Review
The Russian Revolution
Vladimir Brovkin
Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922
Princeton University Press, Princeton 1994, pp. 455
Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Russian Revolution
Oxford University Press, Oxford 1994, pp. 199, £7.99
Gennady Shkliarevsky
Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions 1917–1918
St Martin’s Press, New York 1993, pp. 282
THE OPENING of the Soviet archives from the late 1980s and the interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the closing of an historical epoch have not only resulted in an upsurge of publications on the Soviet Union and encouraged many authors to produce new editions of existing works, but have provoked a resurgence of the literary battle between the conservative ‘Sovietologists’, who see Bolshevism as intrinsically totalitarian and little more than a conspiracy, and the liberal and left wing ‘revisionist’ historians, who take a more objective view. Vladimir Brovkin and Gennady Shkliarevsky are members of the former school, whilst Sheila Fitzpatrick was recently referred to as ‘the doyenne’ of the latter. It is clear that having been on the receiving end over the last couple of decades of the revisionists’ criticisms, the conservatives see the opening of the Soviet archives as an ideal opportunity to wreak their revenge upon the liberals and leftists, and both Brovkin and Shkliarevsky openly admit that this is their intention. Fitzpatrick’s book is an updated version of her popular outline from 1982 of the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Stalinist regime, and draws upon newly-available material, including documents from the archives and Molotov’s memoirs.
Shkliarevsky’s book investigates the relationship between the factory committees and trade unions in Russia from the February Revolution until the early days of the Civil War in mid-1918. He describes the development of the factory committees as their attitude towards the Provisional Government hardened, through their rapid rise as an increasingly politicised and pro-Bolshevik movement, to their fate in the aftermath of the October Revolution, when they were incorporated into the trade unions.
There is, however, more to this book than just that, and it appears that one of its primary purposes is to put the radical Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin, in a bad light. Shkliarevsky denies that Lenin was a self-serving power-seeker, but he does think that his support for workers’ control was a disingenuous means of winning the support of militant workers for his ultimate aim of a one-party dictatorship, and that he only supported the factory committees to undermine the trade union leaders, who were mainly Mensheviks or moderate Bolsheviks who were in favour of a pluralist Socialist government, in order to assist his quest for state power. Once the Soviet government was in place, the Mensheviks marginalised, and the moderate Bolsheviks faced with a governmental fait accompli, Lenin then rapidly subordinated the factory committees to the unions.
Whilst Shkliarevsky’s descriptions of Lenin’s manoeuvres are not inaccurate, like other conservative historians, he prefers to leave old prejudices unchallenged. It just will not do today to bang on about Lenin’s hostility to workers’ spontaneous activity, and to hark back to
What Is To Be Done?, as if that book represented the be-all and end-all of Lenin’s strategic, tactical and theoretical approach to the working class. A look at Lenin’s writings during the period of revolution shows that he was adamant that the local initiatives of the working class had to be combined with centralised economic direction. And whilst Shkliarevsky presents Lenin as an inveterate centraliser, he seems to think that Lenin’s support for local working class initiative was an endorsement of parochialism and indiscipline, whereas in fact Lenin was always insistent on the need to improve labour discipline. What underlines Lenin’s political manoeuvring was not merely the outflanking of political opponents, but the concrete needs of Soviet society. Whereas in 1917 he showed great confidence in the capabilities of the masses, by early 1918 he was beginning to recognise the problems that the low level of popular culture was causing, and, whilst never repudiating his desire to draw the masses into the running of society, he tended to seek solutions in administrative, centrally determined measures.
As for the factory committees themselves, Shkliarevsky is faced with the problem of why they let themselves be subsumed into the Bolshevik political monopoly, and, indeed, helped to defend the Soviet regime in the industrial sphere by bureaucratic means when many workers became disenchanted with the Bolsheviks. Unlike many commentators, particularly those on the left, Shkliarevsky does not consider the factory committees to have been a democratic force; indeed, he sees them and the trade unions as major factors behind the establishment of the Bolsheviks’ political monopoly. Shkliarevsky turns to the concept pioneered by Max Weber and Robert Michels that labour activists have a specific agenda that does not necessarily coincide with the interests of those whom they claim to represent. The problem with Weber and Michels is that they were too categorical and over-deterministic, and saw the rise of labour activists over their constituency as an automatic, ineluctable process. Things are complicated here by the fact that Shkliarevsky fails to explain just what the separate interests of labour activists are, either in the abstract sense or in the specific conditions of Russia in 1917.
What Shkliarevsky is actually addressing is the problem of the exercising of power by labour movement institutions, something which was not only specific to Russia in 1917, but will confront any genuine Socialist regime when it assumes power. After the October Revolution, the organisations that had been set up to defend the working class against the autocracy and the capitalists, were now also organs of the state and industrial management, and were obliged to balance their original rôles as workers’ organisations with their new concerns, which went beyond the immediate interests of the working class. Under the rapidly deteriorating conditions with which they were confronted, it is hardly surprising that the relationship between the leadership of the labour organisations at all levels and the working class became problematic. If a revolutionary party is unable to form a relationship with the workers, or if it becomes separated from them, it will usually either loosen up to the point where it more or less dissolves itself, or it will tighten up and ossify. In opposition, this does not cause much harm (Gerry Healy’s victims apart) other than to make revolutionary politics look somewhat bizarre. In power, however, this process can have profound consequences.
Brovkin’s book looks at these consequences.
Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War is a lengthy compendium of Bolshevik misdeeds, with a walk-on part for the Whiteguards. Using a wide array of non-Bolshevik publications, exposures of excesses in the Soviet press, and recently-opened archival material, he presents a depressing list of ballot-rigging, suppression of workers’ strikes and peasant unrest, harassment of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and of ‘educated society’ in general, lying, cheating and so on by this bunch, who did not constitute a real political party at all, but were ‘a loosely organised radical revolutionary party of intellectuals claiming to speak for workers in 1917’, and ‘a military-industrial mobilisation agency in control of the state apparatus’ by 1919 (p. 414).
As the Civil War had been raging for some months by the time his account commences, Brovkin is not, I suppose, obliged to cover theoretically the establishment of the Soviet regime, but all in all there is very little theoretical discussion in this book. Allusions and inferences there are, however, aplenty to bolster the conservatives’ case that the Bolsheviks were inherently totalitarian from the start, and he maintains a constant attack on those who think otherwise.
For all that, Brovkin’s book is worth reading. More than other writers on the early years of the Soviet regime, he shows the tremendous extent of the rural opposition to the Soviet regime, which by early 1921 was close to bringing it down. He shows how dubious characters attached themselves to the Soviet administration in rural areas, one of whom was fond of declaring ‘I am your Tsar and God! Pray for me and bow to me!’ (p. 137), and were no more than gangsters; and how unreliable the largely peasant Red Army was in dealing with peasant uprisings (desertions probably amounted to 3.7 million men), with many refusing to fight, and many actually joining the insurgents. Brovkin also shows that the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left SRs, who became to some degree reconciled, were heavily involved in the peasant movement. If the political statements of the SRs were typically amorphous, those of the Mensheviks were highly detailed, and Brovkin shows how their popularity grew during the Civil War amongst what was left of the working class, as they called for an end to repressive measures, especially grain requisitioning, for the resumption of democratic elections to the soviets, and for free trade unions, and supported the workers’ activities against the Soviet authorities.
Whilst Brovkin naturally considers that the Bolsheviks’ authoritarian political culture was rooted in their ‘underground past’, which made inevitable their use of ‘conspiratorial and terrorist methods to settle scores with their rivals or opponents’ once in power (p. 269), he correctly emphasises the effect of the Civil War in inculcating a militaristic attitude amongst them: ‘Obedience, discipline and submission became positive virtues, rather than spontaneity, initiative and challenging authority.’ (p. 414) But this is hardly original. Trotsky himself later emphasised this very factor (
Stalin, pp. 384–5), as does, indeed, Fitzpatrick in her book under review here (p. 71). Furthermore, whilst it is certainly true that the Bolsheviks’ administrative and coercive measures of the Civil War strongly influenced the manner in which the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union occurred later on, he avoids the awkward fact that some of the most enthusiastic proponents of those methods, not least Trotsky, soon came around to demanding the democratisation of the regime, and it is no surprise that he draws the weary conclusion that ‘it is irrelevant ... whether Trotsky rather than Stalin stood at the helm’ (p. 421).
In the end, Brovkin has nothing kind to say about anyone. The Bolsheviks were, of course, beyond the pale. The Whites may have been led by upstanding patriots, but they were uncoordinated, unable to work with anti-Bolshevik liberals and leftists, and their troops were a drunken pogrom mob. The Kadets (who barely get a look-in here) either mumbled complaints at the White generals or descended into anti-Semitism. The Mensheviks were naive in their hopes that the workers could wield power. There is also a strong sense of elitism. For Brovkin, the Bolsheviks’ food requisition squads were like the peasants’ land seizures, an excuse for ‘an unbridled Russian free-for-all’ (p. 418). His apparent sympathy for workers’ demands during the Civil War clashes with his assertion that during and immediately after the October Revolution ‘the victory of labour over capital ... amounted to freedom from work’ (p. 10). This dismissal of the various actors makes sense in the light of a line in his conclusion where he says that Russia ‘was not ready for democratic parliamentary statehood’ (p. 420). He ties, as it were, a Gordian knot. Not only were the Bolsheviks hopeless utopians, so were the Cadets, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who all saw a parliamentary regime as the next stage of Russian development.
Conservative commentators see the Bolsheviks as uniquely violent and repressive. Yet Brovkin’s almost throwaway line opens up a crucial question. The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was greatly facilitated by the inability of the Tsarist regime and the Provisional Government to deal with the problems that the First World War imposed upon Russia; the crisis of which they took advantage was not of their making. Had the Bolsheviks failed, any incoming administration would have been confronted by mass working class unrest, a peasantry determined to seize the land and overturn the landowning class, a deepening economic crisis, increasing calls for autonomy or independence by non-Russians, the loss of major industrial and agricultural areas, worsening food supplies to the urban centres, the collapse of the army, and the world war. Many of the features of War Communism were not peculiar to Bolshevism. Capitalist governments have directed labour, statified trade and manufacturing, requisitioned food, and used coercion (although many Bolsheviks deluded themselves that these measures represented a move into a new society, and their insistence upon them after their necessity had passed made things worse). None of the problems facing a non-Bolshevik government could have been dealt with through the organs of parliamentary democracy and political consensus, and it would inevitably have been obliged to resort to coercion, or have faced collapse. It is a shame that Brovkin did not devote any space to the possible consequences of the collapse of the Soviet regime, as he shows that this was by no means an impossibility.
Finally, we come to Fitzpatrick’s book. Popular introductions like this inevitably suffer from the problem of covering a series of momentous events and complex processes in a small space, and the book tends towards superficiality. However, although there are limits to what a relatively short introduction to the subject can include, Fitzpatrick glosses over some important factors in a sentence or two, and ignores others. The main problem is that for all her intended concentration upon both change and continuity, she overlooks the vital significance of both the fundamental changes in Lenin’s thinking during the First World War, and Stalin’s theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’.
