Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades

314 Pages·1985·8.949 MB·English

by  Isaac Deutscher

Isaac
Deutscher
Vietnam in perspective
'1984' -The Mysticism of Cruelty
Discussions with Trygve Lie & Heinrich Brandler
Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party
Maoism -its Origins & Outlook
Open Letter toGomulka
Isaac Deutscher
Verso
lsAAC DEUTSCHER was born in 1907 near Krakow and joined
the Polish Communist Pany in 1926. After his expulsion in
1932, he maintained his opposition to the general drift of
Comintern policy in the 1930s. He moved to London in 1939
and continued his journalistic activity until 1946, devoting the
rest of his life to historical research and the writing of books and
essays.
Isaac Deutscher's prolific output includes Stalin (1948); a
trilogy on Leon Trotsky: The Prophet Armed (1954), The
Prophet Unarmed (1959) and The Prophet Outcast (1963); The
Unfinished Revolution (1967), The Non-Jewish Jew (1968), and
numerous essays on Russia, China and contemporary com
munism. Isaac Deutscher died in 1967.
TAMARA DEUTSCHER, who has edited several collections of her
husband's essays, is herself a writer specializing in Soviet and
East European affairs.
v
Marxism, Wars and
Revolutions:
Essays from Four Decades
Edited and introduced by
Tamara Deutscher
With a preface by Perry Anderson
British Library
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Deutscher Isaac
Marxism, Wars and Revolutions
I. Communism - 1945-- Case studies
2. Communist state - Case studies
I. Title
320.5'32'0722 HX44
First published 1984
• Tamara Deutscher and Verso 1984
Verso
15 Greek Street London WI
Filmset in Garamond by
PRG Graphics Ltd
Redhill, Surrey
Printed in Great Britain by
The Thetford Press Ltd
Thetford, Norfolk
ISBN 0 869010954
978-0-86091-803-5
Contents
Preface by Perry Anderson
Introduction by Tamara Deutscher
XX:l
I. The USSR
1. The Moscow Trial 3
2. 22 June 1941 18
3. Reflections on the Russian Problem 26
4. Two Revolutions 34
II. Cold War
1. The Ex-Communist's Conscience 49
2. '1984' - The Mysticism of Cruelty 60
3. The Cold War in Perspective 72
III. Europe
1. The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party 91
2. An Open Letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka 128
3. Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler 132
4. Conversation with Trygve Lie 169
IV. China
1. Maoism - Its Origins and Outlook 181
2. The Meaning of the 'Cultural Revolution' 212
V. Marxism and Our Time
1. The Roots of Bureaucracy 221
2. Marxism in Our Time 243
3. Violence and Non-Violence 256
4. On Socialist Man 263
Preface
Isaac Deutscher, who died seventeen years ago, was one of the
greatest socialist writers of this century. He was a Marxist and a
historian. But in the way in which these two vocations were con
nected in his work, the place he occupies in the literature of each is
unlike any other. Deutscher's fame rests above all, of course, on his
political biographies of Stalin and Trotsky - two masterpieces on
the fate of the Russian Revolution. In them, all Deutscher's powers
were concentrated on the object of his life's study; and it is there that
readers new to his legacy will continually start. This volume serves a
complementary purpose. The collection of essays and addresses that
it contains gives us the best intellectual portrait of the biographer
himself - that is, of Deutscher as a mind. For the essayist, in the
nature of the genre, could speak more directly and personally, and
over a more various and unexpected range of topics, than the
historian: subjective experience and conviction find greater expres
sion in these interventions than in the major objective reconstruc
tions of the past themselves. From them, we can see Deutscher as he
was, a much more complex and multi-dimensional figure than the
terms by which he became best known in his life-time would suggest:
not simply a scholar, but a thinker, of the Left; and not only a
commentator on events, but a committed participant in them.
Thanks to the care of Tamara Deutscher, the symposium of texts
below - which includes several that have never before been
published, or collected, in English - presents a more comprehen
sive view of Isaac Deutscher, as a fighter and a critic, an intellectual
and militant, than any previously available.
What do they reveal? In the first instance, through their prism, the
original context that nurtured Deutscher comes into view. The uni
versalism of the mature writer tended to conceal these origins: but it
was in fact a very. particular regional experience that made possible
the later cosmopolitanism. However, like that of another master of
English prose, Joseph Conrad, his Polish past long lay partly hidden
from sight, and can easily be misunderstood. Deutscher was born in
the province of Krakow in 1907, and as a boy grew up in natural
sympathy with Polish traditions of literary experiment and political
emancipation. But his family was not from the patriotic gentry, but
from the Jewish middle-class, where his father owned a printing
