Stalinism in Europe
International (Socialist Outlook site)1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
THE QUESTION of Stalinism is central to an understanding of twentieth century history, and to analysing the reasons for the survival of the capitalist world system well beyond the point where it had become 'rotten ripe' for socialist revolution. Here are two books which will greatly aid the socialist movement in coming to terms with this problem. Hallas's book is a no-nonsense primer on the history of the Communist International which charts its rise as a revolutionary movement and its eventual strangulation by Stalinism. Spriano's book is a more detailed and reflective account of the relationship between the Kremlin and the European Communist movement between the 1930s and the death of Stalin in 1953.
With Hallas's book we have few arguments. Anyone new to the socialist movement will benefit from his lucid account, which mainly sticks to Trotskyist orthodoxy. Spriano, the central historian of the Italian Communist Party, is a different kettle of fish. While much of what he says is a searing critique of the history of the Stalinist movement, in a couple of his central judgements he tends to justify the orientation which the Communist Parties eventually adopted.
First, though, it is worth paying tribute to Spriano's skills in marshalling a mass of detail which damns the course adopted by the Stalinist parties and by the Soviet government. Particularly striking are, for example, his account of the French Popular Front of the 1930s and the gyrations of the Stalinists over the second world war. On France Spriano, covering much of the same material as EH Carr's Twilight of the Comintern, shows that the French CP under Thorez went far to the right of the Blum's Socialists in demanding the inclusion of bourgeois forces in the Popular Front, and in forcing the adoption of most right-wing social chauvinist slogans. All this shocked left wing militants in the Socialist Party. No one should think that the right wing antics of Marxism Today are anything new: the spectacle of 'communists' denouncing socialist militants from the right is a tradition which goes back to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s.
Particularly gripping is Spriano's account of the policy adopted by Stalin and imposed on the Comintern during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. To prove his sincerity, Stalin handed 500 German Communist exiles over to the Gestapo. When France was invaded by Germany, the French CP was instructed not to raise any slogans against the German occupation. In 1940 the walls of Paris were covered by CP slogans such as 'The rich must pay!' and 'Long live Stalin!' — but not a word about the minor fact that the country was occupied by the Nazis or that thousands of working class militants were languishing in jail, with all democratic rights and liberties suppressed.
All this turned into its opposite when the Soviet Union was invaded. Communist propaganda was then turned towards the most grotesque flattery of the 'democratic' capitalist powers, the virtues of Mr Churchill, Catholicism, Christian Democracy and so on ad nauseam. Not surprisingly, socialist militants of the PSI, in the Italian underground, regarded all this as disgusting. Again, the bizarre spectacle of social democratic militants denouncing 'communists' from the left.
Spriano in my view makes a couple of errors of judgement which despite all the damning detail, tend to justify Stalinist policy. Significantly they are on questions where he takes issue with Trotsky and Trotskyism and indeed these points will be very familiar to those who have followed these historical debates.
First, while paying tribute to Trotsky's analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany, Spriano argues that Trotsky was wrong on Spain and France in the mid-1930s, and grossly overestimated the possibility of any revolutionary working class victory in these countries. The real choice for the working class, says Spriano, was not fascism or socialism, but fascism or democracy (p125). Certainly this line of argumentation cannot be sustained in relation to Spain where there was indeed a revolution following the Francoist coup in 1936.
In the case of France, while nobody can be certain that the 1936 occupation of the factories could have resulted in the conquest of working class power, it is certain that the Popular Front, just like the CP in May 1968, demobilised the movement and prevented its maximum development.
The point is this: if the real choice facing the working class was democracy or fascism, and there was no hope of any revolutionary breakthrough, then why be so hard on the Popular Front? All you can say is that it did have dreadful rightist, class-collaborationist excesses, but it was right on the central question – that socialist revolution was off the agenda.
Spriano judges it to be 'an old Trotskyist myth' that there was any revolutionary potential in the situation in post second world war Europe. That may be so. But is is not a myth that Italy was liberated by the Communist-led Garibaldi brigades; that Mussolini's government was brought down by mass working class strikes and an uprising; that Paris was liberated by Communist-led resistance brigades before the allies got there;. and that following the overthrow of the Third Reich factory committees were spontaneously formed all over Germany; and that in the end the Communist Parties ordered the armed masses to disband, to turn in their guns, and to accept the bourgeois order. Was there no revolutionary potential in this situation?
Again, one canot prove that the conquest of power by the working class in one or several European countries was possible, but one can prove without a shdow of a doubt that the Stalinist line of restoring bourgeois order and legality prevented any such struggle for power.
If Spriano is right and there was no possibility whatever of fighting for socialist revolution, then the disarming of the masses at the behest of the CP leaders can be justified: what ultra-leftism to retain armed bands in a non-revolutionary situation!
These points are not mere quibbles, because they go to the heart of post-war political developments. The restoration of world capitalism after world war two and the long economic boom which temporarily stablised the capitalist system in the 1950s and 1960s, was only possible because of the crushing defeats which the working class suffered between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the defeat of the post-war revolutionary wave between 1945-9.
This raises the question that we posed at the beginning of this review: the relationship between Stalinism and the survival of capitalism and the imperialist world order. It is often argued in left wing circles that the European working class does not have a revolutionary history, compared with the masses of the 'third world' and the 'East'. This kind of argument is a travesty, even when peddled by the would-be Trotskyists of Socialist Action.
Time and again sections of the European working class movement have taken the road towards socialist revolution, only to be defeated or crushed through the perfidy of their leaderships; and in all the central turning points of 20th century working class history the role of Stalinism has been key — from the role of the KPD in allowing the Nazis to come to power in Germany, to the defeat of the Spanish revolution, to the post-war stablisation in Europe.
As Duncan Hallas explains, the Communist International had hundreds of thousands of supporters in Europe during its revolutioanry phase in the 1920s. There was a revolutionary mass alternative leadership for the working class. The breaking of that continuity, the result of the Stalinisation of the Comintern, is the fundamental explanation of the temporary stablisation of the bourgeois order in Western Europe in the 'fifties and 'sixties. It is in this sense that one can speak of a 'long detour' in the world revolutionary process.
The central task for Marxists today is to relink the new generations of working class militants with the traditions of the revolutionary Communist International, a tradition which was only preserved through the long period of bitter defeats by Trotsky and the Fourth International. Two prerequisites for this are a serious study of the political lessons of the Comintern and an unshakeable conviction of the revolutionary potential of the working class, in Europe as much as anywhere else. Both these books provide much material for the first prerequisite, and ample evidence of the second.
Paolo Spriano Stalin and the European Communists Verso £16.95.
Duncan Hallas The Comintern Bookmarks £3.75.