Without Lenin’s ability to transcend to a considerable degree the Second International’s formalistic and paternalistic concept of Socialism, and to recognise the active rôle of the working class in a revolution, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Bolsheviks would have attempted to establish a Soviet regime in 1917, or would have been able to interact with the working class in such a way as to make such a regime a possibility. That is why Lenin’s positive endorsement of the rise of workers’ control in 1917 stood in contrast with his rather suspicious initial response to the soviets in 1905, and also why he was able to write such a novel work as
State and Revolution. In a rather hackneyed manner, Fitzpatrick repeatedly describes the October Revolution as a ‘coup’ (pp. 63–66, 68, 72) apparently unconnected with the tremendous increase of support for the Bolsheviks amongst the workers, and the growing desire for a government based on the soviets. She sees the Bolsheviks’ championing of workers’ control as a mere ruse to gain support, and she counterposes workers’ control to centralised economic direction as irreconcilable opposites, seemingly oblivious to Lenin’s calls for them to be combined in order that the basis of economic planning could be established.
Similarly, little is said about the problems that the Bolsheviks encountered in their exercise of state power after the October Revolution – how the disintegration of the proletariat led to their substituting themselves for that class and effectively rising above it; how Lenin continually called for the involvement of the working class in the running of society, yet was reluctant to enact policies that would facilitate this lest the relaxation of the party’s hold over society led to social disintegration; and how the Bolsheviks often engaged in practices which guaranteed their rule in the short term, but which undermined the basis of a Socialist society in the long run. The implication is that a Bolshevik dictatorship over the working class was a logical and inescapable product of Bolshevism.
The rise of the theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is seen as a practical response to the isolation of the Soviet republic, and not as a major revision of Marxism which had profound consequences for both the Soviet Union and the Communist movement. When in 1917 the Bolsheviks implicitly adopted Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, it meant that they accepted that the Russian proletariat was obliged to seize power, but that the resulting regime could only survive if successful proletarian revolutions occurred in more advanced countries. Bolshevism was essentially a holding operation, a desperate quest to hold onto power in the anticipation of proletarian revolutions in Western Europe. Once the link between the October Revolution and a European revolution was broken, then the tendency towards the universalisation of the Russian experience within the Communist movement was solidified, and if Socialism could be built within one country, then the entire experience of the Soviet Union was valid in and of itself, and all preceding and succeeding Soviet practice was effectively validated as a model – indeed, the universal model – for the transition to Socialism. Rather than being considered as emergency measures intended to enable the Soviet regime to survive in temporary isolation in a backward country, the undemocratic features of the Soviet regime became an essential and permanent part of the domestic system, and the great intensification and expansion of these practices under Stalin was accompanied by a slavish imitation of them within the Communist International. The theory also laid the basis for the rise of Great Russian chauvinism within the Soviet Communist Party, and for the transformation of the Communist International into a wing of Soviet diplomacy.
Fitzpatrick considers that the industrialisation and collectivisation drive of the First Five Year Plan represented the culmination of the October Revolution. But it is not sufficient for her to say that the Soviet Union evolved in a different manner from that which the Bolsheviks had foreseen or desired in 1917. The real question is whether Stalin’s ‘revolution’ of 1929–33 constituted a step towards Communism in the sense that Marx employed the term – did it produce a society that could utilise labour more efficiently than capitalism, develop the forces of production in a qualitatively superior manner, and thus enable a truly classless society to emerge? Was the Soviet Union historically viable as a socio-economic formation? Now that the whole edifice has collapsed, the answer can only be in the negative. Rather than representing the culmination of the October Revolution, the First Five Year Plan saw the transformation of the Soviet bureaucracy into a self-conscious ruling elite, standing not only objectively above the Soviet working class, but subjectively as well, and rapidly becoming virulently hostile to proletarian revolutions in the capitalist world. Notwithstanding the eradication of capitalism in the Soviet Union during this period, the First Five Year Plan represented the extinction of the Soviet Union as a revolutionary factor.
Unlike the conservatives, who never miss the opportunity of mentioning the revisionists for the specific purpose of shooting them down, Fitzpatrick attempts a more balanced approach. This, however, merely makes the conservatives appear stronger in their assault, as they have no qualms about promoting their ideologically committed stance. It is as if she is a little embarrassed about promoting her views. As it is, we have seen that Fitzpatrick makes concessions to the conservatives, and some of her general statements – such as her description of revolutionaries as ‘zealots’, ‘utopians’ and ‘violent, suspicious and destructive’, and that by their very nature, revolutions are bound ‘to end in disillusionment and disappointment’ (p. 8) – verge on clichés more reminiscent of them rather than of an objective observer.
For many years, the vast majority of studies of Bolshevism, the October Revolution and the rise of Stalinism consisted of either Western demonology or Soviet hagiography, neither of which were particularly enlightening, and good literature was in short supply. The last couple of decades has seen a considerable turn for the better, as the revisionist school started to look more objectively at the social background of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, and showed that the Bolsheviks did enjoy a strong political base in 1917. But most of their accounts have been narrowly focused monographs, and they have not produced a satisfactory substantial overall account of the Bolshevik experience. Having said that, the Marxist left hasn’t produced one, either. Any takers?
Paul Flewers
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Review
Militant Tendency
Jens-Peter SteffenMilitant Tendency: Trotzkismus in der Labour Party Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, pp. 284, DM79
THIS BOOK is the product of a decade’s research. It is a revised and drastically shortened version of the author’s dissertation. He has used archive materials, interviews, internal and external publications, books from and about the Trotskyist movement, labour movement studies, newspaper and magazine articles, etc., and the huge source reference indicates just how much effort the author has expended on his subject. Unlike many university products, where sources are a bluff designed to impress, here one feels that the author has genuinely read them. He thanks some of the comrades, past and present, associated with this journal for their kind assistance, although it is quite clear that he does not share their views.
What we have is the most definitive study of the British phenomenon known as the Militant Tendency, from its start to its recent split, going back to its prehistory in British Trotskyism, and an attempt, in turn, to locate that within the tradition of British left wing politics. It is seen through the eyes of a German Social Democrat of the postwar generation, not a working class party or union activist, but somebody examining the movement from without. This is partly a plus, inasmuch as he is more rigorous in tackling theoretical questions, and partly a minus, as he has not succeeded in fully grasping the subject. Never mind; I don’t think that the Trotskyist movement could produce anything better.
The author’s introduction states: ‘Neither the conceptions nor the activity of the British left ... can be understood without considering their relationship with the Labour Party and its links with the trade unions.’ (p. 13) He then introduces us to
Trotskyism and British Marxism without ever giving us any definition of the nature of the Labour Party, or what the Marxist attitude should be towards it. Given that Militant developed as a group entrenched in the Labour Party, this is a central problem. In the section of the book devoted to Militant’s doctrine, the author points out that only in the 1970s did it define the Labour Party ‘as a proletarian organisation with a capitalist leadership’, and that studies of Militant itself lack a definition of it. Callaghan devotes just 13 lines to it, whilst Crick sets out no coherent thoughts on it at all (p. 131). The author believes, rightly in my opinion, that the focus of Militant upon the Labour Party developed out of the lack of any other option at the time when it began, hence its theoretical justification was cobbled together
post factum.
Those Trotskyist organisations facing up to the ‘Labour Party question’ who do not make do with creating a fantasy alternative labour movement of their own (thus repeating the lunacies of Stalinist ultra-leftism), usually base their orientation on views expounded by Lenin in 1920, when he tried to persuade sectarians in the Communist Party of Great Britain to support affiliation to the Labour Party (his view in 1908 on Labour’s affiliation to the Second International is in the same sense). Trotsky did not go beyond that understanding. Lenin’s view — that the Labour Party is a party of workers with a bourgeois leadership, and only if it had a leadership that saw the world in a similar way to him and acted accordingly, would it be a
real workers’ party — has confused more people than it has aided. It seems to me to be a subjective assessment, akin to that describing the Mensheviks as ‘petit-bourgeois’, and the Labour Party as even ‘bourgeois’.
Karl Radek used the term ‘parties resting upon the working class’ for those parties not in the Communist camp. In their time, Marx and Engels condemned views expressed by Lenin et al in respect of the ‘most resolute’ and ‘most advanced’ elements setting up separate parties, and set out an orientation for their supporters which aimed at educating the movement through its own experiences. After all, Communism is not a conspiracy; if the majority of working people do not desire it, then the minority has no right to foist it upon them. To me, it seems that the question of the Labour Party is quite simple. It is
the working class party inasmuch as since Socialists and union leaders set it up, the workers have neither broken from it in any significant measure, nor have they set up any party to supersede it (the CPGB was a result of external impulses and bidding, kept going by external finance and instructions, without which it would have collapsed long ago). Almost every Socialist and working class organisation affiliates to the Labour Party. It is the highest expression of the political aspirations of working people. If it is deemed inadequate by some, then this is a view expressed by most Labour Party members, but they seek to change it, not to set up rival bodies. It reflects the maturity of the working class, or its immaturity, but whatever its inadequacies, its membership tries to rectify them from the conclusions they have drawn. Any Marxist not attempting to be a part of that process has obviously failed to assimilate the ABC.
Steffen summarises his argument in
Trotskyism and British Marxism, but although he sketches out some worthwhile criticism, such as the stress on the leaders’ ‘betrayals’, which underestimates the factor of consciousness (a common theme of Trotskyism), he falls into some errors. Trotsky did not consider that a ‘capitalist counter-revolution’ in the Soviet Union was ‘only possible through enemy intervention’ (p. 15). As his view of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union developed, he said that, if not removed by the working class, ‘the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, would plunge the country back to capitalism’. Steffen also tries to establish a link between the ‘Anglo-Marxism’ of H.M. Hyndman and Trotskyism. There is a tradition of sectarian propagandism in Britain, and many of the Trotskyist organisations practise it, and although it infected much of the earlier Marxist movement, its manifestations in Trotskyism arise from its own history and that of Bolshevism itself. Summed up, it is circle and not mass politics, the methodology of squabbling intellectuals, the legacy of pre-1914 Russian Social Democracy universalised as a panacea. Moreover, it was not, as Steffen claims, ‘Hyndman’s class against class politics that hindered the collaboration with the liberal-orientated trade unions’ (p. 18), but his failure to assimilate the method of Marx and Engels, in which the Communists do not set up separate parties, etc., but ‘go into any real general working class movement, accept its actual [
faktische] starting point as such, and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme’ (Engels’ letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, 28 December 1886)
To say that ‘in the 1920s and 1930s the CPGB, because of its links with the USSR, played a visionary rôle far beyond its low membership which, however, the Stalinisation of the party brought to an end’ (p. 20), is to get mixed up. With the onset of the ultra-left line in 1929, which marked the end of the Stalinisation process, the CPGB directed its venom at the Labour Party. After the end of its ultra-left period, the CPGB engaged in wrecking activities inside the Labour Party that were directed against the left, with the aim of ‘liberalising’ the party. The USSR’s existence did play a visionary rôle, inasmuch as Labour Party members tended to see it, whatever its warts, as a beacon, an outpost of Socialism. That was so before the CPGB was even set up. It would be useful to dig out of the CPGB’s archives the wrecking plans it devised for the Independent Labour Party and then the Socialist League, its later infiltration into the Labour Party, and its postwar hostility to the Bevanites. Likewise it is wrong to see the CPGB as part of the ‘hard left’ during the 1980s. On the contrary, the CPGB was still trying to liberalise the Labour Party, and build alliances with wet Tories, the churches, etc. Some of the ‘Tankies’ took up a firmer position, but whereas the
Morning Star eulogised the poll tax non-payment campaign, their supporters voted against it whenever it was raised in the trade unions.
