26.11.1998
Debating the USSR: The external dynamic of negative ideology
In a recent article we identified the ‘problematic of negative ideology’ as being pertinent to the study of the USSR (Weekly Worker October 8 - for Jack Conrad’s reply see Weekly Worker October 15). This outline identified the abstract status of Marxist-Leninist ideology within the Soviet Union, arguing that it suffered an endless blocked mediation as a result of distinct bureaucratic distortions. In that sense the ideological power of the USSR was seen to be manifest in the most negative of connotations. Readers may have identified a definite teleological thrust to the argument, in that the ‘bitter end’ of August 1991, the collapse of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, was never far from the author’s mind. However, we also have to consider the survival of socialism in the USSR, a mere trifle of 73 years.
The phenomenon of ‘negative ideology’ that the Soviet Union represented was found to be a product of its internal political blockage. Clearly this represents a theoretical assertion and not a ‘finished’ analysis. Nevertheless we can certainly pose the external relation of the USSR - the international communist movement that was a response to its creation - as a point of nurture for the continued existence of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore it is proposed that our point of departure for investigation should be the dialectic of the internal and external.
It should be of no surprise that the subject of the relations between the CPSU and the fraternal parties of the Comintern (alongside the looser associations of latter years) would be mutilated by the dual canon of Trotskyite and bourgeois scholarship. This complex historical problem is resolved into a simple instrumentalist relation whereby ‘subordination to diktat from Moscow’ becomes the organising principle. Such one-sided inanities have even begun to filter into the ranks of our contemporary CPGB. In various formal and informal gatherings, communists who remained loyal to the defence of the USSR have been depicted as suffering from a ‘mass-psychosis’.
I think we can safely put such judgements aside. Of course the CPSU was an important specific determination inside the international movement, but never an unmediated one. There also existed other determinants, the national communist parties and their relationship with the ‘host’ society. Any exploration of this edifice therefore needs to grasp such interrelationship through the mantle of its totality.
Some readers may question exactly what sort of international movement existed after 1945. After all, Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943 and the revisionist idea of ‘national’ roads to socialism became current in the various communist parties in the years immediately following the World War II. However, one must not be misled into the myth that the international communist movement manifested itself as a fully ‘polycentric’ tendency through the Cold War and beyond.
Writing in 1983, Ponomarev articulated the Soviet definition of ‘proletarian internationalism’: “Operating under specific national conditions, guided in its struggle by the basic ideas of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, each communist party is an independent organisation. It formulates its own policy, its programme and tactics and is completely independent in working out the forms and methods of its activity. If the points of view of all the communist parties or of most of them on a particular issue coincide, surely this is not because someone has given them a directive to harmonise their stands. Their common approach to major issues springs from their common ideology, and people of like mind, sharing the same world outlook, naturally have similar stands on specific problems” (B Ponomarev Marxism-Leninism in today’s world: a living and effective teaching Oxford 1983, pp135-36).
Ponomarev appears blind to the fact that his revisionist formulation of “national conditions” and “independent organisation” is the living negation of proletarian internationalism. In fact it functions as an apologia for the fracturing of the international communist movement in latter years. Nevertheless, Ponomarev’s arguments concerning a commonality of ideology have a definite truth that was broadly operative for much of the movement’s history. For example, as the CPGB proceeded with its disastrous condemnation of the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, “The party leadership did not by any means renounce their Soviet attachments, and depicted their stance as being one of fraternal criticism” (W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p157).
Even during periods when the national communist parties became severely infected with opportunistic nationalism, the USSR and hence the international movement was never far from their intellectual horizon. Thorez, the general secretary of the French Communist Party, argued in 1937: “On the whole, it is legitimate to affirm that life is happier, freer, and more beautiful in France, our country. Apart from the Soviet Union, France now occupies first place in the world; once again it has become a land of progress and liberty” (cited in P Spriano Stalin and the European communists London 1985, p19).
From this point onwards our analysis will be primarily based on the experience of British communism. The CPGB was no different in its retention of close fraternal ties with the Soviet Union prior to and after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. That much is well known. Less well formulated is the exact meaning of these bonds, presuming of course that we have ditched the one-sided instrumentalism of the Trotskyites.
Kevin Morgan, in his interesting biography of Harry Pollitt, addresses the question of how much the CPGB leaders knew of the practice of the CPSU during the various stages of political show trials in the USSR and Eastern Europe. He utilises a story told by George Matthews of Pollitt’s reaction to the exposure of a Polish communist member as a Titoite: “You know, it’s extraordinary ... I met this chap and I stayed in the same room as he did and he showed me his back with the scars on it which had been inflicted on him in Pilsudski’s jails. Here’s a man who’s undergone these tortures for the communists and he turns out to be a traitor” (cited in K Morgan Harry Pollitt Manchester 1993, pp175).
Morgan asks how this presumed suspension of judgement could occur, giving his answer in the lack of a “clear dividing line between knowledge and ignorance” (ibid p174). In a similar vein, Doris Lessing details a fictionalised account of her life in the CPGB through the eyes of one Anna Wulf: “...this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack [the] Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it ... Fascinating - the roles we play, the way we play parts” (D Lessing The golden notebook London 1993, p153).
