Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, Lon¬don, 1988, pp174, £16.95
This memoir, with its dedication: `To the memory of my parents Rudolf and Selma Adler (Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942) and for my wife Janka' is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break up of the Austro Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.
The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:
`Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a govern¬ment office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become "konfes¬sionslos", in Czech "bez nabozenstvi", ie without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself "Konfessionslos". As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golin¬sky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-¬obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had re¬nounced my religion, and told him the story.
My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appeal¬ed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.'
As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied `Marxian economics' under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 `Bloody July'. Here is his account:
`It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Lander of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.
`Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class move¬ment, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded...
`I will never forget the burial of the vic¬tims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very mov¬ing. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-¬powerful Austrian working class move¬ment. A few years later they lost the civil war.'
Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:
`There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained com¬pletely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, in¬cluding a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o'clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.'
The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutscosterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline `Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl'. Even the Com¬munist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.
While still studying in Vienna he was of¬fered, and accepted, the co editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, `Entry forbid¬den to dogs and Jews', Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho Ukraine. In the chapter headed `Gun running for the Schutzbund', is the following report:
`In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.
`The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.
Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into .Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.
`My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.'
After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprison¬ment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis' oc¬cupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1000 visas for the same number of families. Adler's wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.
One of the first places he stayed in Bri¬tain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers' League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.
I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisa¬tion, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would sup¬port them modestly with some contribu¬tions, and had recently been supporting the miners' strike with a contribution of £100 a month.
He died in 1986.
Pierre Naville (ed), Pierre Naville, Denise Naville and Jean van Heijenoort, Leon Trotsky: Correspondence 1929 1939, L'Harmattan, Paris, 1989, pp229, 110ff
The flood of fascinating French books on revolutionary history continues. This latest work is a collection of 123 letters from three of Trotsky's main French cor¬respondents during the 1930s, together with 24 letters from Trotsky. Pierre Naville was one of the key leaders of the French section. of the Trotskyist move¬ment. Denise Naville was a close friend of both Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova. Jean van Heijenoort was Trot¬sky's most capable secretary.
Between 1927 and 1939, Pierre Naville was a leading member of the Trotskyist movement. After the outbreak of war, he turned to the academic world, and wrote a large number of books, mainly on the sociology of work and on philosophy. Over the last 15 years he has begun to publish material from his years of political activity, including a volume of his writings between 1926 and 1939 (L'entre deux-¬guerres), and a book of memoirs (Trotsky Vivant).
This latest collection of documents has a curious history, as Naville explains in his Introduction. At the outbreak of war Naville put about 300 letters from Trot¬sky, together with copies of his replies, in the care of a friend of his wife. Following the German occupation of France, this person took fright and destroyed the let¬ters. When Naville came to try and reconstitute the correspondence in the 1970s, he discovered that many of the let¬ters were missing from the three main ar¬chival collections (Harvard, the Hoover Institution and the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam).
Naville claims that these gaps must be due to Trotsky's archives having been rifl¬ed by his son, Iron Sedov, and by one of Trotsky's secretaries, Jan Frankel, or even by Jeanne Desmoulins, ex wife of Raymond Molinier. As Naville points out, he was at loggerheads with Sedov and Frankel on many points throughout the 1930s, and there was and still is! a mutual detestation between himself and Molinier. Given that Naville presents ab¬solutely no proof for his allegations, it seems far more probable that he is inter¬preting events in the light of a series of rivalries which are now over 50 years old.
Despite the book's title, the bulk of the documents are written by Naville and van Heijenoort. Amongst the letters by Trot¬sky there is little that has not previously been published„ and the few documents that are not in the French Oeuvres add nothing fundamentally new to our knowledge of Trotsky's positions and ac¬tivity during these years. Further, with the exception of a couple of previously ¬published documents by Trotsky, these are not letters dealing with major theoretical questions. Rather, they deal with the practical problems of building the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. This does not, however, detract from the interest of the collection in any way.
Most of the letters are from 1937 to 1939. Nearly two thirds of the book is devoted to this period. The main subject they deal with is the Moscow Trials, and the struggle waged by Trotsky to clear his name and expose the Stalinists. Naville's letters to Trotsky and van Heijenoort ex¬plain in detail the work which the French Trotskyists undertook, notably their cam¬paign of public meetings and political confrontations with the French Com¬munist Party.
In February 1937 the POI the French section held a meeting with 2,000 people at it. At the same time, Naville was in Belgium, speaking about the Trials to a meeting of miners. The letters describe how the PCF was forced to respond to the POI's campaign, by organising its own meetings, at which the POI intervened with leaflets and by organised heckling.
