Stalinism and the Defeat of the 1945–51 Labour Governments, from Peter Cadogan

[p032] Stalinism and the Defeat of the 1945-51 Labour Governments NOW that the storm of 1956-57 is over and a significant num- ber of socialists have returned to the first principles of Marx- ism, it is possible to undertake major reassessments of the past. These are extremely important for the future. Brian Pearce (Joseph Redman) has already done a great service in this respect in his New Reasoner pamphlet and in Labour Review. He has uncovered the process, starting from the history of the General Strike, in which the profoundly mistaken theory and policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Stalin was imposed upon the British Com- munist Party through the Communist International, and how in consequence communism in Britain persistently cut itself off from the mass movement by subserving the interests of Stalin’s diplomacy rather than the interests of international socialism and the British working class. The purpose of this article is to start the inquiry into post-war Britain from this point of view in order to throw new light on the defeat of the Labour Government in 1950- S1. The success of a Labour government will always depend upon its pursuit of a socialist policy. The possession of such a policy will depend in turn upon the success of the Labour Party in determining it. Further, in order that the policy shall be substance and not in name only, it is necessary that within the Labour Party the leadership shall come from the scientific- ally-minded element who, by virtue of that equipment. are able to understand the historical situation. grasp the contemporary character of capitalism and define the first steps to be taken to the conquest of real power and the use of that power to the ends of socialism. In the period 1944 to 1951 the scientific socialist leadership was in the Communist Party. The handful of Marxists in the Labour Party, like Laski and Brailsford, was compounded of individuals powerless to provide concerted leadership. This meant that historic responsibility rested with the Communist Party while the Left in the Labour Party tended to look to- wards the Communist Party and the Daily Worker for leader- ship. Thus if the Communist Party was wrong in its analysis and policy the result would necessarily be disastrous for the whole Labour movement. Capitalism would get all its own way, while the Right-wing Labour leaders would be undisturbed for the time being in their enjoyment of office for its own sake. Finally, when the day of reckoning came and the Right wing ‘led’ the movement to defeat, the Left wing, never having under- stood what was going on, would find themselves quite unable to explain the defeat and utterly incapable of knowing what to do next. This was the situation in 1951. In consequence there would have to follow a long period during which social- ists wandered in the wilderness trying to find their bearings once more. We are still in this phase. It will be apparent that, if we are to find our bearings, we must understand how we came to lose them. In the twentieth century domestic policy is in the last analysis determined by the world situation. After the 1917 Revolution there were ‘two worlds’, one of international capitalism and the other of international socialism. The capitalist powers, violently antagonistic to one another, were united in their hatred and fear of the new-born Soviet Republic. International socialism rested upon the October Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, the threatened revolution in Germany, the French naval mutiny in the Black Sea and the opposition of the British working-class movement to the war of intervention. There were sther elements too. This Marxist view of the class struggle on the scale of a world made one by imperialism was abandoned by the Russian 125

[p033] LABOUR REVIEW Communist Party in 1923, after the defeat of the German workers. The reasons for this abandonment do not concern us here. They arose out of the internal situation of the Soviet Union. THE ‘TWO CAMPS’ THEORY From 1923 the CPSU, through the Comintern, put forward a new conception of the two worlds theory using the old phraseology (and quotations from Lenin taken out of their context) to mask a reversal of policy. Henceforth the Comintern was interested only in the retention of power in the Soviet Union and the duty of international socialism was reduced to protecting that power. The success of the revolution else- where was irrelevant. This twisted version of the two worlds theory was made much of after the second world war (the ‘two camps’) and then suddenly abandoned with the recognition of the role of India and the Bandung Powers. This of course further indicates its use as an instrument of power politics in the hands of the CPSU and not as a theory of socialism fundamental to the whole period of transition from world capitalism to world socialism. In the name of that very internationalism which had been dropped by the CPSU, the Communist Parties of other coun- tries accepted the policy of the Comintern as laid down by Stalin. He was thus in a position to direct the policies of Communist Parties according to what he considered to be in the diplomatic interests of the Soviet Union at any particular time. Here is the starting point of the rot in Britain from 1945. In the nature of the world situation all policies must be built on the foundation of foreign policy. But the crude anti- socialist theory of the ‘two camps’ (i.e., for or against Stalin) foisted on Communist Parties throughout the world made it impossible for communists even to start the task of working out a socialist foreign policy. The barrier in the mind