Reviews

Reviews • 90

REVIEWS

The rise and decline of British Stalinism Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1985, pp338, pbk £6.95.

In 1985 the Communist Party of Great Britain split into rival factions. The traditionalist wing centred around the party's daily paper, the Morning Star, established itself as the Communist Campaign Group. The Eurocommunist-dominated party executive committee expelled dozens of Morning Star supporters (including the paper's editor and deputy editor and leading union officials such as Ken Gill of AUEW-Tass), before the formation of the CCG. The executive now publishes its own weekly 7 Days. Smaller factions like The Leninist, Straight Left and Proletarian litter the landscape, underlining the divided state of British Stalinism.

The Communist Party now faces its greatest crisis. The executive has threatened disciplinary action against the CCG dissidents.' But few British Stalinists have the stomach for a wave of expulsions. The party's paper membership of 12 771 at the last count is only 521 above the 1937 level. Worse, many of today's members are demoralised, elderly and inactive. Thus the rival factions have opted for an uneasy coexistence, while they feud over the future of the party. The Eurocommunists, comparing the rise of their glossy monthly Marxism Today to the decline of the Morning Star, accuse the traditionalists of a dogged fixation with macho trade unionism, a failure to come to terms with social change and disdain for *new

91 • Reviews social movements'. Their opponents reply that the "Euros' downgrade the class struggle, abandon Marxism and promote blatant anti-Sovietism. The controversy reiterates themes already well-established in Stalinist debates on the Continent.

Today all European communist parties — with the possible exception of the resilient Italian PCI - are in an advanced state of decay. Most have either split or are riven by factions. The contending wings of Stalinism each blame this impasse on the misguided tactics of their opponents. But the real cause lies deeper.

The publication of the third volume of the official history of the British party, covering the period when the party embarked on the road which led to its current crisis, provides a useful opportunity to examine how and when the rot set in.

The Stalinisation of the Communist Party In 1924 Stalin unveiled the doctrine of 'socialism in one country", asserting that socialism could be built within the borders of the Soviet Union. The new strategy confirmed that the Soviet leadership had abandoned the project of world revolution. This turn was the starting point for the degeneration of the Communist International.

It encouraged the consolidation of national reformist trends in communist parties outside the Soviet Union, and legitimised the transformation of the International into an agency pursuing Soviet foreign policy objectives. Trotsky made a far sighted assessment of the implications of the strategy of socialism in one country: 'If socialism can be realised within the national boundaries of back ward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be realised in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory....The day after tomorrow the French party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social patriotism."

Trotsky's verdict drew out the logical conclusion of Stalinist strategy. The European parties began to evolve along national reformist lines, as each lowered its horizons to the narrow objective of gaining recognition in the established political system of its home state.

Reviews • 92 Even before its Stalinisation, the British party had gone further than most in adapting to reformism. The exceptional power of British Labourism and the weakness of the British Marxist tradition ensured that the revolutionary phase of British communism was shortlived. In the early twenties the Communist International recommended that communist parties should form tactical alliances with social democratic parties, around limited practical demands to defend the working class against the employers' renewed offensive. The United Front tactic was designed to expose the inability of social democracy to pursue such demands consistently, and thus to counter the resurgence of reformism. But in the hands of the British party, the United Front became a formula for blurring the distinctions between reform and revolution.

In 1925 the Communist Party launched the National Left Wing Movement to implement the United Front. The movement declared that its objective was to 'secure the adoption by the Labour Party of a militant socialist policy in place of its present policy of compromise with capitalism. This statement, quoted approvingly by Branson, reveals the party's plan to transform rather than defeat the Labour Party. It shows how, even at this early stage, the Bolshevik approach to overcoming reformism had a negligible impact on the British Communist Party.

The Stalinisation of the Communist International, and the suppression of the revolutionary Left Opposition within the Soviet Union, met little opposition among British communist leaders. The ease with which the British section of the International adapted to the shift in Stalinist policy underlined the party's immaturity. This problem was a product of the party's scant experience of political struggle, and of the pressure of Britain's reformist tradition. It was reinforced by the Stalinisation of the International. The Communist Party leadership responded favourably to a policy which confirmed its own reformist inclinations.

