New Interventions

Volume 12, no 4, Autumn 2008

Chris Gray, Hamlet and Politics Politics and personality in Shakespeares classic play Harry Ratner, Britain and the First World War Class interests and individual actions in 1914 Paul Flewers, Stalin and the Great Terror Politics and Personality in Soviet History Peter Fryer, Freedom of the Individual The individual under capitalism and communism Alan Spence, Our Health Service Sixty years of the NHS, time for a new course Paul Flewers, Georgia: Dangerous Implications The consequences of last summers fighting Mike Jones, The Save Gordon Rally This Years Labour Party conference Reviews Ewan McColl, British Communist Party dissidents, The Hadrian exhibition, Pro-Soviet Labour MPs, Soviet aviation Letters Marx and the future, Islamophobia 2 15 25 46 58 63 68 70 84

This Issue
This issue of New Interventions is largely dedicated to the question of the role of the individual in history. We hope that our articles on this contentious topic will spur debate amongst our readers and lead to further contributions. The next issue of New Interventions will contain an investigation into the response of trade unions to immigration, a look at the politics of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and an in-depth analysis of the economic crisis.
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Chris Gray

Hamlet and Politics

Marcellus: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Horatio: Heaven will direct it. Marcellus: Nay, lets follow. I THE political problem posed in Hamlet is how to deal with the all-pervasive rottenness which is overwhelming a whole society, a rottenness which, as Gertrude tells Claudius, stems from Hamlets fathers death and our oerhasty marriage (Act II, Scene 2, line 57). It is one of the ironies of this overwhelmingly ironical play that it is set in Denmark. Shakespeare evidently made use of a late twelfth-century CE chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus, in which is recounted the story of Amleth, Prince of Jutland (see the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play). Yet, for all the Danish setting, it is clear that the state referred to in the play is a typical Renaissance one, which could equally well have been England Elizabethan audiences would surely have seen parallels with their own political set-upeven if it would have been highly impolitic for Shakespeare to have suggested any possible criticism of Tudor statecraft. (I shall argue later on that the play embodies a degree of disquiet about certain contemporary political practices.) Michael Rosen, in his recent excellent little book on Shakespeare, observes that: As an intellectual, Hamlet can see quite clearly that the state has been seized by a murderer, but finds it impossible on his own to find a way to reform or change things. (William Shakespeare, Redwords, 2004, p 39) Unfortunately, he does not elaborate. The word intellectual links into what must still, I suppose, be the majority interpretation of the play since about the 1930s, namely, the view that Hamlet is an effete liberal incapable of decisive action. It was, apparently, pointed out as long ago as the early eighteenth century that if Hamlet had disposed of Claudius without undue delay then the play would have ended as early as Act II. This is, of course, a theoretical possibility, but the result would have been a lesser play and not only as measured in length, Actually the effete liberal interpretation is completely wide of the mark: dealing with Claudius is not the only task that the play poses. In my view, a basically correct reading of Hamlet was given long ago by HDF Kitto in his book Form and Meaning in Drama (Methuen Paperbacks, 1960). My indebtedness to it here will be obvious, but there is one particular ostensible criticism of the play put forward by the most recent Penguin editor, Anne Barton, which I must address before outlining the core of Kittos analysis. Anne Barton writes: Hamlet never says why it is that he should remain unable to do the obvious: collect his friends about him, confront Claudius, accuse him, and
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then draw his sword and run him through. (Hamlet, Penguin edition, 1996, p 40) I would argue that there is a simple Marxist rejoinder to this argument. The first point to notice is that the suggested solution is, in the plays terms, far from obvious. Elizabethan audiences would have had some idea of the difficulties involved in trying to overthrow an established regime. Rebellions against Tudor rule were all suppressed: the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Western rebellion of 1547-49, Ketts rebellion, Wyatts rebellion, the Northern rebellion and that of the Earl of Essex all ended in failure. The next reign saw the classic example of a botched rising, the Gunpowder Plot against James (VI and I), provoked by that monarchs Machiavellian remark on his accession to the throne of England, when, having previously made certain promises to the Catholic party, he explained that he was reneging on them with the immortal words: Na, na, we dinna need the Papists noo. The ensuing plot was defeated largely thanks to efficient intelligence work carried out by Cecils secret service. The state of Denmark (primarily in the sense of special bodies of armed men) is not light years away from this TudorStuart regime. It is worth emphasising the point because Hamlets position, following his encounter with the ghost of his father, is not favourable, politically speaking. Claudius has the whole court on his side: Nor have we herein barred Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone With this affair along. For all, our thanks. (I, 2, 14-16) The king has a Swiss palace guard (IV, 5, 98). Furthermore and here is the main link with the Tudors and James he has an active prime minister (Polonius), who is no slouch at gathering political intelligence. Hence Hamlets insistence that Horatio and Marcellus swear not to reveal what they have seen and heard in relation to the ghost, and Hamlets adoption of an antic disposition. The cards, in short, are stacked heavily in Claudius favour at the beginning of the play. Claudius makes things even more difficult for Hamlet by persuading him (with Gertrudes help) not to resume his studies at Wittenberg the unstated reason is surely that Hamlet can be the more easily kept under surveillance if he is forced to base himself at court. As for Hamlets friends, they can be counted on the fingers of one hand: there is Horatio, a man of slender financial means (III, 2, 67-68); there is Ophelia (Polonius too dutiful daughter), and then there are Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern (soon to allow themselves to be used likewise by the regime). Hamlet does not even begin to overcome these disadvantages until Act V. To suggest that he should be able to do so early on in the play would be like criticising James Bond for not killing Doctor No while still in the clutches of Smersh. Admittedly, as the play unfolds, the pressure on Hamlet to make some sort of move mounts underlined by the re-entry of the ghost in the course of the interview with Gertrude in order to whet thy almost blunted purpose (III, 4, 111-12). It is not until after this that we learn that Hamlet has another card that he could conceivably play, when Claudius explains that he is afraid to use the legal system against his nephew for Polonius murder since: Hes loved of the distracted multitude. (IV, 3, 34) But, having killed Polonius, Hamlet is forced to embark for England. Just before he does so he tells us:
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I do not know Why yet I live to say This things to do , Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To dot. (IV, 4, 43-46) And that is the only hint of a possible virtuous political solution that we get that is to say, one fashioned by Hamlet. The Gordian knot is in fact broken by Laertes, who returns from France transformed into a would-be avenger by the death of his father Polonius. He puts himself at the head of the rabble, invades the palace and confronts Claudius, exclaiming: O thou vile King, Give me my father. (IV, 5, 117-18) The obvious suggestion here is that this is what Hamlet should have done, or should do although, again, if he had gone ahead and done it we should have had a far lesser play. As it is, Hamlet is off-stage and barred from such a course of action at this point. What follows shows the depth of Shakespeares understanding of politics. Claudius has no difficulty in deflecting Laertes anger away from himself: all he has to do is to produce the by now crazed Ophelia and then offer arbitration: Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will And they shall hear and judge twixt you and me. If by direct, or by collateral hand They find us touched, we will our kingdom give, Our crown, our life, and all that we call ours To you in satisfaction. But if not, Be you content to lend your patience to us, And we shall jointly labour with your soul To give it due content. (I, 5, 204-12) Laertes agrees, and the revolution is subverted. (The rabble now disappear from the action as quickly as they burst in, but no matter: the point is surely that leaders of emeutes can be suborned by those in power. In any case, Laertes has no real sympathy with the multitude: his quarrel with the regime is a private one, so he is naturally easy meat if Claudius can convince him that he has his interests at heart, which he duly does.) Hamlet meanwhile escapes from his forced despatch to England with the aid of some helpful pirates only to inform Claudius that he is returning to court naked (that is, without resources, or unarmed). The revolutionary road is evidently not the one Hamlet wishes to take at least for the moment. We then have Ophelias burial, witnessed by Hamlet and Horatio, but Hamlets impetuous choler gets the better of him again and he falls to brawling with Laertes. Later he confesses: I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself Ill court his favours. (I, 2, 75-78) This opens the way for Claudius final stratagem, the fencing bout in which Laertes is armed with a concealed unbuttoned foil whose tip has been dipped in poison; plan B is the poisoned wine-cup. As they say in Belfast: You know the rest.
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II The foregoing Marxist analysis will serve as a response to Anne Barton, but not as an overall reading of the play: it is even deficient on a political level, since it fails to do justice to the profundity of the drama, does not elucidate all the political points that Shakespeare can be said to make in it, and, above all, says nothing about the plays deep relevance to our own time. In this second section, I want to say something about all of these. I will therefore discuss: 1. Hamlets qualities that mark him out as a potential model Renaissance prince. 2. What prevents him from achieving this stature his madness. 3. The theme of espionage. 4. Hamlets remarks on drama in general and their political significance. 5. Our contemporary situation and what it has in common with the plays underlying theme. Let us consider first, then, Shakespeares attitude to Hamlet as a potential model prince. Here there are possible comparisons with (a) Hamlet Senior, (b) Laertes and (c) Fortinbras. Hamlet obviously damages his candidacy here by his madness, but as the play progresses we become acquainted with his virtues as well as his vices enough to agree with Ophelia when she exclaims in Act III, Scene 1: O, what a noble mind is here oerthrown! The courtiers, soldiers, scholars eye, tongue, sword, Thexpectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, Thobserved of all observers. Ignoring for the moment the soliloquies, which are excellently designed to show us how Hamlets thoughts and emotions proceed, we learn several facts about Hamlets character in the course of the play. In Act I, Scene 2, where Hamlet greets Horatio on his arrival at the court, we straightaway encounter his sharp wit and passionate nature: Hamlet: But what is your affair in Elsinore? Well teach you to drink deep ere you depart. Horatio: My lord, I came to see your fathers funeral. Hamlet: I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student. I think it was to see my mothers wedding. Horatio: Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet: Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Later, when they are watching for the ghost to appear, we get a sense of his moral earnestness and love of country as he comments on the trumpets and discharge of ordnance accompanying Claudius rouse (bumper of wine). Horatio asks: Is it a custom?, and Hamlet replies: Ay, marry, ist. But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance. This heavy-handed revel east and west
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Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase Soil our addition; and indeed it takes From our achievements, though performed at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. Not only that, but he follows this up with a generalisation indicative of an ability to reflect in philosophical fashion upon human nature: So oft it chances in particular men That for some vicious mole of nature in them that these men Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. The dram of eale [evil] Doth all the noble substance of a doubt, To his own scandal At this point, the ghost interrupts him with its intrusion upon them, and we then learn how resolute and determined Hamlet can be if his mind is made up, as the ghost beckons him to follow, while Horatio and the guards try to prevent him from doing so as they fear for his safety. Hamlet expostulates: Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, Ill make a ghost of him that lets me. (Not capable of decisive action?) Once he has learnt what the ghost has to say, Hamlet reveals an admirable capacity for political self-preservation in response to Horatios questioning: Horatio: What news, my lord? Hamlet: O wonderful! Horatio: Good my lord, tell it. Hamlet: No, you will reveal it. His interlocutors insist that they wont, but Hamlet is determined to ensure that they dont, even though, clearly, he finds it difficult not to tell: hence the tantalising remark: Theres neer a villain dwelling in all Denmark But hes an arrant knave. Still ignoring for the moment darker revelations of Hamlet, which follow thick and fast in the earlier part of the play, we are treated to further examples of our heros perspicacity and wit, for example: Polonius: Do you know me, my lord? Hamlet: Excellent well. You are a fishmonger. Polonius: Not I, my lord. Hamlet: Then I would you were so honest a man. Polonius: Honest, my lord ? Hamlet: Ay, sir. To be honest, as the world goes, is to be one man picked out
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of a thousand. Polonius: Thats very true, my lord. All this, of course, is Hamlets antic disposition in action a mask which he puts on as a defence mechanism. Hamlet is clearly no fool; his perspicacity shows through again as he divines the real reason for the activities of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, and extracts the confession from Guildenstern: My lord, we were sent for. This leads to Hamlets own confession that: I have of late lost all my mirth. And to a marvellous speech (which at one point echoes the great Athenian dramatist Sophokles in its description of humanity): indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave oerhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire why, it appeareth to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. This is the cue for the announcement of the arrival of the players at court, and, as Kitto points out (Form and Meaning in Drama, p295), Hamlets spirits revive at this point and we get a fresh glimpse of his true worth, of the old Hamlet as he must have been before his fathers murder and his mothers marriage with Claudius set in motion the tragic concatenation of events that leads ultimately to his death (along with that of seven others). Hamlets views on the dramatic art deserve separate treatment and will be considered later, but we may note here one of the best exchanges in the play, when Polonius, in reply to Hamlets request that the players be well used, says: My lord, I will use them according to their deserts. And Hamlet rejoins: Odds bodikins, man, much better! Treat every man after his deserts, and who shall scape whipping? The promised entertainment then gives him the idea of using it to test the veracity of the ghost and catch the conscience of the King. He reveals his plan to Horatio, and in so doing praises him in a way which we cannot but feel casts a reflexion on his own behaviour in the preceding section of the play, behaviour which remains for us to analyse in detail. Explaining to Horatio why he counts him as a particular friend, Hamlet says he thinks of him: As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortunes buffets and rewards Hast taen with equal thanks. And blest are those Whose blood and judgement are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortunes finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passions slave, and I will wear him him In my hearts core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. (I, 2, 75-84) Further evidence in support of Hamlets rare intellectual and oratorical powers can
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be adduced. Take, for example, the soliloquy in Act IV, Scene 4, spoken as Hamlet is about to set off for England, just after he has encountered the Norwegian army led by Fortinbras on its way to attack the Poles. Here we find the exquisite opinion it is hard not to feel that Shakespeare decanted a lot of his own observations into the character of Hamlet on humanitys reasoning powers: What is a man, If the chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused. (IV, 4, 33-39) It comes as no surprise that when we renew our acquaintance with the prince we find him observing a gravedigger and exercising his imagination, wondering who they were whose skulls the man so rudely tosses aside as he digs. Last, but not least, we have his conduct in the final act, which cannot be faulted apart from his failure to spot the unbuttoned foil. Enough has been said by way of an indication of Hamlets good qualities: let us now turn to the effect on him of his fathers murder and his mothers remarriage. Even before learning the true state of affairs from the ghost, he reveals in the first soliloquy what a devastating effect the ClaudiusGertrude liaison has had on him, even propelling him in the direction of suicide: O that this too too solid flesh would melt How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie ont, oh, fie, tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (I, 2, 129-37) This mood is certainly not assuaged by the news that his fathers spirit has been seen in arms: he confesses to a sense of foreboding: Foul deeds will rise Though all the earth oerwhelm them, to mens eyes. (I, 2, 257-58) Once the ghost has enticed Hamlet off-stage, Marcellus and Horatio speak what are perhaps the key lines of the whole play Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, says Marcellus, hinting at a combination of political crisis and corruption. Horatio responds Heaven will direct it, indicating that the hand of Providence is at work, to which Marcellus adds, Nay, lets follow, suggesting that humans themselves can, and should, play a role in the action. Horatio and the guards catch up with Hamlet, and find him more than a little disturbed. He starts to tell them what the ghost has revealed, then breaks off, for reasons we have already noted. To Horatios just rejoinder that it needs no ghost to tell them that every villain in Denmark is an arrant knave, Hamlet exclaims: Why, right, you are in the right, And so, without more circumstance at all,
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I hold it fit that we shake hands and part: and for my own poor part I will go pray. (I, 5, 126-32) Disorientation could not be better expressed. Further evidence of his unhappiness comes in the assertion that: The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born, to set it right! (I, 5, 188-89) Next Ophelia reveals how far the whole experience is unhinging Hamlet. We have already (Act I, Scene 3) seen Polonius ordering that she sever relations with him: I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth Have you so slander any moment leisure As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. Look to tot, I charge you. Come your ways. (I, 3, 132-35) She recounts how Hamlet paid her a visit: with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyved [fallen down] to his ankle, And [this is the crucial bit] with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors (II, 1, 78-84) This last detail is highly apposite: what has actually happened is that the ghost has been, so to speak, loosed out of Purgatory (I, 5, 9-13) to speak of horrors in Denmark, and these horrors are already beginning to take their toll on our hero. Polonius interprets the effects as love-sickness and asks Ophelia: have you given him any hard words of late? To which Ophelia replies: No, my good lord. But, as you did command, I did repel his letters and denied His access to me. (II, 1, 107-10) This suggests that Ophelias breaking-off of relations has deepened the agony. So while we have in Hamlet a capacity to simulate madness (or pronounced eccentricity) in the form of an antic disposition, which we came across in Act II, Scene 2, beneath this there is a grave disquiet which is making him despair, and, in his conversation with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, leads him to affirm that: Denmarks a prison. (II, 2, 243) By the end of the play we are bound to conclude that his judgement on this last point (if not on some others) is thoroughly sound: the trouble is that he extends the notion to cover the whole of human existence, which is manifestly an unbalanced view. He shows some sense of what is happening to him in the soliloquy in which he conceives the plan to establish the ghosts veracity by commissioning the players to act something closely akin to what has been revealed by his dead father. This is most brave That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
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Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion! (II, 2, 580-85) He snaps out of it, and conceives the plan for a special play within the play. Yet in the very next scene there is a relapse into ranting, with the injunction to Ophelia Get thee to a nunnery and the cry I say we will have no more marriage. The derangement, as Kitto judiciously explains, carries over into Hamlets bawdy remarks to Ophelia as they form part of the plays audience, and into the scene where Hamlet discovers Claudius at prayer and decides he doesnt want to risk the prospect of his uncle becoming penitent and attaining Heaven. Further examples appear later on, but enough of that for the moment. These outbursts and excess enthusiasms show that, in contrast to his friend Horatio, Hamlet has indeed become passions slave, and if he can be said to have a tragic flaw this is it. (Kitto argues that the plays point is actually much broader: it is not so much that Hamlet is destroyed as that the poison let loose in Denmark should destroy indiscriminately the good, the bad and the indifferent Form and Meaning in Drama, p 333.) We may say that Hamlet as he was before the evil affected him is close to the ideal of a Renaissance prince. As far as comparison with other characters in the play goes we may surmise that Hamlet Senior was even closer to the ideal, but in the nature of things we are not presented with such a detailed picture of him as we have of his son. Laertes is in one way Hamlets superior he is much readier for decisive action but his very simplicity compared with Hamlet means that he fails to perceive the finer points of life that Hamlet appreciates and does not achieve his overall breadth of vision. One can hardly imagine him as a dramatic critic, for one thing. Fortinbras the name, strong in arm is surely significant, just as Ophelia, Polonius daughter, is significantly named after the Greek word for gain or profit (a reflexion on Polonius) is a much stronger candidate. His readiness to lead Norwegian forces into battle even for a little patch of ground That hath in it no profit but the name (IV, 4, 18-19) accords well with contemporary notions of royal valour, surely. Yet Fortinbras himself gives a just verdict on Hamlets qualities as a prince, For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royal. (V, 2, 391-92) By the end of the play we have learnt enough to agree with this assessment: Hamlet without his warped pessimism would make an able ruler. Let us leave the absorbing subject of Hamlets character and turn to the espionage theme, which bulks large in the play. As noted, Elizabeth Is government enjoyed the services of an extensive network of intelligence agents, including one Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeares fellow playwright at least, that is the obvious conclusion from the fact that, when the Cambridge university authorities were proposing to withhold a degree from Marlowe for not complying with their termtime attendance regulations, the Queens Council intervened on his behalf saying that he had been serving Her Majesty who recognized his merit and did not wish him to be penalized (JB Steane, introduction to the Penguin edition of Marlowes
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plays, 1969, p 11). Consequently the pervasiveness of espionage in Hamlet is of considerable interest. Immediately following the scene in which the ghost apprises Hamlet of his murder we have a scene between Polonius, Clausius chief minister, and his agent Reynaldo, whom he instructs to spy on his son Laertes while the latter is studying at Paris. Kitto observes that this scene is often left out when the play is performed: The social habits of our time make it impossible for producers to give us Hamlet; all we get is Selected Scenes from Hamlet. But if the critic omits a scene, either he is distorting the play, or Shakespeare made an artistic blunder in writing it. (Form and Meaning in Drama, p 264) Why, then, did Shakespeare put the scene in? Kitto answers that the scene is meant to show up Polonius: What would we naturally think of a man who spoke to his son like that [the famous advice given in I, 3, lines 58-80] and then about his son like this? (p 265) And what is the point of the surveillance in Laertes case? It strongly suggests that Polonius cannot trust his son to behave himself something that, if it is the case, hardly reflects credit on Polonius. Clearly the state espionage is part of the generalised evil that is corrupting the Danish kingdom. The activities of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are also part of it, even if Claudius paints his motives in engaging them in the best possible light (II, 2, 10-18). Clearly Claudius is acting out of an instinct for self-preservation. Polonius serves his master well, extracting from Ophelia a love-letter from Hamlet, which he uses to advance his theory that Hamlets madness is a form of love-sickness. Polonius then proposes to test his theory by allowing Hamlet and Ophelia to meet secretly observed (II, 2, 160-67). Then in Act III, Scene 2 we have Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern calling on Hamlet and the arrival of the players. As we have seen, Hamlet guesses the purpose of his friends visit, and, at the end, voices his objections to it. He borrows one of the players recorders and invites Guildenstern to play it: despite Hamlets pointed comment: It is as easy as lying. Guildenstern protests that he lacks the necessary skill. Hamlet then administers the coup de grce: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. But the espionage, despite this impassioned outburst against it, continues. Polonius announces: My lord, hes going to his mothers closet. Behind the arras Ill convey myself To hear the process. (III, 3, 27-29) The upshot is that the eavesdropper reveals himself and is killed. We cannot know whether Shakespeare intended all this as some form of criticism of Tudor state methods, or what his views were on the justifiability or other11

wise of monarchical intelligence-gathering in general. All we can say is that the use of surveillance by Polonius is viewed as excessive, that in so far as Claudius uses it as a means to promote evil it is part of that evil, that Hamlet is given lines that protest against the unwarranted intrusion upon privacy and personal dignity that it constitutes, and that, lastly, by Polonius death Shakespeare seems to be saying that its practitioners should not be surprised if they meet with a violent response as a result. (As the old IRA adage has it: Spies and informers beware.) Similarly we cannot know exactly why Shakespeare chose to make so much of this particular subject in this particular centrally important play. (As to its centrality, is it entirely accidental that Shakespeare chose to call his son Hamnet?) But that it caused him disquiet is clear, I believe. It is a positive joy to move on to the topic of the views expressed in the play on the dramatic art and its political role. Hamlet is surely voicing Shakespeares own opinion when he conveys his wishes to Polonius: Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear? Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. (II, 2, 520-24) One can imagine the likes of John Arden or David Hare savouring these lines. Then in the scene before the play is acted Hamlet speaks of: the purpose of playing, whose end, both at first and now, was and is hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (III, 2, 20-24) The assumption is that this is not a distorting mirror; the unspoken epistemological position here is that of Protagoras: Panton chrematon metron estin anthropos [Humanity is the measure of all things] as in Leonardo da Vincis wonderful pictorial representation of the human figure. It is a declaration of uncompromising realism, that is, the duty of poets and playwrights is to tell the truth. Here Shakespeare agrees, paradoxically, with a thinker whose position on this question is in some respects diametrically opposed to his, Plato. Plato too is concerned that the poets should not express erroneous opinions: he reproaches the Greek poets in The Republic because: They have said that unjust men are often happy, and just men wretched, that wrong-doing pays if you can avoid being found out, and that justice is what suits someone else but is to your own disadvantage. We must forbid them to say this sort of thing, and require their poems and stories to have quite the opposite moral. (Republic, Penguin translation, p 130) I strongly suspect that Shakespeare would not have agreed with this Platonic censorship programme, but that both Plato and Shakespeare were in agreement on the fundamental duty of artists, even if they would have interpreted it differently, seems to me unquestionable. (Not that Shakespeare would have been satisfied that a poet or playwright should merely tell the truth: his whole oeuvre suggests that it is not just a matter of telling the truth, but of telling it memorably.)
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We are left with the question of the relevance of Hamlet to our own time. Kitto wisely warns that it is very easy to see in a play what you see everywhere else (Form and Meaning in Drama, p 94), but I would nonetheless argue that world events of the past 25 years have made this particular Shakespeare play even more relevant, if anything, to our contemporary situation than it was before (which it certainly was). Hamlet is about a menacing all-pervasive evil wreaking destructive effects upon a kingdom. Any serious observer of world affairs endowed with a moral outlook would find it hard to deny that the twentieth century has seen a flowering of evil and corruption on a scale hardly imaginable in previous ages and I am not talking only about Adolf Hitler and Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin: other seemingly virtuous statesmen were (and are) also involved. A malign pattern exemplified by the 1930s, described by the poet WH Auden as a low, dishonest decade, seems to be re-emerging in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001. However, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was not the original act of destruction ushering in our present problems. To understand humanitys current predicament we have to go back at least as far as the ReaganThatcher years, roughly from 1980 onwards. I cannot here do more than indicate reasons for this assessment. I ask the reader only to consider the following statistics and their sources, and judge accordingly, as likewise the one non-statistical extract included: In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, the chief executive of the average large corporation was paid 42 times as much as the average manual worker. By 1995, in the middle of Clintons presidency, it was 141 times as much. Three years later, in 1998, the CEO got 419 times as much. (Jonathan Neale, Whats Wrong With America?, Vision Paperbacks, 2004, p 73; Source: Michael Zweig, The Working-Class Majority: Americas Best Kept Secret, Cornell University Press, 2000, pp 68-69) To cite Susan George: According to the United Nations Development Programmes Human Development Report 2002, the top five per cent of the world population has an income 114 times greater than the bottom five per cent. The richest 10 per cent of Americans alone (some 27 million people, not even half of one per cent of the world) has an income equivalent to that of the poorest 43 per cent of the world population. At the rate were going, still according to the UNDP, it will take at least 130 years to rid the world of hunger. rich countries provided poor ones with an average 52 billion dollars a year (1997-2001) in Overseas Development Aid or ODA, which is in free fall since the Berlin Wall tumbled and the USSR ceased to be a threat. Much of that aid also comes straight back to the donors because the money is tied to purchases from them. Meanwhile the same rich countries provide roughly one billion dollars every day in agricultural subsidies and supports mostly to their own large farmers. Less than 10 per cent of the funds devoted world-wide to medical and biological research are available for poor peoples diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and, increasingly, AIDS, although these scourges account for 90 per cent of the global disease burden. (Susan George, Another World
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is Possible If, Verso, 2004, pp 20-22) Or Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky: At the dawn of the twentieth century (and the high tide of classical imperialism) the gap between the GDP per capita of the poorest and richest nation was in the ratio of just 22 to 1. By 1970 this had widened to 88 to 1. By 2000 that is, after the market had reached its greatest extent in history it reached 267. It is inconceivable that this process has any source other than the market itself. in 1992, debt service payments by the developing countries totalled $179 billion and net financial inflows were $128 billion. By 2000, debt service payments had reached $330 billion while net financial inflows had dwindled to $86 billion. The methods of US imperialism under Pax Americana are no more civilised than its European precursors. It launched the nuclear age by deploying nuclear weapons against Japan, engaged in gratuitous and systematic bombing to economically devastate North Korea in the final stages of the war on that peninsula; made repeated military incursions in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and killed two million people in Vietnam. It propped up the great majority of the most odious and repressive regimes in the world (four decades of support for Franco, Salazar, successive Guatemalan regimes, Israel, the Shah of Iran, Pinochet, Marcos, Somoza, the Greek colonels, Saudi Arabia and, until it became inconvenient, Saddam Hussein and indeed Osama bin Laden themselves). Via the IMF and the WTO it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people, having reacted with supreme indifference to the crushing of billions by poverty and the deaths of tens of millions from preventable or containable diseases. It tolerates and actively fosters systematic domestic racism and judicial terror against its own black population. It is busily destroying the world environment, and uses aggressive military force against all who oppose it. It moves daily closer to its stated strategic goal of deploying battlefield and theatre nuclear weapons as an instrument of foreign policy. (Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky (eds), The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis, Pluto Press, 2004, pp 9, 11, 37-38) In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, within a few weeks, one million people in Thailand and 21 million people in Indonesia were pushed below the poverty line (Freeman and Kagarlitsky, p 86. See Prague 2000: Why We Need to Decommission the IMF and the World Bank, Bangkok, Focus on the Global South, 2000, pp 18, 22) In the recent invasion of Iraq: Iraqi sources have identified 37 000 civilian deaths. (The Blitz of the Luftwaffe in England killed 22 000 people.) (Ken Coates, The Social Europe We Need, Spokesman 2004, p 2) If the above extracts do not give eloquent testimony to the existence of worldwide evil, then I dont know what can. This is the reason why Hamlet speaks to everyone who wants to escape from such a disastrous state of affairs. It is all too easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the monstrosity, as Hamlet was for a time. The
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play has many lessons for us, not least that a Laertes-style frontal attack designed to right a particular wrong is risky: the opposition, thus narrowly organised, can be bought off with a marginal reform. This is not to attack the need for reforms, but to say that we are obliged to look deeper and conceive the necessary changes on a more fundamental level. I cannot, obviously, go into details, but interested readers should consult the above-mentioned book The Politics of Empire, especially the final section thereof. Hamlet, who grasps that the time is out of joint, has a deeper awareness of what needs to be done than Laertes. But even Hamlets initiatives suffer from an inordinate desire for revenge the shadow of Thomas Kyds popular play The Spanish Tragedy lies over Shakespeares great creation. It cannot be overstressed that revenge is not what we should aim at: it is not a question of getting even, but of depriving the oppressors of their power. Once so deprived, they remain individuals with rights like everyone else. On the subject of revenge, one cannot but recall that monumental Icelandic masterpiece, Sagan om Brennu Njal (The Saga of Burnt Njal), which shows definitively how revenge exacted gives rise to an analogous desire for revenge on the part of those on whom vengeance is wreaked, and so on in a grisly vicious cycle. (Alas, such relations among rival nationalisms are still commonplace in todays world.) Faced with such a daunting situation, we need more analysis and investigative work, not less. Of course we need action as well, but this action must be brought to bear where it will be most effective, and that means we have to combine action and research. The twentieth-century thinker who seems to have grasped most surely what is at stake here is, to my mind, the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) with his concept of egemonia, the notion that oppositional forces need to establish an ascendancy in the sphere of ideas if they are to win political power. The other tradition we should look closely at is the anarchist one (especially Kropotkin, whose writings testify to the fact that effective social change in the requisite direction cannot be the product of some all-wise state, but must be achieved by the great mass of the population exercising initiative at the local level). As the old adage puts it, the emancipation of the workers can only be achieved by their own efforts: only then will we have a chance to treat everybody not as they deserve, but much better.

