From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Thus the International Executive Committee is first identified with the United Secretariat as a whole (p. 196), and then even with the International Committee (pp. 262–3). Nor is there any account of the LSSP’s conciliatory rôle during the split between the International Secretariat and the International Committee in 1953. Amarasinghe’s perplexity when dealing with the ‘T’ group shows that he is clearly unacquainted with the practice of creating broad working-class parties around a Marxist core (pp. 213–21), precisely the method recommended by Marx himself (cf. What Next?, no. 9, 1998, pp. 3–5; Workers Fight, Winter 1998–99). The discussion of the party’s attitude towards the nationalist movement on pp. 218–20 shows no acquaintance with the debates on the Anti-Imperialist United Front, either in the Comintern to begin with or among the Trotskyists afterwards. And in view of the facts that Bracegirdle had previously been the acting secretary of a Stalinist front organisation in Australia (p. 24), and joined the Communist Party when he got back to London, where he was closely associated with S.A. Wickremasinghe (p. 224), it is a matter for regret that so little consideration is given to the opinion of Philip Gunawardena, Vernon Gunasekera and Edmund Samarakkody that Bracegirdle had been sent to bring the Ceylonese party into line with the Comintern (p. 45, n97, p2. 24, n45, p. 270).
So little is generally known of the histories of Cuba, Chile, Bolivia or the Argentine that Amarasinghe might well be forgiven such statements as that the LSSP is ‘unique in being a Trotskyist party with much influence, outside the confines of western Europe’ (p. 1), but it is less excusable when the predominance of Trotskyism over Stalinism in Sri Lanka is described as ‘the only instance in the whole of Asia’ (pp. 2, 6; cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 2). Amarasinghe’s knowledge of the movement in Vietnam is encapsulated in the remark that ‘there were a handful of Trotskyist supporters among the radical intellectuals in some Asian countries, particularly in the French colonial territories, in the 1930s … It has also been claimed that Trotskyist groups existed in Indo-China as well. It is not possible to discard these claims off-hand, but it can be said that in none of these countries did a noteworthy Trotskyist movement exist.’ (p. 240) It is thus unfortunate that he appears to be unaware of Stelio Marchese’s argument (Storia e Politica, no. 4, December 1977, pp. 664–83) that some of the influence of Trotskyism among the working classes of both Sri Lanka and Vietnam might be accounted for by the dialectical ferment previously laid down by Buddhism, for whilst admitting that ‘the LSSP never became successful in winning over more than a handful of Buddhist monks’ (p. 180), he does note that that there was ‘a significant positive correlation of the Marxist vote with Sinhalese and Buddhist populations’ (p. 290).
More serious is Amarasinghe’s ignorance of the party’s ideological roots in Britain, in part due to the neglect of oral evidence until quite recently in academic circles. Assuming that Trotskyism here ‘was not to develop to any significant proportion until the late 1930s’, and that ‘most of the students who came to lead the LSSP had left England by 1933 or 1934’ (p. 241), he believes that ‘there is evidence pointing to various nationalist and orthodox Communist influences on the young students, who later became founders of the LSSP, yet not to any Trotskyist influences as such’ (p. 241; repeated on p. 242). The most he is willing to concede is that Philip’s move towards Trotskyism ‘may have been due to the influences he received while in the United States and Britain’ (p. 243). He therefore mentions Philip’s contacts with Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt and Krishna Menon, but not his and Colvin’s contacts with Aggarwalla, Frank Ridley or Reg Groves during the same period (p. 11). A stroll from the LSE Library round the corner to Frank Ridley’s flat in Herbrand Street, or a chat with Reg Groves in Wandsworth, would soon have put him right on Philip’s activity as a Trotskyist within the Communist Party here. If this failed to convince him, even though the very detailed secret service reports now on deposit in the British Library were not open to inspection while he was over here, Amarasinghe could still have found out from Philip’s daughter how he had been stopped in Bulgaria on a journey to see Trotsky in Prinkipo (Lakmali Gunawardena, Philip: The Early Years, March 1996, pp. 16–17).
Lack of acquaintance with the history of the British movement (which Amarasinghe appears to think was called the Revolutionary Communist League in 1939 [p. 251]), badly affects his discussion of the covert Trotskyism of the leadership of the early LSSP. Whilst he does admit that the ‘T’ group did exist (p. 224), he carries on a vigorous polemic against Lerski’s view that the inner core of the LSSP was Trotskyist from the very beginning (pp. 217–9), claiming that ‘the programme of the LSSP during the first few years of its existence reflects nothing more than moderate welfare-socialism which falls far short of revolutionary Trotskyism’ (p. 218), and that the resolution of December 1939 ‘marks the beginning of the take-over of the LSSP by the tendency opposing the Third International’ (p. 225). When we recall Marx’s methods of building a working-class party, and the theory of the Anti-Imperialist United Front mentioned above, his contention that ‘it would be difficult to maintain the view that the party itself followed a Trotskyist policy in its early years’ (p. 217) falls to the ground. He does makes up for it by a good discussion of how the party strengthened its links with the Fourth International during the Second World War (pp. 249–53), but even here, whilst admitting that ‘it is possible that the British Trotskyist group … was instrumental in bringing the LSSP and SWP [Socialist Workers Party] closer to each other’ (p. 251), he does not appear to know of the invaluable services rendered to it by Workers International League members in the armed forces such as Douglas Garbutt and Fred Bunby. Nor does he mention the deeper immersion of the party’s leaders in Trotskyist literature at this time which resulted in Colvin’s duplicated version of Harold Isaac’s book on China put out during the war, his Whither the Soviet Union?, and Leslie’s summary of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and study of C.L.R. James’ World Revolution (later published over the pseudonym of K. Tilak in Bombay).
So once again we are brought face to face with one of the major problems of Trotskyist historiography: no matter how painstaking may be our examination in a particular country (and this book is a splendid example of it), without a full investigation of the complicated dynamic of the relationship between that and the rest of the international movement, the full richness of the picture will continue to elude us.
Whilst making it clear that he does not intend to compete with Amarasinghe’s account (pp. viii––ix), he does offer two interesting corrections to it. He disagrees that the famous jailbreak of the LSSP leaders in 1942 was largely the work of Robert Gunawardena, for it was planned by the whole of the party’s Central Committee (p. 43; Amarasinghe, p. 57), and he places Philip’s accusation that Doric was a police spy during the first secret Central Committee meeting after their escape in May 1942, and not during the public polemic of 1945 (pp. 51–4; Amarasinghe, p. 69, and n69, p. 87).
The writer also has some interesting theories of his own on the development of the party during the time he was a member, which he describes as ‘the years when the party was transformed from the open, radical mass party it had been before the war to a committedly Trotskyist party with a cadre organisation’ (p. viii). He believes that this was partly due to the exclusion of the party’s working-class supporters from its theoretical discussions, which were conducted in English, but also because ‘the semi-legality, and later the complete illegality, into which the wartime colonial state forced the LSSP certainly accelerated the party’s movement away from the loose, open, radical mass party it had been before the war’ (p. 34). For once legality returned, along with independence, ‘the vanguard party had no viability once the LSSP moved into the period of open mass politics’ (p. 75). He even hints that if Philip, who continued to feel the need to make a wider appeal long after he had left the Trotskyists, had retained his ascendancy in the party, this would never have happened, for as early as 1942 he was already interested in the difference between Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of party organisation and that of Lenin (pp. 49–50).
These are only two of the books to emerge from the present keen interest in Sri Lanka’s revolutionary past. We at Revolutionary History can take pride if the publication of Blows Against the Empire has made any contribution to sparking it off.
Monatte was a born rebel. He became a revolutionary in circumstances which remind those of us born later just how easy a time we have had of it. He narrowly escaped expulsion from school for being in possession of a text by Zola on the Dreyfus case; later he was thrown out of the family home when a rich horse-dealer threatened to withdraw his custom from Monatte’s father, a farrier, unless the young Monatte renounced Socialism. When his comrade Benoît Broutchoux, an anarchist miner, was jailed, Monatte stood up in the courtroom yelling ‘Down with the court!’, and was lucky to get off with a suspended sentence.
Chambelland shows Monatte’s evolution to revolutionary syndicalism and his differences with both anarchists and parliamentary Socialists. The journal he founded, La Vie ouvrière, was a model of Socialist journalism; its articles were clear and accessible to worker readers, yet without patronising or over-simplifying. The journal never ducked the difficult issues; in 1912, when Charles Andler wrote an article dealing with what he saw as dangerous pro-imperialist trends in the German Social Democratic Party, many on the French left believed it should not be given wide circulation for fear it might inflame anti-German feeling. Monatte, despite opposition from Jaurès and others, reprinted the article because he believed the issues should not be evaded.
Chambelland shows how La Vie ouvrière brought together those from the Socialist, anarchist and syndicalist milieux. In seeking to establish dialogue between the different currents of the left, Monatte thus helped to pave the way for the radical regroupments that took place during and after the war.
In 1914, Monatte, alongside Rosmer, was one of the handful who opposed the war from the first day. When called up to the army, he went without question (though he had friends in the union bureaucracy who could undoubtedly have got him exemption had he asked) and served in the trenches. The decision to go to the army seems to have been essentially a result of the moral component that was so important in the syndicalist tradition; Monatte felt an obligation to fight alongside his fellow-workers, though he felt more anxiety at the prospect of killing than of being killed. In an army that was more peasant than proletarian, he had little opportunity to agitate or promote anti-war ideas.
Monatte rejoiced at the Bolshevik Revolution; yet it is at this time that the divergences with Rosmer begin to appear. Rosmer was always an enthusiastic traveller, and he was glad to visit Russia and stay there for many months working in the Comintern apparatus. Monatte was much more deeply attached to his roots in the French labour movement, and he never visited Russia, even for the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions.
Nor did he move as far as Rosmer in the direction of Leninism. He did not join the French Communist Party (PCF) at its foundation, and in 1922 he was writing that the trade unions would play the essential rôle in the emancipation of the working class, and the party only an auxiliary rôle. Only in May 1923 did he join the PCF, and he became a member of its Executive Committee the following January.
To understand Monatte’s brief period in the PCF, it is necessary to look at the historical context. The PCF was created in December 1920 when the majority of the Socialist Party (SFIO) voted to affiliate to the Comintern. All too often this is seen as providing some sort of Delia Smith-style recipe for the formation of all future revolutionary parties. On the contrary, it was a very contradictory victory. To win the majority of the main working-class party was of course highly desirable, but one vote scarcely converted the membership into Communists. And winning the majority meant including many opportunists of the species who would swim with any stream going (the same species as the ex-Bennite Blairites we know so well today).
In this situation, the rôle of the revolutionary syndicalists, the Rosmers and Monattes, was crucial. They were vitally needed in the PCF to provide a political and moral counterweight to the corrupt parliamentary cretins who had come from the SFIO. Lenin and Trotsky (but all too few of the other Bolsheviks) understood this, and urged Monatte and other syndicalists to join the PCF. Chambelland quotes a letter to Monatte from his Swiss friend Fritz Brupbacher, reporting a conversation with Trotsky in which the latter expressed his sympathy for revolutionary syndicalism, and urged Monatte and friends to state their conditions for entering the PCF.
Monatte could not last long in the PCF. Faced with the pretentious charade of Zinovievite ‘Bolshevisation’, Monatte, Rosmer and Delagarde issued an open letter to party members stating: ‘It is said that the party must be an iron cohort. In fact … it is not an iron cohort that is being formed, but a regiment of slugs.’ Expulsion followed the next month.
The potential and actual rôle of the revolutionary syndicalists in the early years of the PCF is one that requires much more study. With their stress on proletarian self-emancipation and workplace struggle, their anti-authoritarianism and their moral integrity, they could have played a vital part in complementing other currents in the party, and where necessary counteracting them. That they failed to do so cannot be blamed on Stalinism — the die was cast before Stalin had emerged from his relative obscurity. Much of the blame lies with Social Democrats and the Zinovievites, who, whatever the rhetoric, opposed the syndicalists for all the wrong reasons. But the syndicalists also take some of the blame for their own sectarianism — Monatte himself was surely wrong not to join the PCF at its foundation and fight within it at a time when he could have had a real influence (as did his friend Marcel Martinet). At a time when regroupment between different currents of the left is again on the agenda, it is important to learn from this period.
Monatte had no personal ambitions, and returned to work as a proof-reader (in the 1940s he read the proofs of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness). He never shared Rosmer’s hopes in Trotskyism, and devoted the rest of his life to La Révolution prolétarienne. A journal which had contributors such as Monatte, Rosmer and Louzon was way above the general run of left-wing papers, but although La Révolution prolétarienne admirably held together its basic core, it never recruited from a new generation, and its impact on the broader labour movement was negligible.
Chambelland entitles her last chapter Neither Stalinism nor Reformism. Like others, Monatte tried to walk the narrow line of independence from both Washington and Moscow. Certainly many of his judgements may be questioned — for example, his support for the American-financed Force ouvrière breakaway from the CGT, or his description of Russia as ‘red fascism’. But on the essentials he never wavered. At his funeral, in Gaullist France in 1960, while the Algerian war still raged, there were two wreaths from family and friends — and a sheaf of flowers from an Algerian workers’ union. This was not a man who had made his peace with imperialism.
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Over the years I have occasionally wondered why the atheist Cliff, whose disregard for appearances was immediately apparent, should worry so about a few slivers of gloss paint. I believe that I can now shine a small light on this puzzle. In every mezuzah there is a tiny scroll with 20 lines from Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible, in which Moses sets down his last injunctions to the Israelites. It demands absolute adherence to his words, and that the message shall be taught during every waking hour. Such fidelity will be rewarded by a land flowing with milk and honey, fat cattle and tables groaning with comestibles and good wine. Cliff, it seems to me, steeped as he was in biblical lore, saw himself as just such a Moses figure, who would lead his people to the promised Socialist land. Even if he did not get there himself, he would set out his law for them to follow. Of course, his Moses days would have to fit in with this busy programme, so that it did not conflict with his Lenin days (very frequent these), or his Trotsky days, neglected for many years, but a bit bullish in recent times. There would, of course, be no problem with his Luxemburg days, because he forswore that rôle in 1968.
Cliff’s last, posthumously-published work, A World to Win, sees him very much in a valedictory Moses mode. This is a book for Socialist Workers Party members, and one that will prove, despite the odd setback, that the organisation has over the years developed, under his wise tutelage, into a firmly-based expression of Bolshevism in the twenty-first century. If the comrades will pay careful attention to Cliff’s application of the Marxist method, as he learned it from Lenin, then they too can become instruments of history.
Most of us who have spent some years in the revolutionary movement have found it all too easy to forget the generous impulses that drew us to it in the first place. The revulsion against discrimination, exploitation, poverty and war, usually through some heightened personal experience, provides the live evidence that makes Socialist ideas both relevant and inspiring. That high passion is too often lost sight of in the practice of everyday sectarian or factional organisation. What we fondly imagined was the means is all too often transformed into an end in itself. For most of Cliff’s life, it was the organisation and what he perceived to be its needs that formed the basis of his thought and deed. If those thoughts wandered beyond the immediate concerns of the party to the sunlit uplands of the Socialist commonwealth it was, more often than not, that species of May Day peroration calculated to enthuse the comrades to greater efforts on behalf of the Party. The turning point in Cliff’s life came very early when he witnessed the wretched conditions of Arab children in his native Palestine. An essay by the youthful Cliff on his sadness that there were no Arab children in his school was prophetically marked up by his teacher as ‘Communist’. Most of us have a teacher with a talent for prophecy like that in our past, mine with prescient accuracy wrote ‘abject failure’. This part of the autobiography dealing with Palestine is probably the most interesting. For some inexplicable reason, I find it quite pleasing that somewhere in the Gluckstein family album there may still exist a picture of Cliff’s uncle, Banker Gluckstein, leading a Jewish delegation to Tsar Nicholas II, bringing loyal blessings to that doomed and dim Romanov. Perhaps part of the charm of Cliff’s Palestine reflections is that one was not there to know what actually happened and what he actually did, nevertheless there is certainly an air of authenticity about his assertion that in a country where the tiny working class was divided by religion, language and tradition, the minuscule Trotskyist organisation had virtually no contact with organised workers. Cliff goes so far as to say that ‘the average branch of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain today has greater impact than we had in Palestine’. Those of us who knew the International Socialists when a good third of its members were manual workers, and saw what kind of a sorry fist Cliff made of that, might give him an argument on that one.
In pursuit of a relationship with the working class, Cliff came to Britain in 1946. It is part of his and our tragedy that in the next 50 plus years that contact was never more than skin deep and oh so fleeting. En route to the UK, he stopped off in Paris to meet the leaders of the Fourth International, and discovered, as so many of us did later on, that this powerhouse of the ‘World Party of Bolshevism’ was in fact an empty shell just kept afloat by Michel Pablo’s and Ernest Mandel’s windy rhetoric. Nevertheless, he agreed to defend the workers’ state thesis against the state capitalist leanings of Jock Haston and Ted Grant when he got to the UK. You will not find any mention of this particular arrangement in Cliff’s book, although on page 51 you might read: ‘Jock did toy with the idea that perhaps Stalin’s Russia was not a workers’ state. But a few months later he dropped this idea completely.’ The entire text is littered with small evasions of this sort.
In that confusing postwar time, the nature of the Stalinist regime exercised the minds of Trotskyists throughout the world. Trotsky’s predictions and promises after the Founding Congress of the Fourth International in 1938 looked particularly thin in the light of the war and its aftermath. If Trotsky predicted that the Stalinist bureaucracy could not survive the convulsions of a world war and it turned out that Stalin was not only still in charge in Russia but was presiding over half of Europe in addition, then James P. Cannon, in his self-appointed rôle of Trotsky’s successor, decreed that the war was not over. Mandel let it be known that news was expected by the next post that Stalinism had succumbed to a rejuvenated proletariat. If this suggests that Mandel’s mind was less brick-shaped than Cannon’s, nevertheless both had only the most tenuous grip on reality. Max Shachtman in the USA saw this as a chance to convert the Fourth International to his bureaucratic collectivist theory, and replace Cannon in the driving seat. Haston at least was attempting to come to terms with reality, even if his ideas were extremely tentative. It is now possible to say with some confidence that all the protagonists in this debate got it wrong, and they are still in error to this day. For all of them, the argument was cast within the old categories that had been found wanting. It was all form and no content, the working class, the proper study for Socialists, was not in it. It was rather like three blind men feeling their way around different parts of an elephant and, from their researches, attempting to describe the beast. There would certainly be elements of truth in their reports, but it would bear no relation to a living, breathing, complicated flesh-and-blood jumbo interacting with the real world. It is this inability to see beyond the boundaries of their own dubious certainties that ensured that the fall of Stalinism was unheralded in workers’ statist, state capitalist and Shachtmanite publications. As Al Richardson wrote in the introduction to his collection In Defence of the Russian Revolution: ‘It has to be said that the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them all napping. In spite of their claims to scientific Socialism, possession of this science gave them no predictive powers whateverb… you can scan their journals right up to the event in vain for any suggestion of what was coming. Nor has any coherent explanation emerged since.’ Al also makes a significant point, in the same introduction: ‘Those who hold to a state capitalist analysis came up with the illuminating suggestion that a state capitalist class had slimmed down its bankrupt concern into smaller private firms, oblivious of the observation that while many a small shopkeeper dreams of becoming a monopoly capitalist, few monopoly capitalists dream of becoming small shopkeepers.’ Similarly, when I consider the arguments for the idea that Russia was a workers’ state, I like to think that the Russian workers, having for all those years exerted pressure on the bureaucracy to retain state property, awoke one day with an overwhelming craving to put on a pair of 501 jeans and queue for a Big Mac, while they listened to their Sony Walkmen. What has state property and the monopoly of foreign trade to offer to match the seductive charms of these powerful symbols of personal freedom? After much heart-searching and sleepless nights, Cliff came to the conclusion that Jock Haston was right, Russia was state capitalist. At the same time, Jock decided that not only was Russia a workers’ state, but so were all the countries of the Eastern bloc. Which nifty piece of footwork not only put Jock at odds with Cliff, but also with Mandel and Pablo, who insisted that the Eastern bloc regimes were capitalist states with an ‘extreme form of police Bonapartism’. It is true that they did not hold this view for long, because in 1948 Tito broke with the Cominform and, for the Fourth International, was transformed from a semi-fascist into an appropriate ally for Trotskyism. In later years, Mandel had the good grace to be embarrassed if you twitted him about his mental gymnastics in 1948.
