II

E. J. Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917

and was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and
Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy and
Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, he
taught until retirement at Birkbeck College, Uni­
versity of London.
SOME OTHER TITLES BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Age of Revolution: Europe 1779-1848

The Age of Capital 1848-1875
The Age of Empire 1875-1914
Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750
Labouring Men
Bandits
REV 0 L UTI 0 N ARIES
Contemporary Essays

E. J. Hobsbawm

PHCENIX
 A PHOENIX PAPERBACK

First published in Great Britain

by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in1973
This paperback published in1994
by Phoenix, a division of Orion Books Ltd,
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,
London WC2H 9EA

Copyright © 1973 by E. J. Hobsbawm

The right of E. J. Hobsbawm to be identified as the author of

this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN1 85799129 X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London
 CONTENTS

PREFACE vii

COMMUNISTS
1 Problems of Communist History 3
2 Radicalism and Revolution in Britain 11
3 French Communism 16
4 Intellectuals and Communism 25
5 The Dark Years of Italian Communism 31
6 Confronting Defeat: The German Communist Party 43
II ANARCHISTS

7 Bolshevism and the Anarchists 57

8 The Spanish Background 71
9 Reflections on Anarchism 82

III MARXISM
1o Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement 95
11 The Dialogue on Marxism 1 09
12 Lenin and the 'Aristocracy of Labour' 121
13 Revisionism 1 30
14 The Principle of Hope 1 36
15 The Structure of Capital 1 42
16 Karl Korsch 1 53

IV SOLDIERS AND GUERRILLAS

1 7 Vietnam and the Dynamics of Guerrilla War 1 63
1 8 Civilians versus Military in Twentieth-Century Politics 1 77
1 9 Coup d' Etat 1 92

V INSURRECTIONARIES AND REVOLUTION

20 Hannah Arendt on Revolution 20 1
2 1 The Rules of Violence 209
v
 REVOLUT IONARIES
22 Revolution and Sex
23 Cities and Insurrections
24 May Ig68
25 Intellectuals and the Class Struggle
INDEX

vi
 PREFACE

This book consists of essays on a number ofrelated subjects. The first

part deals with the history of communism and communist parties,
mainly in the period of the Communist International. The second
part deals with anarchism, a movement in which interest has revived
oflate, the third part with various aspects of the international debate
on Marx and marxism, which has been lively since the middle 1 950s.
It contains some footnotes to Marx and Lenin, but consists chiefly of
comments on some rediscovered old and some new marxist writers,
and on the debates to which they have given rise. Finally a number
of topics are considered which can be loosely grouped under the
heading of 'violent politics' ....:. revolution, insurrection, guerrillas,
coups d'etat and such like.
Writers choose some subjects and have others chosen for them.
The great majority of those in this volume have been chosen for me,
partly by those who invited me to give various lectures but mainly by
editors who commissioned them in the form of book-review essays.
No doubt they thought that a marxist of the 'old left' ought to know
something about the subject-matter of the books they sent me and
might be interested in expressing his views about them. The second
assumption is evidently correct, but the first cannot be made without
substantial qualifications. Over the years I have acquired some
knowledge both of marxist ideas and of the history of recent revol­
utions and revolutionary movements but, speaking as a historian,
these are not fields in which I would claim professional expertise.
Much of what I know comes from the authors reviewed here. Little is
based on first-hand research. The most I can claim is to have kept
my eyes. open during the past decades as a modest participant, or
what the anthropologists call a 'participant observer', to have lis­
tened to friends in numerous countries who know a great deal more
vii
 REVO L U T IONARIES

than I, and to have had at least a tourist's view of some of the

activities with which these essays deal.
Still, first-hand observation ought to count for something. If the
results of reflecting upon it can be communicated, it may perhaps
help those who have not lived through the era which formed my gen­
eration - the period during which the hopes and fears of revolution­
aries were inseparable from the fortunes of the Russian revolution - to
understand an important part of twentieth-century history. That
is why I have tried to be as lucid as possible about the movements of
that era. As for the more recent episodes discussed here, I have done
my best to write about them realistically though not dispassionately.
It is improbable that the lessons which may be drawn from such an
analysis will be learned, but the least a historian can do is to provide
material for education.
The object of these essays is not to add to an already vast liter­
ature of polemic and counter-polemic, accusation and justification.
It is not even certain whether the questions which haunt middle­
aged and elderly men and women who gave themselves - and others
- to their cause, will strike their less committed contemporaries or
their younger successors as equally important. Their object is to assist
clarification and understanding. What the author's views are on the
polemical issues discussed, should be clear. However, it would be a
pity if interest in these papers were confined only to those who agree
with them.
The dates ofwriting of the essays have been indicated. Three have
not been published before (nos 5, I 8 and 25). A small part of the first
appeared as a review in the Times Literary Supplement, the others were
given respectively as lectures in Montreal and London. The rest of
the chapters first appeared in English in the Times Literary Supplement,
the New Tork Review of Books, the New York Nation, New Society, New
Statesman, New Left Review, Marxism Today, The Spokesman, Monthly
Review, History and Theory and Architectural Design. Chapter 7 ap­
peared in Anarchici e Anarchia nel Mondo Contemporaneo (Fondazione
Luigi Einaudi, Turin, I 97 I ). Minor changes have been made in
almost all, but some have been more or less extensively rewritten.
My thanks are due to the publishers for permission to reprint.
E .J . HOBSBAWM

viii
 I

COMMUNISTS
 I

PR OBL E M S O F C OMM U N I S T
H I S T O RY

We are today at the end of that historical epoch in the develop­

ment of socialism which began with the collapse of the Second
International in 1 9 1 4 and the victory of the bolsheviks in October
1g1 7. This is therefore a suitable time to survey the history of the
communist parties which were the characteristic and dominant
forms of the revolutionary movement in this era. The task is
difficult because communist party historiography has special
complications, but also for wider reasons.
Each communist party was the child of the marriage of two
ill-assorted partners, a national left and the October revolution.
That marriage was based both on love and convenience. For anyone
whose political memories go back no farther than Khruschev's
denunciation of Stalin, or the Sino-Soviet split, it is almost impos­
sible to conceive what the October revolution meant to those who are
now middle-aged and old. It was the first proletarian revolution, the
first regime in history to set about the construction of the socialist
order, the proof both of the profundity of the contradictions
of capitalism, which produced wars and slumps, and of the pos­
sibility - the certainty that socialist revolution would succeed.
-

It was the beginning of world revolution. It was the beginning of

the new world. Only the nai:Ve believed that Russia was the
workers' paradise, but even among the sophisticated it enjoyed the
general indulgence which the left of the 1 g6os now gives only to
revolutionary regimes in some small countries, such as Cuba and
Vietnam. At the same time the decision of revolutionaries in other
countries to adopt the bolshevik model of organization, to subor­
dinate themselves to a bolshevik international (i.e. eventually to
the cPsu and Stalin), was due not only to natural enthusiasm, but
3
 REVOLUTIONARIES

also to the evident failure of all alternative forms of organization,

strategy and tactics. Social democracy and anarcho-syndicalism
had failed, while Lenin had succeeded. It seemed sensible to
follow the recipe of success.
The element of rational calculation increasingly prevailed, after
the ebbing of what had, in the years after 1 9 1 7, looked like the
tide of global revolution. It is, of course, almost impossible to
separate it in practice from the passionate and total loyalty which
individual communists felt to their cause, which was equated with
their party, which in turn meant loyalty to the Communist
International and the USSR (i.e. Stalin) . Still, whatever their
private feelings, it soon became clear that separation from the
communist party, whether by expulsion or secession, meant an
end to effective revolutionary activity. Bolshevism in the
Comintern period did not produce schisms and heresies of prac­
tical importance, except in a few remote countries of small global
significance, such as Ceylon. Those who left the party were
forgotten or ineffective, unless they rejoined the 'reformists' or
went into some overtly 'bourgeois' group, in which case they were
no longer of interest to revolutionaries, or unless they wrote books
which might or might not become influential on the left some
thirty years later. The real history of Trotskyism as a political
trend in the international communist movement is posthumous.
The strongest among such exiled marxists worked quietly in
isolation until times changed, the weakest broke under the strain
and turned passionately anti-communist, to supply the CIA culture
of the 1 950s with several militants, the average retreated into the
hard shell of sectarianism. The communist movement was not
effectively split. Still, it paid a price for its cohesion : a substantial,
sometimes an enormous, turnover of members. The joke about the
largest party being that of the ex-communists has a basis in fact.
The discovery that communists had little choice about their
loyalty to Stalin and the ussR was first made - though perhaps
only at the highest levels of the parties - in the middle 1 920s.
Clear-sighted and unusually strong-minded communist leaders like
Palmiro Togliatti soon realized that they could not, in the interest of
their national movement, afford to oppose whoever came out on top
in the cpsu, and tried to explain this to those less in touch with
the Moscow scene, such as Gram.sci. (Of course even a total
willingness to go along with Stalin was no guarantee of political,
4
 PROBLEMS O F C OMM U N I S T H I S T O R Y

or for residents of the USSR physical, survival in the I93os.) Under

the circumstances loyalty to Moscow ceased to depend on ap­
proval of the Moscow line, but became an operational necessity.
That most communists also tried to rationalize this by proving to
themselves that Moscow was right at all times is another matter,
though it is relevant to the argument, because it confirmed the
clear-headed minority in the belief that they would never be able
to take their parties with them against Moscow. A British
communist who attended the meeting of the leadership in
September I 939 which was told that the war was not, after all,
supposed to be a people's anti-fascist war but just an imperialist
one, recalls saying to himself : 'That's it. There's nothing to be
done. An imperialist war it is.' He was right at the time. Nobody
bucked Moscow successfully until Tito carried his party against
Stalin in I 948 - to Stalin's and a lot of other party leaders'
surprise. Still, he was by then not only a leader of a party but also
of a nation and a state.
There was, of course, another factor involved : internationalism.
Today, when the international communist movement has largely
ceased to exist as such, it is hard to recapture the immense
strength which its members drew from the consciousness of being
soldiers in a single international army, operating, with whatever
tactical multiformity and flexibility, a single grand strategy of
world revolution. Hence the impossibility of any fundamental or
long-term conflict between the interest of a national movement
and the International, which was the real party, of which the
national units were no more than disciplined sections. That
strength was based both on realistic argument and moral convic­
tion. What convinced in Lenin was not so much his socio­
economic analysis - after all, at a pinch something like his theory
of imperialism can be derived from earlier marxist writings - but
his palpable genius for organizing a revolutionary party and
mastering the tactics and strategy of making revolution. At the
same time the Comintern was intended to, and very largely did, give
the movement immunity against the terrible collapse of its ideals.
Communists, it was agreed, would never behave like inter­
national social democracy in I9I4, abandoning its flag to follow
the banners of nationalism, into mutual massacre. And, it must be
said, they did not. There is something heroic about the British and
French CPS in September I939· Nationalism, political calculation,

