS book brings together Alan Wald’s essays of the last decade on Marxist writers and intellectuals, and is divided into three parts: Trotskyism and anti-Stalinism, Communism and culture, and race and culture.
Chapter one gives consideration to the life and work of Duncan Ferguson, a sculptor and a member of the US Socialist Workers Party, whose bust of Trotsky is illustrated in the book. Duncan’s art was turned in a public direction by the impact of the Depression, and he executed a series of architectural commissions, for instance a high relief topographical map of Louisiana. Ferguson, however, suffered from the dilemma facing many a revolutionary artist and writer – whether to devote one’s life to art or politics – and for some years made politics his priority, and returned to sculpting almost too late. Today, his name does not appear in any recent histories of American sculpture, and his works sit shrouded in the basements of the Whitney Museum and other museums which once displayed them.In the second chapter, entitled Victor Serge and the New York Anti-Stalinist Left, in which he considers Serge’s writings and political development over the years, Wald cites an observation made by Daniel Singer (author of The Road to Gdansk, 1982): ‘To bury Stalinism really means to revive the idea of Socialism, and to begin its construction all over again.’
In an essay repudiating a reference made by the historian Paul Buhle to ‘an undying revolutionary “faith”‘, Wald says: ‘What is required is the constant rethinking and reworking of data and ideas so as to approximate as closely as possible what has happened in the past and what we may expect in the future.’ Wald is possibly referring to the method of George Breitman, for five decades an activist in the US Trotskyist movement, and to whom Wald pays tribute in the last chapter of Part III of the book for his uncompromising interrogation of all empirical data, and his repudiation of Socialist groups which lacked an interest in the past, except inasmuch as they could use it to validate their own political line.
The Stalinists, of course, were past masters in the distortion of politics, economics and culture in support of a specific and temporary tactic, and in Chapter three of Part I, in reviewing recent books by three authors, Wald touches again on the matters discussed in his The New York Intellectuals (reviewed in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 2, Autumn 1989), once again giving consideration to the Stalinist John Reed Clubs and the era of ‘proletarian culture’ during which unknown working-class writers were promoted, until the turn to the Popular Front dictated the dissolution of the John Reed Clubs in favour of the courting of well-known anti-Marxist writers such as Hemingway and Macleish, resulting in James T. Farrell and other Marxist writers who had condemned the Moscow Trials being denounced as ‘gangsters of the pen’.
In the same vein, Wald writes on the career of Howard Fast, whom many Socialists will know for his early books, Freedom Road, Conceived in Liberty and Citizen Tom Paine. Fast was a supporter of the Popular Front in the late 1930s, and joined the Communist Party during the Second World War. Unfortunately, the promise of his earlier books never flowered, because the ideology of the Popular Front ‘inculcated him with the notion that radical politics could be transmitted to a large audience in the garb of liberal sentiments and idealised patriotism all aimed at a reader imagined to represent the “common man”‘. Wald concludes that if Fast had been formed in a different period of American culture or had been subject to different influences after achieving his initial success in the 1940s, he might have made a contribution to our literature that would have commanded more respect, even if it had resulted in fewer sales.
In Chapter 19 of Part IV, Continuity in Working-class Literary Movements, Wald compares the 1930s ‘proletarian’ literature with the publications of Singlejack, a little press set up in the late 1970s by three West Coast longshoremen, the catalyst being Stan Weir, a leader of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party in the 1940s and 1950s. These books by workers are aimed at providing for workers images of themselves in the workplace, as these images are not being provided by popular literature or the media. Wald writes that whilst ‘proletarian’ literature dealt little with the actual process of work, but was devoted to depicting the social consequences of capitalism by showing down-and-outs, demoralised victims of unemployment, working-class solidarity in strikes, inspiring international developments such as the struggle against Fascism in Spain, ‘club-swinging cops, placards with Communist slogans, and the singing of the Internationale‘, the Singlejack books rarely offer working-class writers dramatising militant class struggles, or exhort readers to engage in revolutionary politics, although in at least one story, Night Shift in a Pickle Factory (1980), Wald considers that the writer, Steve Turner, subtly interweaves a number of Marxist economic concepts incorporating various strategies by capitalists to increase their profits and surplus value, so that Wald writes: ‘It is unlikely that one will come away from this story without a strong sense of the seething rebelliousness that lies beneath the surface of the US workforce – a rebelliousness awaiting leadership and focus.’
