Had it not been for the Russian revolution, Marxism in all probability would have dropped into the realm of rejected beliefs in the nineteen-twenties. The Victorian thinkers generally were out of favour, implicated somehow in the criminal mistakes of the pre-war generations. Marxism, in the organizations which had proclaimed it in the western world, had been found wanting; the European social-democrats were discredited, and the United States was never again to have a left-wing political movement of any size or influence.15 The great doctrines of automatic progress towards perfection no longer appeared to answer the questions of humanity.
The Bolshevik Revolution, however, put Marx in a different light. The existence of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been known and followed since the beginning of the century, and the Menshevik Plekhanov’s works on socialist theory were highly regarded in the west. The withdrawal of Russia from the war and the overthrow of the Tzar would not in themselves have been remarkable amid the eastern European upheaval, if power had not been assumed — and a new regime proclaimed — in the name of Marxist socialism. Moreover, the reaction of the press and politicians of the west indicated plainly that in their eyes too a threat had arisen to the established civilization.
Up to this time, the meaning of what Marx wrote had never been in question to any extent. The theory of value, the tremendous analysis of capitalist production and its historical laws, and the theory of the state and revolution had not appeared as subjects for differing interpre¬tations. The SPGB had never quarrelled with H. M. Hyndman’s Marxism, only with the actions and polices which they saw as betrayals of Marx¬ist principles. The most notable criticism of Marx’s economics, Bohm- Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of his System, had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction by a young German social-democrat named Rudolf Hilferding; there was no argument over which kind of Marxism.
The Socialist Party had a slight, sympathetic contact with the Bolsheviks. In March, 1915, the Socialist Standard had on its front page a statement headed A RUSSIAN CHALLENGE. The Russian party, finding itself uninvited to a London conference of social-democratic
parties of the Allied nations, sent a declaration which every left-wing paper refused to publish before it was received by the SPGB. Drawing attention to the fact that its Duma representatives — Petrovski, Muranoff, Badaoff and Samoiloff — had been imprisoned by the Russian government, the statement condemned the war and the ‘monstrous crime against Socialism’ of the labour leaders who had entered war governments. It ended with an appeal for support in the struggle against Tzarism, and was signed by M. Maximovitch for the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee.16
The first comments in the Standard on the 1917 Revolution were made in a short editorial. It was cautious, because the facts were barely known, but the sympathy and approval were unmistakable: ‘It is an astounding achievement that these few men have been able to seize opportunity and make the thieves and murderers of the whole world stand aghast and shiver with apprehension. ’ Here, it seemed, the social¬ly flame was burning bright: 'The Germans arrest Socialists all over Germany, and are at once reduced to denying the fact when the Bolsheviks declare the Socialists everywhere are under their protection. The Bolsheviks publish their demands, and immediately the Allies’ war aims are whittled of most of their truculence and proclaimed from the housetops. Verily, not all the derision of capitalist hirelings can alter the fact that all the belligerents are uneasy in the face of Bolshevik success. ’
What was brought to all socialists’ minds was the Paris Commune of 1871, the classic demonstration that the working class could take power, could organize and administer. It too had sprung from war, and its glory was only enhanced by the savage revenge of the ruling class; every March the SPGB held meetings in commemoration of it. But the Commune had quickly been destroyed, and nobody had asked what might have happened had it lived. The question had to be asked now: was socialism being established in Russia ? The Standard in April, 1918, was circumspect; it arraigned the governments of the world for their schemes to intervene in Russia, ‘without admitting that the Bolshevik rising is Socialist’.
In August Fitzgerald attempted for the first time an analysis of the revolution. The information available was still meagre, but one fact was almost enough to decide the issue. For the socialist revolution proper to take place, a whole population must be converted to the acceptance of socialist principles. Had this happened to Russia’s hund¬red and sixty millions ? ‘Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place,’ wrote Fitzgerald, ‘or an economic change has occurred more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the
answer is “No !” ’ The judgement, then, was that the Bolsheviks were prevented by circumstances — their encirclement by capitalist powers, the ignorance of the Russian masses — from establishing socialism.
