Mr. F. Montague, M.P., Attacks the Labour Theory of Value (First Article) (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Blogger's Note: 

Fred Montague was the Labour MP for Islington West and, as a young man, was an active member of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation. He was replying to Frank Evans' two-part article on the Labour Theory of Value which appeared in the July and August 1937 issues of the Socialist Standard.

Mr. F. Montague, M.P., Attacks the Labour Theory of Value (First Article)

I thank The Socialist Standard for allowing me to deal at reasonable length with Mr. Evans's articles on “The Labour Theory of Value.” The view that I desire to uphold is (1) that the Marxian doctrine of exchange is not a true theory of value, even an erroneous one, and (2) that it is not Socialist.

Mr. Evans asks what determines value when supply and demand are equal. I take up this point at once because the question throws into sharp relief, as I think, the fallacious reasoning common to the Marxist case.

Unless value and price are independent of each other, and there is in fact a “soul of the commodity” (Mr. Evans’s own phrase), such a question is like asking what determines the weather when the mercurial level in the barometer equals the atmospheric pressure outside. It is meaningless, not merely irrelevant.

But whether there is such an independent standard is the very issue in discussion. The objective and immediate fact in exchange is that prices fluctuate between what the buyer will pay rather than go without, and what the vendor will accept rather than make no sale, the operations of the market going on readily within those limits. No theoretical standard makes any difference to the facts. It is for the Marxist to show, over and beyond, that the alleged "soul of the commodity” is more than a metaphysical Pepper’s Ghost.

What Marx actually does is to average prices and call the result “value.” The independent standard turns out to be just the mean of price fluctuations, nothing more, except by way of dogmatic assertion. In other words, prices fluctuate “around” a standard set up by the fluctuations. An argument in a circle if ever there was one, and characteristic of the Marxian logical method throughout.

Commodities “embody” labour since they take labour to produce, and, obviously, labour takes time. There is no dispute so far. But the “embodiment” of labour does not, of itself, prove the labour-time theory. Marx relies upon the arithmetical process of addition-plus-division called “striking an average” and the platitude, which no one quarrels with, that exchange does not change things either in quantity or worth. In other words, he postulates labour time value for a start, performs the arithmetical exercise mentioned, and produces the inevitable result as proof of his postulate.

I could do exactly the same with molecular content, weight, or cubic volume. I could add up the eyes in a bushel of potatoes or the cheese-mites in a quantity of ripe “Stiltons," showing that nothing is added in the process of exchange, and, by division into the units in each case, that in average exchange averages are exchanged. There is no intended gibe in this. I contend that Marx does no more than what I have described and that averaging out an admitted content of the commodity no more proves the Marxian doctrine of exchange than it disproves any other.

When Marx tells me that if corn of the value of £2 10s. exchanges with wine of the value of £2 the com and wine together still total in value £4 10s. and that someone has merely been robbed, I agree. If the prices are as stated there is nothing else to be said. Not even the Marxian Aunt Sally, the “vulgar economist," ever claimed that profit was “created" outside the price ultimately fixed. Marx is right. Two-and-two, if it is two-and-two, make four. Two-pounds-ten- shillings and two-pounds make four-pounds-ten- shillings. Indubitably! Value has already set its seal upon even an inequitable transaction. But its inequity does not prove the Marxian Theory of Value.

The question of what is value still remains open. How is it that Marx begins, in this as in every other illustration of the kind, with money’s-worth ? Corn, wine, coats, chairs, all are priced for a start. Is it that the “money form of value" is invoked in order to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and illegitimate argument? Value is the thing actually under discussion. Its nature is being probed. Yet Marx calmly calls upon the competitor to hold the stop-watch, the prisoner to occupy the bench, tells us that pounds sterling are pounds sterling as if it were divine truth, and then proceeds to superimpose labour time upon his small change without a shred of logical excuse!

Once detecting this type of fallacy it is easy to understand why any other definition of value, any conception fantastic or otherwise, may be substituted for labour time without it making the slightest difference to the logical structure of any of the supposed cast-iron instances of the boot-and-butter-equation order. They begin with value (by sheer presumption labour time) in a chain of deduction that should only end in that desired, if elusive, quarry.