However, Wald concludes that although the Singlejack project is in certain ways more authentic than the 1930s ‘proletarian’ literature, as a natural expression of the need for workers to write, the publishing house to date has yet to make a mark with a memorable work of drama, vision and, especially, characterisation. Conversely, some of the 1930s ‘proletarian’ writing shows that memorable art could still triumph over dubious programmes. Wald refers to Ben Field’s Cow (in Proletarian Literature of the United States), in which the radical is characterised powerfully and ultimately as of heroic stature, probably as a result of the writer’s own radicalism and in accord with the visionary zeal of the 1930s movement as a whole, which are elements considerably tempered in the Singlejack books. However, whilst I agree that memorable literature requires strong characterisation, I am doubtful of the need for heroes – even radical heroes – and I tend to agree with Brecht: ‘Unhappy is the land which needs heroes.’ It has to be remembered that the Singlejack books are written and published in an age of disillusionment in which ‘heroes’ are knocked flat on their backs every day of the week, the current need being ‘to revive the idea of Socialism, and to begin its construction all over again’ …
With regard to ‘the constant rethinking and reworking of data’, Wald reviews Maurice Isserman’s Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown 1982). Isserman is one of the younger US historians, such as Paul Buhle, Roger Keeran, Mark Naison and Kenneth Waltzer, who are challenging the traditional histories of US Communism (for example, Theodor Draper’s Fund for the Republic’s Project on Communism and American Life, and Howe and Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History). Isserman’s book covers roughly the same period as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s Two Steps Back (Ilford 1982), but whereas the latter examines the record of the British party from an uncompromising revolutionary Socialist position, it seems from Wald’s review that Isserman is intent on defending Earl Browder’s policies from June 1941, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Isserman goes as far as to call the CPUSA’s support for the no-strike pledge ‘a difficult but principled stand’, and attempts to refute the criticism that Communists ‘abandoned’ or ‘suspended entirely’ the struggle for black equality during the war, by claiming that all it did was to limit ‘its struggle for black rights to those areas it believed benefited the war effort’.
Browder was expelled by Moscow in 1945, only a year after he had abolished the CPUSA to replace it with the Communist Political Association, which was formed in anticipation of an expected postwar class harmony. Following his expulsion, the party was reorganised under the leadership of William Z. Foster, and Isserman, searching for a basis for the unity of the left, centres his defence around the pre-Foster party and especially ‘the generation that left the party in 1956’. They, he states, showed that ‘the American left could not be built on foreign models: that civil liberties and democratic institutions should be at the centre of any vision of the American Socialist future’. To me, this smacks of ‘Socialism in One Country’ all over again, and, as Wald asks, what does Isserman mean by the ambiguous term ‘democratic Socialist’, and what type of unity of the left does he actually advocate? Whilst it is obvious that the whole question of Stalinism became muddied for liberals during the McCarthy era and through the intensity of the Cold War in the USA, with Communists being seen as victims of a right-wing establishment, it is clear that for Socialists an adequate historical interpretation demands an understanding of Marxism.
In Chapter four of Part I, Wald reviews CLR James: The Artist as Revolutionary by Paul Buhle, a leading figure in the US New Left and a founding editor of Radical America. In tracing James’ political history and development, Wald says that eventually James’ stature will surpass that of most Marxist theorists of his generation, even though his theories were mostly partial, if provocative, insights, for Jamesian theory is sufficiently profound to rebound among ‘larger circles of left activists, and will live on as a constructive and ineradicable component of the revolutionary left tradition’. Because James used the Marxist sensibility and imagination variously and creatively, Wald sees Buhle’s subtitle The Artist as Revolutionary as appropriate. However, whilst Buhle has written a book which carries out the almost impossible task of reconstructing a career defying a conventional notion of shape or form, Wald criticises him for assessing and valorising James in opposition to much of the broader left movement from which he emerged, and of which he remained a part.