Nevertheless, every sympathy was directed to them. The downfall of the Soviet government seemed inevitable: ‘It may be another Paris Commune on an immensely larger scale,’ Fitzgerald said. He ended
‘Every worker who understands his class position will hope that some way will be found out of the threatened evil. Should that hope be unrealized, should further victims be fated to fall to the greed and hatred of the capitalist class, it will still remain on record that when members of the working class took control of affairs in Russia, they conducted themselves with vastly greater humanity, managed social and economic matters with immensely greater ability and success and with largely reduced pain and suffering, than any section of the cunning, cowardly, ignorant capitalist class were able to do, with all the numerous advant¬ages they possessed. ’
The Party’s attitude hardened with the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. The Russian experiment was still praised: the Bolsheviks had stopped the war, had kept their promise and refused to compromise with the capitalist world. Their disciples in Britain were another matter, however. Relatively only a few had preten¬sions to being Marxists, the former members of the British Socialist Party and the SLP. The majority were radicals of various sorts, none of them approved by the SPGB. The statutes and conditions of the Third International, to which all the new Communist Parties were affiliated, included armed insurrection and conspiratorial organization — both denials that the only path to socialism was the education of the working class.
The real hostility arose when the flow of Marxist literature began, setting out the theory and justifications of Communism. Questions and disputations galore came in to the Standard: Marx, Engels and Lenin were quoted on economics, history and revolution, and the meanings of their words — in and out of context — argued as never before. What did ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ mean ? How important were the state measures advocated in the Communist Manifesto ? Most important of all, was there a ‘transition period’, a revolutionists’ bridge from capital¬ism to socialism ?
The Communists insisted that there was: that, prevented by admitted obstacles from giving socialism to Russia, the Soviet govern¬ment had nevertheless broken away from capitalism. The Socialist Party retorted that there was no such intermediate stage of social development. It pointed out that Russia was an undeveloped country with great sub-
medieval tracts, and capitalism itself had taken hold only in the small, widely separated industrial areas. Marx had said: ‘No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.’ The revolutionary act was the metamorphosis from private to communal ownership; a partial change meant no change at all, since common ownership in anything less than entirety was, by definit¬ion, not common ownership. It must be either socialism or capitalism.
Where was the capitalist class in Russia ? For the SPGB, it existed by Marxist inference. If people went to work for wages they were selling labour-power, because wages existed only as the price of labour- power. Ergo, there were also buyers of it, to whom the product of industry went and for whom surplus-value was realized. The development of the Russian state was another proof of the progress into capitalism, not socialism. When the property system ended, Engels had said, the state would ‘wither away’, and the reverse was happening in Russia before everyone’s eyes.
Reasoning from these economic and historical rules of thumb, the SPGB preceded by nearly forty years the discovery by savants that the Bolsheviks had transformed a vast backward country into a highly centralized modern capitalist state. In the process, however, the whole relationship of the Party to Marxism was measured and carefully defined. Adherence to Marx’s writings as guides to socialist action was no longer enough; their whole scope and implication had to be evaluated. Passages which lent themselves to Bolshevik and reformist purposes were rejected as views held only by a younger, less mature Marx, or as asides unrelated to the main stream of his thought. The reform programme in the Communist Manifesto was explained away in the preface by Marx and Engels to the German edition of 1872:
‘Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revol¬utionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. ’17
The recommendations of Marx on the use of political power, as well as phrases like ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, were examin¬ed and discussed. Were these repudiated or modified elsewhere in Marx ? Did contexts lead to other meanings than the first-sight ones ? The Bolsheviks leaned on Marx’s remarks about ‘uninterrupted revolution’. Trotsky was to build a theory from them; in the meantime while Lenin presented state capitalism as a step forward for Russia, the SPGB could only condemn this avowal as open confession of Lenin’s non-socialist intentions.
To deal with Marx’s teaching in this way was by no means satisfactory. Few theories are more closely knitted, with each section integral to the prime subject. Marxism has often been divided by com¬mentators into component theories of differing validity: Harold Laski, for example, separated historicism from the economic doctrine, and separated again the theory of the state and revolution. The fact is that Marx’s thought is continuous, the economic and political theories depending on the materialist conception of history. It is true that Marx in his lifetime changed his mind about aspects of the capitalist system — his and Engels’s views on the causes and frequency of industrial crises, as one instance, altered repeatedly — but the scope and intention of his analysis of society are all of a piece.
The basic generalization of Marxism, the materialist conception of history, was put forward by Marx in the preface to his first major work, the Critique of Political Economy. After describing the research which had led him so far, he wrote:
‘In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of develop¬ment of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures anti to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of pro¬duction these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution . . . No social order ever disappears before all the pro¬ductive forces, for which there is room in it, have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material condit¬ions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. ’ Marx had partially developed this theme in the Communist Manifesto, and began his denunciation of the modern capitalist class with the axiom: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ The law of historical development was the dialectic, turned from its Hegelian realm of conceptual knowledge into the vehicle of social progress. The class struggle in every society provided
the conflict between thesis, the class in possession, and anti-thesis, the class compelled to fight to unfetter itself; the social revolution produced the synthesis, the new regime which in its turn became the thesis in the continuation of the conflict at a higher level of development.
