From Martin Grainger

[p031] Martin Grainger a Marxist argument. If Hanson’s major premise, taken over uncritically from Stalinism, is accepted, then his conclusions follow naturally. He is quite entitled to stress, as he does, that Thompson has conceded the premise, and with it much of the argument. However, it is really quite unnecessary to Thompson’s argu- ment to make Hanson the concession that the horrors of Stalin- ism can be justified on Marxist grounds, or that they were - inevitable, or that they had a ‘progressive aspect’. But before lecturing Thompson about morality, Hanson ought to tell us a lot more about his morality. The first paragraph of Hanson’s ‘Open Letter’ shows, as he intended, that he dissociates himself from Marxism—but it shows some- thing else which surely he did not intend to show. He says: ‘Since I left the Communist Party I have tended to devote .. . energies . . . to immediate issues where I found my conviction of moral and political rightness required no specific ideological support.” This could mean several things. It could mean, for instance, that for the last few years Hanson has been doing just what- ever came into his head, without his being aware of what he was doing. It could also mean that he has not systematized his own motives, that he has an ideology all right, but simply does not know what it is or how to state it. There is nothing unusual here. M. Jourdain spoke prose all his life. The great majority of ‘educated’ middle-class people in Anglo-Saxon countries are unaware of the ideology which underlies and informs their activities. Hanson boasts that, like the tortoise in the Greek proverb (‘happy inside his shell’) he is undis- turbed by approaching danger because he cannot see it. In Marxist philosophy this method is called ‘impressionist’. In ordinary language it is called smug self-satisfaction, a normal characteristic of the British Fabian and Right-wing trade union leaders. Let us press Hanson to tell us where he thinks Stalinism came from. Was this brand of reactionary revisionism a product of ‘original sin’? But after all, Hanson may say, Thompson does admit that Stalin and the Stalinists ‘did the job’. Hanson makes the most of this concession. Yet Thompson need never have made it, for this opinion is simply a hangover of the old Stalinist mythology. The historical record, however, is clear enough. The people who carried through the unprecedented expansion

[p032] DOCUMENT of the forces of production in the Soviet Union were the Soviet masses, acting through the nationalized industries and economic planning they achieved when they made the October Revolution. The job could have been done with far greater fruit and far less suffering, if it had been done, as the Bolshe- viks pressed for it to be done, with the active participation and control of the workers and poor peasants and in alliance with the developing socialist revolution in the advanced coun- tries. The Stalinist party ‘élite’ was not necessary to the industrial and scientific progress of the workers’ State. Rather it was the symptom of a certain degeneration. Stalinism was a cancer upon Soviet society and a handicap to it. Soviet economy grew, the Nazis were defeated, in spite of Stalin and the pri- vileged minority whose interests he represented. Hanson seizes upon Thompson’s argument that a party élite, was ‘necessary’ to carry through Soviet development. We are asked to picture this élite, armed with Marxism, unendowed with socialist humanism, falling into error in doing a necessary but difficult task. Why did Thompson make such a damaging admission, one which undermines his whole case? For no one who has studied the history of the Bolshevik Party before Stalinism temporarily defeated it in the middle 1920s can doubt that the Bolsheviks organized a body of people, united on the basis of conviction and motivated by the highest moral principles, to help the masses to achieve their aims. Nor could it have been otherwise. Lenin possessed no all-powerful police apparatus, no day-spring of wisdom from on high. The Stalinist régime was established on the defeat of Bolshevism. Accord- ingly it was only to be expected that those who profited from Stalin’s crimes would want us to accept that crimes were ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’. This is not a case of Marxists being wise after the event. The future of Stalinism was forecast and charted in the middle of the 1920s. Anyone today can read ‘The New Course’, ‘The Real Situation in Russia’ and the later ‘The Revolution Betrayed’. The stock exchanges of the world also understood Stalinism, for they reacted favourably to the news of the suppression of the Left Opposition. The bourgeoisie preferred Stalin to Trotsky. Churchill several times expressed this clearly. Like Hanson I too am deeply concerned about the damage which Stalinism has inflicted on the British Labour movement, especially by misdirecting and exhausting the energies of many thousands of able and devoted people. But here again Hanson starts by taking as good coin what the Stalinist leaders say about themselves. He says that the party line was two-faced, which was often true. But what an example he chooses! He gives us as a sample of Marxist morality in the service of the revolution the following: ‘They will adopt a policy of revolutionary defeatism and present it to the public as one of negotiated peace.’ Here is indeed a cry from the heart. For Hanson refers here to the period between October 1939 and June 22, 1941, when the Communist Party in Britain opposed British participation in the war. But it really is time that he got his facts right about that period. For the real policy of the Communist Party was a negotiated peace with Hitler, That was Stalin’s line. Stalin’s line was never Bolshevik revolutionary defeatism. In order to conceal objective capitu- lation to Hitler the party had to dress it with the sauce of Leninist propaganda phrases. Hanson was deceived then. He is still deceived. His position is all the more deplorable because, even at the time, documents were available to prove what the Comin- tern policy really meant. But, alas, they were ‘banned’. The magazine Left published documents of the German Communist Party, which reproduced passages cut out in the translations issued through the British communist Press. These passages called on the German communists to hand over to the Nazis opponents of the Nazi war effort. Later, facts came to light of the direct co-operation of the Communist Parties of France and Norway with the Nazis—who allowed them, in return, to publish legally their papers for a brief period. The bravery of rank-and-file communists in the anti-Nazi underground should not obscure the treachery to socialism in 1940-41 of the Communist Party leaders, Throughout the whole of the war, from the beginning to the end, the Stalinists kept in the background any inter- nationalist appeal to the working class of Germany to over- throw Nazism by international revolutionary action. In June 1941 Stalin’s men simply changed sides, switching their alliance from Hitler to Churchill. Naturally they dropped their ‘revolutionary’ verbiage and extolled the virtues of ‘democracy’; from support of one imperialist camp they passed over to support of the other. Yet Hanson still regards Stalinist policies as revolutionary and seeks to father them on Marxism. Truly, like Napoleon, he should say, ‘La recherche de la paternité est interdite’. It is all too obvious to any observer that Stalinist policies have not built, but decimated the world’s revolutionary working-class movement. Ever since the middle of the 1920s Stalinism has converted the struggle of the workers and pea- sants into the small change of diplomatic bargaining between the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism. This is why capitalism still exists and why the Soviet Union is still in such grave danger of imperialist attack. One more point on Hanson’s ‘morality’. Despite his ‘con- victions of rightness’, we find him in the company of people who accept his Fabian politics but have different moral con- victions from his. Among the Fabian and trade union leaders there co-exist peacefully vegetarians and gluttons, teetotallers and alcoholics, the morally rearmed and _ television stars, puritans and profligates, united in complacent confidence in the future of capitalism and in contempt for the working class. Here is a fair proposition for Hanson. Let him first preach his ‘convictions of moral and political rightness’ to the people who make money out of attacking the trade unions on tele- vision. Let him join in waging a campaign against his political co-thinkers who plunder their trade union treasuries and enjoy bloated expense accounts. He will then find Marxists right alongside him. 93

[p033] LABOUR REVIEW He ‘Confessed’