Branson's apologetic party history reflects the worst features of the British Stalinist tradition. She neatly deploys the techniques of deliberate agnosticism, euphemism, innuendo and distortion to concoct a eulogy to patriotic communism. The book's most striking

93 • Reviews feature is its lack of interest in the practical effect of communist policy on the fortunes of the working class movement in the turbulent years under review.

Branson kicks off with the so-called Third Period from 1928-33, when the Comintern rejected all contact with reformist parties and branded social democracy as 'social fascism' . She describes it as an example of the 'extreme sectarianism...to which Marxists have been prone ever since Karl Marx himself fought against it':* Branson rejects the disastrous policies of the Third Period, but for reasons which suit the purposes of the modern Communist Party. Equating the reactionary policies of Third Period Stalinism with left-wing sectarianism has its uses for the Communist Party, which habitually uses the charge of sectarianism to denounce its left-wing opponents.

But this sleight of hand obscures the real meaning of the Third Period. The Third Period was not a sectarian aberration, but the first stage in the evolution of Stalinist patriotism. From the late twenties onwards the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was directed towards reaching an accommodation with the imperialist powers.

This encouraged each of the national communist parties to adopt a more conciliatory approach towards national prejudices in their own countries. The more sectarian features of the Third Period aimed to consolidate the grip of the Stalinist bureaucracy, in the face of the threats of internal dissent from Trotskyists and external competition from social democrats.

Stalinist patriotism evolved further under the subsequent Popular Front policy of the thirties. The communist parties were then encouraged to form uncritical anti-fascist alliances with reformist and bourgeois parties, to help defend the Soviet Union during the build-up to the Second World War. Branson's prejudices blind her to the continuity between the two phases of Stalinism.

Branson's critical spirit is satisfied with regurgitating the familiar contrast between the sectarian form of Third Period Stalinism and the non-sectarian form of Popular Front politics. But the author fails to consider the nationalist political content of Stalinist policy in both phases. This ensured that the interests of the working class were subordinated to the requirements of Soviet foreign diplomacy

Reviews • 94 under both the Third Period and the Popular Front policies.

The German working class was the chief victim of the Third Period. The Stalinists' disastrous 'social fascist' approach disarmed the working class and played a decisive role in the victory of the real fascists. The first victim of the Popular Front period was the Spanish working class. The Stalinists restrained Spanish workers in order to preserve the Popular Front, which allowed the fascists to win the 1936-39 Civil War. The next victims were more than 30 million workers around the globe, killed in the imperialist slaughter of 1939-45 under the banners of anti-fascist unity. While Branson eloquently describes the German disaster of 1933, she is reticent to comment on those which rained thick and fast between 1936 and 1945. Branson's partial amnesia is easily explained. British Stalinists were not particularly prone to the affliction of Third Period sectarianism. Branson correctly notes that the social fascist line encountered resistance at all levels of the British party and was only implemented half-heartedly. But she fails to explain this phenomenon. Whereas the German party implemented the social fascist' line in a desperate bid to thwart its eclipse by the rival Social Democrats, British communist leaders responded unenthusiastically to a policy which ran counter to their orientation towards Labourism. If Third Period sectarianism was a plague British workers were spared, Popular Front chauvinism was one they suffered in abundance. Branson's preference for the latter reflects the deep roots this trend was able to strike within British Stalinism.

Patriotic communism In 1938, Trotsky reviewed the course that the Communist International had taken in the preceding decade: 'On the one hand, it lives on the subsidies of the Kremlin, submits to the latter's commands, and, in this respect, every ex-communist bureaucrat is the younger brother and subordinate of the Soviet bureaucrat. On the other hand, the..growth of the communist parties in recent years, their

95 • Reviews infiltration into the ranks of the petit bourgeoisie, their installation in the state machinery, the trade unions, parliaments, municipalities, etc, have stre expensed in the irationhe deepende on a kreml imperialism at The Popular Front policy was adopted at the seventh congress of the Comintern in 1935. It confirmed the substitution of patriotic reformism for revolutionary internationalism. Stalin had tentatively initiated this step with the doctrine of 'socialism in one country.

