[Lenin sneaks to workers in Red Sauare: the…]

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Lenin sneaks to workers in Red Sauare: the later Stalinist counter-revolution was the negation of the 1917 Tawney's image is not the have learned something from bare recognition of the fact half a century [since Tawnof the class struggle, but the ey] of such tumult and rejection of the possibility terror in human affairs. And that it can be resolved peace- part of what we have learnt, fully or that the ruling class or should have learnt; adds will peacefully allow itself to up to a direct refutation of be divested of its wealth or apocalyptic Marxism, or, if of the power to defend that you wish, a justification, in wealth The ruline class does anite a different sense from IN PART 2 of his written peroration on parliamentary democracy and those whom he denounces as its enemies (Observer, January 17), Michael Foot attempts to answer the challenge he had posed to himself in There, he ended by promising to undertake the difficult task of replying to those whose attitude to peaceful parliamentary road to socialism in Britain was expressed in R.H.Tawney's brilliant image which Foot quoted thus:

"Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger paw by paw... If the Labour Party is to tackle its job with some hope of succeess, it must mobilise behind it a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it".

Exorcism Foot commented: 'In other words Tawney recognised the existence of the class struggle and the mighty convulsions required to secure its exorcism"

But nobody with even a slight awareness of the facts of history or of present-day Britain would now deny the existence of the class Even Ramsey McDonald, the right-wing Labour prime minister and the renegade who went over to the Tories and became their captive figurehead prime minister in the anti working class 'National Government' in 1931, recognised the class struggle. He used to boast that while of course he recognised the class struggle, he deplored it and regarded it as something to be moved away from, abandoned, outgrown, patched up.

Serious socialists, of course, regard the class struggle as something to be fought in a spirit that takes account of the realities of class society and the facts of history. It will only be exorcised after it has been won by the working class, after the spectre of social. ism has become solid social fact.

A thousand terrible victories by the ruling classes will not exorcise it, because they cannot abolish class society: only the working class can.

Ordinance

And the idea that the class struggle can be 'exorcised' by the agreement of the labour movement to limit itself, by a historic self-denying ordinance, to certain methods of struggle, is an idea that directly serves the ruling-class side in the struggle, which in fact is ineradicable and will last as long as class society. It is an ideological weapon of the ruling class to help tie the hands of its working class opponents.

What is distinctive about Revolution, not its direct continuation indeed have tiger's claws, and will use them when it needs to. The ruling class is 'armed to the teeth' ', and, as Foot in passing recognises in part 1, it does dispose of storm troopers.

Misreads

It is the measure of Michael Foot's politics now that he finds Tawney's comment noteworthy for its mere recognition of the fact of class struggle, and that, astonishingly, he so misreads Tawney as to think that is the point he is making. (It is central to Foot's conception of parliamentary democracy, as we shall see, that for practical purposes he does not himself even recognise the class struggle').

In fact, Foot never actually gets round to directly discussing, still less refuting, the point that makes Tawney's image arresting and central to the dispute between reformists and revolutionaries: the ruling class will not let us win socialism peacefully, and we can only get our heads clawed off if we approach the matter with naive trust in the myths of parliamentary democracy.

As an advertisement for part 2, Foot in part 1 had said: "After all we should the old one, of [the Fabian 44 2 11 1 slogan of] the inevitability of gradualness.

"Throughout those years, several different rivers of experience merge into the same torrent" - which he promises to 'explore'.

In fact the gist of his reply in part 2 is to reject incinlism in the guise of rejecting 'apocalyptic Marxism'. . For Foot now, there is to be no socialist transformation, no socialism as something distinct from capitalism - only civilised, decent Labour government, concerned with amelioration and reforms. And the goal of returning and then sustaining such a Labour government displaces all other goals.

Academic

Like the early Christians who abandoned the expectation of the imminent second coming of Christ 1o set up his kingdom on earth, and thereafter instead regarded the Church itself as the existing kingdom of God on earth, Foot substitules a Labour government like the last one for the 'apocalyptic' goal of socialism.

His discussion of peaceful or non-peaceful roads to sorjalism is thus purely academic, because, essentially, he resolves the dilemma he has posed for himself by way of the quotation from Tawney by abandoning the goal of socialist transformation.