There are other errors. The general election of 1935 did not ‘bring Labour into government’ (p. 37). Tom Braddock is confused with Jack Braddock (p. 65), who was not a leading light of
Socialist Outlook. To consider the Bevanite left of the 1950s as being ‘without roots in the party structure’ is unserious. A glance at their votes for the Constituency Labour Party section of the party’s Executive illustrates the degree of their support.
When he sketches out the history of British Trotskyism, Steffen is much better. He bases himself largely upon sources known to this journal’s readers, particularly Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson. However, centrism is not just ‘a tendency... on the way to revolutionary politics’ (p. 35), but one moving towards or away from it, or a crystallised formation, and it is necessary to determine the nature of the beast before approaching it.
The evaluation of the exiled German Trotskyists of the two rival British Trotskyist groups existing during the Second World War contains some insights, and we can learn something to help understand later developments. Again, the outsider often sees clearer:
‘Whilst the official section [the Revolutionary Socialist League] shrivelled up, the Workers International League had developed itself well. Its germ-cell — the Paddington group — was a clique of active and willing but not very politically developed comrades. They remained active and willing, but they also remained a clique, which did not, however, spare them the usual personal frictions. Rather, it cost them their theoretical brain, comrade [Raff] Lee. Nevertheless, the group grew, spread out to almost all the important centres of the country, and openly represented the cause of the [Fourth] International, which treated it as a breakaway. The strength of the WIL remained activity and political instinct. Its weakness was the opposite of that; it overestimated ‘activity’ — selling papers — and it depended too much on instinct, and neglected to create a mental life and elaborate a political line (which came already set out from Mexico, and later New York).’ (p. 48)
Vladimir Derer, a member of the WIL during the war, concurs with the IKD’s view of the low theoretical level of the WIL, and adds that its ‘internal life was defined by a Stalinist bureaucratic centralism. Jock Haston alone had been impressive, and in his eyes had developed into one of the major Marxist thinkers in Europe at the time.’ (p. 48)
Over a third of the book covers Militant’s prehistory, until it emerges in the form we know so well, grouped around the organ
Militant. The nodal points of postwar British Trotskyism, the groups, factions, personalities, disputes, etc., are set out, as is their relationship to the parent body, the world leadership (Mandel, Pablo,
et al.). A lot of this is new to me. Some is based on personal memoirs, unpublished dissertations and letters, as well as internal texts. Steffen has done his readers a big favour here. One weakness, however, is his inability always to distinguish the public from the private views and features of Militant — the core figures used to say nice things in public about Benn, Skinner and other left allies, but run them down internally; everyone else was ‘a load of rubbish’, whilst the thickest Young Socialist was ‘pure gold’ if he had seen the light, a manifestation of the strong sectarianism encouraged by Taaffe, Grant
et al.
Steffen says that the dogmatism and the theory had been elaborated by Lenin and Trotsky, and then brought up to date by Grant, who saw himself, and was indeed seen by Militant, as the ‘red thread’ going back to Marx via the first two. The primitive undialectical method by which all politics, as if through laws of nature, lead inevitably from economics, means that Militant can never initiate or be the bearer of revolutionary actions. Although Steffen does give Grant credit for theorising,
post factum, the practice of Militant, he has put his finger on a sore point. Left wing Labour activists will recognise this criticism. Steffen sees Militant overcoming this problem by its declaring itself as ‘the left wing of the party’ (p. 117), although the concept of entrism, the ‘party within a party’, the ‘fear for the liquidation of its Trotskyism, always hindered its effective involvement with new social movements and single issue campaigns (p. 117). Steffen correctly sees this sectarian defence of its own principles as the landmark of its own existence, and a refusal to participate in the real movement.
The section
The Doctrine of the Militant Tendency gives an evaluation that I would, on the whole, share. He characterises Militant’s use of Marxism as ‘a normative reference system’ (p. 119). He compares it with Kautskyism. Militant’s thinkers see all change as emerging from the laws of capital. In a process that was mapped out decades ago, there is the constant expectation of economic crisis, which, in turn, results in a social crisis, which, in turn, leads to workers flooding into the Labour Party, strengthening its left wing and thus the Marxists (that is to say, Militant). Another schema is tacked onto it describing the next stage, the move to Socialism. This grand plan does not, of course, necessarily clash with reality. Economic crises do occur, but the next, inevitable (to use a favourite Militant word) stage stays away. The perspectives are updated to take this into account, but we are assured that it will occur in the future. Anyone who has studied Marxism — the real thing, that is — can see that what we have here is a religion. History constantly disappoints the drafters of the grand plan, just as left Labour activists often have concerns outside of the plan.
The concept of entrism and its development by Grant is evaluated in depth, using internal texts which show that there have been criticisms from within. The only other concept of entrism considered was that of Brian Biggins (which has the seal of approval of the editor of this journal). In 1960 Biggins thought it impossible to recruit openly to Trotskyism, and saw being in the Labour Party as a means of survival. Trotskyists had to be ‘critical but loyal members ... only in this way would they be accepted ... to recruit individually to the revolutionary organisation was wrong. Instead he sought to organise the left wing through simultaneously building the revolutionary organisation and participating in the class struggle.’ (p. 135) Consequently, Biggins opposed Grant’s schema of the Trotskyists remaining separate from the centrist left which would emerge, and saw some form of transitional formation as the goal, from which the revolutionary party could later develop from whole layers of Social Democratic organisations. Biggins’ concept was apparently rejected. I haven’t read the actual text, but I do wonder if he intended to tell Labour activists what he had in mind for them, or whether it was just another conspiracy carried on behind their backs.
After examining Militant’s doctrines in some detail, Steffen looks at its organisation in all its spheres of practice prior to the split. Internal minutes show that the leadership has hardly changed since 1964. The professional staff, however, grew to some hundreds, and this apparatus became distanced from the rank and file members. Their grasp of reality moved away from the lower cadres’ experiences. Militant became, so to speak, a victim of its own success. Its successes led it out of the Labour Party and into a situation where, in a sort of Stalinisation process, the office manager threw out the founder and brain behind it, and took the group off into the politics of the ‘ultra-left sects’ it had condemned for so long.
As Steffen was finishing his study (which also looks at Militant’s atypical work in Liverpool, where it meshed in with the rest of the ‘broad left’), Militant became Militant Labour, and Grant was left with the rump of the group. Steffen’s study has been in some ways superseded, as the reader can study the texts by Grant et al which describe the ‘Stalinist clique’ which hijacked Militant, the undemocratic regime and even a bit of thuggery. Ted, of course, had no part in building this regime; it came as a shock that a tiny clique around his office manager was running the whole outfit, even extending it across the world... Those who long ago stopped waiting for the tooth fairy can dip into the texts written by those comrades who originally went with Grant, genuinely sought to investigate the causes of Militant’s degeneration, and simultaneously tried to find measures by which it could be avoided in the future. Ted wanted none of this ‘democratitus’, and yearned for the old tried and tested methods, and the Democratic Platform comrades parted company with him. Their texts are a serious attempt to investigate the roots of Militant’s negative features that we all know so well, and to overcome them.
Meanwhile, Steffen’s book gives those in German universities and libraries who study British Trotskyism in the Labour Party an impressive and all-encompassing study, far superior to anything I have seen from the other Trotskyist sects, precisely because it emerged from outside that milieu. All the sects tend to suffer from the same sicknesses, and so are incapable of recognising the symptoms of sectarianism, bureaucracy, dogma, mythology, dishonesty, and even a bit of thuggery, which are so widespread amongst them.
Mike Jones
WHILST RESEARCHING his doctorate, Jens-Peter Steffen left few sources unexamined. Not only did he consult assorted British and German historical analyses of Trotskyism, he also spent time visiting Militant Tendency meetings in London and Liverpool. Such fieldwork was supplemented by delving through archives and by interviewing numerous activists, past and present, from a panoply of left wing groups. The first part of the book comprises an intricate presentation of the ins and outs of the Communist and Trotskyist movements from 1932 to the 1970s, which draws on interviews with participants whose experiences stretch right back into the 1930s. Some of the interviewees have now passed away, lending Steffen’s book something of a testimonial character. This book is a heavily cut version of Steffen’s PhD. The PhD must have been huge, for the book is large enough, covering diverse aspects of Trotskyism and labour movement history.
Steffen’s study incorporates a survey of the Militant Tendency from its beginnings in the 1960s to its – for Steffen’s chronicling purposes – rather convenient end, of sorts, in 1992. A glance at the chapter headings divulges the broad historical and theoretical scope of this work. Chapter One,
Introduction, comprises a study of Trotsky’s relationship to the British labour movement, as well as a consideration of the New Left’s analyses of the formation of British capitalism and the peculiarities of the British political order; Chapter Two,
The Revolutionary Continuity of the Militant Tendency, encompasses an investigation of pre-war and post-war Trotskyism; Chapter Three,
The Doctrine of the Militant Tendency, is a study of Militant’s programme; Chapter Four,
The Organisation, Activities and Representation of the Militant Tendency, includes a special section on Militant in power in Liverpool; and Chapter Five,
Supplementary and Concluding Reflections, provides general reflections on Militant’s legacy and the split. Also included is a list of archives and their contents, and an extensive bibliography of relevant periodicals, dissertations, articles and books.
Two particular questions directed the author’s research. What are the qualities of an anti-Stalinist revolutionary tendency which remains anchored in reformism over a long period? Does entrism exist as a political translation of the recognition that anti-capitalist politics in the postwar period can no longer be conceived according to the mutually exclusive couplet of reform or revolution? The second question intimates Steffen’s own political standpoint. Whilst the Labour Party and other campaigning groupings are seen to have adapted to a new reality of changed class composition and an agenda of new political priorities in a remoulded political landscape, Militant continued into the 1990s to adhere to old leftist certainties. Steffen’s criticisms of the Militant Tendency are in the main fairly familiar accusations voiced against revolutionary groups. Militant is economistic, subordinating political struggles to economic struggles; workerist, ignoring other oppressed groups; and mechanistic. The Militant Tendency is a typical product of ‘Anglo-Marxism’, simultaneously determinist (from Henry Hyndman), and apocalyptic (from Daniel De Leon). Ignorant of ‘post-Fordist’ analyses, the Militant Tendency disregards the structural alterations in British and world capitalism over the last 40 years, in order to promote the permanent myth of capitalism’s terminal crisis and imminent collapse. Militant has to ignore the death of the industrial proletariat and its replacement by technology, in order to hold onto the ‘myth of the revolutionary proletariat’. The notion of Militant as an organisation which strongly promoted Ted Grant as ‘the revolutionary guru’, inheritor of the genuine Trotskyist line, and the assessment of Militant’s rôle in encouraging ‘a myth of revolution’ and ‘a myth of the revolutionary proletariat’, recur in Steffen’s analysis. Steffen regards Grant as Militant’s necessary projected ideal of an authentic class fighter who exists to give the lead on how to live the true proletarian life. Grant’s own sense of his centrality for British Trotskyism is highlighted. In an interview with Sam Bornstein, Grant once cited himself as one of the very few postwar Trotskyist theorists. For Steffen, such theoretical centralisation is symptomatic of a party which suffers from a qualitative and quantitative poverty of theory.
Steffen’s book sets out to expose Militant’s ‘doctrine’, a set of ideas which encourage sectarian isolation, as well as establishing a confident sense of being part of the authentic Trotskyist tradition. Such a doctrine is seen to lead to an arrogant elitism amongst cadres, a trait which intensified through the 1980s, when an increasing split between the leadership and the membership developed. It is clear that whilst Steffen’s book is largely concerned with tracing the fate of the Militant Tendency, its analyses are to be applied generally to the whole revolutionary left, who operate according to what Steffen regards as an irreconcilable contradiction between democracy and centralism. Steffen inclines more towards what he perceives as Marx’s model of a radical democratic mass organisation with a high degree of intellectual and political liberalism. Marx’s vision is seen to contrast with the Leninist model of a strict, hierarchical, vanguardist party dedicated to violent political overthrow. Trotskyism vainly attempts to reconcile both models, relying on both mass self-activity and the vanguard party, which substitutes for the backwardness of the masses. Trotskyist maxims – class against class, revolutionary outbreak as natural law, the proletariat as sole bearer of social emancipation, the avant-guard rôle of the revolutionary party – elicit little sympathy from Steffen. The Trotskyist left is charged with indulging in a ‘mystification of the proletariat’. The erroneousness of the myth of the proletariat occasions Militant’s own political crisis. Ultimately, Militant failed to win popular support in Liverpool because the city is composed not of opposing classes, but of communities, identified with race and local traditions. The Anti-Poll Tax Union succeeded precisely because as an issue-based campaign, its basis was in the various communities, rather than the workplace, the left’s traditional focus for political campaigning. The community-based APTU finally led to Militant’s fission, because its political concepts could not be reconciled with the notion of the revolutionary working class party. Steffen makes Militant’s obstinate workerist policies responsible for its split, rather than finding the witch-hunting activities of the Labour Party to be at least partly to blame.
According to Steffen, Britain’s leftist political traditions are precisely too traditional. He concurs with the Anderson-Nairn-Hobsbawm thesis of a backward ‘feudal’ Britain, which, lacking a ‘proper’ bourgeois revolution, remains insufficiently democratic and conservative in tendency. It is such a conservatism which in encouraging quiescence in the lower orders, acts to make a revolution impossible, but also forges a hybrid conservative-revolutionary politics. For Steffen, Militant never breaks free of labourism, at least in part, because of the inherent cautiousness of the British left, inherited from a non-revolutionary bourgeoisie. The tradition of labourism exerts a powerful force on the British revolutionary left. Militant, claims Steffen, is always dogged by its relationship with labourism: its policies of nationalisation are shown to resemble those of the Labour left of the 1930s and 1940s (including those on the issue of compensation, which resemble Labour’s position rather than Trotsky’s), and also, curiously enough, the notion of the vote. Ultimately, Militant finds itself, just like the Social Democratic left, fetishising elections.
Steffen also finds similarities between the Militant Tendency and E.P. Thompson’s descriptions of English religious sects with all their backward-looking traditionalism and their utopian faiths. Militant is seen to promote a politics based on old-fashioned, romantic myths of class and class struggle. Such perceived traditionalism provides the underpinning to Steffen’s psychological portrait of Militant members. His psychologising interpretation insists that the appeal of Militant lies in its fulfilment of a nostalgic wish for secure old models of class struggle and class identification. The restructuring of capitalism in the postwar period has brought about the death of the social, economic and cultural unity of the working class, and, in that context, the visions promoted by Trotskyist organisations offer a compensatory and comforting vision of an old-style working class and the prospect of revolution.
Conservatism in the revolutionary party is seen to be apparent on yet another level. According to Steffen, it is in the nature of Trotskyist groups to become dogmatic in their claims to faithfulness to Trotsky’s analyses. Militant’s strategy of entrism is seen to evolve from a tactic, espoused by Trotsky in the 1930s, into a principle.
Objectively, Militant is seen to collapse because of its inflexible faith in revolution in post-revolutionary days. Entrism is seen as a half-recognition of the end of revolutionary possibilities. It is analysed by Steffen as a doomed attempt to revive dead revolutionary working class politics in post-revolutionary days. Militant is scuppered
subjectively by the impossibility of combining long-term entrism with the building of an hierarchical revolutionary party, and by the inadequacy of its theory when matched against reality.
In this book, Steffen hints quite insightfully at reasons for Militant’s recent difficulties, concentrating more on the problems of long-term entrism, and the burn-out and isolation of cadres, and less on the devastating impact of a militantly wrathful Labour Party. But his critique is largely that of someone who regards the revolutionary left as historically superseded and politically bankrupt. Some key issues are avoided. There is little analysis of the effect of historical events on Militant; importantly, for example, the crushing impact of the revolutions in the Eastern Bloc in 1989 upon Militant’s deformed and degenerated workers’ state analysis. And there is little in-depth critical discussion of the chief defining feature of Militant’s politics – the Tendency’s unclear view of the form and content of the revolutionary party, which allowed it to attempt to recruit members to a revolutionary party
covertly. The trouble with Militant may not have been that it had too much faith in the revolutionary party, but too little.
Esther Leslie
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Baruch Hirson
Interviews with Wang Fanxi
(Winter 1995/96)
Gregor Benton
Interviews with Wang Fanxi on Tang Baolin’s History of Chinese Trotskyism
Leeds East Asian Papers, 1995, pp. 20
IT WAS sometime in the 1940s when Max Shachtman wrote about the interrogation he had to undergo leading to his expulsion from the Communist Party of the USA. Among the witnesses called was the manager of the party’s bookshop whose evidence was succinct and to the point: ‘Comrade Shachtman’, said this pundit, ‘would come into the bookshop and ask if there was any new material on China. Everyone knows that is a Trotskyist subject.’
That request for material on China and the expulsion of Shachtman took place over 60 years ago, and since then, if my impressions are correct, there is much less interest amongst Trotskyist cadres in what happened in China, in 1927 or subsequently. This might be because we are unable to read Chinese, and are cut off from a vast field of publications – good, bad or indifferent. Yet there has been a steady stream of publications (and translations) by Gregor Benton into English, some of them published in specialist academic journals, which contribute to our knowledge and understanding of what happened in China.
This short critique of Tang Baolin’s
History, introduced by Benton, is based on Wang Fanxi’s memories of events in the 1930s, and includes references to Trotsky’s writings on China. The issues included by Benton raise problems, old and new, that are of more than historical interest.
It is not certain what led to the publication in China of a book on the Chinese Trotskyists, but we can be certain that it would be filled with misinformation and downright lies. Indeed, that appears to be the case, although Tang Baolin has at least had the good grace to counter Stalinist and Maoist condemnations of Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and later a supporter of the International Left Opposition. In all other respects, says Benton, Tang ‘peddles the same mixture of misunderstandings, crude misrepresentations and mindless copying of familiar Stalinist and Maoist smears’.
In refuting Tang’s misrepresentations, Wang Fanxi provides accounts which have not previously appeared in English of what happened inside the Trotskyist groups. He speaks of activities and positions taken by individuals in the group on the Trotskyist policy on the Japanese invasion of China, and on the war that subsequently raged in the Pacific region. In this respect, Wang repeats what he has described elsewhere, that is, that the position taken by their group – and by Trotsky – was not one of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. The stated aim was to ‘transform the war against the foreign invaders into a revolution to replace the leadership of the resistance war and thereby to assure the victory of the war against the foreign invader ...’. This policy, says Wang, whilst avoiding a discussion of the dispute inside the Trotskyist group, was in line with Trotsky’s declaration that the workers’ organisations had to ‘participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan’. But because Chiang Kai-Shek could not assure a victory over the Japanese, the Trotskyists had to win prestige in the military struggle and the political struggle against the deficiencies and betrayals of the Guomindang. That is, the policy towards the war could be more properly called ‘revolutionary victoryism’ than revolutionary defeatism. Wang adds, pace Tang, that the Trotskyist group never adopted a policy of defeatism towards the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war of 1945–49.
Despite the brevity of this publication, the issues that are discussed provide material that should be required reading by newcomers and veterans alike in trying to understand some of the difficulties faced by that small group of revolutionaries who faced persecution and martyrdom in holding aloft the banner of proletarian revolution. In the aftermath of the counter-revolution of 1927, it was a task beyond their capabilities, but it was a task that they had to undertake. They failed, and the lessons that are to be learnt from their work need to be understood by those who will strive to rebuild the revolutionary movement.
There is an additional bonus for readers in the footnotes to this essay. Benton provides guidance to texts on China that are either not generally known or are still forthcoming. Included in the list of Leeds East Asian Papers are Benton’s
The Founding of the New Fourth Army, 1937–38 (1991);
Chinese Trotskyism and Democracy (1992);
Bolshevising China: From Lenin to Stalin to Mao, 1921–1944 (1994); and Wang Fanxi (
ed. Gregor Benton),
Isaac Deutscher, Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists: A Comment on Deutscher’s The Prophet Outcast (1994). And in the text there are footnote references to two forthcoming titles by Benton:
Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942 from the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, which he has edited; and his
China’s Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921–1952, Humanities Press, 1995. One other title of supreme interest that is quoted is Zheng Chaolin’s
Siebzig Jahre Rebell: Erinnerungen eines chinesischen Oppositionellen, edited by Benton, Frankfurt am Main, ISP-Verlag, 1991. The text, in English, is on disk, and it is surely high time that the work is made available to English readers.
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Review
The USSR 1987–1991
Marilyn Vogt-Downey (ed.)
The USSR 1987–1991: Marxist Perspectives
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1993, pp. 544, $60.00
ALTHOUGH THE main aim of this book is to provide an understanding of the process of change as it happened over the period covered by its title, and therefore deals with current events that lie outside the scope of this magazine, it contains a number of very valuable contributions that serious historians of the Soviet Union would ignore at their peril, particularly those in the third section, entitled History is Knocking at the Door (pp. 265–330). Apart from one item from the Redgraves’ Marxist Monthly and another from the British Socialist Organiser, most of the pieces have appeared either in International Viewpoint, the monthly press journal of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, or in the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, the most readable of the various Mandelite magazines inside the USA.
