The Strangled Cry, by John Strachey

[p041] The Strangled Cry. By John Strachey. The Bodley Head, 258 pp., 21s. John Strachey is being robed for enthronement as the ‘philosopher and thinker’ of the Labour Party (Sunday Times, September 30, 1962). This book provides for a review of his qualifications. His family is a clan of British liberals, wealthy and established in bourgeois society. His mind is stocked with the literary culture of the Western world. He has been writing about politics since the middle 1920s. His works reflect the succession of political fashions current among the ‘avant garde’ petty-bourgeois. He started with Fabianism and the Webbs. He advocated the Douglas Credit scheme. He joined Mosley’s ‘New Party’ around 1932. He turned to Stalinism in the ‘Popular Front’ period 1934-1939. He then went to the Koestler-Orwell-Gollancz school of anti-Marxism. In The Strangled Cry he ends up where he started, which provokes the question: ‘Has Strachey ever really been anything but a Fabian?’ The Strangled Cry is supposed to come from a liberal humanist crushed by Stalinist totalitarianism. It could really be Strachey’s own protest at being lost in the forest of events, where he wanders round in circles. The main essay, which gives its title to the book and was highly esteemed by Encounter, reviews the fate of his former friends, Koestler and Orwell, with whom he rightly brackets Pasternak. They are out of fashion. The logical end of their ideas, he explains, is mysticism or cynicism, good fellows though they were. For after all, the Cold War has got the West nowhere and there is something in Marxism. Pure-and- simple MacCarthyism will no longer do. So where are we to go next? Strachey tells us. ‘Last-stage Capitalism’, dominated by the great monopolies, can be ‘centralised’ and

[p042] BOOK REVIEWS ‘resolute democratic This must be our abolished by governmenis’. road. But he wrote no differently for the right wing of the ILP in the New Leader in the 1920s. This pro- gramme is Fabianism and nothing more. He returned to it in the late 1930s, in ‘Programme for Progress’, a blue- print for Popular Front Governments. Today such a programme is less plausible than ever. All our experi- ence since 1945 has been that mono- polies control ‘democratic govern- ments’ and not the other way round. Seeing no alternative, other than the Stalinist caricature of Marxism he concludes, “The mysteries are seen to be far deeper than we dreamed; reason must become by that much the finer to comprehend them.’ What profound and learned emptiness! What leadership for British Labour! Strachey’s passing acquaintance with Marxism was too hasty for him to grasp that Marxism is not a body of tags but a method for analysing the development of society and par- ticipating in the class struggle. He learned some of the tags, but his method remains what it was at the start, that of a liberal bourgeois empiricist. A good test is to consider why, for all his erudition, he fails to explain his own development. How has he come to shift from one ‘school’ to another? He has criti- cised each fashionable set of ideas, after it fell from fashion, after he himself succumbed to the social pressures which gave it birth. Abusing the Communist parties has been cheap and easy since the late 1940s. But in the middle 1930s, he was pretending that the repulsive features of Stalinism did not exist. While the hired journalistic liars defended the Moscow Trials he baited the Trotskyists, when the Trotskyists were showing how Stalinism was weakening the international position of the Soviet Union and discrediting socialism, How did he get himself into the position of defending what Khrushchev (himself implicated) later revealed to have been monstrous crimes? Let us try to explain. In the early 1930s Strachey had. turned away in disillusionment from the right-wing leadership of Ramsay Macdonald and Arthur Henderson. Repelled by the sectarian stupidities of “Third-Period’ Stalinism, he saw at the same time that Mosley’s programme of war against the Soviet Union had at that time little appeal. He could soon join the liberal intellectuals moving towards Stalinism, which after 1934 was attracting them by liquidating the old ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat and was erecting the programme of defence of bour- geois democracy. The Coming Struggle for Power, ‘The Menace of Fascism and The Nature of Capitalist Crisis, written in this period, presented Marxism without any of the aspects, vital to militant workers, of building a revolutionary movement, of struggle against bourgeois ideas, of developing programmes of struggle. These books are well-written text-books of abstrac- tions. They helped precisely for this reason to popularise ‘Popular Front’ ideas (‘unity of all men of