Iron Curtain. Anne Applebaum. Review and a Note on Totalitarianism.

Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer Recht!
Und, Genossen, es bleibe dabei;
Denn wer kämpft für das Recht,
Der hat immer recht.
Gegen Lüge und Ausbeuterei.
Wer das Leben beleidigt,
Ist dumm oder schlecht.
Wer die Menschheit verteidigt,
Hat immer recht.
So, aus Leninschem Geist,
Wächst, von Stalin geschweißt,
Die Partei – die Partei – die Partei.

Oh The Party, The Party is always right

And comrade, may it ever be so;

For who fights for the right

He is always right

Against lies and exploitation

[women] Whoever insults life

is stupid or bad

Whoever defends humanity

Is always right

Grown from the spirit of Lenin

Welded by Stalin

The party – the party – the party.

Das Lied der Partei.

Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. 1944 – 1956. Anne Applebaum. Allen Lane 2012.

A Note on Totalitarianism.

Iron Curtain is an important and deeply researched study of Eastern European Communist states. It begins with their blood-stained birth, illustrates their brightest hopes, and deepest fears, it travels from the sweated labour that built Socialist Cities, to the spying and the stridency of everyday life. Anne Applebaum’s book is equally an investigation into regimes that aspired  to “total control” and how they used their power to achieve this.

Anne Applebaum is, as Duncan Bowie observes (Chartist March/April 2013) highly “partisan”. She is married to the centre-right Polish foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski. She  is, nobody will be surprised to hear,  far from  neutral about assessing the damage done in the name of Communism.

It would be derisory, and irrelevant,  to make her parti pris stand against the mass of historical detail, mastery of several of the countries’ languages, and weighed judgements that Iron Curtain offers.

Why? The answer comes in the opening pages. The first chapters of Iron Curtain Applebaum overwhelm the reader with the terror brought in the wake of the Second World War. Axis atrocities are laid out in full and the Shoah is never far away from the narrative. Readers of Timothy Synders’ Bloodlands will be acquainted with the terrible reality of destruction on the Eastern Frontiers. But it is other events that stay in the mind the undoubted heroism of the Red Army in fighting its way to Berlin and defeating Nazism, was accompanied by its own brutality against civilians and, in particular, mass rape. The Red Army re-opened camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald almost as soon as they closed them, to house their own undesirables.

The cruelty, oppression, and ethnic cleansing (notably of those of German origin, or even, in Hungary’s case, of those with Teutonic names of other ethnicities) that followed  in the first years after the war, principally, East Germany, Poland and Hungary are memorably described. Whole populations of Poles, Rutheniums, Hungarians, were summarily ‘re-allocated’ to new territories.

During the late 1940s Communists consolidated their rule. At the pivot of the system – even before the countries were openly Communist-led – were the security services. Moscow trained local functionaries under the ultimate command of the Soviet NKVD quickly consolidated these. From the Interior Ministries they directed wholesale purges of real and suspected opponents. Executions, consigning people to local camps, even sending them to the Soviet Gulag, followed. The take-over of each state proceeded remorselessly, “first (by) the elimination of right-wing; or anti-communist parties, then the destruction of the non-communist left, then the elimination of opposition within the communist party itself.”(xxxiv)

True Believers.

Yet at the same time the Communist parties were led by true believers. Their Central Committees initially allowed (relatively) free elections because they thought they could win. They thought their doctrine was true. They “really did think that sooner of later the working-class majority would acquire class consciousness, understand its historical destiny and vote for a communist regime.”(P xxxiv)

Harsh policies were a reaction to defeat in elections, notably by the Small Holders’ Party in Hungary, and (if electoral fraud had not obscured this) by the Social Democrats and others in East Germany, ‘patriotic’ parties in Poland, and elsewhere Even in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, barely covered in Iron Curtain) where the local Communist parties did have deeper bases (something Applebaum plays down) they were unable to reach a majority on their own.

