Is Marxism a science of defeat?

I don't want to write a great deal about 2016 as a sort of year in review piece - apart from some victories for the Left like the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, overall the year has been pretty depressing overall and the thought of revisiting it in detail is also pretty depressing - but I guess this blog should register Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump somewhere, even briefly. What is important to register however is how they represent not defeats for socialism and socialists - but do represent historic defeats for liberalism - or more precisely, as Alex Callinicos notes, 'the Western liberal capitalist order' as '40 years of neoliberalism and nearly ten years of what Michael Roberts calls the “Long Depression”—are beginning to destabilise the political systems of the advanced capitalist states'. Given the outcome is not particularly pretty so far, given the palpable shift to the right in mainstream political discourse and confidence that racists and fascists in the US and Europe now feel, the events of 2016 represent a political challenge for the Left. To quote Callinicos again,

The challenge here in Britain, in the rest of Europe and in the US, is to build broad and united anti-racist mass movements that can drive back the likes of Trump and May, Farage and Le Pen. The arrival of a right-wing adventurer at the head of the main imperialist power is unwelcome indeed. But Trump’s power can be broken through the kind of combination of external pressures from above, internal divisions from within, and mass resistance from below that have removed many of his ilk before him. The giant demonstrations in Seoul that have forced the South Korean National Assembly to impeach another right wing president, Park Geun-hye, underline how hubris can rapidly be transformed into nemesis.

Yet rather than see matters as a challenge for the Left and how the Left can - and must - intervene to ensure that the anger at forty years of neoliberal capitalism is directed not at the poor and generally powerless like refugees, migrants and Muslims but against the rich and powerful - those politicians and bankers who caused the crisis in the first place, too much of the Left instead seems to prefer a narrative and perspective of extreme pessimism - essentially 'pass the popcorn and lets watch the world go to hell', a narrative which they claim has been vindicated by 2016.

So Richard Seymour, author of generally useful recent work on Corbynism, insisted in November after Trump's victory that Marxism is a science of defeat; the history of the Left is a history of defeats. We mourned them, learned from them. This is no different. He then followed this tweet up with: Out of incomparably graver defeats than the ones we are witnessing - 1848, 1871, 1936, etc - there came analysis, elegy and the means to win. Yet leaving aside the question about whether 2016 did represent a 'defeat' for the Left - which as noted above, I don't buy - is this right? Is Marxism a 'science of defeat'?

Firstly, to deal with Seymour's case for why Marxism should be seen as a 'science of defeat', he argues that 'the history of the Left is a history of defeats' - and then to support this argues that '1848, 1871 and 1936' were typical examples of 'defeats'. Is this right? Well, if the history of the Left was really simply a history of defeats without end, then - and to just take the example of Britain alone here - we would not have had the formation of trade unions in the face of intransigent opposition from employers and the state, the winning of trade union and workers rights to strike and organise, the formation of mass workers movements on a national scale like the Chartists, the victory of the right of workers and then women to vote, the formation of mass long lasting workers political parties like the Labour Party, and so on. Or more broadly, if the abolitionist movement which the early working class movement was intertwined with had known only defeat, we would possibly still have slavery; if the anticolonial movements which again the Left were central to building had known only defeats, we would not have had the decline and fall of the European Empires in terms of colonialism; if the anti-apartheid movement which again the Left was central to had known only defeat, we would still have had the brutal obscenity of apartheid South Africa; and if the anti-racist and anti-fascist movements in post-war Britain which again which the Left was central to building had known only defeat, then well the National Front in Britain would not resemble a minuscule rump of embittered old blokes in a pub somewhere, but be more like its sister organisation in France - the Front National - posed to challenge for presidential office next year.

As for Seymour's specific 'defeats' - was 1848 simply a defeat - or should it also be remembered as an inspiring year of Europe-wide democratic revolution that toppled a number of regimes and in France saw workers independently challenge for power in France and see the first socialists and workers ever elected to governmental office? Was 1871 simply a defeat (when the Paris Commune was repressed - or also a historic victory for workers in the sense of the first revolutionary workers government ever in history and an exciting and inspiring experiment in 'democracy from below'? Was 1936 simply a year of defeat in terms of the Moscow Trials and Stalinist terror or also the days of hope in Spain as workers militias rose up to block Franco and mass strikes and workers factory occupations rocked Paris after the election of a Popular Front government?

I think a much better and far more useful definition of Marxism is as a generalisation of and from working class experience - both defeats and victories - or as Georg Lukacs put it 'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution'. Indeed, 2017 will mark the centenary of the greatest ever victory won by the Left and working class movement in its history to date - the Russian Revolution of 1917. 1917 was not any kind of 'defeat' for the Left and the workers - it was a clear unambiguous world historic victory as a workers and peasants' revolution that not only was critical to ending the barbaric slaughter of the First World War but also saw the first socialist government ever form. It represented a fantastic blow to imperialism, racism and international capitalism - and gave hope to those who dreamed of a world without exploitation and oppression. Obviously what followed with respect to the failure of that revolution to spread internationally and especially to Germany represented massive defeats for the international workers movement, defeats that ultimately culminated in the rise of Nazism in Germany and the rise of Stalinism in Russia. But if Marxism was simply a 'science of defeat' then not only would such a science have not been able to envisage the possibility of something like 1917 happening in the first place, it would not have been able to serve as a guide of action for those Bolsheviks who led the October Revolution, and then not have been able to make sense of such a moment as 1917 (and so be like any other bourgeois theory which also can't really properly make sense of or come to terms with 1917).