was insurmountable. Since it was, always has been and still remains correct that socialists should defend the October Revolution, the position was an extremely difficult one. A vast bureaucracy has captured that revolution and perverted it, but not undone its historic achievement. The power of that bureaucracy has been main- tained by the terror of the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD, not by the conviction of the workers and peasants in the policy of the party, the conviction that Lenin fought for so successfully. The correct attitude, therefore, was to defend the Soviet Union while attacking the policies and leaders who had betrayed the principles of October, and to be equally interested in solidarity with socialists elsewhere. This task proved so difficult in prac- tice that very few succeeded in doing it, certainly no Com- munist Party. The Communist Party here accepted the Comintern line. At the end of the war Anglo-Soviet relations were good. Stalin had obtained much of what he wanted at Teheran and Yalta. He and Churchill talked the same language of ‘spheres of in- fluence’. What he now wanted was time for consolidation in eastern Europe. It followed therefore that the British Govern- ment—whatever its character—should be supported to the full. The British Commuunist Party in such circumstances could have only one policy—support for whatever Government took office. It will be remembered that the Daily Worker even came out for some kind of coalition government and support for Churchill! But that was too much for even the most docile party membership in history and the line was changed. Communists and socialists generally had done a tremendous job of political propaganda in the armed forces during the war years, and the Labour victory of 1945 was no accident. But the King Street switch to the Right came nevertheless and its great political capital was slowly wasted away. When Attlee took office, the Communist Party, in the context of Soviet policy, pledged unconditional support for the Labour Government. Any criticism had to be confined to the terms of the Labour Party’s own policy. Thus the 1945-48 slogan ‘Implement “Let Us Face the Future” ’, i.e., the electoral policy of the Labour Party in 1945. The only critical note permitted 126 August-September 1958 was ‘Cut the Armed Forces’. This, a progressive demand, arose out of no socialist analysis or policy whatever. It too was a by-product of Soviet diplomacy. It is very humbling for us to look back on those post-war years. We communists knew it all! We had not begun to under- stand how we as a party and as individuals were in the grip of historical circumstance and how our thinking was stoppec by a combination of Soviet policy, the two-faced character of our leadership and our own inability to think from first principles and to speak our minds. Yet we know Lenin’s dictum that ‘criticism and self-criticism is the law of develop- ment of the party’. But Pollitt did not entirely hide the truth. He always said: ‘You can tell a man’s politics by his attitude to the Soviet Union.’ No one, however, pressed him to explain what he really meant by that extremely ambiguous statement. At the same time thousands of individuals gleaned something of the truth, but never worked it out thoroughly and collectively enough to constitute an opposition platform. There was just that endless stream of those who resigned or refused to re- register at the end of year. ‘THE BRITISH ROAD TO SOCIALISM’ So Marxism has been unmanned in Britain for a whole generation. The British people are still led to believe, by some. that Marxism means ‘The British Road to Socialism’. Marx knew that under capitalism one cannot predict the course of the socialist future. He never made the absurd mistake of trying to do so. But King Street, knowing better, have com- mitted this, their epitaph, to paper. After a revolution, or conceivably while in the very throes of one, when the actual conditions to be faced are known. it is not only possible but essential to make predictions. These are the plans for building socialism. The Soviet party and Government have therefore quite rightly undertaken predic- tions—with very varying degrees of success. True to type, the communist leaders in Britain must do likewise—regardless of the wholly different pre-revolutionary situation in Great Britain. In 1958 the subject of the British road to socialism 1s not on the agenda of the Labour movement—and quite rightly so. The key item today, as it was in the days of Marx. is the understanding of capitalism itself. The Labour Party’s ‘Industry and Society’ may not have come to the correct conclusions. but at least it is about the right subject. But times have changed since ‘Capital’ and we must also add the need for understanding international socialism and the nature of the Soviet Union. The rest of the agenda reads: (a) the preservation of peace: (b) the understanding of socialist ideas; (c) the conquest of State power in Britain by the Labour movement and its allies: (d) the immense task of the internal reorientation and re- organization of the Labour movement which all this requires. When all this has been done we shall find ourselves in circumstances that it is most difficult for us at present to begin to imagine. Then and only then shall we be able to think scientifically about the British road to socialism. This is of course no reason for not studying our socia! and economic systems and those of other countries, especially those of the USSR and the USA, to sharpen our wits and whet our appetites. We must of course do this. But first things rst. The Communist Party’s ‘British Road to Socialism’ emerged in 1951. It was the culmination of that move to the Left that began in the years 1947-48 when the pathetic post-war slogans were too tattered for further use and no answer to the anti-communist witch-hunt that broke out as the domestic corollary of the Cold War. Stalin approved of ‘The British Road to Socialism’ be- cause it followed him in the abandonment of ‘soviet’ ideas and because, as a non-revolutionary document, it was one more weapon in the Cold War—enabling him to demon- strate to anyone who might be interested just how harmless ‘communism’ was, how Soviet communism was not for

