*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, Autonomedia, Brooklyn 1988, pp363
Although the writer of this book is an Associate Professor of politics, the fact that he lacks a basic training in Marxism and writes for a milieu that has no concept of class politics at all means that what we have here is yet another non-political book written about political movements. The fact that the Trotskyist movement in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party, is just about the most theoretically wretched in the entire world cannot have helped matters. Add to that more than a dash of old-fashioned Stalinism and we have a very exotic mixture indeed.
His attempt to grapple with Trotskyism is deeply flawed. It cannot, of course, be understood without some command of either its basis within Bolshevism, or of its transitional methodology. On the first count Fields’ understanding of the conflict of Bolshevism and Stalinism seems to be limited to a remark about Trotsky’s propensity to blame all the bureaucratic deformations of the Soviet Union on Stalin (p.234), and so little is grasped about democracy within the party that he appears to believe that Trotsky’s support for democratic centralism and for factional rights at the same time is “inconsistent” (p.235). On the second count, believing as he does that the Transitional Programme is meant to pose “minimum demands” (p.239), he thinks that “Trotskyists in the United States place much more stress on the Transitional Program than do the French Trotskyists who are appealing to a much more radical working class” (p.181), and that “there is thus less a need for the Ligue to emphasise the Transitional Program in the more radicalised milieu of the French workers than there is for the SWP in the United States where the workers are more conservative” (p.158). Even workers’ control, apparently, is a “minimum demand” (p240). Oblivious of Lenin’s demand for Communist membership of the Labour Party, he assumes that the practice of entry is “not one which is clearly consistent with what most people would recognise as Leninism” (p.239), and even confuses it with left wing activists belonging to trade unions, for example those of the UJCML inside the CGT (p.92).
And whilst we can sympathise with anyone approaching the complexities of Trotskyist history from outside, the blunders he makes are monumental. Pierre Frank, apparently, is “still active” (p.42), Pablo was “General Secretary of the Fourth International in 1942” (pp.48-9), Lutte Ouvriere is “probably smaller” than both the LCR and the OCI (now PCI) (p.77), and the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was in 1939 (p.182). We are told in all seriousness that the Union Communiste dropped its claim to belong to the Fourth International, not because of a threatened lawsuit, but in order to “secure some sort of reform of the PCI and possible unification with it” (p.74). Most fatuous of all is the assertion that the American SWP “has been subjected to a severer and relentless repression by those who control the political system, the parallel of which can only be found in France during the World War II Occupation” (p.139).
He has also swallowed an ocean of Stalinist and Maoist nonsense. Although Stalin did not even know that the Netherlands were part of Benelux, his writings on the national question, apparently, “are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought” (p.219). Mao, whose works on dialectics were ghost written for him, and didn’t know Hegel from Harold Lloyd, “touched the philosophical basis of Marxism” (p.16), and during the Cultural Revolution, a noxious purge if ever there was one, he was really “attempting to mobilise the younger generation to control the bureaucracy” (p.9).
Most amusing, however, are his own dialectical meanderings, particularly in chapter six. He appears to operate using his own concept of the first, second and third levels of practice, which he nowhere relates to Marxism, and along with this comes all manner of sub-Althusserian claptrap. “Trotsky and the movements which have followed in his wake have played the role of international superego” and “like most superegos, Trotskyists are little appreciated and much repressed” (p.243), and since they are unwise enough to have a theory, it “becomes increasingly dysfunctional at the level of practice as the practitioners move away from a suggestive conception of theory and towards a rigidly scientist conception and a posture of vigilence [sic] against all political pragmatics” (pp.253-4). But beneath this elaborate smokescreen his own concept is really rather crude: that the Trotskyist and Maoist movements are split because they are not only at odd; with “the pecularities of the political culture in which the attempt to apply the theories is made” but that there are also “contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories themselves” (p.ix).
Although class concepts rarely intrude upon his analysis (at one point we are given the telling fact that only between eight and nine per cent of LCR member are factory workers, p.52), it is in fact only by using them that this extreme fragmentation both of organisation and of theory can be explained. Based as the groups are within essentially unstable strata that are caught between the primary contending classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class, ideological vacillation, sectarian sterility or opportunist adaptation are nor only to be expected, but are virtually inevitable. The very ideological freedom he recognises in French Maoism, for example, is surely because its romantic escapist Third World peasant ideology has only historic contact with France’s past, and not a great deal to offer it in the present. The romanticism of the middle class left (in Britain as well as in the USA and France) is only matched by its irrelevance.
We search in vain for any inkling as why this is so. But the marginal position which the left finds itself rests upon a real material basis, in the global defeat of the working class before and during the Second World War which, along with the long boom and the spread of Stalinism an ideology of peasant nationalism, could not fail to promote Stalinist and Social Democratic illusions, not only among masses but even among would-be revolutionaries.
To add to the distress of any innocent who might reach for this book as a guide to the maze of far left politics is the incredible violence done to the English language. Apart from verbal barbarisms such as “delegitimization” (p27) and “thusly” (pp.54, 95), organisations “operate at tight end of the continuum” (p.ix), social scientists “hypothesize” (p.35), Marx calls “to transform the social universe in an emancipatory direction” (p.ix), and we repeatedly encounter the mysterious “postures of vigilence against Marxist-Leninist pragmatics” (e.g. p.252). Oh dear!
Al Richardson
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique, Glasgow, 1987, pp 220, £8.00
But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter the Slav Sonderbund [alliance], and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.' (F. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, January 1849)
Rosdolsky correctly notes that Engels’ position on the Austrian Slavs has been irrevocably refuted by “the severest critic of all critics – history”. The “reactionary peoples” condemned by Engels are the Czechs and Slovaks that today populate Czechoslovakia, the Serbs and Croats who help make up Yugoslavia, and the Galician Ukrainians who now live in the Western Ukraine. These peoples have recently emerged from the collapsing Stalinist Eastern Bloc only to be thrown once again into the cauldron of insurrection and ethnic conflict. For that reason, the recent publication in English of this 40-year-old study of Engels’ peculiar attitude towards the nationalities of Eastern Europe in 1849 is timely, and to be welcomed.
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality. (p.185)
In his book, Rosdolsky sets out Engels’ justification for his position at length. Briefly, both Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois revolutions that broke out from February 1848 throughout Europe as the necessary precursors to the Socialist revolution, which they erroneously expected to be imminent. However, the revolutionary fervour of the bourgeoisie soon evaporated, and the forces of reaction rallied, particularly in Metternich’s Austria. In October 1848 the bloody suppression of the Vienna rising marked the turning point of the insurrections, and the revolutionary forces were thrown back everywhere from then onwards. What motivated Engels to write his vituperative articles was the Austrian Slavs’ rejection of their chance to win freedom from the oppressive rule of the Habsburgs, and their enthusiastic participation in Metternich’s counter-revolution.
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. (Democratic Pan-Slavism, February 1849)
Rosdolsky links Engels’ adoption of this conception directly to Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic people’. In his Philosophy of Mind, the German philosopher held that only those peoples that could – thanks to inherent “natural and spiritual abilities” – establish a state were to be the bearers of historical progress: “A nation with no state formation ... has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.” As a result, those who were indifferent about possessing their own state would soon stop being a people. The reactionary implications of Hegel’s theory are clear: he thought that some peoples will always be uncivilised, no matter what. For instance, in 1830 Hegel wrote off Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa ... it is an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.”
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
The [Ukrainian] question cannot be solved as long as the Ukrainians have not achieved full – and not merely formal ’ independence with or without federation with the Russians. (p.165)
This hint of pro-nationalist sentiments indicates that, while Rosdolsky formally accepted Lenin’s approach, he retained reservations in practice.