1917 - A Victory for Workers and Peasants

In fact, there were very many so-called Marxists - even in Russia - who did in a sense envisage Marxism as a 'science of defeat' - even during 1917 - these 'Marxists' were terrified at the looming prospects of the workers taking power as they saw this as 'premature' - according to their theory - based on a supposedly 'scientific' reading of Marx's Capital, Tsarist Russia was only 'ready' for at best a bourgeois revolution - they feared the 'dark primitive masses' actually taking power as they felt this would only lead to pillage and looting and would frighten the liberal bourgeoisie from undertaking what was supposed to be their 'bourgeois revolution'. In this sense, as Antonio Gramsci noted in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution was 'a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.'

In Russia, Marx’s Capital was the book of the bourgeoisie, more than of the proletariat. It was the crucial proof needed to show that, in Russia, there had to be a bourgeoisie, there had to be a capitalist era, there had to be a Western-style of progression, before the proletariat could even think about making a comeback, about their class demands, about revolution. Events overcame ideology. Events have blown out of the water all critical notions which stated Russia would have to develop according to the laws of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks renounce Karl Marx and they assert, through their clear statement of action, through what they have achieved, that the laws of historical materialism are not as set in stone, as one may think, or one may have thought previously. Yet, there is still a certain amount of inevitability to these events, and if the Bolsheviks reject some of that which is affirmed in Capital, they do not reject its inherent, invigorating idea. They are not ‘Marxists’, that’s what it comes down to: they have not used the Master’s works to draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed. They live out Marxist thought, the one which will never die; the continuation of idealist Italian and German thought, and that in Marx had been corrupted by the emptiness of positivism and naturalism. In this kind of thinking the main determinant of history is not lifeless economics, but man; societies made up of men, men who have something in common, who get along together, and because of this (civility) they develop a collective social will.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 - like other social revolutions - then also led to a revolution in thinking, and an intellectual revolution within Marxism - as the humanistic non fatalistic creative strand of Marxist thinking (which had been represented perhaps most clearly before then in works such as Leon Trotsky's writings on Permanent Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike and Reform or Revolution and Vladimir Lenin's writings on Imperialism and The State and Revolution) came to dominate over the sterile lifeless mechanistic version, and a new golden age of Marxist theory followed (represented in the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Bukharin, the early Lukacs, Gramsci and so on) before Stalinism snuffed it out and tried to return Marxism to the dry stuffiness of before - for a very useful overview of all this read What is the real Marxist tradition? by John Molyneux.

Molyneux notes Lenin’s contention that Marx 'laid the cornerstones of the science which socialists must advance in all directions, if they do not want to lag behind events'. If one sees Marxism as 'a science of defeats' then such a definition may appeal to confused liberals post-Brexit and Trump, but one will in all likelihood be depressed and get so carried away with purely 'theoretical analysis' one will avoid fighting practically for the small victories in the here and now in the class struggle underway, and therefore only find oneself forever lagging behind events - just as so many 'Marxists' during 1917 found themselves lagging behind the Russian Revolution when it erupted. If we instead see Marxism as the historic generalisation of working class experience - both defeats and victories - and about the unity of theory and practice, then it focuses our attention on fighting for the small victories in the here and now against the racists and the bosses, in preparation for learning from these for the greater class struggles to come. Marxism understood has such has no danger whatsoever of ever becoming a sterile dogma to salve (or perhaps 'salvage') the consciences of confused liberals - and every chance of remaining what Marx always envisaged it to be: a guide to action for socialist revolutionaries.

 Edited to add: Since writing this, Seymour has usefully expanded his argument here - his references to Enzo Traverso's new book Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History and Memory are illuminating, but do not I think undermine the essential argument I make in the above.

Leon Trotsky's relevance today

Leon Trotsky speaking in Copenhagen in 1932 (photo: Robert Capa)

As the Jeremy Corbyn campaign continues to strike fear into the hearts of the Labour Party grandees and bureaucracy, who have in characteristic Stalinist fashion prosecuted what has been dubbed 'Operation Icepick' to purge the lists of those eligible to vote in the Labour Party leadership election of 'Trotskyists', it is perhaps worth revisiting the political thought of the original victim of 'Operation Icepick', Leon Trotsky himself, given this week marks the 75th anniversary of his murder at the hands of a Stalinist agent. Sue Caldwell, who incidentally once wrote a wonderful introductory guide to chess which taught me the little I know about strategy and tactics in that game, has written a timely short piece - online here in this week's Socialist Worker which does just that.  It is important to pay tribute to Trotsky, who was not only the heroic sword of the Russian Revolution and the shield against the Stalinist counter-revolution until his tragic murder, but also a revolutionary whose political and intellectual thought as a Marxist was so original and outstanding it retains relevance in the 21st century.  And as Caldwell rightly notes,
'It’s never easy to get the correct balance right between working with and against reformists and their leaders.
Revolutionaries have to stand with them to defend working class organisation against the bosses and fascists. But it’s also crucial that revolutionaries argue against them sowing illusions in reformism and build a revolutionary alternative. For example, we welcome left reformist parties such as Syriza, Podemos and the momentum around the Jeremy Corbyn campaign.  These can push politics to the left. But only the working class has the power to transform society. '

Some suggested further reading on Trotsky:

A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky - Esme Choonara

Trotsky's Marxism - Duncan Hallas

Tony Cliff's four volume biography of Trotsky is also now online - see here.