Iron Curtain’s principal thesis is that Communist rule under the period of High Stalinism (that is, from the late 1940s to 1956) saw an effort to eliminate any independent life for civil society. “The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passion, talents and free time.”(Page 185) They took over youth groups, women’s leagues, churches, trade unions, independent educational movements, and, above all, the mass media, beginning with the Radio. In doing so, “They managed, undermined and sometimes eliminated churches, newspapers, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, banks, sports clubs and universities.”(Page 496)

60th Anniversary of Stalin’s Death and the Great Terror in le Monde.

Yesterday in Le Monde on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death (5th March 1953) there was a supplement on the Great Terror.

See Géographie de la terreur stalinienne

The Supplement includes Identity photos of the victims. Unlike the well-known figures whose memory was effaced from the public record, many images remain of ordinary people. 

More details are in: La Grande Terreur en URSS, 1937-1938, de Tomasz Kizny, Nicolas Werth, Arseni Roguinski, Christian Caujolle. Avant-propos de Sylvie Kauffmann. Editions Noir sur blanc, 412 p., 40 €.

Vestiges invisibles de la Grande Terreur

Photos of the sites of mass executions and common graves, including these.

Boutovo, near Moscow, where people condemned to death were shot.

Tomsk, in the centre of Russia. It is estimated that there are 10,00 corpses in this ravine.

Medvejiegorsk and Povenets, near the border with Finland. At least  6 786 bodies have been identified of those who were killed and buried here.

 

Green Party Begins to Lose its Grip.

Mirroring the worst excesses of left wing sects?

From our good friends at Socialist Unity.

Reinstate the Bromsgrove One – Rectify the Anomaly Soon!
By Abu Jamal

As the Green Party of England and Wales gathers in Nottingham for it Spring Conference featuring the 40th Anniversary of the Founding of the Party, one person who will be not attending this event is Mark France.

Mark a longstanding Labour Movement and Socialist Activist who joined the Green Party in June 2010 was Expelled by a decision of the Green Party Regional Council at a meeting held on the Weekend of 2nd/3rd February 2012.

Mark was never given any clear indication of what charges were laid against him or provided with any evidence or documentation relating to these charges. Mark was not able to provide any defence. There was no hearing in which Mark was able to participate in nor was he able to present any defence. Mark was given no clear indication of the Disciplinary Process despite numerous unanswered attempts to clarify this with Green Party Officers.

To and insult to a series of injuries Mark was not even informed of the outcome of this Disciplinary Process until after he protested loudly via social media at his mistreatment. When he finally [19th February] received a special delivery letter from the party

For a political party of the Left with an avowed Republican Socialist Feminist, Caroline Lucas as the Green Party MP in Westminster, the treatment of Mark France seems to make a mockery of the Green Party rally cry ‘Fair is Worth Fighting For!’

The article continues,

At the same Green Party Regional Council meeting on the 3rd of February another longstanding activist from Cardiff, Anne Greasby, was also expelled from the party. Her ‘crimes’ seemed to centre on public criticism of Pippa Barlotti the Leader of the tiny semi-autonomous Green Party in Wales.

In Mark’s case, some jokey comments made on this website over two years ago were apparently used to accuse Mark of “promoting violent revolution under the banner of the Green Party” this reason for his expulsion was given to a London Federation of Green Parties meeting by a member of the GPRC.

If the “Libertarian” Green Party is capable of mirroring the worst excesses of left wing sects then something deeply disturbing is affecting the political culture in England. Finding the source of this undemocratic culture of control is something that all socialists need to address. Defence of the victims of this culture is part of rebuilding a genuine spirit of social solidarity.

More details of this sorry tale and the Greens’ “Dispute Resolution Committee”.

This should be read with the following:

Why I resigned from the Green Party

Joseph Healy, a founder member of the Green Left. 2012.

The battle lines became obvious over the issue of local government budgets and cuts at the GPEW conference in spring 2011. At that point the Greens had not yet taken control of Brighton, but it was clearly on the mind of the party leadership.

An amendment was put to an anti-cuts policy motion by Green Left and some of the Young Greens. It called for local Green councils to fight the cuts and to defy the government by setting an illegal ‘needs budget’. Councillors were dragooned by the leadership to speak against it and finally it was defeated by just 3 votes.