During this time the POI grew to several hundred, with scores of youth and workers who were at least partly won on the basis of their work around the Trials. The enthusiasm with which Naville describes the growth of the organisation in this period makes its decline within two years it was down to a few dozen all the more difficult to fathom. Unfor¬tunately, none of the letters shed any light on this collapse, although there is a telling remark in a letter to van Heijenoort (23 April 1937): `With lots of work and in¬itiative, we can double our membership in the next two months. The only problems as always are our organisational and propagandistic capacities.' (p.l27)
The POI was riven by the same dif¬ferences of opinion over the nature of the USSR as were to split the International, notably the SWP (US). In October 1937 Naville reports that he expected around 30 per cent of the POI's conference delegates to support Craipeau's position, which denied that the USSR was a workers' state. Similar problems hit Raymond Molinier's PCI during the same period.
A theme which runs through all the let¬ters, especially during the period of the campaign against the Trials, is that of mutual reproaches by both Naville and his correspondents. Trotsky and van Hei¬jenoort complained that the POI was slow in getting vital evidence with regard to Trotsky's visits in France; Naville retorted that Trotsky had not done enough to en¬courage support from the author Andre Gide.
This, coupled with bitter complaints from both sides about not having received documents (which were clearly 'lost' in the post), Naville's bleatings about van Heijenoort's translations together with the somewhat sharp replies he received in return, give an impression of distinctly uncomradely relations. This is not the case, as other, more relaxed let¬ters show. Rather, we are given an indica¬tion of the pressure under which both men who were in fact very friendly were working.
A major disappointment is the lack of any discussion on the Founding Con¬ference of the Fourth International, presumably due to the gaps in the various archive collections. In one of the few references in the book, Naville writes to van Heijenoort that the Transitional Pro¬gramme had already sold 1200 copies by 23 June 1938, 10 weeks before the Pro¬gramme was adopted (and amended) at the Founding Congress!
One point which will draw a sigh of recognition from anyone who has been in France during the summer months is Trot¬sky's exasperated letter to Naville (2 September 1935), with regard to an at¬tempt to organise a conference of the Bloc of Four!
'The conference was adjourned in order to prepare it properly, but as far as I can tell, nothing has been prepared. In many respects the internal perspectives docu¬ment has been overtaken by events. The political perspectives document is not ready. Having been adjourned, the con¬ference is now going to take place any old how. But nothing can be done, because there is a supreme historic factor which is called the holidays. We are in France, in a civilised country and the revolution can just wait at the door.' (p62)
A final historic footnote which drew a smile from this reader was Trotsky's re¬quest for help in finding quotes from Robespierre and other French revolu¬tionaries, to include in his book on Stalin. Denise Naville organised a team of young comrades to help out, whom Trotsky wished to thank in the preface to his book. Two of those involved were Barta and his companion Louise, who were shortly to found the Union Communiste, of which the French organisation Lutte Ouvriere claims to be the continuation.
Despite the gaps in the record, and the fact that a good 15 per cent of the letters are of virtually no interest whatsoever, (especially a series of covering notes sent by van Heijenoort with documents in 1938 39), this collection is extremely in¬teresting, and Naville had done us all a ser¬vice in reassembling the correspondence and publishing it. Given the wealth of other, more important, material which is in French and remains untranslated, it is probably too much to hope that Naville's book will be published in English in the near future. However, everyone who has an interest in this period and can read French should get hold of a copy.
Alison Peat
Tony Cliff, Trotsky, Volume P Towards October, 1879 1917, Bookmarks, Lon¬don, 1989, pp314, £6.95
A sharp observer once wrote that Cliff's biography of Lenin reads like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. Since the rise of the International Socialists to party pretensions in the Socialist Workers Party, we have become accustomed to one book after another ex¬plaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of this group's insight and experience. After Lenin and Luxemburg it was in¬evitable that Trotsky would come in for the same treatment.
For this reason the book has the weaknesses that we would expect. The sec¬tions on democratic centralism go on at great length about centralism, but are noticeably silent about democracy. In the conflict over the formula `the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' Trotsky is condemned for `abstraction' against Lenin (pp134 9), whereas history proved Trotsky to be right about this and Lenin to be demonstrably in the wrong. But since the SWP is deeply involved in the fetishisa¬tion of `the Party' we have the old myth of Lenin creating the revolutionary party of the working class, at a time when he, in any case, did not believe that the next revolution in Russia would be a pro¬letarian revolution.
