From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

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. 
******** 

The German Revolution

Pierre Broué
The German Revolution, 1917–1923
Brill, Leiden/Boston 2005, pp. 991

THIS is the English-language edition of Broué’s classic study published in French in 1971, translated by John Archer, and edited by Ian Birchall and Brian Pearce. It is equipped with a chronology, bibliography, biographical details of some of the key protagonists, unfortunately not updated, and a short foreword by Erik D. Weitz, which includes suggestions for further reading. In his foreword, Weitz describes the book as ‘a remarkable achievement’, which it is, as the author did not have access to the archives from which scholars have benefited since the 1990s. Broué consulted contemporary material and later accounts, memoirs, biographies, as well as studies in East German publications. Weitz also points out that for Broué, ‘the Bolshevik Revolution remained the correct model of revolutionary practice and V.I. Lenin the key strategist and thinker’ (p. xi). However, that does not blind Broué to Lenin’s mistakes regarding Germany, nor prevent him from evaluating Paul Levi highly.

The first six chapters cover the pre-history: the German labour movement, the currents within the SPD, the outbreak of war in 1914, the emergence of the Spartacists and the USPD. The Spartacists stayed within the USPD, rejecting Leninist wisdom as expounded in Germany by Radek, whose arguments in favour of splitting are pointed up. In his article Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin from 1930, August Thalheimer ridicules criticism from the KPD that a split should have taken place in 1914 or 1915, or even in 1903, as a ‘schoolboy notion’ (What Next?, no. 7, 1998). The November Revolution and the following period of ‘dual power’ receive the orthodox treatment. Looking back on this period, Jacob Walcher believed that the revolutionaries blundered decisively during the congress of workers’ and soldiers’ councils by presenting a proposed list for the Executive Council that included no SPD members at all, instead of presenting a programme to be enacted, its point of departure being the sentiment for unity amongst the majority of delegates. The SPD was able to utilise the resulting uproar to isolate the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries wrongly evaluated the degree of maturity of the soldiers and majority of workers (see Ernst Stock and Karl Walcher, Jacob Walcher, Berlin 1998). The revolutionary shop stewards (Obleute) are translated as ‘revolutionary delegates’, which could confuse readers.
Broué returns once more to the lack of a clearly defined party. Rosa had already in 1916 opposed those wishing to set up a sect. The Spartacus League was established, though it remained within the USPD. Its role was to help the masses reach higher consciousness through their own struggles. It hoped to grow in influence and numbers with the long-term aim of gaining the majority of the USPD. Twelve days later, the IKD (International Communists) was set up, composed of the Bremen people influenced by Radek, but also by Pannekoek, who Lenin mistook for a co-thinker, whereas he was really a Council Communist, plus the Hamburg and Berlin currents outside of the USPD. Broué writes of the danger threatening the Spartacists, who ‘tended to be elements who were isolated not only from the mass organisations, but from the working class itself and its traditions’. ‘The majority of Spartacist activists and … the IKD confused the organisations with their leaders. They denounced trade unions … as outdated … [and] appealed to class-conscious working people to organise outside of them.’ (pp. 196–97) But once the Spartacists decided to leave the USPD, the IKD was ready to fuse with them to form a unified party.
The turn of the year of 1918–19 saw the foundation of the communist party, the KPD(S), and Broué outlines the key debates, though concludes that ‘the ultra-leftists won the day’. (p. 213) Hostility towards work in the trade unions was dominant, but a decision was avoided. Participation in the election to the Constituent Assembly was rejected, but Rosa’s programme, which committed the KPD(S) to winning the majority for conscious support of its aims, was adopted. Broué describes that as ‘political inconsistency’. (p. 221) The Spartacist leadership around Luxemburg ended up with a party whose members were not regarded as Marxists by the revolutionary shop stewards, who refused to join it, nor by the USPD left wing. Leo Jogiches, the brain behind Spartacus, had been fiercely opposed to fusing with the IKD, and had favoured staying in the USPD until its next congress, in order to attract the left wing. Clara Zetkin did just that. In his report to the Second Comintern Congress, Paul Levi said that had one heeded Jogiches and stayed in the USPD for another three or four months, then the revolutionary masses within that party could have been separated from their opportunist leaders. Broué does not use that quote.
The first part of the book ends with the January 1919 uprising, the murders of Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, and Paul Levi taking the helm of the KPD(S). Levi began the process of rooting out ultra-leftism. At the Heidelberg Congress in October 1919, he pushed through a set of theses designed to rid the party of ‘semi-anarchists’. As a result the KPD(S) lost about half of its membership; in some districts, like Berlin, it almost ceased to exist. Some of the expellees would set up the Communist Workers Party (KAPD), but it soon fragmented into a variety of currents. Radek opposed the split and Lenin condemned it, illustrating just how out of touch both were. Broué examines the National Bolshevism current, that guided by Pannekoek and Gorter, and that of Otto Rühle and Pfemfert. Meanwhile, the USPD left wing made great strides in replacing the reformists in top union posts, particularly in the metalworkers’ union (DMV), where Robert Dissmann became president. While ‘the Communists had practically no presence within the unions … Levi was impressed by the results which the Independents had achieved …’ (p. 335)
Developments in the USPD are analysed. During six months of 1919 its membership more than doubled, and support for communism within it increased. Meanwhile, as Broué admits, the KPD(S) was a sect. However, within the USPD there was little support for a split over adherence to the Third International, a process of evolution was preferred. There were also ‘reservations about the Bolshevik principles of organisational centralisation’, which could lead to ‘a dictatorship over the party by the bureaucratic apparatus …’ (p. 343) Lenin’s intervention was ‘highly embarrassing’ for the KPD(S) leaders, as he ‘once again condemned the split’ with the ultra-lefts and ‘denounced the left wing of the Independents’, thus helping the right wing. (p. 345) Broué quotes from a pamphlet by Thalheimer that defended the USPD lefts, and pointed out that Lenin’s information was poor and that he was lagging behind developments. Furthermore, he defended the split over the Heidelberg Theses. It did not concern mere tactical questions, rather the ultra-lefts had ‘positions which denied the very basis of the party’, would convert it ‘into a propaganda society’, and later would ‘dissolve it into the mass of workplace organisations …’ The split meant that ‘the German Party can show the working class of the Western countries the tactical problems which will confront them in one form or another’. (p. 346) The universality of the Russian example was rejected. Splitting with the ultra-left and focussing on the USPD left wing demonstrated a different method of building a communist party than that followed in Russia.
A chapter is devoted to the Kapp Putsch and the Workers’ Government that could have resulted. Initially the KPD(S) Zentrale adopted a sectarian posture towards the general strike, but corrected it and said it would support a Socialist government. However, the USPD left wing rejected the proposal from the union supremo Legien. The KAPD was set up shortly after and believed that it could displace the KPD(S) as the section of the Comintern in Germany. By now Rühle and Pfemfert’s current saw no need for a party at all, and the Bremen current remained outside it and would be won back to the KPD(S). In the general election of 6 June, the SPD vote almost halved while that of the USPD almost doubled, outstripping the former in the industrial centres. The KPD(S) vote was a modest 589,000. The next chapter examines the debates at the KPD(S) congress following these events. Most controversy revolved around the declaration of ‘loyal opposition’ to a Workers’ Government; Brandler’s pamphlet on the united front policy that beat the Kapp Putsch in Chemnitz was ignored. Broué points out that the line of ‘loyal opposition’ represented ‘for the first time in the history of the Communist movement, the problem … of a transitional form of government …’ (p. 385) Radek was critical of the ‘loyal opposition’ line, but Lenin intervened to praise it, excepting the term ‘socialist’, which in Bolshevik style should have been ‘social-traitors’. Broué remarks that ‘Levi seems to have been the only German leader [present] to express clearly the aim of winning the workers who formed the core of the USPD and the driving force of its left wing’. (p. 392)
Broué covers Moscow’s intervention regarding the three German parties, and he then looks at how it was tackled at the Second Comintern Congress. Levi had reservations about the Twenty-One Conditions for membership; organisational matters should be secondary, so opportunists would have to deal with political issues. Neither did he share the general optimism about revolutionary prospects in Europe, nor did he approve of the Red Army’s march on Warsaw, and told Lenin that contrary to his view it would not be met with an uprising upon reaching the German border. Furthermore, the KPD(S) delegates threatened to leave should the KAPD be admitted. The Bolshevik leaders, particularly Zinoviev, began to consider that Levi was continuing Jogiches’ and Luxemburg’s antagonism towards them, while Levi, in turn, began to wonder whether they had not been right about an International dominated by the Bolsheviks. The decision to set up a Red International of Labour Unions was another huge blunder that the reformists would use to denounce the communists as ‘splitters’. This would alienate many leading trade unionists in the USPD, and not just supposed rightists. Describing the struggle within the USPD following the Comintern Congress, Broué notes the leading role in opposing the Twenty-One Conditions played by Robert Dissmann, the DMV president, labelling him as a ‘former supporter of the Left’. (p. 437) The right or left label is of limited use in this context, as many USPD left-wingers were either opposed to or sceptical about not just the decision to establish the RILU but the Comintern’s extreme centralism and the powers of its Executive, as was Levi himself, Dissmann became a leading proponent of international trade union unity in the mid-1920s, and proposed to Walcher that the KPD and SPD left advance a joint platform and list against the SPD right for the DMV congress in 1923 (see Stock and Walcher).
At its Halle Congress, the USPD split, but only a minority would join with the KPD(S) to become the VKPD. A mass communist party now existed in Germany. Broué asks whether this was a victory for the Comintern, or a personal triumph for Paul Levi. In a chapter on Levi and his conception of communism, he concludes that the debate remains open. One can see the influence of Luxemburg in this quote from Levi: ‘The question for Communists is to have, not the largest party, but the most conscious working class. In this sense, the party is nothing, the revolution and the proletariat are everything.’ (p. 453) In my opinion that reflects Marx, too. Closing the chapter, Broué quotes Zinoviev: ‘… the dictatorship of the working class can be brought about only through the dictatorship of its vanguard, that is to say, of its Communist Party … we need a strong centralised Communist Party, with iron discipline and military organisation.’ More like Gerry Healy than Karl Marx! Broué points out that ‘conflict was inevitable between this conception and that of Levi …’ (p. 458)
Looking at the activity of the VKPD, Broué admits that Levi had been correct, rather than Lenin, in evaluating the international situation, and thus the tasks involved. The Russians feared that opposition to putschism would become passivity so they wanted to fuse the VKPD with the KAPD. Radek was at work undermining Levi, and Broué relates that Levi’s draft manifesto, accepted by the Zentrale, ‘was kept off the agenda [of the unification congress] in conditions which remain obscure’. It was replaced by one from Radek which claimed that now the VKPD was ‘strong enough to go alone into action’. (pp. 464–65) In the meantime, as a result of the impact of the Stuttgart Demands, the VKPD issued the Open Letter to all working-class organisations, calling for a joint struggle around a series of demands. Although K.H. Tjaden’s study of the KPD(O) is listed as a source, it is not referred to by Broué in locating the origins of the Five Demands of the Stuttgart DMV (Tjaden notes the roles of Brandler and Walcher). However, in pointing out that ‘a new tactic was taking form’, he does locate its antecedents ‘in the writings of Levi, Brandler, Radek and Thalheimer’. (p. 469) In the biography of Walcher mentioned above, one can read that Radek read the pile of resolutions on Walcher’s desk in the Trade Union Department of the Zentrale that were supportive of the Five Demands and got the idea for the Open Letter. Walcher was critical of the ‘unsuitably rough and boastful tone’ of it. ‘Furthermore, it bore an ultimative character. Should one put a pistol to the chest of someone one wishes to win as an ally?’, he asks, and explained it as due to resistance towards putting it into practice (p. 69). ‘The Open Letter was sharply attacked by Zinoviev and Bukharin.’ (p. 473) It was condemned by the ECCI Presidium, which led Lenin to intervene, and at the Third Comintern Congress he would describe it as a ‘model political step’.
Chapter 24 is devoted to the split in the Italian Socialist Party at Livorno. The PSI had adhered to the Comintern in 1919, but had failed to implement the Twenty-One Conditions, particularly the expulsion of the reformist minority led by Turati. The ECCI sent Rákosi and Kabakchiev to decide things. Levi attended as a fraternal delegate. He was appalled by the way the split took place, and ‘several hundred thousand revolutionary workers [either] stayed in the PSI with Serrati, or dropped out of political activity’. The communist party that was set up ‘was in the hands of notorious ultra-leftists such as Bordiga’. (pp. 477–78) Italian socialism thus began a process of dissolution in the face of the fascist threat.
Believing that the Livorno split could be corrected by the ECCI, Levi sent it a report. He wrote an article in the Rote Fahne in the same spirit, representing the Zentrale’s views. Radek responded with a personal attack on Levi, and defended the ECCI’s role at Livorno. He threatened Levi at a meeting of the Zentrale. Then Rákosi arrived in Berlin demanding that the Zentrale back him against Levi, but a motion in that sense was lost. So Rákosi attended a session of the ZA (Central Committee), where he spoke in favour of splits to attain political clarity, and the same motion was put. The ZA backed Rákosi by 28 votes to 23, thereupon Levi and Däumig, co-chairmen, Zetkin, Otto Brass and Adolf Hoffmann resigned from the Zentrale. Broué writes that thereafter ‘Levi fought the battle on the political level with great clarity. He demonstrated first that the differences began with very different appreciations of the world situation … [There was a] … bourgeois counter-offensive … a recovery of Social Democracy … the VKPD should … avoid letting itself be isolated from the masses …’ (p. 488) The Bolsheviks had failed to see this, and with them the majority of communists, hence the talk of ‘action’ and ‘offensive’. Levi saw the urge for splits as originating in the Bolshevik tradition, its formation in illegality, but in the West one could not proceed by splitting ‘on the basis of resolutions, but only on the basis of political life’. Serrati represented communism in Italy, but the ECCI had denounced him and expelled him and his followers. Mechanical splits were becoming the norm. Such practices were alien to the revolutionary movement in the West. The Russian party had introduced them into the Comintern through its dominance.
Quoting materials from Radek stressing the need to ‘activise’ the VKPD, Broué sees the struggle against Levi as necessary if the ECCI were to achieve its aim. Béla Kun and other ECCI emissaries arrived in Berlin. Kun set about ‘forcing the development of the revolution’, and an occasion presented itself. Police were sent to industrial centres in Prussian Saxony around Halle, supposedly with the aim of restoring law and order. In reality, writes Broué, it was to disarm the workers in a communist stronghold. On 21 March, strikes began in the districts occupied by the police. Armed bands linked to the KAPD, which Kun had brought into the plan, undertook attacks on soldiers, police, banks and other institutions. Solidarity from elsewhere in Germany was fairly sparse, and by 1 April the VKPD Zentrale called for an end to what became known as the ‘March Action’.
Broué examines the reaction to the events from the various sides. Naming it a ‘disaster’, he writes that ‘in a few weeks the party lost 200,000 members’. (p. 505) The ECCI, however, told the VKPD members: ‘You acted rightly.’ It was in this situation that Paul Levi wrote his famous pamphlet against putschism, and was expelled from the party. He appealed to the ZA and explained his action. He had done nothing that Lenin had not done in 1917, and more recently Zinoviev himself over the Kapp Putsch, that is, gone public. Levi’s expulsion was upheld. Broué quotes extensively from Levi’s arguments.
