New Interventions, Volume 13, No 2

A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion
Volume 13, no 2, Spring 2010, 2.00
Philosophy and Revolution
Uniting the Left
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Conspiracy Theories
George Orwell and Lindsay Anderson
Stalinism, War and Revolution
The Fall of Stalinism
NEW INTERVENTIONS, VOLUME 13, NO 2
New Interventions
Volume 13, no 2, Spring 2010
David Black, Philosophy and Revolution
Why revolutionaries should study philosophy
2 5 8 9 11 19 22 27 32 36 38 43 48
Chris Gray, Uniting the Left

Practical proposals for left-wing unity
Dave Spencer, The Closure of the Campaign for a Marxist Party

What lessons can be learned?
Geoff Barr, CMP: Doomed From the Start

How to start anew
Mike Belbin, Second Glance

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and conspiracy theories
David Landau, The Stalin-Hitler Pact

Seventy years since Stalin shocked the world
Roger Cottrell, George Orwell and Lindsay Anderson

The impact of the English public school system on their work
Harry Ratner, Stalinism, War and Revolution

Were workers revolutions possible in 1945?
Andrew Coates, Requiem For a Dream?

Assessing the fall of official communism
Arthur Trusscott, Different Strokes for Different Blokes

Roman Polanski and Gary Glitter
Paul Flewers, Stalinism and Revolution

Why Stalin opposed workers revolutions in the West
JJ Plant, Recent Exhibitions

A look at recent exhibitions in London
Letters Otto Rhle; Kosovo

New Interventions is indexed at the Alternative Press Centre, website www.altpress.org, e-mail altpress@altpress.org
Editorial Board: Mike Belbin, Paul Flewers, Chris Gray, Mike Jones, John Plant, Alan Spence, Dave Spencer Subscriptions: 10 for four issues, 18.00 for eight issues, unwaged half price, institutions and abroad 15 for four issues, 25 for eight issues. Cheques to be made payable to New Interventions. The views expressed in articles, reviews and letters in New Interventions represent those of the author or authors, and may not coincide with those of members of the Editorial Board. ISSN 1464-6757, 116 Hugh Road, Coventry CV3 1AF, United Kingdom E-mail: trusscott.foundation@blueyonder.co.uk (editorial), drdavidspencer@talktalk.net (business)
David Black
Philosophy and Revolution

I Philosophy is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude towards being and beings in general, and through which an historicalsocial situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life. Herbert Marcuse functionaries, military leaders and educators who love power and honour. Above the guardians are the Philosophers, who love wisdom. And because the philosophers are the most perfect they live communistically, with equality between the sexes, and no private property. As regards government and the decision-making process, Plato excludes, as well as the multitude, anyone who selfishly engages in the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. No capitalist would want to live in Platos Republic. Rosa Luxemburg says that at the moment the Greeks enter history their situation is that of a disintegrated primitive communism. The ancient society, in which all members of the tribe are entitled to an equal share of their collective produce and collective plunder, is undermined by the rise of an aristocracy and the spread of monetisation. So, at the very time in Greek history when primitive communism is extinguished in reality, it is reinvented as an litist ideal by Plato. III Aristotle understood that movement from human potential to its actualisation within the polis as exemplifying the metaphysical and theological character of a perfected universe. Alisdair MacIntyre Aristotle, who comes after Plato, develops the concept of the good life. The good life spans through ones lifetime; it is not a project in which the end takes primacy over the means; ones life is not a means to something else; its activity is an end in itself. Aristotle, like Plato, divides the human community into three parts: at the top is the realm of theory and philosophy; secondly, there is the realm of praxis (which means action in the sense of free activity); and thirdly, at the bottom of society is production. Whilst philosophy and praxis are activities with no other ends than themselves, production as performed by slaves, women, artisans and others whom Aristotle excludes from citizenship has its end outside of itself. Like Plato, Aristotle believes that ideal forms and universals are real in the logical-metaphysical sense. But unlike Plato, Aristotle argues that ideal forms and universals cannot exist separately from the material reality. In Aristotles Republic or rather the polis, or city state what he calls the material cause is the quality and quantity of the citizens rather than the physical territory, which he assumes to be under private ownership. What he calls the efficient cause of the polis is the legislator the revolutionary leader who founds the constitution. And what he calls the final cause (the telos or purpose) of the polis is the self-sufficient community and the good life. According to Aristotles concept of totality in the polis, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. By contrast, if we accept our fate under capitalism, we are just a collection
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F there is one dominant philosophy in the modern world that embraces both left and right (not to mention postmodernism), that philosophy is pragmatism. As a philosophy pragmatism is really quite simple. If you want to eat a bowl of soup, and the choice is between using a fork or a spoon, you will choose the spoon because it will do the job best. If you want a society where the maximum number of commodities is available to the maximum number of consumers, you might try and create a free market; or, if that doesnt work, you might try state control and nationalisation; and, if neither does the job, there is always a mixture of the two, such as market-socialism (or something a lot nastier). The question for pragmatism is always and only, what works best. If, on the other hand, you advocate a society in which there is no commodification of production and no reification or alienation of human labour, the pragmatist will say you are not living in the real world. You are talking abstractions. As for alienation, well what does a non-alienated state of being look like? And the pragmatist might accuse you of looking for a concealed reality behind appearances, the consciousness of which and this isnt allowed either might lead to consciousness of a possible alternative. Go back two and a half thousand years and we find Plato arguing that there is indeed a reality beyond the false appearance of the phenomenal world. Plato, who doesnt give a damn about public opinion, argues that the truth in its totality, like the soul, is universal, beyond time and beyond space. II The [Russian] Communist Party corresponds to the guardians [of Platos Republic]; the soldiers have about the same status in both; there is in Russia an attempt to deal with family life more or less as Plato suggested the parallel is extraordinarily exact between Platos Republic and the regime which the better Bolsheviks are endeavouring to create. Bertrand Russell (1921) In Platos imaginary Republic he divides society into three parts, which correspond to what he sees as the three human characteristics. At the base is the multitude. The soul of the multitude expresses itself in the love of food, comfort and sex. Above the multitude are the Guardians the
of atomised individuals subject to a treadmill of unlimited value-production which is ultimately beyond our control, rather than members of a self-sufficient, rational community. In Capital Marx describes the polis of Greek Antiquity as well as primitive communism as societies in which it is the actual community that presents itself as the basis of production; and in which the final purpose of production is the reproduction of the community. Marx says that in mediaeval feudalism the forms of domination appear quite openly as the motive power of production; whilst in capitalism the domination is characterised by economic mystification. When Marx talks about the communist realm of freedom in relation to community and final purpose he is using Aristotles terminology. But Marx is also suggesting that society can consist of the Good Life without the class system to which Plato and Aristotle could see no alternative. IV Once upon a time Reason, like a sun, circled around the world of appearances, and sought to illuminate it; but Kant bade Reason to stand still and now the world of appearance revolves around and is illumined by it Heinrich Heine (1835) Marx comes out of German Idealism. Immanuel Kant, the founder of German Idealism argues, in some ways like Plato, that there is a concealed reality beyond phenomenal appearances. But Kant says that we can never know the thing-initself; we can never know the ultimate reality of things in their historical totality. But thats OK he says, because science depends on that division of reality into two parts. For Kant time and space are a priori forms of sensibility which condition all of the knowledge we get through sense perception and understanding. Because of the a priori forms and the judgements based on categories such as cause and effect, universal and particular, etc, we can make sense of the manifold events we perceive in the phenomenal world; we can measure data, we can calculate numbers for practical purposes. The dualism in the philosophy of Kant is a reflex or projection of the dualism in bourgeois society between labour and capital. Kant, however, does introduce the possibility of totality. In 1784 Kant publishes an essay on Universal History in which he considers the idea that human freedom and selfdetermination, beyond the mechanical ordering of animal existence, is present in nature as a tendency in nature itself. In that sense Kants argument resembles Aristotles. And Kant, at one point, seems to prefigure the Communist Manifesto when he says: The means employed by nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society the unsocial sociability which constantly threatens to break up society. Kant says that in historical progress individuals get bound up together in exploitative relationships. But exploitation contradicts Kants categorical imperative that no individual should treat other individuals as a means to his or her own ends, but should instead treat them as ends in themselves. Kant says that moral wisdom must remain an unceasing reproach to the realm of brute nature. As regards world history, Kant speculates that as traffic, trade and industry
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spread throughout the world, the leading nations would need to manage collectively the available natural and human resources. To achieve this, nation states would have to recognise that their selfish and increasingly destructive behaviour would become self-defeating. And so the crooked wood of humanity might be straightened by its own competitive crookedness. Kant, in 1784, foresees the type of international bodies we have over 200 years later, such as the United Nations, World Trade Organisation and G20. Therefore, he is today the moral philosopher par excellence for the progressive New Age ethical consumer, who believes that change comes from within. In the antiglobalisation movement Kantianism re-emerges in the idea of gradual infinite progress towards a fairer and safer world, in which the self-edifying consumer becomes the agency for the ideals oughts of Stop Global Warming and Make Poverty History. In the world of bourgeois science Newtonian physics and Cartesian rationalism the objective world exists independently of, and separate from, the thinking subject. Subjectivity becomes instrumental reason; that is, the method of reducing nature to nonbeing the consequences of which are now obvious. In the philosophy of Kant, the concept of the thing is firmly separated from thing in itself, which he says is unknowable. In Hegels concept of totality, this duality in the process of knowledge is resolved by eliminating the autonomy of both the objects and their concepts. In the Hegelian dialectic there is no objective reality that is independent of consciousness, and there are no mental concepts without a relation to the content of objective reality. V When Hegel complained that philosophy had not responded to the challenge of the French Revolution, he didnt mean that it would have done so if thought corresponded to reality. He meant thought too would have to transform reality. Raya Dunayevskaya (1965) The Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality re-emerges in George Lukcs History and Class Consciousness, published in 1922. Lukcs argues that commodity production has the effect of rationalising and mechanising the work process in such a way that the working class becomes passive and fragmented. Through the sale of labour-power, the labouring activity of the individual, whether mental of manual, is thingified, reified alienated. Against the fragmenting power of the commodity on the whole of society Lukcs dialectically juxtaposes the particular commodity that production is based on: labour-power. Since labour-power cannot be separated from the labourer, then any real selfconsciousness on the labourers part can be ascribed, or imputed, as revolutionary. Lukcs thus postulates a working class that wakes up to mass revolutionary consciousness. Lukcs, however, is well aware of the gap between the potential revolutionary consciousness and the actually existing reformist/false consciousness. So he formulates this imputed revolutionary consciousness, which he claims can be determined by relating existing consciousness to the totality of social relationships, so that it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings people would have in a particular situation, if they were able to assess how that situation, and the interests arising from it, impact on immediate ac-
tion and on the whole structure of society. For Lukcs, this power to infer is embodied in the Communist Party. VI Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality. Karl Marx (1842) Forty-five years after Lukcs, the Situationist International takes up his analysis. In 1966, Omar Khayati says: Since the struggle between the system and the new proletariat can only be in terms of the totality, the future revolutionary movement must abolish anything within itself that tends to reproduce the alienation produced by the commodity system It must be the living critique of that system, the negation embodying all the elements necessary to supersede it. As Lukcs correctly showed, revolutionary organisation is this necessary mediation between theory and practice, between man and history, between the mass of workers and the proletariat constituted as a class. However, as Guy Debord argues in The Society of the Spectacle, when Lukcs claimed that the Bolshevik form of organisation was the long-sought mediation between theory and practice, in which proletarians are no longer spectators of the events organised by the politicos, but consciously choose and live these events, the trouble was: Lukcs was actually describing as merits of the Bolshevik party everything that the Bolshevik party was not. Guy Debord differentiates the Situationist International from both vanguardism and anarcho-spontaneism when he says:
Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognised and lived by the masses. It requires workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought into practice. It seems to me that this statement bears more than a passing resemblance to (if not a dtournement of) Raya Dunayevskayas argument in Marxism and Freedom published 10 years earlier in 1958 in the USA. She argues that the Black civil rights activists, women, rank-and-file workers and youth represented a movement from practice which was itself a form of theory. But whereas Dunayevskayas anticapitalism became increasing grounded in philosophy during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980, Debords did not. In 1964, Dunayevskaya interestingly contrasted what she called two kinds of subjectivity. One kind is the litist voluntarism of Mao Zedong: with no regard for objective conditions. Mao plunges China into the Great Leap Forward then the Cultural Revolution with disastrous human consequences. The other kind of subjectivity, as postulated by Dunayevskaya, is one resting on nothing less than the Hegelian transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality. That is to say, the revolutionary subject, through its struggle for freedom, gets to know and cope with the objective reality. This second subjectivity has two sides: firstly, the fact that the workers were going to rebel spontaneously whether the theoreticians were interested or not; and secondly, the necessity for theoreticians to stop acting like bystanders and engage with workers thoughts and activities. For the theoretic power of philosophy in class struggles to be exercised, it must be projected organisationally as the power that is both the form for eliciting from the masses their thoughts and for projecting a humanist and Marxist perspective for a new society in which the capitalist value form is overcome.
Chris Gray
Uniting the Left

Socialist Unity, the Lenin Complex and the Ghost of Amadeo Bordiga
ARLIER this year, the British Socialist Workers Party made another of its periodic unity calls addressed to the left (see Socialist Worker, 13 June 2009). The excuse this time is the right-wing advance in the recent European Union and local elections and the rise of the British National Party. The comrades say: We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left-wing alternative. Gratifying but they suggest that: One simple step would be to convene a conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working-class interests at the next election.
Again, admirable. But there is an unspoken assumption here that deciding what constitutes working-class interests is relatively straightforward, and furthermore that those who have a clear and adequate view of said interests can be persuaded to work together. Experience unfortunately suggests, however, that matters are not so simple. Taking that portion of the left that claims to follow the lead of Leon Trotsky, we currently have, in the UK, by my reckoning, some 17 distinct groupings thats counting everyone from the largest organisations down to groups consisting of two men and a dog. (Actually the latter extreme has died
out: it consisted of two men only the dog was too intelligent to sign up.) Personally, if I were trying to organise a unity conference I would definitely not invite a number of these organisations: I can think of at least one that I would exclude on principle, possibly more than one. As regards organisations worth talking to, there are, in my view, some 10 worthy of respect, and I would concentrate on these. The key question remains, however: what policies should we put forward in the interests of the working class? The only way to achieve even a modicum of unity in the current climate revolves around this question. Once agreed, the programme can then be a unifier. It is not so much where we say it though that is important but what we say that will count. In this context there are some useful models and also numerous examples of what not to advocate. Hence the current 17 or so groups claiming the heritage of Lev Davidovich as Eamonn McCann put it memorably once: Will the real ghost of Leon Trotsky please stand up? One of the reasons for this multiplicity of organisations is what I am inclined to call the Lenin complex, or, alternatively, the rule of Big Chief Ainobest of the Wenobest Tribe. It is not only leaders of many of the existing organisations that evince this characteristic, but it is they who are chiefly responsible for it. The attitude is well exemplified (if reports are accurate) by the well-known music critic Hans Keller, who is reported to have said: I disagree with you on two counts: one, because I am absolutely right, and, two, because you are absolutely wrong. Readers will observe that this affords a wonderful basis for cooperation. Denouncing people is not usually the best way to win them over for example, the liberal use of the description sectarian or centrist may well not be the best way to persuade (even if the description may well be apt). The Hans Keller approach can usually be relied upon to cause a split. There are many reasons for splits: sometimes the organisation reaches an impasse and comrades disagree about what to do (the British Revolutionary Communist Party in 1949); sometimes disagreements develop which indeed cannot be resolved by remaining in the same organisation because tactics being advocated are diametrically opposed; too often, however, splits have occurred because one faction loses patience with another faction and takes, as a consequence, what it thinks is appropriate action even if that means expelling the opposition. All this produces an extremely unhealthy inwardlooking (not to say at times paranoid) culture which is totally self-defeating. To break out of this it is necessary to address the problems facing the working class as a whole. Here all organisations have something to contribute, and the necessary vehicle for harnessing it is the united front. It is true that the united front tactic was devised in order to counter the division between social-democratic and communist parties after the First World War, but there is no reason why it cannot be used as a potential means of overcoming splits within the revolutionary movement itself, especially as divisions within that movement are closely connected with various attempts to establish some sort of alternative social-democratic party. (For an introduction to the united front see Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Progressive Publishers, Kolkata, 2006, pp 479-88). To repeat, the programme should be the focus. Here the
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most relevant model is Trotskys Action Programme for France. Warning against both inflationary and deflationary initiatives by the French bourgeoisie that is, opposing both the policy of relying on injection of money into the economy and a policy of cuts Trotsky called for the abolition of business secrets, democratic control over the banks, industry and commerce (including widespread nationalisation), improved working conditions, a workerpeasant alliance, a peoples militia, election of judges, abolition of the Senate, and various other measures. Clearly Trotsky did not confine himself, in France in 1934, to measures which ordinary folk would find immediately credible and acceptable. On the contrary, he tried to indicate what was necessary. That should be our approach too. Our job is not to make promises of easy remedies, but to alert people to the real gravity of the situation. What should we call for, then? It is likely that there is agreement on the left that the starting point must be proper nationalisation of the banking system, involving opening the books of the banks together with a system of democratic control, with banking boards of directors possibly composed of one-third elected bank workers, one-third trade union representatives and one-third government representatives, as recommended in the International Marxist Tendency programme (The Crisis: Make the Bosses Pay, IMT, no date, p 4). This should be combined with regulations designed to outlaw the trade in derivatives, which has led to an unprecedented growth of fictitious capital. There is no point in handing banks cash to balance their books if they then retain the right to unbalance them again at the drop of a hat. There is equally no point in having a market in debt packages which contain an opaque mixture of runnable and unpalatable risks. That a business brings in an adequate return is a fair indication that the labour expended is socially necessary, so businesses can by and large be expected to bring in an adequate return, but householders cannot properly be expected to lose their homes if they get into debt, just as workers cannot properly be expected to take it lying down if they are made redundant through no fault of their own. Accordingly repossessions must cease, rent burdens be eased and a house-building programme instituted. Investment banking should be separated from run-ofthe-mill high street operations. Measures should be taken to combat unemployment and its effects: the unemployed should receive adequate remuneration better still, jobs as well. Enterprises threatened with closure should be nationalised under workers control; the best way to ensure said control is, of course, occupation of the plant. Workers should not simply be asked to accept wage cuts: the company books should be opened and the available work shared out. A large-scale programme of public works geared to the promotion of sustainable economic activity, involving improvement of infrastructure and the promotion of renewable energy production, should be instituted. Trade union committees should be set up to monitor the cost of goods these could include workers, housewives, small business people, unemployed (see IMT, The Crisis, p 10). Taxation should be reformed in order to ease the burden on the subordinate classes. Industrial relations legislation should be amended in order to give trade unions the freedom to operate in their members interests; laws operating against the interests of trade unionists should be
repealed where possible, whether they emanate from Westminster or Brussels. In relation to the latter we should work together with our continental comrades to transform the EU from a bosses club into a proper instrument of European solidarity, that is, a Socialist United States of Europe, with the definitive end to constitution-making by treaty. We should not support initiatives to withdraw from the EU or elect MEPs who will not take their seats in the EU parliament: such a policy is about as much use to the working class as a cuckoo in the Antarctic. Agreement is likely also on such policies as withdrawal from Afghanistan, abolition of ID cards, cancellation of Trident, an end to privatisation in the NHS, opposition to immigration controls, and more. Indeed I suspect that if the 10 organisations I have in mind were to get together they could quite easily agree on a programme such as the one outlined above. However, there are additional considerations, resulting from the recent furore over MPs expenses, which force us to confront a whole number of constitutional issues. The left in the UK has tended to steer well clear of such topics in the main: this was, and is, a mistake, as recent events have underlined. The model approach here is the German Communist Partys Open Letter to all workers parties and unions of January 1921, as described by Mike Jones in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no 3, Autumn 1989, p 4. Mike shows how the KPDs policy proposals flowed directly from the situation facing the country: Their programme of joint action included demands for higher pensions for disabled war veterans; elimination of unemployment; the improvement of the countrys finances at the expense of the monopolies; the introduction of workers control over food supplies, raw materials and fuel; reopening of all closed enterprises; control over sowing, harvesting and marketing of farm produce by peasants councils and farm labourers organisations; the immediate disarming of all bourgeois militarised organisations; the establishment of workers self-defence; amnesty for political prisoners; and the immediate reestablishment of trade and diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. Mike Jones gives an outline of reactions to this initiative: The left in the KPD leadership described the tactic as opportunist, as did Zinoviev and Bukharin. The leaders of the main workers organisations rejected the call, but the rank-and-file Social Democrats sympathised with it, and they began to see the KPD in a better light. Lenin, again, intervened at the Cominterns Third Congress when the Open Letter was condemned as opportunist. He described it as a model political step, and continued: It is a model because it is the first act of a practical method of winning over the majority of the working class. In Europe where almost all the proletarians are organised, we must win the majority of the working class, and anyone who fails to understand this is lost to the Communist movement; he will never learn anything if he failed to learn that much during the three years of the great revolution. (See Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, p 470)
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The political situation in the UK following the Daily Telegraphs revelations about MPs expenses and the forward march of the right in the recent elections calls for intervention by socialists in the constitutional arena. The aim here has been well expressed by the comrades of the Communist Party of Great Britain as republican democracy. In the forefront we must place reform of the House of Commons. Here, to start with, the scandal of MPs making money out of second homes must be ended: if an MP needs additional accommodation, that property should belong to the state, and MPs should be charged rent for using it, just as anyone else would be. Secondly, any expenses claimed should be open to scrutiny by the public via the internet and/or the local press. Thirdly, in relation to the Labour Party (and any rival workers party) local parties should have the right of recall to the extent that if a majority of members are dissatisfied with the conduct of their MP they can demand that a reselection process be instituted. In parallel, the remuneration of an MP should not greatly exceed the average wage of a skilled worker, that is, if the average is 20 000 per annum there should be a ceiling of, say, 25 000. (The same principle holds for trade union officials.) Legitimate expenses should, of course, be allowed on top of that. A recent article in Socialist Appeal (June 2009) calls for the immediate introduction of democratic reselection procedures for Labour representatives in all constituencies, but this is badly worded: there is no point in demanding such procedures in constituencies where the sitting MP is not Labour, since in such circumstances the Labour candidate is not under scrutiny; however, where the sitting member is Labour he or she needs an immediate clean bill of health no problem in many cases. Then there is the question of parliamentary procedure. If the object is to restore the prestige of the House of Commons as a democratic forum, then an essential demand is for an end to the insensate farmyard braying which breaks out all too frequently in the chamber. MPs seem to forget that they are supposed to function as a court they make laws, after all in which case they should uphold the dignified demeanour which is appropriate in a court. There is also an argument for relaxing the power of party whips over the composition of select committees, and for giving greater opportunities for bills from private members (see Jenni Russells article in The Guardian, 26 June 2009). With the Commons in the spotlight the question of electoral systems has resurfaced. Here it has to be said that the case for proportional representation is overwhelming as far as formal democratic theory goes, and that if that is to be set aside it must be on the basis of some higher aspect of democratic theory. The crucial question, however, is what kind of PR should be adopted. Personally I would favour the Single Transferable Vote system (STV) which is used in the Irish Republic, in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland for Assembly and EU elections, and in Malta. This system has multimember constituencies; parties may submit as many candidates as there are seats to be contested in each constituency, and voters may list all candidates in order of preference, or just some, or plump for one (see Christopher Wilson, Understanding A/S Level Government and Politics, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp 83-84). The advantage of multimember constituencies is that voters are less likely to be saddled with an MP whose party they do not favour; they have an increased chance of ending up
with an MP of their preferred party. However, as Mosh Machover has shown, in the Weekly Worker, no 793 (12 November 2009), this system is not fully proportional. As an alternative, if single-member constituencies are felt preferable, we should consider the Alternative Vote (AV) (see Wilson, op cit, p 80). Then there is the House of Lords. The question is, what does this institution do which is worthwhile that a reformed House of Commons could not equally well do? No constitution is foolproof, and it is quite possible, of course, for a set of partially elected or unelected individuals to undo mistakes made by a representative body, but one would think that a legislative system which is able to consider proposed legislation three times (plus detailed scrutiny) ought to be adequate. If that reasoning is sound then there is only one proper course: abolish the Lords. Similar considerations apply to the monarchy. What individual needs 18 palaces to live in? And if these buildings belong to the state, why shouldnt the rest of us get the chance to live in them for a time on a rota basis? And why should there be an hereditary hierarchy with the crown at its apex? As the peasants reportedly put it in 1381: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? As we have asserted in our movement for many years, the working class must come to power in the form of a democratic republic. It will be necessary for the workers to defend their republic by force of arms. A recent letter in the Weekly Worker criticised the demand for a popular militia on the grounds that this will give the bourgeoisie as much right to
arm as the workers. The point of raising the demand, however, is to introduce the notion that workers have the right to the use of arms in their defence no more, no less. The bourgeoisie already enjoy this right via the supposed state monopoly of armed force. The comrade calls for militias under the democratic control of the working class: a worthy aim, but if a genuine popular militia were ever set up in this country it would likely be under the control of the workers. (If not, steps would need to be taken to ensure that that happened.) Finally we need to make inroads on state secrecy: the rationale here is that the state is ultimately their state, and we need to know what they are up to. As I have tried to indicate, it is necessary to keep in mind what unites us on the left and at the same time to stress those measures which do not necessarily command widespread support but which are vital for the defence of working-class interests. Given the degree of organisational disunity prevailing, the rational approach can only be that of the United Front march separately, strike together. This means debate will continue, but efforts should be made to attain the maximum unity in action. This brings us back to consider the interests of the class as a whole, internationally, as being superior to the momentary advantage of a particular political group, and the need to support worthwhile initiatives by workers in defence of their interests, while at the same time putting forward independent proposals where necessary, as opposed to presenting people with, in effect, an ultimatum, in the manner of the Italian Communist Partys original leader, Amadeo Bordiga, whom Trotsky attacked for abstract propagandist passivity.
Dave Spencer
The Closure of the Campaign for a Marxist Party