Now it had matured into a comprehensive universal strategy.

The impulse for this move came from two sources. European communist leaders, reeling from the defeats and isolation of the early thirties, were desperate for a break with Third Period policy and for a return to the United Front tactics of the mid-twenties. At the same time, the Soviet Union was preoccupied with defending itself against imperialist attack in the impending world conflagration. These were legitimate concerns. But the solutions Stalinist leaders came up with were even worse than the earlier horrors of the Third Period.

The new shift showed that diplomatic maneouvre had become the preferred method of Stalinist policy. Instead of relying on their capacity to mobilise the working class, Stalinist leaders looked to the imperialist establishment and the middle classes to help counter the military threat to the Soviet Union and the isolation of the communist parties. Under the Popular Front, a shared desire for peace' with the class enemy rallied all sections of the International behind the banner of patriotic communism.

The policy of "peaceful coexistence' substituted a strategy of longterm coexistence with imperialism for the traditional Bolshevik diplomacy of temporary tactical compromise — a policy the young and isolated Soviet state had been forced to adopt after the revolution. In initiating this break with Leninist orthodoxy, Soviet leaders hoped to break down any political barriers to the formation of a military alliance with France, Britain and the USA. The Moscow bureaucracy regarded such an alliance as its only guarantee against the threat of invasion by Germany and Japan.

The Popular Front turn, backed up by an elaborate revision of

Reviews • 96 Lenin's theory of imperialism, lent ideological coherence to social patriotism within the European parties. It cleared the way for rejecting the Marxist approach of uncompromising hostility to the bourgeois state. Stalinists began to consider bourgeois democracy in a positive light and became more closely involved with state institutions. Under the Popular Front, the distinction between communism and social democracy began to disappear.

Stalinists postponed socialism to the distant future and relegated the proletariat to the role of a pressure group lobbying the establishment to adopt 'progressive' imperialist policies. National chauvinism was allowed to flourish and the 'defence' of the capitalist nation became a legitimate objective of communist policy.

Given Branson's enthusiasm for the Popular Front, her treatment of the period is predictably uncritical. It comes as no surprise to see her declare that communist support for the Franco- Soviet military pact of 1935 'did not imply any illusions concerning the imperialist nature of the French government, nor did it damp down the class struggle as the Trotskyists alleged, Readers who have a fleeting familiarity with European working class history will know that the French Communist Party demonstrated its support for French 'democracy' by sabotaging a major strike wave in 1936, giving the Marseillaise and the Tricolore pride of place at Communist gatherings, refusing to back Algerian nationalists against a state ban under the Popular Front government, and so on.

In short, the French Stalinists so demobilised the French working class that by 1939 a proto-fascist government was bold enough to take power, ban the Communist Party and smash the working class movement. But Branson generously sweeps over such unfortunate events. Branson's account of relations between the British Communist Party and the Labour Party in this period is equally selective. She refers to a letter to the Labour leadership of November 1935, in which the communist leadership coupled its appeal for affiliation to Labour with a pledge to work loyally' within the Labour Party on 'all current electoral and other campaigns, while maintaining its 'revolutionary standpoint. But she omits to mention this, far more significant, passage in the party's 1938 congress resolution on

97 • Reviews Labour Party affiliation: The Communist Party pledges itself to do everything in its power to mobilise the people behind every campaign of the Labour Party in order to secure its maximum success. The Party will help to strengthen the Labour Party throughout the country, particularly in those backward areas where the strengthening of the Labour Party is decisive for the development of the people's movement....The Communist Party declares that it fully accepts the constitution of the Labour Party, asks for no special privileges, and will abide by all decisions of Labour Party conferences, accepting at all times the same obligations and enjoying the same rights as all other affiliated organisations."

Given that publicising this resolution could reinforce the already widespread suspicion that there is no political justification for the Communist Party to survive outside the Labour Party today, Branson's omission is all too understandable.

The Communist Party grew rapidly through the late thirties.

Membership increased from 5800 in December 1934 to 17 756 in July 1939. Its influence grew in unions in the engineering, aircraft, building and textile industries, on the railways and in the mines.

