Book Reviews

[p077] Book Reviews owners’ pocket. The strongest ex- ponent of this form of company unionism was Mabon (William Abraham), boss of the Cambrian Miners’ Association in the Rhondda, Liberal MP for the area from 1885. The Mabon approach to the owners —industrial harmony—stemmed not only from the Liberal position shared with many owners but also from shared religious non-conform- ity which reinforced the belief in social and industrial peace, respect for the ordained divisions between master and man. From 1889, with the formation nationally of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, there was mounting rank-and-file opposition to the sliding scale system in South Wales. The great strength of the MFGB lay in its complete rejection of the sliding scale, its demand for a living wage as the basis for all wage agree- ments and its policy of national strike action in defence of consti- tuent unions. The contradiction at the heart of the MFGB was the fact that its leadership was mainly in the hands of Liberals, notably the formidable Ben Pickard of York- shire. For these leaders there was no discrepancy between efficient trade unionism and Liberalism. Such trade unionism was, for them, one of the means for extracting conces- sions from capitalism; the other was the Liberal Party. They were not therefore committed in any way to challenging the capitalist system as such. In fact, once the MFGB had consolidated itself after the bitter Midlands strike in 1893, its leaders formed increasingly close ties with the coalowners through the system of collective bargaining set up to replace the sliding scale, the Conciliation Board. It was in this way that a bureaucracy based on the Liberal attitudes of the MFGB leaders and their peaceful relations with the owners began to emerge during the 1890s. Rise of the MFGB in South Wales and the 1898 lock-out In South Wales a somewhat similar process occurred. The for- mation of the MFGB stimulated an increasing number of miners to re- ject ‘Mabonism’ and ‘to demand the formation of a militant, fighting union. Essentially this meant out- right opposition to everything Mabon stood for, including the ideology of Liberalism and non-conformity. It was, in fact, during the bitter struggle to break the sliding scale in the 1890s and to defeat Mabon and his associates that the deep dis- trust of the pro-Liberal union leaders was evolved. The fight to break the sliding scale was pro- longed and intense and, most im- portant, was fought almost entirely through the initiative and militancy of the rank-and-file miners. The first encounter came in 1893 with a mas- sive unofficial strike by the Rhondda hauliers against the sliding scale. Its effect was immense. Miners of all grades came out in many valleys in defiance of the pleadings of Mabon and other leaders of the Sliding Scale Associations; in fact, one of the main features of the strike was the identity of outlook _between the owners and these lead- ers against the strikers. Only in backward areas was there rank- and-file opposition to the move- ment. At Ebbw Vale, for example, owners armed and paid their em- ployees to attack and beat up the groups of strikers who were marching from valley to valley call- ing out the miners. The defeat of the hauliers was only episodic. The growth of support for the MFGB policies continued. Across the 1890s membership of the MFGB developed secretly in many areas in South Wales, spreading from Monmouth- shire where there existed a branch of the MFGB led by William Brace and Tom Richards. In the more distinctly Welsh areas where ‘Mabonism’ still had some hold membership was an_ undercover affair. In the Rhondda, rank-and-file militants belonged openly to Mabon’s union, secretly to the MFGB. To avoid victimization by owners and Mabon, they were forced to work as a disciplined faction holding meetings under cover of darkness on remote mountainsides. The de- cisive turning-point came with the lock-out of 1898. The growth of MFGB influence was now sufficient to allow the rank-and-file militants 137

[p078] to insist on the breaking of the sliding scale through a_ decisive confrontation with the owners. Mabon and the supporters of the old methods were forced reluctantly to adjust to this mood but this shifting of position was not suffi- cient to appease rank-and-file hos- tility. The fear of .a sell-out to the owners preduced the rank-and-file decision, by large majorities, to withhold all powers of settlement from their negotiators and for the reference of all actions by the leadership to rank-and-file approval. This decision was completely in line with the predominant role played throughout by rank-and-file miners in building the union. The result was the great 1898 lock-out. Involving over 100,000 miners directly, it lasted six months accom- panied by increasing destitution and distress. A participant in the struggle recorded that ‘during this time strike pay was paid to us about six times of ls. or Is. 6d. per per- son to members of the Cambrian Association’ (Mabon’s union). It was in the face of sheer starvation that the miners were forced back with- out at this point breaking the slid- ing scale; but the six months’ sacri- fice was not wasted. The immediate result of the struggle was the for- mation of the SWMF (South Wales Miners’ Federation) as a member of the MFGB, that is, committed to the ending of the sliding scale and now backed by the strength of the national union. This move in itself meant that the South Wales owners must again be challenged in the near future from a position of much greater strength. To avoid such a conflict in a period of high profits and rapid expansion the owners formally abandoned the scale in 1903. A Conciliation Board on the English model was set up; wages now were not to fluctuate below a guaranteed minimum. Ideological