The last chapter of part two, entitled The Moscow Compromise, deals with the Third Comintern Congress and how it tackled the March Action. The VKPD delegates intended to defend the theory of the offensive, which the ECCI had hitherto promoted. Radek, however, was slyly retreating, although at the Tenth Russian party conference in May 1921, reporting on the tasks of the Third Comintern Congress, he not only rejected a feeling in several communist parties ‘that the world revolution was in retreat’, but saw it accelerating. (p. 536) Broué expresses surprise and points out the ‘striking contrast to the theses on the international situation which Trotsky and Varga were to present to the … Congress …’ (pp. 536–37). Lenin had argued the case, and both the Russian party Central Committee and the ECCI had adopted the analysis: ‘Lenin and Trotsky had a simple aim … to preserve the unity of the German party and the International, whilst [undertaking] … a radical political turn.’ (p. 538) They would sacrifice Levi, but only for ‘indiscipline’, in order to cover up the ECCI’s role. The theory of the offensive would be demolished, but the March Action would be hailed as ‘a step forward’. Most of this squalid procedure took place behind closed doors, not on the floor of the congress. ‘Zinoviev, who, as President of the International, had to present a report on its activities, did not have to deal with the March Action … and though he had received a long appeal from Levi against his expulsion … he neither read from it nor even acknowledged its existence at the Congress.’ (p. 541) Zetkin attacked the procedure whereby Levi was expelled for ‘indiscipline’ and the political problems were ignored. Nevertheless, Lenin and Trotsky’s aim was achieved, Levi’s evaluation of the international situation was accepted, as were the corresponding tactics: the communist parties should turn to the masses. Broué asks, however, whether the foundation of the RILU was ‘really consistent with the new analysis of the situation’. (p. 546) Quite! In winding up part two, Broué examines Lenin’s conciliatory role, and quotes from his criticism at the Fourth Comintern Congress of the resolution on the structure of the communist parties adopted at the Third. It was ‘Lenin’s last intervention’ in the Comintern, ‘an organisation which so far had made little progress, and which was not to make any more in the future’. (p. 552)
Part three starts by looking at the turmoil in the KPD after the congress, as the leftists tried to undo the Moscow Compromise, and Levi’s supporters either left or were expelled. They set up the KAG (Communist Working Group). The Russian leaders denounced Levi, seeing the KAG as a threat. Broué estimates that the KPD lost two-thirds of its membership. The KAPD left the Comintern, as it saw that Levi’s politics now dominated the KPD. At the end of 1921, the united front was promoted by the ECCI, and the KPD began to recover due to its use of the tactic. Broué looks at the conference of the three Internationals, and points out that it helped the Vienna and Second Internationals to fuse in 1923, after the USPD and SPD had fused in the autumn of 1922. That led to ‘the rebirth within the SPD of a left-wing tendency which generally favoured united action with the communists’. Once his project for a revolutionary party outside the KPD had been rejected by the USPD majority, Levi joined the united SPD, in order ‘not [to] cut himself off from the masses …’ and he became ‘the intellectual inspiration of a “new left” in the SPD’. (p. 598)
When Walter Rathenau was killed by right-wing thugs in June 1922, the KPD initiated an impressive united front campaign, which involved the creation of a variety of rank-and-file committees, but eventually the SPD succeeded in outmanoeuvring the KPD. This enabled the leftists and Zinoviev to attack the campaign. Broué writes that Kleine’s role in this (he was Zinoviev’s mouthpiece in the Zentrale) ‘showed how the long-term alliance of Zinoviev and the leftists on the ECCI with the German Left was a permanent and serious source of danger’ due to some leaders ‘always being ready to confess … in order to avoid a clash with the ECCI’. (p. 622) Following a chapter on the KPD’s structure, membership, press, etc., Broué returns to the united front, the Workers’ Government which might emerge from one, and the Transitional Programme needed in such a situation. This problem was becoming real in Saxony and Thuringia, where the workers’ parties gained majorities in the diets. ‘However, the communists took great care to stress that the workers’ government must rest on an extra-parliamentary working-class base, and not on a simple parliamentary coalition.’ (p. 655)
The tactic would be developed further at the Fourth Comintern Congress. Broué quotes from some preliminary remarks for delegates from Radek, where he referred to the need for a transitional programme in the prevailing situation. The congress went on to adopt resolutions on, among other things, the united front and the Workers’ Government. This whole approach was opposed by the leftists, as would become clear at the Fifth Congress. The Leipzig Congress of the KPD, in early 1923, concretised this approach for Germany. Yet such was the strength of the leftists that Brandler’s theses were adopted only by 118 votes to 59. Ernst Meyer was blamed for the perceived failure of the Rathenau campaign and was replaced at the head of the KPD by Brandler.
The leftists kept up their hostility to the agreed line on the Workers’ Government as events unfolded in Saxony, where the KPD would support a left-wing SPD government, just as they also opposed the party line following the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 over non-payment of reparations. The Reichstag adopted a line of passive resistance: a de-facto cross-class alliance. Nationalism was strengthened, and fascism emerged as a real threat. The KPD’s line of trying to maintain a class approach towards both bourgeois sides, but reaching out to the masses gripped by nationalist fervour, was controversial. The leftists, in the shape of Ruth Fischer – the Hamburg leftists did not share all the Berliners’ differences with the Zentrale – broke discipline and began promoting their own line. Fischer went to the Ruhr to organise a leftist current. At the District Congress in Essen, she attacked the opportunism of the Zentrale and proposed an action programme towards seizing power. Broué talks of a crisis in the KPD due not only to such opposing views, but also the blatant indiscipline. The ECCI called for tolerance towards the Berliners, undoubtedly seeing them as a useful lever and potential substitute leadership. Brandler, as archive material not available to Broué shows, tried to accommodate Fischer et al., and was criticised by Zentrale members for making too many concessions. The issue of their expulsion would be raised, but Brandler was concerned to avoid another split. The ECCI arranged a meeting in Moscow in May 1923 to establish unity. It rejected Fischer’s adventurism and criticised certain formulations of the Zentrale, but instructed it to coopt four leftists, Fischer and Thälmann among them, to the Zentrale.
Under the heading An Unprecedented Pre-Revolutionary Situation, Broué describes the economic, social and political consequences of the occupation. He describes the KPD’s progress in the unions and the factory council movement. This grew as the trade unions shrunk due to the effects of inflation on their finances, and members leaving. He writes: ‘The Congress of Factory Councils, which in August started the strike which brought down the Cuno government, claimed to represent, directly or indirectly, some 20,000 councils.’ (p. 718) Hermann Grothe was the chairman of the 15-strong committee leading the council movement, but Broué refers to him throughout, including during his time in Spartacus and with the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, as a ‘Left’, whereas he was, in fact, a supporter of Brandler. The price-control committees took off, as Proletarian Hundreds were built, the ‘most remarkable’ of the KPD’s initiatives, conceived as united front organs, rather than party ones. But although the KPD’s progress was evident, that ‘of the nationalists of the extreme right was much more spectacular’. Broué labels this current ‘popular or, to put it better, plebeian’. (p. 720)
Fascism would be the central issue of the enlarged ECCI session in June. Zetkin gave the report on the subject. During the discussion, ‘Radek delivered his celebrated speech about Schlageter’. (p. 727) Although controversial, it attempted to sketch out an approach for the KPD towards these plebeian rightists. Broué describes how it was put into effect. Quoting Zinoviev, he points out that at the end of June everyone considered the revolution to be still in the future, and at the ECCI session ‘no one posed the question of power’. In fact, Zinoviev did not foresee its coming ‘in a month or in a year, [but perhaps] much more time will be required’. (p. 731) An Anti-Fascist Day was called for 29 July, and the demonstrations would enable the KPD to assess its support. Most German states banned them. Broué goes into the resulting controversy: to defy the ban or not. He writes that Stalin’s letter calling for restraint was written ‘after the event to Bukharin and Zinoviev’. (p. 741, n29) He gives figures of attendance at meetings or demonstrations, and judges that ‘very large numbers of people’ were involved positively. The KPD spoke of a success, but in reality the results were modest, and in Saxony, where no ban operated, participation was low, as the SPD boycotted the events. The figures given for Dresden and Leipzig, for example, are inflated. That fact illustrates that Saxony, soon to be the focus of an uprising, was still an SPD bastion. Broué has missed the point, although he mentions the conference of the SPD Opposition called by Paul Levi, which was attended by Kurt Rosenfeld, DMV leader Robert Dissmann, and Berlin DMV chief Max Urich, among others, which called for the overthrow of the Cuno government and its replacement by a Workers’ Government.
A wave of economic strikes broke out. On 11 August, factory council delegates met in Berlin, and Grothe proposed a three-day general strike, which was adopted along with a nine-point programme calling, among other things, for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. The Cuno government fell, but was replaced by a coalition led by Stresemann, which included four SPD ministers. Although it wasn’t recognised at the time, that was the end of the ‘pre-revolutionary situation’. The following chapters cover the build-up to the uprising, which the Russian leaders suddenly discovered was on the cards, plus the bursting of such illusions at the Chemnitz Conference. The conference took place shortly after Böttcher, Brandler and Heckert (KPD) had entered the left-wing SPD Saxon government of Erich Zeigner, supposedly to defend the proletariat from intervention by the military and threats from Bavaria. The KPD’s plan was to win the conference for a general strike. That would be the start of the uprising. When Brandler put the proposal, it failed to resonate with the SPD delegates. Georg Graupe (SPD) responded that the task of defending Saxony could not rest on such a conference alone. ‘Saxony had its government of “republican and proletarian defence” … [this in turn] was responsible to an elected Landtag, in which the two great workers’ parties were represented, Brandler himself was a member of it. Therefore … it was for the government … alone … to consider what means of action to prescribe …’ (p. 808) Graupe’s argument is logical and, in my opinion, illustrates the contradiction in the plan made in Moscow.
Looking at the aftermath of another defeat for the KPD, Broué links it to the dispute in the Russian party between Trotsky and the Troika. Just like Thalheimer, he refers to Radek’s speech in support of the Opposition, dating it to 11 December, where he declared ‘that the leaders of the most important parties … the French, German and Polish sections, agreed with Trotsky and the Forty-Six’. (pp. 620–21) Thus, Zinoviev could harm Trotsky through Radek and Brandler. Broué shows how Zinoviev offloaded responsibility on to Brandler et al. The stitch-up occurred at the ECCI session in January 1924. Basing himself on the published record, Broué is unaware that Brandler was stuck in Prague waiting for almost three weeks for the means to buy a false passport. He assumed Zinoviev was responsible, as the ECCI’s analysis was determined before his arrival. Broué mentions the theses presented by Radek, signed also by Trotsky and Piatakov, and writes that they have ‘never been published’. (p. 827, n28). Since Broué wrote this, they have been published in extract in Bayerlein, Babitchenko, Firsov and Vatlin (eds.), Deutscher Oktober 1923. Ein Revolutionsplan und sein Scheitern (Berlin 2003), along with other texts to which he could not get access, including reports on the situation in Germany by Radek and Piatakov, which were also censored out of existence.
In part four of his study, Broué examines the historical treatment of the early KPD, and how much of its elaboration was incorporated into the Comintern’s arsenal: united front, Workers’ Government, transitional demands, etc. He sees the Spartacists as learning from Bolshevism and creating a party in its image, though he stresses its traditional German nature in the early years. It allowed tendencies, open and democratic debate, and it had only around 200 paid officials. ‘Apart from the specialists … the communist functionaries were strictly accountable. They could be recalled.’ (p. 864) This was not a bureaucracy. Broué looks at the role of the International in the life of the KPD. He has a benign view of it until ‘Bolshevisation’, but admits that ‘there was no real international leadership’. (p. 870) The ECCI personnel were not top drawer, and ‘between congresses, the International never functioned … but was always an appendage of the leadership of the Bolshevik party’. (p. 872) Archive material not available to Broué and used in Heinrich Brandler (Hamburg 2001), Jens Becker’s biography, allows us more insight into the ECCI–KPD relationship. A letter from Brandler, Thalheimer, Walcher and Zetkin to the Russian party’s Central Committee, dated 19 February 1922, complains about the existing shambles and organisational deficiencies of the Executive, and ‘demanded regular minuting and living information in order to be able to combat growing tendencies of bureaucratisation and surveillance’. The postal traffic was delayed and letters went missing. Correspondence from the KPD Zentrale to the ECCI was subject to censorship. As Zinoviev had various posts, he was away a lot. Moreover, his style of work was criticised, and proposals were made for a further comrade to take over, as well as a ‘bold reduction’ of the ‘over-inflated’ Comintern apparatus, ‘which could lead to an increase in efficiency’. (p. 148) Brandler was part of a commission that was set up to examine the workings of the Comintern in response to a financial crisis. Letters from him and Eberlein to the KPD Zentrale give a good picture of the state of affairs. The commission concluded that a ‘lack of professionalism, bureaucratism, routinism and the consequent waste of resources, characterised the work of the Comintern apparatus’. (p. 155). Proposals to rectify this were resisted by the Russian party leadership.
Paul Levi and his loss are evaluated. Broué points out that in the summer of 1920, he ‘was perhaps the only communist leader in the world’ to recognise ‘that the postwar revolutionary wave had ended …, the last people to understand … were the leaders of the International’ a year later. (p. 881) As Broué admits: ‘Levi had been essentially right, not least against Lenin, who freely admitted it.’ He had been right over the Heidelberg split, the KAPD, the Polish adventure, and the Twenty-One Conditions. Broué castigates him for not fighting more forcefully over the latter, predicated as they were on imminent revolution. Levi ‘was one of the very few who could foresee the dangers inherent in them, and he understood that they were destined to “Bolshevise”, by summary and forceful means, parties’ with other traditions’. (p. 883) Levi was shocked at the treatment of the PSI, and again was proved right. He won a victory at the Third Comintern Congress but rejected Lenin’s deal, which Broué sees as a result of Levi’s ‘pride’ and his having made up his mind to give up communism. It was impossible for Lenin, not having strong support in the Russian Communist Party or ECCI summits, both to destroy the offensive theory and exonerate Levi, as the KPD might have split, so the deal he worked out denounced Levi for ‘indiscipline’, but secretly approached him with an offer to readmit him in six months time. Summing up, Broué says that ‘during 1918–1921, Levi was the only communist leader outside Russia … who could discuss with the Russian leaders on an equal basis, and that no one was able to fill the gap’. His loss was somehow symbolic of the fact that the ‘Comintern was unable to achieve its ambition of becoming the “world party of the socialist revolution”’. (p. 887) Rather than locating Levi’s rejection of Lenin’s deal in his personality, it seems to me that he had his doubts about not only the poor quality of the Comintern leaders, but also its structure and methods of work, and had concluded that the KPD would never be allowed to develop communist politics relevant for Germany, and that the Comintern itself would fail to achieve its stated aims. He would be proved correct on both counts.
Karl Radek gets the same treatment. Broué sees him as an outsider everywhere, shifting unexplainably from sensible positions to leftism, working to undermine Levi, but ends up concluding, with Trotsky, that Radek was ‘merely a journalist … never an independent politician’. As Trotsky hardly ever had a good word to say about anyone, and as he himself was a journalist for much of his life, it seems to me too harsh a judgement. The book ends with a balance-sheet of the 1923 events, which tends to be uncritical of Trotsky’s shifting and superficial analyses which, in my opinion, are too general to be given such weight.
There are errors and omissions in the Biographical Details, due to the failure to update them. For example, Otto Bachmann, the ‘first Communist mayor in Germany’, did not lead a red union after 1926. He led the expelled building workers in Chemnitz from 1921, but the KPD dissolved it in 1926. He did not go into exile nor die abroad. Hermann Grothe was not a KPD full-timer until 1933. Expelled in 1929, he joined the KPD(O). In the GDR archives, it was possible to establish that Grothe joined the KPD/SED in 1945, and by 1951 was being investigated due to his past. Grothe’s principled stand would have pleased Broué, as he told the investigators that Thälmann had originally been an ultra-left, and that Trotsky was Lenin’s closest collaborator, not Stalin, that is, he countered the mythology. Eventually he would be expelled. Details, along with those of many others, can be found in Theodor Bergmann, Gegen den Strom. Geschichte der KPD(O) (Hamburg 2001). Heinrich Malzahn was readmitted to the KPD in late 1922, and did not join the SPD. Paul Wegmann stayed with Ledebour in the rump USPD until it split, and both were leaders of the Socialist League. Hermann Weber and Andreas Herbst’s Deutsche Kommunisten. Biografisches Handbuch 1918 bis 1945 (Berlin 2004) contains 1,400 potted biographies of key KPD figures.
It is a shame that we had to wait so long for Broué’s study to appear in English, but it is anyway to be welcomed. In spite of newer studies covering the subject, it is still an impressive work. Were one beginning afresh today, with the materials now available, one could not uphold the mythology of a basically healthy Comintern which in its first five years elaborated a full cookbook for the proletarian revolution. One senses that Broué can see the problems highlighted by Levi’s differences, but believing that Bolshevism was the standard by which everything should be judged, he is forced to conclude that, in the end, Levi’s personality was at fault, and that somehow, if he had accepted Lenin’s deal, all would have turned out fine. At the time he wrote his book, he believed in the orthodox Trotskyist view of the Comintern, so it is understandable. However, the more research that is done only shows up just how far away the Comintern was from being a world leadership.

