The struggle against modern revisionism is in full swing, it is world-wide and gathering momentum with each passing day. These letters which you have read are part of that struggle, for the struggle against revisionism, in one form or another, It’s as old as Marxism itself. For British readers to fully appreciate and understand the roots possessed by revisionism in this country one could do no better than to read once again the Marx-Engels Correspondence covering the British movement. Even in those early days the belief in a “British Road to Socialism.” via ’capturing’ parliament, was already strongly entrenched.
But a point must be brought out, stressed and driven home: the struggle against modern revisionism contains a qualitatively new element for State power has passed out of the hands of the capitalist class in a number of countries. First and foremost, because of size and population, those of the Soviet Union and People’s China. Another point must be stressed. When State power passes out of direct control of the capitalist class this does not inevitably mean that State power passes into the hands of the people, headed by the working class. For the people, and the bulk of the working class, must by necessity–their lack of theoretical understanding–delegate authority to the most experienced and time-tested representatives of the new emerging forces. Within this Party elements hostile to the new, individuals smuggled into the movement by the bourgeoisie, careerists cynical and untrustworthy, and people who degenerate as socialism makes life more comfortable, form the hard core of modern revisionism. Their degree of success is largely dependent upon the success with which they widen the gulf between the incomes of those at the bottom and those at the top of the new society. A strata of highly paid people can emerge, but this is not all. The family has not disappeared and its members support one another, their children marry into like families so that the strata becomes self-perpetuating and, unless the process is smashed, reintroduces private property and privilege for the few against the many, which can only result in the restoration on a new State base, of a modified or new form of capitalism. This is precisely what is happening in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Lenin’s remarks in his State and Revolution on egalitarianism, of the necessity to keep within bounds differences in incomes, became forgotten and this fact was seized upon by the remnants of the old displaced classes, used as a wedge, and is the base of revisionism in the Soviet Union today.
Believing in the inevitability of objective law there is a tendency among Marxists to belittle the actions of living men, to forget the persistence with which ideas are imbedded, even as steel and concrete, into the hands of men. It is not enough to read and formally agree with Marx’s wise and famous dictum: “The ideology of the ruling class is the prevailing ideology.” the truth contained within it must be closely examined and analysed. Conceit, pride and arrogance, a belief in individuality to the point of madness, indeed including it, these things are pivotal to an understanding of bourgeois mentality. Without a clear understanding of this subjective aspect of the class struggle of our own day, of its living savagery, Marxism is robbed of much of its vitality, no longer throbs with the pulse of life.
Let me exemplify. In these letters you have read of my attack on Maurice Dobb, I likewise attacked Emile Burns, a pivotal figure in the Party’s top leadership. I heavily censure the present Editor of the Daily Worker, George Mathews, and turn on men such as Maurice Cornforth. Each of these individuals pride themselves on being Marxists and take equal pride in the fact that their work has appeared in print. If I am correct in my assessment, if my accusation is just and can be upheld, that these men have deserted Marxism, then it means that much of their life-work is a living lie. Yet these men have had high praise heaped on their heads, they have risen in their respective fields, they are regarded by the rank and file as authorities.
However, the truth is quite simple, there is no mystery involved. Those mentioned are praised by men with a similar class background, a common psychological approach. Furthermore, it is well to remember that the mind of man is connected with the heart and it is the heart of man that impels one forward, drives him to struggle and fight to the last breath against injustice, oppression and evil-doing. When men lack this wholeness, this vital linkage between heart and mind, degeneracy sooner or later appears. And this is true of the men I attack in this pamphlet. But how to prove this assertion of mine? Can it be proved? Let us see.
