Donations to Party Funds (1946)

Party News from the January 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Obituary: Cyril Oldfield (2003)

Obituary from the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Manchester Branch were saddened recently to learn of the death of Comrade Cyril Oldfield at the age of 90.

Cyril Oldfield was living in Luton when he first joined the Socialist Party in 1942. He had previously been a member of the "Communist" Party but was expelled in 1938. According to his own account he toyed briefly with Trotskyism, but came across socialist ideas in 1939 through a member in the same workplace; he was a conscientious objector during the war. Unfortunately he had to leave the Party in 1952, when he went to live in Nigeria. But he remained a committed Socialist, spreading our ideas to fellow workers across Africa.

But then, after a gap of forty years, Cyril Oldfield contacted our Head Office again. He was now living in Horwich, and he re-joined at a meeting in Bolton in 1994. He was at first a member of Central Branch, but transferred a couple of years ago to Manchester Branch. During this period, he attended meetings in Bolton and Manchester. Prior to his death, he had begun to write again, and his review of William Blum's Rogue State appeared in the April Socialist Standard. The party was represented at his funeral and a member made a short contribution on Cyril's Socialist work, at his family's request.

We send our condolences to his wife and family. 

Manchester Branch

Who’s a rogue state? (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower’. By William Blum. (Zed Books, 2002)

The name William Blum will not be familiar to many readers in Britain and the majority of those in the USA who learn about him will probably despise him as a traitor. He was intending to make a career in the State Department but found that he could not accept America’s policy in the Vietnam war and left the service. True-blue Americans might have let this “weakness” pass by condemning him as a “wimp”, but he then committed the unpardonable sin of starting to disclose the truth about the shadier actions of their glorious government . He wrote about the members of the CIA and followed that up by an on-the-spot exposure of their involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Soon afterwards he extended his searches to CIA staff and activities in Europe.

The recent up-date of his book Rogue State, first published in 2000, collects together not only his wide and carefully researched exposure of CIA tricks and misdeeds worldwide. It also looks in devastating detail at a whole range of US government actions and policies and at the totally amoral and illegal methods used to carry them out. Lying, murder, criminal interference in elections and other affairs of nations across the globe, covert and overt terrorism, corruption of the UN, continuous brainwashing of its own electorate… The list is almost endless; and all this carried out under the most cynical worldwide propaganda umbrella of “developing democracy” and spreading the “noblest civilised values”.

Many of us will already know, or suspect, some of what Blum has to say, but the sheer power of his detailed exposures makes his book , if not a “must”, a very fine source of ammunition against the present leader of world capitalism, in fact of the world. His listing (with comments) of US global interventions since 1945 and his detailing of little-known US voting at the UN General Assembly over a period of about ten years; these alone are worth the cost of the book.

The slight weakness from a socialist viewpoint is his failure to make a strong enough connection between his many trenchant criticisms and their direct link with the capitalist drive for control and profit. He is quite clear about America’s fifty-year long imperialist expansion and all the accompanying hoodwinking of the American people with endless “wicked enemy” propaganda. He has no illusions about 11 September (“after the attack it was Christmas every day for the security establishment and its corporate cohorts”) : and he knows that the US destruction of Afghanistan was carried out to safeguard its proposed oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. All this is excellent; it’s just a pity that Blum does not add the clincher argument for socialism that, to those who can see, is so implicit in all his facts.

Cyril Oldfield

Blogger's Note:

An earlier edition of this book was reviewed in the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Come to bury not to praise (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lenin: Life and Legacy by Dmitri Volkogonov (Harper Collins 1994. £25.)

The author of this 500-page book is a high-level Soviet Army officer who from the mid- 80s held the post of Director of the Institute of Military History and in August 1991 became Defence Adviser to President Yeltsin. Initially trained as a philosopher and historian, he researched and wrote a biography of Stalin in 1985 which found some disfavour in the military hierarchy, reinforced in early 1991 by his "un-Soviet" views in a history of World War Two.