For many of us this was the writing on the wall and a sign that should the Greens take Brighton, they would implement the cuts. It led to a real fall in morale among many of us on the left of the party.

Painfully aware of the impact of any cuts budget in Brighton on the national party’s reputation and on its relationship with the wider anti-cuts movement, as well as the new political movements such as Occupy, I supported a motion calling for a last minute debate with a Green councillor from Brighton on the budget there. The motion fell and the majority abstained, prepared to accept any decision reached by the Brighton councillors.

It was now clear to me that the iceberg was fast approaching the SS Green Brighton, with its consequent impact on the reputation of the Green Party nationally. The collision happened when the cuts budget was passed at the end of February. However, the budget passed was even worse than predicted and was the Labour-Tory version, which the Greens swallowed whole in order to remain in office.

A few days later at the party’s national conference, despite vigorous objections from Green Left, the party voted to support the Brighton decision. Pragmatism had defeated principle, realpolitik triumphed over radicalism.

I resigned on the same day.

Healy adds this on  how the Greens Treat dissent.

Socialist Action, a Response to the SWP Crisis.

Sam Marcy lives!

Socialist Action is a descendant of the International Marxist Group (IMG).*

A descendant.

It has now waded into the SWP crisis, asking,

Why the bourgeois media offensive against the SWP?

There are answers:

There are really two issues involved. First, why this crisis in the SWP has developed. Second why the capitalist media, who are implacable enemies of anything progressive, have decided to take such an interest in the matter. As will be seen the two issues are very different.

Before seeing how SA responds their own political background has to be borne in mind.

Socialist Action  is best known for its close co-operation with Ken Livingstone.

Amongst Livingstone’s ‘bag carriers’ were (Wikipedia reports)  Socialist Action supporters,  chief of staff Simon Fletcher, deputy chief of staff and director of public affairs and transport Redmond O’Neill, economic adviser John Ross, green adviser Mark Watts and culture adviser Jude Woodward.

In 2007 Livingstone changed the GLA rules so that his eight key advisers, four associated with Socialist Action (including John Ross and the late Redmond O’Neill), who as temporary appointments would not normally have been entitled to severance pay, received an average of £200,000 each.

Hedging their bets, “Socialist Action has also participated in Respect – The Unity Coalition since the 2007 split in that party. Several of its supporters became members of the party and one serves as its national treasurer.”

A failure  to secure Livingstone’s re-election led to Respect being given more priority. However Kate Hudson’s exclusion from the Galloway orbit (she was O’Neill’s partner though had been in the Communist Party of Britain), may have meant that this strategy was downgraded.

What is SA’s ideology?

Socialist Action has evolved far from the Trotskyism and new leftism of the IMG. Very far. Its ideology is often described as “Marcyism‘ after the former US Trotskist Sam Marcy (Sam Ballan, 1911 – February 1, 1998).

Marcey saw the main duty of the left was to “defend the existence of the USSR and its satellites in spite of their bureaucracy”. He supported the Soviet military intervention, in Hungary 1956, arguing that the initial worker uprising had attracted class elements that sought to restore capitalism.

After the collapse of the  Eastern Bloc and Soviet Stalinist states  SA has defended  ‘anti-imperialist’ forces of any kind.

Jane West and  Tom Castle’s articles on the Socialist Action site define everything in the world in terms of the fight against ‘imperialism’ – the US and to a lesser extent the European Union.

If you be bothered to wade through them you will learn that,

The class struggle in Egypt is still unfolding. Recent steps in foreign policy by President Morsi have been progressive – including the decision to visit Iran for the non-aligned summit and to pay a state visit to China before making one to the US. But so far domestically there has been only a limited response from the Muslim Brotherhood to demands of the Egyptian masses for improvements in their living standards and in standing up to the army, behind which stands the US.

Most immediately at the heart of the relationship of forces in the region now lies the struggle in Syria, where the imperialist-sponsored, financed and armed Free Syrian Army is seeking to overthrow Assad in order to break the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah axis which has successfully resisted the Israeli state and is one of the chief obstacle to untrammelled imperialist control in the region.

