CONTENTS

CRITIQUE NOTES

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

ARTICLES

Terry Austrin : Fabianism and Stalinism

John Newsinger : Destroying the Myth -George Orwell and Soviet Communism

Raymond Challinor : The Second World War and its Hidden Agenda

Gerd-Rainer Horn : Trotskyism and Europe in World War II

Hiliel H Ticktin : The Political-Economic Nature of the Purges

Susan Weissman : The Role of Purges and Terror in the Formation of the USSR

Hyyhory Kostiuk : The Accursed Years from Lukianivka Prison to the Tragedy of Vorkuta (1935-1940)

DISCUSSION

Scott Meikle : Marx and the Stalinist History Textbook

REVIEW ARTICLE

Ian Spencer : Lev Vygotsky - A Neo-Stalinist Myth

OBITUARY

Adam Westoby

CRITIQUE NOTES

This issue of Critique is devoted to historical questions. They largely concern the way in which Stalinism and social democracy have destroyed or betrayed the left. We have chosen a number of themes. One is the purges and their meaning. The importance of Stalin's mass killings can never be overestimated and they cannot be understood simply as a political liquidation of the left, although they did accomplish that purpose.  One way that we may look at them is in a grand historical sense as an attempt to arrest history by force. The problem of the reason, effects and extent of the purges is one which will be discussed for many years. In this issue Susan Weissman and Hillel Ticktin write on the nature of the purges. Critique Notes also discusses them again below in connection with the question of the barbaric nature of the age.

The Second World War was not the same as the First World War and the left debated, then and later, its correct attitude to that war. Clearly, the existence of Stalinism and social democracy (not to speak of Fascism)  determined the whole nature of the war. We include two articles on the war one by Raymond Challinor and another by G.R. Horn.

In British intellectual history, Orwell and the Fabians are contrasting figures on the left. Both very British in origin and orientation but very different in their essential integrity. Orwell has had an enormous influence with his two works, Animal Farm and 1984. He correctly saw the reactionary nature of Stalinism and Stalin's Soviet Union. The Fabians on the other hand supported imperialism and can be easily accused of racism and anti-Semitism. Their preferred strategy of gradualism can now be seen as little more than a compromise with the ruling class. The article by Terry Austrin provides a useful insight into the shared intellectual assumptions of Fabianism and Stalinism, whilst John Newsinger assesses Orwell's attempts to debunk the "Soviet myth". In the discussion section Scott Meikle provides a view of history that seeks to expose and avoid the mistakes of Stalinist historiography. We hope that a debate can evolve in Critique around this question.

THE NATURE OF MODERN CHAOS

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in most countries of the world today. Criminal capital, whether as drug capital or other forms, has become an integral part of the modem bourgeoisie. In the former Soviet Union, the only form of capital that can exist is criminal capital. At the same time, mass unemployment has become a permanent feature of the metropolitan countries, while in the third world it is often a fortunate labour aristocracy that has work at all. Social democracy, in the form of the welfare state in the metropolitan countries and in the form of attempted development in the third world, has failed. Stalinism is dying. The bourgeoisie has tried to propagate a triumphalist view of an all conquering market, which would deliver a high standard of living for all. That doctrine is now little more than a tasteless joke except in the corridors of the IMF and at the universities, where Western economists continue to delude themselves that reality will finally shape up to their expectations. Apparently, the laws enunciated by Marx have been fulfilled and overfulfilled.

The world disorder, which was the subject of our last issue, seems to be continuing and indeed gathering strength. It is clear that the former Soviet Union is in permanent disorder. It has failed to get to capitalism, though its present social system has no name, if indeed it can be called a system at all. Eastern Europe has also failed to go over to a successful market system, though whether one or more countries will actually become a junior and subordinated, if rather miserable capitalism, is still open to question. It is clear that there is no successful transition to capitalism in any of these countries. It is no surprise to see the old elite remaining in power in all these countries and the Communist Party, which is one of its parties, returning to government. Capitalism has no solution and can have no solution. The strength of the working class everywhere means that no parliamentary system can sustain the vicious attack on the standard of living of the population induced by the transition to the market. On the other hand, this intermediate situation where the former Stalinist countries are neither Stalinist nor capitalist cannot last very long historically. The history of the world will be ultimately determined by events in the former Soviet Union, interacting with the West. Eastern Europe can only play a facilitating or blocking role.

Nationalism and religious fundamentalism, which is very similar to nationalism, are now functioning as the chief barriers to real change. It has ruined Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Poland, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and much of Africa. These divisions create the impression of world disorder and indeed of an incurable epoch of disorder. That, indeed, is what some right wing intellectuals are now propagating. Such an analysis has the advantage from their point of view of creating the impression that the world situation is hopeless and little can be done to improve the condition of mankind.