Into this maelstrom Cliff tossed his 150-page Revolutionary Communist Party internal bulletin on state capitalism. Right or wrong, it was the most coherent argument on the disputed questions around at the time. It formed the central core of all subsequent editions of Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, except that Cliff removed the original material about ‘Soviet millionaires’, such as the odd collective farmer and Alexei Tolstoy, who were thought to be of great significance in the RCP just after the war. Reading this internal bulletin today, aside from its antique charm, one can appreciate that it had some persuasive power, even though, for me, it is no longer persuasive enough. Certainly it is more appealing than the tediously longer accretion of supporting evidence with which Cliff felt it necessary to burden later editions.
This was Cliff’s attempt to reconcile Trotskyism with the postwar reality, to give the party a defensible theory. That this inevitably required that he contradict and replace large chunks of Trotsky’s pre-war politics ensured that the response to his ideas would be hostile. His personal base in the RCP was negligible, after just a few months in Britain and Haston’s rejection of state capitalism meant that there was no significant figure to pursue the argument internationally. From this point on, the idea was to form a distinct state capitalist group. Now theory would serve to build a new organisation, and he set about building a cadre. The pool from which these recruits would come was the RCP as it subsided into Labour Party entrism and Gerry Healy’s maw. In A World to Win, Cliff mentions only three of the original band: his wife Chanie Rosenberg, Duncan Hallas and Geoff Carlsson, which is less than generous to Jean Tait, Ray Challinor, Bill Ainsworth, Ken and Rhoda Tarbuck, Peter Morgan and Anil Munesinghe. This unwillingness to acknowledge that comrades other than Cliff and Chanie made some contribution to building the group runs throughout the volume. Suffice it to say that many others were involved in NCLC lecturing, speaking to YS branches, writing for Socialist Review, setting type for the pocket Adana editions of Rebel, and making contact with likely recruits. The difference between Cliff and the rest of us was that we worked for a living before we engaged in all these exciting pursuits. Cliff, for example, makes much of his heroic contact visiting trip to Glasgow on the back of a comrade’s motor-bike, no doubt a long and arduous ride. What he does not say is that the heroic rider of the machine was Stan Newens, who was pressed into this primitive chauffeuring activity on a regular basis. Stan, of course, lost his right to any credit when he left the group in the late 1950s, compounding this offence when he later became a Labour MP and later still an MEP.
Cliff does not claim to be the only begetter of state capitalist theory, perhaps because too many people have heard of C.L.R. James. He does, however, let it be understood that the theory of the permanent arms economy was his very own brainchild and stands as the second of the three pillars holding up his political legacy. In fact, the theory made its first appearance in the American magazine Politics in February 1944 under the by-line of Walter J. Oakes. This was one of the many pen names of Ed Sard, a member of Shachtman’s Workers Party. Sard expanded on his original article in the New International in a six-part series starting in January 1951, this time under the pseudonym T.N. Vance. True Sard called his theory the Permanent War Economy, but so did Cliff for several years until Mike Kidron changed the middle word to ‘Arms’. On chronological evidence alone, Cliff could not claim originality on this one.
It is possible to plough through this text and unearth many, many examples such as the Permanent Arms Economy where Cliff claims unwarranted primacy in thought, word and deed, but it would weary the reader almost as much as it would weary me. I believe there are those who find this kind of implacable self-aggrandisement strangely charming, I am not one of them. Perhaps Cliff thought that Ian Birchall (whose ‘phenomenal memory’ he rightly commends) would be the only one to remember the real facts, and, as the SWP’s premier apologist, he would keep mum. In every small revolutionary organisation, there is always a problem with the founding father (or mother, if you are talking about the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). One feels a debt of gratitude for his founding efforts, he may well be older and more knowledgeable of revolutionary theory and practice, and, in any case, you can bet your bottom dollar he will fight like hell to get his own way. Ted Grant is like that, Gerry Healy was like that, and Cliff, although less boring than Grant and much more civilised than Healy, would go to considerable lengths to come out on top in any dispute. This trait was compounded by his absolute certainty that his current policy, because it was his, brooked no denial, and it was imperative that it be implemented by next Tuesday at the latest.
From about the mid-1950s, Cliff drifted away from the organisational conceptions of Trotskyism, and maintained and developed a more libertarian approach to these questions until the mid-1960s. This largely corresponds to the period when Mike Kidron exercised the greatest influence within the Socialist Review Group. It was incidentally the period when CND and the Labour Party Young Socialists were the main area of recruitment. For this work, Rosa Luxemburg was much more useful than Lenin. Cliff proclaimed in his short book on Luxemburg, published in 1959: ‘For Marxists in advanced industrial countries, Lenin’s original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s.’
By 1968, the International Socialists had grown modestly but not unimpressively to about 800 members. That year also saw the abomination of London dockers marching in support of Enoch Powell. This event led Cliff to propose left unity under the urgent menace of fascism. Let us leave aside the fact that if there had been an urgent menace of fascism, then the unity of say 2,000 revolutionaries would not have been of much significance, it would have been far more sensible for all the revolutionaries to have joined the Labour Party if they wanted a real fight against fascism. Really, the object of the exercise, despite the fact that all the groups and the Communist Party were called on to unite, was the International Marxist Group, then the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. For such a unity to happen, let alone work, it would be necessary to adopt at least some of the forms of the Trotskyist tradition. For Cliff this was no great problem, and he assumed, his wish being father to the deed, that democratic centralism would be readily accepted by a grateful membership. In June 1968, he unleashed his Notes on Democratic Centralism on a less than appreciative group. This is a slipshod piece of work, more like a stream of consciousness than an internal bulletin, in which he seems to suggest that the First International had a democratic centralist constitution. It may surprise some current members of Cliff’s organisation that he once took it as the sine qua non of democratic centralism that factions could exist, and that they were entitled to representation on all the leading committees.
This pathetic two sides of quarto paper produced a storm of controversy. Almost overnight, about a dozen factions formed and produced long documents ranging in politics from ultra-libertarian to king-sized Bolshevism. Having sown the dragon’s teeth and reaped a whirlwind, Cliff restricted his intervention to long telephone calls, leaving the rest of the leadership to carry on the argument, despite the fact that we had not been privy to his plans. In the hope of great joy in heaven, I repent and confess that the two lengthy documents put out by the Working Committee that attempted to make up for the inadequacies of Notes on Democratic Centralism and to answer the plethora of opposing documents, were written by me. I sincerely apologise to the comrades. In his autobiography Cliff, for some inexplicable reason, dates his Notes on Democratic Centralism after October 1968.
Funnily enough, if Cliff had a hidden agenda so did several of us working closely with him at the time. We calculated, given a more formal structure and with a clearly understood decision-making process, that Cliff’s propensity to appoint himself a central committee of one would be reined in so that he might become part of a collective, where his ideas would be respected and discussed, but not venerated as revealed truth. Not only that, we also took the view that as we were recruiting a few but still significant number of workers, democratic centralism would enable their ideas to enlighten and inform the leading committee’s decision-making. Oh comrades, what vain hopes we entertained when we were a lot younger than we are today. Cliff, of course, continued to run things as a piece of private enterprise whenever the whim took him, rather like the proprietor of an inefficient corner shop. His veneration for the worker members was unabated and had only one reservation — that they agreed wholeheartedly with his immediate preoccupation. On page 118 of A World to Win, Cliff lets us into the secret of leadership in a Marxist organisation. Lenin, following an original idea of Napoleon’s, believed ‘On s’engage et puis on voit’. Cliff translates this as ‘get stuck in and see what happens’, or putting it another way, suck it and see. He first let us in on this particular aperçu in the draft of Volume One of his Lenin, it was, he explained, profoundly dialectical. Whatever the merits of this, and I think there are none, Cliff unintentionally gives us a good insight into how his mind worked. You think of something to do, then do it, and if it does not work think of something else and do that, and so on. Now that has not got a great deal to do with dialectics, and is a system that over the centuries has made bookmakers rich and silly punters broke. Cliff seems to recognise this when he goes on to says: ‘Of course this method must lead to mistakes being made, but at the same time it is essential if there are to be breakthroughs, forward jumps into new ways of doing things.’ All of this seems to me to be closer to a superstition than a Marxist analysis. Because there is something missing here, how do you decide what is a good thing to do in the first place? Do you spread your analytical net as wide as possible, drawing on the advice and experience of the worker members? Or, do you dredge up the idea from your subconscious, seek out buttressing quotes from Lenin, and then talk to Chris Harman? If you have answered yes to the second of these questions, then you are not just a pretty face, nor are you Chris Harman.
Joe Stalin let it be known that, as a general principle, the closer the Soviet Union approached Socialism the greater would be the attacks of the counter-revolution abroad and the depredations of internal subversion. Thus the rising population of the isolators and labour camps marked not only the eternal vigilance of Comrade Stalin, but also the giant strides being made toward Socialism. In the early 1970s, as IS began to grow modestly but into the very low thousands, with a small, perhaps 30 per cent, working-class membership, Cliff seemed to operate on the general principle that the closer IS became to a serious and viable organisation, the more capricious and impatient he should be. Increased membership was at the centre of his preoccupations. On the principle of ‘on s’engage et puis on voit’, he appointed himself membership secretary and set up league tables of local organisers recruiting efforts where the biggest liar won the most plaudits. Naturally enough, on this criteria, Roger Rosewell was the man of the hour.
Cliff also produced his thesis on the leading areas. The most promising areas would be identified speakers, money and manpower would be dedicated to these places, and the less promising areas left to their own devices would benefit, according to Cliff, from a sort of Thatcherite trickle-down process. Then there was the risible ‘buyers into sellers’ campaign, where anyone who bought the paper was pressed to become a seller. This up-to-the-minute campaign was lifted direct from Lenin, spluttered briefly and died without regret, as did the leading areas and the league tables. Another dud was the Socialist Worker Supporter’s Cards, known to the cynical as ‘revolutionary beer mats’ because most of them were left soggily on public house tables. The cards idea, lifted from Lenin on the workers’ paper, were less for the money they might bring and more to get a commitment from the workers that might be the first step to full membership. Sad to say, this was another bummer, as I have never heard of anybody who graduated from Supporter’s Card to Membership Card. The strike rate for Napoleon and Lenin’s little aphorism was looking pretty poor, and those of us who thought it might be a good idea to consolidate some of our existing recruits, who were drizzling away almost as rapidly as we recruited them, were condemned as conservative elements, unable to grasp the great opportunities opening up before us. Cliff’s zeal now shifted, momentarily, to ridding the leadership of conservative elements (Cliffspeak for Duncan Hallas and Jim Higgins). Whatever merit this plan might have, the replacements were to be local full-timers from the provincial branches, who in the very nature of their work could not operate as a day-to-day leadership. Cliff would be back into his one-man central committee mode.
Duncan, whose affection for Cliff had not survived, having knowing him for 30 years, felt that the course Cliff was embarked on would seriously endanger the advances we had made, and he proposed that we form a faction. I, who was actually quite fond of Cliff (but then I had only known him for 15 years), felt that he had gone too far, and that a short sharp faction fight might clear the air a bit. John Palmer and Roger Protz agreed with us, and we set about contacting people around the group. I was surprised at the favourable response we got when we approached others with our worries and discontents. Typically, the people who responded to our call were members of several years standing, and with some experience in the wider working-class movement. Among them were shop stewards and trade unionists from Manchester, Teesside, Glasgow, Harlow, Birmingham, Exeter, London and several other places. Cliff’s response, on the other hand, was most uncomradely. In short order a series of organisational manoeuvres were put in place, usually preceded by a thin veneer of political justification. Roger Protz and I were working on Socialist Worker, and this became the object of close analysis. A paper that Cliff had shortly before praised somewhat immoderately, became unreadable. With much quotation from Lenin on the workers’ paper, Cliff indicated that journalist were not really needed, just somebody to put in punctuation and correct the spelling of the workers’ reports. Naturally enough, there were no more workers’ reports than there had ever been, but Roger and I were fired.
Far more serious than this piece of petty spite, however, was Cliff’s attempt to deal with the fact that our opposition contained a number of trade unionists, including a fair sprinkling of AUEW members. This was especially so in Birmingham, where we had 20 AUEW comrades, organised in two factory branches. Among them were 10 shop stewards, two convenors of big factories, six members of the AUEW district committee, and Arthur Harper, the president of that district committee, plus several trades council delegates. As Ted Crawford has written elsewhere, these people were the catalyst that brought the Saltley struggle to a victorious conclusion. This, if not the jewel in the crown, was of a similar character to the ENV branch of which Cliff had been so proud. Now he produced a novel thesis that shop stewards were rotted by years of reformism and routinism; many convenors, he discovered, worked full-time on their union work. Only the young were revolutionary, and we should be encouraging them to run for shop stewardships. Leave aside what serum Cliff would use to inoculate these eager thrusting youngsters against reformism in the unlikely event that they were elected, this bizarre novelty made nonsense of the declared policy of the group since its founding in 1950. Even more tragically, the policy that it sought to replace was having some success in integrating experienced trade unionists into the group.
This ultra-left nonsense was compounded by a decision to run an IS member from Glasgow for National Organiser in the AUEW elections. This decision, taken without any discussion with the IS-AUEW national fraction, was nevertheless reaffirmed when the AUEW fraction rejected it by an overwhelming majority. All this was extremely embarrassing to the Birmingham AUEW comrades, which is just what it was intended to be. As they explained, they had, as directed by IS conference decisions, been working in the Broad Left grouping in the union, and, as always when working with Labour Lefts and the Communist Party, this involved a fair amount of work around union elections. Long before Cliff had a rush of blood to the head and decided to run an IS candidate, the IS members working the AUEW Broad Left had committed themselves to working for the election of a CPer called Ken Higgs. Cliff was completely unable, or unwilling, to understand that initiatives like the Saltley success are based on contact with people of different or no political affiliation who have some respect for the character and trust in the word of our comrades. That trust would be lost, and with it future joint activity, whether electoral or militant. With all the splendid disregard for cost of a man who knows that he has enough money to last him the rest of his life, so long as he dies at 6.30pm tomorrow, Cliff and his satraps began expelling the Birmingham AUEW members. A couple of them had to be suspended at the door to a meeting of the IS district committee, of which they were members, so that they might not vote against their own exclusion. It was this action that convinced me that Cliff, with all his brains and all his years in the movement, was not a serious person.
Just to make sure that the Opposition should not get a fair crack of the whip, Cliff then arranged that the basis of delegation to the conference should be changed, as would the election of delegates, in a way that was specifically designed to minimise the Opposition’s representation. This was a neat trick, because according to the constitution the only way that its clauses could be changed was at a conference. No problem there, for a man with a stranglehold on the Leninist impulse. The delegates could vote to insert those provisions by which they had been improperly elected. It was not long before the Opposition was either expelled or forced out. Cliff describes this as follows: ‘One symptom of this situation [this refers to an alleged shift to the right in the unions in 1975 — JH] was a demoralisation among significant sections of our own members. They lost heart. Some left without any statement of disagreement (like Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick), but some, like the former national secretary Jim Higgins and former editor of Socialist Worker Roger Protz, led a split that included 150 members.’ It is difficult to imagine a statement with more misstatements in it than this one. ‘Demoralisation’ indeed, in our dispute Cliff was arguing that the workers would turn against the Labour government in three months, and I said it would be at least six months. Now you could say, with some justice, that both of us were talking nonsense, but hardly that my slightly longer-term perspective indicated demoralisation. We had not lost heart, just our patience with Cliff playing the fool. Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick certainly had a number of discontents that they expressed quite forcefully, and Kidron, in particular, blotted his copybook by rejecting the Permanent Arms Economy theory that he had done so much once to flesh out into some coherence. They left, together with a number of others, in 1977 when Cliff, still on his ultra-left binge, proclaimed the Socialist Workers Party. Finally, Roger and I did not lead a split, we were expelled.
One last entertaining and revealing example from the pages of A World to Win, on page 133, is that Cliff, so it seems, is confessing his mistakes about perspectives in 1975. He writes: ‘In retrospect it is clear that we were radically wrong in our prognosis regarding the shape of the class struggle and hence our fate. I cannot think how we could have come to a more correct prognosis at the time … at all breaking points in the past we find that the best Marxists get things wrong.’ Cliff then goes on to show that Lenin — what a reliable buttress for a chap to lean on, no matter how heavily — got it wrong in 1906. Well there you have it comrades, when he is wrong it is the case that he is right to be wrong, and in any case in changing circumstances even the best Marxists get it wrong, like Lenin in 1906. Phew, for a nasty moment I thought he was going to bring himself to account, there is nothing like a session of self-criticism for an easy acquittal.
This is a book that only Cliff could have written. It is clever but naive, cunning but transparently obvious, and a mine of misinformation with terminological inexactitude like a giant worm leaving a small deposit on every page. As with all his other works, it is not written to make the historical record, it would not pass any half-way rigorous test. It is intended that it will fill a rôle as an inspiration to the comrades in their task of building the Socialist Workers Party. That is a cause to which Cliff dedicated his life, and the ultimate sadness is that 60-odd years of thinking and scheming and plotting have built an organisation in his own image of a few thousand, whose influence in the working class is negligible. His background and training and the political milieu he chose in his formative years produced a particular mindset. His intelligence and his ego made him believe that the important thing was for him to lead. But his thinking was abstract, the secret recipe for the revolutionary cocktail could be found in Lenin, not in the working class. He did not generalise from working-class experience, but from Lenin’s tactics. With all due respect, that is a poor substitute.
Nearly 80 years ago, the Communist Party of Great Britain had a few thousand members, probably not a great deal more than the SWP today. It did, however, exercise an influence in the working-class movement, in the Labour Party, the trade unions and the rank-and-file movement that was infinitely greater than the SWP has ever exercised — and when the latter did begin to build a periphery of some consequence, Cliff blew it. Of course, the Communist Party did not make the revolution, and it went out of business a few years ago. The SWP still has time to do either of these things, but I would not bet the mortgage on the revolution if I were you. Three individuals dominated British Trotskyism in the second half of the twentieth century: Gerry Healy, Ted Grant and Tony Cliff. Of the three, Cliff was the most accomplished, and, on a personal level, a man of great humour and charm. Gerry Healy also got the odd laugh, but that was generally from those who thought someone breaking a leg was funny. He had great energy, and Jock Haston commended his organising abilities, but for the rest he was a bully and a liar and a scoundrel. Ted Grant was, well Ted-like, what more can I say? If one were called to testify to any saving graces they might have shown, it would be quite in order to say that they kept alive a revolutionary Socialist tradition through some difficult times. After that it gets difficult, because they clung like limpets to the worst features of a framework that militated against them building anything more than a sect. In a way, perhaps, Cliff’s sin was the greater because for a brief time he started to look beyond the arid certainties of the tradition, before settling back into the easy embrace of a spurious Leninism. It is not easy to forgive him for that.
It’s worth quoting Cliff’s own reasoning for opposing feminism: ‘Imagine a male worker writing to his friend. “I have good news to tell you. My wife’s wages are lousy. To add to my joy there is no nursery for our children. And to fill my cup to the brim my wife is pregnant and we want to have an abortion, but she can’t get one.”’ From this Cliff concludes that ‘male workers do not benefit from women’s oppression’. This hypothetical example is hardly the stuff of Marxist analysis! Surely Cliff should have understood the gender game played by the state for over the generations by which, to take a fairly recent example, both men and women have been brainwashed into rôles to suit the perceived needs of capitalism. For instance, before the Second World War, at a time of high male unemployment, women were ‘educated’ into a belief that their place was in the home, practising the womanly arts of cooking, cleaning, childcare and submitting to their menfolk. This message was carried by the media, various pundits and even by the popular women’s magazines. The men, on the other hand, were told that as the breadwinners they were masters in their own homes (if nowhere else), and that the women should submit. Even George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier applauds the fact that the wives of unemployed men returned home after a day’s work (no doubt gruelling and low-paid) to cook, clean and wait on the man, so maintaining male dignity!
As we know, the Second World War ended all this, because women were needed in the munitions factories, and following the war it proved impossible to return women to the home. Capitalism, of course, adapted, and now not only has the family wage disappeared, but women are being forced out to work in low paid jobs. However, the brainwashing of previous generations has been slow to erode, and women continue to receive 80 per cent of the male rate, and also retire on unequal pensions because of broken service from home and caring responsibilities. Additionally, in much of the Third World, women are under attack by governments supported by the West. While men in the Third World might not benefit in the long-term by women’s oppression, they obviously believe that they do so.
If nothing else, the women’s movement has made us aware that women need to fight for greater equality both in the home and at work, just as an earlier generation of women had fought for the vote. In this way, the women’s movement has changed the way in which women think about themselves. For that I am grateful.
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The Black Book is an oddly-constructed affair. Nicholas Werth’s chapters on the Soviet Union would make up a sizeable book by itself, whilst some other parts of the world are covered in short articles that would probably be rejected by academic journals on the grounds of superficiality. Apart from Werth’s piece, which does draw to some extent on Russian archival documents and other primary sources, there is little original research, as most of the authors rely heavily on other people’s work.
Basically, and with no attempt on my part at being flippant, this massive book could be boiled down to the formula ‘Leninism = Terror’, and an end-of-century death score of ‘Communism 85 million, Fascism 20 million’. There is no attempt at constructing a socio-economic analysis of Soviet-style societies, and the contributors only occasionally venture beyond superficial observations on the level of politics. But if one starts with the assumption that the essence of Bolshevism is terror, then everything from the October Revolution through to Kim Jong-Il’s madhouse in North Korea and the Pol Pot fan club in the Sendero Luminoso is easy to understand, and needs no further explanation. From the storming of the Winter Palace right through to the various hulks of Stalinism still in evidence here and there, it was thus and could not have been otherwise. Teleology has never been so easy.
If we look at history in a more objective manner, however, things aren’t quite so simple. Wearisome as it is to have to run through this whole business yet again, to look at the real issues, and to drag them out from the vast heap of anti-Communist outpourings to which Courtois & Co have added their two-penn’orth, it has to be done. Although Werth tries to dissociate himself from what he calls the ‘liberal’ (I’d say ‘conservative’) analysis of Bolshevism as a putschist conspiracy, he nonetheless completely ignores the evidence produced by various scholars that proves that the Bolsheviks enjoyed a close relationship with the Russian working class during 1917 and were steadily winning large majorities in soviets, unions and factory committees, and he sees the October Revolution as a ‘coup d’état’ – an old cliché if ever there was one. In other words, the Bolsheviks were not intrinsically linked with the Russian working class, but constituted some kind of alien force, taking advantage of the mayhem and chaos in order to impose their party rule. Now that’s the sort of explanation which has satisfied conservatives and vulgar anarchists ever since 1917, and the Black Book crowd presumably think that it will suffice today.
Nowhere do we read in Werth’s essay that the Bolsheviks saw their seizure of power as the first blow in inopportune circumstances, not least a backward and impoverished country with a small working class, of the world revolution. Bolshevism in power was a holding operation, a desperate attempt to cling onto power in the hopes that revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries would secure its rule – and in the knowledge that its collapse would demoralise militants in other countries. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which the Bolsheviks effectively adopted in the spring of 1917. Bolshevism cannot be understood unless this rationale is accepted.
Stalinism was by no means the inevitable product of Bolshevism, successful revolutions in Europe would have done much to rejuvenate the democratic thrust of Bolshevism that existed in 1917 and which fired State and Revolution, which – surprise, surprise – does not get a mention in this book. What emerged out of the Civil War and into the period of the New Economic Policy was a Bolshevik party that was victorious in war, but facing political defeat; bureaucratised and with no clear vision of where to go or what to do. It had survived through those difficult early years, but at the cost of putting its existence as a revolutionary proletarian party deeply in jeopardy. The rise of Stalinism represented the defeat of Bolshevism, the end-product of the fiercely difficult conditions of the early Soviet republic and its isolation in a hostile world, the transformation of many revolutionaries into state bureaucrats, and the extinction of the Soviet Communist Party as a revolutionary proletarian force. The democratic thrust of Bolshevism could now only manifest itself in oppositional trends. Once broken away from the working class, the general trend of the Soviet party-state apparatus was towards establishing itself as a ruling élite, a process that was guaranteed by the isolation of the Soviet republic, and which was consummated with the final consolidation of Stalinism during the First Five Year Plan. In short, what most people, including The Black Book’s contributors, have come to call ‘Communism’ is in fact the result of the defeat of Bolshevism. Official Communism – Stalinism – was a product of Bolshevism, but a negative one; the product of its defeat, not of its victory; the mutation of a Communist force into a form of anti-Communism, antagonistic to capitalism, but equally opposed to Communism.
If one looks at official Communism, the marks of that defeat are very clear. Never has official Communism, either as regimes or opposition parties, ever acted in the tradition of the Bolsheviks of 1917; it has always acted in the Stalinist tradition. What we had in China from the 1930s was the wreckage of the Communist Party going up-country as a bureaucratic military leadership heading a peasant jacquerie, with nothing to do with a proletarian revolution whatsoever. Other ‘Communist’ regimes followed suit, or, as in Eastern Europe, were implantations through territorial expansion. Official Communism in power was basically a substitute for a weak or even non-existent bourgeoisie, attempting to implement a programme of modernisation, including industrialisation, literacy and land reform. The Stalinist Five Year Plans of the 1930s usually served as a model, and in Third World countries, sometimes with an imitation of the Chinese experience thrown in. Each time, however, we had a new generation, it was like recording from an already badly recorded tape: the quality degenerates down the line, until we arrived at the mind-boggling irrationality of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, which, name apart, cannot be wedged into any permutation of Marxism, even of a degenerated Stalinist variety. Parenthetically, it’s a wonder that the authors did not extend their net wider to include the nasty dictatorships that could have been recruited, whatever the dictators’ wishes, into the pantheon of ‘Communist’ countries on the basis of Ted Grant’s assertion that Syria and Burma were workers’ states, and Gerry Healy’s lauding of Ba’athist Iraq as a Socialist country – as this could have jacked up the final score of ‘Communism’.
Our authors employ a sneaky sleight of hand when comparing Communism and fascism in that Bolshevism and Stalinism are lumped together, with the latter being the inescapable result of the former, whilst fascism is completely abstracted from capitalism, as if the authors are trying to dissociate the Third Reich from the capitalist system. Indeed, The Black Book manages to overlook the frightful number of deaths that have occurred under capitalism. What about the many millions of deaths in the slave trade? What about the First World War, the parts of the Second World War that did not involve the Soviet Union, the millions of deaths in various Third World famines and wars, the near-extinction of Australian aborigines and the extermination of Tasmanian natives, the slaughter of Native Americans and the deaths in the US Civil War, or the Turkish genocidal attack upon the Armenians? For all what they have done, North Korea or North Vietnam did not drop hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosive on the USA, like the USA did on them, killing several million people. What can one make of people who can write about the apparent treatment of dissidents in Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua without mentioning the considerably greater number of political oppositionists in Latin American bourgeois states who have met a much nastier end, or write about South-East Asia without mentioning the slaughter of half-a-million Communist Party members and sympathisers in Indonesia during the 1960s? If The Black Book’s authors are really ‘closely wedded to the left’, a small nod in that direction might be expected.
Perhaps the most virulent contributor to The Black Book is Courtois. A former Maoist, he is using this opportunity to expurgate himself thoroughly of his old sinful ideas. And in this he is true to himself; Maoists were notorious for taking seriously every bit of nonsense that emanated from the ‘Great Helmsman’, and he has merely junked one dogma for another. It just will not do to parade all these hoary old anti-Communist clichés, yet Nechayev’s Catechism is wheeled out yet again, as is What Is To Be Done? and the notion of Bolshevism as ‘a revolutionary party made up of professionals linked in an underground structure of almost military discipline’, etc., etc. The most remarkable thing is that he comes out with all this as if he has rolled away the stone and is revealing something startlingly original.
Having said this, I do not wish to take an uncritical attitude towards Bolshevism. Whether we like it or not, the spectre of Kronstadt hangs over the October Revolution, and Marxists, particularly those in and around the Trotskyist movement, should replace their rather romantic image of the first few years of the Soviet state with an analysis that attempts to explain how and why the party-state apparatus constructed by the Bolsheviks came into conflict with many of the workers who had supported them in 1917. Trotsky’s analysis of the evolution of the Soviet republic remains a profound critique, but he failed adequately to explain why the Bolsheviks (and especially himself) had ended up advocating the militarisation of labour and accepting the substitution of their party for the working class during the Civil War. This breakdown between the Bolsheviks and the working class must be carefully studied; the party-class relationship is something that the Bolsheviks themselves and the Socialist tradition from which they emerged did not really comprehend – it was no accident that State and Revolution broke off at the point when it was to be discussed. The relationship between the subjective factor – the Bolsheviks’ understanding of their tasks within a revolution – and the objective factors facing them must also be carefully studied, as it is clear that some of the Bolsheviks’ practices that emerged from the period of the Civil War, whilst by no means in and of themselves incurable, did help pave the way for the Stalinist degeneration. The Bolshevik experience provides many lessons for revolutionaries today; unfortunately some of them show what not to do, and what could happen if you did repeat them. We cannot successfully counter the anti-Communists’ blanket condemnation of Bolshevism by clinging to an uncritical attitude towards it.
The Black Book caused quite a stir when it was originally published in France, not only because of its contents, but because the various authors promptly fell out with each other in an unseemly dogfight. The reaction to its publication here in Britain has been much more muted. Perhaps it’s because we already have the works of Richard Pipes, Martin Malia and Vladimir Brovkin at first hand, and prefer the organ grinder to the monkey. A genuine accounting for the whole experience of Bolshevism and its mutation into Stalinism, one that stands on the basis of the liberatory promise of Bolshevism, has yet to be written. It will subject the days of Lenin to an objective critique no less than it would of what happened afterwards. Marxists should have no fear of that, understanding the mistakes the Bolsheviks made will leave the Socialist movement better placed to attend to the tasks that face it today and tomorrow. As for The Black Book, all I can add is that to compile a huge tome on the ‘crimes of Communism’, whilst barely mentioning the crimes of capitalism, and without giving anything but a time-dishonoured array of clichés about the basis of Bolshevism and the relationship between it and Stalinism, is an indication of the intellectual poverty of those who feel obliged to reject the promise of human liberation for the shabby reality of today.
Craipeau was first drawn to Trotskyism as a teenager through reading Trotsky. When in 1929, he first made contact with the organisation, he was shocked to discover that since the French Trotskyists saw themselves as a faction of the Communist Party, he was expected to join the PCF. (‘These heretics see salvation only in the Church that is driving them out.’) However, he rapidly recovered from his surprise and spent the summer of 1930 building Communist Youth sections in the Vendée; the PCF youth was in decline and the party was unwilling to call a conference for the Atlantic region because the Trotskyists would have had a majority. It could not last, and he was expelled – but the bureaucracy was only able to win a vote for his expulsion by threatening that all those who voted against would themselves be excluded. Craipeau’s account is a reminder that the Stalinisation of the PCF was not such a smooth process as might appear in retrospect.
But the Trotskyist movement also had its problems; Craipeau arrived at around the time of the dispute between Rosmer and Molinier. He recalls Rosmer as seeming ‘unbelievably old’ (he was in his early 50s). Craipeau sided with Molinier, whose dynamism he admired, in the disputes with Naville. He gives a vivid account of Molinier’s driving, as impatient as the rest of his politics, which made ‘every journey an adventure’. But even Craipeau drew the line at one of Molinier’s stratagems. The Trotskyists were giving shelter to a very young Greek woman who had fled repression in her native country; she was a leading figure in the Archeiomarxist group. Since Molinier was anxious to win influence with the Archeiomarxists, he proposed that Craipeau should sleep with the young woman.
At a time when the extreme right was on the rise, violence was common, and Craipeau gives some vivid descriptions of street-fighting. Often the tactics employed were provocative. Thus a single comrade would be sent out into the streets of the Latin Quarter to distribute violently anti-fascist leaflets. This would attract a crowd of fascists who were then attacked by the Young Leninists, armed with iron bars, who had been waiting in hiding. Earlier, in 1931, the Trotskyists had invaded the notorious Colonial Exhibition and smashed various precious exhibits to protest at repression in Indochina.
But it was not all activism. By the mid-1930s, Craipeau had rejected the view that Russia was in any sense a ‘workers’ state’, and saw it as a new form of exploitative society, in no way progressive in comparison with capitalism. (Craipeau now accepts the state capitalist analysis.) He was strongly influenced by the writings of Ciliga, and claims to have anticipated the work of Rizzi. He claims that in 1937 about one-third of the members of the POI held his position.
At the outbreak of war, Craipeau was in the Pivertist PSOP, which effectively disintegrated. A small group of Trotskyists met in Paris and drew up a leaflet about the declaration of war. Barta (the grandfather of Lutte ouvrière) was assigned to get this printed in large numbers. He failed to do anything about it, and the others voted for his expulsion.
Though Craipeau says little new about the politics of Trotskyism under the German Occupation, he gives some lively stories of activity in clandestine conditions, including the time he escaped the Gestapo by hitting one of them on the chin with the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.
Craipeau describes the situation in Paris at the Liberation, when the Trotskyist leadership was claiming that soviets were being established under Trotskyist leadership. In fact, Trotskyists comrades did hold leading rôles in the workers’ militias in several factories, but they had not ‘come out’ politically, so their influence was limited.
Nonetheless, Craipeau argues that the potential for the Trotskyist movement in the immediate postwar years was substantial. In the autumn of 1946, Craipeau fell only 300 votes short of being elected as the first Trotskyist member of parliament in France. In 1947, Craipeau argues, there was a real possibility of fusion between the Trotskyist PCI and two left splits from the SFIO, leading to a party of some 10,000 members. But the Craipeau leadership was replaced by a ‘sectarian’ alliance of Frank and Lambert, and the merger came to nothing. Of course, this is Craipeau’s account, and others might be less optimistic about the prospects. Nonetheless, this is clearly a period which deserves closer study.
Craipeau now abandoned the Trotskyist movement, but he remained active in left-wing politics for another three decades. He describes some colourful incidents, such as the time when he – literally – kicked Pierre Lambert downstairs. He was active in the Nouvelle gauche in 1954 and the Union de la Gauche socialiste in 1957. In the latter, in the aftermath of Hungary, he launched the slogan: ‘The UGS opens its doors to all Communists who have ceased to be Stalinists, but not to Stalinists who have ceased to be Communists.’ In 1960, he was involved in the founding of the Parti socialiste unifié; he recalls the leadership voting unanimously to reject one application for membership – from a certain François Mitterrand.
Craipeau’s memory may be fallible, and his account certainly needs to be checked against the available documentation. But his autobiography is an invaluable contribution to the history of French Trotskyism; it is also an enthralling and enjoyable read.
***************
National consciousness, as distinct from nationalism, had begun to develop in the Lowlands in the period before the union with England. The social system of the Highlands, feudalism with large pre-feudal elements, was a huge obstacle to the development of Scots capitalism. To the Lowland farmer, the Highlander was a cattle-thief, not a fellow countryman. A bourgeois society was created by brutally smashing the pre-capitalist Highland social system, which was good practice for future repression further afield. When the threat from perceived Highland barbarians receded, Scottish élites invented a national identity from the romantic idealisation of the society which they had so recently helped to destroy. Davidson is very informative on Scots economic and political participation in the British Empire. Far from being junior partners, as is so often claimed, Scots capitalists were disproportionately important. Scots also played a key rôle in the Empire’s military, police and administration. The stereotype of the stiff-upper-lipped colonial official could hardly have been modelled on the relaxed and garrulous English.
Nationalist movements have to create their ideologies from such scraps as come to hand, but Scots nationalists are luckier than most. The British state promoted a picturesque Scots identity within and beyond Scotland’s boundaries. Monarchs from Victoria onwards have encouraged grotesque Highland ceremony, and no imperial occasion was complete without Scots regiments with their tartan and pipe bands. Scots national identity, a subdivision of British imperial identity, was available when needed. Radical nationalists now insist that the Scots were among the first to be colonised, and like to quote Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to demonstrate that they were and remain oppressed, just like Africans and Asians. Does anyone in the Third World believe that story? Davidson refutes the loopy radical nationalist historians in the Scottish Socialist Party, who see early nineteenth century workers’ struggles as rebellions against English rule, although the workers made no such claims, and the employers were also Scots.
Scots nationalism is a modern phenomenon. The Scottish Nationalist Party was established only in the 1920s, and had little electoral success until the 1960s. Stories from the fourteenth or eighteenth century are used to stitch together an essentially new garment. Nationalism remains essentially limited, posing few problems for the British state or, so far, for the Scots labour movement. The SNP, which wants the British Army to retain its Scots regiments, and presses the merits of Scots airfields as bases to bomb the Serbs, is hardly a subversive force.
But many of the major problems of Marxist historiography find no airing here at all. Why do all human societies except those of the Old Stone Age and capitalism seem to be so geographically limited, how and why does each new form of class rule extend the power of the state over its subjects, and why does a pure class system only gell out under capitalism? Even if we cannot blame Harman for skating over these basic questions, we must surely think it strange for a Marxist historian to make no mention of the birth of dialectical thought in ancient Ionia, or of Marx’s dim view of Bolivar when describing the revolt of the Spanish colonies.
Much that is necessary to Marxist historiography is totally absent. As far as ancient history is concerned, although use is made of Ste Croix’ work, it is nowhere stated that the spread of the Roman empire was part of the crisis of late classical society, a process of bailing out the upper classes of the polis and reinforcing their rule over the chora. Nor do we learn that the spread of Islam is part of the revolt of this same chora against city state civilisation, along with a Semitic reaction against the hellenisation and étatisation of Christianity. Why this same Christianity triumphed in the first place is not seen against the archaeological background of the large number of silver hoards from the fourth century onwards, which show that an important motive for the conversion of the Roman empire was the opportunity afforded a bankrupt state to plunder the wealth of the pagan temples (not unlike what moved Henry VIII to break with Rome so many years later). Nor is there is any analysis of the crucial part played by literate religions in the rise of peoples from tribalism to statehood during the Dark Ages, as illustrated by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, the Khazars to Judaism, or the Uighurs to Manichaeism.
Coming up to more modern times, there seems to be no awareness that the two different phases of the British Empire are related to merchant and industrial capital, or how the American Revolution represents the dividing line between them. We look in vain for any application of Abram Leon’s concept of the people-class to understanding the process of nation building in Eastern Europe, of Rosdolsky’s investigation of the same problem, or of Mandel’s researches into the nature of the Second World War. A particularly Jesuitical piece of reasoning (pp. 511–2) attempts to establish a difference between Stalinism and fascism, quite an achievement for someone with a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union. And yet again we have the tired old myths that Rosa Luxemburg ‘alone’ challenged the ‘complacency’ of Kautsky and Bernstein (p. 393) and ‘best appreciated the importance of 1905’ in Western Europe (p. 402).
This brings us on to straight factual errors, which abound at every turn. Susan Pollock has shown (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 3, p. 322) that contrary to Harman’s categorical denials (p. 12), both social stratification and male supremacy were already well developed in Mesopotamia by 3000 BC. The Middle Kingdom in Egypt can in no way be described as ‘stagnation’ (p. 41). Sippara, with its great temple of Shamash, was hardly ‘run by the trading merchant classes’ (p. 38). It would be interesting to learn where Kassites are mentioned in the Old Testament (p. 40). No Israeli archaeologist of any credit any longer believes in the existence of ‘Solomon’s empire in Palestine’ (p. 45). The rapid Hittite raid that captured Babylon hardly ‘captured Mesopotamia’ (p. 45). And when Harman talks of Rome being ‘under the domination of the Etruscan state to the north’ (p. 72), he is wrong on two counts. Etruria was never united into one state, and there is no evidence that the nearest of their cities, Veii, ever dominated Rome. Neither Luoyang nor Chang’an were ‘new capitals’ during the Sui and Tang dynasties (p. 107). There was no such thing as an ‘ordinary Inca’ (p. 170). ‘Elector’ does not simply mean ‘prince’ (p. 637, n47), but a member of that college that had the right to select the Emperor. Most of the Gunpowder plotters were from the gentry class, hardly ‘some of the rump of large Catholic landowners’ (p. 205). Compared with Gustavus Adolphus Wallenstein cannot be regarded as ‘the ablest commander’ of the Thirty Years War (p. 196). Aehrenthal’s annexation of Bosnia did not add it to the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy (p. 343). Hobsbawm is not wrong to question whether Franco, a pronunciamento general backed by Alfonsine and Carlist monarchists and the church, was a ‘fascist’ (p. 509).
At the same time, Harman is fearfully anxious to appear politically correct, especially on the anti-racist front. His discussion of the ‘African’ roots of Egyptian civilisation reflects very modern concerns, and is quite silly when applied to the fourth millennium BC (p. 136). Colour coding in Egyptian tomb paintings sticks to a rigid pattern, and does not show ‘fairly random mixtures of light, brown and black figures’ (p. 252). The Ethiopians did not develop their own script during the early stages of the ‘urban revolution’ (p. 17). The earliest inscriptions of the Kushite court were in classical Egyptian, and the first dated examples of Meroitic come from the second century BC. It is quite ridiculous to compare the scale of atrocities in the Aztec sacrificial system with those of the Spanish Inquisition (p. 167), and it is simply not true to say that ‘the Spanish attempted to destroy all Aztec records when they conquered the Valley of Mexico in the 15th [sic] century’ (p. ii).
This work, therefore, must be regarded as a brave, if premature, attempt at a synthesis. But Marxist historical writing, if it is to remain Marxist at all, must be oppositional and iconoclastic, and subject all traditions to the keenest criticism, particularly its own. And it should ask questions as much as answer them. So whilst this book cannot be said to have succeeded in its stated aims, it does succeed in quite another direction, that by systematically laying out the orthodoxy of left-wing historical thought at the end of the twentieth century, it allows us to measure how far it falls short of the development of conventional bourgeois scholarship.
As I said, our aim is to get rid of humanity if that is at all possible – and I am glad to say that in the last few decades it has been looking increasingly possible – but if we can’t do that then we hope humans suffer as much as they can be made to. After all, they deserve it for refusing to listen to the advice of the Boss, don’t they? In this context Mr McCann provides some useful information on how an organisation whose ostensible aim is the alleviation of human suffering has actually been contributing to it over the years. Perhaps you and your readers think that what I am saying is all diabolical propaganda: I assure you that is not the case. If you doubt my word you have only to read the section of the book (which consists of articles written for the press by Mr McCann) entitled Child Cares, and the three case histories at the end (Chapter 10: Home Tales). It is, of course, the institution of clerical celibacy which is responsible for much of the trouble and for a series of scandals revealed in this past decade which have seriously eroded the prestige and respect of the Irish Catholic Church among the population of that country. I told the church authorities long ago when they insisted on imposing celibacy on the clergy that the regime would be too strict for them, but, unfortunately (for obvious reasons), they don’t always listen to me. But, as Mr McCann judiciously observes, the trouble does not end there: faced with the multitude of scandals in recent years, the clerical authorities have simply concentrated on a cynical damage limitation exercise, contrary to the interests of the victims such as those children who were forcibly expatriated, ‘huge numbers of whom are traumatised still, offered neither compensation nor counselling, nor even, in many cases, acknowledgement that they’d gone through the bleak experience which continues to darken their lives’.
If the bishops were genuine in the remorse which they advertise, even now they’d take the obvious course … They’d open the archives which their Church meticulously keeps so we could measure the extent of what happened and pin-point what Church leaders knew and when they knew it. In other words, they’d tell the truth. This isn’t a complicated matter. Scores of children treated abominably in ‘homes’ in Derry in the 1940s and 1950s were eventually shipped off to Australia, where their suffering continued and, if anything, increased. How many children, exactly? Who were they? Children who ‘wouldn’t be missed’, perhaps? Who devised this policy and why, and who supervised its implementation? (p. 103 – for the background to this post-World War Two forced export of children, involving not only Irish youngsters but also some from the UK, see page 153.)
To be fair to the worthy Mr McCann, I must stress that his opus is not all a chronicle of unmitigated horror. Your readers will find much to interest them besides, including some acute observations on Pope John Paul II, Catholicism in Belfast, the Good Friday Agreement, abortion, Mother Teresa, the Blessed Virgin of Medjugorje, and Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb (who was put on trial after the Second World War, charged with collaborating with the wartime fascist government of Croatia), all spiced with Mr McCann’s usual humorous wit.
On one point I must take issue with Mr McCann. He quotes approvingly Trotsky’s proposal for the overthrow of all existing regimes in the Balkans and the establishment of a Balkan Federal Republic (p. 179). I must warn that our forces on the ground will strain every nerve to prevent such an eventuality if it ever looks likely – and, what is more, I can assure you we shall succeed in stopping it dead.
Nonetheless, I warmly recommend the book. No doubt the Boss’s ‘official representatives’ on earth and those who speak for them will take a different view, but I leave them to make their own case, in the knowledge that they will, as usual, not be backward in coming forward.
Please accept my most felicitous sentiments. Forward to the common ruin of the contending classes!
The Nosotros group was a key element in the fighting which smashed the military rising of 19 July 1936 in Barcelona, where Ascaso was killed. Once the counter-revolution was defeated in Catalonia, two CNT columns advanced into Aragon, one led by Durrutti, the other by Ortiz. When Durrutti was persuaded that he was needed in Madrid, Ortiz remained as the leading Anarchist in Aragon, and was a thorn in the side of the Stalinists. An Aragon defence council was formed at a meeting in October 1936 to carry out the CNT’s programme of social revolution. Joaquín Ascaso, a cousin of Francisco Ascaso, became its President. In Catalonia itself, the militia committees had been replaced by Companys’ bourgeois government. Elsewhere in the republican areas, bourgeois rule was hardly challenged.
After the Stalinist putsch in May 1937, Ortiz was removed from his command, as were other Anarchists and POUM members. Aragon was the only area not under the control of the Republican government, which was determined to crush the social revolution. However, this was not easy, as there were three CNT divisions on that front, all commanded by prestigious militants. An order dissolving the council was made in June, but was not put into effect until August, when government troops under the command of the Stalinist General Lister arrested libertarian activists, and seized and destroyed communal property.
The CNT leaders were unwilling to stand their ground, as they would have been accused of helping the Francoists. Ortiz and Ascaso strongly opposed the CNT’s capitulation, particularly that of Mariano Rodríguez Vásquez (‘Marianet’), its National Secretary, who seems to have been anxious that the CNT should regain the government positions that it had lost in May.
Soon afterwards, when about to return to Aragon from a CNT meeting in Valencia, Ascaso was arrested and accused of currency smuggling, but he was released in September without being charged. The affair went back to early 1937, when two members of the CNT’s National Committee were stopped by the police at the French border carrying a substantial amount of money and jewels, which were to be used to buy arms and material for the CNT. At that time the CNT was represented in Largo Caballero’s government, in which Garcia Oliver was the Minister of Justice. According to Ascaso, ‘Marianet’ asked him to accept responsibility, as the occurrence might give the Communists a weapon against the CNT. Garcia Oliver would be able to lose the relevant file.
Garcia Oliver told Ortiz that he had known nothing of the matter, and claimed that ‘Marianet’ was terrified that he would be implicated, as even a short stay in prison would endanger his control of the organisation. Ortiz’s story tallies with Garcia Oliver’s memoirs, but as it was rejected by other CNT members, the affair of the ‘Aragon treasure’ remains in dispute. Many Anarchists believed that Ascaso and Ortiz were engaged in private accumulation, but that would not explain how the ‘treasure’ came into the hands of CNT National Committee members. Ascaso and Ortiz lived out their lives in poverty, so they would appear not to have benefited by the affair. Ortiz, disappointed by the capitulation in Aragon, lost confidence in the CNT leaders, and enrolled in the military academy. He was eventually given the command of the twenty-fourth division stationed close to the French border, but he was removed in July 1938 and demoted to sergeant. He had come to the conclusion that the Stalinists meant to kill him, as he believed they had killed Durrutti.
He fled to France on 5 July with Ascaso and a group of about 10 soldiers which included prominent CNT members. That action outraged many Anarchists, including some who shared his criticism of the capitulation in Aragon. Once across the border, Ortiz and his companions gave themselves up to the police. They were treated well until it was discovered that in the 1920s Ascaso’s cousin had plotted with Durrutti to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Ortiz had to suffer not only the hostility of the French police, but of the CNT leaders whom he believed had tried to kill him. As the Stalinists saw all Anarchists as potential traitors, Ortiz’s desertion had strengthened the case of the CNT’s opponents.
Ortiz’s later fate was similar to that of many other Spanish refugees. He got out of a prison camp by enlisting in the French army. At the end of the Second World War, he was eager to renew the struggle, in spite of having been expelled from the CNT. In December 1948, he tried to kill Franco by dropping a bomb from a light plane when the Caudillo was watching the yacht races in San Sebastian. The attempt failed as the bay was patrolled by fighter planes. He then emigrated to Bolivia, and later to Venezuela.
The book’s title is appropriate as Ortiz obeyed neither God nor master. If much of the story remains mysterious, this is not the fault of the authors. The book avoids many of the pitfalls of oral history by a meticulous use of varied materials. The authors interviewed Ortiz at length, studied the documents he had preserved for so long, and compared them with the recollections of other participants. They have examined the CNT’s and other archives, and studied the published literature on the Anarchist movement and the Civil War. When the evidence is contradictory, readers are left to decide for themselves.
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.
********
Trotskyism in Sri Lanka
Yodage Ranjith Amarasinghe
Revolutionary Idealism and Parliamentary Politics: A Study of Trotskyism in Sri Lanka
Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo 1998, pp. 341
Revolutionary Idealism and Parliamentary Politics: A Study of Trotskyism in Sri Lanka
Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo 1998, pp. 341
Regi Siriwardena
Working Underground: The LSSP in Wartime, A Memoir of Happenings and Personalities
International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo 1999, pp. 75
Working Underground: The LSSP in Wartime, A Memoir of Happenings and Personalities
International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo 1999, pp. 75
SEVERAL full-length articles that have recently appeared in the popular press in Sri Lanka testify to the growing interest in the history of that country’s Trotskyist movement. Nobody is better qualified to respond to it with an overall treatment than the author of our first book, some of whose preliminary results appeared in a previous issue of this magazine (Volume 6, no. 4, pp. 100–12 and 180–208). But here for the first time is a full analysis of the party’s significance in the country’s overall development, and of the LSSP’s place within it. There are, inevitably, some omissions. The book obviously went to press before the appearance of Wesley Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe’s two documentary collections (The Bracegirdle Affair and Britain, World War Two, and the Sama Samajists), and the special issue of our magazine, but apart from the absence of Edmund Samarakkody’s classic analysis in Spartacist (no. 22, Winter 1973–74), the documentation of the party’s history is admirable throughout. A coherent picture is given of the basis of the party’s support, its policy during the major turning points of the island’s history, its adaptation to parliamentary politics, and the tension set up between this and its stated ideology and aims. The present unhappy situation in Sri Lanka cannot at all be understood without reading it.
At the same time, it has to be said that it suffers from the limitations of its academic origins, a PhD submitted from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies to the University of London in 1974. Its analysis is therefore couched in terms of the model worked out for ‘Asian radical parties’ by Franda, John Kautsky and Scalapino (pp. 310, 313–4), which displays no more than a rudimentary knowledge of Trotskyism in general, or in Asia in particular. And it is precisely in this area that its limitations emerge, for it is not possible to make sense of an internationalist party without a clear understanding of its ideological and organisational parallels and links abroad.Thus the International Executive Committee is first identified with the United Secretariat as a whole (p. 196), and then even with the International Committee (pp. 262–3). Nor is there any account of the LSSP’s conciliatory rôle during the split between the International Secretariat and the International Committee in 1953. Amarasinghe’s perplexity when dealing with the ‘T’ group shows that he is clearly unacquainted with the practice of creating broad working-class parties around a Marxist core (pp. 213–21), precisely the method recommended by Marx himself (cf. What Next?, no. 9, 1998, pp. 3–5; Workers Fight, Winter 1998–99). The discussion of the party’s attitude towards the nationalist movement on pp. 218–20 shows no acquaintance with the debates on the Anti-Imperialist United Front, either in the Comintern to begin with or among the Trotskyists afterwards. And in view of the facts that Bracegirdle had previously been the acting secretary of a Stalinist front organisation in Australia (p. 24), and joined the Communist Party when he got back to London, where he was closely associated with S.A. Wickremasinghe (p. 224), it is a matter for regret that so little consideration is given to the opinion of Philip Gunawardena, Vernon Gunasekera and Edmund Samarakkody that Bracegirdle had been sent to bring the Ceylonese party into line with the Comintern (p. 45, n97, p2. 24, n45, p. 270).
So little is generally known of the histories of Cuba, Chile, Bolivia or the Argentine that Amarasinghe might well be forgiven such statements as that the LSSP is ‘unique in being a Trotskyist party with much influence, outside the confines of western Europe’ (p. 1), but it is less excusable when the predominance of Trotskyism over Stalinism in Sri Lanka is described as ‘the only instance in the whole of Asia’ (pp. 2, 6; cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no. 2). Amarasinghe’s knowledge of the movement in Vietnam is encapsulated in the remark that ‘there were a handful of Trotskyist supporters among the radical intellectuals in some Asian countries, particularly in the French colonial territories, in the 1930s … It has also been claimed that Trotskyist groups existed in Indo-China as well. It is not possible to discard these claims off-hand, but it can be said that in none of these countries did a noteworthy Trotskyist movement exist.’ (p. 240) It is thus unfortunate that he appears to be unaware of Stelio Marchese’s argument (Storia e Politica, no. 4, December 1977, pp. 664–83) that some of the influence of Trotskyism among the working classes of both Sri Lanka and Vietnam might be accounted for by the dialectical ferment previously laid down by Buddhism, for whilst admitting that ‘the LSSP never became successful in winning over more than a handful of Buddhist monks’ (p. 180), he does note that that there was ‘a significant positive correlation of the Marxist vote with Sinhalese and Buddhist populations’ (p. 290).
More serious is Amarasinghe’s ignorance of the party’s ideological roots in Britain, in part due to the neglect of oral evidence until quite recently in academic circles. Assuming that Trotskyism here ‘was not to develop to any significant proportion until the late 1930s’, and that ‘most of the students who came to lead the LSSP had left England by 1933 or 1934’ (p. 241), he believes that ‘there is evidence pointing to various nationalist and orthodox Communist influences on the young students, who later became founders of the LSSP, yet not to any Trotskyist influences as such’ (p. 241; repeated on p. 242). The most he is willing to concede is that Philip’s move towards Trotskyism ‘may have been due to the influences he received while in the United States and Britain’ (p. 243). He therefore mentions Philip’s contacts with Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt and Krishna Menon, but not his and Colvin’s contacts with Aggarwalla, Frank Ridley or Reg Groves during the same period (p. 11). A stroll from the LSE Library round the corner to Frank Ridley’s flat in Herbrand Street, or a chat with Reg Groves in Wandsworth, would soon have put him right on Philip’s activity as a Trotskyist within the Communist Party here. If this failed to convince him, even though the very detailed secret service reports now on deposit in the British Library were not open to inspection while he was over here, Amarasinghe could still have found out from Philip’s daughter how he had been stopped in Bulgaria on a journey to see Trotsky in Prinkipo (Lakmali Gunawardena, Philip: The Early Years, March 1996, pp. 16–17).
Lack of acquaintance with the history of the British movement (which Amarasinghe appears to think was called the Revolutionary Communist League in 1939 [p. 251]), badly affects his discussion of the covert Trotskyism of the leadership of the early LSSP. Whilst he does admit that the ‘T’ group did exist (p. 224), he carries on a vigorous polemic against Lerski’s view that the inner core of the LSSP was Trotskyist from the very beginning (pp. 217–9), claiming that ‘the programme of the LSSP during the first few years of its existence reflects nothing more than moderate welfare-socialism which falls far short of revolutionary Trotskyism’ (p. 218), and that the resolution of December 1939 ‘marks the beginning of the take-over of the LSSP by the tendency opposing the Third International’ (p. 225). When we recall Marx’s methods of building a working-class party, and the theory of the Anti-Imperialist United Front mentioned above, his contention that ‘it would be difficult to maintain the view that the party itself followed a Trotskyist policy in its early years’ (p. 217) falls to the ground. He does makes up for it by a good discussion of how the party strengthened its links with the Fourth International during the Second World War (pp. 249–53), but even here, whilst admitting that ‘it is possible that the British Trotskyist group … was instrumental in bringing the LSSP and SWP [Socialist Workers Party] closer to each other’ (p. 251), he does not appear to know of the invaluable services rendered to it by Workers International League members in the armed forces such as Douglas Garbutt and Fred Bunby. Nor does he mention the deeper immersion of the party’s leaders in Trotskyist literature at this time which resulted in Colvin’s duplicated version of Harold Isaac’s book on China put out during the war, his Whither the Soviet Union?, and Leslie’s summary of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and study of C.L.R. James’ World Revolution (later published over the pseudonym of K. Tilak in Bombay).
So once again we are brought face to face with one of the major problems of Trotskyist historiography: no matter how painstaking may be our examination in a particular country (and this book is a splendid example of it), without a full investigation of the complicated dynamic of the relationship between that and the rest of the international movement, the full richness of the picture will continue to elude us.
