Notes by the Way: Something to Cheer About? (1947)

The Notes by the Way Column from the December 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Something to Cheer About?

On November 6th Molotov announced that Russia had solved the secrets of making atom bombs.

The following is from the Daily Worker (7/11/47) : 

“When a mass meeting of 15,000 in the largest hall in Paris were told of the Molotov atom bomb statement, they rose to their feet and cheered enthusiastically for 20 full minutes.”

* * *

Scientists in Russia

In “Scientist in Russia” (Pelican Books Edition, 1s.), Professor Ashby tells what happened to a Russian scientist who opposed the scientific theory backed by the Russian Government. He writes as follows :

“The argument by heresy-hunt was used with deadly effect against the most outspoken and devastating critic of Lysenko, the famous Russian biologist N. I. Vavilov. Vavilov probably went beyond safe limits in condemning the new genetics as an outbreak of medieval obscurantism. He paid a high price. He was accused of dilatoriness in getting practical results, of lending support to fascists by his theory of centres of origin of crops, and of aligning himself with Bateson, the leader of genetics in England. In 1940 he was deprived of his directorship of the Institute of Plant Industry. He was subsequently imprisoned and he died, without any announcement or explanation, probably in 1943. The type of argument used against Vavilov is well illustrated by a comment made to me by a prominent animal physiologist in Moscow in October, 1945. ‘I reject Vavilov’s views,’ he said, ‘because Vavilov believed in Bateson, and Timiryazev condemned Bateson.’ The same argument has been put on paper by Prezent.” (P. 111).

In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, as in the book itself, Professor Ashby made it clear that such intolerance is not in his view the whole picture. He wrote :

“It is true that Vavilov was killed because he adhered to bourgeois genetics; it is no less true that there are to this day two professors of bourgeois genetics in the University of Moscow—no other kind of genetics is taught there, and the official text-book was written by an American. This sort of inconsistency is, in my opinion, the key to an understanding of Russian policy not only in science but also in public affairs.”—(Manchester Guardian, 1/11/47.)

To which the Manchester Guardian reviewer replied as follows :

“When Russian scientists see a political adventurer, half charlatan and half visionary, attacking the most eminent scientist of the country with pseudo-scientific, slogans steeped in political venom ; when they have to stand by helplessly and watch the victim standing at bay and being hounded in the end to prison and death (the campaign took about, ten years from start to finish) – then I am sure they felt exactly as any of us would if this happened here. The more dearly they love their country, the more bitter is their shame and horror, and their seeming unconcern is simply a token of the reigning political terror.”— (Manchester Guardian, 11/11//47.)

* * *

Why Financiers Like Labour Government

The following is from the Financial Times, (8/9/47):

“Despite a formidable total of bear points—inadequate supplies of coal, steel and other materials, reduced home consumption, dollar shortage, and a possible autumn Budget—there are more favourable aspects which, at the moment the market tends rather to ignore.

“This is the view expressed in their current circular by a leading firm of Stock Exchange brokers.

”‘There can be no comparison with conditions in 1931 when industry was facing a widespread saturation of its markets through over production,’ says the circular, ‘and while the sequence of events ten years earlier after the 1914-18 war were rather more closely comparable, there is one significant difference—the fact that a Labour Government is in office will surely mean that we need not fear widespread or long lasting strikes of the character which then caused the collapse of post-war industrial activity.”

* * *

Machinery and Unemployment

“NEW YORK, Friday.— Mechanisation and other agricultural developments threaten to make displaced persons of many American farmers, according to a report by the House of Representatives’ Agricultural Committee.

“More than 3,000,000 farm labourers were unemployed last year because of mechanisation, although crops beat all records.

“Further displacement of people now making some kind of living from the land is expected, says the report.–Reuter.”—(Evening Standard, 12/9/47.)

* * *

The U.S.A. and the Mediterranean

“Admiral Bieri, commanding the United States Mediterranean Fleet, has given an interview in Naples to the correspondent of the Milan daily Corriere Lombardo in the course of which he is alleged to have said :

”The United States Fleet is here and intends to stay here in Italian and Mediterranean waters. American interests in Europe will not cease with the signing of the German treaty. In accordance with the policy of the United States Navy Minister American forces will be allocated wherever there are American interests, in closest co-operation with the British’.”— (Manchester Guardian, 10/9/17.)

* * *

The Miners’ New Masters

“Mr. Bernard Rees, chairman of the National Union of Mineworkers’ lodge at Arrail Griffin Colliery, Abertillery, where 16,000 miners are on strike, said this afternoon :

” ‘Surface workers are still being paid wages at starvation level and the National’ Coal Board’s policy of subjection has been worse than anything we ever experienced under free enterprise.

” ‘N.C.B. officials are standing over men to time their movements, and the miners say that they are turning our colliery into something which resembles a concentration camp.’ “—(Evening Standard, 21/10/47.)

* * *

NOT the Socialist Party

“One of the richest men in England has just joined the Socialist Party. He is metal-magnate Steven James Lindsay Hardie, 62-year-old Scot, chairman of British Oxygen Company and its associated companies.

“British Oxygen has a capital of £6,000,000 and directly controls eight companies, with interests in South Africa, Australia, India find Norway.

“Total directorships held by Hardie, 27. Among them is vice-chairmanship of the £2,750,000 firm of Metal Industries, Ltd. As an industrialist Hardie makes metal products ranging from screws to ships.”— (Evening Standard, 14/10/47.)

* * *

Erstwhile Internationalist Proclaim National Sovreignt

The report to the Warsaw Conference at which the new Communist International organisation was formed was made by an influential Russian Communist, Zhdanov. Much of it was reproduced by the Manchester Guardian (3/11/47). One illuminating passage reads as follows:

“Taken up by the bourgeois intelligentsia, dreamers and pacifists, the idea of a ‘world government’ is being used not only as a means of ideologically disarming the people still defending their independence from the encroachments of American imperialism, but also as a slogan specially aimed at the Soviet Union, which constantly and consistently defends the principle of true equality and the maintenance of the sovereign rights of all nations, great and small.”

In the meantime Russia,, like the other capitalist Powers, keeps troops in occupation of several countries and is at the moment trying to induce the Persian Government to carry out the agreement to set up a Russian controlled oil concern in North Persia, the agreement having been forced on the Persian Government last year while Russian troops were in occupation.

Back to the USSR? (1996)

TV Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite attempts by both the Tory Party and the BBC hierarchy to stifle its investigative reporting. Panorama has lost none of its cutting edge. On Monday 10 June, Jane Corbin filed an excellent documentary report on the situation in Russia and the resurgence in support for the Russian Communist Party. By the time you read this the outcome of the Russian presidential elections will of course be known— what is almost certain is that if Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov doesn’t beat that arch “democrat" Boris Yeltsin, he will nonetheless have come close to doing so.

The Communist Party, banned after the 1991 attempted coup but since legalised again, is now a real political force to be reckoned with. Its programme of state control, agricultural "collectivisation" and Russian nationalism has attracted millions of Russian workers disheartened by the failures associated with the move towards a more private enterprise-based capitalist economy. The reason for their dismay at conditions in modern Russia is obvious. Over six million Russians are officially unemployed. industrial production has plummeted, real wages have fallen catastrophically for most and the shelves are emptier in many shops than they were in the worst days of the old regime. In addition. Russia is now plagued by crime, gangsterism, prostitution, drug abuse and spreading epidemics. The Russian working class, and what remains of the peasantry, have clearly sunk into the pit and Panorama demonstrated that few apart from the rich capitalists and aspiring petty-bourgeoisie have benefited from the move towards the free market.