The former triumphalism which was proclaimed everywhere after the fall of the Berlin wall, which found its ideologist in Fukuyama, is now seen to be hollow, even though some continue to cling to it, in spite of all the evidence. They still think that the former USSR will go capitalist, if not now, in 30 years time. Others cling to the hope that a compromise is still possible, between socialism and the market, in the form of market socialism. They see market socialism or social democracy as a realistic alternative in spite of the fact that Gorbachev's attempts to go that way failed, and in spite of the patent and massive decline of all social democratic parties.

The British Labour Party, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), and the French Socialist Party have all abandoned their former pseudo-socialist programmes. Nationalisation, full employment, greater protection for workers in their places of work, rising standards of living, realistic pensions, as opposed to the miserable ones provided by the state today, have all been lost. Today their only policy is one of maintaining austerity with a human face. They are less vicious than their right wing counterparts and hence from time to time the workers vote for them. The British Labour Party exemplifles the abandonment of social democracy for left conservatism. Modern social democracy since the war had little to do with socialism, but it supported the welfare state which it is now gradually abandoning. It has no alternative because the bureaucratic nature of the welfare state meant that it was vulnerable to populist right wing alternatives and the current global financial climate prevents individual countries acting on their own to raise their own rate of growth.

On the other hand, the United States is patently declining as an imperial power and no other metropolitan power can take its place. Even though it plays the dominant role in the IMF and the World Bank in ensuring that a semi-monetarist policy is maintained, so placing the world in a strait jacket, it can no longer police the world as it used to. Nor can it finance particular ruling classes as it did previously. The decline of Stalinism and of the Imperial United States is the immediate reason for the world disorder but it is not the fundamental cause.

TRANSITION AND STALEMATE

Ultimately we are witnessing the continuing results of the defeat of the October Revolution. We live in an age of transition in which the old order, capitalism, must malfunction. In the last issue of Critique the question of decline was discussed by Hillel Ticktin and it was further explored in a debate with Ken Tarbuck printed in New Interventions. The problem is not one of absolute decline with absolutely declining production, but of increasing difficulty for capitalism to solve its -capitalist- problems. Contemporary capitalism cannot provide a solution for the former Stalinist countries and it has equally well failed in the so-called third world, where absolute decline has in fact been the fate of many of those countries. Only in the very specific circumstances of South East Asia is it any different. Mass unemployment is now permanent everywhere and the standard of living ceased to rise for most of the population in countries such as the United States and Sweden from 1973 onwards. The gap between potential and actual production is growing. Yet the 1989-94 depression looks like it is being succeeded by a weak boom followed by another downturn. The bourgeoisie is afraid to expand lest the working class demand both higher wages and greater control. The switch to finance capital after 1973 had a limited life, since money cannot make money. Ultimately production had to expand or the standard of living decline. While the flows of capital from Russia, the third world, and Japan, and the import of commodities from the first two at low relative prices has sustained the West, there is a limit.

In effect there is a global stalemate between the bourgeoisie and the working class which cannot be resolved. It is impossible to defeat the working class in a developed country so as to reverse the class relationship into one of full subordination of the working class. Until the workers are defeated the bourgeoisie cannot invest and so expand on the scale required to return to the situation that prevailed from 1973. Monetarism and its accompanying forms of privatisation, deregulation, balanced budgets and high interest rates has failed. It has ruined the third world and thereby destroyed the sources of accumulation, but it has not restored capitalism to its nineteenth century form of the dominance of capital and so money, with open competition, and a true reserve army of labour. A reserve army of labour requires workers going in and out of employment on a regular basis, whereas the form of mass unemployment which currently exists is not the same thing. Older workers, women, people in the regions, and the long term unemployed often drop out of the labour market altogether or else do not compete with the main body of the workforce. The level of unemployment required to ensure a true reserve army is so great that it is politically impossible in a parliamentary democracy.

The permanent austerity of the first world and the absolute poverty of much of the third world does not in itself make the world unstable. What has caused the instability of the present time has been the end of Stalinism. The ruling class no longer has a means of cohesion at the same time as it is sharply divided by its different interests and consequently different strategies. Italy, the UK, Ireland and France have suffered Government scandals and divisions, which show no signs of abating. The natural corruption of capitalism has developed further and can no longer be hidden. The Stalinist parties have collapsed or been transformed and social democracy has little purchase on the working class. The social democratic trade unions are losing members and are increasingly demoralised.