In order to assert the importance of organisation over ideas Cliff is obliged to treat the theory of Permanent Revolution in a most unsatisfactory way. Although he is careful to make reverential references to it (eg pp 11, 37), the fact that he does not support the theory himself (he believes, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and many Mensheviks, that the Russian revolution ended in state capitalism) obliges him to follow the Stalinists in arguing that it was a peculiarly Trotskyist heresy which `had no impact in the Rus¬sian Socialist movement' (p139) with which `none of the Marxist leaders agreed' (p132). It must come as a surprise to Cliff to learn that this theory was by no means rare among the Nashe Slovo group, as a quick reading of Radek's Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution (1917) and Ways of the Russian Revolution (1922) shows. Although Cliff is careful not to counterpose Lenin to Trotsky as if they encountered each other in a vacuum, as Stalinists are wont to do, and an especially strong part of his book is its detailed discussion of the ideas of the Menshevik leaders, by handling the question in the way he does he leaves us with the impres¬sion that Trotsky was a loner, whose basic ideas had no long term impact at all.
The book is also written with a lack of imagination. Page after page consist of long quotations from Trotsky printed en bloc and separated by one or two sentences from Cliff. It is also a one-¬dimensional Trotsky that is presented here, discussed almost exclusively in the context of the relevance of his ideas and actions to the coming revolution. Trotsky the student of military affairs barely ap¬pears (pp168 72), and Trotsky the essayist not at all.
Cliff appears to be totally ignorant of Trotsky's most important contribution to understanding the relationship between the intelligentsia and the workers, the arti¬cle he wrote for Kievskaya Mysl in 1912. But then, if the members of the SWP were acquainted with it, they might not remain in the SWP.
Since as far as the general public is con¬cerned it was Deutscher who rescued Trot¬sky's name from the oblivion to which the Stalinists consigned it, Cliff is obliged to assert his originality and revolutionary rectitude by an attack upon him. Deutscher is accused of seeing the Cold War as `the main, or perhaps only, arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism' (p16), a view that is said to lead to the conclusion that `the workers are irrelevant to the class struggle' (pp16¬7). Apart from the fact that I do not recall Deutscher anywhere arguing that the class struggle did not go on in the West, or in the undeveloped world, irrespective of the confrontation of the superpowers, this is an indirect attack on Trotsky through the intermediary of his biographer. Trotsky (like Marx himself) held that a confronta¬tion between states resting upon different class relations partook of the nature of an international civil war. To Trotsky the basic confrontation in world politics in the twentieth century in foreign affairs was between the workers' state and world imperialism. The last three volumes of the Pathfinder edition of his writings concen¬trate on very little else. Since Cliff believes that Trotsky was mistaken, because the Soviet Union was a bourgeois state merely in conflict with rival imperialisms, he should have the courage to attack Trotsky openly, and not through the ideas Deutscher holds in common with him. An even more dishonest polemic is carried on in the context of the quotation from Machiavelli from which Deutscher's first volume takes its title, The Prophet Arm¬ed. Although it is obvious to all but the most prejudiced that `the prophet' in question here is Trotsky, Cliff twists it round to make Deutscher intend Stalin:
`The significance of the quotation from Machiavelli which stands at the head of The Prophet Armed is now clear. The prophet must be armed, so that when the people no longer believe in the revolution, he can "make them believe by force". Ac¬cording to Deutscher, Stalinism not only protects the achievements of the revolu¬tion, but also deepens and enlarges them...' (p 15)
The very lack of substance in this portrait, and its narrow concern with a limited range of Trotsky's ideas and actions dur¬ing the period it covers, show that what we have here is not a true biography, but a flat icon representation of Trotsky as a patron saint of the SWP. And in it what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The coincidence of this book with Broué's massive biography creaks a pain¬ful impression.
Al Richardson
Lynne Viola, ?'he Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivisation, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp285, £8.95
This book is a well researched and detailed study of the workers who, in response to an appeal launched by the Soviet Communist Party at its Central Committee plenum in November 1929, volunteered to help organise the crash agricultural collectivisation scheme, which was announced at the same time. Of the 70,000 volunteers, 27,519 were selected, and they became known as the 25,000ers. They were predominantly factory activists, members of factory committees, party cells and union committees, shock workers, etc. Nearly 80 per cent of them were party members, or in the party's youth section. Over half of them were under 30 years old, and 7.7 per cent of them were women. In order to ensure their reliability and loyalty to the regime, in most areas a four tier screening process was run to weed out workers with close connections with the countryside, troublemakers, heavy drinkers and anyone who had been associated with party opposition groups.