5
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

even common sense, pulled one way, yet they unhesitatingly chose
to put the interests of the international movement first. As it
happens, they were tragically and absurdly wrong. But their error,
or rather that of the Soviet 11ne of the moment, and the politically
absurd assumption in Moscow that a given international situation
implied the same reactions by very differently situated parties,
should not lead us to ridicule the spirit of their action. This is how
the socialists of Europe should have acted in I 9 I 4 and did not :
carrying out the decisions of their International. This is how the
communists did act when another world war broke out. It was not
their fault that the International should have told them to do
something else.
The problem of those who write the history of communist parties is
therefore unusually difficult. They must recapture the unique and,
among secular movements, unprecedented temper of bolshevism,
equally remote from the liberalism of most historians and the
permissive and self-indulgent activism of most contemporary ultras.
There is no understanding it without a grasp of that sense of total
devotion which made the party in Auschwitz make its members pay
their dues in cigarettes (inconceivably precious and almost impos­
sible to obtain in an extermination camp), which made the cadres
accept the order not merely to kill Germans in occupied Paris, but
first to acquire, individually, the arms to do so, and which made it
virtually unthinkable for them to refuse to return to Moscow even to
certain imprisonment or death. There is no understanding either the
achievements or the perversions of bolshevism without this, and both
have been monumental; and certainly no understanding of the
extraordinary success of communism as a system of education for
political work.
But the historians must also separate the national elements
within communist parties from the international, including those
currents within national movements which carried out the inter­
national line not because they had to, but because they were in
genuine agreement with it. They must separate the genuinely
international elements in Comintern policy from those which
reflected only the state interests of the USSR or the tactical or other
preoccupations of Soviet internal politics. In both national and
international policies they must distinguish between those based
on knowledge, ignorance or hunch, on marxist analysis (good or
bad) , on local tradition, the imitation of suitable or unsuitable

6
 P R OB LEMS OF C OMMUNIST HISTORY

foreign examples, o r sheer trial and error, tactical insight or

ideological formula. They must, above all, make up their minds
which policies were successful and sensible and which were
neither, resisting the temptation to dismiss the Comintern en bloc
as a failure or a Russian puppet-show.
These problems are particularly difficult for the historian of the
British CP because, except for a few brief periods, they appear to
be so unimportant in this country. The party was both entirely
loyal to Moscow, entirely unwilling to involve itself in Russian or
international controversies, and an unquestioned chip off the
native working-class block. Its path was not littered with lost or
expelled leaders, heresies and deviations. Admittedly it enjoyed
the advantage of smallness, which meant that the International
did not expect the spectacular results which put such a strain on,
say, the German party, and of operating in a country which, even
on the most cursory inspection, was unlike most of Europe and the
other continents. Being the child, not of a political split in
social-democracy, but of the unification of the various groups of
the extreme left, which had always operated to some extent
outside the Labour Party, it could not be plausibly regarded as an
alternative mass party to Labour, at least an immediate alter­
native. Hence it was left free - indeed it was generally encouraged
- to pursue the tasks to which militant British left-wingers would
have devoted themselves anyway, and because they were com­
munists, to do so with unusual self-abnegation and efficiency.
Indeed initially Lenin was chiefly concerned to discourage the
sectarianism and hostility to Labour, to which the native ultra-left
was spontaneously drawn. The periods when the international line
went against the grain of the national left-wing strategy and
tactics (as in I 928-34 and I 939-4I ) stand out as anomalies in the
history of British communism, just because there was so obviously
- as there was not in all other countries - such a strategy. So long
as there was no realistic prospect of revolution, there was only one
TUC and the Labour Party was the only - and still growing -
party likely to win the support of the politically conscious workers
on a national scale, in practice there was only one realistically
conceivable road of socialist advance. The disarray of the left
today (inside and outside the Labour Party) is due largely· to the
fact that these things can no longer be taken for granted and that
there are no generally accepted alternative strategies.

7
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

Nevertheless, this apparent simplicity o f the British communists'

situation conceals a number of questions. In the first place, what
exactly did the International expect of the British, other than that
they should turn themselves into a proper communist party, and -
from a not entirely certain date - that they should assist the
communist movements in the empire? What precisely was the
role of Britain in its general strategy and how did it change? This
is by no means clear from the existing historical literature, which
is admittedly not of high quality, with rare exceptions.
In the second place, why was the impact of the OP in the 192os
so modest, even by unexacting standards? Its membership was
tiny and fluctuating, its successes the reflection partly of the
radical and militant mood of the labour movement, partly of the
fact that communists still operated largely within the Labour
Party or at least with its local support. Not until the 1930s did the
OP become, in spite of its modest but growing membership, its
electoral weakness and the systematic hostility of the Labour
leadership, the effective national left.
Thirdly, what was the base of communist support? Why did it
fail, again before the 1930s, to attract any significant body of
support among intellectuals, and rapidly shed most of the
relatively few it attracted (mostly from the ex-Fabian and guild
socialist left) ? What was the nature of its unusually strong
influence - though not necessarily membership - in Scotland and
Wales? What happened in the 1930s to turn the party into what
it had not previously been, a body of factory militants?
And of course, there are all the questions which will inevitably be
asked about the rightness or wrongness of the party's changing line,
and more fundamentally, of this particular type of organization in
_the context of interwar and post-1945 Britain.
James Klugmann1 has not seriously tackled any of them. This
extremely able and lucid man is clearly capable of writing a
satisfactory history of the communist party, and where he feels
unconstrained, he does so. Thus he provides the best and clearest
account of the formation of the party at present available.
Unfortunately he is paralyzed by the impossibility of being both a
good historian and a loyal functionary. The only way yet dis­
covered to write a public 'official' history of any organization is
1 Jrunes Klugmann, History of the Communist Par!)! of Great Britain: Formation and
. Early Tears, London, 1966.

8
 P R OB L EMS OF C OMM U N I S T H I S T O R Y

to hand the material over to one or more professional historians

who are sufficiently in sympathy not to do a hatchet job, suf­
ficiently uninvolved not to mind opening cupboards for fear of
possible skeletons, and who can, if the worst come to the worst, be
officially disavowed. That is, essentially, what the British govern­
ment did with the official history of the second world war, and the
result has been that Webster and Frankland were able to produce
a history of the air war which destroys many familiar myths and
treads on many service and political toes, but is both scholarly
and useful - not least to anyone who wishes to judge or plan
strategy. The Italian CP is the only one which has so far chosen
this sensible, but to most politicians almost unthinkable, course.
Paolo Spriano has therefore been able to write a debatable, but
serious and scholarly work.2 James Klugmann has been able to do
neither. He has merely used his considerable gifts to avoid writing
a disreputable one.
In doing so he has, I am afraid, wasted much of his time. What,
after all, is the use of spending ten years on the sources - including
those in Moscow - when the only precise references to contemporary
unpublished CP sources - give or take one or two - appear to
number seven and the only references even to printed Communist
International sources (including Inprecorr) number less than a
dozen in a volume of 370 pages. The rest are substantially references
to the published reports, pamphlets and especially periodicals of
the CP in this period. In I 92 I-2 the Presidium of the Comintern
discussed Britain thirteen times - more often than any country other
than the French, Italian, Hungarian and German parties. One
would not have known it from Klugmann's book, whose index lacks
all reference to Zinoviev (except in connection with the forged letter
bearing his name) , Borodin, Petrovsky-Bennet, or, for that matter, so
purely British a field of party activity as the Labour Research
Department.
An adequate history of the CP cannot be written by systematically
avoiding or fudging genuinely controversial issues and matter likely
to be regarded as indiscreet or bad public relations within the
organization. It cannot even be offset by describing and document­
ing, more fully than ever before, the activities of the militants. It is
interesting to have I6o or so pages on the party's work from I 920 to
11 Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, vol. 1, Da Bordiga a

Gramsci, Turin, 1967.

9
 REVOLUTIONARIES
I 923, but the basic fact about this period is that recorded in
Zinoviev's report to the Fourth World Congress at the end of I 922,
namely that 'In no other country, perhaps, does the communist
movement make such slow progress', and this fact is not really faced.
Even the popular contemporary explanation that this was due to
mass unemployment is not seriously discussed. In brief, Klugmann
has done some justice to the devoted and often forgotten militants
who served the British working class as best they knew how. He has
written a textbook for their successors in party schools, with all the
clarity and ability which have made his high reputation as a teacher
in such courses. He has provided a fair amount of new information,
some of which will only be recognized by those very expert at
deciphering careful formulations, and little of which - on important
matters - is documented. But he has neither written a satisfactory
history of the OP nor of the role of the CP in British politics.
( I 969)

IO
 2

RAD I CA L I SM AND
R E V O LUT I O N IN BR I TA I N

The learned study of communist movements, an academic

industry with a large but on the whole disappointing output, has
generally been practised by members of two schools, the sectarian
and the witch-hunting. They have tended to overlap, thanks to
the tendency of many ex-communists to progress from disagree­
ment to total rejection. Broadly speaking, the sectarian historians
have been revolutionaries, or at least left-wingers, mostly dissident
communists. (The contribution of communist parties to their own
history has been muffled and until recent years negligible.) The
main purpose of their enquiry has been to discover why commun­
ist parties failed to make revolutions, or produced such disconcert­
ing results when they did. Their main occupational weakness has
been an inability to stand at a sufficient distance from the
polemics and schisms within the movement.
The witch-hunting scholars, whose orthodoxy was not fully
formulated until the years of the cold war, saw communist parties
as sinister, compulsive, potentially omnipresent bodies, half religion
and half plot, which could not be rationally explained because
there was no sensible reason for wishing to overthrow the
pluralist-liberal society. Consequently they had to be analyzed in
terms of the social psychology of deviant individuals and a
conspiracy theory of history. The main occupational weakness of
this school is that it has little to contribute to its subject. Its basic
stereotype is rather like the Victorian one of 'the trades union', and
it therefore illuminates those who hold it more than communism.
Mr Newton's rather ambitiously named The Sociology of British
Communism1 demonstrates, to the satisfaction of anyone ready to be
1 Kenneth Newton, The Sociology ofBritish Communism, London, 1 969.