Harry Ratner

Britain and the First World War

Considering the Role of Individuals in History
ONE of the problems facing socialist historians particularly Marxist historians is what weight to give to the two strands in Marxism, the determinist and the voluntarist; and how to reconcile the two. The determinist strand sees history as the unfolding of objective laws that are as determinist as the laws governing the physical universe. It sees the stream of causality running one way from the economic base to the superstructure. Happenings in the economy determine happenings in the superstructure. The development of human societies is governed by these objective laws,
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and the role of the individual is minimal. Though Plekhanov, in his seminal The Role of the Individual in History, concedes that in certain circumstances individuals, because of their position in society, can affect events, they can only alter details but not the main trend of events, which is determined by large-scale social historical forces. At best, prominent individuals are instruments of these historical forces. He describes the role of the individual as an accident in history (Lawrence and Wishart edition, p 42). I have long been unhappy about both an overly economic reductionist interpretation of history and the downgrading of the role of the individual. How reconcile it with the voluntarist strand in Marxism? After all, why if it is historically determined that capitalism is going to be replaced by the next historical stage, communism should you and I bust our guts, go on demonstrations and have our heads bashed in by police truncheons? Why have thousands of socialists and communists risked their lives, suffered torture and imprisonment if it was all predetermined and their actions made little difference? Why did Marx and Engels toil away at convincing people of the correctness of their views if the development of a revolutionary (Marxist) consciousness by the working class and its eventual overthrow of capitalism were determined by objective historical laws? I believe it is possible to reconcile the determinist and voluntarist strands. I will look at the factors leading to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and particularly Britains entry into the war, to argue that a holistic view of history is better than a strictly economic reductionist one or a purely voluntarist one. I want to show that the outbreak of the 1914-18 war cannot be attributed solely or mainly to purely economic causes, but that political and military factors were its proximate cause. Within the political and military superstructure the decisions of individuals are not only necessary links in the causal chains, but can have far-reaching consequences. I want to rescue the importance of the individual from its downgrading by a tooeconomic-reductionist view of history. A review of the events of 1914 shows that the decisions of just 19 men, members of the British Cabinet (and among them one particular individual), had farreaching consequences on the future history of Europe and the world. So much for Plekhanovs description of the effect of the individual as an accident in history! The Economic and the Political Factors The Marxist explanation is that the 1914-18 war was the inevitable outcome of objective forces the imperialist rivalries, the struggle for markets, colonies, control of material resources. And these struggles were the consequences of the development of the productive forces of capitalism having reached a certain stage. It is undoubtedly true that the whole previous development of capitalist industry provided an impetus for the acquisition of colonies and spheres of influence because of the economic advantages these provided. In that sense the 1914-18 war was a capitalist war. But it is only a part of the explanation if it leaves out of the equation the purely political factors and the crucial roles of individuals. To describe the war as a capitalist war implying that it was a war inspired purely and mainly by the struggle for markets and outlets for the investment of capital is an over-simplification. Certainly Britain and France were fully developed capitalist nations. But in the three other major powers involved, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, there had been no bourgeois revolution. Russia was ruled by
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an autocratic Tsar, Germany and Austria-Hungary were ruled by a landed-military class headed by a hereditary emperor. In none of these countries did the capitalist class the bankers and industrialists control the state machine. The imperial governments were not primarily motivated by the desires of these industrialists, but by pre-capitalist considerations of military strength. Ever since the existence of distinct nation-states based on territories going back even to classical times internation relations had been a free-for-all. There were no rules, no independent arbiters, no supra-national umpire to set the rules. In this dog-eat-dog world, survival depended on military muscle and making the correct alliances. Of course, feudal rulers and absolute monarchs and the later Russian, Austrian and German imperial governments had an interest in encouraging the development of industry and finance as this underpinned their military power. So there was a convergence of interests between the imperial governments and the industrialists. An example of this was the naval rivalry between Britain and Germany; each trying to maintain naval superiority. The manufacturers of the steel required to build the ships for the new German battle fleet, and the mine-owners who produced the coal to fuel it, paid for the flood of pamphlets and propaganda put out by the Navy League to arouse popular support for the idea of a large German navy. And the British shipyard owners were also quite pleased to profit from orders by the British navy. But the main and immediate motivations for the actions of the imperial governments were military-strategic considerations, maintaining armed superiority and concluding alliances against any possible combination of adversaries. These imperatives had existed before the growth of capitalism and continued into the new era. Military expenditure profited the capitalists, and they looked forward to exploiting any new territories that their imperial governments might acquire as a result of military victory. However, this does not alter the fact that the main and proximate causes of war were not primarily and directly economic competition between capitalists, but the old-fashioned military-strategic considerations which pre-dated the establishment of purely bourgeois regimes. Who Wanted War? There was a large body of opinion in business and financial circles which did not welcome the prospect of war as it disrupted trade and created uncertainty. War was seen as inimical to the smooth flow of trade. As James Joll points out: The belief that the economic fabric of international life was too closely knit to allow war to break out found expression in the final crisis of July 1914. In Britain Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for economic policy, was well aware of the anti-war opinion in the City of London, and this contributed to his initial opposition to British intervention. As late as 31 July Grey told the French Ambassador, who was pressing for a clear statement of British intentions, The commercial and financial situation was extremely serious, there was danger of a complete collapse that would involve us and everyone in ruin; and it was possible that our standing aside might be the only means of preventing a complete collapse of European credit in which we should be involved. In Germany, while many industrialists had a direct interest in naval construction and in the arms industry, and were dreaming of an expanded zone of German economic predominance in Europe and an expanded colonial empire overseas, even if this involved a risk of war, others felt that their own eco17

nomic interests were bound up with the maintenance of peaceful international trade, and the chairman of the Hamburg-America steamship line, Albert Ballin, a personal friend of the Kaiser, was particularly active in the final crisis in trying to find a peaceful way out in conjunction with the British financier Sir Ernest Cassel. (James Joll, Europe Since 1870, Penguin Books, 1990, p 186) It is over-simplistic and smacks too much of economic reductionism to describe the war as simply a war between rival groups of capitalists and to ascribe to it purely or even mainly economic causes. The prime and immediate causes of the war were the political and military strategic decisions taken by non-bourgeois, that is, imperial rulers based on land-owning military lites; and in this context the decisions of individual had great weight. This is clear if we look at the events leading up to the outbreak of war The Final Steps to War The crisis started in the Balkans, which for long had been the scene of a struggle between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires over who would take over the region when Turkey, the sick man of Europe, was finally evicted. In addition, the Austro-Hungarian empire was faced with national independence movements from its many subject nationalities, Bosnians, Southern Slavs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles. The Croats and Slovenes were demanding autonomy, the Czechs were demanding an autonomous Bohemia and were looking to Russia for support. And its Serb minority were demanding union with Serbia. The Balkan wars had just ended, and Austria hoped finally to subdue Serbia and assert its disputed authority in the region. In July 1914, the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, by nationalists suspected of being aided by Serbian authorities gave Austria the pretext it needed. Russia was Serbias protector. So when Serbia was attacked, Russia mobilised and prepared to support Serbia (Russia also had a long-standing ambition to control the Dardanelles the entrance to the Black Sea). Meanwhile Austria had appealed for support to its ally Germany. The latter was anxious to strengthen its main ally in the region and also felt threatened by Russian moves in the region. The Russian mobilisation triggered a German response. The Russian moves had been primarily directed at Austria, and the Tsar had originally intended to mobilise on the Austro-Hungarian frontier alone in an attempt to show that Russia had no intentions against Germany. But he was advised by his military chiefs that this was impossible as all the plans for mobilisation were for a simultaneous mobilisation along both the Austro-Hungarian and German borders. By 1 August, Germany and Russia were at war. At this stage previous treaties and military plans now dragged France into the conflict. Not only were France and Russia bound by treaty to come to each others assistance, but German military strategic planning required that Germany must attack France and neutralise the French army in order to be free to throw its main armies against Russia. And in order to attack France, the German armies had to march through Belgium. So a whole combination of movements for national independence, mutual treaty obligations, strategic considerations and the rigid mobilisation and war plans of the contending powers combined to bring about war. It is evident that the main factors were political-military rather than economic.
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Britain on the Brink In the light of all that had happened till then one could say that a continental war had become inevitable. But there was nothing inevitable about Britains involvement. There was a good possibility that Britain would have remained neutral at least for a time. If this had happened, the outcome of the war could have been very different, and with it the future development of Europe and the world. This possibility and its consequences have been explored by Niall Ferguson in his essay The Kaisers European Union in the collection Virtual History (Picador, 1997), and by the military historian, Robert Cowley in his What If? (Pan Books, 2001). I am aware that the what if? counterfactual approach to history is looked on with disfavour by Marxist historians; EH Carr described it as parlour games. Nevertheless, I believe that one cannot avoid examining what might have happened if certain factors in a situation had been different or absent. To avoid asking these questions means that one cannot ascertain which factors are necessary or sufficient. Without posing these questions, one cannot assess cause and effect. Ferguson and Cowley put forward convincing arguments to show that British involvement was by no means certain and that Britains abstention would have had far-reaching consequences. It is at this stage that the decisions of a small group of individuals, the members of the British cabinet, had important consequences for future events. And among this small group, one man, Lloyd George, played a key role. The Cabinet was divided when it met on 31 July 1914. As already mentioned, there were no overwhelming purely economic imperatives driving Britain to war. The City of London and influential industrialists were in favour of Britain staying out of the conflict. There were fears of the effect of war on international trade, fears about the collapse of credit, etc. Marxists may have believed that the economic struggle for markets and spheres of investment led to war. But that was not a view held by many capitalists themselves. The views of the City, of the financial institutions and of many industrialists were reflected by Lloyd George and others within the British cabinet who argued that Britain should keep out of the war. (This did not of course prevent them once the war had started from wringing the maximum possible profits supplying armaments and uniforms for the armed forces.) So the reasons for Britain declaring war must be found in non-economic, that is, political and military considerations and in the subjective decisions of Cabinet members about these considerations. In the context of strategic and military policy, there were arguments for and against British involvement. We can dismiss the argument that Britain was bound by treaty to come to the defence of Belgian neutrality or to the aid of France. Both the Prime Minister, Asquith, and Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, strongly emphasised in their memoirs that there was no contractual obligation that obliged Britain to intervene in the war between the continental powers. In Asquiths words: We kept ourselves free to decide, when the occasion arose, whether we should or should not go to war There was no great military convention [with France]: we entered into communications which bound us to do no more than study possibilities. Nor did Grey make any secret of his opposition to any precipitate attempt to force a decision, which prevented his making any commitment to France in July (p 236). A
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former Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary, Sanderson, noted that the 1839 treaty with Belgium was not a positive pledge to use material force for the maintenance of the guarantee of neutrality in any circumstances and at whatever risk. As Ferguson has pointed out, a careful scrutiny of the contemporary documents reveals how very near Britain came to standing aside: While it seems undeniable that a continental war between Austria, Germany, Russia and France was bound to break out in 1914, there was in truth nothing inevitable about the British decision to enter the war. (p 237) The main argument in favour of British intervention was that, for strategic and military reasons, Britain could not afford that one power should dominate Europe. It was therefore necessary to prevent France from being crushed and Britain having to face alone a rampant, expansionist and potentially hostile Germany. The buildup of German naval strength in the years immediately prior to the war was seen by many British strategists as a serious potential threat to Britains imperial power. The need to defend poor little Belgium was a post-facto justification for Britains intervention. However, there were equally potent factors that made British neutrality conceivable. Ferguson makes the following case: At this point, it is worth asking once again an older counter-factual question which German liberals used endlessly to ponder: what if Britain had reached such an understanding, if not a formal alliance, with Germany? Despite some contemporary British anxieties about German commercial rivalry as German exporters began to challenge Britain in foreign markets and then to penetrate the British consumer market itself, the idea that economic rivalry precluded good diplomatic relations is nonsense. Disputes about tariffs are only harbingers of war to the incurable economic determinist Moreover there were numerous overseas areas where German and British interests potentially coincided. In 1898 and 1900 Chamberlain argued for Anglo-German cooperation against Russia in China. There was serious though inconclusive discussion of an AngloGerman Japanese triplice in 1901. After much British grumbling, agreement was reached to give Germany Samoa in 1899. The period also saw cooperation between Britain and Germany over Portuguese Mozambique and Venezuela (in 1902). Even in the Ottoman Empire and the former Ottoman fiefdoms of Egypt and Morocco, there seemed to be opportunities for Anglo-German collaboration, though here opinion in London was more divided. A priori, there is no obvious reason why an overstretched power (as Britain perceived itself to be) and an under-stretched power (as Germany perceived itself to be) should not have cooperated together comfortably on the international stage. It is simply untrue to say that the fundamental priorities of policy of each country were mutually exclusive. (p 238) Furthermore: neither colonial issues nor naval issues were leading inevitably to an Anglo-German showdown before 1914. As Churchill later put it: We were no enemies of German colonial expansion. Indeed, an agreement between Britain and Germany, which would have opened the way to in20

creased German influence in the former Portuguese colonies in southern Africa, came close to being concluded. Grey himself said in 1911 that it did not matter very much whether we had Germany or France as a neighbour in Africa. He was eager to bring about a division of the derelict Portuguese colonies as soon as possible in a pro-German spirit Even where Grey inclined to give French interests primacy in Morocco there was not a complete impasse with respect to Germany In any case, the German government backed down after Agadir; and when they turned their attention to Turkey, it was much harder for Grey to take an anti-German line without playing into the hands of the Russians with respect to the Straits Relations were further improved by Germanys conciliatory response to British concerns over the BerlinBaghdad railway. (pp 247-49) It comes out clearly from all accounts of the run-up to 1914 that all the major powers were constantly manoeuvring for position and willing to change alliances whenever it suited them. It is also clear that in Britain there were opposing points of view some favouring alignment with France, and some accommodation with Germany. As far as Britain was concerned, the options were open. In the end the Cabinet opted for war with Germany, but this was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Role of Individuals It is therefore no wonder that when the Cabinet met on 31 July 1914, the 19 members were divided. Lloyd George was from the start opposed to war. At least five others, Morley, Burns, Simon, Beauchamp and Hobhouse, were for an immediate declaration of neutrality. Only two members (Churchill and Grey) were definitely in favour of declaring war on Germany. The rest, including Asquith, were still undecided. The day before, 22 Liberal members of the backbench Foreign Affairs Committee had warned that any decision in participation in a European war would meet not only with the strongest disapproval but with the actual withdrawal of support from the Government (p 267). With the Cabinet split and Grey threatening to resign if non-intervention was definitely decided, the Cabinet agreed that British opinion would not now enable us to support France we could say nothing to commit ourselves. Then when Churchill persuaded Asquith to let him mobilise the navy in response to Germanys ultimatum to Russia, Morley and Simon threatened to resign and the majority once again opposed Greys plea for a clear declaration. The most that could be agreed was that if the German fleet came into the Channel to attack the French coast or shipping the British navy would give all protection in its power. But even this which was hardly a declaration of war as such German naval action was unlikely caused Burns, the President of the Board of Trade, to resign. As Samuel noted: Had the matter come to an issue, Asquith would have stood by Grey and three others would have remained. I think the rest of us would have resigned. (p 270) At lunch at Beauchamps that day, seven ministers, among them Lloyd George, expressed reservations about even the limited naval measures. When Grey finally secured a commitment to Belgium only by threatening to resign, Morley, Simon and Beauchamp countered this by now following Burns in offering their resignations. So why did the government not fall? Because, at the last minute Lloyd George, Simon and Pease changed their minds and appealed to the resigners to stay and say nothing. Why did they do so? The answer they gave was Belgium. But, as Ferguson
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points out, this has to be viewed with some scepticism: As we have seen the Foreign Office view had been that the 1839 treaty did not bind Britain to go to war in any circumstances and at whatever risk. (p 271) Lloyd George had earlier tried to argue that the Germans would pass only through the furthest southern corner, and that this would imply only a small infraction of neutrality. You see, he would say (pointing to a map), it is only a little bit, and the Germans will pay for any damage they do. (p 272) So what made Lloyd George and his supporters change their minds? Party politics might have been a factor. The Liberals depended on the support of the Irish Nationalists. A cabinet split would let in the Tories. The Tories were pro-war. If the resignations had gone ahead, Churchill and the pro-war Liberals might have invited the Tories into a war coalition. Alternatively a general election would have been called and a decision on war would have had to be postponed until afterwards. Maybe Lloyd George and his supporters were finally convinced that in the long run Britain could not afford a French defeat and a Europe dominated by an expansionist Germany. But whatever the motives, it is still the case that Lloyd George and the others finally voted for war. In this first week of August 1914 several possibilities existed. Either the cabinet would opt for neutrality, or the Cabinet would split and a ToryLiberal coalition declare war, or the decision would be put off until a general election. That none of these alternatives actually happened and the Liberal government declared war on 3 August was due to the change of mind of six or seven men out of 19 in the British Cabinet. The Consequences When we look at the consequences, it is clear that in some historical conjunctures the role of a few individuals can have far-reaching consequences. And among these few individuals the role of one or more key ones can influence the others. If Lloyd George had not changed his mind and not dissuaded his colleagues from resigning, Britains abstention or belated entry and the absence of a British Expeditionary Force in France in August and September might have drastically altered the balance of forces. The Germans might have won the battle of the Marne. The possibility of a repeat of 1870 might have forced France to negotiate. The conclusion of a negotiated peace in 1914 or early 1915 between the continental powers would have had far-reaching consequences. However onerous the conditions imposed on France and Russia by the victorious Central Powers, the productive forces and wealth of the warring countries would have been largely preserved. More importantly, millions of soldiers would not have been killed, millions of women would not have been widowed, millions of children not orphaned. A not unimportant consideration for these millions of human beings!! An early peace between Germany and France might also have resulted in an early end to the war with Russia. If that had been the case, there might have been no Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Some sort of revolution in Russia was probably inevitable; the Tsarist regime would sooner or later have been overthrown or forced to concede reforms. But there might not have been the complete breakdown that another three years of war brought and which made possible the Bolsheviks seizure of power. Tsarist absolutism might have given way to some type of bourgeois democracy or constitutional monarchy. And even if a socialist revolution had occurred, it would have been in far more favourable conditions. The degeneration into a Stalinist
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police state might have been avoided. What would have been the consequences for Germany? The factors which made possible the triumph of Nazism included the traumas of the November 1918 defeat, and of the occupation of the Ruhr and the hyperinflation of 1923. If Hitler had not come to power in 1933 would there have been a war in 1939? And if sooner or later Germany had once more been at war, it would have been a different war with different consequences All this, of course, is speculation. The consequences of Britain staying out of the war in 1914 might have been other than those envisaged above. But there is no denying that the course of the war and its outcome would most probably have been different to what they actually became. The future course of history would have been altered if the 19 members of the British Cabinet had acted otherwise than they did. The decision could have gone either way. The crucial influence was that of Lloyd George. He was the most adamant opponent of Britains participation and the most influential member of the Cabinet. It was his belated change of mind and influence on his colleagues that swung the pendulum to war. Plekhanov downplayed the influence of individuals as accidents in history. Some accidents involving the lives and deaths of millions!! Reconciling Determinism and Voluntarism Even if one takes a determinist view, even if one argues that the 1914-18 war was determined by large-scale, impersonal, historical forces, it is a fact that for it to have taken place the actions of individuals were necessary. The armies did not spontaneously march to the front, the guns did not go off by themselves. Somebody had to give the orders for the armies to be mobilised, somebody had to give the order to fire. And that somebody was not an abstract entity called capitalism or imperialism. These somebodies were flesh-and-blood human beings, a Tsar Nicholas, a Kaiser Wilhelm, an Emperor Franz Josef, and their close advisers; or a group of individuals, the British and French cabinets. Of course these individuals did not act in a vacuum. They were embedded in and part of complex social and political structures and hierarchies. For the decisions of these individuals to have had effect they had to have the power and authority to have their orders carried out; they had to be embodied in power structures with material means. It can be argued that these individuals and sets of individuals represented social forces, classes, nations, etc. But these social forces could only act and express themselves through the agencies of flesh-and-blood people. These people had to make decisions, carry out actions, give orders to other flesh-and-blood people, and in turn these had to accept the orders and carry them out. Objective factors might well have made the war possible, even inevitable, but before the potential could become actual the decisions and actions of individuals were a necessary part of the network of cause and effect. It is evident, when we look at the details of events, that in certain historical conjunctures the decisions and actions of small groups of individuals or even of one key individual can have important and long-lasting consequences. The entry of Britain into the First World War was one instance. We can think of many more. For example, the role of Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1917, Hitlers order to the German Sixth Army not to retreat from Stalingrad, the decisions of John F Kennedy and his advisers and of Khrushchev and his Politbureau during the Cuban
23

missiles crisis of 1962. In this crisis, one finger pressing the nuclear button would have had immeasurable consequences for humanity. To quote Plekhanov again some accident!! Recognition of the sometimes critical role of the individual does not, however, contradict a determinist view of history. Even if we accept the hard determinist view that everything in the universe is determined right down to the most minute decision what Lloyd George and the Kaiser decided to have for breakfast it is still a fact that neither the British nor the German armies would have moved, nor would guns have gone off, unless these individuals had made the decisions they did and issued the orders they did. And unless other individuals had decided to obey these orders. Why does a determinist view not lead to fatalism and quietism? This is a question that Plekhanov also asked. The answer is twofold. Firstly, ones actions do effect events. It may be determined that I pass my driving test. But I will not do so unless I actually get in the car and drive. Human beings (and other sentient animals) are imbued with wants and desires which can only be satisfied by their actions. It is their subjective perception of the best action to satisfy these desires and further their interests (even if they are mistaken) that is the immediate cause of their actions. Secondly, even the most convinced determinist does not have absolute knowledge of everything. In particular, he does not know in advance what his next decision will be until he makes that decision. And that decision is a conscious decision because the human brain has evolved over the millennia to be capable of consciously choosing between alternative actions in the light of the objective circumstances in which the possessor of the brain finds himself or herself. Even the most convinced determinist cannot, therefore, help acting in the same way as if he had free will. Faced with choices, he has consciously to choose between them. This is what Lloyd George and his colleagues, and the Kaiser and Tsar Nicholas and their advisers, did. This is not altered by the fact that objectively speaking their actual decisions were determined by a combination of all previous events, the situation in which they found themselves and their characters (determined by their genetic make-up). Where does this reconciliation of determinism and voluntarism leave the lowly socialist activist, the rank-and-file member of the Labour Party, of the Socialist Workers Party or any other organisation? At the beginning of this article I asked why should thousands of socialists and communists have risked their lives, suffered torture and imprisonment if it was all predetermined and their actions made little difference? Let me repeat what I wrote in a previous article, Historical Materialism: A Critical Look at Some of its Concepts, in this magazine. I wrote: The individual can make a difference. How much of a difference depends on the overall objective situation and the individuals position in the social context. A Lenin has more influence than a rank-and-file party member. A Tony Blair or Gordon Brown has more influence than a member of his local Labour Party. But no one can tell in advance how much influence he or she may have in the future. (New Interventions, Volume 10, no 2, Autumn 2000) Even a marginal individual can have a considerable effect on history at second hand by being a decisive influence on someone who later reaches a position of power.
24

Lenin was one of these individuals whose actions had far-reaching consequences. But what influences formed him? Obviously the whole historical situation in which he grew up. Part of this situation was the activity of the Narodniks, the terrorist group to which his brother, Alexander Ulyanov, belonged. Alexander was executed after a failed attempt to assassinate the Tsar. The Narodniks adoption of individual terrorism failed to overthrow the autocracy. Alexander Ulyanov was a marginal individual who failed in his objective. Yet all biographers of Lenin agree that this failed enterprise by his brother greatly influenced the young Vladimir Ilyich; not only by convincing him of the need for other methods, but no doubt also by imbuing him with the psychological determination that drove his subsequent career. Hitler was not born a Nazi. It is interesting to speculate the influences his parents, schoolmates and early acquaintances exerted on the young Adolf which drove him along the paths he took. One cannot know in advance what consequences ones actions may have. One can only hope that ones contribution together with that of others will make a difference. In his The Role of the Individual in History, Plekhanov described the views of the subjectivist historians of the eighteenth century who reduced everything to the conscious activities of individuals as the thesis. He called the fatalistic views of later historians, Guizot, Mignet and others, who completely denied the role of the individual, the antithesis. The recognition of the role of the individual within the framework of large-scale social forces, and the reconciling of free will and determinism, may be described as a synthesis of the determinism and voluntarism that coexist in Marxism and historical materialism.