The most serious deficiency in Buhle’s work, Wald states, is the lack of a serious summary or criticism of James’ theory of state capitalism and his eccentric interpretation of dialectics. Buhle also apparently praises James’ anti-party viewpoint, stating that ‘amid the Hungarian Revolution [of 1956] he would find his vindication in the substitution of the mass for the party of any kind’. As Wald points out, the revolt of the Hungarian workers and students might well have gone further with an organised instrument of leadership. This, of course, can be said about the rest of Eastern Europe in view of what has happened in the past few years!
In Part III much consideration is given to the fight against racism, and in Chapter 10 Wald discusses the 1960s liberal notions that racial minorities should have the ‘freedom’ to acculturate to Euro-American values – a doomed effort, Wald points out, for one of the hallmarks of Euro-American culture is its deep-rooted racism. He quotes from Robert Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America and Mario Bomera’s Race and Class in the South-West, stating that the colonised minorities – native American peoples, the descendants of slaves brought from Africa, populations of Mexico and south-west states invaded by Euro-Americans – differ from the European immigrant ethnic minorities, in that the colonised minorities were incorporated into the nation by force and violence, and their cultures and religions suppressed. In the same way, there is a difference between the nationalism of the oppressor and the oppressed, and Wald quotes Amilcar Cabral ‘that for a colonised people the cultural struggle is inherently political’.
Translating this into the situation in Britain, whilst our ‘colonised minorities’ arrived here as immigrants, their transfer has been as a result of British imperialism, which makes their situation doubly difficult, for this immigration is mistaken by many for a free choice. With regard to their cultures, it is of interest to note that the previous policies of multiculturalism which took root in the 1960s have now been abandoned by the Tory government, in favour of the imparting of standard English middle-class mores. In Britain we have been through a similar process in education to that described in Chapter 18 of Part IV, in which Wald reviews Ira Shor’s Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 (1986). Shor writes that in response to the ‘leftist’ challenge of the 1960s, the Nixon and then Reagan administrations launched a three phase political counter-attack, masking itself as concern over educational issues. The first attack was the emphasis on ‘career’ (vocational) education. The second was based on a perceived crisis in literacy, requiring a return to basic education, and ‘most recently conservative policies have been instituted under the guise of “excellence” against “mediocrity”’. The result has been an ideological war waged continuously in the education system. Wald remarks that Shor identifies the problem, but gives no answer, but of course there is no answer except militant action against the straitjacketing of education, such as that taken by teachers and many parents in Britain against the tests in schools, which hopefully will lead to a discussion on the purpose of education, followed by political action. Wald also discusses how to fight racism on campus, and the position of Socialist academics, concluding that movements from below must be supported, for strictures operated from above rebound onto areas of student freedom, and are used against the left.
The essays in this book cover a wide area, and it is not possible to review them all individually. But surely the questions raised by Wald add to the discussions which must take place if we are to construct Socialism once more.
Sheila Lahr
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Reviews
Life in Ancient Egypt
Eugene Strouhal,
Life in Ancient Egypt,
Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp279, £24.95
Life in Ancient Egypt,
Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp279, £24.95
AT first sight the attractive illustrations that accompany this book could easily give the impression that it is yet another coffee table production about Ancient Egypt. But this impression is quickly dispelled on starting with the text, for it is a most serious work, the first attempt at a synthesis of the evidence on this topic by a practising Egyptologist for over a generation. And he has the advantage over his predecessors of being able to check the data coming from literary or monumental sources against the physical remains themselves, for the author is probably the leading palaeopathologist working in this field. One of the surprising results of this type of analysis is the estimate made for the average age at death of as low as between 20 and 25 years (pp. 254-6), a figure that would seem to be wildly at variance with those coming from inscriptions on tombs and statues, except when we remember for whom such monuments were made, and that the ‘the hope of living longer was one of the more important privileges of the upper classes’ (p. 256).