development of the youth The creation of an effective union in South Wales had an immense effect on the workers throughout the coalfield. The means now seemed to exist for decisive oppo- 138 sition to the owners. The pheno- menal growth of the SWMF in its first few years indicated how ripe conditions were for carrying the fight against capitalism in South Wales to a higher level. Starting with 60,000 members in 1898, the union had attracted 127,000 by 1900 out of a total of 132,000 miners in the coalfield. At the same time this spectacular growth was accom- panied by the rapid breakdown of traditional attitudes among the miners. Among the young miners in particular there was a rejection of Liberalism and religious non- conformity which had been so deep- rooted among the miners through- out a large part of the nineteenth century. There was a search for a completely alternative system to capitalism and its religious ideo- logy. In the first place, religious idealism was rejected for a material- . ist outlook as the reality of the conflict with capitalism became in- creasingly clear and understood. A young miner of the period ex- pressed this ideological struggle exactly; ‘ young people were pondering; “Shouldn’t there be some visible influence of spiritual teach- ings in Social and Industrial Life?” The Lord’s Prayer spoke of “Thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven.” What and where are the signs of this? Personally,I was reading Darwin’s Origin of Species and couldn’t square it with Genesis. I could turn to no-one for guidance. The teachers were silent and ig- norant, the preachers considered such ideas as heresy, and so one was left to brood. Slowly the cer- tainty grew that the Church was fallible.’ This sort of experience was widespread and it was in this way that young miners brought up in the religious traditions turned to socialism and revolutionary theories. Noah Ablett and Arthur Horner, for example, both to be leading figures in the origins of the revo- lutionary movement among the miners, were initially training for careers in the chapel when they rejected religion for Marxism. It is important to stress this turning away from religion because it was directly linked to the rapid growth of Socialist influence in South Wales from the turn of the century and the emergence of revolutionary groups basing themselves on Marx- ism. Chapel attendance was in rapid decline from the 1890s and parallel- ing this was the steady _ break- down of support for Liberalism. By the middle 1900s the SWMF was one of the leading areas in the MFGB in forcing the national union to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1908. A conservative leadership But these developments did not occur in any straightforward way. They were the product of ideologi- cal, political and industrial struggle against the established relations with the coalowners, yet the SWMF, while it was seen as a break from these traditions by the mass of the rank and file, continued to be led very largely by representatives of these old traditions. Mabon emerged in 1898 as president of the new union, and while his fellow officials, Brace and Richards, had originally led the fight against ‘Mabonism’, they were no more committed to class-conscious trade unionism than he. While they stood for a more effective form of trade unionism, they saw this wholly in terms of establishing a workable system of collective bargaining procedures with the owners. Like Mabon, they were leading figures in the chapel and active supporters of the Liberal Party; they joined Mabon as Liberal MPs in the 1906 electicn. They - shared these characteristics with the great majority of the members of the SWMF executive and the result was that soon after the for- mation of the union they came to form a tight bureaucracy with close and cordial relations with the owners on the Conciliation Board. This institution served in an ideal way to reinforce the basic opposi- tion of the executive to militant, class-conscious policies. On the Board differences between the two sides could be ironed out through peaceful compromise virtually irres- pective of the feelings of the union membership because of the fact that the district agents of the union, who made up the executive and Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p079] sat on the Board, were unaccount- able to the rank and file through any system of recall or annual election. Concentration of ownership and intensification of exploitation The marked differences between the union leadership and the atti- tudes of the rank and file became increasingly clear throughout the 1900s. The relationship between the officials and owners centrally was in stark contrast to the position of the rank-and-file miners in the dis- tricts. The 1900s were, in fact, a period of mounting attacks by the owners on wages and _ established conditions throughout the coalfield. To offset the cost of labour legis- lation (e.g. the Mines Acts, the Workmen’s Compensation Acts, the miners’ Eight-Hour Day legislation in 1908) and to compensate for the loss of the sliding scale, the owners began a concerted policy of speed- ing up production, cutting costs at the expense of the long-established customs of the miner, generally in- tensifying the rate of exploitation. The lead in this was taken by the great combines that began to emerge in the coalfield in this period, notable the Cambrian Com- bine of D. A. Thomas. These com- bines represented the concentration of ownership of what had hitherto been a multitude of individually owned collieries. They permitted the introduction of ‘scientific’ mana- gerial techniques for the systematic intensification of exploitation. Attacks on conditions centred on the question of ‘abnormal places’, i.e. those places where physical conditions in the colliery prevented a miner