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EW Interventions has published two accounts of the demise of the Campaign for a Marxist Party by two comrades who were centrally involved and were in the minority who opposed the closure Phil Sharpe and Steve Freeman. Both take an admirably serious look at the political differences within the CMP and how these developed. However, in my opinion they both let the Communist Party of Great Britain off the hook. In my view the main reason the CMP was closed down was the sectarian and bureaucratic centralist methods used by the CPGB. There was never any fraternal discussion of political differences. The CPGB deliberately misrepresented the views of those they considered rivals, and carried out a policy of gossip and character assassination among their members and contacts and in the Weekly Worker. On the CMP website they encouraged the use of personal abuse not amongst themselves of course, but targeted at minorities or individuals whom they thought were not winnable to their organisation. Phil Sharpe and Steve Freeman were in particular recipients of this method.
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In my view, right from the start the CPGB were never interested in building a broad, democratic and open Campaign for a Marxist Party. They had a Machiavellian calculation of what they could get out of it if anything and saw any growth in the CMP as a potential rival to itself, rather than as an ally in building a mass movement where they would be one section. This type of behaviour is of course not new on the Left. The CPGBs sectarian closure of the CMP was an exact replica of the Socialist Workers Partys closure of the Socialist Alliance. The cynical calculations are exact replicas of the methods used by the Socialist Party in the Socialist Alliance and the Campaign for a New Workers Party, and the SP and SWP in the Scottish Socialist Party. The key policy is the building of the sect. They enter alliances only to get members, not to build the movement as an open, democratic process. If they cannot control the broad movement, they will destroy it. I have a number of conclusions from this experience. I
think it was a mistake for the CMP to have anything to do with the CPGB. Originally I thought they were different because their public pronouncements in the Weekly Worker and their criticisms of other groups are based on policies of extreme democracy and openness. But their practice is exactly the opposite of what they preach. I generalise from the CPGB to include all other Left groups that are based on a one-sided interpretation of Lenins theory of the party to produce litism, vanguardism, substitutionism and statist solutions. Global capitalism is on the ropes and the Left is nowhere. The Left groups have passed their sell-by date and are unfortunately a blockage on the road to communism. Of course individual members of these groups can be subjectively revolutionary, but the groups themselves are hopeless. When I have made these criticisms of Left groups, the reply is usually that it is a personal matter. Thus the CPGB leadership said I was thin-skinned and afraid of robust debate. In the Socialist Alliance, Pete McLaren constantly accused me of hating the Socialist Party for personal reasons. It is not a subjective question, it is a political criticism of the political methods stemming from sectarianism and bureaucratic centralism endemic on the Left. In his Introduction to In Defence of the Russian Revolution, Al Richardson makes some political points which are directly relevant to the Left groups. He is talking about the implosion of Stalinism in 1989, but his remarks can be adapted and used to explain the Lefts reaction to the present economic crisis or to any crisis really: It has to be said that the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them all [the Left] napping. In spite of their claims to scientific socialism, possession of this science gave them no predictive powers whatever, and apart from Critique magazine, you can scan their journals right up to the event in vain for any suggestion of what was coming And later:
No overall theory has emerged about this state form [that is, communism in the USSR] that explains its birth, its mechanism of decline and its subsequent collapse and it should be added that no theory can be counted as adequate unless it explains the whole process from start to finish. In 1989 I was on the National Committee of the newlyformed International Socialist Group. I remember at the time being bewildered by the events in the USSR because, as Al Richardson points out in his Introduction, we Trotskyists did not expect things to turn out this way. There should be a violent political revolution or a counterrevolution, not a velvet revolution back to capitalism. I argued on the National Committee and at the ISG Conference that we should start an open debate on the question of the nature of the USSR. I pointed out that clearly Ernest Mandels view that industry in the Soviet Union was superior to that in the West because it was nationalised was wrong; otherwise the Russian working class would have defended it. Instead of welcoming this opportunity for democratic discussion, the National Committee of the ISG brought out the cross and the garlic and made it clear that any questioning of the holy texts was verboten. Applying Als comments to the economic recession today the Left did not predict this crisis and do not have any real explanation or answers for it. Certainly they have not prepared politically to challenge the capitalists or the social democrats. The organised Left in the UK is weaker now than it has been for a long time just at the point when Marxism is mentioned even by the capitalist class as an alternative system. Marxism remains a spectre because it hardly exists as a living movement. My conclusion is that any communist movement has to be built from below. The mass parties of Stalinism and social democracy have failed. The Trotskyist Left groups have failed to develop as an alternative, to fill the vacuum left by the mass parties of the working class.
Geoff Barr
CMP: Doomed From the Start

Time For Some New Thinking
THINK that a few comments on the failures of the Campaign for a Marxist Party are in order. I am sure that the worm was in the bud. The project was doomed from the start. The three pieces on this topic in your last issue are a sad comment on the state of the serious left. We had a bid to re-establish the movement to which many of us have given a large part of our lives. Dedication and enthusiasm are not in doubt. Yet, lets be frank, it never had a chance. The old story of the visitor to London asking a policeman, how to get to Trafalgar Square? comes to mind. After
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much thought he replies: Well if I was going there I wouldnt start from here. So what is wrong with the starting place and where should we start from? The starting place is impossible. The core issue is the kind of organisation being constructed. A Marxist party is fundamentally mistaken. This is because: 1. Parties are based on social movements, not ideas. In response to this point it may be argued that the justification for the party based on ideas is that the ideas themselves directly reflect the interests of the class.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Thus, a conceptually-founded party is identical to one based on interests. This would be fine if there was a way of achieving such a state of knowledge that it fully reflected the interests of the class. However, this is impossible. The class struggle is always changing, and working-class interests can only be roughly reflected in a party. Parties based on ideas are bound to split. Once you have decreed that Marxism is the basis of the movement, you have to say what that means. We see from the discussion in New Interventions, Spring 2009, that there is no basis for agreement on this even in the very small groups involved. The logic has already been tested in a large number of political sects. However, the lack of democracy is seen, by the participants, as an unfortunate aberration of the particular sects. It is, in fact, part of the nature of the founding of movements on this narrow ideological basis. The proposed party seems to have been split on whether it was to be the core of a mass movement or something in itself. Neither works. The first idea, that the party is a core, was tested to destruction by the Socialist Alliance. There we had a number of parties. Each saw the Socialist Alliance as a source of influence and recruitment. The result was that once the Socialist Party realised that it could not dominate it, it walked out. The Socialist Workers Party then ran the show and others continued under the SWPs political and organisational domination. When the SWP waltzed off to Respect it was resurrected on a still more bizarre basis. These parties within parties are mainly on fishing expeditions. The trouble is that there seem to be more lines in the water than fish to take the bait. The party as itself is no better. Instead of organising all the people driven forward to defend the class, it can only recruit a small proportion of these people. They are the ones who wish to advance the class and who have come to a particular group of analytical and methodological conclusions. In practice the struggle for purity has its own logic and leads to splits, dictatorship or both. Note that the whole campaign is based on the premise that agreement on methodology leads on to agreement on policy. In practice this formulation does not work. People thinking of themselves of Marxists differ on a vast body of strategic and tactical issues. On each of these policy issues any of the groups is closer to others who reject the label Marxist. Agreement on policy not on theory makes a party live.
Is There Any Better Idea? Yes! The party of the class needs to be a reflection of the requirements of the working class. It reflects the real movement of the class towards a socialist future because the capitalist system builds up and concentrates the tensions that make life under capital intolerable. The party is not the provider of wisdom about this to be offered to the unthinking masses. Unless millions find their way to this line of thinking there will be no socialism. Thus, the old top-down approach is part of the problem, not the solution. Furthermore, the current period is one of qualitative transitions. The old forms of resistance are either dying or being transformed. At this point laying down rigid forms is sterile. We need to learn to listen and pay attention to the real movement. This changes our role. We can offer some analysis and ideas to the emerging movement. But most of all we need to be open to the flow of ideas. Any party which is serious about transforming society (rather than debating points of ideology) needs to have certain characteristics. 1 It needs to agree on policy. That is to say, it must have a programme that drives forward the transition to socialism. Agreement is not complete or absolute. Members with different views would express them openly. 2 It needs a lively debate on history, philosophy and a variety of social issues. Central here is the recognition that no serious party could either avoid or resolve most of these discussions. The majority of its members would probably see Marx and his ideas as central, but once acceptance of Marx is a dogma the character of the party as a party is lost. 3 The basis of point 2 above is that the movement has to be creative and to absorb critically what is new. The recent waves of younger people coming into radical action through the Social Forum movement, the anti-war movement and various other campaigns have generally not been Marxists. To make Marxism the basis of the movement is to drive them away, not to draw them in. 4 Those people with confidence in the ideas formulated by Marx would feel sure that their ideas would win. They would also have sufficient humility to listen and learn. They would see that there is no need to impose these ideas. New organisational forms are needed. It is sad that the most serious people on the left seem to be the most determined not to embrace them.
Paul Flewers
The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalins Soviet Union, 1929-1941

An exciting book by a New Interventions Editorial Board member 299 pages, 12.99 from Francis Boutle Publishers, 272 Alexandra Park Road, London N22 7BG website: www.francisboutle.co.uk What they say: extensively researched Weekly Worker; an extremely comprehensive survey Permanent Revolution; a very enjoyable book Jewish Socialist
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Mike Belbin
Second Glance
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
S there anything more to be said about the Protocols that alleged evidence of a Jewish World Conspiracy except that they are a forgery? Isnt this text merely an extreme example of conspiracy thinking (or theory or logic, or conspiracyism), an approach still being applied, particularly nowadays to the works of the West and Israel (9/11, etc), which simplifies the world in a manner unworthy of rational people? David Aaronovitch1 recently and Norman Cohn2 in the 1960s have both given us thorough accounts of the history and use of the Protocols. The text was originally composed by the Tsarist secret service at the turn of the twentieth century and published in 1905. These Protocols or lectures are supposedly a report, translated from French, given to a secret meeting of the leaders of the Jewish World Conspiracy, the Elders of Zion. In this, they bear some resemblance to a previous document, the Rabbis Speech (published in 1881), a conspiratorial oration supposedly delivered in a Prague cemetery. What the Protocols Outline The location of the meeting the Protocols refer to is unspecified; the speech is delivered by an Elder outlining the organisations wide-ranging plans to undermine all nations in order to set up a Jewish King over the whole Earth.. 1. The Elder speaks of the various means in this campaign of subversion: the concentration of economic power in monopolies and the government, alongside the promotion of journalism partial to the wishes of the World Conspiracy. Trade and industry will be favoured above the landowning aristocracy. Periodicals will be bought up and used to neutralise the rest of the press. There will be the appearance of contradictory views in these periodicals, issued from supposedly contending parties but all taking positions that fit in with the Conspiracys aim. Publishing will be dominated by a secret Masonic understanding. The cities will come under the influence of the provinces, and the views of the majority will be manipulated by agents of the Elders. The time will come when the Jewish sovereign can emerge to rule the world. 2. Not only will influence be bought, but also hatred and dissension spread. The workers will be encouraged to join groups of socialists, anarchists and communists. Jealousy and hatred of the upper classes will be encouraged. On the other hand, the hierarchy of occupation
1. 2. David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories (Jonathan Cape, 2009). Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). 11
and caste will be kept rigid, reinforced by a stratified education system. Gentile rulers will be undermined by theories of human rights; nations will be set against each other. Railways will be constructed in the cities, and these will be blown up in due course. The descendants of King David will prepare leaders to be world rulers. These sovereigns will be firm and trustworthy, unswayed by animal instincts. In fact, many of the details of the Protocols are not even an original forgery but adapted from a previous text, a satire. This text had nothing to do with promoting a particular prejudice anti-Semitism but sought to describe a particular regime. It was a fictional attempt to define a truth. This work was published in 1864 in Paris and was called the Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavelli by Maurice Joly. Joly based his fiction on an early text, Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Rousseau by Jacob Venedy, a Jewish socialist and early comrade of Karl Marx in the International. Joly, also a socialist, aimed to use a dialogue about Machiavellian manipulation to satirise the French ruler Louis Napoleon, who seized power by a coup in 1851. Nephew of the Waterloo Bonaparte, Louis was acclaimed Emperor Napoleon III by a national referendum, possibly rigged, but with the support of the middle classes and all who were afraid of working-class revolution. The man and the regime were memorably analysed by Marx of course in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), where the clumsy authoritarian is described as a leader who wished to please all sections of society but couldnt give to one class without taking from another.3 Forbidden to criticise the regime in Paris, Joly, a witty lawyer, resorted to the discretion of the Dialogue Aux Enfers, published in Belgium and smuggled back into France. Several passages in the Protocols can be traced directly to his fiction. The first recorded adaptation of Jolys text was not the Protocols but a modified draft made by an exile in Paris, Elie de Cyon (or Ilya Tsion). De Cyon was actually Jewish by birth but a convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity. He was part of a group of exiles who were concerned at the influence on Tsar Nicholas II by a liberal, Sergei Witte, Minister of Finance from 1892. Witte wanted to modernise Russia, to build railways, increase coal and iron production, and develop industrial capitalism. To thwart this, de Cyon was working on a redraft of Jolys satire to attack Witte. His house in Switzerland was burgled and a copy of his redraft ended up in the hands of Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the
3. K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works (Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), p 177.
Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. Rachkovsky was also opposed to liberalism and capitalism, which he saw as a threat to Orthodox Christianity and traditional leadership. In Paris in 1898, Rachkovsky gave the Joly/de Cyon text to Mathieu Golovinsky. Golovinsky was a police forger, the offspring of an impoverished aristocratic family. Golovinsky may have been the first to suggest fabricating a manifesto and ascribing it to the recent National Jewish Congress (the Zionist movement), which had convened the previous year, in order to link modernisation to Jewish influence. It seemed easier and quicker, however, to amend the Joly text the way de Cyon had been doing and to use the fear of a conspiracy to undermine society. Appearing first in French and then translated into Russian by one Sergei Nilus, it was this rewrite of Golovinskys, published in 1905, that was the basis of all other drafts of the Protocols. In Jolys Dialogues, the speeches by the Machiavelli voice are an ironic attack on the coup of Louis Napoleon, showing a modern concern with the corruption of free republican institutions from within. The exile de Cyon, on the other hand, wished to attack the encroachment of modernisation in Russia a conservative polemic. The Protocols, however, are the detailed revival of an older theme, the Jews as the ultimate negative. All these texts can be said to dramatise their own legend of conspiracy and subversion, though Jolys is an openly fictional allusion to the use of established institutions such as parliament and the press as a faade by a modern authoritarian. In the summary above, the Joly text is responsible for the accusations in the first part (paragraph 1). They are concerned with power from above and journalism. Further original additions in the second part (paragraph 2) are Tsarist. The concerns shown are with the working class and the modern, such as railways and theories of human rights. They also betray the forgers interest in power of a royal kind: the conspiracys ultimate aim is to depose the Tsar and set up a world king. In Jolys Twelfth Dialogue, Machiavelli declares: I foresee the possibility of neutralising the press by means of the press itself. Since journalism is such a great force, my government will take to journalism. It will be journalism incarnate I will count the number of newspapers that represent what you call the opposition. If there are 10 for the opposition, I shall have 20 for the government: if there are 20, I shall have 40; if there are 40, I shall have 80 But the mass of the public must have no suspicion of these tactics Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give expression to all shades of opinion throughout the whole country. People will belong to my party without realising it. Those who think they are talking their own language will be talking mine, those who think they are stirring up people on their side will be stirring people on mine Joly is using hyperbole here to emphasise how partial the press is under Louis Napoleon. This isnt a thorough account of governmentmedia relations; it is a characters vainglory. It isnt literal, but it does indicate a new concern
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with modern media, where power also resides alongside the church and state institutions. Here, on the other hand, is the Twelfth Protocol, where the above implication becomes a statement of the Elders secret operation: Literature and journalism are the two most important educational powers; for this reason our government will buy up the greater number of periodicals. By these means we shall neutralise the bad influence of the private press and obtain an enormous influence over the human mind. If we were to allow 10 periodicals, we should ourselves start 30, and so forth. But the public must not have the slightest suspicion of these measures, therefore all periodicals published by us will seem to be of contradictory views and opinions, thus inspiring confidence and presenting an attractive appearance to our unsuspecting enemies, who will thus fall into our trap and will be disarmed. These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion. The Tsarist text also introduces new material. The Third Protocol discusses the means to prepare for their King through intensification of class division. We intend to appear as though we are the liberators of the labouring man, come to free him from this oppression, when we shall suggest to him to join the ranks of our armies of Socialists, Anarchists and Communists. The latter we always patronise, pretending to help them out of fraternal principle and the general interest of humanity evoked by our socialistic masonry. The aristocracy, who by right shared the fruits of the labour of the working classes, were interested in the same being well-fed, healthy and strong. We are interested in the opposite, that is, in the degeneration of the Gentiles. We govern the masses by making use of feelings of jealousy and hatred kindled by oppression and need. And by means of these feelings we will brush aside those who impede us in our cause. We will create a universal economic crisis, by all possible underhand means and with the help of gold, which is all in our hands. They will not harm us, because the moment of the attack will be known to us and we will take measures to protect our interests. The Protocols present history as being without such things as systemic crises or endemic class conflicts, there is only individual responsibility, and here responsibility is with the agents of the Conspiracy. Thus, Marxism, historical materialism, is a lie, except of course as rhetoric for legitimating envy of the aristocracy who, revealing the Tsarist bias, are characterised as beneficent to the workers with whom they share so much. The Elder glories in having so much control we will we do more power, greater significance, than anyone, Tsar or forger, has ever had. Everything in the plan is connected, not in a complex pattern, but in lines running from an emitting centre. Left-wing movements are
manipulated by the Jewish World Conspiracy; every business, every media outlet is theirs, as is all the gold: an economic crisis can be produced at will. The controllers are secret, but they are united. No point in investigating history and discussing the struggle of ideas or the work of private interest and overall system: someone is in control and all visible politics are merely parts of the big manipulation, the operations of One Big Plot. We are in the Conspiracys hold, and we can never be out of it. The Protocols have been republished many times since 1905, right up to the present day. In an English edition of 1920, the figure of a serpent is introduced. The Serpent being the World Conspiracy, which devours non-Jewish government. It stretches from Jerusalem through the Rome of Augustus to Russia in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. England and Germany, its implied, are next to fall after Tsarism. The final stage will occur in Constantinople, where the head will again unite with the tail in Jerusalem. The conspiracy thinking shown in the Protocols spread. Echoes of it can be found in a 1920 article in the Sunday Herald, where none other than Winston Churchill can be found writing about the schemes of International Jews who have forsaken the faith of their forefathers. In vivid Churchillian tones, the piece states that these irreligious Jews are: the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. The future PM, however, distinguished these Jews from those more amenable to his conservatism, specifying the hairgrips as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman: his article was entitled Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People.4 As recently as 1977, a National States Rights Party in the US published three editions of the Protocols in English, while in 2001 Egyptian state television was all set to broadcast a series, Knight Without a Horse, based on the text. Though championed by an Egyptian newspaper, linking it to criticism of Israel, the series was prevented from being shown by protests from the Egyptian intellectual community.5 One of the Protocols biggest promoters was the motorcar manufacturer Henry Ford. He was so sure of the Jewish World Conspiracys existence that when challenged in 1920 to prove conclusively that it actually existed, Ford refused to take the money offered to assist the search and instead set up his own investigation to find the head of the Serpent. Whats more, they found it! The opportunist investigators in charge managed to chase down the HQ of the World Conspiracy to a borough of New York, and to a self-help immigrants association for Jews newly arrived from Europe.6 This apparent success in finding the Elders dastardly
4. Cited in W Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (WW Norton, 2005). 5. Ibid, pp 125-26. 6. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p 163. 13
head office did not seem to stop continued claims that the fiends were still in the conspiracy business. Why the Jews (Again)? Someone may have asked once: why the Jews? What characteristics can anti-Semites knowingly point to which make Jewish people a possible candidate for conspiracy theory? Many would argue that the idea of a Jewish conspiracy is of a long vintage, stretching back to the Middle Ages and even the Bible, as in Pauls Second Letter to Thessalonians, which deals with the Anti-Christ. In fact, the notion of a secret world conspiracy, as opposed to accusations of local sabotage (like poisoning wells, murdering Christians), is a nineteenth-century construction, following the French Revolution. Deposed aristocrats made up for their feeling of insignificance in the face of history by explaining the defeat of their class by blaming those old associates of Satan, now collectively organised in a cabal, like the Freemasons, or indeed behind the Freemasons. Anti-Semites have nevertheless used identifiable cultural characteristics as evidence that the Jew is a conspirator. Judaism is not now a missionary religion, making the community protective rather than proselytising. Jews are prevalent in journalism, finance, the arts these being possible sources of manipulation out of sight and behind our backs, unlike, say, politics, the military or the law. In addition, of course, Jews think they are special and separate in their declared status as the Chosen People of God, even as they were dispersed throughout the nations of the Earth. None of these characteristics were or are unique to Jews; nor are they particularly sinister. On the contrary, Jews are not united, they differ on many things. They are Orthodox and Reform, radical and conservative, Zionist and socialist. Are some partial? Which group is free of partiality to relatives or friends? Giving the job to someone like yourself is called discrimination the world over. All religions embrace their members all you have to do is convert. As for separatism: if Jews are members of the media, the arts and finance as well as in law and politics in fact, how separate is that? And what of the assimilated or atheist Jew? Jews may indeed all unite in fellow feeling over one thing, the fear (often mixed with incomprehension) of antiSemitism: group protection against group discrimination. The above characteristics are only special and frightening if they linked to a duplicitous movement to gain power without an open struggle, as per the Protocols. Jewish people then are a special threat because they have a special destructive intention and a secret consensus. And if the secular Jews may not be as obviously belonging to the community as others, they are therefore suspected by the anti-Semite of hiding their allegiance, the most underhand move of all.7 The features listed above only count as evidence if you begin from the idea that these are clues to a conspiracy, as opposed to being general human traits which feature to some extent in every community and are explainable by history. Surely, this is the kernel. Conspiracy thinking is not an exposure of something secret, it relies on something being secret. The Jewish World Conspiracy as portrayed in the
7. J-P Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (originally published 1948; Schocken, 1968).
Protocols exercises power everywhere but not quite over everything yet. Thats why it remains undeclared. However, believers in the existence of a plot are not taken in. Certainly there are gaps in their knowledge about the organisation, details that might amount to some proof, but these gaps can be disregarded by presuming that if they were filled, everyone would see the conspiracy for what it is. We who have been initiated into the secret, just because we know, are already far from insignificant. Also, we are faced with the urgent necessity of stopping it, even to the point of murder. For genocide is not a crime motivated like burglary. The burglar has no problem in assaulting an innocent house. But every massacre, especially if communal, is aimed at preventing another, at halting the enemys discreet advance: We were just defending ourselves. The obsession of the genocidal Adolf Hitler with the Jewish World Conspiracy should not be underestimated. The Jew is and remains the world enemy, the NSDAP leader announced back in 1927, and his weapon, Marxism, is a plague afflicting mankind.8 The Nazis campaign against Jewish Bolshevism turned out to be not only a holocaust for 20 million Slavs and six million Jews but was ultimately the weak point of German imperialism. As Andrew Roberts points out in his recent history of the 1939-45 war, the Germans made the mistake of badly treating East European peoples, such as the Ukrainians, so squandering any goodwill engendered by the defeat of Kremlin rule.9 Calling this a mistake, however, minimises the post-Protocol ideology of the Nazis. In Hitlers worldview, Slavic peoples were hybrids, corrupted by the Jewish World Conspiracy imbecilic, unfit. Providence would see to it (no atheist he) that they could never defeat him. Though industrially efficient, there was nothing rational about the Final Solution. It diverted resources from the war to the labour camps and extermination sites. Moreover, Hitlers reluctance to allow his armies to surrender indicates how much the Fhrer saw it as a no-holds-barred struggle against a ruthless demon. Whatever targeted appeals Hitler made to conservative Germans about national regeneration and imperial advance, he never saw the contest as just between Germany and other nations, but between Aryans and the World Conspiracy. It was Germanys very lack of form as a world power, the Germans lack of empire, that for Hitler made them purer than the Empires of Russia, Britain and France. Germans hadnt mixed with colonised peoples. It was their very lack of colonial experience that made Aryan Germany the fittest European knight to take on the Serpent. There has been much debate about whether Nazism was just another form of colonialism linked to the expansion of a national capitalism, or whether it was special pathological, in some way. Firstly, unlike France or Britain, Germany didnt have a bourgeois liberal moment: a victory for republicanism or free trade. There was no Prussian equivalent of Robespierre or Peel. The German Reich after 1871 industrialised under Bismarcks united state and developed as an advanced form
8. Cited in I Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (Yale University Press, 2008). 9. A Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Allen Lane, 2009). 14
of organised capitalism which was paternalist rather than feudal. The Nazis and Hitler didnt emerge from a backward anti-bourgeois culture but a monopoly capitalism that had bypassed liberalism.10 The twentieth-century drive to acquire a world empire was not the result of ambitious aristocratic (Junker) interests, but an advanced capitalism seeking to catch up. It obsessed the middle classes (even the sociologist Weber shared it), many feeling the nation had been treated unfairly by other imperialisms, denied their place in the sun, made insignificant. Nazism got its opportunity through this outstanding demand as well as by German voters reaction to the misery of war reparations and the Depression, not to mention the street battles of class and party warfare. Many Germans evidently believed they needed some special effort to win in the survival of the fittest. Nazi colonialism was pathological then in being biased towards extermination in the service of racial purity and land-grabbing. The Slavs were occupying the space needed by Aryan settlers, the Jews were a world conspiracy, Roma and gays were unhealthy, so all could be worked to death to build up the Reichs economy. The Nazis were just in more of a hurry than other colonialisms, settling the East rather than the South, and energised by the fixation on the degenerate threat. Israel and the Protocols Of course, throughout the twentieth century, one big fact that publishers and supporters of the Protocols had to deal with was the open political movement for a Jewish homeland. In a preface to a 1934 edition, the editors (or editor) quote Dr Weizmann, the then leader of the Zionist Congress, assuring all that a Jewish nationalism would be supported by an international movement: A beneficent protection which God has instituted in the life of the Jews is that He has dispersed them all over the world. The Protocolists immediately draw the attention of the reader to the Eleventh Protocol to prove another conclusion about dispersion. Here the Elder proclaims that from which appears to all eyes to be our weakness has come forth all our strength, which has now brought us to the threshold of sovereignty over all the world. The editors conclude: It proves the Learned Elders exist It proves that the desire for a National Home in Palestine is only camouflage and an infinitesimal part of the Jews real object. It proves that the Jews have no intention of settling in Palestine or any separate country11 The editorial asserts the logical implication of the plan revealed by the Protocols: why take a part of the Middle East when the overall aim is so close, the goal of subverting the world and raising a king over it? Surely, investing in a mere nationalism would mean the Elders showing their hand too blatantly. Surely, it would be better for the Jewish World Conspiracy to have continued subverting civilisation through finance, industrialisation and red revolution than throw in its lot with a public political movement of colonisation? The Protocols text doesnt prove anything about a secret conspiracy, but the idea of such a scheme is ultimately dis10. Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism (Unwin Hyman, 1986). 11. Introduction to Protocols, 1934 Edition.
proved by the public creation of the state of Israel. Why draw so much attention and opposition while the network for underhand world subversion is so widespread and discreet, as the Protocols would have us believe? The public advance of Zionism contradicts the secret plan of Zion. Unlike the Jewish World Conspiracy, political Zionism has a history a beginning in the nineteenth century and a process since then to becoming the nuclear power of its region, albeit unadmitted.12 This doesnt mean that anyone can accuse the state itself as being a paranormal figure responsible for half the violence on the planet, which is what Nick Cohn charges Ted Honderich with claiming.13 It does mean that this colonialist national power, proposed by its open supporters in Britain as a David encircled by Goliaths, has had more than a hand in the troubles of the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon. However, even if the activities of Israeli forces are no secret, Israel is rarely spoken of as taking an initiative. It is always a reaction, an inevitable defensive option. There is a grammar to this. Take a recent report on President Obamas demand to Israel to stop building settlements. In a report in The Times (2 November 2009), the piece begins by saying that the Palestinian leadership has accused the US of caving in. The second paragraph finds Secretary of State Hillary Clinton having failed to force Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, to meet US demands, has switched tack and is now praising the PMs concessions. Its not until the sixth paragraph that we learn what these are: the proposal of limiting construction of 3000 homes on the West Bank, though not the expansion of other settlements on the West Bank or in east Jerusalem. Settlements within the Palestinian Authority are not a conspiracy; they are as public as the security wall, but yet again reporters fail to use the active voice. Palestinians accuse, Americans switch tack, but Israelis dont continue to build or refuse to stop or even make an offer of unspecified limiting, at least not in the first paragraph. They are the object in others sentences, even when what they do is policy. If Jews in the Middle East are always objects victims how can they create victims? The case of the Palestinians almost always the subject, resentful, rioting, terrorists goes by the board. Unlike the anti-Semite, the anti-Zionist seeks a change in consciousness as much as a change in geography. AntiZionists join with criticism of the state made by Jews whether inside or outside Israel. For this approach need not implicitly chastise the Jewish majority of being unalterable or inaccessible to reason, negotiation or influence. The discussion of Great Powers in the Middle East and the Zionist movement within it can be the appreciation of a complex whole, which is what differentiates it from conspiracyism. The Razor and the Antenna David Aaronovitch defines a conspiracy theory in his Voodoo Histories as the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended. Or it is the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less
12. Israel and Nuclear Weapons, wikipedia.org. 13. Nick Cohen, Its the Jews, Once Again, Waiting for the Etonians (Fourth Estate, 2009). 15
covert and less complicated action of another.14 His conclusion being that this fantasying distorts our view of history and therefore the present and, if widespread enough, leads to disastrous decisions. Regarding current conspiracy thinking, unlike the Tsarist forgers, we need not dispute that their specific accusations start as anything but a search for truth, an attempt to understand how the world works. However, the tendency to simplification thrives in a landscape crammed with secrecy and confidentiality, rumour and dumbed-down news. Conspiracy thinking promises certainty now we know whodunit but is based on uncertainty. Like faith in a Supreme Being, it isnt based on proof but on lack of disproof. How do you know its not true? How can you be certain that the writer of this very piece is not a Freemason, CIA agent or secret friend of the Elders, working to deny the reality of any such big plots? The fact is you cant, and in this lack of certainty, this doubt, conspiracy thinking begins. The conspiracyist sets up a certain relation between the known and the unknown. For the believers in the Jewish World Conspiracy, the clear facts that Jews often follow a separate religion, that they are in both finance companies and revolutionary movements, pressure groups and the communications industry, is not the basis for the theory. What counts is the leap from these known facts to an unknown, hidden purpose. Simply assume a link between all these people, uniting them all in a secret intent and you have a conspiracy. The accusation depends on what is understood as being hidden, of covering gaps with assumptions. Of course, a scientist may move from the known to the unknown it is called an hypothesis. It may be more carefully argued but its not necessarily certain. As Hume and others pointed out, association doesnt imply causation. We read back from the behaviour of the expanding universe to the event of a singularity, calling the whole process a Big Bang. Yet, someone could still believe in something else even if he had discovered relativity itself. Albert Einstein resisted the idea that the universe was other than static by coming up with antigravity dark matter to counteract the force of cosmic gravity. He later admitted his answer was a fudge after Hubble proved the likelihood that it was space itself that was expanding, an hypothesis based on general relativity anyway.15 A conspiracy then is likely or unlikely. Rather than assume that conspiracies do or dont exist, how do we determine whether they are more or less likely? Many recent claims of conspiracy are more modest and less impressive. Even claims that the 1969 Moon landing was a fake rely on camera trickery and editing rather than the whole media cooperating in deception. The classic approach to this sort of thing, in order to restore a sense of proportion, is to use the instrument famously known in philosophy as Occams Razor. William of Occam (or Ockham) was a fourteenthcentury Franciscan. Philosophically, he was a nominalist. He believed that no one material thing depends on another, each is absolute. Change is a mere shuffling and knocking together of the singulars, while God the creator remains entirely exterior to creation, an idea halfway to atheism.
14. Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories, p 5. 15. M Kaku, Einsteins Cosmos (Phoenix, 2004), pp 98-101.
Therefore, plurality must not be posited without necessity (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate). In other words, keep it simple: a particular hypothesis is more plausible than another if it involves fewer new assumptions. Dont multiply causes of an event unnecessarily, always ask how so many things and persons could be squared and fit so well together. For example, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is figured as a put-up job by the Bush administration. It was the US government that synchronised the impact of the planes with precisely planted explosions within the towers so causing their utter collapse. The planes on their own, it is argued, couldnt have done this. All the evidence of course was lost in the debris of Ground Zero. Anyway, it served its purpose to promote the justice of US intervention in the Middle East. If so, this event of explosive coordination must certainly have been more meticulously planned than the subsequent war. If someone did a good job calculating how vulnerable the supports of the Towers were, this would contrast sharply with the carelessness taken over the supports of Iraq society after the intervention. Did no high-level plotter foresee the risky lack of support in Europe, the hostility everywhere to Western intervention, which would make the war itself such a PR disaster? So much care in the conspiracy about the event, so much carelessness about the war it justified. What about other such claims regarding justification of war by the US? Take the accusation that FDR provoked the Japanese into bombing Pearl Harbor, so that the US could enter the war against Japan and her ally, Germany.16 On 26 November 1941, in Washington, Japanese envoys were presented with a 10-point proposal from the US government. It was an ultimatum from the President and demanded complete withdrawal from China and Indo-China, the Japanese to support Chinas Nationalist Forces (Kuomintang) and to abandon their Tripartite agreement with Germany and Italy (the Axis). Later, Cordell Hall, then Secretary of State, commented that we had no serious thought Japan would accept. On 29 November a message in Purple code was intercepted by US code-breakers from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo. He confirmed that the Germans had said that if Japan went to war with America, Germany would, of course join in immediately, and Hitlers intention was that there should be no question of Germany making a separate peace with England.17 The Pentagon did not need to foresee Pearl Harbor or to know where or how the Japanese would strike first. Provoking Japan to declare war was the aim, not getting the US fleet almost levelled. Some code messages deciphered at the time have still not been released. They are the hidden. So, it is not known whether these show that FDR knew before the 29th that the Germans might support the Japanese. But they are not essential to a case about FDRs need to get the US into the war by provoking a Japanese declaration. In the event, Hitler also declared war on America a few days after the attack so bringing the US there and then into the European fight as well.
16. G Vidal, Japanese Intentions in the Second World War, Dreaming War (Clairview, 2003). 17. Pearl Harbor Advance-Knowledge Debate, wikipedia.org. 16
Another plot well documented is the US help for the 1973 coup in Chile against Salvador Allendes Popular Unity government.18 Covert actions of the CIA, activity by the US corporation ITT and the loan-refusing World Bank acted in conjunction with conservative forces and the military within the country to initiate a bloody coup. No doubt, much of this neednt be called a conspiracy as in secret intentions: various moves can be filed under foreign policy19 or antigovernment protest, but secret moves assisted too. Nor do we need to neglect the contribution of tensions with the left coalition supporting the government, or the tragic allegiance of Allende himself to unarmed legality in the face of right-wing violence. Nor is there much reassurance in the idea that the military junta did eventually step down in favour of a civilian regime, as they only did this after many opponents had been killed and disappeared. One Big Simple Thing To deal with how these things work, with history, we need more than the razor; we need something more sensitive, something like an antenna or aerial, to acknowledge a complex whole and to distinguish different factors within it. If conspiracy thinking would rely on too many things being coordinated, it also insists on an ultimate cause: One Big Simple Thing the Plot, the Power. While the razor cuts out an excess of complexity at one level, our antenna or aerial would be sensitive to the possibility of many relationships within a whole, like channels along a bandwidth or the many surfaces of an environment. Let us agree with the nominalist critics of conspiracyism, that what we always need is a sense of proportion, but then go on to say that this also involves not an acceptance of the simple but the rejection of the One Big Simple Thing. Take the way we analyse that phenomenon broadly called Islamism. A British teacher is jailed for a few days in Sudan for agreeing to call a classroom teddy bear Muhammad. A young British man blows himself up on the tube, declaring on a tape his solidarity with Muslims all over the world. A certain local town council is reported as banning a calendar with a pig on it.20 A student in Elephant and Castle declares that he agrees with the aims of the bombers but not with their tactics. Yet, instead of looking at the varied local motives and causes, some just call this the March of Islam. We subsume Sudanese conservatism, youthful rebellion in the UK, sensitivity to all religion, action within the politics of the Occupied Territories or US allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, collecting them together in one big thing. Instead of the many varieties of something, we keep things simple and make them all Muslims, who are all the same, like Jews in a conspiracy. The believer in conspiracy is someone who is confronted with this nightmare, the one big thing which invites a response of powerlessness. We face conspiracy as victims, especially of its duplicity. Of course, a victim is morally the thing to be nowadays. This sense of victimhood has given us fear of Al Qaeda, but it has also given us Al Qaeda in the first place.
18. Ralph Miliband, The Coup in Chile, in R Blackburn (ed), Revolution and Class Struggle (Fontana/Collins, 1977). 19. United States Intervention in Chile, wikipedia.org. 20. AN Wilson, Our Times (Hutchinson, 2008).
Al Qaeda got its chance to be Enemy No 1 not because of its commitment or flexibility but because of Western intervention. Not in Iraq but in Bosnia. There, Muslims were the victims the West wanted to protect, just as Muslims were the fighters, mujahedin, to cheer on in Soviet Afghanistan. Its simply that some people, who happened to be Muslims, continued to support the idea of Islam in struggle against victimhood. The young men who blew themselves up on the London tube wanted to protect Muslims as well as make states like Saudi Arabia more Islamic, meaning less disposed towards US oil policy. They too were mujahedin fighting a foreign influence. In fact in November 2009, the British government could be heard making noises about approaching the moderate wing of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Previously wed all thought that at least the Taliban were solid. Dont Panic, Comprehend Beyond the mixed metaphors of razor and aerial, what finally do we oppose to conspiracy thinking? Not a countersimplification but dialectical thinking, the study of process, of complex wholes, involving the checking of facts and a reasonable estimation of human reach. In dialectic, the seed looks nothing like its product the flowering plant but proceeds from it. Any potentiality, what it is not, is released by the action of its relation with its conditions. With earth, with water, with time, it changes, grows. Not every seed does this, but a stone cannot do this. By definition, a stone doesnt contain the possibility of the flower. The study of process, of how what is not becomes liberated from what is, goes by the name of dialectical thought. The real is not the fact of a single appearance in the process, like the flowering plant bought in a shop. Heres Marcuse explaining Hegel: The real definition of a plant must show the plant constituting itself through the destruction of the seed by the bud and the bud by the blossom. It must tell how the plant perpetuates itself in its interaction and struggle with its environment.21 Just as an idea, a meme some call it, is like a bag: of a definite condition big, small, etc but also modified by what people put into it, how they relate to it. For example, communism has been everything from cooperative to callous. Another example, Caribbean slavery. In the eighteenthcentury world economy, Britains biggest import was sugar produced in the Caribbean by slave labour. In this case: slave labour is not [to be] regarded as capitalist simply because it entails production for the market, or as non-capitalist because it is not the wage form of labour. Rather slave labour is conceived as a part of the organisation of social labour on a world scale. Slave relations are not treated as separate from or prior to the world market and division of labour.22 Instead they are parts of and in relation to a complex whole.
21. H Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1941), Chapter 3. 22. DW Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar (John Hopkins University Press, 1990), p 5. 17
The opposite of this approach could be called Satanics, the disregard of the difficulty involved in finding the actually occurring relation of things. In the Harry Potter universe, a tree can suddenly turn into a person, probably a villain, and perhaps even back into a seed. In a magic world, we have no need to study and argue in order to understand processes. Nor do we if we already have the answer, having filled in the gaps. The quick and easy answer is always a Satan, the negative that does not change, and with the Protocols and after, there was no better Satan, no better allencompassing magic, than the Jewish World Conspiracy, the Serpent that simply destroys. Indeed, without debate and study, we risk substituting the Capitalist Class or the all-powerful US (or indeed the all-powerful Jewish Lobby) for that age-old demon. As C Wright Mills wrote: The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society opens opportunities to various lites and how various lites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them.23 Recent debates about conspiracy, however, are between kinds of liberal. Most accusations of conspiracy are about the state, whether from the right or the left. They dont speculate on an organisation behind or beyond the state (as with the Protocols or the capitalist system), but about the state and its secret purposes. David Aaronovitch in Voodoo Histories concludes: If conspiracyism is a projection of paranoia, it may exist in order to reassure us that we are not the totally unconsidered objects of a blind process.24 Such as elderly people thinking their doctors are intent on poisoning them. In this, they may be wrong, though not if their doctor was Harold Shipman. The elderly may not be wrong, however, in a general way, about the indifference of the medical institution to them, the reluctance, say, of NHS managers to treat them as adults, or the need to save money on the free service. Anyone who has had any experience of local or national government, let alone foreign intervention, knows that too often you can be the objects of an indifferent process, which is not personally directed at any individual but nevertheless operating without his or her consultation or much consideration. You dont have to be a crazed loner to sense the difference between what most people want out of a public service and what its managers are aiming to provide. Take the Post Office. And who would you rather be made redundant by someone who dislikes you (though you cant prove it), or someone who only knows you as part of a number to be chucked? This of course is a trick question youre out on your ear anyway. This is not conspiracy, of course, but policy, ideology, not hidden or unknown, but known, open, even if accepted with resignation as given, normal. Most conspiracy theories are wrong, but not all accusation of plotting: deposing Mossadegh in Iran, assassination attempts on Castro and other inconvenient leaders, even
23. C Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956). 24. Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories, p 308.
decisions in Whitehall, all these in the past have shown the attention of plotters, individuals often paranoid, many fallible and so exposed, some still unrevealed, but none very grand. However, the attitude revealed in these plots, the assumed right to act without open inspection, illustrates a more general approach of our rulers. We need not treat all claims about plotting as automatically wrong because we are wary of frightening ourselves out of the capacity for action. Nor do we need to accept all the stories, but the answer to what we consider erroneous or dangerous beliefs is, as Milton argued in the Areopagitica, not suppression but free speech. The guarantee that you will have a right to reply is that they have it too and all of us need it. We cant even save the planet without open reciprocal global decision-making. Forcing people to be good, especially if this actually means giving in to Big Interests (states, industries, firms), leads to war. In promoting this democracy, a full democracy, not only of talk about action, we may make it less likely that large groups of people will go in for legends that make themselves feel significant and others frightened. As a French commission on the quality of life recently found: People dont like being disenfranchised. They like to vote, to speak up for themselves in court and to be heard at public meetings. They value social connectedness.25 Conspiracy thinking, logic or theory is mostly a disease of powerlessness or assumed powerlessness in the face of secret, confidential, government, especially where government pretends that it is open, accessible and popular, that is, representative republican democracy. The current animosity against bankers, mortgage lenders, incompetent politicians, stoked by the virtuous press, is a form of conspiracy thinking. These little devils are figured as responsible, separately and in concert, for our sense of unfairness. Yet, though culpable, they are merely symptoms of a capitalism that is collapsing inwards, of credit undermined as companies take jobs East and the goods that return are unable to find customers who have lost jobs in the West.26 The solution is not just to pillory a few sharp practices, the illusion of a boom or a cabal of especially selfish and safe bods on bonuses and expenses. This is Big Brother politics, not in the sense of the coming surveillance society, but in the sense of the famous TV show, the model for so many others, where we get to call a few performers nasty or useless. The solution is for the majority to take a hand in reorganising the game to find a better democracy everywhere than one of occasional humiliation. Conspiracyism is an infection active in a divisive and suspicious society. Changing one is the key to ridding ourselves of the other.
The New NATO Chief