Mike Jones

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Confronting an Ill Society

Patrick Hutt
Confronting an Ill Society: David Widgery, General Practice, Idealism and the Chase for Change
Radcliffe, Oxford 2004, pp. 152

ONE of the difficulties of writing a biography of someone who has died recently is the temptation of that person’s friends to demand a role in the story. Some will remind you of their dead friend’s many positive characteristics and deny all other blemishes as if they were quite imaginary. Others will insist that any of your protagonist’s best-known achievements did not belong to him or her at all; that ‘David’ (or whoever), far from originating the campaign he is said to have led, was in fact only a distant bystander, muscling into events late and with the sole idea of gaining all the credit afterwards. As a biographer, you can only do your best, armed with your protagonist’s writing, a historians’ guess as to who is right, and ideally by checking as many different views as possible. The interpretation that none of them denies is probably just right.

David Widgery, doyen of OZ, the BMJ, Rock Against Racism and Socialist Worker, has surviving friends in abundance, which makes it heartening that the author of this first biography is a recent medical student who was not even in his teens when Widgery died in October 1992. Patrick Hutt uses Widgery as the start and end of his book, but much of the middle is a rather general reflection on the nature of general practice and also of ‘idealism’, the quality that Hutt associates with Widgery’s political radicalism and also with the work of being an NHS doctor.
Hutt perceives a profession dominated by new managerial initiatives, by increased integration into the rhythm of the market, by stupidity, bureaucracy and by a sort of fallback cynicism in face of the tenaciousness of ill health. ‘Consultants have different interests from GPs, who have different interests from nurses, who all have different interests depending on which part of the country they work in.’ Against the culture of permanent change, Widgery is seen to have embodied alternative values.
Hutt reads Widgery’s life through the prism of his last and greatest book, Some Lives, a medical journal turned history, turned autobiography, an account of Widgery’s own medical practice in the East End. His socialism is explained in similar terms:

Widgery believed his causes deserved attention but he also knew that you had to make an argument for them. He drew strength from a belief that his patients and colleagues were especially hard done by. They were already poor and working in depressing circumstances. The last thing they needed were changes making life more difficult … This is not to say that he did not possess a wider view, merely that he thought that taking a narrow and extreme view was a necessary tactic.

