Revolutionaries (4 page)

For the labour movement the years from 1914 to 1920 were a succession of defeats, and of historically decisive defeats. 1914 meant the total failure of all sections and all formulae of the earlier movement – both socialist and syndicalist. From early 1915 a modest pacifist-internationalist (but not revolutionary) opposition emerged, though – significantly enough – not on the foundation of the prewar radical left. It failed in 1917, and slowly a revolutionary pro-bolshevik left emerged after the armistice, though – again significantly – it was only very partly based on the pacifist-internationalist ‘Zimmerwald' current of 1915–17, many of whose leaders refused to join it. There was at this stage no split in the French labour movement, or at any rate no more divergence than there had always been in it, since the formula of loose unity had been devised in the early 1900s; nor was there a serious prospect of a permanent split. On the contrary, in 1918–19 both the Socialist Party and the General Confederation of Labour appeared once again to have found a basis for unity in a shift to the left – but not the bolshevik left – which criticized but did not disavow the nationalist and class-collaborationist excesses of 1914. Unlike Germany, the war had not split the party. Unlike Britain, the leaders of class collaboration in 1914 (such as Arthur Henderson) did not carry a united party with them into opposition to the war and into a moderate socialism. But like Austria, the former pacifist minority became a majority, without dividing the party.

Of course in the heady atmosphere of world revolution all sections of the movement except the tiny and discredited extreme nationalist right, looked forward to ‘revolution' and ‘socialism',
though it is a moot point whether the battles fought in 1919–20 actually had it as their object. Whatever their object, they all failed. The small ultra-left who dreamed of a western-style proletarian revolution based on ‘councils' and equally hostile to Parliament, parties and trade unions, failed in the strikes of the spring of 1919, for it never reached the masses.
⁴
The solution of libertarian or decentralized communism was eliminated. The political socialists had always put their money on elected socialist governments, and drafted an ambitious programme of what such a government would do. They failed in the autumn of 1919, because the political shift of the electorate to the socialists was disappointingly small; only about 14 per cent, much smaller than in other countries. But for the half-heartedness of the reformist leadership, it would, as Mrs Kriegel proves convincingly, have been considerably more, but even so, an electoral majority was never in sight and thus saved the leadership of the party the probable demonstration that they would have done nothing with it. At all events the reformist road was temporarily barred.

Last, and most seriously, the revolutionary syndicalists – perhaps the strongest purely proletarian tradition of revolution in France – tried and failed in 1920, with the collapse of the great railway strike. The traditional myth of French labour, the revolutionary general strike, was dead. So, more significantly, was revolutionary syndicalism as a serious trend in the French movement.

It was in these circumstances – and only in these circumstances – that the bulk of the French socialist party was prepared to follow Moscow, and even then it did so only with tacit qualifications – ‘unreservedly, but without inopportune clarifications', as Mrs Kriegel puts it. It required the reflux of the majority of socialists into the old party shortly after and the elimination of the original
CP
leadership some years later, to lay the foundation for a real bolshevik party. This is doubtless true, but one may still doubt whether the permanent emergence of a mass
CP
was as ‘accidental' as she suggests.

In the first place the bankruptcy of the earlier currents and formulae of French socialism was irreversible. What is more, the traditional pride in French as the ‘classical' country of European revolution, and French revolutions as international style-setters, which had kept the French movement largely immune to marxism, was broken. The French had failed – lamentably, and for the first time in an era of European revolution – whereas the bolsheviks had succeeded. In any future French extreme left Lenin had to supplement the failing vigour of Robespierre, Blanqui or Proudhon. The way for a transformation of French revolutionaries was, for the first time, open. But in the epoch of the Third International such a transformation excluded any maintenance of the prewar formulae of socialist unity. A communist left would be bolshevik or it would not exist at all.

In the second place, as Mrs Kriegel rightly observes, the entire social basis of the pre–1914 French labour movement disappeared. The war brought the French economy for the first time into the twentieth century, that is to say it made impossible (or marginal) not only the unstable minority trade unionism of pre-industrial craftsmen, which had been the foundation of revolutionary syndicalism, but also the illusion of an outlaw working class, linked to the capitalist system by nothing except hatred and the hope of its total overthrow. One way or another both the reformism and the revolutionism of before 1914 had to change, to be re-defined or more precisely defined. In this sense also, the road back to 1914 was barred.

But this very change in the French economy and the relationship between employers, workers and the state, raised problems which neither the socialists nor the communists faced, or even
fully recognized, and in this failure lies much of the tragedy of western socialism. Léon Blum's Socialist Party became neither the ideal Fabian party approaching socialism via elections and piecemeal reforms, nor even a simple reformist party within capitalism. It degenerated into something like the Radical Party of the Third Republic, and indeed took over its political role in the Fourth: a guarantor of social and economic immobilism, sweetened by ministerial office for its leaders. The Communist Party remained the party of international proletarian revolution and, increasingly, of effective labour organization. Bolshevization made it almost certainly into the most effective revolutionary organization in French history. But inevitably, since the world revolution turned out to be simply the Russian revolution, the hope of its extension lay in the
USSR
, and would remain located there so long as the
USSR
‘continued to see herself as the advancing revolution'.
⁵
And since there was no revolutionary situation or perspective in France ‘the
PCF
necessarily became the seat of all the contradictions and antinomies of pre-1914 French revolutionary socialism: reformist in its daily practice, though revolutionary; patriotic though internationalist'. And, as she correctly observes, it discovered a pseudo-solution for them ‘by turning itself into a sort of imaginary global society, on the model of the soviet Russian universe'; and, we may add, by increasingly retiring from effective participation in politics. Only one thing has firmly divided it from becoming a reincarnation of socialism. Unlike it, in the crucial crises which made a choice between nationalism and internationalism mandatory, it has opted for internationalism (in the only available form, loyalty to the October revolution as embodied in the
USSR
).

