Eleanor Marx
"We see no more in common between a Mrs Fawcett [the
leading light of the women's rights movement in the late 19th century] and a
laundress than we see between [the banker] Rothschild and one of his employees.
In short, for us, there is only the working-class movement."
Eleanor Marx
"We had to take new bearings. Though we were not
deflected from our course, it marked a turning point. 'Never glad confident
morning again.'" This is not a recantation but an adjustment."
Yvonne Kapp
Time Will Tell by Yvonne Kapp is an ordinary memoir by an
extraordinary woman. She is best known for her excellent biography of Eleanor
Marx (1855–1898). Published in two volumes in 1972 and 1976. The Verso
publication is issued in one volume as part of its Marx 200 series. Verso also
published Kapp's memoir.
Kapp's memoir was published very late in the day by Verso.
It has joined a veritable cottage industry of memoirs of members or former
members of the Communist Party of Britain. One of the more well known was
Raphael Samuel's The Lost World Of British Communism[1].
Raphael Samuel's book consists of three separate articles
reprinted from the New Left Review written in the mid-1980s. His primary
purpose for writing the book remains unclear, although it is common for
political activists to put down in writing their understanding of events that
have played a crucial role in their political development. Written amidst a
bitter faction fight inside the British Communist Party for political control,
the book does almost nothing to further our understanding of Stalinism. The
book is part autobiographical, part "social history" and part "history
from below". It is almost hybrid. Most of the book takes the form of a
polemic about Samuel's life inside the British Communist Party. Given the
political nature of his subject, the book is remarkably free of political
analysis. He also has selective amnesia towards the betrayals of the Communist
Party both in the USSR and Britain.
Samuel had a very romantic view of his time in the CP and
tended to see his party through rose-tinted spectacles. Its betrayals are
glossed over. He says nothing of the Show Trials that were responsible for the
murder of hundreds of thousands of old Bolsheviks. The countless betrayals of
the working class by Stalinism remain untouched. Samuel, it should be said took
the death of Stalin hard. He cried when it was announced and wore a black
armband.
Eric Hobsbawm, who like Kapp, stayed in the CP until the end
was not too polite about Communist Party memoirs saying that some authors exhibited
a "twilight zone of memory".[2]
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Kapp's biography
of Marx's youngest daughter rescued her from historical obscurity. The
biography should be on the reading list of any young socialist today. Although
overshadowed by her famous father, the book restores her place amongst the
leading socialists of her day. It is hard not to agree with Eric Hobsbawm who
said the book was "one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of twentieth-century
biography."
Like many of her generation, Kapp's life (1903–1999) spanned nearly a century of struggle. She witnessed the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and took part in many of the great struggles of the 20th century.
Kapp led a bohemian life. She did not undertake formal
education and moved from one job to another. According to one writer Kapp had
until meeting Pollitt no fixed ambitions and had no political awareness. Kapp
admitted that she had no sudden blinding light on the road to Damascus that
awakened her political consciousness.
According to Ellen Leopold, "her life story becomes a
picaresque chronicle of progressive movement activities leavened by often
amusing tales of encounters with colleagues, friends, and lovers. At one moment,
she is traipsing across town shouting "Arms for Spain." The next she
is marching to prevent Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts (members of the
British Union of Fascists that Mosley founded) from entering the predominantly
Jewish neighbourhood of Whitechapel in London's East End. Or she is organising
a fundraiser at the Royal Albert Hall where Paul Robeson comes to sing for
refugees from the Spanish Civil War".[3]
1956
It is doubtful that her twenty years in the CP would have
prepared her for the cataclysmic events that happened in 1956. In 1956 sections
of the Stalinist bureaucracy turned on its commander in chief and partner in
crime Stalin. Kruschev's "secret speech" was hardly secret and was
not so much a political break with Stalinism but a mechanism in which to deal
with the raging political and economic crisis that gripped world Stalinism.
Khrushchev's speech was typical of a man who was implicated
in all the major crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. One subject all
the Stalinist bureaucrats were in agreement was the correctness of the struggle
against Leon Trotsky the only leading Bolshevik not to have been rehabilitated
by the Stalinists. Khrushchev said "We must affirm that the party fought a
serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists and
that it disarmed all the enemies of Leninism ideologically. The ideological
fight was carried on successfully ... Here Stalin played a positive role."
Khrushchev had a very limited understanding of what social
forces he was inadvertently unleashing with his speech. Far from preventing
revolution, he opened the floodgates. His response was the same as Stalin and
unleash terror on the working class.
The fact that Kapp brackets her house purchase in 1956 with
the significant political events of the same "traumatic year"—the
Hungarian uprising, Suez, and Krushchev's speech to the Communist Party
Congress said a lot about her miseducation inside the CP.