Rank and file communists were engaged in activities which involved considerable courage and tenacity — fighting in Spain, leading street fights with the fascists, organising rent strikes and industrial battles. But the leadership's support for British 'democracy' meant that the party made no direct challenge to the domination of the capitalist class. And, when the drive towards war began under the guise of 'defending democracy", it ensured that workers seeking a way out of the imperialist slaughter could not expect communist support. The legacy of defeat If the formation of the Communist International was a product of the wave of radicalism that swept across Europe and beyond at the end of the First World War, the Stalinisation of the International was a product of working class retreat under the impact of the defeats of the early twenties. Stalin's theory of socialism in one

Reviews • 98 country' gave coherence to a defeatist and opportunist mood which took hold of communist leaders as the revolutionary wave ebbed. It paved the way for the degradation of communism into a reactionary, bureaucratic doctrine.

Today's European communist parties are the product of an era of class peace, ushered in by the defeat of the international proletariat, and consolidated by Stalinist class collaboration. Stalinism owes its survival to the political immaturity of the working class movement — a problem which the Stalinists themselves played a major role in creating. The defeats of the inter-war period created an environment in which European Stalinism was able to play a mediating role in the conflict between capital and labour.

Having gained a foothold in the mainstream of establishment politics during the war, the communist parties were ready to abandon the last remnants of their association with Leninism.

Branson speaks for the entire British party when she says that the communist movement attained 'maturity during the Popular Front era. Nevertheless... "it was not until the war was nearing its end that the British party began to face up to the fact that the mechanical application of Soviet experiences and methods to Britain was actually an un-Marxist and un-Leninist approach, From then on, extra-parliamentary action ceased to be seen as an alternative to parliamentary action: on the contrary, it was realised that the way forward must involve a combination of the two.

"The object must be to transform and democratise the state machine, and to change the parliamentary system, not to "replace" it. So began work on a different concept: that of a British road to socialism.* In order to reap the rewards for its wartime service in defence of Britain, the Communist Party was keen to 'face up to' the need to disassociate itself from outlandish ideas like 'replacing' capitalism.

The party welcomed the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, which relieved it of Soviet interference and allowed it 'at last', as Branson admirably puts it, to emerge as an independent party 'responsible to itself alone. '° The adoption of The British road to Socialism in 1951 signalled the party's desire to become like any other reformist outfit.

99 • Reviews But today the Communist Party is paying a heavy price for its adaptation to reformism. Having helped bring about the defeat of proletarian internationalism within the working class in the period Branson describes, the party suffered the inevitable consequence.

The Labour Party strengthened its grip on the labour movement, while the Communist Party began the decline to its present status of an irrelevant sect. Despite issuing frequent reminders that it is not a 'ginger group', the Communist Party has long resigned itself to the role of a loyal opposition chorus on the left flank of the Labour Party. The one remaining difference between its programme and that of the Labour left has been the Stalinists' insistence on calling patriotic reform policies Marxist.

Over the past few years, the decline in traditional trade unionism and the disintegration of the left has had serious repercussions inside the Communist Party. Comparing the buoyant and 'confident' mood of the working class in the early seventies with today, party industrial organiser Pete Carter recently remarked that the fall in trade union membership, anti-trade union propaganda and laws, linked to the political advances of Thatcherism have all changed the situation radically."' Eurocommunist Carter now tries to keep the show on the road by projecting the party as a matchmaker between the various fragments of Stalinism and Labour's soft left: 'There is an urgent need for this tendency to assert itself. Important in this respect is the Labour Coordinating Committee, and a whole host of personalities like Bickerstaffe, Sawyer, Knapp, Livingstone and Blunkett.

This is still an emerging group with problems of cohesion and coherence, and lacking in confidence, but crucial to winning the centre ground of the trade union movement." Carter's search for an alliance with a selection of time-served careerists and bureaucrats is a measure of the Communist Party's present desperation. There is a cruel logic behind the Eurocommunists' drift to the right. For example they understand that undemocratic practices in the unions have enabled the Thatcher government to pose as the defender of union democracy.