After a two week (!) training course, the 25,000ers were despatched with much fanfare into the rural areas in order to help assert the centre's control over the crisis wracked countryside. By mid-¬February 1930 they were all in rural areas, ready to take on such tasks as chairmen of collective farms and party secretaries and administrators. Not surprisingly, the existing rural officials resented the volunteers' entry onto their patch, cold¬-shouldered them, and often relegated them to menial work. The peasantry, generally bitter at the harsh treatment they had been receiving since grain requisitions had commenced in 1928, were mainly hostile to the volunteers, and were often contemptuous of their unfamiliarity with rural life. Even though Viola claims that the volunteers' attitude towards the peasants was on the whole better than that of the average rural officials, several volunteers were brutally murdered. By the time the campaign ended in late 1931, there were still 18,000 of the volunteers in the countryside, many of them by then having gained leading posts in rural party and government bodies.
For all the extensive research behind this book, Viola emerges as an apologist for Stalinism, albeit of a curious kind. She claims that collectivisation was supposed `to be a revolution which would undermine the old order, modernise agriculture, institute a reliable method of grain collection, stimulate a cultural revolution, and build a new social and administrative base in the countryside' (p91). However:
`Although centrally initiated and endorsed, collectivisation became, to a great extent, a series of ad hoc policy responses to the unbridled initiatives of regional and district party and government organs. Collectivisation and collective farming were shaped less by Stalin and the central authorities than by the undisciplined and irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimentation of collective farm leaders left to fend for themselves, and the realities of a backward countryside and a traditional peasantry which defied Bolshevik fortress storming. The centre never managed to exert its control over the countryside as it had intended in the schema of revolution from above.' (pp215 6)
Notwithstanding the efforts of the volunteers, the centre apparently could only assert its authority over the coun¬tryside through `a network of strict repressive measures' and by ruling `by ad¬ministrative fiat', which `did not represent effective control, but its opposite' (p216).
True, rural officialdom did act in a bureaucratic manner, alternating between collectivising everything within sight, and merely collectivising on paper. But whose fault was that? There were no detailed plans for collectivisation for the rural of¬ficials to subvert, nor could there have been. Soviet agriculture was quite unready for all out collectivisation. The material prerequisites for it were just not there. On the eve of the collectivisation drive there were only 35,000 tractors in the Soviet Union, 5.5 million households still used wooden ploughs, half the grain harvest was reaped by sickle or scythe, and 40 per cent of it was threshed by flails. Under Stalin and Bukharin theoretical myopia and factional zeal had ensured that little attempt had been made to initiate measures to modernise agriculture and increase in¬dustrial capacity, measures which would have enabled a realistic collectivisation drive to proceed smoothly. Their policies led directly to the grain crisis of 1928, when peasants started to withhold grain as they saw no purpose in selling it to the state when there was little industrial pro¬duct to buy in return.
Collectivisation was in no sense a fully worked out scheme. It was a desperate at¬tempt by the Soviet bureaucracy to reassert its faltering authority over the peasantry. It grew spontaneously and haphazardly from the enforced grain re¬quisitions of 1928, themselves an emergency measure. The alternating lack of instructions and floods of contradic¬tory diktats to the rural areas from the centre, the continually changing central policy statements, the sudden charges and retreats, and the general application of coercion against the peasantry all con¬tradict Viola's bizarre claims that the pro¬blems were essentially caused by rural of¬ficialdom's sabotage.
Viola holds the 25,000ers in high esteem, considering them as `the cadres of the Stalin revolution who, as advanced workers, served in the vanguard of the revolution' (p169). But the `Stalin revolu¬tion' was a disaster, not least in the agricultural sector. The peasantry, rich or poor, was overwhelmingly hostile to the coercive methods of collectivisation, and reacted by destroying their stock. From 1929 to 1933 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 12.1 million, horses from 34 to 16.6 million, and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 50.2 million. Shortages and disloca¬tions led to famine. The human cost was terrible. At least six million people, pro¬bably more, perished during the collec¬tivisation drive. Viola admits that many of the volunteers who made a career in the countryside adopted the siege mentality common to Soviet officialdom at the time. They were of that generation `who would replace the cadres purged in the late 1930s and who would later come to be identified as the cohort of the Brezhnev generation' (p211), which, incidentally, is not (as far as I can tell) intended as a criticism.