Our second book, whilst no less interesting, is of a very different character. It is a series of personal memories from the time of the Second World War, which, ‘although no longer a Trotskyist … nor a Marxist of any persuasion today’ (p. x), the writer feels he has to justify on the grounds that an ‘accident of excessive and undesired longevity’ has left him ‘the last survivor of certain events who can speak of them with direct, first-hand knowledge’ (p. viii). No such excuse is needed, for his narrative is vivid and true to life, and bears the stamp of honesty throughout. His adventures in illegality included fraternising with British soldiers, two of whom were converted to Trotskyism (p. 43), until he was finally betrayed to the authorities along with Edmund and the others by the operator of their underground printshop (pp. 55–9). His literary skill sketches out some very fine pen portraits of Lorensz Perera (pp. 18–20), Doric de Souza (pp. 21–5), Colvin R. de Silva (pp. 44–5) and Philip Gunawardena (pp. 48–50).
He is also the first modern writer on the history of the LSSP to give Phillip his real due in the development of the party at this time: ‘I am convinced that it was mainly Philip, who had then an enormous intellectual ascendancy over the party, as the most deeply read Marxist and most experienced political activist … who pushed the party into that clean break with Stalinism’ (p. 10; cf. p. 48).Whilst making it clear that he does not intend to compete with Amarasinghe’s account (pp. viii––ix), he does offer two interesting corrections to it. He disagrees that the famous jailbreak of the LSSP leaders in 1942 was largely the work of Robert Gunawardena, for it was planned by the whole of the party’s Central Committee (p. 43; Amarasinghe, p. 57), and he places Philip’s accusation that Doric was a police spy during the first secret Central Committee meeting after their escape in May 1942, and not during the public polemic of 1945 (pp. 51–4; Amarasinghe, p. 69, and n69, p. 87).
The writer also has some interesting theories of his own on the development of the party during the time he was a member, which he describes as ‘the years when the party was transformed from the open, radical mass party it had been before the war to a committedly Trotskyist party with a cadre organisation’ (p. viii). He believes that this was partly due to the exclusion of the party’s working-class supporters from its theoretical discussions, which were conducted in English, but also because ‘the semi-legality, and later the complete illegality, into which the wartime colonial state forced the LSSP certainly accelerated the party’s movement away from the loose, open, radical mass party it had been before the war’ (p. 34). For once legality returned, along with independence, ‘the vanguard party had no viability once the LSSP moved into the period of open mass politics’ (p. 75). He even hints that if Philip, who continued to feel the need to make a wider appeal long after he had left the Trotskyists, had retained his ascendancy in the party, this would never have happened, for as early as 1942 he was already interested in the difference between Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of party organisation and that of Lenin (pp. 49–50).
These are only two of the books to emerge from the present keen interest in Sri Lanka’s revolutionary past. We at Revolutionary History can take pride if the publication of Blows Against the Empire has made any contribution to sparking it off.
Al Richardson
This review also appeared under the heading of Full Analysis of the Party’s Significance in the Country’s Overall Development, in The Island (Sri Lanka), 3 May 2000.
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Ian Birchall
Another Syndicalist Voice
(2000)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 4, 2000.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Colette Chambelland
Pierre Monatte, une autre voix syndicaliste
Les éditions de l’Atelier/Éditions Ouvrières, Paris 1999, pp. 190, FF 125
Pierre Monatte, une autre voix syndicaliste
Les éditions de l’Atelier/Éditions Ouvrières, Paris 1999, pp. 190, FF 125
PIERRE Monatte was Alfred Rosmer’s friend and comrade over many years, an incorrigible class-fighter and an intransigent revolutionary till the day he died. Yet it is only now, nearly 40 years after his death, that a biography of him has appeared. Monatte was written out of history by the Stalinists, and ignored by Trotskyists because he kept his distance from Trotsky in the 1930s; as for the right-wing anti-Communists, Monatte was far too bloody-minded for them even to try coopting him.
Colette Chambelland’s biography is short, but rich in information. She knew Monatte in her childhood as a family friend, and she has had access to his diaries, letters and personal archives. Her book is an important contribution to the recovery of those currents in twentieth-century Socialism which resisted the twin perversions of Stalinism and Social Democracy.Monatte was a born rebel. He became a revolutionary in circumstances which remind those of us born later just how easy a time we have had of it. He narrowly escaped expulsion from school for being in possession of a text by Zola on the Dreyfus case; later he was thrown out of the family home when a rich horse-dealer threatened to withdraw his custom from Monatte’s father, a farrier, unless the young Monatte renounced Socialism. When his comrade Benoît Broutchoux, an anarchist miner, was jailed, Monatte stood up in the courtroom yelling ‘Down with the court!’, and was lucky to get off with a suspended sentence.
Chambelland shows Monatte’s evolution to revolutionary syndicalism and his differences with both anarchists and parliamentary Socialists. The journal he founded, La Vie ouvrière, was a model of Socialist journalism; its articles were clear and accessible to worker readers, yet without patronising or over-simplifying. The journal never ducked the difficult issues; in 1912, when Charles Andler wrote an article dealing with what he saw as dangerous pro-imperialist trends in the German Social Democratic Party, many on the French left believed it should not be given wide circulation for fear it might inflame anti-German feeling. Monatte, despite opposition from Jaurès and others, reprinted the article because he believed the issues should not be evaded.
Chambelland shows how La Vie ouvrière brought together those from the Socialist, anarchist and syndicalist milieux. In seeking to establish dialogue between the different currents of the left, Monatte thus helped to pave the way for the radical regroupments that took place during and after the war.
In 1914, Monatte, alongside Rosmer, was one of the handful who opposed the war from the first day. When called up to the army, he went without question (though he had friends in the union bureaucracy who could undoubtedly have got him exemption had he asked) and served in the trenches. The decision to go to the army seems to have been essentially a result of the moral component that was so important in the syndicalist tradition; Monatte felt an obligation to fight alongside his fellow-workers, though he felt more anxiety at the prospect of killing than of being killed. In an army that was more peasant than proletarian, he had little opportunity to agitate or promote anti-war ideas.
Monatte rejoiced at the Bolshevik Revolution; yet it is at this time that the divergences with Rosmer begin to appear. Rosmer was always an enthusiastic traveller, and he was glad to visit Russia and stay there for many months working in the Comintern apparatus. Monatte was much more deeply attached to his roots in the French labour movement, and he never visited Russia, even for the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions.
Nor did he move as far as Rosmer in the direction of Leninism. He did not join the French Communist Party (PCF) at its foundation, and in 1922 he was writing that the trade unions would play the essential rôle in the emancipation of the working class, and the party only an auxiliary rôle. Only in May 1923 did he join the PCF, and he became a member of its Executive Committee the following January.
To understand Monatte’s brief period in the PCF, it is necessary to look at the historical context. The PCF was created in December 1920 when the majority of the Socialist Party (SFIO) voted to affiliate to the Comintern. All too often this is seen as providing some sort of Delia Smith-style recipe for the formation of all future revolutionary parties. On the contrary, it was a very contradictory victory. To win the majority of the main working-class party was of course highly desirable, but one vote scarcely converted the membership into Communists. And winning the majority meant including many opportunists of the species who would swim with any stream going (the same species as the ex-Bennite Blairites we know so well today).
In this situation, the rôle of the revolutionary syndicalists, the Rosmers and Monattes, was crucial. They were vitally needed in the PCF to provide a political and moral counterweight to the corrupt parliamentary cretins who had come from the SFIO. Lenin and Trotsky (but all too few of the other Bolsheviks) understood this, and urged Monatte and other syndicalists to join the PCF. Chambelland quotes a letter to Monatte from his Swiss friend Fritz Brupbacher, reporting a conversation with Trotsky in which the latter expressed his sympathy for revolutionary syndicalism, and urged Monatte and friends to state their conditions for entering the PCF.
Monatte could not last long in the PCF. Faced with the pretentious charade of Zinovievite ‘Bolshevisation’, Monatte, Rosmer and Delagarde issued an open letter to party members stating: ‘It is said that the party must be an iron cohort. In fact … it is not an iron cohort that is being formed, but a regiment of slugs.’ Expulsion followed the next month.
The potential and actual rôle of the revolutionary syndicalists in the early years of the PCF is one that requires much more study. With their stress on proletarian self-emancipation and workplace struggle, their anti-authoritarianism and their moral integrity, they could have played a vital part in complementing other currents in the party, and where necessary counteracting them. That they failed to do so cannot be blamed on Stalinism — the die was cast before Stalin had emerged from his relative obscurity. Much of the blame lies with Social Democrats and the Zinovievites, who, whatever the rhetoric, opposed the syndicalists for all the wrong reasons. But the syndicalists also take some of the blame for their own sectarianism — Monatte himself was surely wrong not to join the PCF at its foundation and fight within it at a time when he could have had a real influence (as did his friend Marcel Martinet). At a time when regroupment between different currents of the left is again on the agenda, it is important to learn from this period.
Monatte had no personal ambitions, and returned to work as a proof-reader (in the 1940s he read the proofs of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness). He never shared Rosmer’s hopes in Trotskyism, and devoted the rest of his life to La Révolution prolétarienne. A journal which had contributors such as Monatte, Rosmer and Louzon was way above the general run of left-wing papers, but although La Révolution prolétarienne admirably held together its basic core, it never recruited from a new generation, and its impact on the broader labour movement was negligible.
Chambelland entitles her last chapter Neither Stalinism nor Reformism. Like others, Monatte tried to walk the narrow line of independence from both Washington and Moscow. Certainly many of his judgements may be questioned — for example, his support for the American-financed Force ouvrière breakaway from the CGT, or his description of Russia as ‘red fascism’. But on the essentials he never wavered. At his funeral, in Gaullist France in 1960, while the Algerian war still raged, there were two wreaths from family and friends — and a sheaf of flowers from an Algerian workers’ union. This was not a man who had made his peace with imperialism.
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Jim Higgins
A World To Win
(2000)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 4, 2000.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Tony Cliff
A World To Win: Life of a Revolutionary
Bookmarks, London 2000, pp. 247, £11.99
A World To Win: Life of a Revolutionary
Bookmarks, London 2000, pp. 247, £11.99
READING Cliff’s autobiography has brought back to me a host of images and incidents, hardly any of which feature in the book. Its tone is serious, displaying little of his humour, and conferring on the author a quite unmerited gravitas. I remember once saying to Jock Haston how impressed I was by C.L.R. James’ book Black Jacobins. Jock, who did quite a nice line in patronising cynicism, replied: ‘I always find James impressive unless I know something about the subject he is writing about.’ I feel much the same about Cliff’s last book. I know a little about his life from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, and the virtually unsullied character presented here does not sit too well with the multiple-charactered personality I knew for years on an almost daily basis.
For example, some time in the 1960s, Tony Cliff and his family moved house from Finsbury Park to more commodious premises in Stoke Newington. This larger property had been purchased from a Jewish family, and came not only with more room, a garden and the usual offices, but also with a mezuzah nailed to a door frame. Anxious that he should not have to walk about his home with a rope of garlic round his neck, I suggested to Cliff that he hand me a screwdriver, and I would have the offending religious item in the dustbin in a trice. To my surprise, he refused this handy offer. ‘No, no, you will spoil the paint’, he insisted. Now this mezuzah was a tinny little item fixed with panel pins, definitely at the Woolworths end of the religious artifacts market. For my part, I would sooner have a slightly damaged architrave than suffer this piece of pious persiflage. Cliff, however, was adamant, and the mezuzah stayed. It may be there to this day.Over the years I have occasionally wondered why the atheist Cliff, whose disregard for appearances was immediately apparent, should worry so about a few slivers of gloss paint. I believe that I can now shine a small light on this puzzle. In every mezuzah there is a tiny scroll with 20 lines from Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible, in which Moses sets down his last injunctions to the Israelites. It demands absolute adherence to his words, and that the message shall be taught during every waking hour. Such fidelity will be rewarded by a land flowing with milk and honey, fat cattle and tables groaning with comestibles and good wine. Cliff, it seems to me, steeped as he was in biblical lore, saw himself as just such a Moses figure, who would lead his people to the promised Socialist land. Even if he did not get there himself, he would set out his law for them to follow. Of course, his Moses days would have to fit in with this busy programme, so that it did not conflict with his Lenin days (very frequent these), or his Trotsky days, neglected for many years, but a bit bullish in recent times. There would, of course, be no problem with his Luxemburg days, because he forswore that rôle in 1968.
Cliff’s last, posthumously-published work, A World to Win, sees him very much in a valedictory Moses mode. This is a book for Socialist Workers Party members, and one that will prove, despite the odd setback, that the organisation has over the years developed, under his wise tutelage, into a firmly-based expression of Bolshevism in the twenty-first century. If the comrades will pay careful attention to Cliff’s application of the Marxist method, as he learned it from Lenin, then they too can become instruments of history.
Most of us who have spent some years in the revolutionary movement have found it all too easy to forget the generous impulses that drew us to it in the first place. The revulsion against discrimination, exploitation, poverty and war, usually through some heightened personal experience, provides the live evidence that makes Socialist ideas both relevant and inspiring. That high passion is too often lost sight of in the practice of everyday sectarian or factional organisation. What we fondly imagined was the means is all too often transformed into an end in itself. For most of Cliff’s life, it was the organisation and what he perceived to be its needs that formed the basis of his thought and deed. If those thoughts wandered beyond the immediate concerns of the party to the sunlit uplands of the Socialist commonwealth it was, more often than not, that species of May Day peroration calculated to enthuse the comrades to greater efforts on behalf of the Party. The turning point in Cliff’s life came very early when he witnessed the wretched conditions of Arab children in his native Palestine. An essay by the youthful Cliff on his sadness that there were no Arab children in his school was prophetically marked up by his teacher as ‘Communist’. Most of us have a teacher with a talent for prophecy like that in our past, mine with prescient accuracy wrote ‘abject failure’. This part of the autobiography dealing with Palestine is probably the most interesting. For some inexplicable reason, I find it quite pleasing that somewhere in the Gluckstein family album there may still exist a picture of Cliff’s uncle, Banker Gluckstein, leading a Jewish delegation to Tsar Nicholas II, bringing loyal blessings to that doomed and dim Romanov. Perhaps part of the charm of Cliff’s Palestine reflections is that one was not there to know what actually happened and what he actually did, nevertheless there is certainly an air of authenticity about his assertion that in a country where the tiny working class was divided by religion, language and tradition, the minuscule Trotskyist organisation had virtually no contact with organised workers. Cliff goes so far as to say that ‘the average branch of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain today has greater impact than we had in Palestine’. Those of us who knew the International Socialists when a good third of its members were manual workers, and saw what kind of a sorry fist Cliff made of that, might give him an argument on that one.
In pursuit of a relationship with the working class, Cliff came to Britain in 1946. It is part of his and our tragedy that in the next 50 plus years that contact was never more than skin deep and oh so fleeting. En route to the UK, he stopped off in Paris to meet the leaders of the Fourth International, and discovered, as so many of us did later on, that this powerhouse of the ‘World Party of Bolshevism’ was in fact an empty shell just kept afloat by Michel Pablo’s and Ernest Mandel’s windy rhetoric. Nevertheless, he agreed to defend the workers’ state thesis against the state capitalist leanings of Jock Haston and Ted Grant when he got to the UK. You will not find any mention of this particular arrangement in Cliff’s book, although on page 51 you might read: ‘Jock did toy with the idea that perhaps Stalin’s Russia was not a workers’ state. But a few months later he dropped this idea completely.’ The entire text is littered with small evasions of this sort.
In that confusing postwar time, the nature of the Stalinist regime exercised the minds of Trotskyists throughout the world. Trotsky’s predictions and promises after the Founding Congress of the Fourth International in 1938 looked particularly thin in the light of the war and its aftermath. If Trotsky predicted that the Stalinist bureaucracy could not survive the convulsions of a world war and it turned out that Stalin was not only still in charge in Russia but was presiding over half of Europe in addition, then James P. Cannon, in his self-appointed rôle of Trotsky’s successor, decreed that the war was not over. Mandel let it be known that news was expected by the next post that Stalinism had succumbed to a rejuvenated proletariat. If this suggests that Mandel’s mind was less brick-shaped than Cannon’s, nevertheless both had only the most tenuous grip on reality. Max Shachtman in the USA saw this as a chance to convert the Fourth International to his bureaucratic collectivist theory, and replace Cannon in the driving seat. Haston at least was attempting to come to terms with reality, even if his ideas were extremely tentative. It is now possible to say with some confidence that all the protagonists in this debate got it wrong, and they are still in error to this day. For all of them, the argument was cast within the old categories that had been found wanting. It was all form and no content, the working class, the proper study for Socialists, was not in it. It was rather like three blind men feeling their way around different parts of an elephant and, from their researches, attempting to describe the beast. There would certainly be elements of truth in their reports, but it would bear no relation to a living, breathing, complicated flesh-and-blood jumbo interacting with the real world. It is this inability to see beyond the boundaries of their own dubious certainties that ensured that the fall of Stalinism was unheralded in workers’ statist, state capitalist and Shachtmanite publications. As Al Richardson wrote in the introduction to his collection In Defence of the Russian Revolution: ‘It has to be said that the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them all napping. In spite of their claims to scientific Socialism, possession of this science gave them no predictive powers whateverb… you can scan their journals right up to the event in vain for any suggestion of what was coming. Nor has any coherent explanation emerged since.’ Al also makes a significant point, in the same introduction: ‘Those who hold to a state capitalist analysis came up with the illuminating suggestion that a state capitalist class had slimmed down its bankrupt concern into smaller private firms, oblivious of the observation that while many a small shopkeeper dreams of becoming a monopoly capitalist, few monopoly capitalists dream of becoming small shopkeepers.’ Similarly, when I consider the arguments for the idea that Russia was a workers’ state, I like to think that the Russian workers, having for all those years exerted pressure on the bureaucracy to retain state property, awoke one day with an overwhelming craving to put on a pair of 501 jeans and queue for a Big Mac, while they listened to their Sony Walkmen. What has state property and the monopoly of foreign trade to offer to match the seductive charms of these powerful symbols of personal freedom? After much heart-searching and sleepless nights, Cliff came to the conclusion that Jock Haston was right, Russia was state capitalist. At the same time, Jock decided that not only was Russia a workers’ state, but so were all the countries of the Eastern bloc. Which nifty piece of footwork not only put Jock at odds with Cliff, but also with Mandel and Pablo, who insisted that the Eastern bloc regimes were capitalist states with an ‘extreme form of police Bonapartism’. It is true that they did not hold this view for long, because in 1948 Tito broke with the Cominform and, for the Fourth International, was transformed from a semi-fascist into an appropriate ally for Trotskyism. In later years, Mandel had the good grace to be embarrassed if you twitted him about his mental gymnastics in 1948.
Into this maelstrom Cliff tossed his 150-page Revolutionary Communist Party internal bulletin on state capitalism. Right or wrong, it was the most coherent argument on the disputed questions around at the time. It formed the central core of all subsequent editions of Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, except that Cliff removed the original material about ‘Soviet millionaires’, such as the odd collective farmer and Alexei Tolstoy, who were thought to be of great significance in the RCP just after the war. Reading this internal bulletin today, aside from its antique charm, one can appreciate that it had some persuasive power, even though, for me, it is no longer persuasive enough. Certainly it is more appealing than the tediously longer accretion of supporting evidence with which Cliff felt it necessary to burden later editions.