In fact there is only one stream to Michael Foot's 'torrent" , and that is the experience of Stalinist totalitarianism.

Tiger

His way of replying' to what Tawney said about the tiger is to quote Tawney 20 years later, in the 1950s, writing thus:

"The fact remains that the prizes, however glittering, won by way of totalitarlanısm, are rarely, those which they sought. The means destroy the end ....

"The truth is that a conception of Socialism which views it as power, on which all else depends, is not, to speak with moderation, according to light.

'The question is not merely whether the State owns and controls the means of production. It is also who owns and controls the State.

"ll is not certain, though it is probable, that Socialism can in England be achieved by the methods proper to democracy. It is certain that it cannot be achieved by any other"

Foot adds emphasis to the last sentence.

Tawncy and his politics is a subject in itself. The use Fool makes of him is astonishing!

According to Foot, when Tawncy invoked the , tiger would will not voluntarily bt skinned, he was writing before he and most others had examined the full nature of Soviet totalitarianism" . And somehow the fact of Stalinist totalitarianism • qualifies that - essentially irrefutable - image of the figer who will not be skinned peacefully, and renders it obsolete.

Only if the goal of skinning the capitalist tiger is abandoned does Tawney's image become obsolete.

Tawney uses the general term by the methods of democracy' ' where Foot gives it the most narrow reading to mean 'exclusively by the methods of parliamentary legality' Foot presumes Tawney meant "peaceful methods' (though whether only peaceful methods are democratic is in fact open to argument). But in any case Tawney (as quoted) argued only that such methods would probably be sufficient, not that they would certainly be so.

He teft the alternative open - where Foot closes it completely, thereby disavowing in advance the right of the labour movement to self-defence against the organs of state repression, which in Foot's best of all possible democracies remain in the hands exclusively of of the ruling class.

loot does iwo impermissible things here.

First he equates Stalinism with a form of socialism, accepting , the preposterous self-justification of the Stalinist ruling caste as a force embodying and struggling for a form of socialism. Unfortunately its methods are bad (Foot argues) and destroy a (presumably) acceptable end.

Foot links and identifies the totalitarian system that has now existed in the USSR for over 50 years (and has been replicated in many other countries) with the workers' revolution of 1917, and locates the root of totalitarianism in the original sin committed in 1917 by the Russian workers in using violence to take power.

Then he equates any violence by the labour movement - implicitiy even defensive violence - with the germ of totalitarianism. Thus only the methods of democracy', by sleight of hand identified as those of the decrepit British parliamentary system (even including its blatantly undemocrațic secondary rules) are permissible.

Proper

The second unforgiveable step in Foot's argument is to pretend that his references to Stalinism have anything to do with what he is in dispute with the serious Labour Party left about.

'By the methods proper to democracy' or by totalitarian means: that is Foot's way of posing the alternatives. It is a-historical, illogical, and for the immediate issue beside the point. The issue which remains to be argued is whether the 'methods proper to democracy' should or can exclude violent self-defence against ruling-class violence, or violent revolutiohary action by a working class majority to deprive the ruling class and its state of the means of threatening of using violence against the labour movement.

Having made the ridiculous and false identification of the workers* revolution of 1917 with the totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy over the working class which was established in a bloody civil war against the workers and peasants of the USSR after 1928 (a civil war in which only one side, the bureaucracy, was armed and organised), Foot cites a weird and wonderful crop of quotations to back him up. In fact, ao'we will see, all of them are beside the point of his argument, and indeed on almost every issue testify against him, as Tawney does above.

Orwell

The argument about ends and means, says Foot rightly, "did mount to a new point of intensity, once the world began to recognise the nature and accompaniments of the Soviet dictatorship"

Those overthrown in the Russian Revolution had denounced the force used to overthrow them. "Much more serious and persistent and devastating were the socialist criticisms directed to the same end" - George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Ignazio Sione.

With this self-chosen itical genealogy, Foot firmly places himself in the ranks of those who in the '30s or '40s abandoned socialism for, at best, liberal reformism, in re sponse to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

"Every means tends to become an end" , he quotes the one-time pre-Stalinist communist Silone.