business; and his youthful politics were early on socialist. A genera
tion earlier, Rosa Luxemburg had come from a similar background in
the neighbouring province of Lublin, where her father was in the
timber-trade. 1 Like her, Deutscher entered the Polish revolutionary
movement while still in his teens, joining the Polish Communist
Party in early 1927. Between the experiences of the two lay, of
course, the change that had confounded one of Luxemburg's life
long perspectives - the independence of Poland. But as Deutscher
explains in The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party, the pre
dominant tradition in the political milieu in which he became a
militant was still Luxemburgist. The way in which that tradition was
weakened, compromised and finally snuffed out forms, in fact, the
leitmotif of his moving evocation - at once analytically sharp and
acutely felt - of the fate of pre-war communism in Poland.
Deutscher's own formation, however, was in close continuity with
Luxemburg's heritage. From it he took its moral independence, its
spontaneous internationalism, its uncompromising revolutionary
spirit - a Marxism that was as classical in ease with the theory of
historical materialism (Luxemburg had been the first Marxist to
criticize the schemas of reproduction in Capita~, as it was vigorous
in its connection with the practical life of the workers' movement.
To these historical bequests there was added a specific geogra
phical endowment as well. Poland lay between Germany and Russia,
the two great powers that had decisively shaped - or misshaped -
its destiny since the days of Napoleon. Luxemburg's career as a
socialist had passed in the ambience of all three nations: organizing
the clandestine labour movement in Poland from her student days,
intervening in the debates of the Russian movement during the
Revolution of 1905-1907, and leading the Left in the German move
ment in the final decade of her life. Nor was her case an isolated one.
Her contemporary Karl Radek, from Brest, was equally at home
from Bremen to Moscow. For a socialist of Deutscher's generation,
Versailles Poland no longer afforded this kind of possibility. But the
' The principal difference between the two was the language spoken at home: Polish
in Luxemburg's case, Yiddish in Deutscher's.
geopolitical position of the country still ensured that any Polish
Marxist would be formed against the imm~diate horizons of events in
Germany and Russia: in some ways more so than ever, as the
October Revolution had now given birth to the USSR, the first
workers' state in the world, while the Communist International
focused its greatest hopes and efforts on a second breakthrough in
Weimar Germany. It was thus quite logical that Deutscher's service
in the Polish Communist Party should have come to an end, not over
national issues as such - tortuously mishandled though these were
by the Party under Soviet pressures, as his retrospect recalls - but
over the growth of fascism under the neighbouring capitalist state. In
1932, he formed part of a minority opposition that attacked the
sectarian passivity of the German Communist Party, imposed by the
Stalinist leadership of the Comintern, towards the rise of Nazism -
while at the same time criticizing the results of the same 'third period'
line, and the bureaucratic regime that accompanied it in the Polish
party. These positions came to coincide with those of Trotsky in
exile: and Deutscher was expelled from the Polish Communist Party,
as Trotsky's warnings of the terrible threat posed by Hitler's gangs to
the European working-class reached their crescendo.
If Germany was the immediate occasion for Deutscher's break with
the official Communist movement, Russia was to be the abiding
concern of his mature work as a Marxist. Already in 1931 he had
travelled to the USSR for the Polish party, and witnessed at first hand
the ravages of collectivization and famine, as well as the industrial
feats of the first five-year plan. By this time, the policies of the Third
International were entirely subordinated to the twists and turns of
the Soviet party leadership, as Stalin remorselessly consolidated his
power in Russia. With the victory of Nazism in Germany in 1933,
the direction taken by the Russian Revolution would be decisive for
the fate of the European labour movement as a whole. The text that
opens this collection, the pamphlet Deutscher wrote in October 1936
on the first of the great Moscow Trials, set the agenda for the rest of
his life. Written with searing indignation, his hand - as Tamara
Deutscher puts it - 'trembling with rage', Deutscher's protest
nonetheless already displayed some of the distinctive qualities that
were to mark his later work as a Marxist historian. Thus he was not
content with dismantling the circumstantial absurdities of Stalinist
'evidence' at the Trial: even more conclusively, he dwelt on the
psychological impossibility of an alleged 'terrorism' that abased itself
before its accusers, an audacious 'conspiracy' collapsing into abject