My Recollections of Lenin, by Klara Zetkin

[p033] My Recollections of Lenin by Klara Zetkin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. London: Central Books, 2s. 6d.) Wings, A Play in Four Acts, by Alexander Korneichuk (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. London: Central Books, 1s.) AT THE Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party the historian Pankratova spoke out boldly against the muti- lation and alteration of books about Party history, not ex- cluding the works of Lenin himself, which had taken place under Stalin. Unfortunately, the new English version of Klara Zetkin’s famous collection of interviews with Lenin, which recently arrived in this country from the USSR, shows that the practices condemned. by Pankratova still go on. Comparison of the new version with the one well-known 93 in this country and America, where it was published in 1929 and 1934, reveals a number of cuts. Thus the passage in which Lenin acknowledges that Radek’s advice against the march on Warsaw had proved correct has been omitted. Lenin’s refer- ences to Thalheimer as ‘a good and well-informed theoreti- cian’ and to Bela Kun as ‘an excellent revolutionary’ are no longer to be found. Lenin is not now permitted to ask Zetkin, in the course of his chiding of her for some ill-considered political action: ‘Why didn’t you write to Zinoviev?’ During the famous conversation on sex-problems, Lenin followed up one of his remarks by advising Zetkin to ‘speak to comrade Lilina about it. She has had much experience in her work in educational institutions of various kinds, and you know she is a thorough communist and entirely unprejudiced’? The Foreign Languages Publishing House editor does not allow Lenin to give such advice in his edition, presumably because Lilina was Zinoviev’s wife. ... In two places the text has not been merely cut but ‘im- proved’. Where Zetkin wrote of the battle of Perekop being won by the Red troops ‘under Comrade Pyatakov’s brilliant

[p034] and bold leadership’, it now turns out that what she really meant to write was: ‘led by the gallant commander Frunze’. And where Zetkin imagined the Russian peasants during the Civil War, threatened by the return of the landlords with the White Armies, saying: ‘Little Father Lenin will save us, and Trotsky with his Red Army’, she now appears as putting these less embarrassing words into their innocent mouths: ‘Ilyich and the Bolsheviks together with the Red Army men will come to our rescue’. These changes may be explained by concern to remove all mention, or at least all favourable mention, of those whom Stalin transformed into ‘unpersons’ during his years of dictatorship. A more subtle explanation must be sought, how- ever, for the excision of this passage from one of Lenin’s soliloquies: ‘Do you think that the Bolshevik Party, which you so admire, was ready and finished at one blow? Even friends have sometimes done unwise things’. A particularly cynical flavour is imparted to this arbitrary handling of a famous Marxist book by the retention of the foreword written by Krupskaya, with its ending: ‘It is im- portant, essential for us to know what Klara Zetkin, who loved Lenin so dearly, had to say about him’. * * : * . Krupskaya died in 1939, and Zetkin in 1933, but Kornei- chuk is still alive, and so presumably consented to the changes made in the text of his play ‘Wings’ as it is now at last pre- sented to English readers. Though the date ‘1954’ stands at the end of the play it differs in a number of ‘places from the work which caused such a sensation when it first -appeared in ‘Novy Mir’ for November 1954, and when performed on the stage shortly afterwards Not only have the historic lines, referring to the security police: ‘How much evil and pain, how many tears, were brought upon people by the mistrust that that gang sowed amongst us under the guise of vigilance! They blinded our eyes and we believed them—how we believed them!’ now be- come: ‘How much evil, pain, and how many tears has lack of faith brought upon people!’ We also look in vain for the exchange between the new party secretary and the old bully from whom he is taking over, in which the former snaps: ‘There are no “generals” in the party’, as well as the passage where the bully, taking up a ‘you-can’t-do-this-to-me’ line, adds: ‘Me, a member of the Central Committee!’ In one place a curious insertion has been made, the point of it being apparently to enable someone to say that ‘there will be no equalization under complete communism’; in an- other such insertion, a character points out that human nature rather than the system is at the root of the abuses being ex- posed—“‘it wasn’t the administration that turned you into officials and bureaucrats. You spoiled yourselves...’ LEONARD HUSSEY The Birth of Marxism The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique, by K. Marx and F. Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 7s. 6d.) AT LONG LAST we have a passable translation of the whole of this seminal work of scientific socialism. The Holy Family was the first fruit of the collaboration begun between the 26-year-old Marx and the 24-year-old Engels at their second meeting, in August 1844—though Engels’ contribution is in fact much smaller than his friend’s. In its pages we can study Marxism in the very process of being born, as Marx casts off the Hegelian and Feuerbachian trappings and sets foot once and for all on the path of communism. It is this which gives The Holy Family, together with the Theses on Feuerbach written a few months later, their peculiar fascination. Marx is here settling accounts with the school of “Young Hegelians’ (their leading lights were three brothers, Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer: hence the book’s title) who grossly caricatured Hegel by holding that his ‘Ab- solute Idea’ had found expression in their own abstract ‘criticism’ of all ‘mass movements’-—from Christianity to the French Revolution and English industry. But Marx is also performing another and much more important task. He is settling accounts with his own teachers and forerunners. In doing so he is evolving a philosophical method which is more truly dialectical than Hegel’s, since it seeks both its data and its test, not in men’s minds, but in the unity and conflict of social opposites: ‘proletariat and wealth’—the negative and positive, ‘self-dissolving’ and ‘self-satisfied’, destructive and conservative forms of the world of private property. (p. 51) And he is evolving a humanism which is an advance even on that of Feuerbach, since it steps forward from the abstract theoretical recognition that ‘man’ is shaped by his circum- stances to the demonstration that circumstances must be changed, and men made human, by the practical revolution- ary struggle of men themselves—of the proletariat, in fact. In The Holy Family is to be found, along with the shadowy intimations of the concepts of relations of production and of surplus value which were to be elaborated during the subse- quent forty years, the first germ of the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution, of the historical task of the proletariat to abolish private property, abolish poverty, abolish itself as a class, and thereby abolish ‘all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own . Situation.’ (p. 52) Now Marx is here creating Marxism, as an aid to both understanding and changing the world, by boldly bridging the gap between theory and practice which had misled or limited all previous thinkers. He is bringing philosophy to the ‘de- humanized’ proletariat to guide its struggle for human con- ditions of life. He is bringing the revolutionary proletariat into the very heart of philosophy. This unity of theory and practice, which is the kernel of Marxism, and which marks a clear-cut break with the old philosophy, finds expression here in two main ways. First, as we have seen, dialectics is brought to earth. The dialectics in the human head are a reflection of the dialectical processes taking place in the material world, including human society, where the proletariat is en- gaged in a practical struggle in which it can be ‘victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite.’ (p. 52) Secondly, materialism is transformed from an abstract theory about the relationships of being and consciousness into an ap- proach to the pressing questions of social life, an approach which flows from the proletariat’s conditions of existence. The class which proves each day in its labour, and in its being exploited, the objective reality of nature, of class relation- ships, of the whole material world, is the living proof of materialism. The proletariat ‘are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between conscious- ness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage- labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain, but very practical, very objective sources of their self-estrange- ment and that they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in con- sciousness, but in... being, in life.’ (p. 73) A class which can attain human dignity only by abolish- ing itself as a class; which is continuously changing the ob- jective world through labour; which is exploited every moment it functions as a working class: this class has nothing to fear from a revolutionary, dialectical, materialist philo- sophy. A philosophy which shows how everything in life contains the seeds of its own destruction, and how men’s ideas are determined by their real social relations: this philo- sophy has no purpose or meaning except as the theoretical weapon of the revolutionary proletariat. In 1845, when The Holy Family was published, such an audacious challenge to the conventions of society and of controversy alike seemed bizarre. But the whole development of the proletarian move- ment and of philosophy since then has confirmed the truth of Marx’s central ideas. * * * It is a commonplace of present-day ‘sociological’ criti- cism that between the young and the old Marx there was a gap; that the writer on human ‘self-alienation’ of the early forties had moral preoccupations, quite different from those of the author of Capital. On the other hand, many of those who are now turning in revulsion from Stalinist crimes and Stalinist theoretical decay would have us believe that this degeneration was inevitable, since Marxism implies no moral code, has nothing to say about individual freedom and has nothing in common with humanism. To study The Holy Family and then to return to its authors’ later works, is to see how profoundly erroneous are both these claims. The first was deliberately fostered by Stalinist theory, which’ pretended that the whole concept of ‘self-alienation’