on piecework from earn- ing a living wage. Hitherto coal- field custom had been for owners ‘to pay ‘consideration’ money to make up wages; now the attack on conditions focussed on the abo- lition of this custom. The problem of abnormal places was common to all coalfields in Britain; in South Wales it was rendered particularly acute by the extremely difficult con- ditions of production. At the same time, the effect of this attack was made all the more serious by the Book Reviews growing inflation of the 1900s which reduced real wages at the very time when these wages were being threatened by the policy of the owners. The result in South Wales was rapidly mounting rank-and-file unrest and militancy which was to explode in the Cambrian Combine strike of 1910. Moreover, while the conditions for a bitter conflict be- tween the owners and the rank and file were maturing, the leadership of the SWMF showed itself unable and unwilling to resist the owners’ attacks. Despite the rank-and-file unrest expressed via successive con- ferences, the SWMF leaders would do nothing to prejudice the smooth working of the Conciliation Board system to which they were so de- voted. When a new wage agree- ment was signed in 1910 it did nothing to solve the now desperate question of abnormal places. The conflict in the Cambrian coalfield It was this situation which was the basis for the Cambrian Com- bine strike. What the strike repre- sented was a direct repudiation of the methods of the SWMF bureau- cracy. It was an attempt by the 12,000 workers of the Combine to force a settlement of the abnormal places question by direct action. Rejecting the whole procedure of the Conciliation Board system, the strikers aimed at forcing from the management payment of piece-rates that would guarantee a living wage whatever the conditions at the coal- face. More than this; the strike was linked directly to the general prob- lems of miners throughout the coal- field. During 1910 there had been mounting rank-and-file attacks on the SWMF bureaucracy and _ its whole policy towards the owners. The conciliation system was con- demned as a method of class co- operation and the demand grew for the extraction from the owners cf a living wage by militant union action. It was not the role of the union to subordinate itself to the economic laws governing the coal industry but to win a decent stan- dard of living for its members. It was this mood which provided the basis for the extensich of the Cam- brian Combine strike into a general demand for a minimum living wage and which provided the conditions for the partially successful minimum wage strike in 1912. Even more sig- nificant was the fact that implied in the mood of the rank and file was the demand for the destruction of capitalism in the mining industry and its control by the mineworkers. It was not coincidental that the nationalization of the mines emerged as a central part of the policy cf the MFGB after the 1912 strike. The great Cambrian strike It was the Cambrian strike, then, which served to bring to a head the growing radicalization among rank-and-file miners. In this con- text it needs noting that the strike was no isolated affair; elsewhere in the coalfield unofficial strikes occurred at the same time on the question of abnormal places, notably in the Aberdare Valley where the struggle which developed simultane- ously with that in the Rhondda was, if anything, even more bitter. That the strikes were the culmination of years of intense frustration ex- pressed almost as much against the bureaucrats in the leadership of the SWMF as the coalowners was” shown by the character of the struggle and the position adopted towards it both by the state and the union leadership, nationally and in South Wales. In the Rhondda the Cambrian Combine strike was characterized by the mobilization of the whole mining community against the Combine, the police and troops dispatched by Churchill, and the union negotiators who attempted throughout to negotiate a compro- mise settlement which rested, in fact, purely on belief in the goodwill of the Combine manage- ment. The pitting of the whole mining community against these forces was evident from the start of the strike in November 1910. The situaticn was one which must lead to an inevitable and bitter clash. With the approach of winter, and the dependence of the strikers on 139

[p080] their 10s. per week strike pay, it was clear that success depended on the total immobilization of the Combine. So long as the pumping and ventilation equipment func- tioned and the collieries could be maintained in a good state of re- pair, the Combine could hold out indefinitely until the strikers were forced back by starvation. Two courses of action thus emerged; the first, to prevent blacklegging by ail workers engaged in maintenance— enginemen, safety officials, etc.—so as to force the Combine to sur- render in the face of breakdown of the pits through flooding and roof falls; the second, to attempt to win the South Wales coalfield and the Miners’ Federation nation- ally to general strike action for a minimum wage for all mineworkers. It was this second course which was the main outcome of the strike, and the lead here came from the syndicalist-dominated Unofficial Re- form Movement. The first course of action was ultimately frustrated by the intervention of the state with police and troops. Initially the strike leadership, the Cambrian Combine Committee, was able to prevent blacklegging by mobilizing the whole working population of the mid-Rhondda. The mass picketing: involved was immensely efficient and impressive. A local newspaper recorded that ‘A vast procession, comprising thousands of workers, marched from one side of the val- ley to the other side at Penygraig. . Prominent in the procession were two men garbed in white shirts bearing the phrase ‘Take warning”. These two men were fur- ther led along with halters round their necks—another significant re- minder to the offenders as to the treatment to which they would render themselves liable.’ The so- called ‘Tonypandy Riots’ were the direct outcome of this determina- tion to halt the collieries com- pletely. While blacklegs were ade- quately disposed of, colliery officials, led by L. Llewellyn, the general manager, had manned the power houses and were maintaining the pumping apparatus. Llewellyn later. made it clear that he and his offi- cials were armed and ready to shoot 140 any intruders. The ‘riots’ proceeded from successive attempts to storm the power houses and rake out the boiler fires. At the Naval and Cam- brian collieries these attempts were initially successful; at the Glamor- gan, Llewellyn and the police suc- cessfully resisted. In all these actions the evidence of the total commit- ment of the whole mining popula- tion against the Combine was over- whelming. As the press noted, ‘A surprising feature of the whole dis- turbance was the part played in it by the women who ... were the ringleaders in many of the assaults on the collieries and exhorted the men to further violence.’ It was at this point that the state intervened, via Churchill, the Home Secretary in the Liberal government. Churchill’s policy was twofold. While on the one hand he and the ruling class as a whole were aware of the radically new mood in the working class repre- sented by the strike—its insurrec- tionary character and its tendency to virtual civil war—he was equally aware of the electoral dependence of the Liberal party on Labour sup- port. Direct military repression could shatter the already weakened position of Liberalism. The first-line forces used against the strikers were thus police; while they were backed by troops, the latter were held in reserve and kept as far as possible from direct conflict with the strikers. The police did an effec- tive enough job, however; their savagery in clashes with strikers is well documented, and, backed by the military, they were able to maintain a reign of terror in both the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys during the most critical period of the strikes. Even the ultra-Tory Western Mail, ardently supporting the owners, was shocked at the character of police action. As it recorded of police handling of a demonstration at Aberdare: ‘. . . the police resorted to their truncheons, with which they eventually suc- ceeded in beating back the strikers along the side of the canal, into which nearly a hundred of them were precipitated among the number being women and children who had figured prominently in the riot. The spectacle was now of an alarming nature. From dozens of heads blood flowed profusely and the cries of the women and children were piti- ful beyond description ne It was repression like this that defeated the policy of bringing the collieries to a total halt. The strike. in the Rhondda thus _ inevitably turned into a war of attrition with the odds weighted heavily to the owners. The main factor now, of course, was the isolation of the strikers. The leaders of the SWMF and the MFGB were successful in their attempts to prevent § any general sympathetic action and eventually, against intense rank-and- file resistance, were able to force a purely local settlement on _ the strikers after the conffict had lasted for ten months. Emergence of an alternative leadership What was so momentous about the Cambrian strike, however, was not simply the heroism of the miners involved, but the way a revolu- tionary leadership at rank-and-file level emerged from the _ conflict and began to win support through- out the coalfield, and then the MFGB as a whole, against the union bureaucracy. The alternative leader- ship within the SWMF was based upon the branches of the Plebs League in the Rhondda and adja- cent valleys. This organization had been established in 1909 as a direct result of the strike at Ruskin Col- lege of that year. The whole aim of Ruskin College, then as now, was the training of young trade union- ists for the role of tame trade union bureaucrats through capitalist econo- mics and social theory. It was against this indoctrination that the strike took place, and prominent in it were a number of Welsh miners, notably Noah Ablett and Noah Rees, the latter a leading figure on the Cambrian Combine Committee during the 1910 strike. The strikers demanded training in Marxist theory as a preparation for trade unionists to play a revolution- ary role in the unions with the aim of building a trade union move- ment powerful enough to smash Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p081] capitalism. The strikers broke away from Ruskin, founded the Central Labour College as a trade union educational centre for revolution- ary trade unionists, and formed the Plebs League as a complementary movement which would establish branches in all industrial areas to carry out local educational work on Marxist lines. It was significant that the whole movement was an expression of total opposition to the growing bureaucracy in the Labour movement and its close in- volvement with the state and em- ployers, and it was this point which meant that the branches of the Plebs League in South Wales were in a position from 1909 to provide an effective leadership against the executive of the SWMF. It was members of the Plebs League who played a leading role in the Cam- brian Combine strike in developing the policy of broadening the strike into a general demand for the mini- mum wage, and who mobilized rank-and-file opinion not only into getting this policy officially adopted by the SWMF but in committing the union to a ‘missionary’ cam- paign throughout the other districts of the MFGB into converting the rank and file as a whole to action. This campaign evoked widespread response, so much so. that at national level there was a growing realization among MFGB officials that unless the Federation took up the policy officially they would lose control to the revolutionary move- ment at rank-and-file level. As one official put it, unless they opened negotiations for a minimum wage *, . . there will be a strike, and that strike will be brought about in such a way that the leaders of the Federation will have no command over the men and the men kept in hand .. .’