This was Cliff’s attempt to reconcile Trotskyism with the postwar reality, to give the party a defensible theory. That this inevitably required that he contradict and replace large chunks of Trotsky’s pre-war politics ensured that the response to his ideas would be hostile. His personal base in the RCP was negligible, after just a few months in Britain and Haston’s rejection of state capitalism meant that there was no significant figure to pursue the argument internationally. From this point on, the idea was to form a distinct state capitalist group. Now theory would serve to build a new organisation, and he set about building a cadre. The pool from which these recruits would come was the RCP as it subsided into Labour Party entrism and Gerry Healy’s maw. In A World to Win, Cliff mentions only three of the original band: his wife Chanie Rosenberg, Duncan Hallas and Geoff Carlsson, which is less than generous to Jean Tait, Ray Challinor, Bill Ainsworth, Ken and Rhoda Tarbuck, Peter Morgan and Anil Munesinghe. This unwillingness to acknowledge that comrades other than Cliff and Chanie made some contribution to building the group runs throughout the volume. Suffice it to say that many others were involved in NCLC lecturing, speaking to YS branches, writing for Socialist Review, setting type for the pocket Adana editions of Rebel, and making contact with likely recruits. The difference between Cliff and the rest of us was that we worked for a living before we engaged in all these exciting pursuits. Cliff, for example, makes much of his heroic contact visiting trip to Glasgow on the back of a comrade’s motor-bike, no doubt a long and arduous ride. What he does not say is that the heroic rider of the machine was Stan Newens, who was pressed into this primitive chauffeuring activity on a regular basis. Stan, of course, lost his right to any credit when he left the group in the late 1950s, compounding this offence when he later became a Labour MP and later still an MEP.
Cliff does not claim to be the only begetter of state capitalist theory, perhaps because too many people have heard of C.L.R. James. He does, however, let it be understood that the theory of the permanent arms economy was his very own brainchild and stands as the second of the three pillars holding up his political legacy. In fact, the theory made its first appearance in the American magazine Politics in February 1944 under the by-line of Walter J. Oakes. This was one of the many pen names of Ed Sard, a member of Shachtman’s Workers Party. Sard expanded on his original article in the New International in a six-part series starting in January 1951, this time under the pseudonym T.N. Vance. True Sard called his theory the Permanent War Economy, but so did Cliff for several years until Mike Kidron changed the middle word to ‘Arms’. On chronological evidence alone, Cliff could not claim originality on this one.
It is possible to plough through this text and unearth many, many examples such as the Permanent Arms Economy where Cliff claims unwarranted primacy in thought, word and deed, but it would weary the reader almost as much as it would weary me. I believe there are those who find this kind of implacable self-aggrandisement strangely charming, I am not one of them. Perhaps Cliff thought that Ian Birchall (whose ‘phenomenal memory’ he rightly commends) would be the only one to remember the real facts, and, as the SWP’s premier apologist, he would keep mum. In every small revolutionary organisation, there is always a problem with the founding father (or mother, if you are talking about the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). One feels a debt of gratitude for his founding efforts, he may well be older and more knowledgeable of revolutionary theory and practice, and, in any case, you can bet your bottom dollar he will fight like hell to get his own way. Ted Grant is like that, Gerry Healy was like that, and Cliff, although less boring than Grant and much more civilised than Healy, would go to considerable lengths to come out on top in any dispute. This trait was compounded by his absolute certainty that his current policy, because it was his, brooked no denial, and it was imperative that it be implemented by next Tuesday at the latest.
From about the mid-1950s, Cliff drifted away from the organisational conceptions of Trotskyism, and maintained and developed a more libertarian approach to these questions until the mid-1960s. This largely corresponds to the period when Mike Kidron exercised the greatest influence within the Socialist Review Group. It was incidentally the period when CND and the Labour Party Young Socialists were the main area of recruitment. For this work, Rosa Luxemburg was much more useful than Lenin. Cliff proclaimed in his short book on Luxemburg, published in 1959: ‘For Marxists in advanced industrial countries, Lenin’s original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s.’
By 1968, the International Socialists had grown modestly but not unimpressively to about 800 members. That year also saw the abomination of London dockers marching in support of Enoch Powell. This event led Cliff to propose left unity under the urgent menace of fascism. Let us leave aside the fact that if there had been an urgent menace of fascism, then the unity of say 2,000 revolutionaries would not have been of much significance, it would have been far more sensible for all the revolutionaries to have joined the Labour Party if they wanted a real fight against fascism. Really, the object of the exercise, despite the fact that all the groups and the Communist Party were called on to unite, was the International Marxist Group, then the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. For such a unity to happen, let alone work, it would be necessary to adopt at least some of the forms of the Trotskyist tradition. For Cliff this was no great problem, and he assumed, his wish being father to the deed, that democratic centralism would be readily accepted by a grateful membership. In June 1968, he unleashed his Notes on Democratic Centralism on a less than appreciative group. This is a slipshod piece of work, more like a stream of consciousness than an internal bulletin, in which he seems to suggest that the First International had a democratic centralist constitution. It may surprise some current members of Cliff’s organisation that he once took it as the sine qua non of democratic centralism that factions could exist, and that they were entitled to representation on all the leading committees.
This pathetic two sides of quarto paper produced a storm of controversy. Almost overnight, about a dozen factions formed and produced long documents ranging in politics from ultra-libertarian to king-sized Bolshevism. Having sown the dragon’s teeth and reaped a whirlwind, Cliff restricted his intervention to long telephone calls, leaving the rest of the leadership to carry on the argument, despite the fact that we had not been privy to his plans. In the hope of great joy in heaven, I repent and confess that the two lengthy documents put out by the Working Committee that attempted to make up for the inadequacies of Notes on Democratic Centralism and to answer the plethora of opposing documents, were written by me. I sincerely apologise to the comrades. In his autobiography Cliff, for some inexplicable reason, dates his Notes on Democratic Centralism after October 1968.
Funnily enough, if Cliff had a hidden agenda so did several of us working closely with him at the time. We calculated, given a more formal structure and with a clearly understood decision-making process, that Cliff’s propensity to appoint himself a central committee of one would be reined in so that he might become part of a collective, where his ideas would be respected and discussed, but not venerated as revealed truth. Not only that, we also took the view that as we were recruiting a few but still significant number of workers, democratic centralism would enable their ideas to enlighten and inform the leading committee’s decision-making. Oh comrades, what vain hopes we entertained when we were a lot younger than we are today. Cliff, of course, continued to run things as a piece of private enterprise whenever the whim took him, rather like the proprietor of an inefficient corner shop. His veneration for the worker members was unabated and had only one reservation — that they agreed wholeheartedly with his immediate preoccupation. On page 118 of A World to Win, Cliff lets us into the secret of leadership in a Marxist organisation. Lenin, following an original idea of Napoleon’s, believed ‘On s’engage et puis on voit’. Cliff translates this as ‘get stuck in and see what happens’, or putting it another way, suck it and see. He first let us in on this particular aperçu in the draft of Volume One of his Lenin, it was, he explained, profoundly dialectical. Whatever the merits of this, and I think there are none, Cliff unintentionally gives us a good insight into how his mind worked. You think of something to do, then do it, and if it does not work think of something else and do that, and so on. Now that has not got a great deal to do with dialectics, and is a system that over the centuries has made bookmakers rich and silly punters broke. Cliff seems to recognise this when he goes on to says: ‘Of course this method must lead to mistakes being made, but at the same time it is essential if there are to be breakthroughs, forward jumps into new ways of doing things.’ All of this seems to me to be closer to a superstition than a Marxist analysis. Because there is something missing here, how do you decide what is a good thing to do in the first place? Do you spread your analytical net as wide as possible, drawing on the advice and experience of the worker members? Or, do you dredge up the idea from your subconscious, seek out buttressing quotes from Lenin, and then talk to Chris Harman? If you have answered yes to the second of these questions, then you are not just a pretty face, nor are you Chris Harman.
Joe Stalin let it be known that, as a general principle, the closer the Soviet Union approached Socialism the greater would be the attacks of the counter-revolution abroad and the depredations of internal subversion. Thus the rising population of the isolators and labour camps marked not only the eternal vigilance of Comrade Stalin, but also the giant strides being made toward Socialism. In the early 1970s, as IS began to grow modestly but into the very low thousands, with a small, perhaps 30 per cent, working-class membership, Cliff seemed to operate on the general principle that the closer IS became to a serious and viable organisation, the more capricious and impatient he should be. Increased membership was at the centre of his preoccupations. On the principle of ‘on s’engage et puis on voit’, he appointed himself membership secretary and set up league tables of local organisers recruiting efforts where the biggest liar won the most plaudits. Naturally enough, on this criteria, Roger Rosewell was the man of the hour.
Cliff also produced his thesis on the leading areas. The most promising areas would be identified speakers, money and manpower would be dedicated to these places, and the less promising areas left to their own devices would benefit, according to Cliff, from a sort of Thatcherite trickle-down process. Then there was the risible ‘buyers into sellers’ campaign, where anyone who bought the paper was pressed to become a seller. This up-to-the-minute campaign was lifted direct from Lenin, spluttered briefly and died without regret, as did the leading areas and the league tables. Another dud was the Socialist Worker Supporter’s Cards, known to the cynical as ‘revolutionary beer mats’ because most of them were left soggily on public house tables. The cards idea, lifted from Lenin on the workers’ paper, were less for the money they might bring and more to get a commitment from the workers that might be the first step to full membership. Sad to say, this was another bummer, as I have never heard of anybody who graduated from Supporter’s Card to Membership Card. The strike rate for Napoleon and Lenin’s little aphorism was looking pretty poor, and those of us who thought it might be a good idea to consolidate some of our existing recruits, who were drizzling away almost as rapidly as we recruited them, were condemned as conservative elements, unable to grasp the great opportunities opening up before us. Cliff’s zeal now shifted, momentarily, to ridding the leadership of conservative elements (Cliffspeak for Duncan Hallas and Jim Higgins). Whatever merit this plan might have, the replacements were to be local full-timers from the provincial branches, who in the very nature of their work could not operate as a day-to-day leadership. Cliff would be back into his one-man central committee mode.
Duncan, whose affection for Cliff had not survived, having knowing him for 30 years, felt that the course Cliff was embarked on would seriously endanger the advances we had made, and he proposed that we form a faction. I, who was actually quite fond of Cliff (but then I had only known him for 15 years), felt that he had gone too far, and that a short sharp faction fight might clear the air a bit. John Palmer and Roger Protz agreed with us, and we set about contacting people around the group. I was surprised at the favourable response we got when we approached others with our worries and discontents. Typically, the people who responded to our call were members of several years standing, and with some experience in the wider working-class movement. Among them were shop stewards and trade unionists from Manchester, Teesside, Glasgow, Harlow, Birmingham, Exeter, London and several other places. Cliff’s response, on the other hand, was most uncomradely. In short order a series of organisational manoeuvres were put in place, usually preceded by a thin veneer of political justification. Roger Protz and I were working on Socialist Worker, and this became the object of close analysis. A paper that Cliff had shortly before praised somewhat immoderately, became unreadable. With much quotation from Lenin on the workers’ paper, Cliff indicated that journalist were not really needed, just somebody to put in punctuation and correct the spelling of the workers’ reports. Naturally enough, there were no more workers’ reports than there had ever been, but Roger and I were fired.
Far more serious than this piece of petty spite, however, was Cliff’s attempt to deal with the fact that our opposition contained a number of trade unionists, including a fair sprinkling of AUEW members. This was especially so in Birmingham, where we had 20 AUEW comrades, organised in two factory branches. Among them were 10 shop stewards, two convenors of big factories, six members of the AUEW district committee, and Arthur Harper, the president of that district committee, plus several trades council delegates. As Ted Crawford has written elsewhere, these people were the catalyst that brought the Saltley struggle to a victorious conclusion. This, if not the jewel in the crown, was of a similar character to the ENV branch of which Cliff had been so proud. Now he produced a novel thesis that shop stewards were rotted by years of reformism and routinism; many convenors, he discovered, worked full-time on their union work. Only the young were revolutionary, and we should be encouraging them to run for shop stewardships. Leave aside what serum Cliff would use to inoculate these eager thrusting youngsters against reformism in the unlikely event that they were elected, this bizarre novelty made nonsense of the declared policy of the group since its founding in 1950. Even more tragically, the policy that it sought to replace was having some success in integrating experienced trade unionists into the group.
This ultra-left nonsense was compounded by a decision to run an IS member from Glasgow for National Organiser in the AUEW elections. This decision, taken without any discussion with the IS-AUEW national fraction, was nevertheless reaffirmed when the AUEW fraction rejected it by an overwhelming majority. All this was extremely embarrassing to the Birmingham AUEW comrades, which is just what it was intended to be. As they explained, they had, as directed by IS conference decisions, been working in the Broad Left grouping in the union, and, as always when working with Labour Lefts and the Communist Party, this involved a fair amount of work around union elections. Long before Cliff had a rush of blood to the head and decided to run an IS candidate, the IS members working the AUEW Broad Left had committed themselves to working for the election of a CPer called Ken Higgs. Cliff was completely unable, or unwilling, to understand that initiatives like the Saltley success are based on contact with people of different or no political affiliation who have some respect for the character and trust in the word of our comrades. That trust would be lost, and with it future joint activity, whether electoral or militant. With all the splendid disregard for cost of a man who knows that he has enough money to last him the rest of his life, so long as he dies at 6.30pm tomorrow, Cliff and his satraps began expelling the Birmingham AUEW members. A couple of them had to be suspended at the door to a meeting of the IS district committee, of which they were members, so that they might not vote against their own exclusion. It was this action that convinced me that Cliff, with all his brains and all his years in the movement, was not a serious person.
Just to make sure that the Opposition should not get a fair crack of the whip, Cliff then arranged that the basis of delegation to the conference should be changed, as would the election of delegates, in a way that was specifically designed to minimise the Opposition’s representation. This was a neat trick, because according to the constitution the only way that its clauses could be changed was at a conference. No problem there, for a man with a stranglehold on the Leninist impulse. The delegates could vote to insert those provisions by which they had been improperly elected. It was not long before the Opposition was either expelled or forced out. Cliff describes this as follows: ‘One symptom of this situation [this refers to an alleged shift to the right in the unions in 1975 — JH] was a demoralisation among significant sections of our own members. They lost heart. Some left without any statement of disagreement (like Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick), but some, like the former national secretary Jim Higgins and former editor of Socialist Worker Roger Protz, led a split that included 150 members.’ It is difficult to imagine a statement with more misstatements in it than this one. ‘Demoralisation’ indeed, in our dispute Cliff was arguing that the workers would turn against the Labour government in three months, and I said it would be at least six months. Now you could say, with some justice, that both of us were talking nonsense, but hardly that my slightly longer-term perspective indicated demoralisation. We had not lost heart, just our patience with Cliff playing the fool. Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick certainly had a number of discontents that they expressed quite forcefully, and Kidron, in particular, blotted his copybook by rejecting the Permanent Arms Economy theory that he had done so much once to flesh out into some coherence. They left, together with a number of others, in 1977 when Cliff, still on his ultra-left binge, proclaimed the Socialist Workers Party. Finally, Roger and I did not lead a split, we were expelled.
One last entertaining and revealing example from the pages of A World to Win, on page 133, is that Cliff, so it seems, is confessing his mistakes about perspectives in 1975. He writes: ‘In retrospect it is clear that we were radically wrong in our prognosis regarding the shape of the class struggle and hence our fate. I cannot think how we could have come to a more correct prognosis at the time … at all breaking points in the past we find that the best Marxists get things wrong.’ Cliff then goes on to show that Lenin — what a reliable buttress for a chap to lean on, no matter how heavily — got it wrong in 1906. Well there you have it comrades, when he is wrong it is the case that he is right to be wrong, and in any case in changing circumstances even the best Marxists get it wrong, like Lenin in 1906. Phew, for a nasty moment I thought he was going to bring himself to account, there is nothing like a session of self-criticism for an easy acquittal.
This is a book that only Cliff could have written. It is clever but naive, cunning but transparently obvious, and a mine of misinformation with terminological inexactitude like a giant worm leaving a small deposit on every page. As with all his other works, it is not written to make the historical record, it would not pass any half-way rigorous test. It is intended that it will fill a rôle as an inspiration to the comrades in their task of building the Socialist Workers Party. That is a cause to which Cliff dedicated his life, and the ultimate sadness is that 60-odd years of thinking and scheming and plotting have built an organisation in his own image of a few thousand, whose influence in the working class is negligible. His background and training and the political milieu he chose in his formative years produced a particular mindset. His intelligence and his ego made him believe that the important thing was for him to lead. But his thinking was abstract, the secret recipe for the revolutionary cocktail could be found in Lenin, not in the working class. He did not generalise from working-class experience, but from Lenin’s tactics. With all due respect, that is a poor substitute.
Nearly 80 years ago, the Communist Party of Great Britain had a few thousand members, probably not a great deal more than the SWP today. It did, however, exercise an influence in the working-class movement, in the Labour Party, the trade unions and the rank-and-file movement that was infinitely greater than the SWP has ever exercised — and when the latter did begin to build a periphery of some consequence, Cliff blew it. Of course, the Communist Party did not make the revolution, and it went out of business a few years ago. The SWP still has time to do either of these things, but I would not bet the mortgage on the revolution if I were you. Three individuals dominated British Trotskyism in the second half of the twentieth century: Gerry Healy, Ted Grant and Tony Cliff. Of the three, Cliff was the most accomplished, and, on a personal level, a man of great humour and charm. Gerry Healy also got the odd laugh, but that was generally from those who thought someone breaking a leg was funny. He had great energy, and Jock Haston commended his organising abilities, but for the rest he was a bully and a liar and a scoundrel. Ted Grant was, well Ted-like, what more can I say? If one were called to testify to any saving graces they might have shown, it would be quite in order to say that they kept alive a revolutionary Socialist tradition through some difficult times. After that it gets difficult, because they clung like limpets to the worst features of a framework that militated against them building anything more than a sect. In a way, perhaps, Cliff’s sin was the greater because for a brief time he started to look beyond the arid certainties of the tradition, before settling back into the easy embrace of a spurious Leninism. It is not easy to forgive him for that.
Sheila Lahr adds:
While appreciating much of this book, especially Cliff’s recounting of his political experience of Palestine before and during the Second World War, and also being reminded of the political and economic events of the 1970s, I am unhappy with his attitude to women and feminism.
For instance, Cliff deplores the publication of Women’s Voice by the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s because: ‘I was steadfast in following the Bolshevik tradition of insisting on the common interests of female and male workers.’ (p. 146) Cliff tells us that Lenin always insisted on the party leadership controlling women’s activities. He quotes Anne Bobroff’s criticism of Bolshevism on this point — ‘And although the editorial board [of Rabotnitsa — Woman Worker] was made up completely of women … Lenin had the deciding vote in the event of a tie.’ (p. 147) — only to reject her complaint. He adds with approval that women working under Lenin’s direction put through resolutions on his behalf.It’s worth quoting Cliff’s own reasoning for opposing feminism: ‘Imagine a male worker writing to his friend. “I have good news to tell you. My wife’s wages are lousy. To add to my joy there is no nursery for our children. And to fill my cup to the brim my wife is pregnant and we want to have an abortion, but she can’t get one.”’ From this Cliff concludes that ‘male workers do not benefit from women’s oppression’. This hypothetical example is hardly the stuff of Marxist analysis! Surely Cliff should have understood the gender game played by the state for over the generations by which, to take a fairly recent example, both men and women have been brainwashed into rôles to suit the perceived needs of capitalism. For instance, before the Second World War, at a time of high male unemployment, women were ‘educated’ into a belief that their place was in the home, practising the womanly arts of cooking, cleaning, childcare and submitting to their menfolk. This message was carried by the media, various pundits and even by the popular women’s magazines. The men, on the other hand, were told that as the breadwinners they were masters in their own homes (if nowhere else), and that the women should submit. Even George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier applauds the fact that the wives of unemployed men returned home after a day’s work (no doubt gruelling and low-paid) to cook, clean and wait on the man, so maintaining male dignity!
