From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
While on the subject of the introduction, it might be as well to include another small niggle. On page one, as part of a generally laudatory paragraph about Trotsky, our editors feel moved to say: “Even his mistakes live on in the works of those who might not even be aware of Trotsky’s contribution to thought.” Try getting your mind round that after a few bottles of Carlsberg Special. Alternatively, try it stone cold sober. It seems to mean that there is someone – I picture an unworldly academic, in the public baths at Syracuse – who cries: “Eureka, I think Stalinist Russia is a workers’ state, better found the Fourth International.” Whether our idiot savant might further decide to stay away from Lenin’s funeral, and regret his failure to militarise labour, probably depends on whether he had overfulfilled his norm of mistakes for that week.
As I say, though, these are really niggles, and the volume here under review is worth having. Whilst the content obviously represents the concerns of the editors, the contributors nevertheless do not all come from the same stable. We have, for example, an article by John Molyneux quite effectively taking Baruch Knei-Paz and his book, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, to the cleaners (why is it that whenever I hear the name Knei-Paz I think of the protection worn by carpet layers?). Immediately preceding this we have an article by David Law rubbishing Molyneux’s own book, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution. One assumes that this juxtaposition is intentional, but one hopes that it is not intended to cause offence.
This is a collection that is, broadly, attempting to come to terms with the immensely rich, but extremely complicated and sometimes contradictory heritage of Leon Trotsky. Inevitably, it covers a lot of ground that has over almost 70 years been trampled to concrete hardness by the tiny feet of several generations of Trotskyists. The class nature of Russia and the satellites is raised by both Ticktin and Cox, and without too much difficulty they dispose of the “workers’ state” theory. If LDT was in error, he is at least awarded marks for his willingness to shift on the question, and for the indications he made that a Stalinist workers’ state was a special case, limited in time, a contradiction that would inevitably find its resolution in class-based exploitation or a second revolution. The bureaucratic collectivist thesis also comes in for some stick, and whilst state capitalism is not directly attacked, the secondary evidence suggests that at least the Cliff and Dunayevskaya variants are not acceptable either. Which might lead one to ask: “Tell us please, comrade editors, what is this bloody monstrosity then?”
One feels this particularly in an otherwise excellent piece by Michael Cox, Trotsky’s Misinterpreters and the Collapse of Stalinism, in which he gives vent to the following statement: “Trotsky had few problems fending off critics such as Shachtman and Dunayevskaya because both individually and collectively they really didn’t provide much of a theoretical alternative.” Now it is perfectly respectable to prefer Trotsky’s arguments to Dunayevskaya’s state capitalism or Shachtman’s bureaucratic collectivism. The thing you cannot have, however, is Trotsky getting the better of them both, because he did not argue the Russian question with Dunayevskaya, and Shachtman did not adopt the bureaucratic collectivist theory until after LDT’s death. This is slipshod and a pity, because one is preoccupied with the howler, and is liable to miss the meat of the paragraph, which goes on to say something that is both true and needed saying: “This highly charged discussion, however, had a number of unfortunate consequences. Most obviously, it tended to push Trotsky and his followers into an ideologically rigid mould from which they never escaped. It also made the whole debate on Stalinism highly sectarian. Thus what began life as a potentially fruitful dialogue on the left about the nature of Socialism was soon transformed into a sterile fight between ideological militants who neither cared nor listened to what their opponents had to say.” It is an unfortunate fact, here attested by Michael Cox, that each contending theory is far more convincing in its criticism of different evaluations than as a theory in its own right.
The problem, though, was not only that the varying schools of thought could only contend at a distance, beyond the range of sticks and stones, but also that LDT taught his followers that nationalisation, plus planning, plus the monopoly of foreign trade were good and sufficient reasons for a nation to be hall-marked as a workers’ state. For Trotsky it may have been axiomatic that the working class had to be involved in creating this state of affairs, but unfortunately he did not say so. The export to Eastern Europe of these three elements, on the points of Russian bayonets, required orthodox Trotskyists to perform mental gymnastics to account for the post-war reality which would have done severe damage to any psyche less pliable than that of Ernest Mandel. In commenting on this phenomenon in the pages of the New International in 1948, Hal Draper quoted the immortal lines of Samuel Hoffenstein:
I am also indebted to Lynne Poole for calling to attention another example of Tony Cliff’s increasingly spastic sleights of hand. She mentions an article of 1901, that Trotsky had written in favour of a strong Central Committee, even going so far as to suggest that branches failing to accept the CC’s instructions should be cut off from the party. Unfortunately, this particular piece has been lost, and the sole evidence for its existence is Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation. Here Trotsky specifically refutes his article of 1901 in favour of the position set out in Our Political Tasks. This disavowed article of 1901 is, according to Cliff, Trotsky’s real position, and his attack on What Is To Be Done? was merely an expression of his affection for Martov. The reason for Cliff’s retailing this load of old cobblers is probably because some years ago in the first flush of his renewed love affair with Vladimir Ilyich, while writing Volume One of his Lenin biography, Trotsky came off rather badly in the text. In his more recent biography of Trotsky, the main character emerges unsullied, a closet Bolshevik all the time. If this fantasy is intended to aggrandise Trotsky, it does nothing of the sort. We are expected to believe that LDT, a man of unflinching dedication to his politics, should have spent 14 years perpetuating a split with a powerful co-thinker, because Lenin had been nasty to his chum Martov. The notion is as insulting as it is grotesque. Apart from anything else, if there had been any truth in this story, it is certain that Trotsky would have found a way to use it in his defence against the accusations of anti-Bolshevism levelled by Stalin in the 1920s.
Trotsky’s conversion to Bolshevism, when it came, was root and branch. His encomium, “without the party we are nothing”, despite its all-embracing character, applies to just one party, the CPSU(b), and that judgement was time-bound in application. When it failed he built, in microcosm, parties on the same model, and, possibly because it was the only way he could play a rôle, there must be an International, a world centre to direct the coming revolution. To construct a chain with a small collection of weak links is to ensure that, at the first sign of strain, it will break into even smaller chains. The Fourth International is the (I almost said “living”) proof of this assertion. Given a certain generosity with the assumptions, it is of course a powerful idea, and one that still exercises the minds of some people; the break-up of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in the wake of Gerry Healy’s expulsion, has let loose on the world several additional sets of people, rebuilding, or reconstructing, or whatever you do to get a Fourth International. Experience does, however, suggest that proclamation is as good a method as any.
Trotsky at least had the justification that, for him, capitalism was in its death agony and Stalinism would not survive the hammer blows of war; therefore the Fourth International had to be in place to try and lead the revolution. Unfortunately, when the war did come, the thing that succumbed first was the Fourth International, under the impact of Russia’s pre-emptive annexation of the Karelian Isthmus, which in terms of world war was hardly a hammer blow. Nevertheless, for Trotsky the stark choice was Socialism or barbarism, and no one else was even aware that a choice had to be made. What for him was a duty, an obligation, for his latter day disciples is more of a hobby. There are few things better calculated to keep a chap out of mischief than working up a few theses on the world economy, or revolutionary prospects in faraway countries of which he knows little.
Of some interest too is Susan Weissman’s article, The Left Opposition Divided: The Trotsky-Serge Disputes – you will have gathered that the titles given to the articles are not the most inspired part of this volume – in which she details the rather extreme abuse that Trotsky heaped on the unfortunate Victor’s head, in such phrases as: “What do people of the Victor Serge type represent? ... these verbose, coquettish moralists, capable of bringing only trouble and decay, must be kept out of the revolutionary organisation even by cannon fire if necessary.” Susan Weissman suggests that some of this was due to misunderstanding, and some due to the machinations of Étienne (Mark Zborowski), Stalin’s agent in the Left Opposition in Paris, and she is probably right. What she does not mention is the fact that a number of people in Europe, including Trotsky’s son Sedov, were suspicious of the circumstances of Serge’s escape from Stalin’s clutches. Elizabeth Poretsky, who was married to Ignace Reiss, in her book, Our Own People, indicates that she wrote a report for Trotsky on Serge’s laxness in security matters. Walter Krivitsky also wrote a report for Trotsky, in which he came to the conclusion that Serge was a GPU agent. Henk Sneevliet, too, was convinced that there was a Stalinist agent in Sedov’s circle, finally and correctly concluding that it was Étienne. In all this welter of suspicion and accusation, very little of it susceptible to genuine proof, it was possible to see political disagreements as part of a cunning plan to sow discord in the ranks. Perhaps Serge was one of those innocents who needlessly suffered in an atmosphere poisoned by Stalinist terror.
There is much more in this book that is interesting, stimulating and provocative. Paul Flewers has done an excellent job in producing a clean and attractive text. The cover, on the other hand, is a bit weird; it has a picture of Trotsky’s head wearing what looks like an astrakhan hat, which is in the process of melting all over his face. I know astrakhan hats do not melt, but this it what it looks like. On closer inspection, the offending fur turns out to be people’s heads. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but the symbolism of all this escapes me.
The main target throughout, however, is none of these, but Abram Leon, whose ‘concept of the people-class is founded on a rigid economic determinism which prevented him from seeing the dialectical interdependence between the different historical factors’ (p. 218), a ‘vulgar materialist vision’ which ‘negated the relative autonomy of superstructural phenomena in the historic process’ (p. 213). Traverso brushes aside Nathan Weinstock’s defence of Leon’s thesis in the Pathfinder edition of The Jewish Question in favour of Maxime Rodinson’s criticism prefaced to the French version (see Cult, Ghetto and State, London 1983, pp. 68–117). However, whilst describing Leon’s thesis of the people-class as applicable only to Jewish history in Europe from 1096 onwards, his references to Blumenkrantz, Rodinson and Vidal-Naquet show that outside his own field he is heavily reliant upon secondary sources, and has no first hand appreciation of Jewish history in its full span, either historically or geographically.
Whilst it is indisputable that the narrow range of functions Leon analyses as carried on by the Jews as a people-class belong narrowly within Medieval Europe, it is equally false to deny their widespread involvement in usury, commerce and handicrafts outside these limits. Cuneiform tablets dating as early as the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Persian period already show Jews adapting to a commercial function in diaspora society, and it was this group that lay behind the subsequent recolonisation of Judaea after the exile, with its resulting theocratic structure. Jews had replaced Syrians in the Mediterranean carrying trade long before the Crusades, and the Turkish Empire of the Khazars in Central Asia accepted Judaism as its state religion precisely because of its position on the Silk Road. The Jews who opposed Muhammad in Arabia were at the centre of long-distance trade, and even the Ethiopian Falashas, probably a split-off from the Monophysite church, fulfilled a specialised function in wider society in craft (especially iron) and petty commerce (though of course many of them remained peasants in rural areas). It is difficult to believe that Judaism arrived in South India and China other than through trading contacts, even if their communities over the centuries adapted to a different function. In the case of China, their earliest large concentration appears to have been at Kaifeng, at the end of the Silk Road, and here there is an obvious parallel with the Sogdians, a trading people who introduced Manichaeism into China via the same route.
And although Traverso shows an awareness that the category of people-class can be applied to other groups, both in Europe and elsewhere (pp. 24, 216), he seems to be unaware that it was precisely in Eastern Europe where these structures played a part in nation-building. For centuries over the whole area many of the ‘non-historic peoples’ existed almost entirely as peasantry, the Polish and Hungarian ‘nations’ as gentry classes, and the bourgeoisie and working class as Germans living in the larger cities, whose constitutions were directly copied from those of the four main Hansa towns. On the other hand, within the Turkish Empire a large part of the commerce was handled by Armenians and Phanariot Greeks.
For all his learning (and it is considerable), Traverso’s solution to the Jewish problem is surprisingly simplistic: classical Marxist thought reveals ‘an incapacity to perceive the significance of the religious phenomenon in history and a difficulty in theorising the nation. Despite its macroscopic obviousness, the religious dimension of the Jewish problem was hidden by the economist reduction of Jewish history to that of an urban commercial caste ... we believe that religion is a factor as important as the economy to the understanding of the Jewish question.’ (p. 234) This use of the royal (or should we say, divine) ‘we’ proceeds from his argument that ‘it is necessary to adopt a new methodological approach – that, for example, developed by the liberation theologians in Latin America – founded on the idea that Marxism and religion are not two irreconcilable universes’ in order to produce ‘a transcendence of the Marxism/religion antinomy’ (p. 179). Traverso’s preoccupation with ‘liberation theology’ has already shown us what sort of ‘transcendence’ he has in mind with his Philistine attack on Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours from the standpoint of universal morality in Critique Communiste (no. 140, Winter 1994–95). This has an all too familiar ring to those of us in Britain who remember how the ‘Communist-Christian Dialogue’ marked an important stage in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s formal break with Marxism, which is of necessity firmly grounded in a militant atheism.
The discovery that it was their religion that preserved the Jews as a ‘peculiar people’ is hardly an original one. It can be got from any Bible, any synagogue, and any church. It also begs the question, not even mentioned in Traverso’s investigation, of how and why this religion transformed itself so completely over the centuries, from its wide diversity both inside and outside Palestine before the destruction of Herod’s temple, to its unitary Talmudic form by the end of the first millennium AD, not to mention the no less radical changes since. For none of this can be understood without an analysis of the changing circumstances of its existence.
More interesting than this rather flat and banal outcome to such an accumulation of painstaking research is the route by which it was approached. The materialist critique of religion is, of course, rooted very firmly in the analysis of class. ‘The Jewish question’, notes our author, ‘is revealing also of the backwardness and limitations in the approach taken by Marxists toward forms of oppression not directly related to class, such as national, but also racial and sexual oppression ... [which] corresponded absolutely to the opposition to feminism and the very idea of an autonomous movement for women’s liberation.’ (p. 235) As the tendency to which Traverso belongs moves ever further from a class analysis of society, it is not at all surprising that it should find ‘autonomous’ solutions to human oppression, whether they lie in bourgeois feminism or in other directions. Its sections have been organised along the lines of the Bund for some time, not only with regard to feminism, but in the USA, where for many years they have called for a separate black party, and with Basque nationalism in Spain. These remarks of Traverso’s are perfectly consistent with his criticism of Lenin’s view of the Bund as ‘a great indifference, if not a veritable blindness, toward a culturally vibrant and dynamic Jewish community’ (p. 132), for Lenin pointed out that whereas ‘the bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion, with the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle’ (The Right of Nations to Self-Determination).
Identity politics, ‘the politics of the personal’, as they are fashionably called, whether religious or otherwise, lead to fragmentation and impotence. Oppression is always felt in particular ways and by particular individuals, but ending it is a universal task.
But even within this framework there are signs that its author has failed to command his material. We are told that the Greek section, which condemned the guerrilla struggle against the German occupation as chauvinist, was ‘very influential in the resistance’ (p. 116), and that in spite of James Klugmann’s activities (see Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no: 3, Summer 1992, pp. 106–10) the victory of Tito in Yugoslavia was ‘no product of Moscow’s policy’, which was to support the royalists (p. 125). The ‘Second World Congress’ of the Fourth International was held, according to this writer, in September 1948 (p. 119). Similarly, during Mao’s seizure of power, Russia, whose troops had armed Mao with the surrendered weapons of the Japanese in Manchuria, had ‘maintained its military aid to Chiang up to the last minute’ (p. 125). The Fourth International, on its part, ‘vigorously condemned’ the repression of the Trotskyists in such countries as Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China in ‘public declarations reproduced in the whole of its press’ (p. 126). (Moreau lets the cat out of the bag here later on page 174, when he excuses Castro’s suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists by his ‘exasperation’ at the ‘irresponsible critiques of Posadism’). Then we are told that in May 1968, ‘as opposed to reformist or Third Worldist currents’, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International had championed the perspective of ‘new revolutionary crises, even in the most advanced capitalist countries’ (p. 198). Its failure to recruit from the disarray of the Italian Communist Party at that time is put down to the small size of its section (The Italian Lesson, pp. 200–2), oblivious of the fact that one of the worst of the Stalinist groupings in this mess, Falc e Martello, owed its origin to the miseducation of the GCR’s own youth group in the principles of Maoism. And when the war over the Falkland Islands is ascribed to ‘the British intervention against Argentina’ (p. 246), we realise that the hold of this writer upon the facts ‘depends on a thread’, as he might put it.
But even though he remains imprisoned within the mythology of his organisation, this does not mean that he is incapable of acute insights of his own. His view of the discussion about the class nature of the postwar ‘glacis’ states (pp. 117–9) comes quite close to those of the British Revolutionary Communist Party and the later Vern-Ryan faction of the US Socialist Workers Party, admitting that ‘the Second World Congress therefore confined itself to an incomplete analysis of Eastern Europe’ (p. 119). This is putting it mildly, to say the least, when we remember that they were of the opinion that capitalist states still existed there. But he points out quite rightly that the view of the ‘Third World Congress’ that in ‘exceptional circumstances’ such as Yugoslavia and China ‘Stalinist Communist parties could “project a revolutionary orientation” under the pressure of the masses’ was how ‘the “orthodox” interpretation of the postwar revolutions left the door wide open for the “revisionist” perspective’ (p. 124).
He is therefore able to demolish the ludicrous claims of the splitters of 1953 to represent anything better, showing how ‘the American SWP in particular was in solidarity with the international leadership in declaring that the documents submitted to the Third World Congress appeared to conform to the Trotskyist programme’ (p. 133), noting that when the motion for the suspension of the leadership of the French section came up on the International Secretariat the voting was Pablo for, Healy for, and the SWP for, with Mandel and Maitan voting against (pp. 137–8). He quite correctly identifies the views of Healy and Cannon in this split as being that whilst it was OK for the International Secretariat to ‘intervene in the affairs of the little groups in Europe with the approval of the SWP’, doing the same for them was ‘right over the top and merited an immediate split’ (p. 142). For if we accept, as they did then (and the author still does), that the organisation to which they all belonged was indeed Trotsky’s Fourth International, his conclusions logically follow: that the famous Open Letter, which adopted the Lambertist critique of the IS hitherto rejected by the SWP, was ‘without doubt one of the most irresponsible documents that have ever been written in the history of the Trotskyist movement’ (p. 140), ‘a veritable attempt at liquidating the International as an organised cadre’ (p. 141), in order to set up an organisation which had ‘no real international structure, and functioned by consultation between the national leaderships of the affiliated sections’ (p. 143). And Moreau has more than an ounce of truth on his side when criticising the ‘permanent catastrophism’ of the International Secretariat during the 1950s by saying that the International Committee was ‘in no way superior’; ‘very much the reverse’, for ‘the Lambertists and the Healyites were marked by a completely delirious catastrophism, combined with an absurd factionalism’ (p. 155). And the failure of the ICFI to make a self-criticism of its support for the MNA in Algeria (pp. 166–7) indeed showed how little it had in common with anything that could be recognised as Bolshevism.
However, such insights as this book contains, and they are by no means limited to what have been selected here, the main actor in the Marxist drama, the working class, is conspicuous by his absence. There is little discussion about what was actually going on inside the workers’ movement, and even less about strategies for intervening there. The Fourth International of the early 1950s is criticised for ‘still seeing the Chinese Communist Party as a purely Stalinist party’, and so ‘failing for a certain time to accept that the Chinese revolution was a proletarian revolution’ (p. 122). The document The Dynamics of World Revolution Today is congratulated for ‘safeguarding itself from an ouvrierist deviation – into which the Trotskyist forces have often fallen – which reduced the working class to the formally waged urban proletariat alone’ (p. 180).
Would that they had. For this is a nice phrase to find on the pen of a Canadian sociology professor, who has managed to convince himself that in the 1960s and 1970s ‘the student youth was the milieu where the new vanguard most forcibly asserted itself’ (p. 200), and that ‘the “leftism” of the new European sections remained on the terrain of Trotskyism and of Leninism’ (p. 202).
This account of the theoretical life of the Fourth International therefore reads very much like Hamlet without the prince. But the actor will yet appear, and he will have the last word.
Let us specify that, in those days, although the wave of terror in the USSR had begun, it had not yet reached the terrible peak of the first great Moscow Trial. This explains why, in the first months of the revolutionary process, the POUM took part, together with the PCE, the PSUC and the other left organisations, in all the revolutionary bodies and committees, and above all in the Catalan Militia Committee and the Popular Executive Committee of Valencia. And furthermore, this worked in such a fashion because there existed a genuine revolutionary fraternity, and because the aims of all could be summed up as revolutionary war against Fascism, which was the main enemy for everyone. Things changed when the Soviet intervention occurred. Stalin was trying to consolidate an alliance with France and Britain, and the Spanish Revolution was an encumbrance to him or was ‘inopportune’, as was acknowledged by the Communist historian Fernando Claudín.
