Lenin . . . Reviewed (1976)

Book Review from the Fall 1976 issue of the Western Socialist

Lenin as Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek, Merlin Press, 11 Fitzroy Square, London, W.l.

The Russian State proclaims as its official ideology “dialectical materialism.” Their views, however, have nothing in common with those of the man who first used the term, Joseph Dietzgen. The basic text of Russian State philosophy is Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a diatribe written in 1908. Thirty years later Anton Pannekoek, a Dutch Marxist and astronomer of world renown, wrote a criticism of Lenin’s work under the title Lenin as Philosopher, his own 1948 English translation of which has now been re-published by Merlin Press.

There are, argues Pannekoek, two types of materialism: middle-class materialism and historical materialism. Middle-class materialism was the view embraced by the rising bourgeoisie when they were fighting the landed aristocracy for control of political power. Religion was an important ideological support for their opponents and the bourgeoisie used the findings of the natural science of the time to undermine religious superstitions. Nineteenth Century natural science had a mechanical materialist view of the world: reality was seen as being composed of tiny particles of physical matter, whose movement was governed by natural laws to discover which was the task of science; consciousness was seen as a purely biological phenomenon, for which a physical-chemical explanation would ultimately be found.

Historical materialism, on the other hand, says Pannekoek, is based on the study of society and social change. Consciousness clearly has a biological aspect, but in origin and content it is a social product. For Marx and Engels, ideas arose from society. Dietzgen dealt with a different aspect: how the experiences of our senses were translated into ideas. Dietzgen's materialism was dialectical: the material world was the ever-changing world of observed phenomena, whether tangible or not, considered as a single whole. Human beings, alone amongst animals, are capable of abstract thought, i.e, of delaying and planning their response to the stimuli of their external environment.

Abstract thought is done with mental concepts, which the mind constructs out of the real world of phenomena as experienced by the senses by distinguishing and naming parts of it. Everything that is the subject of abstract thought is a mental construction, including what we regard as physical objects. This is because reality is ever-changing and exists only as a whole. A table, as the group of phenomena given that name, does not exist separately on its own; it exists only as a part of the whole world of phenomena.

This dialectical view is well explained by Pannekoek.

Of course for our everyday life we need to assume that the things we use have a separate existence, but dialectical materialism teaches that what will do for everyday life will not do as an adequate scientific understanding.

Not only are tables and chairs abstractions from the world of reality, but so are atoms and physical matter. The world of phenomena is not really composed of tiny particles of physical matters; this is just one possible way of describing various physical phenomena experienced by the senses. This does not invalidate materialism at all since “matter” for dialectical materialism is something different:

  "If . . . matter is taken as the name for the philosophical concept denoting objective reality, it embraces far more than physical matter. Then we come to the view repeatedly expressed in former chapters, where the material world was spoken of as the name for the entire observed reality. This is the meaning of the word materia, matter in Historical Materialism, the designation of all that is really existing in the world, ‘including mind and fancies’ as Dietzgen said” (p. 83).

Mach and Avenarius, who Lenin attacked in his book, also held that physical matter was an abstraction, but they regarded this as a refutation of materialism. Their views were shared by a number of German Social Democrat Revisionists and even by some of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. In order to preserve the ideological unity of his party, Lenin set out to refute these ideas, but — and this is the burden of Pannekoek’s criticism of him — from the point of view of bourgeois rather than dialectical materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin defends the view that the world is composed of particles of physical matter and claims that any departure from this position opens the door to religious ideas. In fact, as Pannekoek points out, just like the rising bourgeoisie in its early days Lenin insisted on a militant atheism, even suggesting that the main battle in the field of ideas is between materialism and religion (rather than between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas).