In August, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ex-prime minister of Denmark, who, like Tony Blair, has for the past year or so been hawking himself around Europe saying Gizza job, both fancying the presidency, was installed as the new NATO General Secretary. Until the last minute Foghs appointment was being blocked by Turkey, as he was the prime minister during the crisis over the Mohammad cartoons, and had not only allied himself with the anti-Islamic Danish Peoples Party, but spoken of a sort of new Kulturkampf and the defence of our values. When ambassadors from 12 Islamic countries asked for a meeting with Fogh to express their concern over the anti-Islamic atmosphere in Denmark and ask for some assurances, he refused to meet them. This impoliteness was widely criticised, and Fogh responded by putting it about that the ambassadors wanted him to censor the press. When they released their letter, that claim was shown to be a lie. To get the Turkish vote, Fogh said that he regretted if anyone was offended by the cartoons. So much for the kulturkampf. Had he said that during the controversy over the cartoons it would have satisfied the great majority of Muslims in Denmark, and no crisis would have developed. Upon taking up the NATO job, Fogh announced that he would be visiting ambassadors from Muslim countries to explain that NATO was defending them too. You have to laugh. Mike Jones
Many Thanks!
The Editorial Board of New Interventions extends its thanks to Harry Ratner for his generous donation of 100.
Harry Ratner
A Socialist at War
With the Pioneer Corps
The latest publication from Socialist Platform Ltd, this book covers Harry Ratners time in the British army during the Second World War, including his experiences in Italy and in France and Belgium after D-Day. 8.00 including p+p (UK only, elsewhere details on request). Order directly from the author at 25 Admiral Close, Heanor, Derbyshire DE75 7QH, email ratner1@tesco.net.
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25. Observer, 20 September 2009. 26. G Turner, The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis (Pluto Press, 2008).
David Landau
The Stalin-Hitler Pact

Socialists and the Fight Against Fascism and War
T is now over 70 years since the signing of the HitlerStalin Pact on 23 August 1939. This pact was perhaps the greatest betrayal of the oppressed peoples of the world in the history of humanity. Here, the self-proclaimed leader of the international working class Stalin made a deal with the Nazis which made the Holocaust the genocide of Jews, Gypsies and other races possible, as well as the destruction of all working class organisations, and all democratic and human rights throughout Europe. It handed the Nazis the possibility of victory in a world war a victory which they came close to accomplishing with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In this article, I not only want to demonstrate that the above claim is correct, I want to look at what revolutionary socialists and communists should have done in response to it, and finally to look at their failure to do so and the disastrous effect that this has had on revolutionary politics. The Danger By the end of the 1930s, there could be no doubt that the Nazis were greatest and most brutal threat to the working class and oppressed minorities throughout the world. Furthermore, they were the most serious immediate threat to the peoples of Europe. Why? Were they not imperialists like all other imperialists? What marked them out from other colonialists such as Britain and France? Let us be perfectly clear, British, French, Dutch and American imperialism were in no sense good imperialism as opposed to the German bad imperialism. All imperialism stands condemned as the slave-owning ravishers of the planet. The point about the Nazis was that they distilled and magnified the inhumanity of imperialism and capitalism and brought it to a new level of barbarism. German imperialism was a young, renewed imperialism. Its industrial development outstripped all but America, and yet it had no colonial empire. German imperialism had two principal goals: firstly, to smash Bolshevism; secondly, to redivide the world so that it could gain colonies. The first objective it shared with all other imperialist powers, so much so that the leaders of the erstwhile allies, had previously seen Hitler as a bulwark against the USSR. The second objective brought it into conflict with other imperialist powers. Hitler hoped to get around this contradiction by creating, in the first instance, a colonial expansion in the East at the expense of the USSR. He thought that this would get at least the acquiescence of the other powers. Later, when he had grown strong on the human and material resources of the East, he would take on Britain and France in order to get some asserts in Africa and Asia. Faced with this, the other imperialist powers vacillated. This was the policy of appeasement.
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But Nazism had aims which went beyond the objective and strategic needs of German imperialism. It had genocidal aims based on an ideology of racial superiority. Again, this is a feature of all imperialism. To dominate the world you have to be a racist. Look at the history of slavery. Look at the genocide against the Native American peoples and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. The difference with the Nazis was that their racial objectives and theories driven by anti-Semitism were in the driving seat, and were more important than straightforward German imperial objectives. They really believed in the world Jewish conspiracy, and they set out to smash it. Finally, Nazism and fascism, more than any other form of bourgeois rule, set themselves the task of physically liquidating all forms of proletarian organisation and liberal expression. For the Nazis, this was all part of the war against the Jews. They had proved their ruthlessness in Germany itself. The workers of the rest of the world knew what was in store for them if they too were to fall under the Nazi yoke. Certainly, the leaderships of the communist parties and Stalin himself knew this with absolute clarity. The Great Betrayal It is in this context that we see the enormity of the crime represented by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In the first half of 1939, Hitler was in a bind. On his Western flank were the imperialist allies. They were still vacillating in their attitude to Hitler, but since the invasion of Czechoslovakia the pendulum seemed to have swung against anti-communist unity. They had become nervous of the powerful Germany that would emerge from a decisive victory in the East. On his Eastern flank was the USSR itself, which up to that time had, at the level of rhetoric at least, been anti-Nazi and had been seeking an alliance with the west against the Nazis. Hitler knew that he could not survive a war on both flanks. If he struck out in both directions, he risked Allied imperialism and the USSR joining forces and crushing him. He could only proceed if he could make a deal with one or the other, allowing him to fight on one flank, leaving the other till later. Stalin gave him a way out. With the pact, Hitler could invade Poland and then invade the West without a threat on his Eastern flank. Having fought and won the war in the West, he could then turn East again. This is exactly what happened. The consequence of the pact was the greatest tragedy in human history. The Nazi occupation of Poland and Western Europe made the Holocaust possible on an enormous scale. The disorientation of the workers movement through the policy of revolutionary defeatism adopted by the
communist parties during the period of the pact massively reduced effective opposition to invasion and resistance to the tyranny and genocide which followed in its wake. The shifting of the balance of forces in the rest of Eastern Europe in favour of pro-Nazi currents, whose regimes contributed to the Holocaust in Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria. The repressive behaviour of the Soviet Union in the territories it occupied as a result of the pact was not only evil in itself, it encouraged the illusion that the Nazis might represent some kind of liberation. The military unpreparedness of the Soviet Union in the face of Operation Barbarossa, leaving the rest of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine to the mercies of the Nazis and thus extending the compass of the Holocaust still further. The near-defeat of the Soviet Union itself and the millions who died in the battles on Soviet soil. The advent of the Second World War itself. No small crime this. What Should Revolutionaries in Europe Have Done? It was not enough merely to condemn the pact. It was vital to put forward a fighting alternative to the revolutionary defeatism of the communist parties on the one hand, and the collaborationist line advanced by social democracy on the other. It was necessary to warn of the coming catastrophe, and arm the workers and all the oppressed to unite against the Nazi onslaught. With a clear line of advance, the best, perhaps even the majority, of communist party members could have been won away from the Stalinists to build the anti-fascist resistance alongside militants won from social democracy. The principal platform should have gone along the following lines: The Nazis are the main and immediate enemy of the working class and the oppressed throughout Europe. The principal task is to build a united front to oppose invasion and, failing that, to resist occupation. No reliance on the domestic bourgeoisie. They will capitulate to the Nazis whenever it suits them. They have more in common with Nazis and fascists than with the interests of the working class. Despite this, the independent organisations of the working class will cooperate with the states military defence against the Nazis in as much as the ruling class, is preparing it. This cannot extend, however, to the suspension of struggle against exploitation and oppression at home. Arming of the workers and the oppressed. Putting together the last two points, organising within the armed forces with a view to arming the workers and taking over the armed forces from the officers who are preparing to capitulate. To build an armed anti-fascist united front seeking socialist revolution in the face of the capitulation of the bourgeoisie in the face of Nazism. Where the above has all failed to happen, support for resistance movement against the occupation, organising escape or refuge for Jews and Gypsies. Revolutionary Defeatism The principle of revolutionary defeatism was born of a
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proud struggle by Marxists against the patriotic nationalist direction taken by the social democrats of the Second International in the First World War. The national parties supported their domestic imperialism, and thus pitted worker against worker. Against this, revolutionaries such as Lenin and Luxemburg argued that there is no such thing as good imperialism. British and French imperialism were as bad as German imperialism. So the best way for the international working class to defeat all the imperialist powers was for its national sections to oppose their own bourgeoisie the main enemy is at home. When it came to the Second World War, the fundamental nature of imperialism had not changed. But the question was no longer whether French imperialism was better than German imperialism it wasnt. The question was whether bourgeois democratic rule was better than Nazi rule. And the answer was decisively, yes. Nazi rule would be a disaster for the working class and all the oppressed. It remained the case that the interests of the working class were opposed to all imperialism, and that it should not form a block with its own bourgeoisie. But it was no longer the case in France, say, at the time of the HitlerStalin Pact, that the main enemy was at home. Stalin and the Comintern, cynically distorted the principle of revolutionary defeatism to justify the turn of the communist parties in the Allied countries to a position supportive of its treacherous foreign policy. It was up to genuine Marxists to challenge this distortion. They failed to do so. Trotsky and the Fourth International In my view one of the most serious flaws of Trotskyism is the emphasis it puts on the question of leadership, both in terms of correct leadership and in terms of betrayals by false leaders, be they Stalinists, social democrats or other Trotskyists. Strange then that Trotsky and his comrades failed to appreciate the gravity of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Of course Trotsky condemned the pact on many occasions, often in the strongest terms: Has the German worker not the right to spit in the faces of his teachers of yesterday? The only merit of the German-Soviet pact is that in unveiling the truth it broke the backbone of the Comintern. The world proletariat will step over the treason of the Kremlin and also the cadaver of the Comintern. (The German-Soviet Alliance, 4 September 1939) Nevertheless, even today, it does not seem to rate high amongst crimes of Stalinism in the canon of Trotskyism. More seriously, however, far from, repudiating the communist parties line of revolutionary defeatism, Trotsky and the young Fourth International echoed this line, and continued to do so throughout the course of the Second World War. Even before the pact and the war Trotsky wrote: In point of fact, bourgeois democracy is the political formula of free trade, nothing more. To make ones aim in our epoch the struggle for democracy can be done with the same success and sense as the struggle for free trade. (Progressive Paralysis: The Second International on the Eve of the New War, 29 July 1939)
Trotsky ridiculed the slogan the struggle for democracy, pointing out quite correctly that the bourgeois democracies of Britain, France and the USA have enslaved peoples across the world, and equating it with the struggle for free trade. But this misses the point entirely. The workers instinct to defend democracy and human rights is a wholly progressive tendency. It has nothing to do with a desire for free trade! It is a tendency which the Fourth International should have fostered and harnessed. More of the tragedy was that such a tendency was coopted by bourgeois leaders falsely claiming to be fighting for democracy throughout the world. This has familiar echoes in relation the lefts response to the events in the Balkans today. Immediately following the pact and the outbreak of war, Trotsky wrote: Diplomatic machinations, juggling with the formula democracy versus fascism, sophists concerning responsibility cannot make us forget that the struggle is going on between the imperialist slaveholders of different camps for a new division of the world. Consequently, I dont see the slightest reason for changing those principles in relation to the war which were elaborated between 1914 and 1917 by the best representatives of the workers movement under the leadership of Lenin. The present war has a reactionary character on both sides. Whichever camp is victorious, humanity will be thrown far behind. (Who is Guilty of Starting the Second World War?, 5 September 1939) The formula of revolutionary defeatism was mechanically taken from the First World War to the Second without an appreciation of the differences. Trotsky appears to have forgotten all that he wrote in the struggle against fascism in Germany, where he was at pains to teach the followers of Third Period Stalinism the importance of distinguishing between different forms of bourgeois rule: all are enemies, but some are more dangerous than others. But perhaps these were off-the-cuff writings, trying to appreciate the significance of events as they happened. Do we get a more considered analysis later on? No, the line holds through to the Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution in May 1940. Again the slogan defence of democracy was attacked without understanding what it might mean for workers drawn to it. But the most decisive paragraph is this: By his victories and bestialities, Hitler provokes naturally the sharp hatred of workers the world over. But between this legitimate hatred of workers and helping of his weaker but not less reactionary enemies is an unbridgeable gulf. The victory of the imperialists of Great Britain and France would be no less frightful for the ultimate fate of mankind than that of Hitler and Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy cannot be saved by helping their bourgeoisie against foreign fascism, the workers would only accelerate the victory of fascism in their own country. The proletarian military policy adopted by Trotsky and the Fourth International in no way mitigated this, geared as it was to being where the workers were rather than being about the military struggle against Nazi invasion (especially
in the USA). The debates which burned within the Fourth International about the pact and the Second World War were not about the correctness of revolutionary defeatism, but on what the pact meant in relation to the nature of the Soviet Union and whether the defence of the USSR against either the Allies or the Nazis remained a legitimate question. In Europe, different bits of the Fourth International prioritised different issues. Some engaged in fraternisation (a very unfortunate phrase) with German soldiers, trying to win them over to anti-Nazism and socialist revolution. Undoubtedly a courageous and positive thing to do, but not, in my view, the most important task for revolutionaries in a country under Nazi occupation. Others engaged in resistance and rescue work. Why did Trotsky, whose understanding of Nazism was more advanced than any Marxists of the time, come to make these errors? It was partly through a dogmatism which did not allow him to believe that the principles of revolutionary defeatism, generally laudable, could not be transferred uncritically from one situation to another; and, secondly, I think, from a massive overestimation of the German working class. This was seen for so long as the most advanced, socialistic class in the world, that despite the destruction of its organisations, it must somehow be able to rise up again, and that it could not succumb to antiSemitic and other reactionary tendencies. The fact that large sections of the German proletariat were influenced by this ideology and were silent or complicit in the terrible events that were unfolding in Nazi Germany, was beyond the imagination of revolutionary Marxists in 1939, and is something denied by many even today. An Enormous Setback for Revolutionary Socialism The Hitler-Stalin Pact was a defining moment in world history, and in particular in the history of the revolutionary socialist movement. Genuine communism had to advance a distinct line from the revolutionary defeatism of the Comintern. The only independent working-class organisation which put united front resistance to the Nazis as their overwhelming priority was the Jewish Bund, in alliance with sections of leftwing social democracy. They did this even where the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against them. If the Fourth International or any other international communist movement had advanced the line I have suggested, then I believe history would have been very different. Working-class militants from social democracy, Stalinism and other tendencies would have flocked to the banner of the Fourth International. At best, a united front opposition to invasion and occupation could have been built, and have succeeded in the overthrow of bourgeois order itself. Less optimistic, at the end of the war, a credible communist movement could have emerged. In 1938, the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International ended with the words: Workers men and women of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory! How hollow these words sound today! But how hollow they must have sounded already in 1945, when what emerged from the war was a tiny tendency which almost immediately degenerated into a clutch of even tinier squabbling sects.
21
Roger Cottrell
George Orwell and Lindsay Anderson