Was there – is there – no way out of this dilemma of the revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary environment? To ask this question is not to deny the correctness of the international course prescribed for the communist movement by Lenin, whose towering political genius emerges from Mrs Kriegel's book as from all other serious studies of his activity. There was, after all, a revolutionary situation in half the world in 1917–21, though this does not mean, and Lenin never supposed it to mean, that soviet republics were on the agenda in London and Paris. Hindsight may show that the developed countries of capitalism – even Germany – remained fundamentally unshaken, but it was correct, not to mention natural, for political generalship at the time to see Europe – or at any rate central Europe – as a battlefield on which victory was possible and not as a territory to be promptly evacuated. Furthermore, not to have divided the labour movement, even if this had been possible, would have solved nothing. The record of movements which remained substantially united, like the British and the Austrian, shows that the interwar failures cannot be blamed simply on the socialist-communist schism. Lastly, the creation of effective revolutionary parties, which was the great achievement of the Comintern, had striking positive results, as was proved in the 1930s and 1940s, and especially in the resistance movements against fascism, which owed far more to the communist parties than these were willing to claim at the time or their enemies to admit subsequently.

This is not to accept the Comintern uncritically. Gross mistakes of political appreciation were made, which the military rigidity of its organization passed on to the communist parties. Its inevitable domination by the
CPSU
had extremely bad consequences, and eventually wrecked it. But those who think that the international labour movement, especially in western Europe, should never have taken the road it did in 1917–21 are merely expressing a wish that history ought to have been different from what it was. What is more, they overlook the
positive achievements, however qualified, which make the period of the Third International so much less discouraging for the socialist than that of the Second. They are easy enough to overlook, particularly in the present era of reaction against stalinism and of international communist schism, and at a time when the Comintern clearly no longer provides a useful model for international socialist organization. However, the historian's business is not praise and blame, but analysis.

Curiously enough, such analysis would reveal that the fundamental problem of the revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary environment was not neglected in the Comintern. Indeed, it adumbrated one possible solution for it, and the extreme sensitiveness of anti-revolutionaries on this point suggests, that it was by no means an impracticable one: the ‘popular front' and – until it was turned into a mere cover for the
CP
after 1946, or until the
CP
was driven out of it in the same period – the national anti-fascist fronts of resistance and liberation. At the time the character and possibilities of such movements and governments were obscured by a number of historical irrelevancies: by the reluctance of communist parties to admit that such fronts were steps towards socialism, or by their insistence that they would only be so if they became assimilated to the
CP
; by the briefness of their careers and the exceptional circumstances in which they often operated; and by various other factors. However, so far this phase of communist thinking has been the only one in which the specific problems of achieving socialism in the advanced countries of the west have been realistically considered at all on an international scale. It is worth remembering that it was initiated by the French Communist Party. Whether, or how far, the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s remain relevant, is a matter for discussion. In any case they fall outside the scope of Mrs Kriegel's book.

¹
Successful, that is, but for British military intervention and Soviet diplomatic abstention.

²
I do not say that it ought to be remote; merely that, as a matter of observable fact, the Chinese revolution and the revolutions of national liberation have not impregnated the socialist and communist movements of the west in anything like the same extent that the October revolution did.

³
A.Kriegel,
Aux Origines du Communisme Français, 1914–20
(2 vols), Paris and The Hague, 1964.

⁴
Mrs Kriegel rightly points out that there was a genuine revolutionary alternative to bolshevism, and one which sought to combine socialism and liberal or libertarian values; but also that its failure, under whatever label it was organized, was total. In fact, it was simply a political non-starter.

⁵
Under the conditions of stalinism this implied a total identification with all the actions of the
CPSU
, for any hesitation meant expulsion and the loss of contact with the reality of world revolution; but Mrs Kriegel may perhaps be defending her own past when she argues that ‘any attempt to establish any distinction between the soviet state and . . . the French
CP
, would have been radically absurd in theory as well as in practice'.

The love affair between intellectuals and marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime. Before 1914 the marxist intellectual was a rare bird west of Vienna, though at one point in the early 1890s it looked as though he would become a permanent and plentiful species. This was partly because in some countries (such as Germany) there were not many left-wing intellectuals of any kind while in others (such as France) older pre-marxist ideologies of the left predominated, but mainly because the bourgeois society to which the intellectual – satisfied or dissident – belonged was still a going concern. The characteristic left-wing intellectual of Edwardian Britain was a liberal-radical, of Dreyfusard France a revolutionary of 1789, but one almost certainly destined for an honoured place in the state as a teacher. It was not until the first world war and the 1929 slump broke these old traditions and certainties that the intellectuals turned directly to Marx in large numbers. They did so via Lenin. The history of marxism among intellectuals in the west is therefore largely the history of their relationship with the communist parties which replaced social democracy as the chief representatives of marxism.

In recent years these relations have been the subject of a vast literature, mainly the work of ex-communists, dissident marxists
and American scholars, and chiefly consisting of autobiographies or annotated who's whos of prominent intellectuals who joined, and mostly left, various communist parties. David Caute's
Communism and the French Intellectuals
¹
is one of the more satisfactory specimens of the second type, for it accepts – indeed it argues strongly – that the reasons which led intellectuals into communist parties and kept them there were often both rational and compelling, and controverts the characteristic 1950s view that such parties could attract only the deviant, the psychologically aberrant, or the seeker after some secular religion, the ‘opium of the intellectuals'. The greater part of his book therefore deals not so much with communism and the intellectuals as with the intellectuals and communism.