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique, Glasgow, 1987, pp 220, £8.00
But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter the Slav Sonderbund [alliance], and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.' (F. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, January 1849)
Rosdolsky correctly notes that Engels’ position on the Austrian Slavs has been irrevocably refuted by “the severest critic of all critics – history”. The “reactionary peoples” condemned by Engels are the Czechs and Slovaks that today populate Czechoslovakia, the Serbs and Croats who help make up Yugoslavia, and the Galician Ukrainians who now live in the Western Ukraine. These peoples have recently emerged from the collapsing Stalinist Eastern Bloc only to be thrown once again into the cauldron of insurrection and ethnic conflict. For that reason, the recent publication in English of this 40-year-old study of Engels’ peculiar attitude towards the nationalities of Eastern Europe in 1849 is timely, and to be welcomed.
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality. (p.185)
In his book, Rosdolsky sets out Engels’ justification for his position at length. Briefly, both Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois revolutions that broke out from February 1848 throughout Europe as the necessary precursors to the Socialist revolution, which they erroneously expected to be imminent. However, the revolutionary fervour of the bourgeoisie soon evaporated, and the forces of reaction rallied, particularly in Metternich’s Austria. In October 1848 the bloody suppression of the Vienna rising marked the turning point of the insurrections, and the revolutionary forces were thrown back everywhere from then onwards. What motivated Engels to write his vituperative articles was the Austrian Slavs’ rejection of their chance to win freedom from the oppressive rule of the Habsburgs, and their enthusiastic participation in Metternich’s counter-revolution.
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. (Democratic Pan-Slavism, February 1849)
Rosdolsky links Engels’ adoption of this conception directly to Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic people’. In his Philosophy of Mind, the German philosopher held that only those peoples that could – thanks to inherent “natural and spiritual abilities” – establish a state were to be the bearers of historical progress: “A nation with no state formation ... has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.” As a result, those who were indifferent about possessing their own state would soon stop being a people. The reactionary implications of Hegel’s theory are clear: he thought that some peoples will always be uncivilised, no matter what. For instance, in 1830 Hegel wrote off Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa ... it is an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.”
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
The [Ukrainian] question cannot be solved as long as the Ukrainians have not achieved full – and not merely formal ’ independence with or without federation with the Russians. (p.165)
This hint of pro-nationalist sentiments indicates that, while Rosdolsky formally accepted Lenin’s approach, he retained reservations in practice.
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158
This is a fascinating and most disturbing book, disturbing because it is written by an American army colonel who appears to be a good deal more aware of the problems of Socialist insurrection – a key aspect of Leon Trotsky’s thought – than the vast majority of those who call themselves Trotskyists. The author has used the Russian edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works, published in 12 volumes in Moscow between 1925 and 1927 and cites these references, which makes crosschecking with the far more limited English and French language material available to this reviewer difficult. Essentially the work divides into three: firstly and most novel to me, Trotsky’s rôle in the debates among revolutionaries after 1905 about the tactics necessary to overcome the Tsarist army, involving the complex and subtle interaction of politics and military technique; secondly, the comments and analyses on the Balkan wars and the First World War of Trotsky the brilliant journalist; and finally an account of the way in which Trotsky mobilised and commanded the Bolshevik seizure of power – all clearly and well written in less than 200 pages.
The second of these three themes, that of Trotsky the war correspondent, is the least politically controversial, and can be dealt with first of all. Whether it was his Marxist training or his own natural genius, Trotsky was able to perceive as closely as any civilian could both the way in which total war involved total society and – though forbidden proximity to the front – the nature of the stresses on humans in twentieth century battle. In this sense he foreshadows the work of academic authors like John Keegan or Michael Howard who, with the advantage of hindsight over two tremendous military convulsions this century, systematise much of what Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in a small war in a god-forsaken corner of Europe. What was incredibly original then is now part of conventional wisdom, and indeed Michael Howard once said to me that “We are all Marxists now”, by which I understand him to mean that many of Marx’s insights about society have passed into the general consciousness of good historians. So Marxists seeking to understand war might all start by reading the Face of Battle by Keegan and the Franco-Prussian War by Howard.
Trotsky’s feat was the more amazing when one glances at what passed for military science in those days, such as the work of Bernhardi or, on a more specialised level, the documents submitted to the Cabinet by the Committee of Imperial Defence, let alone the attempts of Hilaire Belloc to explain war to a civilian readership in early 1915. On a simple strategic plane Trotsky was more than competent, though I have some doubt myself as to whether Nelson is correct in believing that the former’s strategy would have enabled the Bulgarian army to take Constantinople and avoid the costly battle of Lule Burgas. Indeed a Marxist – and not only a Marxist – analysis would tend to see costly savage battles as inevitable between enemies who were more or less equally well-equipped. Some clever little manoeuvre could not avoid this, and it would be all the more true when, as Trotsky pointed out, the technical conditions of the day favoured the defence. However reactionary he may be, an historian like John Terraine is surely right about the need for fighting in order to win, and Nelson’s surprising admiration for his subject has carried his judgement away. Chauvinists amongst us might assert that the American military expects to win without fighting – simply by technologically brilliant massacre.
One interesting aperçu that Nelson does not develop is that after his Balkan War experience, Trotsky became convinced that partisan warfare was not suited to a Socialist revolution, though he thought that guerrillas could be useful to a nationalist movement. [1] Perhaps it is a pity that many Trotskyists in the late ’sixties and ’seventies did not appear to be familiar with this judgement. It also raises an interesting question about Nelson’s view of the Vietnam war in which he served. Perhaps he does not think Vietnam is Socialist, in which case he may judge it to be capitalist or state capitalist! But the author’s Vietnam experience seems to have marked him in other ways, since he chooses not to mention Trotsky’s furious denunciation of the atrocities of the Bulgarian army and their habit of killing enemy wounded which, since Turkish army units contained up to 25 per cent Christian soldiers – either Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and so on, resulted in the murder of many men who would have been delighted to join the victorious allies. Such behaviour was therefore militarily counter-productive, as well as barbarous. But perhaps for a serving American officer in an army which had, as a matter of policy, bombed Vietcong hospitals to break their opponents’ morale, it would be too delicate ’ not to say handicapping for promotion prospects ’ to praise Trotsky for this. (Their legal experts said that the Vietcong wounded were not covered by the Geneva convention, since they were not members of a state’s armed forces.)
Trotsky’s writings on the First World War continue with his search to understand the psychological and social stresses on the front line soldier in greater depth, and there is even a remarkable sentence that foresees the invention of the tank. Yet the psychological aspect on which he insisted is one, if not the main, reason why generals today wish to put their troops in armoured vehicles. If that is done, their soldiers can be carried forward into danger against their will like the crew of a warship. Unlike the Prussian soldier of Frederick the Great, imprisoned by ferocious brutal discipline in the regiment, modern servicemen can be imprisoned in the steel walls of their weapons and so are both forced to fight and not to fraternise. The most extreme example of this is in naval operations – the bureaucratic mechanised mode of warfare par excellence. So the technical solution, armour, arises in part from the psychological needs of the death-avoiding soldier in opposition to the desire of the general to control this impulse. Here Trotsky’s sharp intellect seems to be on the right lines.