The Convergence of Perspectives Between Such, Such Were the Joys and If
The Sixth Form were a group of older boys who were selected as having character and were empowered to beat smaller boys. George Orwell Rather significantly, in his vision of a totalitarian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four,5 in which fascism and Stalinism were somehow merged, the repressive characteristics and mores of life in the Party somehow reflect those of the public school the total institution of which Orwell had firsthand experience. In contrast to the real life Soviet Union (and even to Nazi Germany, up to a point), there seem to be no working-class party members, and the proles are not subject to the same rigours and discipline as members of the political lite. At its most simplistic, and stripped of all political rationalisation, Orwell is concerned that if the working class isnt capable of running its own revolution (as it aspired to do in Spain), it will be the victim of the moral equivalent of the bullying school prefects, who, with their sadistic rituals steeped in displaced sexuality together with their hypocritical references to service, honour and tradition, will impose their own kind of Order the moment history presents them with an opportunity. As OBrien says to
INDSAY Anderson is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of the new wave of kitchen sink films that began to represent working-class life in British cinema from about 1958. But his most memorable (and perhaps his greatest) film, If, made in 1968, was at least partly informed by his experiences as a boy at Cheltenham College, where the film was also made.1 More surreal than kitchen sink, it would seem to share important points of contact with George Orwells 1947 memoir of his own miserable experiences in St Cyprians, from which he went to Eton.2 Like Orwell, the roots of Andersons rebellion were rooted in his hatred of the ritualised sadism of the public school regime (viewed as a total institution, much like a borstal, an army barracks or prison) and in the hypocrisy of the values that it claimed to espouse before ever he read any socialist literature or even met a member of the working class. For Anderson, as for Orwell, the decline of Britain was in fact to be measured in the decline of its ruling class and its institutions. In The Lion and the Unicorn, written in the aftermath of Dunkirk in the autumn of 1940, Orwell lambasts a ruling class and Conservative Party that had appeased Hitler before the war, and argued that fascism could only be defeated in Europe on the basis of a socialist revolution in Britain.3 But all was not well with Orwells vision of the future. No sooner had the USSR, under Stalin, entered the war on the Allied side than Orwell developed an intense pessimism as to what form such a revolution might take.4
1. In order to secure the cooperation of the college, writer David Sherwin was asked to provide a fake script. The college authorities were outraged by the result (and particularly by Andersons betrayal as a former pupil, and he was forbidden to set foot there ever again. 2. G Orwell, Such, Such Were The Joys, Collected Essays (London, 1980). 3. G Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Collected Essays. 4. In my view, Orwells political development goes through three main phases and what I call a subsidiary phase (3b) after the Soviet Union entered the war. Following his resignation from the Burmese Police he becomes a reformist and his activities are broadly consistent with those of middle-class social missionaries as described by K Dodd and P Dodd in their From the East End to Eastenders: Representations of the Working 22
5.
Class, 1890-1990, in D Strinati and S Wagg (eds), Come on Down: Popular Media Culture in Postwar Britain (London, 1992). After Spain, he becomes a revolutionary in the tradition of the London Bureau (to whom the POUM in Spain was affiliated) and to which he was aligned through the Independent Labour Party during 1938-39. When war broke out, he broke with the ILP because of its opposition to a peoples war against fascism but while Trotsky is sympathetically represented (as Snowball) in Animal Farm, Orwell didnt become a Trotskyist either. Rather, and for all that he recognised the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism as historically legitimate (which it was), he also saw it as limited. At the same time he became influenced by the theories in circulation prior and especially after the Hitler-Stalin Pact that saw fascism and Stalinism as identical species of stable class formation beyond capitalism that had to be defeated by popular revolt. Ergo his claim, following Dunkirk, in The Lion and the Unicorn (whose imagery is invoked in If) that only a social revolution in Britain can defeat Hitler in Europe. As a consequence, Orwell embraced a slogan calling for a peoples war against fascism before James P Cannon (representing a faction of an already fragmented Trotskyism) in 1940 after Trotskys murder in Mexico. When the USSR joined the war, however, Orwells optimism about the prospects for revolution were dashed despite the dramatic upturn in class struggle in Britain from 1944 that made the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party a significant force. G Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1984).
Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. This image is rooted in the public school system and is the principle thing that unites the pessimistic vision of Anderson to that of Orwell. It is also the future to which both Winston Smith and Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his followers succumb, in their different ways, in their respective narratives. Conflicting Views of the Working Class Before George Orwell became a revolutionary, he embarked on two significant journeys of investigation into workingclass life that conformed to a well-established tradition of English literature.6 This is the tradition of the enlightened social missionary who investigates the working-class condition (as if the working class were an exotic Third World tribe), but also re-imagines it. There is no reference to social alienation in Orwells account of working-class life, because Marxs seminal works on alienation did not start to appear in Britain until the 1950s.7 The British proletariat, insofar that they appear in Orwells literature of the 1930s, are not estranged from their fellow workers, from their communities in decline and from themselves. They do not aspire to escape from their lot, like the characters in Alan Sillitoes later novels, or form sub-cultures to try and make meaning of their alienated existence, like the subjects of 1960s sociology, or the Mods and Rockers depicted in Quadraphenia. Orwells working class, like that of Gramsci and the nineteenth-century social missionaries,8 believes in the nobility of its own labour and in a fair days pay for a fair days work. Insofar that this proletariat had ever existed, it was well and truly dead by the time that Alan Sillitoes Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was adapted as a film by Tony Richardson in 1962. Lindsay Andersons publication of Get Out And Push, in 1958, is generally acknowledged to be the point of departure for the debut of the kitchen sink film or English New Wave.9 In this manifesto, Anderson rails that 75 per cent of Britains population (by which he means the working class) is denied a voice by British cinema. Decades later, critics like Worpole and Strinati were able to identify this as one
6. See, for example, Dodd and Dodd, From the East End to Eastenders: Representations of the Working Class, 1890-1990, in Strinati and Wagg (eds), Come on Down. See also P Keating, Fact and Fiction in the East End, in HJ Dyos and M Wolf (eds), The Victorian City (London, 1973); G Stedman-Jones, History: The Poverty of Empiricism, in R Blackburn (ed), Ideology in Social Science (London, 1972); and G Stedman-Jones, Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870-1900, in G Stedman-Jones (ed), Language of Class Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982 (London, 1983). 7. These works were, specifically, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (in Early Writings, Harmondsworth, 1975) and Grundrisse (London, 1973). For further discussion on the centrality of alienation, as a theme, to Marxs unfinished political sociology, see, for example, E Mandel and G Novack, The Marxist Theory of Alienation (New York, 1977); D McLellan, Marx (London, 1975); R Sennett, Authority (New York, 1993); R Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1993); and C Smith, Marx at the Millennium (London, 1999). 8. P Keating, Into Unknown England 1866-1913: Selections From The Social Explorers (London 1976). 9. L Anderson, Get Out and Push!, in T Machler (ed), Declaration (New York, 1958). 23
of the main reasons why young British audiences preferred American films after the Second World War.10 However, the issue was not just one of working-class characters and representation but one of working-class theme. Throughout the 1950s, Hollywood exiles like C Ryker Enfield and Joseph Losey, and indigenous British filmmakers like Val Guest, had increasingly cast working-class protagonists like Stanley Baker in generic movies constructed to Hollywoods rules. While most of these films inhabited a working-class space, the class themes of these movies were however latent, rather than manifest. While Lindsay Anderson championed the need for more representation of the working class in cinema, his hatred for his own privileged (yet brutal) background precluded the kind of warts-and-all representation of working-class alienation found in the novels of Sillitoe. However remarkable This Sporting Life is as a film, it will never be as powerful as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or (more especially) The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. This is because Anderson never had the lived experience of aspiring to escape from an alienated working-class community in decline, and would never have dared (as Sillitoe and Ted Lewis did) actually to despise a working class that, because of alienation, is backward, misanthropic, racist and perhaps even worthy of punishment for its failure to make a revolution after the Second World War. If there is hope, it lies with the proles, writes Winston Smith in his diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But its also worth noting how Orwells novels were greatly inferior to his journalism, before Coming Up For Air in 1940, and that his greatest book, Homage to Catalonia, is a factual account of the one genuine working-class revolution in Western Europe between the wars and what became of it. 11 When Orwell starts to shine as a novelist, it is when he breaks with the organised left and addresses the similarities of modern totalitarianism to the old class system he despises, mediated through his own lived experience of an English public school. Andersons finest hour as a filmmaker was likewise when he returned to the roots of his oppression in public school boyhood, not to praise it but to bury it. The Origins of Andersons Pessimism in the Failure of the 1960s New Left In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, made in 1962, there is continual reference to Harold MacMillans clich as Prime Minister that the working class has never had it so good. Something that is particularly skilful, both in Sillitoes novella and in Richardsons film, is the way that this is juxtaposed to the wretchedness of the Smith familys council house existence in Nottingham and Colins rejection of the capitalist work ethic that killed his father. This being said, the conditions of the working class were considerably improved, as against the prewar years, during this period of relative stability in capitalism that had been ensured (though not to last) by the role of finance and fictitious capital in the economy.12
10. D Strinati, A Taste of America, in Strinati and Wagg (eds), Come on Down. See also K Worpole, Dockers and Detectives (London, 1983). 11. G Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Collected Essays. 12. See (for example) Geoff Pillings writings in Workers Press during 1995 and contributions of Hillel Ticktin to Critique. See
Where evidence of working-class rebellion could be found (aside from the seamens strike in 1966), this was largely articulated in terms of alienated youth creating new identities (through subcultures) that rejected or resisted the compulsion that young workers should learn to labour. Looked at sociologically, this is to say that youth rebellion was being articulated more as a species of primitive rebellion than as any overt manifestation of class consciousness and warfare.13 In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the very moment that Colin Smiths mother gets her hands on her dead husbands inheritance money she squanders it on consumer goods, and Colin articulates his quasi-understanding as to the actual nature of capitalist exploitation both by aspiring to escape (as represented in the trip to Skegness) and by becoming a petty crook, thereby ending up in borstal. Thereafter, once he throws the race against the boys from the public school, he is belatedly taught how to sell his labour power as a commodity in the capitalist labour process both by the borstal governor whose dreams of glory he dashed, but also by his workingclass peers. By 1964, a section of the New Left represented by Herbert Marcuse and elements from within the Frankfurt School of Marxism began to postulate that the working class might now be totally integrated into its own enslavement through something that the Situationists would call the Consumerist Spectacle.14 In this case, elements within the New Left postulated, the revolution might be made not by the core of the working class but by oppressed minorities: the unemployed or unemployable, and sub-groups of outsiders who aspire to redefine their own identity on their own terms. As for the leadership of this revolution, Marcusian Red Base theory speculated that this might be provided by university students (comparatively few of whom were workingclass) insofar that this was the social milieu that had already provided leadership in the Anti-Apartheid and AntiVietnam War protests. In this historical context, Lindsay Andersons fable about privileged but oppressed public school rebels staging an insurrection inside a public school, against the hypocrisy and brutality of its institutions, had a particular resonance. It was filmed after the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong on 22 March 1968, but before the 22 March Movement of Sorbonne University students triggered what became the largest general strike in history, in France in that year. Significantly, the original title of the film coined by the writer, David Sherwin, was Comrades.
also K Marx Capital, Volume 2 (London, 1980). 13. The category of primitive rebellion was first applied (in 1959) by the historian Eric Hobsbawm to the swing rioters and Luddites who destroyed machines because they saw technology (rather than capitalism) as their enemy. It was later applied by sociologists and criminologists like Geoff Pearson to any limited response to alienation that finds localised targets short of full-blown class-consciousness against Capital. Very often, according to Pearson, this is drawn in a reactionary direction as in the case of racism, which is actually prevalent in the working class and in civil society. See G Pearson, Paki-Bashing in a North-East Lancashire Mill Town: A Case Study and its History, in G Mungham and G Pearson (eds), Working-Class Youth Culture (London, 1976). 14. H Marcuse, One Dimensional Man in Class Society (Boston, 1964). See also P Mattick, Critique of Marcuse (London, 1977). 24
Inherent in Andersons pessimism in If is recognition that this kind of revolution cannot succeed, and he dooms his rebels accordingly. In 1968, it is unlikely that the 22 March Movement could have provided leadership to a successful socialist revolution even if the Stalinist French Communist Party hadnt deliberately scuppered the general strike. A decade later, after the New Left had fragmented and split, groups like Baader-Meinhoffs and the Italian Red Brigades, through their actions of substituting terrorism for a mass working-class revolution that hadnt come to pass, permitted the perfection of the repressive organs of the capitalist state. It was these events, irrespective of the resurgence of open class warfare in Britain in the 1970s (and a social revolution in Portugal that was similarly decapitated by Stalinism) that framed the pessimism of If and that of its de facto sequels.15 If as Dissection of Public School Values I even conceived a prejudice against Sussex, as the county that contained St Cyprians, and as an adult I have only been to Sussex on a short visit. George Orwell Although it isnt a classical movie in the sense of having an Aristotelian three-act structure, there is nonetheless a structure and shape to If that isnt always easy to read into on a first viewing. The first three segments broadly correspond to the first act of a classical narrative, in that they set up the plot, but they also serve to dissect the institutions, belief system and rituals of the public school and are titled College House Returns, College and Term Time accordingly. They also correspond roughly to Orwells six-part dissection of the structures and ideology of the public school system in Such, Such Were the Joys. In these first three segments of the film, Mick Travis and his cohorts are identified as confusing rebellion with puberty and rejection of the public schools corrupt value system with nihilism and death. In 1947, Orwell prefaces his blistering attack upon the totalitarianism of the public school system by revealing how he was ritually beaten (with an obvious sexual element to this cruel treatment) for wetting his bed at St Cyprians, when he was eight. In If, the connection with Orwells polemic is revealed by the presence of a new boy who is ritually abused for failing properly to internalise the schools rituals and values. It is revisited in Section 5 (Discipline) where Travis is himself ritually beaten by whips (who are themselves mostly repressed homosexuals) in the school gymnasium and then swears revenge. As in Orwells account, all learning is by rote and is underpinned by threats of violence. If, however, was made 21 years after Orwells emotive essay and roughly half a century after Orwells disgraceful treatment at St Cyprians. In that time, the British ruling class had averted revolution by allowing a classically social democratic Labour government to introduce limited but significant reforms.16 Even in the 1960s, however, Lindsay
15. Oh Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital both feature protagonists called Mick Travis. 16. Nevertheless, both the Attlee and Wilson governments appear refreshingly left compared with the Thatcherite travesty of a New Labour government that exists today.
Anderson seems to have perceived the superficiality of the changes to British society that had preserved capitalism and its class system intact. The schools headmaster, as an example, continues to cite cod liberal philosophy throughout the film, in a manner that mimics Harold Wilsons praise of modernity in the Britain of the swinging sixties. Speaking to a group of sixth formers, the headmaster virtually reiterates Labours 1966 election pledge to forge a social revolution in the white heat of the technological revolution.17 Meanwhile, the reality of oppression and sadism is delegated to others, and the real nature of the public school system remains unchanged. It is against this background that Mick Travis denounces tradition, Kipling and character, just as Cyril Connolly claims that Orwell did at Eton. Indeed, even the title of the film, taken from a Kipling poem, is chosen with some care. Eros and Thantatos: Puberty and Rebellion in If Despite its ideological connotations, If (by Rudyard Kipling) is also a rite of passage poem, and this accounts for its immense popularity with the general public.18 Consequently, rebellion in Lindsay Andersons film is closely linked to puberty and sex. When we first meet Mick Travis, he is disguised as Guy Fawkes in order to conceal the fact that hes grown a moustache. There are continual references to sex throughout the first three segments of the film which broadly constitute its first act. In the schools arcane lexicon of social codes that are beaten (literally) into new pupils, the townspeople of Cheltenham (which is out of bounds) are referred to as smudges and oiks, and town girls are referred to as town tarts. This underlines their potential role (later represented by Christine Noolan) as catalysts for revolt. Significantly, the above also mirrors a theme in Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. While the world view of totalitarianism as a stable class formation, beyond capitalism, derives from James Burnham, the story arc in Nineteen Eighty-Four remains rooted in Orwells own institutionalised adolescence. Winston, like a rebellious public schoolboy, first rebels not on the basis of ideology but of sex. It is Winstons need to find a flat where he and Julia can have sex away from the telescreen, that first sends him into the proletarian district where the elderly prole tells him of the times before the Party came to power. But this illicit coupling is also doomed from the start, linking Eros and Thantatos (sex and death) as surely as in a Romantic poem by Browning. This theme carries over into Andersons If. At the end of the first act, Travis is shown a photograph of an attractive woman, prefiguring Christine Noolans appearance in the narrative (as motif). He comments that there is only one thing you can do with a girl like that. Walk naked into the sea together, make love once, then drown, thereby embracing death. What this signifies, through sexual metaphor is that Travis rebellion is as doomed as that of Winston Smith. In the middle part of the film (Ritual and Romance and Discipline), which broadly corresponds to the second act of a classical drama, sex and punishment are closely linked in a displaced way. Even in the first act, the perverse cruelty of
17. Labours 1966 manifesto, Lets Go With Labour!. 18. My late father-in-law, who was an electrician and certainly didnt go to a public school, had a copy on his wall. 25
the whips is revealed to be rooted in their repressed homosexuality. The act ends with Travis, naked, being forced to take a cold shower as the whips look on. But the real catalyst to rebellion occurs when Travis and his closest cohort abscond to town rather than cheer on their house at a rugby match. At first, they encounter the working-class residents on the streets as an alien species who also regard them with disbelief. This recalls Orwells account of how, when he was at Eton, it was hard to think of working-class people as human at all.19 Working-class girls might be a different matter, however, as they find when they encounter Christine Noolan in a cafe. This follows an earlier sequence when they steal a motorcycle (invoking images of Che Guevaras motorcycle trip across South America). Travis tries to seduce the girl while an African chant plays on the jukebox and the scene involves a great deal of feral imagery before they are entwined, naked, on the floor. As previously, the switch from monochrome to colour (and vice versa) deliberately confuses us as to how much of this is actually happening and how much is in his head. At one point, she warns him that she can kill him with her eyes. But like Orwells Julia, Christine Noolan also acts as a catalyst or sexual muse to all subsequent escalations of rebellion, whether she is really present or not. This is evident when Travis thinks he sees her through the telescope (in the third act) and in her seemingly magical appearance when they break into the schools artillery room, at the end. Inevitably, the trio of (male) friends are singled out for punishment by the whips, back at college, to be made an example of in the name of Order in the house. Travis beating is particularly brutal and sexual, invoking Orwells description of public birching as being obscene as well as cruel. This, for Travis, is also the last straw from which there is no going back, that locks him and his followers on to the path to insurrection. Broadly speaking, this corresponds to the protagonists low point in a classical drama, and to the process of moral catharsis and reversal. From this point all the plot that was set up in the opening sequences of the film needs to be paid off. If as Dissertation on the Failure of the 1960s New Left and of Guevara in Bolivia The invoking of the African chant throughout the film is also significant in other ways, beyond invoking the feral nature of Travis attraction to Christine Noolan. Most of the pictures on Travis wall are of Third World revolutionaries (Mao but particularly Guevara) as well as of Third World revolt and the war in Vietnam. Implicit in Ifs spin on the rite of passage theme, in Kiplings original poem, which it effectively appropriates from its imperialist origins, is Fanons notion that a colonial people can aspire to Manhood (rite of passage) by rising against their colonial masters and cutting off their heads.20 In this, we are reminded (again) that Orwell met Indian servants and administrators and peasants, in his childhood, before ever he met any representatives of the working class, and that it was his recognition that Imperialism was an evil thing that led him to socialism. His first (and probably best) novel written before the Second World War was Burmese Days, which has no white or English working-class characters at all.
19. G Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Collected Essays. 20. F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London, 1979).
This being said, the kind of Third World revolution with which Travis in If identifies, describing pictures of armed revolutionaries as magnificent, were also doomed for reasons that CLR James and Trotsky in contrast to Fanon would have recognised. Principally, this is because of their failure to root themselves in a class (such as the working class, even when it is a minority of the Third World population) that can lead a transformation of society and render its democratic and social gains permanent.21 Otherwise, the revolution will be doomed (as in the example of Guevaras tragic death which the ending of If invokes), or else will lead to regimes that are potentially worse than their colonial predecessors, as in Maos China, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Zimbabwe.22 What is significant here is that what applies to this failed trajectory of Third World liberation applies also to the New Left that was inspired by it. Unable to root itself in the working class or achieve a revolution (particularly in France) in 1968, it fragmented and some of its fragments turned to terrorism. This is also the path that Travis and his followers take in If, following their ritual beating that corresponds to the police murder of student demonstrators, for example, in Germany.23 According to Che Guevaras threephase strategy, as described by Regis Debray, the purpose of the guerrilla struggle is to act as a detonator to wider insurrection. But what happens, as Debray would have it, when the ignition fails to provide a detonation?24 After they fail to provoke an insurrection in the mock execution of the padre, during Cadet Corps exercises, the trio (assisted by the girl) break into the artillery room and unleash on orgy of violence against the school staff, parents and those pupils who will not join the revolution due to their own integration into one dimensional society perceived in Marcusian terms. But this doesnt change society or incite a revolution. Rather, like the violence of Baader-Meinhoff and the Red Brigades, it simply serves to consolidate the political reaction in civil society that is mapped in Andersons later films, as well as perfecting the capitalist state itself as both a means of political violence and engine of class despotism.25 Conclusion What is definitive about the movie If is that it measures the decline of post-colonial Britain by that of its ruling class and of their institutions. In this respect, it is consistent with Orwells project, both as an optimist (in The Lion and the Unicorn) and as a pessimist (in Such, Such Were the Joys). In his 1941 essay, Orwell argued that only a social revolution in Britain could defeat fascism in Europe and that the common people (as potentially in Spain in 1936) must sweep aside the old and moribund institutions of the established order so as to build socialism. At the same time, his vision remained a patriotic one. In this, Orwell was influenced by the kind of pre-Marxist traditions of indigenous
English radicalism that are particularly mapped by EP Thompson (also in 1968) and which include the work of William Blake.26 Here, Albions Lost Children must find their way back to the ancient civilisation that has been lost amidst class injustice and the dark satanic mills.27 In a way, Mick Travis and his companions represent these lost children of Albion as much as they represent the student revolutionaries murdered by police in continental Europe. But this is also a cautionary tale. In the 1970s, there was indeed a resurgence of working-class struggle and the rise of the Trotskyist left was sustained by its relationship to this struggle (much as the New Left was sustained by the counter-cultural underground). Left-wing films in the 1970s, consequently, were less surreal than concrete, with this also applying to the dystopian visions of, for example, John Gould. But Lindsay Anderson remained sceptical that this working class and left could actually make a revolution and explores this in the second part of the Mick Travis trilogy that is Oh, Lucky Man. This film, significantly, is also about incarceration, this time in a prison.28 When the third part of the trilogy, Britannia Hospital, was released in 1982 this was in the context of the orgy of patriotic celebrations of the Falklands conflict. As Thatcher built her consensus for a new and populist Conservatism, deriding tradition in a decadent and reactionary way, so Lindsay Andersons work was denounced as unpatriotic in the same way that Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch accused the BBC of treason.29 When the working class was physically defeated in the mid-1980s, effecting the transition to conditions of the coercive state, it was amidst similar patriotic flagwaving and the drumbeats of imperialist war which have scarcely ceased.30 As New Labour have demonstrated, you dont need toffs to run an unjust capitalist order regulated by the law of value, and the alienated and demoralised working class are, once more, very often integrated into their own enslavement. Insofar that If, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, can be seen as a dystopian vision of the future, this is insomuch as reality television (as an example) replicates the institutional bullying of the public school system on a mass scale, as a similar mechanism for social control. The imperialist patriotism that Mick Travis rightly sneered at has, meanwhile, assumed a much more overtly fascist form. Now that New Labour has afforded them a breathing space, the bullying Etonian whips who are Cameron, Johnson and Osborne wait once more in the wings to punish the working class for its failure to get off its knees and fight back.
21. LD Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York, 1973). 22. The cult of Guevara persists within the ranks of the anticapitalist movement despite Ches signing of his name as Stalin II and shaking hands with Ramn Mercador. 23. See the German movie The Baader-Meinhoff Complex. 24. R Debray, The Revolution on Trial (London, 1976). 25. K Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, nd). 26
26. EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968). 27. P Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1995). 28. Several of the most significant British movies of the 1960s and 1970s were about incarceration in total institutions. In this, they seemed to have been influenced by Irving Goffmans idea (in Asylums) that prisons, insane institutions, etc, reproduce and clearly map the power relationships of wider society. Examples of such films, in chronological order, would be The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, The Hill, If, Oh, Lucky Man and Scum. 29. R Bolton, Death on the Rock and Other Stories (London, 1993). 30. P Hillyard and J Percy-Smith, The Coercive State: The Decline of Democracy in Britain (London, 1988).
Harry Ratner
Stalinism, War and Revolution