Pannekoek explains that it was no coincidence that Lenin should have been a proponent of bourgeois materialism. For the anti-Tsarist revolutionaries of Russia were faced with the same task as Western bourgeois revolutionaries a century earlier: to overthrow a reactionary landed ruling class, propped up by Church and religion, so as to pave the way for industrialisation. In Russia the bourgeoisie was very weak so that the task of carrying out Russia’s bourgeois revolution fell to another group, the intelligentsia. Organized in a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries and armed with the ideology of militant atheism, a section of the Intelligentsia did seize power in Russia in 1917, eventually evolving into a new ruling class on the basis of state capitalism:

  “The Russian economic system is state capitalism, there called state socialism or even communism, with production directed by a state bureaucracy under the leadership of the Communist Party. The State officials, forming the new ruling class, have the disposal over the product, hence over the surplus value, whereas the workers receive wages only, thus forming an exploited class” (p. 102).

Pannekoek goes further: “The 
alleged Marxism of Lenin and the bolshevlst party,” he writes, “is nothing but a legend.” Leninism, he says further, is “a theory of middle-class revolution, Installing a new ruling class.”

Pannekoek, incidentally, knew of the world socialist movement and was, despite important disagreements, sympathetically disposed towards us. The Western Socialist recounts, in their obituary of him in 1960, how in 1938 when he was in Boston to receive an honorary degree in connection with the tercentenary of Harvard University, Pannekoek found some time to address a party meeting and talk to Socialists. He also contributed two articles to The Western Socialist after the war (“Public Ownership and Common Ownership” in November 1947 and “Strikes” in January 1948). From these it can be seen where his views differed from ours.

Although both Pannekoek and Socialists insist on the need for the working class to organize democratically, without leaders, in order to establish Socialism, Pannekoek was a lifelong anti- parliamentarlst and said the workers should do this through “workers councils.” We, on the other hand, have always urged that the workers should organize democratically into a socialist political party using the vote to gain political power (see Socialist Standard, May 1942 for a criticism of Pannekoek’s views on this).

Pannekoek’s Lenin as Philosopher has a place on the bookshelf of every Socialist, not just for its criticism of Leninism but also for its clear account of dialectical materialism.

Adam Buick

CP war zigzag (1982)

Book Review from the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engineers at War 1939-1945. Richard Croucher. Merlin Press 1982 (£4.80)

Although ostensibly a history of the effects of the Second World War on the engineering unions, this book inevitably becomes a record of the sordid conspiracy of the Communist Party to seize control of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Their attempts turned to farce after the first volte-face, when Harry Pollitt was booted back to Manchester and the CPGB was instructed (from Moscow) that the war was nothing but an "imperialist power struggle".

The CP reverted to all its old tricks— instigating strikes, sabotaging the war effort and harassing Bevin, the Minister of Labour. Then came the Nazi invasion of Russia, and overnight the War was again a sacred crusade for democracy against Hitler. Pollitt, Wal Hannington, Jack Owen, Bob Lovell and other CP notables, notorious for their vehement denunciations of Bevin and the TUC in 1941 rushed up and down the country, wherever a strike broke out, to beg the naughty workers to go back to work. With Jack Tanner, President of the AEU, they supported Bevin's Joint Production Committees and the notorious Regulation IAA, under which young girls (in Coventry, for example) were jailed for absenteeism from the war factory.

Perhaps the whole thing is best summed up by an ex-CP member, Alf Doig, a tool-maker at the Acton Works of the Napier Engine Company:

  What is all this nonsense we get from Harry Shaw (CP) these days about the "workers backing up their leaders". We do not elect "leaders", we elect representatives; the former command, the latter carry out mandates. Sheep need leaders, and where you have sheep, you have shepherds, crooks, and fleecers.
   Here I would like to appeal to the Rank and File of the Communist Party to lake a holiday from the Party: study other peoples’ views and read the literature of the Party between October 1941 and May 1945. Then consider whether you are to be taken in any longer by the nonsense of "Changing Conditions". “New Situations’* and "leading the Working-Class etc." I know it is a hard job to break away, having done it myself, but DO IT before it breaks you.