As we know, the Second World War ended all this, because women were needed in the munitions factories, and following the war it proved impossible to return women to the home. Capitalism, of course, adapted, and now not only has the family wage disappeared, but women are being forced out to work in low paid jobs. However, the brainwashing of previous generations has been slow to erode, and women continue to receive 80 per cent of the male rate, and also retire on unequal pensions because of broken service from home and caring responsibilities. Additionally, in much of the Third World, women are under attack by governments supported by the West. While men in the Third World might not benefit in the long-term by women’s oppression, they obviously believe that they do so.
If nothing else, the women’s movement has made us aware that women need to fight for greater equality both in the home and at work, just as an earlier generation of women had fought for the vote. In this way, the women’s movement has changed the way in which women think about themselves. For that I am grateful.
*************
Black Book of Communism
Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karol Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 856, £23.50
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 856, £23.50
RIGHT from the start, the revolutionary Socialist movement has seen a steady stream of deserters leave its ranks, all convinced that they have seen the light, the blindingly obvious realisation that the cause for which they have struggled is nothing but a cruel hoax. Although common to all countries, it does seem to be especially de rigueur for intellectuals in France to be able to point to a now-disavowed radical past. Indeed, becoming an anti-Communist seems to be a more or less compulsory career move if one wants to make it in the French political or literary world. And just as it was once the height of fashion to wave a red flag, it is now the done thing to pour scorn on all of this childish nonsense, and to show that Bolshevism, far from showing the way to a realm of genuine freedom, can only lead to a veritable vale of tears.
The Black Book of Communism has all the hallmarks of such a shift of allegiances. So what is our authors’ rationale for throwing away their old convictions; have they discovered some new devastating critique of Bolshevism that will finally drive a stake through Lenin’s mummified body, assuming that it hasn’t been buried or otherwise disposed of in the meantime? Not at all; our intrepid team have adopted lock, stock and barrel the entire methodology of traditional anti-Communism, cranking out all the familiar explanations that were doing the rounds no doubt before any of them was born. Believe it or not, they do not view themselves as born-again reactionaries, and they even describe themselves as being still ‘closely wedded to the left’. ‘Left of what?’ might be legitimately asked, as their book is suitably introduced by the leading conservative Sovietologist Martin Malia, who believes that any attempt to go beyond capitalism will inevitably come to grief.The Black Book is an oddly-constructed affair. Nicholas Werth’s chapters on the Soviet Union would make up a sizeable book by itself, whilst some other parts of the world are covered in short articles that would probably be rejected by academic journals on the grounds of superficiality. Apart from Werth’s piece, which does draw to some extent on Russian archival documents and other primary sources, there is little original research, as most of the authors rely heavily on other people’s work.
Basically, and with no attempt on my part at being flippant, this massive book could be boiled down to the formula ‘Leninism = Terror’, and an end-of-century death score of ‘Communism 85 million, Fascism 20 million’. There is no attempt at constructing a socio-economic analysis of Soviet-style societies, and the contributors only occasionally venture beyond superficial observations on the level of politics. But if one starts with the assumption that the essence of Bolshevism is terror, then everything from the October Revolution through to Kim Jong-Il’s madhouse in North Korea and the Pol Pot fan club in the Sendero Luminoso is easy to understand, and needs no further explanation. From the storming of the Winter Palace right through to the various hulks of Stalinism still in evidence here and there, it was thus and could not have been otherwise. Teleology has never been so easy.
If we look at history in a more objective manner, however, things aren’t quite so simple. Wearisome as it is to have to run through this whole business yet again, to look at the real issues, and to drag them out from the vast heap of anti-Communist outpourings to which Courtois & Co have added their two-penn’orth, it has to be done. Although Werth tries to dissociate himself from what he calls the ‘liberal’ (I’d say ‘conservative’) analysis of Bolshevism as a putschist conspiracy, he nonetheless completely ignores the evidence produced by various scholars that proves that the Bolsheviks enjoyed a close relationship with the Russian working class during 1917 and were steadily winning large majorities in soviets, unions and factory committees, and he sees the October Revolution as a ‘coup d’état’ – an old cliché if ever there was one. In other words, the Bolsheviks were not intrinsically linked with the Russian working class, but constituted some kind of alien force, taking advantage of the mayhem and chaos in order to impose their party rule. Now that’s the sort of explanation which has satisfied conservatives and vulgar anarchists ever since 1917, and the Black Book crowd presumably think that it will suffice today.
Nowhere do we read in Werth’s essay that the Bolsheviks saw their seizure of power as the first blow in inopportune circumstances, not least a backward and impoverished country with a small working class, of the world revolution. Bolshevism in power was a holding operation, a desperate attempt to cling onto power in the hopes that revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries would secure its rule – and in the knowledge that its collapse would demoralise militants in other countries. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which the Bolsheviks effectively adopted in the spring of 1917. Bolshevism cannot be understood unless this rationale is accepted.
Stalinism was by no means the inevitable product of Bolshevism, successful revolutions in Europe would have done much to rejuvenate the democratic thrust of Bolshevism that existed in 1917 and which fired State and Revolution, which – surprise, surprise – does not get a mention in this book. What emerged out of the Civil War and into the period of the New Economic Policy was a Bolshevik party that was victorious in war, but facing political defeat; bureaucratised and with no clear vision of where to go or what to do. It had survived through those difficult early years, but at the cost of putting its existence as a revolutionary proletarian party deeply in jeopardy. The rise of Stalinism represented the defeat of Bolshevism, the end-product of the fiercely difficult conditions of the early Soviet republic and its isolation in a hostile world, the transformation of many revolutionaries into state bureaucrats, and the extinction of the Soviet Communist Party as a revolutionary proletarian force. The democratic thrust of Bolshevism could now only manifest itself in oppositional trends. Once broken away from the working class, the general trend of the Soviet party-state apparatus was towards establishing itself as a ruling élite, a process that was guaranteed by the isolation of the Soviet republic, and which was consummated with the final consolidation of Stalinism during the First Five Year Plan. In short, what most people, including The Black Book’s contributors, have come to call ‘Communism’ is in fact the result of the defeat of Bolshevism. Official Communism – Stalinism – was a product of Bolshevism, but a negative one; the product of its defeat, not of its victory; the mutation of a Communist force into a form of anti-Communism, antagonistic to capitalism, but equally opposed to Communism.
If one looks at official Communism, the marks of that defeat are very clear. Never has official Communism, either as regimes or opposition parties, ever acted in the tradition of the Bolsheviks of 1917; it has always acted in the Stalinist tradition. What we had in China from the 1930s was the wreckage of the Communist Party going up-country as a bureaucratic military leadership heading a peasant jacquerie, with nothing to do with a proletarian revolution whatsoever. Other ‘Communist’ regimes followed suit, or, as in Eastern Europe, were implantations through territorial expansion. Official Communism in power was basically a substitute for a weak or even non-existent bourgeoisie, attempting to implement a programme of modernisation, including industrialisation, literacy and land reform. The Stalinist Five Year Plans of the 1930s usually served as a model, and in Third World countries, sometimes with an imitation of the Chinese experience thrown in. Each time, however, we had a new generation, it was like recording from an already badly recorded tape: the quality degenerates down the line, until we arrived at the mind-boggling irrationality of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, which, name apart, cannot be wedged into any permutation of Marxism, even of a degenerated Stalinist variety. Parenthetically, it’s a wonder that the authors did not extend their net wider to include the nasty dictatorships that could have been recruited, whatever the dictators’ wishes, into the pantheon of ‘Communist’ countries on the basis of Ted Grant’s assertion that Syria and Burma were workers’ states, and Gerry Healy’s lauding of Ba’athist Iraq as a Socialist country – as this could have jacked up the final score of ‘Communism’.
Our authors employ a sneaky sleight of hand when comparing Communism and fascism in that Bolshevism and Stalinism are lumped together, with the latter being the inescapable result of the former, whilst fascism is completely abstracted from capitalism, as if the authors are trying to dissociate the Third Reich from the capitalist system. Indeed, The Black Book manages to overlook the frightful number of deaths that have occurred under capitalism. What about the many millions of deaths in the slave trade? What about the First World War, the parts of the Second World War that did not involve the Soviet Union, the millions of deaths in various Third World famines and wars, the near-extinction of Australian aborigines and the extermination of Tasmanian natives, the slaughter of Native Americans and the deaths in the US Civil War, or the Turkish genocidal attack upon the Armenians? For all what they have done, North Korea or North Vietnam did not drop hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosive on the USA, like the USA did on them, killing several million people. What can one make of people who can write about the apparent treatment of dissidents in Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua without mentioning the considerably greater number of political oppositionists in Latin American bourgeois states who have met a much nastier end, or write about South-East Asia without mentioning the slaughter of half-a-million Communist Party members and sympathisers in Indonesia during the 1960s? If The Black Book’s authors are really ‘closely wedded to the left’, a small nod in that direction might be expected.
Perhaps the most virulent contributor to The Black Book is Courtois. A former Maoist, he is using this opportunity to expurgate himself thoroughly of his old sinful ideas. And in this he is true to himself; Maoists were notorious for taking seriously every bit of nonsense that emanated from the ‘Great Helmsman’, and he has merely junked one dogma for another. It just will not do to parade all these hoary old anti-Communist clichés, yet Nechayev’s Catechism is wheeled out yet again, as is What Is To Be Done? and the notion of Bolshevism as ‘a revolutionary party made up of professionals linked in an underground structure of almost military discipline’, etc., etc. The most remarkable thing is that he comes out with all this as if he has rolled away the stone and is revealing something startlingly original.
Having said this, I do not wish to take an uncritical attitude towards Bolshevism. Whether we like it or not, the spectre of Kronstadt hangs over the October Revolution, and Marxists, particularly those in and around the Trotskyist movement, should replace their rather romantic image of the first few years of the Soviet state with an analysis that attempts to explain how and why the party-state apparatus constructed by the Bolsheviks came into conflict with many of the workers who had supported them in 1917. Trotsky’s analysis of the evolution of the Soviet republic remains a profound critique, but he failed adequately to explain why the Bolsheviks (and especially himself) had ended up advocating the militarisation of labour and accepting the substitution of their party for the working class during the Civil War. This breakdown between the Bolsheviks and the working class must be carefully studied; the party-class relationship is something that the Bolsheviks themselves and the Socialist tradition from which they emerged did not really comprehend – it was no accident that State and Revolution broke off at the point when it was to be discussed. The relationship between the subjective factor – the Bolsheviks’ understanding of their tasks within a revolution – and the objective factors facing them must also be carefully studied, as it is clear that some of the Bolsheviks’ practices that emerged from the period of the Civil War, whilst by no means in and of themselves incurable, did help pave the way for the Stalinist degeneration. The Bolshevik experience provides many lessons for revolutionaries today; unfortunately some of them show what not to do, and what could happen if you did repeat them. We cannot successfully counter the anti-Communists’ blanket condemnation of Bolshevism by clinging to an uncritical attitude towards it.
The Black Book caused quite a stir when it was originally published in France, not only because of its contents, but because the various authors promptly fell out with each other in an unseemly dogfight. The reaction to its publication here in Britain has been much more muted. Perhaps it’s because we already have the works of Richard Pipes, Martin Malia and Vladimir Brovkin at first hand, and prefer the organ grinder to the monkey. A genuine accounting for the whole experience of Bolshevism and its mutation into Stalinism, one that stands on the basis of the liberatory promise of Bolshevism, has yet to be written. It will subject the days of Lenin to an objective critique no less than it would of what happened afterwards. Marxists should have no fear of that, understanding the mistakes the Bolsheviks made will leave the Socialist movement better placed to attend to the tasks that face it today and tomorrow. As for The Black Book, all I can add is that to compile a huge tome on the ‘crimes of Communism’, whilst barely mentioning the crimes of capitalism, and without giving anything but a time-dishonoured array of clichés about the basis of Bolshevism and the relationship between it and Stalinism, is an indication of the intellectual poverty of those who feel obliged to reject the promise of human liberation for the shabby reality of today.
Paul Flewers
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Ian Birchall
Trotskyist Dinosaur
(2000)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 4, 2000.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Yvan Craipeau
Mémoires d’un dinosaure trotskyste
L’Harmattan, Paris 1999, pp. 360, FF 180
Mémoires d’un dinosaure trotskyste
L’Harmattan, Paris 1999, pp. 360, FF 180
NOT far from his ninetieth birthday, Yvan Craipeau has published an autobiography that is full of wit, insight and sheer enthusiasm for life. Despite the repeated batterings on the head he received in anti-fascist demonstrations, Craipeau retains a lively memory for concrete detail. Like other veterans of the movement, he shows that revolutionary Socialism is a better antidote to the ageing process than any drug on the market.
Craipeau has lived a varied life, and there are many sections of the book – his childhood in rural France, his marriages and children, his experiences teaching in Guadeloupe – that are a delight to read. However, for the purposes of this review, I shall assume that Revolutionary History readers are narrow-minded philistines, and will concentrate on the sections most likely to interest them, those on French Trotskyism in the 1930s and 1940s.Craipeau was first drawn to Trotskyism as a teenager through reading Trotsky. When in 1929, he first made contact with the organisation, he was shocked to discover that since the French Trotskyists saw themselves as a faction of the Communist Party, he was expected to join the PCF. (‘These heretics see salvation only in the Church that is driving them out.’) However, he rapidly recovered from his surprise and spent the summer of 1930 building Communist Youth sections in the Vendée; the PCF youth was in decline and the party was unwilling to call a conference for the Atlantic region because the Trotskyists would have had a majority. It could not last, and he was expelled – but the bureaucracy was only able to win a vote for his expulsion by threatening that all those who voted against would themselves be excluded. Craipeau’s account is a reminder that the Stalinisation of the PCF was not such a smooth process as might appear in retrospect.
But the Trotskyist movement also had its problems; Craipeau arrived at around the time of the dispute between Rosmer and Molinier. He recalls Rosmer as seeming ‘unbelievably old’ (he was in his early 50s). Craipeau sided with Molinier, whose dynamism he admired, in the disputes with Naville. He gives a vivid account of Molinier’s driving, as impatient as the rest of his politics, which made ‘every journey an adventure’. But even Craipeau drew the line at one of Molinier’s stratagems. The Trotskyists were giving shelter to a very young Greek woman who had fled repression in her native country; she was a leading figure in the Archeiomarxist group. Since Molinier was anxious to win influence with the Archeiomarxists, he proposed that Craipeau should sleep with the young woman.
At a time when the extreme right was on the rise, violence was common, and Craipeau gives some vivid descriptions of street-fighting. Often the tactics employed were provocative. Thus a single comrade would be sent out into the streets of the Latin Quarter to distribute violently anti-fascist leaflets. This would attract a crowd of fascists who were then attacked by the Young Leninists, armed with iron bars, who had been waiting in hiding. Earlier, in 1931, the Trotskyists had invaded the notorious Colonial Exhibition and smashed various precious exhibits to protest at repression in Indochina.
But it was not all activism. By the mid-1930s, Craipeau had rejected the view that Russia was in any sense a ‘workers’ state’, and saw it as a new form of exploitative society, in no way progressive in comparison with capitalism. (Craipeau now accepts the state capitalist analysis.) He was strongly influenced by the writings of Ciliga, and claims to have anticipated the work of Rizzi. He claims that in 1937 about one-third of the members of the POI held his position.
At the outbreak of war, Craipeau was in the Pivertist PSOP, which effectively disintegrated. A small group of Trotskyists met in Paris and drew up a leaflet about the declaration of war. Barta (the grandfather of Lutte ouvrière) was assigned to get this printed in large numbers. He failed to do anything about it, and the others voted for his expulsion.
Though Craipeau says little new about the politics of Trotskyism under the German Occupation, he gives some lively stories of activity in clandestine conditions, including the time he escaped the Gestapo by hitting one of them on the chin with the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.
Craipeau describes the situation in Paris at the Liberation, when the Trotskyist leadership was claiming that soviets were being established under Trotskyist leadership. In fact, Trotskyists comrades did hold leading rôles in the workers’ militias in several factories, but they had not ‘come out’ politically, so their influence was limited.
Nonetheless, Craipeau argues that the potential for the Trotskyist movement in the immediate postwar years was substantial. In the autumn of 1946, Craipeau fell only 300 votes short of being elected as the first Trotskyist member of parliament in France. In 1947, Craipeau argues, there was a real possibility of fusion between the Trotskyist PCI and two left splits from the SFIO, leading to a party of some 10,000 members. But the Craipeau leadership was replaced by a ‘sectarian’ alliance of Frank and Lambert, and the merger came to nothing. Of course, this is Craipeau’s account, and others might be less optimistic about the prospects. Nonetheless, this is clearly a period which deserves closer study.
Craipeau now abandoned the Trotskyist movement, but he remained active in left-wing politics for another three decades. He describes some colourful incidents, such as the time when he – literally – kicked Pierre Lambert downstairs. He was active in the Nouvelle gauche in 1954 and the Union de la Gauche socialiste in 1957. In the latter, in the aftermath of Hungary, he launched the slogan: ‘The UGS opens its doors to all Communists who have ceased to be Stalinists, but not to Stalinists who have ceased to be Communists.’ In 1960, he was involved in the founding of the Parti socialiste unifié; he recalls the leadership voting unanimously to reject one application for membership – from a certain François Mitterrand.
Craipeau’s memory may be fallible, and his account certainly needs to be checked against the available documentation. But his autobiography is an invaluable contribution to the history of French Trotskyism; it is also an enthralling and enjoyable read.
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Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Neil Davidson
The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Pluto, London 2000, pp. 264
The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Pluto, London 2000, pp. 264
ALL nationalism is based on mythical history, and the Scots version is no exception. For example, the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath is presented as proof that Scotland is the oldest nation in Europe. The Act of Union with England in 1707 is presented as a catastrophic defeat, while the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 demonstrate that the Scots can still hope to be, ‘a nation once again’, as the song has it. Most of the time, admittedly, the struggle took less dramatic forms. The nation survived, thanks to the Gaelic language, the rich folk memory of a pre-capitalist culture, and the music and traditional dress, which lift Scots’ hearts whenever we see our Highland regiments march past. While union with England was a disaster, fragments were saved from the wreckage. Scotland retained its established church, Scots law, and its educational system, all significantly different from the English versions. So, while Scotland is still subject to the English yoke, the nation is not dead, but sleeping. Why did the sleep last so long, and what made the nation awake when it did?
Davidson’s important study provides a very different version of Scots history, showing that the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath were asserting their claim to rule over their own tenants and serfs, not leading the liberation struggle depicted in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. The claims made for the Declaration are as spurious as those made for the Magna Carta. Davidson’s demolition of nationalist myths is very convincing. He argues that the Act of Union, usually presented as the defeat of the nation, was one of the preconditions for the emergence of national feeling. The 1707 settlement ensured that the Scots élites retained their traditional privileges. Davidson refutes the standard claim that Scots national identity was secured by the trinity of Kirk, Law and Education. Education is not mentioned in the Act of Settlement, not surprisingly as most of the population had little contact with it. The Church of Scotland failed to establish a religious monopoly, while most of the population dreaded contact with the legal system. Incorporation into the developing Empire was much more important than any of those for developing a Scots identity.National consciousness, as distinct from nationalism, had begun to develop in the Lowlands in the period before the union with England. The social system of the Highlands, feudalism with large pre-feudal elements, was a huge obstacle to the development of Scots capitalism. To the Lowland farmer, the Highlander was a cattle-thief, not a fellow countryman. A bourgeois society was created by brutally smashing the pre-capitalist Highland social system, which was good practice for future repression further afield. When the threat from perceived Highland barbarians receded, Scottish élites invented a national identity from the romantic idealisation of the society which they had so recently helped to destroy. Davidson is very informative on Scots economic and political participation in the British Empire. Far from being junior partners, as is so often claimed, Scots capitalists were disproportionately important. Scots also played a key rôle in the Empire’s military, police and administration. The stereotype of the stiff-upper-lipped colonial official could hardly have been modelled on the relaxed and garrulous English.