Edited to add: Speaking of Trotsky and today, what would he have made of the contemporary Black Lives Matter' in the US?  Well, we know he was a more profound thinker about race in the US than he is often given credit for, but Paul Buhle (for a recent interview with Buhle by the way, see here) has also recently suggested that, via the writings of the then Trotskyist C.L.R. James and with the help of the Harlem lawyer and also then a Trotskyist Conrade Lynn Malcolm X read and studied 'The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States' (1948) which represented the best analysis of the American Trotskyist movement on race at that time,while Malcolm was in prison in the early 1950s.  So not only would Trotsky have welcomed the new Black Lives Matter movement, but perhaps the intellectual origins of the Black Lives Matter movement - via Malcolm X and C.L.R. James - may owe something to the inspiring life and work of Trotsky...

On Victor Serge

Richard Greeman and Ian Birchall reflect on the life and work of a great revolutionary writer

Alex Callinicos on the Ukraine crisis

The reaction of the Western left to this enormous crisis has been, to put it mildly, confused. Far too many (including some who should know better) have been willing to cast a blind eye at or find excuses for Russia’s military intervention. The reasons for this attitude are, in ascending order of respectability, Stalinist nostalgia, exaggeration of the role of the extreme right in the anti-Yanukovych movement, and the search for some counterweight to American power. The net result is a revival of what used to be called campism in the days of the Cold War—seeing states in conflict with the US and its allies (then the USSR, now usually Russia and China) as in some sense progressive allies of the left.
      None of this has much to do with the revolutionary Marxist tradition. The fate of Ukraine preoccupied Trotsky during the last year of his life in 1939-40, as Europe rolled into the Second World War. Distilling the results of prolonged debates among Russian Marxists (which continued after October 1917) in which Lenin consistently insisted on the necessity of defending the right to self-determination of oppressed nations, Trotsky defended “the independence of a United Ukraine” (ie incorporating Polish Galicia and Volhynia) even if that meant “the separation of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR”—and this, remember, at a time when he was vehemently arguing that the Soviet Union was still a “degenerated workers’ state” that revolutionaries should defend against Western imperialism.
       Quoting Trotsky can be a religious exercise, but his views are worth bearing in mind when considering supposed Marxists who dismiss the idea of Russian imperialism as an “abstraction” or even advocate the partition of Ukraine. Putin’s apologists on the Western left must explain how their stance squares with the right to national self-determination. If they defend Crimea’s (extremely dubious) claim to separate from Ukraine, where do they stand on the long-standing Chechen struggle for independence from Russia, brutally crushed by Putin? And what will they say if Russian forces move into eastern Ukraine and become mired in crushing the nationalist insurgency that this would almost certainly provoke?
       Of course, the US remains the dominant imperialist power on a world scale. And of course, it is thoroughly hypocritical for Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry to denounce Putin’s seizure of Crimea, forgetting Washington’s interventions in its own backyard such as the October 1962 naval blockade of Cuba or the December 1989 invasion of Panama (a state, incidentally, carved out of Colombia at Teddy Roosevelt’s behest at the beginning of the 20th century).
But from a Marxist perspective, imperialism is about more than American power. The classical theory of imperialism is, more than anything else, a theory of intra-capitalist competition. Imperialism is a system, the form taken by capitalism when the concentration and centralisation of capital bring about the fusion of economic competition among capitals and geopolitical competition among states. Putin’s actions express exactly this imperialist logic, combining geopolitical preoccupations (above all, blocking NATO expansion) with economic motivations (fear that Russian firms will be squeezed out of the Ukrainian market by European rivals).
      The confused left response to the Ukrainian crisis is in part the result of an optical illusion created by the so called “unipolar moment” of apparent US global dominance after the end of the Cold War. Particularly in the light of Afghanistan and Iraq, American power has seemed so overwhelming and so malign that everything must be subordinated to resisting it. But this was always precisely an illusion. US hegemony has always been contested, reflecting the fact that imperialism involves a hierarchical distribution of power among competing capitalist states. This fact is becoming more important now.
       The relative decline of US power that has become evident since Iraq and the crash is opening up a period of more fluid competition, in which the weaker imperialist states begin to assert themselves. Putin’s strategy has reflected this for some time. Potentially a much more important conflict is developing in Asia, as China’s economic rise encourages its ruling class to flex their muscles geopolitically, in particular by building up the military capabilities to exclude the US Navy from the “Near Seas” along their coasts. The clashes between China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands are harbingers of more to come.
     In this era of growing inter-imperialist rivalries political clarity among revolutionary Marxists is vital. In New York, London and Moscow the main enemy is at home (a slogan Karl Liebknecht coined in response to a great inter-imperialist war whose centenary we will soon be remembering). But acknowledging this is no reason to apologise for our own rulers’ rivals. Imperialism is a hydra-headed beast. It needs to be killed, not merely one of its manifestations.

Full article 'Imperial Delusions' (from the forthcoming International Socialism journal) online here, while Tariq Ali also has quite a good article on the Ukraine here, as does Mehdi Hasan here 

Edited to add: See also Rob Ferguson and Sabby Sagall in the new Socialist Review

Neither Washington nor Moscow

Socialists in the West must of course oppose any military intervention by the US or NATO in Ukraine. But the crisis reminds us that imperialism can’t be reduced to American domination. It is a system of economic and geopolitical competition among the leading capitalist powers.

        Rather than tail any of these powers, we must fight this entire system. This means opposing Russian intervention in Ukraine. Never has the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism” been more relevant.

