World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International
544
World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International
544eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2017 |
| Series: | The C. L. R. James Archives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 544 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian and works for Leeds University Centre for African Studies. He is the author of C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain and the coeditor of The Black Jacobins Reader, both also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Marxism
What then is socialism according to the prophets? To answer this question we have to look back and not forward, at the origin of Socialism in the scientific sense, placing it in the particular phase of social evolution to which it belongs. For though it is to be attained by the will and energy of men, it will not be attained how and when men please. It is neither pious hope nor moral aspiration but a new form of society which will arise for one reason and one only, the unavoidable decay of the old.
The French Revolution and Marxism
This emergence of a new society from the old Marx and Engels deduced from wide and profound studies of economics and history, and their standard illustration of it was the emergence of fully fledged Capitalist society out of the bankruptcy of the feudal regime in France. So much of their work was based on their analysis of the French Revolution, so emphatic were they as to the value of French history for the proper understanding of their ideas, the French revolution of 1789 acquires such historical significance with each succeeding year of post-war history, that we shall give here some idea of this revolution as they saw it in the early forties of last century, a view which has been at last accepted by official French historians of today.
For Marx and Engels the basic division of society was into classes, groups of people who were distinguished from other groups by the fact that they earned their living and lived in a common way and therefore had common needs, aspirations and ideas. These classes in the France of 1789 were the working masses, the landed aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie (peasants in the country, small masters and clerical employees in the towns). The outstanding feature of pre-revolutionary France was the breakdown of peasant economy, the basis of the whole structure. The peasants, still bound by the laws of serfdom, could not secure enough food. France suffered from chronic famine and the increasing dislocation of the finances and administration of the State. Nothing could improve the plight of the millions in the countryside and regenerate the country but the release of the peasantry from the feudal laws. But the State-power in France was held by the monarchy which, though it had deprived the feudal aristocracy of political power, yet did not have, or at least believed that it could not have, any support in the country except from the aristocracy and the land-owning clergy. The State-power, as always, sought to maintain the existing regime, with its anarchic economic conditions in the countryside, and its privileged castes, corporations, and other social and political anachronisms. Within the State, however, had developed in the course of the centuries a new class, the French bourgeoisie. The French bourgeoisie was the richest class in France; its wealth, created in trade and industry, was already greater than that of the aristocracy. The bourgeois had the experience and education which is acquired by those who organise and administer industrial and commercial wealth, and it had power over those large sections of the population whose livelihood was dependent upon them. Great as was their wealth and power they could see possibilities greater still. But for this, their first need was the creation of a free market for the increased distribution of their goods. This free market was hampered on all sides by the feudal organisation of France into tariff-surrounded provinces, the chronic disorder of production in the countryside, the incapacity of the peasant to feed himself, far less to buy, the parasitism of the aristocracy and clergy, whose extortions burdened the peasant and were wasted in luxurious and unproductive consumption. The bourgeois wanted to reorganise the State in accordance with the necessities of their industrial and commercial power, in which they justly saw the present, and still more the future, strength of the country. They had a model before them — England, where Cromwell had broken the feudal State-power a century before. In addition, their pride suffered from the insults to their dignity and the restrictions on their social and political activities, which the long tradition of the feudal State-power imposed upon all who were not members of the nobility or the clergy. These were the basic elements of a revolutionary change in society. On the one hand the recurrent break-down in production and the bankruptcy of the State-power; on the other a new class which, growing up within the old society, had already reached the stage when it was fully able to embark upon the business of freeing the productive forces from the old social and political fetters.
This struggle of economic forces for their full expansion was translated, as always, into a political struggle, the struggle for control of the State-power without which it is quite impossible to transform the organisation of society. It took, as always, a long and bloody revolution to accomplish this necessary change. This struggle against the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie quite genuinely inflated into the doctrines of the rights of man, only to recoil violently when the masses interpreted mankind to mean all men. The great bourgeoisie who began the agitation grew frightened at the revolutionary vigour and energy of the petty-bourgeoisie which they had unwittingly unloosed; they became counterrevolutionary and were swept away by more mobile sections of their own class, driven by the pressure of ever broader and broader groups of people seeking to widen the economic and political formulae of the revolution so as to include themselves. It was the petty-bourgeoisie of the towns and the country who carried the revolution to its conclusion. Nor did they in their turn fail to crush the Paris masses, feeling their way to Communism a century before their time. The peasant having got his land came to a dead stop, and isolated the revolution in the towns. Liberty, equality and fraternity appeared to end in the Napoleonic dictatorship. But by the time Napoleon became Emperor the destruction of feudalism, the main business of the revolution, had been accomplished, and to this day France has never known a single famine. Napoleon instituted a modern system of legislation, which gave the French bourgeoisie full opportunity to develop the resources of the country. The irritating and hampering privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy were swept away. Careers were now open to those who had talent. However much Napoleon might disguise his bureaucracy as princes, dukes and counts, the outworn paraphernalia of the old feudal system, the revolution had accomplished its purpose. Louis XVIII might be restored to the throne by reactionary Europe in 1815, his nobles might mulct the treasury of millions, but the ancien régime was dead. No power on earth could restore it, for it had been replaced by an economic system and a social organisation that were vastly superior to the old. It is in that sense and that sense only that a new society is finally and irrevocably victorious. And whenever a Socialist society is established in the world its armies might conceivably (through act of God) be defeated by hostile powers, but the restoration of Capitalism is impossible.