If this is disputed I challenge anyone to put pounds avoirdupois in the place of pounds sterling wherever the latter occurs by way of illustration, and see for himself whether a scrap of logical difference is made by the substitution. And if this is true where is the validity of the reasoning, whatever value might be in actual fact?

No assertion in the Marxian theory is held to be of greater importance in the alleged unique proof of exploitation than that profit is made, not in the market, but in the factory. It is imagined that the origin of value itself is involved in the dogma. How is it supported?

We are told that if a capitalist were to make profit on the market he would be compelled to surrender it when he in turn became, not a seller, but a buyer. Capitalists would have to do this upon the average all round anyhow if profit in general were made on the market. If someone sells dear, someone else buys dear; if anyone buys cheap, somebody sells cheap. Profit cannot be created in the mere exchange of commodities. No one ever said that it could, as a matter of fact, for that it has been said is a Marxian fiction.

But, this aside, what is meant by an adventitious profit “made on the market" being “surrendered" ? Surrendered to whom? Not to the consumer, for the “surrendering" is supposed to take place in the subsequent buying. To other capitalists then! Capitalists surrender profit to themselves! Surely an amazing outcome of a Marxian postulate that is inscribed on the very corner-stone of the theory. One might suggest that when the capitalist sells goods at large he takes it out of the public at large, whereas when capitalists “surrender" profit to each other they actually share the swag.

But I make no such statement. I regard the distinction between the factory and the market in the process of profit as entirely false. The act of making and realising profit is not two but one. There is no real distinction between paying wages and exchanging food and clothes for the same wages. If the process were to be completed without a market and the sustenance of the worker paid in kind direct the result would be the same. The worker is robbed of the difference between what he socially produces and what he consumes. That is the reality. Wages are only command of consumable goods. The market is only an extended factory.

Nothing is “made" in the factory but commodities. Nothing is realised in the market but the value of those same commodities. The operation begins in the factory to be completed in the market and Marx draws an entirely false distinction between two parts of the same process in order to bolster a time concept that would otherwise show itself as demonstrably false.

In my next and final article I shall seek to show that this time concept obscures the fundamental basis of Socialism and that its logical conclusion is, not Socialism, but a wage system. I conclude now by pointing out that “buying cheap and selling dear” is not alleged to be the origin of profit by anyone and is no part of any theory of value whatever. It is pure invention and pure fiddle-sticks. There is no meaning in the terms until value has been determined. The most capitalist of economists asserts that commodities exchange at actual values according to their conceptions of value. Marx juggles with “dear” and "cheap” without authority or relevance, and in advance of the very judgment that alone can settle what is dear and what is cheap. He begs the question.

(A second article will follow.)

Reply.

As the writer of the article criticised is away at present, the criticism has been passed on to me.

There have been, and still are (for we get the question at our lectures), people who argue that price, and therefore value, is determined by the operations of supply and demand. In order to show that this cannot be so, we point out that at times demand and supply are equal, and therefore neutralise each other. At one time supply is greater than demand, at another time it is less. There must be a time when, like the see-saw, the two sides are level. In order to dispose of this argument, therefore, we put a question that is quite relevant, in spite of Mr. Montague’s barometrical illustration.

The ends of a see-saw rise a certain height and fall a certain depth, but they do so about a certain point. Why? Because the fulcrum keeps the seesaw moving about that point. Whether the whole contraption overturns or is wrecked does not alter the matter. Mr. Montague may de-materialise the fulcrum but it will still be there.

Prices rise and fall about a certain level—the point is higher in a pound of butter than in a pound of potatoes. What is it determines this level? Is it the higgling of the market that determines a higher point in one than in the other, or is it something else? There must be something, and it cannot be the relations between supply and demand as, in general, they only have effect within a limited range—supply and demand of butter, supply and demand of potatoes. It should be obvious that relative usefulness is also ruled out.

Marx does not average prices and call the result value. He shows that the fluctuations are around a given point and that it is the value of the article which, in the ultimate, determines the position of this point. Prices, therefore, do not “ fluctuate ‘around' a standard set up by fluctuations,” a curious reading of Marx, if ever there was one!