Fascinating data emerge for a class analysis of Egyptian society, which is gradually yielding up its secrets to computer-based techniques (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no. 4, Spring 1990, p. 48). One such survey applied to the dimensions of 500 houses at Amarna estimates the elite of ‘highest-ranking officials, high priests and generals who worked closely with the Pharaoh and controlled the political, religious and military affairs of state’ at between seven and nine per cent, the middle-ranking administrative officers, priests and master craftsmen at about 33 per cent, and the poor making up the rest (p. 67). This would seem to be a very high figure for the relative proportion of the upper classes to the rest of the population, and it would be dangerous to generalise it as an estimate for the rest of the country, for this site was a temporary capital built on virgin territory in a most unsuitable spot, doubtless containing a high proportion of non-productive personnel. Then, as now, the vast bulk of the poor population was rural, and lived in the villages.This peasantry laboured at the behest of an all-powerful administration. Dr Strouhal comments:
The fruits of the farmer’s toil did not belong to him; the bulk of it had to be handed over to the state. All land in Egypt was the sole property of the king, or of the temples and nobles who received it from the king as a gift. It was in effect a system of large estates tilled by the population at large. (p. 101)
However, like most professional Egyptologists since the work of Butzer, he does not believe that this immense power over the direction of labour comes from the control of irrigation by the centre: ‘In contrast to the earlier notion that irrigation was a centralised affair, recent findings show that it was promoted by local initiative which sometimes exacerbated parochial rivalry.’ (p9. 4) However, since the earliest dated royal monument, the macehead of the Scorpion King, shows him cutting the first sod of a new canal (reproduced in this book on page 92), it is perhaps better to suspend judgement on this for the moment; certainly the arguments that canals for irrigation are not mentioned in the texts until the reign of Pepy I (c. 2350BC) (p. 93), or that the absence of a specific title pertaining to irrigation amongst the upper nobility precludes centralised direction of such works (p. 94) stop short of being compelling. The weakest argument is always that drawn from silence, and in any case we know that the division of labour amongst state bodies was relatively undeveloped during the Old Kingdom, the bodies of men raised at this time functioning indiscriminately as the armed forces and for public works.
The non-agricultural workforce was certainly directed in the same centralised manner as the peasant farmer; already by the Old Kingdom (c. 2705BC) production had been concentrated in centres employing large numbers of craftsmen; ‘the producer thus lost his individual attitude of ownership towards his tools, materials and products, and became an employee of royalty, priesthood or aristocracy’ (p. 137), since ‘the craftsmen of Ancient Egypt had no workshops or even tools of their own; these all belonged to members of the ruling class or to the institutions they controlled’ (p. 154). And as pointed out in previous reviews on this subject (for example Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 3, Summer 1992, p. 104), the division between cult and state is shown to be largely illusory, when temple workshops are shown to be engaged in the production of war chariots (p. 204).Moving on to crisis theory, the author explains the collapse of the Old Kingdom (about 2195BC) by a failure of the system of state granaries due to ‘a breakdown in the central administration at critical moments when a worsening climate coincided with inadequate floods’, resulting in ‘famine, civil war or invasion, and general chaos’ (p. 134). Again, this would seem to be a rather sweeping conclusion to draw from a single set piece rhetorical text which may not apply to this period at all (cf. Van Seters, The Hyksos, 1966), especially as similar collapses were to take place on two subsequent occasions separated by several centuries, and would seem to be part of the laws of motion of this particular type of society.
The book certainly deserves careful study, especially as it represents the current consensus of scholarship on the subject of Egyptian life, and is beautifully produced, in spite of the odd slip in translation here and there (for example, papyrus texts in the New Kingdom are certainly not to be read ‘from left to right’ (p. 216)). But its interest as far as Marxists are concerned lies in the fact that institutions which were to become part of the future of all mankind — of class, state, social and work organisation — here appear in their earliest, unexpected forms, especially as history seems to suggest that societies dominated by all-powerful states are extremely inflexible, and can only develop their economies to a certain point before coming to the brink of collapse. Or perhaps it is better put the other way round: that there is a limit to which such economies will allow the despotic state to develop, before it collapses in its turn.
Al Richardson
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