Paul Flewers

Stalin and the Great Terror

Politics and Personality in Soviet History
SEVENTY years ago this year, in March 1938, the veteran Bolshevik revolutionaries Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Krestinsky, Christian Rakovsky, Aleksei Rykov and Stalins former secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda sat with 16 other defendants in the dock in Moscows October Hall before Stalins hanging judge Andrei Vyshinsky. Charged with a variety of heinous crimes and having been subjected to months of harsh treatment at the hands of the secret police interrogators, they were harangued by Vyshinsky, found guilty, and sentenced to death or long-term imprisonment, which amounted to the same thing. This was the third of a series of major show trials, the first of which, somewhat ironically, had been held under the auspices of Yagoda. The first was held in August 1936, and resulted in Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and 14 other Old Bolsheviks being sentenced to death. The second, held in January 1937, resulted in Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and 15 others being sentenced to death or long-term imprisonment. Like a three-ring circus, each trial was more flamboyant than its predecessor, with increasingly lurid accusations and confessions about the defendants forming anti-Soviet terrorist groups and for years collaborating
25

with foreign powers and the exiled Trotsky and engaging in terror and sabotage in order to overthrow the Soviet regime and re-establish capitalism, and at the third trial ultimately backdated almost to the October Revolution itself. These three grotesque show trials were merely the public face of a far deeper and broader reign of repression. In between the second and third trials, in June 1937, the Soviet government announced that several senior military leaders, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been found guilty of treason, and had been executed. All the while, the Soviet press was providing long lists of names of officials who had been purged for their alleged involvement in heinous activities against the Soviet state, and plenty more were disappearing without notice. The number of people officially executed during 1937-38 stands at 681 692, although this figure has been considered an underestimate, and it has been estimated that during that time between one million and one and a half million persons were killed by firing squad, physical maltreatment or massive over-work in the care of the NKVD. By 1939, there were 2.9 million prisoners in labour camps and prisons. 1 This was the time of the Great Terror. I: Looking at the Great Terror At the time, the Moscow Trials and the concurrent reign of terror divided opinion in Britain. The adherents of the pro-Soviet lobby the official communist movement and its fellow-travelling allies either happily accepted Moscows reasons for the purges and hailed the show trials as a victory for the socialist state over the forces of counter-revolution,2 or, if they did have a few qualms, very much gave the Soviet regime the benefit of the doubt.3 Some commentators, most notably the left-wing intellectuals Harold Laski and Kingsley Martin, wobbled alarmingly between believing that the defendants, as Laski put it, engaged in acts against the government which were objectively counter-revolutionist, and worrying about the level of repression and lack of free expression in the Soviet Union.4 Some people, whilst unequivocally discounting the allegations and confessions about desiring to return to capitalism, plotting sabotage and collaborating with foreign powers, nonetheless considered that there was a possibility of Trotsky conspiring in a political manner with the defendants with the aim of unseating Stalin, as this was the only way in which opposition to him could be manifested in a country where there was no opportunity for open political discourse.5 There were a few strongly anti-communist

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

Robert Service, A History Twentieth-Century Russia, London, 1997, pp 222-24. See, for example, Dudley Collard, Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, London, 1937; William and Zelda Coates, From Tsardom to the Stalin Constitution, London, 1938; JR Campbell, Soviet Policy and Its Critics, London, 1939. Sidney and Beatrice Webb accepted the trials as genuine, but with little of the sense of triumphalism demonstrated by many other pro-Soviet people. Their mammoth treatise accepted that there were considerable restrictions upon independent thinking, and that the GPUs powers were dangerously wide, but, all in all, the average workman thoroughly believes that it is to the vigilance of the GPU that is due the continued existence of the Soviet state, which would otherwise have been overthrown by innumerable internal and external enemies (S and B Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, London, 1937, p 586). So thats alright then. Harold Laski, A Record of Achievements, New Statesman, 30 July 1938, p 192; Kingsley Martin, The Moscow Purge, New Statesman, 5 September 1936, pp 307-08. John Maynard, Light on the Trotskyist Trials, Political Quarterly, Volume 8, no 3, July 1937, p 94; HC Foxcroft, The Revolution Betrayed, Quarterly Review, January 1938, p 9; Peter Horn, The Lesson of the Moscow Trial, Controversy, March 1937, p 104. 26

observers who accepted the core allegations against the Soviet military leaders, if not all the details,6 presumably on the basis that viewing them as fraudulent undermined the legitimacy of their call for an Anglo-Soviet bloc against the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Most observers at the time, however, were horrified by the purges and the trials, and a wide range of commentators in Britain found the accusations and confessions just too fantastic to be taken seriously. The Spectator averred that the confessions at the second trial were utterly unconvincing in the absence of other evidence,7 whilst the Economist referred to the utterly unconvincing accusations at the third one.8 The veteran socialist Henry Brailsford declared that he had been very sceptical about Soviet justice ever since the Menshevik Trial in 1931, at which it was stated that the Menshevik leader Rafael Abramovich had been plotting in Moscow on the very day when he was actually with Brailsford and other socialists in Brussels.9 It was pointed out that the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, at which Holtzman, a key defendant in the first trial, claimed he had met Trotskys son Leon Sedov in 1932, had in fact been demolished in 1917 and not rebuilt.10 EH Carr sarcastically wrote off both DN Pritt, the British apologist for the trials, and the trials themselves, by calling him a skilful enough advocate to be able to impart some shreds of plausibility to the most hopeless case.11 Writing pungently about the second trial, but with equal relevance to all three, the academic Goronwy Rees, who until then had held a fairly positive attitude towards the Soviet Union, pointed out that the whole case rested upon confessions lacking documentary evidence, that absurdities, contradictions and even impossibilities in the evidence were not challenged, that exact dates were never given, and that confessions were directed by leading questions. He then asked his erstwhile colleagues of the pro-Soviet lobby if this could be anything other than the justice of a police state.12 George Soloveytchik, a Russian liberal exile, drew out the logic of the trials: After all, there are only two possibilities: either all these men are guilty, in which case 20 years of revolutionary triumphs and the successful building of socialism are entirely the work of gangsters, and the Soviet lite which is now being exterminated by its chief is the worst kind of scum the world has yet produced, or else the allegations are not true, and then the indictment of this regime which is compelled to invent such ghastly charges is even more devastating.13 Some people, including George Orwell and the radical novelist Nigel Balchin, found the spectacle of the trials so bizarre that they ridiculed them in a couple of satirical sketches that combined delightful whimsy with devastatingly sharp insights.14
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Henry Wickham Steed, The Anti-Bolshevist Front, International Affairs, Volume 16, no 2, March 1937, p 185; Robert Seton-Watson, Britain and the Dictators: A Survey of Postwar British Policy, Cambridge, 1938, pp 134-36. News of the Week, Spectator, 29 January 1937, pp 153-54. Topics of the Week, Economist, 5 March 1938, p 494. HN Brailsford, Soviet Trials, New Statesman, 31 July 1937, p 181. Friedrich Adler, The Witchcraft Trial in Moscow, London, 1936, pp 15-16. EH Carr, USSR, International Affairs, Volume 16, no 2, March 1937, p 311. Goronwy Rees, The Twilight of Bolshevism, Spectator, 21 May 1937, p 956. George Soloveytchik, Whither Stalin?, Contemporary Review, February 1938, p 153. George Orwell, Impenetrable Mystery, New English Weekly, 9 June 1938, p 169; Nigel Balchin, 27

The Stalinists countered their critics, and they did, on the face of it, have a reasonable case. Why, they asked, with the Soviet Union doing so well, would Stalin stage a series of fake trials, what possible purpose could it have?15 Did not the defendants confess their guilt, unlike Georgi Dimitrov at the Reichstag Fire Trial? 16 Observers repelled by the trials racked their brains attempting to comprehend why they had taken place, and why the defendants had confessed. Stalin was considered to have attained to the last phase of unfettered tyranny, mania or vertigo, that madness of power, and was striking right and left at the tallest poppies.17 Some relied upon clichs, with, for example, the staunch right-winger Charles Petrie proclaiming sagely that the trials proved the adage that revolutions end up devouring their own children,18 an observation that does little to explain the complex issues of power in post-revolutionary societies, whilst a right-wing conservative journal opined that the Russian had a sort of satisfaction in self-abasement that was unknown in the West.19 The rather obvious point was made that the trials indicated a profound crisis within the Soviet regime.20 But what was behind the crisis? One theory held that Stalin was staging the trials in order to shift the blame for economic mismanagement from his regime onto scapegoats. After outlining many instances of major malfunctions, poor management and general incompetence, the Moscow correspondent of the Economist exclaimed: Sabotage explains everything; revelations of gross inefficiency need not cast discredit upon central planning, which, without some such explanation, might come into disrepute. He added that the trials, which were accepted as genuine by most Soviet citizens, could act as a conductor, using the defendants as a focus for popular discontent that might otherwise be directed against the government.21 CLR James considered that Stalin was attempting to crush a burgeoning wave of opposition.22 He added that Stalin was attempting to pre-empt anyone within the party-state apparatus who intended him to meet the same fate as Robespierre, and that by allowing workers to be promoted into jobs vacated by purged managers Stalin could pose as the man of the people.23 Many observers, including Winston Churchill and EH Carr, maintained that Stalin was clearing out the Old Bolsheviks who maintained a commitment to the cause of world revolution,24 and others felt that he was purging the bureaucracy in order to reinforce his position by forestalling the rise of any potential opposition, and clearing out all but the most servile of his

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Trotsky or Notsky, Night and Day, 19 August 1937, p 3. We republished Balchins article in New Interventions, Volume 11, no 4. Campbell, Soviet Policy and Its Critics, pp 248-49. John Strachey, Topic of the Month: The Soviet Trials, Left News, March 1937, 274. Episodes of the Month, National Review, July 1937, pp 8-9. Charles Petrie, Foreign Affairs, English Review, October 1936, p 361. Episodes of the Month, National Review, April 1938, p 433. Notes of the Week, Economist, 22 August 1936, p 345. USSR, Economist, 27 February 1937, p 466. CLR James, World Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, London, 1937, p 367. CLR James, Trotskyism, Controversy, October 1937, p 8. Winston S Churchill, Step by Step, 1936-1939, London, 1939, pp 60-61; EH Carr, Russia, London, 1937, p 6; Rus, Russia at the Crossroads, Contemporary Review, December 1937, pp 690-91; AS Elwell-Sutton, The Russian Terror, New English Weekly, 12 January 1938, pp 268-89; Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International, London, 1939, p 423. 28

retinue.25 Nowadays, in the light of Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the extensive research work carried out in the West, and the vast array of documentary evidence available for study in the Soviet archives, the Great Terror is accepted as an historical fact. Only a few disturbed individuals, kennelled away in the pro-Stalin corner of the left, now promote an unblemished picture of the Stalin era, or claim that the Moscow Trials represented anything other than a cruel parody of a legal process.26 The extent of the Terror has been extensively researched, although the precise number of victims remains a subject of debate. The cruel methods used by Stalins secret police to extract confessions are public knowledge. The discussion today is largely centred upon questions of interpretation, and the same questions that puzzled observers seven decades ago are often repeated: why did the terror take place, and what were the driving forces behind it? Many standard accounts of the Terror consider that there were several crucial formative factors. Firstly, there was the emergence of opposition amongst previously trusted members of the Soviet Communist Party leadership during the First FiveYear Plan, and the subsequent refusal of a majority of the partys leaders to agree to Stalins demand that the Moscow official Maremian Riutin be executed after he was discovered to have written a detailed oppositional programme that called for the removal of Stalin from his post of General Secretary.27 Secondly, there was the implicit snubbing of Stalin at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, where, depending upon ones sources, over 100 or nearly 300 delegates voted against him, 28 and where there was private talk (which no doubt swiftly reached Stalin) of substituting Sergei Kirov for him as the partys General Secretary. Thirdly, Kirov was promoting a call for a more liberal party regime, reconciliation with former oppositionists, and a reduction in state coercion.29 Fourthly, there was the subsequent assassination of Kirov on 1 December 1934, for which many commentators claim that Stalin was responsible,30 or that, if there is no direct proof that he was, of which he took full political advantage.31 Ronald Hingley summed up the former view, stating that Kirovs death removed only one political rival, but paved the way for removing all other
25. 26. Notes of the Week, Economist, 25 December 1937, p 634; Nicholas de Basily, Russia Under Soviet Rule: Twenty Years of Bolshevik Experiment, London, 1938, p 252; Frederick Voigt, Unto Caesar, London, 1938, p 253. Two works demonstrating Stalins adage that paper will take anything thats written on it are Kenneth Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Stevenage, 1988, and Harpal Brar, Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism, London, 1992, which both consider that the Moscow Trials were fair, and deny the existence of the Ukrainian famine and the Gulag. Ronald Hingley claimed that Stalins call to shoot Riutin was to establish a valuable precedent, and give him the right to consign to death without question, let or hindrance, any communist or expelled communist, from the most senior downwards (Ronald Hingley, Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend, London, 1974, p 218). Robert Tucker gave the lower figure, Dmitri Volkogonov the higher one. See Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941, New York, 1992, p 260; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1991, p 200. The Letter of an Old Bolshevik, in Boris Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet lite, London, 1966, pp 29ff. Particularly Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp 275-76; Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder, London, 1989, passim; Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Oxford, 1989, p 345. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, London, 2004, p 315; Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Henchmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him, London, 2004, p 240. 29

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

rivals, actual and potential, numbering several millions, in the Great Terror of 193738.32 The Great Terror followed the tremendous increase in state coercion and control that accompanied Stalins crash industrialisation and collectivisation schemes that started in 1929 with the First Five-Year Plan. There had been something of a lull in the level of state repression and official hysteria after the chaotic events of the initial Five-Year Plan had calmed down, and there were widespread hopes that the worst of the upheavals were over. The public image of the Seventeenth Congress was that of party unity having superseded the deep divisions evident at earlier national gatherings. This, however, was very much a false dawn, as a new bout of state-inspired violence was to wrack the Soviet Union in the wake of Kirovs assassination, one which, it has been argued, had been in Stalins mind for some time; indeed, as early as the latter half of 1932.33 According to Robert Conquests classic account, the Great Terror itself started with the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936, with many preparatory moves having been made since Kirovs death. In September 1936, Stalin announced that the GPU was running four years behind in revealing malcontents, and its head Genrikh Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov. The trial of Radek and Piatakov took place in January 1937, and in February-March of that year the Soviet Communist Partys Central Committee met with the simple agenda of dealing with the matter of Bukharin and Rykov; that is, setting them up for persecution. The centrepiece of this meeting was Stalins blood-curdling address, Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and other Double-Dealers. Here, the General Secretary warned that the more successful the Soviet Union became, the more the capitalist world would wish to destroy it; that Trotskyites were now nothing more than saboteurs and wreckers working on behalf of the countrys enemies; and that members of the Soviet Communist Party were most lax in their appreciation of the dangers posed to the Soviet Union.34 It was a clear signal for the implementation of widespread terror, and by mid-1937, with a purge of the secret police, Stalin was in full control of the machinery of mass repression.35 The period from mid-1937 to late 1938, the Yezhovshchina, was the full-blown Terror, marked most publicly by the grotesque third Moscow Trial in March 1938. The Terror affected practically every corner of the Soviet regime. The partys top and middle cadre, by then mostly loyal to the general Stalinist line, was purged, often with the lower echelons whipping up a witch-hunt atmosphere against them. The military leadership and industrial management structures were particularly badly hit, as were party leaderships in the non-Russian republics, but no government department escaped, and soon nobody at all was safe as the dragnet descended to the rank-and-file worker and peasant. Brutal interrogation resulted in those arrested implicating others, some people denounced others for personal revenge or in the hopes of obtaining their jobs; few indeed could escape suspicion, few knew who to trust. The personal cost was tremendous, Conquest states that the Terror destroyed
32. 33. 34. 35. Hingley, Joseph Stalin, p 236. Robert Conquest saw the Kirov affair as the key moment on the way to extreme terror (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, London, 1990, p 51). Tucker, Stalin in Power, p 271. See also Hlne Carrre dEncausse, Stalin: Order Through Terror, Harlow, 1981, p 45. JV Stalin, Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other DoubleDealers, Works, Volume 14, London, 1978, pp 241-73. Conquest, The Great Terror, passim. 30

personal confidence between private citizens everywhere. Eventually, towards the end of 1938, the Great Terror was reined in. Yezhov was purged and suffered the fate of many of his victims. The Soviet Union under Stalin remained an extremely repressive state, and millions were incarcerated in labour camps until shortly after Stalins death in 1953. Yezhovs replacement Lavrenty Beria was a particularly vile character who carried on his predecessors style of work until his dismissal and summary execution after Stalins death.36 However, the drawing down of the Great Terror did not mean the end of extreme coercion as a means of governance in the Soviet Union, and the totalitarian aspects of Stalins regime continued until shortly after his death. In his final years, Stalin staged a vicious assault upon the Leningrad party leadership, and it is legitimate to consider that his sharp criticisms of the national party leaders and his anti-Semitic measures of the early 1950s were preliminaries for a new round of mass purges. 37 One cannot be sure that Stalin would not have tried to repeat the Great Terror had his death not intervened. II: Historical Rooting of Stalins Terror That the Soviet Union evolved during Stalins time into a hypertrophied bureaucratic state based upon terror did not come as a surprise to some. Socialism, they claimed, would lead to tyranny, as sure as night follows day. The fear of totalitarianism preceded both the society and the term. In his polemic against Marx, the anarchist Bakunin claimed that any society run under the banner of Marxism would be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic and contemptuous of all regimes. Governing the population economically and politically would be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretend scientists and scholars. 38 Bakunins sentiments were developed or paralleled by certain radicals, not least in Russia, where Jan Wacaw Machajski concluded that socialism represented the seizure of power by the intelligentsia, and the emergence of a new form of exploiting society. 39 Opponents of socialism considered that it would drill and brigade us into a kind of barrack-yard existence, with inspectors exercising an intolerable official despotism, and with the population in time becoming mere automata moved by the allabsorbing and all-directing power of the state.40 For conservatives and libertarians alike, the rise of Stalinism merely confirmed their preconceptions. Many of them have seen Leninism as incipiently or actually totalitarian in outlook, and viewed the Terror as the inevitable consequence of that school of thought. Some observers have claimed that the roots of this totalitarian trend can be found amongst the various strands of thought that emerged during and after the Enlightenment. Robin Blick, a libertarian socialist, considered that Lenin, whilst claiming to stand in the Marxist tradition, harked back to Robespierre, Blanqui and the Russian populists, who, by claiming to be the infallible leadership of the revolutionary masses, adhered to an litist stance towards them.41 The conservative
36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. Ibid, passim. Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, London, 1993, pp 304ff; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, London, 1966, pp 602ff. M Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, London, 1984, p 38. See M Shatz, Jan Wacaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism, Pittsburg, 1989, passim. Nemo, Labour and Luxury: A Reply to Merrie England, London, 1895, p 107. Robin Blick, The Seeds of Evil: Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevik litism, London, 1995, pp 36-53. 31

writer Martin Malia rooted the Bolsheviks opposition to the market a concept that can lead in practice only to the suppression of civil society and all individual autonomy back to pre-Marxian philosophers such as the Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century.42 Some observers have sought the roots of Stalinist totalitarianism in the peculiar historical development of Russia. The conservative historian Adam Ulam stated that Lenins conception of a vanguard party a hierarchical organisation which implied that workers were passive and needed to be driven and controlled by an lite party was heavily influenced by the experience of the Decembrists and the populists, who were forced to work in clandestinity because of the repressive nature of Tsarism. He considered that the response of Nicholas I to the Decembrist uprising in 1825 sowed the seeds of totalitarianism, and resulted in Russia becoming something more approximating the modern police state, with the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery being the lineal ancestor and prototype of the notorious institutions of secret police in Russia. Moreover, he added that the revolutionary movement was to develop strong traits of psychological resemblance to the secret police: an inquisitorial spirit, constant search for treason or deviation, and contempt for legal norms and rules.43 This last point is important, because Stalins Great Terror, he declared, bred upon communist semantics: terms like class war, class justice, enemy of the people, all of which encouraged a frame of mind in which individual guilt or innocence was the consequence not of facts but of political and social imperatives of the moment.44 Merle Fainsod posited the basis for Stalinism in Lenins concept of the revolutionary party. He noted various factors, in particular the Bolsheviks absolutism of the party line, drive for total power, litism, highly centralised leadership, intolerance of disagreement and compromise, manipulatory attitude toward mass organisation, and subordination of means to ends. All this implemented the germinating conception of the monolithic and totalitarian party. Although Lenin recognised that differences of opinion in the party were inevitable, and rarely implemented the last resort of expulsion from the party, he left precedents that permitted the totalitarianisation of the party to go ahead after his death.45 Some left-wing critics of Bolshevism have also rooted the repressive nature of Stalinism in Lenins conception of the party and its relationship with the working class, and in the consequences of attempting to move towards building socialism in a backward country. During the 1930s, Karl Kautsky wrote that Lenins conception of a clandestine party led to his recommending a powerful dictatorial leadership that would demand that the working class subordinate itself to it. This would lead to the intellectual impoverishment of the party as members accepted uncritically its outlook, the inability of the party to work with other socialist currents, and the viewing of them as enemies, against whom any manoeuvres were acceptable. The Bolsheviks refusal to work with other socialist currents after 1917 inevitably led to rule by terror, which was greatly exacerbated by their utopian attempts to build a socialist society in a backward country.46
42. 43. 44. 45. 46. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, New York, 1994, pp 186, 225. Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, London, 1973, pp 37-38, 236-37, 247. Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and his Era, New York, 1973, p 413. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, Cambridge, 1953, pp 47, 138. Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy Versus Communism, New York, 1946, pp 48-66. 32

These concepts of the inevitability of Stalinist totalitarianism have been strongly challenged by various commentators who have taken a radically different standpoint. Not merely have they placed far more emphasis upon conditions that existed and events that took place after the October Revolution to explain the rise of Stalinism, but have also argued that Stalinism was not the logical outcome of either Bolshevism47 or the events during the early years of the Soviet regime. 48 In an analysis no doubt familiar to readers of this magazine, Trotsky considered that the isolation of the Soviet republic in a backward, war-ravaged country meant that the building of a fully socialist society was impossible within its boundaries, although certain moves could be made in a socialist direction, and that the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath, with the exhaustion of the working class and the absorption of the Communist Party into the state apparatus, resulted in the rise of the Soviet party-state apparatus during the 1920s into a privileged stratum of society and eventually a ruling lite, which was personified by Stalin. 49 However, Trotsky also pointed to characteristics of Russian society prior to 1917 that impacted upon Bolshevism and which subsequently assisted the rise of Stalinism. He noted that in a country with a backward and scattered working class, and in which politics were clandestine, a centralised party was essential. This led to the ascendancy of the young revolutionary bureaucrat, the committee man, within workers parties and over the working class. Stalin was not just a classic case of such a person: Devoid of personal qualifications for directly influencing the masses, he clung with redoubled tenacity to the political machine. In time to come his blind loyalty to the party machine was to develop with extraordinary force; the committee man became the super-machine man, the partys General Secretary, the very personification of the bureaucracy and its peerless leader.50 Nonetheless, this was not by any means the main reason why Stalin ended up where he did. Post-1917 events, and particularly the Civil War, were of key importance: The three years of Civil War laid an indelible impress on the Soviet government itself by virtue of the fact that very many of the administrators, a considerable layer of them, had become accustomed to command and demand unconditional submission to their orders. There is no doubt that Stalin, like many others, was moulded by the environment and circumstances of the Civil War, along with the entire group that later helped

47. 48.

49. 50.

For a thorough debunking of the usual myths surrounding Lenin and the Bolshevik party, see Lars T Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context, Leiden, 2005. Hannah Arendts analysis of totalitarianism is more akin to this school of thought in that she claimed that whilst Bolshevism was dictatorial, its one-party rule would not necessarily have led to totalitarianism. She saw Stalin introducing a totalitarian form of rule as a policy o ption, in order to destroy the existing social classes (the peasantry, working class and b ureaucracy), and to fabricate an atomised and structureless mass. In other words, Stalins socio-economic policies were predetermined by his desire for a totalitarian society (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, London, 1986, pp 319-22). This is most comprehensively elaborated in LD Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, London, 1937. LD Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, New York, 1967, p 61. 33

him to establish his personal dictatorship51 Trotsky did not think that Stalins ascendancy during the first decade or so of the Soviet regime was a narrow quest for personal power, or even that he was conscious of the social forces at play which he represented. To be sure, he had a relentless itch for domination over others; nonetheless, he was unaware of the social significance of the process of bureaucratisation, deaf and blind to the formation of a whole privileged caste welded together by the bond of honour among thieves, by their common interest as privileged exploiters of the whole body politic, and by their ever-growing remoteness from the people.52 Furthermore: If Stalin could have foreseen at the very beginning where his fight against Trotskyism would lead, he undoubtedly would have stopped short, in spite of the prospect of victory over all his opponents. But he did not foresee anything.53 This admission, made after Stalins totalitarian regime had shown its appalling potential in full, demonstrates that Trotsky considered that even with the decline of the revolutionary forces in the Soviet Union during the early 1920s, the rise of Stalinism in the specific manner in which it arose was not inevitable. In some respects, the analysis elaborated by the dissident Soviet Marxist Roy Medvedev followed that of Trotsky, in that he considered that Stalins ascent to power was facilitated by certain historical features of Russian society, and by decisions made and practices followed by the Bolsheviks once they were in power and which were forced upon them by the onerous objective conditions that confronted them. Medvedev considered that the extremely difficult position of the Soviet republic during the Civil War forced the Bolsheviks to establish a political monopoly and the strict centralisation of society, but felt that these were seriously problematic, as they led to an end to open public discussion, to freedom of opinion and criticism, a stifling of local initiative and individual creativity, and contributed to the prolongation and deepening of mistakes by the partys leaders. However much these factors were temporary measures to enable the regime to survive a very difficult period, such necessary evils came to be seen by many as normal, as war and terror create not only habits but also institutions, which are even harder to eliminate. Many Bolsheviks acquired the habit of commanding, of administration by fiat, ignoring the opinion of the masses, whilst new recruits to Soviet officialdom, such as the former Menshevik Vyshinsky, were often unprincipled careerists. Even those who were not seduced by the privileges and power of authority found difficulty in moving from the authoritarian atmosphere of Civil War leadership into a frame of mind more suited to complex educational work. The low level of culture and education and weak democratic traditions in Russia, along with the exhaustion of the working class and the general disruption caused by the Civil War which led to the decline of popular institutions that could exert control over the regime, did much to assist the rise of the Communist Party over the working class and society in general. Such

51. 52. 53.