In 1974, in the film The Two Memories, produced by Jorge Semprún in Paris, Carrillo attributed the repression against the POUM and the murder of Andreu Nin to the Russian intervention. Then, for reasons unknown to us, Carrillo watered down these statements at various times. When he was asked for his testimony for the documentary Operation Nikolai, made by Catalan television (TV-3) with documents obtained from the Moscow archives, he said he did not have time. Moreover, in spite of the repercussions of this historic film (which, unfortunately, has still not been shown by Spanish Television throughout the country), Carrillo also did not have time to make any comments or give an opinion on one of the most shameful episodes of Stalinist policy in Spain — the murder of Nin.
Anti-Franco unity was broken by the policy which Stalin imposed on the PCE and PSUC, and which Carrillo and his friends followed slavishly. From the time of the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov (which was denounced as a crime only by the POUM), a policy was initiated which planned to eliminate the POUM, to reduce the influence of the CNT, and, later, to eliminate Largo Caballero and the Socialist Left. The purpose was, as is clearly apparent in numerous documents found in the archives of the Communist International, to establish a ‘democracy of a new type’ or a ‘people’s democracy’ like those which were imposed on the countries of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. For this it was necessary to contain the revolutionary process and to go into reverse gear, cancelling the gains of July 1936 (committees, civil liberties, collectivisation in industry and in the countryside, militias, Catalan and Basque sovereignty, regional authorities, etc.). And this is what happened with incredible tenacity and perseverance, violating all democratic, Socialist and revolutionary principles.
Shortly after the May Days of 1937, the repression against the POUM, the offensive against the CNT and the removal of Largo Caballero enabled the PCE to infiltrate itself into the state apparatus, and to control a significant part of the army, the police and the secret services, to reduce Catalan autonomy to a minimal form, to destroy the collectivisations and workers’ control, etc. The consequences of all this were catastrophic for the fight against Franco. Now we know that even General Berzin and other senior representatives of the Soviet state sent as advisers to Spain had the courage to denounce this policy, for which they were sentenced and executed in Moscow.
Many of us hoped that Carrillo and his friends would end up by recognising all these facts, and make a critical assessment of their policy (and not one of those wretched self-criticisms invented by Stalinism). But it seems that they are persisting in living with the myths and platitudes of Stalinism in an age in which it is necessary to renew a great many things, to destroy that which is no longer useful, and to open a new perspective for the struggle against capitalism and for the Socialist future.
Ken Loach has done no more than draw back the veil from a period of history by evoking a dramatic episode from the Spanish Revolution, and doing so with a talent and a mastery which have taken the breath away from the selfsame Carrillo. We should applaud him, hoping that his work will inspire Spanish film-makers of the new generation who want to defend historical memory and maintain critical thought.
Vaksberg tries to explain the roots of Stalin’s anti-Semitism by emphasising a passage in his essay of 1912, Marxism and the National Question: ‘A nation has the right to determine its fate freely. It has the right to live as it wishes.’ (p. 5) As Stalin didn’t think the Jews constituted a nation, says Vaksberg, it is logical for him to think that they were ‘an object to be manipulated by those in power in accordance with their political goals’ (p. 7). Far from me to defend Stalin, but he was not saying that those who in his opinion did not constitute a nation were to be denied their rights. He said that such people, not just the Jews, but the Letts in Lithuania, the Poles in Ukraine, and the Russians in the Caucasus, should be permitted, and in a democratic state would be permitted, to use and be taught their own language, and would have complete religious freedom. Moreover, Stalin did not say, as Vaksberg asserts, that the Jews ‘are not a nation but “something mystical, intangible and otherworldly”’ (p. 4), this was Stalin’s interpretation of the consequences of Otto Bauer’s theory of nationalism, and had nothing to do with the Jews at all. As Stalin says elsewhere in his essay, ‘paper will put up with anything that is written on it’ – and he should know. As a lawyer, Vaksberg should be aware that if charges are to stick, the evidence has to be convincing. His misrepresentation of a readily available document places a shadow, not over his assertion that Stalin was anti-Semitic – there is concrete evidence of that prior to 1912 – but over his competence in analysing archival documents that are not available to the average reader.
This is a shame, because the author unearths some very interesting background details to the Jewish dimension of the Moscow Trials, and to the background of official anti-Semitism. Stalin was sensitive to any accusation that his regime was in any way anti-Jewish. The trial of the alleged killers of the Soviet Arctic explorer Nikolai Vulfson took place in May 1936. The major factor in the accusation was that the accused had acted on anti-Semitic motives, although, as Vaksberg says, there was nothing to show this. However, in August the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev opened. Vaksberg considers that the former trial was organised with the intention of dispelling any suggestions that the show trial of leading Jewish Old Bolsheviks had any anti-Semitic flavour. This was typical of Stalin; later on he was to hand out Stalin Prizes to distinguished Jewish figures as his henchmen harassed others. As Vaksberg says, Stalin’s public statements against anti-Semitism were akin to a criminal’s desire to deny his guilt, a repeated assertion which, because of its unprompted nature, could only highlight its dishonest nature.
Vaksberg intends to dispel the idea that Stalin only embarked upon an official anti-Semitic course in the late 1940s. This is hardly contentious, as most studies of Soviet Jewry recognise that there were traces of official anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Once again, he shows a careless attitude towards available texts, saying that Trotsky said nothing about Stalin’s anti-Jewish feelings in the chapter on Thermidor in his Stalin, which is just not the case. Nevertheless, it is chilling to read that in August 1942, as the huge battle at Stalingrad was starting, that the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CPSU’s Central Committee was writing to Malenkov, Andreyev and Shcherbakov, complaining that many Soviet institutions, including the Bolshoi Theatre and the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories, were headed by Jews and not Russians. Vaksberg has found many other similar documents in the archives. As he asks, would these letters have been written if their authors had not been sure that such denunciations met with the approval of their superiors?
Vaksberg raises various reasons for the revival of anti-Semitism in the Stalin era. On a couple of occasions he sees a parallel between the Soviet regime’s promotion of Russian nationalism and the recrudescence of anti-Semitism as a state policy. Elsewhere he sees it as a device used by crisis-ridden regimes to divert popular discontent. Sometimes he links the accentuation or muting of anti-Semitism with foreign policy issues. In other places, it is seen as the product of Stalin’s personal prejudices.
In one respect, Stalin’s prejudices were not a crucial factor. Once the Soviet regime had embarked upon a nationally-oriented course from the late 1920s, it was extremely likely, if not inevitable, that it would sometime fall prey to Russian nationalism and its corollary, anti-Semitism. In another respect, however, Stalin’s prejudices were important, as it was no accident that it was he who led and personified the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Bolsheviks who held to their revolutionary ideas, and who would never have descended to anti-Semitism, had to be destroyed. On the other hand, Bolsheviks who were corrupted through the process of degeneration often adopted an anti-Semitic outlook, such as Molotov, or, if they were Jews, pretended that anti-Semitism didn’t exist, and happily helped Stalin’s plans by kidding themselves that it was something else. It must, however, be said that of Stalin’s characteristics which enabled to him to adopt his historic rôle, anti-Semitism played a secondary part. Much more important were his lack of confidence in the proletariat, either in the Soviet Union or internationally, and his consequent reliance upon bureaucratic measures, and his general crude conception of what Marxism actually represented.
Stalin’s personal prejudices provided the form in which Soviet anti-Semitism took place. Had he died in, say, 1945, there still would have been an anti-Semitic purge in the late 1940s as part of the general terror which accompanied the rebuilding of Soviet society after the war, although the precise details would have been different. The Jews were an obvious target for the bureaucracy. Apart from the fact that anti-Semitism had long been a useful tool for Great Russian chauvinists, the huge emigration during the last few decades of Tsarism meant that many Soviet Jews had family connections in the West, and especially the USA, which was very dangerous in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War. Furthermore, after the horrors of the Second World War and the indifference of the Soviet regime to their specific suffering, it is not surprising that many Soviet Jews saw the establishment of the state of Israel as something positive, and this too was especially suspect once the Soviet Union’s short honeymoon with Israel had ended, and it shifted into the Western sphere of influence.
Stalin’s death corresponded with the growing realisation within the Soviet bureaucracy that mass terror was rapidly becoming a self-defeating strategy. One of the first acts of his successors was to terminate the planned anti-Jewish measures; the doctors were freed, and the trials, pogroms and deportations were called off, no doubt because a thorough purge of the Jews would have seriously damaged the running of the state apparatus, for although by then there were few Jews in high ranking posts, there were still many in a wide range of lower positions. But just as coercion remained an option for the Soviet bureaucracy right through the post-Stalin period, so did anti-Semitism, and at various times after 1953 anti-Jewish sentiments were whipped up by the Soviet authorities, often in the form of ‘economic’ criminal trials (theft, embezzlement, etc.), in which Jewish defendants were to the fore, or under the guise of anti-Zionism.
The basic question that has to be addressed is why the internationalist regime resulting from the October Revolution, which offered and indeed gave much to the Jews and others who suffered Tsarist oppression, adopted a nationalist course, which, due to the intimate connection between Great Russian nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiments, inevitably led to the revival of anti-Semitism as a state policy. Vaksberg does not recognise the national isolation of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s resulting theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ as the determining factors behind the rise of Great Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and he is therefore left with a number of essentially correct but disconnected factors that cannot in and of themselves explain why the Soviet regime betrayed one of its founding principles.
I crossed swords with the author in Workers Press over my allegation that the break to the Blues (as opposed to the idea for it, which had originated with the dockers and their unofficial leaders) was actually initiated by Gerry Healy’s Club, and carried out by a bureaucratic manoeuvre, with the object of strengthening their position and prestige in the Labour Party relative to the other left wing forces, such as the Bevanites. I maintained that members or supporters of the Club initiated the split at a mass meeting held in Hull on Sunday, 22 August 1954. This is endorsed by Bob Pennington, a leading Trotskyist and a prominent participant in this episode, who in a statement from 1960 cited in this pamphlet, wrote: ‘There is a very strong possibility that had the visit of the Birkenhead delegates to Hull in August 1954 not taken place, the Hull men would never have joined the NASD.’ The Birkenhead delegation, which included Bill Johnson, was strongly influenced by the Club. What is more, the ‘mystery man’ present at the meeting ‘can now be revealed as the late Gerry Healy’, who undoubtedly wished to ensure the success of the operation by his presence.
Sinclair disputes this, and says that the chain of events did not occur in this way. He says that the report Dockers Break Away From Union in the Hull Daily Mail on 18 August 1954 proves that the decision to break to the Blues preceded Johnson’s visit on 22 August, and the split from the Whites was not the work of the Club. As such, the mass meeting on Wednesday, 18 August which had passed a motion of no confidence in the TGWU, and voted to try and join the NASD, was a spontaneous reaction by the dockers alone, without being influenced by outsiders, and especially by Club members.
However, the proceedings of the Wednesday meeting do not appear to have been known by any participant in the struggles of that time. If this had been the meeting at which the decision to break from the TGWU had taken place, then Pennington would have known about it. And would not Albert Hart, a strike leader from whom the author obtained ‘the only detailed first hand account of the strike’, have known when and where the momentous decision to break from the Whites for the Blues had taken place? Bill Hunter states that after discussions with the Birkenhead committee, the Hull strike committee decided to ‘propose to Hull dockers that they join the Blue union’, for which they voted ‘almost unanimously’ on Sunday, 22 August. Is it not strange that the Hull leaders should ‘decide’ at this particular meeting to ‘propose’ a course of action that had already been decided four days previously?
The evidence of this meeting and its decision is crucial to Sinclair’s argument, and yet the Wednesday meeting is not elaborated any further, and the reference to an ex-docker called Murphy, ‘who was involved from the first day’, serves to cloud rather than to clear the air. Did Murphy speak at the Wednesday meeting, and call for a break to the Blues? No details are given about the meeting itself. It is obvious that this issue was raised at this meeting, but was it a definitive decision taken formally by the strike committee and the mass meeting, or a spontaneous exclamation from an angry and frustrated rank and file who had had enough of the TGWU’s officials, which made the Mail’s headlines?
Sinclair says that Johnson’s visit to Hull ‘no doubt reinforced the views of the strike leaders’. In other words, without his exhortations to the Hull leaders to go ahead and lead the breakaway, and the promise that ‘Birkenhead would follow Hull’s example in leaving the TGWU to join the Blues’, it is unlikely that inexperienced Hull militants would have acted in isolation. In this light, this pamphlet confirms both what Pennington and Hunter wrote, and the view that the intervention of the Club-influenced Merseyside delegates activated the national process of leaving the Whites for the Blues. The responsibility for the break and its consequences lies, therefore, at the door of Healy and his Club.
Keith Sinclair has produced an interesting and factual pamphlet, a vital contribution to the history of struggle of a section of the British working class. It would be a great asset in the fight for Socialism, both as a contribution to working class culture and as a practical record for lessons to be learned for future struggles, if similar pamphlets were produced to cover such strikes as Timex, Grunwick, Burnsall, the present docks strike in Liverpool, and whatever strikes may occur in the future.
In none of the polemics between the former members of Gerry Healy’s Club and myself have they made an objective analysis of events surrounding the dockers’ exodus to the Blue union and the consequences thereof. The aftermath of the breakaway was disastrous, resulting in the collapse of the portworkers’ national rank and file organisation that had been built up over the years in the course of struggle, in favour of a union, albeit democratic and militant, but divided into sections of dockers and stevedores, and circumscribed by its very nature as a trade union. There followed a series of inter-union disputes over the following years, the growth of non-unionism in what was a union stronghold, strikes for recognition instead of united efforts against the bosses for better wages and conditions, and finally the demise of the Blue union and its merger with the old established and bureaucratic TGWU. Archer fails to deal with these matters in an objective manner, and lowers still further the whole argument to personal attacks and naive political labelling – ‘Stalinist’, ‘ultra-leftist’, ‘reformist’, etc. He is more concerned with accusing me of abusing a point in his 1990 lecture than with an objective analysis of events.
For Marxists, the scientific approach to determine whether a policy or tactic will help to strengthen the working class’ struggle for the overthrow of capital is revealed by historical analysis, to which we Marxist-Leninists must constantly subject tactics and policies. If it is found in practice that such a policy or tactic has not benefited the working class, then we must analyse why we arrived at such an erroneous conclusion, and correct it at the earliest opportunity. This may be too late to affect the immediate course of events, but it must nonetheless be recorded as a lesson for future reference. Without this approach, which is ignored by Archer (and the movement at large for that matter), we cannot learn from past mistakes and rearm the workers for successful struggles in the future.
Since 1945 the dockers in the main ports of London, Merseyside, Bristol, Hull, etc., had over the years established a great tradition and a reputation for solidarity in struggle, not only for their own demands, but for the demands and welfare of workers outside their own ports. This had developed despite the efforts of the TGWU to keep the workers divided and under the strict control and domination of class collaborationist officialdom. Through unofficial struggles, the dockers forged a national unity, concretised through the establishment of the National Rank and File Portworkers Committee, and a national paper, the Portworkers Clarion. Its value lay in the fact that it was democratically created, and was developed and maintained by rank and file portworkers at mass meetings in each port. It was outside the control and the disciplinary tentacles of the TGWU’s officials and the union bureaucracy as a whole. It not only embraced dockers and stevedores, but had the potential for reaching lightermen, engineers and other portworkers. The portworkers’ organisation was a unifying body, and demonstrated its revolutionary class potential to close down the capitalist economy time and again, putting fear into the hearts of the bosses and their Labour and Tory lackeys. This unifying organisation was sacrificed by Healy’s Club, and the workers were disarmed in favour of another sectional trade union. However, the historical necessity for such an organisation was shown by the great number of times that it was reconstituted after the exodus to the Blues, whenever an organised national struggle was necessary. Even a militant and democratic union like the Blues was strictly circumscribed in its rôle as a class weapon, a fact that is still ignored by those who consider saving face to be more important than saving the workers from further defeats.
In 1948, at the time of the Canadian seamen’s strike and the portworkers’ solidarity action, Bert Aylward and Harry Constable, two national leaders of portworkers’ struggles (Aylward also being a Blue official), made contact with and joined a small Oehlerite organisation, the Socialist Workers League, because of its policies of class struggle against the Labour government, and its call for the building of a genuine Communist party. This organisation and its leader, Joe Thomas, a journalist, helped to produce the Portworkers Clarion. Not being hampered by any policy of critical support for Labour, the Portworkers Clarion gave every encouragement to the building of a national rank and file organisation for portworkers in pursuance of a policy of strengthening an organised opposition to the government’s anti-working class measures. Far from being a Syndicalist concept limited to trade unionism, or, as Bill Hunter suggests, the cause of the dockers’ failures, it was a weapon to organise a strike aimed directly at the heart of the political establishment, and by so doing to forge united action by the working class as a whole, and to raise its political understanding. Not once do Archer & Co raise the perspective of united working class action as the key both to waging a successful struggle, and of raising the level of struggle onto a political plane. The Club confined the dockers to a trade unionist, reformist and pressure group style of ‘struggle’.
The question of leading a breakaway from the TGWU to the NASD was discussed in the SWL. It originated in the dockers’ movement, in which it was very popular, and was strongly advocated by Constable. The SWL, including Thomas and I, opposed it on the grounds that it was a sectional dockers’ solution to a class problem. Also, whilst a militant and democratic independent union like the Blues may be tolerated whilst its power and influence were restricted, once it started to expand and became a point of attraction to large numbers of workers in other unions, it would constitute a threat to the trade union bureaucracy and the stability of the capitalist system, and would therefore be crushed before it left its infancy. Our prognosis, based not upon the dogmatic acceptance of the 30-year-old ideas of our teachers, but upon our own independent analysis of the rôle of unions under imperialism, proved to be 100 per cent correct.
In an effort to disparage our claim to foresight in condemning the policy of attempting to reform the unions into democratic and independent organisations, Archer writes: ‘This is not the first time that people have tried to be “clever” after the event, to take unfair advantage of hindsight.’ Apart from the fact that even if this were so, it is better than ignoring the lessons of past defeats and so allowing workers to tread the same defeatist road in the future, what proof have we that we are not dealing in hindsight, which (according to Archer) is ‘that kind of “wisdom” [that is] useful only to sceptics and reactionaries’? The evidence is in the articles Rôle of the Trade Unions and Rôle of the Rank and File Organisations, Soviets and Marxist Party, in the January–March 1948 issue of the SWL’s quarterly journal, the Workers Review.
This document pre-dated the membership of Aylward and Constable, and served as the basis for our opposition to a policy of campaigning and planning a breakaway. The SWL checked the efforts of the dockers’ leaders to proceed along these lines, and thereby prevented a disaster in the ports. That was so until a split in the SWL gave Healy a chance to exert his influence and win over Constable and others to his Club, with its superior numbers, organisation and technical means.
As if upon reflection and with a feeling of guilt, Archer writes: ‘... did Constable, did Healy take into account what they can reasonably be expected to have known? Did they reach their decisions on the basis of the information available to them at the time?’ In other words, did they not do all that was necessary to make the venture a success? So, despite the failure of the breakaway, we should not judge them too harshly!
Healy and Constable did not know – and Archer and other former Club members and defenders still have not learnt – that success or otherwise did not hinge upon the day-to-day factual considerations that determine tactics. It is a question of whether or not the whole strategic approach, as outlined by Trotsky and dogmatically accepted by his supporters, of revolutionising unions is a valid Marxist-Leninist proposition. Arising from the debâcle of the docks episode, and the more recent militant electricians’ breakaway and their isolation from the mass of electrical workers, this concept of ‘independent’ and ‘revolutionary’ unions should be subjected to analysis and discussion, particularly as it immediately and directly affects workers in the early stages of their struggles both within and outside of the unions.
So far this question has been ignored. And so we carry on in the pages of Workers Press and elsewhere advocating this erroneous policy, which is doomed to failure from the start, of fighting for revolutionary and independent unions, as opposed to independent rank and file combat organisations that would exist alongside the reformist unions as autonomous bodies, free from the control and discipline of trade union officialdom.
In ‘hindsight’, in the light of the defeat of the exodus to the Blues, the thin line of defence has been drawn, suggesting that it was not so much the Club’s policy of wanting or initiating a split, but rather a question of its giving support to what the dockers wanted and to their spontaneous action. Archer says, ‘who else was there, if anyone, who could credibly offer to the dockers what they wanted ...?’, and again, ‘in this particular case, the “Club” could agree with the experienced “unofficial” leaders that they could best help to mobilise the forces ... helping the dockers to find a new, hopefully democratic, centre around which to organise’. And: ‘What the dockers needed was a group that could hear them, could listen to them, could understand what they had been through, and could help them to do what they thought had to be done.’ This manoeuvre of disclaiming responsibility and shifting the onus for the breakaway onto the dockers is embraced by other former Club members. Hunter writes in the Workers Press of 29 April 1995 that a ‘break to the Blue union was discussed many times by members of our group, and it was the dockers’ leaders who pressed us to support it’. In the same issue, Dave Finch endorses Hunter’s statement in his book that ‘the Trotskyists supported and assisted the break to the Blue union in the North’. Nowhere do we find these former Club leaders admitting their rôle in initiating and leading the dockers’ breakaway. Nowhere do we find them admitting to mistakes on this issue, and, as alleged Marxists, searching openly and honestly before the working class movement for an explanation of why things went wrong. Instead, they make excuses and continue with the old false policies, as if nothing really serious had happened. Only Harry Ratner in his Reluctant Revolutionary admits that ‘it is certainly true that the breakaway was not finally successful’. However, instead of drawing conclusions and lessons from this failure, he sidesteps the question, stating that Hunter may be correct, that it was ‘not doomed’ to failure. The very fact that it did fail demands that we ask why.