"Machines which ought to be man's instrument. enslave him, the state enslaves society, the bureaucracy enslaves the state, the church enslaves religion. parliament enslaves democracy, institutions enslave justice, academies enslave art, the army enslaves the nation, the party enslaves the cause, the dictatorship of proletariat enslaves "Parliament enslaves democracys would serve well as a reply to Foot. For the rest, Silone is talking about Stalinism. As 2 communist of the heroic period who broke with the Communist International in 1929, as it was becoming something qualitatively diff erent from the revolutionary organisation set up by Lenin and Trotsky, Silone knew something about the differences between Stalinism and Bolshevism.

: What is centrally wrong with all Foot's argument here is indeed the identifica. tion of Stalinism and Boishevism. Bolshevism was a political tradition in the Russian labour movement which con. centrated in itself the selfliberating energy of the rev. olutionary workers, and led them to take and consolidate state power in most of the former Tsar's empire.

Network

The Russian worker! armed themselves, and used force to disarm or destroy those who were in arm: against them. They were org anised in a democratic net work of workers' councils elected in factories and distr icts, and linked togethe across Russia. Elections wer frequent and delegates wer easily recallable.

It was a far more flexible representative, responsive system, controllable by thi masses, than any parliamen such as the existing Britis! one ever can be.

This system aimed (an‹ initially partly succeeded) tr do without permanent state bureaucrats. The armer forces which made the revol ution were the Red Guard; - a workers' militia, which was essentially more or les identical with formation: like the flying picket squad: of miners, builders or steel workers which we hav known in Britain over the last decade, except that they were armed, that they disarmed the bourgeoisit and its agents and support ers, and that they themselve: became the state power.

that was the revolution 65 years later, it is a proper subject for critical study by socialists whether or noi everything done by the

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'Socialist Organiser no. 70 January 28, 1982 Page 11 REFERENC ¡TE FRATERA A 19th century Socialist wor it shows Marx, carrying 'Capital', pointing out the class-struggle road to winning the ils set forward even by bourgeois democracy - Liberty, British troops land in Archangel, to fight alongside the troops of 13 other invading nowers arainst the Russian workers' revolution ocialist pamphlets that you should read John Cunningham [Dinnington NUM] introduces two novels based on the struggles of the miners' union: 'Cwmardy' and 'We Live' by Lewis Jones [published by Lawrence and Fraternity, Equality armed workers and by the workers' party led by Lenin and Trotsky was well done, and whether anything they did contributed to the rise of Stalin later on. But to identify the revolution with Stalinism is preposterous.

Armed It was the opposite of totalitarianism: mass, armed, working class (and initialiy peasant) democracy.

They would rightly have replied in Trotsky's words to the notion that 'methods proper to democracy' meant excluding armed self-defence or armed self-assertion against the armed forces of the ruling class: "The reformists systematically implant in the minds of the workers the notion that the sacredness of' democracy is best guaranteed when the bourgeoisie is armed to the teeth and the workers are unarmed "

Not only were they the opposite of totalitarianism, they were in the actual conditions of Russia in 1917 the only alternative to bloody ruling-class dictatorship. If Wishart].

FIRST published in 1937 and 1939 respectively, 'Cwmardy' and 'We Live' are literary monuments to the struggle of the Welsh miners and their communities.

Lewis Jones, the author, was a Communist Party militant. The youngest ever chairman of the Cambrian Lodge, he attended the Central Labour College between 1923 and 1925 and joined the CP there.

During the 1926 lock-out he was sent on a speaking tour of the (then as now)

moderate Nottinghamshire coalfield - for which he was given a three month prison sentence on charges of sedition.

Tirelessly

After the defeat of 1926, Jones tried hard to hang on to his job as checkweighman foften the only job a prominent union man could get in those times), but he was kicked out in 1929.

SUPREE UNIVERSEL unm the vacillating middle-of-theroad government of Kerensky had not given way to the workers' power, it would have given way to the armed reaction, based on sections of the army. The pioneering fascist-style counter-revolutionary movement would have emerged in Russia, not, as happened (when the Italian workers failed in 191920 to take power) in Italy.