Let us take a look at Palme Dutt. Here is a man who can point to continuous membership in the British Communist Party since its birth over 40 years ago. Palme Dutt has lectured extensively, edited well-known journals, written a number of books. He has been for many years possibly the most respected and widely known member of the Party’s Central Committee. On paper it cannot be denied that Palme Dutt has an impressive record. His influence on the Indian Communist Party’s leadership is known to all, but what sort of an influence was it? A bad one, for it led to the belief in many minds that India, under Nehru, was developing socialism, that Nehru was a true socialist, though inclined to backslide every once in a while. Palme Dutt’s influence led to creatures such as Dange coming to the fore, who supported Nehru to the hilt in the latter’s adventurous attack, military attack, on People’s China. Then you suddenly recall the word of Lenin: “In the final analysis, a political Party is judged by results.” Silently, at first, you ask yourself: “What has the British Party to show for 40 years of being?” Then you repeat the question, louder and louder, you shout it to the workers, for without a strong and powerful Communist Party headed by trained Marxists there is no hope of smashing, destroying, the capitalist State, no hope of ending wage-slavery.
What has the British Party to show for these past 40 years of existence? But first, let us glance at the main happenings of these long years. Some fifteen years of mass unemployment in the basic industries, of ever increasing bitter exploitation of those workers ’lucky’ enough to hold on to jobs. Then came the second world war with all that entailed. Ruination of the cities, tight rationing, 5,000,000 torn from their homes, in the armed forces. 1945, the end of the war and a swing to the Left without precedent. An overwhelming triumph for the Labour Party, with the Communist Party itself in near control of the vital shop-steward movement. These are historical facts beyond contradiction. Are we being unfair when we assert that this was the soil for the growth of a mass Communist Party? Yet what do we find in reality? That we are weaker today than ever before. Even the position of strength we enjoyed through our near-control of the shop-steward movement has been frittered away through stupidity –as when we lost control of the London Trades Council, through Julie Jacobs, taking direct orders from such as J. Mahon and Peter Kerrigan–or outright treachery, planned from bourgeois elements within the top circle of the Party–when we dissolved the factory nucleus, shifted emphasis as far away from the factory as possible and made our main aim work in the local Councils and boroughs.
No, not objective conditions, which heavily favoured the growth of a Communist Party, but the subjective control of the Party by a group of right revisionists, ’tailists’ who hang on to the shirt-tails of an outright bourgeois Party, the so-called Labour Party, is the real cause of our total failure to establish a solid base among the working class and other exploited sections of the people. The question of penetration within the top cadres of the Party by direct agents of the bourgeoisie must never slip our minds. Let us never forget the fact that the enemy we confront, the British ruling class, is the most experienced of all, the one with the longest history of how to rule. Let us never forget that the government of the Czar, stupid as it was, nevertheless still managed to get one of its agents into the Central Committee of Lenin’s own Party!
Never will I forget the incredibility with which I received the news in 1947 that the Party was preparing to organise committees on the job to increase exports, that is to say, to help the British capitalists, our masters, out of the serious difficulties of those postwar years, years of deepest crisis for capitalist survival. Yet these committees were set up, and this act of outright treachery written into Party history. By so doing our Party aided in surmounting the deep crisis of capitalism in such countries as France and Italy. Our Party accepted tighter rationing with no real protest, knowing full well that part of our own food supplies were being poured on to the continent, especially to Italy, where some 8,000,000 Communist votes had been registered, where arms were in the hands of scores of thousands of workers and poor peasants.
While it is unquestionably true that the bourgeoisie always succeed in implanting agents within the Communist Party, the principal danger does not arise from this sort of infiltration, rather is it the result of degeneration on the part of those who come into the Party quite honestly but who bring with them firm-rooted ideas alien to Marxism, ideas which they are not only unable to get rid of, but which they defend, in one fashion or another, with astonishing tenacity.