That they intend to carry on with the old incorrect policies of supporting breakaways from unions is borne out both by their support for the electricians’ breakaway, and by Dot Gibson’s review of Hunter’s book (Workers Press, 3 September 1994): ‘The dockers’ mass strikes raised the question of the need for revolutionary trade unions ... We Trotskyists were a very small group, but our historical goals [revolutionary unions] met up with the dockers’ aspirations.’ One would think that this marriage between Trotskyist ‘historical goals’ and the ‘dockers’ aspirations’ was a roaring success – not one word do we read about the fatal effect of this marriage!
Archer infers several times that I’m a ‘Stalinist’, and just as the old smear ‘Trotskyist’ was used to cover a multitude of sins by their accusers, so he uses the term ‘Stalinist’ to avoid engaging in reasoned discussion on the basis of an historical analysis of events. For your information, John, I left the Communist Party in 1945 in protest against its support for a Labour-Liberal-Tory coalition government. I have consistently opposed the Stalinists ever since then on the basis of the struggle for a genuine Leninist Communist Party. As a member of the old Electrical Trades Union that was dominated by the Stalinists, I was tried in 1958 by the London District Office for ‘bringing the union into disrepute’, that is to say, criticising and actively opposing the leadership. As you correctly say, the ETU ended up ‘in the clutches of a right wing dictator’, John Byrne (and Les Cannon). However, did you know that this was due in no small measure to the fact that the Club’s policy was for its ETU members to nominate and campaign for Byrne, who was a member of both the Labour Party and Catholic Action, for the post of General Secretary? (If not, maybe Dave Finch can enlighten you.) ETU members in the SWL criticised this reactionary position, and suggested that rank and file members should be nominated for office on a militant programme. This caused Healy to approach me on a May Day demonstration, and declare: ‘Cowan, if you carry on slandering my lads in the ETU, I will put my boys onto you.’ And off he went, without my chance of a reply. Old Healyite habits die hard, eh? This was during the 1950s, when Archer considers Healy was ‘at his best’, a period when Healy used – literally – to kick his opponents into line, and sexually abused his female members; a period Archer refers to as ‘principled “entry” work’, when Healy’s faction voted for the expulsion from the Labour Party of Trotskyists of a different faction to curry favour with the right wing leaders, and thus to stay in the party. Perhaps Dave Finch can provide details of this as well.
Despite all this and more, Archer would have us believe that Healy was not capable of executing such a ‘bureaucratic manoeuvre’ of initiating the dockers’ exodus in order to strengthen his position within the Labour Party’s Bevanite left! ‘I could “suggest” no such thing’, he says, ‘It would have made no sense.’ However, Dave Finch, a member of the Club’s National Committee, admitted in Workers Press (29 April 1995) that ‘had the Blue union been strengthened ... it would have enormously strengthened the left in the Labour Party and unions – at that time centred around the Bevanites’. Of course it would, and it is useless for Archer to deny it, for as Finch continues, ‘opportunities opened up to the small group of revolutionary Socialists [the Club] attempting to find a mass base among an important section of workers’.
At the beginning of his diatribe, Archer accuses me of having contempt for the dockers, and infers that I despised them. To put the record straight, let me say that as a worker myself, with a record of militant struggle of which I am proud, I do not and have no need to bow down and patronise any section of the working class and its spontaneity. Furthermore, as a Communist, it is my duty, as with other Communists, to tell the workers the truth, even though one may temporarily lose their support, as was the case with the SWL and Constable & Co. To know that one has been true to one’s cause and class is the greatest stimulant to carry one forward, confident of the future victory of our struggles. There is no other answer I can give to the infantile accusations levelled against me.
Keith Sinclair’s pamphlet is available from 27 Strathmore Avenue, Hull HU6 7JH; John Archer’s is available from Old Tavern, Upper Denby, Huddersfield HD8 8UN; and the SWL’s documents are available for 75p from Tom Cowan c/o Revolutionary History.
If Stalin were so bent on revolution and on imposing his rule right across Europe after the Second World War, why did he not mobilise his multi-million ‘army’ in the official Communist movement? Raack says: ‘Stalin had apparently relied on the local Communist parties in France and Italy as effective fifth columns, prepared to deliver those nations over to a Soviet-united Europe, “like ripe fruit”, when the proper time arrived.’ (p. 233) This is nonsense. The French and Italian Communist Parties had mass support and hundreds of thousands of armed men and women under their direct command or influence. A ‘revolution in the rear’ as the Hitler regime started to collapse would have caused havoc. And yet the Stalinists in France and Italy preferred to rebuild the capitalist state and power structures, rather than attempt to seize power. The ‘proper time’ had come and gone by mid-1947, when the official Communist movement finally adopted a militant pose.
Raack talks about Stalin’s plans for Asia, but does not mention that he was deeply suspicious of Mao’s plans to seize power, and only reluctantly and belatedly backed Kim’s demands to invade the south of Korea. Raack does not mention that Stalin withdrew from Austria and northern Iran, and he quotes from Djilas’ Conversations with Stalin, but not the bit where Stalin tells the Yugoslavs to abandon the Greek Communists to their fate. As for Finland, he says that Stalin was worried about how the USA would respond to its annexation, so he did not invade it; a feeble explanation if ever I heard one. By and large, it cannot be denied that Stalin and his successors generally kept to the terms of the Yalta agreement.
The problem always facing the ‘roll back’ proponents is that the post-1945 international settlement worked very well for the USA, which is why so many of them came to accept it once they assumed positions of responsibility. The bipolar world enabled the USA to gain almost complete hegemony over its half. The division of Germany ensured that its potential full strength and thus disruptive capabilities could not be realised, and Europe experienced its most stable period in modern times. The existence of a repressive state masquerading under the guise of Socialism did much to discredit the idea of fundamental social change. It is hardly surprising that there is considerable disquiet within US ruling circles now that the bipolar world has gone into history.
Like so many of the conservatives’ recent efforts, this book, with its intemperate style and omission of crucial facts, harks back to the kind of works that were the norm at the height of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yes, the conservatives are mounting a clamorous counter-attack upon the historians and analysts who have done much to demystify the rôle of the Soviet Union on the international stage, but they are fighting a rearguard battle, and objective observers have little to fear from them.
Baruch Hirson is one of the very few to have been part of that non-Stalinist left, active in one capacity or another since the early 1940s. This position enables him to give us a wealth of unique insights into the history and development of South Africa in this century, and glimpses of viewpoints, problems and perspectives which have remained largely absent from the public domain. The cover notes on Revolutions in My Life include the comment that Hirson has ‘strong opinions on everything from people to politics, making entertaining if controversial reading’. This is a true but also a trivialising statement: he is not being controversial for its own sake. The challenge of Hirson’s arguments and perspectives is seminal. No attempt to tackle the history and problems of South Africa can now be valid if it does not take into account the issues raised by these two books. One can agree or disagree with Hirson’s arguments, but they cannot be ignored.
The Delegate for Africa deals with the precursors and earliest years of the Third International, and Revolutions in My Life deals with the 1940s through to the 1960s, yet there are essential links between them. The central characters in both books are almost all white. Given the nature of South Africa, South African politics and concerns about South Africa, this needs to be said. Not only are they white, but in several cases immigrants. This is not a problem of selectivity on Hirson’s part. It is a material fact in the history of the South African Socialist and Marxist movements which has been of profound historical significance. White immigrants into South Africa arrived not just as colonial masters and adventurers, but also as a workforce. White labour arrived from the late 1880s not just as a sizeable workforce, but also as a workforce which brought with it elements of European labour organisational and Socialist traditions. Initially, the main elements of this labour force came from the British Isles, and slightly later a significant East European element also appeared. Although of lesser status, South Africa thus featured alongside North America, Australia and New Zealand for some of those seeking new beginnings.
The story of the ‘delegate for Africa’ to the first congress of the Third International thus begins not in Africa, but in Wales. The biography of David Ivon Jones is in two distinct parts. The first, written by Gwyn Williams, focuses primarily on his early life in Wales; the second, written by Hirson, follows him through South Africa to Moscow. The story of Jones’ evolution from a background in radical Welsh non-conformism is of immense value in its own right. It is a timely reminder that the radical proletarian and Socialist traditions of industrial South Wales were not the only ones to feed into the labour movement as it existed at the turn of the century. There is also food for thought in the fact that two of the most influential earliest proponents of interracial labour solidarity in South Africa, Ivon Jones and S.P. Bunting, both came from backgrounds steeped in theological radicalism, whereas more narrowly materialist labour activists were more easily drawn into dangerously ambiguous positions, as exemplified by the Rand General Strike of 1922.
Jones is revealed as one amongst many to arrive in South Africa almost by accident. Emigrating for the sake of his health, his originally intended destination was New Zealand (later on, others from Baltic Russia actually thought they were heading for the USA!). Initially settling into Rand society in the turbulent years of 1912–14, Jones was still little more than a radical deist liberal, but his keen intellect was spurred to question the situation in which he found himself. White labour was under tremendous pressure, with lower wage rates and worse conditions of work than elsewhere, squeezed by the ‘Randlord’ employers’ attempts to undercut rates and conditions by using unskilled black labour held under conditions of virtual slavery. White labour was hitting out almost blindly in all directions, leading to a series of violent clashes with the authorities, whilst engaging against employers one minute, and against the contrived ‘black threat’ the next. The desperate depths of the struggle led Jones first to the conclusion that it was the very treatment of white workers as human beings that was at stake: ‘They were not engaged in a revolt merely to raise the standards of wages, but to raise the standard of manhood.’ This led him straight to the tiny handful who were already declaring that they needed to ‘fight for human rights, whether for the coloured or white people’. But both whites and Indians, including Ghandi, were not averse to playing with the authorities for sectional advantage.
We are not dealing here with a mass or sizeable movement of any sort, merely the personal evolution of a tiny handful of individuals. But by 1915 a small group, including Jones and Bunting, had reached the point of breaking with established labour. Their new grouping, the anti-war International Socialist Organisation of South Africa, was to be the germ from which future South African Marxism and Communism would spring. Strongly influenced by De Leon as well as Marx, the International Socialist League (as it became) began a sustained effort to combat segregationism: ‘The employing class, which exploits all labour without prejudice ... strives to perpetuate that colour prejudice in the ranks of the workers themselves ... It is for the white workers to stretch out the hand of industrial unity to the native workers.’
I have emphasised this prehistory of South African revolutionary Socialism which the Jones biography now reveals in unique detail, as it is so essential for the understanding of any of the subsequent developments. A reading of The Delegate for Africa should be required reading for anyone who would now presume to comment on any aspect of the subsequent labour, liberation or revolutionary movements. Hirson’s seminal treatment of the 1922 Rand General Strike, the ‘Red Revolt on the Rand’, where the fledgling Communist Party of South Africa struggled to encompass a movement to defend white labour against further degradation, and produced the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa’, produces many disturbing questions about the origins of apartheid thinking. The line between combating a descent to the conditions of black labour and wishing to be rid of black labour itself was not easy to hold. And for white workers this was a desperate and defensive struggle for survival from which almost any lifeline was likely to be grasped.
Nor was this the only problem. By 1922 Jones himself was in Russia, from where work for the Third International and then health problems were to lead him never to return. Here again the detailing of Jones’ central rôle at the heart of events, coupled with Hirson’s excellent placing and contextualisation of the debates, sheds unique and essential light on the difficulties of the Third International in establishing a position and giving a lead on the racial question. Race and colonial questions were important to the Third International, but not, it must be said, the most important items on its immediate agenda. The failure satisfactorily to resolve the contradictions between the stances on anti-colonialism, Garveyist middle class black nationalism, and labour solidarity are all very revealing of future problems in the strategies of the Communist Party. The compounding of these problems through the use of commissions with overlapping and contradictory remits played its part here. Ultimately, the CPSA was left to work out its own salvation, as official resolutions focused on the racial question in the USA and of colonisation in general, and the special insights of Jones and Bunting regarding the peculiar aspects of the South African situation failed to gain official endorsement (further light is also shed on this in Searchlight South Africa, no. 3, July 1989, where transcripts of the Bunting-Bukharin debate of 1928 are reproduced). But ultimately, of course, local autonomy was not the case either. The death of Jones in 1924, and the expulsion of Bunting in 1931 in the first stages of the Stalinisation of the CPSA, were to remove even this avenue to salvation. And as detailed elsewhere (see Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 4), South African Trotskyists in the 1930s were never able satisfactorily to resolve these problems, or to break out of their situation of isolation.
Baruch Hirson’s autobiography effectively begins at the very end of this dark chapter, and at the threshold of an even darker chapter, that of institutionalised Apartheid. Hirson’s entry into Marxist politics in the 1940s came through his involvement in the last actions of the openly Trotskyist groups dating from the pre-war period. Like many of the earlier members of these groups, however, Hirson’s political apprenticeship began in the Rand Jewish community in which he grew up. This community was of Baltic Russian origin, with large numbers originally from Latvia and Lithuania in particular. Many families had arrived as exiles from Tsarist Russia, and had living and personal links with European revolutionary groups. Links also existed with Zionist and other Jewish groups, and with Palestine itself. Hirson’s own personal and family history outlined here provides a marvellous placing of this community and the multi-faceted milieux within it in South Africa. His own introduction to Marxism came through the Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair, one of the few Socialist milieux where Stalinism, although present, was not completely dominant.
The detailing of Hirson’s involvement and activities with the Trotskyist groups of 1943–46 has to be read to be appreciated, as has his detailing of the earlier period. The shattering effects of the closing down of trade union activity by the Trotskyist Workers International League and the coming into being of institutionalised Apartheid hardly need emphasising. And the difficulties of finding academic and teaching work as a known dissident, maintaining personal integrity, and finding a meaningful rôle in a situation of almost total political isolation, all provide enlightening testimony: ‘It was possible to mix with hundreds of students, see many lecturers and still feel intensely lonely.’ Yet it was only because he was a physicist that work could be found at all, as one colleague pointed out: ‘“If you did have a degree in the humanities you would never have been appointed to the staff at Wits.” Physics was “safe” for a radical, but no history or sociology department would have appointed me.’
The relevance, effectiveness and validity of the Non-European Unity Movement initiative taken by some of the black and coloured former Trotskyists during this period is still hotly debatable, but at least given the treatment here this, too, can now be on a more informed basis (see Hirson’s further treatment of the NEUM in Searchlight South Africa, no. 12, June 1995). But even more controversial is the eventual assumption of the tactics of sabotage by the anti-Apartheid activists, including Hirson himself. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre is central here. Despite the ANC and PNC developments, the emergence of SACTU, and the anti-Pass Law protests, the feeling is clearly reflected that fruitful action against Apartheid seemed as far away as ever. In fact, if anything, with the National Party’s political and security offensive, which had been underway since 1957–58, the situation looked bleaker than ever. The revelation of the depths of the impasse as felt on the inside by opponents of the regime are powerfully chronicled here. Simultaneously, it seemed necessary to go even further ‘underground’ in order to survive, and yet it was necessary to produce public acts of defiance to deny the regime the legitimacy of acquiescence through silence. Shades of the psychology behind 1916 in Ireland, one wonders? Symbolic action was necessary to maintain the self-respect of a movement and a people. This seemed more necessary than ever in the aftermath of Sharpeville and the Treason Trials.
Hirson was arrested and tried for his rôle in the sabotage campaign in 1964. He was imprisoned for nine years, and came into exile in England after his release in 1973. Even in his accounts of the time of his imprisonment, however, the divisions maintained by Stalinism within the anti-Apartheid movement continue to be revealed. Did the anti-Stalinist Marxists of the Socialist League who had played such a central rôle in the creation of the anti-Apartheid sabotage groups achieve what they could and should have done? Opinions will vary, but no one can gainsay the value of such an account from the inside. The value of both of the books reviewed here for comprehending what has happened inside South African Socialism and Marxism, warts and all, is immense. But there is also much to be learnt by inference regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the new regime, and what it is necessary still to do.
When Revolt foundered on the rocks, Gerry Healy, anxious to recruit them to the Socialist Labour League, sped to Glasgow. The ever-optimistic Gerry had even obligingly written a public declaration, recounting all the virtues of the SLL, which he expected them to sign. But, alas, they were not so obliging. Further amorous advances, extending over many years, were made by the Socialist Workers Party. These, again, were rebuffed. They did not see Tony Cliff as the messiah.
Perhaps the reluctance of Les Forster and his comrades to join any of the Trotskyist tendencies partly arose because they thought that these organisations shared some of the characteristics of the Communist Party, a political line that was determined from the centre. Yet it was probably also as a result of the great importance they attached to local issues. They were usually preoccupied with purely Clydeside affairs, not with building a national organisation.
The great value of this book is the fresh light it throws on working class politics in Glasgow. The fight for better education and housing, and the struggles of the railwaymen and of the left on Glasgow Trades Council; all the time the emphasis was placed on rank and file activity, the need for militancy rather than parliament to find the solutions. Throughout, Harry McShane remains a father-figure, a leader who always espouses the doctrine of Socialist Humanism.
It seems a shame that Les Forster did not recount the final days of Harry McShane. As Les, Hugh Savage and others know better than I, Harry McShane died cursing Tony Cliff and the SWP. He thought that he had been used by them; his name would appear on billboards advertising public meetings, and his reputation would attract a bigger audience. Yet at these actual meetings, they would confine him to making a token appearance. He was there for decoration, not for a political contribution.
Harry McShane’s hostility did not stop Tony Cliff and his cronies from flying up from London to hijack his funeral. They hoped to claim his corpse for the greater glory of the SWP. However, their attempt did not succeed.
This book can be obtained from the author, 24 Keystone Avenue, Milnagavie, Strathclyde G62 6HZ.
Whilst developing her analysis the writer deals damaging blows to the naive assumption that capitalism alone is a society built on competition, and the fiercely competitive mechanism of Aztec society had the added unpleasantness that it centred around obtaining human sacrificial victims. Socialists who have for so long accepted Lewis Henry Morgan’s analysis of it as some sort of ‘democracy’ in Ancient Society and Montezuma’s Dinner should take a good hard look at this book. So however we may regret the loss of so much beautiful art, which can be sampled by a visit to the British Museum’s new Mexican gallery, it was not the least of Spanish imperialism’s achievements during its ‘golden century’ to have swept this appalling system away, whatever we may feel about what replaced it.
Of course, the Aztecs were not the first civilisation in the Valley of Mexico to develop so spectacularly, or to fall so completely. Whilst the author has an acute sense of the rapidity with which Aztec society developed, she does not agree that it was bound for a collapse that could be just as rapid. Here she departs from the view held previously that this society had already overreached itself by the time of the Spanish conquest, describing the idea that ‘any polity has “inevitable limits”, to be an underestimation of ‘the flexibility of human arrangements and invention’ (p. 309, n41). This has probably more to do with the self-confidence of American capitalism during its own ‘golden century’ than with any generalisation about society based upon history, which has always passed its own verdict on imperial splendour. But be that as it may, it does not alter the fact that this book is useful, informative and enjoyable.
North of the border, he reappeared under the name of Lewis Corey, initiating a tangled pattern of Communist Party fellow-travelling. He was a key organiser for the League of Professional Groups, which sought to capitalise on the party’s election campaign of 1932, but never quite won the trust of its leadership. He penned The Decline of American Capitalism (1934), an underconsumptionist account of the slump, which stood out largely due to the absence of a serious competitor in the field of political economy, and The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), which became something of an unofficial handbook for Popular Front politics. However, his relationship with the Communist Party disintegrated, and he enjoyed a brief sojourn on the anti-Stalinist left, notably with the Modern Quarterly. By 1940 he was explicitly hostile to Marxism. He died in 1953, after a lengthy period awaiting deportation for ‘un-American activities’ committed in the 1920s and 1930s.