For Socialists the main interest of this book will surely lie in the debates in which Trotsky participated after 1905 concerning the tactics to be used to overthrow the Tsar’s army – the concentrated essence of the autocratic state. This argument boiled down as to how far the army could be overthrown militarily or subverted internally, and Nelson deals with this clearly, concisely and subtly. The weakness of the book here is that the author concentrates overmuch on Trotsky, the military hero, though this whole dispute should be seen in rather broader context, and the documents of the SRs and both the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party might have been looked at. Indeed the question could be broadened further and the whole debate on ‘People’s Armies’, in which. western Socialists such as Jaures took part, could be examined in order to understand the context of the Russian quarrel. On Nelson’s evidence the Bolsheviks, at one time, do seem to have had a very ultra-left and triumphalist attitude, believing that they could smash the Tsarist army by means of a workers’ insurrection, and justifying individual acts of terrorism. Nelson fails to point out that after the excesses of some Bolshevik bank robbers Lenin changed his mind. A matter that many sectarians today do not understand is that a working class party develops its programme, not in one thunderous stroke of genius by the revolutionary leadership, but by a process of class struggle, trial and error. The working class and its leaders learn from experience and each other in a dialectical way, and though it is equally true that some understanding of the past may save them from dreadful mistakes, historical knowledge alone may not provide any clear answers to present day problems. So the Bolsheviks and Lenin learnt and looked at events and the consequences of their own actions, and they did not merely tell people what to do.
For the Bolsheviks the military question was complicated by the fact that the army was overwhelmingly recruited from the peasant masses rather than from the working class, where the RSDLP was influential. Things were even more complicated as the different arms were raised from different social groups, the engineers and gunners being more likely to be workers than the infantry. But it was the peasant infantry who were used for repression. In the First World War the socially backward infantry were misused by their commanders and so slaughtered in ill-considered offensives that they became temporarily very advanced politically, and the problem was resolved. It was the military defeat of the army by the Germans, rather than the revolutionaries, that opened the way to its subversion and the seizure of power. When the revolutionaries went on the military offensive the subverted army collapsed with scarcely any resistance. Earlier, when the Russian Socialists debated the military question in the prewar period, it had been noted that attacks on the army had often resulted in a hardening of attitudes against the revolutionaries among the soldiers.
It may be relevant here to note that attempts to do agitational work in the army in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s met with very limited success, and that the few soldiers and NCOs contacted – however advanced in other ways – were always very hostile to the rather pro-IRA line put forward by the agitators from a Trotskyist group. The soldiers perceived the Irish problem as a fight between two reactionary groups of Irish people, not a struggle for national liberation, and it is at least arguable that they, not the revolutionaries, were the more correct. The British army today, like that of the United States and unlike the Russian, is composed of long service volunteers and, in Britain at least, it contains a strong janissary element. [2] Agitation here will take place on unpromising terrain, though if the units have been thinned out in an unsuccessful war the situation would change, as it did in Russia among the peasant levies of Tsar Nicholas. And if such a war arises it will do so because of a political crisis facing the regime, as did the little Falklands affair, which surely owed its outbreak to the internal problems of the British and Argentine governments of the day. Such crises, and the consequent opportunities, will doubtless continue to arrive.
Much of the final section of Nelson’s book dealing with the seizure of power will be broadly familiar to readers who know Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. It is nevertheless very well done and worth reading. I return to the point with which I began by asking myself how it comes about that an American Colonel can deal with this field so very competently. What ‘being’ has determined his ‘consciousness’? I can only assume that his experience in Vietnam, and those of his fellow officers at the War College, when they saw their own army disintegrate before their eyes, despite a casualty rate that was tiny by the standards of World War One, has made them exceedingly sensitive to the problem of the social cohesion of the armed services. Events in Iran, too, where there were many US military advisers, may have had an impact. These instances underline the fact that those very few American Trotskyists who during the Vietnam war maintained that, rather than running away to Canada, revolutionaries should allow themselves to be drafted to work into the army, were correct. Alas, they had but tiny resources while the Woodstock generation, which was their milieu, proved an unpromising layer from which to recruit a Bolshevik party willing to undertake that hardest task of all for Marxists – agitation in the regiments. Nevertheless the modern army, despite the vastly enhanced technical ability of military power in the modern capitalist state, is far from invulnerable to its own working class. And, as this excellent book indirectly bears witness – they know it.
Ted Crawford
Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Judith Shapiro who went to considerable trouble to check the Russian language references for this review. However she was quite unable to find the quote which Nelson puts in inverted commas on p.66 citing Sochineniia, Volume 6, p225. I had thought that it was from a passage from Kievskaya Mysl no.293, of October 1912, which seems thematically related to this topic and which can be found on p.234 of The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, 1980. Even if the citation has been muddled it seems to be either a not unjustified paraphrase of Trotsky’s thought on this issue or may indeed appear somewhere else.
2. By ‘janissary’ I mean individuals who have been torn out of society and lack even family links with it, let alone trade union ones. In Britain this is the case with almost all the many boy recruits, about a third of the infantry, who join at sixteen, the vast majority being from broken homes who do not get on with their step-fathers. Like the janissaries their only home is the regiment. The statistics concerning the background of these lads are, of course, an ‘official secret’ – perhaps with good reason.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158
This is a fascinating and most disturbing book, disturbing because it is written by an American army colonel who appears to be a good deal more aware of the problems of Socialist insurrection – a key aspect of Leon Trotsky’s thought – than the vast majority of those who call themselves Trotskyists. The author has used the Russian edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works, published in 12 volumes in Moscow between 1925 and 1927 and cites these references, which makes crosschecking with the far more limited English and French language material available to this reviewer difficult. Essentially the work divides into three: firstly and most novel to me, Trotsky’s rôle in the debates among revolutionaries after 1905 about the tactics necessary to overcome the Tsarist army, involving the complex and subtle interaction of politics and military technique; secondly, the comments and analyses on the Balkan wars and the First World War of Trotsky the brilliant journalist; and finally an account of the way in which Trotsky mobilised and commanded the Bolshevik seizure of power – all clearly and well written in less than 200 pages.
The second of these three themes, that of Trotsky the war correspondent, is the least politically controversial, and can be dealt with first of all. Whether it was his Marxist training or his own natural genius, Trotsky was able to perceive as closely as any civilian could both the way in which total war involved total society and – though forbidden proximity to the front – the nature of the stresses on humans in twentieth century battle. In this sense he foreshadows the work of academic authors like John Keegan or Michael Howard who, with the advantage of hindsight over two tremendous military convulsions this century, systematise much of what Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in a small war in a god-forsaken corner of Europe. What was incredibly original then is now part of conventional wisdom, and indeed Michael Howard once said to me that “We are all Marxists now”, by which I understand him to mean that many of Marx’s insights about society have passed into the general consciousness of good historians. So Marxists seeking to understand war might all start by reading the Face of Battle by Keegan and the Franco-Prussian War by Howard.
Trotsky’s feat was the more amazing when one glances at what passed for military science in those days, such as the work of Bernhardi or, on a more specialised level, the documents submitted to the Cabinet by the Committee of Imperial Defence, let alone the attempts of Hilaire Belloc to explain war to a civilian readership in early 1915. On a simple strategic plane Trotsky was more than competent, though I have some doubt myself as to whether Nelson is correct in believing that the former’s strategy would have enabled the Bulgarian army to take Constantinople and avoid the costly battle of Lule Burgas. Indeed a Marxist – and not only a Marxist – analysis would tend to see costly savage battles as inevitable between enemies who were more or less equally well-equipped. Some clever little manoeuvre could not avoid this, and it would be all the more true when, as Trotsky pointed out, the technical conditions of the day favoured the defence. However reactionary he may be, an historian like John Terraine is surely right about the need for fighting in order to win, and Nelson’s surprising admiration for his subject has carried his judgement away. Chauvinists amongst us might assert that the American military expects to win without fighting – simply by technologically brilliant massacre.
