The question of the Popular
Front was a political issue that was fought about over eighty years ago. To the
uninitiated Elinor Taylor’s new book published in 2018 on the subject might
seem a pointless exercise in navel-gazing at a dead issue. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The Popular Front issue is alive and kicking.
One of the most recent
examples of this is the former pseudo-left Paul Mason’s call for a popular
front style collaboration between The Labour Party, Liberals and any Scottish nationalists
that would be open to such a move.
According to Chris Marsden “The
role played by Mason and others within Britain’s pseudo-left, and the liberal
commentariat is to dress up this strategic reorientation of imperialist policy
in a progressive cloak, in an attempt to build a popular political base of
support. This appeal is pitched above all to upper-middle-class layers who see
both Brexit and Trump’s election as a threat to the comfortable and
economically privileged position they enjoy. In return, they have serviced the
economic needs of big business in a managerial role, or in various cultural and
academic fields that have benefited from access to the Single Market and EU
subventions. However, the appeal is also directed at students and other young
people fearful for their future and that of the UK. Utilising the racism,
xenophobia and nationalism espoused by Nigel Farage of the UK Independence
Party (UKIP) and by Trump in America, they urge the formation of an alliance
with supposedly progressive sections of the British bourgeoisie”.[1]
A second example is that of
the Pseudo left book publishers Verso has just published Chantal Mouffe’s new book
For a Left Populism. In this book, she argues for a new populist strategy. Her
argument is both anti-socialist and has disastrous implications for the working
class around the world. Mouffe glosses over betrayals by pseudo-left parties in
Europe like Podemos and Syriza. The latter carried out a betrayal by imposing the
EU austerity orders and blocking the emergence of an independent political
alternative for the working class.
Elinor Taylor’s new book is
part of a campaign to resurrect the Popular Front strategy in Britain. The
origins of the Popular Front came from Joseph Stalin but were carried out by
the Comintern. In this particular book, Taylor looks at the relationship
between the Popular Front and its interpretation by English left-wing authors
at the beginning of the 20th century.
Taylor examines several
novels of the British Communists including Jack Lindsay, John Sommerfield,
Lewis Jones, and James Barke. All these authors were in one shape or another proponent
of the Socialist realist novel. All were far from political
novices when it came to implementing Stalinist policies using this genre.
When asked how she became
interested in the British “literary Popular Front, Taylor replied “I became
interested in literary relationships with communism and anti-fascism when I was
an undergraduate student. I was curious about how modernist writing, often
thought to have peaked by the mid-1920s, was transformed by the rise of fascism
and the coming of the Second World War. I was interested too in working-class
and socialist writers but found that these figures, and the larger
socio-political developments of the later interwar years, were rarely discussed
by major literary histories of the time. Part of the problem is that
twentieth-century writing has come to be defined by the periodisation of
modernism and post-modernism so that writing at mid-century is often thought of
as either late modernist or early postmodernist. That excludes a lot,
especially the persistence and transformations of realism. It was the question
of the relationship between realism and political commitment during the 1930s
that became the focus of my doctoral thesis, and that was the rationale for
focusing on novels rather than other forms”.[2]
While Stalin was the author
of the Popular Front policy it is clear that the various Communist parties
around the world, especially in Britain, were willing accomplices and as
Jonathan Haslam points out “It has been a common assumption that the Popular
Front strategy was designed by Stalin to
complement the Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance, signed in May 1935. Any
explanation of Comintern policy that ignores the role of communist parties as
instruments of Soviet foreign policy is bound to prove inadequate. However,
there is another error rather more apparent in the literature on the subject.
This takes the form of a tendency to see the world communist movement as a
static entity open to complete manipulation by the Soviet government, without
taking into account that membership of the movement was voluntary and that if
it was to be retained or extended, the strategy had to answer to its needs as much
as to the demands of Soviet state interests.[3]
As Taylor points out in the
book, Jack Lindsay was a crucial figure in implementing Comintern policy
through his numerous novels and history books. Lindsay was born in Australia
and like many at the time was radicalised by the growing capitalist crisis and
the threat of war and fascism. He was to remain a convinced Stalinist
throughout his life remaining in the Communist Party after the crises of 1956.
During the 1930s Lindsay wrote
a significant amount on English history,
especially on the English revolution. Lindsay would have been heavily
influenced by the new generation of historians that formed the CPHG(Communist
Party Historians group). It is not that Lindsay’s or any of the other writer's
work is rubbish it is that that they were the product of a political line that
led to the betrayal of the struggles of the working class that is their most
significant historical and political crime.
It is quite striking that
when one of these writers did step out of line the Stalinist leadership of the
Communist Party came down on them like a ton of bricks. One such incident is
recounted by John T Connor in his essay Jack Lindsay, Socialist Humanism and
the Communist Historical Novel.
