Communism in Guatemala: 1944-1954, by Ronald M. Schneider

[p024] Communism in Guatemala: 1944-1954, by Ronald M. Schneider. The Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pensylvania Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, New York.) The American Universities, reflecting the torment of United States capitalism at the world activities of communist parties, have created departments to investigate this subject. This book about Guatemala is one of their fruits. With exhaustive material, Mr Schneider shows how the Guatemala communist party, which did not exist prior to the revolution that over- — threw the dictator Ubico in 1944, strengthened itself through - the control of the trade unions and the principal peasants’ organizations, and by means of penetration into. the govern- ment. For thirteen years Ubico’s military dictatorship had defended the interests of the Jandowners, the church and especially of the all-powerful North American imperialist — United Fruit Company. The fundamental task of the revolution.

[p025] LABOUR REVIEW was to fulfil agrarian reform, but the first of the two presidents who governed during the revolutionary period did nothing in this direction. Arevalo confessed his ‘socialism’ in these terms: ‘We are socialists because we live in the twentieth century. But we are not materialist socialists. We do not believe that man is primarily stomach. We believe that man is above all a will for dignity . Our socialism does not, therefore, aim at an ingenuous 5 distribution of material goods, or the stupid economic equalization of men who are economically different. Our socialism aims at liberating men psycho- logically,. granting to all the psychological and spiritual integrity denied by conservatism and liberalism’. Neither dare the author label the second president, Jacobo Arbenz, as a communist; however, he reprimands him for his intimate friendship with the leaders of Guatemalan com- munism. Under his government a programme for agrarian reform was initiated, which was considered ‘bourgeois- campesino’ by the communists. The land expropriations struck at the interests of the United Fruit Company and, similar to what has now happened in Cuba, Eisenhower's government took it upon themselves to avenge the blow. The book is rich in detail, but its method, inclined to separate facts and groups, obscures the necessary interrelated- ness of events. And although this is a work dedicated to ‘facts’, it is easy to deduce from it that the author is on ‘the side of imperialism. After Arbenz’s overthrow by the mercenaries of reaction in 1954, the communists formulated their self-criticism. According to them, they had put too much trust in the president; further, in their party there was a predominance of middle-class elements. They could have added to these criticisms that the infiltration into the bureaucracy, either of the government or of the trade unions, does not secure the success of a revolution, and that, in order to mobilize the anti-imperialist feeling of the Latin American masses, it is not enough to teach them - nationalism and simultaneously proclaim the excellence of the political régimes that exist in Moscow and Peking. A.R. Arab Revolt OT. E. Lawrence, by Jean Bernard Villars. trans. (Sidgwick and Jackson, 30s.) This further contribution to the literature of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt is well worth reading, as a careful study of two big questions which still attract able young -people even forty years after the events. First TEL tried to re-discover forgotten methods of warfare, to cut through the formal doctrines of the militarists, to demonstrate how to manoeuvre, to harness the minds of men to a cause,:to demoralize the enemy, and, especially, to minimize senseless slaughter. By 1917 imperialism needed these services very badly, after the collapse of the Tsarist armies and the French mutinies. TEL and his friend Liddell Hart tried to do for the Imperial General Staff what the Fabians try to do for the bourgeois ‘ state as a whole, to purge it of inefficiency, to rationalize it. _. But what do Fabians actually succeed in doing? Thanks to what they call bad luck and what Marxists recognize as the underlying social realities, the streamlining process does not abolish but highlights and accentuates the basic contradictions. Hence the answer to the second big question about TEL; why did he break down after the war? Was it because he was a psychopath? __ Villars makes it quite clear.that TEL was like many of the ‘hero-adventurers’, ; in both the imperialist and the Socialist : camps, who dramatize themselves as ‘independent’ of social October-November 1959 forces. They involve themselves in historic processes which they cannot equip themselves to understand. In large degree, TEL’s Oxonian intellectual arrogance prevented him from ever learning to identify himself with the masses. Villars proves TEL to have understood that no stable Arab state could come out of the Revolt unless it was the work of the Arabs themselves. While, on the other hand, he was desperately searching, with bags of gold in hand, to create a stable Arab ruling class from the desert tribes, he knew nothing of the mutually inconsistent agreements which his masters were making with the Arabs and each other, without pausing to inform him! M. Villars exposes the aims of French and British imperialist strategy so frankly that we could suspect him of cynicism .... if he were not French: “The war made allies of three of the competitors, England, Russia and France. Could these three nations forget from one day to the next, however, that they had for centuries kept their fingers on the trigger in the Near East? Each of the European Powers was only checked in the brutal conquest of Ottoman territory by the opposition of the other interested parties.” Such disparity between the lofty mission which he thought he was carrying out and the sordid reality of imperialist aims has been enough to wreck even well-integrated personalities. M. Villars’ interesting analysis of TEL’s personality, built as he admits on somewhat slight foundations, points to profound inner conflicts, which, at “this distance of time and in the absence of the evidence which a psychiatrist would need, cannot hope to be accurately explained. ROBERT SHERWOOD e - - An Irish Jaunt