Ernest Mandel’s essay
The Causes and Consequences of Bukharin’s Rehabilitation (pp. 267–70) is a very useful analysis of why it was politically useful for reformers ‘to publicly [
sic] rehabilitate Bukharin and his co-thinkers’ (p. 268), identifying the prime movers as the surviving families of Stalin’s victims, young historians and the supporters of Perestroika, who for a time sought inspiration from the Right Opposition for their own economic policies. Mandel’s prediction in March 1988 that rehabilitating Bukharin could not be done without doing the same for Trotsky, is based on the fact that the verdict passed on Bukharin in the Third Moscow Trial depended in its turn on that passed on Trotsky in the First, and was confirmed in a matter of months (
Soviet Press Agency Does a Turnaround on Trotskyism, pp. 277–9). This is followed by two very revealing reports by the editor, Marilyn Vogt-Downey. The first,
Current Events in the Soviet Union (pp. 280–7), is a fascinating record of how historical truth is finally making its way in Russia via the press, the protests of survivors, and the re-emergence of the relatives of the murdered Bolshevik leaders. The second,
Trotsky’s Voice Heard Again in the USSR (pp. 288–98), shows how Trotsky has gradually come into recognisable focus as a major figure in Russian history for the first time after 70 years. The section ends with a summary of the new image of Trotsky put out by the regime in V.P. Vilkova and A.P. Nenarokov’s “
Afterword” to the Soviet Edition of Leon Trotsky’s The Stalin School of Falsification (pp. 309-–16), and Aleksandr Pantsov’s
The New School of Falsification (pp. 317–30).
Nor is important historical information limited to this section of the book. Other reports by the editor,
A Visit to the USSR (pp. 373-–84), and
Potential for a Conscious, Working Class Revolutionary Movement in the USSR (pp. 425–37), are especially revealing about the then current Soviet perceptions of Trotsky and Trotskyism (especially pp. 428–30).
So however much we may agree with Vasetsky that the USFI, with its uncritical acceptance of all the liberal shibboleths of third worldism, the politics of the personal, ecology, etc., is ‘left reformist’ (p. 278), or disagree with
Marxist Perspectives as the title of a book put out by a tendency that had no inkling that these events were about to happen, or any understanding of what was going on while they were, there can be no doubt at all that it contains some very valuable information indeed.
Al Richardson
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Kautsky, Marxism and Leninism
John Kautsky
Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution and Democracy
Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick NJ 1994, pp. 256, £32.95
John Kautsky
Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge
Greenwood Press, Westport, 1994, pp141, £44.95
THESE TWO books by Karl Kautsky’s grandson are an indication of the growing interest in the man who was for several decades the leading Marxist authority in the world, yet who has generally been remembered only through Lenin’s somewhat inaccurate epithet of ‘renegade’. The first book is a sympathetic appraisal of various aspects of Kautsky’s political thought, consisting of a lengthy introductory essay, investigations of the differences between the attitudes of Kautsky and Lenin towards the rôle of intellectuals in the Socialist movement, Kautsky’s theory of imperialism, and the influence of his ideas upon Eurocommunist thinkers, plus introductions to reissues of his The Road to Power and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The second book is an exposition upon a premise outlined in the first that Lenin was not a Marxist at all, but represented the modernising intelligentsia in a backward country with relatively little industry and a tiny proletariat.
John Kautsky considers that Lenin’s identification with Marxism was based on a misinterpretation, as he did not realise that it was not applicable to Russia (he also says that the Mensheviks were guilty of the same mistake, but they were doomed as they were authentic Marxists, and expected a Western-style development to occur in Russia). His interpretation of Marxism, however, is pedestrian, and makes Plekhanov’s mechanistic Marxism look flexible by comparison. Relying upon a rigid stages theory of development – from feudalism through capitalism and eventually to Socialism – he insists that Marx’s analysis of history did not apply to Tsarist Russia. Yet in their introduction to the 1882 Russian edition of the
Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels tentatively ventured that Russia might avoid capitalism. Moreover, in 1905 Karl Kautsky, in
The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects, took a distinctly radical stance, asserting that the working class in Russia, whilst numerically small, was disproportionally powerful, and was leading the revolutionary forces, and that the revolution itself, whilst not Socialist, was not bourgeois either, a position more radical than that of Lenin. John Kautsky is correct to see Lenin’s theory of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry as incoherent, but this was not due to his attempting to wedge Marxism into his unconscious rôle as a moderniser. Rather, it was due, on the one hand, to his recognition of the leading rôle of the working class in 1905, and, on the other hand, the idea that the revolution was bourgeois in nature. In other words, we had diametrically opposing attractions – his observations versus Second International orthodoxy.
Lenin and Kautsky did not resolve the contradiction until 1917, when the former adopted Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, and the latter backed off. John Kautsky alludes to Lenin’s adoption of Trotsky’s theory, but, just like his grandfather, he ignores its essential
international aspects, which emphasised that whilst the proletariat could seize power in Russia, it could not hold onto it unless successful proletarian revolutions occurred in the advanced capitalist countries. Lenin fully concurred with this, and said so on many occasions. Third World industrialisers, Stalinist or not, have never been internationalist in outlook. All have viewed their political strategies and resulting regimes on a purely national level, and have seen their revolutions as a national rejection of imperialism, leading to national development through industrialisation. They took one aspect of Bolshevism – hostility towards imperialism – and combined it with the Stalinist concept of isolated industrial development. They may have sought international sympathy or backing from other countries in order to help withstand the hostility of the imperial powers, but they never predicated the very rationale of their revolutions and the survival of their regimes upon spreading the revolution to those imperial powers.
It is undeniable that the Soviet Union evolved into a society in which a ruling elite put into practice an ambitious scheme of industrialisation within the bounds of a nation state, and that this served as a model for modernising elites in the Third World. What Kautsky sees as the unconscious basis of Bolshevism is in fact the logical consequence of its
national isolation, in other words, the consequences of its defeat, not its consummation. In this sense, his whole concept is one of reading history backwards on an epic scale; most members of the continuity school leave it at the organisational question, and don’t try to posit Stalin’s desires for an autarkic industrial state in Bolshevism.
Kautsky also considers that the rôles of intellectuals in the German and Russian Socialist movements were qualitatively different, as befitting the different levels of development in the two countries. Here he is little different from the conservative academics who see Bolshevism as barely more than a plot by members of the radical intelligentsia to seize power, and he even says that for Lenin ‘Socialism meant rule by revolutionary modernising intellectuals’ (
Marxism and Leninism ..., p. 68), and that ‘in an underdeveloped country like Russia, revolutions are made not by the industrial proletariat and its organisations, but by intellectuals’ (
Karl Kautsky, p. 78). Like them, he is forced firstly to deny the fact that in 1917 the Bolsheviks enjoyed an exceptional relationship with the working class through the soviets, factory committees and trade unions, a symbiotic relationship which developed the demands, tactics and strategy of both the party and the class, and, secondly, to overlook the fact that Lenin was strongly absorbed with the problem of bringing the working class into the running of the Soviet state, something (whatever his shortcomings in this field) that no other Socialist leader, let alone a Third World moderniser, has ever addressed to such a degree, if at all.
John Kautsky correctly insists that Lenin was a Eurocentric, but then adds that with the failure of revolutions in Western Europe he came ‘half-heartedly and hesitatingly’ to see that ‘the Russian Revolution had something in common with revolutions in countries that distinguished it from Western European revolutions’ (
Marxism and Leninism ..., p. 107). Lenin was not promoting the Third Worldism to which all too many of his epigones have adhered (it must be added here, however, that Kautsky is correct in pointing to the ambiguous legacy of the early Communist International in this respect), but was looking at the course of class and national struggles in the backward parts of the world, and also at the backwardness of Russia, a factor that constantly haunted him. Lenin was a Eurocentric in that at first he denied that a Socialist revolution could occur in Russia, and he remained one when he adopted the theory of Permanent Revolution, which intimately tied the survival of a proletarian seizure of power in Russia to successful workers’ revolutions in Western Europe. He never considered that Russia or any other backward country could go any distance towards Socialism in isolation.
Although Karl Kautsky’s Marxism represented the better end of the Second International, it was lacking in that vibrancy and vitality that Lenin showed in 1917. Nonetheless, anyone interested in the history of the Socialist movement should not be satisfied with the repetition of the epithet of ‘renegade’. However, the curious theory that John Kautsky puts forward in these two books not only gives a misleading analysis of Lenin that often merely parallels the discredited conservative viewpoint, it also undermines the author’s honourable intention of restoring his grandfather’s name to its proper position.
Paul Flewers
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Review
Ancient South America
Karen Olsen Bruhns
Ancient South America
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 424, £17.95
AT PRESENT New World archaeology is in great excitement over the decipherment of the Maya script, since the possibility of reconstructing the history of that civilisation in some detail will reduce the scope for speculation within manageable limits for the first time. But because none of the cultures of South America produced written records, its archaeology continues to give full rein to scholarly debate. A clash between North American academe, just emerging from the Cold War and using politically correct language (‘supernumerary genders’, p. 223), and what this writer describes as ‘the Marxist orientation of numbers of scholars and their students’ in South America (p. 9), is one of the more predictable lines of controversy. Equally predictable is her approach to it: ‘As to whether South America’s past really shows the existence of a utopia now ruined by degenerate man, progress towards a truly egalitarian state of being (similarly now ruined by degenerate man), or even just the variety of the human response to life, I leave the reader to decide.’ (p6)
To help him make up his mind the author of this fascinating book appears to have abandoned the attempt to identify or periodise phases in human development at all: ‘Culture history is, or tries to be, a factual statement of what did happen as best we know, laying a basis for further discussion of meaning and pattern from the archaeological record.’ (p. 6) She objects most strongly to the fact that ‘much archaeological interpretation of time has been done on the basis of stages, the idea that on the world scene cultures pass through the same sequence of development in terms of economy, social and political organisation, etc.’, which according to her ‘have never been proved anywhere in the world’. Thus, in spite of his repeated denials of linear development, Marx, who had the misfortune to be ‘working and writing during the heyday of social/cultural evolution theories’ (p. 9), produced a Eurocentred ‘stage theory’ (p. 6), quite inapplicable to South America, where ‘the historical sequence of subsistence and craft technologies’ was ‘considerably different from that observed in Eurasia, and the definitions of civilisation and the way it develops based solely upon Eurasian models are clearly inadequate’ (p. 115). Dr Bruhns obviously has a point here, for stages theory, with its terminology of horizon, cultist, experimental, pre- and post-classical, city builder, formative, etc., has certainly run riot when applied to Andean development. Moreover, the ‘Marxism’ prevalent in Latin America bears the heavy stamp of the notorious automatic stages theory of the
Short Course history of the CPSU. But surely only a prehistorian would deny that feudalism was a stage observably followed by capitalism, in Japan as well as in Europe.