In view of this it is hardly surprising that millions long for a return to the "old days" of state subsidies, guaranteed minimum wages and state repression of criminal elements. The yearnings of these workers are often accompanied by nationalism and anti-semitism, together with an indulgence in conspiracy theories about international banking cartels, the United Nations and the role of the CIA in domestic Russian affairs. Gennady Zyuganov himself displays virtually all of these tendencies and. as such, can be said to be a man truly in touch with his core supporters. He is an unrepentant Stalinist among unrepentant Stalinists whose main priority is the reformation of the USSR and the re-establishment of "socialism"—in reality the re-awakening of almost full-blooded state capitalism and the extension of the Russian empire.

State capitalist class

Zyuganov represents more than just the discontented mass of Russian workers though—in fact he only represents them subjectively, in terms of their objective interests he doesn't represent them at all. What he represents instead is the old state capitalist class built up under Communist rule with its power base in the bureaucracy and military. Part of this social strata took the opportunity, on the disintegration of the old regime, to use its privileged position to turn itself into a private-enterprise bourgeoisie, but as this wasn't possible for them all. the others want to return to the old nomenklatura system of state privilege. These will be the real beneficiaries of any return to state capitalism under the dictatorial rule of the Communist Party.

The dreams of old Stalinists notwithstanding, state capitalism offered the working class nothing but poverty and repression under the old system and a return to it will not improve their situation one bit. Indeed, many of the problems of the Russian economy were first kindled during the days of the USSR, the system itself being so inefficient that it virtually collapsed under the weight of planned over-staffing, an unsustainable armaments programme and a declining rate of profit caused in large part by state subsidy of inefficient units of production. That the free market has not been able to solve Russia's problems comes as no surprise to us—it was something we warned Russian workers of at the time. But it is pleasing all the same for Panorama to have acknowledged this basic fact where others would have attempted to deny it with the smoke-screen of the return of private enterprise and the success of McDonalds.

Jane Corbin's report showed us some of the 25,000 who sleep homeless each night on the streets of Moscow and queue up every morning at the soup kitchens run by the Starvation Army. It highlighted the plight of those workers who have seen their incomes reduced to one fiftieth of the level they once were and who now only avoid starvation through eating potatoes grown on allotments. It revealed the barren shop shelves—barren that is of commodities most Russian workers would be unable to afford anyway.

Can it be any wonder that the benefits of the free market—so loudly trumpeted by the Western bourgeoisie—are imperceptible to the average Russian? Of course not, but there can be no solution in the old dreams either. State capitalism was the system which failed so pitifully before and there is no reason for believing it will, succeed now under Zyuganov or anybody else. That the Communists do not offer real communism or socialism at all is the great tragedy for the Russian working class—for it is more apparent than ever that only production for use and free access to wealth can put an end to the poverty, insecurity and decadence which are expressions of capitalism everywhere, not least of all in Russia today.

Dave Perrin

Not socialism (2006)

Book Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crisis of Socialism by Randhir Singh. Amit Atwal. 2006. 1087 pages. £29.99.

In Europe most Leninists are probably Trotskyists. In Asia they would seem to be Maoists. Randhir Singh falls into this category, arguing that although Stalin made mistakes and what he called socialism wasn’t socialism, Russia finally became a fully-fledged new class society ruled by a state bourgeoisie only in 1964, when Brezhnev took over from Khrushchev. Russia went capitalist in 1991. Since then China has gone that way too. Only Cuba and North Korea have not yet gone capitalist, and only Cuba is on the road to socialism. That’s what this book argues but we doubt that many people will have the patience to read through 1000 pages portraying Lenin, as like Marx, an advocate of the democratic self-emancipation of the working class, interspersed with favourable comments on Mao and Stalin.

Adam Buick

What! Another Mistake? (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

1. Old.

In the October, 1936, Socialist Standard there appeared an article “The Russian ‘ Terrorist ’ Trial,” dealing with the infamous “Moscow Trials.” It contained extracts from a special number of “International Press Correspondence,” Vol. 16, No. 41, September 9th, 1936—a journal of the late, unlamented “Third International” (“Comintern,” Moscow). The article is contained in the pamphlet "Russia Since 1917” (Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1948, 1s.) from which the following is quoted (pages 59, 60):—

(Vishinsky, prosecutor, cross-examining Holzman):

" 'We drove in a taxi—Holzman continued his deposition—but I do not remember the street. Sedov took me into a flat. It was on the fourth floor. Here I gave him the report and code. ... I met him like this six to eight times in the course of four months. 'In November,' Holzman continued, 'I again 'phoned Sedov, and we met again. Sedov said to me: 'As you are getting ready to go to the U.S.S.R., 1 would advise you to go with me to Copenhagen, where my father is.' "

“Vishinsky: ‘That is?'

“ Holzman: 'That is, Trotsky?'

“Vishinsky: 'You went? ’

“Holzman: "I agreed and told Sedov that in two or three days I would go to him in Copenhagen and stay at the Hotel Bristol, where we could meet. I went straight from the station to the hotel, and met Sedov in the lounge.' (Page 1120)."

The writer of the “ S.S.” article commented:

“ Let us consider this statement.

“ The second paragraph states that Holzman went to a flat with Sedov, but Holzman could not remember the street, although he visited the flat ’six to eight times in the course of four months.' How very curious!

“This paragraph states that they met in 1932 at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Unfortunately for this statement the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (September 17th, 1936) points out that the Hotel Bristol was pulled down in 1917! Possibly one of those who took part in preparing the case had been in Copenhagen during the war but did not know the dirty trick someone had played in 1917! ”

There is much more in the article quoted from, which throws grave doubts, to say the least, on the reliability of these confessions and the evidence on which conviction is obtained.

2. New.

“. . . Two and a half years ago, ... the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party passed a resolution of congratulation on the occasion of ... (the) birthday ... of the party’s general secretary.” (Vernon Bartlett, News Chronicle, December 19th, 1949.) 

He continues: —

“ One sentence in it is worthy of repetition: ‘ Your deep Marxist-Leninist knowledge, your great culture, your well-known industry and steadfastness, your modesty, your iron will, your unquestionable loyalty towards the Party and [! ] the working class, are those Bolshevist characteristics which beautify your whole life.’ ” 

This was for Traicho Kostov!

Later, when his Bulgarian Nationalism appeared to be superceding his Russian Nationalism, “Kostovism” became “Titoism on Bulgarian soil,” according to a report from Sofia. (“Titoism” appears to mean Yugoslav Nationalism superceding Russian Nationalism “ on Yugoslav soil.")

The following is quoted from the Evening News December 13th, 1949. If a correct report of proceedings it would indicate an incident similar to the “Hotel Bristol 'mistake'. "

"The Foreign Office said to-day that Mr. 'Billy' Watson, whose name has been mentioned in the treason trial in Sofia of Traicho Kostov and others, was a business man who lived in Sofia. It was alleged that Mr. Watson had contacted Kostav in February, 1948; in fact, he died in January of that year . . ."