Horatio

Same difference (2018)

Book Review from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Challenge Today. Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn. By Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. 100 pages. Merlin Press

 This pamphlet-length book is an attempt to draw a distinction between ‘Social Democracy’ (which seeks merely to run capitalism better) and ‘Democratic Socialism’ (which seeks to transform capitalism away). The authors see Bernie Sanders’ campaign to get the Democrat presidential nomination, the rise of Syriza in Greece, and the election and re-election of Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party as examples of the latter.

These do represent a change in conventional politics but what the authors forget is that what they call ‘Social Democracy’ also originally set out to transform capitalism away. However, through the experience of being in government under capitalism, they ended up as a mere alternative team for managing capitalism. Instead of them transforming capitalism, capitalism transformed them.

What the authors call ‘Democratic Socialism’ is essentially a return to the original aim of ‘Social Democracy’ anyway. There is no reason to suppose that their fate will be any different. Panitch and Gindin quote, and endorse, Tony Benn as saying that any serious ‘socialist’ strategy has to begin from ‘the usual problems of the reformer: we have to run the economic system to protect our people who are locked into it while we change the system.’

This is accepting that a left-wing government would have to be running capitalism for a while. But both the theory and the experience of how capitalism works show that it cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers; and that any government that tries this may well, at the beginning, be able to introduce a few favourable reforms but in the end will have to ‘run the economic system’ on its terms, by giving priority to profit-making over spending on reforms.

The authors have a different explanation for the failure of Social Democracy – not that no government can change the economic laws of capitalism but that previous left-wing governments neglected to transform the state. Instead of mobilising their supporters in the country by establishing popular committees to oversee and implement reforms decided at government level they left the existing state apparatus as it was. In other words, a political rather than economic explanation, a variation on the familiar theme that left-wing governments fail because they were not determined enough.

This is in fact the main theme and policy recommendation of the book. But it doesn’t stand up. Not even popular mobilisation can overcome or change the economic laws of capitalism. The Chavez government in Venezuela tried this but still failed. In fact it is instructive that Panitch and Gindin chose not to include Chavez alongside Syriza, Sanders and Corbyn.

Adam Buick

Mattick Again (1979)

Book Review from the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Bolshevik Communism by Paul Mattick. Merlin Press. London, £2.50.

This is a collection of articles written by Mattick over the past thirty or so years. Despite his sometimes convoluted style Mattick is always worth reading as on a number of important points his views are very close to ours (though on others, such as using parliament in the establishment of socialism, there arc fundamental differences). He did in fact write occasionally for the Western Socialist in the 1950s though none of these articles arc reproduced here.

Particularly good is his 1947 article on "Bolshevism and Stalinism" in which he shows how Lenin and Trotsky had laid the foundations for Stalin's dictatorship and that Trotsky’s basic complaint against Stalin was simply that it was Stalin rather than Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin. And we can only but agree with the view expressed in the Introduction that "the revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense leading to the ‘association of free and equal producers'. but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state".

Adam Buick

In Defence of Unions (1967)

Book Review from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant Trade Unionism by V. L. Allen, Merlin press, 12s. 6d.

Nearly ten million workers are in trade unions in Britain yet there is a pervading air of hostility to trade unionism. Trade unions, we are told, cause inflation and disrupt production by strikes and restrictive practices. These views are shared and spread by Labour and Tory governments alike. Very rarely is a reasoned case for trade unionism put. V. L. Allen (who spent some time in jail in Nigeria recently for helping unionists there organise a general strike) attempts to do this and does it well enough. His approach is basically Marxist: In present-day society the means of production are the property of a few so that the rest, owning little but their ability to work, must sell it to an employer to live. Trade unions arise out of this market relation between employers and employees, to bargain more effectively over the wages, hours and working conditions of the employees. Strikes are built-into the system and will last as long as it does, even if they are made illegal.

Some of Allen’s points are worth repeating:

   The strike then is implicit in a free market transaction and any attempt to interfere with it alters the course of the transaction in favour of employers by adding another disability to employees. Every limitation on the ability to strike adds an element of compulsion on workers to sell their labour-power at prices largely set by employers.
  Unofficial action is informal trade unionism occurring because formal unions are incapable of fulfilling their functions satisfactorily and have, for this reason, lost some control over their members.
  Strikes are a challenge to the power and authority of employers. They challenge the prices that employers pay for labour, the profits the employers accrue from production, and their prerogative of control over the means of production.