The dialectical laws were both revolutionary and evolutionary.
The synthesis was not a sudden break but the climax to a series of modifications and minor changes, a forward leap at the point of ‘transfor¬mation of quantity to quality’. The law of the ‘interpenetration of opposites’ confirmed the process: the synthesis was already operative in the antagonism of thesis and antithesis. Thus, the catchphrase that the capitalist system held ‘the seeds of its own decay’. Historical material¬ism taught that men’s actions and ideas were consequent upon their interests as members of the social classes; the dialectic showed that in pursuing their interests (as they must ultimately do) they were adding to the process by which society changed.
Marx’s economic writings were his detailed working-out of the class struggle in nineteenth-century capitalism. The capitalist class, themselves the revolutionary force in the dialectical triad of feudalism, must now carry out their interests as owners of the means of production by exploiting the working class. The exploitation took place at the point of production. Each worker created values by the application of his labour-power. In a working day, a proportion of the value created went to replacing the value of labour-power itself, in wages, and formerly-expended labour-power, in overheads and depreciation; the remainder was surplus-value, taken by the capitalist and realized as rent, interest and profit.
The wealth of capitalism took the form of commodities only all production was for sale and profit. Accordingly, the social institutions and functions were shaped to the requirements of this supreme motive. Religion, morality, education, philosophy, science, all existed in such forms as helped towards the realization of profit. While the sponsors of, say, state education were acting directly for the capital¬ist class, their employees were accessories to the productive act. All wage¬workers, productive or professional, belonged to the great mass exploited for the production of surplus-value. (Marx saw that a managerial class was emerging in the growth of large-scale industry, but classified them still as highly paid wage-workers.)18
The class struggle, then, was integral to capitalism and so irreconcilable. Its purpose for both classes, conscious or otherwise, was the ownership of the means of production. A class-conscious worker was simply one who was aware that this was the issue, but the uncon¬scious were in the struggle just the same. Moreover, the eventual outcome
of the modern class war had a special historic significance. In the earlier forms of society, the vital struggle for the means of production had been between rival propertied classes; slaves and serfs had fought against repression, not for revolution. In the progression from each social form to the next, the owning classes had eliminated one another. Now there remained only two great contestants, and the inevitable triumph of the working class would be the climax of all history — the emergence of the one-class, or classless, society.
But victory involved the conquest of the state. Marx and Engels, their youth passed in the age of barricades, had postulated political power as the only means to establishing the classless society.
The capitalist class had had to seize government from the lingering feudal monarchy (and in doing it, to create the beginnings of parlia¬mentary democracy) to make way for its own revolution; the working class must do the same. Analysis of the state and its function was an important item in revolutionary literature, though one of the most popular works, Edward Jenks’s History of Politics, was a simple non- Marxist historical study. Engels’s Origin of the Family and Anti- Duhring and Lafargue’s Evolution of Property all dealt with the state; there were William Paul’s The State, its Origin, History and Function and, later, Martov’s The State and the Socialist Revolution.
Not only the Communists and the SPGB took notice of Marx, of course. Virtually all the left-wing organizations were under his influence insofar as they accepted the idea of the ‘laws’ and ‘contrad¬ictions’ of capitalism. The National Council of Labour Colleges, with its vigorous magazine Plebs, was mentor to many Labour politicians; it taught Marx’s economics, and published cheap books and pamphlets which were widely read. The Marxist phraseology became current, the expectation of a revolutionary situation almost general. While the SPGB stood apart, it was regarded as the authority on Marxism among the political parties — indeed, its function was considered by many people to be simply an educational one.
Jacomb, Fitzgerald, Kohn, McClatchie and Hardy filled pages of each issue of the Socialist Standard with replies to the innumerable queries. Isobel Kingsley, author of Is Materialism the Basis of Communism ?, pursued Fitzgerald with spiritualist arguments for months and had him reading the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which he finally described in exasperation as ‘like conversat¬ions in Bedlam, or conferences among persons in an advanced state of intoxication’. The principles and minutiae of the currency system were examined, the meanings of Marx’s references to force decided. Again and again, correspondents urged the Party to show vigour in the class
struggle by joining crusades for reform, but the replies were adamant.