Where did Stalinism come from? Stalinism was a counter-revolution (on the basis of maintaining the state-owned property forms established by the revolution and later developed and extended) by a distinct social frmation which emerged in the 20s - a bureaucracy rooted. in the state that had to be created for self-defence in the civil war and the wars against the 14 capitalist states which intervened Russia.

In the course of the struggle in the three years after the revolution, the working class itself as a social formation was dispersed and partly destroyed, so great was the disruption From that time until his death in 1939, he was a tireless agitator and organiser for the unemployed.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he volunteered to go, but the CP wouldn't let him, saying that he was too valuable in Wales. So he worked tirelessly, despite bad health, for the Republican cause.

Driving himself on, he died of a heart attack after a series of street meetings in the same week that Barcelona fell to the fascists.

Lewis Jones represented all that was good in that generation of militants who joined the Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. but never broke from it after its degeneration at the hands of Stalin.

The two books are really one whole, set in Jones' native Rhondda. 'Cwmardy' is in effect the mining village of Maerdy - 'Little Moscow' , where according caused by counter-revolutionary violence and invasion.

Russia in 1917 was too backward for socialism. The Russian labour movement expected that the workers of Germany and France would soon follow where they had led, and that a European socialist federation would emerge, at the heart of which would be the advanced and developed countries whose material development and culture were on a level to make an advanced post-capitalist socialist system possible.

Shoot Instead of joining the Russian working class n a push for socialism, the main leaders of the labour movement sustained capitalism. In Germany they did not scruple to shoot down the revolutionary workers to make Germany safe for capitalism (any more than government minister Michael Foot scrupled to use the armed power of the British state to keep Des Warren in to one contemporary observer the writings of Karl Marx had become household words.

'Lord Cwmardy' was in real life the tyrannical Lord Rhondda, and Ezra, the miners' agent, is modelled on Noah Rees, whom Jones knew personally:

Rees was one of the authors of 'The Miners' Next Step', a widely read pamphlet published in 1912 by the Unofficial Reform Committee. It advocated reorganisation for the South Wales Miners' Federation along industrial union lines which paralleled the work of the American socialist Daniel De Leon.

Jones himself comes through partly, at least, in the main character of Len Roberts. Len is born into jail for three of the last Labour government's five years in office).

Totalitarianism, with its terror and savage violence, its lies and its wiping out of many of the fruits of the entire epoch of capitalist civilisation, was the system that emerged when the bureaucracy that grew up in isolated and backward Russia threw off the constraints which survived from the revolutionary period and made itself master of society.

It used the most terrible and savage violence to destroy the power of the workers and to wipe out the Russian labour movement and the revolutionaries. It used the power thus established and consolidated to exercise an unparalleled totalitarian dominance in society - partly because it lived the lie that it had something to do with socialism. In turn that arose because it continued to base itself on - and in its own way to defend -the property system initially set up by the workers' revolution.

the mining family of 'Big Jim' and Shane. At an early age Big Jim fixes up for Len to start at the pit, and under his guidance Len is initiated into the gruelling world of the underground and, using the words of the Welsh miners' poet Idris Davies, into ' ... those bitter battles the sun has never seen' Through this harsh school Len starts to learn the realities of existence.

His political consciousness develops, or rather it is forced on him, as troops are sent to break a strike in Cwmardy, some of the strikers are shot down in cold blood, and then war The facts about that bloody Stalinist counterrevolution, which included the public trial - in person or in absentia (Trotsky) - of the leaders of the revolution are very well known by now. The river of blood that marks off Stalinism from Bolshevism is by now so well charted that even Tribune, which fellow-travelled with the Stalinists until 1939, long ago became aware of it.

What sense therefore can there be in pretending that murderer and victim, Cain and Abel, Bolshevik workers' revolution and Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution, are identical? In terms of historical fact, what sense is there in pretending that the workers' revolution of 1917, one of the greatest liberating events in history, directly liberating the workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities of the vast Tsarist empire, is the self-same thing as the vile counter-revolutionary system that was erected on the political grave of that revolution, and on the graves of countless Russian workers. breaks out.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Ezra stands on a recruiting platform with the hated Lord Cwmardy urging the miners to join the very army that only a few years previous shot them down in the streets. In a wave of patriotic fervour hundreds join up, including Big Jim.