One of the first reviews of Confronting an Ill Society appeared in Socialist Review, where a former medical colleague of David’s complained that Hutt’s politics were hazy and that he had relied too much on other people’s opinions. Perhaps the silliest of these, Socialist Review concluded, was the quote Hutt cites from another doctor, Trevor Turner, who told him that if he was still alive Widgery would be working for New Labour. Definitely, Hutt should have seen through such nonsense.

Widgery acted at various stages as a guiding influence to half a dozen of the best-known names of British feminism, a similar number of early gay socialists, and countless other activists. Hutt passes the politicos by, concentrating on doctors who knew David, some of them barely. The best anecdotes are missing as a result and even the quotes from Widgery’s books are not his sharpest, nor his funniest, but come from the frequently more constrained passages of Widgery on medicine.
Confronting an Ill Society does suffer from a surfeit of sources, and those often of the wrong sort. The list of people who dedicated obituaries to Widgery, following his death at a party in October 1992, counted Paul Foot, Richard Neville, Mike Rosen, Raph Samuel, Sheila Rowbotham and Darcus Howe. By the time Widgery died in the early 1990s, no one but he could have kept them in a room together. The sparks between them might have enlightened a different book.
The last word should belong not to the book but to its protagonist. David Widgery wrote several obituaries, the most poignant of which was dedicated to the magazine OZ, where his first and some of his liveliest journalism had been published:

The last part of OZ’s life was spent in a wistful melancholy … He was happiest among friends reminiscing and he would talk of the old days with a bewildered tenderness. The circumstances of OZ’s tragically early death remain unclear. Whether OZ is dead, of suicide or sexual excess, or whether OZ is alive and operating under a series of new names is unclear at the moment. What is clear is that OZ bizarrely and for a short period expressed the energy of a lot of us. We regret his passing.

David Renton

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Bury the Chains

Adam Hochschild
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Pan, London 2005, pp. 467, £8.99

IF one asked why slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, a likely answer would be that it was no longer economically viable; that wage slavery was more suitable for the developing capitalist economy than chattel slavery. This would satisfy the orthodox Marxists among us. But I have always felt that this type of economic reductionism to explain major social events, while not necessarily untrue, is inadequate. Other factors – political, ideological, the actions and aspirations of individuals – have to be included.

Hochschild’s well-researched history of the anti-slavery campaign shows that more than purely economic factors were involved. The opponents of the slave trade and of slavery itself had to contend with the opposition of powerful vested interests. There were two distinct but linked aspects to slavery. One was the trade in slaves; their acquisition in Africa, transport across the Atlantic and sale to the plantation owners. The other was the actual exploitation of the labour of these slaves in the production of sugar, cotton and other commodities. The slave trade was abolished in 1807 by Act of Parliament, but slavery continued on the plantations of the West Indies and in the rest of the Empire till 1838. Both the trade in slaves and their exploitation generated great wealth for important sections of the British ruling class.
The trade in slaves had three legs, and was known as the triangular trade. The first leg was a ship’s voyage to the African coast. Most of the societies of Africa had their own systems of slavery, and the chiefs and kings of these societies were willing to sell slaves in return for cloth, glass beads, iron bars, pots and pans, gunpowder and muskets.
Once the ship was loaded with slaves it sailed ‘the middle passage’ across the Atlantic, to the West Indies or the American South where the slaves were sold to the plantation owners. The now empty ships’ holds were then filled with sugar, cotton and other products for sale back in Europe. On each leg of the journey handsome profits were made. A Liverpool merchant, William Davenport, made an overall rate of profit of 8.1 per cent on his investment in 74 voyages. (Two voyages by his ship, Hawke, netted returns of 73 per cent and 147 per cent in the war years of 1779 and 1780.) The profits from both the slave trade and the sugar plantations provided a substantial boost to the whole national economy and provided capital for the expansion of industry as a whole. In fact the slave trade and slavery provided a kick-start for the Industrial Revolution. Much of the capital that fuelled the railway-building boom came from sugar plantation profits. Hochschild comments:

Think of them [the West Indies] as the Middle East of the late eighteenth century. Just as oil drives the geopolitics of our own time, the most important commodity on European minds then was sugar and the overseas territories that mattered most were the islands so wonderfully suited for growing it. The riches of the Caribbean, said a prominent French writer of the day, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, were ‘the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe … By the mid-1700s Britain was importing 100,000 hogsheads (63-gallon casks) of sugar a year. Because of sugar, in 1773 the value of British imports from Jamaica alone was five times that from the 13 mainland colonies. In the same year, British imports from tiny Grenada were worth eight times those from all of Canada … While slaves laboured in the fields, whites who owned or managed the large plantations lived in conspicuous comfort, the best off in the legendary ‘great house’ that was the centre of every well-established estate. Whenever possible, planters built their great houses on breezy heights overlooking the sea, sometimes at the end of a carriage road lined with cedars or coconut palms … Rooms in the most elegant houses were panelled in hardwood; more wood was shaped into bedposts and banisters for majestically curving staircases; louvers or venetian blinds kept out the sun. Slaves on their knees used coconut husks to polish the dark mahogany floors to a high shine. From chamber pots to wine glasses, many household objects were imported from England. The planters were renowned for their vast meals. (pp. 54–55)

A large and influential section of Britain’s ruling class obtained their wealth and influence from slavery as absentee plantation owners, as participants in the slave trade as ship-owners and as financiers of slaving expeditions. Landowners and merchants alike were intricately tied to slavery. William Beckford, a Lord Mayor of London, was the richest absentee plantation-owner of his time with a dozen properties in Jamaica worked by over 2,000 slaves.

There was strong representation of plantation-owners and slave-traders in Parliament. London was a slave-ship port and the headquarters for the bankers and brokers who financed the sugar plantations. All four of its representatives in the House of Commons were pro-slavery. All told, several dozen MPs owned West Indian plantation land.
The livelihoods of tens of thousands of seamen, merchants and shipbuilders depended on the slave trade. The author shows how intimately the whole of British society was implicated in slavery:

Finally, the slave economy’s profits were a path to respectability. John Gladstone, a member of Parliament and the father of a future prime minister, owned Caribbean sugar and coffee estates with well over a thousand slaves. The cathedral-like library of All Souls College, Oxford, was financed by profits from a slave plantation in Barbados. Family slave estates in Jamaica paid for the elegant house in Wimpole Street where Elizabeth Barrett would be courted by Robert Browning. William Beckford, with a vast fortune based on slave-grown Jamaican sugar, hosted the most sumptuous banquets since Henry VIII and hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. Edward Colston MP was the best-known philanthropist in Bristol; vestryman of his church, lavish benefactor of schools, poorhouses, hospitals, and retired seamen, creator of an endowment that paid for sermons on specified subjects to be preached annually at several churches and the city jail. Colston proudly declared that ‘every helpless widow is my wife and her distressed orphans my children’. A large bronze statue of him still overlooks Bristol’s Colston Avenue, and it was not until one night in 1998 that someone scrawled on its base the name of one of the professions in which he made his fortune: Slave Trader. (p. 15)

One of the largest, most profitable and harshly managed plantations in Barbados, the Codrington estate, had an absentee owner – the Church of England!

So when 12 men met in a London book store and print-shop on 22 May 1787 to form a committee to campaign against slavery they were taking on a powerful section of Britain’s ruling class. In fact they were attacking the source of much of that class’ wealth. Not only that. They lived in a world in which slavery was an accepted fact for the majority of the world population, for most people did not know of any other way of life. Hochschild gives very good description of what the general attitude to slavery must have been at the time:

At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three-quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom. The age was a high point in the trade in which close to 80,000 chained and shackled Africans were loaded on to slave ships and transported to the New World each year. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumbered free persons. The same was true in parts of Africa and it was from these millions of indigenous slaves that African chiefs and slave dealers drew most of the men they sold to Europeans and Arabs sailing their ships along the continent’s coasts. African slaves were spread throughout the Islamic world, and the Ottoman Empire enslaved other peoples as well. In India and other parts of Asia, tens of millions of farm workers were in outright slavery, and other peasants in debt bondage that tied them and their labour to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave was bound to a plantation owner in South Carolina or Georgia. Native Americans turned prisoners of war into slaves and sold them, both to neighbouring tribes and to the Europeans now pushing their way across the continent. In Russia the majority of the population were serfs, often bought, sold, whipped, or sent to the army at the will of their owners. The era was one when, as the historian Seymour Drescher puts it, ‘freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution’. This world of bondage seemed all the more normal then, because anyone looking back in time would have seen little but other slave systems. The ancient Greeks had slaves; the Romans had an estimated two or three million of them in Italy alone; the Incas and the Aztecs had slaves; the sacred texts of most major religions took slavery for granted. Slavery had existed before money or written law. (p. 2)

So these pioneers of the anti-slavery movement were not only taking on powerful vested interests, but challenging universally and widely-held assumptions. Yet by 1838, just half a century later and within a lifetime, slavery had been formally abolished in the British Empire. This book is a story of one of the most successful campaigns in history. Who were these campaigners?

They were not ‘class warriors’. Most of them were motivated by ethical and moral considerations. They were, in fact ‘do-gooders’. Nine of the 12 original committee members were Quakers, and the campaign in its early stages was organised through the Quaker network. It owed much of its success to the organising skill of the Quakers gained through long years of campaigning to defend their right to practice their religion. Hochschild stresses the disinterestedness of the campaigners:

Slaves and other subjugated people have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people became outraged and stayed outraged for many years over someone else’s rights. And most startling of all, the rights of people of another colour, on another continent. No one was more taken aback than Stephen Fuller, the London agent for Jamaica’s planters, an absentee plantation owner himself and a central figure in the pro-slavery lobby. As tens of thousands of protesters signed petitions to Parliament, Fuller was amazed that these ‘were stating no grievance or injury of any kind or sort, affecting the Petitioners themselves’. (p. 5)

The abolitionist attitude towards blacks was perhaps summed up best by Wedgwood’s design [of a logo for cufflinks and hairpins to be worn by supporters, showing a kneeling slave and the words ‘Am I not a man and brother?’]. The African may have been a ‘man and a brother’ but he was definitely a younger and grateful brother, a kneeling one, not a rebellious one. At a time when members of the British upper class did not kneel even for prayer in church, the image of the pleading slave victim reflected a crusade whose leaders saw themselves as uplifting the down trodden, not fighting for equal rights for all. (p. 133)

Yet there was also another strand in the movement. Over a large portion of its activity it coincided with the radical ferment within the British working class encouraged by the French Revolution across the Channel. Many of the abolitionists were also active in the working-class and radical movement. Thomas Hardy, a City shoemaker, the secretary of the London Corresponding Society, one of the first working-class organisations that campaigned for universal suffrage and reform, was also a strong abolitionist. He was close to the former slave Equiano (Gustavo Vasa), who wrote part of his best-selling autobiography while living in Hardy’s house. Equiano became one of the leading lights of the abolitionist movement. He was also one of the first of the London Corresponding Society’s several thousand members, and was active recruiting to it throughout his extensive travels. He helped establish contact between the London Society and Sheffield.