W
AS revolution possible in Western Europe in the closing stages of the Second World War and shortly afterwards; and if so did the Stalinists prevent it and save capitalism? Had the Stalinist leadership in Moscow and the Communist parties outside really abandoned the Leninist goal of world revolution? In his book A New Civilisation?, Paul Flewers mentions the varying answers given to the latter question. Generally the conservatives, many liberals and social democrats and the Cold War hawks argued that Moscow still aimed for world domination. Their nightmare was of the Red Army marching to the Channel and the Atlantic aided by Communist risings in the capitalist homelands. Traumatised by their personal experiences of Stalinist totalitarianism, disillusioned ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler, opted for Western capitalist liberal democracy as the lesser evil. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Trotskyists explained Stalinist policies as a conscious attempt to sabotage the revolution and actively to support the capitalist regimes in order to ensure peaceful coexistence between the Soviet state and the capitalist powers. They were only interested in preserving their rule and privileges in the Soviet Union against their own working class and feared that successful revolutions outside would embolden their own working class. The Stalinist rulers in the Soviet Union really believed coexistence was possible and they used the Communist parties in the West as pawns in their diplomacy. Which was the correct analysis? Before we can answer this question we have to decide whether successful revolution was possible. Because if it wasnt, or the chances of its success were minimal, there was nothing for the Stalinists to prevent. My purpose in this essay is to re-examine both the chances of revolution and the role and aims of the Stalinists; and more generally the nature of Stalinism. Revolutionary Situations? From 1943 onwards there was ample evidence to give hope to revolutionaries and fear to defenders of the established order. In all the countries occupied by Nazi Germany armed resistance movements were growing and liberating large areas; and these movements were increasingly under the control of or influenced by the Communist parties. The ruling classes of these countries were discredited. There was a growing realisation among the working class, the peasantry and large sections of the middle class that the prewar capitalist societies of mass unemployment and poverty should and could be replaced by more just and fairer systems whether socialist or a reformed and more humane capitalism. The successes of the Red Army in resisting the Nazi onslaught and then in liberating large areas of
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Europe raised the prestige of the Communist parties and support for socialist and radical ideas generally. In Yugoslavia Titos Partisan movement created by and controlled by the Yugoslav Communist Party had not only defeated the anti-communist (Chetnik) wing of the resistance but liberated the whole country by their own efforts with only minimal aid from the Anglo-Americans and the Russians. In Greece the main resistance forces EAM-ELAS were dominant, and by 1944, following the retreat of the German armies, were in control of much of the country. That Moscow tried to hold back the Yugoslavs and gave no support to the Greeks does not alter the fact that in these two cases there was a difference between the Stalinists in power in Moscow and those not in power in the outside world but who were being impelled by the situation and their own subjective desires to win power. In Italy large strikes had erupted as early as 1943 under German occupation in the large industrial centres of Northern Italy, reflecting the growing militancy and radicalisation of the Italian working class. Side by side with these the armed resistance forces important sections of which were controlled or influenced by the Communist Party were developing to the point where they were able wrest control from the weakened German forces and occupy large cities in advance of the regular Anglo-American forces. The main concern of the Allied military commanders was the disarming of the Resistance militias. In addition to the problem of securing military control, the Allied governments faced the task of securing the acceptance by the people of the legitimacy of the official Italian government of Marshall Badoglio. In France a similar situation developed. As in Italy, important sections of the armed resistance were under Communist Party control or influence. In many areas the Resistance had either militarily attacked and expelled the German occupying forces or taken control in the interval between the withdrawal of the German forces and the arrival of the regular Allied armies. Local Liberation Committees established their own rule, organised services, controlled food distribution, administered justice, etc. De Gaulles appointed delegates found it difficult to get their role and legitimacy recognised. De facto dual power existed on a local level both in Italy and France (and to a certain extent in Belgium) similar in some ways to the situation that existed in Russia in 1917. There the legitimacy and control of the Provisional Government was being contested by the Workers and Soldiers Councils (Soviets). In Russia the conflict was resolved by the Bolsheviks overthrow of the government and their seizure of power in the name of the Soviets. Could the same have happened in France and Italy? Could the Resistance forces have achieved what Titos Par-
tisan armies had achieved in Yugoslavia power on a national scale? Trotskyists have consistently argued that revolution was possible and that it was betrayed by the Stalinists. Had it not been for this betrayal by the Stalinists (and the social democrats) capitalism would have been overthrown. In his autobiography Bill Hunter heads a chapter Did Trotsky Falsely Promise Revolution?, and answers with an emphatic No. Let us ask some concrete questions. Let us get down from generalisations to nuts and bolts. What forces or parties could have organised and led such a revolution? The only groups that were pushing for revolutionary policies were the Trotskyists (and perhaps some anarchists, left socialists and libertarian communists). But these were too few and weak to affect events. Its true that Trotsky had argued that in these revolutionary situations the small Trotskyist groups would, thanks to their correct policies, develop mass support as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917. But this did not happen. Despite their valiant efforts and the courage of their militants (many of whom perished in prisons and concentration camps), the Trotskyists were unable to break out of their isolation and challenge the hold of the Stalinists and social democrats over the working class. So, who then had the forces to launch a struggle for power? If we ignore the social democratic parties who had long ago abandoned any ideas of leading armed revolution (if they had ever entertained them), that leaves the Communist parties. Was Revolution Possible? If the existing governments of France and Italy could have been overthrown, the only forces that could have done so were either the Resistance as a whole or the Communist parties. What were the possibilities of Resistance-based movements or of the Communist Party winning power in France and Italy as happened in Yugoslavia and nearly in Greece? Let me deal in some detail with what happened in France as I am more familiar with the events there. (I played a small part in the liberation of Paris attached to a Resistance column and so got a feel of the situation on the ground.) In France, as in Italy and the Balkans, the Resistance movement was socially and politically diverse ranging from right-wing nationalists (and even royalists) to Communists. Right-wing groups included the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire) and the Arme Secrte, mainly composed of army officers. The Front National and the armed Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) were animated by and controlled by the Communist Party (PCF). There was the Insurg group in which members of the left-wing socialist party, the PSOP, were involved. After 1942 and the German occupation of the formerly unoccupied zone, a whole variety of maquis groups arose in the countryside and mountains composed of men evading forced labour in Germany. Some were PCF-controlled; others were politically neutral; others anti-communist; others organised by agents from the London SOE (Special Operations Executive), which included a section run by de Gaulles Free French. Even though united in their struggle against the occupying German forces, they were bitterly divided politically.
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Right from the beginning an internal struggle for position and for access to arms drops from Britain and North Africa was taking place. In 1943 attempts formally to unite the Resistance resulted in the formation of the Conseil National de la Rsistance (CNR) on which all the main groups were represented. All the armed organisations were incorporated into the FFI (Forces Franaises de lInterieur) which were controlled by a Military Action Commission (COMAC). Within these formally united structures the various political currents manoeuvred for position. The Communist Party had some success. As I explained in A Socialist at War, by the spring of 1944 the PCF held some 22 of the 38 top military posts (due to arrests the figures fluctuated). They controlled COMAC and appointed a Communist Party member, Rol-Tanguy, as its Paris Commander. They had a strong presence in the Paris Liberation Committee and the FFI (the FTP being the best organised). As already explained, a situation of dual power already existed in the provinces where the Liberation Committees had established their control in the liberated areas and contested the authority of de Gaulles commissioners. But the crucial situation came with the liberation of Paris. After the break-out from the Normandy beach-head, the plan of the Allied High Command was for the British Second Army to swing into Northern France and Belgium, while the Americans by-passed Paris to the south and drove straight for the German frontier. It was not intended to go for Paris till September. But in the meanwhile in Paris strikes and demonstrations erupted. On 14 July, Bastille Day, 100 000 participated in strikes and demonstrations. On 10 August, a railway strike started and rapidly spread to other industries. On the same day Charles Tillon called for insurrection in the name of the PCF-controlled FTP. The Allied High Command and De Gaulle were opposed to insurrection by the Resistance. They feared this would open the road to social revolution. De Gaulles delegate to the Resistance, Alexandre Parodi, argued at a meeting of the CNR against it, but he was ignored. It was not only the PCF that was in favour of insurrection; even the nonCommunists were for it. The non-Communist chair of the CNR, Georges Bidault, saw which way the tide was flowing and endorsed the decision to go ahead. In fact the armed insurrection started on 15 August with a strike by the Paris police and their occupation of the Prefecture. The initiative for this came from the non-Communist Honneur et Patrie, one of the three police Resistance groups. The others were the Communist group and the Socialist Police et Patrie. As the insurrection progressed de Gaulles Free French Second Armoured Division was allowed by the Americans to divert to Paris and entered the capital on the last day of the fighting. The German commander of Paris, von Choltitz, was only too glad to surrender to General Leclerc; no doubt relieved to be able to surrender to a regular army officer rather than to a Communist rabble. In the wake of the Second Armoured Division de Gaulle entered Paris and proceeded to the Htel de Ville where the members of the National Resistance Council had gathered to receive him. The CNR immediately accepted the legitimacy of his Provisional Government. Was there any possibility that the CNR might have contested the legitimacy of de Gaulles government? Did they even wish to? If not, what were their motives for supporting and participating in the insurrection against the wishes of
de Gaulle and the Allied High Command? Let us deal first with the motives on the non-Communists. Certainly they had no intention of challenging the authority of de Gaulles government. They were for insurrection for a variety of reasons. As already explained, the general mood was that the old prewar set up had been corrupt and unjust and a new France had to be built. The Socialists looked to a socialist France achieved through peaceful, parliamentary struggle; others looked for a still capitalist France but more democratic, more just, less corrupt. They were suspicious of de Gaulle and his conservative, catholic, militarist allies; they were afraid the conservative forces, including former Vichyites, would coalesce around de Gaulle to block any reforms. They hoped, by a successful insurrection, to enhance their influence in the post-liberation structures. There was also the question of pride, of being able to claim that they had liberated themselves by their own efforts; of wiping out the shame of the collapse of 1940. Another motive was to prevent a possible scorched earth policy by the retreating German forces. What about the Communist Party? The evidence is clear. They did not aim at revolution. In fact they participated in de Gaulles government and in coalition governments till 1947 when the coalition was broken and the PCF went into opposition and made a left turn. In Italy too there were fears among conservative politicians and industrialists about the challenge to their power. As already mentioned, in Northern Italy industrial towns were the scene of armed insurrection; factories were occupied, workers armed. According to Paul Ginsborg in his A History of Contemporary Italy: the fear of imminent social revolution remained very strong in capitalist circles. Rocco Piaggio, a leading Genoese business man, told the Allies in June 1945 that he hoped they would assume control of the major Italian firms, including his own: With some form of Allied ownership and with the corresponding political protection, it would be possible to save something of Italian industry. If not, Piaggio foresaw not only expropriation per se but the total and definitive ruin of business Even the liberal Action Party was calling for the CLNs (Liberation Councils) to be developed as organs of the new democracy, and for them to form a central consultative assembly to control the governments actions in Rome. But, as Ginsborg remarks, the fears proved unfounded: All the events, conflicts and decisions of the previous months Churchills meeting with Stalin in 1944, the example of Greece, Communist Party strategy, the Protocols of Rome conditioned and determined the choices open to the Resistance The Communists were quite unprepared to risk a confrontation with the Allies at this stage. For them the Action Partys proposal, if acted upon, might have put in jeopardy the future independence of the country, the strategy of national unity and their own existence as a party. It might also have damaged the interests of the Soviet Union. At a time when the Allies were in a position to move much further into Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia than had been agreed upon, the last thing the Russians need29
ed was provocative action by one of the Communist parties in the West. There is much evidence in both France and Italy to support the Trotskyist accusation that the Stalinists actively and consciously sabotaged a possible revolution and thus saved capitalism; that they were consciously defending capitalism and thus were counter-revolutionary. However there is another possible explanation for their actions. It is this other possible explanation I now want to explore. Had the Stalinists Really Abandoned World Revolution? This is that the Stalinists had not abandoned the aim of world revolution but that they desisted from attempts at revolution in Europe because they considered the chances of success too small; the enterprise too risky. Did Moscow hold them back because Stalin and his entourage saw no prospect of success and moreover thought such an attempt would have disastrous consequences? Germany was still fighting on. Would an attempt at revolution have led to a realignment of forces with America and Britain and Germany uniting against the Bolshevik common enemy? Was Americas possession of the atom bomb a factor in their calculations? Did they still believe in the impossibility of permanent coexistence; in the inevitability of a final confrontation between world capitalism and Communism? Was their decision not to attempt revolution in Western Europe in 1943-44 a strategic decision because the relationship of forces was seen as unfavourable? It is likely that any attempt by the Stalinists to challenge de Gaulle for power in 1944 would have ended in failure. They would not have carried the non-Communist sections of the Resistance with them. The poorly-armed FTP would have been no match for Leclercs Second Armoured division and the American and British armies. The same unfavourable relationship of military forces also existed in Italy. Could this have been compensated for by political factors; the militancy of the workers, by mutinies among the American and British forces? This is problematic. The political actions of individuals and groups of individuals are determined by their world-view, their ideology. What was the world-view of Stalin and the Politbureau of the Russian Communist Party? How did it develop? From the start Lenins Bolsheviks were internationalist revolutionaries. The Russian Revolution was seen in an international context, as part of the world revolution. Socialism could not be built in isolation in a backward country like Russia. Either the capitalist powers would destroy the Soviet state or the revolution would spread to the advanced capitalist countries. There could not be permanent coexistence between the two systems. But what happened was a stalemate. The Bolsheviks survived the civil war and foreign intervention, but the revolutionary wave in Europe subsided, leaving the Soviet state isolated. Faced with what they saw as merely the postponement of the revolution in the outside world, the Bolsheviks were forced to make deals with the capitalist nations in order to maintain Bolshevik power in Russia until the revolutionary tide started to flow again. The first of those deals was the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany. Even in Lenins time the Soviet government were seeking
agreements with capitalist governments. For example, deals with Weimar Germany allowed them to train their army in Russia in contravention of the Versailles treaty, the Rapallo agreement, etc. Lenin favoured offering concessions to foreign firms to invest in the Soviet Union. There was always a potential conflict between the immediate nation-state interests of the Soviet Union and the fomenting of revolution. The Soviet foreign office and the Comintern had different agendas. Also, while awaiting rescue from the world revolution the Bolsheviks still had to deal with their internal economic problems; the towns had to be fed, the peasant problem resolved, industry built up. The Bolsheviks could not just sit on their backsides waiting for the world revolution to solve all problems. This meant, except during the retreat of the New Economic Policy, building up the state-owned industries, collectivising agriculture and introducing planning in other words, laying the foundations of socialism even if it was admitted that full socialism could not be achieved in Russia alone. The controversy about building socialism in one country was blown up out of all proportion by Trotsky. His criticism of Stalin and his attempt to deduce from this Stalins abandonment of world revolution was hypocritical. In fact Trotsky was attacking Stalin for holding back the development of Soviet industry, that is to say, not building socialism fast enough or well enough! There was no contradiction between supporting world revolution and building as far as the situation allowed the foundations of socialism in Russia. So at what point, if at all, did the Russian Politbureau under Stalin consciously abandon the aim of world revolution? One could argue that, after Hitlers coming to power in Germany, the abandonment of class-against-class policies and the turn to the Popular Front was a turning point. The Franco-Soviet treaty of 1935 was paid for by the PCFs abandonment of anti-militarist work, its support for French rearmament, its abandonment of opposition to conscription and the curbing of its agitation for freedom of the French colonies. This and the Spanish Communist Partys suppression of the revolution during the Spanish Civil War and the British partys clamour for unity with the progressive Tories such as Churchill and anyone, however reactionary, who supported an anti-German alliance with the Soviet Union, was evidence enough that these parties had become instruments of the Soviet Unions foreign policy. But was this conclusive proof that the Stalinists had permanently and for good given up on world revolution? Or were they merely adopting a more flexible strategy? After all, in any military conflict it is a poor commander who does not realise that a policy of attack at all costs and in any circumstances can be disastrous; that there are long periods when a defensive or static stance behind ones own defences is necessary; when sometimes it is necessary to have calm on one sector of the front while strengthening defences against a more immediate threat on another sector. I find it difficult to answer this question with certainty. But I think it is worth posing. Even if we assume that the bureaucrats in the Soviet Union in positions of power and with all their privileges, special shops, country dachas, etc, were purely concerned with defending their own power and lifestyle and could not care a fig for world revolution, did they really believe per30
manent coexistence with the capitalist world was possible? Let us not forget that Stalin and his Politbureau were of the generation that had been reared and trained in the Marxist and Bolshevik tradition. And Marxism and Leninism insisted on the impossibility of such permanent and peaceful coexistence between capitalism and Communism (and Stalin & Co believed their own corrupt system was the real thing). The situation after the Second World War when both the West and Russia had developed nuclear weapons was one of uneasy truce maintained by the fear of mutually assured destruction. All that the Soviet bureaucracy could hope for was that this uneasy truce would last their lifetime, and that if war did break out they would survive it. But whether they liked it or not, permanent peaceful coexistence was unlikely, and sooner or later one system or the other would prevail. Unless a nuclear conflict ended in mutual destruction or a new stalemate, this must mean victory on a world scale.1 It should also be remembered that a similar belief in the inevitability of a showdown also existed among influential sections of the ruling establishment in the capitalist world hence not only the nuclear arms race but also, for example, preparations by the CIA for underground antiCommunist resistance groups in Italy in the event of a Communist takeover or Soviet invasion. I think it can be argued with some justification that it was only under Gorbachev that the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union finally and consciously abandoned the idea of world revolution and sought a permanent agreement with the West to coexist. (However, this coexistence did not last long as the Soviet Union and its satellites soon collapsed into capitalism.) The Communist Parties I mentioned earlier that Stalinism was not homogeneous; that one must make a distinction between the Stalinists in power in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, East Germany, Hungary, etc, and the Stalinists in the Communist parties in the capitalist countries who were not in power. That the Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc had by the 1930s become subservient tools of Moscows foreign policy is a fact. But it is not the whole story. Again we have to make a distinction between the Moscow-based leaders like Thorez and Togliatti who spent the war years in Mos1. This brings us to the late (and much maligned in some circles) Michael Pablo. He famously argued that if such a war broke out it would be an international civil war, a war-revolution. In these circumstances the Communist parties in the capitalist countries would be impelled to revert to a revolutionary policy in defence of the Soviet Union. In other word to struggle for power. He envisaged the possibility of centuries of deformed workers states and of Trotskyists acting as a loyal opposition, fighting against Stalinist deformation, and for workers democracy and control. For this he was violently attacked by selfstyled orthodox Trotskyists for succumbing to Stalinism, while they, the true Trotskyists, were continuing to build the essential revolutionary party. History has shown both sides to be wrong. The orthodox Trotskyists still fail to progress towards a revolutionary party. In the absence of war and with the collapse of actually existing socialism the Stalinist parties have transformed themselves into social democrats or worse and only a rump remain unreconstructed Stalinists. At the time the 1950s the possibility of such a war-revolution was not to be lightly dismissed.
cow, and those who operated in illegality like Charles Tillon in France, Tito in Yugoslavia and also the hard-core cadres below them. They were not in power enjoying all the privileges of the Moscow bureaucrats but operating underground at the risk of their lives. Certainly they were loyal to the Soviet Union, the land where the revolution had triumphed and where they believed socialism was being built. But surely they wanted more than its survival. Surely they wanted power in their own right in their own countries in order to build socialism there (or at least their version of socialism). The defence of already conquered territory was part of the wider international struggle. If the balance of forces required temporary abandonment of the direct drive for power and a policy of accommodation with bourgeois politicians so be it. Sometimes detours and side steps are necessary. But when the situation and the balance of forces made conquest of power possible, or made compromise with the local enemy impossible as in Yugoslavia and Greece then the Communist parties fought for power; successfully in Yugoslavia, unsuccessfully in Greece. The Italian and French Communist Parties would have liked to take power if that had been possible. And wouldnt Moscow have preferred a Thorez or a Togliatti in power in Paris and Rome than a de Gaulle or a Badoglio if that had been possible? The alternatives asserted by Trotsky and the Trotskyists of either successful revolution or Bonapartist military dictatorships were not the only ones. A capitalism recovering from the war and its immediate aftermath to enjoy a prolonged period of growth with rising living standards, welfare state reforms and a depoliticised working class was the other alternative and the one that happened in reality. The Stalinists did not betray or prevent revolutions that were not possible. They merely settled for what was achievable. The goal of world revolution was only finally abandoned by Gorbachev. However, we must also realise that the sort of revolution they wanted and would have carried out would not have been a revolution carried out by a self-organised working class, installing a democratic socialist regime, but a revolution carried out by litist parties backed in all probability by the Red Army installing a one-party Stalinist state. (Whether the higher cultural level and history of struggle for democratic rights in the countries of Western Europe would have led to a liberalisation as Isaac Deutscher hoped for the Soviet Union is a moot point.) As those who have read my previous writings are aware, I have for some time been critical of class-reductionist concepts the attempt to describe every political movement as representing the interests of a particular class; of identifying the coming to power of a party with the coming to power of a class. Rather one should accept that political movements and ideologies have their own logic and momentum, drawing support at different times from sections and coalitions of sections of classes. Marxism emanated from educated members of the bourgeoisie and was brought to the working class from outside. Bolshevism in Russia also had its roots in the intelligentsia. Naturally, because of the central role these ideologies assigned to the working class, they concentrated their efforts on winning support in that class and organising it for revolution
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with only episodic success. The Bolsheviks never represented the working class. Nor was their achieving power the equivalent of the working class coming to power. At best they, for a short time, won sufficient support among the working class and the peasant soldiers to achieve power. But they soon lost that support and elevated themselves above the working class and peasantry ruling as a closed privileged caste representing no one but themselves. Similarly the Stalinist leaderships and cadres in the capitalist countries were a social stratum or current defined by an ideology. Though they claimed to represent the working class, they only represented themselves and sought power for themselves. Where they could not achieve power they settled for participation as junior partners in the bourgeois state machines. They participated in or supported coalition governments and tried to infiltrate the state machine. This suited Stalin too. If he could not have Thorez as prime minister, having him and his comrades in the government and party members infiltrating the ministries was a second best. Another factor that must be considered is the pull of bourgeois ideology and the prospect of sharing in the spoils and perks of ministerial office and positions in the state machine at both the national and local level as it must have affected many of the party cadres. I do not claim that the above conclusions are a definitive truth. I may well be mistaken. But I believe that the facts, as we know them, fit in with these conclusions. I offer them as a contribution to trying to understand what happened in history. On the question of the nature of Stalinism, one further point needs to be made. How should one describe the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s? Which class did Pol Pots movement represent? Or the so-called Marxist regime that ruled for a short time in Ethiopia? Or for that matter, the Chinese Communist Party both in its Maoist period and its present incarnation? Do they not fit my description of a social stratum seeking power for itself rather than representing a class? In some of these cases could we even describe them as Stalinist or Marxist? Rather they chose an ideology off the shelf as a cover or justification for their drive for power. Addendum After drafting this article I had a long discussion over the phone with Paul Flewers. If I understood him rightly he thinks Stalin had abandoned all thought of world revolution well before the Second World War; long before Gorbachev. We shall have to agree to disagree. However, this discussion led me to realise that there was an important difference between Stalinism in the advanced industrial capitalisms and the Marxist movements and regimes in the undeveloped and developing countries such as Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, etc. According to Paul in these countries modernising nationalist currents saw in the Soviet command economy, its Five-Year Plans, etc, an alternative road to industrialisation. (And, I would add, a justification for their rule.) I still do not understand the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Is there something in Marxist ideology that contains the seeds of such brutal dystopian lunacy? Was Pol Pots regime and his killing fields Stalinism taken to its extreme limits?
Andrew Coates
Requiem For a Dream?