Alex Callinicos on the mounting crisis of inter-imperialist rivalry in the Ukraine

Edited to add: Ukraine in Crisis - say no to imperialist war games

Joseph Stalin - The Gravedigger

'[Michal] Reiman’s argument is that, far from being a logical consequence of socialism, the methods Stalin employed were “a complete break with the meaning and essence of the social doctrine of socialism”. But this break did not occur because of the programme of 1917 or even because of some thought out ideology on Stalin’s part.  Rather, Reiman argues, in 1927 the USSR faced an immense economic and political crisis, to which Stalin and his supporters responded “pragmatically”.
It was out of these pragmatic responses that the Stalinist system grew – and in turn shaped the mentality of those who ruled over it, Stalin included, so that “Stalin in 1929” was very different to “Stalin in 1926” in “the general nature of his politics” and the “type of practical solutions he proposed”...'
  From Chris Harman's review of The Birth of Stalinism, the USSR on the Eve of the “Second Revolution” by Michal Reiman

Edited to add: Ian Birchall on Stalin's River of Blood

Sheila Fitzpatrick on Victor Serge

Great review of the new full version of Serge's classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Peter Petroff and the origins of British Bolshevism

The now forgotten but once legendary veteran Russian Marxist
Peter Petroff (1884-1947) now has a significant collection of his writings in English up on the Marxists Internet Archive. Ted Crawford has written a short biography of him for the site. Petroff played an important role in the origins of not only Russian Bolshevism but also British Bolshevism. In 1907, he had arrived in Britain as a refugee from Tsarist Russia and worked with John Maclean and other socialists up in Glasgow, learning English and relating to them in turn something of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Imprisoned during the Great War, Petroff maintained links with Trotsky and returned to Russia after the revolution in 1918, joining the Soviet government. By the 1930s, after being sent to Germany as a special envoy and witnessing the disastrous role Stalinism played at the time of the rise of Hitler, he broke with the Communist International. He then escaped from Nazi Germany back to Britain, where he wrote a classic work The Secret of Hitler’s Victory with his German wife, Irma (1891-1968), published in 1934 by Woolf’s Hogarth Press - which provided a Marxist analysis of the resistable rise of Hitler.

Vasily Grossman T-shirt

War correspondent for the Red Star newspaper, Vasily Grossman became Russia's greatest chronicler of both the horrors of the 1941 Nazi invasion and the eventual victory over Nazism. Never afraid to upset the Soviet authorities his classic account of the USSR's resistance to the Nazi invasion Life and Fate was not only heroic but also told the story of the Ukraine famine, the Gulags and purges, the instances of collaboration between Russian citizens and the Nazis. As a result it was banned by Stalin, though the book was eventually published under Glasnost in 1988 - and now in 2011 Life and Fate is honoured in a special Philosophy Football T-shirt.

Tony Cliff on the revolutionary roots of International Women's Day

This year marks the centenary of International Women's Day, now celebrated across the world on 8 March - and still of critical importance today given the continuing reality of women's oppression. Tony Cliff, author of among other things a 1984 work on Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, once described how International Women's Day originated with the German revolutionary Marxist Clara Zetkin at a 1910 international conference of socialist women in Copenhagen.

'Zetkin proposed the adoption of 8 March as International Women’s Day. (Both the date and the idea were taken from a demonstration of American socialist women in New York on 8 March 1908 in opposition to the bourgeois suffrage movement there.) The proposal was approved with enthusiasm by the conference. Beginning in 1911 and continuing until the outbreak of the war, International Women’s Day demonstrations were organised in practically all the main cities of Europe. (Of course the most important one was the single one which took place during the War – in February 1917 – and launched the first Russian revolution of that date.)'

In a 1981 article on 'Alexandra Kollontai: Russian Marxists and Women Workers' from International Socialism, 14 (Autumn 1981) (not yet online but see here), Cliff described how the day took roots in Russia before the 1917 February Revolution:

An International Women's Day was held on 8 March every year since 1911 in a number of countries. The first time the event was observed in Russia was in 1913. It was not held on 8 March but a little earlier, on 17 February, because of fear of police interference. To commemorate the day a special six-page issue of Pravda was published. It contained articles about women workers, the significance of International Women's Day for the socialist movement, and pictures of leading revolutionary women like Clara Zetkin, Eleanor Marx, and Vera Zasulich.

Celebrations took place in five cities: St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Samara and Tblisi. The largest celebration was in St. Petersburg. It was organised by a group of women textile workers and Bolshevik activists such as KN Samoilova and PF Kudelli, who were part of a special holiday committee set up by the Bolshevik-controlled Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. The main meeting of the day was held in the great Hall of the Kalashnikov Exchange. The Police were there in full force. At the entrance both mounted and regular patrols were stationed. Inside, police occupied the first two rows. Exactly at one o'clock, they closed the doors of the hall and would not allow even those with tickets to enter. Despite this, over one thousand people managed to crowd into the hall. One of the main speakers, a textile worker, Ianchevskaia, summed up the meaning of the assembly thus: 'the women workers' movement is a tributary flowing in the great river of the proletarian movement and giving it strength.'