Despite his education and clear critical intelligence. Volkogonov accepted Lenin and Leninism as the pure foundation of the Russian Soviet State which had somehow become sullied and debased in its later progression to the horrors of Stalinism. As he writes: 

"For twenty-five years after the Twentieth Congress (1956) the Russian people asked themselves where Stalin had acquired the cruelty which he inflicted on his fellow countrymen. None of us—the present author included—could begin to imagine that the father of domestic Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian, was Lenin."

With the breakdown of the Soviet monolith in 1990 and its release from the Communist Party stranglehold, immense quantities of previously secret historical archive material became available for researchers. This has enabled authors like Volkogonov to produce more detailed and more fully documented biographies and other historical accounts than has been possible for the past seventy- five years. The result in this case is a devastatingly solid indictment of Lenin and Leninism.

With a wealth of detail the author describes the chilling and almost unbelievable fanaticism with which Lenin drove himself and his colleagues, firstly to seize state power and then to retain it at all costs. He traces the sources of this obsession with power and its unfettered and brutal use to three main factors. The execution of Lenin's elder brother, implicated in a political assassination plot, the influence of 19th century Russian revolutionary terrorist writers, and Lenin's totally lopsided grasp of Marxism from which he retained only those few aspects which appealed to him. Nothing of Marx's humanity nor of his writings on the future intellectual freedom of men and women; nothing except violence, force, and yet more force, including outright terror if that could serve a purpose. With this background firmly established. Volkogonov goes on to show how all the horrific and well-known features of the Stalinist period had their origins in Lenin; the fact that Stalin was personally vindictive whereas Lenin’s cruelties arose as impersonal expediencies is here irrelevant.

Two other interesting and informative sections of the book deal with Bolshevik finances in the early days and with the "sanctification" of Lenin after his death. Many potentially embarrassing records dealing with German financial support during the First World War were of course destroyed. but the author has collected sufficient evidence to give a clear picture of the very substantial support the German government gave the Bolsheviks to help them take Russia out of the war, thus freeing troops which could be switched to the western front. The Bolsheviks naturally did all they could to conceal this German link.

The second item, the mummification of Lenin's body and the parallel ossification and crystallisation of his thoughts and methods, forms a quite fascinating chapter. The painstaking trouble and enormous expense devoted over decades to the preservation of Lenin’s body in a “viewable condition" are positively mind-boggling in their mediaeval stupidity, except of course when viewed from the standpoint of the cynical hierarchy who manipulated the whole charade to maintain their political dominance.

For almost seventy years after his death the preservation of Leninism was the accepted and necessary mainstay of all who clambered to positions of power; and the careful use of selected phrases from his writings or speeches was the common tactic adopted to dethrone opponents or to entangle those accused of anti-Soviet activity in the endless treason trials of the 30sand 40s. It is ironic that in the very society which proclaimed that its Marxist theory was not a dogma but a living, flexible, "dialectical" guide to action, in reality the power elite set Leninism in concrete for the greater part of this century and defended its rigour with a devotion of which a mediaeval churchman could have been proud.

All this will, of course, come as little surprise to socialists who have from the outset recognised that Lenin’s 1917 Revolution, as an attempt to impose socialism by dictatorship and coercion, was doomed to fail. Utopia, unlike Mao’s political power, did not materialise from the muzzle of a gun. despite all Lenin’s cold-blooded steely determination and his party’s control and use of every weapon of coercion. Volkogonov does not indulge in any political theorising, but his book provides powerful support for the view that the building of a socialist society will be possible when the majority of the workers understand and desire such a change. All the guidance by"revolutionary vanguard" parties with "infallible” leaders like Lenin at their head can never be a substitute for a self-reliant working class.

Lenin: Life and Legacy should help those still blinded by the Soviet myth to follow the disturbing path of intellectual awakening already trodden by the author himself. In his own words :”As a former Stalinist who has made the painful transition to a total rejection of Bolshevik totalitarianism, I confess that Leninism was the last bastion to fall in my mind".

Cyril Oldfield