There was tension as well as convergence between the two currents. As Hochschild explains:

Leaders of Britain’s working-class movements were usually against slavery, but they distrusted the politics of aristocratic benevolence, and modern critics have often followed them. Freeing the slaves, they have charged, was a much easier pill to swallow than permitting trade unions, banning child labour, recognising the rights of the Irish and allowing all Britons to vote. And all this fuss about the West Indies helped distract the public from the oppression of labour at home. The first point is certainly true. But the second is not, for, once awakened, a sense of justice is something not easily contained. It often crosses the boundaries of race, class and gender. The movement’s impact spread far more widely than the pious Evangelicals among its early backers ever wished for. If slaves should have rights, why not women? If the brutal working conditions of slavery should be outlawed, why not those in British factories? (p. 352)

Immediately on its formation in 1787, the 12-man committee had to make a decision – whether to campaign only against the trade in slaves or for the complete abolition of slavery. All but one of the 12 decided to restrict their campaign to the slave trade itself. Abolishing the slave trade looked possible, the immediate freeing of all slaves did not. Abolishing the trade required only a decision by the British Parliament. For full emancipation the lawmaking powers of the West Indian colonial legislatures would have to be overridden. Even more daunting, as Hochschild pointed out, in a country where property rights were deeply sanctified by tradition, the committee feared that emancipation would be seen, as Clarkson, its leading member, said ‘as meddling with the property of the planters’.

However, many felt this to be a purely tactical matter. Once the supply of slaves was cut off it was hoped the slave population would eventually disappear due to the high death rate, or that the planters would be forced to treat their slaves so much better that it would be only a few more easy steps to freedom. In fact, both supporters and opponents made little distinction between the two objectives.
According to Hochschild, the campaign was outstandingly well organised. Within a few years of the London committee’s formation there was a committee in nearly every major city in Britain. The committees organised public meetings, debates, undertook investigative journalism publicising the horrors and cruelties of slavery, launched petitions to Parliament, and at one stage organised a boycott of plantation-grown sugar at the height of which more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat sugar. The first petition to Parliament in 1787 came from Manchester, one of the strongholds of both anti-slavery and radicalism, and was signed by over 10,000, one in five of the city’s inhabitants. The organisers of the Manchester petition decided to write to every mayor or other chief magistrate of every town in Britain urging similar anti-slave petitions. In 1788, abolition petitions outnumbered those on any other subject. The movement rapidly took on a democratic flavour. In Sheffield, 769 metal-workers, though aware that the sale of cutlery, scythes, etc., by the traders to the native chiefs provided them with jobs, nevertheless petitioned Parliament:

Cutlery wares … being sent in considerable quantities to the Coast of Africa … as the price of Slaves – your petitioners may be supposed to be prejudiced in their interests if the said trade in Slaves should be abolished. But your petitioners having always understood that the natives of Africa have the greatest aversion to foreign slavery … consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own.

Many of the petitions had their start in public meetings, and one at Leeds explicitly invited the signatures from ‘the rough sons of lowest labour’. In 1792, in conjunction with the debate in Parliament, petitions flooded in. One from Edinburgh stretched the whole length of the House of Commons floor when unrolled. Thirteen thousand signed in Glasgow; 20,000 in Manchester (one-third of the population). The petitions from some small towns bore the signatures of almost every literate inhabitant. In a few weeks, 519 abolition petitions came from all over the country bearing at least 390,000 signatures.

All this campaigning was focussed on getting Parliament to legislate to abolish the trade – and, eventually, slavery itself. In this connection, William Wilberforce is seen by many as the main figure in the campaign. In fact, as Hochschild’s account makes plain, his role was more decorative than practical. All he did was speak in Parliament. The real work was done by others, particularly by Thomas Clarkson. A founder member of the committee in 1787, he devoted his whole life and unremitting activity to the movement, travelling thousands of mile on horseback, organising, speaking, drafting reports and documents to the Parliamentary Select Committees. The first vote in the House of Commons rejected a bill to abolish the trade by 163 to 88. Despite almost yearly votes, committees of inquiry and other activity, it was not till 1807 that Parliament finally outlawed the slave trade by British ships, but not slavery itself. Slavery itself continued till 1838.
Hochschild stresses the importance, the rapid success and the historic significance of the campaign, and he pays due tribute to Clarkson, Equiano and the many other activists involved. However, it is important not to forget that a great contribution to the ending of slavery was made by the slaves themselves. They were not the passive, kneeling and suppliant victims portrayed in Wedgwood’s logo. The West Indies were convulsed by a series of slave revolts.
Though the French Revolution had proclaimed liberty, equality and fraternity, this did not apply to slaves. So the slaves on the island of St Domingue (present-day Haiti), then the largest French colony in the Caribbean, with the largest slave population, rose in revolt. Under the leadership of Toussaint L’Overture they defeated both French and British attempts to reconquer the island. When the revolt broke out in August 1791, the news spread alarm throughout. In London, stock prices fell. Panic spread among slaveholders everywhere. In Virginia, the state legislature tightened restrictions on slave gatherings and passed an ‘Act against divulgers of false news’. In Jamaica, the authorities declared martial law and begged London for soldiers. Slaveholder solidarity overcame the rivalry between Britain and France, and British arms were dispatched to the beleaguered whites in St Domingue. When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, the British attempted to reconquer St Domingue. The main aim being, in the words of the commanding British general, ‘to prevent a circulation in the British Colonies of the wild Doctrines of Liberty and Equality’. The British failed to recover the colony. When some years later Napoleon prepared to reconquer the island, the British government, still fearing the virus of slave rebellions in its colonies, confidentially let Napoleon know that it would not regard his invading St Domingue as a hostile act. This very much reminds one of the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany by the British ruling-class circles just before the Second World War in view of their common fear of communism.
Hochschild comments:

If there were always justice in history, the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of ex-slaves in defeating first the British and then the French, and the transformation of colonial St Domingue into independent Haiti, should have immediately brought freedom throughout the Caribbean, especially to the nearby British islands. But a strong British military presence prevented this, and both British slavery and – for a moment anyway – the British slave trade seemed intact. Yet the events in St Domingue forever changed the way people in Britain thought about their own West Indian colonies. Their image as a glorious, dependable source of imperial wealth, writes the historian David Brion Davis, ‘already tarnished by years of anti-slavery literature, never recovered from Britain’s defeat’. In the minds of both slaves and their owners the Haitian Revolution altered the idea of what was possible, and it thereby raised the stakes in all the struggles that followed. For the first time, whites saw a slave revolt so massive that they could not suppress it, and for the first time blacks saw that it was possible to fight for their freedom and win. (pp. 295–96)

The lesson was not lost on the slaves in the British colonies. There had been a revolt in Dominica in 1791 which the planters blamed on the abolitionists’ activities. A revolt in Jamaica in 1795 was sparked by Maroons, freed blacks and their descendants. It was only put down after more than half a years’ fighting, at a cost of £55,000 and heavy casualties. The same year rebel blacks and mulattos captured the governor, massacred whites, destroyed most of the plantations, and held the bulk of the island for months. When the rebels run out of cannon balls, they loaded their cannons with blocks of sugar wrapped in cloth, and fired these at the British.

In Barbados, long under British rule and with no rebellion or conspiracies for over a hundred years, a rebellion broke out on Easter Sunday 1816. The rebellion had been plotted under cover of a series of social gatherings to celebrate Good Friday. Within a few hours fires had spread across a third of the island. Slaves on 70 plantations were in revolt and had seized weapons before the militia could intervene. A quarter of the island’s sugar crop had gone up in smoke before soldiers could crush the revolt. White troops burned the slaves’ huts to flush out rebels. At least 50 slaves died fighting, well over 200 were executed, and more than a hundred transported to penal servitude.
In the summer of 1823, word reached Georgetown in Guyana about the anti-slavery agitation in Britain and Parliament’s vague declarations. Rumours flew among the slaves that the King of England had freed them; others believed Wilberforce was next in line for the throne and would free them. This was an example of how the agitation in England was having an effect in fanning the flames of rebellion on the plantations. Not waiting for freedom to be handed to them, armed slaves marched on Georgetown. When soldiers halted them and arrested two of their leaders, Quamina and Jack Gladstone, the slaves freed them. The slaves were finally defeated. Quamina and several others fled to the interior. Three weeks later he was found and shot dead. In the fighting and by execution afterwards, some 250 slaves were killed.
Just after Christmas 1831 another revolt broke out in Jamaica. It took most of January 1832 for troops to subdue the revolt. More than 200 plantations in north-west Jamaica suffered over £1.1 million worth of damage. Some 200 slaves and 14 whites died in the fighting, and the gallows and firing squads claimed over 300 rebels – possibly more because some court records were destroyed.
If the campaign by Clark, Wilberforce and the abolitionists can be seen as a major factor leading to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, it is clear that more than that was needed to end slavery itself on the Caribbean plantations. It is clear that it was the rebellion of the slaves themselves that provided the final shove. Although all these revolts – except that on St Domingue – were crushed, it became clear that the cost of maintaining slavery was too high. After the latest revolt in Jamaica, Lord Howick of the Colonial Office warned: ‘The present state of affairs cannot go on much longer … Emancipation alone will effectually avert the danger.’ In the wake of the rebellion, the British naval commander for the West Indies told a House of Commons Committee: ‘The only reason why the slaves are tranquil now is that they … hope to be emancipated.’ If they are not freed, he declared, ‘insurrection will soon take place’.
It had become evident that freeing the slaves was the only alternative to a widespread war that might be beyond the government’s military capacity. Seeing the untenability of their position, the plantation owners now concentrated on being paid compensation for the property that was being taken from them.
Hochschild writes: ‘Elizabeth Heyrick [a prominent abolitionist] had presciently warned nearly a decade before “let compensation be first made to the slave”. But this was not – and would never be on any government’s agenda.’
The emancipation bill finally passed both Houses of Parliament in the summer of 1833. Parliament voted the plantation owners £20 million in government bonds, an amount roughly equal to 40 per cent of the national budget. Compensation satisfied financial interests in Britain as well as in the West Indies, for many of the plantations were mortgaged, and it was their London creditors who ultimately pocketed much of the money. The Church of England received £8,823, 8 shillings and 9 pence for the 411 slaves on its Codrington plantation. For Britain’s landed gentry, who, even after the Reform Act, still controlled the state, compensation was a good compromise. It recognised the impossibility of continuing to exploit the slaves in the old way, and bowed both to public opinion and the sacredness of private property.
For the slaves, freedom was neither immediate nor complete. Parliament had decreed that emancipation would come in two stages. The slaves would become ‘apprentices’ in 1834, obliged to work full-time for their former owners, without pay, in most cases for six years. Only after that would they be fully liberated. As a result of pressure on both sides of the ocean, the six years were shortened to four. Only on 1 August 1838 did all the slaves throughout the British Empire, men, women and children, become officially free. And then one has to wonder whether the new wage-slavery was much better than the old chattel slavery. The history of Haiti since it won its ‘freedom’ is a tale of continued misery, corruption, exploitation and poverty.
Other interesting aspects of Hochschild’s book are the pen portraits of many participants in these events. Until reading the book I did not realise how popular writing had inflated the importance of Wilberforce and how undeserved his reputation is. From Hochschild’s account his role emerges as really a minor one. The actual campaigning and organising, the real hard work was done by people like Thomas Clarkson. The campaigners needed parliamentary spokesman and that is all he was, and, according to Hochschild, he wasn’t even a very effective one:

Year after year, Wilberforce introduced an abolition bill, but he remained as poor a strategist as ever. He would propose the bill either too late in the legislative session or when the MPs were distracted by some other issue, and he was too disorganised to muster his supporters. (p. 252)

On all other issues he was essentially reactionary. When the government clamped down on working-class and radical agitation in the 1790s he spoke and voted for its Seditious Meetings Act and its Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act, noting in his diary: ‘Went to Pitt’s, to look over the Sedition Bill – altered it much for the better by enlarging … I greatly fear some civil war …’ Under the Acts any political meeting of more than 50 people had to be approved by a magistrate. Anyone who spoke or wrote in a way ‘to excite or stir up the people to hatred or contempt of the … constitution of the realm’ was liable to immediate arrest. Hochschild asks: ‘Could that include hatred of slavery?’ Wilberforce continued to support all the era’s repressive measures, arguing in favour of a law that provided three-month jail terms for anything remotely resembling labour organising, which he thought ‘a general disease in our society’.