Returning to their arrival in the rural areas, the 25,000ers did see themselves as enthusiastic fighters for Socialism (but, then, so did the Red Guards during Mao's Cultural Revolution) and may have been at first more humane than the average Soviet official. But when they are con¬sidered in the general context of the col¬lectivisation scheme, their story, far from being a revolutionary epic, is just one chapter, and a fairly minor one at that, in the tragedy that was Stalin's Soviet Union.
Paul Flewers
Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Strong Oak Press, Stevenage,
1989, pp204, £15/£8.95
Glasnost notwithstanding, we know that the Stalinists have yet to produce a half¬way honest account of Soviet history. But many years have surely passed since anything like this rolled off the presses:
`National conspiracy turned to interna¬tional conspiracy. As war loomed closer, the Bukharinites advocated economic deals with the Germans and Japanese whereby they would grant concessions in return for being recognised as the govern¬ment when, as they and most interna¬tional observers believed, the USSR would go down to inevitable defeat.
`A picture of the extent of this sabotage emerged only in the trials of the various opposition leaders between 1936 and 1938, which also revealed that sabotage was linked with plans for the destruction of the Soviet Union in war. These public trials of the "opposition" leaders, however, had revealed only the tip of the iceberg. They indicated the existence of followers everywhere wrecking machinery, making the wrong parts, sen¬ding materials to the wrong places, poisoning farm animals, starting pit fires in mines, planning railway sabotage to build up to the immobilisation of the railways in the coming war... Sergei Kirov, the popular head of the party in Leningrad, was assassinated, and terrorist plans seem to have been afoot to assassinate the whole top party leader¬ship.'
Professor Cameron is a genuine unreconstructed Stalinist not one who merely despairs at Gorbachev, but who rubbishes Khrushchev (or `Krushchev' or `Khruschev', consistency is not his strong point) for sullying the good name of his hero.
Well, our Professor says that Stalin may have been a duffer at dialectics, and should have left genetics to experts like Lysenko, but these are mere spots on the sun. Under Stalin's sublime guidance, the Soviet Union became an industrial and agricultural giant, and has 1936 Constitu¬tion gave Soviet citizens `a broader spec¬trum of rights ...than any in world history'. As for the chronic inefficiency, disproportionalities and wastage of Soviet agriculture and industry, the deportations of entire nationalities, famine, the handing over of German Communists to the Gestapo, Stalin's ugly anti Semitism, it's as if they never existed. And just like another learned Professor, Vic Allen (The Russians are Coming, 1988), Cameron points to the arguments amongst Sovietologists over the numbers held in prison camps, to imply that the Gulag never existed. Academic titles do not pre¬vent men from being fools or charlatans, or both.
Why go on? All the tall tales that Cameron trots out have been convincingly refuted time and again over the last five decades. If this book has any worth, it does confirm Stalin's adage that paper will take anything that's written on it. Otherwise it would, I suppose, make an ideal present for those geriatric Stalinists who pine for the days when wreckers were routed, Trotskyists trounced, and Uncle Joe gazed down benignly upon us all.
Paul Flewers
Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Strong Oak Press, Stevenage,
1989, pp204, £15/£8.95
Glasnost notwithstanding, we know that the Stalinists have yet to produce a half¬way honest account of Soviet history. But many years have surely passed since anything like this rolled off the presses:
`National conspiracy turned to interna¬tional conspiracy. As war loomed closer, the Bukharinites advocated economic deals with the Germans and Japanese whereby they would grant concessions in return for being recognised as the govern¬ment when, as they and most interna¬tional observers believed, the USSR would go down to inevitable defeat.
`A picture of the extent of this sabotage emerged only in the trials of the various opposition leaders between 1936 and 1938, which also revealed that sabotage was linked with plans for the destruction of the Soviet Union in war. These public trials of the "opposition" leaders, however, had revealed only the tip of the iceberg. They indicated the existence of followers everywhere wrecking machinery, making the wrong parts, sen¬ding materials to the wrong places, poisoning farm animals, starting pit fires in mines, planning railway sabotage to build up to the immobilisation of the railways in the coming war... Sergei Kirov, the popular head of the party in Leningrad, was assassinated, and terrorist plans seem to have been afoot to assassinate the whole top party leader¬ship.'
Professor Cameron is a genuine unreconstructed Stalinist not one who merely despairs at Gorbachev, but who rubbishes Khrushchev (or `Krushchev' or `Khruschev', consistency is not his strong point) for sullying the good name of his hero.