The level of the sea rises and falls, but there is still a mean level which is not the result of averaging the fluctuations but of the quantity of water in the sea, though averaging the fluctuations will give the same point. That disposes of Mr. Montague’s barometer.

Marx does not rely upon an arithmetical process of addition plus division, etc., to prove the labour-time theory of value, nor does he “postulate labour-time value for a start.” He examines the exchange relation at length and finds that the proportions in which articles exchange for each other is not accidental but is an expression of something that they all possess in common. He uses a geometrical illustration to make the point clear; the calculation of the areas of rectilinear figures by decomposing them into triangles.

He then sets out to find, by the process of exclusion, what it is that all commodities have in common. In the end he shows that the only measurable thing they all possess in common is human labour. This is the end of a process of analysis, which occupies the first five pages of "Capital,” and not the beginning, as Mr. Montague asserts.

Marx’s case is not, as Mr. Montague suggests, that someone is robbed because corn of the value of £2 10s. 0d. has been exchanged for wine of the value of £2. Such an entire misrepresentation makes us wonder. It seems incredible that anyone could have read Marx’s own version of his theory of value and hold such a view of it. Anyhow, we defy Mr. Montague to produce such a statement of the value theory from Marx’s writings.

Marx, in opposition to capitalist economists, . states most emphatically that equal values are exchanged—i.e., £2 of corn for £2 of wine—and yet someone is robbed. This disposes of Mr. Montague’s ironical remarks, which are quite irrelevant.

Marx does not begin all his Illustrations with money’s worth. In fact he does not mention money’s worth until he has reached page 41 of ‘‘Capital.” His previous illustrations are of the 20 yards of linen equals 1 coat variety. Having analysed the simplest forms of exchange and shown quite clearly that labour is the substance of value, Marx proceeds to examine the price form in the light of what has gone before. When he comes to this point he is dealing with the world of commodities around him, where "corn, wine, coats, chairs, all are priced for a start,” whatever Mr. Montague may think about it. As Marx does not say anything about pounds sterling being pounds sterling, or even arguing to that effect, we simply don’t understand Mr. Montague's attempt at humour in this connection.

According to Mr. Montague, it is a Marxian fiction that anyone-has said that profit is made in the mere exchange of commodities. This is another amazing statement. The view in question has been, and still is, held by numerous people. It was at the basis of one of the leading schools of political economy — the Mercantilists. Put in another form, it meant buying cheap and selling dear.

When the capitalist sells goods at large he does not take it out of the public at large. What he does is to get back in money form what he has taken out of his workers, and he can do this whether he sells to workers or capitalists.

As Mr. Montague does not accept the labour theory of value he naturally can see no reason to distinguish between the factory, where goods are produced, and the market, where their values are realised. Yet he agrees that the worker is robbed of the difference between what he socially produces and what he consumes. How is he robbed ? Mr. Montague does not say, and yet this is the very heart of the matter. It is failure to understand this that has put the worker at the mercy of every kind of tax reformer and money crank who professed to be able to give the worker a greater command over consumable goods.

No, Mr. Montague has made fun of Marx, but so far he has not shown any flaw in the view that the worker is robbed of the difference between the value of what he produces and what he gets. What he gets depends upon how much the employer pays him for the work he does and not upon how much his products realise in the market.

Gilmac.

East Ham, North (1937)

Party News from the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The campaign in East Ham, North is gathering momentum Meetings are better attended and the persistent efforts put in by our propagandists is showing results in larger and interested audiences. There is evidence now that our opponents are taking our activities seriously. Their instinct is sound. We are serious. Incidents have occurred which arouses the suspicion that organised attempts are being made to make the running of our meetings difficult, if not impossible. Such attempts won't succeed.

Anyone disagreeing with our case is allowed to question it or come upon the platform and state a case in opposition.