On this as on every other issue, the Eurocommunists capitulate to

Reviews • 100 bourgeois ideological pressure: *Ballots look like being here to stay. The question is whether the left can grasp this nettle, change its ways of working and secure the kind of approach by the trade union movement that can win the public to the movement's causes."' The hardliners have poured scorn on the Euros' capitulation to the right, their endorsement of wage restraint, condemnations of "macho' trade unionism and acceptance of British membership of the EEC. But the hardline alternative is hardly more appealing. It consists of a tired reassertion of the turgid principles of patriotic trade unionism: the 'alternative economic strategy' of the early seventies, import controls, nationalisation and little-England opposition to the EEC. All the Communist Campaign Group can think of is steering the left back to where it was a decade ago: *Turning to the wider labour movement, the CCG will do its utmost to ensure that the key proposals of the alternative economic economic strategy are once again incorporated in Labour's campaigning programme and election manifesto. In particular it will join with other progressive left activists, including those inside the Labour Party, in demanding that there is no return to any form of wage restraint, that re-nationalisation and extended nationalisation of key sectors of the economy are once again made a top priority, and that there is a firm reaffirmation of the commitment to withdraw Britain from the Common Market."4 British Stalinism has become so inextricably entwined with Labourism that even its crisis only echoes the disintegration of the Labour left. Adaptation to Neil Kinnock or regurgitation of Tony Benn's faded dreams — these are the only options British Stalinism has to offer. The forms taken by the crisis of European Stalinism vary according to national conditions. Yet the underlying cause is the same. The British Communist Party is paying the price for helping prop up reformism over the past 60 years. Now that a new era of class confrontation threatens to destroy the basis for the collaborationist policies of the past, the party's long road looks like it is coming to an end. To write a proper history of the CPGB

101 • Reviews Branson would have to confront the root of the party's crisis: social patriotism. Her apologetic history confirms that some people will always prefer to remain in ignorance.

Paul Flewers Notes • 7 Days, 16 November 1985.

N L Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, New York 1970, p72.

N Branson, p7. Ibid, p29. L Trotsky, "A fresh lesson, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, pp70-1. 6 N Branson, op cit, p243.

7 Ibid, p151. 8 For peace and plenty: report of the fifteenth congress of the CPGB.

London 1938, pp148-9 9 N Branson, op cit, p108.

10 Ibid, p336. 11 Marxism Today. March 1985.

12 Marxism Today, April 1986.

13 7 Days, 21 December 1985.

14 Communist Campaign Group, Which way for Labour?, CCG pamphlet, April 1986.

Reviews • 102 A flawed critique Ellen Meiksins Wood, The retreat from class: a new 'true' socialism, Verso, London 1985, pp202, pbk £6.95.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, a Canadian professor of political science, has written a useful critique of the school of academic Marxism closely associated with Eurocommunism. She notes that the advance of reaction under Reagan and Thatcher has encouraged a new intellectual attack on Marxism, the effect of which is ultimately to deny the possibility and necessity for the overthrow of capitalism.

She identifies the separation of politics from economics, the contention that the class conflict generated by workers subordination to capital has no necessary relationship to the struggle for a new society, as the central theme of the new revisionism. Indeed some of the radical critics of Marxism examined by Wood go so far as to conclude that, because the working class is committed to winning a better deal out of the present system, it is most unlikely to lead the anti-capitalist struggle.

The strength of Wood's critique is that it reveals a basic grasp of Marx's analysis of capitalist society which is singularly lacking among most academic Marxists. She explains that under capitalism the distribution of social labour takes place spontaneously through the operation of the law of value, and that the state plays no direct role in the regulation of economic life. Hence the political institutions of capitalist society appear to be above the conflict between classes that arises from the economic sphere.

103 • Reviews The separation of politics from economics gives the state an appearance of neutrality, even though it is the ultimate enforcer of capitalist relations. Struggles in the economic sphere — trade union disputes — appear to have no relation to political conflicts over issues such as women's rights, racism, or war. Wood rightly identifies the failure to appreciate that the apparent autonomy of the political sphere is inherent in capitalist society as a key weakness of academic Marxism. Wood labels today's academic Marxists as the 'new "true" socialists' after Marx's characterisation of the utopian socialists of the 1830s, who regarded socialism as the outcome of the spread of progressive ideas rather than the result of the class struggle. The new revisionists share the old utopians' disdain for a working class apparently more concerned about winning higher wages than getting involved in wider political issues. Indeed when it comes to women, blacks or war, many workers seem to adopt backward views. Hence the radical academics put their faith for the future in the liberal middle classes and their progressive democratic values.