Well, our Professor says that Stalin may have been a duffer at dialectics, and should have left genetics to experts like Lysenko, but these are mere spots on the sun. Under Stalin's sublime guidance, the Soviet Union became an industrial and agricultural giant, and has 1936 Constitu¬tion gave Soviet citizens `a broader spec¬trum of rights ...than any in world history'. As for the chronic inefficiency, disproportionalities and wastage of Soviet agriculture and industry, the deportations of entire nationalities, famine, the handing over of German Communists to the Gestapo, Stalin's ugly anti Semitism, it's as if they never existed. And just like another learned Professor, Vic Allen (The Russians are Coming, 1988), Cameron points to the arguments amongst Sovietologists over the numbers held in prison camps, to imply that the Gulag never existed. Academic titles do not pre¬vent men from being fools or charlatans, or both.
Why go on? All the tall tales that Cameron trots out have been convincingly refuted time and again over the last five decades. If this book has any worth, it does confirm Stalin's adage that paper will take anything that's written on it. Otherwise it would, I suppose, make an ideal present for those geriatric Stalinists who pine for the days when wreckers were routed, Trotskyists trounced, and Uncle Joe gazed down benignly upon us all.
Paul Flewers
Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein,The Labour Party a Marxist History,Bookmarks, London, 1988, pp 427, £7.95
This book offers itself as a Marxist history of the Labour Party, and sets out to ex¬plain its relationship with the working class movement, claiming in the process that it will expound the opinions of the great Marxist thinkers as to its nature and the attitude to be taken towards it by revolutionaries. A large amount of negative empirical evidence is amassed, and the very size of the book seems to lend credibility to its thesis. However, a closer inspection shows that its compilers have a selective myopia on an even vaster scale than their own researches.
Its broad structure is a most peculiar one. On page 3 it lists what it calls `major periods of class warfare' and totally omits the years 1944 45, the former year being the highest number of days lost in strikes since 1926, the latter being the inevitable Labour landslide as a result of it. The most left wing Labour Party conferences in history, during precisely this period, are carefully avoided. When we come to ex¬amine its treatment of the ideas of Leon Trotsky we shall see why this is so.
Nor is it entirely factually sound. Thus we are told (p60) that the British Socialist Party protested against the First World War `on clear internationalist grounds', whereas in fact it took two years to break with its initial chauvinism. On page 89 we read that the Communist Party `establish¬ed its credentials' in 1920 `without being inside the Labour Party' (their emphasis), even though its largest component had been an affiliate since 1916 and no deci¬sion had been taken to exclude those who were already in there. During the General Strike we are informed that (p139) `even the best Labour activists abstained politically', whereas as is well known, in areas like Lewisham, where no important trade union or trades council structure ex¬isted, it was the local Labour Parties that became the councils of action. Page 176 repeats the hoary old myth that the Com¬munist Party called the demonstration to stop the Fascists in Cable Street, a story that should have been consigned to a more or less honourable grave the day Joe Jacobs' memoirs came out.
But the most striking tampering with the record comes at the points at which the book claims to explain the views of the classical Marxist thinkers on this history. Since the authors claim that the Indepen¬dent Labour Party was `not the child of new unionism, but of its defeat' (p12), they are careful to omit Engels' en¬thusiasm for its founding, when he said that it was `the very party which the old members of the International desired to see formed' (Workmans Times, 25 March 1893). Page 3 claims that the book will answer the question as to `what were the views of Lenin and Trotsky' about the Labour Party and whether revolutionary Socialists should `enter the Labour Par¬ty'. Here the selective misrepresentation is so obvious as to leave little doubt that it is deliberate. The part played by Lenin in the debate that accepted the Labour Party into the Second International is dealt with nowhere. The discussion itself is consign¬ed to a minor footnote (p56), even though the reference (n.10, p399) makes it clear that the information used by the authors comes from Lenin himself, who is not even mentioned in their account.