Perhaps this is a case where we should add : "Psychic News: please copy ”!

Alec Hart

The Memoirs of a Dutiful Follower (1967)

Book Review from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

This book. Post-war Years; Vol VI of Men, Years—Life (MacGibbon and Kee, 45s.), has not been an easy one to review for a special reason. It is one of those rare autobiographies written by one who has spent his life under a dictatorship—where he still remains. The reviewer, reaching for the knife, must always in fairness keep asking himself the question: “How would I myself have acted if I had had to live my life under the heel of a Stalin?” And having answered that as best he may, he must then also wonder how free the author was to tell his story even under the milder tyranny of Stalin’s successors. The fact that only recently two Russian authors, Sinyavsky and Daniel, have been condemned to harsh sentences in labour camps for writings that would have been regarded as mild criticisms and certainly permissible in any country with the slightest pretensions to freedom or democracy, tells its own tale.

Equally, one must not fall into the trap of leaning over so far backwards that one can write anything as stupidly naive as the dear old Guardian whose reviewer (quoted on the dust jacket) says we should be “grateful to find such courage and moral purpose in so readable a form.” Whatever else one can accuse Ehrenburg of, courage and moral purpose must clearly be left out of the indictment. The whole book, interesting and even fascinating though it is in parts for its insight into some of the darker chapters of Russian history, is the opposite of courage; it is the apologia of one who has succeeded in living through decades of Red Terror when his friends and colleagues were being slaughtered. His only “defence” (like that of Sieyès after the Terror in the French Revolution) amounts to nothing more than “I survived”.

There are not really any lessons to be gleamed from the book that were not, at least in substance, if not in detail, already known. But the detail can still be illuminating. For example, how often were we told in the Stalin era that one facet alone proved that Stalinism could never be as bad as Hitlerism, namely the respective attitudes to anti-semitism? Well, it is doubtless true that Hitler was unique in his “final solution” of the Jewish question—as six million corpses in the gas chambers will testify. But even apart from Stalin’s own exercises against whole peoples like the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans (there is no evidence in this book that Ehrenberg was at all concerned with such trivia), the sustained persecution against Jews which is given great prominence throughout the story shows that even this alleged mark of superiority of the Russian regime was spurious. All the talk about the Russian Constitutions guaranteeing freedom from persecution was, as was obvious at the time—just talk.

Ehrenburg goes out of his way to give prominence to the fate of a leading Jewish intellectual called Mikhoels who was apparently a close friend. This man was used by Stalin during the war to go on deputations of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to England and America where they raised huge sums of money from Jews and others for aid to Russia. After the war, he like so many others, was butchered in one of Stalin’s purges. The author found this all very sad. At the same time he tells us about his visit to (of all places) Sheffield for one of the endless series of so-called Peace Conferences about which he goes on at great length throughout the book. What he forgets to mention is that whilst there he was closely questioned by reporters from the English Jewish press about the fate of Mikhoels and other prominent Jews. Ehrenburg told them he knew nothing but would make enquiries when he got back to Russia and let them know. Of course he never did let them know. Nor did he make enquiries; it is clear from the book that he was lying in Sheffield; he knew quite well what was going on. Perhaps we should make excuses for him. He did not dare to say what he knew. But what about now, when Stalin has been dead for over a decade? The reticence on every page of this book makes it quite clear that he is still afraid to say what he knows. What a reflection of this alleged Socialist society, this workers’ paradise fifty years after the revolution! And why does Ehrenburg bother to write his memoirs at all if he is unable to tell the truth? Better silence than lies. But then, a regard for truth has never been a virtue of the Communists.

As mentioned above, the book is very largely taken up with accounts of the “Peace” Conference that the Communists were running in countries all over the world in the decade after the end of the war. They were of course a gigantic fraud having nothing whatever to do with peace and everything to do with acting as a propaganda front for the foreign policy of Russia in the worst days of the Cold War. It is just possible that people like Ehrenburg really imagined they were achieving something for peace in their constant travels around the globe (he seems to have visited practically every country you can think of); there is not the slightest sign that this so-called Communist intellectual ever stopped to think that perhaps the competitive jungle known as capitalism in the west, which was just as much capitalism in Russia, produced wars as surely as a hen lays eggs. So that no amount of peace conferences which left the social system unchanged could possibly have any effect.

Still, it at least enabled Ehrenburg to enjoy his globe trotting and meet “intellectuals” (ill-defined creatures, to be sure) of his own ilk. And the book is full of stories about these famous friends he made — Picasso, Matisse, Einstein, Casals, Joliot-Curie et al, ad nauseam. It was, of course, one of the “peace” movements aims to enrol these famous names whose influence in their respective countries would serve such a useful propaganda purpose for the policies of Russia. It is indeed pathetic to see how such gifted individuals would allow themselves to be used in this shameful way. The truth is, of course, that they have no more notion of the workings of capitalism and of what Socialism is really about than the mass of workers in England or Russia or anywhere else. Or than Ilya Ehrenburg, if the evidence of this book is anything to go by. But they are pretty vain creatures and were easy meat for Communist flattery and liked to be regarded as princes of peace as they sat on platforms in front of admiring audiences of thousands of working-class dupes. And of course this game goes on still and people still pay regard to the views of such as Bertrand Russell (who wanted to drop an atom bomb on Moscow in 1947) or (believe it or not) Vanessa Redgrave. And although a lot of these people are like children (Einstein, it seems, persuaded Roosevelt to make the atom bomb but never thought it would be used), some of them must (or at least should) have realised what was what. For example, we are told here that when Matisse was told that the Russian people were forbidden to see his paintings which were hidden away in cellars he just laughed. Perhaps it is funny that the regime you support, and which wants you for your works, regards those works as unfit for human consumption. It is less funny to know that artists like Matisse but, unlike him in living in the west in freedom and wealth, were hounded in Russia and even executed like Mikhoels and his friends.

But of course the real trouble with Ehrenburg, as with so many others both in Russia and the west, is that he never seems to question the basis of his creed. In 1918 the Socialist Standard made it clear that whatever else Lenin and his Bolsheviks might achieve Socialism (or Communism — they are synonymous terms) was out. A dictatorship of a so-called Communist Party was fastened on the necks of the Russian people so that the workers there have been exploited under a tyrannical system of state capitalism. Ehrenburg talks, with every appearance of sincerity, of “the Soviet people, whose concepts I cherish”. It never occurs to him to ask himself: what people? what concepts? '

All we have now is the rule of a minority group who exploit the Russian workers for their own benefit and that of their hangers-on like Ehrenburg. The time has still to come when the workers of Russia, like those of England or America or China, will show that they indeed have a concept of what the world could be like under a free system of society where the means of life will really be owned in common. The fact that the emancipation of the working class of the world is still to come is the fault of the workers themselves. But the Ehrenburgs of the world have a lot to answer for. It might be as well to conclude with a mention of a quotation from another work of this author taken from our companion paper the Western Socialist a year or two ago in which he urged the Russian soldiers to “kill, kill, kill, my brave Red Armyists” and “break the power of the German women” — a brutal incitement to slaughter of the civilian men of Berlin and the rape of their womenfolk. A not untypical contribution to international working-class solidarity from a self-styled Communist intellectual. Needless to say, none of the reviewers in the posh papers, A. J. P. Taylor and all, seem to have been aware of this side of the picture.