Parliamentary democracy is clearly dying. It came into being in its present form in the post-October Revolution period. To some, this point will appear absurd but a moment's reflection will show that only at the point of the full franchise in an industrialised society could a real parliamentary politics exist. Before that time, the majority who were usually excluded in one way or another could not be represented and thereby be incorporated. Parliamentary politics is above all a means of incorporation of the majority by the ruling class. In the UK, it was only in 1928 that everyone over 21 was enfranchised and parliament could fully serve to incorporate working class politicians. Stalinism played a crucial role in this process. In its absence parliamentary democracy has insufficient roots in the working class and general population. In the United States around a half of the population may vote for the president while around a third takes part in mid-term congressional elections. In Russia, its move to democracy appears to have withered before it could blossom. There, around a half of the population voted officially while many consider those figures fraudulent. In the UK at least a third do not vote. Even where people do vote they do so in a cynical frame of mind expecting little and believing that all politicians are crooks and congenital liars.

THE ESSENCE OF MODERN DISORDER

The underlying meaning of the modern world disorder lies in the nature of the transition from one mode of production to another. In all previous transitions chaos, wars, plagues and general insecurity have prevailed. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism which may be dated from the 12th century to the 16th or 17th centuries, wars wracked Europe, large scale plagues ruined large swathes of whole countries, families lost their homes and livelihood when they were turned off the formerly feudal estates, while lies, deception and murder became a normal form of government and commerce. We are witnessing similar phenomena for parallel reasons. The plagues of aids and viral leukaemia have been supplemented by the return of tuberculosis and new forms of old diseases. Where people are malnourished, as in the former Soviet Union in its transition from Stalinism, diphtheria, cholera, etc. are able to take their toll. Similarly in Africa where independence has not only failed to raise the standard of living of the ordinary population, but even led to a precipitous decline; aids, tuberculosis , malaria and numerous other diseases have exacted a barbaric toll. Civil wars and wars between nations have ruined parts of Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Mass unemployment and underemployment is the lot of an increasing proportion of the population of every country except for a very few. A modern Machiavelli would have no trouble writing an update of his predecessor's famous work, The Prince. Politicians take part in political life in order to advance their own careers at the expense of the working class. The Italian case, where the political life of the ruling caste was closely interlinked with the Mafia and constant bribery, is only a more visible and advanced case of a form existing everywhere. It is no accident that private enterprise in the former Soviet Union is criminalised. The old Stalinist forms were themselves based on forms of force and deception and hence the old elite simply transferred their old tricks into new forms. But they could only do so in a world receptive to them because the fact is that criminal capital now plays an important role in capitalism itself, whether through drug production and money laundering, or through the use of a complex unity of state force and bribery.

The old morality of the family, work discipline and religion is dead. It could not survive the blows wrought by the increasing independence of women, insecurity of employment, demands for democracy in the workplace and the growth of education and science. The new humanist morality of the socialist cannot be introduced without socialism and consequently there is a moral vacuum filled with cynicism, mysticism and the debasement of all human values.

Everywhere paradoxes abound. In the name of efficiency and the elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy more managers are employed than before. In Russia there is a bigger bureaucracy today than in the whole of the former Soviet Union. Managers are imposed on the public sector who then absorb a larger slice of the budget than the supposed savings established through their presence. Workers are enjoined to work more for less pay, more insecurity and less hope for betterment at the same time as the management receives astronomical salaries with astronomical increases year by year. Workers are supposed to work harder if they are threatened by lower pay and unemployment while managers supposedly work harder only if given salaries which can only be spent on luxuries. In the universities academics are enjoined to publish. What the ambitious then publish is secondary to the need to publish in a hierarchically controlled series of publications. Inevitably research is conformist and increasingly trite, particularly in the arts and social sciences. The waste of public money spent on such academics is directly due to the governments themselves and such research is little more than a form of modern corruption. These same academics then produce weighty treatises justifying this state of affairs, espousing the trickle down effect of higher payments to the rich. Of course, a slave may only perform if forced to do so, whereas his master, who is provided for by the slave, is necessarily so lazy that he can only act if given a sufficient reward. The effect of such transparent forms of ideological control is to replace morality with cynicism. The gangsterism of youths living in a culture of hypocrisy and permanent despair is inevitable.