So long as there remained two classes in society, one exploited by the other, the sole solution to the world’s problems was the establishment of socialism.
In fact, the Party’s preoccupation with Marxism was virtually limited to the economic theory of value. The occasional lectures and articles on the arts and ethics of society earned respect for the erudit¬ion of their authors, but they were not the backbone of the Party case which rested basically on the situation of the working class. Even the respect was tempered by a suspiciousness of ‘culture’; men like Hubert Reynolds and R. W. Housley were too discursive on subjects outside the value theory to be accepted wholeheartedly. The ignorance of the learned lay in their understanding of everything but economics, and the only useful knowledge for the working class was of the economics of their exploitation.
Thus, in spite of individual efforts, the SPGB’s contribution to Marxist sociology was less than it should have been. Its accounts of history and culture were unoriginal renderings mainly of Engels, Plekhanov, Lafargue and Kautsky; where the writer had looked out knowledge for himself, the creativeness was at once stultified by the demands of an over-mechanistic interpretation. However, it ought to he said that Marxist scholarship in due course turned into an academic industry whose lofty terms now defy comprehension by most working men. The aim of Marx and Engels was always that their findings should reach and be understood by the working class. In spurning the intellect¬ual, non-economic application of Marxism the Party was more in touch with the spirit of the masters than perhaps it knew.
The class-struggle dialectic was hardly heeded by the Party. Its acceptance, always vague and non-committal, involved casual acts of dubious arbitration. The ‘interpenetration of opposites’, for example, the doctrine of a new society growing within the old, was alleged to mean only mental preparation for the new society — not an alteration of conditions, but the acceptance of Socialist Party teaching.
It must be considered that the floods arising from the 1917 Revolution carried away such possibilities as might have existed in the nineteen-twenties for the SPGB to become the working-class party carrying the banner of Marxism. It did not have, as it expected, to re¬claim Marxism after the war. Instead, its task became the near-impossible one of maintaining orthodoxy while other Marxisms ran riot. Through¬out the ’twenties, the Socialist Standard grimly observed the trend towards totalitarianism in Russia. The SPGB alone had forecast such an outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution; if the prediction had not been
made from the beginning, Fitzgerald and his confreres grasped within a relatively short time that the implications of a Commune not massacred but triumphant were a new consideration. (The annual Paris Commune meetings were dropped after the Russian situation became clear.)
The only concession was a recurring admiration for Lenin, expressed for instance in an article headed THE REAL RUSSIA in 1925:
‘It was a tragedy that Lenin should have listened to those emotional babblers who mistook their hopeful imaginings for facts, and created the colossal myth of a revolutionary working class in England, Germany and America. It is a tribute to Lenin . . . that he was able to face the unpleasant truth before it was too late, and instead of concen¬trating entirely on futile schemes for world revolution, was willing to lay his hand to the task of hastening Capitalism, modified in favour of the workers to the extent that that is possible. ’
The passage is a curious one, suggesting that Lenin’s greatness lay in his consciously leading the Russian working class away from hopes of socialism because it was not possible. The Party at that time still could not forget that Lenin knew Marxism and had taken the Russians out of the war. Indeed, for all their predictions, there were members who found the subsequent horrors of the Stalin regime hard to credit. When the 1936 trials came they had to ask if these were the men of whom Fitzgerald had written that they ruled ‘with vastly greater humanity’ than the capitalist class.
It is impossible not to give credit to the SPGB for its insistence against all other voices on what was to prove the truth about Russia.
The warmth towards Soviet Russia that spread from the left-wing move¬ment to scientists, writers and thinkers in the ’twenties and ’thirties was not simply the attraction of the politically ignorant to false theories: it was the form taken by the humanism of the time. When western capitalism appeared capable only of mass unemployment and wretchedness, the goodwill of its impotent humanists was drawn to any attempt to build an alternative elsewhere.
By being a little less right, the Party would have communicated better with the times and perhaps had greater recognition. Showing its correctness, it extended the area of its alienation from humanistic thought; the members settled into the habit of mind of assuming that people must first try the limits of political error to be convinced that only socialism would do. In fact, in the ’twenties they became them-selves the victims of history. If participation in the Russophile Marxist stream had brought recognition, it would have guaranteed sub¬sequent extinction as well. Individuals survive commitment to errors,
but political groups seldom do; and the Socialist Party would be conscious eventually that correctness had given it, at least, survival.
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