If our opponents have a case there is no need therefore for them to shout our speakers down. We have never been afraid of opposition and we are not afraid now. Socialist propaganda will thrive on it. We are democrats and have always practiced free and open discussion. We have never at any time favoured the stupid tactics of breaking up the meetings of any opponent. Such behaviour leads to the discredit of those who practice it. The banning of demonstrations in East London by the police is relatively fresh news. Workers who are wise will avoid giving any excuse to the authorities for the closing down of working-class meetings.

We appeal to all our members attending the meetings in East Ham, North, not to allow themselves to be provoked into doing anything which is likely to reflect on the time-honoured practice of the Party. Show by example, self-discipline and argument, that our democratic methods of running meetings are in the interests of the workers. The majority of workers who make up public audiences are intelligent enough to realise the importance of democratic principles and should quickly resent attempts by interested parties to prevent us from stating our case.

Arrangements are being made for a distribution of leaflets to the electors of East Ham. The first will be ready soon. 

About that fund. You know we have set ourselves the job of getting £400 in a very short time. You have convinced yourself that you have contributed your share? Good ! Now set yourself this task. Imagine you are without a cent in the world. Imagine you have the most wonderful idea which could only be turned to account if you managed to raise a few pounds. What schemes your imagination would evolve to make good your poverty! Now imagine that idea to be our Parliamentary activity and the raising of funds your personal responsibility, and see how quickly your mind produces plans. We want members not only to give, but to plan how to raise money.

Get going! Think and talk Socialism! Interest others in our activities, and, be assured, you will get a kick out of seeing the results of your own efforts.

Parliamentary Committee.

Click pic to enlarge.

Divide and Rule in Palestine (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Royal Commission's proposal to solve the Palestine troubles by partition has met with a mixed reception.

The recommendation is to split Palestine up into three pieces, an Arab State, a Jewish State, and a portion which will remain under the British Mandate.

At the recently concluded Zionist Congress opinion was sharply divided. A two-thirds majority, headed by the Zionist Chairman, Dr. Weizmann, voted in favour of the principle of partition, largely on the grounds that it was the best that could be expected from the British Government under the circumstances. The decision was only come to after long and heated discussion, and the news of it called forth protest from some leading Zionists in America and elsewhere.

Among the professed spokesmen of working-class interests there is also a conflict of views.

Communist writers, who claim that the Jews in Palestine have been building up a flourishing business under the protection of the British Government, back the Arabs. They urge resistance to the partition proposal and the establishment of an independent Arab State in Palestine, of which the Jews are to be members on an equal basis. The Communists put this forward on two grounds: The right of the Arabs to self-determination and the need to curb British Imperialism.

On the other side, opponents of the Communists, like Abramovich and Orenstein, favour the continuance of the mandatory system and oppose the Arab viewpoint. In doing so they overstate the Jewish case, though probably unconsciously, painting a beautiful picture of Palestine under the Jews, where Socialist ideas will flourish.

The state of affairs in Palestine is not clear cut. There is an old social system side by side with a new, and both subject to an over-ruling Imperial power. Within each again there are class interests that cut across racial and national feelings. And, to still further complicate matters, there is the peculiar international position of the Jew.

The Arab lives under a semi-feudal regime with the land-owner despoiling the peasant of nearly everything. The coming of the Jews introduced modern industrial methods which threaten the incomes of land-owners, partly by offering the peasants a way of escape from fleecing, and partly by competition. Hence the influential Arabs are opposed to the continued immigration of Jews and strive to stir racial hatred among the poor by using the religious bogey. They are opposed to partition and want an independent Arab State.

The Jew, hunted out of various occupations in the East and the victim of pogroms, has been drifting into Palestine for decades. The immigration  of the Jew has been vastly increased since the War, until at present it has reached from fifty to sixty thousand a year. How the Jews are permeating Palestine may be appreciated from the fact that, in spite of Arab immigration, the Jewish section rose from 17 per cent. of the population in 1930 to 30 per cent. in 1936. This antagonises the Arab, who foresees himself being swamped in the rising flood. On the other hand, the growing Jewish section pays the bulk of the tax revenue but receives the least benefit from it, which is a permanent source of complaint.