"The old forms have broken down and the new have not yet come into being", is a common aphorism. While it is true that there are no socialist forms, the new socio-economic forms are coming into being in a protoplasmic way making the old forms malfunction and rendering the old morality obsolete. Mankind feels that it is on the edge of a precipice and no one knows how to act. The most disadvantaged sections turn to petty criminal acts which are usually exercised on those only slightly better off than they are. The short-termismoffmance capital becomes the prevailing morality. There is little difference in attitudes between those of the modern thrusting, dynamic entrepreneur and the poverty stricken youths who turn to gangsterism. Both are out for quick returns, without regard to the effect on the society as a whole. At least the awful effects of gangsterism are limited to particular neighbourhoods, whereas the short-termism of finance capital has ruined whole countries if not continents. The degeneration of modern society is only part of the barbaric age in which we live.

BARBARISM

At the same time, through all the disorder and barbarism, capitalism continues and the transition from capitalism must necessarily continue to operate. The old slogan of "socialism or barbarism" has been proven to be correct but the fact that we live in a barbaric age does not mean that there are no laws operating or that history has come to an end. The transition from capitalism to socialism is already almost as bloody as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, when whole civilisations and countries were destroyed and millions reduced to slavery. The house of capitalism was built with bricks of blood and it has already absorbed the blood of millions more as it gives way to the new, truly human society. In all these processes, the laws of capitalism, of transition and of the approaching society remain operative. The despair of those who argue that we live in a new age of barbarism from which mankind cannot escape is not warranted. The inchoate but enormous force of the working class must force its way through the myriad chains which now hold it down.

The barbarism of the present was above all a counter revolutionary barbarism in which Stalinism was the main force. Hobsbawm (1) starts his investigation of barbarism with the First World War and conveniently ignores Stalinism. The millions killed in the First World War were dwarfed by the millions who died in collectivisation, the famine of 1933, and the purges. The Second World War itself was in no small measure a consequence of Stalinism. Hobsbawm sweeps away the tortures of Stalinism as if the mass use of such tortures under Stalin were simply street theatre, unnecessary for the maintenance of the state itself. On the contrary the all-pervading sense of fear in Stalinist societies, which remained to the end, relied on its classical use in the Stalin period of torture and killing. Hobsbawm contrasts the use of torture in the West with its absence in the East in the period 1950 onwards. Even though his dating is dubious, the real point is that these regimes no longer needed to use direct physical torture under conditions of direct secret police control. No direct threat to the rule of the Stalinist elite was possible. On the other hand, the possibility of a return to the purges remained in the minds of all and prevented many from doing anything. In a sense Stalinist society was so barbaric that it could go no further. In the West, the use of torture in South Africa, Ireland, Argentina and elsewhere served a particular purpose, that of preventing further anti-government action. Under Stalinism there was no such immediate reason since there was no such action, the aim was far more general: to terrorise the entire population.

Stalinism legitimised the use of a mass secret police, the use of mass killings, and the use of torture. Mass opposition to the killings in the post-war world in the West was half-hearted at best because of the nature of Stalinism itself. After all it is the left itself which ought to be bearers of a genuine humanism, which opposes both in word and deed this new age of barbarism. Instead, it found itself justifying killings on the ground that the other side was worse. The fact that millions are dying of starvation under capitalism then served as a reason for justifying the sacrifice of millions in insurrectionary wars, which could not be socialist by their very nature. That insurrectionary elite then used barbaric means to maintain themselves in power in practically all the countries involved. The point is Hobsbawm is right to point to the barbaric nature of the age, but he fails to put Stalinism at its centre.

The right has always taken Trotsky's justification in Terrorism and Communism as some kind of proof that the left is not without its own skeletons. Yet those who fall for this argument have little historical understanding. During a time of war, one side kills the other side. One can of course not fight, surrender the battle and the war. This is not an argument to be ignored, but if the war is once engaged then war-like acts of all kinds are inevitable though perhaps not justifiable. Lenin and Trotsky were opposed to the systematic use of torture or terror to maintain power. It was Stalin who pioneered these principles and Hitler never surpassed his master in such matters. That was the true barbarism, not the individual use of torture wherever it occurred, however awful that was.

The barbarism of Stalinism and of Fascism is now over. It is probably more difficult for governments to justify torture than ever before. Many of the Stalinist and semi-Stalinist regimes have collapsed. Although there are confused people who grieve for them, the fact is that their collapse now makes modern barbarism all the more stark.

In other words, there is a difference between the degeneration of society to a point where force is part of everyday life as under Stalinism and Fascism and the slow disintegration of capitalism itself. At certain points in time the disintegrative process may slide into forms which are wholly barbaric, but for the most part the barbarism is limited and partial.

Apology

In the last issue, the footnotes to Hillel Ticktin's article on decline were unfortunately omitted. Anyone who needs them could be supplied with them if they write to us enclosing a stamped addressed envelope.

1 E Hobsbawm, 'Barbarism: A User's Guide", New Left Review, 206, July-August, 1994