Lindsay had written a book
in what he called a “pioneer spirit”. The book was attacked by Emile Burns in
the Daily Worker. Lindsay capitulated and according to Connor “He stood
chastened. In the self-report he submitted the following year, he acknowledged
‘the anarchic element’ in his personal development hitherto and confessed his
failure ‘to come with all the force I can muster in the party-line.’ He now
expressed his hope ‘every month to put my talents, such as they are, more
effectively at the Party’s disposal.’29 This he did, becoming a public champion
of socialist realism and explaining to all who would listen how the struggle
for socialist realism is ‘bound up at every point with the function of
leadership by the communist party,’ how “no writer is going to master socialist
realism who does not understand what communist leadership is, who is not
playing his part in the development of that leadership, helping to change our
people politically as well as culturally, seeing no division between politics and
culture, and daily embodying in his own experience the experience of the Party.”
Lindsay’s mastery of
Socialist Realism was expressed in his book After the Thirties. If ever there
was a craven capitulation to Stalinism this was it. The fact that Taylor holds
it up as some great piece of literature says more about her than it does about
Lindsay.
Aside from the spiteful, unprincipled
attack on George Orwell who because of his exposure of the Stalinist’s murderous
activities in Spain was public enemy number one of the Stalinist Lindsay
defends the Stalinist perspective of Socialist Realism. As Ken Coates in his
review of the book brings out “Mr Lindsay's blindness to
the betrayals of socialism by the rulers of the Soviet Union, immediately revealed
by his treatment of Orwell makes spurious most of his case against the majority
of ex-communist writers who lost sight of the ideal of socialism in the bloody
haze created by Stalin’s men as they
carved it up all over the world whilst they cynically flashed the label of
socialism on their executioner's axes for the benefit of Mr Lindsay and the Dean
of Canterbury.”
Socialist
Realism
Not a single one of these
writers protested against the Stalinist leadership of the USSR promotion of
Socialist realism as a legitimate form of artistic expression.
One of their many crimes was
to promote through their novels this socialist realism. Long ridiculed in the West
this art form was officially sanctioned by the state under Stalin. Long after
the death of the dictator, it is being revived by books like Taylor. “socialist
realism” has suddenly acquired new respectability around the world.
As Leon Trotsky explained in
1938 “The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called ‘socialist
realism.’... [T]he ‘socialist’ character apparently consists in representing,
in the manner of pretentious photography, events which never took place. It is
impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with
horror, or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which
functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of
functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the ‘great’ and ‘brilliant’ leaders,
actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness. The art of the
Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline
of the proletarian revolution.” [4]
Lindsay promoted this
rubbish during his lifetime. Every twist and turn of the British Communist
party political line was reflected in his work. His novels were produced during the
1950s of which there were nine promoted the British Way. As Taylor explains “the
‘British Way’ series that began with Betrayed Spring (1953), in which he
explored post-war social change through class, political and industrial
struggles. Those novels might be understood, loosely, as thinking through the
implications of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s post-war British Road to
Socialismprogramme (1951), just as the English historical novels of the 1930s
think through the implications of the Popular Front line.”[5]
History
From Below
The Popular Front line led
to the genre History from Below. A case could be made for the origins of the
historical genre “History from Below coming from not the pen of A.L. Morton but
the mouth of Georgi Dimitrov. In 1935 at the Comintern Dimitrov gave a speech
that outlined many things, one of which was how to tackle in Dimitrov’s words
the fascist’s use of the past to justify their actions.
He writes “The fascists are
rummaging through the entire history of every nation so as to be able to pose
as the heirs and continuators of all that was exalted and heroic in its past,
while all that was degrading or offensive to the national sentiments of the
people they make use of as weapons against the enemies of fascism. Hundreds of
books are being published in Germany with only one aim -- to falsify the
history of the German people and give it a fascist complexion. The new-baked
National Socialist historians try to depict the history of Germany as if for
the past two thousand years, by virtue of some historical law, a certain line
of development had run through it like a red thread, leading to the appearance
on the historical scene of a national 'saviour', a 'Messiah' of the German
people, a certain 'Corporal' of Austrian extraction. In these books the
greatest figures of the German people of the past are represented as having been
fascists, while the great peasant movements are set down as the direct
precursors of the fascist movement”.
Lindsay and his fellow
Communist Party novelist and historians immediately took Dimitrov’s half baked
theory on board and created the historical genre of “peoples history” or “history
from below”. This type of history has seen a tremendous resurgence over the
last few decades. However many of the historians promoting it do so from
ignorance of its past or its class nature.
Ann Talbot states The Communist
Party sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L.
Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of former
rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all
as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical
approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.[6]
Despite the two quotes from
George Orwell and Georg Lukacs Taylor is uncritical of the Stalinist Popular
Front policy and Dimitrov especially. Taylor freely quotes Dimitrov as if the
Popular Front was a masterstroke that led to numerous victories of the working
class. Taylor quotes the principal architect of the Popular Front Georgi
Dimitrov without as much as a hint that this policy was opposed on a far higher
political level than Lukacs and Orwell and that was by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky
remains the great unmentionable in Taylor's book. None of his vast writings on
the Popular Fronts are used by Taylor. The fact that that this
policy was responsible for the Fascist victory in Spain, paved the way for the
Second World War and led to the defeat of countless working-class struggles not
to mention the deaths of millions passes Taylor by.