Wilberforce seemed as much concerned with suppressing sin as slavery. Having persuaded George III to issue a proclamation against vice and ordering prosecution of ‘excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord’s Day or other dissolute, immoral or disorderly practices’, he founded the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation Against Vice and Immorality. For good measure he got this society to secure the jailing of a small bookseller, Thomas Williams, for publishing Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason. A prissy character indeed.
One wonders why Wilberforce is always mentioned as a champion of the slaves when much more worthy campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, James Ramsey, John Newton, James Phillips and Edward Rushton (see Bill Hunter’s biography) are hardly mentioned.
As well as giving the main events and trends leading to the abolition of slavery in Britain, Hochschild includes fascinating accounts of the attempts to establish communities of freed slaves in Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia.
It is clear that the final emancipation of the slaves was the result of a combination of factors. One undoubtedly was the brilliant and dedicated campaign of the abolitionists that made the issue of slavery a central one in public discourse over a period of years. But it is doubtful whether this purely moral campaign would have forced the powerful moneyed vested interests to retreat. It is obvious that the rebelliousness of the slaves themselves, in Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere, made the old forms of exploitation impossible. It was a combination of struggle, economics and moral campaigning that determined how and when slavery was abolished in the British Empire.
But one thing still puzzles me after reading this excellent book. Why was the slave trade made illegal in 1807 – 30 years before the abolition of slavery? True there were recurrent problems with attempted mutinies by the slaves on the ships, but these seemed to have been contained. As far as one can tell, the trade was still profitable. It would seem that the moral pressure exerted by the abolitionist campaign, the petitions and the exposure of the cruelties were sufficient to move the consciences of Parliament. I would love to believe this was the case. But one wonders whether there were more material causes. Did the supply of slaves from Africa dry up? Did the rate of profit drop too low? Were there geopolitical factors involved? Did the wars with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France and international relations have an effect. It is a pity that Hochschild says little on these aspects.

Harry Ratner

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Helen of Troy

Bettany Hughes
Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore
Jonathan Cape, London 2005, p. p458, £20

THIS book is by an accomplished historian who has become well known for her presentations of historical subjects on television, of which this is the most recent. Serious students of history should not be disappointed: Bettany Hughes tries to get behind the extraordinary accretion of myth and legend to the no doubt equally extraordinary person called Helen. Such a project requires an appreciation of the position of women not only in Mycenaean Greece, but also in the preceding Minoan and contemporary Hittite civilisations.

In this connexion the following passage on Minoan Crete is of great interest:

One persuasive interpretation of the female imagery on Bronze Age seal-stones and pots and figurines is that women were responsible for nature’s good health – for the germination of the seed and the ripening of the corn. A society that has moved from hunting and gathering to farming finds that nature, in its newly domesticated and artificial form, depends on the farmer as much as he does on it. So when nature becomes an agro-business, nature’s CEOs, women, need to be kept on side. Grain supplies are stored in the palace-complexes of Knossos on Crete or Pylos on the Greek mainland and were perhaps guarded by priestesses, the klawiphoroi, the ‘keepers of the keys’.

Knossos has been identified as the mother of all grain stores. Many hundreds of pithoi [large jars] were found lining its labyrinthine storerooms. Someone must have walked through those pregnant, malty chambers organising what went where, deciding how the wheat and barley and olives should be stored, saying what proportion was due to be offered back to the gods, marshalling the rations of a civilisation. The Grandstand and Temple frescoes from Knossos imply that women were present in the palace in huge numbers. This painted female host surely escapes its earlier identification as a chorus of dancing girls or a harem of silent, dutiful wives. The attractive woman from the Campstool Fresco, christened ‘La Parisienne’ by Evans’ team of excavators because she seemed the height of coiffeured urbanity, was almost certainly not there to be decorative. It is as likely that such women received the harvest, blessed it and then controlled its use and redistribution.

That would have been a powerful position to be in. Consider how fragile food production was in the Bronze Age. The panic caused by the prospect of seven years of famine in Egypt is well documented, but it has been calculated that it would take just two years of bad harvests to clear out the warren of food storage rooms in Knossos – the same or even less at the palaces of Mycenae. (pp. 325–26)

Bettany Hughes also gives a number of examples of Hittite women in powerful positions. The most dramatic example is that of Queen Puduhepa, whose correspondence with the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II has been preserved. Rameses was in negotiation with the Hittite court about one of their royal daughters he was anxious to marry, but a treasure-house fire at the Hittite capital was making it a bit difficult to complete the arrangements. Even so, Rameses seems to have pressed the matter, and Queen Puduhepa suspected that the Pharaoh was rather over-anxious to acquire her daughter’s dowry along with her person. She proceeded to administer the following diplomatic reproof: ‘Does my brother possess nothing at all? Only if the son of the Sun-God, the son of the Storm-God, and the sea have nothing do you have nothing! Yet, my brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That is worthy neither of your reputation nor of your status.’ (quoted p. 189) Another example is the priestess Kuvatalla, recipient of rich gifts from the Hittite royal court (pp. 326–27).

The Mycenaean Greeks inherited many cultural traits from their Minoan predecessors (Crete was under Mycenaean rule from about 1450 onwards, but Mycenaean civilisation collapsed around 1150). The role of aristocratic women in the Mycenaean centres was clearly comparable with that found in the Minoan period (see pp. 101–02). On the basis of all this, Bettany Hughes concludes, plausibly, that Helen was not only queen of Sparta but a priestess as well:

In chronologically parallel societies (the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Babylonians) the highest-born women have central religious roles – they are the chief representatives of the gods. There is every reason to believe that a Mycenaean queen – a Bronze Age Helen – would also have been a high priestess, a religious as well as a temporal potentate. Although Homer’s Helen is half-mortal, half-divine, it is as a woman, as a Spartan queen, that she speaks confidently to the gods and goddesses in the epic; she addresses her altera ego Aphrodite as an equal. (p. 102)

Bettany Hughes is almost certainly not a Marxist, otherwise she would surely have pursued the question of how high-born Bronze Age women lost their pre-eminent position in the succeeding centuries. Classical scholars who are Marxists will have to address this. (Suggestion: the process is probably linked with the rise of Zeus to a dominant role in the Greek pantheon.) As it is, she contents herself with some well-aimed swipes at the prevalent attitude of Fifth-Century Athenian males towards their womenfolk, as exemplified by the speech that the historian Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian statesman Perikles, where he says ‘the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you’ (quoted pp. 264–65). (Perikles’ stance here is a curious one, since, despite the above utterance, which appears authentic, he vigorously defended his mistress Aspasia when his political opponents tried to use her as a stick to beat him with – a clear case of wishing to have your cake and eat it too.) It is noteworthy that Bettany Hughes studiously avoids any reference to the remainder of this famous apologia for Athenian democracy.

But all this is something of a side-issue. More to the point is the light that the book Helen of Troy sheds on Homer, especially on the Iliad. Homer probably lived and composed his two great masterpieces around 850 BCE, but the Trojan War, if it took place (which seems very likely) occurred at some stage between 1275 and 1180 BCE. As Bettany Hughes rightly states:

Homer’s tale of the Trojan Wars, of the final flourish of the Bronze Age, describes the end of an era. For Homer’s audience, this story about Helen had to do two things. It had to explain the influence of a woman to an audience who, living in a man’s world, knew that this power had been eclipsed. And – even subconsciously – it needed to describe a moment in time of displacement and flux. (p. 102)

Besides setting Homer properly in context, Bettany Hughes gives several instances where archaeology has confirmed the accuracy of Homer’s lines. Enlightened classical scholars, of course, have long realised that Homer is, on the whole, more reliable historically than otherwise. This reliability is, indeed, an index of the great poet’s artistic success: his work was so prized that it rapidly acquired high ideological standing in the Greek world. In short, the Iliad and the Odyssey are examples of what Gilbert Murray has described as a ‘traditional book’. As Murray explains:

The book which contained the whole Logos of the wise man was apt to be long-lived. It became an heirloom [the original rhapsodes, the reciters of the Homeric poems, lived on the island of Chios and were known as the Homeridai, the ‘sons of Homer’ – see N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322BC, Clarendon Press, 1959, p. 88]; and with each successive owner, with each successive great event in the history of the tribe or the community, the book was changed, expanded and expurgated. For the most jealously guarded book had, of course, its relation to the public. It was not meant to be read; it was meant to recite from … It was the source of stories and lays which must needs be interesting; of oracles and charms and moral injunctions which must not seem ridiculous or immoral; of statements in history and geography which had better not be demonstrably false. (The Rise of the Greek Epic, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 99–100, my emphasis)

A beautiful example of Homer’s accuracy is given by Bettany Hughes in connexion with the Catalogue of Ships that records the various contingents of Greek troops who fought at Troy:

In 1993, the discovery of a single Linear B tablet in Thebes threw an entirely new light on the Catalogue question. The tablet was uncovered by accident, when a water pipe was being laid in Pelopidas Street in central Thebes. The waterworks were suspended and an archaeological investigation begun. The dig has been productive and, to date, over 250 tablets have surfaced. These tablets show that Thebes was in fact the centre of a massive territory, a territory larger than Pylos or Sparta or Mycenae itself. If the Theban district was a vitally powerful region in the Late Bronze Age, it suddenly makes sense that a consolidated movement of Greeks should set sail from Thebes’ port – the port of Aulis.

The new Theban tablets list a town, Eleon, which had always given archaeologists and historians some trouble – it is mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, part of the naval contingent from Boiotia. Yet Eleon seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. As a northern Greek settlement it is not mentioned in any other source from antiquity. And so, scholars argued, this town must simply have been a figment of Homer’s imagination.

The Thebes tablets dating from the thirteenth century BC tell a different story. Eleon appears on tablet TH Ft 140. Homer’s lines, in this case (as in many others), are transmitting information direct from the Bronze Age past. (p. 197)

Bettany Hughes wisely refrains from pronouncing upon all the various historical questions raised by Homer’s story, but she does give full references in the text and in the bibliography, so that readers may extend their knowledge of the Minoans, the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, and of much else besides. Hopefully this book will also encourage those unfamiliar with the Iliad and the Odyssey to read them. Alas, full appreciation of the quality of these poems demands a knowledge of Homeric Greek, as even the best translation cannot convey the sound-music of the original. If you do choose to embark on the task of reading the epics in their original language you will find it well worth the effort: in any case, you will be following in the footsteps of that ancient Greek hero Odysseus – ‘pollōn d’anthrōpōn iden astea kai nōon egnō’, ‘He knew the cities and the mind of many peoples.’