goodwill’) by giving a socialist coloration to the doctrine that the aims of the working class should be subordinated to those of their masters. This is the reason why Strachey could not see that Stalinism aimed at defending the Soviet Union by the methods, not of Lenin and Bolshev- ism, but by those of the Soviet bureaucracy, not by revolutionary leadership to enable workers in the capitalist world to take power, but by seeking alliances with ‘democratic’ forces among the capitalists, at the cost of supporting bourgeois politi- cians and preaching confidence in bourgeois policies. Consequently he could not under- stand that the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 also was a logical part of Stalinist foreign policy, a switch not from ‘goodies’ to ‘baddies’ but from one bourgeois side to the other. Consequently also he failed to see that the atrocities committed by Stalinism were a product, not of Marxism but of the degeneration of the first workers’ state, the internal defence and product of Stalinism. So Stalinist teaching well prepared him in advance to run away from the Communist Party, to take others with him and ‘to justify the informers and 159 renegades. Those CP writers who have ‘panned’ The Strangled Cry should pause to consider that he learned nothing in the 1930’s from Sialinists to counteract his organic Fabian tendency to rally to the side of his ‘own’ bourgeoisie. The CP writers should spare their vituperation, however, for another reason. Strachey may soon become a ‘friend of peace’ again. He wrote in The Observer on September 23, 1962, ‘Co-existence is not a policy of mere weak postponement of an evil day of inevitable world conflict. Just the contrary; if a combination of firmness and of adequate military preparation at every level, with a genuine recognition of the rights and interests of the Russian people, is pursued by the West, there is a prospect of the organisation of world peace. Send him wine, Nikita! Here is another apostle of peace-by- summit-talks. Strachey learned early in life that the working class represents a mighty force in society. But he never learned from Marxism how the working class can develop and use its potential strength. He sees politics as the work of ‘clever people’ who manipulate the mgss. Always . . except for a few paragraphs in the writings of the later °30s, which echo the idea from Lenin and the CP’s__ pre-1935~— publications __ that genuine democracy for the masses requires Soviet rule. That his method is bourgeois em- piricism comes out also in his paper on Trotsky. It is fashionable that bourgeois intellectuals shall prattle a little about Trotsky, and bait the unhappy Stalinist academics. These people have seen the futility of the Koestler-Orwell school of liberal protest and, after all, Deutscher has published his monumental historical works. The fashion of talking about Trotsky, which would have been un- speakably ‘bad form’ before the 20th Congress, is not unconnected with the success of the British Trotskyists in establishing a stable organisation and press, and developing a strategy of class-struggle that alarms. the cheer-leaders of bourgeois democracy from Great Turnstile to King Street. So in 1959 we find our Strachey talking on the Third Programme

[p043] 160 about the ‘gigantic historical forgery on the Stalinist scale’ which alone denies that Trotsky was a great man. (Not a whisper about his own leadership of the fellow travellers! Not a hint that he might understand his other ‘mistakes’ if he studied how he fell into such company!) ‘If Trotsky had come to power in the 1920s instead of Stalin, I think it probable he would have failed. He was too civilised a man to have resorted to the extremities of Stalin’ This, the fashionable cliché, leads to two conclusions. Either the horrors of Stalinism were necessary and inevitable, or they were the necessary consequence of Bolshevism. Strachey has every opportunity to locate the writings of Trotsky which others could be excused for not knowing. Trotsky, in his evidence to the Dewey Commission in 1939, dealt with this very point. He did not aim at power to do the same job as Stalin. He represented different social forces, and, in brief, the Rus- sian proletariat and not the Soviet bureaucracy. Had the proletariat been able to place the Left Oppo- sition in poWer it would not have carried out Stalin’s policies. In The Real Situation in Russia, published as long ago as 1929 in English, we find the actual economic proposals of the Left Opposition, developed at length, but assiduously concealed from the ranks of the Communist parties. Whatever the material diffi- culties, Soviet industrial planning would have been more and not less effective if it had been carried through with the participation of the masses instead of bureaucratically from above. How much _ higher would be the position of Soviet agriculture today if the forced col- lectivisation and slaughter of the cattle. had been avoided? These policies of Stalin are not ‘roughly the same’ as those of the Left Oppo- sition; they were completely opposed to them. The horrors of Stalinism were not at all the inevitable overhead costs of progress in a backward country. They were the product of the specifically Stalinist, bureaucratic way by which the ruling minority, based in the nationalised property, sought to defend its position. This argument, further, feeds the generation which says, ‘If what goes on in Russia is Socialism, we want none of it... How often have we heard this, and what pessimism and demoralisation it has spread among the youth! For all his belated croco- dile tears, Strachey justifies the Stalinists and the damage which they have done to socialism. . Is it, as Strachey argues, a ‘blind spot’ in Twxotsky that he should accept responsibility (in Diary in Exile) for the killing of the Tsarist royal family, and should passionately indict Stalin for murdering Trotsky’s own children? The blind spot is in Strachey that he can see no difference. Trotsky defends the regicide not as an indi- vidual but as a representative of the Bolshevik Party, which had just led the masses to power. ‘When the party of the revolution is obliged to kill, it does it on its open responsi- bility in the name of the tasks and immediate aims understood by the masses. Revolutionary morals are not abstract Kantian norms, but rules of conduct which place the revolu- tionist under the control of the tasks and the aims of his class.’ (Trotsky: Problems of the Chinese Revolu- tion, p. 263). If any conclusions at all are to be drawn from the Marxist criticisms of the crimes of Stalin and from Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Congress. and since, it is that the work of Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria. was not an expression of communist policies. Their crimes weakened and did not strengthen the workers’ state. They discredited socialism and weakened its support- ers. Trotsky’s family were perse- cuted precisely because Trotsky re- presented the traditions and policies of Communism on a world scale. Attacks on Trotsky were attacks on Communism. He and his family were persecuted just because they represented Bolshevism. He was completely consistently a defender of the working-class standpoint in de- fending the killing of the Tsar’s family. and denouncing that of his own. Let Labour’s philosopher pursue his thought further. Was Cromwell wrong to execute Charles I and passionately to justify the execution? LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 Were the Jacobins wrong to ensure the death of Louis XVI and his entourage? Incidentally, would it be against the rules to ask if Malayan Com- munists were not executed under Strachey as Minister of War in the Labour government after 1945? No less an authority than R. H. S. Crossman testified for Strachey in the Guardian recently, ‘During the war, the uncompromising theorist gave way to the professional propagandist. Strachey put his exceptional gifts for public relations at the service first of Fighter and then of Bomber Com- mand. His radio talks were a vital factor in quelling public protest against Bomber Harris’ total destruc- tion of German cities.” Who is Strachey to speak of murder? But . . . ‘Trotsky Jacked self- criticism,’ says Strachey. Surely Strachey has read The Prophet Armed? Does this not trace with careful scholarship the stages of Trotsky’s development from Centrism to Bolshevism and his coming to Lenin as a mature revolutionary in July 1917? Is not the whole account based on Trotsky’s own writings and his own consciousness of its stages? ‘Reason must become the finer,’ says Strachey, so we start by ignoring the evidence that answers the fashionable chatterers! Trotsky in his last book (Cn Defence of Marxism) says explicitly that Lenin was right and he was wrong on all questions of Party building up to 1917. The final question: ‘Where is Strachey going?’ If not to mysticism with Gollancz, then to cynicism? He says, ‘resolute democratic govern- ments’ are going to reform society. Then why do we not hear his voice raised in the Labour Party in defence of Clause Four? Let his faith in democracy bear fruit in a defence of the Young Socialists against the right-wing bureaucracy. But after all, to see Fabians finish up as cynics is nothing new. The belated revival of Fabianism is, if you like, the strangled cry of the progressive middle class. faced with no other prospect than acute class struggle in Britain and hoping against hope to stave it off by petty mano- euvres. J.A.

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