A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (69 page)

This argument fails because it neglects the process of ‘combined and uneven development’ explained by Trotsky. Spain in the 1930s was a backward country with a backward landowning class, a backward capitalist class, a backward military and a backward church. But it was also an integral part of the modern capitalist world, with centres of advanced industry and a powerful, if relatively small, working class capable of using the most up to date and revolutionary forms of struggle. The archaic ruling class and middle class reacted by adopting up to date forms of counter-revolutionary struggle. In 1934 this meant attempting to copy the ‘clerico-fascism’ of Dollfuss, and in the revolutionary year of 1936 it meant a move towards the thoroughgoing fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. The copy was not exact, moulding together different traditions and different propertied classes, large and small. But what resulted was a genuine mass movement capable of doing what no military coup had done before—not merely defeating the opposition, but destroying the basic organisational networks of the workers’ movement. The number of people estimated to have been executed in the wake of Franco’s victory is around half a million. A greater number went into exile. For more than two decades, no open expression of liberal, let alone socialist, ideas was possible. Not until the early 1960s was there a recovery of the workers’ movement. Those who threw up barricades on 18-19 July 1936 were right to see what they were fighting as ‘fascism’. The middle class politicians who believed conciliation was possible, as it had been with past monarchist governments and military
pronunciamentos
, were fundamentally mistaken.

Midnight in the Century
was the title Victor Serge gave to the novel he published in 1939. It expressed his feelings about what he had seen happen to the hopes of his life, and to those of humanity as a whole.

Serge had been imprisoned as an anarchist in France before the First World War, taken part in the rising workers’ movement in Barcelona, and then travelled to Russia to put his services at the disposal of the revolutionary government, working for the Communist International in Germany in 1923. On returning to Russia he had joined the opposition to Stalinism in the mid-1920s and as a result spent three years in the early
gulag
system. He was able to escape Russia just before the bloodletting of the mid-1930s thanks to the efforts of left wing intellectuals in France like André Malraux, but left many friends and comrades behind to face torture and execution. Other friends and comrades were in the hands of Hitler’s Gestapo and also faced torture and execution. In Spain Serge’s friend Joaquin Maurin was serving a 20 year sentence in one of Franco’s jails and another, Andrés Nin, also a member of the POUM party, was murdered by Stalin’s agents in Barcelona. Totalitarianism of one sort or another was spreading right across Europe.

Serge was not alone in having to confront this frightful reality. Many thousands of people who had fought for a better world found themselves trapped by the machinations of rival states: German Communists were handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin’s police in 1940; Polish Jews fled eastwards from advancing German troops in 1939 only to be imprisoned in the Russian
gulag
; refugees from Nazi Germany were interned as possible spies in Britain; soldiers escaping from republican Spain were thrown into concentration camps in republican France; Russian advisers to the Spanish republic were executed on their return to Moscow as ‘fascist agents’.

As a living reminder of the revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky epitomised everything that governments of every sort hated. He was exiled to Turkey by Stalin, and expelled from France by a Radical government and from Norway by a social democratic one. His daughter was driven to commit suicide in Berlin in the last weeks before the Nazi takeover. One son died in the
gulag
, and another was poisoned by a Stalinist agent in Paris. Trotsky himself was to be murdered by an agent of Stalin in Mexico in 1940. For him the ‘symmetry’ between Nazism and Stalinism was all too plain—the monolithic ruling party, the show trials, the secret police, the vast concentration camps, and the denial of any space for independent thought or independent artistic expression.

Yet he dissented from the view, fashionable today, that Stalinism and Nazism were essentially the same—a view which can easily slide over into a virtual apology for the Nazis on the grounds that they were ‘no worse’ than those who fought them on the streets of Germany or Spain.
²²³
The ‘symmetrical’ political structures, Trotsky argued, presided over different social contents.

He believed the difference lay in the USSR still being somehow a ‘workers’ state’, albeit ‘bureaucratically degenerated’, because industry was nationalised. This part of his argument did not hold water. If workers did not control the political structures—and Trotsky rightly insisted they did not—then they were in no sense the ‘owners’ of industries run by those structures. They were just as exploited as workers anywhere else in the world. The revolution of 1917 had been murdered politically and economically.