II
 REVOLUTIONARIES

convinced, that the witch-hunting school has no visible bearing on

the British Communist Party. This CP does not consist, and has
never consisted to any substantial extent, of deviants or alienated
minorities. In so far as its social composition can be discovered - and
Mr Newton has collated what information is available - it consists
primarily of skilled and semi-skilled workers, largely engineers,
builders and miners, and of school teachers who come largely from
the same family backgrounds. As in the case of so-called 'traditional
radicalism', it is 'not supported by uprooted or unattached
individuals, but on the contrary by individuals who are closely
connected with their community and its radicalism'. It does not
consist of 'authoritarian personalities' similar to fascists, and indeed
the conventional myth that the two 'extremes' interchange easily
has little basis in fact.
Its activities did not and do not conform to the sociologist's
pattern of 'mass movement' ('direct and activistic modes of
response' in which 'the focus of attention was remote from
personal experience and everyday life') . Whatever the ultimate
aims of the party, its militants, in the unions or the unemployed
movements between the wars, were passionately concerned with
practi�al matters such as improving the condition of the workers
here and now. There is not even evidence that the cP is any more
oligarchic than other British parties, that its members pay less
attention to inner-party democracy, or have a notably different
attitude to their leaders.
In brief, Mr Newton establishes at some length what everyone
who has actual experience of British communists knows. They are,
sociologically speaking, much what one would expect an activist
working-class elite to be, sharing notably 'the persistent attempt at
self-improvement through self-education' which is familiar to any
student of the cadre of working-class leadership at all periods of
British history. They are the kinds of people who have provided
labour movements with leadership and a cutting edge at most
times. Mr Newton implies that they are in this very like the
Labour Party activists, and that the chief reason for the unusual
smallness of the British CP is that (until recently) the Labour
Party expressed the views of most politically conscious British
workers quite satisfactorily. In this he is almost certainly right,
though there has always been a working-class left which found it
inadequate. This ultra-left is the subject of Mr Kendall's book.
12
 R AD I C A L I SM A N D R E V O L U T I O N IN B RI TA I N

The real question is whether it has constituted or constitutes a

'revolutionary' movement. In so far as the CP is concerned, what is
at issue is not its subjective commitment to a fundamental social
change, but the nature of the society in which it pursued and
pursues its objectives, and the political context of its activities. For
the young ultras of 1 969, whose idea of revolution is, if not
actually to stand on a barricade, then at least to make the same
sort of noise as tho�gh standing on one, it is plainly not
revolutionary and has long ceased to be so. But the question is
more serious than that. How far can any party be functionally
revolutionary in a country in which a classical revolution is simply
not on the agenda, and which lacks even a living tradition of past
revolution ?
Walter Kendall's enquiry into the left of 1 900-2 1 raises this
question in an acute form.2 The author himself sometimes appears
to get lost in the intricacies of sectarian history and spends too
much time on the argument that the CP grew not out of the past
of the British radical left but out of the international requirements
of the Russian bolsheviks. This argument can be briefly dismissed.
If anything is clear about the period 1 9 1 7-2 1 it is (a) that the
ultra-left passionately identified itself with the bolsheviks, (b) that
it consisted of squabbling small groups, (c) that most of them
wanted nothing more than to become the Communist Party,
whatever the Russians wanted, and (d) that the natural and
sensible course for the Russians was to see that a single unified
party emerged. In fact, what happened was pretty much what
might have been expected. The largest and most lasting of the
independent marxist organizations of the British left, the British
Socialist Party, became the main nucleus of the CP, absorbing
politically important but numerically small groups of other left­
wingers. The Russians used their prestige to knock some of the
extreme anti-political sectarianism out of it, though the process of
turning it into a 'boJshevik' party did not seriously begin until
after Mr Kendall's book ends.
But how far was this radical left revolutionary ? How far could it
be revolutionary ? It is evident from Kendall's very full and
scholarly account that only a tiny fraction of the smallish pre- 1 9 1 4
radical left consisted of revolutionaries i n the Russian or Irish sense :
2 Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, London,
1 969.
 REVOLUTIONARIES

mostly i n Scotland, the East End of London (with its Russian

connections) and perhaps south Wales. These few score, or at best
few hundred, militants played a disproportionately large part in the
years I 9 1 1-20, when the British labour movement, probably for the
first time since the Chartists, showed signs of genuinely rejecting 'the
system', including 'politics', the Labour Party and the trade union
leadership. To say that it was revolutionary would be misleading.
The immediate reason for failure was that the British left had
neither a sense of power nor organizations capable of thinking in
terms of power. The rebels merely faced the more modest choice of
either capturing the traditional mass organizations of labour from
the reformist leadership or refusing to have any truck with them.
But the one course, though more fruitful in the long term, lowered
the temperature of militancy in the immediate crisis ; the other
maintained it at the sacrifice of effectiveness.
The south Wales miners - their union was essentially the produce
of rank-and-file rebellion - chose the first, with the result that after
the great 1 9 1 5 strike there was no widespread unofficial movement in
the pits which could link up with that in industry. But the miners
held together, were radicalized en bloc (the South Wales Federation
even thought of affiliating to the Comintern at one point), elected
A.J. Cook in 1 924 and pushed the whole of labour into the General
Strike - at a time when this had ceased to have much political
significance. As Kendall notes rightly, their success 'staved off
radical action during the war only to cause it to break out once the
war was over'.
The shop stewards, on the other hand, by their very grass roots
syndicalism, their distrust of any politics and officialdom, wasted
their efforts and produced - as Kendall also points out - a mere
supplement to official trade unionism. They expressed rather than
led a genuine revolt, though unable to give it effectiveness or even
permanence. Hence their movement melted away, leaving behind
only a few score valuable recruits to the new CP. 'In I 9 1 8', wrote
Gallacher, 'we had marched through Glasgow a hundred thousand
strong. On 1 May 1 924 I led a demonstration through the streets. A
hundred was our full muster.'
The trouble about the revolutionary left in stable industrial
societies is not that its opportunities never come, but that the normal
conditions in which it must operate prevent it from developing
the movements likely to seize the rare moments when they are called
 R A D ICA L I S M AND R E V O L U T I O N IN B R I T A I N

upon to behave as revolutionaries. The discouraging conclusion to be

drawn from Mr Kendall's book is that there is no simple way out of
this dilemma ; it is built into the situation. A self-sealing sectarian­
ism is no solution. Nor is a reaction of simple rebellious rejection of
all politics and 'bureaucracy'. Being a revolutionary in countries
such as ours just happens to be difficult. There is no reason to believe
that it will be less difficult in future than it has been in the past.
( 1 969)
 3

F R E N C H C OMMU N I SM

The history of communism in the developed economies of the west

has been the history of revolutionary parties in countries without
insurrectionary prospects. Such countries may be, and at various
times in our century have been, involved in revolutionary activities
arising out of the international contradictions of capitalism (e.g.
Nazi occupation), or reflecting the glow of fires elsewhere (e.g. in
eastern Europe) , but their own political roads have not led, or ever
looked like leading for more than a fleeting moment, towards the
barricades. Neither the two world wars nor the intervening great
slump, seriously shook the social basis of any regime between the
Pyrenees, the southern border of the Alps, and the North Cape: and
it is not easy to imagine more massive blows hitting such a region in
the relatively short period of half a century. In eastern Europe - to
take the nearest example - the situation has been very different.
Here we have in the same period at least four and perhaps five cases of
endogenous social revolutions (Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece,1
perhaps Bulgaria) , not counting temporary but serious upheavals.
Spontaneously or deliberately, the labour movements of the west
have had to adapt themselves to this situation, and in doing so they
have always run the grave risk of adapting themselves to a perman­
ent and subordinate existence within capitalism. In the period up to
1914 this predicament was to some extent obscured by the refusal of
bourgeois regimes to admit them formally or completely into their
system of political and economic relations, by the miserable con­
ditions of existence in which most workers lived and the self­
contained social universe of an outlaw proletariat, and by the
strength of the revolutionary traditions - mainly marxist, but also
anarchist - which had formed most labour movements and still
1 Successful, that is, but for British military intervention and Soviet diplomatic

abstention.

16
 F R E N C H C O M MU N I S M

powerfully imbued them. In the generation after 1 9 1 7 it was also

partially obscured by the collapse of capitalism into mutual mas­
sacre, slump and barbarism, and more specifically by the bolshevik
revolution, which was (correctly) seen as the herald of world
revolution. In our generation it has emerged with much greater
clarity, because of a combination of three factors: the remarkable
and unprecedented economic prosperity of the 'west' (including the
bulk of its working classes), the disintegration of the Third
International - whether in its formal or its informal versions - and
the remoteness - both geographical, social and political - of the
post-1 945 phase of the world revolution from the problems of the
developed western countries.2
The period before 1 9 1 4 has passed into history. The Second
International collapsed totally, and beyond any chance of revival,
and so did the part-rival, part-complementary movement of anar­
chizing revolutionary trade unionism ('syndicalism'). If we study
that period at all for any reason other than academic curiosity, it is
simply to help to explain what happened later, and perhaps to seek
some clues about the operation of what was then usual, but is now
rare, namely single national socialist movements organizationally
united but ideologically pluralist. The period of the Third
International is still with us, at least in the form of the permanent
schism between communist and social-democratic parties, neither of
whose patterns of behaviour or traditions can be understood without
constant reference to the October revolution. Hence the importance
of studies like Annie Kriegel's massive Origins of French Communism,
I9f4-20.3
The French Communist Party is in many respects unique. It is
one of the few mass communist parties in the 'advanced' economies
of the west, and, with the exception of the Italian CP (which
operates in a country that came late and incompletely into the
'advanced' sector of the world economy), the only one to have
become the majority party within its labour movement. At first
sight this poses no great problem. France is the classical country of

2 I do not say that it ought to be remote ; merely that, as a matter of observable

fact, the Chinese revolution and the revolutions of national liberation have not
impregnated the socialist and communist movements of the west in anything like
the same extent that the October revolution did.
8 A. Kriegel, Aux Origines du Communisme Fran9ais, 1914-20 ( 2 vols) , Paris and The

Hague, 1964.
 R E V O LUT I O N AR I E S

west European revolution, and if the traditions of 1 789-94, 1 830,

1 848 and 1 87 1 will not attract a nation to revolutionary parties,
nothing will. Yet on second thoughts the rise of the CP is rather
more puzzling. The classical traditions of French revolutionism -
even that of the working class - were not marxist and even less
leninist, but Jacobin, Blanquist and Proudhonist. The socialist
movement of before 1 9 1 4 was already a German graft on the
French tree, and one which took only incompletely in politics and
even less in the trade unions. Guesdism, the nearest thing to social
democratic orthodoxy, though still some way from it, remained a
regional or minority phenomenon. The French CP marked a much
more radical 'bolshevization' or russification of the native move­
ment, and one for which there was little foundation in it. Yet this
time the graft took. The French Communist Party became and has
remained not merely the mass party of most French workers, the
main force on the French left, but also a classically 'bolshevik'
party. This poses the major problem of its history. Mrs Kriegel does
not set out to answer it directly - her two volumes end with the
Congress of Tours which founded the party - but she does answer it
indirectly, as it were, by a process of eliminating alternative
possibilities. The history of the years she has taken as her subject
did not complete this elimination. Indeed, one of the main points of
her argument is, that the subsequent development of the CP was by
no means readily predictable in 1 920. Nevertheless, war and post­
war cleared a very large area of historically accumulated, but
obsolete or impracticable politics.
The impact of the war and the Russian revolution must be traced
by parallel enquiries into the evolution of the working class and the
loosely organized and sometimes unrepresentative minority which
made up the French labour movement. The distinction is important,
because the very fragility, instability or narrowness of the French
movement may, as she argues, have made the appeal of revolution­
ary parties after the war greater than in countries in which the
labour movement was more representative of the masses. Mrs
Kriegel's book tells us comparatively little about this evolution,
though it clearly passed through four major phases : a solid reversion
to nationalism in 1 9 1 4, a rapidly growing war weariness from the
end of 1 9 1 6, culminating'in the abortive strikes and army mutinies of
the spring of 1 9 1 7, a relapse into inactivity after their failure (but one
combined with an increasing influx of workers into labour organ-
18
 F R E N C H C O MM U N I S M