I gave as an example an outright paid-agent of the Czar, but history furnishes us. with the other variety as well, the type who degenerates under bourgeois influences. Such was Lassalle, the founder of German Social Democracy. A man with a brilliant mind, but clouded, ever more heavily, with vanity, pride and personal conceit. Trotsky comes to mind, his analysis of Mayakovsky is the best that has ever been written. But this essay of Trotsky’s on Mayakovsky is also all-revealing of Trotsky himself. After proving to the hilt Mayakovsky’s narrowness of outlook, his provincialism, Trotsky becomes alarmed at his own temerity and ends his essay with a deep obeisance to the Poet he has so largely destroyed. Such men, and their numbers are legion, are basically unstable, highly emotional, they lack principle. Such was Bukharin, who attempted after Lenin’s death to resurrect and impose an opinion on the Party–even to the extent of attempting to persuade the Party that Lenin acknowledged the correctness of his, Bukharin’s, thesis–almost immediately after the passing away of Lenin. Such men are devoid of true human pride, they love themselves beyond all else.
Turning to recent times, there is the classic example of N. Khrushchov whose entire history stinks of opportunism. But there is a difference which must be noted between the revisionists of the past and Khrushchov, Khrushchov is not of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin. He has had little formal schooling, his origin and upbringing is working class. He himself openly admits– almost boasts of, his ignorance of literature, philosophy and the arts–his philosophy is of the ”horse’s mouth” variety, spiced by extremely apt and homely quotes known and beloved by ordinary people, folk sayings. Herein lies a great deal of this man’s strength, for the working class recognises Khrushchov as one of themselves, all too often indulgently overlook his basic lack of broad culture.
I stated that Khrushchov’s entire career stinks of opportunism, and once again the reader is fully entitled to know the reasons for such an indictment, in order that he himself may decide on the truth of the matter. In 1956 Khrushchov denounced Stalin, the man mainly responsible for shaping Soviet policy since 1923, the year before Lenin passed away. Since this first denunciation of Stalin, Khrushchov has systematically added to his bonfire, epithet has been added to epithet. N. Khrushchov would have us believe that Stalin was a “coward,” a “fool,” an “idiot,” the “greatest dictator in Russian history,” that “the Stalin era was when wives kissed their husbands goodbye not knowing whether they would be seen again.” Stalin has been made a creature only fit to be spat at. Yet it was this man, Joseph Stalin, who defied the Tzarist police, who was arrested many times, who, with such as Comrade Molotov, spent long years in Siberia, it was this man, Stalin, who was primarily responsible for leading the fight against the kulak, for initiating and carrying to success the First Five-Year Plan. Stalin stated: “We have 10 years with which to catch up with capitalism, we either do that or we perish.” Almost precisely 10 years later the German capitalist class, under the leadership of Hitler, crossed the Russian border with 20,000 tanks, 1,500,000 front-line troops, and control of the entire industrial and farming output of continental Europe.
Four years later this colossal military machine, the greatest ever assembled in the history of mankind, had been crumbled, then smashed, with Berlin a heap of rubble, firmly in the hands of the Red Army. Was it not Churchill, this arch Tory, who publicly declared, “The Red Army has torn the guts out of the German war machine”? Yet Khrushchov would have us believe that the Head of the Soviet State during this period was a “coward,” a “fool,” an “idiot.” I cannot swallow this.
One other point. Why is it that the speeches of Molotov and other comrades who opposed Khrushchov’s policies have never been put before the Soviet people and the working class in general? It is known that differences of opinion existed, primarily over the farming problem. Khrushchov destroyed all opposition, and went ahead with the opening-up of the New Lands, from which no harvest worth talking about has been gathered for 4 years, for the natural conditions in much of N. Kasakhstan is harsher than that of N. Alberta, whose farmers are heavily subsidised by the Canadian government, and who consider one good crop in four as normal. Today there are bread lines in the Soviet Union and Khrushchov is buying grain at any price, wherever he can lay hands on it. Finally, it is to be noted that the capitalist press the world over have only touched on the bread-lines of Moscow, they are treating Khrushchov as a wiser man than his predecessor, a man to whom the problems of humanity are close and very precious. What kind of headlines would the capitalist press have carried given such a situation in Stalin’s day?
Long live the memory of Comrade Stalin! Down with modern revisionism! Long live the struggle for World Socialism!