More recently Castle opines,

The US is encouraging its junior imperialist partners to step up their military role in Africa, with the US providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance rather than the key fighting forces. This is to allow the US to continue prioritising its ‘pivot’ to Asia, which is aimed at stepping up its presence in the Pacific as a curb on China, partly aimed at forcing a diversion of Chinese resources into defensive military spending in an attempt to curb the growth of the Chinese economy.

Human Rights? Forget it.

The SWP ‘Crisis’ to the SA.

Socialist Action begins by listing various crises in the SWP’s recent past, largely to do with their own hot and cold, very cold,  relations with windbag Galloway.

Then comes the Macryite line,

The real roots of this crisis are that the SWP was founded on a wrong analysis of the international class line of divide between the international working class and imperialism which led to major misunderstandings of the class struggle. Its famous strap-line ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism’ expressed its analysis that the Soviet Union was a variation of capitalism, dubbed ‘state capitalism’. No class distinction could be drawn between this ‘state capitalism’ and the capitalist and imperialist powers.

The SWP failed to understand that the destruction of the USSR, and the re-establishment of capitalism constituted a great victory for imperialism which set back the class struggle internationally.

This is followed by a tortuous paragraph,

Throughout the last two decades the SWP’s comrades have therefore been led to expect a major upsurge in the struggle in the imperialist centres, which has failed to materialise, while turning their faces away from the really progressive developments in world politics such as Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and the whole advance of the left in Latin America. This over-heated view of the possibilities in the class struggle also led to a sectarian and wrong attitude to other forces pursuing limited but progressive struggles within the imperialist centres – one of the issues which lay behind the wrong approach of the SWP in Respect.

Put simply they didn’t keep on Galloway’s bandwagon, or support unconditionally Chavez and Cuba.

The SWP, Socialist Action condescends to say, did,  apparently, stand on the right side against ‘imperialist interventions’.

What the Bourgeois Offensive against the SWP?

The bourgeois media thinks, accroding to SA, that a Labour victory in the next election is probable.

So,

This therefore leads to the ruling class’s second goal: to reduce, divide, weaken and confuse any potential leftward pressure on Labour or emergence of forces to its left. This is why the bourgeois media is jumping on the crisis in the SWP to run a campaign against it. It is taking the opportunity of the SWP’s crisis to weaken as much as possible a significant component of the left that would oppose Labour’s austerity policies and help organise the resistance to it. And to discredit and smear the left in general.

In other words it should be clearly understood that the current attack on the SWP by the Daily Mail and its ilk is not carried out to ‘improve’ the left but to damage it as much as possible.

So, so,

Whatever discussions continue on the left about the issues raised by the crisis in the SWP, there should be no confusion about the fact that the bourgeois media campaign against the SWP has no progressive content whatever. It is merely part of an offensive to weaken the left as much as possible now and prevent the emergence of a powerful left campaigning against Labour carrying out austerity policies after 2015.

Quite Right Comrades!

We have been confused by the bourgeois attacks. We have thought they have an oppressive content”, we considered the Daily Mail was out to “improve” the left.

The scales have fallen from our eyes!

More information on Socialist Action, Stalinist, secretive and not left-wing: Socialist Action, the group behind ‘Student Broad Left’

*As is Tendance Coatesy.

The Crisis of the SWP, Leninism and the Left.

To defend press freedom the 19^th century French liberal Benjamin Constant used analogy. * He imagined a society before the invention of language. Suddenly people could speak. When it undermined order figures in authority began to regret this state of affairs. Gradually the innovation was accepted. Nobody any longer had the idea of forbidding talking on the grounds that it could be used to spread rumours, lies or fantasies.

Perhaps the Socialist Workers Party will consider Constant’s argument when they next stick on their internal documents, “Under No Circumstances Should This Text be Posted on the Internet, For SWP members Only.”

* Cited Page 227. Les Gauches Françaises. Jacques Julliard. 2012.

The Crisis of the SWP, Leninism  and the Left.