. It was to head off the movement at rank-and-file level that the MFGB in fact took up the question and eventually led the 1912 strike. Critical appraisal of the new leadership: two important points It is necessary to assess critically, however, the nature of the Unoffi- Book Reviews cial Reform Movement in South Wales (i.e. the movement in the SWMF based on the policies of the Plebs League) for the methods of the movement were to determine the character of the revolutionary movement in South Wales and, by example, in the trade unions generally, into the 1920s. The great strength of the URM was the way in which it understood the role of bureaucracy within the trade unions and saw the need. for complete rank-and-file control over officials if the unions were not to become increasingly tied into the employers and the state. It was this demand which featured so prominently in the famous publication of the URM, . The Miners’ Next Step. Despite its Marxist inspiration, the URM was wholly syndicalist in character. Its interpretation of Marxism was of a one-sided nature. The basic argu- ment of the movement (and _ this applied to the Plebs League and Syndicalist movement throughout Britain) was that as_ capitalism moved from an individualistic to a monopolistic form, so the working class, in reaction to this develop- ment, would strengthen and extend the power of its trade union organi- zation. In particular, the formation of Industrial Unions embracing all workers in a given industry would be necessary to confront capitalism cn an equal basis. The process of forming Industrial Unions, it was argued, would inevitably lead to the progressive encroachment of the working class on the power of the capitalists; the profit margin would be whittled away as wages were pushed up; the control of the capi- talists over production would be eroded as hours were shortened and conditions improved. Eventually a point would be reached where the working class, through Industrial Unions, would be able to take complete control by means of the General Strike. Two important points emerge in connection with this theory, as ex- pressed in the Miners’ Next Step: its rejection of political action by the working class and its opposi- tion to revolutionary leadership. To a large extent the rejection of poli- tical action was a direct reaction against the opportunist politics of the Labour Party under Macdonald in the 1900s. What the syndicalists were attempting to do was to de- velop a revolutionary alternative to Lib.-Lab. reformism, but they failed to see that all mass struggles of the wcrking class must assume a directly political form, that in challenging the control of industry such struggles were a direct challenge to the capitalist state upon which the defence of private property re- lations rested. The theory of direct industrial action was, in fact, only possible in a period of vigorous capitalist expansion, when the system, if pressed strcengly enough by militant trade unionism, could afford to make concessions. This situation was reversed in a period of economic crisis and _ capitalist decay. Up to 1921 the methods of the URM could yield results; an immensely powerful organization had been built in some areas, not- ably the Rhondda, by 1920, where- by, for example, the whole 40,000 miners of the valley would strike, as they did, in defence of one victimized comrade. In 1921, how- ever, the bottom dropped out of the boom; the coal industry was particularly severely hit, and, backed by the state, the owners demanded savage cuts in wages. In such con- ditions, purely trade union action was insufficient; the crisis could be resolved only by a struggle for power against the capitalist state. There was no question now of steadily encroaching on the power of the owners. The great miners’ strike of 1921 was a directly poli- tical struggle and revealed that the syndicalist unofficial movements were able to provide no revolution- ary leadership for the working class. The denial of the need for poli- tical action by the working class was logically accompanied by a re- jection of leadership. In their ana- lysis of the causes of bureaucracy in the trade unions, the authors of the Miners’ Next Step had argued that the institution of leadership itself created bureaucracy. The only way of avoiding this was to ensure complete rank-and-file control over the actions of the trade unions. In this way, as the rank and file 141

[p082] automatically came to see the need for Industrial Unionism directed towards the seizure of control in industry, so their outlook would be reflected automatically in the policies of the union. The whole theory of syndicalism was thus de- pendent on the spontaneous actions and moods of the working class. What syndicalism existed for—move- ments like the South Wales URM— was to stimulate rank-and-file mili- tancy, and to work for the asser- tion of democratic control over trade union leadership. This ten- dency of opposition to all leader- ship became deeply rooted in South Wales and in other areas where the South Wales example was imi- tated. While this form of organiza-. tion could serve to get militant policies adopted through ginger group activities in periods of capi- talist expansion, in acute revolution- ary situations, as in 1921, it was completely unable to take effective, concerted