However, this does not mean he was wrong to insist on a difference between Stalinism and Nazism. Stalinist state capitalism was constructed by a new ruling class in a backward country which, desperate to match the economic and military power of its more advanced rivals, concentrated into a short period all the horrors of the ‘primitive capital accumulation’ which had accompanied the rise of capitalism. That is why it enslaved, executed, imprisoned, deported and starved people. This was the rational core of Stalin’s paranoia and barbarity.

Nazism, by contrast, was the product of an already mature industrial capitalism. The German ruling class saw the only way to escape from a deep economic crisis was to hand political power to a totalitarian movement based on the irrational fantasies of a middle class driven mad by the crisis. This process culminated, in the midst of the Second World War, in the ‘Final Solution’—the use of the most advanced industrial techniques to systematically wipe out millions of people simply because of their supposed ethnic identity. Stalin placed millions in labour camps, where about one in ten were worked to death. Hitler had similar camps, but alongside these—and on an even greater scale—he set up death camps in which millions were simply gassed. Both engaged in barbarity, but they were different sorts of barbarity, corresponding to different stages in capitalist development. Millions suffered under the national chauvinism and anti-Semitism to which Stalin resorted to bolster his rule, but the majority survived to talk about it. Few of the millions of Jews and Gypsies who suffered under Hitler survived. The word ‘genocide’ fits the second case, not the first.

Of course, this did not make any difference to those who died. But it did have wider implications, especially for those who supported the rival ideologies elsewhere in the world. The core of the Nazi movement was made up of people who enthused at its barbaric features, its racist and genocidal fantasies, and its worship of ‘blood and honour’. The core of the Stalinist movements in the West and the Third World was made up of people who tried to hide from themselves its reliance on totalitarianism and its willingness to resort to chauvinism and anti-Semitism. They identified with Russia because they wanted something better than the inhumanity of capitalism and were convinced that these things existed in Russia.

This point had important practical implications. The various Nazi and fascist movements which arose in the West and the Third World were dedicated to breaking working class organisation. By contrast, the Communist movements tried to combine fighting for workers’ interests—which is what normally led people to join them—with defending the policy requirements of the rulers of the USSR. Their leaders tried to balance one against the other. Again and again this had disastrous consequences and led struggles to defeat—just as did the behaviour of social democratic leaders. But it was not the same as the systematic attempt to smash the workers’ movement which characterised Nazism.

The crisis of the American Dream

For liberals, there did seem one sign of hope in the mid-1930s. This was in the US. Elections held at the deepest point of the slump, at the end of 1932, had produced a new Democratic Party Congress and a new president, Franklin D Roosevelt. These people were certainly not revolutionaries, and were not even social democratic reformists of the European sort. The Democratic Party had been the party of the slave-owners and remained a coalition of Southern segregationist whites, Northern political bosses and certain major capitalists.

But the mood both of US capitalism and the mass of people was one of desperation at the end of 1932. It was expressed in a feeling that something, however unorthodox, had to be done to get the economy moving. Congress even gave serious consideration to a bill to reduce the working week to 30 hours in a desperate attempt to create more jobs. In the end Roosevelt pushed through emergency powers which involved state controls on the operations of capitalism. These included guarantees of the funds of banks through the Federal Reserve system, use of government money to buy up and destroy crops in order to raise their price, a civil construction corps to provide work camps for 2.3 million unemployed young men, a limited form of self regulation of industry through cartels to control price and production levels, limited amounts of direct state production through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and even measures which made it easier for workers to form unions and raise wages, so increasing consumer demand. The speed and audacity with which these measures were implemented caught the enthusiasm of those suffering from the recession, and of political liberals who wanted an alternative to fascism or socialist revolution. They seemed to stand in sharp contrast to the previous administration. Its response to mass unemployment had been to send in 25,000 troops with bayonets fixed, led by General MacArthur on a white charger, to disperse a protest by unemployed war veterans. At least Roosevelt seemed to be providing some jobs, even if at rock bottom wage rates and under appalling conditions.