Ibid, pp 384-85. Ibid, p 386. Ibid, p 393. 34

were the objective and subjective factors that permitted the rise of Stalinism.54 There is also the question, raised by some commentators, of the main political influence upon the Bolsheviks; that is to say, the paternalistic Marxism of the Second International. Although challenged in 1917, especially in Lenins writings, the Bolsheviks were ultimately unable to break from it, as can be seen in the measures that they implemented which resulted in the ascendancy of the Soviet Communist Party above the working class.55 Trotsky and those who follow his analysis considered that the programme of the Left Opposition provided a superior alternative to that promoted by Stalin. Medvedev, along with Moshe Lewin and Stephen Cohen, considered that the programme evolved by Bukharin would have provided another better alternative to Stalinism.56 These positive sentiments stand in contrast to the critics of Bolshevism cited above who considered that Stalinism was the ineluctable consequence of the Bolsheviks seizing of power in 1917. III: Why the Terror? Commentators have largely agreed that one reason why Stalin embarked upon his campaign of terror was in order to forestall the rise of any potential political opposition. Looking at the assault upon the higher echelons of the Communist Party, Isaac Deutscher declared that Stalin wanted to destroy the men who represented the potentiality of alternative government, and indeed perhaps not of one but of several alternative governments.57 Alan Bullock stated that Stalin had come to view with the greatest suspicion those in the party leadership who had rallied to him in the late 1920s, but who still considered themselves partners rather than minions and held their own opinions.58 Medvedev added that during the early 1930s there was a degree of estrangement developing between Stalin and a significant portion of veteran cadre elements who had not been oppositionists.59 Similarly, the assault on the military has been seen as destroying a focus of potential opposition;60 indeed, Deutscher went so far as to declare that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were actually engaged in a plot to overthrow Stalin,61 although this is a view that has been largely discounted.62 The three Moscow Trials have been regarded as a means of destroying the very character and integrity of potential oppositionists. Deutscher stated that had the defendants been presented as being merely politically opposed to Stalin, they may have been seen as martyrs for a good cause. Convicted as traitors, Stalin could be sure that their execution would provoke no dangerous revulsion, and he would be
54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp 614-720. This is touched on in respect of the Bolsheviks attitude towards workers control in SA Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-18, Cambridge, 1986, pp 259ff. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp 203-04; Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers, London, 1975, passim; Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, Oxford, 1980, passim. Deutscher, Stalin, p 372. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, London, 1993, p 386. See also Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, pp 250ff. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p 328. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism, Cambridge, 1956, p 76. Deutscher, Stalin, pp 375-76. For example, Conquest, The Great Terror, p 186. 35

looked upon, especially by the young and uninformed generation, as the saviour of the country.63 The show trials have also been seen as a means of providing a mobilisation narrative for the broader campaign of repression that Stalin intended to launch. William Chase noted that by pointing to a threat posed by not immediately identifiable double-dealers, Stalin empowered local actors to ferret them out, and the local secret police would obtain confessions that proved their duplicity. The big trials thus played a crucial role in defining, and circumscribing, political attitudes and behaviours in the late 1930s.64 Moving to the more general terror, Medvedev stated that Stalin wished to accumulate political capital by means of deliberately forcing tension in the country to silence his critics. He sought to terrorise the party and the people, to create an emergency situation, thereby to allow himself, the warrior and saviour of the state, to concentrate more power in his own hands; he also needed to blame enemies of the people for the political and economic difficulties that still existed in the Soviet Union,65 points accepted by other writers.66 Robert Services analysis was unusual as it gave little significance to the events at the Seventeenth Party Congress, and placed considerably more emphasis upon discontent within the country as a whole. He considered that after the fraught experience of the First Five-Year Plan, there was a surge of resentment throughout society at the effects of Stalins policies: peasants who had suffered badly during collectivisation; workers living and working in worsened conditions; intellectuals, experts and managers chafing against harassment; religious and national groups angry at their treatment; defeated oppositionists and former members of outlawed political parties bridling against the regimes strictures: There was plenty of human material across the USSR which could, if conditions changed, be diverted into a coup against his Politbureau.67 However, other commentators have downplayed the actual opposition that Stalin faced. Deutscher, for example, considered that although domestic discontent definitely existed, it was too amorphous to constitute any immediate threat to his position, and the political opposition was pulverised, downtrodden, incapable of action.68 The reasons for the frightful dimensions of the Terror have been probed. Deutscher recognised that once put into motion, such repression would of necessity become pervasive and self-perpetuating: He [Stalin] had set out to destroy the men capable of forming an alternative government. But each of those men had behind him long years of service, in the course of which he had trained and promoted administrators and officers and made many friends. Stalin could not be sure that avengers of his victims would not rise from the ranks of the followers. Having destroyed the first team of potential leaders of an alternative gov63. 64. 65. 66. Deutscher, Stalin, p 374. See also Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, p 547. William Chase, Stalin as Producer: The Moscow Show Trials and the Construction of Mortal Threats, in Sara Davies and James Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge, 2005, p 247. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp 273, 389. Volkogonov, Stalin, pp 209, 212. Roberta Manning considered that the Terror was in response to severe economic difficulties emerging from the Five-Year Plans, and in turn exacerbated them (Roberta Manning, The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936-1940 and the Great Purges, in JA Getty and RT Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge, 1993, pp 116-41. See also Alec Nove, Stalinism and After, London, 1981, p 61. Service, Stalin, pp 313-16. Deutscher, Stalin, p 372. 36

67. 68.

ernment, he could not spare the second, the third, the fourth, and the nth teams.69 In short, once the Terror started, its possible extent could not be determined, as it would take on a dynamic of its own so long as the arrests, interrogations and denunciations mounted, and so long as Stalin and his closest allies were happy to sign the death warrants and refuse to bring it to a halt. So why was the Great Terror brought to a close? Conquest argued that the Terror, which hit practically every sector of Soviet society, was wound down because the extreme limits had been reached, and it could not have continued without inflicting irreparable damage on the country: the secret police could not ignore someone against whom allegations had been made; and when he or she denounced others under interrogation, more arrests would have to follow: At the rate arrests were going, practically all the urban population would have been implicated within a few months.70 Service stated that Stalin and his clique had come close to demolishing the state itself: The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSRs defences in a period of intense international tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the peoples commissariats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative coordination. This extreme destabilisation endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalins career would be at an end.71 Nevertheless, the very extent of the repression did bring about what, according to various commentators, was Stalins main intention for launching the Terror: to remould the Soviet lite so that it would be in his image and firmly under his personal control; the creation of a regime that represented a radical break from its predecessor, whilst still promoting Stalin as the sole legitimate heir of the October Revolution.72 Hingley drew out the functional rationale of the Terror that existed beneath all the chaos and destruction: Driven by an inner urge to make certainty doubly certain, and to maximise dominion which had long seemed total to all save himself, while insuring against all possible threats to his person and system, the dictator could never rest easy so long as there remained, in the length and breadth of his realm, any established and cohesive institution however thoroughly Stalinised which might conceivably turn against its creator. Reconstructing, refreshing and reforming successive hierarchies in order to destroy existing vested interests, he found himself constantly impelled to turn and rend each newly arising organisation even as it appeared to attain some degree of cohesion. From the Politbureau down to the individual family all human associations must be prevented from acquiring sta69. 70. 71. 72. Ibid, p 377. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp 289, 433. Service, A History Twentieth-Century Russia, pp 225-26. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, pp 550-01; Conquest, The Great Terror, pp 445ff; Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp 319ff, 526ff. 37

bility and esprit de corps.73 During the 1980s, the traditional view of the Great Terror started to come under sustained criticism from revisionist historians. The most noted of this school, J Arch Getty, considered that the whole process of terror in the 1930s was far less coordinated than normally accepted, and he rejected the related and incremental view of the purges, and the idea that Stalin had any terroristic grand design. He viewed the Soviet leadership around Stalin as a fractious group which encompassed a wide range of ideas on many issues, and not as a monolithic bunch of yes-men. In many cases, he declared, Stalin took a more moderate line than, say, Molotov on industrialisation, or arbitrated between opposing views. He considered that the party-state apparatus was not monolithic, as it was untrained and uneducated. The Terror itself was uneven and uncoordinated, confused and chaotic.74 Getty shifted the responsibility for the Terror to some degree from Stalin. Although Stalin took ultimate responsibility, not least in unleashing Yezhov, a determining factor was that Yezhovs manic search for wreckers coincided with the party-revival campaign fronted by Zhdanov in mid-1937. The Yezhovshchina had an anti-leadership, anti-bureaucracy basis, in that the top leadership encouraged the lower echelons of the party to attack their superiors, but because criticism became conflated with wrecking, Zhdanovs attempts to blow a democratising wind through the party turned into uncoordinated chaos and confusion, with all the bureaucratic factions and interest groups settling old scores.75 Unlike the totalitarian school, which has customarily seen the Terror as having forced Soviet society into conformity with a new generation of politically more reliable functionaries placed in commanding positions,76 Getty stated that the party after the Terror was no better behaved and obedient than before. There was a shortage of trained and educated cadres, and, because of the way that rank-and-file members had acted against their superiors, there was no way of guaranteeing their obedience to party secretaries in the future.77 IV: Stalins Character Many observers have attached considerable importance to Stalins malign character,78 and it cannot be denied that he came from a dysfunctional family background, and that many of the character traits that he demonstrated during the Great Terror could be detected in a nascent form when one looks at his earlier years. The impact of the brutal beatings by his father, the primitive cultural ambience of the Caucasus with its blood-feuds, the claustrophobic and repressive atmosphere of the seminary with its intrigue, spying and learning by rote: all this conspired to produce a heavily
73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. Hingley, Joseph Stalin, p 286. See also Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, p 373; Service, Stalin, p 370. JA Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, Cambridge, 1985, pp 3, 12, 130ff, 176ff, 201ff. Ibid, pp 171ff. Lionel Kochan and John Keep, The Making of Modern Russia: From Kiev Rus to the Collapse of the Soviet Union, London, 1987, p 396. Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges, pp 194-95. His characteristics, however, have been downplayed. Ulam saw him as an archetypal Bolshevik, a typical product of Leninism, but without those internal contradictions and vestiges of Western socialist traditions that never left Lenin. Presumably this is what he meant when he poked fun at Lenin for having created only a semi-totalitarian apparatus (Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, pp 721, 728). 38

twisted character. Stalin made no effort to transcend his violent and culturally retarded background, and all the congealed muck of the past clung to him. The police in Georgia were known to concoct charges, falsify statements, terrorise and threaten people and use hearsay reports of secret agents, and, as Trotsky noted, such methods must have left a lasting impression on Stalin, as they were employed on a vastly greater scale three decades later.79 With his first-hand experience of the man, Trotsky saw him as sadistic, callous and spiteful, with his own five-year plan and even 10year plan of revenge.80 Bullock pointed out that Stalin had a tendency of seeing treachery and conspiracy where others saw inefficiency and muddle.81 Within the revolutionary movement, he was suspected and even accused of betraying party comrades to the secret police, and, as Trotsky declared: Such things have never been told about anyone else!82 Stalin has even been accused of not being a genuine revolutionary at all: Medvedev reckoned that he was a crude power-seeker from the start. He was one of the many historical examples of unstable and dishonourable people who join a revolutionary movement and later degenerate into tyrants or servants of tyrants, the sort of people who join it for personal reasons, sometimes with rather ulterior motives, hoping to occupy a better position in the new society than they had in the old one. Altogether, he considered: It was not out of love for suffering humanity that Stalin came to socialism and the revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks because of his ambition and lust for power.83 Service made an important point that Stalin was in his element when functioning in a chaotic environment: The trick he perfected in the Civil War had been the concoction of an atmosphere of suspicion and fanaticism unrestrained by moral scruple. He issued general objectives without specifying how they were to be attained. His supreme stipulation was that the objectives would be met; and if the measures involved heads being broken, he did not mind. While the world spun wildly, Stalin alone stayed tranquil and unmoved.84 As Stalin climbed his way to the very top, the unpleasant aspects of his character and conduct were magnified, and his actions became increasingly less those of a political leader and more akin to those of a successful gangster. This is very much evident in respect of his relations with his henchmen, and in particular those closest to him, who resembled nothing more than a gangsters cronies, people who were, in Walter Laqueurs words, carefully handpicked yes-men: They were neither very clever nor (with one or two exceptions) very stupid. They could be trusted blindly to obey him. Like medieval retainers, they owed all they had to the seigneur, who could withdraw his patronage at any moment and thus

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

Trotsky, Stalin, p 36. Ibid, p 415. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, p 105. He added that Stalin had an instinctive grasp of how administrative could be transmuted into political power (ibid, p 118); and George Kennan took this further, stating that for Stalin no political issue was ever without its personal implications (George Kennan, Introduction, in Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet lite, p xvii). Trotsky, Stalin, p 116. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp 596, 600. Service, Stalin, p 338. 39

cause their immediate downfall. They were, without exception, either weak or dishonest; no one of elementary decency would have lasted a day in such surroundings. There was no room for friendship or even sincere cooperation under the circumstances, for they could not trust each other.85 Such a venal retinue was eminently suitable for the style of government that Stalin was intending to introduce during the mid-1930s; their characteristics made them ideal for the tasks which he required of them. Robert Tucker has provided us with an intricate psychological portrait of Stalin. He saw him as an extremely ambitious man whose sense of insecurity was aroused by his unconscious and unregistered recognition that his self-idealised character as a revolutionary indeed, a Lenin II did not match up to reality, as he was overshadowed by many other leading Bolsheviks. His insecurity developed into a strong if suppressed sense of self-hatred, which was then projected onto his rivals in the party leadership. Refusing to accept anything that detracted from this imagined self-image, he accused his rivals of those very same defects. He required constant affirmation of his self-image hence his promotion of those willing to flatter him, such as Beria and his undying hatred for those who criticised him, whom he saw as vilifying him on a personal level. As he viewed criticism not merely as a personal slight, but as an attack upon the very Soviet system, which by the late 1920s he had come to feel he personified that is to say, an attack from his class enemies this enabled him to avoid analysing his opponents viewpoints, and he thereby warded off any need to confront himself in a self-questioning way and accept the painful possibility that these attitudes had some foundation.86 Tucker noted an aspect of Stalins character that would have great significance in the following decade: Owing to the habit of projecting his unacceptable traits and selfaccusations upon others, Stalins accusations were often very selfrevelatory. The villain-image of the enemy became a sort of dumpingground for the rejected evil Stalin. The personal and political shortcomings, biographical blemishes, lapses, failures, mistakes, scandals all the facts and memories that Stalin had to repress because there was no place for them in the genialny [genius] Stalin could be emptied into his image of the enemy and by this means mentally projected onto real persons in the environment whom he identified as enemies.87 Tucker stated that Stalin was desperate to equal Lenin, and craved to implement his own October the wholesale modernising of Russia which, during the initial Five-Year Plans, took on a national-messianic character, harking back to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Having risen to the top and implemented his October, he was horrified to discover that there was opposition amongst his own cohort, which he recognised as their impugning of his self-idealisation. As before, his selfhatred became projected onto others, and he expressed his own feelings as those of others. Once again, he projected his actions onto others: he blamed the assassination of Kirov on his defeated rivals. He demanded confessions, as he was surrounded by
85. 86. 87. Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations, London, 1990, pp 164-65. Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality, London, 1974, pp 429ff. Ibid, pp 459-60. 40

secretly hostile people, and he needed reassurance that he was right. He felt that they were against him because he was a leader of genius. His notorious Short Course history of the party presented his fictitious biography writ large in the partys history, and served to help purge those who did not believe in the ideal Stalin, whose memories did not coincide with its fictional nature. The sheer numbers of these people guaranteed that Stalins purge would be vast in scope.88 Tucker considered that Stalins party colleagues were to some degree or another aware of his malign characteristics, but, because of their Marxian outlook which did not take much notice of the question of an individuals personality, downplayed them, as what mainly mattered about a comrade was not his personality but his political beliefs, his ideological commitment, the rightness or wrongness of his positions in party councils.89 Lenin, Tucker claimed, somewhat belatedly came to recognise that Stalins character was of great importance, but neither he nor others who later arrived at the same realisation succeeded in supporting this insight with anything like an adequate analysis of Stalins character. Trotsky merely saw him as a personification of the Thermidorean bureaucracy, that his unpleasant personal traits were but characteristics of the new ruling stratum.90 V: Stalinism as a Socio-Economic Formation Despite the official pronouncements that the Soviet economy was planned, over the years a few observers have recognised that this was not the case for example, in 1940, the former US fellow-traveller Eugene Lyons wrote that the ostensible plan was in truth a gargantuan chaos, without the slightest harmony of its parts91 and, as we have seen, some have stated that the Terror was partly in response to the chaotic process of crash industrialisation. An economic rationale for the Terror has been claimed. Hlne Carrre dEncausse considered that the rapid industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan presupposed the passage of the whole productive apparatus into state control, and because this necessitated the integration of the entire life of the Soviet Union into the plan, the totalitarian character of society was inevitable.92 During the height of the Terror, the free-market economist Frederick Hayek emphasised that the repressive nature of the Soviet system was a direct and logical result of the quest for a collectivist society. Centralised planning, he declaimed, presupposed complete agreement throughout society upon social aims, and this re-

88.

89.

90. 91. 92.

Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp 3ff, 64, 162ff, 372ff, 475ff, 536ff. Apropos the projection of Stalins own guilt, Conquest stated that Vyshinskys charges [at the Moscow Trials], transferred from the innocent Zinoviev and Piatakov to the guilty Stalin, may indeed seem to have a certain appropriateness. (Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder, p 139) Vyshinsky had accused the two defendants of being hypocritical in their demonstrations of mourning for Kirov. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, p 421. Marxism does not discount the matter of personality; however, the Bolsheviks were raised on Plekhanovs brand of it, which certainly does. See his On the Question of the Individuals Role in History, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 2, Moscow, 1976, pp 283-315. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, p 422. Indeed, to the end Trotsky played down the matter of Stalins character: Special historical circumstances were to invest these essentially secondary attributes with primary significance. (Trotsky, Stalin, p 54, my emphasis) Eugene Lyons, Stalin: Czar of all the Russians, London, 1940, p 167. Carrre dEncausse, Stalin, pp 15-16. Service stated that the Terror was Stalins applying to the judicial system what he had already developed for the economic system: Just as waste occurred in industrial production, so unnecessary human losses could be accepted in the Great Terror. (Service, Stalin, p 370) 41

quired an ideological consensus around a detailed code of values, which itself necessitated the dictatorial direction of society, as no alternative ideas could be countenanced. Information had to be controlled, and any government attempting to plan the economy necessarily had to be totalitarian. Moreover, he stated: Every doubt in the rightness of the ends aimed at or the methods adopted is apt to diminish loyalty and enthusiasm and must therefore be treated as sabotage. The creation and enforcement of the common creed and of the belief in the supreme wisdom of the ruler becomes an indispensable instrument for the success of the planned system. The ruthless use of all potential instruments of propaganda and the suppression of every expression of dissent is not an accidental accompaniment of a centrally-directed system it is an essential part of it.93 Nevertheless, mainstream commentators usually steer clear of elaborating a theoretical analysis of the Stalinist socio-economic formation, and the task has customarily fallen to left-wingers who wish both to explain the emergence of Stalinism and to dissociate it from the concept of socialism. However, like many of the totalitarian and revisionist schools, not a few of them have proved unable to explain the sheer intensity and extent of the Terror. Although Trotsky was willing to state that by the late 1930s the repression in the Soviet Union was worse than in the fascist states,94 he considered that the rationale for Stalins purges was essentially superstructural. Independent thought, he wrote in 1938, would inevitably become directed against the [ruling] bureaucracy, against its privileges, against its ignorance and its arbitrary rule: Herein is to be found the explanation for the fact that the purge, having started with the party, penetrated later into all spheres of social life without exception. He recognised that a consumers and producers democracy was the one and only conceivable mechanism for preparing the socialist system of economy and realising it in life. Yet he could still consider that the Soviet economic system was at root healthy, and despite the mismanagement of the bureaucracy, the technical premise of socialism had taken on an enormous step forward in the Soviet Union.95 Why the Terror became so all-pervasive remains a mystery. The same problem confronted those who considered that the Soviet Union represented a form of capitalism. The council communist Paul Mattick, who claimed that the Bolsheviks were, as a minority, forced to rule in a dictatorial manner, and, because of the pre-capitalist nature of Tsarist Russia, merely ushered in a state capitalist regime, could not explain why he considered their regime to be totalitarian.96 Tony Cliff, who followed the Trotskyist view that Stalinism arose out of the national involution of the Russian Revolution, stated that the totalitarian nature of Stalinism sprang from the realisation of the bureaucracy that its rule was rooted in a temporary and transient concatenation of national and international circumstances, in oth93. 94. 95. 96. FA von Hayek, Freedom and the Economic System, Contemporary Review, April 1938, pp 43539. LD Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution, New York, 1973, p 105. LD Trotsky, Does the Soviet Government Still Follow the Principles Adopted 20 Years Ago?, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38, New York, 1976, pp 126-27, 130. Paul Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?, Armonk, 1983, pp 202ff. 42

er words, because of its sense of insecurity.97 A handful of commentators have attempted to locate the reason for the consistently repressive nature of Stalinist society within the relations of production of the Soviet socio-economic formation. Don Filtzer showed that as the regime eliminated the market and refused to contemplate any form of democratic control of production and distribution by the producers and consumers, it had no systematic regulator of economic relations to achieve proportionality between the different units of the economic organism, and could only attempt to organise production through the application of coercion. However, the specific nature of repression the atomisation of society precluded the efficient running of the production process, and because of a permanent labour shortage, the workers were able to exert some negative control over the work process through producing shoddy goods. Enterprise managers were compelled to accept this, and the regime was thus unable either to calculate what had been produced, or to draw up accurate production plans. Far from being planned, the Soviet economy was chaotic, with all these problems being reproduced as a matter of course at all levels of production.98 Hillel Ticktin extended this analysis into the question of the Terror itself. As the whole industrial management structure was obliged to accept the poor performance of the workers, ignore central directives, and falsify production figures, etc, the Soviet lite responded by increasing centralised command in an attempt to control the economy. But intensified centralisation did not work: the more centralised the system, the more anarchic it became, as total control is not possible. 99 Suzi Weissman pointed to a fundamental contradiction in the system: The state has political control and commands the development of the economy; but cannot control nor predict with accuracy the results of its policies, and in attempting to assert control has persistently tightened its grip, while the object (to control labour and hence the system) slips further from its grasp.100 She added that the logic of the system was to go towards total control, but as this was impossible, it was thrashing around, even killing itself, with the Terror running amuck.101 The important point made by both Ticktin and Weissman is that terror was a systemic feature of the Soviet socio-economic system during Stalins time precisely because totalitarian rule was unable to control the labour process.102 VI: Conclusion When considering the Great Terror, one must ask whether it was inevitable. Were the horrors of the late 1930s the inevitable result of Bolshevism, or of the Soviet system as it evolved after 1917, or of Stalins disturbed personality or of one or other
97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, London, 1974, p 254. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation, London, 1986, pp 33, 116ff, 254ff. Hillel Ticktin, The Political-Economic Nature of the Purges, Critique, no 27, 1995, p 138. Susan Weissman, The Role of Purges and Terror in the Formation of the USSR, Critique, no 27, 1995, p 146. Ibid, p 153. Both Ticktin and Weissman emphasise that this applies only to the formative stages of the Stalinist system, that is, the 1930s and the immediate postwar reconstruction period. The system could run without recourse to terror once it had achieved maturity after Stalins death, but the centre was never able properly to plan the economy and thereby effectively to manage society. 43

combination of these factors? For the totalitarian school, the Great Terror was pretty much inevitable: an unbroken thread ran from Lenins What Is To Be Done? to the Moscow Trials and the massive purges. For other commentators, the course of history was far less simplistic: Stalins terror was one of several different possible outcomes. The totalitarian school has always adhered to a hopelessly one-sided view of Leninism, and has been obliged either to ignore its democratic aspects for example, Lenins State and Revolution, the open nature of the party in 1917, and its liberatory aspirations or write them off as demagogic deceit. There were alternatives to Stalinism; had Stalin been effectively opposed during the 1920s by the communist forces in the Soviet Union, a different form of Soviet society would have developed, one that would have avoided the horrors of Stalinism. It would not have been socialist; but it would have been less oppressive and less chaotic, and one in which a socialist consciousness could hopefully have survived and been revived to some degree or another. The arguments put forward by the revisionist school have been soundly dealt with, including by commentators who remain critical of the totalitarian theories.103 If, on the one hand, the revisionists were obliged if rather reluctantly to admit that Stalin was ultimately in charge of the Terror, Getty, on the other, was too willing to accept at face value Zhdanovs democratic verbiage. Such a risible attempt to discover a democratic kernel in the antics of one of Stalins most appalling bureaucrats seems to this writer to be reminiscent of the apologies for the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China, where Maos use of junior cadres Red Guards in a bureaucratic dogfight against his lite rivals who were critical of his adventurist approach in the Great Leap Forward, was given a revolutionary faade. The majority of analysts, be they of the totalitarian school or their revisionist rivals, or indeed of other trends of thought, have operated largely on the level of politics, that is to say, they have customarily considered that political decisions were the determining factor behind the repressive nature of the Soviet socio-economic formation, and their analyses thus remain essentially on the superstructural level. A few, more or less restricted to free marketeers and certain Marxists, have the distinct advantage in that they have rooted the coercive nature of Stalinism in the extinguishing of the market during the First Five-Year Plan and the ensuing inability of the Soviet lite effectively to plan the economy. However, whilst this analysis is certainly convincing in respect of an overall view of Stalinism, it is unable fully to explain the extent and peculiarities of the Terror. Once the Soviet socio-economic formation had been erected by the mid-1930s, was the Great Terror inevitable, or did Stalins peculiar character exert a crucial influence upon developments? In a society, such as the Soviet Union had rapidly become during the 1930s, in which relations of power are increasingly focussed and mediated through one person, the characteristics of that individual are of great importance. To be sure, it was no accident that Stalin led and personified the process of bureaucratisation during the 1920s. Trotskys insights were correct here. Nevertheless, important as it was, Stalins character was not the determining factor in this process, and it ultimately only determined the form in which it developed up to the mid-1930s. Had Stalin met with a fatal accident at the start of the First Five-Year Plan

103.