izations), and after the end of the war, a rapid and cumulative
radicalization, which almost certainly ran ahead of the formal labour
organizations. Its chief carriers were the demobilized soldiers - the
rhythm of gradual demobilization maintained the momentum of
radicalization - and the industries (metals and railways) which
combined a record of wartime importance with the return of
ex-servicemen to their old occupations. Nevertheless, until the end of
the war the deep-seated nationalism which is the oldest and strongest
tradition of the French left, kept the masses remote from a revolution
(including the Russian revolution) which seemed to imply a German
victory. Compared with Britain, for instance, the movement of
sympathy for the soviets in 19 17, was strikingly weak. Only after the
armistice had eliminated the choice between patriotism and revol­
ution, could the political radicalization of the French workers
proceed unhampered. And when it did, it was dissipated by the
failure of their labour movement.
For the labour movement the years from 1914 to 1920 were a
succession of defeats, and of historically decisive defeats. 1914 meant
the total failure of all sections and all formulae of the earlier
movement - both socialist and syndicalist. From early 19 I 5 a modest
pacifist-internationalist (but not revolutionary) opposition emerged,
though - significantly enough - not on the foundation of the prewar
radical left. It failed in 1917, and slowly a revolutionary pro­
bolshevik left emerged after the armistice, though - again signifi­
cantly - it was only very partly based on the pacifist-internationalist
'Zimmerwald' current of 19 15-17, many of whose leaders refused to
join it. There was at this stage no split in the French labour
movement, or at any rate no more divergence than there had always
been in it, since the formula of loose unity had been devised in the
early I goos ; nor was there a serious prospect of a permanent split.
On the contrary, in 1918-19 both the Socialist Party and the
General Confederation of Labour appeared once again to have
found a basis for unity in a shift to the left - but not the bolshevik left
- which criticized but did not disavow· the nationalist and class­
collaborationist excesses of 19 14. Unlike Germany, the war had not
split the party. Unlike Britain, the leaders of class collaboration in
1914 (such as Arthur Henderson) did not carry a united party with
them into opposition to the war and into a moderate socialism. But
like Austria, the former pacifist minority became a majority, without
dividing the party.
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Of course in the heady atmosphere of world revolution all sections

of the movement except the tiny and discredited extreme nationalist
right, looked forward to 'revolution' and 'socialism', though it is a
moot point whether the battles fought in 1919-20 actually had it as
their object. Whatever their object, they all failed. The small
ultra-left who dreamed of a western-style proletarian revolution
based on 'councils' and equally hostile to Parliament, parties and
trade unions, failed in the strikes of the spring of 19 19, for it never
reached the masses.4 The solution of libertarian or decentralized
communism was eliminated. The political socialists had always put
their money on elected socialist governments, and drafted an
ambitious programme of what such a government would do. They
failed in the autumn of 19 19, because the political shift of the
electorate to the socialists was disappointingly small; only about 14
per cent, much smaJler than in other countries. But for the half­
heartedness of the reformist leadership, it would, as Mrs Kriegel
proves convincingly, have been considerably more, but even so, an
electoral majority was never in sight and thus saved the leadership of
the party the probable demonstration that they would have done
nothing with it. At all events the reformist road was temporarily
barred.
Last, and most seriously, the revolutionary syndicalists - perhaps
the strongest purely proletarian tradition of revolution in France -
tried and failed in 1920, with the collapse of the great railway
strike. The traditional myth of French labour, the revolutionary
general strike, was dead. So, more significantly, was revolutionary
syndicalism as a serious trend in the French movement.
It was in these circumstances - and only in these circumstances -
that the bulk of the French socialist party was prepared to follow
Moscow, and even then it did so only with tacit qualifications -
'unreservedly, but without inopportune clarifications', as Mrs
Kriegel puts it. It required the reflux of the majority of socialists into
the old party shortly after and the elimination of the original C P
leadership some years later, to lay the foundation for a real bolshevik
party. This is doubtless true, but one may still doubt whether the
permanent emergence of a mass CP was as 'accidental' as she suggests.
4 Mrs Kriegel rightly points out that there was a genuine revolutionary
alternative to bolshevism, and one which sought to combine socialism and liberal or
libertarian values; but also that its failure, under whatever label it was organized,
was total. In fact, it was simply a political non-starter.

20
 FRENCH C OMMUNISM

In the first place the bankruptcy of the earlier currents and

formulae of French socialism was irreversible. What is more, the
traditional pride in France as the 'classical' country of European
revolution, and French revolutions as international style-setters,
which had kept the French movement largely immune to marxism,
was broken. The French had failed - lamentably, and for the first
time in an era of European revolution - whereas the bolsheviks had
succeeded. In any future French extreme left Lenin had to supple­
ment the failing vigour of Robespierre, Blanqui or Proudhon. The
way for a transformation of French revolutionaries was, for the first
time, open. But in the epoch of the Third International such a
transformation excluded any maintenance of the prewar formulae of
socialist unity. A communist left would be bolshevik or it would not
exist at all.
In the second place, as Mrs Kriegel rightly observes, the entire
social basis of the pre- 1914 French labour movement disappeared.
The war brought the French economy for the first time into the
twentieth century, that is to say it made impossible (or marginal) not
only the unstable minority trade unionism of pre-industrial crafts­
men, which had been the foundation of revolutionary syndicalism,
but also the illusion of an outlaw working class, linked to the
capitalist system by nothing except hatred and the hope of its total
overthrow. One way or another both the reformism and the
revolutionism of before 191 4 had to change, to be re-defined or more
precisely defined. In this sense also, the road back to 1914 was
barred.
But this very change in the French economy and the relationship
between employers, workers and the state, raised problems which
neither the socialists nor the communists faced, or even fully
recognized, and in this failure lies much of the tragedy of western
socialism. Leon Blum's Socialist Party became neither the ideal
Fabian party approaching socialism via elections and piecemeal
reforms, nor even a simple reformist party within capitalism. It
degenerated into something like the Radical Party of the Third
Republic, and indeed took over its political role in the Fourth: a
guarantor of social and economic immobilism, sweetened by minis­
terial office for its leaders. The Communist Party remained the party
of international proletarian revolution and, increasingly, of effective
labour organization. Bolshevization made it almost certainly into the
most effective revolutionary organization in French history. But
21
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

inevitably, since the world revolution turned out to be simply the

Russian revolution, the hope of its extension lay in the ussR, and
would remain located there so long as the ussR 'continued to see
herself as the advancing revolution'. 5 And since there was no
revolutionary situation or perspective in France 'the P CF necessarily
became the seat of all the contradictions and antinomies of pre-1g14
French revolutionary socialism : reformist in its daily practice,
though revolutionary ; patriotic though internationalist'. And, as
she correctly observes, it discovered a pseudo-solution for them 'by
turning itself into a sort of imaginary global society, on the model of
the soviet Russian universe' ; and, we may add, by increasingly
retiring from effective participation in politics. Only one thing has
firmly divided it from becoming a reincarnation of socialism. Unlike
it, in the crucial crises which made a choice between nationalism and
internationalism mandatory, it has opted for internationalism (in the
only available form, loyalty to the October revolution as embodied
in the USSR) .
Was there - is there - no way out of this dilemma of the
revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary environment ? To ask
this question is not to deny the correctness of the international course
prescribed for the communist movement by Lenin, whose towering
political genius emerges from Mrs Kriegel's book as from all other
serious studies of his activity. There was, after all, a revolutionary
situation in half the world in 1917-21, though this does not mean,
and Lenin never supposed it to mean, that soviet republics were on
the agenda in London and Paris. Hindsight may show that the
developed countries of capitalism - even Germany - remained
fundamentally unshaken, but it was correct, not to mention natural,
for political generalship at the time to see Europe - or at any rate
central Europe - as a battlefield on which victory was possible and
not as a territory to be promptly evacuated. Furthermore, not to
have divided the labour movement, even if this had been possible,
would have solved nothing. The record of movements which
remained substantially united, like the British and the Austrian,

6 Under the conditions of stalinism this implied a total identification with all the
actions of the CPsu, for any hesitation meant expulsion and the loss of contact with
the reality of world revolution; but Mrs Kriegel may perhaps be defending her
own past when she argues that 'any attempt to establish any distinction between the
soviet state and . . • the French CP, would have been radically absurd in theory as
well as in practice'.

!22
 F R E N C H C O MM U N I S M

shows that the interwar failures cannot be blamed simply on the

socialist-conununist schism. Lastly, the creation of effective revolu­
tionary parties, which was the great achievement of the Comintern,
had striking positive results, as was proved in the 1930s and 1940s,
and especially in the resistance movements against fascism, which
owed far more to the communist parties than these were willing to
claim at the time or their enemies to admit subsequently.
This is not to accept the Comintern uncritically. Gross mistakes of
political appreciation were made, which the military rigidity of its
organization passed on to the communist parties. Its inevitable
domination by the C P SU had extremely bad consequences, and
eventually wrecked it. But those who think that the international
labour movement, especially in western Europe, should never have
taken the road it did in 1917-2 1 are merely expressing a wish that
history ought to have been different from what it was. What is more,
they overlook the positive achievements, however qualified, which
make the period of the Third International so much less discourag­
ing for the socialist than that of the Second. They are easy enough to
overlook, particularly in the present era of reaction against stalinism
and of international communist schism, and at a time when the
Comintern clearly no longer provides a useful model for inter­
national socialist organization. However, the historian's business is
not praise and blame, but analysis.
Curiously enough, such analysis would reveal that the fundamen­
tal problem of the revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary
environment was not neglected in the Comintern. Indeed, it adum­
brated one possible solution for it, and the extreme sensitiveness of
anti-revolutionaries on this point suggests, that it was by no means
an impracticable one : the 'popular front' and - until it was turned
into a mere cover for the CP after l 946, or until the CP was driven out
of it in the same period - the national anti-fascist fronts of resistance
and liberation. At the time the character and possibilities of such
movements and governments were obscured by a number of histor­
ical irrelevancies : by the reluctance of communist parties to admit
that such fronts were steps towards socialism, or by their insistence
that they would only be so if they became assimilated to the CP; by
the briefness of their careers and the exceptional circumstances in
which they often operated; and by various other factors. However,
so far this phase of conununist thinking has been the only one in
which the specific problems of achieving socialism in the advanced
 REVOLUTIONARI ES
countries of the west have been realistica11y considered at all on an
international scale. It is worth remembering that it was initiated by
the French Communist Party. Whether, or how far, the experiences
of the I 930S and I 940S remain relevant, is a matter for discussion. In
any case they fall outside the scope of Mrs Kriegel's book.
( I 965)
 4

I NT E L L E C T U AL S A N D
C OMMU N I SM

The love affair between intellectuals and marxism which is so

characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe,
though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime. Before 191 4
the marxist intellectual was a rare bird west of Vienna, though at one
point in the early 1890s it looked as though he would become a
permanent and plentiful species. This was partly because in some
countries (such as Germany) there were not many left-wing intellec­
tuals of any kind while in others (such as France) older pre-marxist
ideologies of the left predominated, but mainly because the bour­
geois society to which the intellectual - satisfied or dissident -
belonged was still a going concern. The characteristic left-wing
intellectual of Edwardian Britain was a liberal-radical, ofDreyfusard
France a revolutionary of 1789, but one almost certainly destined for
an honoured place in the state as a teacher. It was not until the first
world war and the 1929 slump broke these old traditions and
certainties that the intellectuals turned directly to Marx in large
numbers. They did so via Lenin. The history of marxism among
intellectuals in the west is therefore largely the history of their
relationship with the communist parties which replaced social
democracy as the chief representatives of marxism.
In recent years these relations have been the subject of a vast
literature, mainly the work of ex-communists, dissident marxists and
American scholars, and chiefly consisting of autobiographies or
annotated who's whos of prominent intellectuals who joined, and
mostly left, various communist parties. David Caute's Communism and
the French Intellectuals1 is one of the more satisfactory specimens of the
second type, for it accepts - indeed it argues strongly - that the
1 David Caute, Communism.and the French Intellectuals, London, 1 969.