One interesting aperçu that Nelson does not develop is that after his Balkan War experience, Trotsky became convinced that partisan warfare was not suited to a Socialist revolution, though he thought that guerrillas could be useful to a nationalist movement. [1] Perhaps it is a pity that many Trotskyists in the late ’sixties and ’seventies did not appear to be familiar with this judgement. It also raises an interesting question about Nelson’s view of the Vietnam war in which he served. Perhaps he does not think Vietnam is Socialist, in which case he may judge it to be capitalist or state capitalist! But the author’s Vietnam experience seems to have marked him in other ways, since he chooses not to mention Trotsky’s furious denunciation of the atrocities of the Bulgarian army and their habit of killing enemy wounded which, since Turkish army units contained up to 25 per cent Christian soldiers – either Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and so on, resulted in the murder of many men who would have been delighted to join the victorious allies. Such behaviour was therefore militarily counter-productive, as well as barbarous. But perhaps for a serving American officer in an army which had, as a matter of policy, bombed Vietcong hospitals to break their opponents’ morale, it would be too delicate ’ not to say handicapping for promotion prospects ’ to praise Trotsky for this. (Their legal experts said that the Vietcong wounded were not covered by the Geneva convention, since they were not members of a state’s armed forces.)
Trotsky’s writings on the First World War continue with his search to understand the psychological and social stresses on the front line soldier in greater depth, and there is even a remarkable sentence that foresees the invention of the tank. Yet the psychological aspect on which he insisted is one, if not the main, reason why generals today wish to put their troops in armoured vehicles. If that is done, their soldiers can be carried forward into danger against their will like the crew of a warship. Unlike the Prussian soldier of Frederick the Great, imprisoned by ferocious brutal discipline in the regiment, modern servicemen can be imprisoned in the steel walls of their weapons and so are both forced to fight and not to fraternise. The most extreme example of this is in naval operations – the bureaucratic mechanised mode of warfare par excellence. So the technical solution, armour, arises in part from the psychological needs of the death-avoiding soldier in opposition to the desire of the general to control this impulse. Here Trotsky’s sharp intellect seems to be on the right lines.
For Socialists the main interest of this book will surely lie in the debates in which Trotsky participated after 1905 concerning the tactics to be used to overthrow the Tsar’s army – the concentrated essence of the autocratic state. This argument boiled down as to how far the army could be overthrown militarily or subverted internally, and Nelson deals with this clearly, concisely and subtly. The weakness of the book here is that the author concentrates overmuch on Trotsky, the military hero, though this whole dispute should be seen in rather broader context, and the documents of the SRs and both the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party might have been looked at. Indeed the question could be broadened further and the whole debate on ‘People’s Armies’, in which. western Socialists such as Jaures took part, could be examined in order to understand the context of the Russian quarrel. On Nelson’s evidence the Bolsheviks, at one time, do seem to have had a very ultra-left and triumphalist attitude, believing that they could smash the Tsarist army by means of a workers’ insurrection, and justifying individual acts of terrorism. Nelson fails to point out that after the excesses of some Bolshevik bank robbers Lenin changed his mind. A matter that many sectarians today do not understand is that a working class party develops its programme, not in one thunderous stroke of genius by the revolutionary leadership, but by a process of class struggle, trial and error. The working class and its leaders learn from experience and each other in a dialectical way, and though it is equally true that some understanding of the past may save them from dreadful mistakes, historical knowledge alone may not provide any clear answers to present day problems. So the Bolsheviks and Lenin learnt and looked at events and the consequences of their own actions, and they did not merely tell people what to do.
For the Bolsheviks the military question was complicated by the fact that the army was overwhelmingly recruited from the peasant masses rather than from the working class, where the RSDLP was influential. Things were even more complicated as the different arms were raised from different social groups, the engineers and gunners being more likely to be workers than the infantry. But it was the peasant infantry who were used for repression. In the First World War the socially backward infantry were misused by their commanders and so slaughtered in ill-considered offensives that they became temporarily very advanced politically, and the problem was resolved. It was the military defeat of the army by the Germans, rather than the revolutionaries, that opened the way to its subversion and the seizure of power. When the revolutionaries went on the military offensive the subverted army collapsed with scarcely any resistance. Earlier, when the Russian Socialists debated the military question in the prewar period, it had been noted that attacks on the army had often resulted in a hardening of attitudes against the revolutionaries among the soldiers.
It may be relevant here to note that attempts to do agitational work in the army in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s met with very limited success, and that the few soldiers and NCOs contacted – however advanced in other ways – were always very hostile to the rather pro-IRA line put forward by the agitators from a Trotskyist group. The soldiers perceived the Irish problem as a fight between two reactionary groups of Irish people, not a struggle for national liberation, and it is at least arguable that they, not the revolutionaries, were the more correct. The British army today, like that of the United States and unlike the Russian, is composed of long service volunteers and, in Britain at least, it contains a strong janissary element. [2] Agitation here will take place on unpromising terrain, though if the units have been thinned out in an unsuccessful war the situation would change, as it did in Russia among the peasant levies of Tsar Nicholas. And if such a war arises it will do so because of a political crisis facing the regime, as did the little Falklands affair, which surely owed its outbreak to the internal problems of the British and Argentine governments of the day. Such crises, and the consequent opportunities, will doubtless continue to arrive.
Much of the final section of Nelson’s book dealing with the seizure of power will be broadly familiar to readers who know Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. It is nevertheless very well done and worth reading. I return to the point with which I began by asking myself how it comes about that an American Colonel can deal with this field so very competently. What ‘being’ has determined his ‘consciousness’? I can only assume that his experience in Vietnam, and those of his fellow officers at the War College, when they saw their own army disintegrate before their eyes, despite a casualty rate that was tiny by the standards of World War One, has made them exceedingly sensitive to the problem of the social cohesion of the armed services. Events in Iran, too, where there were many US military advisers, may have had an impact. These instances underline the fact that those very few American Trotskyists who during the Vietnam war maintained that, rather than running away to Canada, revolutionaries should allow themselves to be drafted to work into the army, were correct. Alas, they had but tiny resources while the Woodstock generation, which was their milieu, proved an unpromising layer from which to recruit a Bolshevik party willing to undertake that hardest task of all for Marxists – agitation in the regiments. Nevertheless the modern army, despite the vastly enhanced technical ability of military power in the modern capitalist state, is far from invulnerable to its own working class. And, as this excellent book indirectly bears witness – they know it.
Ted Crawford
Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Judith Shapiro who went to considerable trouble to check the Russian language references for this review. However she was quite unable to find the quote which Nelson puts in inverted commas on p.66 citing Sochineniia, Volume 6, p225. I had thought that it was from a passage from Kievskaya Mysl no.293, of October 1912, which seems thematically related to this topic and which can be found on p.234 of The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, 1980. Even if the citation has been muddled it seems to be either a not unjustified paraphrase of Trotsky’s thought on this issue or may indeed appear somewhere else.
2. By ‘janissary’ I mean individuals who have been torn out of society and lack even family links with it, let alone trade union ones. In Britain this is the case with almost all the many boy recruits, about a third of the infantry, who join at sixteen, the vast majority being from broken homes who do not get on with their step-fathers. Like the janissaries their only home is the regiment. The statistics concerning the background of these lads are, of course, an ‘official secret’ – perhaps with good reason.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).
It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
************
This is an entry from the American Left History blog
Saturday, August 11, 2007
*ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LOOK AT LEON TROTSKY-Albert Glotzer's View
Click on title to link to the Albert Glotzer Internet Archive for samples of his writing while was in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s and later after he split from that party in the famous Shachtman-led exit in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. That was the touchstone issue for his, and later generations, and one can see in the later writing the slip-slide into the defense of "democratic" imperialism. A cautionary tale, for sure.
BOOK REVIEW
TROTSKY-MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, ALBERT GLOTZER, PROMETHEUS BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1989
THIS MONTH MARKS THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF LEON TROTSKY BY A STALINIST AGENT-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY
As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I have noted elsewhere that I believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies, or in this a case a memoir and critique (naturally-the memoir alone in this case would not sustain a book) on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Mr. Glotzer’s take on Trotsky’s legacy is a classic post World War II social democratic one driven by the effect of the ravages of American imperialism during the Cold War on the right wing of that international political tendency. The post war period was not kind to those who fell away from the politics that sparked their communist youth, but more on that at another time.