Part of the book is devoted to discussing the series of “crises” and consequent appeals to consume less and work harder we’ve had to put up with since the war—from Cripps with his wage restraint in 1947 and wage freeze in 1949, through Gaitskell, Butler, Thomycroft, Selwyn Lloyd, (and his “pay pause”) to George Brown’s so-called incomes policy. Since Allen wrote things have got worse with the wage freeze imposed by the Prices and Incomes Act.

Allen argues that workers have been asked to make sacrifices to preserve Britain’s role as an international banker. To play this role government’s must keep the confidence of foreign investors. So, in effect, says Allen, workers are asked to make sacrifices for these foreign investors who tend to be hostile to Labour governments. Which means, we might add, that Labour governments have to be more harsh on workers to overcome this prejudice.

This is the weakest part of Allen’s book. He seems to be suggesting his own solution for British capitalism’s problems: end Britain’s international banking role; have a fluctuating exchange rate; and, in the long run, nationalisation and planning. In other words, the old state capitalism that used to be the vision of Labour leaders. What is significant is that it is now the view only of a minority of Labourites. Needless to say, none of these measures will end the commodity status of labour power (which gives rise to unions, protective practices and strikes) or help solve the many problems workers face because we are propertyless in a property society.

Despite this limitation the book is useful to defend trade unionism and refute the lies spread against it.

Adam Buick

Economics (1980)

Book Review from the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation, by Paul Mattick, Merlin Press. £2.40

It is a great pity that Mattick's style of writing is so long-winded and convoluted since he has a thorough knowledge of Marxist economics and is one of the few, along with us, to define socialism as a classless, moneyless, wageless, stateless society.

This book is a collection of six articles written between 1973 and 1978. The first three repeat the arguments of his book Marx and Keynes. Since this has already been reviewed by us (Western Socialist, No. 2 1972) there is no need to go over this ground again here, except to criticise Mattick's vague use of the word inflation. Sometimes he uses it to mean over-issuing money, sometimes to mean rising prices and sometimes even to mean the reasons which, in his opinion, have led governments to pursue inflationary money and price policies.

This, combined with his style, makes the first three articles difficult going. The next two on state capitalism are excellent, bringing out well the differences between state capitalism and socialism:

Under state-monopoly capitalism, as under capitalism in any other form, the task of the proletariat remains one and the same, namely, the abolition of capitalist relations through the elimination of wage labour in a classless society (pp. 89-90)
But according to socialist theory, the state is an instrument of class rule, and therefore in a classless socialist society it should become superfluous. Those central authorities still necessary would perform only technical and organisation, not state, functions and would remain dependent on the decisions of the producers (p. 98).

Mattick also denies that the Russian revolution was a socialist revolution and proclaims that "to abolish capitalism, the first task is to make Bolshevism a thing of the past once and for all" (p. 113). The final article is an interesting analysis of the depression in America that followed the 1929 Stock Exchange Crash.

Adam Buick

Mattick V. Marcuse (1972)

Book Review from the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critique of Marcuse by Paul Mattick. Merlin Press. £1.

This short—and expensive—booklet is a criticism of Marcuse's assumption, in his One-Dimensional Man and other writings, that nowadays the capitalist class is able to manage the capitalist economy so as to avoid big slumps and at the same time to gradually increase working class living standards. Mattick repeats the arguments of his Marx and Keynes (reviewed in The Western Socialist, No. 2 1972) to the effect the government intervention can only temporarily postpone the crisis of capitalism.

On the political side, Mattick speaks of the working class as having ceased to be revolutionary; but when have the mass of workers ever consciously wanted Socialism as opposed to being merely greatly discontented with capitalism (as they were just after the first world war)? And he mistakenly restricts the working class to industrial workers only; other kinds of wage-worker, apparently, are to play only a secondary and subordinate role in the socialist revolution.