These words and the general spirit of International Women's Day grated on the nerves of the bourgeois feminist Dr Pokrovskaia. She wrote: 'As we expected, the women workers' day did not protest at all against the subordinate position of wives in relation to their husbands. They spoke primarily of the enslavement of the proletarian woman by capital, and only in passing mentioned domestic subservience... Does personal freedom really have such paltry significance in the eyes of proletarian women that it is not even worth talking about? That is inconceivable! When that same proletarian woman sets up her own women's day, she will give voice to protest against such laws, her resentment of them, and demand t abolition. At the meeting Mme Kudelii was wrong in asserting economic interests are the most important for the woman worker. Personal freedom stands higher. The pet rooster is always full, and the wild eagle is often hungry. All the same, we prefer eagles.'

Her conclusion was simple: all men benefitted from male privilege; women must join together to fight it.

In 1914 it was decided to celebrate International Women's Day with large open meetings in the larger workers' quarters of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately these plans were blocked by the authorities. Ten meetings were requested, but the Government granted only one.

On the 23 February extra detachments of police were on the streets; there a large crowd at the one legal meeting; instead of five speakers there were only two. The others had been arrested on that day, and the police had forbidden substitutes. Many of those present, disappointed and angry, spilled out into the streets, singing revolutionary songs, but they were eventually dispersed by the police, who carried out mass arrests.

Both in 1913 and 1914 deep differences manifested themselves between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks regarding the celebration of International Women's Day. The Mensheviks wanted only women to participate in the celebrations, while the Bolsheviks insisted that International Women's Day should be celebrated not only by working women but the entire working class.

During the war it was far more difficult to celebrate International Women's Day. In 1915 and 1916, despite a government ban, the day was commemorated by small meetings and celebrations.'

However, it was to be International Women's Day in Russia in 1917 that remains the high point, as Cliff noted:

In January 1917 a police report noted that

'the mothers of families, exhausted from endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half-starving and sick children, are very likely closer now to revolution than Messrs Miliukov, Rodichev and Company, and of course, they are more dangerous because they represent that store of inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire.'

It was the women workers of Petrograd who started the revolution of 1917. On 22 February (7 March) a group of women workers met to discuss the organisation of International Women’s Day the following day. V. Kaiurov, the worker-leader of the St Petersburg district committee of the Bolshevik Party, advised them to refrain from hasty action:

'But to my surprise and indignation, on 23 February, at an emergency conference of five persons in the corridor of the Erikson works, we learned from comrade Nikifer Ilyin of the strike in some textile factories and of the arrival of a number of delegates from the women workers, who announced that they were supporting the metal workers. I was extremely indignant about the behaviour of the strikers, both because they had blatantly ignored the decision of the District Committee of the party, and also because they had gone on strike after I had appealed to them only the night before to keep cool and disciplined. With reluctance the Bolsheviks agreed to [spreading the strike] and they were followed by other workers – Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead.'

Not until 25 February did the Bolsheviks come out with their first leaflet calling for a general strike – after 200,000 workers had already downed tools!

The massive wave of strikes and demonstrations was the culmination of years of accumulated anger. As one witness later recounted:

'The working women, driven to desperation by starvation and war, came along like a hurricane that destroys everything in its path with the violence of an elemental force. This revolutionary march of working women, full of the hatred of centuries of oppression, was the spark that set light to the great flame of the February revolution, that revolution which was to shatter Tsarism.'

It was the women workers in the textile industry who elected delegates and sent them round to neighbouring factories with appeals for support. Thus was the revolution detonated. It was, as Trotsky said,

'... a revolution begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisation, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the working class – the women textile workers.'

It was these same women who fraternised with the soldiers, persuading them to disobey the orders of the officers, and to hold fire:

'They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us”. The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd. The barrier is opened, a joyous and grateful “Hurrah!” shakes the air. The soldiers are surrounded. Everywhere arguments, reproaches, appeals – the revolution makes another forward step.'

The newly resurrected Pravda acknowledged the revolution’s debt to women in an editorial:

'Hail the women!
Hail the International!
The women were the first to come out on the streets of Petrograd on their Women’s Day.
The women in Moscow in many cases determined the need of the military; they went to the barracks, and convinced the soldiers to come over to the side of the Revolution.
Hail the women!'

Edited to add: Alexandra Kollantai on International Women's Day

Journalists and Revolution: The Case of Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome dismounting a train in Soviet Russia
Or, a review of The Last Englishman; The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers

In an interview published in the latest Socialist Review, the great journalist John Pilger was asked, 'Every year now sees a generation of journalism graduates failing to find work in the media. What would you say to young people who want to enter journalism to hold power to account?' and replied that:

I would say that the BBC and the Murdoch press are not for you. Become a freelance; maintain your independence and, above all, your principles. Remember that journalism is a privilege and that you are an agent of ordinary people, not of those who seek to control them. Journalism is about humanity, and your responsibility is to report the world from the ground up, not the other way round.

One freelance journalist who has done this through reporting the student revolt in Britain is Pilger's fellow New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny. When the revolt subsided over the Christmas break, Penny, having safely won much praise and number of plaudits (including 'Histomat Socialist Blogger of the Year 2010', let's not forget), decided to do what many liberal-lefty columnists tend to do when they run short of material - have a dig at the Socialist Workers Party, mainly for, er, still selling Socialist Worker in the age of the internet and generally acting like some 'cultish Petrograd-enactment society' i.e. arguing the Bolshevik Revolution remains an inspiration for anti-capitalists in the 21st century. Those who want to get into the Laurie Penny-SWP debate can get into it via Lenin's Tomb, but what I want to do is explore the question of journalists and revolutionary struggle - in particular Arthur Ransome and, (sorry Laurie yes), the er, Russian Revolution. This will be done by way of a short book review of Roland Chambers recent biography - also reviewed here and here - and hopefully may go someway to clarifying why revolutionary Petrograd remains an inspiration today.

