The Debate Goes on

[p005] The Debate Goes on N this editorial we carry forward the discussion we began in the editorial of our last issue. We want to make a further contribution to the ‘great debate’ on the future of Marxism in the British Labour movement which has been going on, at a quickening pace, during the last fifteen months. Since Khrushchev made his speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Com- munist Party the icy grip of Moscow ‘orthodoxy’, which had held as in a vice large and important sec- tions of those who wanted to find out how Marxism could help the British Labour movement, has been considerably weakened. In the first phase of the debate it was the intellectuals of the Communist Party who appeared to set the pace. Large numbers of them announced in clear, unambiguous terms their revulsion and anger at the revelations which Khrushchev had made of the crimes of Stalin. They went on from this to demand that every dogmatic tenet of ‘Stalinist Marxism’ should be examined afresh as a preparation for reconsidering the whole strategy of the Marxist movement in Britain. As might have been expected, this ferment among socialist intellectuals has rapidly spread until it now involves much wider circles: militant workers inside and near to the Communist Party, intellectuals in and around the Labour Party, rank-and-file Labour Party and trade union members, and, of course, the various groups of Marxists outside the Communist Party. The whole Left in Britain—and, indeed, everywhere else in the world too—has now become involved in a far- reaching discussion of socialist prospects, carried on with an intensity and depth unknown for forty years. By no means all the credit for initiating this liberating discussion should go to Khrushchev. His speech was only one important product of the force which sustains the present debate: the growing upsurge in working-class activity throughout the world. There is no need to remind readers of Labour Review that the class struggle is assuming acuter and more far- reaching forms. Two million engineers and shipyard workers have recently been on strike. Their unanimity terrified not only the bosses but also some of their own 65 trade union leaders. In recent months large numbers of workers and peasants throughout the world have been actively involved in resisting and defeating British and French imperialist aggression in Egypt. The echoes of the Trafalgar Square demonstration of November 4, 1956, will resound in Britain for many a day yet. The recent agreement between Macmillan and Eisenhower on a programme of extended production and testing of atomic and hydrogen bombs, guided missiles and other instruments of push-button war is making people aware of what is at stake. The people are moving to ‘halt the atomaniacs and to end the social causes of war and threats of war—capitalism itself. It is important therefore to remind ourselves that the ‘great debate’ is not taking place in some imagined isolation of university lecture halls or academic ‘dis- cussion circles’, whose members sometimes imagine that ideas develop only through the cut and thrust of intellectual debate. The class struggle invades every discussion, every ‘Forum’, every political debate, every theoretical disputation. It is an elementary proposition of Marxism that in so far as the impelling influence in political discussion of the class struggle is conscious- ly recognised, that discussion is thereby made more fruitful. The present re-estimations of socialist strategy are taking place in the shadow of these great developments in the fighting strength of the working class and of the opportunities which flow therefrom. But opportunities by themselves are not decisive; they have to be grasped —by the intervention of conscious Marxist thought, by a rejuvenated communist movement, cleansed of the distortions, betrayals, opportunism and crimes of Stalinism. The supreme task of today is to create this new movement. To this end Labour Review is dedicated. In the ‘great debate’ attention has properly been concentrated on the search for a Marxist explanation of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution under Stalin, and of the social function of the bureaucracy which today rules Russia. It is very important for socialists to understand these questions if they are both