Because the peculiar idea is held that soviets are `workers' councils of factory and office [!] delegates' (p139), we are told that Lenin in 1920 was `misinformed when he took the councils of action to be "the same kind of dual power as we had under Kerensky” (p"9;. This is to imply because the writers do not appear to know that the Mensheviks, SRs, etc, were all represented in the Soviets as parties, along with many bodies that had nothing to do with factories (or `offices'). The role played in the Soviets by Chkeidze, Cher¬nov, etc, was in fact exactly the same as that of their British counterparts in 1920. Whether this analysis is meant to justify the sectarianism of the SWP towards the local Labour Parties during the miners' strike of 1984 85, when they were the backbone of the support committees, is impossible to say. But repeated remarks such as `although a great many of Labour Party supporters must have been caught up in the strike action [before the First World War AR], on no occasion were they acting as Labour Party members, but rather in spite of that fact' (p48) show that the two Cliffs feel that they have a lot of explaining to do. Nor does Lenin's theory of the United Front fare any better at their hands. Thus we are told that `correctly ap¬plied' it `involved an attempt to force the leaderships of the reformist and centrist organisations into limited co operation on concrete issues by winning their followers for unity in action' (p113), that `as long as Communists understood affiliation as just a tactic it did not lead to compromising of their 'politics' (p108n), and that `First there had to be a split. The BSP members who wished to become Communists were already in the Labour Party, but had to come out.' (p107) But the theses of Lenin's Comintern (21 January 1922) define the United Front in Britain as `the task of the English Communists to begin a vigorous campaign for their acceptance by the Labour Party', making `every effort, using the slogan of the revolutionary united front against the capitalists, to penetrate at all costs deep into the work¬ing masses'. The light minded dismissal of this policy as `just a tactic' of `limited co¬operation on concrete issues' may be the policy of the SWP, but it is neither United Front policy, nor Leninism. The authors of this book even approve of the CPGB's crude attempt to sabotage its instructions by applying for affiliation in terms that deliberately invited refusal (p110). Final¬ly, the SWP's absurd slogan, `Vote Labour without illusions' is fathered upon Lenin without the slightest atom of proof (p 110).
If Lenin's ideas are distorted, Trotsky's are almost unrecognisable. On pages 119 20 the writers try to restrict them to the condemnations of the ILP and the Labour Party in only two writings, Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going? Not a single reference is given to his contributions to the theory of revolu¬tionary entry at all. Although the first Labour government is blamed for not allowing political affiliation to civil ser¬vants (p96n), the writers clearly approve of the political backwardness of such union members (pp377 8) (from which the SWP draws its own strength and among whom it plays no part in the struggle for affiliation), in spite of Trotsky's argument in Where is Britain Going? that 'a systematic struggle must be carried on against them' for affiliation, `to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike breakers'. The fact that this argument takes up an entire chapter of Trotsky's book is not even hinted at. When arguing against revolutionaries be¬ing in both the trade unions and the Labour Party the book is clearly at log¬gerheads with Trotsky. On page 115 we are solemnly told that `despite formal links, the two are in fact quite different in¬stitutions', only to be contradicted from the mouth of Trotsky himself five pages later that `these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour' (p120).
The whole treatment of the theory and practice of revolutionary entry is deeply unsatisfactory. On page 112 we are told that when the Communist Party in 1923 `decided to secretly send its members into the Labour Party' this `obscured the cor¬rect orientation on Labour' and `negated the affiliation tactic as a public exposure of Labour's reformism'. This is in line with Duncan Hallas' previous categorical statement that `the Communist Party's attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party was not an "entry" operation, as that term later came to be understood' (The Com¬intern, p45). Neither appear to be aware that the campaign for affiliation was the central tactic of the Comintern's United Front strategy in Britain, and that revolu¬tionary entry is simply the form this same strategy takes when revolutionaries do not lead any substantial sections of the work¬ing class. As Trotsky defined it, `the rela¬tionship of forces has to be changed, not concealed. It is necessary to go to the masses. It is necessary to find a place for oneself within the framework of the United Front, ie within the framework of one of the two parties of which it is composed', what he called an `organic place' where the revolutionaries are `too weak to claim an independent place' (Writings 1934 35, pp35 6, 42).
A minimal political logic would have posed the question in an obvious way: if the reformists were able to refuse the de¬mand for affiliation, should the Com¬munist Party have accepted it at that and just gone away? Isn't it just as logical to pose it from within as outside? A small footnote (p108) admits that `there have been occasions' in the 1930s and '40s, and by Tony Cliff's own group in the '50s and '60s, when entrism has been `used' as `a tactic imposed by great weakness' only to be abandoned `as soon as it had served the purpose of helping revolutionaries to stand on their own feet'. Not the slightest hint is given that during the entire history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain during Trotsky's lifetime its organisations were urged by him to practice entry, in the Communist Party to begin with, then the ILP and finally the Labour Party. On the contrary: Trotsky's concepts are openly mocked throughout. the book. On page 85 we are informed that `there is a theory which states that when workers move in a revolutionary direction they will turn to the Labour Party and remake it. 1919 pro¬ved this to be arrant nonsense'. In his in¬terview with Sam Collins in 1936 Trotsky prophesied `a strike wave in the near future', advising his supporters to enter the Labour Party. The process to which he referred did not mature until 1944 45, for it was set back by the coming of the war, and it is significant that this book carefully avoids the study of how the trade union militancy of 1944 a real crisis year if ever there was one had the effect of revitalising the Labour Party in 1945 and thrusting it to the left. We similarly look in vain in the book for Trot¬sky's argument that the opposition of the Labour Party right: to the Popular Front in the 1930s was `far too radical' for the Communists, for the SWP has its own Popular Front to advertise the Anti¬-Nazi League, with its night clubs, Chris¬tians, bikers, vegetarians, skateboarders, skins and football clubs (p335), and, we might add, vicars and liberals as well.