action to assert a revolu- tionary leadership. In short, a purely mechanical approach to Marxist theory, a rejection of politics, and an inability to provide revolution- ary leadership were all essential parts of the basic weakness of syn- dicalism. It is worth noting, fur- thermore, that syndicalism, which was essentially the reflection of purely ‘trade union consciousness’, provided the basis for opportunism within the trade ‘union movement. It was quite possible, given the loose, untheoretical character of the movement, for trade union careerists to associate with the movement, exploit the mood of the working class through left talk, and to use the movement as a basis for gaining high trade union posi- tions. The clearest case in this respect was Frank Hodges, closely associated with the URM in South Wales before 1914. It was un- doubtedly his playing up of his association with the left wing of the SWMF, and the question of workers’ control, that gained him the secretaryship of the MFGB in 1918. From there his career went rapidly to the right, aiming at an eventual Cabinet position in a future Labour government. From 1921, moreover, Hodges became the darl- ing of the coalowners. An important outcome It would, however, be wrong to see the syndicalism of the South Wales miners, as it evolved _ be- tween 1909 and 1914, purely in terms of its weaknesses. Essentially, it represented a genuine attempt to find a way to a consistently revo- lutionary position, a way out of the opportunism of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracies. The use made of the movement by people like Hodges did not alter the fact that through the activities of the URM many hundreds of rank-and- file miners in South Wales were won to a revolutionary position. It was these miners who made up the basis of the Communist Party when it. was formed in 1920-1921 and who began the process of learning from the mistakes of the URM the need for revolutionary politics in the trade unions. The fact that the syndicalist tendency in South Wales was never fully over- come was due wholly to the impact of Stalinism on the CP from 1925. As the CP leadership moved to an anti-revolutionary position by the 1930s, so it became necessary to encourage a purely trade union con- sciousness among its industrial mili- tants. In this work of re-inforcing the syndicalist tradition in South Wales and subordinating it to the opportunism of the policies of the CP, Arthur Horner, one-time leader in the URM, played a major part. It is by assimilating the lessons of the experience of the South Wales miners, understanding the conditions which gave rise to it, the reasons for its failures and the way it was eventually exploited by Stalinism that industrial militants today can re-inforce their theoretical under- standing of the vital need for leadership by a revolutionary party in the unions. M. Woodhouse Two pamphlets by Leon Trotsky Class & Art Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Speech by Trotsky during discussion, May 9, 1924, at a meeting called by the Press Depart- ment of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. Price: Two shillings The Intelligentsia and Socialism A review written for the St. Petersburg review Sovremenny Mir in 1910, of Der Sozialismus und die Intellektuellen, by Max Adler published in Vienna in the Price: One shilling same year. NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD. 186a CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON SW4 ——— ‘142 Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p083] Centrist architect of defeat OTTO BAUER ET LA REVOLUTION Textes presentés et annotés par Yvon Bourdet Editions et Documentation Internationales, Paris, 1968. LITTLE IS KNOWN about Bauer in this country; his works have not been translated and no biography of him exists. Yet for a whole period he was one of the leading ‘figures of European Social Demo- cracy, representing a particular centrist trend described as Austro- Marxism. Starting out among the circle of Viennese intellectuals who met around the cafe tables in the years before 1914, referred to scathingly by Trotsky in his auto- biography, it defined itself more clearly after the First World War as part of the left-wing of Social Democracy. Bauer was a man of considerable talents and literary ability who had already established a reputation as a theorist before the First World War, notably by his writing on the nationality question which came in for criticism in a once frequently quoted pamphlet by Stalin. After the war, which he ended as a priso- ner in Russia and a friend and sympathizer of the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks, he returned to become a minister in the govern- ment of the newly-established Austrian republic created out of the ruins of the multinational Hapsburg Empire. The first problem for the biographer of Bauer, then, is why the Socialists, who had the backing of the mass of the urban working class, did not take power. Bauer’s own answer is contained in the first long extract in this volume from a work published in 1919. According to this, while it would have been possible to take power, there would have quickly fol- lowed a victorious counter-revolu- tion backed by the Western powers. However, in view of the situation which prevailed throughout Central Europe and the level of class struggle in Britain and France, this claim is far from convincing. Bauer’s writing at this period reads very Book Reviews Price 18.10 francs much like an elaborate justification for not having made the attempt to overthrow bourgeois rule in Austria. Ww Despite Austria’s post-war econo- mic difficulties, during the boom of the 1920s the Socialists, entrenched in the cities, were able to carry out a programme of social welfare which was the admiration of reform- ists everywhere. In city