Chris Gray

 

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Herman Melville

 

Loren Goldner
Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer
Queequeg Publications, New York 2006, pp. 291, £9

HERMAN Melville, as Loren Goldner notes, was ‘the man who put American literature onto the level of world literature’ with his literary classic Moby Dick (1851), the famous ‘whaling story’. Yet Melville was never acknowledged as such in his own lifetime, and for several decades after his death in 1891, was just another ‘minor New York writer’ (p. 22). In the 1920s, this finally changed as Moby Dick was ‘discovered’ by literary critics, and by the time of the Cold War Melville had been safely canonised as a romantic writer of the ‘American Renaissance’ whose individualistic heroes fought for liberty against totalitarianism. It is therefore perhaps hardly surprising that Marxists with a bent for literary criticism have generally avoided writing that much about Melville, and so Goldner’s new study is welcome.

Goldner’s starting point is quite rightly Moby Dick, the story of the doomed whaling ship the Pequod, and the creative influences which inspired Melville to write it. Much of this work is concerned with examining the specificity of American society during ‘1848’, with respect to the problematic of slavery in particular, and so demonstrating how ‘something approaching “the” nineteenth-century American literary epic’ was born at that moment. Yet though he discusses Melville’s voluminous other writings, this is not a biography using a strictly chronological framework to build up ‘a “history and literature” study’ of the writer. Goldner rather has a specific argument to make, noting that ‘in Moby Dick, Melville imagined something beyond bourgeois society, and after Moby Dick, he did not. That is the axial point of his life, and of this study.’ (pp. 283–84)
Yet what is really novel about this study is how Goldner discovers one ‘thread’ in Melville’s thought that has not received significant attention up to now, which weaves in and out of Moby Dick in particular. ‘That Melville, at the time he wrote Moby Dick, was intimately familiar with a vast range of world mythology is no mystery; the most casual reading of the book suffices to demonstrate it.’ (p. 89) But Goldner insists that there was more than mere mythology in Melville, there was a concern with a particular myth, that of ‘cosmic kingship’. This, according to Goldner, began with the Egyptian pharaohs and then Alexander and reached its zenith in the sacred founder of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne, but had steadily declined in the face of the development of science and the decline of feudalism into ‘pseudo-sacred’ Emperors like Charles V. The French Revolution with its regicide broke the tradition of ‘cosmic kingship’, and from then on power could only be mythic, with secular ‘heroes’ like Napoleon or Nelson. By the 1840s, when Melville was writing, Goldner argues that there were simply no more heroes worthy of the name left: ‘Napoleon represented a last Ersatz recomposition of mythic unity before being shattered into the fragments of late-nineteenth-century Bonapartist buffoons such as his nephew.’ (p. 91) Moby Dick, contemporaneous then with Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for Goldner is first and foremost an attack on such legitimations of power. In his portrayal of the Pequod’s captain Ahab, ‘Melville weaves the question of charismatic authority so totally into his story of the destruction of the Pequod that it would not be an exaggeration to characterise Moby Dick as, among other things, a treatise on the origins and decline of the Napoleonic myth’. (p. 23)
Goldner cites a particularly telling paragraph in Moby Dick, Chapter 35, The Mast Head:

Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of the Vendome, stands with arms folded, some 150 feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Phillippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft of his towering main-mast in Baltimore … Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze.

The parallels between this and the last lines of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (the prediction that ‘when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendome Column’) are noted – as are the parallel use of metaphor and vivid imagery in both Marx and Melville. Yet Goldner not only cites reference after reference to historic ‘Kings’ and ‘Emperors’ throughout Melville’s writings, but he also shows how the personal circumstances of the writer help explain why Melville saw the decline and fall of this myth of cosmic kingship so clearly: ‘What made him virtually unique among the American Renaissance writers of the 1850s was extreme downward social mobility.’ (p. 145) Not only were the Melville family high aristocrats originally, (indeed, his grandmother was apparently descended from the King of Norway), but his grandfathers were men of action in the American Revolution of the mid-1770s. However, Melville was a writer of ‘dispossession’ from this rich past and revolutionary traditions after his father had died a bankrupt when he was only 13 in 1832 and he had been forced to work as a bank clerk. A monotonous and relentlessly dull life of white-collar work and capitalist wage-labour was apparently all that awaited him, one where individuals were doomed to be just cogs in the machine (pp. 8, 148). The young Melville felt an instinctive hatred of bourgeois civilisation.

Yet in the early 1840s, Melville escaped New York and enlisted to see the world through working on ships. His visit to the islands of the South Seas allowed him further to criticise ‘Western civilisation’ though a comparison with the ‘primitive’ islanders he encountered. He was repelled by the impact of Christian missionaries, noting in Typee the ‘diseased, starving and dying’ natives of Hawaii. As he put it: ‘The devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking – “Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of enlightening?”’ (p. 120) Even witnessing the ‘rather bad trait’ of Polynesian cannibalism prompted Melville in Omoo to ‘ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that only a few years since was practised in enlightened England: a convicted traitor … had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!’ Indeed:

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilised man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. (p. 121)

Melville’s next book, Mardi (1849), now for the first time saw a conscious cosmic dimension enter into his writing as he rose above the purely descriptive accounts of his travels which had been his form of writing up to now. (p. 123) That he was also clearly influenced by the revolutions of 1848 can be seen also in his other novels of this period, Redburn and White-Jacket, which are full of descriptions of class conflict. In White-Jacket, set on board a US warship the Nevermind, when rumours of a war with England sweep the fleet the officers are enthusiastic, but the men are not showing ‘the incurable antagonism in which they dwell’ for ‘how were these officers to gain glory? How but by a distinguished slaughtering of their fellow men. How were they to be promoted? How but over the buried heads of killed comrades and mess mates …’ (p. 134)

Yet it was not until 1851 and Moby Dick that race and class finally came together in Melville to demonstrate that there was an alternative way of organising work and so society without ‘officers’, empires and ‘Kings’ – to be brought about through the mass collective action of those who produce the wealth. As Goldner notes, for Melville ‘the modern labour process in its collective and de-mythified character … is the actual and potential source of a new, directly lived “cosmic imagination” that exceeds in its power anything known in the past. This is a “reading” of Melville which must be pulled carefully out of Moby Dick’, through an examination of his portrayal of the multi-racial crew of the Pequod – as opposed to his portrayal of its ‘officers’. (p. 60) This is from Moby Dick, Chapter 26, Knights and Squires:

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces … if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rain-bow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!

In stressing that the harpooners like Queequeg (a South Sea cannibal), Tashtego (an Indian) and Daggoo (an African), ‘the meanest mariners, renegades, and castaways’ constituted ‘an Anarcharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea’ (Chapter 27, Moby Dick), Melville, Goldner argues, was going beyond mere democratic humanism. That would be astonishing enough in itself in the America of 1848, still torn apart by the question of slavery. But by referring to Anarcharsis Clootz, a Prussian nobleman who embraced the Great French Revolution and called for one Universal Republic open to all, Melville was consciously returning to the moment when the ‘myth of the cosmic king’ met its decisive end in the regicide of Louis XVI. (p. 104) Moreover, he was alluding to the birth of what he called a new ‘antemosaic’ cosmic man – not only a revolutionary democratic antithesis to the myth of authoritarian cosmic kingship but what Goldner argues is ‘a return on a higher level’ of ‘a ‘cosmic’ sensibility’. (p. 52) Queequeg for Melville was a truly heroic figure in an age of myths and legends. ‘Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face … you cannot hide the sou l… Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.’ (Chapter 10, Moby Dick) The parallels with Marxist thought with respect to ‘primitive communism’ are examined, with Goldner arguing that:

Melville’s portrayal of [intellectual] Ishmael in the final scene of Moby Dick, swept into the vortex of the maelstrom and then carried back to the surface with Queequeg’s coffin, is a condensed symbolic expression of the ‘supercession’ of the wreckage of the world of the bourgeois ego by a fusion with elements of the primordial past, much as Engels in the final part of The Origin of the Family described communism. (p. 25)

After the ‘failure’ of Moby Dick to impress the world of publishing and the public at the time, Melville, after taking revenge on the literary critics in Pierre (1852), retreated into the world of the ‘sacred’ totality that had preceded the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He immersed himself in the study of the lost world of Western Christendom to illustrate the transition from warrior monks like the Knights Templar to the ‘pseudo-sacred’ modern lawyers at the Temple Bar. In one passage from a short story in 1853 (which inadvertently also reminds us of the influence of Melville on later American socialist writers like Jack London), Melville described how with the decline of the power of kings, ‘the iron heel is changed to a boot of patent leather; the long two-handed sword to a one-handed quill … the helmet is a wig. Struck by Time’s enchanters wand, the Templar today is a lawyer.’(p. 167) Melville’s ‘medievalism’ comes out again in Clarel (1876), but it is clear that after Moby Dick, Melville had abandoned his hope in a collective revolt by the working class and his dream of seeing the ‘Anarcharsis Clootz deputation’ return. Yet Goldner continues to devote himself to pulling at the ‘thread’ of ‘cosmic kingship’ in Melville’s later writings, pulling until the writer is left exposed to us, a bourgeois ego somewhere ‘between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man’.

There is much more that could be said about Goldner’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking study, but I have limited myself to try and stress what I see as the new dimension to Melville’s thought that has been illuminated through his stress on the ‘cosmic imagination’ in Moby Dick. His exploration of the relationship of Melville to modernism as it initially emerged as a movement in France after 1848 is also noteworthy, as is his argument for an ‘anthropological’ as opposed to a purely ‘aesthetic’ view of culture. Goldner’s attention to detail with respect to the world of the sacred, cosmic and mythological is impressive, and reinforced with a fascinating discussion about a host of minor and almost forgotten thinkers. One cannot help but be reminded of Marx’s maxim that ‘nothing human is alien to me’, and Goldner’s humanism shines throughout this work.
There are a couple of minor but glaring factual errors. Melville was born in 1819 not 1818 so he was not quite ‘the exact contemporary of Marx’ (pp. 7, 10), and his father died in 1832, not 1831 (p. 9), and Goldner at times seems to assume his readers have already read the relevant work by Melville when making his argument. The classic Marxist study of Moby Dick in my opinion remains that of the late Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James. How much Goldner’s thoughts on ‘race, class and the crisis of bourgeois ideology’ in Melville owe to James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953) will be clear to anyone who reads that work. Yet James’s pioneering work was written in difficult circumstances in the midst of McCarthyism, and parts of it are clearly now outdated. Though this is not the place to discuss Goldner’s Jamesian ‘attempt to outline a “program” for American Marxism understood not from the vantage point of the “Ishmaels” but of the “Queequegs”’, he should be congratulated for bringing what he calls James’ ‘unusual and little-known study’ to the attention of a new generation of anti-capitalists. (p. 25) We should also celebrate a new Marxist study of Herman Melville, whose descriptions in Moby Dick of ‘the meanest mariners, renegades and castaways’ according to C.L.R. James constitute, ‘like all great literature, not only literature but history’.