The Economic Impossibility of a National Socialism
Even before the revolutions of 1848 Marx and Engels had foretold a similar inevitable breakdown in the economic system of Capitalism. They based their prediction on the periodic recurrence of commercial crises, due to the ownership by the bourgeoisie of the means of production. In these crises
The productive forces at the disposal of the community no longer serve to foster bourgeois property relations. Having grown too powerful for these relations, they are hampered thereby; and when they overcome the obstacle, they spread disorder throughout bourgeois society and endanger the very existence of bourgeois property. The bourgeois system is no longer able to cope with the abundance of the wealth it creates. How does the bourgeoisie overcome these crises? On the one hand by the compulsory annihilation of a quantity of the productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of old ones. With what results? The results are that the way is paved for more wide-spread and more disastrous crises and that the capacity for averting such crises is lessened.
Bourgeois economists, having sneered at this analysis for over eighty years, have been frantically trying, since 1929, to find some more consoling explanation for the present encircling crisis which has apparently eased its coils for a moment, only (as the bourgeois economists themselves admit) in preparation for a still more merciless grip.
But the breakdown of Capitalism did not mean that Capitalism would shake at the knees and collapse of itself, any more than feudalism collapsed of itself. The economic disorder would be translated, as always, into political struggles and be resolved by the revolutionary victory of a new class.
The other element for the revolution was therefore a new class which, suffering intolerably from the difficulties created by the chaos in production, would be driven to seize the State-power and create the conditions for the new Socialist society, in the same way as the bourgeoisie had taken over the State-power and created the political conditions for the new Capitalist regime. This class Marx and Engels found in the proletariat. And as the bourgeoisie within feudal society had been consolidated and disciplined by the direction and organisation of wealth, in the same way the proletariat, organised in factories by the development of the Capitalist system of production, disciplined by the increasing discipline of large-scale Capitalist organisation, would be forced to combine industrially and ultimately politically by the increasing pressure upon them of the bourgeois system of production protected by the bourgeois State. In this way, and in this way only, could they find themselves fitted to assume the direction of affairs and to initiate the new society. And in the same way as bourgeois assumption of State-power had been caused ultimately by the breakdown, and resulted in the liquidation, of feudal property relations, so the proletarian assumption of State-power would be caused by and would result in the liquidation of bourgeois property relations. It was here, however, in the liquidation of bourgeois property that Marx and Engels saw the profound difference between all previous revolutionary changes in society and the change from Capitalism to Socialism. For whereas all previous revolutionary changes had merely substituted one ruling class for another, they claimed for this change that it would ultimately result in the abolition of all classes and the establishment of a society without exploitation over the whole of the world. On this important aspect of Marxist theory a lamentable confusion exists, not only in liberal bourgeois thought (which is not important, except so far as it misleads the workers), but also throughout the working-class movement, a confusion deliberately created by the rulers of the Soviet Union, the ideological leaders of the Third International. An understanding of this elementary piece of Marxism would riddle the delusion that there is no exploitation of man by man in Russia today. For to Marx and Engels the division of society into exploiters and exploited was not due to wickedness.
The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labour only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labour, arises a class freed from directly productive labour, which looks after the general affairs of society; the direction of labour, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. It does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working-class, from turning their social leadership into an intensified exploitation of the masses.
But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution, at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development.
For Marx and Engels, collective ownership did not mean Socialism. Everything depended on the development of the productive forces which this collective ownership would make possible; and even in the world of 1848 the productive forces necessary for such a development were already international. As they wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
By the exploitation of the world market, the bourgeoisie has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every land. To the despair of the reactionaries, it has deprived industry of its national foundation. Of the old-established national industries, some have already been destroyed and others are day by day undergoing destruction. They are dislodged by now industries, whose introduction is becoming a matter of life and death for all civilised nations: by industries which no longer depend upon the homeland for their raw materials, but draw these from the remotest spots; and by industries whose products are consumed, not only in the country of manufacture, but the wide world over. Instead of the old wants, satisfied by the products of native industry, new wants appear, wants which can only be satisfied by the products of distant lands and unfamiliar climes. The old local and national self-sufficiency and isolation are replaced by a system of universal intercourse, of all-round interdependence of the nations. ...