It is therefore of some importance to the argument in this book to question anything that looks like parallel development, to argue against any diffusion of craft or technology, even within the New World itself, and to minimise anything that appears to suggest a logical progress from one stage of social organisation to another.
Of course, some parallels can hardly be denied. She accepts the good old Marxist maxim that ‘evident surpluses ... would have been needed to finance large structures’ (p. 112), but is at some pains to argue that these surpluses were not at all based upon the same grain cultivation as those of the civilisations of the old world (pp. 89, 112, etc.). There is nothing, of course, in Marxist or any other ‘stages’ theories to suggest that cereal production is the only way of assuring a surplus upon which ordered society can be erected. Certainly in Peru tuber and root crops are ‘demonstrably important in the ancient economies, more important, in fact, than any grains until circa AD 500’, and it might even be the case that here the earliest civilisation was ‘founded on a maritime economy in which agriculture and other domesticates were not particularly important’ (p. 112). The enormous wealth and power of Tiahuanaco, on the other hand, may rest upon ‘the possession of extensive pasture and abundant herds’ of cameloids, along with the reclamation of ‘low-lying lands by constructing huge systems of raised fields’ (p. 239), and Chimu society upon ‘elaborate irrigation systems’ (p. 299).
Dr Bruhns’ concentration upon the particularities of each society also makes her reluctant to accept that diffusion, whether from outside the continent or within it, played any significant rôle in the development of the various cultures at all. ‘Archaeological evidence suggests how weak the theories of a single origin and deliberate introduction of maize into other regions are’ (p. 96), ‘the very diversity of the earliest ceramics on the continent ... is most parsimoniously explained as the result of multiple inventions of ceramic technology’ (p. 121), the metallurgical system was ‘totally independent’ (p. 184), and much the same thesis is defended for stone working, textiles, animal husbandry, and so on. Surely Occam’s razor comes into play at some point here! And even if these things were all independently invented, does that not assume that at a certain point in the development of human society comparable technological innovation takes place?
Moreover, anxious as she is to deny stages of development, she cannot avoid introducing them: ‘During the first half of the first millennium AD ... large states were coming into being throughout the Andes ... the stage was being set for the first conquest states, multinational empires whose interest was in controlling land and resources as much as in obtaining booty or prisoners for sacrifice’ (pp. 221–2), so that ‘by the tenth century AD the central Andes had produced its first conquest states ... away from the Andean regions growing populations resulted in the development of large-scale hydraulic works’ (p. 276).
Did I hear the name of Wittfogel mentioned?
Al Richardson
***********
Ian Birchall
In Defence of the Russian Revolution
(Winter 1995/96)
Al Richardson (ed.)
In Defence of the Russian Revolution
Porcupine Press, London, 1995, pp. 287, £12.95
‘NO REVOLUTION resembles those that preceded it’, wrote Karl Radek in 1917 (p. 22). History does not repeat itself, and the one thing we can be sure about any future revolution is that it will correspond to nobody’s predictions. The study of history is valuable in that we can see how revolutionaries confronted unique concrete circumstances in the past, in order to prepare ourselves to confront unique concrete circumstances in the future.
Porcupine Press has thus done us a service by producing this volume of writings by leading Bolsheviks from the 1917–23 period. Too often the history of the Russian Revolution is presented as though there were only three actors – Lenin, Trotsky and the masses. This book presents substantial amounts of hitherto unavailable material from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin and Tukhachevsky, thus helping to give a fuller picture of how the collective leadership of the Revolution viewed events.
The volume opens with four pieces by the acute but erratic Radek. We are able to see the theory of Permanent Revolution as formulated by Radek, together with an extended quotation from the pre-war Kautsky showing how he viewed the prospects for revolution in Russia. These texts help to show that the theory of Permanent Revolution was not Trotsky’s personal property, but was integral to the Marxist tradition.
In a later section Trotsky advises friends of Soviet Russia to practise honest reporting – ironically addressing his words to the young Anna Louise Strong! There is a shorthand report of a speech by Lenin on the war in Poland that is not included in the
Collected Works, and Tukhachevsky shows how completely the pioneers of the Red Army had broken with nationalism: ‘The army must have forgotten of what nationality it was in its majority composed. It must be aware that it is the army of the world proletariat, and nothing else.’ (p. 173)
There is also a delightful piece of dialogue, written by Trotsky, about the national question. The protagonists are a naive young Communist who has fought in the Red Army, and a more sophisticated comrade. The youngster believes that all forms of oppression can be dealt with by means of simply repeating ‘the class question ... is incomparably more important’ (p. 175). The species is still extant, and not all its members are young. Trotsky cuts through the confusions by advocating a non-uniform attitude to Great Russian and to Muslim nationalism: in relation to the former, ruthless struggle, stern rebuff, especially in those cases when it is displayed in the administrative and governmental sphere; in relation to the latter, patient, attentive, painstaking educational work (p. 181). They are words that should be pondered by those Marxists who saw fit to line up with the French bourgeois state against veil-wearing Muslim schoolgirls.
In a review it is only possible to skim the surface of this valuable and well-presented book. The notes are thorough and unobtrusive, though inevitably a few errors have been included. Alexandre Millerand was not the first French Socialist to enter a bourgeois government; that honour goes to Louis Blanc and Albert in 1848. And it seems odd to describe Fourier as being ‘famous for his asceticism’ when he planned to turn the ocean into lemonade (though I appreciate that some comrades would have preferred real ale) (p. 20).
Unfortunately, it is not possible to be so complimentary about the editor’s introduction. Richardson has rather overreached himself here, trying to use a collection of texts from the 1917–23 period to construct an explanation of events up to 1989. He points out, quite correctly, that no-one on the left predicted the cataclysm of 1989, but since there is no record of Richardson having predicted it either, the mildly messianic tone in which everyone but the editor is pronounced to be out of step is not really justified.
Thus we are told that ‘the present debate between supporters of the workers’ state theory and the proponents of state capitalism’ is ‘a puerile exercise, unworthy of the attention of serious Marxists, as well as being a waste of time and effort’ (p. ix). That puts us all neatly in our places. But is not Richardson, the foremost historian of British Trotskyism, being a little ‘light-minded’ in thus dismissing a debate that preoccupied the movement over at least six decades? As Victor Serge testifies, it was a debate which was carried on amongst Russian oppositionists in face of imprisonment and death. And for a very simple reason. They wanted to know what the enemy was.
And that is a question that Richardson’s analysis will not answer. He tells us that from the outset of the Revolution Russian society contained features of both the workers’ state and state capitalism. Of course he is quite correct in this claim – in fact Lenin saw post-revolutionary Russia as containing no less than five socio-economic structures: patriarchal, small commodity production, private capitalism, state capitalism and socialism (
Collected Works, Volume 27, pp. 335–6). From this he deduces that ‘there is no such thing as a healthy workers’ state. It is a necessary, temporary, social evil.’ (p. vi) Again, there is no problem with following Richardson in this, but it does not take us very far. There is no human body free from germs; but some of us walk around quite cheerfully, while others lie on trolleys in the corridors of NHS hospitals. A workers’ state will be contradictory until the day it withers away, but that does not excuse revolutionaries from perpetual vigilance in the struggle to keep it as healthy as possible.
And identifying the contradictions that lay at the heart of the new-born workers’ state does little to assist in the understanding of Stalinism and its aftermath. What made Russia a workers’ state in the first place was the existence of soviets, or organs of direct working class power. They were fragile and imperfect from the outset, but they nonetheless account for the peculiar attractive power that October 1917 had for a whole generation of revolutionaries.
The original soviets were short-lived, as the working class itself was eroded by the course of the Revolution. But in the early 1920s there was still a government committed to restoring the principles of workers’ democracy as fully and rapidly as was possible, as is shown in Trotsky’s article
The Rôle and Tasks of the Trade Unions in this volume. And Russia remained, at least until 1923, a base from which revolution might spread to other countries. But by 1929 what ‘gains of the Revolution’ actually survived? Why should any worker, in Russia or elsewhere, have risked his life to defend the Russian state? Surely not state ownership, since Richardson himself concedes that the Russian experience ‘has all but discredited the very concept of public ownership’ (p. i). That is the question that Richardson’s neither-flesh-nor-fish analysis cannot resolve.
Richardson has some inkling of the difficulty. He recognises that there is ‘more than an atom of truth’ (what? a whole molecule? thanks!) in Tony Cliff’s account of the turning-point of the late 1920s, but refuses to recognise it as a qualitative change (p. xii). (Richardson gives no footnote for this reference to Cliff; one wonders why he does not want to encourage his readers to consult the original source.)
This is the crux of the argument. The post-revolutionary Russian workers’ state was indeed contradictory. But the later period of Stalinism was characterised by quite different contradictions – the contradictions of capitalism. As Marx showed in the
Communist Manifesto capitalism is a profoundly contradictory system; it is both revolutionary and oppressive. Failure to grasp the contradictions of Stalinism produced the twin errors of Mandel, who saw Russia as economically superior, and the
Critique school, who could not explain the very real economic successes (the
sputnik) that existed alongside the failures of the so-called ‘planned economy’. Richardson dismisses the state capitalist analysis of the 1989 crisis with the ‘cheap jibe’ that ‘few monopoly capitalists dream of being small shopkeepers’ (p. ii). He should find the time to study Chris Harman’s article
The Storm Breaks (
International Socialism, no. 46), with its analysis of the transition from state capitalism to multinational capitalism on a world scale. He would find the argument a little more complex than he imagines.
Ironically, Richardson’s analysis defeats his own purpose. He sets out to refute the notion that Leninism led to Stalinism. But by claiming that Stalinism can be explained solely in terms of contradictions inherited from the Revolution of 1917, rather than from the counter-revolution of the late 1920s, he plays straight into the hands of those who seek to establish the Lenin-Stalin continuity. Fortunately, the texts will stand very well by themselves; the introduction may be discarded.
Review
Reluctant Revolutionary
Harry Ratner
Reluctant Revolutionary
Socialist Platform, London, 1994, pp. 304, £5.95
THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL account of the experiences of a Trotskyist during the years 1936–60 is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of the Fourth International in its British context. Harry Ratner’s account is of particular interest in that it describes the life and tribulations of a comrade who was drawn to the Trotskyist camp in the Labour League of Youth at the age of 16, joining the Militant group at the end of 1936 after meeting its leader, Denzil Harber. He insists that his ‘early Socialism owed nothing to Marxism’, and that it was not until he came into contact with Trotskyists that he learnt anything about Marxism. It was a development of his attitude to morals and ethics, repelled by the ‘narrowness and hypocrisy of the world of business’ which he glimpsed through his father. Only later did Harry became familiar with and accept Marxist historical materialism, which showed ‘that Communism was the next historical stage of society, and that the working class was destined by its position in society to overthrow capitalism. This would happen because the objective laws of the development of society decreed it, and not because individuals of good will decided it was desirable.’ He later speaks of ‘Marxist comrades’ who told him that he was reading too much determinism into Marx’s writings. He can be forgiven, however, for reporting on the ‘deterministic’ version of Marxism which won him over to a cause which he served faithfully for a quarter of a century.
