Against the grain

The British far left from 1956

Evan Smith, Matthew Worley, Evan Smith, Matthew Worley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780719095900
• eBook ISBN: 9781847799227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Against the grain is the first general history of the British far left to be published in the twenty-first century. Its contents cover a range of organisations beyond the Labour Party, bringing together leading experts on British left-wing politics to examine issues of class, race and gender from 1956 to the present day. The essays collected here are designed to highlight the impact made by the far left on British politics and society. Though the predicted revolution did not come, organisations such as the International Socialists, the International Marxist Group and Militant became household names in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken as a whole, the collection demonstrates the extent to which the far left has weaved its influence into the political fabric of Britain.

Part I

Movements

1

Engaging with Trotsky

The influence of Trotskyism in Britain

John Callaghan

Trotsky became known in Britain after the Bolshevik Revolution in association with Lenin, as he did across the globe. But as early as 1920 Bertrand Russell, who noted the ‘lightening intelligence’, vanity and charisma of the man while visiting Moscow, warned that Trotsky was ‘not by any means’ regarded as Lenin’s equal by his Bolshevik comrades.¹ By January 1925, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was depicting Trotsky, who had ‘resigned’ his government posts, as a disruptive factionalist who had adopted an ‘anti-Party, anti-Bolshevik’ outlook all of a piece with his Menshevik and individualist past.² The continuing campaign against Trotsky caused barely a ripple among British Communists as, between November 1927 and February 1929, he was successively expelled from the party, sent into internal exile and then finally thrown out of the country. The architect of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the man who created the Red Army, had by 1936 become the central fascist conspirator in the plot to overthrow the Bolshevik state uncovered by the first of the Moscow Trials. In January 1937, as the second of these show trials began, in which he was once again the chief defendant in absentia, the exiled Trotsky entered Mexico. In doing so he placed himself under the protection and care of his American followers as well as the government of President Cárdenas. He thereby loomed larger in the English-speaking world than hitherto, chiefly in the world of ideas. His defence against the ‘Stalin school of falsification’ would be conducted before a commission headed by the distinguished American philosopher John Dewey. His writings would be published in English by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which constituted the largest section of his nascent Fourth International, launched from the living room of Alfred Rosmer’s house in September 1938 in the Paris suburbs.

Trotsky’s persecution and the fantastic charges brought against him – upheld in court by even his closest colleagues, such as Christian Rakovsky – were not universally reviled even in liberal circles. Many testified to the scrupulous fairness of the Moscow legal process. It was recalled that renegades, police spies, closet conservatives and proto-fascists were not unheard of in the history of socialism. Why would Stalin’s government risk international obloquy, at a time when it needed allies, by staging an elaborate legal farce? Among the Communists – though not only Communists – it was taken for granted that socialism was being built in the Soviet Union, that fascism was its extreme enemy, and that anything harming Stalin’s government could only strengthen these forces of the dark, led by men who openly stood for everything that was anathema to the left. How much worse then for those few who took Trotsky’s side and who knew that the Stalin dictatorship was engaged in the wholesale destruction of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, that the confessions of the accused had been extracted by torture, that mountains of lies had been written about them and that the regime was actively eliminating left oppositionists abroad, placing Trotsky’s own life in the gravest danger?

As one of the co-founders of the Bolshevik state, Trotsky was unable to accept that the Stalin dictatorship was rooted in anything promoted by either himself or Lenin. Trotsky and his followers claimed that they were the real Leninists, the real revolutionaries, and that Stalin and his supporters had betrayed the revolution of October 1917. The revolution itself had been authentic and Leninism was universally applicable; the social democrats were as useless and treacherous as Lenin said they were; the opportunities for future revolutionary advance were as rich as the first four congresses of the Communist International had maintained; the problem was Stalinism which could not protect the Leninist legacy either at home or abroad. This was the basis of Trotsky’s appeal in these circles and also the reason why so few people were drawn to him. For the left was overwhelmingly composed of people who could not believe either that Lenin–Trotsky had the answers or that Stalin was the main problem. Trotsky himself, however, exercised a broader fascination beyond the Trotskyist ranks. He was a man of enormous and multiple talents who had achieved much and fallen far. He battled on against a brutal and sinister opponent who was backed by the resources of a state and an international army of followers. There was tragedy here, political drama and intellectual brilliance. There was also the public struggle to understand and report on the doings of Moscow, headquarters of a vast experiment in social engineering. After the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, the coincidence of world capitalist economic crisis and the advent of the first five-year plans would ensure that everyone on the left had a stake in what was happening in the Soviet Union. Many people were interested in what Trotsky had to say about it.

Understanding Stalinism

Trotsky maintained that the Bolsheviks had created a workers’ state in October 1917. After 1933 he stressed the need for a political revolution to remove the Stalin regime but held that the fundamentally progressive element in the situation survived, consisting of the state-owned, planned economy. In The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky depicted the Soviet Union as a transitional regime between capitalism and socialism and argued that the Stalin dictatorship represented a privileged caste, the bureaucracy, which defended the gains of October only with policies likely to undermine them. Problems of waste, inefficiency and corruption were, like the bureaucracy itself, manifestations of Russian backwardness and shortages in the field of consumption. While international capitalism was heading for a catastrophic collapse, the state-owned economy of the Soviet Union was the sure foundation of its future progress. Thus, vis-à-vis the fascist and capitalist powers Trotsky insisted that the Soviet Union deserved to be unconditionally defended by his followers.