Three Books on Communism
NNIVERSARY of the fall of the Berlin Wall or not, drawing up the balance-sheet of communism remains a central issue on the left. There are those, from the shrunken Western communist parties to some on the hard left, who try to save positive elements from the record of the ex-USSR, its satellites, and the remaining communist partyrun states. Others, philosophical speculators, such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, yearn for a communism beyond mundane time and politics. Anti-communism, sometimes claiming left credentials, has enjoyed a revival. Frustrated at being unable to soldier in the real Cold War, some, with little success in extending democracy by military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, have latched on to fighting the Lilliputian chiefs of the European far-left. None of these stands has the remotest chance of contributing anything of value to understanding what Paul Flewers calls official communism. That is the history, political structure and ideology of those communist parties that came to power in the wake of the October Revolution. By contrast, each of these books1 makes a contribution to understanding the communists relation (or not) to Marxism and socialism, their harsh regimes under Lenin, Stalin and the period of stagnation the way they were seen in the West and on the left (Flewers object), and their final collapse. If The Red Flag and The Rise and Fall of Communism are more syntheses than original studies, its as overarching summaries that they are most useful. The New Civilisation?, by contrast, is, for anyone from a left that is both anti-Stalinist and antianti-communist, important for the new light it sheds on the way British political opinion came to look at the USSR during Stalins rule.2 More than the posturing of residual Soviet patriotism, or (at its lowest) one-time leftists out to justify their present-day opinions by re-enacting the ideological war against totalitarianism, Priestland, Brown (both politically liberal) and Flewers (decidedly left) all offer serious ways of looking at the final account of the selfproclaimed heirs of the October Revolution. The Sources of Communism David Priestland and Archie Brown begin their books with an outline of the sources of communist ideology. Brown cites Christian origins for communism his authority,
1. David Priestland, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World (Allen Lane, London, 2009); Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (The Bodley Head, London, 2009); Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalins Soviet Union, 1929-1941 (Francis Boutle Publications, London, 2008). See The Uses of Anti-Communism, Socialist Register 1984 (London, 1984). 32
Beers Edwardian History of British Socialism. Thomas Mores Utopia is evoked. This is a rather cursory start. If opinion today is largely that the early members of the Jesus movement shared some of their wealth, they never held the means of production in common. Nor did More, whose enduring work was part thought experiment, part moral homily, part satire, rather than a programme. If it describes equality of wealth, the law of Utopias Polylerites condemns criminals (a large group given the multiplicity of legislation) to be bondmen (slaves). Priestland describes early utopian ideas as harking back to a Golden Age. It would be more accurate to portray them within the Christian context of a feeling for the closeness of Gods kingdom, reflections of the conditions to come in the reign of the Millennium, or at least of the eternally present Divine order. Religious influence on utopian thinking is long-lasting. It had not disappeared in Marx and Engels time. The 184748 Communist Manifesto, charitably described utopian socialism as fantastic pictures of a future society inspired by abstract social science rather than the class struggle. Marxism was built in opposition to a central aspect of utopianism: this science (in reality a feeling for Gods Order, lightly secularised or, in cases such as Fourier, Deist). It was, Marx and Engels asserted, the coming of the Proletariat that rendered their classless appeal outdated. How did Marxism differ from utopian thought? Priestland makes a more useful comparison with the Jacobins of the French Revolution. That is a specifically political legacy. They thought: like later communists, that only a united band of fraternal citizens, free of privilege, hierarchy and division, could create a strong nation that was dignified and effective in the wider world. Jacobinism as, then, in some respects, the prelude to the modern communist drama, and it is in the Jacobin crucible that many of the elemental tendencies of communist politics and behaviour appeared in rough, unalloyed form. (p 2) One of Marxisms three sources, Lenin claimed, lay in French socialism, which was heavily impregnated with the Jacobin tradition of revolutions led by a leaven of the Enlightened. Babeufs 1791 Conspiracy of the Equals summed up a paradox that ran throughout communisms history. Babeuf and his comrades had a utopia, but one rooted in a picture of a realised vision of popular sovereignty. A future state, founded on absolute equality, is run in the last instance by a central insurrectional comit, but there are no longer any cities; the country is run on decentralised lines (multiple assemblies), and people will live in idealised
2.
villages. By passing through a vigilant dictatorship the state passes to the people, in a sense it thus withers away as a separate body. Babeufs communism was far from Marxism: it was distributive and not based on social ownership producers bring goods to the general store where they are shared out. But there is no doubt that his political organisation of a (failed) insurrection (in which he considered the proletarians the most vigilant force) marks him out amongst utopians as the precursor of the important current of nineteenth century republican socialist insurrectionists notably in the person of Auguste Blanqui, whose influence on Bolshevism is, if contested, widely accepted. Blanquis support for a temporary Parisian revolutionary dictatorship that would educate the country out of ignorance is often seen as a forerunner of the communist idea of a vanguard-led transition to socialism. And for setting down a dilemma. That is, the conflict within socialism between what Paul Flewers calls socialism based on social planning as a matter for experts (central committee) and a society in which everyone plays a role in decisions, a democracy. This more clearly than Priestlands conflict between hierarchy and tradition on the one hand, and equality and modernity has served as the dividing line on the left. The Basis of Official Communism Official communism was based on Marxism-Leninism. While the French Revolutionaries left their mark, much else was involved. The first part of the tandem, Marxism, Priestland dissects in an ambiguous way into a story of three competing themes, paradigms of socialist practice, a Romantic one, in which people work for the love of it and govern themselves, without the need for authority imposed from above; a Radical, revolutionary and egalitarian one, in which the heroic working class unites on the barricades to fight the bourgeoisie and establish a new modern revolutionary state; and a Modernist one, in which the economy is run according to a central plan, administered, at least in the early stages, by some kind of bureaucracy (p 31). Apart from the heavy adjective heroic, this is a fair picture. Marxisms other sources, economic and philosophical, contained elements of each from the idyll of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the sketches of radical democracy in the writings on the 1848 Revolutions and the Paris Commune, to production organised and carried out by industrial armies in the Communist Manifesto and the (sketchy) ideas on one single labour force organised in accordance with one definite social plan in the first volume of Capital. Applying this idea of the cyclical dominance of these three themes (romanticism, radicalism, stabilisation) to Lenin and then his successors is not so simple. It rides uneasily with the historical strand of The Red Flag. That is its concern to embed these ideas in developing structures and changing politics. Lenin is portrayed both as a romantic (workers democracy will encourage universal culture), a radical state-builder, and a modernist (his adoption of Taylors scientific and progressive ideas, power of technocrats). When we come to Stalin we get largely the latter two. The First Five-Year Plan endorsed in 1929 could be implemented despite the USSRs industrial backwardness, utopian plans were entirely feasible because Marxism has proved that revolutionary leaps forward were a verifiable natural phenomenon, and therefore equally applied to the
33
economy (p 148). Stalins reforms of industry and agriculture caused mayhem from their inception. They were enforced by mass murder above all through the programme of forced collectivisation of the countryside. But while a cruel version of revolutionary voluntarism dominated this process, the underlying reality was the consolidation of a bureaucratic structure. Thus: The ravenous industrial economy swallowed everything that came within reach The unrealistic targets, the storming labour methods, and the deployment of semi-trained workers and engineers created shortages, waste and chaos. Self-criticism, and class struggle were also damaging practices which soon escaped party control. (p 155) There was soon a rigid hierarchy, plans and work-targets (norms) were laid down by the ministry at the centre, each worker was given what was effectively a mini-plan to fulfil (p 305). In brief, the Five-Year Plan, as a blueprint, did not work through conflict, but only when a ramshackle command hierarchy was put in place riddled with favouritism, jealousy and back-scratching. Its successes were limited to targeted sectors (quantitative production of, say, in Marxist terms Department One primary goods), where resources could be deployed on a military basis the enduring feature of Soviet economies. In other words, there was continuity at work here, not a series of leaps-forward and rebounds. Why the Great Terror? Party control was asserted throughout these practices, the economy was under its thumb but it was still organised bedlam and the centre directed attacks on the authority of managers and specialists while it tried to discipline the population. Centred on a hunt for ideological opposition, real or imagined, it went right down to the deepest inner thoughts of individuals. The Great Terror of the late 1930s still remains inexplicable without the role of Stalin and his utter contempt for humanity. How was it experienced? Priestland illustrates communisms history through art, as reflections of developing tensions, from the novels and films of the 1920s, to the heroic pictures of the 1930s and the War years, right up to the 1980s and complaints about the shoddy world of Brezhnev and the glimmerings of opposition in Eastern Europe in Wajdas Polish films. But here one is at a loss. Perhaps much was foreshadowed in the violent image of eastern revolutionary hordes in Bloks poem Scythians (1918), Mayakovskys satirical The First of May Down with affection! Mandelstams 1930s Verses about Stalin, his fat fingers as oily as maggots, words sure as forty-pound weights helped soon seal his fate in the Gulag. How the party of Stalins warrior monks was turned on itself during this period is just one of the unresolved questions of what was either a counter-revolution, against the old Bolsheviks, or to theorists of totalitarianism, its true destiny, is as important than conceptualising the type of society that developed. The problem is not just to explain the shift in policies (in terms of their success or failures), but, for this non-specialist, to see how the authority of the state was consolidated around the personalised tyranny of Stalin himself. That is despite its failure to mobilise the
population, the party developed its rule in which members were expected to absorb not only military heroic values, but Lenins almost Protestant ideal of sober asceticism (p 165). That is, however, with Salvation resting on the Grace of a single Person. In the process of cultivating his genius Stalin became increasingly nationalistic the One Country prevailing over international Socialism and known as the Vozhd, the Boss. Or as Brown simply puts it, the head of an oppressive party-state, which was authoritarian at best and ruthlessly totalitarian at worst (p 614). Whether this model drew its strength from pre-existing authoritarian elements in Leninism (one of a group of potentials according to anti-Stalinist Victor Serge), or was a result of a total monopoly of power centring on the Leader, needs some discussion of how this organisations material infrastructure operated. That is adopted forms of the division of intellectual labour and centralised command not unlike that of early industrial enterprises (a charge Trotsky in Our Political Tasks (1904) made against Lenins model of the party) might be one factor. But is that all? Neither Brown nor Priestland discuss this in detail. But some hints are there. One cant help thinking that its earliest powercentre, the Red Army, in its militarised Civil War form, had provided a model. It was a bulwark of the new regime, the germ of a new society within the old (p 96). In which case, Bolshevism, far from developing into something wholly different from the Leninist early 1920s, was profoundly marked by its early years in power. Was this all? Stalins role, of the Individual making the decisive tipping-point, is hard to avoid. But the system produced its own monsters from the beginning. One area was the ruthless suppression of opposition during the Civil War. Critics seek in vain for a parallel to the Quranic Sword Sura in Marxs writings, lines calling for the extermination of enemies. By contrast, Lenins works are replete with calls for harsh action against counter-revolutionaries, lawbreakers (shooting bribe-takers and rogues) and the claim that a revolutionary who does not want to be a hypocrite cannot renounce capital punishment. Victor Serge considered that the lawless practice of summary execution was a central fault of early Soviet power it encouraged the growth of a separate repressive power, and ultimately led to the Gulag system. The penal system has other objects. One area, on which Priestland touches, is the very un-Marxist concept of class that ruled every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, its satellites and, to a grotesque extent, Maoist China. Before Stalin political and social rights were given on class grounds. And taken away on them. Class, however, was not defined in Marxist terms as the social relations people engage in (voluntary or not), but a quasi-hereditary trait, stamped by parentage. As the criteria for giving rights or denying them, these categories were used in the courts and extra-judicially to justify further severe punishments. Class struggle was stamped with this fight against tainted hostile class individuals. This practice existed before Stalin and continued, in various forms, long after his death. It is noteworthy that some of the left even today retains more than a trace of this theory of class as a near-biological characteristic of people which can never be wiped away. The Structure of Official Communism Browns The Rise and Fall of Communism offers a structural,
34
useful overarching framework for understanding official communism. The different histories of official communisms spread, from the military-led occupation of most what would become the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe, to the indigenous revolutions of Yugoslavia and Albania, and in the Far East (China, Vietnam and Laos), have, he argues, certain features in common. That is an ideal-type of political-economics system: with 1. A monopoly of power of the Communist Party (p 105). That is, even when there were other parties (in various Eastern European National Fronts) these had no independent existence and no political weight. 2. The party was run on the lines of democratic centralism, the decision of the higher organ was binding on the lower that meant completely centralised control (in its Stalinist version) with only an input by party members. All communist parties, with a complex hierarchy of cell and fraction structure, have used this template, though varying degrees of fictional democracy have existed (such as the British partys panel system, approved candidates for the Central Committee). 3. There was a non-capitalist economy, dominance of a command economy as distinct from a capitalist economy (p 108). This leaves open as to what non-capitalist means. 4. These parties had the declared aim of building communism as the ultimate, legitimating, goal (p 110). A factor not to be lightly dismissed, and related to the next point. 5. There was the existence of, and sense of belonging to, an international communist movement (p 112). In this respect there was a strong belief (pre-SinoSoviet split) in the unique role of the Soviet Union (p 113). Brown notes that from this there was a strong sense of being part of a world-historical process, in which myriad peoples combined in a project, sometimes going forward, sometimes facing set-backs. That is part of the doctrine of inevitability. (p 126) In short, a feeling of being on the right path, and the inner core of the left. The Quest for Historical Legitimacy It is this sense of historical legitimacy that Paul Flewers explores in The New Civilisation?. His thoroughly researched study concentrates on the way people in Britain reacted to the Soviet Union during the crucial years between 1929 and 1941. For members of the CPGB, the role of the Soviet Union was, self-evidently, paramount, and their disciplined obedience to its orders was at the centre of the partys existence. But Flewers draws out the intriguing fact that its original supporters came from what was originally the most anti-bureaucratic stratum of the British left. The October Revolution was initially seen as a victory for the working class, a radical democracy, not as the 1920s wore on a Modernist beacon of industrial progress. Yet it was only in this period, that of the First Five-Year Plan and its aftermath, that wider interest in the Soviet regime grew. In more detail than either Brown or Priestland, Flewers recounts the self-delusions of the fellow-travellers, both those who visited the land, who wrote and argued in its favour domestically, and those who bought into their enthusiasm. Domestic and international factors, he demonstrates, determined much of their reception: the 1929 crash, the rise of
Fascism and Nazism, all drove many to regard the USSR as a progressive alternative to capitalism. For them a rationally-devised plan for social progress and human need, thus offering a positive alternative to the very evident chaos and irrationality of slump-ridden capitalism, made it an extremely compelling vision for a large number of people who were looking for an answer (pp 52-53). So much was the urge to believe that despite, as Flewers shows on countless occasions, there was enough critical evidence to give an entirely different picture, a wide swathe of opinion believed by 1936 that the new Soviet constitution represented the coming of age of Soviet democracy, or at least a prefiguration of a democratic revival in the Soviet Union (p 123). And during the Moscow Trials, many of them persisted to plead the case for Stalin, even in the face of the absurdity of the charges. Kevin Morgan in his studies of the CPGB has demonstrated the financial and organisational ties between the British communists and their Moscow superiors. Horrific examples have come to light of their failure to defend even Stalins British victims British Soviet sympathisers caught up in the Great Terror. As Flewers notes, the CPGB leader Harry Pollitt did little more than gently lobby on behalf of one individual, his friend Rose Cohen. But despite not being caught up in the Stalin myth many on the left tried to find some good in the Soviet Union. It was after all actually existing socialism. This extended not just amongst the intelligentsia, a very mixed category including those genuinely wanting to believe in a better society, to selfserving individuals, and the usual array of what one can call, kindly, utter cranks. It existed throughout the labour movement. The cultural bonds of the left would have made it hard to step outside a prevailing feeling of sympathy for the USSR (however reserved). Flewers makes the point that many left-wingers did not fall for this trap. But others were unlikely to have had the confidence to express their views to be shouted down or made to feel small no doubt by any communist they happened to meet. This kind of lecturing I am one of the last generation who grew up at a time when pro-Soviet communists still had some real presence on the left had its own effects. It would seem the case that the CPGB produced critics as much through its domestic behaviour as through its subordination to a flawed overseas idol. Brown and Priestland skirt close to an argument which Flewers puts explicitly. That admiration for the Soviets was the last if nonetheless intense gasp of both the Victorian idea of progress, with its faith in human rationality and the inexorable rise of democracy, culture and social well-being, and utopian thinking, with its customary concept of a rationally-planned and ordered society under the aegis of an enlightened lite that ruled in the interests of the population as a whole (p 50). This is better put than the prevailing view (from David Cautes study of fellow-travelling) that this stems from a revival in Enlightenment confidence as such. For clearly the USSR had little in common with the radical Enlightenment of those who attacked power and established ideas it was all about power and establishing irrefutable ideas. Instead this idea of progress broad enough as it is is nevertheless an important part of the lefts bedrock ideology. In early 1950s France, keenly aware of the crimes of Stalinism (and having been attacked by ideologue Roger Garaudy now an anti-Semitic Islamist for their existentialism), Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
35
nevertheless aligned with the Parti Communiste Franais. It was the workers party. It was the left. Sartre kept his criticisms polite, believing, according to de Beauvoir that if he became a full-blown opponent of the USSR he would be isolated. And that common work with the PCF was vital to campaign for Algerian independence (Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses, 1963). This position, both describing where the intellectuals were stuck and what line they took, was widespread. And justified. To stand with anticommunism in Europe was to support the colonialists, and later, as the Cold War liberal former left discovered, to back American mass killing in Vietnam. Brown cites Raphael Samuels writing on British communism to indicate a quasireligious forward movement. But it is hardly a matter of faith: if the Soviets were unable to prove that they had made progress then these very Victorian hard-headed admirers would fade away. The Demise of Official Communism That they did, and that it was a combination of Modernist or modernising individuals within the ruling communist parties and some more romantic supporters of democratisation that led to the systems demise is the story of the later chapters of The Red Flag and The Rise and Fall of Communism. To Priestland it was a development that hatched inside the state: Ultimately, then, it was this small vanguard alliance of communist party politicians and intellectuals that led the revolution against communism just as small bands of revolutionary intellectuals had brought communism to power. (p 516) Lack of freedom and a society that continued to be marked by postwar austerity and under-development were strong impulses for change. To Brown, who is at his best in describing such internal concerns and the processes involved in attempts at reform (already illuminating on the Prague Spring), it was also a matter of state actors: Ultimately it was the combination of new ideas, institutional power (the commanding heights of the political system having fallen into he hands of radical reformers), and political choices (when other options could have been chosen) which led to the end of communist rule in Europe. (p 588) Writers such as Timothy Garton Ash, whose gaze ranges widely across Europe, have felt it necessary to argue that similar approaches widely shared fail to recognise the importance of the equally pragmatic populations who saw all too keenly the lack of progress their countries had made particularly in the Soviet marches (Guardian Review, 24 October 2009). The Soviet Union dissolved; the party splintered and lost its grip the moment the ban on factionalism was lifted. Whatever the precise interaction between popular and opposition agency and lite reformists, official communism tumbled, and the successful transition to prosperous crisis-free liberal capitalism is there for all to see. For Brown: As an alternative way of organising human society, communism turned out to be a ghastly failure. (p 616) But he is prepared, generously, to admit that even official communism had some genuinely humanistic traits.
Priestland observes the dangers of utopian thinking. But that while communism is over, sharp inequalities and perceived injustice may cause new forms of utopianism to emerge. In this vein The Red Flag ends by asking how can decentralised communities be combined with economic prosperity (p 575). A good start might be by considering not the intricacies of utopias, but the way the Marxist-Leninist party tried to organise human society. As Paul Flewers observes, the marginalisation of those who wanted devolved industrial democracy, and, we would add, democracy full stop, during the Stalinist regime, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, continues to mark the left. The denial of the
political turbulence opposition, factionalism through monolithic party structures has left a mark on left politics, whether overtly, in the remaining insignificant Leninists sects or covertly through modernised social democracy that seeks to marginalise all dissent. The importance of democracy, not just in electoral politics but also in society as a whole, rather than some imaginary resurgence of menacing leftist totalitarianism, is the real dividing line between democratic socialists and free-marketers of all stripes, from Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to Putin and the Chinese capitalist-communists.
Arthur Trusscott
Different Strokes for Different Blokes

T
HERES nothing like having a reputation as a writer, sculptor or film-maker to have your other reputation as a dirty old man referred to in the most delicate of phrases by the artistic intelligentsia. This has been proved over the last few months with the publishing of Vladimir Nabokovs last book, an exhibition of Eric Gills works, and the arrest of Roman Polanski. In September, Polanski had his collar felt in Switzerland upon his arrival from France, where he has lived for the last 30 years or so. He was held under an international alert issued in the USA in 2005 in respect of charges relating to his having illegal sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in the USA in 1978. He is currently on bail, pending an extradition decision. He could face a life sentence if he returns to the USA. Now, a man in that predicament is usually pretty much on his own. Gary Glitter, for example, convicted in Vietnam of having sex with under-age girls, was universally reviled. That nobody came to his defence comes as no surprise; indeed, Channel Four actually ran a make-believe drama featuring his trial and execution for the sexual abuse of a child. But Polanski has friends, lots of them. In the US Nation on 1 October, Katha Pollitt listed some: Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodvar, Woody Allen (insert your own joke here), Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg and many, many more. Bernard-Henri Lvy, whos taken a leading role in rounding up support, has said that Polanski perhaps had committed a youthful error (he was 43). Debra Winger, president of the Zurich Film Festival jury, wearing a red Free Polanski badge, called the Swiss authorities action philistine collusion. Frderic Mitterrand, the French cultural minister, said it showed the scary side of America and described Polanski as thrown to the lions because of ancient history. French for36
eign minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, called the whole thing sinister. Closer to home, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that his crime wasnt rape rape, just, you know, rape. Oh, that! Conservative columnist Anne Applebaum minimised the crime in the Washington Post. Nobody knows you when youre down and out, goes the old blues song. Thats not the case if youre a famed filmmaker. Polanskis victim, Samantha Geimer, does not wish to see him in court again, as she does not want to have the distressing episode raked over once more. That is an understandable response, and it should be respected by the authorities. But one gets the feeling, however, that the clamorous chorus in favour of Polanski is more about propping up his cultural reputation than respecting the wishes of a woman who wants above all to put this traumatic experience behind her once and for all. In the world of left-wing politics, the World Socialist Websites statement on the Polanski case tried to deflect the condemnation of his behaviour by pointing to the very serious crimes committed in the name of US official policy, and to the fact that people responsible of far greater crimes lived freely in the USA: Accepting that Polanskis case involved a criminal offense, the circumstances of his sudden arrest after the passage of more than three decades at the age of 76, the substantial evidence that his earlier prosecution involved serious misconduct by the judge, the many mitigating circumstances arising from the facts of Polanskis own tragic life, the sentiments of the victim, the artistic significance of Polanskis work [its that excuse again AT], and, finally, the reactionary characteristics of the media campaign all these elements and circumstances should give
pause to those who have adapted themselves, without taking the time to think, to official public opinion. This is not apologetics. Thirty years after the fact, things need to be looked at critically all the facts of the case, all the human circumstances. It needs to be borne in mind: the abuses of the state the extension of its powers is far more dangerous to the public well-being than the actions of any individual. Dangerous precedents are being set in this case. Of course one must question the motives of the US authorities and those of the right-wing media in this and other similar cases. Both have long been guilty of gross hypocrisy. But what about the arrogant attitude of Polanskis illustrious friends? Taking into consideration the ancestry of the World Socialist Website in Gerry Healys branch of the Fourth International, one might have expected a slightly more circumspect attitude in respect of the matter of sexual exploitation of women Writing in the Guardian on 17 October, Fiona MacCarthy curiously describes Gills incestuous relationships with members of his family, including one of his sisters and two of his daughters (and the family dog), as sexual experiments. Harmful perhaps, particularly in respect of the daughters? Well, maybe not entirely: Both she [Petra] and her sister Betty appear to have absorbed the experience, making apparently good and happy marriages, bringing up large families. Their history challenges received opinion on the inevitability of damage done by child abuse. Not everyone thought MacCarthys review acceptable. On 24 October, the paper ran a letter accusing her of being close to an apologist for Gills abuse of his children and lacking appropriate responsibility in the characterisation of his unacceptable abusive sexual behaviour. A month later, on 14 November, the Guardian featured Martin Amis lengthy essay on Nabokovs The Origins of Laura, compiled by the authors son from a bundle of notes and jottings, and recently published to great fanfare. There is, writes Amis, in the style so redolent of that classic pose of his being draped over a chaise longue, a problem with it, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, one which has to do with the intimate malice of age: The word we want is not the legalistic paedophilia, which in any case deceitfully translates as fondness for children. The word we want is nympholepsy, which doesnt quite mean what you think it means. It means frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable, and is rightly characterised by my COD as literary. As such, nympholepsy is a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. Ah yes, dont use that word paedophilia, which, to the average person (I am not thinking here of tabloid-incited lumpen paedo-bashers), if not to elevated littrateurs, has not a legalistic effect, but the impact of predatory personal abuse committed against a boy or girl by an adult, one who is usually in a position of trust.
And, in such circumstances, Amis preferred word nympholepsy, which indeed does mean ecstasy or frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable, is nothing but a deceitful alibi. Amis cites huge slabs of Nabokovs repeated lurid descriptions of adult males encounters with young girls. Amis admits that writers like to write about the things they like to think about to put it in plain words, Nabokov was a dirty old man with a very unhealthy state of mind, perpetually letching over young girls. But what is Amis conclusion about Nabokovs lip-smacking fantasies? And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokovs mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence insufficiently honoured the honour of 12-year-old girls. So Nabokov insufficiently honoured the honour of the girls over whose images he slobbered. And that is all that Amis and Amis at his sternest, please note will say. Amis and his hero did not have it all their own way. On 21 November, a letter from Elizabeth Trott hit out at Nabokovs determined, sustained and luxurious misogyny, and gave a sharp kick to Amis, that he loves his master too much to call this what it is. MacCarthy skates on particularly thin ice when she averred that Gills behaviour could even be artistically valid, as perverse sex can produce works of great beauty. Now it is true that Richard Wagners musical imagination was fired to a considerable degree by his deep delving into Germanys mythical past, and that this imagination, one which produced works of great stature, was also steeped in antiSemitism, the brutal consequences of which subsequently became clear under the Third Reich. One cannot be divorced from the other. But the coincidence of and at times interdependent relationship between, on the one hand, artistic talent and, on the other, personal prejudice and, with some, outright depravity should leave the observer with a decidedly uncomfortable feeling. One cannot detect that sense of discomfort in Amis essay on Nabokov and MacCarthys on Gill, just mild qualms which the authors almost seem ashamed to admit to having. Polanskis defence squad does not even feel slightly abashed about what he did. We are not talking here about a consensual relationship between an adult and someone slightly under the legal age of consent. There is a world of difference between, to use a recent example, the case of teacher Helen Goddard, who was scandalously prosecuted and jailed for her affair with a 15-year-old pupil, and Polanski, who forced himself upon a 13-year-old girl; Gill, who systematically sexually abused his family; and Nabokov, who even if he did not put theory into practice was not the sort of man whom anyone would wish to leave a young daughter with. One can only conclude that an alarming number of intellectuals are happy at best to minimise or downplay and at worst to excuse the sexual behaviour of certain men on account of their artistic achievements, making justifications that would never be made if any of them was, say, an office or factory worker, or especially an illmannered yob from a sink housing estate. Gary Glitter had no chance of his predatory behaviour being excused or minimised by intellectuals. A singer of decidedly cheesy, low-brow popular songs, rather than an acclaimed sculptor, film-maker or writer of literature, he could never be in their gang.
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Paul Flewers
Stalinism and Revolution