Nationalist movements have to create their ideologies from such scraps as come to hand, but Scots nationalists are luckier than most. The British state promoted a picturesque Scots identity within and beyond Scotland’s boundaries. Monarchs from Victoria onwards have encouraged grotesque Highland ceremony, and no imperial occasion was complete without Scots regiments with their tartan and pipe bands. Scots national identity, a subdivision of British imperial identity, was available when needed. Radical nationalists now insist that the Scots were among the first to be colonised, and like to quote Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to demonstrate that they were and remain oppressed, just like Africans and Asians. Does anyone in the Third World believe that story? Davidson refutes the loopy radical nationalist historians in the Scottish Socialist Party, who see early nineteenth century workers’ struggles as rebellions against English rule, although the workers made no such claims, and the employers were also Scots.
Scots nationalism is a modern phenomenon. The Scottish Nationalist Party was established only in the 1920s, and had little electoral success until the 1960s. Stories from the fourteenth or eighteenth century are used to stitch together an essentially new garment. Nationalism remains essentially limited, posing few problems for the British state or, so far, for the Scots labour movement. The SNP, which wants the British Army to retain its Scots regiments, and presses the merits of Scots airfields as bases to bomb the Serbs, is hardly a subversive force.
John Sullivan
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A People’s History of the World
Chris Harman
A People’s History of the World
Bookmarks, London 1999, pp. 729, £15.99
A People’s History of the World
Bookmarks, London 1999, pp. 729, £15.99
THE writer of this book is to be commended for his audacity in attempting such a mammoth task. It is well conceived and logically developed, and the range of the author’s reading is quite astonishing. But it is equally plain that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Taking his title from the language of 1930s Stalinist populism, he stakes a claim to an alternative concept of history, as opposed to such things as learning lists of great men (p. iii), which according to him is the policy of New Labour. His criticism of the national curriculum is well beside the point here, for the method the modern state uses to make history unintelligible to working-class students is precisely the opposite, chopping it up into incoherent gobbets under the excuse of teaching methodology. Moreover, Harman only overthrows one orthodoxy to erect another in its place – the fashionable viewpoint of the New Left and ex-Stalinist mafia dug into the universities. For example, he claims to break with Euro-centred bourgeois conceptions, but the structure and focus of his book say quite otherwise. Well over half of it is about the last 200 years, and a third is devoted to the twentieth century alone. Ireland receives more space than Indonesia and Indo-China put together, and none of it touches on the Dark Ages, when Ireland was fulfilling an important rôle on the world stage. Chartism is made out to be ‘as important for world history as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution had been’ (p. 325). If you think that this is frightfully innovative, try looking at the curricula of all too many of our university history departments.
At the same time, Marxism in these pages becomes quite unproblematic, a grand schema into which all world events can be happily fitted, after the manner of Kautsky’s Materialist Conception of History or the notorious chapter in Stalin’s Short Course. Speaking of the origins of class society, Harman considers that ‘the only account of human society which comes to terms with the change is that outlined by Karl Marx in the 1840s and 1850s and further elaborated by Frederick Engels’ (p. 24). But modern scholarship has made it clear that the gens and phratry system that Engels deduced from classical Greece and Rome was not a linear development from more ancient forms, but was in both cases a regression from a previously more advanced society. On the other hand, Harman is similarly unaware that, echoing Engels, several modern scholars believe that representative institutions preceded the rise of sacral kingship at the first point at which it is open to investigation, ancient Sumeria.But many of the major problems of Marxist historiography find no airing here at all. Why do all human societies except those of the Old Stone Age and capitalism seem to be so geographically limited, how and why does each new form of class rule extend the power of the state over its subjects, and why does a pure class system only gell out under capitalism? Even if we cannot blame Harman for skating over these basic questions, we must surely think it strange for a Marxist historian to make no mention of the birth of dialectical thought in ancient Ionia, or of Marx’s dim view of Bolivar when describing the revolt of the Spanish colonies.
Much that is necessary to Marxist historiography is totally absent. As far as ancient history is concerned, although use is made of Ste Croix’ work, it is nowhere stated that the spread of the Roman empire was part of the crisis of late classical society, a process of bailing out the upper classes of the polis and reinforcing their rule over the chora. Nor do we learn that the spread of Islam is part of the revolt of this same chora against city state civilisation, along with a Semitic reaction against the hellenisation and étatisation of Christianity. Why this same Christianity triumphed in the first place is not seen against the archaeological background of the large number of silver hoards from the fourth century onwards, which show that an important motive for the conversion of the Roman empire was the opportunity afforded a bankrupt state to plunder the wealth of the pagan temples (not unlike what moved Henry VIII to break with Rome so many years later). Nor is there is any analysis of the crucial part played by literate religions in the rise of peoples from tribalism to statehood during the Dark Ages, as illustrated by the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, the Khazars to Judaism, or the Uighurs to Manichaeism.
Coming up to more modern times, there seems to be no awareness that the two different phases of the British Empire are related to merchant and industrial capital, or how the American Revolution represents the dividing line between them. We look in vain for any application of Abram Leon’s concept of the people-class to understanding the process of nation building in Eastern Europe, of Rosdolsky’s investigation of the same problem, or of Mandel’s researches into the nature of the Second World War. A particularly Jesuitical piece of reasoning (pp. 511–2) attempts to establish a difference between Stalinism and fascism, quite an achievement for someone with a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union. And yet again we have the tired old myths that Rosa Luxemburg ‘alone’ challenged the ‘complacency’ of Kautsky and Bernstein (p. 393) and ‘best appreciated the importance of 1905’ in Western Europe (p. 402).
This brings us on to straight factual errors, which abound at every turn. Susan Pollock has shown (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 3, p. 322) that contrary to Harman’s categorical denials (p. 12), both social stratification and male supremacy were already well developed in Mesopotamia by 3000 BC. The Middle Kingdom in Egypt can in no way be described as ‘stagnation’ (p. 41). Sippara, with its great temple of Shamash, was hardly ‘run by the trading merchant classes’ (p. 38). It would be interesting to learn where Kassites are mentioned in the Old Testament (p. 40). No Israeli archaeologist of any credit any longer believes in the existence of ‘Solomon’s empire in Palestine’ (p. 45). The rapid Hittite raid that captured Babylon hardly ‘captured Mesopotamia’ (p. 45). And when Harman talks of Rome being ‘under the domination of the Etruscan state to the north’ (p. 72), he is wrong on two counts. Etruria was never united into one state, and there is no evidence that the nearest of their cities, Veii, ever dominated Rome. Neither Luoyang nor Chang’an were ‘new capitals’ during the Sui and Tang dynasties (p. 107). There was no such thing as an ‘ordinary Inca’ (p. 170). ‘Elector’ does not simply mean ‘prince’ (p. 637, n47), but a member of that college that had the right to select the Emperor. Most of the Gunpowder plotters were from the gentry class, hardly ‘some of the rump of large Catholic landowners’ (p. 205). Compared with Gustavus Adolphus Wallenstein cannot be regarded as ‘the ablest commander’ of the Thirty Years War (p. 196). Aehrenthal’s annexation of Bosnia did not add it to the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy (p. 343). Hobsbawm is not wrong to question whether Franco, a pronunciamento general backed by Alfonsine and Carlist monarchists and the church, was a ‘fascist’ (p. 509).
At the same time, Harman is fearfully anxious to appear politically correct, especially on the anti-racist front. His discussion of the ‘African’ roots of Egyptian civilisation reflects very modern concerns, and is quite silly when applied to the fourth millennium BC (p. 136). Colour coding in Egyptian tomb paintings sticks to a rigid pattern, and does not show ‘fairly random mixtures of light, brown and black figures’ (p. 252). The Ethiopians did not develop their own script during the early stages of the ‘urban revolution’ (p. 17). The earliest inscriptions of the Kushite court were in classical Egyptian, and the first dated examples of Meroitic come from the second century BC. It is quite ridiculous to compare the scale of atrocities in the Aztec sacrificial system with those of the Spanish Inquisition (p. 167), and it is simply not true to say that ‘the Spanish attempted to destroy all Aztec records when they conquered the Valley of Mexico in the 15th [sic] century’ (p. ii).
This work, therefore, must be regarded as a brave, if premature, attempt at a synthesis. But Marxist historical writing, if it is to remain Marxist at all, must be oppositional and iconoclastic, and subject all traditions to the keenest criticism, particularly its own. And it should ask questions as much as answer them. So whilst this book cannot be said to have succeeded in its stated aims, it does succeed in quite another direction, that by systematically laying out the orthodoxy of left-wing historical thought at the end of the twentieth century, it allows us to measure how far it falls short of the development of conventional bourgeois scholarship.
Al Richardson
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Dear God
Eamonn McCann
Dear God: The Price of Religion in Ireland
Bookmarks, London 1999, pp. 201, £9.99
Dear God: The Price of Religion in Ireland
Bookmarks, London 1999, pp. 201, £9.99
Dear Editor
As this book is ostensibly addressed to the Almighty, He thought someone should reply officially. Unfortunately, everyone in Heaven is very busy at the moment, which is why an official request was received down here that one of us should take on the job. Not wishing to disappoint the Boss – we get on very well, actually – I agreed to dispatch the task.
I must say that I always enjoy reading intelligent Socialist commentators like Mr McCann, because in so doing I get fresh insight into how well we are faring in our principal task, which is, of course, the destruction of the human race. So I have little hesitation in recommending this work to your readers. Indeed the only reluctance I feel springs from a sense that, in praising Mr McCann’s exposition of how the Catholic Church in Ireland has managed to contribute to the end we have set ourselves in Hell, I may perhaps convey the impression that we are really on the side of the Reverend Ian Paisley, since he and his co-thinkers also take a keen interest in the goings-on in the Irish Catholic Church. Let me make it clear: we are not biased especially in favour of either the Protestant or the Catholic variant of Christianity – on the contrary we support (and denounce) both as and when it is necessary to do so. Salus Inferni suprema lex is our motto – ‘the safety of Hell is the supreme law’.As I said, our aim is to get rid of humanity if that is at all possible – and I am glad to say that in the last few decades it has been looking increasingly possible – but if we can’t do that then we hope humans suffer as much as they can be made to. After all, they deserve it for refusing to listen to the advice of the Boss, don’t they? In this context Mr McCann provides some useful information on how an organisation whose ostensible aim is the alleviation of human suffering has actually been contributing to it over the years. Perhaps you and your readers think that what I am saying is all diabolical propaganda: I assure you that is not the case. If you doubt my word you have only to read the section of the book (which consists of articles written for the press by Mr McCann) entitled Child Cares, and the three case histories at the end (Chapter 10: Home Tales). It is, of course, the institution of clerical celibacy which is responsible for much of the trouble and for a series of scandals revealed in this past decade which have seriously eroded the prestige and respect of the Irish Catholic Church among the population of that country. I told the church authorities long ago when they insisted on imposing celibacy on the clergy that the regime would be too strict for them, but, unfortunately (for obvious reasons), they don’t always listen to me. But, as Mr McCann judiciously observes, the trouble does not end there: faced with the multitude of scandals in recent years, the clerical authorities have simply concentrated on a cynical damage limitation exercise, contrary to the interests of the victims such as those children who were forcibly expatriated, ‘huge numbers of whom are traumatised still, offered neither compensation nor counselling, nor even, in many cases, acknowledgement that they’d gone through the bleak experience which continues to darken their lives’.
If the bishops were genuine in the remorse which they advertise, even now they’d take the obvious course … They’d open the archives which their Church meticulously keeps so we could measure the extent of what happened and pin-point what Church leaders knew and when they knew it. In other words, they’d tell the truth. This isn’t a complicated matter. Scores of children treated abominably in ‘homes’ in Derry in the 1940s and 1950s were eventually shipped off to Australia, where their suffering continued and, if anything, increased. How many children, exactly? Who were they? Children who ‘wouldn’t be missed’, perhaps? Who devised this policy and why, and who supervised its implementation? (p. 103 – for the background to this post-World War Two forced export of children, involving not only Irish youngsters but also some from the UK, see page 153.)
To be fair to the worthy Mr McCann, I must stress that his opus is not all a chronicle of unmitigated horror. Your readers will find much to interest them besides, including some acute observations on Pope John Paul II, Catholicism in Belfast, the Good Friday Agreement, abortion, Mother Teresa, the Blessed Virgin of Medjugorje, and Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb (who was put on trial after the Second World War, charged with collaborating with the wartime fascist government of Croatia), all spiced with Mr McCann’s usual humorous wit.
On one point I must take issue with Mr McCann. He quotes approvingly Trotsky’s proposal for the overthrow of all existing regimes in the Balkans and the establishment of a Balkan Federal Republic (p. 179). I must warn that our forces on the ground will strain every nerve to prevent such an eventuality if it ever looks likely – and, what is more, I can assure you we shall succeed in stopping it dead.
Nonetheless, I warmly recommend the book. No doubt the Boss’s ‘official representatives’ on earth and those who speak for them will take a different view, but I leave them to make their own case, in the knowledge that they will, as usual, not be backward in coming forward.
Please accept my most felicitous sentiments. Forward to the common ruin of the contending classes!
Yours infernally
Beelzebub
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Without God or Master
José Manuel Márquez Rodriguez & Juan José Gallardo Romero
Ortiz: General sin Dios ni Amo
Editorial Hacer, Barcelona 1999, pp. 382
Ortiz: General sin Dios ni Amo
Editorial Hacer, Barcelona 1999, pp. 382
THIS is the first biography of Antonio Ortiz, one of the most intriguing characters in Spanish Anarchism. When the authors traced him to an old people’s home, he was 88 years old, and had returned from exile in Venezuela in 1991. Ortiz was born in Barcelona in 1907. He started work at the age of 11, and joined the woodworkers’ branch of the CNT when he was 14.
When the Republic was installed in 1931, Ortiz supported the radical FAI tendency against those who wanted the CNT to be a more conventional trade union. In November 1932, he became the Chairman of the wood workers’ union, where he participated in bitterly-fought strikes. In January 1932, after a revolt in the mining area of Alto Lobregat brought fierce government repression, Ortiz became the Secretary of the strikers’ support groups, and was jailed and tortured following armed clashes with the police in January 1933. Such actions widened the split between FAI supporters and the moderate Trentistas who were soon to split from the CNT. Ortiz joined the newly-formed affinity group Nosotros, whose members included such illustrious militants as Durrutti, Francisco Ascaso, Gregorio Jover, Ricardo Sanz and Garcia Oliver. The group decided to assassinate Dencás, the Catalan regional government’s fascistic police chief. Ortiz thought that the action might be counter-productive, but he accepted the majority decision. He was prepared to throw the home-made bomb which was meant to kill Dencás, who, however, failed to show up.The Nosotros group was a key element in the fighting which smashed the military rising of 19 July 1936 in Barcelona, where Ascaso was killed. Once the counter-revolution was defeated in Catalonia, two CNT columns advanced into Aragon, one led by Durrutti, the other by Ortiz. When Durrutti was persuaded that he was needed in Madrid, Ortiz remained as the leading Anarchist in Aragon, and was a thorn in the side of the Stalinists. An Aragon defence council was formed at a meeting in October 1936 to carry out the CNT’s programme of social revolution. Joaquín Ascaso, a cousin of Francisco Ascaso, became its President. In Catalonia itself, the militia committees had been replaced by Companys’ bourgeois government. Elsewhere in the republican areas, bourgeois rule was hardly challenged.
After the Stalinist putsch in May 1937, Ortiz was removed from his command, as were other Anarchists and POUM members. Aragon was the only area not under the control of the Republican government, which was determined to crush the social revolution. However, this was not easy, as there were three CNT divisions on that front, all commanded by prestigious militants. An order dissolving the council was made in June, but was not put into effect until August, when government troops under the command of the Stalinist General Lister arrested libertarian activists, and seized and destroyed communal property.
The CNT leaders were unwilling to stand their ground, as they would have been accused of helping the Francoists. Ortiz and Ascaso strongly opposed the CNT’s capitulation, particularly that of Mariano Rodríguez Vásquez (‘Marianet’), its National Secretary, who seems to have been anxious that the CNT should regain the government positions that it had lost in May.
Soon afterwards, when about to return to Aragon from a CNT meeting in Valencia, Ascaso was arrested and accused of currency smuggling, but he was released in September without being charged. The affair went back to early 1937, when two members of the CNT’s National Committee were stopped by the police at the French border carrying a substantial amount of money and jewels, which were to be used to buy arms and material for the CNT. At that time the CNT was represented in Largo Caballero’s government, in which Garcia Oliver was the Minister of Justice. According to Ascaso, ‘Marianet’ asked him to accept responsibility, as the occurrence might give the Communists a weapon against the CNT. Garcia Oliver would be able to lose the relevant file.
Garcia Oliver told Ortiz that he had known nothing of the matter, and claimed that ‘Marianet’ was terrified that he would be implicated, as even a short stay in prison would endanger his control of the organisation. Ortiz’s story tallies with Garcia Oliver’s memoirs, but as it was rejected by other CNT members, the affair of the ‘Aragon treasure’ remains in dispute. Many Anarchists believed that Ascaso and Ortiz were engaged in private accumulation, but that would not explain how the ‘treasure’ came into the hands of CNT National Committee members. Ascaso and Ortiz lived out their lives in poverty, so they would appear not to have benefited by the affair. Ortiz, disappointed by the capitulation in Aragon, lost confidence in the CNT leaders, and enrolled in the military academy. He was eventually given the command of the twenty-fourth division stationed close to the French border, but he was removed in July 1938 and demoted to sergeant. He had come to the conclusion that the Stalinists meant to kill him, as he believed they had killed Durrutti.
He fled to France on 5 July with Ascaso and a group of about 10 soldiers which included prominent CNT members. That action outraged many Anarchists, including some who shared his criticism of the capitulation in Aragon. Once across the border, Ortiz and his companions gave themselves up to the police. They were treated well until it was discovered that in the 1920s Ascaso’s cousin had plotted with Durrutti to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Ortiz had to suffer not only the hostility of the French police, but of the CNT leaders whom he believed had tried to kill him. As the Stalinists saw all Anarchists as potential traitors, Ortiz’s desertion had strengthened the case of the CNT’s opponents.
Ortiz’s later fate was similar to that of many other Spanish refugees. He got out of a prison camp by enlisting in the French army. At the end of the Second World War, he was eager to renew the struggle, in spite of having been expelled from the CNT. In December 1948, he tried to kill Franco by dropping a bomb from a light plane when the Caudillo was watching the yacht races in San Sebastian. The attempt failed as the bay was patrolled by fighter planes. He then emigrated to Bolivia, and later to Venezuela.
The book’s title is appropriate as Ortiz obeyed neither God nor master. If much of the story remains mysterious, this is not the fault of the authors. The book avoids many of the pitfalls of oral history by a meticulous use of varied materials. The authors interviewed Ortiz at length, studied the documents he had preserved for so long, and compared them with the recollections of other participants. They have examined the CNT’s and other archives, and studied the published literature on the Anarchist movement and the Civil War. When the evidence is contradictory, readers are left to decide for themselves.
John Sullivan
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