Despite our extreme politic differences Mr. Glotzer’s reminiscences of how he became a communist are welcome. I am always fascinated by how those who came to political maturity a couple of generations before me and who are the real living links to the Russian Revolution felt about that event. Moreover, Mr. Glotzer is no mere chronicler of Trotsky’s life. During the 1930’s before the political temperature in the American left intellectual milieu got too hot for some of them Mr. Glotzer was part of the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement and was a key lieutenant, factional operative and personal friend of a central founder- one Max Shachtman. That these two, along with another “Young Turk” one Martin Abern, spent as much time plotting for organizational control of the movement against the wily ‘bureaucratic’ old timer and founder James P. Cannon during that time as in constructive political work is a separate issue. Needless to say only a few cryptic references to that experience surface in this work- a very selective memoir, as is usually the case. For more on that political struggle read Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and make up your own mind.
As always the critique of Trotsky, or more correctly, Bolshevism is centered on the question of the organizational principles of that party. That is democratic- centralism or as the critics would have it bureaucratic-centralism-long on the bureaucratic, short on the democratic. Trotsky is seen here to have escaped that bad practice until he linked up with the Bolsheviks in 1917. This is his 'original sin' in the eyes of liberals and social democrats like Glotzer. The reduction of an organizational principle of a political party to the decisive reason for the degeneration of a revolution defies belief.
The model for all European social democratic parties, including both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century was the German party. One does not have to read to far into the history of that party to know that even without state power to buttress its organizational practice that party was as bureaucratically run as any Stalinist party cell. The real question then is not the principle of democratic centralism but the question of a ‘vanguard party’ versus a ‘party of the whole class’. In the end that was what the dispute in the Russian social democracy turned on. And later on the international movement, as well. History has demonstrated, if it has demonstrated anything on this question, that a ‘party of the whole class’ with its implication of inclusiveness toward socially backward workers can never take state power, if that was the idea of those who argued for this type of party in the first place. All of the above said, the question of bureaucracy in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism is one that has, in the light of the history of Stalinism, has to be taken as a real question. There are no a priori guarantees on the bumpy road to socialism but that is hardly the decisive question for now.
The rest of Glotzer’s critique is a more or less quick gloss on his politics and a rather annoying gloating over what proved to be the incorrectness of some of Trotsky’s predictions. The central argument Glotzer presents here is that capitalism rather than being in its death throes as Trotsky (and before him, Lenin) suggested still had, and has, a life and is not ready to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, those social democrats, like Glotzer, did more than their fair share of ideological work of behalf of preserving the imperialist status quo. Perhaps he would have been better off if he had ended his memoirs in his Communist youth in the 1930’s when he helped to try to create an international Trotskyist youth movement -that is the Glotzer who interests me. The rest I have heard a million times before.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).
It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
************
This is an entry from the American Left History blog
Saturday, August 11, 2007
*ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LOOK AT LEON TROTSKY-Albert Glotzer's View
Click on title to link to the Albert Glotzer Internet Archive for samples of his writing while was in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s and later after he split from that party in the famous Shachtman-led exit in 1940 over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. That was the touchstone issue for his, and later generations, and one can see in the later writing the slip-slide into the defense of "democratic" imperialism. A cautionary tale, for sure.
BOOK REVIEW
TROTSKY-MEMOIR AND CRITIQUE, ALBERT GLOTZER, PROMETHEUS BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1989
THIS MONTH MARKS THE 67TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF LEON TROTSKY BY A STALINIST AGENT-ALL HONOR TO THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY
As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I have noted elsewhere that I believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies, or in this a case a memoir and critique (naturally-the memoir alone in this case would not sustain a book) on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Mr. Glotzer’s take on Trotsky’s legacy is a classic post World War II social democratic one driven by the effect of the ravages of American imperialism during the Cold War on the right wing of that international political tendency. The post war period was not kind to those who fell away from the politics that sparked their communist youth, but more on that at another time.
Despite our extreme politic differences Mr. Glotzer’s reminiscences of how he became a communist are welcome. I am always fascinated by how those who came to political maturity a couple of generations before me and who are the real living links to the Russian Revolution felt about that event. Moreover, Mr. Glotzer is no mere chronicler of Trotsky’s life. During the 1930’s before the political temperature in the American left intellectual milieu got too hot for some of them Mr. Glotzer was part of the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement and was a key lieutenant, factional operative and personal friend of a central founder- one Max Shachtman. That these two, along with another “Young Turk” one Martin Abern, spent as much time plotting for organizational control of the movement against the wily ‘bureaucratic’ old timer and founder James P. Cannon during that time as in constructive political work is a separate issue. Needless to say only a few cryptic references to that experience surface in this work- a very selective memoir, as is usually the case. For more on that political struggle read Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and make up your own mind.
As always the critique of Trotsky, or more correctly, Bolshevism is centered on the question of the organizational principles of that party. That is democratic- centralism or as the critics would have it bureaucratic-centralism-long on the bureaucratic, short on the democratic. Trotsky is seen here to have escaped that bad practice until he linked up with the Bolsheviks in 1917. This is his 'original sin' in the eyes of liberals and social democrats like Glotzer. The reduction of an organizational principle of a political party to the decisive reason for the degeneration of a revolution defies belief.
The model for all European social democratic parties, including both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century was the German party. One does not have to read to far into the history of that party to know that even without state power to buttress its organizational practice that party was as bureaucratically run as any Stalinist party cell. The real question then is not the principle of democratic centralism but the question of a ‘vanguard party’ versus a ‘party of the whole class’. In the end that was what the dispute in the Russian social democracy turned on. And later on the international movement, as well. History has demonstrated, if it has demonstrated anything on this question, that a ‘party of the whole class’ with its implication of inclusiveness toward socially backward workers can never take state power, if that was the idea of those who argued for this type of party in the first place. All of the above said, the question of bureaucracy in the process of transforming society from capitalism to socialism is one that has, in the light of the history of Stalinism, has to be taken as a real question. There are no a priori guarantees on the bumpy road to socialism but that is hardly the decisive question for now.
The rest of Glotzer’s critique is a more or less quick gloss on his politics and a rather annoying gloating over what proved to be the incorrectness of some of Trotsky’s predictions. The central argument Glotzer presents here is that capitalism rather than being in its death throes as Trotsky (and before him, Lenin) suggested still had, and has, a life and is not ready to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, those social democrats, like Glotzer, did more than their fair share of ideological work of behalf of preserving the imperialist status quo. Perhaps he would have been better off if he had ended his memoirs in his Communist youth in the 1930’s when he helped to try to create an international Trotskyist youth movement -that is the Glotzer who interests me. The rest I have heard a million times before.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party – a Marxist History, Bookmarks, London 1988, pp427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to explain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls “major periods of class warfare’ and totally omits the years 1944-45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to examine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p.60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War “on clear internationalist grounds”, whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party “established its credentials” in 1920 “without being inside the Labour Party” (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no decision had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p.139) “even the best Labour activists abstained politically”, whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure existed, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Communist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs’ memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Independent Labour Party was “not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat” (p.12), they are careful to omit Engels’ enthusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was “the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed” (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to “what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky” about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should “enter the Labour Party”. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consigned to a minor footnote (p.56), even though the reference (n10, p.399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are “workers’ councils of factory and office [!] delegates” (p.139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was “misinformed when he took the councils of action to be ‘the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky’” (p.9). This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or “offices”). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Chernov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as “although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War – AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact” (p.48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin’s theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that “correctly applied” it “involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co-operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action” (p.113), that “as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic” it did not lead to compromising of their ‘politics’ (p.108n), and that “First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.” (p.107) But the theses of Lenin’s Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as “the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party”, making “every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the working masses”. The light-minded dismissal of this policy as “just a tactic” of “limited cooperation on concrete issues” may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB’s crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p.110). Finally, the SWP’s absurd slogan, “Vote Labour without illusions” is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p.110).