In 1935 Dimitrov was well
aware that Trotsky was still alive and was able to oppose the right-wing line
of the Stalinists. His speech in 1935 sought to dress up his collaboration with
anti-working-class forces as a product of Bolshevik orthodoxy.
He writes “There are
wiseacres who will sense in all this a digression from our basic positions,
some sort of turn to the Right from the straight line of Bolshevism. Well, in
my country, Bulgaria, they say that a hungry hen always dreams of millet. Let
those political chickens think so. This interests us little. For it is
important that our Parties and the broad masses throughout the world should
correctly understand what we are striving for. We would not be revolutionary
Marxists, Leninists, worthy pupils of Marx, Engels, and Lenin if we did not
suitably reconstruct our policies and tactics in accordance with the changing
situation and the changes occurring in the world labour movement. We would not
be real revolutionaries if we did not learn from our own experience and the
experience of the masses. We want to eradicate from our ranks all
self-satisfied sectarianism, which above all blocks our road to the masses and
impedes the carrying out of a truly Bolshevik mass policy.
One of the weakest aspects
of the anti-fascist struggle of our Parties is that they react inadequately and
too slowly to the demagogy of fascism, and this day continue to neglect the
problems of the struggle against fascist ideology. Many comrades did not
believe that so reactionary a brand of bourgeois ideology as the ideology of
fascism, which in its stupidity frequently reaches the point of lunacy, would
be able to gain any mass influence. This was a serious mistake. The
putrefaction of capitalism penetrates to the innermost core of its ideology and
culture, while the desperate situation of wide masses of the people renders
certain sections of them susceptible to infection from the ideological refuse
of this putrefaction. Under no circumstances must we underrate fascism's power
of ideological infection. On the contrary, we for our part must develop along
ideological struggle based on clear, popular arguments and a correct, well
thought out approach to the peculiarities of the national psychology of the
masses of the people”.
Why does Taylor allow this
ideological rubbish to be passed by without as much as a comment? It would be
nice to think that during the peer review of her PhD thesis that the learned
professors would have drawn her attention to leading Bolsheviks such as Leon
Trotsky who opposed these political concepts and that some of them should
appear in her thesis. However, this is the real world and that did not happen.
As Leon Trotsky points
out "Fascism—is not feudal but
bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged
only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution. Menshevism,
itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling
of these facts. The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the
young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent
revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems,
like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without
the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this, in turn, places the
socialist revolution on the agenda."[7]
Voronsky
and Art as the Cognition of life
As mentioned earlier Trotsky
was one of the great unmentionables. Taylor has worked hard on this book and has
deep mined numerous archives. However, she has a blind spot for anyone that
contradicts the Stalinist line on the Popular Front or Socialist Realism for
that matter. Her selective bibliography is not down to sloppiness but political
bias. I am not criticising someone who has a political bias in their work but when
you leave out leading Bolsheviks such as Trotsky and figures like Alexander
Voronsky whose collection of wirings was published by Mehring Books in 1998 then
this goes too far.
Voronsky is well worth
reading if only for his work on the relationship between art and politics. As
the Marxist critic David Walsh writes “Voronsky
writes about Tolstoy and Proust, the poets Mayakovsky and Esenin, the errors of
Soviet “Proletcultists” and Freudians alike, with passion and urgency. His aim
at all points: to encourage art that engages deeply and truthfully with life.
The world must be present in the artist’s work, Voronsky wrote, “as it is in
itself, so that the beautiful and ugly, the kind and repulsive, the joyful and
sorrowful appear to be so, not because that’s the way the artist wants it, but
because they are contained in real life.”
Taylor has the right to
express whatever opinion she wants, but a publisher that purports to have
sympathies for the Trotskyist movement to publish a book that is an open
defence of Stalinism says a lot.[8]
16
November 2016-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/16/maso-n16.html
[2] The Popular Front
Novel-An interview with Elinor Taylor-https://mronline.org/2017/11/03/the-popular-front-novel
[3] The Comintern and the
Origins of the Popular Front 1934-1935-) Jonathan Haslam- The Historical
Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 673-691
[4] (Leon
Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our Epoch”)
[5] The Popular Front Novel:
An Interview with Elinor Taylor- www.historicalmaterialism.org/interviews/popular-front-novel-interview-with-elinor-taylor
[6]
"These the
times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-By Ann
Talbot -25 March 2003- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[7] The Lessons of Spain:
The Last Warning-(December 1937)-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm
[8] See : An assembly of
political bankrupts: Historical Materialism and Jacobin host “Socialism in Our
Time” conference-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/16/pers-a16.html