For example, Stephen Cohen, Stalins Terror as Social History, Russian Review, Volume 45, no 4, October 1986, pp 378-84; Donald Filtzer, The Destiny of a Revolution, Against the Current, March-April 1998, p 30. 44

in 1929, and the Soviet Union had been led by, say, Molotov, Kaganovich or one or other of Stalins cronies, or even by one of the more independently-minded supporters of Stalins ideas, such as Kirov or Ordzhonikidze, would such a person have acted in a fundamentally different manner during that period? This is unlikely, as there was a fundamental agreement amongst them in respect of implementing the plan, and they were all willing to countenance the huge rise in state coercion that was necessary for its implementation. However, the nature of Stalins character is of vital importance after then. By the mid-1930s, when political power in the Soviet Union was focussed essentially through Stalin, he was in a position to put into practice his personal ambitions, ambitions that had been greatly magnified and intensified by the experiences of the preceding years. The Stalin of 1934 was considerably more vengeful and suspicious than the Stalin of 1929, let alone that of 1924 and before that. The Great Terror was an attempt by Stalin to discipline the Soviet lite, in order to force it to exert control over a society that was essentially uncontrollable because the core of that society the economic process was governed by neither the market nor a genuine plan. The system was irrational, but the response of the Stalin to the problems facing it was to impose an even more irrational solution. No matter how much the centre attempted to impose its control over society, indeed, precisely because the centre attempted to impose its control over this vast process, efficient regulation eluded it. In accordance with his deeply disturbed character, Stalin then attempted to overcome this lack of control through an ever-increasing level and ever-widening range of coercion that eventually engulfed the whole of Soviet society during the Great Terror, and, running out of control itself, threatened the very existence of the society before it was reined in. Even within the context of an irrational society, the Great Terror was utterly irrational. The terror that accompanied the First Five-Year Plan did have, if only on its own terms, some sort of logical basis; the Great Terror served no purpose whatsoever beyond securing Stalins personal and political ascendancy. The impact was disastrous: hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who posed no threat to the centre were killed and millions incarcerated, the running of the whole country was severely disrupted, and the effects of the military purge nearly led to the defeat of the Soviet regime when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941. And even Stalins attempt to create an obedient lite failed. Opposition, however loyal and constructive, could not be tolerated, yet the emergence of differing ideas for dealing with the myriad problems that society threw up could not be avoided. In view of this, can one be surprised that Stalin appears to have been intending to stage another great purge in the early 1950s? Once the initial stages of the new Soviet socio-economic formation had been completed with the conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan, a leader with a more balanced personality than Stalin would almost certainly have refrained from launching the country into such a maelstrom of irrational and harmful mayhem. It is very possible that a different figure at the helm would have attempted to deal with the pressing problems ensuing from the rapid industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation drives in a much less destructive manner. Whilst the chaotic nature of the Soviet socio-economic formation in the mid-1930s would have ensured that any measures of liberalisation would have been initially less extensive than those introduced after Stalins death when the system was at a more mature stage, a gradual process of easing repression would have resulted in much less disruption than that which occurred under the Terror, and would have permitted further liberalisation to have
45

taken place. That the Soviet Union descended into the horrors of the Great Terror and the totalitarian nature of the regime endured for near enough two further decades was very much the result of personal decisions on the part of Stalin, and thus could have been avoided had he been replaced around the time of the Communist Partys Seventeenth Congress in 1934. However, this was not to be. Stalin struck first, and the Great Terror was soon to follow.

Peter Fryer

Freedom of the Individual

This article was first published in Labour Review, August-September 1958. *** We are not communists who want to destroy personal freedom and transform the world into one great barracks or one great sweat-shop. As a matter of fact there are communists who do not care for and want to suppress personal freedom, which in their opinion bars the way to harmony; but we do not want to buy equality at the expense of personal freedom. (Frederick Engels, Kommunistische Zeitschrift, September 1847) Capitalism and Human Nature TO liberals no freedom is higher and more precious than the freedom of the individual. Marxists wholeheartedly agree that it is the individual human being who achieves freedom, and not humanity in general. They agree that society as a whole cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. But they take issue with the use of the watchword of individual liberty in opposition to socialism and socialist planning. For they do not think there is any contradiction between the interests of the individual and the interests of a society whose fundamental aim is the satisfaction of peoples material and cultural needs and the enrichment of their lives. They take the view that only under communism will the individual human being be able to develop his potentialities and abilities to the utmost. Under capitalism the great majority of people have neither leisure, money nor education to develop as all-round human beings. Nor are they encouraged so to foster their individuality. The capitalist system of production, the bourgeois educational system, the barrage of advertising and ready-made culture to which the individual is subjected from the cradle to the grave, are not designed to fan into flame the sparks of talent and creative ability that are possessed by all but a tiny proportion of human beings. They are designed to make competent wage-slaves. Capitalist relations of production the private ownership for private profit of the means of production cannot bring to the individual wage-worker the freedom that comes through leading a full life, a life packed with many-sided activities and giving the fullest scope to every physical and mental aptitude. They block the way to a full life for the exploited. Capitalism devastates human nature, dulls and extinguishes the senses, corrupts and brutalises men as it sucks out profit from their work, rends men into
46

fragments, into half-men, makes labour a burden instead of a joyful and indispensable part of life. It robs men of their heritage of happiness, beauty and knowledge. It takes the warmth and colour out of human relationships and measures every emotion, every delight and every virtue by the yardstick of gold and silver and bits of printed paper and entries in account books.1 The individual is not, and cannot be, free under capitalism because he cannot leap out of the world of the market, the world where everything moral and spiritual is bought and sold for cash. It is a world of universal venality, of cynical self-interest. Human labour power; works of art; knowledge; the very conscience and honour of men; truth itself:2 all become commodities, measured in terms of their market value, accessible to those with money. To the profiteer the object he is buying or selling, its meaning and importance to human beings, are in themselves of little or no importance compared with the objects abstract expression in monetary terms. This barren outlook determines and taints every relationship, not only between man and object, but between man and man. Money becomes a fetish: the cash nexus becomes the only significant bond between people. The questions that matter about a fellow human being are not Is he happy? or Is he hungry? or Is he a good man? but Is he rich? and Can we do business together? and What advantage can I get out of him? Those who have this outlook cannot be said to enjoy life: what they enjoy are deals and transactions and money-making. Life in bourgeois society means making a living. Nor can the wage-worker remain wholly unaffected by this outlook. The very fact that he is forced to sell his labour power, that he must work for someone else in order to live, drains his labour of its sweetness, makes it a dreary burden instead of an essential and beneficial part of living. The life of the individual worker is chopped and divided: there is the part of his life that is not his own, but the bosss, spent in the factory, where the boss is the aristocrat; and there are the looked-forward-to oases of leisure, the time that belongs to the worker himself: The invariable comment when the leaving-off hooter sounds is: Thats the one Ive been waiting for all day! And in the morning when the startingsignal is given they mutter, Roll on the second one! They look forward every day to the end of so many hours of life.3 Only when his working day is done does the workers own life really begin. He is robbed of a third or more of his life half or more of his active, waking life. He is not free to live as he wishes, to taste the pleasures of creation, the thrill of work that
1. In his Adult Interests (New York, 1935) Dr Edward L Thorndike gave the cash payments which men and women would take to do certain normally repugnant things. He claimed to find that the average woman would practise cannibalism for 750 000 dollars, but the average man would do so for 50 000. The women tested would renounce hope of life after death for 10 dollars, but the men wanted 1000. The men would become intoxicated for 25 dollars, but the women demanded 98. Other money equivalents were given for blindness, temporary insanity, eating beetles and earthworms, choking a stray cat to death, cutting a pigs throat and spitting on a crucifix and on pictures of Charles Darwin, George Washington and ones mother. Dr Thorndike has been described as the Nestor of American psychologists. The best test of truth, according to Mr Justice Holmes epigram, is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market (Dissenting opinion in Abrams v US, 250 US 616 (1919)). RM Fox, The Triumphant Machine (A Study of Machine Civilization) (1928), p 35. 47

2. 3.

is done, not because one has to do it in order to eat, but because one feels passionate and absorbing enthusiasm for the social task. Work done for someone else, in which the worker belongs not to himself but to another, is, as Marx pointed out, external to the worker instead of being part of his nature; it is not in itself the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs.4 This has been grasped by certain bourgeois writers. Thus John Dewey says: The subordination of the enterprises to pecuniary profit reacts to make the workers hands only. Their hearts and brains are not engaged. They execute plans which they do not form, and of whose meaning and intent they are ignorant beyond the fact that these plans make a profit for others and secure a wage for themselves Minds are warped, frustrated, unnourished by their activities.5 Another American writer, in an essay entitled Freedom in the Factory, remarks: The operative is fitted like a cog to another cog in wheels turning endlessly round; over his movements in the rotation he has no more control than have the hands of a clock over their movements upon its face. Save when he is hired and fired, or bawled out for such a slip as any wearing machine part might make, he is not a person with a proper name, but a hand in the shop, a numbered machine part, making movements he does not initiate, producing results he does not intend and owns no part in.6 And the professor of philosophy of education in the University of London calls for respect for and cultivation of the free personal life and the infusion of something of this spirit into the highly organised life of modern society, so that freedom is not separated from work, not something to be attained after the reins of organisation have been laid down, but something which is intrinsic to daily work itself, sweetening every part and making it human.7 Where every object, including other human beings, has become a source of profit, all mens senses not only the physical senses, but also the feeling for beauty, for the arts, for knowledge, for the enrichment of the human spirit all these senses are subordinated to and largely replaced by the single, abstract desire for property, for possessions. I have becomes the supreme emotion. The barrenness of I have finds its finished, most abstract, expression in money the supreme substitute for real human relationships. Men are thus rendered less than truly human. Instead of living to the full, instead of squeezing from life and making part of themselves every drop of the beauty created by human hands and brains or latent in human relationships, they are fobbed off with a substitute for these concrete riches: the abstract hoarding, posses-

4. 5. 6. 7.

See TB Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (1956), pp 169-70. John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1931), pp 122-23. Horace M Kallen, The Liberal Spirit: Essays on Problems of Freedom in the Modern World (Ithaca and New York, 1948), p 193. Louis Arnaud Reid, The Individual and Social Purpose, Part 2, The Fortnightly, September 1951, p 623. 48

sion and contemplation of things. They are impoverished by capitalism all the more terribly because they are only dimly, if at all, conscious of the cynical trick capitalism is playing on them. The more the worker produces, the more he empties himself into the product, the more powerful becomes the world of things which he creates but does not possess, which is his own labour objectified and standing independent of and opposed to him, and the poorer becomes the workers inner sensuous life.8 Even this does not exhaust the crippling of human nature by capitalism. Men are not merely spiritually robbed and emasculated, shut out from a whole world of sensuous, intellectual and moral delight. They are also split, turned into fragments of men, by the enforced sacrifice of all their other physical and mental faculties to the development of one single faculty. The individual, subordinated to the principle of the division of labour, becomes a mere cog in the production process, the appendage and servant of a machine, a detail worker performing one small operation over and over again. The individual is moulded by the machine he serves into something less than human: Taylor, of Bethlehem Steel Works fame, has declared that in order to get pig iron loaded most efficiently it is necessary to get men as near like oxen as possible. But men do not grow so; they have to be made. An important part of scientific management is this scientific degradation of men.9 The individual is stunted, warped, chained for life to one particular calling, to one particular function, often to one particular tool. In capitalist society what matters is not man as such but particularised man, restricted and conditioned by his special skills: the division of labour is the division of the individual labourer himself. And this means that men are subjected to their instruments of production, that instead of the producers using and controlling the means of production, the latter use and control the producers. Nor have men control over the disposal of the products which result from their labours; these products become independent forces which overpower their makers in booms and slumps according to the blind laws of the market. The means of production are utilised in such a way as to enslave men and atrophy their faculties. And the exchange of products for profit leads to the concentration of enormous wealth in the hands of a few and the impoverishment of the majority, to economic anarchy and periodical economic blizzards. Thus men are not free to determine their own destiny. It is determined for them by forces over which they have no control. In the process mens individuality is forfeited, is crushed. They lose their individuality because they are dependent on capital. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.10 An economic individualism of motives and aims, echoes Dewey, underlies our present corporate mechanisms, and undoes the individual.11 Defenders of and apologists for the capitalist system of society have as little right to speak of the freedom of the individual as they have to speak of any other
8. 9. 10. 11. Bottomore and Rubel, p 170. Fox, p 5. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 1 (1950), p 46. Dewey, p 57. 49

freedom. Under capitalism human individuality becomes at once a commercial article and the fabric in which money operates. Capitalism estranges man from nature, from himself, his own active functioning It is the alienation of man from man.12 Capitalism stifles mens creative spirit, condemning the majority to a life of monotony, drudgery and ugliness to life in a cage. It puts out the eyes of the painter and cuts out the tongue from the poet who is within each one of us. It butchers human nature on the altar of the machine and calls that progress. Freedom and Culture Certain forms of mass culture, which masquerade as popular art but in fact are imposed on ordinary people by big business, play a big part in the devastation of human nature by capitalist society. Many films, popular songs, thrillers, comics, news stories, advertisements and television shows, in which artistic standards and techniques are largely abandoned, both reflect the splitting, stunting and dehumanisation of people and powerfully assist that process. Spoon-fed to the common people, such culture is pitifully shoddy and tawdry. It abounds in clichs, in stock situations, stock emotional responses, stock remedies for human problems. It provides a cheap, potent and hallucinatory fantasy-world. Its vulgarity heightened by daily repetition, it rings the changes on the slogan with which the advertiser, plugger, publisher, editor or film magnate wishes to condition the minds of his audience. After reading a dozen or more versions of the illustrated fable of how a worker was too tired to work properly until he drank a certain milk-food, or smelled of stale sweat until he washed with a certain soap, or had halitosis until he used a certain toothpaste, a reader has been trained or so it is hoped to react in a specific way to a specific stimulant. The popular song reiterates a limited number of emotional phrases in trite verse, set to hackneyed and soothing harmonic progressions. The thriller and the horror comic blend violence with pornography, retool for illiteracy and prepare the readers mind for war. The Press moulds the minds of its readers with a daily flood of mass suggestion. Television programmes, particularly in the USA, tend to distort reality, play down to the lowest common denominator of artistic taste among audiences, and glorify acts and threats of violence, especially in childrens programmes.13 All this art is fundamentally propaganda for capitalism, for it aims not merely to sell people chlorophyll tablets and detergents, but also to lull them into a complacent, passive, helpless, habit-bound acceptance of things as they are. It provides vicarious experience, excitement and enjoyment, to make content those whose lives are dreary and impoverished. As one student of advertising folklore has observed, to keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.14
12. 13. 14. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted in Modern Quarterly, Winter 1949-50. See, for example, Dallas W Smythe, Reality as Presented by Television, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 18, no 2, Summer 1954, pp 143-56. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951), p v. Discussing a motor oil advertisement with the caption Freedom American Style, showing a middle-class family on a picnic, McLuhan writes (p 117): If this is freedom American style, then is it not freedom and not American to have less money and fewer possessions? What proportion of Americans enjoy this style of freedom? Looking at the standardized equipment of this family and their standardized pattern of living how far [can they] be said to be free as human beings? Does freedom mean the right to be and do exactly as everybody else? How much does this kind of freedom depend on obeying the orders of commercial 50

It is, of course, true that many workers have a healthy contempt for this form of art, and that their number and their contempt grow in times of social struggle. But there is no such thing as a mental vacuum. To the extent that liberating ideas, ideas which challenge capitalisms mind-forgd manacles, ideas of working-class militancy and socialism, are not gripping the minds of the masses of the people, then inevitably the lives, opinions, emotions and outlook of the masses are to that extent conditioned by television jingles, Press lies and prejudices and the like. And to that extent they are unfree. The Decay of Liberalism The liberal idea of individual liberty is a good example of an idea which is progressive when first put forward, but which begins to play a reactionary role when the circumstances which gave rise to it have changed. Preoccupation with the individual and his rights began in the seventeenth century, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose existence and development as a class depended on the freedom of the individual capitalist to buy, and of the individual proletarian to sell, labour power. The rebellion of the rising bourgeoisie against the economic shackles of feudalism found its political, social and ideological expression in opposition to arbitrary political power, to arbitrary restraints on personal liberty, to the violation of human dignity and to clerical obscurantism. The fight was seen as a struggle between reason and unreason. The class which fashioned liberalism as its intellectual weapon conceived of individual freedom, not as freedom from all restraint, but as freedom under the law,15 as freedom limited by certain eternal truths and values which were thought to be embodied in a natural law or natural rights derived from human nature. Both the atoms of which matter was composed and the social atoms of which society was composed were governed by rational laws which human reason could grasp and apply. But, as Marx observed, the natural Rights of Man, the rights belonging to individuals by virtue of their humanity, did not eliminate man the egoist, an individual withdrawn into his private interests, separated from the community. On the contrary, bourgeois society itself appeared in them as an external frame for individuals, as a limitation of their original independence; the only ties by which individuals were held together were natural necessity, material needs, private interests and the conservation of their property.16 As developed by the bourgeois intellectuals of the early nineteenth century, the liberal idea of individual freedom remained progressive in an age when the workers were totally deprived of their leisure, when women and children worked in the pits, when there was no legal limit to the working day. These intellectuals supported the struggle for leisure for the industrial workers, as a struggle for time in which people might be free to do, think and say what they liked provided they were not thereby endangering capitalist society.17 The liberal ideal could not, and did not, trans-

15. 16. 17.

suggestion? If it takes a lot of money to conform in this way, does conformity become an ideal to strive for? Freedom, wrote Voltaire, exists in being independent of everything but law. (Penses sur ladministration publique). See D Riazanov (ed), Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Part 1, Volume 1:1 (Frankfurt, 1927), p 595. No one pretends, wrote John Stuart Mill, that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought 51

cend (but rather reflected) the splitting of a mans life into two parts: his working time, in which he was unfree, a wage-slave, and his leisure, in which he was for a few hours a day an individual shorn of responsibilities, answerable only to himself an individual temporarily outside of society, and whose freedom was enjoyed outside of society. Mill, for example, wanted every worker ultimately to have the same leisure as his employer and therefore the same partial freedom from the necessities of social organisation as he. What happened to liberal ideology when capitalism approached its monopoly phase has been well summarised by Hallowell and Laski: So long as the bourgeoisie remained economically, socially, and politically unsatiated they championed the substantial rights of man. As monopoly capitalism replaced free enterprise and as the bourgeoisie acquired a dominant social and political position, they tended to espouse formal equality and formal rights of citizens rather than substantial equality and substantial rights of man.18 The earlier liberals released the individual from a type of social organisation which restricted his capacity for growth. But the assumption which underlay that release made it in fact valid only for men who were in a position to surmount the conditions of a fiercely competitive industrial society, that is, broadly, the owners of property. The liberty predominantly secured was their liberty; the others came in as residuary legatees of their triumph. And when the men of property had won, they conceived that the campaign was over What they did not see was that the new social order their liberalism had built brought with it new problems as intense as any they had solved Liberalism had established a freedom in which, formally and legally, the workers were entitled to share. Actually, they could not, for the most part, share in it because its attainment was predominantly conditioned to the possession of property; and they had no property save in their labour power. When the victors were asked to extend the privileges their new freedom had brought them they were dismayed.19 In the period of monopoly capitalism it is precisely the separation of the interests of the individual from those of society, the counterposing of individual freedom to external social necessity and social responsibility, that becomes an ideological weapon for the defence of capitalism and for arousing opposition and hostility to socialism. The social discipline of social planning is held to destroy human personality, to take away the individuals liberty to live his own life and to think and choose for himself. This discipline is represented as being imposed on people against their will. The liberal who today attacks socialism on these grounds is in fact surrendering all the values that liberalism once championed. He is turning his back on the
to be unmolested when simply circulated through the Press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. (On Liberty (Everyman edition, Utilitarianism; Liberty; Representative Government, 1954), p 114). John H Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology: With Particular Reference to German Politico-Legal Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1943), p 14. HJ Laski, The Decline of Liberalism (1940), pp 13-14. 52

18. 19.

warping of human individuality and human personality by monopoly capitalism. Whether he is aware of it or not, his claim to freedom of the individual is at bottom the claim of the privileged, leisured and rich section of the population to the maintenance of their privileges, leisure and riches, based on the liberty of private property as such, to be uncontrolled in its operations by aught else than the will of the individual possessing it.20 Since these privileges, leisure and riches are obtained and maintained for the bourgeoisie and for the intellectuals who serve them only by the exploitation of millions of their fellow human beings, what the modern liberal is really demanding is freedom for an lite. No wonder that Dewey says of liberalism today that it is vaguely called forward-looking, but quite uncertain as to where to look and what to look forward to. 21 The liberal idea of individual freedom is hollow, bankrupt and impotent, for three reasons: because it cannot be realised for more than a tiny minority, and then only imperfectly and at the cost of the distortion of social values; because it predicates an individual abstracted from society; and because it conceives of freedom not as power for men to do things in social cooperation, but as the absence of restraint, as freedom from what are in reality the unavoidable necessities and obligations of living, the social ties that make men human. In other words, the individualism which centres in personal property is a purely abstract and formal individualism which sacrifices the real freedom of the individual to his merely nominal freedom.22 One illustration of the hollowness, bankruptcy and impotence of the liberal ideology is the way prominent German liberals accepted and some even acclaimed the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933. The liberals had neither the standards nor the will to declare this despotism wrong. They saw nothing to fight about. They had no ideas, no values, for which to fight; they had no doctrine, no way of life to defend The Nazis were the legitimate heirs of a system that committed suicide.23 Another is the limited horizons of liberal thinkers when they try to grapple with the workers loss of individuality in the capitalist factory. When Kallen, in The Liberal Spirit, comes to give his nostrum for freedom in the factory, all he can suggest is that the workers should somehow have their vision expanded from their own narrow task to the entire operation in which the factory as a whole is the craftsman and the worker but one of its hands so that the individual worker can identify himself with the entire industry as a team-mate; and that workers be given the opportunity to experiment, to take initiative, to exercise and to gratify the creative impulse under conditions of competitive cooperation.24 Similarly William Angus Sinclair, though he calls himself a socialist, cannot imagine any better society than a capitalism which somehow manages to give people in ordinary jobs that sense of their importance which is felt by creative minds and men in responsible positions.25

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

E Belfort Bax and J Hiam Levy, Socialism and Individualism (nd [1904]), p 10. Dewey, p 58. Bax and Levy, p 24. Hallowell, pp 108-09. Kallen, pp 211-12. William Angus Sinclair, Socialism and the Individual: Notes on Joining the Labour Party (1955), p 74. A classless society in which every man receives whatever he may need to lead the good life seems impossible to realise, he adds, since things just do not work out that way (p 121). Those who think differently from Mr Sinclair on this question he terms silly socialists, unpractical extremists, crackpots, calamitous idealists and the Labour Partys lunatic fringe (pp 149-50). 53

It is the scramble for profits that tramples on human personality. Socialist planning, by enabling men to cooperate to run the world in a rational, conscious way, will integrate the needs of the individual human being with the needs of the whole of humanity. Only real socialism can emancipate the individual and pave the way to the utmost development, under communism, of all his physical and mental powers, senses and aptitudes. The Individual and Socialism The task of socialism is to lay the indispensable basis for the teeming abundance of necessities and what are today called luxuries that must be achieved before men may receive according to their needs. The social discipline of socialist planning alone can free men from the jungle of capitalism. Even with bureaucratic distortions, socialist planning is able to achieve a great deal. With these distortions eliminated socialism will harness the creative energies of millions. Real socialism does not impose economic plans on people from above. The individual helps to draw up, administer and fulfil the plan; by so doing he not only helps to make everybody elses life better, but also improves his own life. The individual cannot free himself from the capitalist swamp by his own unaided efforts, but only in active cooperation with millions of others. Together they are fired with the vision of a new life and a new society. Together they work to achieve them. To accomplish the socialist reconstruction of the world is not to mould the individual to the requirements of an abstract society. It is to reshape the social system to the requirements of the individuals who make it up. This implies planning. It implies discipline, endeavour, sacrifice, voluntarily undertaken. But this alone is the way to make men free from class exploitation and class oppression. The outcome of socialism is a human individualism as opposed to class individualism.26 It is not, perhaps, surprising that those who fail to understand that freedom from exploitation, unemployment, poverty and want has any bearing on the freedom of the individual are those who have never worked in a factory, never drawn the dole in a Labour Exchange, never been without the price of a lavish meal in their lives. To them freedom is something spiritual, and a free economy is one where some are free to exploit and others to suffer. This was stated quite explicitly not long ago by Mr Howard Pyle, one of the US Presidents assistants at the White House and a former Governor of Arizona, who left the comforting thought at Detroit where unemployment in the motor industry is increasing that the right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.27 The view that men who are hungry, or poor, or insecure, or exploited, or unemployed, or homeless, or oppressed, are not free, that freedom from these social evils is the foundation of human liberty, is to be found well before the advent of Marxism. It was held by Shelley: What art thou, Freedom? Oh! could slaves Answer from their living graves This demand, tyrants would flee

26. 27.

Bax and Levy, p 28. Quoted in a dispatch from the Washington correspondent of The Times, 25 May 1956. Mr Pyle, the dispatch went on, seems to have added a fifth dispensation to Roosevelts four freedoms Now and again the philosophers of the Eisenhower Administration have an uncanny knack of saying the wrong thing. 54

Like a dreams dim imagery: *** For the labourer thou art bread And a comely table spread From his daily labour come In a neat and happy home. Thou are clothes, and fire, and food For the trampled multitude: No in countries that are free Such starvation cannot be As in England now we see.28 If by England we mean also the British colonies in Africa and Asia, the argument summed up in these lines is wholly true today, when for hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans the problem of individual liberty is before everything else the problem of finding enough food to keep the individual alive another day. Moreover it is recognised by many of those concerned about the growth of revolutionary movements in what are called the under-developed regions as by far the most difficult argument for imperialism to answer. An editorial in the Manchester Guardian, for example, came to the conclusion that the advocates of Western freedom must address themselves, not to the masses of the people of Asia, but to the intellectual lite there, for only this enlightened minority could understand the meaning of the freedom in ideas and freedom of debate that the West had to offer: Offer a starving man liberty or a packet of sandwiches, it is said, and he will naturally choose sandwiches. But the classes to whom our appeal is addressed are not actually starving, though they may be commendably disturbed about how many of their countrymen are in this plight. The middle classes and intelligentsia of Free Asia can still be attracted by the ideals of liberty29 But socialism does not make real liberty, liberty without quotation marks, stop at freedom from hunger. What it does do is expose the hypocrisy of capitalist freedom, which denies the fundamental freedoms to the colonial peoples, and hypocritically prates about freedom in ideas and freedom of debate though it can no more permit free discussion and exchange of ideas in the colonies, when those ideas challenge imperialism, than it can adequately feed the millions it oppresses. Real socialism offers not merely material prosperity, but is also a powerful stimulus to intellectual ferment. Even with major bureaucratic distortions and defects, a workers state has taught tens of millions in the central Asian republics to read and write, so opening for them the gates to the world of ideas and culture. And, as even Sinclair admits, one reason for the appeal of communism to the Asiatic and the African is that it promises an industrialised culture with a higher standard of living to groups that have remained intact and continue to feel as groups; whereas at present the Western powers can only provide an industrialised culture which admittedly offers
28. 29. The Masque of Anarchy. Manchester Guardian, 10 January 1956. 55

a higher standard of living, but in which a man feels an isolated and lost individual. Whatever else they give him it does not include what is essential for his happiness.30 Cherishing and fostering individual ability, socialism will elevate the individual to a position of far greater real importance and give him far greater social responsibility than capitalism can ever do. To run society in a conscious, planned way cannot but call forth the utmost personal initiative, imagination, enterprise, zeal and creative ability from each individual. Liberty to choose where and how one can best take part in the general social activity, to discuss that activity both in its general aspects and its local details, to have ones own suggestions and criticisms discussed, means that the individual is no longer an insignificant cog in a vast, impersonal, exploiting machine, but a vital and conscious part of a great collective endeavour whose central aim is the improvement, elevation and ennoblement of human life. Now while this is already a tremendous advance on the stifling of personal initiative and creativeness by capitalism, it does not yet solve the problem of the splitting and stunting of the individual. This problem is solved only in the course of a long transition to communist society. The individual becomes free in the full sense of the word only when he is able to take out of societys store exactly what he needs to develop all his capacities to the full; when dull and arduous work is abolished and a new attitude to work as a joyful and indispensable part of life has grown up; when the distinctions between intellectual and manual labour no longer exist and all workers are raised to the level of engineers, technicians, scientists and artists; when the hours of socially necessary labour have been shortened to something like four hours a day or less, enabling the individual to work, play, study and take a full part in running society. Of all these requisites, none is more important than the shortening of the hours of labour, the fundamental premise, as Marx observed, for the flourishing of the true realm of freedom.31 The individual becomes really free, in fact, only when men have achieved complete conscious social control over their entire economic development complete control over the utilisation of their means of production and the disposal of their social product. This establishes truly human conditions of existence, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.32 The Healing of Men Communism will bring abundance, such as the world has never before known, a bountiful abundance in which all men will share. It will give everybody an all-round education, open wide the gates of culture and knowledge, make life full, absorbing, exciting and free. No longer the passive recipients of a ready-made culture, no longer conditioned to believe in their own inferiority and incapacity, the new generation of men and women born into a world cleansed of exploitation will be all-round people, masters of many different skills, crafts and arts. Their birthright will be the comprehensive development of their physical and mental abilities. This is no Utopia, though it corresponds to the hopes for the future of humanity entertained by men of vision through the ages. Now the time has come when the realisation of these hopes is within the grasp of humanity. The harnessing of atomic power, automation, the scientific discoveries that come thicker and faster with each

30. 31. 32.