If Lenin’s ideas are distorted, Trotsky’s are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119-20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolutionary entry <1>at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil servants (p.96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp.377-8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky’s argument in Where is Britain Going? that “a systematic struggle must be carried on against them” for affiliation, “to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers”. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky’s book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries being in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at loggerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that “despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different institutions”, only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that “these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour” (p.120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 “decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party” this “obscured the correct orientation on Labour” and “negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour’s reformism”. This is in line with Duncan Hallas’ previous categorical statement that “the Communist Party’s attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an ‘entry’ operation, as that term later came to be understood” (The Comintern, p.45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern’s United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolutionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the working class. As Trotsky defined it, “the relationship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed”, what he called an “organic place” where the revolutionaries are “too weak to claim an independent place” (Writings 1934-35, pp.35-6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the demand for affiliation, should the Communist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn’t it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p.108) admits that “there have been occasions” in the 1930s and ’40s, and by Tony Cliff’s own group in the ’50s and ’60s, when entrism has been “used” as “a tactic imposed by great weakness” only to be abandoned “as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet”. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky’s lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky’s concepts are openly mocked throughout the book. On page 85 we are informed that “there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 proved this to be arrant nonsense”. In his interview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied “a strike wave in the near future”, advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944-45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 – a real crisis year if ever there was one – had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trotsky’s argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was “far too radical” for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise – the Anti-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Christians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p.335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky’s verdict on small groups assuming an “independent” existence:
The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to remain as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolutionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolutionary party, and can work most effectively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the international situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten. (Writings 1935-36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical information is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condemnations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted – particularly how revolutionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called premythological, or, at best, magical – that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from attempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thousand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolutionary party of the working class are subject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a successful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume 1 Towards October, 1879-1917, Bookmarks, London 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff’s biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group’s insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was inevitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sections on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ Trotsky is condemned for ‘abstraction’ against Lenin (pp.134-9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisation of ‘the Party’ we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a proletarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (e.g. pp.11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which “had no impact in the Russian Socialist movement” (p.139) with which “none of the Marxist leaders agreed” (p.132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek’s Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impression that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long-term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely appears (pp.168-72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the article he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is concerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trotsky’s name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as “the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism” (p.16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that “the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle” (pp.167). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confrontation between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers’ state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concentrate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher’s first volume takes its title, The Prophet Armed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that ‘the prophet’ in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can ‘make them believe by force’. According to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolution, but also deepens and enlarges them ... (p.15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky’s ideas and actions during the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué’s massive biography creates a painful impression.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Pierre Naville (ed.), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929-1939, L’Harmattan, Paris 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky’s main French correspondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist movement. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trotsky’s most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L’entre-deux-guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trotsky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the letters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the letters were missing from the three main archival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky’s archives having been rifled by his son, Leon Sedov, and by one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex-wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was – and still is! – a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents absolutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is interpreting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book’s title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trotsky there is little that has not previously been published, and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky’s positions and activity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville’s letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort explain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their campaign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Communist Party.
In February 1937 the POI – the French section – held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI’s campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline – within two years it was down to a few dozen – all the more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): “With lots of work and initiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems – as always – are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.” (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same differences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI’s conference delegates to support Craipeau’s position, which denied that the USSR was a workers’ state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier’s PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the letters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Heijenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky’s visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to encourage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints – from both sides – about not having received documents (which were clearly ‘lost’ in the post), Naville’s bleatings about van Heijenoort’s translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed letters show. Rather, we are given an indication of the pressure under which both men – who were in fact very friendly – were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Programme had already sold 1,200 copies – by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Programme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trotsky’s exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an attempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives document has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the conference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door. (p.62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky’s request for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938-39), this collection is extremely interesting, and Naville had done us all a service in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication:
To the memory of my parents
Rudolf and Selma Adler
(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)
and for my wife Janka
is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:
It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...
I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:
In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Ernest Rogers
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread: The Development of Trotskyism over 40 Years, Fortress Books, London 1989, pp.85, £6.95
A book that sets out to present in handy form the contributions of one of the foremost thinkers of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain can only be welcomed, did it but restrict itself to that aim. Unfortunately, that is not the case with this selection, which in a number of places sets out to tinker with the historical record in the interests of promoting a personality cult.
Readers of our Reviews section will recall (Vol.1, no.4, p.44) that in a previous review of a book from the same publisher I took exception to the remark that in 1938 Ted Grant was already the “Theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain”. I made the point that in no way was this the case, and that even in the WIL Ralph Lee considerably overshadowed him, although he did not even deserve a mention in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s account.
This book’s compilers were in considerable difficulties in finding any writings signed by Ted Grant that could justify this statement at all that dated from 1938, let alone earlier, where his name does not appear alone on a single document. The result of a no doubt dedicated search to prove the contrary came up with the preface to the WIL version of Trotsky’s The Lessons of Spain – The Last Warning, which on page 1 is described as “written jointly by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee”, and less modestly in the caption of the illustration on page 59 as “Ted Grant’s introduction”. The truth is, as any comrade in the WIL at the time in London is able to affirm, that it was the work of Lee himself, with next to no input by Grant at all. The initials appended to the text, those of J.R. Strachan, were in fact those of Jock Haston's wife. Devotees of stylistic analysis – which can now be done by computer – will no doubt derive great amusement from the demonstration that the preface bears none of the marks of Ted Grant’s easily recognisable style at all. The attempt to predate Grant’s leadership qualities to his sojourn in South Africa is even more laughable, when on page vii of the preface he is credited along with Lee and Purdy with founding “the Workers International League in South Africa”, the name of the new group that Lee founded when he returned to that country during the Second World War. Even Lee’s rôle in founding the English group of that name is concealed by the statement (p.viii) that he came to Britain in 1938, whereas the minutes of the Conference of the Harber Group show clearly that he was in Britain a year earlier. Grant’s journey, on the other hand, is placed a year earlier than it was in order to lend credence to his alleged leading theoretical role at this early date. This is historically light-fingered, to say the least.
As with the versions of Stalin’s and Lenin’s Selected Works, names have simply dropped out of history. Whereas in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s book the main victim of this treatment was Ralph Lee, in this collection it is Roy Tearse, Jock Haston and Bill Hunter who have slipped out of the record, names to be found in neither text nor index.
Thus on page ix of the preface we are told that “only Ted Grant” was able to come to terms with the development of the new situation in the post-war world, and on page 82 that the RCP did this “under the theoretical guidance of Ted Grant especially”. Nowhere are we informed that the documents pointing out a new situation written by Goldman and Morrow circulated freely inside the WIL and the RCP before Grant recognised what was valid in them, or that as far as the economic forecast was concerned Tearse realised the fallacy of the International Secretariat’s position before Grant did. And as for foreseeing the new situation in Europe before all others, that too is myth, as a simple consultation of the article written by Ted Grant entitled The Coming German Revolution in the October 1944 issue of Workers International News shows all too plainly – an article mysteriously absent from this collection. The contributions of Tony Cliff and Jock Haston to this discussion are not cited in the description given in this book on pp.371-3, and most disgracefully of all the section on Eastern Europe on pp.187-91 does not even hint at the fact that it was Haston who began the discussion about Russia and Eastern Europe, both in Socialist Appeal and in the internal bulletin of the RCP. We are simply told that “it was Ted Grant, as the leading theoretician of the RCP, who worked out a correct position” (p.188).