In her memoir Kapp makes light of the event saying "We
had to take new bearings. Though we were not deflected from our course, it
marked a turning point. 'Never glad confident morning again.'" This is not
a recantation but an adjustment".[4]
This adjustment did not mean leaving the party but ignited a
passion for the study of the past. Kapp conceived the idea of writing the life
of Eleanor Marx while translating the correspondence between Frederick Engels
and Paul and Laura Lafargue.
Kapp was politically aware enough to see that writing about specific
events of the 20th century such as Stalinism, bourgeoise nationalism
to name but two was not possible under the control of the Communist Party
leadership. It was only in a study of the past she could escape for a time its
dominance. Kapp said "I have said that the idea of writing the life of
Eleanor Marx arose from my translating the correspondence between Frederick
Engels and Laura and Paul Lafargue. Eleanor flits in and out of the pages of
these three volumes most tantalisingly. Every reference to her evoked an
interesting personality who aroused my curiosity. I wished I knew more about
her, but when I enquired I found there existed no biography of her".
To her credit, she did not mimic Josef Stalin's attitude to the
study of Marx's family. Stalin upon looking at the file on Marx's son minuted
the file "Unimportant, keep in the archives,"
Another subject that was taboo inside the CP was the question
of Leon Trotsky or the leading Trotskyist party of her day Gerry Healy's
Socialist Labour League. Unsurprisingly Kapp does not mention anything on the
CP's hostility to Trotskyism. In her article, Lynne Segal recounts Sheila
Rowbotham although not a Stalinist describing the animosity the radical and
Stalinist milieu had against the Trotskyist of the SLL she writes "Nevertheless,
on moving to Dalston, East London, in 1964, she joined the Hackney Young
Socialists the year Harold Wilsonʼs Labour government assumed power,
heightening hopes for social reforms and cultural change. There she
encountered, in continued action replay, the venomous sectarian combat between
differing Trotskyist factions working as ʻentristsʼ inside the Labour Party.
ʻUnited Front, yes; Popular Front, noʼ, the member from Militant explained when
she joined, warning her against his enemies from Gerry Healyʼs Socialist Labour
League: ʻI blinked, trying to concentrate. It would be easy to get this the
wrong way round, and his tone suggested the consequences could be direʼ.
Scrutinising the battle of dissenting certainties, she was
quickly an expert on the ritual differences between rival Trotskyist sects,
admiring their tenacity (always angry, acerbic, alert for betrayal), even while
appalled by their arrogance and dogmatism (which served primarily to drive away
any working-class youth they managed to recruit). It was the beginning of a
permanent aversion to vanguardism, a conviction that it was not the most
effective, least of all the most creative, way of winning people for
progressive ends while sowing the seeds of potential intimidation or abuse. Several
short satirical efforts at illustrating this over the years would culminate in
her influential critique of Leninism in 1979, in Beyond the Fragments, with its
call for solidarity between differing campaigning movements, creating immediate
but the short-lived impact, in by then already harsher times." [5]
The unprincipled attacks on the SLL did not deter Healy and
the SLL. It did not stop the orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth
International from doubling their efforts to gain from the crisis within the
British Communist Party. Healy continued to believe that Stalinism was a
counter-revolutionary force. The SLL won prominent figures such as Cliff
Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Peter Fryer and Brian Pearce out of the CP. They were able
to double their efforts through the journal Labour Review and the weekly
Newsletter to wage a political-theoretical offensive, leading to the formation
of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) in 1959.
Gender
Kapp correctly places Eleanor Marx within her own time and was
criticised by the feminists of her day and today refused to place Marx as a
leading feminist thinker or activist. Kapp correctly states that Eleanor Marx believed
that the fundamental social division was class, not race or gender.
Kapp was writing her biography at a time when inequality
amongst women was growing very fast. Another more disgusting phenomena were the
unbridled ambitions of various layers of the upper-middle class women who were seeking
to leverage past or present abuses, to advance their selfish interests.
The project took Kapp ten years to complete. Kapp said it "drew
in one way or another upon my whole accumulated experience." The book is
all the more extraordinary since according to Hobsbawm, she 'never passed so
much as a single examination, even at school.'
To conclude, given the enormous struggles witnessed by
Yvonne Kapp, you would think that a writer with her literary gifts would have
given the reader a deep insight and understanding of the "Long Twentieth
Century. It is blatantly not the case with this memoir. Any young socialist
looking for insight into political problems of the 20th century
should look elsewhere. On the other hand, anyone interested in the early socialist
movement should read her masterpiece biography of Eleanor Marx.
[1] See review -
https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2018/03/review-of-lost-world-of-british.html
[2] Lost worlds Political
memoirs of the Left in Britain-Lynne Segal
[3] monthlyreview.org/2005/03/01/committed-chronicler-eleanor-marxs-biographer/
[4] Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell:
Memoirs (New York: Verso, 2003), 296 pages,
[5] Formations of feminism
Political memoirs of the Left (II) Lynne Segal