There is an old saying, don’t judge a book by its cover – and this adage needs to be remembered with Roland Chambers' new biography of Ransome - The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome - as much as ever. If the title is incredibly confusing – and not explained in the text itself bar a passing reference to the fact that at one point it seemed – to Ransome himself at least – that he ‘was the last Englishman in Moscow’ during the Russian Revolution, then the subtitle hardly helps – ‘the double life of Arthur Ransome’. Roland Chambers tells us he was initially aiming in the aftermath of released classified documents in 2005 proving that he he had been recruited by the British government as an agent of the newly formed MI6 to write ‘a brief and colourful exposé, a sharp adjustment to the whitewash that hitherto has screened Ransome from anything approaching a candid assessment.’ The fact that the former head of MI5 Stella Rimington is quoted on the front describing the work as ‘fascinating’ might be enough to put any self-respecting socialist off.

However, fortunately, Chambers’ work offers more than this. As he writes, ‘very quickly I realised that his life, as well as the age that he lived through, offered something much richer.’ This should not have been much of a discovery – Ransome’s rich and varied life has long since attracted historians and biographers, above all Hugh Brogan. But let Chambers continue:

‘No other Englishman saw the war and Revolution from so many points of view. No other journalist so effectively blended the rhetoric of conventional democracy with the radical doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. As a struggling writer in pre-war London, Ransome had befriended strident nationalists and equally strident internationalists. In the same way, between 1914 and Lenin’s death in 1924, he found himself on easy terms with arch-reactionaries and committed revolutionaries. Ransome was a bohemian and a conservative, a champion of self-determination and a an imperialist, a man who cherished liberty but assumed, as a matter of course, that liberty depended on a successful negotiation with power. The fascination of his story consists in the ease with which he adopted all the competing ideals of his generation. Yet Ransome, who longed, above all, to be included, did not consider himself a controversial figure. On the contrary, while others had lost themselves in uncertainty, forgotten who they were or how to live, he had always, he insisted, been the simplest of men’.

Smearing Ransome as 'an imperialist' seems to me to be quite unjustified, and indeed, contra Chambers, rather than leading a ‘double life’ – it seems to me that Ransome remained one man, albeit a many sided man, with fairly consistent principles and a basic if slightly naïve decency and honesty throughout. Moreoever, what emerges as most fascinating about Ransome’s story is not so much this sense of contradiction and ‘double consciousness’ that saw him essentially prove useful for different purposes to the Bolsheviks and the British government, even if never fully really trusted with anything important by either of them. Rather, what is really fascinating about Ransome’s life is the quite unlikely fact that this upper-middle class English journalist and writer of vaguely leftish liberal leanings happened more by accident than design to have been one of the outstanding witnesses of the Russian Revolution.

Chambers' grasp of the Russian Revolution is decidedly shaped by the dominant liberal discourse which portrays the urban insurrection in October 1917 as not the climax of the whole Revolution but rather as a Bolshevik coup. Yet he has done a lot of reading about the revolution and brings it to life generally successfully despite his own political prejudice and weak grasp of what he calls ‘Marxism-Leninism’. For example he sees Lenin’s small polemical pamphlet What is to be done? as a ‘definitive manifesto’ which envisaged a ‘one party state’, rather than what it was, an intervention which in fact rather more modestly aimed to bring home to Russian Marxists the need for a revolutionary organisation with its own revolutionary paper in preparation for the coming revolutionary upheaval predicted by all careful observers of Russia’s development. As Ransome himself was to write of Lenin in 1919, in person he was far from the humourless, sour-faced, power-hungry plotter and schemer of legend:

‘More than ever, today, Lenin struck me as a happy man, and walking down from the Kremlin, I tried to think of any other great leader who had a similar, joyous, happy temperament. I could think of none. Napoleon, Caesar, did not make a deeper mark on the history of the world than this man in making, none records their cheerfulness. This little bald, wrinkled man who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing and another…Not only is he without personal ambition, but as a Marxist, believes in the movement of the masses…his faith in himself is the belief that he justly estimates the direction of elemental forces’

It is a pity that, while Chambers’ work focuses quite rightly on Ransome’s experiences as a journalist reporting the Russian Revolution, he either chose to ignore or did not seem to have come across Paul Foot’s 1992 excellent essay, ‘Arthur Ransome in Revolutionary Russia’ - (there is a short version online) written to introduce the republication after about 70 years of Ransome’s pamphlets written in the aftermath of the revolution. In any case, Chambers’ work missed the opportunity to bring out fully the real significance of Ransome’s life – though this theme shines throughout the work nonetheless.

Before Russia, as Foot noted, ‘what he lacked was any sort of clear commitment’ to or enthusiasm for politics. ‘He had not joined the newly-formed Labour Party or shown the slightest interest in any of the great issues which racked pre-war Britain; women’s suffrage, Irish independence or the great strikes of 1911 and 1912 which effectively destroyed the Liberal Party and shook the Tories to their foundations…Perhaps he yearned for the sort of world which William Morris painted in News from Nowhere, but felt that the reality of Britain in the first 14 years of the century was so far distant from anything Morris had hoped for that there was no point in taking up a political position’. Chambers tells us that Ransome attended meetings of the Fabian Society, 'debates which stirred him so deeply that he took long night walks into the country to clear his head...but his interest in politics rarely extended beyond a fashionable contempt for the "bourgeoisie".'