Christian Hogsbjerg

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The Sixties

 

Barry Sheppard
The Sixties: A Political Memoir
Haymarket Books, Chicago 2006, pp. 354

PUBLISHED by the International Socialists Organization’s Haymarket Books, Barry Sheppard’s The Party is essential reading for anybody trying to understand revolutionary politics over the past half-century or so and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in particular. Sheppard felt the need to rectify false impressions of the party first of all conveyed by the party itself today, which has basically abandoned all of its past political traditions and has evolved into a small and discredited sect. His book will also correct the somewhat distorted portrait found in Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, an otherwise irreproachable history of the Maoist movement. If one formed an impression of the SWP based solely on Elbaum’s book, it would be that of a group with a lot less influence that it actually had.
Barry Sheppard was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States from 1959 until 1988, when he was expelled like hundreds of others before him during the party’s degeneration. With an adroit approach to the mass movement and a high level of commitment from its membership, the SWP blazed across the 1960s horizon until it burned out like a shooting star in the 1980s.
The SWP had a particularly strong relationship to Leon Trotsky. Unlike some of the European intellectuals who had been drawn to the Fourth International, American party leader James P. Cannon embodied the sort of proletarian no-nonsense spirit that pervades Sheppard’s memoir. From Cannon to Farrell Dobbs, to whom Sheppard’s memoir is dedicated, you get a feeling that these are people who are not to be trifled with. With their single-mindedness of purpose and their plain talk, these party leaders made a young recruit feel that we had made the right decision. The rest of the left seemed to smack of petit-bourgeois dilettantism by contrast.
The down side of all this, however, is that the internal life of the party was often devoid of self-reflection. Readings tended to be narrowly restricted to the ‘Marxist classics’, which consisted of works like Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution or James P. Cannon’s party-building tracts. It would be very unusual for a party activist to spend (or waste) much time reading Mariategui, Gramsci, Paul Sweezy or any others outside of the fold. This is not to speak of scholars such as Neil Harding, whose two-volume study of Lenin might have alerted a party member that we were going about things all wrong.
Although Barry Sheppard’s preface warns that ‘the project of building a nucleus of socialists that have as their objective the eventual formation of a mass revolutionary socialist party cannot be a repeat or replica of the SWP in “the Sixties”’, his goal would seem to be clearing the ground for the reconstruction of such a nucleus tomorrow. Whether it is correct to think in terms of a nucleus is, of course, an important issue facing both Sheppard or anybody else trying to move forward from the debacles of the 1980s, Max Elbaum included. In my own opinion, such a concept will have to be discarded, but since volume two of Barry’s memoir will specifically address the question of the SWP’s implosion, it makes sense to defer discussion of that topic until that volume has been published.
In some ways, Sheppard’s volume one is a straightforward history of the SWP in the period from 1960 to 1973. It reads very much as if Sheppard had sat down with old copies of the Militant newspaper and party resolutions and reconstructed a narrative. Although Sheppard has a dry writing style (and is somewhat dry in his personal demeanour), the book is highly dramatic. As a highly capable editor who was responsible for editing the Militant at a time when it captivated readers such as Malcolm X, Sheppard knows how to select the best material from this mountain of documents. He also does not waste a single word. One will find oneself turning pages in eager anticipation of what happens next in his life and in the life of the organisation.
Two of the major struggles taken up by Sheppard are the black liberation and anti-war movements. Despite the fact that the SWP was a relatively minor player in the black struggle, Sheppard’s memoir has eye-opening accounts of how the party and key black leaders interacted with each other. Malcolm X was probably the best known of them, but Robert F. Williams also had an important relationship to the party.
Sheppard’s material complements research done by Timothy Tyson in Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Put briefly, Williams was a Second World War veteran who launched an NAACP chapter in Monroe County, North Carolina in 1957. When the local KKK began terrorising blacks, Williams organised self-defence squads. He also worked with the local Lumbee Indians who sent the Klan packing one night with war whoops and shots fired into the air.
After the cops falsely accused Williams of kidnapping a couple of Klansmen, the SWP worked with other groups to spirit him out of the country. Eventually, the charges against Williams were dropped. Sheppard writes:

Some of those in the North, including SWP members and our Canadian co-thinkers, who knew him from pro-Cuba and other activities formed a modern underground railroad that brought him to Canada and from there to Cuba, where he was given political asylum. We helped set up the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants, which got out the truth about what happened in Monroe, and we began organizing the legal and public defense of the accused. After several years the frame-up was defeated and Williams eventually returned home, becoming active in black rights struggles in Detroit.

Three of the Freedom Riders who had gone to Monroe and aided the defense effort in New York joined the YSA and SWP, among them Ken Shilman, who became a party leader. Shilman had watched television coverage of the assaults on the first three Freedom Rides, and decided then and there to be on the next ride to the South. [Shilman died of cancer in 1989.]

Freedom Rides occurred even as far north as Maryland, a border state, where many segregationist policies existed. Fred Feldman, who joined the SWP later [and Marxmail much later] and became a leading member of our writing staffs, was arrested seven times on these Maryland Freedom Rides.

Reading Sheppard’s account of the anti-war movement will remind veterans of and familiarise newcomers with the depth and breadth of activity in this country. Chicano members of the SWP were intimately involved in helping to found the Chicano Moratorium, which reached deep into the heart of the community. In June 1970, the Los Angeles cops attacked a rally organised by the Chicano Moratorium and killed an LA Times reporter named Ruben Salazar, who was shot point-blank in the head by a gas grenade. Sheppard describes these tumultuous events:

Just after the police riot started, other sheriffs had arrested Corky Gonzales [Gonzalez died recently] as he was driving to the rally to speak. He and a group were in an open truck on their way from Denver. A group of Chicanos crowded into the back of an open truck was ‘suspicious’, the sheriff said. So they stopped the truck, and then arrested the group on ‘suspicion of armed bank robbery’. While these phony charges didn’t stick, the cops got what they wanted – to disrupt the rally by preventing speakers from getting to it.

According to the sheriff’s department: ‘Hundreds of provocative acts were committed by known dissidents who came to the location to incite and foment trouble.’ This was his excuse for the murder of Salazar and the police riot. While not very convincing, the cover story showed that his men were looking for dissidents like Corky Gonzales.

I was alone in the SWP National Office that day, so it was I who got the telephone call from Lew Jones, who was in LA to help organize our response. He gave me a rundown on the days events, and we planned out how we would get coverage for the Militant, and what proposals he would make to the Los Angeles branch for participation in protests against the police riot and murders.

Sheppard frequently alludes to the difficulties encountered by the SWP in the anti-war movement, which are reduced to a matter of political differences over mass action versus an orientation to the Democratic Party, and other less critical questions. While it is correct that the Communist Party of the USA created huge problems for the movement by constantly trying to side-track it into electoral politics, the SWP was hampered by the sort of ‘democratic centralist’ muscle that could also push things forward. It was a double-edged sword. For honest independents who were by no means partial to the Democratic Party, the SWP could often appear as a monolithic presence totally indifferent to their wishes.

The aforementioned Lew Jones, who resigned from the SWP in the 1980s after becoming disaffected by growing sectarianism, now feels that the party was often heavy-handed in the way that it took advantage of bloc voting. In an interview with author Tom Wells in the essential The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, Jones offers a somewhat different assessment of the split in 1968 in the Student Mobilization Committee from Sheppard. For Sheppard, it was as simple as this: ‘The radical pacifists joined with the DuBois [CPUSA youth group] and others in order to scuttle the SMC as an anti-war organization. In part, this was a reflection of the rising pressures of electoral politics in a presidential year.’
Lew Jones, who was one of the party’s floor leaders at this conference, admitted to Wells that the SWP’s approach was ‘greatly insensitive’. He added: ‘You’re dealing with forces coming into political motion for the first time, and you want to broaden out the movement, you don’t want to scare them away. And the SWP’s heavy-handedness sometimes had that effect.’
While Sheppard’s account of the positive relationships between the SWP and figures such as Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X is inspiring, he does not really come to grips with a problem that dogged the SWP throughout the period covered in volume one of his memoirs. Despite the party’s correct understanding of the dynamics of black liberation, African-Americans never really joined the party in significant numbers. Furthermore, when they were members, they often felt vulnerable to charges that they were in a ‘white party’.
When I was in NYC in the late 1960s, a group of black and Latino working-class youth who had recently joined the Young Socialist Alliance – our youth group – was raising the idea of starting a chapter in Harlem that would effectively be free of white members. They felt that it would be a lot easier to recruit new black and Latino members that way. A couple of the more seasoned and ‘orthodox’ black members of the party came down heavily on them, invoking Lenin’s polemics against the Jewish Bund’s demand that it be free to operate as a separate group in the Russian Social Democracy.
Despite his unstinting endorsement of the party-building wisdom of James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs, there are some dark clouds that occasionally crop up in Sheppard’s memoir. We learn that James P. Cannon was not above forming cliques when the spirit moved him. In a footnote to chapter 34 entitled Farrell Dobbs and the Political Committee, we learn:

What I experienced in the early 1960s were attempts by Cannon to establish what amounted to a dual center in Los Angeles that challenged the authority of the Political Committee in New York.

One aspect of this was holding frequent meetings of the NC members residing in LA to discuss and adopt positions on national political questions and then using this leverage in the party as a whole. Later, these meetings included NC members from the San Francisco Bay Area as well.

What was involved was not comrades with opposing political views to the majority of the party getting together in a tendency or a faction, based on a common political position. Such political formations can be helpful in clarifying political debates.

But the meetings in LA had no political basis. Sometimes their proposals were helpful, sometimes not, but that was not the point. These meetings undercut the authority of the center in New York and cast doubts on its capabilities.

Farrell told me, probably in 1963, that Cannon ‘wouldn’t get his dead hand off the steering wheel’. After Peter Camejo moved to Berkeley, he was invited as a member of the NC to one of these meetings in Los Angeles.

Peter told the meeting why he didn’t think it was right to have these meetings of a geographical subset of the National Committee. He said he was leaving the meeting, and wouldn’t attend future ones. This put a stop to the practice.

Since Cannon has the reputation of being some kind of saint in circles still devoted to the memory of the SWP or efforts to recreate such a model, this is truly eye-opening stuff. While it is not as bad as discovering that the kindly Catholic priest in your local church was abusing altar boys, it comes close in Trotskyist terms.

Sheppard even faults Farrell Dobbs for the way he handled attempts to get the SWP to keep the Gay Liberation Movement at arm’s length. Even though Dobbs is described in the dedication as ‘selfless, incorruptible, fair-minded and warm human being and friend’, he comes across as practically Machiavellian when it comes to gays and the party.
Basically, Sheppard accuses Dobbs of catering to the prejudices of his own brother Roland and Nat Weinstein, two long-time trade-union members of the party. Sheppard had prepared a line resolution for the 1973 convention on the gay movement that allowed local branches to ‘relate to concrete local activities and organizations’, but stopped short of projecting an ‘organized national party participation’. The resolution would also take no position on the ‘relative merits of homosexuality or heterosexuality’, which one supposes was an advance over the naked prejudices embodied in the party’s past, when open homosexuals were excluded from membership on the basis that they might be subject to blackmail. Sheppard did note that it is logically absurd to assume that open homosexuals would be afraid of blackmail.
Dobbs advised Sheppard to drop the reference to local branches acting on their own initiative. He didn’t want anything in the resolution that would raise the hackles of a ‘substantial layer of the party’ that agreed with his brother and Nat Weinstein. He was afraid of a split over the gay movement, even though the opposition in the party – in Dobbs’ words – was based ‘purely and simply on prejudice’.
Despite the criticisms I have made in this review, I want to reiterate the need for socialists to buy and read this book. It is essential reading for those of us trying to understand our history and to prepare for the future. Sheppard’s book reminds us of what a great joy there is in building the revolutionary movement, something that far exceeds any other pleasure found in bourgeois society. The fact that he can remain committed to transforming society as he approaches his seventies is also an inspiration. Finally, one has to salute the International Socialist Organization for publishing a book by a Marxist who fundamentally disagrees with them on the ‘Russian question’. Such open-mindedness bodes well for their own future on the left.

Louis Proyect

 

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