“…the fact remains that as long as the dialogue between reform and revolution continues, Trotskyism will claim its own place as the continuation of the classical Marxist tradition with its orientation on working-class self-emancipation from below.”

Alex Callinicos. Trotsky. 1990.

What does the “dialogue” about “reform and revolution” mean today? The Socialist Workers Party’s present crisis came about when members challenged the role of its Disputes Committee in ‘judging’ accusations of rape. But this has rapidly developed into charges about a “serious deficit in party democracy” (Democratic Renewal Platform). The issues at stake have broadened out, to feminism, and the nature of the SWP’s form of the Leninist ‘revolutionary party’. Alex Callinicos has now upped the stakes. He asks, “Do revolutionary parties, like the Socialist Workers Party, that draw on the method of organising developed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks still fit in the twenty first century?” (Is Leninism Finished? Socialist Review. January 2013).

Far from burying his critics with a ‘Zionviest’ appeal to loyalty to Bolshevism Callinicos could have begun a serious debate. It might avoid what he calls the “dark side of the Internet” – people circulating “salacious gossip.” How far indeed do the SWP’s claims to be part of the ‘classical Marxist tradition’ in the working class’s fight for “self-emancipation from below” stand up to scrutiny? What sense does this goal have in the 21^st century? Is the SWP’s crisis a symptom of how this version of revolutionary Marxism, based on the (disputed) appropriation of Trotskyism, is fundamentally awry? Are there other theories and vehicles, reformist or not, that could advance a socialist project?

There are many critics of the SWP, Leninists, or from other Marxist, socialist and different left currents, including ‘reformists’ (a wide category for present-day ‘revolutionaries’). They start from asking whether the SWP has it been able “to bring together all the forces of the oppressed in a common struggle against capitalism, under the leadership of the proletariat”? (John Molyneau. Marxism and the Party 1999) The SWP, on the evidence, has since it launch in 1977, remained far from helping fulfil this objective. It remains politically marginal. Many have suggested that the SWP party-form is one of the reasons why it has remained the “smallest mass party in the world” since its foundation in 1977, and looks like getting even smaller.

Nobody ignores the host of other reasons for this impasse, not least the shadow left by Official Communism and its break up. But we have to ask whether the SWP is trapped in what Callinicos himself has called, following the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, “conventionalist stratagems”, designed to protect the hard core from the persistent refutation of its auxiliary hypotheses.” (Trotsky. 1990) At present the Central Committee looks at if it is acting to protect its own organisational ‘hard core’ whose ‘auxiliary’ actions (its string of ‘united fronts’) have not been successful for some time. Can the SWP look, as Ian Birchall announced in his history of the International Socialists and the SWP (1951 – 1981), “with confidence at the struggles ahead”? Nothing is less sure.

Democracy in Question.

There is a lot of evidence, ranging from the anecdotal (that cannot all be dismissed as title-tattle) to detailed accounts of the SWP internal life, that have been mustered to argue that that the group’s ‘party form’ is flawed. They centre on the widely shared experience of the party as a would-be directing force. It is run by a powerful – many say overweening – Central Committee (CC) through the National Executive (NE), the Centre and regional organisers. To critics this means that the CC commands the membership. It goes its own way, decides on “tactical flexibility”, and only accepts a minimum of dissent. In this political environment it is not surprising that stories about obnoxious or simply out-of-touch party ‘cadres’ – following a ‘line’ decided by the top, emerge.

The Weekly Worker, through a variety of by-lines, calls the SWP internal regime “bureaucratic centralism”. ‘Jack Conrad’ has also traced its faults down to a lack of thought-out programme (Weekly Worker. 72.13) ‘Soviet Goon Boy’ states that the SWP is “not fit for purpose” with an “interventionist leadership” that acts without restraint, appoints Centre workers and organisers by patronage, and a “disciplinary set-up based on in-groups and out-groups.”Martin Thomas argues that the fault lies primarily in the SWP’s “commandist” workings. “The SWP’s version of “democratic centralism” lacks both the best bits of “centralism” and the special sort of democracy needed by revolutionary socialists. (Workers Liberty. 30.1.13)