Buhle’s work is a masterful demonstration of the way that Fraina/Corey’s experiences bridged the divide between the immigrant radical and the committed intellectual. Where it is less useful is in its avowed ‘presentist’ stance. Given the 1990s emphasis on ‘culture’ as the basic building block for social change (or even for comprehending society), Buhle sometimes appears to be reading history backwards. He sees a mass-scale cultural avant-garde of the sort championed by Fraina as the most viable part of the latter’s critique, and potentially the springboard for an opposition movement. Buhle contrasts this to a bankrupt ‘Leninism’, which is summarily dismissed as a detour. Surely a stronger case exists for locating the modernist upsurge of the second decade of this century as part of the wider social ferment that contributed to the demand for Leninist parties. Obviously, cultural production and Communist politics are distinctive activities, but it isn’t necessarily legitimate to counterpose the two. The ‘presentism’ of this account is also apparent when Corey is criticised for lacking environmental awareness!
Overall, this is a useful work, and is a welcome addition to the growing library on the interwar radical left. However, it should also remind us of a key problem of revolutionary historiography: whilst we can learn from history, we should also avoid judging its participants by inappropriate contemporary standards.
As far as religion fitted into this, it seems that the ‘temple-state’ construct of ancient society held by Gordon Childe and Deimel can no longer be justified in the present state of our knowledge (pp. 109, 292): ‘We cannot any longer maintain that because the temple collected commodities and distributed them to its dependants the entire economy operated through “redistribution”, or that the priests controlled all agricultural production and commercial activity’, Dr Postgate considers, but ‘we must not overcompensate, and so underrate the importance of the temple’s rôle.’ (p. 109) Speaking of the archives of the Bau temple at Lagash just before the rise of Sargon I, he notes that even if ‘the accepted opinion that the temples were the state has been drastically revised’, ‘nevertheless the range of the temple’s economic activities recorded in the texts remains unchanged ... including the control of irrigation waters’ (p. 115). Even writing itself appears to be a by-product of the wealth accumulated by the Eanna temple at Erech, where history’s earliest records on clay tablets (developed from what were previously clay bullae marked with numerals and commodities) originate in administrative lists, a genre that along with lexical material (according to table 3:13 on page 66) begins earlier and continues later than any other written form.
Temples remained important sources of wealth, power and status to king and commoner alike throughout Mesopotamian history. The reversion of offerings was a valued source of revenue. To begin with, cultic offerings must have gone to the regular staff of the temples, but ‘in the course of time, as in the temples of contemporary Egypt, many of these posts became sinecures, the tenure of which could be passed on, whether by inheritance, rôle, or even rental’ (p. 125) (we even have deeds of sale for temple offices in Egypt). When the paternal estate was divided at death in Nippur the temple offices came into the possession of the eldest son, and each individual might own more than one office at a time (as was common practice in Egypt as well). This has led Assyriologists to describe these usages as ‘prebends’, on the analogy of the pluralism of the late Medieval church. Rather more than a perk was the practice that as early as pre-Sargonid Lagash ‘a major part of the land was assigned to the office-holders of the temple for their sustenance, and can be called “prebend fields” ... as one might expect, the area assigned varied in proportion to the importance of the holder’ (p. 126).
The cult had a no less important a function in society as a whole:
Nonetheless, the shift from sacred to secular, and from institutional to private activity already noticed (Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 3, p. 104) obviously comes into play here, so that although ‘in the early third millennium the temples would have been the principal actors’, ‘there do seem to be various indications during the period 2500–1500 BC of the formal transfer of power from the temples to the palace’. The first indications of conflict between the two appear during the reign of Urukagina of Lagash (c 2380 BC), King Shulgi of Ur (2095–2047 BC) appears to have placed the temples under the supervision of secular appointees and used them ‘as an arm of the state economy’, and this was repeated by Hammurapi of Babylon (p. 300; 1792–1749 BC). And ‘as far as the private sector is concerned, another frequently asserted trend is the development of private property at the expense of the state after the collapse of the UR III Dynasty’ (p. 292; 2006 BC).
This leads on to a fascinating section (pp. 292ff.) dealing with Dark Ages and Intermediate periods as ‘obvious sources of social change’. These are, of course, a feature of contemporary Egyptian society as well, but whereas there the political structure on the whole maintained its basic unity, the city state was the rule rather than the exception in ancient Iraq, and the pattern here is of a very brief period of conquest of a surprisingly large area, followed by a relapse into internecine city state warfare. As in Egypt, there is an absence of relevant written information, which is ‘obviously symptomatic of conditions, but also veils from us the nature of events’ (p299). But there are some indications that some of these interludes might result from the collapse of a top-heavy state, freeing initiative from below. Speaking of extreme bureaucratism during the Third Dynasty of Ur, during which the title of scribe is used ‘almost as though it were a class’ (p. 153), Dr Postgate feels that ‘when the death of a single sheep appears three times in the government archives, it is hard to believe that the bureaucratic ideal had not become an encumbrance which ultimately contributed to the state’s inability to respond to internal and external threats’ (p. 42). During the same period there was an absolute ban on land sales (p. 183), and perhaps what amounted to a state monopoly of foreign trade, since ‘down to and including the UR III Dynasty the merchant class was indeed partly in the direct employ of the institutions’ (p. 220). But during the Isin-Larsa period that followed (2006–1763 BC), this trade fell into the hands of groups of merchants, for ‘the bureaucratic pyramid of the UR III system could not have survived the collapse of the state, and the local kings could have had neither the capital nor the administrative staff to re-establish a comparable level of inter-state commerce’ (p. 221). Indeed, the ‘apparent shift towards private from institutional enterprise’ (p. 22) is seen as a general feature of development.
Ancient Mesopotamian society always suffered from the same problem of stability and continuity as the later Roman Empire, in that there was no necessary legal reason why any king should be succeeded by his son, as Dr Postgate reminded us in his book (p. 270). Obviously dynasties were established based on the prestige of one successful king or another, but few of them lasted more than a century or so. This built-in instability was particularly the case with the last neo-Babylonian dynasty, where Nebuchadrezzar II’s son was dethroned by the army commander Nergal-sharezer, whose son in turn was overthrown by Nabonidus himself. At the same time the rising power of Iran threatened to engulf the state and its civilisation as a whole.
The analysis set out here allows us a unique glimpse into how this society attempted to meet the threat to its existence, and the forms of internal conflict that raged between the different factions as to how this should be done. It is clear that for Nabonidus the traditions of Babylon alone were too narrow a basis upon which to assure survival. A previous researcher had already drawn attention to ‘the idea of imperial continuity with Assyria, centred on the figure of Ashurbanipal’ as one of ‘the main characteristics of Nabonidus’ personality’ (p. 2), to which our writer adds that ‘according to him, the successive empires of Assyria and Babylonia were two historical manifestations of the same imperial idea, and royal legitimacy rested more on the ability to fulfil the imperial mission than on a legalistic claim to the throne by right of descent’ (p. 140).
Nabonidus appears to have been an outsider, an Aramaean with a military background, ‘an able ruler who tried to save a hastily built and unstable empire from internal political turmoil and from an uneasy, if not desperate position on the international scene’ (p. xiii). Although we moderns would separate out his policies for achieving this into religious, economic and foreign, it is clear that no such divisions existed within the society of the time. Nabonidus’ mysterious 10 year absence in Teima, for example, ‘may well have been provoked by a split between him and an influential party led by his son’ (p. 63), but it was also a logical continuation of the expansion of the last Assyrian emperors and of Nebuchadrezzar II into this area, which controlled the wealth of all the trade from the east (pp. 178–81), possession of which could well have tipped the balance in the war that followed.
A similar picture emerges with what we might call religious policy, which was never a simple matter of individual conscience in the ancient Near East. ‘Royal interference with temple affairs often indicates a major shift of policy at court’, comments Dr Beaulieu (p. 234). Nabonidus evidently regarded himself as heir to the pretensions of the Sargonid dynasty of the Assyrian Empire (722–609 BC), and attempted to mobilise the whole of the cultural tradition of Mesopotamian civilisation in his defence, for which the city cults of the Babylonian heartland were too restricted in their appeal. His long-term aim to restore the cult of the god Sin at Harran, the last bastion of Assyrian power, was also a vital strategic goal, since its dominating position was under the control of the Medes: ‘Nabonidus’ motives for this may have been primarily personal, but the way he translated them into political terms suggests that the issue was subordinate to a broader one, the contest for hegemony over the Near East between the Medes and the Babylonians, a problem which had remained unresolved ever since the downfall of Assyria at the end of the sixth [sic] century’. (p. 114) So his anxiety to re-establish the cult of this temple not only ‘involved a redefinition of the respective spheres of Median and Babylonian influence in the Near East’ (p. 143–4), but ‘the inclusion of Harran in the Babylonian realm necessitated the breakdown of the Median kingdom’ (p. 114).
By demonstrating that ‘it is virtually impossible to draw a firm line between religion and politics when trying to evaluate Nabonidus’ goals’ (p. 110), Dr Beaulieu takes us right to the heart of the functioning mechanism of pre-classical society on the eve of its collapse. So that in spite of their very different aims and focus, these two books ideally complement each other.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Jim Higgins
The Ideas of Leon Trotsky
(Summer 1996)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 6 No. 2/3, Summer 1996, pp. 265-69.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox (eds.)
The Ideas of Leon Trotsky
Porcupine Press, London, 1995, pp. 386, £14.95
The Ideas of Leon Trotsky
Porcupine Press, London, 1995, pp. 386, £14.95
A QUARTER of a century ago in the publishing world Marxism was big. Almost anything that was not straight Stalinism found a publisher. Menshevik, Austro-Marxist, left Social Democrat, all was grist to the publisher’s mill. In particular, there was a good sale for books by and about Lenin and Trotsky. They led the field, and the rest were also-rans. Those days are long past, but I am pleased to see that genuine quality still sells, and Trotsky is most definitely quality. Indeed, it is clear that in the current popularity stakes he is well ahead of Lenin. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that this might be because Isaac Deutscher wrote three volumes on Trotsky, and Tony Cliff wrote four volumes on Lenin. Then I recalled that Cliff has also written a few volumes on Trotsky, which should have redressed the balance. Poor Lev Davidovich; after a life full of tragedy, that he should suffer the farce of being snipped by Cliff’s scissors and drowned in his paste.
The Ideas of Leon Trotsky, a selection of articles from Critique, is one of the better examples of the genre, although I would not go so far as the editors, who claim in their introduction that it is “the most significant volume ever to be published on Trotsky”. One of the less endearing traits to be found in the revolutionary movement is the making of grandiloquent claims. Gerry Healy, for example, used to claim that he had “the finest political headquarters in Britain”. This would have been true if he had deleted “Britain” and inserted “Clapham High Street”, because it was certainly grander than the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s head office in the same street. Perhaps it would be better to say that it is the most significant volume on Trotsky ever edited by Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox.While on the subject of the introduction, it might be as well to include another small niggle. On page one, as part of a generally laudatory paragraph about Trotsky, our editors feel moved to say: “Even his mistakes live on in the works of those who might not even be aware of Trotsky’s contribution to thought.” Try getting your mind round that after a few bottles of Carlsberg Special. Alternatively, try it stone cold sober. It seems to mean that there is someone – I picture an unworldly academic, in the public baths at Syracuse – who cries: “Eureka, I think Stalinist Russia is a workers’ state, better found the Fourth International.” Whether our idiot savant might further decide to stay away from Lenin’s funeral, and regret his failure to militarise labour, probably depends on whether he had overfulfilled his norm of mistakes for that week.
As I say, though, these are really niggles, and the volume here under review is worth having. Whilst the content obviously represents the concerns of the editors, the contributors nevertheless do not all come from the same stable. We have, for example, an article by John Molyneux quite effectively taking Baruch Knei-Paz and his book, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, to the cleaners (why is it that whenever I hear the name Knei-Paz I think of the protection worn by carpet layers?). Immediately preceding this we have an article by David Law rubbishing Molyneux’s own book, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution. One assumes that this juxtaposition is intentional, but one hopes that it is not intended to cause offence.
This is a collection that is, broadly, attempting to come to terms with the immensely rich, but extremely complicated and sometimes contradictory heritage of Leon Trotsky. Inevitably, it covers a lot of ground that has over almost 70 years been trampled to concrete hardness by the tiny feet of several generations of Trotskyists. The class nature of Russia and the satellites is raised by both Ticktin and Cox, and without too much difficulty they dispose of the “workers’ state” theory. If LDT was in error, he is at least awarded marks for his willingness to shift on the question, and for the indications he made that a Stalinist workers’ state was a special case, limited in time, a contradiction that would inevitably find its resolution in class-based exploitation or a second revolution. The bureaucratic collectivist thesis also comes in for some stick, and whilst state capitalism is not directly attacked, the secondary evidence suggests that at least the Cliff and Dunayevskaya variants are not acceptable either. Which might lead one to ask: “Tell us please, comrade editors, what is this bloody monstrosity then?”
One feels this particularly in an otherwise excellent piece by Michael Cox, Trotsky’s Misinterpreters and the Collapse of Stalinism, in which he gives vent to the following statement: “Trotsky had few problems fending off critics such as Shachtman and Dunayevskaya because both individually and collectively they really didn’t provide much of a theoretical alternative.” Now it is perfectly respectable to prefer Trotsky’s arguments to Dunayevskaya’s state capitalism or Shachtman’s bureaucratic collectivism. The thing you cannot have, however, is Trotsky getting the better of them both, because he did not argue the Russian question with Dunayevskaya, and Shachtman did not adopt the bureaucratic collectivist theory until after LDT’s death. This is slipshod and a pity, because one is preoccupied with the howler, and is liable to miss the meat of the paragraph, which goes on to say something that is both true and needed saying: “This highly charged discussion, however, had a number of unfortunate consequences. Most obviously, it tended to push Trotsky and his followers into an ideologically rigid mould from which they never escaped. It also made the whole debate on Stalinism highly sectarian. Thus what began life as a potentially fruitful dialogue on the left about the nature of Socialism was soon transformed into a sterile fight between ideological militants who neither cared nor listened to what their opponents had to say.” It is an unfortunate fact, here attested by Michael Cox, that each contending theory is far more convincing in its criticism of different evaluations than as a theory in its own right.
The problem, though, was not only that the varying schools of thought could only contend at a distance, beyond the range of sticks and stones, but also that LDT taught his followers that nationalisation, plus planning, plus the monopoly of foreign trade were good and sufficient reasons for a nation to be hall-marked as a workers’ state. For Trotsky it may have been axiomatic that the working class had to be involved in creating this state of affairs, but unfortunately he did not say so. The export to Eastern Europe of these three elements, on the points of Russian bayonets, required orthodox Trotskyists to perform mental gymnastics to account for the post-war reality which would have done severe damage to any psyche less pliable than that of Ernest Mandel. In commenting on this phenomenon in the pages of the New International in 1948, Hal Draper quoted the immortal lines of Samuel Hoffenstein:
The small chameleon has the knack,
Of turning blue or green or black. And yet, whatever hue he don, He stays a small chameleon. |
Lines that have lost none of their resonance over the years.
I particularly liked the essay by Lynne Poole, Lenin and Trotsky: A Question of Organisational Form, even if I hated the title. It argues persuasively that in the pre-1917 disputes, Lenin did not always have the best of the exchanges. This, of course, flies not only in the face of received wisdom in our tradition, but also the words of Trotsky himself. Regardless of all that, I confess I am with Lynne Poole on this one. It really is well past the time when we should stop making shamefaced excuses for What Is To Be Done?. Trotsky and Luxemburg were undoubtedly correct in their criticisms. It is an interesting fact of revolutionary group life that every small-time autocrat shows great enthusiasm for this work. Not only must the Socialist message be brought down from on high to the workers by benevolent non-proletarians, but it must be done again and again and again. Such munificence must, naturally, be rewarded by leadership, preferably in perpetuity. What can only be justified, if then, by the special case of Tsarist Russia acquires, for the faithful, all the strength of an Eleventh Commandment with universal application. In the process, great chunks of Marxism, like the dialectic, are flushed away. Incidentally, another slightly different, but also excellent, treatment of this subject is to be found in Duncan Hallas’ article Building the Revolutionary Party (International Socialism, no.79, June 1975). This, which purports to be a review of the first volume of Cliff’s Lenin, is both eminently sane and a salutary lesson in tightrope walking that would have made Blondin look a right amateur.I am also indebted to Lynne Poole for calling to attention another example of Tony Cliff’s increasingly spastic sleights of hand. She mentions an article of 1901, that Trotsky had written in favour of a strong Central Committee, even going so far as to suggest that branches failing to accept the CC’s instructions should be cut off from the party. Unfortunately, this particular piece has been lost, and the sole evidence for its existence is Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation. Here Trotsky specifically refutes his article of 1901 in favour of the position set out in Our Political Tasks. This disavowed article of 1901 is, according to Cliff, Trotsky’s real position, and his attack on What Is To Be Done? was merely an expression of his affection for Martov. The reason for Cliff’s retailing this load of old cobblers is probably because some years ago in the first flush of his renewed love affair with Vladimir Ilyich, while writing Volume One of his Lenin biography, Trotsky came off rather badly in the text. In his more recent biography of Trotsky, the main character emerges unsullied, a closet Bolshevik all the time. If this fantasy is intended to aggrandise Trotsky, it does nothing of the sort. We are expected to believe that LDT, a man of unflinching dedication to his politics, should have spent 14 years perpetuating a split with a powerful co-thinker, because Lenin had been nasty to his chum Martov. The notion is as insulting as it is grotesque. Apart from anything else, if there had been any truth in this story, it is certain that Trotsky would have found a way to use it in his defence against the accusations of anti-Bolshevism levelled by Stalin in the 1920s.
Trotsky’s conversion to Bolshevism, when it came, was root and branch. His encomium, “without the party we are nothing”, despite its all-embracing character, applies to just one party, the CPSU(b), and that judgement was time-bound in application. When it failed he built, in microcosm, parties on the same model, and, possibly because it was the only way he could play a rôle, there must be an International, a world centre to direct the coming revolution. To construct a chain with a small collection of weak links is to ensure that, at the first sign of strain, it will break into even smaller chains. The Fourth International is the (I almost said “living”) proof of this assertion. Given a certain generosity with the assumptions, it is of course a powerful idea, and one that still exercises the minds of some people; the break-up of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in the wake of Gerry Healy’s expulsion, has let loose on the world several additional sets of people, rebuilding, or reconstructing, or whatever you do to get a Fourth International. Experience does, however, suggest that proclamation is as good a method as any.
Trotsky at least had the justification that, for him, capitalism was in its death agony and Stalinism would not survive the hammer blows of war; therefore the Fourth International had to be in place to try and lead the revolution. Unfortunately, when the war did come, the thing that succumbed first was the Fourth International, under the impact of Russia’s pre-emptive annexation of the Karelian Isthmus, which in terms of world war was hardly a hammer blow. Nevertheless, for Trotsky the stark choice was Socialism or barbarism, and no one else was even aware that a choice had to be made. What for him was a duty, an obligation, for his latter day disciples is more of a hobby. There are few things better calculated to keep a chap out of mischief than working up a few theses on the world economy, or revolutionary prospects in faraway countries of which he knows little.
Of some interest too is Susan Weissman’s article, The Left Opposition Divided: The Trotsky-Serge Disputes – you will have gathered that the titles given to the articles are not the most inspired part of this volume – in which she details the rather extreme abuse that Trotsky heaped on the unfortunate Victor’s head, in such phrases as: “What do people of the Victor Serge type represent? ... these verbose, coquettish moralists, capable of bringing only trouble and decay, must be kept out of the revolutionary organisation even by cannon fire if necessary.” Susan Weissman suggests that some of this was due to misunderstanding, and some due to the machinations of Étienne (Mark Zborowski), Stalin’s agent in the Left Opposition in Paris, and she is probably right. What she does not mention is the fact that a number of people in Europe, including Trotsky’s son Sedov, were suspicious of the circumstances of Serge’s escape from Stalin’s clutches. Elizabeth Poretsky, who was married to Ignace Reiss, in her book, Our Own People, indicates that she wrote a report for Trotsky on Serge’s laxness in security matters. Walter Krivitsky also wrote a report for Trotsky, in which he came to the conclusion that Serge was a GPU agent. Henk Sneevliet, too, was convinced that there was a Stalinist agent in Sedov’s circle, finally and correctly concluding that it was Étienne. In all this welter of suspicion and accusation, very little of it susceptible to genuine proof, it was possible to see political disagreements as part of a cunning plan to sow discord in the ranks. Perhaps Serge was one of those innocents who needlessly suffered in an atmosphere poisoned by Stalinist terror.
There is much more in this book that is interesting, stimulating and provocative. Paul Flewers has done an excellent job in producing a clean and attractive text. The cover, on the other hand, is a bit weird; it has a picture of Trotsky’s head wearing what looks like an astrakhan hat, which is in the process of melting all over his face. I know astrakhan hats do not melt, but this it what it looks like. On closer inspection, the offending fur turns out to be people’s heads. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but the symbolism of all this escapes me.