[p006] neater to defend the achievements of 1917 and rid the inter- national Labour movement of the vileness of Stalinism. UT this analysis of the character of the Russian bureaucracy, if carried to its conclusion, has an- other, equally important, function to perform. It leads directly to an understanding of the social origins and r6éle of all bureaucracies in the modern Labour movement. There is scarcely anything we need more than an understanding of the origins and function of the bureaucratic apparatus of Great Russell Street and Transport House, which dominate the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party. The huge, immensely powerful apparatus manipulated by the Right-wing Labour leaders (Parliamentary and trade union alike) is, as Lenin showed, a cancer on the British Labour movement. As in the case of Stalin, a ‘devil cult’ theory is no real explanation of why a man like Ernest Bevin, shrewd, wily, ambitious in the extreme, but intellectu- ally crude, could dominate British Labour politics for more than a decade. The Marxist looks for the ex- planation of such puzzling phenomena in the class struggle, in the correlation of class forces. The Right- wing bureaucracy which dominates the British Labour movement (and also the Labour movements of many other imperialist nations) has evolved a_ political ideology which is an accommodation to the powerful pressures exerted on the Labour movement by the imperialist ruling class. Right-wing Social-democracy is an agreement to live with the ruling class. It is the political theory of leaders who have betrayed the workers’ struggles and agreed to class collaboration and the indefinite postponement of the socialist re- construction of society. But Stalinism is also a reactionary response to the same pressure of imperialism—a response which is different only in so far as it reflects the special condi- tions of areas where the Labour movement is parti- cularly advanced, militant and powerful. In its origins Stalinism is the ideology of the bureaucracy which fastened hold on the Russian Revolution—an-accom- modation to the very heavy pressures exerted on the international Labour movement by the imperialists throughout the world. Stalinism is an agreement to live with the imperialists. Therefore Stalinism, like Right- wing social-democracy, is the political theory of those who in their own special interests have betrayed the workers’ struggles in every country of the world and who have agreed to an indefinite postponement of socialism. The latest fine phrase for this betrayal 1s ‘peaceful co-existence’. Naturally both the social-democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies do very well for themselves out of the bargain they strike with the imperialists. They are superficially different forms of what is essentially the same political ideology—an opportunist adaptation to imperialist pressures of individuals who have a pri- vileged position in the bureaucratic apparatus. Now it is a matter of simple observation that since the Khrushchev speech and the Hungarian events many good militants inside and outside the British Commun- ist Party have begun to react against Stalinism in a way that brings them closer, theoretically, to the views of the ‘Left’ spokesmen of the Right-wing- Labour leaders, such as, for example, John Strachey and 66 G. D. H. Cole. These good militants reason something like this: ‘Perhaps the Strachey-Cole type of reformism isn’t so bad after all. Are these writers not very clever people? Are their books not learned studies, written without jargon or dogmatism? Have they not always spoken up in favour of socialism? And are they nct believers in that very democracy which we have just discovered to be so lacking in Russia? Perhaps the Russian Revolution was, after all, just Russian and perhaps we British (or Americans, or French, or Ger- mans, or Italians) are an “exception” to revolutionary development.’ But the paradoxical fact is that, in direct line with this ‘spontaneous’ turn to reformism by honest militants in the British socialist movement, the Stalinist leaders of the British Communist Party have adopted a political programme, The British Road to Socialism, which is indistinguishable from some Strachey-Cole version of a ‘Left’ Parliamentary pro- gramme for British socialism — though perhaps the latter would be somewhat more radical than the Com- munist Party programme. This turn to reformism all fits in ‘with the fashionable Kremlin chatter about there being ‘many roads to socialism’. Nowadays nearly everyone condemns the murder- ous crimes of Stalin. But some people, either in the embarrassment of shame for giving Stalin this support in the past, or as a long-established instinctive reaction, appear to forget the equally bloody crimes of the Right- wing social-democratic leaders. In this world of capital- ist decay anyone may find plenty of crimes against humanity to condemn with the moral fervour of sin- cere humanism, and by no means all these crimes can be laid at the door of the Stalinists. In Algeria French imperialism, directed by the ‘socialist? Mollet (using powers voted to him by the French Communist Party) is carrying out daily massacres and tortures of the Algerian people. Have we forgotten how Butcher Noske, the ‘socialist’, drowned the German socialist revolution in blood? Nearer home, have we forgotten how this brilliant intellect of the Left: wing of the Par- liamentary Labour Party, John Strachey, togged up and joined a military patrol hunting out the Malayan Peo- ple’s Army when he was Minister of War in the Labour Government? No, it was not a Minister who held up in front of the camera the severed heads of Malayan democrats —- those who held up the heads were sol- diers in the army that Minister directed. Let us not forget how a Labour Government trampled on elemen- tary human rights when it banished Seretse Khama from his people. Let us recall that it was the ‘socialist’ Lord Attlee who, as Labour Prime Minister, used the Tory Emergency Powers Act in order to bring the full weight of the State forces to crush the dockers’ strike. No, let us not try to add up and balance the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the crimes of the Bri- tish Labour bureaucracy in order to discover which one of the evils is the lesser. Rather should both sets of crimes be seen as a joint betrayal of socialism and the working class. Labour Review believes that those who remain in- side the Communist Party—or indeed those who have left it—-who gravitate to social-democracy are not merely following some particular whim or some in- dividualistic logic. They are still accommodating them- selves to the pressures of British imperialism on the Labour movement, though they are not aware of this.

[p007] E must say frankly that only those who remain faithful to basic communist principles will show themselves to be the true representatives and leaders of the workers’ movement. Only communists, armed with Marxism, can lead the British people to socialism. This means they must learn to resist all the pressures of imperialism, whatever form they take; for accommodation to such pressure leads either to Stalinism or to Fabianism. For British Marxists, communists, socialists — call them what you will — the most important task is to consider how best to intervene in and guide the mass movement of the British workers and how to help pre- pare it for taking over State power. Therefore we have to consider ,most carefully all the various effects this new Spring is having on old and new ideologies, groups and sects. Many different trends are taking part in the ‘great debate’. All sorts of tendencies are emerging, with scars from the past, perhaps, but with bright hopes for the future. The ‘great debate’ in British socialist politics is now approaching a critical phase. Labour Review be- lieves that this debate will prove most fruitful if it now begins to apply itself to the key question of the day — how are Marxists to carry on real mass work in. the Labour movement of Britain as it exists today? In our next issue we shall return to this question and suggest some answers to it.