Yet Trotsky had also compared Stalin’s regime to Hitler’s as ‘totalitarian’. He publicised the extreme violence and methods of thought control with which Soviet society was kept under the regime’s control. Trotskyists knew all about the scale and cruelty of the labour camps and the secret police. They knew of the wretchedly low standards of living of the workers and the appalling conditions in which they laboured and the fact that there was no one to defend them against the state – their state. Some wondered what kind of workers’ state this could be. The debate in Trotskyist circles was most vivid in the 1930s because Trotsky himself was one of its main protagonists.³ This ensured that the doubters would achieve maximum publicity for their views – critics within the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and those like Bruno Rizzi (who published La Bureaucratisation du Monde in Paris in 1939) who depicted the Soviet bureaucracy as a (historically necessary) new ruling class exploiting the workers.

The Moscow Trials and the Communist persecution of other leftists in the Spanish civil war formed the context in which these ideas germinated.⁴ The controversy intensified when, after the announcement of the Hitler–Stalin Pact in August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union proceeded to partition Poland. The totalitarian states were active allies it seemed. Yet Trotsky argued that Stalin had exported the revolution abroad by nationalising industry and expropriating landowners in the occupied eastern provinces of Poland, despite excluding Polish workers and peasants from the process.⁵ Max Shachtman now joined James Burnham in disputing the workers’ state theory (and would go on to develop his own theory of bureaucratic collectivism) within the SWP. The imperialism which they perceived in Soviet actions in Poland surfaced again when Moscow demanded military bases in the three Baltic states in October 1939. War with Finland was begun when the latter refused to make concessions similar to those extracted in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. But Trotsky insisted that the Red Army was the progressive force in the Winter War and that Finnish forces were only serving the interests of capital.⁶ Shachtman, Burnham, C. L. R. James, Irving Howe and Saul Bellow were among those who begged to differ. The lasting ideological legacy of these events was Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), published soon after his disavowal of Marxism. The book took up much of Rizzi’s argument that bureaucratic class rule was the shape of the future. Marxism had overestimated the power of the working class to make the world anew in its own interests. The future belonged to the managers who would solve the inefficiencies of capitalism by centralised planning, bringing the masses into a lasting subordination. Germany, Japan and the United States would dominate international relations as managerial powers, while the Soviet Union would be partitioned by the first two.

George Orwell

George Orwell followed these arguments with interest. Throughout the 1930s he gravitated to dissident Marxist circles and was preoccupied by questions such as those posed above about the nature of the Communist parties and the Comintern, the nature of the Stalin regime, and the direction taken by the Soviet Union. He wondered what ‘the truth about Stalin’s regime’ was and argued in 1938 that ‘all the political controversies that have made life hideous for two years past really circle round this question, though … it is seldom brought into the foreground’.⁷ Contrary to the judgement of his best biographer,⁸ Orwell was not interested in totalitarianism per se; he made mostly fleeting and superficial remarks about fascism. Nor was he much interested in the British Labour Party or the mainstream political system in Britain. He was often mistaken for a Trotskyist, knew Trotskyists like Reg Groves and, especially when he returned from Spain, sometimes held views that derived from Trotsky’s end of the political spectrum.⁹ He admitted in 1947 to have been ‘vaguely associated with Trotskyists and Anarchists’, but others were less equivocal about his views; the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason filed in Valencia while Orwell and his wife were still in the country described them as ‘confirmed Trotskyists’. On leaving Spain, Orwell reported that ‘all our friends and acquaintances are in jail … suspected of “Trotskyism”’.¹⁰ He wrote pieces which, by his own admission, were ‘subtly Trotskyist’ and his admirers – like Philip Rahv and Gleb Struve – thought they could see Trotskyist biases in his most famous works of fiction.¹¹

Trotsky was a rich source of ideas and imagery for Orwell but he never accepted Trotsky’s explanation of Stalinism or his defence of Leninism.¹² It was the Soviet Union that exercised his mind and it was to the radical left that he addressed his political writings in the 1930s. During the Second World War he continued to harbour revolutionary ambitions and maintained a continuing dialogue with former Trotskyists in the United States. At the end of the war he published the two books which brought elements of the story of Trotsky and Stalin to millions of readers, film and television viewers – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s best-sellers took the view that revolutions were both possible and necessary. But as Isaac Deutscher observed in 1954, the massive impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four was that of ‘an ideological super-weapon in the cold war’ and it counted heavily against the Soviet Union.¹³ Several of the ‘New York intellectuals’ whom Orwell kept in touch with became active anti-Communists during the early Cold War and Orwell might have been taking the same direction in the years before he died, supplying the police with the names of prominent Soviet sympathisers.¹⁴

But this is only a possibility. What is certain is that Orwell had been a socialist throughout his career as a writer and had attracted the interest of the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the far left in Britain from 1956 Evan Smith and Matthew Worley
• Part I Movements
• Part II Issues
• Index