[p035] was a kind of Hegelian hangover which had nothing to do with the main body of Marx’s work, which Marx soon grew out of, and which it was better not to talk about too much. The fact that we have had to wait so long for the present translation—the equally important Economic and _ Philoso- phical Manuscripts of 1844 are still in the limbo of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe — shows how carefully the Kremlin sought to lop off one vital part of Marxism in order to conceal its own failure to end the dehumanization of men and to give man ‘the positive power to assert his true individuality.’ (p. 176) The second claim is the result of Stalinist practice, which has long abandoned every shred of respect for human beings and human values. That many now blame Marxist theory for the immorality of those who have in fact turned their backs on Marxism, perverted it, negated it and buried it under a junk-heap of petrified quotations and formulas, is itself one of the crimes for which Stalinism stands arraigned before the working-class movement. The Holy Family is instinct with fervent, exuberant, optimistic humanism. ‘Materialism . . now coincides with humanism.’ (p. 169) ‘Each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being.’ (p. 176) ‘Man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet...is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity.’ (p. 52) To his dying day Marx never lost that confidence in human pro- gress. If he never developed the theory of human alienation in class society, that is because he was occupied with one detailed, gigantic application of historical materialism to a specific period of human history, as well as with the practical leadership of the socialist movement. Despite its name the theory is not hard to grasp. Since the workers do not own the means of production they work for somebody else, and their work is not a real expression of their faculties. A man’s labour belongs to somebody else, and instead of leading to the all-round development of the indi- vidual, it splits his life into ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, stunts and stifles all but one of his faculties, subjects him to the domi- nation of the means of production and of the product, estranges him from himself and from his fellow-men. “The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation’ and is indignant at ‘the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, deci- sive and comprehensive negation of that nature.’ (p. 51) Marxism is the only real humanist philosophy of today be- cause it alone shows the way to overcome this contradiction. Socialism will restore to men their working time, secure for them the conscious social control of their means of produc- tion and of their products, and make possible the all-round development of the many faculties latent in each individual. This is the basis of real human freedom. The Soviet bureau- cracy has only succeeded in deepening the ‘self-alienation’ of the proletariat whose power it has usurped. The tasks set forth by Marx have yet to be accomplished. But their accom- plishment is a certainty—not, as Marx explains, because pro- letarians are gods, which they are not, but because the pro- letariat’s ‘aim and historical action is irrevocably and obvi- ously demonstrated in its own life situation.... Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour.’ (pp. 52-3) * * * There is no room in this present notice to do ‘more than draw attention to the important section (pp. 167-79) on the history of English and French materialism, part of which is already familiar to readers of Socialism: Utopian and Scien- tific. It is odd that the translator seeks to improve on the well-known translation of Engels himself, ‘Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain’, with the version ‘Materialism is the son of Great Britain by birth’. Is this really an improvement? Similarly, the English publishers are so little proud of the translation of the sub-title that they wisely have made it ‘Critique of Critical Criticism’ in their Press advertisements. There are a number of other inexpli- cable changes, never for the better, and many examples of sloppy proof-reading (Hargreaves’ name misspelt on p. 22, e.g.) There is no subject index. But it is good to see in the name index that the Russians have apparently abandoned some of their irrelevant claims to have forestalled other nations’ inventions (though Arkwright was inevitably ‘using a number of previous inventions’ (p. 292) when he designed a spinning frame). Leaving aside the shortcomings and eccentricities of this edition, it remains ironic that this translation comes to us 98 from Moscow. Truly they do not know what they are putting in the hands of students of Marxism who have the courage to compare the forecasts of liberty shining from these pages with the way the human spirit is still shackled forty years after the October Revolution. The Holy Family is destined to play no small part in the great renaissance of creative Marxist thinking on whose threshold we are standing. It will help us to hack away the poisonous growth that has often concealed the healthy trunk—and to prove that the trunk itself is sound and capable of new sturdy development in the service of the working class. PETER FRYER Peasants in Revolt