Anark

Den marxistiske historikern Eric Hobsbawn recenserar böcker om brittiska kommunister (Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism; Kevin Morgan et al., Communists and British Society 1920–91; Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left, Part One: Labour Legends and Russian Gold) i London Review of Books 26/4.

Lenin’s ‘vanguard party’ of Marxist cadres, disciplined and ideally full-time, his ‘professional revolutionaries’, was the most formidable political invention of the 20th century. Its impact on the history of that century was extraordinary. Some thirty years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, parties of this type ruled over one third of the world’s population. By dint of following the Leninist model, small groups were able to punch far above their weight, while in the right historical circumstances, their structure afforded them enormous potential for expansion and, indeed, state-building. [...]

How modest the numbers were is often forgotten. When Tsarism fell in 1917 Bolshevik membership in Russia was estimated at ten thousand, of whom three thousand were in the capital. (In 1914 the St Petersburg membership had been barely five hundred.) In November 1940, less than four years before it took power in Belgrade, the Yugoslav Communist Party had six thousand members; at its lowest point, in 1932, it had counted barely two hundred. [...]

Who were they, the members of such parties? What, if anything, distinguished them from those who did not join? How different were their expectations and attitudes? Until the fall of the Berlin Wall these questions were asked and answered chiefly by impassioned anti-Communists, many of them breast-beating former devotees of the God That Failed. With some notable exceptions — Annie Kriegel was one — they wrote works of condemnation, warning and fear rather than understanding and analysis, sometimes based on theories about deviancy and totalitarian personality best forgotten.

[...]

[T]he disintegration of the movement has made possible the current flood of memoir, autobiography and prosopographical research. It is largely the work of former or surviving Party members in the non-Communist world, a disproportonately articulate sample of humanity, on the basis of the gigantic accumulation of biographical source material in the now accessible Russian C[ommunist]P[arty] and, to a lesser extent, Western intelligence archives. Since they are about a movement which has, for practical purposes, ceased to exist in its traditional form, at least in Europe, they are mostly free from the temptations of agitprop and self-justifying polemic, though not of the acids of academic controversy. They probably constitute the rare phenomenon of an obituary literature written from the grave.

[...]

In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the pre-existing cultural milieus of the left, liberal, labour, socialist or (in the case of immigrant Eastern Jews or Irish) from those generally sympathetic to rebels.

[...]

Labour leaders as well as Communists expressed enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and its achievements: as late as 1937, Attlee, who didn’t doubt that the USSR was part of the socialist family though its practices were unsuited to Britain, was the only leader of a major social-democratic party associated with Moscow’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union. In practice, Communists, especially in the workplace, were not seen as rivals but as part of the labour community, even when Labour, anticipating the subsequent Cold War division, had firmly drawn the line between the lefts of ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’. British Communism was thus deeply enmeshed with the long-established labour and socialist movement of the only country in which a massively class-conscious industrial working class formed a majority of the population. As Morgan’s team shows, working-class British autobiographies contain hardly any of the narratives of sudden conversion so common among workers in the first generation of European Marxist social democracy. Overwhelmingly they see Communism issuing out of continuity. CP historians saw themselves both as innovators and as heirs of their radical-liberal and Fabian predecessors. Contrary to the ‘Internationale’, British Communism had no inclination to ‘sweep away the past’; ‘du passé faisons table rase’ was not part of its agenda.

[…]

Why has so powerful a socio-political invention as the classical Leninist Party had so relatively brief a career? The extraordinary success of such parties coincided with the first half, the Age of Catastrophe, of the ‘short’ 20th century, an era of world wars, imperial breakdowns, revolutions and wars for national and social liberation, unsuited to the institutions of democratic mass politics in several of the few countries where they operated. After 1949 and the last of their successful revolutions (the Chinese), opposition Communist parties lived on diminishing capital. South Africa was to be their only major achievement. Their main inspiration, an international movement, disappeared with the Chinese-Soviet split. Since the 1960s their chosen constituencey as the agents of social transformation, the industrial working class, has been eroding and fragmenting. They were slow to recognice postwar social changes.

[…]

The classical non-regime Communist party is today almost extinct as a political force in Europe and the Americas, though not in parts of India. There is no real prospect of its revival. Nor, except possibly in Nepal [sic], have dissident Marxist verisons replaced it. Few if any of the current non-Communist revolutionary or insurrectionary bodies, now mostly ethnic or confessional, look to the Leninist model as they once did. On the other hand, Communist parties survive as state organisations shorn of the old commitment to a centrally state-planned socialism, but, as in China and Vietnam, as extremely effective sponsors of what might be called controlled market economies. Since China is today seen as the exemplar of economic success and the 21st century is likely to provide ample scope for controlled and regulated economies, the post-Communist-state party is not about to fade away. What Lenin would think of it is another question.

Jfr Oskorei om Paul Piccone idag.