Sinclair, pp 146-47. Marx, Capital, Volume 3 (Calcutta, 1946), p 652. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 1, p 51. 56

passing year, provide the material basis for such a colossal enrichment of life as will make the whole earth a paradise for those who dwell on it. The struggle of the working class and the colonial peoples to conquer the world for the common people will ensure that these advances in technique are in fact harnessed for the good of all. Before long the centuries of class antagonism, of greed, cruelty and torment, will have passed away like an evil dream, and man, no longer stunted and crippled in body and mind, no longer shut out from the good things of life, will pass from prehistory into history, will become the master of his destiny. The founders of scientific socialism rightly refrained from giving anything but the barest outline of the main features of the future society, and of the concomitant development and flowering of the human personality. They could not solve in advance the problems of humanity under communism, nor even foresee what many of those problems would be. Neither can we. They did forecast, however, that labour would become not only a means of life, but lifes prime want,33 that productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden.34 Thus ends the splitting of mens lives. Where men are working, not for a boss, but for themselves and for their own society, the whole of their time is theirs. Marx and Engels foresaw, too, the ending of the subordination of men to the division of labour, and the emergence of the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.35 Thus ends the fragmentation of men themselves. Men are no longer engineers, or miners, or bricklayers, or clerks, but men all-round men, spending part of the month or year at one particular occupation, refreshing their minds and bodies with several others the rest of the time. Where every occupation is as absorbing, exciting and spiritually rewarding as what we today call hobbies, men in love with work because they are in love with life will paint pictures, write poems, compose music, work with metal, conduct investigations in scientific laboratories, design houses and help build them all in the same lifetime, perhaps within the same year. The distinctions between artist, designer, craftsman and labourer will vanish. All will in their work to some degree add to the store of beauty available for the enjoyment of mankind. Man will explore the depths of the ocean bed and the far reaches of space; will eliminate disease and increase twice, fourfold, tenfold, the span of human life, will reconstruct his own physiological and psychological make-up so that the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.36

33. 34. 35. 36.

Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 2 (1950), p 23. Engels, Anti-Dhring (1955), p 408. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1954), p 488. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1957), p 256. 57

Alan Spence

Our Health Service

A New Approach
What ideas individuals may attach to the term Millennium I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness improved a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal. (Robert Owen, Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, New Years Day, 1816) IN respect of the National Health Service, the New Labour Government stands accused of: Abandoning the customary and sound method of financing the NHS. Abusing its power and, through the PFI system of paying for hospital construction, of opening the Treasurys doors to give financial interests money set aside for the welfare of the population as a whole. Abusing the integrated health service established in 1948 (together with an attempt to improve it in 1976 with a Regional Areas Working Party set up to get rid of imbalances throughout the Service). Allowing private moneyed interests to fragment the Service with the intention of enriching profit-seeking companies. Abrogating a social contract to bring NHS provision and care up to European Union standards. If this is the case, dont NHS employees have the duty and the right to protect a public institution from such desecration by voting out government lackeys from managerial posts? To ensure that the NHS continues to function normally and to safeguard generations of public funding investment, employees could be part of an alternative system of administration where they all had an equal voice and an equal vote. Through such a democratic administration they could repair the breaches and restore the NHS solely to its use of providing benefits for the general population. If funds collected through taxation for health provision are being siphoned off to financiers and carpet-baggers, hasnt the electorate of this country the right and duty to give whatever assistance is needed to enable NHS employees to implement safeguards against financial attrition and to allow the NHS to provide care when needed by all people living within the UK? If so, should not each NHS workplace seek support from the local community to ask their MP to press for a vote in Parliament to end the Treasurys retrograde activities, in particular the Public Dividend Capital system which demands an annual deduction of 3.5 per cent from the previous years grant? In effect, this is a selfdestruct financial mechanism which is now forcing hospitals into bankruptcy. NHS hospitals return to the Treasury 3.5 per cent of the budget received at the
58

beginning of April by the end of March the following year. This is known as Public Dividend Capital and is analogous to the return on capital employed for a limited company. It is so levied because it is a diversion from potential private sector investment (Prowle and Jones, Health Service Finance, 1997). So shouldnt the Treasury be instructed to return the NHS to traditional means of funding, including annual grants to hospitals, etc, with provision for upgrading so that all areas are provided with a level playing field of health, medical and care services? Health Cooperatives If this case is valid, then MPs, newly motivated and empowered by NHS employees and their supporters, should provide legislation to convert NHS workplaces into employee-managed cooperatives. This legislation should be based on democratic structures with links between neighbourhood health forums and various levels of administration from parish council to town, borough and city to connect all horizontally and vertically to coordinate a democracy of elected and professional people bound by the ethics of providing a service enthused with the spirit of doing no harm but improving the perpetual good. Public Dividend Capital The Public Dividend Capital system is based on a financial myth. Thatcherites and New Labour spun a fiction to confuse hospital staff and the public into accepting a mechanism eating the heart out of the public health sector. Parliament and all its building work, repairs, wages (including MPs salaries), and its new offices for MPs, Portcullis House, which cost 233 million to build, come from an annual grant from the Treasury in the same way as the NHS was once funded. Parliament is still funded this way, and so should the NHS. And the PFI Off balance sheet accounting practices were described in the Guardian as the creative accounting trick when used by private companies. Its much the same when used by Gordon Brown in the form of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Thrifty families put money from their earnings to one side to pay for future welfare and other needs. Writ large, this is what the Chancellor of the Exchequer does with the nations savings in the form of taxation. But more frivolous families go out on a credit spree, building up debts for future payment and the agony that arises therefrom. This is precisely the future that the Chancellor has in store for the people of this country. Previously, when the NHS received cash to build, it came out of that years taxation and was free to the hospital except for depreciation and repair costs. Under PFI it must pay ground rent to the landowner, interest on the money that PFI constructors borrow, an annual rent to the new owners of the hospital, and then a profit to the service company running the hospitals catering, cleaning, etc. In other words, Rent, Interest and Profit, which didnt exist in any meaningful sense in previous NHS funding, is now a crushing charge on every part of every NHS provision. And there exists a series of financial loadings on to hospital budgets which are an abomination to all sincere supporters of the NHS. These consist of: Instructing Inland Revenue valuers to add a further six per cent to the annual rates of a hospital. Charging rates at highest market valuations on property considered surplus
59

(even without planning permission from the local authority). Issuing an instruction in 2003 for every annual hospital employers pension allocation to increase from seven per cent to 14 per cent per annum. For the Royal Free Hospital, for example, it paid 7 million in 2003 and 16 million in 2004. Put into the governments accumulator, these make huge nest eggs for future buy-outs. Working for Health Equality

It was Barbara Castle, the Minister for Health in 1976, who introduced the Regional Areas Working Party with the task of working towards the eradication of health imbalances within the country. Aneurin Bevan had taken into nationalisation a ramshackle collection of hospitals, built at various dates and scattered by religion, philanthropic whim and previous local prosperity. The new working party now had the task, started in 1948, of bringing this jumble into a balanced and cohesive system to provide a level pitch of treatment for every person in the UK. It was much needed in the NHS. The working party had to take into account a real run-down in provision alongside a distortion created by wrongly-sited, huge, monolithic hospitals, outdated in best practice, and introduce a balanced network of provision radiating from the neighbourhood. Neighbourhood Health Provision Surgeries could have been spaced to cover designated neighbourhoods of, say, 3000 people, with all living within that area being patients of that one surgery. This was to be part of designated Health Centres, as planned for by Aneurin Bevan, until they were sufficient in number to become fully-fledged members of properly structured entities, forming part of a network based on the prevention of illness. But forces of reaction were mobilising. BUPA Hits Back At no time since its inception had it been BUPAs wish to be in any way involved in the political scene. But with the defeat of the Conservatives in March 1974, and the election of a Labour government under Harold Wilson, politics were thrust upon us. (BUPA: A Continuing History, Robb and Brown, 1984). With this sally, BUPA organised the ranks of medical consultants, furious at plans to eliminate private beds from the NHS and the very lucrative income received from the use of this publicly funded provision. However, outrage was also intense amongst other medical staff, as beds were kept empty so that consultants could offer immediate treatment to paying patients. Charing Cross hospital staff refused to handle such beds, and in the ensuing crisis Barbara Castle outraged the private sector by her support for this action and her determination to have private beds moved out to the private sector. When James Callaghan replaced Wilson, it gave BUPA and the cohorts of the great and the good their opportunity to lobby and persuade him to sack Barbara Castle. Victorious consultants in private practice rallied to support Thatchers aims to monetarise the NHS, and have responded with even greater enthusiasm to New La60

bours privatisation programme as shown in the formation of Doctors For Reform. Aneurin Bevan had little option, given the conditions in which he had to operate, but to accept private beds in the NHS. Time has shown that they corrupt the very principles of the NHS, and therefore they must go with, if necessary, the sort of action displayed by Charing Cross Hospital workers, in order to safeguard the NHS. The Importance of Health Centres A Peckham in every neighbourhood was the third element in Barbara Castles initiative to introduce some of the unfulfilled aims of the 1948 Health Act. Aneurin Bevan had attached great importance to Health Centres as a major component of his aim to bring preventative medicine to the fore in NHS activity. But only two of these were built: one at Woodberry Down, Stoke Newington, and the other at Harlow (one of the new towns) in Essex. The Peckham Pioneer Health Centre was initiated by a husband and wife medical partnership, Innes H Pearse and G Scott Williamson. The wealthy philanthropic Donaldson family provided money to build a centre at Peckham, South London, in 1934. It was located in a community of some 1200 families and had a swimming pool, athletic facilities, crche and clubs for the young, adults and for women. It also had a cafe with food provided from its own farm. Members were seen as family units, and were given regular checks on their health. They received no medical treatment, but, having identified a problem, the centre referred them to their own doctor. So successful did Peckham become that local doctors (who then depended on paying customers) began to complain as their trade fell off. But Castles initiative had some success, and by the 1980s an embryonic form of health centres, but without the athletics or focus on the family as a unit, were at work in 30 per cent of GP practices. But not meeting the individualist philosophy of the then Tory government, this trend was halted. As Bevan saw, the NHS is not so much a health service as a sick one. People only see their doctors when they are ill. The aim should be to put prevention foremost in assessing every persons health. And for this, a Peckham should be the model to work towards. Camden Borough Council, London, has recently completed its Winchester project in the Swiss Cottage neighbourhood. It contains swimming pool, athletics, library, theatre, caf, and within its building format is a medical centre. So far it remains distant from the Peckham philosophy, but it has all the ingredients for transformation to meet the criterion set by Doctors Pearse and Williamson. Profiting From the Break-Up of the Welfare State Following the mini-flu epidemic of 1999, the Blair government produced a new NHS plan. It proposed to rectify the gross imbalances in health provision between the UK and the EU by harmonising the uneven links of the NHS into a seamless system through a regional restructuring. John Ashton, Regional Director of Public Health in Liverpool, summed it up thus: By 2002 there will be new single integrated public health groups across the NHS. Accountable through the regional director of public health jointly with the director of the government office for the region, they will
61

embrace health as well as environment, transport and inward investment. And the five per cent gap of GDP between Germany, France, etc, would be provided by the Treasury to bridge the gap. Six years later, however, Andrew Way, Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Free Hospital in Camden, London, had to announce that the hospital had an overspend of 16 million. It was therefore closing wards with 100 beds, and also making 500 staff redundant. He attempted to smooth over the shock of this announcement to staff, patients and an alarmed public with: The truth is the best place to recover isnt a hospital bed, where you are often kept awake and dont sleep properly and feel uncomfortable and overall have a risk of getting other infections, not just MRSA. In a similar vein, Robert Naylor, Chief Executive Officer of University College London Hospital, announcing a deficit of 30 million, said My board was debating whether were going to stop treating some patients This was a consequence of the Pay by Results system. The Camden hospital group, back in 1993, had to sell a hospital to pay its then debt of 43 million. Today it has put on the market another hospital, the Middlesex, hoping to raise 100 million for the same purpose. As a result of these sell-offs, that hospital group has 1000 hospital beds less than it had 15 years ago. And, if ever a flu virus does mutate? University College and Royal Free are amongst dozens of hospitals moving into debt, and this is inherent in new Treasury demands for the NHS to move into capitalist markets. Sea-Change Required To counter all this requires a sea-change in thinking about the purpose, the administrative structure and financing of the NHS. Concentrating on illness is no longer appropriate, nor is the undemocratic rule of the NHS from Richmond House. Making the NHS fit for todays purpose means a change both in title and in functions attached to that title. It should be a National Health, Medical and Care Service (NHMCS). These functions should be integrated at all levels into a single stream of provision. And this integration, as noted by Professor Ashton, should embrace environment, transport, housing and inward investment. Peckhams should be the point from which a hierarchy of services radiate: neighbourhood assessment for surgery, treatment, care and respite; infirmary as the secondary tier of hospitals, with district general for the acute; then specialist hospitals, convalescent and hospice, etc. The era of dictatorial chairmen and CEOs must become history, to be replaced by direct democracy in which each employee has an equal say and vote a cooperative form of employee management. New Labour cannot rescue the NHS. It is the problem. Success will require a level of mutual support unseen in the UK for many a year. NHS staff, trade unions, neighbourhood groups and the generality of concerned people, in combination, must present a programme to their MPs particularly Labour MPs. Parliament already has 29 Cooperative/Labour MPs. These, joined by the rest of Labour in Parliament, could lobby for support, which should surely be there from other MPs. Enough, that is, to overcome any Berlusconi type villainy that the government
62

might mount to sabotage change. A national process of collective activity is necessary to produce the legislation to bring about radical transformation. But its translation into a Cooperative Commonwealth with cooperative principles as the fabric and culture of our economic, political and social life is a task of greater resolve and endeavour. However, what better launch pad can we ask for than an NHS described by Richard Titmuss as: the most unsordid act of British social policy in the twentieth century which has allowed and encouraged sentiments of altruism, reciprocity and social duty to express themselves; to be made explicit and identifiable in measureable patterns of behaviour by all social groups and classes.

Paul Flewers

Georgia: Dangerous Implications

THE customary banalities of the summertime silly season were this year overshadowed by the fighting in Georgia. Although it has been put in the shade by the severe financial crisis that has blown up, this brief conflict in a small Caucasian country is of considerable importance, not merely in and of itself, but because of the broader implications for the former Soviet bloc and beyond. The Georgian Tangle The recent war was just the latest episode in the long-running dispute between successive governments in Georgia and separatists in the two autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The national question has always been complex in the Caucasus, and it has long been intertwined with the corrupt political and economic relationships which evolved there, particularly during the Brezhnev era, and which have continued to colour events in them since 1991. Even prior to the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics, the rise of nationalist sentiments, not least in Georgia (where nationalist fervour was exceeded only in the Baltic states and Armenia), meant that the jockeying for position amongst the various national lites took on an ethnical dimension, and could be explosive in instances where national groups and national boundaries did not coincide, or where there was disputed territory. The dubious political and economic norms of the Georgian lite were replicated amongst the rulers of the various non-Georgian areas of the country, and, in the cases of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the local lites attempted to hold on to their power bases against the wishes of the Georgian lite, which intended to impose its rule upon the entire country. These antagonisms led to wars, between Georgia and South Ossetia from January 1991 to July 1992, and between Georgia and Abkhazia from August 1992 to September 1993, and were marked by the pogroms and mass expul63

sions typical of such conflicts. The national question in Georgia immediately raised the question of Russian involvement; both South Ossetia and Abkhazia border Russia and have close ties with it, pro-Russian sentiments were and remain strong amongst both their lites and populations, Russian irregulars had been involved on the side of the separatists, and Russian troops were deployed after the wars as peacekeepers. The situation remained unresolved, and low-level clashes took place on occasions between separatist and Georgian troops. Apart from the questions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, post-independence Georgia became notorious for a series of repressive and corrupt governments, continued political instability, massive institutionalised crime and corruption, poor economic performance, and chronic social problems such as unemployment, poverty and primitive social welfare. The current Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, was elected shortly after the Rose Revolution in late 2003. This was an archetypal fluffy revolution, a middle-class-led venture largely organised by Westerninfluenced and Western-funded non-governmental organisations, and which also reflected a high level of social discontent with existing political individuals, parties and practices. Coming into office with the intention of cleaning up the Augean stables of Georgian political and economic life, he modelled himself on such muscular modernisers as Atatrk, Ben Gurian and de Gaulle, and, for all his liberal pretentions, he has dealt with opposition with a heavy hand. He is a strong advocate of bringing Georgia fully into the Western sphere, and champions Georgian membership of Nato. He rapidly established a very close relationship with the USA, and supports it militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also repeatedly and loudly expounded on the need to reintegrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia. Not surprisingly, he has found himself in an antagonistic position vis--vis Russia. Last Summers War The war last summer was short but sharp. It started on 8 August with a Georgian military assault upon Tskhinvali, the main city of South Ossetia, with much destruction of property and unconfirmed reports of 2000 deaths. A counter-attack by Russian forces swiftly repulsed them, and continued with a drive into Georgian territory, including attacks on civilian targets. On 25 August, both houses of the Russian parliament unanimously recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent entities, and this was endorsed by President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Russia has since agreed to a ceasefire plan drawn up by the European Union, and it has accordingly withdrawn its troops into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, although it is obstructing the work of international observers in the secessionist regions. Western responses were largely hostile to Moscow, and differed in intensity. The USA was the most bellicose, as Georgia under Saakashvili is a key ally in the area, but with an important caveat that we shall investigate below. The British government, all puffed up in the shadow of the USA, loudly showed its disapproval. (Having Gordon Brown and Boy Miliband on the attack must really have shaken the Kremlin.) Although the European Union called for a Russian withdrawal from Georgia, the French and German governments were considerably less belligerent, and the Italian government seemed almost sympathetic to Moscow. China, however, with its own regional problems, did not endorse Russias support for the independence of the two separatist regions, although it refrained from joining the US-led chorus of condemnation.
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The ferocity of the USAs condemnation of Russia can be understood in the light of US foreign policy. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the enfeebled state of Russia during Boris Yeltsins time as President, the USA took advantage of the power vacuum to close in on Russia, with the eventual intention of encircling it, as part of its overall plans to increase its global influence. Most of the East European states have joined Nato, as have the three former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which joined on 29 March 2004 (perhaps significantly a mere 15 days after Putin was re-elected President of Russia). Ukraine has enjoyed a distinctive partnership with Nato since 1997, and the Nato leadership would like eventually to recruit the country to the alliance. Georgia, too, has long had a friendly relationship with Nato, and in April 2008, the Nato leaders agreed that Georgia would eventually become a member of the alliance, although France and Germany, wary of Moscows feelings, acted to delay its actual joining. US bases were established in Kirghizstan and, for a while, in Uzbekistan. Plans are afoot to site US anti-missile batteries in Poland and radar facilities in the Czech Republic, and only idiots can accept the official reason that they are to defend Europe against Iranian projectiles. The Return of Russia Russian foreign policy under Putin and Medvedev represents a distinct attempt by Russias lite to claw back the reverses of the Yeltsin years, to re-establish Russian influence in as much of the former Soviet area as possible, and to try to re-establish Russia as a key big power, if not on a world scale, then most certainly on a continental basis. The invitation of former Eastern Bloc states and former Soviet republics to join Nato would inevitably cause friction with any self-respecting Russian government. Saakashvilis open desire to resolve the national question in Georgia and his quest for Nato membership was a direct challenge to Moscow, and his rash attack upon Tskhinvali was the last straw. Faced with Saakashvilis provocation, Moscow threw down a challenge to the Western powers. Its counter-attack basically demanded of Washington: OK, now what are you going to do? Not only is the USA bogged down militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if it had men and matriel to spare, would it actually contemplate a direct military engagement with Russia? Washington quickly signalled that it would not intervene militarily in support of Georgia, showing that even the neo-con crazies in the White House would baulk at a really foolhardy adventure (this also suggests that the USA did not give Saakashvili the nod to attack). Miliband boldly posed alongside Saakashvili, but only succeeded in exacerbating his already absurd image. The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Mr Humanitarian Intervention himself, did not advocate military action, which must be a first for him. The transporting of US humanitarian aid by air and sea to Georgia was a sign of solidarity, but one that could be achieved at a minimum of cost and risk. The fact is that Russia has humiliated the Western powers. The Yugoslav Parallel The situation in Georgia has many parallels with that in the former Yugoslavia. In both that country and the Soviet Union, the federal borders were essentially political boundaries, and did not necessarily coincide with national and/or ethnical boundaries. Internal borders that were of little consequence in federations took on great significance when those entities broke up amidst an upsurge of rival nationalisms. The closest parallel to Georgia is Croatia, in which the newly-separated Croatian state
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contained large numbers of Serbs who did not wish to be part of that state, and felt no allegiance to it. This led to vicious inter-ethnic clashes, and the problem was ultimately solved by mass expulsions of Serbs, in particular from Krajina during Operation Storm in 1995, an atrocity that was endorsed and even assisted by the big Western states, and which the Belgrade government felt unable to oppose. There is an important difference, however, as Moscow is in a far more powerful position to protect its protgs in Abkhazia and South Ossetia than Belgrade was in Croatia. There is also the question of Kosovo. Unlike the other secessionist Yugoslav states, Kosovo was part of Serbia, a constituent Yugoslav republic, and not a republic in its own right. It could not split constitutionally from Yugoslavia or Serbia, and successive governments in Belgrade refused to relinquish their rule over it. Irrespective of the moral arguments for or against the demand for self-determination for Kosovo, a precedent was set when its secession was recognised by 45 nations, including Britain and the USA. For obvious reasons, the official recognition of Kosovos departure from Serbia raised the question of breakaways from various other states whose boundaries included nationalities with secessionist tendencies. The assertive Putin and Medvedev wasted little time in taking advantage of a similar situation in their backyard, although it is rather ironic that their own opposition to the independence of Kosovo meant that they could not openly use its secession as a precedent for their recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Nevertheless, it was the recognition of Kosovan independence that gave impetus to Russias recognition of these two secessionist regions. Consequences and Implications Various commentators have stated that although Russias newly-found assertiveness has created an atmosphere of uncertainty in international affairs, the situation is not anything as dangerous as the Cold War, in which the world was divided into rival blocs by ideologically-charged protagonists. This is to misunderstand that period. Despite the drama of the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the rivalries and wars in the Third World between pro-Soviet and pro-Western forces and states, actual East-West relations were remarkably stable, even taking into account that dangerous moment of the Cuba missile crisis. That Nato was constitutionally obliged to intervene militarily should one of its member states be attacked did not pose a practical problem as the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking any Nato country; Moscow kept to the borders in Europe established at Yalta, and, beneath the shrill cries of the Cold Warriors, the Western powers were not willing to violate the borders of the Soviet bloc with anything more than the occasional spy-plane. Nowadays, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the jockeying of the successor states for big-power patronage, and the USA attempting to push its influence, including by offering Nato membership, right up to the borders of Russia that is, within what was the territory of not only the Soviet Union but of Tsarist Russia the situation today is a lot more fluid and potentially dangerous than it was prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Whether the various perpetrators have intended to or not probably not what they have done is to lay down a challenge to the post-1945 constitutional order. That is, they have thrown aside the unspoken agreement not to amend the national borders that had been set up by that date. By, on the one hand, the US-led recognition of Kosovo, and, on the other, the Russian recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, they are jointly endorsing the splitting up of existing states without the
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agreement of the state concerned, or without the cover of the state being a federation. The implications of this are dangerous indeed for many states. Merely to consider Europe, Britain has Scotland and Wales to deal with, Spain has the Basque country and Catalonia, Belgium is coming apart down the middle, and the Northern Leagues in Italy could make use of the examples of Kosovo, South Ossetia and Abkhazia And then there is Ukraine. If offering Nato membership to Georgia is full of dangerous implications, then to offer it to Ukraine is even more risky. Russia has customarily regarded Ukraine as a part of itself; Russian nationalists dismiss any idea of Ukraine having any legitimate differences with their own country, let alone its having a different history and future. In Western Ukraine, there are very strong Ukrainian nationalist sentiments with an almost pathological anti-Russian bias; in Eastern Ukraine, there are several million Russians who have lived there for generations, nationalist sentiments amongst the Ukrainians are very much weaker than in the west of the country, and many are openly pro-Russian. The Crimea was handed to Ukraine only in 1954, when the idea of an independent Ukraine existed only as a pipe-dream of exiled Ukrainian nationalists, and remains heavily Russian, with the Russian Black Sea fleet being stationed in Sevastopol. Should Moscow so wish, it could effectively mobilise a pro-Russian movement in Eastern Ukraine, one which would make its basis of support within Georgia look insignificant by comparison. Such a movement could rend Ukraine apart, with strategic implications far deeper than those raised by the events in Georgia. This may not be necessary. The Ukrainian government under President Viktor Yushchenko collapsed in September when his Prime Minister, the formerly pro-Western Yulia Timoshenko, made it clear that she did not wish to antagonise Russia, and left his cabinet. Timoshenkos pragmatic decision, made under the influence of events in Georgia, could swing official opinion in Ukraine away from Yushchenkos plans and towards a more pro-Russian standpoint. If this occurs and a pro-Russian government is elected, then Putin and Medvedev will have won the first round of a major battle and without a shot having been fired (provided, that is, that the anti-Russian Western Ukrainians do not attempt to secede). A lasting Russian victory, however, is predicated not merely upon the appropriate election result, but upon the subsequent behaviour of the government. If Yushchenko or someone like him is returned, or if an initially pro-Russian government shifts, as in the case of Leonid Kuchmas, to a pro-Western stand, then the problems outlined above could emerge with a vengeance. A Neutral Standpoint Socialists are obliged to take a firmly independent stand on the question of Georgia. We cannot side with any of the governments involved. Saakashvilis regime is a puppet of the USA, and it has been a willing if junior partner in the quest of US imperialism to surround Russia. We cannot endorse Milibands and Browns belligerent posturing. We do not support the expansion of Nato; indeed, we advocate its dismantling. Nor can we back Russia in its bullying of a small nation, however much we dislike the latters regime. Our satisfaction at seeing the USA humiliated must be tempered by a recognition that the main beneficiary in this instance is the Russian ruling lite, no friend of the working class, and by no means innocent of appalling behaviour, as we saw in Chechnya. Nor can we support the South Ossetian and Abkhazian secessionists within Georgia. As we have seen in this case and in the instance of Yugoslavia, the kinds of conflict which such forces ignite bring nothing but
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misery for the bulk of the people tangled up in them. The ordinary inhabitants of Georgia, whatever their nationality, share the same interests in fighting for jobs, decent public services and general dignity. Partition, secession and the creation of dwarf states reinforce and institutionalise divisions amongst their working populations, and work only to the advantage of the local ruling lites and their foreign backers. In Georgia and elsewhere and perhaps in Ukraine in the not so distant future socialists cannot afford to take sides in disputes and conflicts between nationalists, or when the big powers use petty nationalist squabbles as bargaining counters in their broader power-games.