2-R • •
 REVOLUT I ONARI ES
reasons which led intellectuals into communist parties and kept them
there were often both rational and compelling, and controverts the
characteristic I 950S view that such parties could attract only the
deviant, the psychologically aberrant, or the seeker after some
secular religion, the 'opium of the intellectuals'. The greater part of
his book therefore deals not so much with communism and the
intellectuals as with the intellectuals and communism.
The relations of intellectuals and communist parties have been
turbulent, though perhaps less so than the literature would suggest,
for the prominent and articulate, with whom it mainly deals, are not
necessarily a representative sample of the average and the inarti­
culate. In countries like France and Italy, where the party has long
been and remains the major force of the left, it is likely that political
behaviour (e.g. voting) is much stabler than the turnover of party
membership - always rather large - would indicate. We know this to
be so among workers. Unfortunately the difficulties of finding a
workable sociological definition of 'intellectuals' have so far deprived
us of reliable statistics about them, though the few we have suggest
that it applies to them also. Thus party membership at the Ecole
Normale Superieure dropped from 25 per cent after the war to 5 per
cent in I 956, but the communists obtained 2 I per cent of the votes at
the Cite Universitaire in I 95 I and 26 per cent in I 956.
Still, whatever the general trend of pofr :cal sympathy among
intellectuals, there can be no doubt of the stormy path of those who
actually joined communist parties. This is normally ascribed to the
increasing conversion of these parties, following the Soviet lead, into
rigidly dogmatic bodies allowing no deviation from an orthodoxy
that finished by covering every conceivable aspect of human
thought, thus leaving very little scope for the activity from which
intellectuals take their names. What is more, unlike the Roman
Catholic Church, which preferred to keep its orthodoxy unchanged,
communism changed it frequently, profoundly, and unexpectedly in
the course of day-by-day politics. The ever-modified Great Soviet
Encyclopedia was merely the extreme example of a process which
inevitably imposed great and often intolerable tensions on commun­
ist intellectuals. The unpleasant aspects of life in the ussR also, it is
argued, alienated many of them.
This is only part of the truth. Much of the intellectuals' difficulty
arose from the nature of modern mass politics, the communist party
being merely the most logical - and in France the first - expression of
26
 INTE LLE CTUALS AND C OMMUNISM

a general twentieth-century trend. The active adherent of a modern

mass party, like the modern MP , abdicates his judgment in practice,
whatever his theoretical reservations or whatever the nominal
provision for harmless dissent. Or rather, modern political choice is
not a constant process of selecting men or measures, but a single or
infrequent choice between packages, in which we buy the dis­
agreeable part of the contents because there is no other way of getting
the rest, and in any case because there is no other way to be
politically effective. This applies to all parties, though non­
communist ones have hitherto generally made things easier for their
intellectual adherents by refraining from formal commitments on
such subjects as genetics or the composition of symphonies.
As Mr Caute sensibly points out : the French intellectual, in
accepting broadly the Third or Fourth Republics has had to do so
despite Versailles, the domestic policy of the Bloc National,
Morocco, Syria, Indo-China, the regime of Chiappe, unemployment,
parliamentary corruption, the abandonment of republican Spain,
Munich, McCarthyism, Suez, Algeria.
Similarly the communist intellectual, in opting for the USSR and
his party, did so because on balance the good on his side seemed to
outweigh the bad. Not the least of Mr Caute's merits is to show how,
for example in the 1930s, not only hard-shell party militants but
sympathizers consciously refrained from criticism of Soviet purges or
Spanish republican misdeeds in the interests of the greater cause of
anti-fascism. Communists did not often discuss this choice in public.
It could be quite explicit in the case of non-members who deliber­
ately opted for the communist side, or against the common adver­
sary, such as Sartre. It may be that not only the proverbial gallic
logic but also the background of Roman Catholicism (shared, in
different ways, alike by believers and unbelievers) made the idea of
adhering to a comprehensive party with mental reservations more
readily acceptable in France than in the Britain of a hundred
religions and but a single sauce.
Still, all allowances made, the way of the party intellectual was
hard, and most of the actively committed ones had a breaking-point,
even those who joined the party in the stalinist period and largely
because of its stalinism, i.e. because they welcomed the construction
of a totally devoted, disciplined, realistic, anti-romantic army of
revolution. Even this Brechtian generation, which deliberately
trained itself to approve the harshest decisions in the war for human
 REVOLUTIONARIES

liberation, was likely - like Brecht himself - to arrive at the point

where it questioned not so much the sacrifices as their usefulness and
justification. Unthinking militants might escape into the self­
delusion of the faithful, to whom every directive or line was 'correct'
and to be defended as such because it came from the party which was
by definition 'correct'. Intelligent ones, though capable of much
self-delusion, were more likely to retreat into the posture of the
advocate or civil servant whose private opinions are irrelevant to his
brief, or the policeman who breaks the law the better to maintain it.
It was an attitude which grew easily out of the hard-headed party
approach to politics, but one which produced a breed of professional
bruisers of intellectual debate.
Mr Caute is understandably hard on these intellectual apparat­
chiks, ready at a moment's notice to find the tone of sincerity for the
potential ally or to blackguard him as an 'intellectuel-flic', but never
to pursue the truth. The French version of them is indeed an
especially disagreeable one, and the book is largely dominated by the
author's disgust with them. One can hardly fail to sympathize with
him. Aragon's gifts as a writer are towering, but irrelevant to one's
feelings about his intellectual gutter-journalism, and there are plenty
of others whose personal talents command no respect. Nor can they
be excused because gutter-journalism is an old habit among com­
mitted French intellectuals of other political tendencies also. Yet two
important questions should not be obscured by this distaste.
The first is about the object of the exercise. If it was to gain
support for the party among intellectuals, as Mr Caute assumes, then
the public activities in the 1950s of MM Stil, Kanapa, Wurmser, et
al. were quite the worst way of setting about it, because they merely
isolated the party among them; and intelligent party men knew this.
The truth is rather that two motives conflicted : that of extending the
influence of the party and that of barricading a large but isolated
movement, a private world within the world of France, against
assaults and infiltrations from outside. In periods of political expan­
sion, such as those of Popular Front and Resistance, the two aims
were not mutually exclusive ; in periods of political · stagnation they
were. What is interesting is that in such periods the French party
chose (as the Italian never quite did) the second aim, which was
essentially to persuade the comrades that they did not need to listen
to the outsiders who were all class enemies and liars. This required
both a constant barrage of reassurance and an adequate supply of
 I N T E L L E C TU A L S A N D C O M MU N I S M

orthodox culture for internal consumption, and Mr Caute has not

perhaps paid enough attention to this attempt at systematic cultural
autarchy, though he has noted some of its symptoms. It implied the
attempt to make the party artist or writer economically independent
of the outside world. It also implied that at such times Aragon's
outside reputation, like Belloc's for prewar English Catholics, was
valuable as an asset within the movement, rather than as a means of
converting outsiders.
The second question is the crucial one of how communist policy
can be changed. Here again the Roman Catholic parallel (of which
French communists were more aware than Mr Caute allows) is
relevant. Those who have changed party orientation have not been
men with a record of criticism and dissidence, but of unquestioned
stalinist loyalty, from Khruschev and Mikoyan to Tito, Gomulka
and Togliatti. The reason is not merely that such men in the 1920s
and 1930s thought stalinism preferable to its communist alternatives,
or even that from the 1930s criticism tended to shorten life among
those domiciled in the ussR. It is also that the communist who cut
himself off from the party - and this was long the almost automatic
consequence of dissidence - lost all possibility of influencing it. In
countries like France, where the party increasingly was the socialist
movement, leaving it meant political impotence or treason to
socialism ; and for communist intellectuals the possibilities of settling
down as successful academic or cultural figures was no compen­
sation. The fate of those who left or were expelled was anti­
communism or political oblivion except among the readers of little
magazines. Conversely, loyalty left at least the possibility of in­
fluence. Since the 1960s, when Mr Caute's book ends, it has become
clear that even hard-core intellectual functionaries like Aragon and
Garaudy were more anxious than he allows to initiate policy
changes. Nor ought their arguments or their hesitant initiatives to be
judged by the standards of liberal discussion, any more than the
behaviour of the reforming prelates before and during the Vatican
Council.
However, to see the problem of communism and the French
intellectuals chiefly as one of the relations between party and
intellectuals, whether from the party's or the individual intellectual's
point of view, is to touch it only at the margin. For at bottom the
issue is one of the general character of French politics, of the secular
divisions within French society, including those between intellectuals
29
 REVO LUTIONARIES

and the rest. It may be argued that party policy in general and in
intellectual matters could have been more effective, particularly in
certain periods such as the 192os and the 195os. But such arguments
can, if they are to have value, be based only on the recognition of the
limits imposed on the party by a situation over which it had little
control.
We cannot, for instance, make sense of the 'dilemma' of the
communist intellectual in a proletarian party unless we recognize
that the causes which have mobilized French intellectuals most fully
have, since 1870, rarely been popular ones. One of the genuine
difficulties of the Communist Party during the Algerian war, as of
the Dreyfusard socialist leaders in the 1890s, was the fact that their
rank and file was largely out of sympathy with Dreyfus or the FLN.
Why this was so requires analysis. So, more generally, does the
failure of the entire French left since 1870 - and perhaps since before
1848 - to achieve political hegemony in the nation which it created
during the great Revolution. Between the wars governments of the
left (1924, 1936-8) were as rare in Jacobin France as in conservative
Britain, though in the middle l 93os it did look for a moment as
though the left might resume its long-lost leadership. One of the
crucial differences between the French and the Italian Communist
Parties is that the Italian Resistance, like the Yugoslav, was a
national movement led by the left, whereas the French Resistance
was merely the honourable rebellion of a section of Frenchmen. The
problem of breaking out of minority opposition into national
hegemony was not only a communist one.
Aragr,n's La Semaine Sainte, underrated in Britain and unmen­
tioned by Mr Caute, is essentially the novel of such secular divisions
among Frenchmen - even among those who 'ought' to be on the
same side. This is probably one reason why French critics of all
parties, whose political nerve it touches, have overrated it. The aim
of the French left has always been to become a movement of both
workers and intellectuals at the head of the nation. The problem of
the Communist Party has arisen largely from the extreme difficulty
of achieving this ancient Jacobin object in the mid-twentieth
century.
 5
T H E D A R K Y E A R S O F I TA L I A N
C OMMU N I SM