planning, housing, medical services, child care, education, this has seldom been attained, far less improved upon, in the so-called Welfare States of the post-Second World War period. This policy was based upon a theory of gradual reform and ‘slow revolution’ to be attained through parliament. Bauer calculated that if the swing to the left continued, at the next election or the one after that the party would have a Majority, have ‘power’. He by no means neglected the danger of an attempt by the bourgeoisie to launch a counter-revolution in de- fiance of its own legality. In fact the Austrian socialists had an armed defence corps, the Schutzbund, to counter just such an_ eventuality. Bauer and the other party leaders claimed to be Marxists and they did not ignore the fact that there were times when the class struggle re- quired the resort to illegality and viclence and the danger of civil war. But they hoped to avoid such dangers by policies which, in fact, only increased them. w Bauer’s writings in the 1920s are really an exercise in_ scholastic Marxism of the sort which had pre- vailed in the Second International before 1914 but from which a large part of the movement had subse- quently retreated. It was accom- panied by an unwillingness to give firm leadership when the situation demanded it. Thus, after 1919, when Bauer and his friends helped to establish the bourgeois republic, came 1927 when they held back a working class ready for struggle. When a clash between members of the Schutzbund and some fascists led to the death of two socialists whose assailants were acquitted by the courts this precipitated a national crisis. The indignation of the working class was tremendous and demonstrations and _ strikes broke out. The story is told that when the electric power workers arrived to see the socialist party leaders about shutting down power supplies as a signal for a general strike the latter avoided the meet- ing by hastily taking the lift down to the side exit. Whether this is true or not, Bauer decided once again that the time was not ripe to make a bid for power. By losing their opportunity once again the Austrian socialists merely encouraged their opponents. The next few years saw the rise of the right-wing Heimwehr as a counter- force to the Schutzbund and a shift to the right in the government which enabled Dolfuss to assume _ dicta- torial powers in March 1933. He then struck at working-class rights and liberties, outlawed the Schutz- bund and prohibited the party press. Even so, the rising in February 1934 came about almost by acci- dent, without real preparation, and brought the workers into collision with the army under the worst pos- sible conditions. The working class was now weakened by unemploy- ment resulting from the depression, the Nazis had already taken power in Germany and the vacillations and missed opportunities of the pre- vious years had undermined its morale. After a few days of heroic but hopeless struggle the workers of Vienna were shelled into sub- mission and Bauer had to flee the country. At the same time the final bankruptcy of Austro-Marxism was revealed. 143

[p084] As the extracts from Bauer’s writings show, perhaps despite the compiler’s intention, he was essen- tially a scholastic Marxist. He em- phasized objective forces in social development and neglected the im- portance of subjective factors. Thus he explained the absence of revo- lution in the Western countries from the nature of the working class. For example, he writes, ‘It was not the “treason” of a few leaders, but the level of consciousness of the masses themselves from which these leaders had come and to which they easily responded, which ex- plains the failure of the great mass parties’. By arguments of this sort Bauer exculpates himself and the other leaders of European social demccracy. Naturally he opposes the thesis of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and underplays the signifi- cance of leadership and organiza- tion. As an objectivist, he comes near to arguing that the defeat of the revolution in Germany was in- evitable and that the Revolution in Russia only succeeded because the workers were more revolution- ary by nature. In Austria he pinned his hopes on a ‘slow revolution’ brought about by the parliamentary road. He re- cognized that there were times when the class struggle required resort to illegality and violence. He hoped, however, to confine violence to a response to that of the bourgeoisie to be used asa last resort should the bourgeoisie infringe its own legality. Thus, despite the Schutzbund, Aus- trian socialism was essentially re- formist. It adopted a defensive stance which left the initiative per- manently in the hands of the class enemy; it imposed on itself rules which had no counterpart in the opposing camp. When it suited the bourgeoisie to stamp on the wor- kers’ liberties it did so; when it sent the artillery against the workers’ flats in Vienna in 1934 it displayed 144 no scruples about the morality of violence in politics. Bauer’s policy was thus a stand- ing contradiction which ended in disaster. The circumstances of Austria in the 1920s and 1930s permitted no middle way: a violent resolution of the class conflict was inevitable. Bauer’s arguments, plus the existence of the Schutzbund, led workers to believe that the Socialist Party meant business and there was never much room for a Communist Party. In fact the class was not prepared for struggle, des- pite the talk about the possible need for violence to meet a counter- revolutionary coup. The party never took the initiative and was finally out-manoeuvred and crushed. w If the editor of this volume thinks that there is much to be learned, except in a negative sense, from a study of Bauer’s writings and poli- tical career, he is mistaken. On major questions Bauer made colos- sal