Mike Jones

The Save Gordon Rally

ON previous occasions Ive commented on the problem of the category in which one should place an article about the Labour Party conference these days. Conference and the input of the Constituency Labour Parties and trade unions were downgraded when the Policy Forum system was introduced. These were heavily stacked with creatures of the leadership, and delegates began staying away. When votes at conference defeated the leaderships position, it just declared its intention to ignore them. Under New Labour conference became a Public Relations exercise and focus for big business lobbyists. Actual Labour Party members had to rely on the fringe meetings for genuine debate and political sustenance. This years conference in Manchester towards the end of September plumbed an all-time low. It became the Save Gordon Rally. Buffeted by the economic crisis, rising inflation and general dissatisfaction with the government, and Browns personal unpopularity, his apparent dithering and inability to communicate with the public, the resignation of a series of junior ministers, mutterings of a cabinet revolt, the probable defeat in the Glenrothes by-election being its trigger, Browns position was shaky, and heir-to-Blair David Miliband was somewhat prematurely offering his candidacy for the top job. The Blairite clique urged Miliband to present his candidacy when Blair stood down, but he was too much of an unknown quantity. Since then he has been cultivating the media in particular, and posturing on the world stage in a most bellicose manner about the conflict in Georgia over South Ossetia. What other government figures elsewhere in Europe made of what one Labour MP termed the pillock on his gap-year, Ive no idea, but the cheesy grin, the banana in the hand, and the putdown by Brown during his speech on Tuesday, 23 September, reminding viewers and readers that this is no time for a novice Cameron was also included in the reference finished off Milibands campaign for now. Brown let it be known that he wants to do better, but then Blair was forever apologising and promising to reconnect with the voters, drop the spin, etc, but nothing changed in his style of government or his policy thrust). On the Tuesday, Brown promised access to computers and broadband for children deprived of Internet usage; to extend help for carers looking after sick or elderly relatives; and a billion pounds towards extending childcare for children as low as two years of age.
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The union leaders gave militant speeches on a range of matters currently concerning the public, such as the call for a windfall tax on the energy companies, and denouncing their greed. Derek Simpson, joint General Secretary of the super union Unite, took on the huge bonuses the tricksters in the City give themselves. Tony Woodley, the other Unite General Secretary, called for the renationalisation of the gas, electricity and water companies, which are becoming monopolies but in the private sector, and which do as they wish because the regulatory bodies are so toothless. At the TUC gathering previously, the public sector gave notice of a coordinated struggle with strikes during the winter against the two per cent pay limit when inflation is now five per cent. A motion pledging the TUC to support the struggle received strong support, but it was not adopted. A GMB motion on ending the UK opt-out of the EU Working Time Directive, that is to keep a maximum of 40 hours per week, was adopted, but Labour Party officials were quick to inform the media that the motion was superseded by another that stipulated that only abuses of the directive will be remedied, which seems to be a cop-out. I imagine that the trade union leaders, while presenting their concerns in more militant terms than has been the case for some years, and advancing views that were sensible and in no way extreme, were more concerned with saving Gordon, as his replacement by someone like Miliband would mean the end of any chance of more union-friendly policies. The resignation of Ruth Kelly from the cabinet in the early hours of the morning following Gordons big speech, put a damper on what was seen as a success for Brown who had impressed enough people both to save himself vis--vis Labour Party members, and to get a significant rise in his opinion-poll rating to lag Cameron by only 10 per cent. Apparently, Kelly intended to resign to help create a momentum for the cabinet rebels who are still inside plotting. Im informed that Hazel Blears is coordinating that part of the plot, while ex-Labour Party General Secretary Margaret McDonagh is in charge of the whole business. On the last day of conference I bumped into a mainstream Labour Party leftwinger who was for some years President of Chester CLP. He gave his opinions and we had an interesting chat, but what struck me was the hatred of the Blairites by someone who was sticking by Brown. This or that person is termed a Blairite in such a way as one would think it concerned a child-molester. I presume that this is a sign of the times. The mutual hatred that seems to exist between the supporters of Brown and Blair doesnt seem to rest on any fundamental policy differences, but is either personal or even psychological: love turned sour. While watching the Labour Party conference and hearing sound speeches demanding certain actions against the spivs and crooks running the privatised utilities, the banks, the ex-mutual societies which have now all failed, it was obvious from responses by Alistair Darling, for example, that these people have taken to heart the free-market, regulation lite and the whole neo-liberal ideology, and that there is no way back for them. How can they now, after New Labours creation and its continuation of Thatcherism, drop it and return to Old Labour ideology, not to mention any socialist policy? After the successive change of leader in the Liberal Democrats and the arrival of Clegg, we now have three Tory parties offering themselves up. Events might save the Labour Party, but as it appears now it is heading for a major defeat and loss of MPs at the next general
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election, which could see it split because of the recriminations. It could end up out of power again for many years. Nothing was resolved permanently at Manchester, it merely provided Brown with a respite.

Afterword: Blairs Revenge? The surprise appointment of Peter Mandelson as Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is a sign of the level of insecurity and desperation of Gordon Browns government in the face of severe economic difficulties. Called in at Browns request, Mandelson will not be making a bid for the party leaders post, but he knows that the governments position puts him in a strong place to exert his influence within both the Cabinet and the Labour Party itself. Brown knows this, but such is his difficult position that he is willing to invite on board such a sworn enemy. Although Mandelson was intimately connected with Tony Blairs leadership, he is astute enough to recognise that Browns policies are a direct continuation of Blairs, and that none of the ultra-Blairites has any possibility of successfully challenging Brown. Therefore, the most effective way for him to make a return to British politics is by reducing the personal rivalries in the party leadership, supporting Brown rather than undermining him, and thereby being able to pose as the saviour of the New Labour project. Mandelsons return confirms that Brown will continue with his neoThatcherite approach, and that the hopes of some union leaders of a return to Old Labour policies are surely dashed. Arthur Trusscott

Reviews
Ben Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl, Pluto Press, pp 348
THERE are lots of good things about this book. The best thing, I suppose, is that it presents a rounded picture of one of Britains most important arguably the most important twentieth century songwriters, demonstrating his humanity, his love of life, his powers of scholarship, his view of the importance of working-class culture, and much more. Particularly useful is the space Ben Harker gives to MacColls theatrical interests, together with some recognition of his plays, knowledge of which fades by comparison with the better-known songs. Another good thing about the book is the way it properly records the important contribution of Ewans partner Peggy Seeger, who collaborated on any number of projects with him, but whose contribution was not always officially recognised. Harker tends to treat MacColls Stalinism with kid gloves: we only encounter criticism in respect of his enthusiasm for the China of Mao Zedong. But we are given enough to understand that the young Jimmie Miller (his real name) was drawn initially to the British Communist Party in its Third Period phase around 1929 (p 18),
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when the line was uncompromisingly one of class against class, implying that: Whoever is not for us is against us. I think that MacColls subsequent political trajectory shows that essentially he stuck to this position: it certainly explains his preference for Maos anti-imperialist stance over Khrushchevs espousal of peaceful coexistence with the USA. Harker comes down hard, though, on the litist Puritanism of the Singers Club and the Critics Group as they developed in the 1960s. Of the Singers Club, Harker observes: The club was run for and by MacColls likeminded vanguardists. Its booking policy reflected the purism it espoused. (p 160) That is accurate in my estimation. The only problem, however, with an account of MacColl which skates over the Stalinism and battens only on the litist approach to running a folk club is that clearly there was an indissoluble connexion between the two attitudes. I do not wish to imply that left-wing litism is only to be found among the ranks of Stalins supporters: such is clearly not the case although we cannot pursue the ramifications of and reasons for that here. All that one can say is that if one believes, as MacColl did, that folk music is workers culture to be protected from the bourgeoisie and safeguarded for the day when the workers will come into their own (p 184), then one is in danger of adopting a kind of police attitude: certain material and certain approaches are liable to be censored out. In practice, however, trying to run a folk club on that basis is a risky business even one dedicated to the performance of socialist and trade union songs and the acrimonious argument that marked the close of MacColls version of the Sons of Homer, the Critics Group, appears as completely comprehensible. The above considerations must not be allowed to detract, however, from MacColls achievements as a songwriter, nor from the validity of his insights concerning the inventiveness and intellectual ability of ordinary people (both in politics and in the arts). Commenting on MacColls relations with the Communist Party in the mid1950s and the partys approach to cultural questions, Harker reports that: MacColl was invited to advise members of the Young Communist League National Committee (including the young Arthur Scargill) on establishing a network of DIY music clubs along the lines of the Ballads and Blues radio programmes and concerts. For MacColl this was the correct cultural line: the Communist Party should be helping to stimulate culture grounded in working-class experience and speech; it should unearth and disseminate the hidden history of Britains politically radical industrial folk culture. (p 123) It is because of insights like these that we cannot afford to ignore MacColls work and his activities, which the book does a good job in documenting. MacColl apparently wrote some 300 songs in all. From my own comparatively limited knowledge of them, I would say that a number of them are quite outstanding such as Dirty Old Town, Jamie Foyers, Browned Off, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, The Shoals of Herring and, perhaps above all, The Ballad of Accounting, with its final challenging lines: Did they teach you how to question when you were at school? Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool? Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men, All your fellow men, all your fellow men?
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MacColl in the end remained one of us because he wrote the party I had served was moribund, but the ideas and concepts which gave rise to it are still as alive as ever they were (p 253). Chris Gray

Lawrence Parker, The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1960-1991, The Rotten Elements, pp 75
THE Communist Party of Great Britain was noteworthy in that apart from the Balham Group of the early 1930s, there were no organised oppositional currents emerging during a time when other communist parties were throwing them up (and out) on a regular basis. Unlike most communist parties, no CPGB Central Committee member, or even prominent cadre, joined a Trotskyist or other critical communist group until Khrushchevs Secret Speech of 1956 sent shockwaves through the whole official communist movement. Things soon died down in the British party, but within a few years oppositional currents started to emerge, and it is these tendencies which are the subject of this useful pamphlet. Parker states that there was always a potential clash between the CPGBs ostensible commitment to Leninism and its day-to-day reformist approach, and that this inevitably provoked tensions between members who took the former at face value and the party leadership. The rise of Sino-Soviet discord in the early 1960s saw the Chinese leadership accusing the Soviet leaders of revisionism, that is to say, revising Leninism in a reformist direction, and such accusations had echoes in Western communist parties, whose leaderships had often started to produce programmes, such as the CPGBs British Road to Socialism, that bore a distinctly reformist air about them. The first organised anti-revisionist group in Britain was the somewhat clumsily-named Committee to Defeat Revisionism For Communist Unity. Its leading figure, Michael McCreery, had for a couple of years been elaborating a critique of the CPGBs reformism, and the group emerged publicly in late 1963 with a manifesto that urged CPGB members to oust the current party leadership for its support for Khrushchev and for betraying the working class. It suffered from the perennial problem facing oppositionists of whether to break openly from the parent body, it was also pretty much bankrolled by the well-heeled McCreery, who died of cancer in 1965, and it did not long survive his early death and the inevitable ideological and organisational problems that it encountered. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s and especially after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, Maoism was a growing trend within the CPGB, particularly within the Young Communist League. It even reached the CPGBs Executive Committee, where Reg Birch, a leading left-winger in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, came into conflict with his colleagues because of his developing Maoist views. Suspended from party membership in January 1967, he was by then already contributing to a Maoist journal, The Marxist, and he left the CPGB when the party leadership preferred to back former party member Hugh Scanlon rather than Birch for the AEU President in 1967. He subsequently played a leading role in the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a Maoist group that eventually backed Enver Hoxhas Albania. Next to be discussed are those within the CPGB who by the early 1970s were concluding that the increasingly parliamentarian and openly reformist course of the CPGB was intimately connected with its veering away from the necessary commitment to the Soviet Union. The CPGBs Executive Committee condemned the Soviet
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overthrow of Alexander Dubeks reforming regime in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and this led to grumbles amongst party members who still held Moscow in high esteem and who considered that it really desired a more militant line on the part of overseas communist parties. Eddie Jackson, the main force behind the Appeal Group, had long opposed the parliamentary orientation of the British Road to Socialism, whilst the rival tendency that formed the New Communist Party broke from the CPGB in 1977 over the overtly revisionist approach that was subsequently sanctified in the 1978 version of the partys programme. Parker states that the idea that Moscow backed their critical stance was a political comfort blanket, and the Appeal Group was especially upset when it learnt that Moscow was in favour of the CPGBs general line. We now know that all versions of the British Road to Socialism were approved by Moscow, with Stalin actually helping in the drafting of the first edition; that is to say, that Moscow wanted the CPGB to have a reformist programme, including during Stalins day. Parker doesnt look at the subsequent evolution of the NCP, but it is interesting to do so in the light of what he writes of other anti-revisionist trends. The NCP did eventually break from its Brezhnevite orientation after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, and has effectively adopted the Maoist analysis that sees the rot in the Soviet Union setting in after the death of Stalin. With no places left in Eastern Europe worthy of the name of socialist, it has had to look further afield, and has settled upon North Korea as the country in which socialism is being built. Oddly enough, this is where another formerly Maoist then pro-Tirana group, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), has ended up, its illusions in Albania shattered after the death of Hoxha, and this group has held joint meetings on the subject with the NCP. However, a senior member of the NCP informed me that there is a feeling within the party that the rot started during the Popular Front period; this is surely a bit risky, as backdating it any further puts the party at risk of aligning itself theoretically with Trotskyism, and, as we shall see, the NCP has already had some bother in this respect. The last group discussed in this pamphlet is the one which emerged within the NCP, and which now runs as the Communist Party of Great Britain, the original CPGB having been wound up in 1991. This group is unique amongst post-1960 oppositions within official communism in Britain in that, under the influence of the Turkish oppositional communist Riza Yrkolu, it started along a course that resulted in its elaborating a critical analysis of the entire history of the movement. Turfed out of the NCP in 1980-81, it published The Leninist magazine and soon evolved positions somewhat reminiscent of the Trotskyist movement, and was and not without justification accused of such a sin by those still adhering to the Stalinist traditions. Of course, this cannot solve all the political problems facing a Marxist group, and whether todays CPGB has escaped the customary pitfalls of leftwing groups is another matter (readers of this magazine will have their own opinions on that), but its development of a critical attitude towards Stalinism demonstrated an unusual open-mindedness on its part. So far as I can tell, this is the first example of a grouping (as opposed to individuals) in Britain doing this since the Balham Group nearly eight decades ago. A thoroughgoing critique of revisionism necessitated a far deeper investigation of the Soviet Union and the official communist movement than those embarked upon by either the pro-Chinese or pro-Soviet oppositionists within the CPGB. Such a critique would necessarily investigate the relationship between revisionist politics
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and the diplomatic requirements of the Soviet regime, and so long as the critics kept an open mind this would inevitably hit upon the adoption in 1924 of Stalins dogma of socialism in one country. And this would open the door to critical communist analyses, whether of the Trotskyist, left communist or other varieties. It would mean recognising that under Stalin the Soviet Union degenerated into a society ruled by an anti-communist lite, and that the Peoples Republic of China was ruled by such an lite from the very start. Parker makes the important point that with the exception of the faction behind The Leninist, all the post-1960 oppositions were fatally limited by their confinement within the Stalinist tradition, and that to make real theoretical progress it was necessary for such oppositionists to break through these self-imposed limitations to reach an authentic form of Marxism. Altogether, this pamphlet is more of a work in progress than a finished account of oppositions within the CPGB. It is useful insofar as it brings to light forgotten and obscure episodes in the history of the CPGB, ones which the official and semi-official histories have either overlooked or dealt with in a cursory manner. There are things that need to be investigated in more detail; for instance, the nascent oppositional sentiments in the 1940s, such as those expressed by Bob McIlhone at the party congress in 1945 that brought down the wrath of Harry Pollitt, and by Eric Heffer a few years later; the Australian Communist Partys sharp polemic against the CPGB in 1948 (and who put them up to it, it could not have been accidental). The whole Maoist movement in Britain, not just those parties which emerged from within the CPGB, could be studied to good purpose. And of course the differences within the CPGB, in particular, the persistence of pro-Soviet sentiments and the tensions between proSoviet party members and the leadership which continued until the partys demise in 1991, would make a worthy subject of a substantial study. This pamphlet marks a good start to such a project. Hopefully, Parker will not leave this matter at this formative stage, and will proceed to a broader and deeper account. Paul Flewers

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict, British Museum, 24 July26 October 2008

THE British Museum is running a series of exhibitions into 2009, dealing with ancient civilisations. The first, on the Chinese, was centred on many individuals the Terracotta Army the latest (till 26 October) focuses on one, Hadrian the Roman Emperor. Why centre things on one person (and why this one)? Could such a survey though tell us something about the place of the individual in history? The exhibition is organised in a circular series of galleries above the fabled Reading Room, presenting different aspects of Hadrians career his accession, actions in government, military and architectural policies, his intimates and successors. Much of this is an exhibition of stone of statues, inscriptions and other artefacts, falling in with a recent emphasis of historians on material culture: what such objects tell us about the mentality of an era. The one material object most people know about regarding Hadrian is the Wall named after him in the North of England. Photos abound here, but its now generally understood not so much as a defence barrier but as a border, a marker of the Empires limit. Like any individual, Hadrian inherited both powers and expectations. Born in CE 76 in Spain, he was chosen by his unrelated predecessor Trajan to follow a line of supreme rulers, committed to conquest and the spoils of slaves and taxes. By Tra74

jans time, emperors were very much the military commander again, taking the field with their troops. After his appointment in 117, Hadrian chose to remain close to the army, but to defend the Empire, not expand it. As well as the wall in Britain, he ordered a line of continuous stake fences across Germany. He withdrew entirely from troubled Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq). In Rome itself he cancelled overdue taxes and commissioned someone to codify the law made by magistrates and governors the praetors edict so enabling greater legal stability. He toured the provinces with his court, showing his face and improving military discipline. With his interest in Greek culture and Roman fame, he gave his capital the Baths of Agrippa and the Temple of Venus. He also rebuilt the Pantheon, the timeless sublime of its ceiling made possible by contemporary developments in construction with concrete. The dome went on to become a model for many impressive vaults in the West St Peters, St Pauls and the Reading Room itself. The Decline and Fall historian Gibbon wrote of Hadrian: His vast and active genius was equally suited to the most enlarged views, and the minute details of civil policy. This exhibition seems in the main to agree. Hadrian is here presented as a man of moderate political ambition, mainly interested in art and travel not a thuggish Tiberius, popularity-seeking Nero or reckless Caligula; a competent ruler, who mainly consolidated the Empire rather than seeking expansion and conflict. Perhaps the curator is suggesting that we could do worse than find such a prince today. Power for achievement always gives leeway for caprice. The exhibition doesnt skip this aspect. Known on inscriptions as the Enricher and Restorer, it was Hadrians very commitment to Greco-Romano culture that led him into actions that will lose him the visitors sympathy. Towards the people of Judaea, the traditional Roman policy was one of religious toleration, a special case being made for the Jews monotheism. The previous incumbent Trajan, however, had come into conflict with the Jewish Diaspora, and perhaps Hadrian sought to root out what he saw as their wrong ideas. Whatever the reason, in 132 Hadrian adopted a policy of Hellenisation, prohibiting circumcision and planning to turn Jerusalem into a colony of Romans. This provoked a revolt, with the Judeans resorting to guerrilla warfare, some hiding out in caves (an echo of some more recent Middle Eastern guerrillas). The emergency lasted until 135, and the rebels were ruthlessly put down. This really was the end of Jewish society in the area, and Hadrian is still the object of a Hebrew curse. In any individuals life, there is room not only for caprice but also the unexpected, for what Bury called a collision of two independent causal chains. One stream meets another and a flood results. The Labour Party elected John Smith as leader, but his physiognomy decided otherwise, and his death created a space for Tony Blair. With Hadrian, the unexpected was the common human one of love, involving a youth from Asia Minor, Antinous, to which a room in the exhibition is dedicated. On a tour of Egypt, this favourite of Hadrians drowned. The ruler promptly made the youth a god and named a city after him. There is an impressively sculpted statue of Antinous here, in the guise of Osiris, an Egyptian god who rose from the Nile. Coopting foreign gods wasnt new to the Romans flexible polytheism, while gay sex was part of Graeco-Roman culture. The latter was not a sign of decadence. Like inmates of an American penitentiary, it wasnt so much that Romans objected to
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gay sex, it was rather partner equality or abasement by a superior that was distasteful. Earlier objections to Neros same-sex marriage, as found in Tacitus, can be understood not so much as an objection to his lovers gender as to the Emperors dressing up and playing the bride, that is, the femme, the receiver, the inferior. An attitude of worship might also have been offensive to many traditional Romans. However, the Emperors wishes were carried out. Hadrians commitment to aesthetics as seen in his personal interest in architecture is given more than one room here. All Roman rulers were interested in building, especially the patronage of temples. In both senses, it looked good while commemorating the patron. However, Hadrians interest was more direct he made professional architects jealous. At Tivoli outside Rome, he supervised the design of a villa, which became almost a small town. The model of it in the exhibition covers a table the size of a squash court. It was a complex of living quarters, swimming pools, temples and even a theatre. Hadrian conducted official business there, and it housed his courtiers. It suggests nothing so much as a model for the showplaces of Renaissance lords and Hollywood producers. Like Hadrians beard, such a magnificent living space may have been the sign of a trend. Before the Emperor went unshaven, soldiers had done so on campaign (as shown on Trajans victory column), and young men in the capital had copied them. However, the trend towards larger and seemingly self-sufficient estates was more than a fashion. The emperor in fact was only one member of a villa-building class, the senators and very rich. In the beginning, with Augustus, the relationship of ruler and group had been accepted by the senatorial class as one of first among equals, in order to prevent a few of the rich imperilling the property of the others by civil war. The emperors gained more authority, often losing it through assassination. Over the centuries, the emperor system continued to secure the place of the very wealthy, eventually making virtual slaves of the citizenry. In the later Empire, however, from the reign of Hadrians successor Marcus Aurelius, the senatorial class became harder to control and tax, less ready to help out the state, retiring, by preference or necessity, to their self-sufficient estates. The burden of taxation fell on the lower classes, even the less well-off propertied. Maintenance of the army, the bureaucracy and the non-tax-paying landowners, including the Church, were taxsupported by the majority, the peasantry. Civilisation was eaten away from the inside as the poorer subsidised the rich. Perhaps these parallels are too close for comfort. We are sometimes accused of neglecting the place of the individual in history, but any individual, even an emperor, cannot stand for a whole society or the decline of an empire. He too is only one, as it were, in situation. By selecting the era of Hadrian as the example of this civilisation, the exhibition chooses a time of relative peace and prosperity. As an individual, Hadrian acted on the power his epoch as emperor gave him, canny or capricious by turns. Before his death in 138, he stabilised rather than expanded the Roman world, imitating previous rulers, like Augustus, by pursuing cultural prestige. He can thus be presented as a competent and even modest executive, though slipping into fanaticism. The Caesars who came after him made increasingly authoritarian and useless moves to avert disintegration and defeat until all that was left of Rome was the one Crown under one God of Byzantium. When the crises came, it was not the power of the prince to build a great villa that mattered, but the place of the rich to live off the rest.
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Mike Belbin