Nevertheless Mattick knows what Socialism is (a world, moneyless, Stateless society) and is one of the few besides ourselves who realises that free access is now technologically possible. He writes here:

Under conditions of abundance, such as characterise the industrially-advanced society, distribution could be free of all value considerations . . .

This places him well in advance of others in his political tendency, who have not yet abandoned the outdated suggestion for labour-time vouchers Marx mentioned nearly a hundred years ago. But then he has had the advantage of meeting our comrades of the World Socialist Party of the United States.

Adam Buick

Memories are made of this (2014)

Book Review from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Notes From the End of History: A Memoir of the Left in Wales'. Philip Bounds. Merlin Press.

Philip Bounds is an historian and journalist and this is his memoir about being attracted towards – and involved in – radical politics and organizations in Wales. It focuses mainly on the 1980s and 90s when he was growing up in a dynamic political environment punctuated by seminal events like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. In particular, he tries to answer the questions ‘Why has Marxism survived in spite of enduring so many defeats?’ and ‘What was it like to belong to the radical left at a time when Marxism was at its lowest ebb?’.

In some ways, he gives a more coherent answer to the latter than the former question though it is interesting that his political journey started out attending meetings of the SPGB as a teenager. His accounts are at times funny and nearly always insightful, a flavour being his vivid description of his first ever political meeting, addressed by late comrade Ron Cook:

‘I suppose he was the sort of socialist Orwell might have been too narrow-minded to appreciate. Grey haired, bespectacled and genial he came across like a university lecturer who had thrown it all up for a career in market gardening . . . I understood about a third of it but in my heart I embraced it all.’ (p.62-3)

Bounds says that despite his admiration for the SPGB’s vision of a peaceful, democratic socialist revolution (which has clearly stayed with him since) he moved on to associate with various of the more conventional organizations of the political left, saying of the SPGB that he was ‘thrilled by its internal culture but dismayed by its lack of activism’. He ended up – perhaps bizarrely – in the Communist Party of Great Britain and then one of its successor organizations after its demise, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), the group still associated with the Morning Star newspaper. The political journey he took, via meetings of the SPGB, an interest in the punk band Crass and the anarchist group Class War is a fascinating one, though despite all his self-reflection in this book, it remains something of a puzzle that he chose to end up in the CPB. Indeed, it is very clear that he retains an affection not only for the style of politics of the SPGB but for the Party’s insistence on majority democratic revolution and hostility to the totalitarian dictatorships of the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea, etc. These are dictatorships for which members of the CPB are normally want to retain something of a political affection.

At times there is a sense that Bounds wishes to challenge his readers to move beyond the stock-in-trade reformism and sloganeering of the far left. For instance, towards the end of the book there is a moving and insightful piece about the occasion he accompanied a poverty-stricken member of the CPB around Swansea late one night, as she rooted through leftovers behind a luxury hotel in search of free food to be distributed amongst those on her estate:

‘With her gift for locating  sources of free food in a hostile city and her uncompromising insistence that the booty be shared out equally among her kinsfolk, she gestured towards a past in which no one thought of themselves as better than anyone else and everyone said ‘this is ours’ but never ‘this is mine’. In reminding us that communism had once been the natural order of things, she incarnated the hope that one day – at a much higher level of technology and culture and at a much lower level of superstition – we could do it all again.’ (p.186)

There is another way in which this book challenges the reader and pushes them further than they might otherwise have gone in their thinking. It is exceptionally well written and the prose flows beautifully. However, it is best to realise that amongst all this are often some very unfamiliar phrases and words. It is almost as if Bounds like to lull the reader into a false sense of security through the fluidity of his writing style before including something more challenging that will have readers running for the dictionary: ‘aetiology’, ‘exegetically gifted’, ‘subfusc’, ‘manichean intuitions’, ‘marmoreal’ and the wondrous ‘gallimaufry of soporific guests’ are but a random selection.

A highly entertaining and enjoyable memoir that deserves a wide audience, in Wales and beyond.

DAP