To the Jew, interference with immigration would have serious consequences. Palestine is perhaps the only place to which he has free access. A large proportion of the immigrants are representatives of families that have been left behind in other countries in dire straits, penniless and denied almost any opportunity of earning a living. To these the immigrant sends back contributions that enable the relatives to buy the necessaries of life. Thus, as one writer puts it, if the Arabs succeed in stopping Jewish immigration into Palestine it will mean starvation to millions of Jews.

The Jewish migration has brought with it to Palestine the capitalist system with its antagonistic classes. While, on the one hand, it is making the desert flower and bringing into existence flourishing towns, on the other hand it is replacing the feudal method of fleecing by the capitalist exploitation of wage-workers. To quote Mordekai Orenstein: —

  You will find in Palestine a highly organised capitalist class, a vigorous and aggressive Jewish clericalism, and a modern Jewish Fascism with all the usual characteristics from strike-breaking to the base murder of a distinguished working-class leader.

—(Page 10, “ Jews, Arabs and British in Palestine.”) 

He also adds that you will find there a strongly organised working class. But, towards the end of the pamphlet, he laments that: —

   Considerable sections of Jewish workers in Palestine have not as yet reached the realisation of the vital urgency of forging this supernational weapon [Jewish-Arab proletarian unity] in the political struggle in Palestine.—(Page 21.)

It may be added that partition, by restricting the area open to Jews, must have a considerable effect on their immigration, which is some explanation of Zionist opposition.

The attitude of the British Government is based on simple principles: The safeguarding of British capitalists' interests, as represented by such things as the oil pipe between Mosul and Haifa; security of Imperial air routes, communications through the Suez Canal, and so forth. Their policy of divide and rule leads them to favour different sides at different times, and to keep racial animosities alive as long as they do not become too dangerous.

The support of both Jews and Arabs during the War was bought by promises that have not been kept, and cause irritation to both sections.

The Mandate has evidently outlived its uses to British capitalism, and the partition system is to take its place. This will give Arab and Jew (like the North and South of Ireland) something to quarrel over for years to come, to the hindrance of propaganda for working-class solidarity against the international capitalist class.

Gilmac.

Why there is Not Enough to go Round (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Daily Express, which boasts that it has the largest circulation and the most up-to-date manner of presenting news and views of all the daily papers, has certain merits. One is that its reporting of the Spanish civil war, though concerned only with what editors call “news value," and therefore, scrappy on occasion, has been unusually fair and unbiassed. The second merit — the one which concerns us here—is that the editorials are often models of terse and lucid statement of fact and opinion. So much so that when they contain glaring falsities of argument it is difficult to avoid believing that the twist is deliberate. The issue of August 13th is a case in point. Here are the key sentences out of a three- paragraph editorial: —

  One kind of person goes round saying: “We have now solved the problem of producing all that we need. . . .” He doesn’t know what he is talking about. The world is still a very poor place. Many people in it starve. Many more go short of the ordinary necessities of food, shelter, clothes, and warmth. That is why it is wicked folly to cut down the business of growing more food, making more goods, extracting more material wealth out of the soil.
  The above-introduced fellow will often tell you that it is only the mechanism of the present (individualist) system that holds up the arrival of the Age of Plenty.
    Russia, which has a collectivist system, seems to show otherwise. For there the standard of living is still poor.

Now this is all very clear and all very crooked. A mixture of truth and half-truth, well calculated to mislead the reader. The truth of this matter is of importance to every one of the workers who read the Daily Express, but the distortion of it is of equal importance to the directors and proprietors, hence the discreditable editorial

Let us straighten it out a little.

It is the Socialist who says that we have now solved the problem of producing all that we need, and he does know what he is talking about. For observe that we do not say sufficient is being produced for the needs of all, but only that the problem of doing so has been solved.