Darren G Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party 1945-89, IB Tauris, pp 294
WHEN I first became involved in left-wing politics some 30 years back, the Soviet Union was well on its downward slide, and those who promoted a rosy picture of it seemed a little quaint, a hangover from another era. Nonetheless, even by that time one could still encounter some people in the Labour Party and trade unions who demonstrated a touching faith in the Soviet regime, and were ever willing to praise what they saw as its social and political achievements. This book, based upon a PhD thesis at Sheffield University, is a substantial investigation into the various Labour MPs over the half-century from 1945 whose attitude towards the Soviet Union and the other Stalinist states was considerably more appreciative than that of their fellow MPs on the left of the party, and who were often criticised as being, at best, apologists for Stalinism and, at worst, de facto or even direct agents of the Soviet regime. Dr Lilleker describes their political history, their justifications for their outlook, and their myriad affiliations to pro-Soviet organisations, such as the World Peace Council, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the British-Soviet Friendship Society and other bodies with close links with Soviet bloc states. Konni Zilliacus was drawn into the pro-Soviet arena during the Popular Front period. Some, such as Stephen Swingler, Lester Hutchinson, John Platts-Mills and Frank Allaun, came from a Stalinist background prior to the Second World War, and they maintained their fondness for the Soviet Union when they subsequently moved into the Labour Party. Others, such as Ron Brown, James Lamond, Stan Newens, Renee Short and William Wilson, came to prominence later on, and came from a variety of political backgrounds (oddly enough, Newens had been in a Trotskyist group, and, I might add, not one of the Pabloite variety that demonstrated a decided softness towards Stalinism). They were always viewed with suspicion by the right-wingers in the party leadership, particularly when the Cold War was at its hottest during the late 1940s, and Zilliacus, Hutchinson, Platts-Mills and Leslie Solley found themselves expelled from the party, and, along with the arch-Stalinist DN Pritt, himself expelled in 1940, unsuccessfully stood as Labour Independents in the 1950 general election. When investigating the motives for their appreciative attitude towards the Soviet bloc regimes, Lilleker notes the common factor in their rejection of the policies promoted by the right wing of the Labour Party moderation in respect of domestic affairs, Atlanticism in foreign affairs and their acceptance of the official image promoted by Moscow: the central role of the Soviet Union in the fight against Hitlers Germany, the Soviet Union as a steadfast proponent of peace, staunch opponent of Western imperialist interventions and stalwart supporter of progressive causes around the world, and the domestic social welfare, education and employment policies in the Eastern bloc which favoured and benefited the working class. Those who did have criticisms of the undemocratic nature of Stalinist rule considered that such blemishes were the result of the Soviet Unions existence within a hostile environment, and that the easing of East-West tensions would lead to a democratic revival. There were also perquisites available to them: they could and some certainly did take full advantage of the free trips on offer to Eastern bloc countries, and the discussions with important officials and the attention lavished on them could help compensate for their lowly positions within parliament and their party at home. Lilleker is critical of the espionage narrative of many Western writers who
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claimed that Britains institutions were under constant threat from communist intrigue, in which the pro-Soviet Labour MPs played a key role, and for whom any sympathy for the Soviet Union or contact with Soviet bloc officials ipso facto rendered such a person a Soviet agent and a traitor to Britain. Such writing was shrouded in sensationalism and relied upon a degree of innuendo (p 5). For example, Chapman Pincher claimed that there were powerful undisclosed Soviet agents within the Labour Partys leadership, then added that the laws of libel prevented him from elucidating further. More recently, former Soviet bloc intelligence officers have made enthusiastic additions to this dubious uvre, and Oleg Gordievsky did himself no favours when he branded Michael Foot as a Soviet agent and was forced to retract his allegation. Lillekers explanation views the pro-Soviet MPs more as change agents: Their role was to highlight the progressive nature of the Soviet world view, the advanced nature of the socialist society and the desire for rapprochement and understanding among the Soviet leadership and people. In advancing these claims these individuals attempted to alter the anticommunist rationale which dominated the Western perception of the Eastern bloc. In putting themselves forward as a conduit for pro-Soviet ideas they acted as the agency through which these ideas could be disseminated, gain a broader audience and alter public perception and thus governmental policy. The ultimate aim was to end the Cold War and establish peace and global security, this would increase national prosperity for all nations following the end of the arms race and enable socialist ideas to spread across Western society. (p 13) It is clear to me that the pro-Soviet MPs made no secret about their allegiance to Moscow: they were public advocates of the Soviet Union. This is a key factor that the conspiracy-seekers overlook; no doubt not accidentally, as this would undermine the essence of their entire uvre. The pro-Soviet MPs did not hide their views, and politically-aware people knew their opinions on the subject. This very openness rendered it almost irrelevant whether they met KGB agents or took a few pieces of Moscow gold. They could provide political information and personal gossip that might add useful colour to what Soviet agents gleaned from the British press, but their obvious pro-Soviet sympathies meant that it was unlikely that they would have appointments that might enable them to be privy to really sensitive information. Lilleker alludes to this when discussing the links that the Soviet Embassy established with Brown, Wilson and Will Owen (who was tried for supplying information, but found not guilty), but unfortunately he does not develop this important point. He also overlooks the intriguing matter of Bernard Floud, a Labour MP who had been accused of being a Soviet agent and who committed suicide in 1967 after being questioned by MI5. He had once been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but in the Labour Party and in parliament he kept his sympathies for the Soviet Union to himself; he was never associated with the pro-Soviet MPs or even with the broader group of left-wing MPs. Lilleker notes that the actual allegiance of the pro-Soviet MPs to the Soviet Union varied in intensity. Zilliacus veered from defending Stalins regime in 1948 against Viktor Kravchenkos insistence that labour camps existed in the Soviet Union, through being excommunicated in 1949 for supporting Tito, to being readopted, as it were, after Stalins death, albeit without his being uncritical of every aspect of
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Soviet policies. Short, Lamond and Brown were undeviating in their uncritical support for Moscow. Swinglers fondness faded after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, whilst Platts-Mills came around to consider that the rot set in once Stalin had died. Allaun was by no means uncritical of Moscows actions; neither was Newens, although the latter sadly blotted his copybook by providing a couple of glowing accounts of Romanias Nicolas Ceauescu, indubitably the most grotesque East European leader this side of Enver Hoxha. Lilleker recognises the important fact that the manner in which the pro-Soviet MPs backed or excused the manoeuvrings of the Soviet regime brought the left-wing cause as a whole into disrepute, and played into the hands of its opponents. Looking at Zilliacus but with much relevance to the others, he notes that the Soviet Union was allowed almost complete latitude of action, and that in hinging his opposition upon an apology for Soviet foreign policy, he devalued the main tenets of his argument and thus his alternative foreign policy programme (p 75). Furthermore, certain key actions of the Soviet Union such as its invasions of neighbouring countries contradicted the tenets of, for example, the World Peace Council, one of the more important international pro-Soviet bodies, thus giving substance to the charges of hypocrisy made by its critics. Lilleker points out that the pro-Soviet MPs provided the Pinchers of this world with real ammunition with which to back up their scaremongering. Whilst they were not agents in the sense that Pincher & Co declared or insinuated, they did promote the idea that Stalinism was a beneficial political factor. Lilleker mentions that there was common ground between the broader politics of the pro-Soviet MPs and those of the left wing of the labour movement. They all held an interest in progressive foreign policy questions anti-apartheid, anticolonialism, nuclear disarmament, anti-Atlanticism and the reduction of East-West tensions and also agreed upon the need for radical reforms at home. The standard left-wing Labour position that considered that the USA was the predominant belligerent force in the world, and that Labour governments should dissociate Britain from Washingtons policies, meant that left-wing Labour MPs maintained a less antagonistic standpoint towards the Soviet Union than their right-wing colleagues, but, unlike what the conspiracy-seekers implied, this did not mean that they necessarily were apologists for Moscow. Opposition to Atlanticism could engender a drift into adopting a pro-Soviet attitude, but I think that it is important to emphasise that this was by no means an automatic, ineluctable process. Whilst hoping for a democratic socialist renewal in the Soviet bloc, the majority of left-wing Labour MPs were very critical of, for example, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was one thing to oppose the Cold War commonplace that the Soviet Union posed a totalitarian threat to the West; it was quite another to say that Stalinism represented a positive alternative to pro-Western social democracy. Lillekers study shows that the pro-Soviet MPs were but a small proportion of the left wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and that most leftwing Labour MPs maintained a respectable distance from Stalinism. There are some minor errors in this book. The Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920, not 1922 (p 43); 27 Old Gloucester Street in London is not a sorting house for radical organisations (p 37), but the address of a commercial postbox and mail-forwarding company; it is unlikely that the Cominform wanted a British MP to produce pro-Ceauescu propaganda (p 144), as it was dissolved in 1956 and Ceauescu did not take the reins of power until 1965; and although Gordon Schaffer was a loyal Stalinist, he was never a member of the CPGB and thus could
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not have been on its Executive Committee (p 155), and was a member of the Labour Party until 1969. Daniel Ortega would be surprised to learn that he headed El Salvador (p 169). Did Allaun, born in 1913, really join the Union of Democratic Control in 1922 (p 129), and did the left-wing Labour MP Ian Mikado really call for greater privatisation (p 157)? Some names are spelt incorrectly: its James Klugmann, not Klugman, and Theodore Dreiser, not Drieser; and the accents are missing from Brning, Ceauescu, Mnzenberg, Slnsk and Wasa. Finally, I have to criticise IB Tauris for the poor standard of production of this book. There are quite a few basic typesetting errors, the titles of nearly all the books in the notes to the Introduction have been deleted, and the normal practice of setting book and journal titles in italics has been ignored practically throughout the book. One expects a little better than this in a book that costs 57.50. Cheney Longville

Scott W Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia, Cambridge University Press, pp 307
THE aeroplane has been almost from its inception one of the most striking symbols of a nations virility and progress. Not only has it been for nearly a century a key military weapon and an important transporter of both humans and material goods, it has symbolised progress through its technological development and its conquest of nature, and has captured the popular imagination like few other products of human ingenuity. This book looks at the rise of what the author terms airmindedness, the particular set of cultural traditions, symbols and markers that, combined with the particular political culture and social institutions, constitute a given nations response to the airplane (p 2), in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, with an emphasis upon what distinguished it there from its manifestations within the countries of Western Europe and the USA. Scott Palmer considers that aviation in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shared many common features; indeed, he insists that the latter was essentially an extension of the former. Although aviation captured the popular imagination in Tsarist Russia in much the same way as it did in Western Europe and the USA, the Russian aviation industry could not escape the particular forms of backwardness of Tsarist society. Although Russia could occasionally produce planes as good as and once in a while better than Western ones Igor Sikorskys Ilya Muromets was the worlds first heavy bomber, a large four-engine plane that appeared in the summer of 1914 and proved successful in the ensuing First World War it tended to be reliant upon foreign designs and technology, especially in respect of engines, and because of this it often lagged somewhat behind Western countries. There was a commonplace feeling that despite this, a single, transcendent event would transform Russia from its current state of underdevelopment and dependence into a position of dominance as the worlds leading air power. This quest for a quick fix was to have a recurrent, deleterious impact on the nations long-term aeronautical fortunes (p 34). Finally, there was a tendency to compensate for Russias backwardness by making dubious historical claims in respect of the countrys achievements in aviation, asserting that Russians were the first to develop balloons, parachutes and powered flight itself. These peculiarities were to reassert themselves in the Soviet era, especially during the time of Stalins rule. Although aviation in Russia was severely disrupted during the Civil War, with many of the prominent airmen siding with the Whites and defecting abroad and
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with most of the aircraft in an unserviceable condition, the Soviet government put much emphasis upon the role of aviation in modernising the Soviet republic. In early 1923, it initiated a campaign to establish a Red Air Fleet and to foster air-mindedness amongst the population by means of the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet (ODVF). Trotsky, as Commissar for War and with a great interest in technological questions, played a key role in establishing this campaign for the development of civil and military aviation, an independent aviation industry and scientific and technical research, and the encouragement of popular interest in aviation. Trotsky, with his rather exaggerated expectations of the capabilities of technology, considered the aeroplane to be one of the key examples of modern technology that would enable the Soviet republic to raise itself from Russian backwardness, with its ability to establish communications in the absence of an efficient road and railway network, and help overcome the cultural and physical gulf between rural and urban society (some of his writings on this can be found in How the Revolution Armed, Volume 5, pp 271-95). Palmer views the approach of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to be similar to that of the modernisers in Imperial Russia: They embraced the dualistic notion that the airplane was an instrument of the future: a transportation technology ubiquitous throughout the industrially advanced world and a convenient contrivance capable of transporting the country into the future. (p 101) Considerable effort was spent in producing propaganda aimed at the peasantry that showed them the role of aviation in the intended modernisation of rural life. The organisations set up to foster air-mindedness in the Soviet Union suffered from the usual problems facing Soviet institutions; whether to centralise or decentralise their running; whether to recruit members individually or en bloc at workplaces; how much local initiative was to be encouraged. In 1925, the ODVF was fused with a similar body for the chemicals industry to form Aviakhim, and then in 1927 with one for defence to form Osoaviakhim, with an overall emphasis upon military matters, as befitting the increasingly militaristic nature of Soviet politics. The establishment after the Treaty of Rapallo of a clandestine German aircraft factory provided the Soviet authorities with access to advanced information and expertise, and helped Andrei Tupelov to produce an all-metal combat plane in 1925. Palmer states that although the Soviet aviation industry had made some advances, by the end of the decade its successes remained overwhelmingly dependent on the importation of foreign engines and airframes (p 182). The development of aviation was given a prime position within the First Five-Year Plan. The number of aircraft factories increased from 12 to 31, with a tripling of the workforce, and production rose from 608 planes in 1928 to 2509 in 1932. However, Palmer insists that this development did not free the Soviet Union from its reliance upon Western technology and know-how, and the USA provided much of that through legitimate sales and unwittingly through extensive espionage. The Soviet aviation industry remained unable to equal Western standards of quality or free itself from dependence upon the West; it was incapable of self-generating growth (p 256). Breakneck production tempi militated against product quality and genuine innovation, and problems were, as in other sectors, blamed upon wreckers and saboteurs. The aviation industry and the Soviet Air Force (VVF) suffered badly in the Great Terror of 1937-38, and the designers Tupelov, Vladimir Petliakov and Vladimir Miasishchev all found themselves working behind prison walls. From the mid-1920s but with increasing regularity in the 1930s, the Soviet regime engaged in prestige flights both across Soviet territory and to countries around
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the world in order to highlight the technical acuity of the Soviet industry, to bring it international renown, and to draw attention to the countrys flying cadres (p 221). The airmen, who, it must be said, took remarkable risks during these flights over often dangerous terrain in none-too-reliable craft, were promoted in the Soviet press as iconic figures in order to showcase the discipline, heroism and endurance of which Soviet citizens were uniquely capable (p 221). Such prestige flights encouraged the development of very large planes, usually by means of the enlargement of existing designs and fitting of additional engines, such as with Tupelovs huge ANT-20, or planes that could fly great distances but were not much use for anything else, such as his ANT-25. Palmer sees this as a manifestation of the colossalist impulse in Stalinist culture as a whole, an attempt literally to overtake the West, making up in sheer bulk what they lacked in refinement, quintessential exemplars of compensatory symbolism (pp 205-06). The Soviet domestic demonstrations and overseas trips enabled foreign observers to inspect Soviet planes, and it should come as little surprise that many of the deleterious features typical of other Soviet industrial products could be found in them. Soviet military planes did not fare too well in the Spanish Civil War, where their initial successes were overshadowed by their subsequent outclassing by German planes, and they also suffered from poor maintenance and a shortage of spares. The VVF suffered heavy losses in the initial stages of the Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, and the Finns were finally overcome by the sheer weight of Moscows forces. The VVF was caught unawares during the German assault in June 1941, losing around 4000 largely obsolescent planes in the first fortnight of fighting. However, new and greatly improved aircraft designs were soon in mass production, and they played an important role in defeating Hitlers forces. Palmers account ends with a look at the immediate postwar period and the Korean War. Once again, he emphasises the reliance upon Western technology, most notably the literal copying of the B29 Superfortress to produce the Tupelov Tu-4, and the captured German technology and know-how and the purchased Rolls-Royce Nene engines which gave early Soviet jet fighters some advantage in Korea. How valid are Palmers main theories, that Soviet aviation was heavily reliant upon Western technology and therefore lagged behind the West, that it carried over from Tsarist days a decided tendency towards mythologising and gigantism, and that aviation was an exalted means both practical and symbolic of overcoming the backwardness of Russian/Soviet society? That Soviet aviation in its earlier years relied heavily upon Western technology, particularly in respect of engines, is not a contentious idea. However, Palmers rather glib statement that the KGB obtained so many thousands of American blueprints and products that it appeared, in retrospect, as if Soviet military and civil sectors had simply substituted American and European firms for their own research and development labs (p 280), is surely an overstatement. Espionage certainly did take place during the postwar decades, but can it really be seen as the major factor behind the development of Soviet aviation? Robert Kilmarxs A History of Soviet Air Power (London, 1962) considered that after the Second World War foreign assistance merely facilitated Soviet progress and made possible short cuts and savings in research, development and production, and, by the Korean War, Russia was entering a period in which its air power could be considered self-sufficient in new technologies (p 233). Kenneth Whitings Soviet Air Power (Boulder, 1986) added that during the period of Khrushchevs rule, the Soviet Union ceased to be dependent upon foreign
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inputs, and its airframe and engine design bureaus were able to hold their own with the West (p 43). Was Soviet aviation always more backward than that of Western countries, with just an occasional and temporary manifestation of equality or superiority? Some good designs, which proved successful in combating the Luftwaffe and were effective against the Wehrmacht, were already drawn up prior to June 1941, and went into mass production after the German assault. It is perhaps pertinent to note that US fighter designs lagged behind British and German ones until some time after the USAs entry into the war in 1941, and that the P-51 Mustang was a mediocre machine until it was fitted with a Rolls-Royce engine. Palmer takes a cursory view of the Soviet aviation industry after Stalins death, which is the period when the Soviet socio-economic formation moved from its formative stage into maturity, and does not present any analysis of its many designs, both civil and military, put into production after the early 1950s, to see how they compared with Western aircraft. The Soviet Union was not the only power guilty of designing and building problematic outsize aircraft. The USA has not been innocent here. Consider the Boeing B-15, a large bomber prototype built in the late 1930s, and the designed but not built Martin B-16 of similar proportions, both too big for the available engines; Howard Hughes infamous H-4 flying boat, the Spruce Goose, so vast that its eight engines could barely lift it off the water; the postwar Lockheed Constitution transport plane, again woefully underpowered. Convairs giant B-36 bomber was produced in large numbers, 384 in all, but it was delayed by a multitude of teething problems, again was underpowered (its original six piston engines had to be augmented by four jet engines), and was effectively obsolete by the time it entered service in 1949. The German company Messerschmitt built several hundred huge Me 321 gliders and powered Me 323 freighters during the Second World, both hopelessly vulnerable to Allied fighters. Then there was Britains Bristol Brabazon, the prototype of which flew to great national celebration in 1949 but was scrapped just four years afterwards, having received no orders; and Saunders-Roes equally massive Princess flying boat, three of which were built, but only one of which actually flew. Parallels with Soviet aviation are clear here. Whilst it is undeniable that aviation and the subsequent space programme played a key role in the Soviet regimes projection of itself as a powerful, everdeveloping force in the world throughout the post-Stalin era, the more ludicrous boastful falsifications of Russian aviation (and other) history of Stalins dotage were quietly dropped after his death. A tendency towards gigantism continued, particularly with the Tupelov Tu-114 airliner and Tu-20 bomber of the late 1950s (although it must be emphasised that Western estimates of their dimensions were scaled down by some 20 per cent over the years), and, as Palmer notes, Antonovs An-225, an immense freighter that first flew in 1988. Although this planes development was stalled by the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was by no means a repeat of the hopeless ANT-20 of the 1930s, and future success on its part cannot be written off. The plane from which it was developed, the An-124, itself a very large machine, continues to enjoy a successful career, including with Western operators. Scott Palmer has produced an interesting and useful account of the role and specific features of aviation in late Imperial Russia and the first few decades of the Soviet Union. However, his conclusions are undermined somewhat by the absence of a detailed analysis of the Soviet aviation industry and the ideological role of Soviet aviation after the death of Stalin, and a consequent overlooking of whether the
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various premises that he puts forward were still relevant after the mid-1950s. Arthur Trusscott

Letters
Marx and the Future Dear Comrades IN the latest issue of New Interventions for which I congratulate you I notice that, apart from my contribution, there is no mention of something one might well have thought would be likely to have found a place in the thinking of Marxists: the future. But then what would Marxism have to do with this? Marx: now, that would be another story. For example, the first article in the issue, that by Chris Gray. This deals with the problem of basis and superstructure, quoting at length from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. The quotation, as usual in Marxist quotations, has been truncated. This is how it should have finished: The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. The social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society. This is not afterthought. Marx did not write the Critique to miss out the future, as is sometimes suggested in biographical sketches of the author. It is the whole point of the book, and everything else which he wrote. Without this aspect, there is no Marx at all. With it, there is Marx. Every mention which shows how past events have conformed with other events is underpinned by the certainty of communism. The point is that Karl Marx was a communist. Cyril Smith Some Observations on Secularism and Islamophobia Dear Comrades I read with interest John Plants piece Secularism, Phobia and Religion in New Interventions, Volume 12, no 3. Perhaps you will permit me to make a few observations in response. 1) I was surprised that John simply attributes my article to one of the New Labour magazines. My piece in fact appeared in What Next?, no 30, in reply to a piece by Andrew Coates in no 29. Both pieces and Andrews reply in no 31 can be read at www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/ Wnext29/Secularism.html, www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages /Back/Wnext30/Secular.html and www.whatnextjournal. co.uk/Pages/Latest/Birchallreply.html. I must say that it is a strange departure from normal practice to polemicise against an article without giving the reader the means to consult the original. I am a member of the Socialist Workers Party and I have profound political
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disagreements with the editorial line of What Next?. I would not, however, describe the magazine as New Labour it is closer to Old Labour left, with the strengths and weaknesses that that implies. I am frequently infuriated by the commentary on current events. But the journal also has a good record of publishing material on historical and theoretical questions. I have contributed a number of pieces over the years, and they have always been accepted and published in full. I subscribe to both What Next? and New Interventions, and regard both as useful forums for open discussion among different tendencies of the left. I am surprised that John does not agree. 2) Johns support for Phobic Action is entirely commendable. But linguistically he is simply mistaken. The suffix phobia long predates any concept of a medical condition and so in no way implies medicalisation according to the Oxford English Dictionary the term Anglophobia dates from the late eighteenth century and xenophobia from the early twentieth. They were doubtless the model for the coinage of the term Islamophobia. In fact the problem exists wherever a term has both a medical and an everyday usage. I and a great many other people will on occasion say, if we are feeling miserable: Im rather depressed today. Some sufferers from clinical depression take exception to this, claiming it trivialises their much more serious illness. But the coexistence of the two usages seems likely to continue. If we were reconstructing the English language from scratch, Islamophobia might not be the ideal term. Indeed, one could also object to the term anti-Semitism (Arabs as well as Jews are Semites; the suffix -ism might seem to imply that antiSemitism is a reputable, coherent intellectual doctrine like rationalism or materialism). But we all know what anti-Semitism means, and I am quite happy to condemn it without quibbling about terminology. Like it or not, the term Islamophobia is now in wide currency. It certainly seems to be the case that a great deal of antagonism has been whipped up in the popular press against Islam. Technically this is not racism, though the vast majority of British Muslims are Asian or of Asian descent. (Doubtless the average BNP supporter regards the small minority of Anglo-Saxon Muslims as race-traitors or whatever.) There is a distinct phenomenon here which requires analysis and political opposition. 3) John questions my argument that religion will disappear only when the social conditions that produce it disappear, saying that this is also true of corruption, war, womens oppression, etc, and that this should not stop us opposing it in the here and now. True enough. But whereas corruption, war, etc, are the cause of immediate human suffering, religion in itself does not do any particular harm. A handful of people singing All Things Bright and Beautiful to an out-of-tune organ in a draughty church are not oppressing anybody. Nor is a woman (like, for example, my very respectable Christian mother) who wears a headscarf. So the efforts of socialists should be focussed on those issues where religion is actively promoting reactionary policies. Genital mutilation and forced marriage should be unequivocally condemned (there is of course huge disagreement among Muslims on these questions). The key issue which John doesnt mention is abortion. Christians and Muslims alike are opposed to abortion rights, and socialists should be at the forefront of any campaign to defend them. Of course socialists should also engage in general philosophical debate. This need not be a threat to united action. I have heard of no Muslim complaints against, for example, Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion. This is a serious (if in my
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view flawed) contribution to debate, and far removed from the provocative and offensive Danish cartoons. 4) I largely agree with Johns position on education. Socialists should certainly favour the ending of all faith schools and of all fee-paying schools. I think there is, however, one problem with his first point: As a first step, there should be no new faith schools built by or for any religious tendency. So the first step is the preservation of the status quo. But the status quo is that there are a great many Catholic schools and a very few Muslim ones. So unless the ban on new faith schools is placed in the context of a plan to phase out all faith schools, it will appear to be discriminatory. The first step cannot be isolated from the rest of the process. 5) Johns comments on George Galloway were clearly written before the recent split in Respect. A great deal, indeed far too much, has been written on this subject and I have no intention of adding to it. Just a few brief points for the record. As anyone consulting the original article will see, I made a passing analogy between Voltaire and Galloway. This was certainly not intended as a serious or sustained comparison. I do not defend everything Galloway said to Saddam Hussein, but nor do I drag it up on every occasion in order to discredit Galloway. On the specific question of the Halabja massacre, it should be remembered that Galloway signed a House of Commons motion condemning this; Tony Blair did not. Galloway, as John himself notes, has some very positive features (courage, tenacity, etc). I do not think it was wrong to form a political alliance with him. It was of course a risk to do so, and those who take risks sometimes suffer mishaps. Those who do not take risks might as well be dead. Some on the left will claim to have predicted that Respect would encounter difficulties. Unfortunately, predicting failure is one of the easiest skills on the left. Some groupings doubtless hope, rather implausibly in my view, that the dispute in Respect means more people will flock to their banner. John, of course, does not have a banner for us to flock to even if we minded to do so. Ian Birchall John Plant replies: Ian is quite right about the citation matter and I thank him for pointing it out. I resolve to do better in this note. The etymology of phobia is not worth arguing further over. The attitude of revolutionaries to religion is a different kettle of halibut. Ian considers religion to be harmless. Here is Trotskys opinion: Religion, as I hope you will agree, diverts attention away from real to fictitious knowledge, away from the struggle for a better life to false hopes for reward in the hereafter. Religion is the opium of the people. Whoever fails to struggle against religion is unworthy of the name of revolutionary.1 And elsewhere: At a gathering of workers who are monarchists or Catholics, I would deal cautiously with the altar and the throne. But in the programme of my party, and in all its policies, its relation to religion and monarchy must be formulated with absolute exactness.2
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Trotskys accusation of unworthiness should not be wielded against Ian, who is without doubt worthy of being called a revolutionary. His position on religion is however clearly both heterodox and revisionist compared to Trotskys. (I wont consume space with quotations to extend this point to Lenin and Marx.) I think his position may also be a recently adopted one I found no example of it in the valuable collection of Ians articles on the MIA.3 Should Ian wish to develop his position further, for clarification, I will of course argue for its inclusion in this journal. Sometimes the validity of a proposition can be clarified by considering its opposite. The religious rarely consider themselves harmless in relation to communism and equally rarely consider communism harmless to them. Jean-Jacques Marie has recently reminded us that in 1956 one of the favourite slogans of the Hungarian clergy in the countryside was: Do not cut down the trees, otherwise, where will we hang the communists?4 Examples could be multiplied for almost every revolution. Perhaps Ian would consider following The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,5 which in its second edition revised its taciturn description of humanity from harmless to mostly harmless. This might not be sufficient to assuage the anger of the families of workers killed in such religion-inspired terrors as the World Trade Center plane bombs, the Japanese Sarin outrage or the murderous campaign against everybody connected with The Satanic Verses. Conversely, it might be admitting more than is consistent with retaining positions on Tower Hamlets Council, but Ians organisation no longer pursues that objective. Finally, Ian reproves me for not having a banner to wave. If I had a banner, Id ban it in the morning.6
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. LD Trotsky, An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham, In Defence of Marxism, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1973, p 73. LD Trotsky, The SAP, the ICL and the Fourth International, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), Pathfinder Press, New York, 1975 edition, p 203. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/birchall/index.htm. Les Cahiers du Mouvement Ouvrier, no 33, January-February 2007 (to appear in translation in a forthcoming issue of Revolutionary History. Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor Beta, date unknown. See P Seeger and L Hays, 1949 (slightly adapted).

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Cyril Smith
IT is with sadness that we note the death of Cyril Smith. Cyril joined the Trotskyist movement in the late 1940s, and was a member of Gerry Healys faction for many decades. After the Workers Revolutionary Party collapsed in 1985, Cyril embarked upon a long and extensive re-evaluation of the entire Marxist movement, and his conclusion, presented principally in his Marx at the Millennium, Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, but also in several articles in New Interventions, was that Marxism, the doctrine put forward by left-wing currents that claim to stand in the tradition of Marx, was a severe distortion and vulgarisation of the concepts that Marx actually promoted in his writings. We published below, on page 46, a letter that we received from Cyril just a few weeks prior to his death. We intend to publish in a future issue of New Interventions an article by Cyril on mathematics. The Editorial Board of New Interventions sends its condolences to Cyrils family, comrades and friends.

O Where Can It Be?

O where can it be, the old SWP, the party of Kidron and Cliff? At the end of the day, with George Galloway, they leave us now frankly scared stiff. If we dont predecease Comrades German and Rees were in for a miserable time, as they murder to death every old shibboleth and summarily lay down the line. Open borders? Abortion? A socialist case? Our policies we must amend, and trim our stout sails to the wind that prevails, lest the Mosque and the Till we offend. Any spiel! Any policy! Just to get votes. Forward! Build for the next demonstration! George and Selma may rat, but what of that? On, on with transmogrification! Crossrail
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