[p034] COMMUNICATIONS export and why, therefore, Britain and NATO should cail off the bloodhounds skulking round the borders of Stalin’s sphere of influence. If ‘The British Road to Socialism’ was the best that socialist science could do, how was it to be expected that Labour Party theorists might ever understand the defeat of 1950-51 and know what to do about it? Socialist theory and policy making were laid in the dust by those who claimed for themselves the mantle of Karl Marx. THE PEACE CAMPAIGN The “peace movement’ was again a move to the ‘Left’. Again it was a matter of a policy that was acceptable on the surface: but it had no depth. The ‘peace movement’ evolving in 1958 stems from a genuine fear of war, a real concern for humanity, the beginnings of true internationalism and a real- ization on the part of socialists that the maintenance of peace is the responsibility of the Labour movement and a requisite for the ultimate victory of socialism. There was something of this—not much, but something— in the British Peace Committee. That is why it neither suc- ceeded nor failed. It was successful in the sense that it was part of the process that led to the thawing of the Cold War. It took the correct and very necessary line that the Soviet Union had no aggressive military intentions. But it failed because it was based essentially on Soviet policy and the Communist Party’s servile leadership in Britain. It could not and did not ever win wide active popular support. It did not stem from the ideas and impulses of the people. It had nothing in common with socialist internationalism, properly understood, Local ‘peace committees’ were ‘front’ organizations and the British Peace Committee (i.e. Communist Party) monopoly of ‘peace’ was such that the development of the movement past a certain point was actually held up. The peace movement that produced Aldermaston was made pos- sible because the Khrushchev speech at the Twentieth Con- gress of the CPSU and the events in Hungary smashed Stalinism in Britain and allowed the peace movement to grow—in a way which may or may not be in accord with Soviet policies, but which has entirely independent origins. Looking back. we can see how utterly hidebound we were about the British Peace Committee and how fantastically dis- trustful of anything that was not directly under its control. The Communist Party leaders were then, as now, afraid of people. wholly without confidence in the working class they claimed to lead and suspicious even of their own members. The belief in people was quietly laid to rest in the party centre some time in the 1920s. The Labour movement might have entered the fight for peace with great effect in the years 1947-51. Britain, in conse- quence, might have taken world initiative against war policies. Stalinism, and Stalinism in Britain particularly, made this impossible. We betrayed, or permitted the betrayal of. our own peace and socialist cause. We played straight into the hands of Ernest Bevin and the Truman Doctrine. The general law that governs alterations of Communist Party policy has been put very clearly by Brian Pearce in a recent letter to me on this subject. He writes: ‘IT think it is very important to see that the history of the Communist Party is not a meaningless zigzag, with equal ‘value’ attaching to both Right and Left switches. The basic trend of Stalinism is towards the Right: they keep moving back to class-collaborationist, anti-revolution- ary positions. That is the norm for them and the Lefi phases are merely the interstices between Right phases. The basic Stalinist policy of rapprochement with imperial- ism being fallacious in its very foundations. the Stalinists are repeatedly getting rebuffed by their would-be partners: the Left phases of Communist Party policy are what they fall back into when these rebuffs occur and until they see a chance of another Right manoeuvre. It is important, I think, to see that the Left phases are never really “returns to a real Marxist policy’, as they often seem at the time to comrades who have been browned off by the preceding Rightism and are very ready to welcome uncritically any change that seems a Leftward one.” THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE H-BOMB Although it concerns a later period, communist policy in relation to the H-bomb exemplifies the character of Stalinism so clearly that it is worth including an analysis of it here. With me, it is very much a question of personal experience. During 1956, I tried for months in the South-East Midlands district committee of the Communist Party to get party policy round to the unilateral renunciation of the bomb by Great Britain. At first there was little support. Palme Dutt attended one of the meetings at which I put the case and he said that it was a correct one but that we could not adopt it for tactical reasons. Just what this meant he did not explain clearly or at any length. It was the ‘we would be misrepre- sented’ thesis—from a communist leader! Some months later, at my instigation, the district committee did in fact pass a resolution in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament—nem. con. It was actually moved by Tom