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Review
Marxists and the Jewish Question
Enzo Traverso
The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843–1943)
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1994, pp. 276, £12.95
The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843–1943)
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1994, pp. 276, £12.95
A CONSIDERABLE amount of very solid research has gone into this book, which cannot be neglected by anyone with the temerity to approach the subject in future. Its stated aim is admitted right from the start as being to ‘try to establish up to what point the theory of the people-class was valid’ by arguing that ‘the economist reduction of the whole of Jewish history to the problematic of the people-class serves to obscure the cultural dimension, as much religious as secular’ (p. 5). Starting with Marx and Engels, going through the Marxism of the Second International, Austro-Marxism, the Bund, the Marxists of Poland and Russia, and ending with Abram Leon, the author tries to establish the one-sided character of the Marxist analysis of the problem. And given the milieu for which he writes, we have the obligatory chapters on Gramsci and Benjamin, in spite of the fact that the former had next to nothing to say about the subject, and the latter was anything but a Marxist.
Considerable strain is placed upon the evidence to make it fit his thesis. After marshalling all the material showing that Rosa Luxemburg repudiated specifically Jewish roots, he can still say that ‘even she could be defined as a granddaughter of the Haskalah’ on the grounds that ‘this declaration of love for the whole of oppressed humanity had a typically Jewish component, namely a universalism that could only be internalised thoroughly by those who had made their lives a meeting-point for the cultures of different nations’ (p. 49). Is not such ‘universalism’ the inheritance of all Marxists? This argument comes uncomfortably close to the contention that Marxist internationalism is part of some world Jewish conspiracy. Otto Bauer, on the other hand, who also denied that there was a territorial solution for the problem of the central European Jews, is accused of ‘a latent form of German nationalism’ that ‘imbued the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia of Vienna’ (pp. 80–1). For arguing against a federal party that would separate the struggle of the Jewish workers from those of the rest of the Tsarist Empire, the Russian Marxists are described as ‘totally incapable of understanding the real nature of the Bund’ (p. 100). Trotsky’s approach ‘completely ignored the national dimensions of the Jewish problem in Russia’ (p. 139), and Lenin had ‘no great concern with theoretical coherence’ (p. 130), even though their point is confirmed when it is later admitted that the Bund took no part in the Russian Revolution that played such a liberating rôle for the Jewish masses, and that its Eighth National Conference meeting in December 1917 had even condemned it (p. 151).The main target throughout, however, is none of these, but Abram Leon, whose ‘concept of the people-class is founded on a rigid economic determinism which prevented him from seeing the dialectical interdependence between the different historical factors’ (p. 218), a ‘vulgar materialist vision’ which ‘negated the relative autonomy of superstructural phenomena in the historic process’ (p. 213). Traverso brushes aside Nathan Weinstock’s defence of Leon’s thesis in the Pathfinder edition of The Jewish Question in favour of Maxime Rodinson’s criticism prefaced to the French version (see Cult, Ghetto and State, London 1983, pp. 68–117). However, whilst describing Leon’s thesis of the people-class as applicable only to Jewish history in Europe from 1096 onwards, his references to Blumenkrantz, Rodinson and Vidal-Naquet show that outside his own field he is heavily reliant upon secondary sources, and has no first hand appreciation of Jewish history in its full span, either historically or geographically.
Whilst it is indisputable that the narrow range of functions Leon analyses as carried on by the Jews as a people-class belong narrowly within Medieval Europe, it is equally false to deny their widespread involvement in usury, commerce and handicrafts outside these limits. Cuneiform tablets dating as early as the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Persian period already show Jews adapting to a commercial function in diaspora society, and it was this group that lay behind the subsequent recolonisation of Judaea after the exile, with its resulting theocratic structure. Jews had replaced Syrians in the Mediterranean carrying trade long before the Crusades, and the Turkish Empire of the Khazars in Central Asia accepted Judaism as its state religion precisely because of its position on the Silk Road. The Jews who opposed Muhammad in Arabia were at the centre of long-distance trade, and even the Ethiopian Falashas, probably a split-off from the Monophysite church, fulfilled a specialised function in wider society in craft (especially iron) and petty commerce (though of course many of them remained peasants in rural areas). It is difficult to believe that Judaism arrived in South India and China other than through trading contacts, even if their communities over the centuries adapted to a different function. In the case of China, their earliest large concentration appears to have been at Kaifeng, at the end of the Silk Road, and here there is an obvious parallel with the Sogdians, a trading people who introduced Manichaeism into China via the same route.
And although Traverso shows an awareness that the category of people-class can be applied to other groups, both in Europe and elsewhere (pp. 24, 216), he seems to be unaware that it was precisely in Eastern Europe where these structures played a part in nation-building. For centuries over the whole area many of the ‘non-historic peoples’ existed almost entirely as peasantry, the Polish and Hungarian ‘nations’ as gentry classes, and the bourgeoisie and working class as Germans living in the larger cities, whose constitutions were directly copied from those of the four main Hansa towns. On the other hand, within the Turkish Empire a large part of the commerce was handled by Armenians and Phanariot Greeks.
For all his learning (and it is considerable), Traverso’s solution to the Jewish problem is surprisingly simplistic: classical Marxist thought reveals ‘an incapacity to perceive the significance of the religious phenomenon in history and a difficulty in theorising the nation. Despite its macroscopic obviousness, the religious dimension of the Jewish problem was hidden by the economist reduction of Jewish history to that of an urban commercial caste ... we believe that religion is a factor as important as the economy to the understanding of the Jewish question.’ (p. 234) This use of the royal (or should we say, divine) ‘we’ proceeds from his argument that ‘it is necessary to adopt a new methodological approach – that, for example, developed by the liberation theologians in Latin America – founded on the idea that Marxism and religion are not two irreconcilable universes’ in order to produce ‘a transcendence of the Marxism/religion antinomy’ (p. 179). Traverso’s preoccupation with ‘liberation theology’ has already shown us what sort of ‘transcendence’ he has in mind with his Philistine attack on Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours from the standpoint of universal morality in Critique Communiste (no. 140, Winter 1994–95). This has an all too familiar ring to those of us in Britain who remember how the ‘Communist-Christian Dialogue’ marked an important stage in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s formal break with Marxism, which is of necessity firmly grounded in a militant atheism.
The discovery that it was their religion that preserved the Jews as a ‘peculiar people’ is hardly an original one. It can be got from any Bible, any synagogue, and any church. It also begs the question, not even mentioned in Traverso’s investigation, of how and why this religion transformed itself so completely over the centuries, from its wide diversity both inside and outside Palestine before the destruction of Herod’s temple, to its unitary Talmudic form by the end of the first millennium AD, not to mention the no less radical changes since. For none of this can be understood without an analysis of the changing circumstances of its existence.
More interesting than this rather flat and banal outcome to such an accumulation of painstaking research is the route by which it was approached. The materialist critique of religion is, of course, rooted very firmly in the analysis of class. ‘The Jewish question’, notes our author, ‘is revealing also of the backwardness and limitations in the approach taken by Marxists toward forms of oppression not directly related to class, such as national, but also racial and sexual oppression ... [which] corresponded absolutely to the opposition to feminism and the very idea of an autonomous movement for women’s liberation.’ (p. 235) As the tendency to which Traverso belongs moves ever further from a class analysis of society, it is not at all surprising that it should find ‘autonomous’ solutions to human oppression, whether they lie in bourgeois feminism or in other directions. Its sections have been organised along the lines of the Bund for some time, not only with regard to feminism, but in the USA, where for many years they have called for a separate black party, and with Basque nationalism in Spain. These remarks of Traverso’s are perfectly consistent with his criticism of Lenin’s view of the Bund as ‘a great indifference, if not a veritable blindness, toward a culturally vibrant and dynamic Jewish community’ (p. 132), for Lenin pointed out that whereas ‘the bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion, with the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle’ (The Right of Nations to Self-Determination).
Identity politics, ‘the politics of the personal’, as they are fashionably called, whether religious or otherwise, lead to fragmentation and impotence. Oppression is always felt in particular ways and by particular individuals, but ending it is a universal task.
Al Richardson
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Review
The Fourth International
François Moreau
Combats et débats de la Quatrième Internationale
Éditions Vents d’Ouest, Quebec 1993, pp. 344, 125 francs
Combats et débats de la Quatrième Internationale
Éditions Vents d’Ouest, Quebec 1993, pp. 344, 125 francs
ALTHOUGH THERE have been several attempts at histories of the Fourth International, few of them have concentrated so much upon its ideological development to the exclusion of all other considerations. This book, written by a Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Ottawa, who sadly died before it came out, tells us that whereas the Dutch and Italian lefts ‘are reduced today to the level of minuscule sects, which is not the case with the Fourth International’ (p. 49), the latter is ‘stronger than at any time in its history, with the exception of a short period in the mid-1970s’, and is ‘now entering a new period of expansion’ (p. 48). So that whilst informing us that ‘the Fourth International possesses no official history and rejects even the notion of official history’ (p. 54), he solemnly affirms that ‘continuity on the international level has never been broken, even though on several occasions it has depended on a thread’ (p. 50).
The illusion of this ‘thread’ is maintained throughout the book, as the final chapter on sources makes abundantly clear, by the exclusive use of documents that have appeared in public print and the deliberate exclusion of embarrassing internal material, such as the discussion of the Bolivian debâcle of 1952, or the argument as to whether or not Egypt was a workers’ state. So whilst it is a relief to learn that Pierre Frank’s wretched book is not an ‘official history’, it is plain right from the start that this writer’s thread is intended to conduct us through the maze of his organisation’s ideological meanderings in the spirit of Dr Pangloss rather than of Karl Marx.But even within this framework there are signs that its author has failed to command his material. We are told that the Greek section, which condemned the guerrilla struggle against the German occupation as chauvinist, was ‘very influential in the resistance’ (p. 116), and that in spite of James Klugmann’s activities (see Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no: 3, Summer 1992, pp. 106–10) the victory of Tito in Yugoslavia was ‘no product of Moscow’s policy’, which was to support the royalists (p. 125). The ‘Second World Congress’ of the Fourth International was held, according to this writer, in September 1948 (p. 119). Similarly, during Mao’s seizure of power, Russia, whose troops had armed Mao with the surrendered weapons of the Japanese in Manchuria, had ‘maintained its military aid to Chiang up to the last minute’ (p. 125). The Fourth International, on its part, ‘vigorously condemned’ the repression of the Trotskyists in such countries as Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China in ‘public declarations reproduced in the whole of its press’ (p. 126). (Moreau lets the cat out of the bag here later on page 174, when he excuses Castro’s suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists by his ‘exasperation’ at the ‘irresponsible critiques of Posadism’). Then we are told that in May 1968, ‘as opposed to reformist or Third Worldist currents’, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International had championed the perspective of ‘new revolutionary crises, even in the most advanced capitalist countries’ (p. 198). Its failure to recruit from the disarray of the Italian Communist Party at that time is put down to the small size of its section (The Italian Lesson, pp. 200–2), oblivious of the fact that one of the worst of the Stalinist groupings in this mess, Falc e Martello, owed its origin to the miseducation of the GCR’s own youth group in the principles of Maoism. And when the war over the Falkland Islands is ascribed to ‘the British intervention against Argentina’ (p. 246), we realise that the hold of this writer upon the facts ‘depends on a thread’, as he might put it.
But even though he remains imprisoned within the mythology of his organisation, this does not mean that he is incapable of acute insights of his own. His view of the discussion about the class nature of the postwar ‘glacis’ states (pp. 117–9) comes quite close to those of the British Revolutionary Communist Party and the later Vern-Ryan faction of the US Socialist Workers Party, admitting that ‘the Second World Congress therefore confined itself to an incomplete analysis of Eastern Europe’ (p. 119). This is putting it mildly, to say the least, when we remember that they were of the opinion that capitalist states still existed there. But he points out quite rightly that the view of the ‘Third World Congress’ that in ‘exceptional circumstances’ such as Yugoslavia and China ‘Stalinist Communist parties could “project a revolutionary orientation” under the pressure of the masses’ was how ‘the “orthodox” interpretation of the postwar revolutions left the door wide open for the “revisionist” perspective’ (p. 124).
He is therefore able to demolish the ludicrous claims of the splitters of 1953 to represent anything better, showing how ‘the American SWP in particular was in solidarity with the international leadership in declaring that the documents submitted to the Third World Congress appeared to conform to the Trotskyist programme’ (p. 133), noting that when the motion for the suspension of the leadership of the French section came up on the International Secretariat the voting was Pablo for, Healy for, and the SWP for, with Mandel and Maitan voting against (pp. 137–8). He quite correctly identifies the views of Healy and Cannon in this split as being that whilst it was OK for the International Secretariat to ‘intervene in the affairs of the little groups in Europe with the approval of the SWP’, doing the same for them was ‘right over the top and merited an immediate split’ (p. 142). For if we accept, as they did then (and the author still does), that the organisation to which they all belonged was indeed Trotsky’s Fourth International, his conclusions logically follow: that the famous Open Letter, which adopted the Lambertist critique of the IS hitherto rejected by the SWP, was ‘without doubt one of the most irresponsible documents that have ever been written in the history of the Trotskyist movement’ (p. 140), ‘a veritable attempt at liquidating the International as an organised cadre’ (p. 141), in order to set up an organisation which had ‘no real international structure, and functioned by consultation between the national leaderships of the affiliated sections’ (p. 143). And Moreau has more than an ounce of truth on his side when criticising the ‘permanent catastrophism’ of the International Secretariat during the 1950s by saying that the International Committee was ‘in no way superior’; ‘very much the reverse’, for ‘the Lambertists and the Healyites were marked by a completely delirious catastrophism, combined with an absurd factionalism’ (p. 155). And the failure of the ICFI to make a self-criticism of its support for the MNA in Algeria (pp. 166–7) indeed showed how little it had in common with anything that could be recognised as Bolshevism.
However, such insights as this book contains, and they are by no means limited to what have been selected here, the main actor in the Marxist drama, the working class, is conspicuous by his absence. There is little discussion about what was actually going on inside the workers’ movement, and even less about strategies for intervening there. The Fourth International of the early 1950s is criticised for ‘still seeing the Chinese Communist Party as a purely Stalinist party’, and so ‘failing for a certain time to accept that the Chinese revolution was a proletarian revolution’ (p. 122). The document The Dynamics of World Revolution Today is congratulated for ‘safeguarding itself from an ouvrierist deviation – into which the Trotskyist forces have often fallen – which reduced the working class to the formally waged urban proletariat alone’ (p. 180).
Would that they had. For this is a nice phrase to find on the pen of a Canadian sociology professor, who has managed to convince himself that in the 1960s and 1970s ‘the student youth was the milieu where the new vanguard most forcibly asserted itself’ (p. 200), and that ‘the “leftism” of the new European sections remained on the terrain of Trotskyism and of Leninism’ (p. 202).
This account of the theoretical life of the Fourth International therefore reads very much like Hamlet without the prince. But the actor will yet appear, and he will have the last word.
Al Richardson
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Review
Land and Freedom
Ken Loach (dir.)
Land and Freedom
Artificial Eye, 1995
Land and Freedom
Artificial Eye, 1995
In this review, translated by Ian Birchall from El País (14–15 April 1995), Wilebaldo Solano, the former General Secretary of the POUM, replies to the Spanish Stalinist leader Santiago Carrillo, and sees in Loach’s film the living image of the extermination of the Spanish Trotskyists by Stalin, culminating in the murder of Andreu Nin.
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IN A different period Santiago Carrillo would have reacted to a film like Loach’s with coarse insults. At present he has no solution other than to combine a relative and studied moderation with a few deceptions. Times have changed a great deal since the collapse of the USSR and the crumbling of Stalinism.
It is obvious that Land and Freedom has left Carrillo defenceless. And it even appears that this splendid film, in which Ken Loach dazzles us with the beauty and dramatic quality of his images, has made something of an impression on him. Hence his praise for the characters of David, Blanca and Maite. So, I shall tell him that ‘the English Communist David’ was inspired by a militant who is a friend of mine and is still alive. He came to Barcelona and joined the POUM militias because, during the first months when Stalin was practising the policy of non-intervention, the Communist International forbade the sending of foreign militants to Spain. He, like other British, French and Italian Communist militants, chose to fight with the POUM, and some died on the Aragon front.Let us specify that, in those days, although the wave of terror in the USSR had begun, it had not yet reached the terrible peak of the first great Moscow Trial. This explains why, in the first months of the revolutionary process, the POUM took part, together with the PCE, the PSUC and the other left organisations, in all the revolutionary bodies and committees, and above all in the Catalan Militia Committee and the Popular Executive Committee of Valencia. And furthermore, this worked in such a fashion because there existed a genuine revolutionary fraternity, and because the aims of all could be summed up as revolutionary war against Fascism, which was the main enemy for everyone. Things changed when the Soviet intervention occurred. Stalin was trying to consolidate an alliance with France and Britain, and the Spanish Revolution was an encumbrance to him or was ‘inopportune’, as was acknowledged by the Communist historian Fernando Claudín.
In 1974, in the film The Two Memories, produced by Jorge Semprún in Paris, Carrillo attributed the repression against the POUM and the murder of Andreu Nin to the Russian intervention. Then, for reasons unknown to us, Carrillo watered down these statements at various times. When he was asked for his testimony for the documentary Operation Nikolai, made by Catalan television (TV-3) with documents obtained from the Moscow archives, he said he did not have time. Moreover, in spite of the repercussions of this historic film (which, unfortunately, has still not been shown by Spanish Television throughout the country), Carrillo also did not have time to make any comments or give an opinion on one of the most shameful episodes of Stalinist policy in Spain — the murder of Nin.
Anti-Franco unity was broken by the policy which Stalin imposed on the PCE and PSUC, and which Carrillo and his friends followed slavishly. From the time of the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov (which was denounced as a crime only by the POUM), a policy was initiated which planned to eliminate the POUM, to reduce the influence of the CNT, and, later, to eliminate Largo Caballero and the Socialist Left. The purpose was, as is clearly apparent in numerous documents found in the archives of the Communist International, to establish a ‘democracy of a new type’ or a ‘people’s democracy’ like those which were imposed on the countries of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. For this it was necessary to contain the revolutionary process and to go into reverse gear, cancelling the gains of July 1936 (committees, civil liberties, collectivisation in industry and in the countryside, militias, Catalan and Basque sovereignty, regional authorities, etc.). And this is what happened with incredible tenacity and perseverance, violating all democratic, Socialist and revolutionary principles.
Shortly after the May Days of 1937, the repression against the POUM, the offensive against the CNT and the removal of Largo Caballero enabled the PCE to infiltrate itself into the state apparatus, and to control a significant part of the army, the police and the secret services, to reduce Catalan autonomy to a minimal form, to destroy the collectivisations and workers’ control, etc. The consequences of all this were catastrophic for the fight against Franco. Now we know that even General Berzin and other senior representatives of the Soviet state sent as advisers to Spain had the courage to denounce this policy, for which they were sentenced and executed in Moscow.
Many of us hoped that Carrillo and his friends would end up by recognising all these facts, and make a critical assessment of their policy (and not one of those wretched self-criticisms invented by Stalinism). But it seems that they are persisting in living with the myths and platitudes of Stalinism in an age in which it is necessary to renew a great many things, to destroy that which is no longer useful, and to open a new perspective for the struggle against capitalism and for the Socialist future.
Ken Loach has done no more than draw back the veil from a period of history by evoking a dramatic episode from the Spanish Revolution, and doing so with a talent and a mastery which have taken the breath away from the selfsame Carrillo. We should applaud him, hoping that his work will inspire Spanish film-makers of the new generation who want to defend historical memory and maintain critical thought.
Wilebaldo Solano
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Stalin Against the Jews
Arkadi Vaksberg
Stalin Against the Jews
Knopf, New York 1995, pp. 308
Stalin Against the Jews
Knopf, New York 1995, pp. 308
IT IS well known that Stalin’s last act, after initiating an anti-Semitic purge, was to organise a trial of mainly Jewish doctors, which was intended to culminate in a public execution in Moscow, followed by ‘spontaneous’ pogroms against Jews, and impassioned appeals from prominent Soviet Jews to the authorities to move their compatriots to the far east of the Soviet Union, for their own safety. This gruesome prospect was cut short by Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953.