A. P.

Where is Labour going? (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Batley and Spen, a constituency in West Yorkshire, had a by-election on the first of July. There were a number of surprises – most notably, that the seat was held by Labour. The election was taken to be something of a judgment on the Labour Party as a whole, with polling suggesting that it would be a 6 percent lead for the Conservatives (Survation, 18 June). Losing Batley and Spen would have been a particularly painful blow for Labour, as it was the constituency of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was murdered in 2016 by a neo-fascist, Thomas Mair. Her sister, Kim Leadbeater, won the seat this year by 323 votes (a lead of 0.85 percent of the vote, having won about 35 percent overall). The seat had been Tracy Brabin’s, a Labour and Co-op MP, since the by-election following Cox’s death. Her leads were 16.7 percent (55.5 percent overall) in the 2017 general election, and 8.7 percent (42.7 percent overall) in 2019. While Labour’s holding the seat was unexpected, considering how narrow the victory was, and how the seat has often historically been Labour’s more strongly, this is by no means a turning-of-the-tides.

Workerism

One of the other surprises was that almost 22 percent of the vote went to George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’, which he describes as ‘the working-class patriotic alternative to fake woke anti-British ‘Labour’’ (Telegraph & Argus, 12 May). The party’s Deputy Leader, Joti Brar, is vice-chair of the CPGB-ML. Whoever they represent it is not the workers. Their website announces that they are a ‘socialist organisation’, but also that they ‘defend the achievements of the USSR, China, Cuba etc’, and that the party ‘believes in the importance of a planned economy, in the directing role of the state. Free-market fundamentalism has gutted Britain of its industries (…) castrating our society and adversely destabilising proud working-class traditions, culture and way of life.’

One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of what one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party Bordiga derided as ‘the typically opportunist conception of the labourist or workerist party to whom all those individuals who are proletarian in terms of their social condition are admitted by right’, to say nothing of the alarming fetishisation of oppressive state-capitalist regimes, past and present.

Socialism’s goal is not to preserve ‘working-class traditions, culture, and way of life’ – on the contrary, in an important sense, it is to abolish those things. We demand the elimination of class, not the extension of the proletarian way of life to the whole of society. Indeed, isn’t it dissatisfaction with the proletarian way of life that gives motivation to socialist sentiment in the first place?

Panic

At any rate, the result was astonishing. Galloway took himself to be ‘standing against Keir Starmer’, and that 22 percent backed the Workers Party, placing it third overall, can reasonably be read as an indictment of the Labour Party as it stands. Indeed, perhaps the only reason Labour didn’t lose is sheer luck. The week before the election, the news broke of then Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s affair and breach of the social-distancing rules he himself set out. This and the Conservative Party’s reaction (or lack thereof) did not reflect well on them, and presumably led to a drop in Tory turnout on the day of the vote. Keir Starmer’s declaration that ‘This by-election is a turning point (…) Labour’s back, and the promise of a better future is back too’ (Guardian, 2 June) is certainly too quick. Indeed, comparing leads over the years, it is not a turning point at all. It is a continuation of the dwindling of victory margins Labour has seen.

Indeed, some of the party’s campaigning tactics showed signs of panic and desperation. Leaflets were distributed showing PM Boris Johnson with the Indian PM Narendra Modi, of the radically Hindu nationalist BJP. This was to appeal to the Muslim vote, especially given continuing human rights abuses in Kashmir, a region disputed by India and Pakistan for generations. The frantic appeal to votes led to some internal division within the party, with Labour Friends of India requesting withdrawal of the leaflets. The vote still remained divided: Kim Leadbeater was heckled and intimidated after being questioned about her stance on LGBT rights, Palestine, and Kashmir (Guardian, 27 June). One man who chased her said he was acting on behalf of Muslim parents concerned about LGBT-inclusive education. Across given demographics, then, Labour has not won many hearts.

Lucky

The victory will, of course, still be welcomed by the Labour party. But it is not a victory that they can take much comfort in. Indeed, looking at it as anything but an immense stroke of luck is probably mistaken. The signs point to a need for change in the Labour Party, if they want to win again – and that change, contrary to what Starmer has suggested, has not already taken place. George Galloway’s Workers Party is an important surprise in the election – Labour would be remiss to not take some note. Handing over 22 percent of the vote to a rival left-leaning party is not a concession they are in any position to make.

Labour’s position is somewhat precarious now, with no signs of a forthcoming reversal in fortunes. The reason they won seems to have as much to do with the Conservatives’ blunders than their own successes. Starmer’s jubilation had better be a mere façade if Labour is to return to serious positions of power in parliament. He writes that ‘Batley and Spen was an important win – in the most difficult of circumstances. But it is only the start.’ Even this might go too far. Perhaps it isn’t the start, but a mere confirmation that Labour is going nowhere fast.

M. P. Shah

George Galloway: would-be Populist Leader (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the results of the recent Batley and Spen by-election were announced a Labour Party supporter responded to a comment about the meagre majority achieved. He was insistent that the 323-vote margin would have been 8,000+ higher had it not been for the appearance of George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain.

From a purely psephological point of view the Galloway performance was remarkable for a representative of a small, leftish party. Nearly 22 percent of the vote secured a comfortable third place, a good 7,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat, 5,000 or so behind the winner.

So perhaps the disgruntled Labour supporter had a point, except, of course, there is a large presumption involved. There is no way of determining whether an absence of Galloway and his new party would have resulted in in his 8,000 votes defaulting to Labour. Indeed, the experience of the previous by-election in Hartlepool suggests the Conservative candidate might have been a beneficiary too, especially given Galloway’s pro-Brexit stance.

There is a strong suggestion that Galloway profited from an alienated Muslim vote who may have perceived themselves as being tainted by Labour’s broad brush anti-Semitism accusations levelled at almost any anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. It must be galling for a community more often the target of racism to feel themselves viewed as racists by the party they traditionally supported.

There is surely little doubt that the impressive vote was for Galloway personally rather than being an ideological breakthrough by the Workers Party of Britain. He has a background of championing anti-Zionism and favouring Islamic causes. There have even been suggestions that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam, although he has denied this.

The Workers Party of Britain appears to be a left-wing manifestation of that recent political phenomenon, populism. On its website the Party states it is a response to a need following the defeat of Corbynism. It believes:

• The importance of a planned economy directing the role of the state.
• Free-market fundamentalism has gutted British industry, castrated society and destabilised the working class.
• The state should guide economic life.
• The working class needs to be united on shared class interests to struggle for socialism.
• Countries that have tried to build the socialist new world include the USSR, China, Cuba et al.
• Brexit is a positive move to secure Britain’s independence to pursue fiscal and monetary policies and take key utilities and transport into public ownership.

There is ‘A ten-point programme for workers’ promoted on the Party’s website that sits easily with left-Labour aspirations. It has garnered the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which situates itself in the tradition of Stalinism and Maoism. Indeed, Galloway’s deputy leader Joti Brar is from a family closely associated with the CPGB (ML). For the Workers Party of Britain the problem is free-market capitalism, the solution… state capitalism.

Galloway has been here before of course. In 2005 he did even better, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency for Respect, a political grouping backed on that occasion by the Socialist Workers Party. A parting of the ways quickly followed and it would seem he has moved from the neo-Trotskyist camp to the neo-Stalinist one. Either way, the prospects for democracy would be dim should such a grouping ever succeed.