As the Trotskyist groups and factions were expelled from the Communist Party in one country after another, and more importantly with Trotsky’s proclamation of the need for the Fourth International following the abject failure of the German Communist Party to unite in a united front with the Social Democrats to halt Hitler’s march to power in 1933, the position of the isolated propaganda groups became more and more difficult. Trotsky supported the ‘French Turn’, the entry of Trotskyists into mass Social Democratic organisations, and especially the youth sections, in order to break out of this isolation, and to ‘find a milieu’. Harry’s description of the ensuing three-way split in the British Trotskyist movement has a familiar, even contemporary, ring about it.
Within a short time, Harry was plunged into the battles in the East End defending the Jewish, Irish and working class communities from Mosley’s Blackshirts. The platforms from which he and other comrades spoke would be attacked by the Fascists as ‘dirty reds’, and the next evening by the Stalinists as ‘bloody Fascists’. He remarks laconically that ‘the chances of our platform being overturned and our meeting broken up by the Blackshirts or by the Stalinists were about equal’. Interestingly, Harry refers to the Jewish Habonim Zionist Youth movement which he had originally joined as being part of the united working class front blocking Mosley’s columns during the Battle of Cable Street.
The Trotskyists’ positions on the Spanish Civil War and, above all, on the Moscow Trials created difficulties for the comrades with the wave of sympathy for the Spanish Popular Front government, which was supported by Moscow, and was apparently fighting Fascism and Nazism. It was literally a case of comrades swimming against the tide, rather than with a current. Perhaps the most fascinating chapters of the book deal with Harry’s ‘return’ to Paris in the summer of 1938, the splits and schisms ‘which plagued the Trotskyist movement’, and particularly the
Parti Ouvrière Internationaliste led by Pierre Naville and Jean Rous, and the
Parti Communiste Internationaliste led by Pierre Frank and the recently deceased Raymond Molinier.
With the outbreak of war and his return to Britain, Harry joined the Pioneer Corps, as he believed that he ‘should be where the workers are, either in the factory or in the forces’. Trotskyists are not pacifists, and the option of registering as conscientious objectors was regarded as ‘being an individualist and useless gesture’. Here in the British army’s ‘foreign legion’ (as it was dubbed), Harry had a unique opportunity of spreading the internationalist ideas of Trotskyism to the Germans and Austrians, who were refugees from Hitler, Spanish Republicans, and Palestinian Jews and Arabs who comprised the corps. We have a perspective of the unfolding of the Second World War with the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily in 1943, the growing radicalisation of the British troops following the D-Day landing in 1944, and the collapse of the Nazi armies on the Eastern front, as seen through the binoculars of a Trotskyist. And this was not as a bystander or a war correspondent, but as a full participant.
Of special interest are Harry’s postwar experiences in the Minority faction of the Revolutionary Communist Party, led by Gerry Healy, John Lawrence and Arthur Cooper (an often overlooked figure), which took a serious attitude to industrial work, and gained the unreserved commitment of its members. Some comrades, such as Lawrence and David Finch, went down the mines, whilst Harry worked in various engineering factories in the late 1940s and the 1950s, becoming a leading shop steward. He combined a serious attitude to his position as President of an Amalgamated Engineering Union branch, a member of the General Management Committee of the East Salford Constituency Labour Party and Salford Trades Council, and the National Committee of the ‘Club’, as Healy’s group became known.
It is against this background of work within the trade unions, trades councils and the Labour Party that we see the emergence of the Minority faction of the RCP as the principal dominant faction within the Trotskyist movement, with the collapse of the RCP Majority around Jock and Millie Haston and Ted Grant. The issues which split the movement, such as the nature of the changes in the Soviet Union, the emergence of its satellite states, the survival of capitalism after 1945, the definition and redefinition of Trotsky’s
Transitional Programme, the apparently endless debates over entrism and independent work, and, above all, the nature of the Fourth International — all this features largely in Harry’s illuminating account of this difficult period.
Although Harry experienced the Healyite regime and its politics at a distance for the most part, his observations are of particular interest to those who also experienced them. He claims that
Socialist Outlook took a stand of critical support for the ‘Soviet’ North Korean state during the Korean War against the puppet South Korean state backed by the USA. Here, one must dissent. The policy of
Socialist Outlook was one of almost uncritical support for the Northern regime, and was almost indistinguishable from that of the
Daily Worker. Although one can agree with the view that Harry expressed at the book’s launch meeting that the ‘state caps’ did not have to split from the Fourth International over the Korean War, despite their ‘Third Camp’ position of ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’, the rump of the RCP Majority certainly did not think so. The nature of Healy’s regime did not provide a healthy atmosphere within which these important differences could be contained within the columns of one journal, or within the confines of one organisation.
Harry is on firmer ground when dealing with the ‘Pabloite split’, especially in respect of his reservations about the methods employed against the Pabloites, not least the unprincipled arguments — the Club had, along with the US Socialist Workers Party, until then unreservedly supported the 100 per cent Pabloite line endorsed by the Third World Congress of the Fourth International.
Harry gives a very penetrating description of the period leading up to the formation of the Socialist Labour League, showing how it was set up by a press conference prior to any consultation with the Club’s Executive Committee and National Committee, still less with a conference to authorise its launch, as a result of pressure from recruits from the Communist Party led by Brian Behan.
This autobiography leads to more questions than it answers. How can one explain how a group of dedicated, fearless and self-sacrificing comrades — Harry being a shining example of those comrades who held fast to the torch of Trotsky’s ideas — could have allowed a Stalinesque regime to disfigure the ‘unbroken thread’ from the days of the Marxian League of 1931? Equally pertinent, how did so many ex-Stalinists who were won over by Healy after 1956 support a regime that was in some respects more Stalinist than the Communist Party from which they had broken? How can we find a satisfactory explanation for Marxists remaining silent all through Healy’s opportunism, not least his support for Messali Hadj long after he had broken from the Algerian liberation struggle against French imperialism? And, finally, can we hold to the historical materialist view of history and still attribute the deformation of Trotskyism as simply the work of a bad man, or the cult of the individual?
Harry’s
Postscript is perhaps the weakest section of his book. It does, however, have the merit of honesty and frank self-appraisal. His final conclusion that Marx was wrong in saying that the working class is compelled to arrive at a Socialist or Marxist consciousness — with or without the assistance of professional revolutionaries — is itself a reflection of a mechanical (and in Healy’s apocalyptic) interpretation of history that is itself not Marxist.
Harry emerges from these pages as a profoundly honest revolutionary, free of the fake postures of the would-be Lenins and self-styled Trotskys who have strutted across the history of the Trotskyist movement all too frequently. Socialist Platform is to be congratulated on publishing this moving account of a soldier of the movement whose deeds shine through the darkness of imperialism and Stalinism. Together with Harry Wicks’
Keeping My Head, Harry Ratner’s autobiography deserves a secure place in the library of every Socialist who is concerned not only with history, but with the lessons to be drawn from it.
Ellis Hillman
*************
Jim Higgins
The Prophet’s Children
(Winter 1995/96)
From
Revolutionary History,
Vol. 6 No. 1, Winter 1995/96, p. 197 200.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by
Einde O’Callaghan for the
Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Tim Wohlforth
The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American Left
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1995, pp. 332
ACCORDING TO Robert Louis Stevenson: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” Whatever universal validity this particular aphorism may possess, it is the one that immediately sprang to mind when I read this account of Tim Wohlforth’s travels through the wide Sargasso Sea of Trotskyism. He travelled far and he laboured mightily, and nobody could have had higher hopes for the marbled splendour of the destination, until finally, after 30 years, he arrived at the low-rise squalor of reformism. Such a well-trodden path, such an irritating inevitability.
In 1953 Tim Wohlforth joined the Independent Socialist League, purveyors of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism – originated by Bruno Rizzi, codified by Joe Carter, modified by James Burnham, brought to full fruition by Max Shachtman, and most recently adopted by Sean Matgamna. For sure, the ISL was one of the better choices for a young comrade to make. It had a relaxed internal regime and a number of very talented and intelligent members, all with a profound knowledge of the movement. Unfortunately, by 1953 Shachtman was beginning the process of dumping the organisation into the soft, soggy lap of the American Socialist Party. In 1958, having signed a humiliating document which denied all connection with Lenin or revolutionary Socialism, Shachtman was allowed to take his depleted forces into the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation. As it happens, the SP/SDF was in an even more dilapidated condition than the ISL, and within not too long the Shachtmanites were in control, not, as you might imagine, to turn it to the left, but further to the right, aligning it even more firmly with the Democratic Party.
By 1957 Tim Wohlforth, together with his co-factionalists Jim Robertson, later to take the Kirk Douglas rôle in the Spartacist League, and Shane Mage, who subsequently became a follower of Timothy Leary dedicated to the proposition that the opium of the masses was alright so long as it came from the Golden Triangle, could see the writing on the wall. In great big letters, it said:
This lot are moving to the right, better join the Socialist Workers Party. So they did.
The SWP was not averse to having them, because they had some recent experience of youth work, whereas the party cadre’s most recent brush with youth had been the Young Communist League in 1928. Tim makes no reference to the fact that the SWP thought bureaucratic collectivism was a reactionary theory, and adhered to the classical Trotskyist workers’ state thesis. It seems he passed from one theory to the other without breaking step. From his account the difference between the two organisations was that the ISL’s headquarters was pretty scruffy, whilst the SWP’s was pretty smart. It may be that this is a factor left out of account by us revolutionaries in our recruitment policy. Perhaps we should draw them in with the subtle texture and colouring of our soft furnishings, or slip them a membership card as they enthuse over the plush opulence of our uncut moquette. It might just work, and, for what it’s worth, I give it free to Tony Cliff, as by now he must have tried every other stratagem. Life in the SWP was dull, routine stuff. The leadership at most levels were the people from the 1930s. These were Socialists who had forgotten Lenin’s terrible warning that the worst crime a Communist could commit was to be over 50. Some, like James P. Cannon, seemed set to commit the same crime twice over. If life is dull, of course, you can always juice it up a bit by forming a faction. Sam Marcy, at about that time, showed the way. His group took the view that the Hungarian Revolution was Fascist, and that the SWP should seek an orientation to the ultra-Stalinist, Foster wing of the US Communist Party. Wohlforth was, reasonably one might think, not impressed either with the policy or the man: “... in the centre of the mass was a little animated man talking non-stop ... he had a high-pitched voice and I thought he spoke in a completely hysterical manner. Yet I noticed that the Marcyites were enthralled by his performance ... and responded to him en masse. It was my first experience with true political cult followers.” Given that Wohlforth spent the next best years of his life in thrall to that true political cult leader Gerry Healy, it is a pity that he did not pay more attention to the awful example of Sam Marcy. It would have saved him a great deal of pain.