mistakes. For example, he deni- grated the Bolsheviks and claimed, like his Menshevik friends, that only a bourgeois revolution was possible in Russia. Yet in Austria, in 1919, his party enabled the bourgeoisie to conserve power. While being a stringent critic of the Soviet Union in Lenin’s day, he later discovered that Stalinism was necessary and that socialism was being built by its methods. After 1934, as a disappointed and defeated political exile by no means devoid of responsibility for his fate and that of the Austrian working class, Bauer made some agonising re-appraisals of his position. He had always avoided the platitudes of the right-wing of Social Democracy and claimed to be a Marxist. In exile he shifted further to the left, mak- ing some admissions about the weaknesses of the reformist posi- . tion. But methodologically his posi- tion has not changed. He is still seeking in objective conditions rather than in the tactics and stra- tegy of the leadership the explana- tion for the catastrophe which befell the working class in one country after another in the 1930s. Now he finds the key in an under- estimation of the capacity for re- sistance of the bourgeoisie. He chides the reformists for having be- come an essential part of the bour- geois social order and thus being unable to combat fascism when the economic crisis struck. He re- vises his former position on the Soviet Union and Communism and becomes a supporter of the Popular Front. Ww In short, Bauer failed to learn the essential lessons from his experi- ences. He still conserved a faith in the virtues of parliamentary democracy and thus in the willing- ness of the bourgeoisie to respect its own legality when its privileges were at risk. He tried to reconcile the obvious need for a revolution- ary struggle in the countries which had gone fascist with the allegedly ethical virtues of reformism. Bauer died in 1938, an unhappy exile in France, with his contradictions un- resolved. This attempt by Bourdet to resurrect him through his writ- ings is a sign of the times. As a consummate centrist, Bauer’s ideas will no doubt find an echo today in certain revisionist and New Left circles. His seeming rejection of reformism is coupled with a per- manent hostility to revolutionary leadership. The jangling of revolu- tionary-sounding theories with the absence of any _ perspective of struggle or concept of leadership is very much to the liking of some people and they are welcome to any consolation which a _ perusal _ of Bauer’s writings may give them. T.K. Fourth International, Winter 1968/1969

[p085] LIMITED PUBLICATIONS PARK NEW Clapham Street, High 186A London, S.W.4 7029 MACaulay List Book Free Write for Essential Marxist Reading Through what stage are we passing? This is the text of a speech made by L. D. Trotsky to the 5th All-Union Congress of Medical and Veterinary Workers in the summer of 1924. Of particular interest to our readers in view of the specific references to Britain and metropolitan Europe. Price : Two shillings Where is Britain Going? Most timely reading for British socialists, this book places the development of British politics in correct historic perspective. Here Trotsky, writing on the eve of the General Strike of 1926, employs his great revolutionary experience to analyse and explain the ideological and moral concepts of the ruling classes and their servants in the Labour bureaucracy. = ; 136 pages, 7/6 Delia) GUL The Draft Programme of the Communist International by Leon Trotsky This is part of the author’s criticism of the draft programme submitted by the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International to the 6th Congress of the Comintern which was held in July 1928. The manuscript of that criticism was writien by Trotsky during his exile in Alma-Ata (Central Asia). It was sent to the Congress in Moscow together with an appeal for reinstatement into the party from which he had been expelled a few months before by the Stalinist faction in 1927. Stalin and his supporters had invented the theory of ‘Socialism in one country’, which was made party policy in 1925 and converted into an article of faith to be defended by the world institutions of Stalinism. It is this theory which Trotsky criticises in these pages. 64 pages, 1/- This document is a landmark in the developrient of 20th century Marxism. It sums up the experience of an entire period of struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy. This Platform also represents the highest point in the fortunes of the Joint Opposition (Trotskyist-Zinovievite) to Stalin. It is the programme of the last of the Bolshevik-Leninists who insisted that they remained communists despite all the per- secution, jailings, violence and slander inflicted on them. But this document also represents a watershed—the end of one phase and the beginning of another—in the evolution of Trotskyist politics. 112 pages, 5/- Left Opposition, This is the basic programmatic document of the world th ao movement founded by Leon Trotsky and his comrades. By The death agony of 1938 the revolutionary Marxists had found it necessary to capitalism te lay the foundations of the Fourth International in order to . restore working-class leadership after the defeats prepared by and the @ee~es the Stalinist bureaucracy in control of the Third (Communist) ” International. The defeat of the German Revolution in tasks of the 1923, of the British General Strike in 1926, and of the ; Chinese Revolution in 1927, followed by Hitler's victory over HMGeluninig =the German working class in 1933, finally ruled out the perspective of transforming the Communist International by internal opposition. 60 pages, 1/- Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU) r.o. 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

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