Communism and Social Democracy, 1914–1931, Vol. IV of a History of Socialist Thought, by G.D.H. Cole

[p022] Communism and Social Democracy, 1914-1931. Volume iv of A History of Socialist Thought, by G. D. H. Cole (Macmillan. 2 vols. 70s.) Though he did not live to complete it, the ‘History of Socialist Thought’ will be a worthy memorial to the life of G. D. H. Cole, socialist, histortan and publicist. The whole work is permeated by his own highly individual approach to socialism, which it is hard to classify. G. D. H. Cole was not a Marxist, but he was a militant; he was not identified with any of the main schools of socialist thought, but he was committed, in the fullest sense, to the Labour movement and to the struggle for the ending of exploitation and class society. While Marxists will dissent from many of Cole’s judgments and, here and there, from some of his factual statements, they will respect his conspicuous honesty and unswerving integrity. The October Revolution, with all its attendant evils and miseries, was, in Cole’s view, ‘an immense liberating force. If it repressed free speech and political freedom, it was at the same time setting more and more of the Russians free from the brutalizing social and economic repression of the old régime and creating not only a more skilled and mechanized working class but also one with immensely greater cultural and intellectual opportunities.’ His interpretation of the course of the Soviet revolution will not, in all respects, commend itself to readers of Labour Review. He is clear, however, that while ‘for the faults. of leadership Stalin must take a big share of the responsibility .... it is absurd to attribute them to him exclusively, or to a small group of amoral ‘realists’ of whom ‘he was the chief. The root of the trouble was not the so- ~called “cult of personality”, which was only a hateful excrescence.’ It was rather, according to Cole, ‘the cult of centralism and its accompaniment—a vast bureaucratic machine which was open to manipulation’. Cole did not see the origins.of this bureaucracy in the under- developed technology or the social structure of the Soviet Union during the 1920s. He saw them rather in the Leninist -conception of the party and in the theories of ‘democratic centralism’ to which this gave rise. In practice, ‘democratic centralism’ meant ‘the authoritive rule of the central committee’, and Stalin ‘only aggravated and consolidated a practice that had already gone a long way in Lenin’s lifetime’. Things would have developed on much the same lines, Cole seems to ‘be arguing, if Trotsky had won the fight for control inside the party. Indeed, if “Trotsky’s warnings about the increasing bureaucratization of the Communist Party under Stalin’s in- fluence were not taken very seriously by most outside observers’ this was, partly at least, ‘because Trotsky was himself BOOKS associated with a policy of sharp dealing with the peasants, of intensified industrialization, and even of using the Red Army es a conscript labour force’. If Cole condemned some of the communist theories and practices he was no less critical of the abysmal record of social democracy in the period under review. The outstanding disaster and, in a negative sense, the historical turning-point, was the betrayal of the German revolution by the social democrats in 1918. Cole explains clearly why the necessary measures were not taken to introduce socialism into Germany at a time when power was in the hands of the Labour move- ment. “These things were not done’, he insists, ‘not only because the social-democratic leaders were afraid to do them, but also because they did not want to. They feared the collapse of the existing society much more than they hoped for a really new social order; and because of these fears they betrayed the revolution and helped to bring the republic to its dismal collapse.’ The entire history of socialism between the end of the first. world war and the economic collapse of 1931 is seen as a tragedy of errors in which the movement became ‘disastrously divided into socialists who were no longer even aiming at socialism and socialists who refused to admit that there could be varying roads towards socialism in countries differently placed, and would recognize only a single road—the sheer imitation of that which the Russians had been forced to tread.’ In the author’s view the movement would have been well advised to follow the lead of the Centrist ‘Vienna Union’ of Socialist parties—popularly dubbed the ‘Two-and-a-Half International’—which maintained an uneasy existence for about two and a half years before rejoining the Second International in 1923, In contrast to Cole, Marxists will try to look beneath the surface of ideologies and errors for an explanation of labour history in terms of the social forces to which Cole paid scant attention. He described his own attitude as ‘akin rather to that of William Morris. or of P. J. Proudhon, or even Kropotkin. than to either communism or orthodox social democracy. In the last years of his life he felt increasingly sad at the bureaucratization of socialist and communist parties which, he feared, held out little hope that the economic and political freedoms for which he stood would be achieved in the foreseeable future. Cole's last book will be used, as he would have wished, as an armoury of facts and ideas for socialists. Many or most of his readers will disagree with particular judgments; some will reject his basic approach; but all will find value and stimulatian in the work of a great and—in the best sense—a disinterested scholar. HENRY COLLINS: