African Mutiny

ROGER CASEMENT first became widely-known through the report which he published in 1904, when British consul at Boma, on Belgian ill-treatment of the Congolese natives in connection with forced labour. The thoroughness of Casement’s exposure of the Belgian atrocities led to his being assigned to carry out a similar investigation in Peru a few years later, for which he received a knighthood. (For turning his attention to oppression nearer home he received still later, as is well known, a death sentence.)

The harsh tradition of Belgian rule in the Congo supplies the background to the violence of recent events in that country, and it is worth recalling what Marx wrote for the New York Tribune when the London papers were full of fury over the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny of 1857:

‘The outrages committed by the revolted sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable—such as one is prepared to meet only in wars of insurrection, of -nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the “Blues” (French revolutionaries), by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen (during the Peninsula War), by Serbians on their German and Hungarian neighbours, by Croats on

Viennese rebels (in 1848-49),by Cavaignac’s Garde Mobile or Bonaparte’s Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France. However infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself, “The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots (peasants), tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them... -Belgian Imperialism and Russia Pre-revolutionary Russia had some of the features of a semi-colonial country; in particular, foreign capital played a big role in its industries. The Russian workers’ struggle brought them directly up against world capital. It was a French factory-owner who by protesting to the Tsar put a stop to police-chief Zubatov’s experiments in

‘ ‘controlled’ trade unionism—no sort of trade unionism at all should be tolerated in Russia! It was in the British-owned Lena goldfields that the shooting of strikers took place in 1912 which aroused such a wave of fury throughout Russia.

Alongside the British and French investors, Belgians were prominent, especially in the metal industry. After the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny, Trotsky wrote a sarcastic article in Pravda (March 23, 1921) commenting on the rise in ‘Russian’ shares which had taken place on the Brussels stock-exchange during the course of that struggle. The Belgian exploiters had glimpsed an opportunity to ride back into possession of their property in Russia on the shoulders of the mutineers.

Profiteer Parasites on Nationalization The attempt of Pye, the Cambridge television and electronics group, to break into the monopoly of the Telecommunication and Engineering Manufacturing Association, dominated by Lord Chandos (better known to the older generation as Oliver Lyttelton, ultra-Tory MP), has again focused attention on the way the nationalized industries are milked by private concerns through the profits they make when supplying equipment to these And it has not escaped notice, either, that the managing directors of TEMA and of Pye Telecommunications are both former Post Office officials. When retired officers of the armed services proceed from jobs in the Admiralty, War Office or Air Ministry to directorships in armament firms, cynics always speculate as to whether these officers’ connections with the firms in question really began only at the moment they left the official jobs where they had . influence on the placing of contracts. It seems unfair that similarly-placed civilians are not more often subject to such sordid speculations!

My father worked in a naval dockyard and was familiar with the gossip that always arises when such moves from Whitehall to the City take place. When a high-ranking naval officer objected to the ‘system’, that was definitely news. In 1919, the fact that Admiral of the Fleet Lord Wester Wemyss, First Sea Lord, was passed over in the war honours list occasioned a lot of knowing comment in naval circles; but it was only in 1935, when Wemyss’s widow published a ‘Life and Letters’ of her husband that the general public learnt what his great offence had been. Apparently he had grown sick of the log-rolling for contracts that he had seen so much of at the Admiralty and had submitted a memorandum to the Cabinet advocating . the nationalization of the armaments industry.

Incidentally, the demand to nationalize the manufacture of all the means of waging war provides today an obvious link between the fight to implement Clause Four and the fight to equip the Labour Party with a real socialist policy on defence; two struggles which the Right will try to — separate and even counterpose one to the other.

Comparative Co-efficients

John Archer has pointed out to me that there is at least one other title to be added to the ‘little books’ through which Trotsky became well-known among thinking Left-wingers in Britain in the 1920s, namely, “Towards Socialism or Capitalism?’, published here in 1926.

This was the book in which Trotsky advanced the key idea that the triumph of socialism could not be assessed merely by crude output figures, important as those were: ‘The economic superiority of bourgeois states lies in the fact that so far capitalism produces cheaper goods than socialism, and of a better quality. The Soviet consumer buying a pair of Soviet boots would inevitably think: ‘Before 1917 a pair of boots cost so many roubles and lasted so many months’, and by that standard he would judge his new boots. And though the passage of time was steadily reducing the number of those whose memories went back to pre-revolutionary years, the number of those possessing either first-hand or second-hand knowledge of conditions in the outside, capitalist world was also increasing, and they would make similar comparisons—with ‘abroad’. .

The basic type of le in Stalinist Russia, that great realm of lies, was the lie about the quantity, quality and price of Soviet-produced goods in comparison with foreign goods. For political reasons it was necessary for the bureaucracy to exaggerate the real achievements and conceal the no-less-real failures and setbacks in the economic sphere. Trotsky’s insistence on honest, scientific attention to the ‘comparative co-efficients’ was perhaps his major real crime in the eyes of the bureaucratic swindlers. The habit of lying about economic matters infected all spheres of Soviet life, and, of course, spread to the foreign Communist press—if only because the editor of the Daily — Worker and the rest had to remember the reader in Leningrad as well as the reader in London! .

Glass-House-Dweller Throws Stones

Amid much sound and useful criticism of the recent book by Leonard Schapiro, “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, Andrew Rothstein remarks (‘Menshevik History Warmed Up’, in the June issue of Marxism ‘Today), that Schapiro is wrong when he describes Trotsky as having been chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet in October, 1917.

This, says Rothstein, is a ‘well-worn myth’. Not Trotsky but Podvoisky was the chairman! Well, I must confess I had never met the statement before that Trotsky occupied this particular position at that time. He was, in fact, as is well known, rather more important—he was president of the Petrograd Soviet itself. But let a real authority speak on this matter: ‘All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the president of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going-over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized. The principal assistants of Comrade Trotsky were Comrades Antonov and Podvoisky.’

The writer of these lines was, of course, the late J. V. Stalin (in Pravda of November 6, 1918). My quotation is taken from page 30 of the 1941 reprint, by Lawrence & Wishart, of a collection of Stalin’s articles called ‘The October Revolution’, originally published in English in 1933. If you look for this passage in the ‘definitive’ version of the article given in Volume 4 of Stalin’s Works (English edition, 1953), you won’t find it, I’m afraid.

It is all very fine for Andrew Rothstein to pick holes in Schapiro’s book; but such facts as this unscrupulous ‘editing’ of an historical document show that unfortunately there is something for writers like Schapiro to base themselves on when they allege a degeneration of the Soviet Communist Party, even though their understanding of the process may be at fault.

BRIAN PEARCE.

Juty 23, 1960