By rapidly improving the means of production and by enormously facilitating communication, the bourgeoisie drags all the nations, even the most barbarian, into the orbit of civilisation. ... Moreover, just as it has made the country dependent on the town, so it has made the barbarian and semi-barbarian nations dependent upon the civilised nations, the peasant peoples upon the industrial peoples, the East upon the West.
In this atmosphere nationalism could not breathe.
It was the all-round interdependence of Capitalist production which was always the basis of the thought of Marx and Engels. They did not proclaim the international Socialist revolution on the humanitarian principle of the more the merrier. With them it was sheer economic necessity. For ultimately, without the collective ownership of these means of production, it would be impossible to have that abundance of products without which the natural division of society into exploiters and exploited would remain. For thousands of years educated men had solaced themselves with dreams of a Communist society, but the realistic conceptions of scientific Socialism could only arise when the international forces of production had made possible the abundance of commodities. For Marx and Engels, therefore, basing their whole structure on the economic interdependence of the modern world and the consequent political ties, the mere idea of a national Socialism would have been a pernicious absurdity, to be driven out of Socialist ideology with whips and scorpions back into its natural home, the camp of the radical petty-bourgeoisie. "Proletarians of all lands, unite" was no idealistic slogan, but the political expression of economic need. They would not have raised it otherwise.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "World Revolution, 1917–1936"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations xiEditor's Note xiii
Introduction / Christian Høgsbjerg 1
World Revolution, 1917-1936
Preface 63
Introductory 65
1. Marxism 75
2. The Forerunners of the Third International 89
3. The War and the Russian Revolution 114
4. The Failure of the World Revolution and the Foundation of the International 135
5. Lenin and Socialism 155
6. Stalin and Socialism 174
7. Stalin Kills the 1923 Revolution 192
8. The Kulak and the British General Council 222
9. Stalin Rules the Chinese Revolution 243
10. The Platform and the Five-Year Plan 276
11. Industry and the Plan 294
12. "After Hitler, Our Turn" 306
13. The Great Retreat 349
14. The Revolution Abandoned 361
15. A Fourth International the Only Hope 387
Appendix on Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Soviet Communism 401
Notes 407
Reviews of World Revolution
Selected Reviews of the Original British Edition
"The Rise and Fall of the Communist International: James's New Book Reviewed by Fenner Brockway in New Leader 425
Reply from C. L. R. James 429
"Du Côté de Chez Trotsky," in New Statesman, by Raymond Postgate 430
"Lunacy or Logic? Two Views of One Book," in Controversy 432
"Communist" by J. R. Campbell 432
"Trotskyist" by Harry Wicks 434
"The Retreat of Moscow," in The Plebs, by Rowland Hill 455
"World Revolution," in International Affairs, by E. H. Carr 458
"Communism in Theory and Practice," in The Advertiser (Adelaide) 460
"The Third International," in Sydney Morning Herald 461
Selected Reviews of the Original American Edition
"No Place for Communists," in the Saturday Review, by Eugene Lyons 463
"History of the CI," in New International by Joseph Carter [Joseph Friedman] 465
"World Revolution," in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, by Harry N. Howard 469
Appendixes
Appendix A. C. L. R. James, Introduction to Red Spanish Notebook: The First Six Months of the Revolution and Civil War by Mary Low and Juan Breá [1937] 471
Appendix B. C. L. R. James, "Report on Activities in the Provinces" [1938] 473
Appendix C. Extracts from the Discussions between C. L. R. James and Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico [April 1939] 490
Index 507
What People are Saying About This
"This incisive and wide-ranging work by the Trinidadian Marxist, C. L. R. James, was one of the first analyses of the rise of Stalin’s tyranny and the subordination of the needs of the international Communist movement to the needs of the Soviet state. Christian Høgsbjerg provides a marvelous introduction to James’s life and to the political context in which he wrote this remarkable work."
“Published in 1937, close to the ‘Midnight in the Century’ when Hitler and Stalin dominated global politics, C. L. R. James’s World Revolution affirms the actuality of Marxism even as it confronts the degeneration of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In telling the story of the advance and retreat of the great revolutionary wave at the end of the First World War, James displays his qualities as a theorist, historian, and writer. This new edition includes an invaluable introduction by Christian Høgsbjerg that sets World Revolution in its place in the politics of the British left in the 1930s and in James’s own rich intellectual development.”