The Italian Communist Party is the great success story in the

history of communism in the western world, or that part of the
world in which such parties are not in power. The fortunes of the
various C P S have fluctuated, but in the course of the half century
or so since most of the European ones were founded few have
substantially improved their international ranking order or (what
is much the same thing) transformed the character of their
political influence in their native country. There have been some
rare cases of 'promotion' from a lower to a higher division of the
political league, as, presumably, the Spanish CP which was
relatively insignificant until the Spanish Civil War,1 and some
obvious cases of relegation such as the CP in Western Germany,
which never recovered from the blows received under Hitler. But
by and large, though their strength and influence have fluctuated,
most of the communist parties at least of capitalist Europe have
never played in their countries' political First Divisions, even
when they emerged at the end of the last war with the prestige of
their unparalleled record in the resistance. On the other hand
some of them, such as the French and the Finnish, have always
been major political forces, even at the worst points of their
careers. How far this is true of the world as a whole is more
difficult to assess, but need not concern us here.
The Italian CP is one of the rare examples of unquestioned
'promotion'. Before fascism it was never more than a minority
party within what was admittedly a rather left-wing socialist
1 The illegality under which several CPS have operated for most of their
history, and a number still do, makes the assessment of their political strength
and influence somewhat speculative.
 REVOLUTIONARIES
movement : somewhat over a third at the Congress of Livorno
( I 92 I ) . As the dust of the split settled down it became rapidly
clear that it represented a comparatively modest minority,
whatever the revolutionary sympathies and possibilities of the rest
of the socialist movement. In I 92 I it polled less than a fifth of the
socialist vote, in I 924, despite the socialist decline, the proportion
was still almost three to one against it. Its own percentage of the
popular vote never reached 5 per cent. Since the war it has
emerged increasingly as the major force within the left, as the
effective 'opposition' in a de facto two-party structure of politics,
and, what is more, it has gained strength steadily and almost
without interruption.2
What changes this has implied in its revolutionary role and
perspective is a question that may be hotly debated. However,
there can be no doubt that the party has been incomparably more
important in national politics since the war than it ever was
before, and that it has not on]y maintained but strengthened its
position for a generation.
Those who write history by extrapolation may be tempted to
project this rising ·curve of communist influence backwards, but
this is to miss the point. What is really interesting about the
history of the Italian cP is the startling contrast between its
extreme weakness for most of the fascist period and its astonishing
expansion during and after the Resistance ; or alternatively
between the remarkable continuity of an unusually able party
leadership, whose quality was internationally recognized, and the
enormous difference between the party which was regarded by the
Comintern as notoriously feeble and disappointing, and that
which, in I 947, was one of the only two non-governmental parties
to be invited to join the Cominform.
How great that difference was can now be established from
Paolo Spriano's Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, written with
full access to the archives of state and C P , but not to those of the
Percentage of communist vote in elections for Chamber of Deputies :
11

1 946 1 8·9
1 948 3 1 ·o (joint list with socialists)
1 953 22·6
1 958 22·7
1963 25·3
1968 26·9
The 1948 elections almost certainly marked a temporary decline.

32
 THE DARK YEARS O F ITALIAN C OMMUNISM

Communist International, which are only slowly being made

available to extremely official researchers. 3 In May I934, shortly
before the reorientation of international communist policy, the
Italian party had, according to the Comintern, 2,400 members in
all, less than the British cP at its lowest point in this period. The
bulk of its leading cadres was in jail, the apparently inevitable
destination of relays of brave and devoted militants sent into Italy
during the past seven years. Its activities in the country were
minimal. The fascist regime was sufficiently self-confident to
include several hundred communist prisoners in the amnesty with
which Mussolini celebrated the tenth anniversary of the March on
Rome.
This catastrophic situation could no doubt be blamed to some
extent on the lunacies of Comintern policy during the notorious
so-called 'Third Period' (1927-34), when the communist move­
ment in Europe was reduced to its lowest ebb. They are suffi­
ciently well known : the obligation to see social democracy as the
main enemy ('social-fascism') and the left wing of social democracy
as the most dangerous part of it, the wilful blindness not only to
the rise but also to the triumph of Hitler, and so on. They reached
a climax of unreality in the eighteen months after his advent to
power. The party's (i.e. the Comintern's) line did not change until
July I 934. It cannot have been easy for a communist historian to
record Italian party leaders trying desperately to retain a faint
element of realism in their analysis ('We cannot say that in Italy
social-democracy is the main support of the bourgeoisie') and
obliged the next day to make a public recantation - and this ten
years after the March on Rome.
Nevertheless, even after the Comintern adopted the line of
anti-fascist unity (with the enthusiastic support of Togliatti, who
joined Dimitrov in the leadership of the International) the Italian
party failed to advance. This was all the more surprising since the
new line was both eminently sensible and uniquely designed to
improve the prospects of the communist parties, virtually all of

8 Three volumes of Spriano,s history have so far been published, covering the

period until 1 941 (Turin 1 967, 1 969, 1970) . Whether the Comintern archives
have been closed for technical reasons - until the death of Stalin they appear
not to have been even roughly catalogued, and unexpected discoveries can still,
one is told on good authority, be made in them - or for political reasons, their
inaccessibility is much to be regretted.

33
 REVOLUTIONARIES

which gained substantial ground in this period. So, of course, did

the Italians, in a modest way. Moreover, they remained by far the
. largest, most active and most serious of the illegal or emigrant
anti-fascist organizations. In 1 936 there were among the Italian
emigration in France some four to five thousand organized
Communists, about six hundred members of the Socialist Party
and a hundred or so anarchists. Still, it is worth remembering
that, according to the CP's own estimates, there were at this time
almost half a million Italian workers in that country, of whom the
largest and broadest mass organization of the CP did not capture
more than fifteen thousand.
The most genuine and publicized achievement of the party also
demonstrates its weakness : its intervention in the Spanish Civil
War. Italian communists occupied posts of the highest responsi­
bility in this, the last and perhaps greatest of the undertakings of a
genuinely international communist movement : Togliatti, Longo,
Vidali. The Garibaldi Brigades played a notably heroic and
effective part ; not only in the defence of Spain but - as the
non-communist Giustizia e Liberta was, it must be admitted,
quicker to see than the CP - in restoring the self-confidence of the
Italian left. 4 Yet what we now know is, that the effort of
mobilizing the first Italian volunteer force exhausted the resources
of the anti-fascist emigration. Of the 3,354 Italians in the
International Brigades the dates of arrival of roughly two thous­
and are known. Approximately a thousand of these arrived in the
second half of 1936, four hundred in the first, a little more than
three hundred in the second half of 1 937, rather less than three
hundred in 1 938. (Incidentally, of the 2,600 whose immediate
provenance can be established, 2,000 came from the French
emigration and only 223 directly from Italy.) 5 Since the casualties
were heavy, they simply could not be filled, in spite of the party's
efforts to step up recruitment : by November 1937 only 20 per cent
4 The following passage from Lussu (Giustizia e Liberta, 28 August 1936)

deserves to be quoted : 'Our need to go to Spain is greater than the Spanish

Republic's need of us. Italian anti-fascism lacks a revolutionary glory . . . We
must recognize that we have not known how to do battle against fascism. The
small political vanguard of the Italian emigration must generously sacrifice itself
.in this enterprise. It will acquire experience on the battlefields. It will make its
name there. It will become the nucleus that will attract around itself the greater
vanguard of tomorrow.'
6 Spriano, vol. 3, pp. 226-7.

34
 THE DARK YEARS OF I T ALIAN C OMMUNISM
of the Garibaldi Brigade consisted of Italians. In a word, the
anti-fascist emigration mobilized itself, and when it had done this
it had nobody left to mobilize.
This is the background to another phenomenon that has not been
sufficiently well known until Paolo Spriano's work : the apparently
persistent campaign of the International against the Italian C P
throughout the I 930S. Like so much in the last years of the
Comintern, this is a very obscure subject ; for as the International
was brought under the direct supervision of the Soviet secret police
apparatus -Yezhov himself, the head of the purges, joined the
executive at the Seventh Congress and Trilisser-Moskvin, another
policeman, the actual secretariat6 - its activities became increas­
ingly shadowy, in so far as they did not atrophy altogether. (After
1 936 it becomes impossible even to identify the leading committees
of the International and their membership from published sources.)
Togliatti's prominence in the International, Longo's in the
International Brigades, have tended to divert attention from the
fact that the m's criticisms became progressively more severe, until
the point was reached where the Central Committee of the party
was dissolved by Moscow in 1 938, the financial aid on which it
depended almost wholly was drastically cut in early 1 939, and that
there was talk of yet further reorganizations of the leadership until
well into the war.
No doubt personal animosities and byzantine court intrigues
played their part in all this, but the major reason for the m's
dissatisfaction was rational enough : the total failure of the Italian
party to make any effective contact with, let alone measurable
progress in, Italy itself. It remained what it had long been, a group
of a few hundred political emigrants, wholly dependent on the
material support of Moscow, plus a large number of prisoners in
Mussolini's jails, or in forced residence. In some respects the
situation in the first year of Italy's war was even more disastrous
than in 1 929-35, for then there had been a coherent body of
leaders, whereas the Spanish war, the fall of France, and other
events had now dispersed even this 'external centre'.
This failure cannot be blamed on 'orders from Moscow' in any
literal sense, however plausible . this explanation may seem for the
period I 92 7-34· (Even so it underestimates the genuine support
6 G. Berti, 'Problemi di storia del PCI e dell'Internazionale Communista', Riv.
Stor. Italiana, LXXXII, March 1 970.