A Response to Harry Ratner
ARRY Ratners article on the possibility of workers revolutions occurring in Europe in the final stages and immediate aftermath of the Second World War makes some important points that need to be discussed. I do not here intend to comment upon this question, as I have not investigated it to any depth, and I no more wish to endorse the traditional Trotskyist view such a revolution was in the making but was sabotaged by Stalinism, than I would deny that the objective conditions for such a revolution were present in at least some major European countries. This would require a great deal more research and consequent analysis than I am currently capable of tackling. What I will take up is Harrys contention that Stalin and his successors, right down until Gorbachev took over the reins of power, continued to adhere to the programme of world revolution on which the Soviet Union was founded, and that Stalins theory of socialism in one country was merely a tactic within that general strategy. I am surprised that Harry, with his background in the Trotskyist movement, accepts this idea. I highly doubt whether he would accept the idea promoted by successive Soviet leaderships that they were building a socialist society if one accepts, as I believe Harry does, that socialism means a society in which class divisions, social inequality and economic inefficiency are being steadily minimised and ultimately overcome. What I aim to show here is that beneath the official rhetoric the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was based upon realpolitik, that is, based upon the primacy of Soviet state interests, and that the demise of the internationalist outlook of the Bolsheviks was an inescapable part of the marginalisation and defeat of the communist forces in the Soviet Union and the rise from within the Soviet party-state apparatus of a new ruling lite. Realpolitik and Deradicalisation The Soviet regime was faced with a profound difficulty from the start. The Bolsheviks took power on the basis that the Provisional Government was quite unable to deal with the problems facing Russia, and that state power had to be in the hands of the working class and its institutions were a total social collapse to be avoided. Nevertheless, as the leading Bolsheviks pointed out at the time, such a regime could not survive in isolation, and its very existence was predicated upon the working class in Western Europe successfully launching a revolution, seizing power and establishing its own class rule. Lenin was very clear about this on many occasions. However, in the interim, in order to survive the Soviet regime was obliged to establish trading and diplomatic relations with those very countries whose governments it wanted the workers, led by the communist
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parties that it was helping to organise, to overthrow. This dual-track course was fraught with difficulties, and indeed, as early as 1920-21, some left-wing communists were already saying that Moscows desire for trade with Europe was undermining its quest for revolution. One striking example of the problem was the secret Soviet-German military agreement, which saw the Reichswehr, which was headed largely by incorrigible reactionaries, being revived partially thanks to assistance from the Soviet state. It would have been a terrible irony had this military collaboration been sufficient to have tipped the balance of forces in favour of the German ruling class had the German Communist Party actually made a concerted bid for power in 1923. Other early examples, both in 1921, of where the differences between Soviet diplomatic requirements and Comintern policies were actually resolved in favour of the former were the abandonment of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran in Gilan in order to maintain good relations with the central government in Tehran, and the maintenance of good relations with Turkey after its authorities had heavily repressed the Turkish Communist Party. The pressures of establishing relations with the capitalist world led to a process in which the requirements of realpolitik became an increasingly important factor in the primary thinking of the Bolsheviks and the decision-making of the Soviet government. The failure of the revolution in Germany in late 1923 dealt a severe blow to their hopes and was a major factor in realpolitik overtaking the organising of revolutions abroad as the key factor motivating Soviet international policy, rather than diplomacy being a subsidiary part of that policy, subordinated to the actions of the Communist International. Stalins idea of socialism in one country, that the Soviet Union could proceed by itself towards socialism without the need for revolutions abroad, was a product of this process, and in turn helped to speed up the reliance upon diplomacy at the expense of helping to organise revolutions abroad; indeed, the original dual nature of Soviet international policy revolutions in the capitalist world via the Communist International, alongside the establishment of good relations with the capitalist world was split asunder. The discussion about the theory of socialism in one country was not, as Harry considers, blown up out of all proportion, but was a crucial debate over the future of both Soviet international policy and the Communist International. Stalins theory both signified and accelerated the growth of a nationally-oriented programme of development, with tendencies even at this point towards a Russian nationalist approach, as the driving factor behind both the domestic and overseas actions and policies of the Soviet regime. One key result was that the parties of the
Communist International increasingly became considered primarily as adjuncts of Soviet foreign policy, rather than first and foremost revolutionary organisations. It is somewhat disturbing to see how rapidly realpolitik emerged as the primary factor in Soviet international policy. There are, however, convincing reasons for this. Although some leading Bolsheviks occasionally alluded to serious threats facing the Soviet regime from within, particularly in respect of the growth of bureaucratism, the survival of the Soviet Union was far more usually seen in the physical sense: that Moscow would be able to ward off military assaults and to maintain and develop its economy. This was especially the case with the party-state leadership that arose around Stalin. And, as the 1920s drew by, the Soviet economy was reviving and, notwithstanding the periodic disingenuous war scares, there was little danger of foreign attacks on Soviet territory. Not only did the idea of sponsoring European revolutions appear increasingly quixotic on the grounds that they were seen as less and less likely to occur, but they also started to be seen as unnecessary in the light of the survival and development of the Soviet Union, and even dangerous and undesirable on the grounds that promoting them would enrage the European bourgeoisies at a time when Moscow was attempting to forge good relationships with them. Another key factor parallel with the rise of realpolitik and helping to accelerate it was the consequences of the changing relationship between the Soviet leadership and the working class. The range of factors that lay behind the transformation of a revolutionary workers party in 1917 to a ruling lite that the Soviet Communist Party leadership was to become by the end of the 1920s cannot be more than sketched here. Certain factors which imposed themselves on the Bolsheviks practically from the start helped to push a wedge between them and their working-class constituency. Whilst the Soviet republic could survive physically at least for some time in isolation, what would be at stake was its communist essence (or, to be more precise, its protocommunist essence); that is, the survival of communism as a guiding factor for the regime. This had already been compromised by the fact that the Soviet republic was established in a backward country that was severely damaged by imperialist and civil wars, and surrounded by capitalism; and the impact that these conditions would exert upon the Bolsheviks was exacerbated by the heavy weight upon them of paternalistic Second International Marxism. So, by the time that Stalin unveiled his theory of socialism in one country, the ruling party had become largely detached from its base in the working class, and represented it in loco parentis; that is, at a remove, and not directly. The ascendancy of the Soviet party-state apparatus over the working class and the population in general continued through the latter half of the 1920s, and a crucial point in this process was the establishment of the huge state industrial and agricultural sector under the First Five-Year Plan after 1929, a vast programme of national development on an historically unprecedented scale. This, the birth of the Soviet socioeconomic formation, gave the Soviet leadership for the first time a solid social base and enabled it to become a fullyformed, nationally-oriented ruling lite that consciously recognised that its interests as an lite stood in contrast with the mass of the population. From now on, beneath the fearsome ultra-left rhetoric
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of the Communist International during the Third Period of 1928-34 and even that had a direct connection with the 1 requirements of Soviet foreign policy the scene had been set for the definite adoption by Moscow of realpolitik as the basis for its foreign policy and its use of the worlds communist parties purely as diplomatic counters. The Subjective Factor What of the subjective feelings of the members of the Soviet leadership within this objective framework of becoming a ruling lite? Readers of this magazine will know of people who were once in favour of a radical transformation of society but became a lot less militant having taken up a position of responsibility in, say, an official post in a governmental body. If this can happen when a left-winger joins the Labour Party to push it leftwards but ends up being drawn rightwards by party duties and the exigencies of holding office in a ministerial post, then why not a revolutionary in power in Russia being drawn by events both at home and abroad into making so many compromises that he ends up wanting to coexist with the capitalist world, to be left alone, and, furthermore, as a member of a new lite, would not want working-class militancy in other countries to get out of hand, lest it upset his own regimes relations with the capitalist world and served to encourage his own workers to demand more control in the factories and farms, and within society as a whole? Of course, it is possible for a revolutionary to maintain his political convictions whilst working in a job that militates against them; for example, a trade union official post that requires him to make and indeed justify to his members compromises with alien class forces. He has to separate his political convictions from the exigencies of his job in order for the former to survive. However, not a few people in this position have at one speed or another abandoned revolutionary politics for an approach that merely wishes to obtain improvements within the capitalist framework, and not to transcend it. Furthermore, people in that position sometimes come to view revolutionary politics as a threat to their new outlook, and turn with a vengeance against their former views and those who still promote them.
1. The Cominterns strident ultra-leftism during the Third Period was both a means on the part of Stalin to outflank demagogically the Left Opposition, and a central tactic in Soviet foreign policy manoeuvring. Applied to the fullest extent in Germany, where there had long been strong leftist tendencies in the communist movement and where therefore ultra-leftism would obtain a ready hearing, the Stalinists verbal and sometimes physical violence against the Social Democratic Party was primarily intended to disrupt one of the main backers of a proWestern foreign policy in Germany. Stalin intended to keep the West European countries divided, and thus wished to see the German government composed of parties that preferred a pro-Moscow orientation, which traditionally were of the conservative right. Such was Stalins interest in derailing proWestern German parties that his policies kept the workingclass organisations divided even though this meant that unity against the growing Nazi threat, which Stalin completely underestimated and misunderstood, was impossible to establish, with the fatal results with which we are familiar. Soviet foreign policy objectives thus dominated Comintern policies, and the Third Periods ultra-leftism was as much a product of Soviet realpolitik as the opportunism of the ensuing Popular Front period.
Again, if this can happen to a trade union official in Britain, then in an analogous situation in the Soviet Union would not a revolutionary be encouraged by the pressures of his day-to-day work either to separate his political convictions from his job, or to abandon them for a more pragmatic approach, and in the latter case also to lash out at those 2 who still called for an internationalist orientation? Another facet of the subjective factor should be considered. Not a small number of those who were revolutionaries in Russia would have been much more like British Labour Party or German Social Democratic Party centrists or moderates had they been living in a less repressive and backward country. On the face of it, the sort of mild reformism expressed by most of the leaders of the Labour Party, or promoted in practice (if not necessarily in words) by the majority of the leadership of the SPD, would have been illogical in Russia. Indeed, those who attempted to do so often rapidly departed from the socialist movement, or were totally marginal. However, in 1938, in his obituary of Abel Yenukidze, Trotsky wrote that the ideas of many Old Bolsheviks did not go much further than the democratic republic in other words, they were not at heart communists but social democrats in the modern meaning of the term. Unfortunately, he never developed this insight which is a great shame but even as it stands it is revealing. It surely was no accident that there was a strong current amongst the Bolsheviks who, once in power in an isolated country, gradually adapted to the situation during the 1920s, increasingly adopted a nationally-oriented statebuilding course, and threw out the internationally-minded communists. They were different to social democrats in Western countries in that they recognised that they were actually in charge of the socio-economic system, as opposed to running parts of it by permission of the bourgeoisie, but having seen the overthrow of the Tsarist system and attempted to establish a modernising programme in Russia, it must have been very tempting for Russian socialists to adopt a similar outlook to Western social democrats who were attempting to modernise their own countrys political and economic institutions and practices. They shared with them the orientation of national development, albeit one that was of a semi-capitalist and, after 1929, a non-capitalist nature. However, despite this shared orientation, a revolutionary in Britain abandoning his convictions has the whole ideological framework of right-wing Labourism, generated by bourgeois society as it is a means of obtaining reforms within the confines of capitalism, into which to fall, whereas the revolutionary in power in Moscow did not have a ready-made ideology like that to hand, but had to continue to express himself in Marxian terms so long as the regime did not return to capitalism. In a society that has emerged out of a revolution led by a workers party under the banner of Marxism, and in which a new lite has arisen, one that is conscious of its social ascendancy, emerging out of that
2. It is quite possible that certain members of Stalins entourage at this point still believed in the establishment of socialism on a world scale, even if the immediate interests of the Soviet state were paramount. But this generation of Bolsheviks was largely destroyed by Stalin during the Great Terror, and their successors grew up in an atmosphere of litism and nationalism, albeit covered in a veneer of Marxism. 40
party and the state that it has built, and with that society not having returned to capitalism, what official ideology could there be other than a distorted version of Marxism? A modern society cannot have an official ideology that is neither capitalist or socialist, unless it has, as with Iran, a theocratic one, but that last option was closed for Moscow. If it is difficult for individual members of a ruling lite to maintain for any length of time a commitment to a revolutionary Marxist viewpoint unless it is kept separate from their official duties, then it is impossible for a ruling lite as an entity to maintain that commitment other than as a wholly disingenuous faade. Marxism is anti-litist to the core; it is about the possibility of there being a genuinely egalitarian and therefore non-lite society. Marxism gives humanity for the first time in history the theoretical basis for the overcoming of all ruling lites. The fact that the October Revolution was fought under the banner of Marxism and that the Bolsheviks stood in the Marxist tradition, at least when they came to power, posed especial problems in this respect for the new Soviet lite, much more than has been the case with any other revolutionary leadership that has evolved into an lite. So although the Soviet lite maintained its image of the keeper of Marxian rectitude, by the 1930s its actions, not least in respect of its working class, were very much in line with any other ruling lite. Hence the tremendous contrast between its theory and practice.3 The Dual Nature of Communist Parties The rise of realpolitik as the guiding principle of Soviet foreign policy encouraged the growth in Moscow of a different attitude towards the working class in Western countries. Rather than viewing class struggle as the embryo of a revolutionary challenge to Western capitalism, during the later 1920s and beyond it became more convenient for the Soviet leadership to view working-class militancy and the development of left-wing politics as a factor to be harnessed to serve Soviet state interests. Stalins overriding concern was the development and defence of the Soviet state. This became clear with the Popular Front orientation, which all communist parties promoted after the Seventh and last Congress of the Comintern in 1935. Moscows intention here was the creation an all-class alliance in the capitalist countries that would encourage or force their governments into establishing a good relationship with the Soviet Union. This, notwithstanding the lurches into a more leftist stance by the communist parties during the time of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and at the height of the Cold War, was to remain the centre-piece of official communist tactics. Harry is correct when he states that the anti-Stalinist left sometimes did have a rather one-sided view of the official communist movement. The communist parties in Greece, France, China and Italy and one can add Britain to them, and others besides did want to gain power. The view put around by Trotskyists and other left-wingers that they were merely pliant tools of Moscow is one-sided. But
3. Another indication of the bogus nature of the commitment of the Stalinist regimes to Marxism was the unseemly speed with which so many officials and intellectuals in the Soviet bloc abandoned their former outlook for bourgeois ideologies after 1989-91.
the question of what the Soviet leadership wanted of the communist parties is different, and here I go along with what the anti-Stalinist left has traditionally claimed: that Stalin was determined that they were not to seize power 4 but to help Moscow in its diplomatic interests. It is very useful to have a force within another country that can help shift that countrys foreign policy towards a more friendly attitude towards ones own country, but to promote a workers revolution is a different matter altogether. And this is the whole point of an all-class alliance: it gives the impression of progressive politics, and can actually win useful reforms for the working class, but, as it can only be established on terms that would not challenge capitalism, it is a barrier to a workers revolution. The situation in Europe during the closing stages and immediate aftermath of the Second World War was extremely delicate for many of the ruling classes of the continent, not only because of the dislocations caused by the worlds most destructive war, but also because, as Harry points out, the war had led to a broad swing to the left within Europes population, and strong resistance forces wielded considerable power in France and Italy. The bourgeoisies of Europe were at their most vulnerable during these few years. Yet it was at this very point that the official communist movement stood at its most moderate and conciliatory. A clue to this can be found in Stalins speech in November 1944, on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution, and therefore at an important symbolic event. He announced that the alliance between the USSR, Great Britain and the USA was based not on casual and transient motives, but on vitally important and longstanding interests. This could only mean that he wanted the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and capitalist Britain and the USA to endure well into peacetime; that Moscow was not intending to use the radicalisation that was visible as the war was coming to a close to challenge Western capitalism. What stood behind the Big Three conferences in Yalta and Potsdam in January and July 1945 was a recognition on Stalins part of the establishment of definite if undisclosed spheres of influences in Europe: he had his domain in Eastern Europe; Western Europe belonged to the Western, that is, capitalist, domain. In short, for Stalin, the revolutionary wave that Lenin had hoped for in Europe at the close of the First World War was certainly not going to take place at the close of the Second. The Western communist parties were in a strange situation. They did want to take power after all, what purpose did they otherwise have? but they were extremely loyal to Moscow. They believed the myth that Moscow still represented the capital of a world revolutionary movement, a myth that Moscow assiduously promoted. With the exceptions of Yugoslavia, where Tito felt strong enough to move from waging a guerrilla war against the German occupation to making a direct bid for state power without, it must be said, gaining permission from Moscow and Greece, where the broad party-led insurrection was brusquely and significantly abandoned by Stalin,5 Europes com4. I am referring to the advanced capitalist countries here; I look at Moscow-oriented Third World liberation movements below. 5. In his discussions with Churchill in October 1944, Stalin had agreed that Western influence in Greece would be 90 per cent, Soviet influence 10 per cent. It cannot be denied that he kept to 41
munist parties managed to rein in their more militant members look at the way that Harry Pollitt rounded aggressively upon critics of the partys opposition to strikes at the party congress in 1945 and ensured that Moscows extremely conciliatory line was obeyed. Moscow laid down the line for the worlds communist parties, and in return they demonstrated a touching faith in its good intentions. No matter what indignities Stalin and his successors laid on them drastic changes in line, excommunications and rehabilitations, outright lies and chicanery they largely put up with it. Although many members came and went, and others grumbled, large numbers, including most of the leading figures, nonetheless stayed loyal to their parties and 6 to Moscow. What Did Moscow Want? The Soviet lite under Stalin and his successors, at the head of a regime that not merely had been victorious in the tremendous test of the Second World War, but had managed to rebuild the war-ravaged country and subsequently to develop it, and expand its rule across Eastern Europe, wished to maintain and where possible reinforce its position within the world. Apart from its military strength, it not only could employ its image of successful national development as part of a progressive global cause, it had the advantage, unlike its main rival, the USA, of sponsoring a political movement with sections in a large number of countries which for some time defended its every move, and even after that remained in varying degrees of political solidarity with it. But beneath the rhetoric about the coming world victory of socialist and progressive forces, what did Moscow want from the official communist movement? It is true that, in order to challenge the growing US hegemony in Europe, the official communist movement adopted a more militant stance in 1947, but this period also saw the adoption with Stalins approval of such explicitly reformist documents as the first edition of The British Road to Socialism. From the mid-1950s communist party members often worked closely with left-wing social democrats, and the national programmes that were promoted by the communist parties in the advanced capitalist countries differed little from the programmes issued by their new allies. Indeed, in Britain the communist party acted as a de facto think-tank for the Labour Party lefts. Had their programmes been implemented, we would not have had a Soviet-style society, but capitalism with a broad range of reforms that would benefit the working class (and possibly represent some moves towards a socialist society), and with a foreign policy that would have been favourable to the Soviet Union. For all of Moscows publishing the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, for all its talk of world socialism sometime in the future, that is what the Soviet regime envisaged in practice, and, as dissident hard-line Stalinists in Britain discovered to their dismay when they appealed to Moscow against the revisionists in their party leadership,
his side of the bargain. 6. It is an interesting question as to why they did remain so loyal. There were such factors as Moscows continuing appeal to socialism and its self-advertisement as a socialist regime, along with the perhaps psychological need amongst official communists for the existence of a seemingly positive alternative to capitalism.
the various editions of The British Road to Socialism met 7 with Soviet approval. It is perhaps valid to compare the Soviet lite with the right-wing social democrats in the advanced capitalist countries. In the latter case, traces of some sort of transformative intention still existed in official statements Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution, for example, or the occasional Marxist relic in continental socialist party programmes. Even today, some right-wing social democrats still once in a while speak of socialism, and the current economic crisis may perhaps see a revival of some of the old slogans. When in government, Britains Labour Party, Germanys Social Democratic Party and other similar parties at least until the arrival of New Labour and its Continental equivalents introduced reforms that benefited the working class, but they had no hesitation in establishing close political relationships with virulently anti-socialist forces, not least governments of the USA, or attacking workingclass interests at the behest of big business, clawing back on the reforms that they had granted. The vestiges of a radical past were therefore often irrelevant to the parties day-today operations. Much the same can be said about the communist parties in power in the Soviet Union and other similar states: they too, particularly after Stalins demise, introduced reform programmes that benefited the working class, whilst at the same time putting into practice policies that worked against working-class interests. The relationship between, on the one hand, right-wing social democratic governments and, on the other, official communist governments and their respective working-class constituency was, mutatis mutandis, similar, with the exception that whilst Clause 4 was eventually put to rest and the SPDs Marxist memory was expunged, the Soviet bloc parties, because they were ruling non-capitalist countries and thus could not have bourgeois ideology to fall back on, maintained the imagery of Marxism and the October Revolution in their official statements and ceremonial activities. And so their commitment to the programme of national development continued largely to be expressed in the revolutionary language of Marx and Lenin. Far from being revolutionary, what characterised the Soviet lite was its conservatism and, beneath the boasting such as Khrushchevs infamous We will bury you! a chronic if never acknowledged sense of insecurity and a consequent lack of confidence. This was not accidental, it was rooted in the very nature of the Soviet socio-economic formation, which not being a mode of production, lacked
7. It is true that in the Third World the Soviet regime was willing to give considerable assistance, including weapons, to antiimperialist guerrilla movements, some of which actually managed to seize power against Western powers and their local proxies. The Soviet model of national development separate from the capitalist world was very appealing to many Third World nationalists, and, particularly after Stalins demise, Moscow was only too keen to capitalise on its appeal. However, it should be noted that references to socialism in Soviet propaganda in respect of such areas were often played down, and the questions of national independence and antiimperialism were emphasised. Subsequently, the inability of the Soviet Union to provide various necessary products, particularly up-to-date technology, led to many former colonial states making their way back towards the West, and any commitment to socialism, such as it was, was quickly discarded. 42
the basic stability and durability of advanced capitalism. East and West, form and content were diametrically opposed during the postwar period. In the West, despite the periodic public displays of self-doubt, the ruling classes of the advanced countries were quite secure, once those in Europe had regained (not least thanks to the Stalinists) their composure after their traumatic wartime experiences. In the Soviet bloc, the posturing of the ruling lites was a cover for their inherently unstable social position. This is why the Soviet lite was not only unable to accede to demands for basic democratic rights (freedom of speech, organisation and publication), but was unable to handle even relatively minor differences of opinion within its own ranks. Radical reform of the system that might result in the rise of far-reaching differences within the ruling lite and which therefore might threaten to fragment it, was thus ruled out. It is thus very difficult to think that such a social stratum wanted to see proletarian revolutions take place. The Cold War Balance If the Soviet Union did not wish to see workers revolutions in the capitalist world, why did the Western right-wing media and, indeed, the broad postwar Western ideology make so much fuss about Soviet subversion and assert that Moscow planned to take over the world and remodel it in its image? As Harry points out, such concerns went so far as to build clandestine armed forces, such as the Gladio network in Western Europe, to fight behind the lines after a Soviet military invasion. Nato forces were trained from top to bottom first and foremost to deal with such an eventuality. The polity of Western states was oriented primarily around the Cold War division of Europe and the wider world, as the vast majority of politicians, state officials and military planners worked on the assumption that war with the Soviet bloc was a distinct possibility, and that the Soviet Union held to the same principles as its founders in 1917 and was thus still bent on subverting the Western world. Although the wartime Big Three alliance did not, as Stalin had hoped, survive the war, and by March 1946 Winston Churchill was complaining that an iron curtain had descended across Europe from Stettin to Trieste, a geopolitical balance was established between the Soviet Union and the Western world, albeit one that rested upon the very division of Europe that Churchill deplored. And it did produce stability: Europe during the period of the Cold War was extraordinarily stable; indeed, for the major countries of the world, this time was one of remarkable stability. This was based upon the East-West confrontation which, like an arch, required tension for it to stand fast. Each side had to portray the other as an existential military and ideological threat, and this was a very effective way of underpinning domestic social discipline: the anti-communism running through the dominant forms of Western political discourse was mirrored by the anti-Western rhetoric in official Soviet bloc politics. Western ideologues and politicians became trapped in their own propaganda, really believing in the Soviet threat. Moscows promotion of and assistance to communist parties and Third World nationalist groups, its own statements about the inevitability of world socialism, and its selfpresentation as the living manifestation of Marxism in practice: all these were grist to the Western propaganda mill. The ideological warfare of the Cold War framework bore
little resemblance to reality, but it was essential for the ruling lites on both sides to maintain this false ideological representation of this mutually beneficial tensioned relationship to ensure that the East-West balance remained intact. This, incidentally, is why dtente, the attempt to establish a less stressful relationship between Moscow and the West, was, despite the official rhetoric on both sides, never really more than partially engaged in, as the uncertain consequences of massively reducing East-West tensions were quietly recognised in official circles on both sides. Indeed, it is ironic that had the Western communist parties programme been fully implemented by left-wing governments right across the Western world, this may well have severely upset the Cold War balance, as East-West tensions would have been considerably relaxed, which would not have been to Moscows advantage. However, as the eventuality of this was in practice most unlikely, not least the election of a left-wing reformist government in the USA, one therefore gets the feeling that all that Moscow really desired were certain modifications within the framework of the Cold War balance, ones that loosened up the Western bloc to some degree, especially slackening the ties between Europe and the USA, thereby enabling more bilateral relations to be established between the Soviet Union and individual Western countries. And following from this desire for modifications within the Cold War balance, it is safe to assume that the prospect of proletarian revolutions in the Western capitalist states was not one that Moscow would have at all welcomed. Conclusion: A Status Quo Power In conclusion, it is clear to me that Moscows role in the world from the mid-1920s, that is, once the theory of socialism in one country became the official ideology of the Soviet regime, was essentially conservative, and intimately connected with the regimes project of national development. Proletarian revolutions in the Western countries rapidly began to be seen by the Soviet lite as a danger to the establishment and maintenance of working relations
with the Western world and therefore were seen as undesirable. Although the official communist movement in turn became mere adjuncts of Moscows foreign policy requirements, the parties themselves nonetheless wished to obtain power, and it must be admitted that Moscow juggled this contradiction with considerable success, as the official communist parties remained remarkably loyal to the Soviet Union. The peculiar nature of the Soviet socio-economic formation meant that the regime was forced to project a Marxist ideological image, but this was useful, on the one hand, in respect of its sponsorship of the official communist movement, and, on the other, in respect of the maintenance of the Cold War balance. Any particular Soviet policy which advanced the cause of the working class in the West (such as the very handy publication of the Marxist classics) was essentially accidental (or at most incidental) or a product of the peculiar situation in which the Soviet Union found itself. Such activities as the establishment of the buffer zone in Eastern Europe, its backing of national liberation forces in the Third World, and its attempts to influence national government policies in its favour via the activities of friendly forces in Western labour organisations had nothing to do with any quest on Moscows part at promoting workers revolutions, but were attempts to reinforce its position in the world. The Soviet regime had no desire to overturn the postwar big-power relationship; rather, its intention was to reinforce its position within it, and to modify it to its advantage. As I stated at the start of this article, I would not like to say whether proletarian revolutions were possible in Europe at the end of the Second World War. However, I have no doubt that had the working class in any European country, and especially in the key countries of Western Europe, made a serious attempt at seizing power, Moscow would have swung its powerful political, diplomatic, espionage and military forces into action in order to prevent any such revolution being successful.
JJ Plant
Recent Exhibitions
Pop Life
HERE are certain people who have expressed the view that Pop Life at Tate Powerstation might be dismissed as both trivial and contemptible. Such people are grievously in error. It is essential to dismiss Pop Life as both trivial and contemptible. Rarely has a major national exhibition gallery so wretchedly conspired against art itself. The cynicism with which this venture has been curated (as the recent jargon will describe the job of assembling an exhibition; I notice that it is now possible to curate not only a music festival, but even a dance club; doubtless all over France concierges are demanding a change in job title) is
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on a scale entirely consistent with our times the age of the hedge-fund manipulator and the parliamentary expenses fraud. The bare-faced thesis of this exhibition is that the transformation of the artist into entrepreneur, huckster and eventually whore (as is literally the case with one of those exhibited), is a process to be approved of, applauded and, if possible, invested in. The invention of this process is fathered upon Andy Warhol, not a claim entirely devoid of merit. But Warhols method of social production of art was destroyed by a feminist would-be assassin, and his work transformed as a result. Much as one might wish such a fate on other malefactors in this exhibition (Haring, Koons,
Kippenberger), no such exculpation is available to them. If Warhol was to find it impossible to cope with the burden of his own talent, this is not an excuse for the talentless upon whom Tate Powerstation seeks to bestow his bloodied mantle. Almost the only point of historical accuracy in the exhibition is the caption The Worst of Warhol. The curators make much of their claim that their exhibition is challenging, somewhat pointlessly applying this adjective to images of fornication, and fussily barring access for young people to the room with those images. They failed the challenge put to them by the censorious Metropolitan Police, and withdrew an image by Richard Prince (apparently an artist) of Brooke Shields (apparently a film actress) without testing the matter at law and without including any statement about the issue in their catalogue. Suspiciously, this challenging image does not seem to have been included in the exhibition catalogue, leading to the possible interpretation that it was much more of a set-up than a challenge. They may have hoped for further free publicity from the overtly anti-christian blasphemy of Maurizio Cattellans dead horse impaled by a placard with the motto INRI, but none rose to the bait. It is, however, a very serious matter that Tate Powerstations curators have allowed the police to decide that viewers in London may not see an image that has been on public show in the USA. The Gadarene rabble that recently demonstrated against BBCs Question Time missed a far more important target (or to be exact, they missed the existence of the target). Museum of Everything The Museum of Everything can confidently be described as the most exciting new display space in London in at least a decade. Based in a former dairy in Chalk Farm, its first exhibition is devoted to the genre often called outsider art the work of untutored but inspired individuals. These creators often work in deliberate secrecy, many of them are designated as mentally ill, and occasionally they will benefit from incarceration in institutions where they can pursue their chosen work with limited interruption, often obsessively and repetitively, with extreme levels of detail and compulsive regard for symmetry. The MoE is not the first chance to see a major show of such work in London. The Tate show Outsider Art in the 1970s was the first major presentation in London, more than capably supported by Richard Cardinals book on the subject. More recently Inner Worlds Outside at the Whitechapel was a calculated attempt, largely unsuccessful, to erode the outsider category by stressing the connections between the outsiders and official culture. In addition to these major exhibitions, outsider art was also available in London through the excellent archive assembled and maintained by Victor Musgrave (which has been relocated to Dublin). Although the MoE show includes a few outsider stars (Henry Darger, Augustin Lesage, Madge Gill, Aloise), the majority of the artists and nearly all the work on show will be new to London viewers. And for the showing itself there can be only praise. Every seeming disadvantage in the dairy building is turned into a positive. Tiny dark rooms are made use of as intense viewing spaces. Holes in walls reveal more works, and the viewer has to lean round corners to see into the private world in which some of the works lurk. A preposterously tall room is hung floor to ceiling with paintings, and opera glasses are made available. Exploiting the opposite impact of scale in the same room, large Fresnel
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lenses are available to allow the viewer to study a group of impossibly detailed drawings. MoE is rightly proud of its display of the section devoted to part of one of Henry Dargers epic narrative sequences. This was the perfect antidote to the depression brought on by the morning at Tate Powerstation. The curatorship was original, and built upon an evident passion for the work. And in the work, no trace of cynicism or commercialism. Every item exudes a quality of necessary expression. A criticism I would advance is that the catalogue, in tabloid format on newsprint, cannot capture the colour quality of the work and it is a pain to find a way to curate it. At the time of writing it is uncertain that the MoE will be able to sustain itself past the end of December. So dont miss the chance to see it. Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers A couple of decades ago, the Whitechapels Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers might well have graced Private Eyes Pseuds Corner. The largest work in the show, occupying most of the ground floor, consisted of the responses by a large number of women to a note from a former lover of the artist ending their relationship. The self-absorption was total. My parents used to tell us, when we encountered a misfortune or setback, not to make a song and dance about it. This woman and her friends made not only song and dance, but photographs, videos and endless, endless words. My Yard The upstairs galleries at the Whitechapel frequently have the better material. My Yard from October to December 2009 was a small touring exhibition from the British Councils collection, aimed obviously at supporting that institutions contribution to UK diplomacy, and presenting an internationally palatable conception of Britishness. A London bombed site by William Coldstream presented an alternative view to Auerbachs, precise and light touched. Spencer Gore, of the Camden Town Group, is infrequently exhibited and his painting of Mornington Crescent served notice that he deserves more. Stanley Spencers Port Glasgow Cemetery, and two pieces by Eric Ravillious, were also high points. David Rayson was a new name to me. His depiction of an empty de-industrialised landscape at Wednesfield was immediately impressive with its muted and harmonious colours, and radically asymmetrical composition. Confirmation gratefully received that figurative painting retains its power despite the ability of conceptualism to continue to con the big money investors. (And dont forget to look at the Guernica tapestry still on show at the Whitechapel.) Picasso Challenging the Past Picasso Challenging the Past was a pair of exhibitions, at the National Gallery, one in the large basement area in the new extension, devoted mainly to paintings, and the second, in the main building, devoted to prints. Both presented artworks that grew out of Picassos looking at those from artists of previous generations. Picassos huge productivity means that stimulating exhibitions can be made around many themes in his work without wearying the viewer. In recent years we have seen, in London, for example, shows of Picassos sculptures and of his ceramics. If the word iconic were to be removed from the public vocabulary altogether it would be no loss. Regrettably, one
of the catalogue essays finds it necessary to refer to the period in which Picasso making variations of iconic masterpieces. Despite her lapses of style (and despite my habitual aversion to essays in catalogues), Susan Grace Gallassis essay is a very helpful consideration of the place of these variations in Picassos work and life (for which I thank her). She suggests that by the late 1950s, Picasso was no longer a leader of the avant-garde, and that his generation was beginning to fade. He had in fact become an old master in his own right, and needed to find a way to take control for himself of this unexpected, unpredicted transformation of his place in art. To grasp this new role with his lifelong vigour and disruptiveness released a new and splendid wave of invention. He set out to measure himself against the masters whose work he most admired, and did so with great competitiveness, as if to prove himself the greatest of all time. Whether he succeeds or not has to be the decision of the individual viewer. At the very least the projects display Picassos ceaseless inventiveness to great advantage, as he works and re-works his selected themes. Decades: 1959-2009 The Serpentine Gallery hosted the first substantial retrospective of Gustav Metzgers work, under the title Decades: 1959-2009. In proportion to his influence, Metzger is massively under-exhibited, but this is at least in part the consequence of his hostility to most of the art system. It was, after all, Metzger who invented the art strike (and carried it out almost single-handedly from 1977 to 1980). It seems to me odd that the Serpentine has turned out to be the gallery which has been able to maintain a continuing relationship with Metzger, being located in the playground for the children of Kensingtons rich pigs. Even getting to the show involves negotiating RBK&Cs draconian traffic schemes, that of course fail to reduce traffic but ensure that the traffic is slow and more polluting. The same rich pigs have all the on-street parking spaces reserved for them 24/7/365, unlike most parts of London where it is recognised that a few evening and weekend visitors should be facilitated, if only for purposes of commerce. After circling the area for over half an hour I eventually found a space on a street where Sunday parking was grudgingly tolerated, for the congregation of a Greek orthodox church. My unkempt beard and wild eyes stood me in good stead. Metzgers life story is an archetype. His German Jewish parents sent him, with his brother, to safety in London while they perforce stayed to face, and be destroyed in, the holocaust. In his youth he spent time among the revolutionary left, only a little later beginning to study art. He was a key figure in the Committee of 100, and was imprisoned along with Bertrand Russell and others. Much of his life has been a struggle to combine a radical criticism of capitalist society with the scope for self-transformation promised (but rarely delivered) by art. He first achieved prominence as the organiser of the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) of 1967, one event in which led to his arrest and fining 100. This was not his first brush with the power of the state (nor was it to be his last). In 1961 he was imprisoned for a month, along with Bertrand Russell, for involvement in organising a major demonstration by the Committee of 100. His career has been marked by a remarkable denseness of fruitful ideas exploiting the random (in early pieces
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based on packaging and rubbish), autodestructive art (such as painting with acid on plastic), autocreative art (using self-organising materials such as the liquid crystal displays projected onto the walls of the gallery), his more recent engagement in radical (mainly anti-car) ecology and in the re-study of anti-semitism. If the intensity of his work has always been apparent, Decades was one of the first opportunities to appreciate the scale and breadth of his creativity. London Building Sites The Courtauld Gallery assembled the series of Frank Auerbachs London Building Sites for the first time. In a way these shared some of Metzgers inspirations arising in destruction and reconstruction. Dating from the early postwar, they depict a number of rebuildings in central London following bomb damage. The distinctive aspects about Auerbachs painting at this stage were the extraordinary thickness of paint he applied and the dark colour range he exploited. As the gallery associated with a major institute for the study of the history of art, the Courtauld often takes trouble to provide clear explanations of potentially difficult works. This show is a good example, and Auerbachs sketches (supplemented in the catalogue with contemporary photographs) are used to show how the final composition arises from the sources. Auerbach is surprisingly closely linked to Metzger both were child refugees from Nazi Germany separated from their families; both took up art at about the same time, and both studied at the Borough under David Bomberg. Both have commented on the intensity of Bombergs influence, and the violence of his vision, his insistence on the inevitable destruction in any creative process. If a little neon sign is flashing the word dialectics somewhere in your head, you wont be surprised to learn that in an interview in his catalogue, Metzger acknowledges that after some experiences in a revolutionary commune in Bristol, he learned about dialectical materialism from a young Trotskyist in Leeds (yet to be identified) in 1942. History missed an opportunity for enlightening coincidence. Auerbach made several paintings based on sketches at the South Bank site, and from the dates of these he cannot have been unaware of the famous strike in which the Trotskyists intervened, with a starring role being taken by Brian Behan, brother of the famous Brendan. But Auerbachs near-mythical construction workers are not given the chance to show their militant aspect. Signs of Revolt Signs of Revolt: Creative Resistance and Social Movements since Seattle at Shop 14 in the former Truman Brewery complex at Brick Lane, advanced an attractive position; that there has developed a new mass vanguard as we used to say in the 1970s, but one which has developed, as we did not say, a unique and historically specific ability to utilise cultural (superstructural, as we used to say in the 1970s) factors to oppose the advance of the new, globalised, smart, capitalism. The show was, of course, overtly political, with its catalogue note giving notice to global capitalism to mend its ways or face the consequences. If this notice caused any boardrooms to tremble, I must have missed the report in the FT. All cynicism laid aside, there is obviously a significant social movement that has developed across the world since the Seattle demonstrations, and it has shown versatility and innovation in its methods. These are well documented in
the exhibition. They range from documentary photography, video and journalism (Jess Hurd, Reel News and Indymedia respectively), Climate Camps to the impressive repertoire of disruption developed by Space Hijackers and Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. There is a steady focus on originality, visual impact and humour in these protests. The devil no longer has the good tunes, they tell us. The (free) catalogue provides an opportunity to access websites for a good selection of these new dissidents. The criticism that might be levelled is that the show has excluded reference to the issues stirred up within the movement by the tactics of groupings within it such as the Black Block, whose taste for physical confrontation with the state has sometimes hijacked the whole agenda. The Truman, Hanbury and Buxton founders of the brewery empire, the industrial heart of which is being transformed into a new, possibly transient, centre of fashion, alternative culture and design, were quakers, and Buxton was a noted contributor to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Is it too cynical to be amused at the very globalised nature of this bit of urban renaissance, built
around the selling of food and fashion from all around the world (and located in the heart of the Sylheti population of 1 Tower Hamlets)? Perhaps then it is not too strange to find them accommodating a show such as this. However, those who imagine an ethical capitalism to be in operation can be reminded that these same corporate landlords responded to a petition from some of their small business tenants against a recent rent increase with an additional, clearly punitive, increase. And when Tower Hamlets Council sets its goon squads against the pavement traders in Brick Lane, the ensuing displacement looks little different from any movement of refugees anywhere in the world. (The journal Permanent Revolution has kindly accommodated my notes on the Futurism and Revolution on Paper exhibitions. It would be unbearably presumptuous to summarise them here.)
1. Time is unlikely to permit the full review deserved by E1: A Journey Through Whitechapel and Spitalfields, by John G Bennett (Five Leaves Publications, 2009). It is an excellent study of the rich texture of this area, its history, present and prospects.
The Revolutionary Defence of Jacqui Smith