Mitchell, the present district secretary, and seconded by my- self. The party centre replied to it quite curtly—to the effect that the resolution had been considered and was not accepted. And that was that. The business about tactics was apparently not considered to be worth explaining. Now what was the real reason why Dutt turned down a policy he acknowledged to be correct? The answer is simple enough, although it may seem amazing at first sight. It is in keeping with the logic of ‘international’ communism since 1923. The Soviet Union wanted Britain to have the H-bomb and that is why Dutt refused to oppose it. This is fully in accord with Stalin’s last theses concerning the increasing contradictions and conflicts of the imperialist powers, and his policy of neutralizing anti-Soviet powers by encouraging their disunity. Stalin and Dutt supported Mac- millan in British manufacture of the bomb, which, as we now know on Macmillan’s own admission, was decided on aS a power-politics gesture directed at America. But Dutt dared not tell the truth to the members of his own party because it would not stand up to critical examina- tion. He therefore relied on his authority and on the deeply ingrained habit of obedience in the party ranks. REALITY AND APPEARANCE We can now begin to appreciate the reality behind the appearance at every stage. It is not simply a question of saving that King Street has always echoed the Kremlin. Socialism is nothing if not international. We need to grasp the whole character of Comintern policy and its contradiction of Marxism so that we may proceed with the task of putting it back on the lines that Lenin laid down. Soviet policy since 1923 has never had any interest in revolutionary movements abroad and has consistently betrayed them. not so much because of a deliberate plan to do so, but because the utter wrongness of policy and the monumental Yenorance of the CPSU under Stalin could have had no other effect so long as the leadership of the Comintern was univers- ally accepted. The communists of China were given to Chiang Kai-shek for execution in 1927, the communists of Germany were in- duced to play straight into the hands of Hitler in 1933, the communists of Spain were driven to disaster in 1936-39 and the communists of Hungary were crushed by Soviet tanks in 1956. A genuine communist abroad is. or has been, an obstacle to Soviet diplomacy. Yet things are changing, and will continue to change, in the Soviet Union. This is not an attempt at a detailed examination of socialist policies in post-war Britain. It is rather a preliminary re- connaissance of what is still largely virgin territory, in order to identify major landmarks. The more we look below the 127

[p035] LABOUR REVIEW surface the more it becomes apparent that the bankruptcy of socialist thinking as regards theory, policy, methods and Organization throughout the whole Labour movement—not just in the Communist Party—stems from the flat denial of internationalism by the Comintern. The fact that the Comintern was dissolved only made matters worse. The authority of the CPSU in world commun- ism was increased. After the dissolution, and the Cominform proved this, opinion could only move in one direction, from the top downwards. Thus Tito had to revolt or knuckle under. Stalin permitted no political criticism. In consequence of all this there was in post-war Britain no systematic and scientific attempt made to grasp what peace, capitalism and socialism were about. The responsibility for this must be laid fairly and squarely at the door of the Marxists of Great Britain. It was our own fault. The fact that so many of us made our mistakes in good faith is hardly an extenuating circumstance. The greatest blame, however, did lie with those in the leadership of the Communist Parties in Britain and the Soviet Union who had their eyes open, and who thought so much more of themselves, their positions and their power than they did of their supposed principles. It would be unscientific to ask ourselves what we should have done in 1945-51. We did what we did because nothing else was possible so long as our illusions remained. What we can do now is to understand those illusions. We are clear- ing the ground for the emancipation of Marxism in Britain. PETER CADOGAN Science and Socialism SCIENTIFIC successes such as the launching of artificial satellites and the development of Zeta, while not being at present of a strictly utilitarian nature except in connexion with military rocketry, have forcefully demonstrated the tre- mendous progress made by science and technology in recent years, in Russia, Britain and the USA. In capitalist circles the sputniks immediately produced an atmosphere of panic. It suddenly dawned on the statesmen of the West that the Russians were even more capable of producing long-range rockets than were their own scientists. For the first time it was brought home to them that in any future world war, New York was on the Russian rocket bases’ doorstep. “We have far too few scientists’, they ex- claimed. Emergency measures were taken to provide more money to train scientists. Capitalist support for scientific research and investigation is quite normally born out of fear—generally fear of compe- tition from other capitalists. But new inventions and new techniques usually require large quantities of new capital to enable them to be put into operation, a fact which often dis- courages scientific research under capitalism. In capitalist society, therefore, science is on the one hand impelled forward by the competition between the individual concerns and, on the other, held back by the system’s internal contradictions. It seems likely that the tendency of capitalism to hold back the development