Lessing further expounds the function of such role-play in coming to an understanding of the reasons why CPGB members identified with the struggles of the USSR. On the occasion of Stalin’s death, Anna Wulf and her flatmate Molly find themselves unexpectedly upset at the news and Anna thinks about “ ... how odd it was we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence” (ibid p158). Earlier in the ‘Red Notebook’ Anna offers a solution to the dilemma: “I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split - not the business of belonging to an organisation whose every tenet - on paper anyway - contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that” (ibid pp156-157).
Lessing’s description of the alienating nature of inner-Party life in the early 1950s is a familiar refrain, partly explained by the CPGB’s adoption of a national, gradualist programme in this period. Reformism is of course the absolute negation of wholeness. Existing structures become naturalised and immutable, leading to a partialised expression of humanity in the struggles of the Party. In this scenario the Communist Party becomes an inferior link to mastering the outside world. Therefore the identification with the USSR becomes an alienated means by which to surmount that world. This is illustrated rather well by Cliff True: “Nobody can deny what [Winston] Churchill said, that it was the Soviet army that tore the guts out of Germany ... I was a product of the war. [I’d] just joined the Communist Party, the Germans were advancing into the Soviet Union ... People, not in a nasty sense [were saying] ‘oh, the Soviet Union’s failed’ and then when the Soviet Union started to overtake and smash the [Germans], well, crikey, you thought, nothing could be wrong with a government that could do that” (author’s interview with Cliff True, Treherbert, February 1996).
Another perspective on this discussion is given by Edward Upward in his beautiful novel, The rotten elements. Alan Sebrill (Upward’s fictionalisation of himself) is driven to a nervous breakdown after resigning from the CPGB along with his wife, Elsie. The Sebrills have been involved in a struggle against the political direction of the Party after the war and Alan has suffered from a complete lack of reconciliation between the desire to express himself poetically and his life as a Party member. Upward details Sebrill’s breakdown in haunting prose: “He found he could stop his trembling by thinking of Stalin and by speaking the name of Stalin, repeatedly but not quite aloud, much as a religious believer might have called on the name of god” (E Upward The rotten elements London 1979, p194). This illustrates, in the most painful human terms possible, the nature of this alienation, rooted in an attempt to mend discord but primarily the responsibility of political failure.
It can thus be considered that the identification of the CPGB with the USSR follows a comparative dynamic to that of Marxist-Leninist ideology inside the Soviet Union. What we are left with is a similar process of abstraction, in that ‘defending the USSR’ could never of itself be a point of mediation for the programme of human liberation. What it could do is strengthen the presence, however abstract, of the progressive tenets of Marxism-Leninism, both internally to the USSR and in the face it presented to the world. This was of course positively promoted by the CPSU. In 1952 Stalin expressed the international need for a Marxist textbook of political economy, “... an excellent gift to the young communists of all countries” (JV Stalin Economic problems of socialism in the USSR Moscow 1952, p51).
The Soviet Union was decidedly ‘thing-like’ in the narratives of CPGB members. However, ideology and its symbols are never immutable and naturalised, they can be mediated and altered. In this case we can identify a definite tendency to gain a sense of closeness to heroic figures such as Stalin, partly through myths, which in turn represented a modification of existing myths. For example Charlie Swain saw “Joe Stalin” as a “straightforward, honest politician” (author’s interview with Charlie Swain, Cardiff, April 1996), which in some ways echoes the colloquial designation of ‘Uncle Joe’ that was given to Stalin by British workers during World War II.
A more literal expression of this narrative was given by Dai Francis. On his return from a miners’ delegation to the Soviet Union in 1952 he exclaimed to CPGB members in his village that on one occasion “I was as near as that house across the road [about 10 yards away] to Stalin”. His son Hywel depicts this tale as containing “a certain degree of awe”. However, this is a very particular form of awe in its attempt to refashion its symbols in such close physical proximity (P Cohen Children of the revolution: communist childhood in Cold War Britain London 1997, p124).
Such mythology could be further embroidered. Doris Lessing details a tale told by Anna Wulf to a Party writers’ meeting of a young man invited to the Soviet Union on a teachers’ delegation. In the middle of the night the protagonist gets escorted to see none other than Stalin himself. After passing “his rough worker’s hand across his brow” Stalin invites the young man to talk frankly about the direction of the British CP. Revealingly, all the members of the writers’ group cannot admit to each other the parodic intent of the narrative (D Lessing op cit pp273-276). This fantasy is the ultimate abstraction, whereby the problems of the CPGB are pushed into the lap of Stalin. The story simultaneously attempts to overcome this. Reading it is almost like having Stalin put his arm around your shoulder. However, these partial attempts to override the alienated effect were doomed to failure precisely because the attempted resolution is enacted on the grounds of abstraction itself.
This article is an initial attempt to establish the process of a particular determination, the CPSU, in its external relations with the international communist movement. In our short dissection we have shown how such effects were mediated through the prism of other determinations, in this case the CPGB. In fact within the confines of their own alienated form, the various national communist parties reflected back their own ideological concerns onto the edifice of the Soviet Union, establishing in turn an outlet and sustenance for Marxism-Leninism within Soviet society, trapped as it was in a negative form. What we have here is not the dynamic of international communism in the 20th century but a dynamic. In itself it is an abstraction of a shifting determination. Nevertheless if it can aid the action by which instrumentalist methodologies are cast into the darkest of dungeons then its author’s struggles will not have been in vain.
Phil Watson