For the sake of clarity let us repeat Trotsky's verdict on small groups assuming an `independent' existence:
`The fact that Lenin was not afraid to split from Plekhanov in 1905 and to re¬main as a small isolated group bears no weight, because the same Lenin remained inside the Social Democracy until 1912 and in 1920 urged the affiliation of the British Communist Party to the Labour Party. While it is necessary for the revolu¬tionary party to maintain its independence at all times, a revolutionary group of a few hundred comrades is not a revolu¬tionary party, and can work most effec¬tively at present by opposition to the social patriots within the mass parties. In view of the increasing acuteness of the in¬ternational situation, it is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisa¬tions while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sectarian, sterile and formalistic in¬terpretation of Marxism in the present situation would disgrace an intelligent child of ten.' (Writings 1935 36, p382).
A great deal of useful historical infor¬mation is amassed in this book, and a useful collection is made of the condem¬nations of the politics of the Labour Party by the classical Marxists. But this is only the beginning of the ABC of political wisdom. A great deal more is carefully omitted particularly how revolu¬tionaries approach this organisation when they remain a small minority. On this question the verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and twos to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International not excepting the Russian issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties. The hold of reformism has to be broken inside the organisations it dominates, and cannot be accomplished by mere name calling from outside.
Thus this book belongs to the school of political thought that can be called pre¬mythological, or, at best, magical that if we call mighty institutions and their leaders by enough names they will vanish in a puff of smoke, like the demon king in the pantomimes. It was once said of an American politician that he never rose to his feet without adding to the sum total of human ignorance. The discrimination of the reading public prevented him from at¬tempting the same in print. But those who have rounded together a couple of thou¬sand or so students, civil service clerks and team leaders on job creation schemes and believe that they have founded a revolu¬tionary party of the working class are sub¬ject to no such constraints. The book will prove an undoubted success, for it will yet again prove the truth of the old saying that if you want to get away with a suc¬cessful deception, you should tell people what they want to believe in the first place.
Al Richardson
`Marxism and the Great French Revolution', Interna¬tional Socialism, no 43, Special Issue, June 1989, pp214, £2.50
Although we do not usually review magazines in this section, the one under consideration here in fact amounts to a considerable book, and is well worth more than a passing mention. It is made up of three extended essays, one by Paul McGarr, who gives us an overview which extends beyond a mere narrative to take in class questions, one by Alex Callinicos which discusses the various attacks upon and defences of the traditional Marxist class analysis, and a final piece by John Rees attempting to understand the development of Hegel's thought against the background of 1789 1815. Apart from Peter Taaffe's good basic book and a thoughtful essay in Permanent Revolution no 8, it represents the only effort by the Trotskyists in Britain to rise to the theoretical problems posed by the French Revolution, which Marxists have always believed was the classic model of a bourgeois revolution.
Paul McGarr's contribution is so com¬pact that it can be recommended to anyone whose prior knowledge is less than encyclopedic. Apart from at the end, where Callinicos feels obliged to advertise Cliff's ersatz theory of 'deflected perma¬nent revolution', most of the arguments for and against a class analysis appear to be taken in, even if enough is not made of the fact that the bourgeoisie already has strong influence within a feudal society, and therefore does not need any high degree of class consciousness to be able to organise for complete power, as opposed to the working class, which not only needs this but a fully developed theory of social rela¬tions and historical understanding to be able to gain control of society. The last contribu¬tion is interesting but one sided, but as it is meant to look at Hegel's thought through the prism of the French events, the writer cannot be blamed. But some indication should have been given to first time readers that there is far more to Hegel than that.
Nonetheless, the whole makes up a valuable contribution, if only to take the British Trotskyist movement out of its parochial concerns and remind it that it is meant to be the heir of all previous revolu¬tionary traditions.
Al Richardson
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