Is it a party at all, or a Galloway supporters’ club? It seems highly unlikely that some John or Joan Smith standing for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen would have garnered anything close to 8,000 votes and their performances elsewhere have been derisory.

Personality politics blurs the line between those who’d style themselves left or right wing. Thus George Galloway was quite sanguine about sharing a platform at a Brexit rally with Nigel Farage. The public moment being far more crucial than principles.

The charismatic leader, or a leader who thinks himself charismatic, becomes all important. A previous attempt to displace Labour as the party of the working class in Yorkshire was the now less than marginal Socialist Labour Party led by Arthur Scargill who tried to politically exploit the prominence he gained from the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Indeed, the CPGB (M-L) was a split from it.

What these parties have in common is being political cul-de-sacs. Setting aside implications of serious democratic deficit in its politics, should the Workers Party actually succeed in displacing the Labour Party nothing much would change for the working class.

With Galloway as prime minister implementing his 10-point plan the workers would still be working for wages that represent only a portion of the value their labour power creates. After all, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has successfully created numerous billionaires while the working masses most definitely do not have control of the means of production and distribution.

In other words, the Workers Party in power would replace capitalism with capitalism, and a less successful version of capitalism if some the models quoted on the Party’s website are anything to go by.

The Batley and Spen by-election is a demonstration that there are no answers to the problems created by capitalism for the working class in any of the parties on offer, major or minor, left wing or right wing.

Kim Leadbeater MP made the usual platitudinous vague promises to serve all the community, bring people together and further local interests. Had the Tory won he would have spouted an almost identical speech. Similarly, the LibDem. Galloway would undoubtedly have been more vocally belligerent, but it would have amounted to the same.

This is because community divisions, Brexit, economic decline and the plethora of other problems are rooted in capitalism. The dreadful murder of Kim Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox, the then sitting MP, was an extreme example of politics under capitalism. It is a system wasteful of human lives that is immune to political point scoring.

The Labour Party supporter decrying George Galloway for undermining the Leadbeater vote remains politically blind, as presently all too many are. There are no short cuts, no inspired leaders, no previous models to draw on. Only a majority recognition of the need for a system of common ownership of economic means, moneyless and cooperative – socialism – can address those problems people have in common, even as they seem to be divided.

Until popular delusions can be effectively dispersed the people of Batley and Spen and everywhere else in the world will continue to labour for the pecuniary benefit of the capitalist few.

Dave Alton

Bourgeois Political Economy in Shambles (2010)

Pamphlet Review from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bourgeois Political Economy in Shambles. By Stefan Engel. Verlag Neuer Weg, 2009

This is an English translation of a pamphlet originally published in Germany, with the subtitle “Some additions to the Marxist-Leninist crisis theory.” ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was the official political theory of the former Soviet Union and was enforced throughout most of the former Eastern European satellite governments of the twentieth century. ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is often synonymous with Stalinism.

Engel gives a reasonable account of the current global crisis of capitalism, which began in September 2008.  Crises are inevitable under capitalism because, as Karl Marx pointed out, “a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier” (Capital, Vol. III). German chancellor Merkel, like politicians everywhere, blamed the “financial excesses with no sense of social responsibility, the abandonment of moderation and the middle course by a number of bankers and executives” which “steered the world into this crisis”. As Engel rightly says, this way of arguing “turns attention to the – undeniable – subjective failings of bankers and executives, and distracts attention from the essentials, from the laws of the capitalist mode of production. These laws compel every capitalist, whether factory owner or manager of a stock corporation, whether privately owned or state-owned company, to act, under penalty of ruin”.

But it is the ‘Marxism-Leninist’ understanding of the state, among other things, where it falls down. Engel quotes Engels on the state:

“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm).

This should have made Engels (and Marx’s) position abundantly clear, but Lenin stood this argument on its head and claimed that capitalism and the state could be made democratic and that this is what socialism means. Engel cites a passage from a pamphlet written by Lenin in 1917:

“… socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased be capitalist monopoly” (original emphasis, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm).

However, the whole thrust of Marx and Engels’s critique is that capitalism and the state, whatever form they take, can never be made to serve the interests of the whole people. For the same reason, the idea of a “socialist state” is a nonsensical contradiction in terms. Lenin was never clear about the need for a “socialist state” as he knew it flouted the basics of Marxism, though it is implicit in some of his writings. Leninists have no such qualms and here we read of the need for a “socialist state of genuine democracy”. But  Leninist states have an abysmal record on democracy, preferring instead a dictatorship over the proletariat as they grapple with the contradictions of managing capitalism. In theory and in practice, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is a shambles.

Lew Higgins

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paris police say the mayor of Kiev’s daughter was robbed of euro4 million ($5.5 million) worth of jewelry as she travelled to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport. An official with the Paris police says a man broke into the luxury car that Kristina Chernovetska was in as it stopped on a highway north of Paris and then stole her purse:

[Dead Link.]

As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.

But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat:

[Link.]

Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il,

This meeting, organised by the Friends of Korea in Britain, would like to convey to you our warmest congratulations on the important occasion of the 68th anniversary of your birth on February 16, and wish you all good health and a long, long life. We send you our very best wishes for the continued success of your great work…We stand shoulder to shoulder with you and the Korean people under your great leadership,and express our common conviction that humanity will achieve a better world where the people are the masters of their own destiny…

Signed by participating organisations:

* Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

* European Regional Society for the Study of the Juche Idea

* UK Korean Friendship Association

* New Communist Party of Britain

* Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

* Socialist Labour Party

[Link.]

The Life of Uncle Joe (2005)

Book Review from the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stalin: a biography by Robert Service. (528 pages. Macmillan. £25,  ISBN 033726278) 

Service deliberately, and bravely, tries to dig for the true story of Stalin’s life beyond the hagiography or demonography that usually represents him.

He presents the case that Stalin, or Joseph Dzughashvili, or Soso, or Koba — as he was variously known — was a central character in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party. He was keen acolyte of Lenin, a hardman — he organised the campaign of bank robbery and extortion in the Caucasian areas of the Tsarist empire at Lenin’s behest, even when the latter promised to cease such activities. He edited Pravda, was on the Bolshevik central committee and was Lenin’s close collaborator on the ‘National Question’. 

He was imprisoned several times, and though taciturn with fellow prisoners, he took his beatings at the hands of prison guards with equanimity. During the civil war, he commanded the Red Army on the south fronts, where he proved to be a ruthless if not effective commander.

So, hardly the grey man Trotsky liked to pretend him to be — but Trotsky could hardly criticise Stalin for brutality, when he was as nearly as ruthless. In fact, Service makes a good case that Stalin rose to power as part of a stop-Trotsky faction.

Stalin was able to present himself as the acme of Leninist orthodoxy, and possibly — and Service does make this case — believed he really was creating some form of socialism in the Soviet Union. Socialists — unlike Leninists — have no need to shy away from this fact. Our argument never was that Stalin was a bad man, a monster (although, obviously, he was) but that he was acting upon a false and dangerous theory — that a band of dedicated leaders could force the world to socialism.