Rather like George Orwell going to fight in the Spanish Civil War, what changed everything for Ransome was the experience of witnessing a society in the midst of a great social revolution. Of course, the revolution had its dangers for a foreign journalist like Ransome still trying to get to grips with the Russian language. At one point in the midst of the February Revolution in Petrograd, a horseman galloped up to him, pointed a pistol in his face and demanded ‘For or against the people?’
‘I am English’, replied Ransome, helplessly.
‘Long live the English!’ shouted the horseman, and galloped away.

Yet as Foot noted, what Ransome saw in revolutionary Petrograd 'excited him so much that he became for the first and last time politically committed’. As Ransome later wrote in The truth about Russia in 1918, ‘I do not think I shall ever be so happy in my life as I was during those first days when I saw working men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class and not of mine’ to the Petrograd Soviet – the workers council springing out of that revolt.

As Foot notes, ‘The key to his excitement was the new democracy. Representatives of a new class, previously dispossessed of property and power, were suddenly entering the political arena. News from Nowhere was News from Everywhere’. The soviets were the real democratic force – with electable and recallable delegates - democracy from below – and the Soviets were, as Foot notes, ‘a hundred thousand times more democratic than the parliaments of the West, which had never really interested him’. As Ransome wrote back home of the Petrograd Soviet, ‘It was the first proletariat parliament in the world, and by Jove it was tremendous’.

Though he now prepared notes in order to write a full history of the Russian Revolution to date, Ransome unfortunately missed his chance to watch the triumph of Soviet power in October, but rushed back in the aftermath. He arrived in time to witness the period when the Constituent Assembly – the old ‘democracy’ from above - was dissolved in 1918. As Foot notes, Ransome, ‘watching Trotsky in action explaining the government’s policies to hundreds of freezing soviet delegates in crude clothes, this moderate and restrained reporter, trained in the reserved language of British upper class education, wrote this:
‘ I felt I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and France so that those of little faith who say that the Russian Revolution is discredited could share for one minute each that wonderful experience’.

Such statements are even more remarkable as Ransome did not see the revolution as someone who was already a committed revolutionary socialist like say, John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World or Victor Serge (see his Year One of the Russian Revolution) or Alfred Rosmer (Lenin’s Moscow). Later, returning from the perils of the Russian civil war to his home city of Leeds to write what would become Six Weeks in Russia in 1919, Ransome confessed to finding his account ‘surprisingly dull’, noting he would have liked to have conveyed more of the excitement of the Revolution which had drawn in the likes of himself, ‘far removed in origin and upbringing from the revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries’.

‘There was the feeling, from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of the revolution. There was the thing that distinguishes the creative from other artists, the living, vivifying expression of something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity. If this book were to be an accurate record of all of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and unwanted war’.


As Paul Foot notes, ‘Ransome’s writing style is as plain and clear as in any of his children’s books. His prose, in Orwell’s famous phrase, is “like a window pane”’. Ransome’s eyewitness accounts were then rather exceptional - the Guardian socialist journalist Morgan Phillips Price also wrote impassioned reports from revolutionary Russia - and Ransome followed Six Weeks up with The Crisis in Russia, 1920. However, they were not reprinted after the early 1920s until the Redwords edition of 1990s – in part because the Bolshevik leaders they tended to focus on were the likes of Trotsky (Ransome fell in love with and married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina - Trotsky’s secretary) and Ransome’s good friend Karl Radek and rather ignored Josef Stalin. As Foot notes, Ransome’s accounts had ‘shuffled him off where he belonged, to the fringe of the revolution’. Incidentally, a similar fate of neglect seems to have befallen Louise Bryant’s accounts – despite the fame of her partner John Reed.

Foot thought The Crisis in Russia 1920 ‘the best of Ransome’s work on revolutionary Russia’ and claims ‘the high water mark of all’ is Ransome’s ‘account of a conference at Jaroslavl'.

'He went there in early 1920 with Radek, recently released from prison in Germany…The conference was a long and difficult one and Ransome and his friends were glad to retire that night to their hotel. As they prepared for bed there was a knock at the door. A railwayman stood outside, begging them to come to a performance of a local play written and performed by local workers and their families. Ransome’s description of what follows – especially his account of Radek’s speech to the railwaymen and their families, is an electrifying piece of writing. I read it first in 1976, and return to it again and again when I feel dispirited.‘


According to Ransome, Radek was asked to ‘give a long account of the present situation of Soviet Russia’s foreign affairs'.

'The little box of a room filled to a solid mass as policemen, generals and ladies of the old regime threw off their costumes, and in their working clothes, plain signalmen and engine drivers pressed round to listen. When the act ended, one of the railwaymen went to the front of the stage and announced that Radek, who had lately come back after imprisonment in Germany for the cause of revolution, was going to talk to them about the general state of affairs. I saw Radek grin at this forecast of his speech. I understood why, when he began to speak.