Even more contemptible is the selection or editing of texts to give a totally false picture or exonerate the author from the results of his mistaken policies. Although we are told that “there are none of the writings or speeches of Ted Grant that the author would not now be prepared to reissue and debate” (p.xiv) the controversy about Chauvinism and Revolutionary Defeatism restricts itself to Grant’s polemic against the RSL in 1943, carefully avoiding the document Grant wrote along with Healy for the WIL’s internal bulletin two years earlier, which showed himself and Healy to be on the right wing of the movement as against the position argued by Jock Haston and Sam Levy. Although we are told that “he main reason why original articles and documents have been cut is an attempt to concentrate as much as possible in a single volume, without vulgarising or simplifying the theoretical constructions” (p.xv), and that the reason that the cuts are not indicated in the text has “no ulterior motive”, this is demonstrably not the case. The version of Preparing for Power that is served up has removed from it the entire polemic against the tactic of entry work into the Labour Party, and in particular the passage with the remark that “such a perspective is farcical and can only serve as a cloak for complete inactivity”. The cuts amount to well over a thousand words, and their significance can easily be gauged.
When in the interview with Collins in 1936 Trotsky advised his British supporters to join the Labour Party, he based himself on the perspective of a rising tide of industrial militancy and its effects upon radicalising the Labour Party and making its supporters receptive to revolutionary ideas. Naturally the coming of war slowed down the process, but 1944 showed the largest number of days lost in strikes of any year back to 1926. The result of this was soon shown by the two most radical Labour Party conferences that have ever met, as a simple consultation of their minutes demonstrates clearly. And in 1945 people who had no previous connection with the party, or even with the working class at all, were able to be adopted as candidates and found themselves almost immediately in parliament. The main responsibility for the British Trotskyists not being there, otherwise engaged in attempting to create a party by linear recruiting, lies squarely on the shoulders of Haston ... and Grant, “especially” (p.82). By these cuts Grant escapes his responsibility for the loss of the historical opportunities of a generation, opportunities prepared and foreseen for the movement by Leon Trotsky himself. The final break-up of the RCP is laid, not at Grant’s door, but “in large measure due to bureaucratic interference and outright manoeuvres by the leadership of the Fourth International” (p.ix), to which is added the ingenuous remark that “at that point [1949] Ted Grant and the British Marxists turned their backs on this international organisation” (p.83).
Add to this catalogue of downright falsification a crop of random stupid errors (e.g. that the authors of the Three Theses had spent most of the war years in exile in Britain, p.84), and we have a very sorry production indeed. This is a shame, because Ted Grant’s theoretical record speaks up as well as anybody’s during the period, even if it has done no more than spin round on the same turntable since 1949. It is, in general, unwise to reproduce documents in extracts, and far better to present fewer key statements intact. But even worse is not to indicate the presence of cuts in the text at all, which makes this collection useless for critical purposes. Anybody reminded of the fate of certain Russian Marxist writings might search for a similar explanation, in the self-censoring activities of a swollen and parasitic bureaucracy of full-time officials.
Al Richardson
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Reviews
Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread: The Development of Trotskyism over 40 Years, Fortress Books, London 1989, pp.85, £6.95
A book that sets out to present in handy form the contributions of one of the foremost thinkers of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain can only be welcomed, did it but restrict itself to that aim. Unfortunately, that is not the case with this selection, which in a number of places sets out to tinker with the historical record in the interests of promoting a personality cult.
Readers of our Reviews section will recall (Vol.1, no.4, p.44) that in a previous review of a book from the same publisher I took exception to the remark that in 1938 Ted Grant was already the “Theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain”. I made the point that in no way was this the case, and that even in the WIL Ralph Lee considerably overshadowed him, although he did not even deserve a mention in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s account.
This book’s compilers were in considerable difficulties in finding any writings signed by Ted Grant that could justify this statement at all that dated from 1938, let alone earlier, where his name does not appear alone on a single document. The result of a no doubt dedicated search to prove the contrary came up with the preface to the WIL version of Trotsky’s The Lessons of Spain – The Last Warning, which on page 1 is described as “written jointly by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee”, and less modestly in the caption of the illustration on page 59 as “Ted Grant’s introduction”. The truth is, as any comrade in the WIL at the time in London is able to affirm, that it was the work of Lee himself, with next to no input by Grant at all. The initials appended to the text, those of J.R. Strachan, were in fact those of Jock Haston's wife. Devotees of stylistic analysis – which can now be done by computer – will no doubt derive great amusement from the demonstration that the preface bears none of the marks of Ted Grant’s easily recognisable style at all. The attempt to predate Grant’s leadership qualities to his sojourn in South Africa is even more laughable, when on page vii of the preface he is credited along with Lee and Purdy with founding “the Workers International League in South Africa”, the name of the new group that Lee founded when he returned to that country during the Second World War. Even Lee’s rôle in founding the English group of that name is concealed by the statement (p.viii) that he came to Britain in 1938, whereas the minutes of the Conference of the Harber Group show clearly that he was in Britain a year earlier. Grant’s journey, on the other hand, is placed a year earlier than it was in order to lend credence to his alleged leading theoretical role at this early date. This is historically light-fingered, to say the least.
As with the versions of Stalin’s and Lenin’s Selected Works, names have simply dropped out of history. Whereas in Taaffe and Mulhearn’s book the main victim of this treatment was Ralph Lee, in this collection it is Roy Tearse, Jock Haston and Bill Hunter who have slipped out of the record, names to be found in neither text nor index.
Thus on page ix of the preface we are told that “only Ted Grant” was able to come to terms with the development of the new situation in the post-war world, and on page 82 that the RCP did this “under the theoretical guidance of Ted Grant especially”. Nowhere are we informed that the documents pointing out a new situation written by Goldman and Morrow circulated freely inside the WIL and the RCP before Grant recognised what was valid in them, or that as far as the economic forecast was concerned Tearse realised the fallacy of the International Secretariat’s position before Grant did. And as for foreseeing the new situation in Europe before all others, that too is myth, as a simple consultation of the article written by Ted Grant entitled The Coming German Revolution in the October 1944 issue of Workers International News shows all too plainly – an article mysteriously absent from this collection. The contributions of Tony Cliff and Jock Haston to this discussion are not cited in the description given in this book on pp.371-3, and most disgracefully of all the section on Eastern Europe on pp.187-91 does not even hint at the fact that it was Haston who began the discussion about Russia and Eastern Europe, both in Socialist Appeal and in the internal bulletin of the RCP. We are simply told that “it was Ted Grant, as the leading theoretician of the RCP, who worked out a correct position” (p.188).
Even more contemptible is the selection or editing of texts to give a totally false picture or exonerate the author from the results of his mistaken policies. Although we are told that “there are none of the writings or speeches of Ted Grant that the author would not now be prepared to reissue and debate” (p.xiv) the controversy about Chauvinism and Revolutionary Defeatism restricts itself to Grant’s polemic against the RSL in 1943, carefully avoiding the document Grant wrote along with Healy for the WIL’s internal bulletin two years earlier, which showed himself and Healy to be on the right wing of the movement as against the position argued by Jock Haston and Sam Levy. Although we are told that “he main reason why original articles and documents have been cut is an attempt to concentrate as much as possible in a single volume, without vulgarising or simplifying the theoretical constructions” (p.xv), and that the reason that the cuts are not indicated in the text has “no ulterior motive”, this is demonstrably not the case. The version of Preparing for Power that is served up has removed from it the entire polemic against the tactic of entry work into the Labour Party, and in particular the passage with the remark that “such a perspective is farcical and can only serve as a cloak for complete inactivity”. The cuts amount to well over a thousand words, and their significance can easily be gauged.