Service makes clear that much of Stalin’s apparent paranoia was based on the simple fact that he and his fellows had risen to power suddenly and almost out of nowhere against the might of Tsarism. He believed, apparently, that a similar cabal could unseat him — what comes round goes around.

His callousness was relentless, ranging from bullying subordinates at informal parties, to personally poring over the list of names and faces of victims of his terror. Service alleges a desire to be at the centre of things, to assert himself that grew from childhood and was fostered by his membership of the Bolshevik party. As he notes, Stalin was among the few genuinely working class members of the inner sanctum of the party — which goes to show that having genuine workers in charge doesn’t make that much difference.

In his desk, when he died, were some keepsakes — a letter from Bukharin begging to know why he Stalin wanted to murder him when he was already politically dead, and a letter from Tito, threatening to try and assassinate him if he didn’t stop trying to bump the Yugoslav dictator off — as Service notes, one gangster to another. Even his intimate moments were blood-soaked and ruthless. This is a tidy account of the life of a utopian who thought that through ruthless will alone he could shape the world. As in some parts of his former empire, his statues are being resurrected and his reputation repaired, it also serves as a timely warning against leaders past, present and future.

Pik Smeet

Twisting and turning (1996)

Book Review from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

L’URSS et la contre-révolution de velours. by Ludo Martens. EPO, Brussels.

Normally we would let the dead bury the dead. And this book (“The USSR: The Velvet Counter-Revolution”) clearly comes into this category, written as it is by someone — the leader of a Maoist party in Belgium — who believes that Stalin was a Great Man and Trotsky a Hitlerite agent. But it reveals an interesting twist to the argument over the nature of the social system in Russia when the Communist Party was in power there.

In the course of their disputes with the rulers of Russia, the rulers of China (Mao) and of Albania (Enver Hodja) came to characterise Russia as “state capitalist”. This was largely name-calling but Mao and Hodja got their State ideologists to work it up into some kind of theory; which, in Martens’s words, went like this:

  "In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s coup d’Etat marked the capture of power by a new big-bourgeoisie, made up of the high officials of the Party and State, who de facto own the means of production and who appropriate the surplus value created by the workers. The Soviet State is a collective capitalist".

As it happened, this description of who the Russian ruling class were and how they owned the means of production and exploited the workers was substantially correct, except why did this suddenly come to apply only in 1953 when Khrushchev took over after Stalin died? Since the political and economic structure was the same, if it applied to Russia under Khrushchev it ought logically to apply to Russia under Stalin too. Indeed, it ought logically to apply as well to China under Mao and Albania under Hodja.

As we pointed out at the time, in characterising Russia as capitalist the Maoists were more advanced than the Trotskyists who still clung to the absurd view that Russia was some sort of “workers state” . However, in so doing they were also underlining their own defence of the Chinese and Albanian regimes which of course were also examples of state capitalism.

And this is what happened. After the so-called Cultural Revolution some ex-Red Guards came to apply the same analysis to China under Mao. Others went further and applied it to Russia under Stalin. As Martens describes it from his point of view:

  “The whole French New Right, of the “former-Maoist-New-Philospher” type, started from the analysis of the restoration of capitalism under Khrushchev to then discover that the “bases” of this restoration had already been laid by Stalin”.

Some went even further, such as Michael Volslensky in his book The Nomenklatura (recommended reading, incidentally, for anyone wanting to understand the ancien régime in Russia) whose views Martens quotes as the final proof that the new class/state capitalist analysis of Russia was wrong and should be abandoned:

  “Neither the Leninist party nor its core has ever been the vanguard or even a simple part of the working class . . . In the event of the revolution they were preparing being victorious, this small group would automatically become an organisation of professional leaders. It is thus that Lenin created the embryo of a new ruling class”.

Mao, Stalin and Lenin as advocates and practitioners of state capitalism, this is where the theory Mao and Hodja patronised in the 1960s and 70s led! This has proved too much for today’s Maoist remnants who have now decided to abandon it as a “leftist” deviation. Martens backtracks on a view which he says he held and ardently defended for twenty years, in these terms:

  “We believed at the time that Khrushchev had established a new specific mode of production, state capitalism, a higher form of capitalism where the “nomenklatura” collectively owns the means of production. This thesis isn’t tenable”.

He now believes that Khrushchev didn’t after all “restore” capitalism in 1953; all he did was to embark on a course that would eventually lead to “the restoration of capitalism” but that this didn’t actually occur till Yeltsin came to power in 1991; in the meantime the Russian economy remained “basically socialist”.

So the Maoists have now retreated to the same absurd position as the Trotskyists they hate: that Russia from Stalin to Gorbachov was still basically socialist even if those at the top were feathering their own nests (as if the absence of a privileged group in society wasn’t the essence of socialism).

This view has the added advantage—and is probably a major factor in their U-turn—of allowing the ex-pro-Chinese Communists to make it up with those ex-pro-Russian Communists who haven’t become open reformists, so that they can both rally round the remaining “socialist countries” (Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam and Laos). On reflection, perhaps we should have left the dead to bury the dead.

Adam Buick

Twenty Years Since Stalin (1973)

From the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. (Engels)
  Our system is state capitalism . . . (Russian underground leaflet)

It is now twenty years since March 1953 when Stalin died. High time to review trends in Russia, the so-called “Socialist camp”—the prison camp society with a state-capitalist economy. A brief sketch of the Stalinist era will help to give the reader some understanding of the developments of the last twenty years.

Stalin became Lenin’s successor largely due to his success in putting his own men in key information posts. Once in power he ruthlessly eliminated the political opposition: the Trotskyists and other opposition factions followed one another into the silence of the camps or were butchered by the G.P.U.

Bolshevik despotism relied on the same instrument of oppression as had done the Tsarist state: a secret police force, especially skilled at spying on nascent opposition movements and strangling them at birth. In Tsarist times this was the Okhrana; Lenin founded its successor, the Cheka, in December 1917. In February 1922 the name changed to G.P.U. and again in 1934 to N.K.V.D. Nowadays it is called the K.G.B: tomorrow yet another euphemistic title will be coined. In a despotic or totalitarian State, such institutions will always be indispensable.

Stalin fought another, more desperate, undeclared civil war with the peasants. In a letter to Sholokhov, Stalin himself wrote that the peasants “in reality were making a ‘silent’ war against Soviet power . . . War by starvation”. During the Revolution the peasants had been able to seize land for themselves and, when land-nationalisation (collectivization) was proposed, they resisted as only peasants can. In January 1930 Stalin decreed full steam ahead with collectivization and the simultaneous elimination of the kulaks (useless to define a kulak since anyone could be labelled kulak who was awkward).

The result was chaos and years of famine, even in the best agricultural regions. Some ten million people appear to have died in the Thirties: from starvation disease or liquidation, who can say? Meat consumption dropped by 50-75 per cent, whilst the country’s grain requirements were barely satisfied. Peasants slaughtered their livestock and destroyed corn and hayricks.

These twin themes—the ruthless suppression of political opposition and appalling agricultural shortages— continue to trouble state-capitalist Russia even now.