35
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

which ultra-sectarianism had within the Italian party, especially

among the youth whose spokesman was Luigi Longo.) Nor can it
be entirely blamed on the errors of the Italian party, whether these
were their own or part of a general trend among communists. They
themselves failed to see fascism as a general phenomenon, and still
tended (when not forced into the official formulae of Moscow) to
analyze it as a special problem of one particular rather backward
capitalism. And of course, in spite of Gramsci's attempts to think
out this problem, they shared the difficulty of all communists in
adjusting themselves to a situation so different from the revolution­
ary world crisis in which they had been formed. Nevertheless, the
main reasons for the failure of the POI were probably objective, and
the Comintern underestimated them, because, in spite of its long
experience of illegality, fascism had no real precedent.
The powers of the modern state determined to suppress oppo­
sition regardless of law and constitution, are enormous, and modern
mass labour movements, which cannot function without some sort
of legality, are unusually vulnerable to it. The POI itself had been
taken by surprise : how else explain that the fascist raids of late
1926 caught no less than one-third of its effective membership,
including its leader Gramsci ? Whatever the ideological and propa­
gandist top-dressing, the essence of both the fascist and later the
Nazi policy towards the labour movements was not to convert them
but to pulverize them. Their organizations were to be dissolved,
their leaders and cadres down to local and works level were to be
eliminated, and they were to be left, as Trotsky was later to put it
'in an amorphous state'. So long as 'any independent crystallization
of the proletariat' (or any other class) was to be prevented, it did
not much matter what the workers thought.
But what could an illegal movement do once decapitation and
pulverization had been successful ? It could maintain - or rather
re-establish - contact with existing groups of loyal supporters, and
perhaps with luck form some new ones. This became progressively
more difficult. The Comintern was quite correct in urging iJlegal
parties to establish an 'internal centre' as the essential base for
effective national activity, but the mere attempt to contact surviv­
ing members, easily threatened and kept under surveillance, almost
automatically led the police to the emissaries of the 'external
centre'. And what, in any case, could the illegal organization do ?
Practically all activities of a labour movement imply some kind of
 T H E D A R K Y E A R S O F I T A L I AN C O M M U N I S M

public appearance, which is precisely what they could not permit

themselves. On the margins of modern society, or where the state
power does not or cannot maintain intensive control, they might
maintain themselves better : in the isolated oral and secret universe
of villages, in small closed communities where outsiders, including
agents of the state, can be more readily isolated. It is probably no
accident that as organization in the industrial north collapsed, the
centre of the illegal party in the late I 920S and early I 930S shifted
to central Italy, which by then had twice as many known members
as the north. But in the short run, what difference did this make ?
When fascism fell, we hear of several touching cases of individuals
and groups, out of touch with their party for years, who paid up all
their back dues, which they had carefully saved up through the
long internal exile of fascism. We know that the militants of the
Sicilian village of Piana degli Albanesi took pride in never once
omitting to send at least a token demonstration on May Day to the
remote mountain glen where the founder of socialism in their
region, the noble Nicola Barbato, had addressed them in I 893 and
where the bandit Giuliano was to massacre them in I 94 7. But such
examples, however moving, prove the efficacy of the fascist policy.
It cut off the party even from its most persistent supporters and
prevented effective expression of their loyalty.
What could an illegal movement do under such circumstances ?
The then familiar refuge of weak illegal oppositions, individual
terrorism, was unacceptable to marxists, the experience of tsarist
Russia having proved to their satisfaction that it was ineffective. 7
The milder forms of drama tic propaganda by action, such as
dropping leaflets from aeroplanes over Milan, favoured by the
liberal Giustiz:.ia e Liberta, did not look very effective either. At this
period guerrilla insurrection of the Maoist or Guevarist kind was
not yet fashionable. In any case the record of such activity in the
nineteenth century, both by Mazzini's followers and by the
anarchists, hardly recommended it to communists. To wait pas�
sively for a process of internal disintegration to set in, or for some
crisis - whether economic or, as it turned out, military - which
would once again provide a means to set the masses in action, was
equally unacceptable. Communists could hope for such a crisis,
and mistakenly thought either the slump or the Abyssinian war
7 We recall that the Russian terrorists at the peak of their effectiveness

consisted of probably not more than five hundred individuals.

37
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

might bring it about, but they could not do much to precipitate

it. All the International could think of was to urge the PCI to get
back into Italy among the masses at all costs, and there was not
much else the PCI could think of either. And this task seemed
impossible.
We can now see in retrospect that the basis of its subsequent
success nevertheless existed or was being established. In the first
place, the mass of anti-fascist Italians remained unreconciled. The
mass basis of Italian fascism remained narrower than that of
Nazism. Secondly, the collapse of anarchism and the passivity of
the Socialist Party transferred a substantial body of worker and
peasant support at least potentially to communism. To this extent
the party's persistent presence, and the fascists' own attitude to
communism, established it as the major nucleus of anti-fascist
opposition. That there was such a transfer of loyalties in Italy,
unlike Germany, was probably due to the very different structure
of the left movement in the two countries. There was not in Italy
the fatal polarization of the labour movement between mutually
hostile parties of very different social structures. The Italian 'red'
movement of the early 1920s was still a spectrum of overlapping
tendencies and groups. Between the reformist Unitarians at one
end and the Communists and anarchists on the other, stood the
Maximalists, whose frustrated desire to affiliate to the Comintern
together with the Pm's serious plans to reunite with them,
demonstrate the common ground between them. Just as it was to
prove easier for socialists and communists to establish a working
united front in 1934, so it was easier for former socialists to emerge
as communists after fascism.
Thirdly, at some time during the I930S - between 1935 and
I938 - a certain revival of opposition within Italy may be noted.
This is most easily documented among the young intellectuals who
subsequently made their names both as party leaders (Ingrao,
Alicata) and as leaders of the postwar communist hegemony of
Italian culture. Spain undoubtedly played an important part in
this crystallization of the old and its reinforcement by a new
generation of anti-fascists - a new generation which probably,
though this is difficult to document, included workers also. At all
events the activists in the small and impermanent party cells
appear to have been chiefly young people. 8 The immediate impact
8 Spriano, vol. 3, p. 194.

38
 THE DARK YEARS OF ITALIAN C OMMUNISM

of the Spanish Civil War i s attested both b y police sources and by

anti-fascist informants, and this, significantly enough, at a time
when communist propaganda from abroad had not yet begun to
pay major attention to Spain. 9 (While Giusti;:,ia e Liberta was
immediately aware of the full significance of Spain, it is a curious
fact that as late as the end of September 1936 the Central Committee
of the P C I perhaps because of deficient contact with the
-

International, but certainly to its discredit - paid hardly any

attention to Spain.) 10 The initial victory of the Republic over the
military rising inspired not only the old anti-fascists, but (accord­
ing to a police informer in Milan) 'even some sectors which had
appeared to be firmly converted to fascism'. It demonstrated that
fascism was not all..powerful, and hence (as another informer
noted in Genoa) raised hopes 'of some sort of political transfor­
mations which would more or less rapidly bring about the
capitulation of the authoritarian spirit of fascism'.
Yet Spain was not the only factor. How much of the new
anti-fascism among young intellectuals, as like as not students
from Sicily, Calabria or Sardinia meeting in the capital, was due
to the desire to escape from the heavy provincialism of fascist
culture to the wider intellectual world, whose luminaries abroad
so visibly supported anti-fascism ? To the failure of Italian fascism
to establish a cultural hegemony as well as a genuine mass basis ?
(The sense of international iriferiority, both cultural and otherwise,
was much greater in Italy than in Germany, the sense of cultural
isolation more oppressive.) Whatever the reasons, by the end of
the I 93os anti-fascism in Italy was no longer based only on the
generations which had come to political maturity before I924· It
had begun to generate its own youthful dissidents.
Curiously enough - and this was one of its major weaknesses -
the PCI seems to have misunderstood the situation, perhaps
because of what had by now become an overestimate of the
popular strength of fascism. Its policy from I935 on was that of a
broad alliance, but it appears persistently (and in line with
international slogans) to have thought in terms of detaching a
supposedly large sector of 'sincere' fascists, disappointed with the
betrayal of the original fascist ideal, from the regime ; and above
all not to hurt the susceptibilities of Italian nationalism, which the
9 Ibid., pp. 8 1 -4.
10 Ibid., p. 99.

39
 REVOLUTIONARIES

Abyssinian war had shown to be a powerful force.11 But in fact, . as

both the non-communist anti-fascist emigrants and some of the
new internal anti-fascists observed, this was not the main problem.
The major effect of the fascism in Italy, observed the youthful
Eugenio Curiel, who finally joined the Communists after main­
taining contacts with both Socialists and Giustizia e Liberta, was
not to convert Italians to fascism. It was :
infinite scepticism . . . which kills all possible faith in any ideal, which
derides the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the welfare of the
community. This is, at bottom, the most conspicuous conquest made by
fascism and will remain as its bitterest legacy.12

As it happened, this very scepticism which isolated the tiny

minorities of active anti-fascists and kept the much larger body . of
inactive ones passive, was to turn against the fascist regime when
Mussolini drove a reluctant and unenthusiastic Italian people into
the second world war. Defeat was to give the anti-fascists their
chance to revive hope and human self-respect through action. But
the masses they were then to mobilize were not to consist to any great
extent of the 'sincere' fascists, or even of the inevitable and numerous
turncoats. They were to consist of the old and young anti-fascists,
and above all of the ordinary Italian workers and peasants, whose
conversion to an active and militant resistance was to be dramatic.
It was, there can be no doubt whatever, opposition to the war
which gave anti-fascism back its mass basis. It is not significant that
in July 1 94 1 yet another attempt to re-establish an 'internal centre'
was made. What is significant is that it succeeded. From the autumn
of 1 94 1 on the P C I functioned in Italy as it had not been able to since
the spring of 1 932, when the last head of a functioning 'internal
centre' had been arrested in Milan. By the spring of 1 943 mass strikes
for bread and peace could be organized in the north. The invasion of
Italy and the armistice reinforced the new mass movement with the
bulk of the cadre of communist leadership - returning from jail, exile
11 A curious example : In 1 939 the PCI detached one of its best military

cadres, Ilio Barontini, to establish a guerrilla action in Ethiopia in conjunction

with the forces loyal to the emperor. This operation was conducted with the
usual efficiency and heroism of good communists, and maintained until May­
June 1 940. It is entirely to the credit of the party, but until the publication of
Spriano's history (pp. 298-9) in 1970, hardly any public reference to this episode
was made in the party's publications.
11 Spriano, vol. 3, p. 273
 THE DARK YEARS OF ITALIAN C OMMUNIS M

or anti-fascist resistance in other countries, or emerging into the

open. Its three components - the old guard of party leaders, the
experienced military cadres of the Spanish war, and the young
anti-fascists of the I 93os vintage - together formed a body of
leadership which had no equivalent among any other anti-fascist
group. It not only took the initiative but provided the great bulk of
the armed partisan units in central and northern Italy. · Probably
well over 80 per cent of them were more or less under communist
leadership. They succeeded in mobilizing not merely a large body of
inactive anti-fascists, or communists who had dropped out of the
struggle,13 but substantial bodies of new working-class and peasant
militants like the famous seven Cervi brothers in Emilia, sons of a
prosperous and modern-minded farmer and good Catholic. The
results were dramatic. It is improbable that in I940 there were even
three thousand members of the P er, and most of these were scattered
all over the globe or in jail. By the winter of I 944-5 there were four
hundred thousand, and the party was growing rapidly. It had
established itself in the position which it was never thereafter to lose,
as the major party of the left.
Could it have done so but for the war ? 'What would have
happened if ? ', is a question which can never be answered with
certainty or even a high degree of probability. It is certain that
Italian fascism was a more fragile political structure than German
National Socialism, that the Italian economy was both more back­
ward and more vulnerable than the German, and that Italians were
poorer and more discontented. Very possibly it might have begun to
break up slowly from within, as the Franco regime in Spain clearly
began to do after fifteen years of fairly stable control from the middle
1950s. It is certain that the feebleness of organized anti-fascism
within Italy was out of proportion to the strength of potential
anti-fascism, old and new. It is also probable that the Italian
Communist Party never lost that organic connection with the
organized popular movement - whether among the unionized
industrial workers or the 'red' peasants which the KPD so largely
lacked. Under the circumstances its heroic and persistent illegal
activity would probably have in any case made it into a stronger
force after fascism than it had been before. It is also certain that it
13 However, with some exceptions such as Arrigo Boldrini, an army officer who

appears to have had no contact with the party before the summer of 1 943, the
partisan leaders were men of the left.