Arkadi Vaksberg aims to investigate the processes which led to Stalin’s final act of terror. Much of what he presents can be found in the various Western histories of Soviet Jewry. He does, however, bring to light archival material that confirms that the anti-Jewish campaign that erupted in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s had been brewing for some time, and that Stalin had been carefully cultivating a culture of anti-Semitism within the Soviet bureaucracy and society at large, whilst at the same time condemning anti-Semitism, and handing out awards to a wide range of Soviet Jews.Vaksberg tries to explain the roots of Stalin’s anti-Semitism by emphasising a passage in his essay of 1912, Marxism and the National Question: ‘A nation has the right to determine its fate freely. It has the right to live as it wishes.’ (p. 5) As Stalin didn’t think the Jews constituted a nation, says Vaksberg, it is logical for him to think that they were ‘an object to be manipulated by those in power in accordance with their political goals’ (p. 7). Far from me to defend Stalin, but he was not saying that those who in his opinion did not constitute a nation were to be denied their rights. He said that such people, not just the Jews, but the Letts in Lithuania, the Poles in Ukraine, and the Russians in the Caucasus, should be permitted, and in a democratic state would be permitted, to use and be taught their own language, and would have complete religious freedom. Moreover, Stalin did not say, as Vaksberg asserts, that the Jews ‘are not a nation but “something mystical, intangible and otherworldly”’ (p. 4), this was Stalin’s interpretation of the consequences of Otto Bauer’s theory of nationalism, and had nothing to do with the Jews at all. As Stalin says elsewhere in his essay, ‘paper will put up with anything that is written on it’ – and he should know. As a lawyer, Vaksberg should be aware that if charges are to stick, the evidence has to be convincing. His misrepresentation of a readily available document places a shadow, not over his assertion that Stalin was anti-Semitic – there is concrete evidence of that prior to 1912 – but over his competence in analysing archival documents that are not available to the average reader.
This is a shame, because the author unearths some very interesting background details to the Jewish dimension of the Moscow Trials, and to the background of official anti-Semitism. Stalin was sensitive to any accusation that his regime was in any way anti-Jewish. The trial of the alleged killers of the Soviet Arctic explorer Nikolai Vulfson took place in May 1936. The major factor in the accusation was that the accused had acted on anti-Semitic motives, although, as Vaksberg says, there was nothing to show this. However, in August the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev opened. Vaksberg considers that the former trial was organised with the intention of dispelling any suggestions that the show trial of leading Jewish Old Bolsheviks had any anti-Semitic flavour. This was typical of Stalin; later on he was to hand out Stalin Prizes to distinguished Jewish figures as his henchmen harassed others. As Vaksberg says, Stalin’s public statements against anti-Semitism were akin to a criminal’s desire to deny his guilt, a repeated assertion which, because of its unprompted nature, could only highlight its dishonest nature.
Vaksberg intends to dispel the idea that Stalin only embarked upon an official anti-Semitic course in the late 1940s. This is hardly contentious, as most studies of Soviet Jewry recognise that there were traces of official anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Once again, he shows a careless attitude towards available texts, saying that Trotsky said nothing about Stalin’s anti-Jewish feelings in the chapter on Thermidor in his Stalin, which is just not the case. Nevertheless, it is chilling to read that in August 1942, as the huge battle at Stalingrad was starting, that the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CPSU’s Central Committee was writing to Malenkov, Andreyev and Shcherbakov, complaining that many Soviet institutions, including the Bolshoi Theatre and the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories, were headed by Jews and not Russians. Vaksberg has found many other similar documents in the archives. As he asks, would these letters have been written if their authors had not been sure that such denunciations met with the approval of their superiors?
Vaksberg raises various reasons for the revival of anti-Semitism in the Stalin era. On a couple of occasions he sees a parallel between the Soviet regime’s promotion of Russian nationalism and the recrudescence of anti-Semitism as a state policy. Elsewhere he sees it as a device used by crisis-ridden regimes to divert popular discontent. Sometimes he links the accentuation or muting of anti-Semitism with foreign policy issues. In other places, it is seen as the product of Stalin’s personal prejudices.
In one respect, Stalin’s prejudices were not a crucial factor. Once the Soviet regime had embarked upon a nationally-oriented course from the late 1920s, it was extremely likely, if not inevitable, that it would sometime fall prey to Russian nationalism and its corollary, anti-Semitism. In another respect, however, Stalin’s prejudices were important, as it was no accident that it was he who led and personified the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Bolsheviks who held to their revolutionary ideas, and who would never have descended to anti-Semitism, had to be destroyed. On the other hand, Bolsheviks who were corrupted through the process of degeneration often adopted an anti-Semitic outlook, such as Molotov, or, if they were Jews, pretended that anti-Semitism didn’t exist, and happily helped Stalin’s plans by kidding themselves that it was something else. It must, however, be said that of Stalin’s characteristics which enabled to him to adopt his historic rôle, anti-Semitism played a secondary part. Much more important were his lack of confidence in the proletariat, either in the Soviet Union or internationally, and his consequent reliance upon bureaucratic measures, and his general crude conception of what Marxism actually represented.
Stalin’s personal prejudices provided the form in which Soviet anti-Semitism took place. Had he died in, say, 1945, there still would have been an anti-Semitic purge in the late 1940s as part of the general terror which accompanied the rebuilding of Soviet society after the war, although the precise details would have been different. The Jews were an obvious target for the bureaucracy. Apart from the fact that anti-Semitism had long been a useful tool for Great Russian chauvinists, the huge emigration during the last few decades of Tsarism meant that many Soviet Jews had family connections in the West, and especially the USA, which was very dangerous in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War. Furthermore, after the horrors of the Second World War and the indifference of the Soviet regime to their specific suffering, it is not surprising that many Soviet Jews saw the establishment of the state of Israel as something positive, and this too was especially suspect once the Soviet Union’s short honeymoon with Israel had ended, and it shifted into the Western sphere of influence.
Stalin’s death corresponded with the growing realisation within the Soviet bureaucracy that mass terror was rapidly becoming a self-defeating strategy. One of the first acts of his successors was to terminate the planned anti-Jewish measures; the doctors were freed, and the trials, pogroms and deportations were called off, no doubt because a thorough purge of the Jews would have seriously damaged the running of the state apparatus, for although by then there were few Jews in high ranking posts, there were still many in a wide range of lower positions. But just as coercion remained an option for the Soviet bureaucracy right through the post-Stalin period, so did anti-Semitism, and at various times after 1953 anti-Jewish sentiments were whipped up by the Soviet authorities, often in the form of ‘economic’ criminal trials (theft, embezzlement, etc.), in which Jewish defendants were to the fore, or under the guise of anti-Zionism.
The basic question that has to be addressed is why the internationalist regime resulting from the October Revolution, which offered and indeed gave much to the Jews and others who suffered Tsarist oppression, adopted a nationalist course, which, due to the intimate connection between Great Russian nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiments, inevitably led to the revival of anti-Semitism as a state policy. Vaksberg does not recognise the national isolation of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s resulting theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ as the determining factors behind the rise of Great Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and he is therefore left with a number of essentially correct but disconnected factors that cannot in and of themselves explain why the Soviet regime betrayed one of its founding principles.
Paul Flewers
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The Blue Union
Keith Sinclair
How the Blue Union Came to Hull Docks
Hull 1995, pp. 20, £1.50
How the Blue Union Came to Hull Docks
Hull 1995, pp. 20, £1.50
John Archer
The Struggle for an Independent Trade Union by the Dockers in Merseyside and Hull During 1954–55
Upper Denby 1995, pp. 10, £1.50
The Struggle for an Independent Trade Union by the Dockers in Merseyside and Hull During 1954–55
Upper Denby 1995, pp. 10, £1.50
AT THE beginning of his pamphlet, Keith Sinclair quotes a member of the Hull unofficial strike committee as saying: ‘An unofficial committee beat the gaffers. You cannot realise it, can you? I can’t. It’s the first time we have done such a thing.’ Even for someone like me, who is used to unofficial committees and their history of success, it is inspiring to read a fellow worker expressing his feeling of awe and wonderment at the power and ability of workers to beat the boss to his knees, something which the union officials have constantly failed to do.
This quote is indicative of the nature of this pamphlet. It is written from the standpoint of the rank and file docker involved in the breakaway from the TGWU (the ‘White’ union) to join the NASD (the ‘Blue’ union) in Hull. He points to the usually glossed-over fact that the Blue union was not a perfect organisation, and it retained ‘all the strengths and weaknesses of British trade unions’. This led to the dockers reverting, after their exodus to the Blues, to the previous form of rank and file committees leading unofficial strikes. This reveals both the weaknesses of unions, and the need to build class combat organisations based on the rank and file.I crossed swords with the author in Workers Press over my allegation that the break to the Blues (as opposed to the idea for it, which had originated with the dockers and their unofficial leaders) was actually initiated by Gerry Healy’s Club, and carried out by a bureaucratic manoeuvre, with the object of strengthening their position and prestige in the Labour Party relative to the other left wing forces, such as the Bevanites. I maintained that members or supporters of the Club initiated the split at a mass meeting held in Hull on Sunday, 22 August 1954. This is endorsed by Bob Pennington, a leading Trotskyist and a prominent participant in this episode, who in a statement from 1960 cited in this pamphlet, wrote: ‘There is a very strong possibility that had the visit of the Birkenhead delegates to Hull in August 1954 not taken place, the Hull men would never have joined the NASD.’ The Birkenhead delegation, which included Bill Johnson, was strongly influenced by the Club. What is more, the ‘mystery man’ present at the meeting ‘can now be revealed as the late Gerry Healy’, who undoubtedly wished to ensure the success of the operation by his presence.
Sinclair disputes this, and says that the chain of events did not occur in this way. He says that the report Dockers Break Away From Union in the Hull Daily Mail on 18 August 1954 proves that the decision to break to the Blues preceded Johnson’s visit on 22 August, and the split from the Whites was not the work of the Club. As such, the mass meeting on Wednesday, 18 August which had passed a motion of no confidence in the TGWU, and voted to try and join the NASD, was a spontaneous reaction by the dockers alone, without being influenced by outsiders, and especially by Club members.
However, the proceedings of the Wednesday meeting do not appear to have been known by any participant in the struggles of that time. If this had been the meeting at which the decision to break from the TGWU had taken place, then Pennington would have known about it. And would not Albert Hart, a strike leader from whom the author obtained ‘the only detailed first hand account of the strike’, have known when and where the momentous decision to break from the Whites for the Blues had taken place? Bill Hunter states that after discussions with the Birkenhead committee, the Hull strike committee decided to ‘propose to Hull dockers that they join the Blue union’, for which they voted ‘almost unanimously’ on Sunday, 22 August. Is it not strange that the Hull leaders should ‘decide’ at this particular meeting to ‘propose’ a course of action that had already been decided four days previously?
The evidence of this meeting and its decision is crucial to Sinclair’s argument, and yet the Wednesday meeting is not elaborated any further, and the reference to an ex-docker called Murphy, ‘who was involved from the first day’, serves to cloud rather than to clear the air. Did Murphy speak at the Wednesday meeting, and call for a break to the Blues? No details are given about the meeting itself. It is obvious that this issue was raised at this meeting, but was it a definitive decision taken formally by the strike committee and the mass meeting, or a spontaneous exclamation from an angry and frustrated rank and file who had had enough of the TGWU’s officials, which made the Mail’s headlines?
Sinclair says that Johnson’s visit to Hull ‘no doubt reinforced the views of the strike leaders’. In other words, without his exhortations to the Hull leaders to go ahead and lead the breakaway, and the promise that ‘Birkenhead would follow Hull’s example in leaving the TGWU to join the Blues’, it is unlikely that inexperienced Hull militants would have acted in isolation. In this light, this pamphlet confirms both what Pennington and Hunter wrote, and the view that the intervention of the Club-influenced Merseyside delegates activated the national process of leaving the Whites for the Blues. The responsibility for the break and its consequences lies, therefore, at the door of Healy and his Club.
Keith Sinclair has produced an interesting and factual pamphlet, a vital contribution to the history of struggle of a section of the British working class. It would be a great asset in the fight for Socialism, both as a contribution to working class culture and as a practical record for lessons to be learned for future struggles, if similar pamphlets were produced to cover such strikes as Timex, Grunwick, Burnsall, the present docks strike in Liverpool, and whatever strikes may occur in the future.
Considering that John Archer’s pamphlet is a contribution to the polemic that took place some months ago in Workers Press on the issue of the White and Blue unions, one would have thought that with hindsight he would have presented at least a new and fresh approach to the matter under discussion, particularly as Workers Press declared the correspondence closed, as ‘the issues raised by Tom Cowan have been answered’ (although the issue of the paper closing the discussion gave three opponents a whole page to attack me, whilst denying me a chance to reply). Considering all this, it is a surprise to see Archer’s pamphlet extensively quoted in Workers Press (9 December 1995) attacking me on the same grounds as the others. Evidently, ‘the issues raised by Tom Cowan’ had not been answered, and once again I was refused the right of reply.
So what is the Workers Revolutionary Party and Workers Press afraid of? That the revelation, on the basis of historical experience, that their present narrow policy of campaigning for ‘independent’ unions, the mainstay of their organisation politically, is a fallacy?In none of the polemics between the former members of Gerry Healy’s Club and myself have they made an objective analysis of events surrounding the dockers’ exodus to the Blue union and the consequences thereof. The aftermath of the breakaway was disastrous, resulting in the collapse of the portworkers’ national rank and file organisation that had been built up over the years in the course of struggle, in favour of a union, albeit democratic and militant, but divided into sections of dockers and stevedores, and circumscribed by its very nature as a trade union. There followed a series of inter-union disputes over the following years, the growth of non-unionism in what was a union stronghold, strikes for recognition instead of united efforts against the bosses for better wages and conditions, and finally the demise of the Blue union and its merger with the old established and bureaucratic TGWU. Archer fails to deal with these matters in an objective manner, and lowers still further the whole argument to personal attacks and naive political labelling – ‘Stalinist’, ‘ultra-leftist’, ‘reformist’, etc. He is more concerned with accusing me of abusing a point in his 1990 lecture than with an objective analysis of events.
For Marxists, the scientific approach to determine whether a policy or tactic will help to strengthen the working class’ struggle for the overthrow of capital is revealed by historical analysis, to which we Marxist-Leninists must constantly subject tactics and policies. If it is found in practice that such a policy or tactic has not benefited the working class, then we must analyse why we arrived at such an erroneous conclusion, and correct it at the earliest opportunity. This may be too late to affect the immediate course of events, but it must nonetheless be recorded as a lesson for future reference. Without this approach, which is ignored by Archer (and the movement at large for that matter), we cannot learn from past mistakes and rearm the workers for successful struggles in the future.
Since 1945 the dockers in the main ports of London, Merseyside, Bristol, Hull, etc., had over the years established a great tradition and a reputation for solidarity in struggle, not only for their own demands, but for the demands and welfare of workers outside their own ports. This had developed despite the efforts of the TGWU to keep the workers divided and under the strict control and domination of class collaborationist officialdom. Through unofficial struggles, the dockers forged a national unity, concretised through the establishment of the National Rank and File Portworkers Committee, and a national paper, the Portworkers Clarion. Its value lay in the fact that it was democratically created, and was developed and maintained by rank and file portworkers at mass meetings in each port. It was outside the control and the disciplinary tentacles of the TGWU’s officials and the union bureaucracy as a whole. It not only embraced dockers and stevedores, but had the potential for reaching lightermen, engineers and other portworkers. The portworkers’ organisation was a unifying body, and demonstrated its revolutionary class potential to close down the capitalist economy time and again, putting fear into the hearts of the bosses and their Labour and Tory lackeys. This unifying organisation was sacrificed by Healy’s Club, and the workers were disarmed in favour of another sectional trade union. However, the historical necessity for such an organisation was shown by the great number of times that it was reconstituted after the exodus to the Blues, whenever an organised national struggle was necessary. Even a militant and democratic union like the Blues was strictly circumscribed in its rôle as a class weapon, a fact that is still ignored by those who consider saving face to be more important than saving the workers from further defeats.
In 1948, at the time of the Canadian seamen’s strike and the portworkers’ solidarity action, Bert Aylward and Harry Constable, two national leaders of portworkers’ struggles (Aylward also being a Blue official), made contact with and joined a small Oehlerite organisation, the Socialist Workers League, because of its policies of class struggle against the Labour government, and its call for the building of a genuine Communist party. This organisation and its leader, Joe Thomas, a journalist, helped to produce the Portworkers Clarion. Not being hampered by any policy of critical support for Labour, the Portworkers Clarion gave every encouragement to the building of a national rank and file organisation for portworkers in pursuance of a policy of strengthening an organised opposition to the government’s anti-working class measures. Far from being a Syndicalist concept limited to trade unionism, or, as Bill Hunter suggests, the cause of the dockers’ failures, it was a weapon to organise a strike aimed directly at the heart of the political establishment, and by so doing to forge united action by the working class as a whole, and to raise its political understanding. Not once do Archer & Co raise the perspective of united working class action as the key both to waging a successful struggle, and of raising the level of struggle onto a political plane. The Club confined the dockers to a trade unionist, reformist and pressure group style of ‘struggle’.
The question of leading a breakaway from the TGWU to the NASD was discussed in the SWL. It originated in the dockers’ movement, in which it was very popular, and was strongly advocated by Constable. The SWL, including Thomas and I, opposed it on the grounds that it was a sectional dockers’ solution to a class problem. Also, whilst a militant and democratic independent union like the Blues may be tolerated whilst its power and influence were restricted, once it started to expand and became a point of attraction to large numbers of workers in other unions, it would constitute a threat to the trade union bureaucracy and the stability of the capitalist system, and would therefore be crushed before it left its infancy. Our prognosis, based not upon the dogmatic acceptance of the 30-year-old ideas of our teachers, but upon our own independent analysis of the rôle of unions under imperialism, proved to be 100 per cent correct.
In an effort to disparage our claim to foresight in condemning the policy of attempting to reform the unions into democratic and independent organisations, Archer writes: ‘This is not the first time that people have tried to be “clever” after the event, to take unfair advantage of hindsight.’ Apart from the fact that even if this were so, it is better than ignoring the lessons of past defeats and so allowing workers to tread the same defeatist road in the future, what proof have we that we are not dealing in hindsight, which (according to Archer) is ‘that kind of “wisdom” [that is] useful only to sceptics and reactionaries’? The evidence is in the articles Rôle of the Trade Unions and Rôle of the Rank and File Organisations, Soviets and Marxist Party, in the January–March 1948 issue of the SWL’s quarterly journal, the Workers Review.
This document pre-dated the membership of Aylward and Constable, and served as the basis for our opposition to a policy of campaigning and planning a breakaway. The SWL checked the efforts of the dockers’ leaders to proceed along these lines, and thereby prevented a disaster in the ports. That was so until a split in the SWL gave Healy a chance to exert his influence and win over Constable and others to his Club, with its superior numbers, organisation and technical means.
As if upon reflection and with a feeling of guilt, Archer writes: ‘... did Constable, did Healy take into account what they can reasonably be expected to have known? Did they reach their decisions on the basis of the information available to them at the time?’ In other words, did they not do all that was necessary to make the venture a success? So, despite the failure of the breakaway, we should not judge them too harshly!
Healy and Constable did not know – and Archer and other former Club members and defenders still have not learnt – that success or otherwise did not hinge upon the day-to-day factual considerations that determine tactics. It is a question of whether or not the whole strategic approach, as outlined by Trotsky and dogmatically accepted by his supporters, of revolutionising unions is a valid Marxist-Leninist proposition. Arising from the debâcle of the docks episode, and the more recent militant electricians’ breakaway and their isolation from the mass of electrical workers, this concept of ‘independent’ and ‘revolutionary’ unions should be subjected to analysis and discussion, particularly as it immediately and directly affects workers in the early stages of their struggles both within and outside of the unions.
So far this question has been ignored. And so we carry on in the pages of Workers Press and elsewhere advocating this erroneous policy, which is doomed to failure from the start, of fighting for revolutionary and independent unions, as opposed to independent rank and file combat organisations that would exist alongside the reformist unions as autonomous bodies, free from the control and discipline of trade union officialdom.
In ‘hindsight’, in the light of the defeat of the exodus to the Blues, the thin line of defence has been drawn, suggesting that it was not so much the Club’s policy of wanting or initiating a split, but rather a question of its giving support to what the dockers wanted and to their spontaneous action. Archer says, ‘who else was there, if anyone, who could credibly offer to the dockers what they wanted ...?’, and again, ‘in this particular case, the “Club” could agree with the experienced “unofficial” leaders that they could best help to mobilise the forces ... helping the dockers to find a new, hopefully democratic, centre around which to organise’. And: ‘What the dockers needed was a group that could hear them, could listen to them, could understand what they had been through, and could help them to do what they thought had to be done.’ This manoeuvre of disclaiming responsibility and shifting the onus for the breakaway onto the dockers is embraced by other former Club members. Hunter writes in the Workers Press of 29 April 1995 that a ‘break to the Blue union was discussed many times by members of our group, and it was the dockers’ leaders who pressed us to support it’. In the same issue, Dave Finch endorses Hunter’s statement in his book that ‘the Trotskyists supported and assisted the break to the Blue union in the North’. Nowhere do we find these former Club leaders admitting their rôle in initiating and leading the dockers’ breakaway. Nowhere do we find them admitting to mistakes on this issue, and, as alleged Marxists, searching openly and honestly before the working class movement for an explanation of why things went wrong. Instead, they make excuses and continue with the old false policies, as if nothing really serious had happened. Only Harry Ratner in his Reluctant Revolutionary admits that ‘it is certainly true that the breakaway was not finally successful’. However, instead of drawing conclusions and lessons from this failure, he sidesteps the question, stating that Hunter may be correct, that it was ‘not doomed’ to failure. The very fact that it did fail demands that we ask why.