He led off by a direct and furious assault on the railway workers in general, demanding work, work and more work, telling them that, as the Red Army had been the vanguard of the revolution hitherto, and had starved and fought and given lives to save those at home from Denikin and Kolchak, so now it was the turn of the railway workers on whose efforts not only the Red Army but also the whole future of Russia depended. He addressed himself to the women, telling them in very bad Russian that unless their men worked superhumanly they would see their babies die from starvation next winter. I saw women nudge their husbands as they listened. Instead of giving them a pleasant, interesting sketch of the international position, which, no doubt, was what they had expected, he took the opportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And the amazing thing was that they seemed to be pleased. They listened with extreme attention, wanted to turn out someone who had a sneezing fit at the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheering when Radek had done. I wondered what sort of reception a man would have who in another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths about the need of work into an audience of working men who had gathered solely for the purpose of legitimate recreation. It was not as if he sugared the medicine he gave them. His speech was nothing but demands for discipline and work, coupled with prophesy of disaster in case work and discipline failed. It was delivered like all his speeches, with a strong Polish accent and a steady succession of mistakes in grammar.

As we walked home along the railway lines, half a dozen of the railwaymen pressed around Radek, and almost fought with each other as to whom should walk next to him. And Radek, entirely happy, delighted at his success in giving them a bombshell instead of a bouquet, with one stout fellow on one arm, another on the other, two or three more listening in front and behind, continued rubbing it into them until we reached our wagon, when, after a general handshaking, they disappeared into the night’.

One gets there a glimpse of the real hope of a new world emerging out of the old - a new world workers felt was their own and were prepared to fight and die to defend - but also the utter tragedy of the counterrevolution under Stalin, where such a spirit of public service, sacrifice, work as not something associated with alienated toil but freedom, was taken up by the Stalinist bureaucracy and used to build – not international socialism – but state capitalism in the most disgustingly bloody, hypocritical and cynical manner.

No wonder Ransome by the late 1920s was sickened by what he saw happening in Stalin’s ‘new civilisation’,– and embarked instead on his legendary series of children’s stories – Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale and so on. Paul Foot takes up the question which inevitably arises:

‘Was there any link at all between his delightful tales of middle class children in the Lake District and in Suffolk and the great events which shook the world in 1917? There is perhaps a clue in something wrote when he was only 22. Hugh Brogan recounts:
“The essence of the child, he held, is its imagination, the way in which, left to itself, and not withered by obtuse or manipulative adults, ‘it adopts any material at hand, and weaves for itself a web of imaginative life, building the world again in splendid pageantry, and all without ever (or hardly ever) blurring its sense of the actual”’

‘This combination of the unleashing of the imagination without ever losing grip on reality is the hallmark of Arthur Ransome’s marvellous reports from revolutionary Russia...The Russian Revolution is not just the most important event of the 20th century. It is a beacon for the 21st. For English-speaking socialists there is no more eloquent or accurate assertion of that than these passionate essays by one of the century’s great writers.

“Let the revolution fail” wrote Arthur Ransome in 1918. “No matter. If only in America, in England, in France, in Germany people know why it has failed, and how it failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as the purpose of his deeds. We have seen the flight of the young eagles. Nothing can destroy that fact, even if, later in the day, the eagles fall to earth one by one, with broken wings”.

Peter Gowan Memorial Conference

A one-day conference to discuss the contribution and ideas of Peter Gowan (1946-2009), author of The Global Gamble, founding editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, long-standing editor of New Left Review, and Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University.

Saturday, 12 June 2010, 10.00 to 5.30
School of Oriental and African Studies, Room G2

Agenda

10.00 – 12.30
Introduction: Tariq Ali
Session 1: Eastern Europe
Speakers: Gus Fagan, Marko Bojcun, Catherine Samary

12.30 – 1.30 lunch

1.30 – 3.00
Session 2: Imperialism and American Grand Strategy
Speakers: Gilbert Achcar, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Susan Watkins

3.00 – 3.30 coffee break

3.30 – 5.00
Session 3: The Dollar-Wall St Regime
Speakers: Robin Blackburn, Robert Wade, Alex Callinicos

5.00 – 5.30
Mike Newman: Peter Gowan as an educator
Awarding of the Peter Gowan Prize

The Conference is sponsored by Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and Historical Materialism. gus.fagan@ntlworld.com

Bush's History lesson

'You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.'

Dave Crouch on Solzhenitsyn

A good obituary in this weeks Socialist Worker of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which manages to get the tricky but necessary balance of praise and criticism about right, and ends 'we must reject Solzhenitsyn the prophet – but celebrate him as a witness to Stalin’s crimes and the voice of his victims'.

[This weeks paper incidently also clearly explains what the hell is happening over in the Caucasus, which is useful for those of us who, unlike the likes of Lenin, haven't been good enough Marxists to make time to find out for ourselves...see also Seamus Milne]

Say No to NATO

I just got this email from the Stop the War Coalition:

GEORGIA, NATO & THE SPREAD OF WAR
Friends Meeting House (Small Hall) London
6.30 pm, Thursday 14 August, 2008 with

MARK ALMOND, lecturer in History, Oxford University and expert on the Caucasus

KATE HUDSON, Chair of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

BORIS KAGARLITSKI, former director Institute of Globalisation Studies, Moscow and author of, ‘Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System’

JOHN REES, Officer of Stop the War Coalition and author of ‘Imperialism and Resistance’

The outbreak of war in Georgia is already a disaster for the people of the region. It risks being turned into a still broader problem by Dick Cheney's threats. The conflict is in large measure the product of George Bush's policy of US global hegemony, in the Caucasus as in the Middle East. Attempts to extend NATO eastwards, specifically incorporating Georgia, directly challenge Russian interests. Please come to the meeting to discuss this latest flashpoint in an increasingly dangerous world and forward this message to your contacts.

Pete Glatter Internet Archive

An excellent tribute to the late Pete Glatter, a fine Marxist and writer on Russian society, past and present.