The critical time came when the SWP fell in love with Fidel Castro. Cannon and his ageing cadre so wanted a revolution they could support, that they were prepared to shut their eyes to the leading rôle played by the Stalinists in Cuba, and to the suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists. Here, without doubt, was their “workers’ state”. Tim Wohlforth disagreed. For reasons not unassociated with the fact that the SWP was becoming close to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the carrier of the dreaded bacillus of Pabloism, Gerry Healy also disagreed with them about the progressive nature of Castro. Wohlforth had a backer, and the SWP had a new faction fight. For a short time Healy could not make up his mind between the two contenders for his favour, Robertson and Wohlforth. Robertson, however, was foolhardy enough to suppose that he was permitted to fight back when attacked, and was quickly consigned to the outer darkness (from which vantage point he sends out his followers from time to time to make everyone else’s life bloody miserable). Wohlforth was awarded Healy’s North American franchise.
One might have thought that the separation enforced by the Atlantic would mitigate the worst effects of the Healy regime. Not a bit of it, the Workers’ League was to become a Socialist Labour League clone forged in the furnace heat of Healy’s random and splenetic rage. Everything and everybody was to be worked and exploited to the limit of endurance and beyond. Party life was an endless round of paper sales and fund-raising, with recrimination and fault finding the punctuating light relief. Wohlforth was summoned to Clapham High Street on Gerry’s whim, charged with gross dereliction of duty, given just enough time to confess, and then stuffed on the plane back to the States. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a rich full life, it isn’t.
Inevitably, ritual abuse in Clapham was not enough. The humiliation needed an appropriate audience. The opportunity presented itself at a Workers League camp in Canada. Healy arrived, and in short order he was accusing Wohlforth’s partner, Nancy, of being a CIA agent. A vote to dismiss Wohlforth as Secretary and to expel Nancy was carried, Nancy and Tim both voting for. How pathetic can you get? The last hurrah was a brief return to the SWP to discover that under Jack Barnes the party was even more besotted with Cuba than before. He spent time in Mexico and visited Coyoacan, and he went to Cuba, but his heart was no longer in it. Nowadays, apparently, he agrees politically with Robin Blick. Oh well, as the old song says: “You can tell a man that boozes by the company he chooses, whereat the pig got up and slowly walked away.”
The Prophet’s Children is a strange book. At the end of it one does not understand why Tim Wohlforth did what he did. He was, it seems, motivated by goodwill to others, he was hardworking and unselfish, and prepared for sacrifice. But why he made those sacrifices is unclear. He thought Shachtman was a great man, and also James P. Cannon. To be fair, they certainly stood out in a field full of the vertically challenged, but to confer similar status on Healy shows a lack of judgement that sets you firmly amongst those who cannot tell Stork from butter. Still, Wohlforth has an endearing foible of larding his tale with little vignettes from everyday life. He visited a female comrade, Deborah, who worked in the party office, but was off sick. She was, it appears, not sick, just in love with him. Before you can say knife: “... we kissed passionately and started to undress each other. We staggered to her bed and were soon making passionate sweaty love.” Afterwards, Tim gets up, gets dressed, and is about to leave when the phone rings. Deborah answers the phone. “Hello, Trina”, she says, “I just fucked the Great Pumpkin.” Tim does not say so, but I think it must have been Halloween. What other explanation can there be?
*************
Review
Lenin: Life and Legacy
Dmitri Volkogonov
Lenin: Life and Legacy
Harper Collins, London, 1995, pp. 529, £25.00/£8.99
ACCORDING TO the translator and editor, Harold Shukman, the first researcher to gain access to the secret archives of the Soviet state was Dmitri Volkogonov, who, as the Director of the Institute of Military History and a serving Colonel General, had for years collected material for his biography of Stalin. After the coup of August 1991, Volkogonov was the new government’s natural choice to supervise the control and declassification of the party and state archives.
Shukman refers to the chronological drift underlying the shifting narrative, and says that the first rule was to try and preserve as much as possible the material published as well as unpublished, either emanating from or pertaining to Lenin himself. The second principle was to preserve the material demonstrating Volkogonov’s own thesis, namely, that Stalin, his system and his successors all derived directly from Lenin’s theories and practice. The editor goes on:
‘In the view of D.R. Volkogonov the question of whether or not Soviet history was a continuation in any sense of Russian history is of less importance than the question of whether Soviet history is itself a continuum. In this book he shows that between Lenin and Stalin there was neither an ideological discontinuity nor a difference in method ... In Russia, as long as the state continued to exist, Lenin remained a virtual unblemished icon. Volkogonov has now demolished the icon and he has firmly committed himself to the view that Russia’s only hope in 1917 lay in the liberal and Social Democratic coalition that emerged in the February Revolution.’ (p. xxvii)
This is a fair summary of the author’s position. My brief comment is that those of us who have never believed in icons will not be duly impressed at the picture of our bemedalled General demolishing the Lenin icon, an icon which he and the other members of the Russian state so strenuously supported for so many years. If in the words of the song, ‘No gods on high can save us’, equally, ‘No devils below can excuse us.’ To seek an explanation of the events in Russia in the character and brains of Lenin and Stalin is to evade any serious discussion of history. It is indeed history upside down.
Of the author’s claim that Russia’s only hope in 1917 lay in the liberal-Social Democratic coalition that emerged from the February Revolution, I am reminded of my grandmother’s saying: ‘If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there would be no need for tinkers.’ To weep for the lost hopes of the Russian Revolution, and to inveigh against the crimes of the Russian state since then is a futile business, but it is undoubtedly the business of the author, and many others. Not to weep, but to understand — that should be our guide to history.
Lenin insisted that the October Revolution and all its dreams could only be realised by the spread of the revolution to the West. Rosa Luxemburg, by no means a worshipper of the Lenin icon, said in
The Russian Revolution: ‘All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the Socialist order of society can be realised. The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of the historical possibilities ... In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia.’ Then there is the prophetic judgement of the dying Lenin on the Russian state in
The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”: ‘... the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and Tsarist hotchpotch, and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we were “busy” most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine ...’ He added: ‘There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.’ It is also interesting to note that Volkogonov quotes favourably many items from Trotsky’s
On Lenin, a change from what he had to say in
The Stalin Phenomenon, an official pamphlet published in Moscow in 1988, where he said: ‘Nobody wrote as many caustic, malicious, offensive, vile and degrading remarks about Stalin as Trotsky.’
Nevertheless, most readers of this journal will not be greatly interested in the author’s theories and change of opinion, but rather in what new facts he has trawled from the archives. The authenticity of his quotations from the files can only be finally checked by someone with a knowledge of Russian with access to them. I list below various items of information that will be of interest to readers:
The execution of the Romanovs (page 206): On 18 July 1918 at an extraordinary session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), chaired by Lenin, a note from the minutes was read to the effect that Nicholas II had been executed by the order of the Yekaterinburg Soviet. The rest of the family had been evacuated to a safe place. Sverdlov went on to say in the name of the VTsIK that he regarded the decision as correct. Lenin asked any questions for Sverdlov. One voice asked: ‘And the family was taken away?’ No reply was recorded. Here the author quotes from Trotsky’s Diary In Exile: ‘Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: “Oh yes, where is the Tsar?” “It’s all over”, he answered, “he has been shot.” “And where is the family?” “All the family along with him.” “All of them?”, I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise. “All of them”, replied Sverdlov, “what about it?” He was waiting to see my reaction. I made no reply. “And who made the decision?”, I asked. “We decided it here. Ilyich believed that we shouldn’t leave the whites a live banner to rally round, especially under the present difficult circumstances.”’
Russian Gold (page 399): An excerpt from the Comintern Budget Commission’s meeting of March 1922.
- Budget for the German CP: Brandler, Popov, Humbert-Droz and Piatnitsky voted for a grant for 1922 of 446,592 gold rubles (42,872,822 German marks), Solts and Molotov voted for 400,000 gold rubles.
- Budget for the French CP: unanimous vote for a grant of 100,000 gold rubles (638,000 French francs).
- Budget for the Italian CP: 360,842 gold rubles (4,306,000 lira).
- Budget for the Czechoslovak CP (Humbert-Droz having left): Popov, Brandler and Piatnitsky in favour of 250,000 gold rubles (791,000 Czech crowns), Solts and Mikhailov in favour of 200,000 gold rubles.
- Budget for English CP: unanimous vote for 200,000 gold rubles.
Comrade Thomas (page 402): A commission established by Stalin, headed by Kritinsky, investigated the affairs of the German party. To the German Communist Party, February 1921, some 622,000 gold rubles in currency and valuables were transmitted, and for the whole of 1921 Comrade Thomas disbursed 1.22 million gold rubles, of which he retained 500,000 under his control in the ‘Frankfurt Fund’. When the commission was unable to find any receipts for some very large sums, it was decided that no further matter connected with financial operations should be entrusted to Comrade Thomas.
Did Stalin Poison Lenin? (page 426): The archives hold a ‘strictly secret’ letter from Stalin to the Politbureau, dated 21 March 1923, in which Stalin reports a request from Krupskaya and Lenin that he should find and administer to Lenin a dose of potassium cyanide, because Lenin was ‘suffering unbelievably’, and that ‘to go on living was unthinkable’. He ended by saying: ‘I do not have the strength to carry out Ilyich’s request.’ The Politbureau summed up in an informal resolution: ‘I propose that Stalin’s “indecisiveness” is correct. There should be an exchange of opinion strictly amongst Politbureau members.’ Signed by M. Tomsky, G. Zinoviev, V. Molotov, N. Bukharin, L. Trotsky, L. Kamenev. In effect the Politbureau decided that Lenin should go on ‘suffering unbelievably’ for another nine months. In his Stalin, Trotsky suggests that Stalin poisoned Lenin. Did he forget that he had signed a resolution approving Stalin’s decision not to administer poison to Lenin?
Lenin and a woman in Paris (pages 262-3): In 1936 a certain Viktor Tikhomirov collecting Lenin manuscripts came across letters alleged to have been written by a woman writer who was on very close terms with him. She did not want to part with the letters as long as Krupskaya was alive. Tikhomirov said: ‘This woman is well provided for, as she has been receiving funds from us in Moscow and they have been passing either through Menzhinsky or Dzerzhinsky, and she now receives an appropriate sum from a bank deposit.’
Telegram from Trotsky to Moscow, 17 June 1937 (pages 263–70): ‘Stalin’s policies leading to complete collapse, external as well as internal. Only salvation lies in radical about-face toward Soviet democracy, beginning with public review of last trials. On this matter offer total support.’ Stalin wrote on the telegram: ‘A spy’s mask! He is an insolent spy for Hitler!’ Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikoyan placed their signatures below.
Stalin’s proposed capitulation to Hitler (page 314): Shortly after Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin made a proposal to him through the Bulgarian ambassador, that the USSR would on the cessation of military action cede the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, the Karelian Isthmus, Bessarabia and Bukovina.
Ernest Rogers