That they intend to carry on with the old incorrect policies of supporting breakaways from unions is borne out both by their support for the electricians’ breakaway, and by Dot Gibson’s review of Hunter’s book (Workers Press, 3 September 1994): ‘The dockers’ mass strikes raised the question of the need for revolutionary trade unions ... We Trotskyists were a very small group, but our historical goals [revolutionary unions] met up with the dockers’ aspirations.’ One would think that this marriage between Trotskyist ‘historical goals’ and the ‘dockers’ aspirations’ was a roaring success – not one word do we read about the fatal effect of this marriage!
Archer infers several times that I’m a ‘Stalinist’, and just as the old smear ‘Trotskyist’ was used to cover a multitude of sins by their accusers, so he uses the term ‘Stalinist’ to avoid engaging in reasoned discussion on the basis of an historical analysis of events. For your information, John, I left the Communist Party in 1945 in protest against its support for a Labour-Liberal-Tory coalition government. I have consistently opposed the Stalinists ever since then on the basis of the struggle for a genuine Leninist Communist Party. As a member of the old Electrical Trades Union that was dominated by the Stalinists, I was tried in 1958 by the London District Office for ‘bringing the union into disrepute’, that is to say, criticising and actively opposing the leadership. As you correctly say, the ETU ended up ‘in the clutches of a right wing dictator’, John Byrne (and Les Cannon). However, did you know that this was due in no small measure to the fact that the Club’s policy was for its ETU members to nominate and campaign for Byrne, who was a member of both the Labour Party and Catholic Action, for the post of General Secretary? (If not, maybe Dave Finch can enlighten you.) ETU members in the SWL criticised this reactionary position, and suggested that rank and file members should be nominated for office on a militant programme. This caused Healy to approach me on a May Day demonstration, and declare: ‘Cowan, if you carry on slandering my lads in the ETU, I will put my boys onto you.’ And off he went, without my chance of a reply. Old Healyite habits die hard, eh? This was during the 1950s, when Archer considers Healy was ‘at his best’, a period when Healy used – literally – to kick his opponents into line, and sexually abused his female members; a period Archer refers to as ‘principled “entry” work’, when Healy’s faction voted for the expulsion from the Labour Party of Trotskyists of a different faction to curry favour with the right wing leaders, and thus to stay in the party. Perhaps Dave Finch can provide details of this as well.
Despite all this and more, Archer would have us believe that Healy was not capable of executing such a ‘bureaucratic manoeuvre’ of initiating the dockers’ exodus in order to strengthen his position within the Labour Party’s Bevanite left! ‘I could “suggest” no such thing’, he says, ‘It would have made no sense.’ However, Dave Finch, a member of the Club’s National Committee, admitted in Workers Press (29 April 1995) that ‘had the Blue union been strengthened ... it would have enormously strengthened the left in the Labour Party and unions – at that time centred around the Bevanites’. Of course it would, and it is useless for Archer to deny it, for as Finch continues, ‘opportunities opened up to the small group of revolutionary Socialists [the Club] attempting to find a mass base among an important section of workers’.
At the beginning of his diatribe, Archer accuses me of having contempt for the dockers, and infers that I despised them. To put the record straight, let me say that as a worker myself, with a record of militant struggle of which I am proud, I do not and have no need to bow down and patronise any section of the working class and its spontaneity. Furthermore, as a Communist, it is my duty, as with other Communists, to tell the workers the truth, even though one may temporarily lose their support, as was the case with the SWL and Constable & Co. To know that one has been true to one’s cause and class is the greatest stimulant to carry one forward, confident of the future victory of our struggles. There is no other answer I can give to the infantile accusations levelled against me.
Keith Sinclair’s pamphlet is available from 27 Strathmore Avenue, Hull HU6 7JH; John Archer’s is available from Old Tavern, Upper Denby, Huddersfield HD8 8UN; and the SWL’s documents are available for 75p from Tom Cowan c/o Revolutionary History.
Tom Cowan
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Stalin’s Drive to the West
Richard Raack
Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938–1945
Stanford University Press, Stanford 1995, pp. 265, £30.00
Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938–1945
Stanford University Press, Stanford 1995, pp. 265, £30.00
THE REVIVAL of conservative historiography continues unabated. Professor Raack has entered the fray with a lively restatement of the ‘betrayal of the East’ argument which many of us had thought had disappeared with the hard-line anti-Communists of the ‘roll back’ school. Raack’s case can be simply presented. Stalin wanted a world Communist state. After the period of construction in the 1930s, it was time to go back onto the offensive. The pact of August 1939 with Germany allowed him a free hand to expand into Eastern Europe, the further expansion after the defeat of Germany in 1945 was the start of a Europe-wide revolution, and ‘the Third World War, to follow, would spread the Communist system around the world’ (p. 28). Stalin was given invaluable assistance during the war by willing dupes in Western political parties, government institutions and the media, and by statesmen who were either naive and venal, like Roosevelt, or too concerned with fighting Germany, like Churchill.
Raack continually rails against those who see Stalin’s international moves as principally defensive. In a sense, he is correct, but really it’s neither here nor there. It is obvious that Stalin was trying to improve the position of the Soviet Union, and this meant taking advantage of where (as Raack concedes) the West was weak. What is important is Raack’s concept of Stalin as a world revolutionary, and inherently expansionist.If Stalin were so bent on revolution and on imposing his rule right across Europe after the Second World War, why did he not mobilise his multi-million ‘army’ in the official Communist movement? Raack says: ‘Stalin had apparently relied on the local Communist parties in France and Italy as effective fifth columns, prepared to deliver those nations over to a Soviet-united Europe, “like ripe fruit”, when the proper time arrived.’ (p. 233) This is nonsense. The French and Italian Communist Parties had mass support and hundreds of thousands of armed men and women under their direct command or influence. A ‘revolution in the rear’ as the Hitler regime started to collapse would have caused havoc. And yet the Stalinists in France and Italy preferred to rebuild the capitalist state and power structures, rather than attempt to seize power. The ‘proper time’ had come and gone by mid-1947, when the official Communist movement finally adopted a militant pose.
Raack talks about Stalin’s plans for Asia, but does not mention that he was deeply suspicious of Mao’s plans to seize power, and only reluctantly and belatedly backed Kim’s demands to invade the south of Korea. Raack does not mention that Stalin withdrew from Austria and northern Iran, and he quotes from Djilas’ Conversations with Stalin, but not the bit where Stalin tells the Yugoslavs to abandon the Greek Communists to their fate. As for Finland, he says that Stalin was worried about how the USA would respond to its annexation, so he did not invade it; a feeble explanation if ever I heard one. By and large, it cannot be denied that Stalin and his successors generally kept to the terms of the Yalta agreement.
The problem always facing the ‘roll back’ proponents is that the post-1945 international settlement worked very well for the USA, which is why so many of them came to accept it once they assumed positions of responsibility. The bipolar world enabled the USA to gain almost complete hegemony over its half. The division of Germany ensured that its potential full strength and thus disruptive capabilities could not be realised, and Europe experienced its most stable period in modern times. The existence of a repressive state masquerading under the guise of Socialism did much to discredit the idea of fundamental social change. It is hardly surprising that there is considerable disquiet within US ruling circles now that the bipolar world has gone into history.
Like so many of the conservatives’ recent efforts, this book, with its intemperate style and omission of crucial facts, harks back to the kind of works that were the norm at the height of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yes, the conservatives are mounting a clamorous counter-attack upon the historians and analysts who have done much to demystify the rôle of the Soviet Union on the international stage, but they are fighting a rearguard battle, and objective observers have little to fear from them.
Paul Flewers
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Life Revolutions & The Delegate for Africa
Baruch Hirson
Revolutions in My Life
Witwatersrand University Press, Witwatersrand 1995, pp. 365
Revolutions in My Life
Witwatersrand University Press, Witwatersrand 1995, pp. 365
Baruch Hirson and Gwyn Williams
The Delegate For Africa: David Ivon Jones 1883–1924
Core Publications, London 1995, pp. 280, £8.50
The Delegate For Africa: David Ivon Jones 1883–1924
Core Publications, London 1995, pp. 280, £8.50
SOUTH AFRICA has posed unique problems for the revolutionary Socialist left. Neglected at times because of more pressing problems elsewhere, it has been at other times the focus of intense solidarity work and campaigning led by the dominant forces of radical liberalism and Stalinism. Neither scenario gave much scope for the development of real depth in the understanding of the nature of South Africa, the old Apartheid regime, or the prospects for a genuine Socialist democracy.
In South Africa itself the forces of non-Stalinist Marxism and Socialism were and have never been anything more than minimal. The initial prestige, resources and collaborationist politics of Stalinism enabled it to become deeply entrenched in the black liberation movement for an entire historical period. This factor, and the segregationist stance of so much of the white ‘labour’ movement, left little room for non-Stalinist Marxism.Baruch Hirson is one of the very few to have been part of that non-Stalinist left, active in one capacity or another since the early 1940s. This position enables him to give us a wealth of unique insights into the history and development of South Africa in this century, and glimpses of viewpoints, problems and perspectives which have remained largely absent from the public domain. The cover notes on Revolutions in My Life include the comment that Hirson has ‘strong opinions on everything from people to politics, making entertaining if controversial reading’. This is a true but also a trivialising statement: he is not being controversial for its own sake. The challenge of Hirson’s arguments and perspectives is seminal. No attempt to tackle the history and problems of South Africa can now be valid if it does not take into account the issues raised by these two books. One can agree or disagree with Hirson’s arguments, but they cannot be ignored.
The Delegate for Africa deals with the precursors and earliest years of the Third International, and Revolutions in My Life deals with the 1940s through to the 1960s, yet there are essential links between them. The central characters in both books are almost all white. Given the nature of South Africa, South African politics and concerns about South Africa, this needs to be said. Not only are they white, but in several cases immigrants. This is not a problem of selectivity on Hirson’s part. It is a material fact in the history of the South African Socialist and Marxist movements which has been of profound historical significance. White immigrants into South Africa arrived not just as colonial masters and adventurers, but also as a workforce. White labour arrived from the late 1880s not just as a sizeable workforce, but also as a workforce which brought with it elements of European labour organisational and Socialist traditions. Initially, the main elements of this labour force came from the British Isles, and slightly later a significant East European element also appeared. Although of lesser status, South Africa thus featured alongside North America, Australia and New Zealand for some of those seeking new beginnings.
The story of the ‘delegate for Africa’ to the first congress of the Third International thus begins not in Africa, but in Wales. The biography of David Ivon Jones is in two distinct parts. The first, written by Gwyn Williams, focuses primarily on his early life in Wales; the second, written by Hirson, follows him through South Africa to Moscow. The story of Jones’ evolution from a background in radical Welsh non-conformism is of immense value in its own right. It is a timely reminder that the radical proletarian and Socialist traditions of industrial South Wales were not the only ones to feed into the labour movement as it existed at the turn of the century. There is also food for thought in the fact that two of the most influential earliest proponents of interracial labour solidarity in South Africa, Ivon Jones and S.P. Bunting, both came from backgrounds steeped in theological radicalism, whereas more narrowly materialist labour activists were more easily drawn into dangerously ambiguous positions, as exemplified by the Rand General Strike of 1922.
Jones is revealed as one amongst many to arrive in South Africa almost by accident. Emigrating for the sake of his health, his originally intended destination was New Zealand (later on, others from Baltic Russia actually thought they were heading for the USA!). Initially settling into Rand society in the turbulent years of 1912–14, Jones was still little more than a radical deist liberal, but his keen intellect was spurred to question the situation in which he found himself. White labour was under tremendous pressure, with lower wage rates and worse conditions of work than elsewhere, squeezed by the ‘Randlord’ employers’ attempts to undercut rates and conditions by using unskilled black labour held under conditions of virtual slavery. White labour was hitting out almost blindly in all directions, leading to a series of violent clashes with the authorities, whilst engaging against employers one minute, and against the contrived ‘black threat’ the next. The desperate depths of the struggle led Jones first to the conclusion that it was the very treatment of white workers as human beings that was at stake: ‘They were not engaged in a revolt merely to raise the standards of wages, but to raise the standard of manhood.’ This led him straight to the tiny handful who were already declaring that they needed to ‘fight for human rights, whether for the coloured or white people’. But both whites and Indians, including Ghandi, were not averse to playing with the authorities for sectional advantage.
We are not dealing here with a mass or sizeable movement of any sort, merely the personal evolution of a tiny handful of individuals. But by 1915 a small group, including Jones and Bunting, had reached the point of breaking with established labour. Their new grouping, the anti-war International Socialist Organisation of South Africa, was to be the germ from which future South African Marxism and Communism would spring. Strongly influenced by De Leon as well as Marx, the International Socialist League (as it became) began a sustained effort to combat segregationism: ‘The employing class, which exploits all labour without prejudice ... strives to perpetuate that colour prejudice in the ranks of the workers themselves ... It is for the white workers to stretch out the hand of industrial unity to the native workers.’
I have emphasised this prehistory of South African revolutionary Socialism which the Jones biography now reveals in unique detail, as it is so essential for the understanding of any of the subsequent developments. A reading of The Delegate for Africa should be required reading for anyone who would now presume to comment on any aspect of the subsequent labour, liberation or revolutionary movements. Hirson’s seminal treatment of the 1922 Rand General Strike, the ‘Red Revolt on the Rand’, where the fledgling Communist Party of South Africa struggled to encompass a movement to defend white labour against further degradation, and produced the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa’, produces many disturbing questions about the origins of apartheid thinking. The line between combating a descent to the conditions of black labour and wishing to be rid of black labour itself was not easy to hold. And for white workers this was a desperate and defensive struggle for survival from which almost any lifeline was likely to be grasped.
Nor was this the only problem. By 1922 Jones himself was in Russia, from where work for the Third International and then health problems were to lead him never to return. Here again the detailing of Jones’ central rôle at the heart of events, coupled with Hirson’s excellent placing and contextualisation of the debates, sheds unique and essential light on the difficulties of the Third International in establishing a position and giving a lead on the racial question. Race and colonial questions were important to the Third International, but not, it must be said, the most important items on its immediate agenda. The failure satisfactorily to resolve the contradictions between the stances on anti-colonialism, Garveyist middle class black nationalism, and labour solidarity are all very revealing of future problems in the strategies of the Communist Party. The compounding of these problems through the use of commissions with overlapping and contradictory remits played its part here. Ultimately, the CPSA was left to work out its own salvation, as official resolutions focused on the racial question in the USA and of colonisation in general, and the special insights of Jones and Bunting regarding the peculiar aspects of the South African situation failed to gain official endorsement (further light is also shed on this in Searchlight South Africa, no. 3, July 1989, where transcripts of the Bunting-Bukharin debate of 1928 are reproduced). But ultimately, of course, local autonomy was not the case either. The death of Jones in 1924, and the expulsion of Bunting in 1931 in the first stages of the Stalinisation of the CPSA, were to remove even this avenue to salvation. And as detailed elsewhere (see Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 4), South African Trotskyists in the 1930s were never able satisfactorily to resolve these problems, or to break out of their situation of isolation.
Baruch Hirson’s autobiography effectively begins at the very end of this dark chapter, and at the threshold of an even darker chapter, that of institutionalised Apartheid. Hirson’s entry into Marxist politics in the 1940s came through his involvement in the last actions of the openly Trotskyist groups dating from the pre-war period. Like many of the earlier members of these groups, however, Hirson’s political apprenticeship began in the Rand Jewish community in which he grew up. This community was of Baltic Russian origin, with large numbers originally from Latvia and Lithuania in particular. Many families had arrived as exiles from Tsarist Russia, and had living and personal links with European revolutionary groups. Links also existed with Zionist and other Jewish groups, and with Palestine itself. Hirson’s own personal and family history outlined here provides a marvellous placing of this community and the multi-faceted milieux within it in South Africa. His own introduction to Marxism came through the Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair, one of the few Socialist milieux where Stalinism, although present, was not completely dominant.
The detailing of Hirson’s involvement and activities with the Trotskyist groups of 1943–46 has to be read to be appreciated, as has his detailing of the earlier period. The shattering effects of the closing down of trade union activity by the Trotskyist Workers International League and the coming into being of institutionalised Apartheid hardly need emphasising. And the difficulties of finding academic and teaching work as a known dissident, maintaining personal integrity, and finding a meaningful rôle in a situation of almost total political isolation, all provide enlightening testimony: ‘It was possible to mix with hundreds of students, see many lecturers and still feel intensely lonely.’ Yet it was only because he was a physicist that work could be found at all, as one colleague pointed out: ‘“If you did have a degree in the humanities you would never have been appointed to the staff at Wits.” Physics was “safe” for a radical, but no history or sociology department would have appointed me.’
The relevance, effectiveness and validity of the Non-European Unity Movement initiative taken by some of the black and coloured former Trotskyists during this period is still hotly debatable, but at least given the treatment here this, too, can now be on a more informed basis (see Hirson’s further treatment of the NEUM in Searchlight South Africa, no. 12, June 1995). But even more controversial is the eventual assumption of the tactics of sabotage by the anti-Apartheid activists, including Hirson himself. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre is central here. Despite the ANC and PNC developments, the emergence of SACTU, and the anti-Pass Law protests, the feeling is clearly reflected that fruitful action against Apartheid seemed as far away as ever. In fact, if anything, with the National Party’s political and security offensive, which had been underway since 1957–58, the situation looked bleaker than ever. The revelation of the depths of the impasse as felt on the inside by opponents of the regime are powerfully chronicled here. Simultaneously, it seemed necessary to go even further ‘underground’ in order to survive, and yet it was necessary to produce public acts of defiance to deny the regime the legitimacy of acquiescence through silence. Shades of the psychology behind 1916 in Ireland, one wonders? Symbolic action was necessary to maintain the self-respect of a movement and a people. This seemed more necessary than ever in the aftermath of Sharpeville and the Treason Trials.
Hirson was arrested and tried for his rôle in the sabotage campaign in 1964. He was imprisoned for nine years, and came into exile in England after his release in 1973. Even in his accounts of the time of his imprisonment, however, the divisions maintained by Stalinism within the anti-Apartheid movement continue to be revealed. Did the anti-Stalinist Marxists of the Socialist League who had played such a central rôle in the creation of the anti-Apartheid sabotage groups achieve what they could and should have done? Opinions will vary, but no one can gainsay the value of such an account from the inside. The value of both of the books reviewed here for comprehending what has happened inside South African Socialism and Marxism, warts and all, is immense. But there is also much to be learnt by inference regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the new regime, and what it is necessary still to do.
Ian Hunter
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Raymond Challinor
Rocking the Boat
(Summer 1996)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 6 No. 2/3, Summer 1996, p. 304.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Les Forster
Rocking the Boat: Memoirs of a Glasgow Socialist and Whistleblower
Milnagavie, 1995, pp. 69, £3.95
Rocking the Boat: Memoirs of a Glasgow Socialist and Whistleblower
Milnagavie, 1995, pp. 69, £3.95
LES FORSTER, born in 1920, came from a working class family in Maryhill, Glasgow. He grew up on the mean streets of Clydeside, where poverty and violence were endemic. Attending an open-air Anarchist meeting kindled his interest in politics. He served a long prison sentence in the Communist Party. Eventually, the rigid discipline and mind-rotting conformity became too painful to endure.
Along with Harry McShane and a few others, he escaped from Stalinist servitude, and began a journey through revolutionary politics. This took them into cooperation with Eric Heffer and I.P. Hughes, publishing the Syndicalist journal Revolt.When Revolt foundered on the rocks, Gerry Healy, anxious to recruit them to the Socialist Labour League, sped to Glasgow. The ever-optimistic Gerry had even obligingly written a public declaration, recounting all the virtues of the SLL, which he expected them to sign. But, alas, they were not so obliging. Further amorous advances, extending over many years, were made by the Socialist Workers Party. These, again, were rebuffed. They did not see Tony Cliff as the messiah.
Perhaps the reluctance of Les Forster and his comrades to join any of the Trotskyist tendencies partly arose because they thought that these organisations shared some of the characteristics of the Communist Party, a political line that was determined from the centre. Yet it was probably also as a result of the great importance they attached to local issues. They were usually preoccupied with purely Clydeside affairs, not with building a national organisation.