In other words, what the Socialist has been saying for a long while is that sufficient for all could be produced but isn’t being produced. The fertile fields and rich mineral deposits are there in abundance, so are the highly developed and productive machines, the railways and motor roads, ships and aeroplanes, and everything else needed for production. So are the human beings who could do the work needed to put everyone far beyond the fear of poverty and deprivation. The Socialist is well aware that enough is not being produced at present, and this in spite of the curious thing that there are numerous instances of production being deliberately restricted and goods destroyed. But when coffee is burned in Brazil or cotton and wheat areas restricted in U.S.A., it is not because the world's needs for coffee, cotton and bread have been satisfied. It is because the people who want more of these things have not money enough to buy them, and the people who have money do not want to buy any more of them. So destruction and restriction go on in spite of the well-established fact that if the hundreds of millions of poor people in the world were suddenly told that they could satisfy their needs free of charge there would be an immediate and immense shortage of the necessities of life.

It will be noticed at this point that, although the Express says that we who say this “don’t know what we are talking about,” what we say is in agreement with what the Express says itself— all except that disingenuous trick already mentioned of pretending that solving the problem of production is the same thing as applying the solution.

The next piece of dishonesty is the pretence that Socialists have in mind Bolshevist Russia; which, of course, they have not. Socialists were claiming that the problem of production had been solved long before the Express heard of Bolshevism, long before there was a Daily Express, and long before Lord Beaverbrook set foot in this country. What Socialists meant and said was, that the problem had been solved in the highly developed and industrialised countries like Great Britain, U.S.A., Germany, and so on. Russia has been dragged in by the leader writer only because he wanted to discredit the Socialist’s claim that it is capitalism which prevents the productive forces from being used to the full. Socialists point out the very obvious thing, that the twofold way of enlarging the supply of goods for those who need them is to increase the number of wealth producers by roping in the idle rich and the unemployed, and to cut out the enormous waste of effort of people whose work is concerned with the unnecessary financial and other operations which capitalism needs and Socialism would not need, including the waste of armaments. What prevents this from being done? Socialists say that it is prevented and will be prevented as long as the capitalist minority controls the machinery of Government, including the armed forces, and can use their control to perpetuate their ownership of the land, factories, railways, and the rest of the instruments for producing wealth. The capitalists are interested in ownership because it enables them to live in wealth and ease without the necessity of working. They are seeking profit, not trying to satisfy the needs of the human race. So they direct policy to that end. They open and close their factories, expand or restrict production, burn coffee and curtail wheat growing, in accordance with their estimate of the effect on prices and, through them, on the amount of profit to be made.

End capitalism and have the means of production owned by the whole community, then goods will be produced for use alone, and the supply of them will not be hindered by artificial barriers of profit and private interest.

What has the Daily Express to say to this? Nothing, except to drag in the red-herring that the “individualist” system cannot be responsible, because in Russia there is a “collectivist” system and still poverty. To start with, the supposed “individualist” system is a myth. The typical capitalist enterprise is no more individualist than is the State capitalist Post Office or the State capitalist concerns in Russia. The Express confuses individual dictatorship over policy with individual enterprise. Lord Beaverbrook and his fellow directors and shareholders can indeed impose their will on the large staff who co-operate to produce and distribute the newspaper, but not by virtue of superior enterprise, only by virtue of legal right of ownership, backed up by the courts and the police. They can prevent the staff from using the paper as a medium for disseminating news and information whenever this conflicts with the shareholders’ purpose of making the maximum profit, but that is no more individual enterprise than is the destructive power of a rat to black-out the electric lighting of a whole town by gnawing a hole in an electric cable. The great-great-grand-fathers of the present generation of capitalists might boast of individual enterprise, but their descendants who do so do not know what they are talking about. They are no more individualist than are the highly organised American racketeering organisations to which they are related by the common purpose of living on the backs of others.

Neither in Russia, nor in the U.S.A. or England, has Socialism, common ownership and democratic control been established. In all countries what we see is a privileged minority tenaciously fastened to the backs of those who co-operate to run the economic machine.

But whereas Russia is still economically a backward country, in England and U.S.A. the production of useful articles could be vastly increased if it were not for the capitalist stranglehold.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Twilight of Bolshevism (1937)

Book Review from the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

From "Lenin to Stalin," by Victor Serge. (Pioneer Publishers, New York.)

The above volume, of one hundred pages or so, presents in brief the views given in greater detail in the author's larger work, "The Fate of the Revolution," $2.00.