Shane, however, although not portrayed as a 'political' person in any sense, sees things more clearly, and the comments of his mother have a profound effect on Len.

He begins to work out his half-felt doubts about the war. Eventually the strands come together, and in 1924 Len joins the fledgling Communist Party.

The Welsh miners There is no sense to it, nor logic, nor rational evaluation of the facts and of the course of development by way of which and out of which the Stalinist totalitarian system emerged and displaced the workers' democracy of 1917.

Foot's notion that the violence of the workers' militia in 1917 is the root of the Stalinist totalitarian system is at root a religious notion (appropriate to his fetishism of the existing form of parllamentary democracy in Britain).

Taboo The taboo is violated and everything thereafter is contaminated, cursed, doomed. The Russian workers - not to speak of the Poles and others - today are still paying for the sins of their revolutionary mothers and fathers and grandparents 65 years ago! And Foot says he is an atheist, believe it or not!

The search for the original sin of Bolshevism has exed the backbone of the early Communist Party. The South Wales Miners' Federation (the 'Fed') in 1921 voted to affiliate to the Red International of Labour Unions (the trade union wing of the Communist Even so it must have been hard for many of the strict chapel-going parents to hear their sons and daughters say, 'I've joined the Party' 'We Live' follows Len through the 1926 lockout, after which he is victimised and remains unemployed for some time. Mary -whom he marries - joins the Party later than Len; but her commitment is no less.

She becomes a leading figure in the party, although she still makes the tea after meetings and marches. One of the things she does is organise a women's contingent on an unemployed march through Cwmardy.

Storm

Led by Mary, the women, against the orders of some of the march's organisers, storm the unemployment board's offices. This action helps to get unemployment relief restored to its old level.

The Party's prestige now stands higher than ever in attempt to break the Fed.

As Big Jim says when conercised tired and demoralised socialists for at least 50 years. Like characters in an ancient Greek drama, they seek the explanation for the Stalinist plague in some violated taboo.

Was the sin the way the Bolshevik party organised itself? That has always been a popular explanation, and shows signs of life now among sections of tired radicals in the Labour Party, in the Chartists for example.

For Foot, the sin was violence.

The diagnosis of what exactly was Bolshevism's original sin may vary, but the very notion that there was an original sin, a single flaw which contaminated everything else, has led most of its devotees away from rational socialist politics and effectively to the conclusion that the great sin of the Russian workers was to dare to take power at all.

This is Foot's conclusion, as it must be the conclusion of anyone who accepts bourgeois democracy as the culmination of historical progress. Things are « safer and better when power remains in the hands cf the ruling class. Ciers rou immediattiy nuk that power being turne against you (Foot himsulf talks of the storm troopers of the ruling class). And even if you destroy the power of the ruling class, things may still go wrong.

To be continued Michael Foot fronting the manager on pay day, 'I have pissed more than this against the back wall of the Boar's Head on a Saturday night before now' This was a fight to the death. The Fed wasn't just a union. It was a way of life in the valleys. The Fed looked after you from cradle to grave. If the Fed was broken, so also was the community.

In response to this attack new tactics developed, like the 'stay down' strike. Len stays on top to represent the men, and the bravery of their action takes everyone by storm.

Tempestuous

The management send down a team of officials and scabs to take the men by surprise, but the men fight back despite their weak condition. The scabs are forced back up the pit, and the strikers take a prisoner - Mr Hicks, the colliery manager. This clinches it, and the management sign an agreement to recognise the Fed.

'Cwmardy' and 'We Live' are not brilliant novels. The style is too hurried and hectic, as is only to be expected from books written in the rare moments of free time which Lewis Jones could find.

But the style of the book is both a reflection of the total commitment to the people he was writing about.

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Sócialist Organiser no:70 January 28,1982 Page 12' Sócialist Organiser n0:70 January 28,1982 Page 12

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Cwmardy, but no sooner is one fight over than another starts. The mine-owners cut wages drastically in an

tempestuous events of the period and the author