When in the interview with Collins in 1936 Trotsky advised his British supporters to join the Labour Party, he based himself on the perspective of a rising tide of industrial militancy and its effects upon radicalising the Labour Party and making its supporters receptive to revolutionary ideas. Naturally the coming of war slowed down the process, but 1944 showed the largest number of days lost in strikes of any year back to 1926. The result of this was soon shown by the two most radical Labour Party conferences that have ever met, as a simple consultation of their minutes demonstrates clearly. And in 1945 people who had no previous connection with the party, or even with the working class at all, were able to be adopted as candidates and found themselves almost immediately in parliament. The main responsibility for the British Trotskyists not being there, otherwise engaged in attempting to create a party by linear recruiting, lies squarely on the shoulders of Haston ... and Grant, “especially” (p.82). By these cuts Grant escapes his responsibility for the loss of the historical opportunities of a generation, opportunities prepared and foreseen for the movement by Leon Trotsky himself. The final break-up of the RCP is laid, not at Grant’s door, but “in large measure due to bureaucratic interference and outright manoeuvres by the leadership of the Fourth International” (p.ix), to which is added the ingenuous remark that “at that point [1949] Ted Grant and the British Marxists turned their backs on this international organisation” (p.83).
Add to this catalogue of downright falsification a crop of random stupid errors (e.g. that the authors of the Three Theses had spent most of the war years in exile in Britain, p.84), and we have a very sorry production indeed. This is a shame, because Ted Grant’s theoretical record speaks up as well as anybody’s during the period, even if it has done no more than spin round on the same turntable since 1949. It is, in general, unwise to reproduce documents in extracts, and far better to present fewer key statements intact. But even worse is not to indicate the presence of cuts in the text at all, which makes this collection useless for critical purposes. Anybody reminded of the fate of certain Russian Marxist writings might search for a similar explanation, in the self-censoring activities of a swollen and parasitic bureaucracy of full-time officials.
Al Richardson
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, Gower, Aldershot 1987, pp.216, £17.50
The Mensheviks, Russia’s moderate Marxists, were completely marginalised in the summer of 1917, when the course of history found itself at odds with their strategy of building a parliamentary Socialist opposition within a capitalist society. Faced with the choice of a military coup or the transfer of power to the workers’ councils, the Bolsheviks led a successful bid for state power.
What could have been a useful study of reformism in a revolutionary period is spoiled by Broido’s preoccupation with the trials and tribulations suffered by the Mensheviks during the first few years of the Soviet republic. Half the book is a depressing catalogue of arrests, jailings and exiles. Things aren't helped by Broido blaming the stern features of the young Soviet republic, not on the prevailing objective conditions, but on the original sin of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
The Russian masses rallied to the Bolsheviks during a period of dramatic upsurge. In the retreat that followed with the deprivation and destruction of the civil war of 1918-20, the old parties, the Mensheviks and the populist Social Revolutionaries, regained some support. This strained the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasantry. Knowing that they were the only alternative to capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention, the Bolsheviks held on, awaiting the European revolutions upon which all depended, and refused to countenance any challenge to their rule.
The treatment meted out to the Mensheviks was often gratuitously harsh, but the Bolsheviks’ mistrust of them was understandable. Hadn’t they supported the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917, hadn’t some leading Mensheviks colluded in the vile slandering of Lenin as an agent of the Kaiser? Had not the Menshevik government in Georgia persecuted the revolutionaries and openly stated that they preferred the imperialists of the west to the ‘fanatics’ of the east? None of this could have endeared the Mensheviks to those who had led the revolution and were intent on defending it.
The Mensheviks were finally suppressed in the early 1920s as the Soviet government reintroduced limited capitalist measures under the New Economic Policy. Despite, or rather because of, the similarities between the NEP and the Mensheviks’ economic programme, the Bolsheviks could no longer chance any political opposition. Yet this final clampdown had a cruelly ironic sequel. The European revolutions failed, the gulf between the masses and the Bolsheviks continued to deepen, arid conservative and bureaucratic trends emerged within the ruling party. Within a few years the degeneration was such that the party’s revolutionary wing, the Left Opposition, was itself marginalised, harassed, jailed and exiled like the Mensheviks, only on a far worse scale.
The Mensheviks were not consigned to the dustbin of history (to use Trotsky’s apt term) because of Bolshevik mendacity. Slaves to a dogmatic Marxism which held that the revolution of February 1917 heralded a long period of capitalist development with all the trappings of bourgeois democracy, they foundered in the storms of that year. They had been rendered obsolete. As we know, Bolshevism, beleaguered and isolated, succumbed soon after. But Bolshevism remains of great significance to this day whereas Menshevism is but of historical interest. However, Broido’s book is of little value for those who wish to learn about the Mensheviks and their place in history.
Paul Flewers
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*********
Reviews
Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, Gower, Aldershot 1987, pp.216, £17.50
The Mensheviks, Russia’s moderate Marxists, were completely marginalised in the summer of 1917, when the course of history found itself at odds with their strategy of building a parliamentary Socialist opposition within a capitalist society. Faced with the choice of a military coup or the transfer of power to the workers’ councils, the Bolsheviks led a successful bid for state power.
What could have been a useful study of reformism in a revolutionary period is spoiled by Broido’s preoccupation with the trials and tribulations suffered by the Mensheviks during the first few years of the Soviet republic. Half the book is a depressing catalogue of arrests, jailings and exiles. Things aren't helped by Broido blaming the stern features of the young Soviet republic, not on the prevailing objective conditions, but on the original sin of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
The Russian masses rallied to the Bolsheviks during a period of dramatic upsurge. In the retreat that followed with the deprivation and destruction of the civil war of 1918-20, the old parties, the Mensheviks and the populist Social Revolutionaries, regained some support. This strained the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasantry. Knowing that they were the only alternative to capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention, the Bolsheviks held on, awaiting the European revolutions upon which all depended, and refused to countenance any challenge to their rule.
The treatment meted out to the Mensheviks was often gratuitously harsh, but the Bolsheviks’ mistrust of them was understandable. Hadn’t they supported the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917, hadn’t some leading Mensheviks colluded in the vile slandering of Lenin as an agent of the Kaiser? Had not the Menshevik government in Georgia persecuted the revolutionaries and openly stated that they preferred the imperialists of the west to the ‘fanatics’ of the east? None of this could have endeared the Mensheviks to those who had led the revolution and were intent on defending it.
The Mensheviks were finally suppressed in the early 1920s as the Soviet government reintroduced limited capitalist measures under the New Economic Policy. Despite, or rather because of, the similarities between the NEP and the Mensheviks’ economic programme, the Bolsheviks could no longer chance any political opposition. Yet this final clampdown had a cruelly ironic sequel. The European revolutions failed, the gulf between the masses and the Bolsheviks continued to deepen, arid conservative and bureaucratic trends emerged within the ruling party. Within a few years the degeneration was such that the party’s revolutionary wing, the Left Opposition, was itself marginalised, harassed, jailed and exiled like the Mensheviks, only on a far worse scale.
The Mensheviks were not consigned to the dustbin of history (to use Trotsky’s apt term) because of Bolshevik mendacity. Slaves to a dogmatic Marxism which held that the revolution of February 1917 heralded a long period of capitalist development with all the trappings of bourgeois democracy, they foundered in the storms of that year. They had been rendered obsolete. As we know, Bolshevism, beleaguered and isolated, succumbed soon after. But Bolshevism remains of great significance to this day whereas Menshevism is but of historical interest. However, Broido’s book is of little value for those who wish to learn about the Mensheviks and their place in history.
Paul Flewers
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)