of science will become more and more marked in the future. As a result of the capital investments required, only very big firms can introduce new scientific developments. In this way, the monopolistic features of capitalism are being further consolidated and the competitive stimulus consequently reduced. Socialists have accordingly said that in a socialist society the flood barriers against scientific advance in capitalist society would be removed and science would surge forward, giving man greater control over nature. Socialists, recogniz- ing that science liberates mankind by means of new labour- saving techniques, have always adopted a friendly attitude towards it. but so far they have given insufficient considera- tion to certain aspects of scientific advance. There is a serious lack of literature on the political aspects of science and scant attention is given to it in political programmes. On a world scale, man has two major problems: the prob- lems of (a) food supplies and (b) fuel supplies. The fact that there is a food problem is not at all obvious to people living in advanced Western countries. There appears to be a plethora 128 August-September 1958 of food and apparently no one need go hungry—provided he has the money to buy food. However, this apparent abund- ance is a delusion. The people who enjoy this abundance, in fact, number well under half of the world’s population. About two-thirds of mankind lack adequate supplies of food. Hun- dreds of millions endure malnutrition and often real starva- tion. This situation will certainly not improve—and in all probability will get worse as the result of the ‘natural’ growth of population—unless planned production is carried through to agriculture. The problem can be solved only by the appli- cation of scientific methods of farming on a very large scale and by the cultivation of areas which are at present non- productive. The stone-age implements which are still in use over large areas of the earth will have to be replaced by; modern machinery, and scientific knowledge must be applied to increase the fertility of the soil and to improve seed and stock. Agriculture needs to be brought up to and beyond the stage of scientific development of modern factory production. Many people, including many socialists. complacently assume that this is a problem which affects only the so-called backward countries. But it is in fact a problem which is on our own doorstep. At the present time Britain is unable to produce enough food to meet the requirements of her popu- lation. Indeed. it is unlikely that she could ever do so. Even under the most favourable circumstances it is unlikely that Britain could produce enough food to support more than half the present popuiation. In the last hundred years the world’s population has more than doubled and is at present about 2.500 million. In two hundred years it will be 10.000 million. Two hundred years may seem a long time, but it is a mere six generations away: this will certainly be an issue which will occupy the minds of the children and grandchildren of our own grandchildren. The Stalinists, as the Lysenko affair showed. have pooh- poohed population questions, labelling them as reactionary neo-Malthusian preoccupations of bourgeois ideology. Yet it would be wrong not to recognize that a growing population presents real problems. Only socialism can solve them. If social- ism can be established over a large part of the world in this period, because of the food problem alone man’s power re- quirements will be even greater. Consequently we cannot solve the food problem unless we solve the power problem. There is a naive tendency to regard this problem as solved by the advent of nuclear energy. Things are not quite so simple, however, for nuclear energy brings with it a whole series of new problems whose solution seems to be at least problematical. Again, nuclear energy from uranium involves drawing on the earth’s energy bank in the same way as does our use of coal and oil, for there is no source by which Jit is replenished. Much more has to be done to utilize our energy income. The development of methods of using solar radiation. directly through the invention of equipment which directly converts solar radiation into electricity, or indirectly in the form of hydro-electric installations. must be given much more serious consideration. In solving these two problems, tremendous industrial effort will be necessary. Machinery and equipment will have to be produced on a scale hitherto unknown. In fact the present advanced industrial countries could not solve the world prob- lem on their own. For this reason the technical level of indus- trially backward countries must be raised considerably. At the same time automation would have to be introduced. not to dispense with workers to increase profits. but to make the best use of the available manpower. What then are the tasks of socialists in relation to sgience” Socialism is unthinkable without science. Consequently much emore consideration must be given to science and scientife problems in discussing and formulating political prosrammes. The possibilities of science must be realistically, not idealistic- ally. appraised and the full extent of these possibilities brought home to the British people. Science. far from being something that requires a superficially complacent reference here and there, must become a major item in any political programme. At the same time. Marxists must educate themselves in the fundamentals of science: they must become more science- conscious. In addition, great efforts must be made to win scientists for socialism. For socialism to succeed we must have a core of scientists who are loyal to the joint cause of