In a note about Serge, we are told that his parents were émigrés in Tsarist days, one member of the family having been hanged after the assassination of Alexander II. Serge appears to have moved in anarchistic circles until 1917 in France and Spain, but joined the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1919.

"He became a member of the Russian Communist Party and a colleague of Zinoviev on the E.C. of the Communist International during the Civil War. He then became a gunner in a special battalion, a member of the military defence staff, and a commissar of the archives in the secret police under Krassin in 1919  . . . He spent considerable time in Germany (during the preparation of the 1923 uprising) and in Austria. Since then he has been a member of the Opposition. Expelled from the party and imprisoned in 1928 . . . deported to Orenburg in 1933, he was banished from the U.S.S.R. . . . in 1936."

The author's theme is the change, real or supposed, which has come over the Soviet Government since Lenin's time. He might have entitled it, "From Heroism to Cowardice." The careful reader who has studied the progress of events will fail to be convinced by such an over-simple presentation of the case. For example, compare the recent slaughter of Russian military leader with an incident in the Civil War, quoted by Serge on page 30:—

"The first Red troops retreat on every occasion. Kazan, the key to the Volga, is lost. Trotsky, Ivan Smirnov, and a group of militants arrive by special train in the midst of this débâcle . . . The  morale of the troops recovered. Trotsky signed this order:— 

'The soldiers of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army are not a cowardly rabble. They want to fight for the liberty and happiness of the working people. If they retreat or fight badly it is the fault of the commanders and commissars.
  

'I serve notice that if a unit gives ground, the political commissar will first be shot. Then the commander . . . For this I assume responsibility before the Red Army.'

"Many Revolutionists disapproved this speech and action, but Lenin approved it heartily."

This typically anarchist view of the responsibilities and powers of  individuals appears to have infected Bolshevism at an early date. The full fruits of the superstition are only now being reaped. When Serge deals with the confessions of people like Kamenev and Zinoviev the same semi-mystical streak appears. On page 81 he says: "Such confessions are made out of utter devotion and there is also an element of calculation about them. Smilga, an Oppositionist 'capitulator,' who has been in prison since 1933, once said: 'We must retreat, surrender for the present, and when the masses awaken, we shall put ourselves at their head.'"

Serge adopts a similar attitude to the defeat of Stalin's policy on the international field. Whether it be China or Germany, Serge evidently fails to realise the fantastic character of the proposition that a different "leadership" would have led to substantially different results. Like Trotskyists generally, he appears to imagine that the workers and peasants of the entire world are only waiting for genuine revolutionary messiahs to effect their deliverance. The tame slogan of "Socialism in one country" only expresses the belated recognition by the ruling clique of the Russian Communist Party of their limited influence outside Russia.

Lenin was by no means exempt from the pressure of external forces, as Serge's own pages bear witness. For instance, on page 29, we read: "Lenin and his co-workers did not contemplate the total nationalisation of heavy industry, but rather an effective workers' control and the growing participation of the Socialist state in mixed trusts in which the capitalists would retain some place."

Dealing with the civil war, on page 32, however, he says: "To an ever-increasing extent the economy must be directed with a view to war and stringent measures of nationalisation are extended to the whole of production. Factory-owners ask to be nationalised, as they cannot live otherwise."

Finally, when the civil war over: "The Poles are driven from Kiev. Lenin at once conceives the project of an offensive against Warsaw to make Poland a Soviet State . . . The workers and peasants of Poland fail to rise, and this, once again, proves that the revolution cannot be brought into a foreign country at the point of a gun."

The peasant risings in Russia itself (Serge instances the region of Tambov, where the peasant force reached 80,000 men), coupled with what he describes as the "useless massacre" of the Kronstadt sailors (rebelling against a Central Government, which had suppressed democracy), forced Lenin to put forward a new economic policy. "War communism" went by the board. Requisitions of grain were abandoned, peasants and others were allowed to trade, and all the feature of small-scale capitalism reasserted themselves. Even the ties between the State and its industrial trusts were slackened, and these began to participate in buying and selling in the ordinary market.

If we are to regard Lenin's régime as one of heroism, we are also compelled to recognise the magnitude of the illusions from the results of which many of his followers have had to suffer.