However, Roosevelt’s measures were neither as innovative nor as effective as many people thought. Roosevelt remained highly orthodox in one respect—he did not use government spending to break out of the crisis. In fact he cut veterans’ pensions and public employment. As Kindelberger writes, ‘Fiscal means to expand employment remained limited, since the Democratic administration under Roosevelt remained committed to a balanced budget’.
²²⁴
He also suggests investment was bound to start rising at some point from the incredibly low level to which it had fallen (from $16 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932), and it began to do so once the level of bank failures had peaked. In any case, Roosevelt got the credit for a rise in production from 59 percent of the level of the mid-1920s in March 1933 to 100 percent in July, and a fall in unemployment from 13.7 million in 1933 to 12.4 million in 1934 and 12 million in 1935. Many people believed his ‘New Deal’ had worked miracles—a myth that remains prevalent today. Yet one person in seven was still jobless in 1937 when output finally reached the level of eight years earlier.

Then in August 1937 there was ‘the steepest economic decline in the history of the US’, which lost ‘half the ground gained by many indexes since 1932’.
²²⁵
Steel output fell by more than two thirds in four months, cotton textile output by about 40 percent, and farm prices by a quarter.

The economic recovery had been short-lived. But, combined with a mild improvement in union rights, it had one very important side-effect. It created a new feeling of confidence among sections of workers in their ability to fight. There was an upturn in recruitment to the unions, although workers who struck still faced vicious attacks from employers and the police. In the first six months of Roosevelt’s New Deal more than 15 strikers were killed, 200 injured and hundreds arrested.
²²⁶
But three strikes in 1934 showed how such confidence could fuse with the sense of bitterness created by the slump to explode into a level of militancy not known since the defeat of the steel strike in 1919. Autolite car component workers at Toledo, teamsters in Minneapolis and waterfront workers in San Francisco struck in a militant fashion, defied court injunctions, defended themselves physically against scabs and cops, and won resounding victories. Furthermore, it was militant socialists who took the lead in each of these struggles—Trotskyists in Minneapolis, Communists in San Francisco, and followers of radical ex-preacher A J Muste in Toledo. In the aftermath of the disputes, trade unionists in the increasingly important auto industry began to recruit widely and demanded a union based on the industry as whole to replace the existing craft unions organised along skill lines.

The lesson was not lost on certain mainstream union leaders. They had been losing members for years—with union membership falling from four million in 1920 to a little over two million in 1933—and with the decline they had lost influence within government and ruling class circles. Now some saw a way to regain influence. Led by the miners’ union leader John L Lewis, a group of them set up an organising committee, the CIO, aimed at recruiting millions of mass production workers into industrial unions.

The formation of the new organisation inspired workers in scores of places to copy the militant methods which had brought the successes of 1934. Workers at the Goodyear and Firestone rubber plants in Akron, Ohio, sat down in the plants to stop the management breaking strikes in December 1935 and January 1936. Mass pickets surrounded the Goodyear plant to stop cops bringing in strikebreakers.
²²⁷
There were more than 40 other sit-down strikes that year. The biggest and most important began in December at the General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan. By the end of the strike 140,000 of the company’s 150,000 workers were either sitting-in or picketing. As in other strikes at the time, they were threatened with injunctions and had to fight off attacks by armed police. But in the end the US’s biggest manufacturing company was forced to recognise the union. As Art Preis, a union activist from the time, recalled:

Around 1.8 million workers were involved in strikes, backed up by support committees, ‘women’s auxiliaries’ which supplied sit-ins with food, and bands which provided entertainment. Total union membership was over seven millon by the end of 1937, up five million on four years before.

The strikes had the potential to change the whole culture of US capitalism by challenging the pervading individualism—the myth of the ‘American Dream’ that anyone could get ahead—and the racism that was the other side of this. Where the unions were successful they began to create a new culture of collective action among workers—summed up by the union song ‘Solidarity Forever’, sung in the sit-ins—and began to chip away at the racism in cities like Detroit. The CIO was the only large-scale institution in US society where blacks had a chance of ‘genuine participation’
²²⁹
alongside whites.

One central problem prevented the wholesale fulfilment of this potential—the politics which dominated as the union movement grew. The craft unionism of the years before 1936 had been ‘non-political’. The great majority of its leaders accepted US capitalism as the most perfect way of organising society, and made deals with local politicians of either mainstream party. John L Lewis, for example, was ‘a Republican in politics, a follower of Adam Smith in economics and an autocrat in his own union’.
²³⁰
The new CIO leaders believed that an alliance with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party was the way to advance their cause.