Stalin’s purges continued even through the War. In his time (ably assisted by Communist Party bureaucrats) he eliminated masses of peasants and intellectuals, Baptists and Marxists, Jews and atheists, generals and doctors and engineers: all were grist for his mill and no-one felt safe. At the time of his death he had just launched the biggest and best-ever purge of them all, aimed mainly against the Jews. As many powerful members of the Politbureau at the time were Jewish or had Jewish connections it is reasonable to speculate that they may have had every reason for eliminating him.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Malenkov at first was in power; then in June Beria, head of the secret police, tried to become Stalin’s heir but was eliminated (murdered). By September Khrushchev had become First Secretary of the Party while Malenkov remained Premier. At this stage they were all still good Stalinists. Malenkov cultivated a fairly liberal image while Khrushchev allied himself with Molotov, Kaganovich and other hard-core Stalinists—as was only natural considering his remarkable and ruthless record as Party boss of the Ukraine.

By 1955 Khrushchev succeeded in ousting Malenkov and installed his own ally, Bulganin, as Premier. The new regime now adopted a more liberal image with “peaceful coexistence” abroad and an improvement in the standard of living at home. Then in February 1956 Khrushchev launched an attack on his enemies in the Party under cover of “de-Stalinisation”. This speech, made at the XXth Congress of the CPSU remained secret, restricted to Party members and key bureaucrats, and although widely published in the West, it has never been published in Russia.

The Communist Party was split internally on the de-Stalinisation issue, and after the Politbureau vote against Khrushchev in June and the Hungarian and Polish revolts (autumn 1956), the Kremlin was torn by an internal power struggle. Throughout the Khrushchev era powerful forces in the Establishment fought de-Stalinisation which represented a threat to their positions.

Khrushchev made his second anti-Stalin speech five years after the XXth Congress. In his speech to the XXIInd Congress, which was widely published in Russia and Eastern Europe, he indicted the “anti-Party faction” as responsible for Stalinist repression. A typical case of the pot calling the kettle black! This speech shocked and startled Russians. Party morale became very low and from now on Khrushchev’s position became even more precarious until in 1964, after the catastrophic crop-failure of 1963, he was finally ousted by Brezhnev and Kosygin.

During the Khrushchev decade, Party control of the arts had been, to put it mildly, erratic. Khrushchev himself authorised, indeed insisted on the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in November 1962 as part of his campaign against his party opponents. Yet Khrushchev himself declared war on avant-garde artists on December 1st. In foreign affairs the most significant factors were the Cuba crisis and worsening relations with China, culminating in the open split of June 1961.

But far more important in causing Khrushchev’s downfall was his failure in the economic sphere. Agricultural production was misdirected, the price levels for meat and milk being set too low in 1958 with resultant under-production in relation to demand. So in June 1962 Khrushchev decreed big price rises—butter prices went up 25 per cent and meat 30 per cent. The inevitable result was widespread unrest and riots in many cities, notably Novocherkassk where demonstrators were shot by armed police. Another important result was that the collectives transferred their efforts to livestock, neglecting grain production. This in turn—combined with a bad drought—resulted in a catastrophic shortage of grain in 1963. It proved necessary to import large amounts of wheat from abroad—another serious blow to Khrushchev’s prestige and an open demonstration that the most strictly State-run economy was uncontrollable, being subject to the anarchic laws of the market. Since 1917 there have been regular famines and grain shortages in Russia, the worst occurring in 1922-23, 1932, 1942, 1952, 1962-3 and the current crisis of 1972-73. It made no difference changing the boss: the system is basically uncontrollable.

The Khrushchev era then had unleashed bitter criticisms among the writers who began to smell freedom and when the State publishing houses refused their work, they started samizdat (Do-It-Yourself Publishing), refusing to be controlled by the Party. At the same time Khrushchev had failed to solve Russia’s continuing agricultural problems.

What has been happening since Khrushchev’s departure from the Kremlin? It is impossible to detect significant change either on the liberalisation issue or in agricultural policies. Just as Khrushchev was truly Stalin’s heir in his insistence that art must serve the Party’s interests, so today, in Pravda editorials on culture, we recognise the same ruling class view of art as subordinate to the interests of the State:

  Soviet artists were together with Lenin’s party and the people . . . they gave all the strength of their talent to the great cause of communism. And this active participation . . . in the construction of a new life earned for Soviet cultural workers the love and respect of the people, made them the trusty assistants of the party . . . the raising of the ideological and theoretical level of literary and artistic criticism, its militancy and party principle basis . . . To augment the glorious traditions of socialist art, leaning on the Leninist principles of party thinking and closeness to the people, to strengthen its offensive spirit—these arc a matter of honour for every Soviet artist. (Front-page editorial, Pravda, Jan. 25, 1973)

In 1966 Brezhnev-Kosygin passed two laws designed to make “spreading slanderous inventions about the Soviet State and social system”, and “disturbance of public order’’ punishable offences. These were directly aimed at the new generation of oppositionists who were disseminating attacks on the régime in samizdat, who were demonstrating in Moscow squares and even allying themselves with increasingly militant workers (see January Socialist Standard which carries a translated leaflet calling on workers to strike against the “Partocracy” which exploits them).

Since then more and more poets have been imprisoned or brainwashed in psychiatric prisons, more and more critics of the régime have been exiled or sent to those self-same concentration camps that Lenin first devised and where so many of their predecessors sowed the bitter need of frustration. The secret police is as strong as ever, and so is the Kremlin.

And that other perennial theme of crop-failures? No change there either. Today in 1973 Russian agriculture is yet again facing a crisis. Last year’s harvest was a flop: significantly the post-mortems in the Russian press ascribe this to inefficiency, misuse of machinery and waste on the farms, rather than to indifferent weather. Last year Russia had to import 28 million tons grain from various western countries—18 million tons from America alone. Yet 60 years ago, pre-Revolutionary statistics showed Russia to be a major grain exporter: “Grain exports in 1913 exceeded the grain exports of Argentina by 177 per cent., of Canada by 211 per cent, and of U.S.A. by 366 per cent.” (Bulletin of the International Agricultural Institute, Rome 1914, quoted in Posev Dec. 1972 from Tsarisme et Revolution by A. de Goulevitch, Paris 1931).

And not only was last year’s crop a failure but this year’s prospects are exceedingly precarious. The unusually late snowfall will have partly destroyed the spring corn and this, combined with extreme shortage of seed-corn in many areas, will mean a pretty poor harvest in 1973. Only too true the admission in a recent pamphlet published by the Soviet authorities that “at the stage of socialist [i.e. state capitalist] society there are not the means to satisfy man’s needs to the full” (USSR Living Standards).

We must not leave unchallenged the misuse of the term "socialism” for a state-capitalist society, a vast prison-state which treats its workers as “mere working cattle” without pity for their poverty and stoical suffering; a “Partocracy” where each and every little Party bureaucrat lines his pocket with loot; an economy which operates successfully only insofar as its wheels are greased with graft and corruption, wire-pulling, intrigue and blackmail.

One significant change there is since Stalin’s days. Russia used to be relatively immune to inflation. However this infectious disease of the capitalist system, endemic in postwar Europe and America, is now reported to be rampant in Russia. As the Eisenhower administration commented to their Kremlin opposite numbers:

  The President is aware that you operate under a system of State capitalism, and he hopes that it has been useful to you to have seen the progress of our people under our system of individual capitalism. We are sure that you have found this experience interesting.

(Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1959, quoted in SPGB Pamphlet Russia 1917-1967)

The problems of capitalism are the same the world over. Whether the Kremlin bosses recognise their system as state capitalism or not, the workers in their country are learning fast that this system has nothing to offer them. The Russian proletariat in farms and factories, the internees doing forced labour on starvation rations in the KGB concentration camp empire (about 4 million at Stalin’s death: how many now?) and the unemployed who have no unemployment pay since the regime will not admit that there is any unemployment: they have found this experience interesting indeed and they are stirring with a bitter anger. We wish the exploited people of Russia success in their struggles against the Partocracy which owns and controls the wealth of their country and which crushes them beneath its iron heel.

Charmian Skelton

Moscow's orphans (1998)

Book Review from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The British Communist Movement and Moscow’, by Mike Mosbacher. Libertarian Alliance, 1997.

Have you ever wondered what became of the Communist Party after the collapse of state capitalism in Russia and East Europe? This short pamphlet will tell you.

The official Communist Party – or Communist Party of Great Britain, to give its full name, by which it was only known on formal occasions and in an international context – in effect dissolved itself in 1991 when it changed its name to Democratic Left and became a trendy left green-feminist-gay pressure group. Its previous policies, however, were kept alive by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which broke away in 1988 and which still publishes the Morning Star. In Scotland another group of ex-CPers set up the Communist Party of Scotland in 1992. An earlier breakaway in 1977, the New Communist Party, still exists but has become, according to Mosbacher. little more than a group denying the atrocities that occurred under Stalin in the same irrational way as Nazis deny those that occurred under Hitler.

Immediately after the CPGB changed its name to Democratic Left in December 1991 this name was taken up by a group which had no historical, political or, for that matter, legal right to do so. The organisation that goes under this name, and publishes the Weekly Worker, is in fact a super-Leninist sect, apparently originating as a splinter from the Turkish Communist Party, which employs the same unscrupulous tactics of infiltrating other organisations (at the moment Scargill’s SLP) as the Trotskyists; indeed, according to Mosbacher, it does have Trotskyist members.

Mosbacher, surprisingly perhaps for a supporter of the mad free market ideas of the Libertarian Alliance, has produced a useful and well-informed little pamphlet. He gets our position right too when he states:

  “The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the view that the Soviet Union never was socialist in the first place. This has been its position since 1917. In a way this party goes further than any other on the revolutionary left in criticising the Soviet Union, in that it views Leninist principles and modes of organisation as non-socialist, indeed anti-socialist”.

Adam Buick 

Letters: Why Socialism Must Be World Wide (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why Socialism Must Be World Wide

Dear Editors,

I have read the articles in the November Socialist Standard setting out the basic socialist philosophy with much interest and benefit.

In its articles on Russia the Socialist Standard pointed out, in 1934, that socialism “is impossible in one country alone, owing to international economic interdependence”.

This fact still applies, so how would a socialist Britain, having abolished money, exchange goods with a predominantly capitalist world?

Bryan Fair, 

Dorchester, Dorset

Reply:

A “socialist Britain” is an impossibility for the same reason that a “socialist Russia” was in 1934: capitalism is a world system into which all countries are locked and from which none can escape on its own.

Various countries, beginning with Russia but also others like Cuba and Nicaragua, have tried to escape from the laws of the world market economy but only at the price of establishing a state capitalism which in the end has had to take into account world market pressures anyway.

In fact it could be said that an isolated “capitalist Britain” is just as impossible as an isolated “socialist Britain”. Ever since capitalism first began to develop about 500 years ago it has involved multi-lateral trade between different countries so making them mutually interdependent; in fact one definition of capitalism is that it is the world market, the world trading system.

As capitalism has developed countries have become more and more interdependent. International trade on which all parts of the world now depend for the daily lives of their inhabitants (just think what you had for breakfast) reflects the underlying fact that production itself involves working on materials that have in part come from different parts of the world.

At one time the typical pattern was that raw materials would come from one part, be worked up into a finished product in another, and then sold there or in some other part. Nowadays, not just raw materials but also parts and semi-finished products are exported and imported. The best known example is perhaps the “world car”, as most cars now are, whose various components are produced in a number of different countries and which is only assembled in one particular country.

So “interdependence” is the key fact of economic life today. Because capitalism is a world system so must be socialism, the system which will replace it. In fact, socialism recognises that all parts of the world are interdependent today and seeks to bring social and institutional arrangements into line with this underlying productive fact by establishing a worldwide democratic community with, besides local and regional (“national” in today’s parlance) administrations, a world administration. Frontiers become obsolete, as does adherence to a particular nation-state. We all become citizens of a united world, Earth-people not “British” or “American” or “Russian” or “South African” or whatever.

Trade, as the buying and selling of goods, ceases to exist but not of course the transfer of goods from one part of the world to another. This will still take place, even if the people of socialist society might decide to produce everyday items of individual consumption more locally than at present. This won’t be trade because it won’t be an exchange of equivalents measured in monetary terms. It will just be the transfer of materials and products from one part of the world to other parts where they are needed, without anything needing to be transferred “in exchange”

Editors.

A Stalinist Writes

Dear Editors,

I saw your review of the book Children of the Revolution; Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain and read it with interest. I must now buy the book, although I anticipate being enraged.

Being born in 1940 I well recall my childhood and teenage years as the son of Communist parents. Wonderful, loving Stalinist parents. Stalinists they must have been because they refused to go along with the demonisation of Joe.

I was brought up on the Daily Worker and books were always plentiful. I could go my own way, I was just one of the fortunate few with access to both sides. After a brief mid-teen crisis when I wanted to be the “gum-chewing good guy” and not a “gook” or an automaton under the control of “State Capitalism” I became a Communist.

Like your reviewer I too joined first the YCL and later the CP. However, I never quit. I went instead from believing that Stalin was of his time to now knowing that Stalin was right. He remains right to this day.

I remember telling my Dad that I wanted to go to Sunday School with some of the kids. This Stalinist said “go ahead”. I went once, never again. I remember too, being on a train with him in 1956 when a man came in the carriage asking for cash and help as he was a poor Hungarian on the run from the Russian hordes. My Dad put his glasses in his top pocket and told him “there are two ways to leave this carriage, by the window or the door, take your pick”. Predictably, this fighter against Red tyranny scurried through the door.

Because, comrades, sometimes the tanks have to be sent in and if the Hungarian counter-revolution had succeeded or the Czech one in 1967 [sic], the chaos that is now Eastern Europe would have occurred sooner with other generations suffering what is being suffered now thanks to revisionists, counter-revolutionists, traitors, the weak, corrupt and the liberal.

And who is counting the dead now, as they pile up all over Eastern Europe. But it’s OK, Wall Street and the CIA, the controlled media play it down, because after all, no-one’s nationalising anything without compensation. Nothing to worry about. Business as usual.

And when the cattle cars are filled again it will be that much harder to defeat the enemy next time without Joe and his Red Army.

Paul Barrett, 

Penarth, Mid Glam

Reply:

We have no reason to believe this letter is a spoof. It confirms the view about the “New Communist Party” expressed in the pamphlet by Mike Mosbacher reviewed on our books page and explains why they are known as the “Tankies”. Such people have done the cause of genuine socialism no end of harm by associating it with the vicious one-party state-capitalist dictatorship that existed in Russia under Stalin and where people were also transported in cattle cars to slave-labour camps where they died in their millions.

Editors.