They consider that these ideas, if properly presented, can win the support of a majority of reasonable people, irrespective of their class background Gavin Kitching, for example, considers that the construction of socialist societies and a socialist world will take a very long time (probably centuries) and that an essential prerequisite of such a world coming into being is a high degree of material prosperity and a citizenry of considerable skill, knowledge and intellectual sophistication.' He concludes that 'the central task of the left in the current situation is to help restore boom conditions as quickly as possible.' For Kitching, workers lack the sophistication required to build socialism, and working class action is not merely irrelevant, but a barrier to the measures needed to revive the capitalist economy. Wood argues with conviction for a Marxism which recognises that the working class is. the only viable agent of social transformation. She points out that there is no direct path from democracy to socialism. Democracy is limited by the requirements of capital, and the class struggle will inevitably reach a stage where

Reviews • 104 the workers' movement is forced either to recognise the need to overthrow the capitalist state, or to accept the restrictions it imposes on society. While the capitalist state can grant formal rights to all its citizens, social inequality will persist as long as the capitalist class owns the means of production. All rights granted by the state remain provisional and restricted, and the coercive power of the most democratic state is always ready to be used if the capitalist order comes under threat.

So far so good. However, when Wood comes to consider the questions of fascism and dictatorship, she abandons her earlier insistence on the necessity to recognise the relation between politics and economics. Here she considers that a case can be made for the principles of the Popular Front and a corresponding ideological strategy in which the continuities between liberalism and socialism take precedence over the discontinuities." Wary of the consequences of this position, Wood pleads that she is not falling into the trap of putting the defence of democracy before the fight against capitalism. She acknowledges 'the risks of a strategy that seems to suppress class struggle, subordinate the interests and independent action of the working class, and postpone the struggle for socialism'. But Wood cannot have her cake and eat it. She cannot reconcile her approval for the Popular Front against fascism and her polemic against the separation of politics from economics, of which the Popular Front is a classical example. Most of the theoreticians against whom this book is directed — Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst — trace their intellectual origins to the international communist movement in its Popular Front phase. In the late thirties the Stalinists reduced the choice facing the working class to capitalist democracy or fascism.

The Marxist view that fascism was the outcome of capitalist social relations was abandoned, together with the strategy of fighting fascism by struggling to overthrow capitalism. The result of separating political forms from the relations of production which gave rise to them was disaster for the working class movement. It is a pity that, after going so far in revealing the weaknesses of the

105 • Reviews revisionists, Wood ends up succumbing to them.

The area where Wood appears to have the greatest difficulty is in establishing the exact relationship between the conflict between workers and their employers and the struggle for socialism. She clearly recognises the need for some sort of working class political organisation which aims to destroy the existing state machine and institute a regime based on workers' power. She also accepts that workers will not spontaneously come to an awareness of the historic role of the working class through their involvement in workplace disputes. Such struggles reveal the possibility of a united workers" movement, not its inevitability. Realising this potential requires the conscious intervention of political leadership in the class struggle.

Wood rightly criticises left-wing organisations which abdicate the responsibilities of political leadership and give a low priority to theoretical matters. Yet Wood fails to draw the organisational conclusions of her own critique. She writes as a political scientist working in a university, rather than as a scientific politician engaged in the class struggle.

She is critical of the electoralism and consensus politics of the British Labour Party tradition. Yet she endorses the views of British intellectuals such as Perry Anderson and Ralph Miliband, both of whom have rejected the Leninist project of building a revolutionary workers' party as irrelevant to the British working class.

Wood's analysis of the new revisionists contains many insights and it makes stimulating reading. But, like many of her colleagues on the editorial board of the New Left Review, she has yet to escape from the tradition she seeks to attack.

Keith Tompson

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