ONE of the more piquant consequences of the MPs expenses scandal last summer was the prurient wave of Grundyism that was unleashed by the revelation that the husband of Jacqui Smith, then Home Secretary, viewed two films from an adult channel on an account mainly used for constituency and Ministerial purposes, and that the costs were subsequently charged to her official expenses. The ensuing hue and cry consumed resources (political and media time and energy) entirely disproportionate to the few paltry quid involved, allowing the media focus to slip away from the billions thrown into bailing out incompetent and corrupt banks. The matter is not, however, quite so inconsequential. For a reformist party, or a party with historical origins in reformism, Ministerialism or rather the efficiency of Ministerialism is a major question. More so, it is a major question for those, and the families of those, whose lives and livelihoods are at hazard from the individual decisions of ministers. (A Home Secretary, for example, has immense individual power and influence in decisions such as immigration and expulsion, the overturn of judicial and penal injustice, in addition to being one of the most senior of Cabinet members.) In an article for International Times, some decades ago (I believe it was by Frank Zappa, but my archive of IT long ago succumbed to the gnawing criticism of the mice), the author defended the profligate enjoyment of oral sex by rock musicians as socially beneficial. The logic was straightforward. Musicians enthusiastically propagate oral sex, initiating large numbers of female students into the practice. These students were, to a considerable extent, from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds and were destined, after their socially-licensed wild years, for marriage with the young capitalists, bureaucrats and military leaders. They would bring to these marriages an expanded sexual repertoire and enthusiasm, contributing to satisfactory relationships and satisfied husbands. These husbands would consequently perform their roles better, generating wealth and employment across the broader national economy. The healthy nation sucks. QED. While the gender balance of economic power has been shifted somewhat since the late 1960s (and female heads of state such as Meir, Thatcher, Bandaranaike have demonstrated that they have all the vices of their male counterparts and no specifically female offsetting virtues) the argument remains robust, with a little adjustment of gender pronouns. One would prefer, in general, ones political and economic fate to be dealt with by a Minister whose judgement is not clouded by sexual frustration or ennui. And who would be so nave as to consider that the security services would not retain some tactful oversight of Ministers sexual arrangements when compelled to spend long, stressful times away from domestic and marital comfort? Certainly not since the discovery that an important Minister (Profumo) shared (sequentially, not simultaneously, according to the record) the athletic attentions of a tart with a senior Soviet intelligence officer. Clearly it is a proper function (albeit one not to be proclaimed unnecessarily) of the state to ensure that Ministers requirements are met safely and satisfactorily. And if such delicate consideration is to be available to Ministers, surely the same arguments extend (in an age where paternity leave is taken seriously as a trade union demand) to spouses and partners of Ministers? If a Minister returns to his or her family home at the weekend, even there to be pressed by constituents, campaigners and media, with perhaps only a few hours in which personal relationships can be conducted, it would clearly be wise for the state to ensure, insofar as such things can be arranged at all, that those hours are not to be spoiled by sexual difficulties that the partner or spouse will blame on the Ministers elevated role. In such case, an insignificant few quid expended on pornography to be consumed in solitude by the partner or spouse is surely preferable to alternatives such as drink, drugs or prostitutes. A well-f***ed Cabinet is clearly a valid demand within reformism. Bridget St Ruth
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Losing the Afghan War

What an irony. There we have President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize with the words that for him the use of force is not only necessary but morally justified. This was only days after he had his LBJ moment, as one of our regular readers put it to me, lining up with the interventionists in his own entourage, the Republican Party right and the military chiefs who, whatever the circumstances, will always want more men and equipment and seriously ratcheting up the level of the US intervention in Afghanistan by sending another 30 000 troops. Another Vietnam is surely in the making. And there we have Gordon Brown dutifully falling in line, sending another 500 British troops, and repeating once more the crass rationale that fighting a war against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan is making Britain a safer place. The New Labour government is finding it increasingly difficult to stem the growing opposition to this war. Opposition is evident right across the political spectrum, and supporters of this adventure are becoming harder to find. This is not surprising, because, apart from the threadbare nature of the official rationale, which nobody, the New Labour spin-doctors included, can possibly take seriously, it is obvious that the longer this war continues the more it will become bogged down, and that eventually the Western powers will be obliged to cut a deal with the insurgents. Indeed, British government spokesmen have all but admitted this to be the case. The insurgents, on the other hand, have time on their side, and they know that the longer they fight on, the more territory they will be able to control, and the better deal they will obtain vis--vis their warlord rivals. They also know that every death and injury inflicted on the Afghan population by Western forces plays into their hands. In the meantime, who knows what will happen in neighbouring Pakistan, and Muslim public opinion around the world will continue to be angered, thus giving a boost to the very extremist Islamicism from which this war, according to the government, is supposed to be protecting us. The government and the military top brass have worked hard to rally public support for the war. But can the heavy media coverage of flag-draped coffins being driven through the Wiltshire village of Wootton Bassett really reverse the governments fortunes? That this is a propaganda ploy is obvious, and it actually relies upon the relatively light casualties that are being sustained in Afghanistan: a total of 236 deaths in the eight years up to December 2009. To put things in perspective, around one million British servicemen died during the First World War an average of well over 600 every day. In the Second World War, the figure stood at 350 000 considerably less, but nonetheless an average of over 150 every day. It was logistically impossible to run public funeral parades for these deaths, or to announce each name in Parliament. Moreover, there was no need to do so; everyone knew someone in the armed forces, many people had friends or relations killed or wounded. War was a direct personal experience for the entire population. Todays propaganda exercise merely emphasises the distance of this war and of military life itself from most people, and the continuing heavy media coverage looks more and more like the official exploitation of the sorrow of the relatives, friends and colleagues of the dead servicemen. This propaganda campaign is very likely to backfire. The increased number of Western troops in Afghanistan will lead to larger numbers of casualties as the war drags on. Far from galvanising support for the war, the media coverage of the funerals could well result, as incessant propaganda often does, to results different to those desired: in this case, growing indifference to the war amongst the general public, or, more dangerously for the government, further opposition to it. The government is already opposed from all sides. Despite the sharply contrasting starting points and rationales, the little Englandism of the right and the anti-imperialism of the left coincide on this issue in a call for a British military withdrawal from Afghanistan. With the governments casus belli being so patently dishonest, with the political forces that the West backs in Afghanistan being so blatantly corrupt and so little different in their social outlook and general behaviour to the Taliban, with the real purpose of the war remaining a mystery to most people, and with the government dropping heavy hints that a deal will have to be struck before too long with the very Taliban forces against which the armed forces are fighting, Brown and his New Labour colleagues are on to a hiding for nothing. Arthur Trusscott
New Books from Clydeside Press

James D Young, A Celebration of the Life and Work of Robert Burns, 1759-1796: An Independent Revolutionary (3.95) and James D Young, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (new edition, 10.50) Copies can be obtained by sending a cheque to James D Young, 8 Tarbert Place, Polmont, Falkirk, FK2 OYX 47
Letters
Otto Rhle
Dear Comrades Thank you for publishing the Otto Rhle essays (New Interventions, Volume 12, no 3), though I am afraid I dont believe that this is the first publication (in English) in Britain, however limited the print-runs. While it is difficult to be absolutely assured, 55 to 60 years after reading, which works I read in English and which I read in French (I doubt if my German was ever adequate), I am pretty certain that I read at least Moscow and Ourselves in English, and I would think that I read both in English as well as in French. Of course the translations might have been made and published by the Industrial Workers of the World or other groups, for example the Freie Arbeiter Stimme in America, or, for instance, the United Workers Party (initially the Proletarian Party) which was at one point affiliated to the Communist Workers International (KAI, the Fourth International of which Rhle wrote), and Guy Aldred was at one stage the agent for UWP material. The launch of the Communist Party of Great Britain saw a number of dissatisfied factions and much manoeuvring, so it was not complete until 1922; it left several spin-offs if one tries to list the Left Communist groups left outside the party in 1923. Sylvia Pankhursts Workers Dreadnought affiliated to the KAI, though they almost immediately split, understandably given KAI insistence on rank-and-file democracy Pankhurst owned the Dreadnought and the party only controlled the last page. The party objected, Pankhurst left them, and for a time both claimed the KAI mandate. The majority faction went back soon after into the CPGB, perhaps Sylvia did too (a matter of dispute), the few that didnt formed (with some former followers of John Maclean, and I believe some ex-Socialist Labour Party/Communist Unity members) the Anti-Parliamentarian Communist Federation, which in the late 1930s fused with other groups as Solidarity. It would seem probable that one or all of these would have published the articles. Maclean was on the point of death, and was widely accused of paranoia, so that most of his associates left him before he died, but he was certainly in touch with Rhle, even though he never repudiated Lenin as the KAI did. He would certainly have had the texts translated, if only to dissociate himself from them. Guy Aldred was certainly in touch with the KAI, as with a number of dissident factions that had left it; and his magazine was largely a symposium of differing Left Communist statements. Arbeiter Frand was still published (right up until the 1950s) though obviously they would not have needed to translate it (at least not into English), but some of its members, for example, Charlie Lahr, were then briefly in the CPGB and I cant imagine Charlie not publishing
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such an important work (if it were not available elsewhere). Guy and Charlie later joined the APCF for a time. Apart from those who would have had direct contact with Rhle, at the time when he wrote the articles and in the three following years various other larger groups were influenced by Rhle. After the demise of the Workers Dreadnought, the Socialist Party of Great Britain had talks considering unity with the KAI on two occasions in the 1920s, and as late as 1936 it had talks with a number of KAPDKAI derived factions. They would hardly have done so without circulating (at the very least, internally) translations of major KAPD texts. Solidarity, which Ive mentioned above, circulated widely within the left of the Independent Labour Party, several of its group had dual membership, and its wartime editor, George Plume Harper, had been Fenner Brockways secretary before leaving to join the APCF. When the ILP resurrected Controversy in the 1960s, it contained reprints of Rhle; while at the end of the war when Common Wealth split and various Leninist groups looked hungrily at the remnant, Rhles writings were again circulated; so that when Common Wealth used Rhles term the third camp of socialism, it meant rather more than did the Shachtmanites when in 1954 we tried with them to launch a world Third Camp Movement. All that said, it is good to see them circulate once again. Laurens Otter
Kosovo: Repression and Independence

Dear Editor I would welcome a reasoned debate about the period covered by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia including the Serb nationalist governments repression of the Albanian Kosovar majority in Kosovo and the events that led up to NATO intervention (Mike Jones, Spooks in Kosovo, New Interventions, Volume 13 no 1). The opposition of many socialists to Belgrades oppressive rule over many years in Kosovo and the systemic discrimination against Albanian Kosovars, owes nothing to the trajectory of some former leftists to being apologists for the US and NATO. Mike Jones makes much of the role of organised crime in Kosovo, ignoring the fact that this is incubated by the backwardness and underdevelopment of much of the region. A starting point for understanding the cycle of repression and resistance might usefully begin with the public declarations of vice premier Miloevis deputy Prime Minister Vojislav eelj in a speech in October 1995 well before the events which led to NATO intervention. eelj (now in prison in The Hague) makes his lebensraum policy chillingly clear in his speech dealing with the need for ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of its Albanian majority: The colonisation of Kosova and Metohija should be
carried out quickly and conclusively. Through political propaganda, colonists could be portrayed as Serbs populating Serb land and it is all the same which part of the country they live in as long as they live in their own land. These Serbs should also be supplied with equipment and long-term loans so they can cultivate the land they are granted which would make them stay there. Referring to the need to destroy any organised resistance by Kosovars, eelj continues: Therefore individuals from the state security must be infiltrated by agents who could pretend to press for establishing such underground or/and hostile organisations, or even become the leaders of such groupings. Such ruses could be exploited by the state as a pretext to undertake uncompromising actions against all their organisations which would result in inter-ethnic tensions and a further ruptures in their parallel life. To this end, more and more such groups are needed, while the police would now and then destroy one of them, which could then be allowed to consolidate again and look like genuine and bona fide organisations. Political parties of Albanians should be created through specific legislation and at the same time scandals should be created to discredit them. This could discredit their leaders in eyes of the domestic and foreign public opinion, a particularly sensitive consideration for Albanians. Distinguished individuals who play important roles in their political life should be eliminated through scandals or by staging traffic accidents, jealousy killings or infecting them with the AIDS virus when they travel abroad. Their infection would be discovered when crossing borders thus they could be quarantined. Through adequate propaganda in their mass media such events can create such an artificial picture of an intolerable percentage of infected people, which would be used as an excuse to isolate large groups of people. This would help in promoting a picture of Albanians as an infected people. I am sure Mike Jones would reject this kind of Serb fascist poison. But he should recognise that the Serb far-right trades actively on the nation that Kosovar resistance to the return of Belgrade rule is a matter of criminality and not democratic rights. I am one of those who publicly condemned NATOs bombing campaign but I still completely uphold the right of the Kosovars to seek military help from NATO or the devil. James Connolly and the Citizens Army in 1916 stood on a Neither King nor Kaiser platform but actively sought Berlins help with the Easter Rising. John Palmer Mike Jones replies: Prior to NATOs war over Kosovo we called for the autonomy to be reinstated, which gave it de facto republic status within the Yugoslav federation. We pointed out that Yugoslavia was a federation of peoples, not of geographical states. There were 24 recognised nationalities in the federation, and apart from Slovenia, which was relatively homogeneous, these peoples were mixed up, just as in many
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parts of the old Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires this was and is the case. In Kosovo it would have been desirable to establish the rights of all nationalities so that all were equal, as the constitution of the federation had proclaimed. We pointed out that the UK/KLA was not a genuine national liberation movement, but, starting out as a hardline Stalinist outfit in the Enver Hoxha mould, it had become a terrorist one that financed itself through a variety of criminal activities, drug-dealing in particular. It murdered both Serbian and Albanian employees of the regime. German intelligence, later US and British, cultivated the outfit in order to use it for their ends. We described it as more akin to the communalist or tribal movements in Africa or India, who kill people not of their tribe, nationality or religion. This was proved by events once NATO moved into and the Yugoslav Army moved out of Kosovo. Not only were Serbs driven out of Kosovo but Roma, Turks and other ethnic minorities. As we pointed out, the liberal-bomber tendency on the left, who uncritically took up the UK/KLA cause, totally ignored their ethnic cleansing. It is on record that prior to the so-called Raak massacre in January 1999 the KLA had killed more Serbs than the Serbs had Albanians (Tony Benn), the KLA had killed more civilians than the Serbs (Donald Anderson). Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary, a key warmonger, reported that to the House of Commons (see Hansard, 19 April 1999). As we pointed out in the obituary of Slobodan Miloevi, quoting Noam Chomsky, the charges against the former regarding Kosovo were, apart from Raak, for crimes after the bombing by NATO. We also reported the findings of the Finnish forensic scientist team into the massacre, which were that the corpses found were not part of a massacre. It was a fabrication. William Walker, a man with a long record of dirty deeds on behalf of US imperialism in Central America, with links to the CIA it is widely believed, was shown the corpses by local UK/KLA people. The OSCE set up its Kosovo Verification Mission on 25 October 1998, in accordance with UN resolution 1203. However already on 17 October, Bronisaw Geremek, Polish Foreign Minister and OSCE president, appointed William Walker as its head. Geremek, a catholic intellectual advisor to Solidarno, did so without much consultation with the Europeans, who were not too pleased about it. The US was obviously calling in a favour. The Belgrade authorities collaborated with the OSCE and the possibility existed of finding a solution. On the other hand, the UK/KLA utilised the return to barracks of Yugoslav forces and police to advance, and by using provocations was able to break the cease-fire. The next step was the Rambouillet Agreement. While the Yugoslav side sent a delegation representing a dozen nationalities from Kosovo, Mrs Albright had chosen to bring along her client Hashim Thai, the leader of a tiny movement previously listed as terrorists who engaged in drug-dealing, people-trafficking, etc, rather than the mainstream Albanian Kosovar party of Dr Rugova. Impossible demands were made upon Belgrade such as giving NATO troops access to Yugoslavia proper and with total legal immunity. It was a charade designed to give the go-ahead for war. Belgrades offer of local autonomy and guaranteed rights for all ethnic communities was ignored. Mrs Albrights Annex B deliberately placed the bars too high, as Henry Kissinger put it. The US needed a war. Originally, it had tried to keep
Yugoslavia together, but once Germany had promoted the breakaways of Slovenia and Croatia, for its own ends, the US moved to gain its own client, and was sabotaging European and UN efforts to attain a peaceful settlement in Bosnia. David Owen describes the constant undermining of the attempts to reach peaceful settlements he undertook from 1992 to 1995 by the US administration, in Balkan Odyssey (London, 1995). As does General Sir Michael Rose, in Fighting For Peace (1998), who headed the UN peacekeeping/ humanitarian mission in Bosnia from 1994 to 1995. David Owen expresses puzzlement at the US sabotage but doesnt inform readers if he ever figured out why. David Owen was always an Atlanticist, that is, an adherent of US world leadership and NATO. Miloevi headed the former Communist Party, now Socialist Party, of Serbia, and was head of state. He was popular among the working people and was elected to office, and was not a dictator as portrayed in the capitalist media. He had begun privatising state enterprises but slowed it own. Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary, was always calling upon him to reform, that is, adopt New Labours worship of the market. The Rambouillet Agreement demanded a free-market economy for Kosovo. The Belgrade regime wasnt interested in adhering to NATO and accepting US tutelage, but had friendly ties to both Russia, and China, the two main US rivals on the world stage. The US has been surrounding both countries with bases and by means of partially fake mass movements installing clients in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, so Serbia fits the pattern, and indeed external finance played a key role in finally ousting Miloevi. However, some analysts on the left saw the Kosovo war as the need to secure the terminal for one of the oil pipelines from Central Asia, as the US involvement in Georgia backing Saakashvili, who unleashed a war against the breakaway South Ossetia on 7 August 2008, is all about the pipelines avoiding Russian territory. In his obituary of Peter Gowan in the current Red Pepper, Leo Panitch praises his essay The Real Meaning of the War over Kosovo, which, in Gowans view, was really all about the US demonstrating to the states of the EU that NATO, under US leadership, would remain the effective policeman of Europe in the post-communist era. Finding a new role for the now superfluous NATO is a view shared by many, even Tory sceptics, about the Balkan adventures. The themes running through John Palmers letters tend towards blaming the Serbs for the tragedy that befell Yugoslavia, and excusing the criminal activities of the UK/KLA. Apparently, I ignore the fact that this is incubated by the backwardness and underdevelopment of much of the region. In other words, these poor chaps were driven into drug-dealing, murder and suchlike by society, by their childhood poverty. Palmer has obviously absorbed much 1960s sociological tosh during his years on the Guardian. The UK/KLA kernel were not illiterate goatherds but university students who could have thrived either in Yugoslavia or abroad. Stalin had an awful childhood but I doubt if Palmer would excuse his subsequent bad behaviour on that account. Palmer obscures his apologies for UK/KLA mafia-type activities, by referring to Serb far-right portraying Kosovar resistance as criminality. I sense that Palmer is creating a smoke-screen to obscure his future retreat. He informs us that he publically condemned NATOs bombing campaign but I still completely uphold the right of the Ko50
sovars to seek military help from NATO. Should NATO have dropped hilarious jokes to degrade the Yugoslav Army, as in a Monty Python sketch? The point is that the US/NATO wanted to bomb but not use land forces. Mrs Albright was criticised in the US as Mrs Not-so-bright when the bombing didnt have the desired result. The UK/KLA wanted the US/NATO to intervene. A negotiated resolution could have been attained either during the KVM cease-fire or at Rambouillet. Neither the UK/KLA nor the US wanted one. Palmer wont admit that he supported imperialism in installing a gang of criminals into power. Another part of Palmers smoke-scream is his quote more than half of his letter from Vojislav eelj whom he has quoted previously to prove his case. He is clearly a nasty piece of work and his paramilitaries undoubtedly engaged in war crimes. But assorted psychopaths, mercenaries and people who kill for pleasure were to be found on all sides in the wars in Yugoslavia. There were genuine Ustashi operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina; Naser Ori, the BiH army commander in Srebrenica, used to show visiting journalists video-footage of headless Serbs in burning villages and boast of his deeds. The thousands of Mujahidin brought from Afghanistan by Izetbegovi, with Bill Clintons approval, used to behead Serbs. These fighters were given Bosnian passports, as was Osama Bin Laden, who was present in Bosnia and later in Albania, where UK/KLA fighters were trained. Some Mujahidin went to Kosovo to fight. A number of recent terrorist plots in Scandinavia originated in Sarajevo. Just as Palmer is sure that I would reject eeljs Serb fascist poison, I hope that he would condemn the case of some 300 Serb prisoners taken to Albania by the UK/KLA, where their organs were harvested for selling and transplanting. Carla Del Ponta, now a Swiss diplomat but previously a prosecutor at the Hague Tribunal, could raise no interest in this case from the international community, and was told to keep quiet by her own government. Its hardly a matter of juvenile high-spirits. Palmers blaming the Serbs for the Yugoslav tragedy looks like the same phenomenon as represented by most of the journalism but not all. These days few journalists speak other languages or possess knowledge about the subject they are covering, so they rely on hand-outs from spokesmen and spin-doctors. In his book, General Rose wrote about gradually being able to distinguish between those journalists who unquestioningly used material provided by the Bosnian government propaganda machine, and those who were interested in presenting a more objective view of the war (p 54). David Owen describes the same problem in his book, relating how the US PR firm Ruder Finn was used by the Croats and the BiH government, not only writing articles but even letters to the editor. He quotes approvingly from a speech by General Rose saying that it is understandable that a government struggling for survival should have a propaganda machine. It is not understandable that the international media should become part of that machine. (p 119) The Guardian became a mouthpiece for the liberal bomber tendency during those events, and the reporting in The Times, Telegraph and Independent was much more objective. I suggest that Palmer dumps his Guardian cuttings and PR hand-outs and does some serious study before he bothers us again with his Serbophobia and apologies for gangsters.
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A Journal of Socialist Discussion and Opinion

Volume 13, no 2, Spring 2010, 2.00

Philosophy and Revolution

Uniting the Left

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Conspiracy Theories

George Orwell and Lindsay Anderson

Stalinism, War and Revolution

The Fall of Stalinism