Serge's account of the war on the Opposition makes dismal reading: "The purge of the population of Leningrad (by imprisonment and deportation) includes between 80,000 and 100,000 victims. And that is in 1935, a year of economic recovery." (Page 77.)

Lenin changed the name of his party from "Social-Democrat" to "Communist." In Spain, Stalin's followers become "Socialists" in order to hound down expelled members of the Communist International. More treacherous than the Fascists, Serge shows that they denounce the P.O.U.M. militia as "the agents of Franco-Hitler-Mussolini," in a word of those who bid fair to reverse Lenin's famous slogan and turn a civil war into an imperial one.

Eric Boden

More Light on the Russian Confessions (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The widespread disbelief in the genuineness of the "confessions" made by prisoners of the Russian dictatorship has had the good effect of bringing more information to light. The International Review, which has published much valuable material during its short existence (published in New York. P.O. Box 44, Sta. O, New York City. 15 cents a month, 1 dollar 75 cents a year) reproduces in its August issue extracts from a statement made before an unofficial committee of inquiry in Prague by a German Communist named Wolf, who lived for considerable periods in Russia. Through casual contact with another Communist who fell foul of the Russian police, Wolf suddenly found himself arrested and urged to plead guilty to Trotskyite and Nazi activities. Here is a typical passage describing how "confessions" were extracted from him: -

At 11 o'clock in the night, he was suddenly undressed, examined, transferred to a cell. Sleep? The light remains there day and night. Every several minutes a soldier, in the service of the G.P.U., looked through the hole in the door. Wolf had hardly fallen asleep when the door suddenly opened, and he was subjected to an interrogation that lasted from 11.30 p.m. to 5 a.m., and started again at 6.30. He was permitted to sit down on a small, narrow, backless iron seat, before a small table. This continued for weeks. He raved, crying for sleep. Every interrogation terminated with his signing a stenographic report in Russian, which he could hardly make out.

He describes convincingly how his questioners twisted and distorted every harmless detail of his past activities. He had lodged in the house of a Trotskyite: therefore he must be a Trotskyite. He had once suggested that the Russian lumbermen's paper should get its own radio station: he therefore must have wanted to establish communication with the Nazis with it. His father was in a Nazi concentration camp: Ah, that was just a trick of the Nazis to fool the Russian police.

On the advice of the Russian Communist Party he had written reports to a German Liberal newspaper favourably commenting on industrial development in Russia: that "proved" his contact with the Nazis, although the paper was anti-Nazi and the reports were written before Hitler came to power.

So it goes on, until the police have their "confession." Luckily for Wolf his German citizenship deterred the Russian police eventually.

All that can be said about the police procedure used in Russia is that there are lots of other countries which use the same procedure.

A correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who has just left Russia after many years' residence there, claims to have interviewed 98 people arrested between 1928 and 1932, about half of whom alleged that they "were subjected to actual torture" in Russian jails. The article dealing with this was published by the Manchester Guardian on August 19th, 1937. The correspondent (whose name is not given) points out that only a fraction of the Russian trials are held in public and the witnesses or defendants who "confess" are only a selected few of the much larger number arrested and held by the police.

In conclusion, for the benefit of those who still believe that "confession" means guilt, consider the report from Rebel Spain about the bombing of the British ship, "British Corporal," outside Algiers. The Rebel authorities at Majorca admitted it was their doing, an unfortunate mistake! General Franco, nominally in supreme command over the Majorca authorities, denied this. He had "proof" that the bombing was done by Russian airmen in the pay of the Spanish Republican Government. What was the proof? What else than a "confession" by a Russian airman captured in Rebel territory. And here is the comment of Mr. Philip Jordan, of the News Chronicle (August 12th, 1937): -

If indeed such an airman exists, it is possible that he has said such a thing. When in Spain I was able to authenticate the case of a Russian pilot brought down in rebel territory with three bullet wounds, one of them in his head. For three days and three nights he was not allowed to sleep or to receive medical attention. At the end of that time he was ready to make any statement demanded from him.

What price confessions?