The great value of this book is the fresh light it throws on working class politics in Glasgow. The fight for better education and housing, and the struggles of the railwaymen and of the left on Glasgow Trades Council; all the time the emphasis was placed on rank and file activity, the need for militancy rather than parliament to find the solutions. Throughout, Harry McShane remains a father-figure, a leader who always espouses the doctrine of Socialist Humanism.
It seems a shame that Les Forster did not recount the final days of Harry McShane. As Les, Hugh Savage and others know better than I, Harry McShane died cursing Tony Cliff and the SWP. He thought that he had been used by them; his name would appear on billboards advertising public meetings, and his reputation would attract a bigger audience. Yet at these actual meetings, they would confine him to making a token appearance. He was there for decoration, not for a political contribution.
Harry McShane’s hostility did not stop Tony Cliff and his cronies from flying up from London to hijack his funeral. They hoped to claim his corpse for the greater glory of the SWP. However, their attempt did not succeed.
This book can be obtained from the author, 24 Keystone Avenue, Milnagavie, Strathclyde G62 6HZ.
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The Aztecs
Inga Clendinnen
Aztecs: An Interpretation
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, pp. 398, £7.95
Aztecs: An Interpretation
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, pp. 398, £7.95
THE FIVE-HUNDREDTH anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the new world unleashed a flood of left wing nostalgia, a stream in which anti-imperialist feeling merged with utopian sentimentality about the societies swept away by the Spanish conquest. This book should bring us back to dry land again with its cool appraisal of one of the most spectacular of these civilisations, that of the Aztecs, probing the structure of their society, and unlocking the driving forces of its development.
The author points out that the capital, Tenochtitlan, was ‘a beautiful parasite, feeding on the lives and labour of other peoples’ (p. 8), emphasising how it took less than a century for ‘a miserable collection of mud huts scraped together on a swampy island by a clutch of miserable refugees’ to develop the ‘imperial splendour and the massive elaboration of the vision of the city’ (p. 37). This naturally involved a move ‘from the relative egalitarianism and known neighbourliness of the early days of settlement and struggle to the inequalities and social distances of the city in its maturity’ (pp. 37–8). The social gap between beggar and noble was enforced by differential law codes, sumptuary regulations and tribute obligations, underpinned by the plundering of other communities of wealth and sacrificial victims by a protection racket that could have taught Al Capone a thing or two.Whilst developing her analysis the writer deals damaging blows to the naive assumption that capitalism alone is a society built on competition, and the fiercely competitive mechanism of Aztec society had the added unpleasantness that it centred around obtaining human sacrificial victims. Socialists who have for so long accepted Lewis Henry Morgan’s analysis of it as some sort of ‘democracy’ in Ancient Society and Montezuma’s Dinner should take a good hard look at this book. So however we may regret the loss of so much beautiful art, which can be sampled by a visit to the British Museum’s new Mexican gallery, it was not the least of Spanish imperialism’s achievements during its ‘golden century’ to have swept this appalling system away, whatever we may feel about what replaced it.
Of course, the Aztecs were not the first civilisation in the Valley of Mexico to develop so spectacularly, or to fall so completely. Whilst the author has an acute sense of the rapidity with which Aztec society developed, she does not agree that it was bound for a collapse that could be just as rapid. Here she departs from the view held previously that this society had already overreached itself by the time of the Spanish conquest, describing the idea that ‘any polity has “inevitable limits”, to be an underestimation of ‘the flexibility of human arrangements and invention’ (p. 309, n41). This has probably more to do with the self-confidence of American capitalism during its own ‘golden century’ than with any generalisation about society based upon history, which has always passed its own verdict on imperial splendour. But be that as it may, it does not alter the fact that this book is useful, informative and enjoyable.
Al Richardson
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A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost
Paul M. Buhle
A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892–1953) and the Decline of Radicalism in the United States
Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1995, pp. 192
A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892–1953) and the Decline of Radicalism in the United States
Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1995, pp. 192
ONE OF the more colourful characters in the history of the American left was Louis C. Fraina. One of the founders of the US Communist movement, he later gained considerable prestige as a Depression era economist and commentator under the name of Lewis Corey. Credit is due to Paul Buhle for breathing life into both of these radical careers in the first full-length biography of the activist turned theoretician. By relating a comprehensive investigation of Fraina/Corey’s life to broader considerations of the strategic problems of the American revolution, Buhle presents a compelling portrait of one of the exemplars of prewar immigrant radicalism. Less convincingly, Buhle attempts to account for the decisive reversal which afflicted this radical tradition, which meant that by the mid-1940s many of its most articulate exponents – at least within the intelligentsia – had adopted a political orientation to the right of Social Democracy, a process of deradicalisation to which Corey himself was subject.
Fraina worked with Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party whilst still a teenager. He championed avant-garde cultural movements, such as modern dance, whilst eschewing the prudish elements of Socialist reform agitation. Politically, he amalgamated Dutch Council Communism and Austin Lewis’ advocacy of the mass strike (with more than a smattering of Anarchism), but this did not prevent his ascendancy within the nascent US Communist movement. As Buhle points out, Fraina’s outlook owed more to DeLeon than Lenin, but he nevertheless became a US delegate to, and worker for, Lenin’s Communist International. This ended in ignominy, with Fraina and a sum of Comintern money disappearing together in Mexico in 1922.North of the border, he reappeared under the name of Lewis Corey, initiating a tangled pattern of Communist Party fellow-travelling. He was a key organiser for the League of Professional Groups, which sought to capitalise on the party’s election campaign of 1932, but never quite won the trust of its leadership. He penned The Decline of American Capitalism (1934), an underconsumptionist account of the slump, which stood out largely due to the absence of a serious competitor in the field of political economy, and The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), which became something of an unofficial handbook for Popular Front politics. However, his relationship with the Communist Party disintegrated, and he enjoyed a brief sojourn on the anti-Stalinist left, notably with the Modern Quarterly. By 1940 he was explicitly hostile to Marxism. He died in 1953, after a lengthy period awaiting deportation for ‘un-American activities’ committed in the 1920s and 1930s.
Buhle’s work is a masterful demonstration of the way that Fraina/Corey’s experiences bridged the divide between the immigrant radical and the committed intellectual. Where it is less useful is in its avowed ‘presentist’ stance. Given the 1990s emphasis on ‘culture’ as the basic building block for social change (or even for comprehending society), Buhle sometimes appears to be reading history backwards. He sees a mass-scale cultural avant-garde of the sort championed by Fraina as the most viable part of the latter’s critique, and potentially the springboard for an opposition movement. Buhle contrasts this to a bankrupt ‘Leninism’, which is summarily dismissed as a detour. Surely a stronger case exists for locating the modernist upsurge of the second decade of this century as part of the wider social ferment that contributed to the demand for Leninist parties. Obviously, cultural production and Communist politics are distinctive activities, but it isn’t necessarily legitimate to counterpose the two. The ‘presentism’ of this account is also apparent when Corey is criticised for lacking environmental awareness!
Overall, this is a useful work, and is a welcome addition to the growing library on the interwar radical left. However, it should also remind us of a key problem of revolutionary historiography: whilst we can learn from history, we should also avoid judging its participants by inappropriate contemporary standards.
Graham Barnfield
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Early Mesopotamia
J.N. Postgate
Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History
Routledge, London 1992, pp. 367, £18.99
Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History
Routledge, London 1992, pp. 367, £18.99
Paul-Alain Beaulieu
The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 BC
Yale University Press, New Haven 1989, pp. 270
The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 BC
Yale University Press, New Haven 1989, pp. 270
OUR FIRST book is a very impressive achievement, weaving together the archaeological and literary sources to make a coherent picture of society at the dawn of history. Although it was conceived as a handbook for courses in Near Eastern archaeology at Cambridge, it is superbly illustrated and documented, and makes a real attempt to be accessible to outsiders by providing each chapter with a compact introduction to all the subjects dealt with in it. And it takes us right to the heart of the historical problems surrounding the emergence of class society, civilisation, state and religion where they first become open to investigation. From this wealth of information we have only space here for those themes that are of interest for framing a Marxist view of ancient society.
Whilst it is stated early on that ‘throughout history whenever South Mesopotamia has fostered a flourishing society this has been centred around an efficient agricultural regime dependent on the controlled exploitation of the rivers’ (p. 14), Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic civilisation is dismissed as ‘no longer fashionable’, and centralised water control is no longer regarded as ‘the “prime mover” converting a society of villages to one of cities’ (p. 173). And whilst temples and palaces ‘are seen as gathering to themselves large reserves and distributing these to their dependants’, and ‘are therefore important in the process of state formation ... it would be dangerous to assume that this was the only route to civilisation’ (p. 191). This is because water control in Southern Iraq remained a localised concern even into the present century (p. 293), and all the evidence is that this was the predominant pattern during the early period. ‘Site survey has suggested that adaptations of the natural system into localised branching networks was the norm well on into the Early Dynastic’ (c 3000–2750 BC), notes Dr Postgate, and only at the end of this period when city life had well got under way were the ‘multiple, small shifting canals ... consolidated into a much reduced number of larger and more permanent courses’ (p. 174). The task of regulating canalisation at district and village level rested on a local official called a gugallum, who rarely appears in official texts. Large-scale brick construction of canal regulators is first mentioned under Entemena of Lagash (c 2450 BC), and major schemes involving redirecting the flow of the Tigris or Euphrates only start to crop up in royal inscriptions and date formulae after the time of Sargon of Akkad (p. 179; 2371–2315 BC). ‘Rural society may therefore have been able to fall back on a minimal default level if central government disintegrated’, explains Dr Postgate, but ‘where the scale of the works required a geographical control beyond the reach of local authorities, the agricultural regime must have rapidly deteriorated’ (p. 293), so that the abandonment of marginal lands must have been the inevitable result of political disorder, and their reclamation would only become viable when stability returned. And ‘for the society’s long-term survival the institutions’ rôle may well be crucial: where natural forces led to the drying of a major river course, the capital investment required to counteract this effect or relocate urban society to another stream must have been beyond individual villages’ (pp. 299–300).As far as religion fitted into this, it seems that the ‘temple-state’ construct of ancient society held by Gordon Childe and Deimel can no longer be justified in the present state of our knowledge (pp. 109, 292): ‘We cannot any longer maintain that because the temple collected commodities and distributed them to its dependants the entire economy operated through “redistribution”, or that the priests controlled all agricultural production and commercial activity’, Dr Postgate considers, but ‘we must not overcompensate, and so underrate the importance of the temple’s rôle.’ (p. 109) Speaking of the archives of the Bau temple at Lagash just before the rise of Sargon I, he notes that even if ‘the accepted opinion that the temples were the state has been drastically revised’, ‘nevertheless the range of the temple’s economic activities recorded in the texts remains unchanged ... including the control of irrigation waters’ (p. 115). Even writing itself appears to be a by-product of the wealth accumulated by the Eanna temple at Erech, where history’s earliest records on clay tablets (developed from what were previously clay bullae marked with numerals and commodities) originate in administrative lists, a genre that along with lexical material (according to table 3:13 on page 66) begins earlier and continues later than any other written form.
Temples remained important sources of wealth, power and status to king and commoner alike throughout Mesopotamian history. The reversion of offerings was a valued source of revenue. To begin with, cultic offerings must have gone to the regular staff of the temples, but ‘in the course of time, as in the temples of contemporary Egypt, many of these posts became sinecures, the tenure of which could be passed on, whether by inheritance, rôle, or even rental’ (p. 125) (we even have deeds of sale for temple offices in Egypt). When the paternal estate was divided at death in Nippur the temple offices came into the possession of the eldest son, and each individual might own more than one office at a time (as was common practice in Egypt as well). This has led Assyriologists to describe these usages as ‘prebends’, on the analogy of the pluralism of the late Medieval church. Rather more than a perk was the practice that as early as pre-Sargonid Lagash ‘a major part of the land was assigned to the office-holders of the temple for their sustenance, and can be called “prebend fields” ... as one might expect, the area assigned varied in proportion to the importance of the holder’ (p. 126).
The cult had a no less important a function in society as a whole:
‘The old sedentary population had developed an explicit ideology to describe the relationships between ruler and ruled, and between politics and religion ... In the spheres reflected in our documents Mesopotamian religion is politics. From the earliest times historical statements are couched in religious metaphors, and this alone is enough to show that their ideological statements were important on a purely secular level.’ (p. 260)
On the difficult question as to which emerged first, temple or palace, it appears that in the south temple precedes palace, whereas in the north the order is reversed (pp. 140–1). ‘In some Early Dynastic cities’, we are told, ‘the government rested in the hands of the chief priests, who no doubt ruled from the temple precincts.’ (p. 137) For example, at Erech ‘where traditionally religious and secular power seem to have been united’, an assemblage of buildings ‘within the Eanna temple precinct was probably in effect the ‘palace’ of the Early dynastic dynasty’ (p. 140), whereas the earliest clearly identifiable royal palaces at Kish are set well away from the temples (p. 137). Dr Postgate still considers that Jacobsen’s theory that the king owed his authority to an emergency appointment in a popular assembly may well have substance to it (pp. 269–70), and even that ‘it is arguable that it was precisely the strength of the communal ethos of South Mesopotamian civilisation that was responsible for the sophistication of its social forms’, so that ‘the palace should perhaps be seen more as an intrusive element from less complex societies than as any sort of political progression in the traditional Mesopotamian scene’ (p. 137).
And the basic institutions of state power long remained rudimentary and undifferentiated. As in ancient Egypt (Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no. 3, p. 171), Mesopotamian armies were often assigned to ‘peace-time tasks of communal labour’ (p. 152), and, again as in Egypt, ‘the word for “troops” is used indifferently for men engaged on any tasks under state control, whether military or civil, just as they themselves would have been redeployed indifferently as occasion demanded from the agriculture and communal labour essential to a southern city state into a military rôle’. In fact, ‘our earliest clear reference to a permanent military force belongs to the Akkad Dynasty’ (p. 242; 2371–2230 BC), the first demonstrably imperial state.Nonetheless, the shift from sacred to secular, and from institutional to private activity already noticed (Revolutionary History, Volume 4, no. 3, p. 104) obviously comes into play here, so that although ‘in the early third millennium the temples would have been the principal actors’, ‘there do seem to be various indications during the period 2500–1500 BC of the formal transfer of power from the temples to the palace’. The first indications of conflict between the two appear during the reign of Urukagina of Lagash (c 2380 BC), King Shulgi of Ur (2095–2047 BC) appears to have placed the temples under the supervision of secular appointees and used them ‘as an arm of the state economy’, and this was repeated by Hammurapi of Babylon (p. 300; 1792–1749 BC). And ‘as far as the private sector is concerned, another frequently asserted trend is the development of private property at the expense of the state after the collapse of the UR III Dynasty’ (p. 292; 2006 BC).
This leads on to a fascinating section (pp. 292ff.) dealing with Dark Ages and Intermediate periods as ‘obvious sources of social change’. These are, of course, a feature of contemporary Egyptian society as well, but whereas there the political structure on the whole maintained its basic unity, the city state was the rule rather than the exception in ancient Iraq, and the pattern here is of a very brief period of conquest of a surprisingly large area, followed by a relapse into internecine city state warfare. As in Egypt, there is an absence of relevant written information, which is ‘obviously symptomatic of conditions, but also veils from us the nature of events’ (p299). But there are some indications that some of these interludes might result from the collapse of a top-heavy state, freeing initiative from below. Speaking of extreme bureaucratism during the Third Dynasty of Ur, during which the title of scribe is used ‘almost as though it were a class’ (p. 153), Dr Postgate feels that ‘when the death of a single sheep appears three times in the government archives, it is hard to believe that the bureaucratic ideal had not become an encumbrance which ultimately contributed to the state’s inability to respond to internal and external threats’ (p. 42). During the same period there was an absolute ban on land sales (p. 183), and perhaps what amounted to a state monopoly of foreign trade, since ‘down to and including the UR III Dynasty the merchant class was indeed partly in the direct employ of the institutions’ (p. 220). But during the Isin-Larsa period that followed (2006–1763 BC), this trade fell into the hands of groups of merchants, for ‘the bureaucratic pyramid of the UR III system could not have survived the collapse of the state, and the local kings could have had neither the capital nor the administrative staff to re-establish a comparable level of inter-state commerce’ (p. 221). Indeed, the ‘apparent shift towards private from institutional enterprise’ (p. 22) is seen as a general feature of development.
Our second book is a valuable insight into the fall of this civilisation, which was in many respects the end of the ancient world as a whole, in the rise of Persia and the development of classical Greece. For many years scholars have been perplexed at the enigma of the last of the neo-Babylonian emperors, obviously a man of considerable ability, who seems to have upset all the traditional religious establishments in his fanaticism for the cult of the god Sin at Harran, whilst absenting himself from the capital for 10 years in the oasis of Teima in Arabia at a time when the Medes, and later the Persians, were threatening the existence of his empire. At first sight this would seem to be an ancient equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, and the virtual absence of conventional annalistic material makes his conduct all the more baffling.
It is, in fact, the interaction between cult, state and realpolitik in pre-classical society that enables Dr Beaulieu to make a credible interpretation of what was actually going on. In the absence of palace archives he brings together building dedications, cultic inscriptions and temple accounts to reveal a fascinating picture of the death agony of the ancient world at the highest state level.Ancient Mesopotamian society always suffered from the same problem of stability and continuity as the later Roman Empire, in that there was no necessary legal reason why any king should be succeeded by his son, as Dr Postgate reminded us in his book (p. 270). Obviously dynasties were established based on the prestige of one successful king or another, but few of them lasted more than a century or so. This built-in instability was particularly the case with the last neo-Babylonian dynasty, where Nebuchadrezzar II’s son was dethroned by the army commander Nergal-sharezer, whose son in turn was overthrown by Nabonidus himself. At the same time the rising power of Iran threatened to engulf the state and its civilisation as a whole.
The analysis set out here allows us a unique glimpse into how this society attempted to meet the threat to its existence, and the forms of internal conflict that raged between the different factions as to how this should be done. It is clear that for Nabonidus the traditions of Babylon alone were too narrow a basis upon which to assure survival. A previous researcher had already drawn attention to ‘the idea of imperial continuity with Assyria, centred on the figure of Ashurbanipal’ as one of ‘the main characteristics of Nabonidus’ personality’ (p. 2), to which our writer adds that ‘according to him, the successive empires of Assyria and Babylonia were two historical manifestations of the same imperial idea, and royal legitimacy rested more on the ability to fulfil the imperial mission than on a legalistic claim to the throne by right of descent’ (p. 140).
Nabonidus appears to have been an outsider, an Aramaean with a military background, ‘an able ruler who tried to save a hastily built and unstable empire from internal political turmoil and from an uneasy, if not desperate position on the international scene’ (p. xiii). Although we moderns would separate out his policies for achieving this into religious, economic and foreign, it is clear that no such divisions existed within the society of the time. Nabonidus’ mysterious 10 year absence in Teima, for example, ‘may well have been provoked by a split between him and an influential party led by his son’ (p. 63), but it was also a logical continuation of the expansion of the last Assyrian emperors and of Nebuchadrezzar II into this area, which controlled the wealth of all the trade from the east (pp. 178–81), possession of which could well have tipped the balance in the war that followed.
A similar picture emerges with what we might call religious policy, which was never a simple matter of individual conscience in the ancient Near East. ‘Royal interference with temple affairs often indicates a major shift of policy at court’, comments Dr Beaulieu (p. 234). Nabonidus evidently regarded himself as heir to the pretensions of the Sargonid dynasty of the Assyrian Empire (722–609 BC), and attempted to mobilise the whole of the cultural tradition of Mesopotamian civilisation in his defence, for which the city cults of the Babylonian heartland were too restricted in their appeal. His long-term aim to restore the cult of the god Sin at Harran, the last bastion of Assyrian power, was also a vital strategic goal, since its dominating position was under the control of the Medes: ‘Nabonidus’ motives for this may have been primarily personal, but the way he translated them into political terms suggests that the issue was subordinate to a broader one, the contest for hegemony over the Near East between the Medes and the Babylonians, a problem which had remained unresolved ever since the downfall of Assyria at the end of the sixth [sic] century’. (p. 114) So his anxiety to re-establish the cult of this temple not only ‘involved a redefinition of the respective spheres of Median and Babylonian influence in the Near East’ (p. 143–4), but ‘the inclusion of Harran in the Babylonian realm necessitated the breakdown of the Median kingdom’ (p. 114).
By demonstrating that ‘it is virtually impossible to draw a firm line between religion and politics when trying to evaluate Nabonidus’ goals’ (p. 110), Dr Beaulieu takes us right to the heart of the functioning mechanism of pre-classical society on the eve of its collapse. So that in spite of their very different aims and focus, these two books ideally complement each other.
Al Richardson