41
 RE V O L U T I O NA R I E S

possessed a coherent body of leaders of remarkably high quality,

which succeeded in avoiding the worst of the internal splits and
purges which played such havoc with the leadership of the KPD. But
beyond this all is speculation, and pointless speculation. History is
what happened, not what might have happened. What happened
was that Mussolini created the conditions which alloweP, the Com­
munist Party to take the lead in a massive movement of national
liberation, at least in central and northern Italy, and to emerge from
it as the major party of the left.
 6

C O N F R O N T I N G D E F E AT : T H E
G E RMAN C O MMU N I S T PARTY

Hermann Weber has added about nine hundred pages to the already
long bibliography of German communist history, with his massive
work Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus.1 The first question
prospective readers will ask is : did he have to ? The answer, on the
whole, is yes. These two volumes are a monument of erudition and
patient, thorough research - seventeen public archives in Western
Germany alone have been consulted - though further research
remains to be done. The major sources for the history of the KPD in
the Weimar Republic are in Moscow, and therefore likely to be
inaccessible for quite a while, and in East Berlin, and therefore also
inaccessible to researchers without the backing of the Central
Committee of the SED, among whom Dr Weber is not going to be
numbered. He has had to rely essentially on public records, notably
police files (when will students of the British left in the 1920s have as
much access to relevant material in our Public Records as historians
in other countries ?), on a few private archives, a mass of interviews
and memoranda from survivors of the period, printed sources and
the literature. Probably he has not missed very much, but a mono­
graph about six years of KPD history designed on this scale must
inevitably suffer far more than a less detailed book from the inability
to get at crucial documentation.
Still, let us be grateful for what we have until something even
better becomes possible. Dr Weber has written at the very least an
invaluable work of reference. The statistical data about the KPD's
districts in vol. I and the 300-page who's who of its functionaries in
vol. II are enough to make the work indispensable. But there is more
1 Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (2 vols.), Frankfurt,

1970.

43
 REVOLUTIONARIES

here than a mere collection of facts and data, or even one of the
comparatively rare histories of German Communism which is free
from the embittered personal involvement in past party and
Comintern infighting, from which older writers find it impossible to
escape. Weber has written a rather sensible book, which throws
light on problems which go far beyond the interest of students of the
KPD.
The problem with which he is essentially concerned is what
happens to a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation.
The KPD was founded and grew as a revolutionary party, or at least
a party of radical and active rejection of, or rather - to use the
correct slang - 'confrontation' with, the status quo. It was founded
when the Empire had collapsed, and the German Councils'
Republic might reasonably be expected to follow soon, as the
Russian October had followed February ; and in so doing
inaugurate the world revolution. I 9 I 9 was an apocalyptic year.
Even Lenin, the most hard-headed of revolutionaries, thought it
might bring the great breakthrough. The young German C P
brought to its great tasks an able if small marxist leadership,
immediately decimated by the assassinations of Luxemburg,
Liebknecht and Jogiches, but also a rank and file composed largely
of the utopian radicals, quasi-anarchist or socially marginal ele­
ments who are likely to flood into small and loosely structured
nuclei of radical opposition in times of revolutionary upsurge. Most
of these ultra-lefts moved away from the KPD within a year or two,
though not without leaving behind a tendency towards 'heroic
illusions' about the possibilities of the situation, a certain putschism,
and a residuum of ultra-radicalism.
The German 'October' did not take place. On the contrary, the
old regime, minus the emperor but plus a passionately and vis­
cerally anti-revolutionary and governmental Social Democracy, re­
established itself. What became the mass KPD, after the I 920 merger
with the left w!ng of the Independent Socialists, expressed essentially
the profound disappointment of large strata of the German working
class with the failure of the social revolution and their embittered
economic discontent. It represented all those forces - proletarian and
intellectual - which rejected and hated a republic which had few
repub)jcans, but plenty of generals, policemen, bureaucrats, tycoons
and jutj.ges whose reactionary bias was flagrant and incendiary, and
44
 C O N F R O N T I N G D E F E A T : T H E G E R MA N C O M M U N I S T P AR T Y

which had installed a restoration o f economic, social, political and

legal injustice.

In social terms, the new KPD attracted the young - in 1926 80 per
cent of its leading functionaries were below forty, 30 per cent below
thirty and its average age was thirty-four ;2 the unskilled - an
unusually high percentage of 1 3 ·5 among the top functionaries were
drawn from them ; the unemployed - in 1927, at the peak of
economic stabilization, 27 per cent of the Berlin membership were
jobless. Like all working-class organizations, however, its cadre
rested largely on the basic rock of skilled proletarians, especially - as
so often - the metal-workers. Three-quarters of its leading function­
aries had only elementary school education, though at the other
extreme 10 per cent were university graduates ; among the member­
ship 95 per cent had only been to primary school, 1 per cent to
universities. Historically, half its leaders but 70 per cent of its
members had entered politics since 191 7. The relatively large
number ofpre-1917 Social Democrats among the functionaries came
into it at the time of the merger with the Independent Socialists.
Only about 20 per cent of the functionaries in the 192os had
belonged to the Spartacus League or the radical left during the war,
so that the direct Rosa Luxemburg traditions were distinctly weak ;
on the other hand only thirty-six out of the almost four thousand
full-time employees of the Social Democratic Party bureaucracy in
1914 were to be found as KPD full timers in the 1920s.
The KPD was new, young, underprivileged, radically hostile to the
system and ready for revolution, which seemed to be possible if not
probable until its great defeat in the autumn of 1923. This explains
the strength within it of the uncompromising, offensive-minded,
activist and often sectarian left. There is no doubt that among the
various factions and currents of opinions within it, which fought out
their differences in the early years with the usual pre-stalinist
freedom and vigour (those were the days when it did not need a
communique to state that discussions had been 'full and frank'), the
left enjoyed by far the greatest support - in 1924 perhaps 75 per cent.
The right, mostly ex-Spartacists who provided the basic leadership
until 1923, was weak, except among the skilled workers - though not
the intellectuals. The middle group or 'conciliators' which split away
from the right after 1923, as the left took over, represented mainly
2 At this time the average age of the SPD leadership was fifty-six.

45
 REVOLUTIONARIES

party professionals, though they could count on about a quarter of

the membership.
The KPD's problem up to I 923 was how to make the revolution,
which seemed within reach, and which was essential not merely for
the triumph of world socialism, but for the Soviet Republic itself.
The German soviet revolution was the necessary complement to the
Russian revolution, and even Lenin was quite prepared in theory to
envisage a situation when the home of Marx, Engels, technological
progress and economic efficiency would take over as the centre of the
socialist world. In I 9 I 9 the Comintern regarded Berlin as the logical
place for its headquarters, its location in Moscow as temporary. The
German CP was treated as an equal - according to Weber even at the
end of I 922 - though we may suspect that the wily Radek, whose
long experience of the German socialist movement made him the
man chiefly responsible for German affairs in Moscow, held dis­
tinctly more modest expectations about its chances. The major
problem for the KPD in this period was posed by its deep involvement
with Moscow ; an involvement arising both from the relative age,
strength and tradition of the KPD and from the crucial importance of
German prospects for Soviet Russia and the whole international
revolution. The KPD might not wish to be mixed up in Russian
affairs, but it could hardly help being so, especially since Zinoviev
was in charge of the Comintern and Radek, a supporter of Trotsky at
a crucial stage, was its German expert. Beside this, the internal
confusion of the party seemed a minor problem. In the first place the
years I 9 I 9-23 clarified it somewhat by eliminating both the bulk of
the utopian-syndicalist ultra-left and an ex-social-democratic right.
In the second place, the prospect of revolution makes differences
which might otherwise bulk large, comparatively manageable : in
I 9 I 7, after all, such fundamental distinctions as those between Marx
and Bakunin had not caused much trouble in Russia.

After the defeat of I 923 the problem was essentially what to do in a

period of stabilization. 'Bolshevization', which is the main subject of
Weber's book, was the answer. This systematic assimilation of other
party organizations to the Russian model, and their subordination to
Moscow, is generally seen by non-communist historians as a by­
product of inner-Soviet developments, which it clearly was to some
extent. However, it is Weber's merit to see th"-t this is not the whole,
 C ONFRONTING D EFEAT : THE GE RMAN C O MMUNIST P ARTY

or even the major part, of the truth. He distinguishes several

elements in it.
In the first place, as he notes correctly, any effective and lasting
organization in modern industrial society tends to be bureau­
cratized in some degree, including revolutionary parties. Demo­
cratic movements and organizations operate somewhere between
the two extremes of unlimited internal freedom, bought at the cost of
practical effectiveness, and ossified bureaucracy. Weber comments :
In a labour movement, the democratic tendency always retains some
force, since its entire tradition requires an anti-authoritarian, egalitarian
and libertarian spirit. Moreover, the leadership is always obliged to support
such tendencies from time to time, in order to stimulate the membership
to activity and prevent a total paralysis of the party.

The formation of a structured and disciplined KPD out of the merger

of men, movements and sects in I9I8-20 was itself normal, and
unacceptable only to utopians or anarchists. It is the systematic
atrophy of internal democracy and over-bureaucratization after
I 924 which provide the problem.
In the second place, a revolutionary party needs an unusually
strong 'skeleton' of this kind, if only because it is a voluntary
organization which must be capable of holding its own against the
power structure of state, economy and the mass media, whose
resources, influence and strength are far superior. An hierarchical
and disciplined 'apparat' of professional revolutionaries (or, in
peacetime, professional functionaries) forms easily the most effective
cadre of this sort. Its absolute size is secondary : the KPD 's corps of
full-timers probably remained far smaller than the SPD' s in the
Weimar Republic. Though this inevitably produced tensions be­
tween leaders and rank and file, not to mention a hypertrophy of
centralism and atrophy of initiative from below, it was acceptable to
German communists for political as well as operational reasons. Just
because the KPD emerged in Germany - whose political traditions
notably differed from those of Russia - somewhere in an undefined
space between social democracy and the libertarian-democratic (not
to say utopian-radical) revolutionism which seems to be its natural
antithesis in industrial countries, it had above all to define its
political location. 'Bolshevization' did so. This was not only because
bolshevism had, after all, shown itself to be the on� successful form of
revolution - the others had failed or not even started - but because

47
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

the 'Party' itself as a disciplined revolutionary army, ready for battle,

provided unity and answers to confusing questions. Loyalty bypasses
many uncertainties, especially in proletarian movements, which are
built on the instinct of unity and solidarity.
These forces would have been operative even without the inter­
vention of Moscow, which Weber only mentions in the third place. It
stands to reason that, given the deliberately centralized structure of
the Comintern, of which the local parties were merely disciplined
'sections', and the obvious and inevitable dependence of both on the
Soviet party, 'bolshevization' would mean stalinization. In other
words a process which had no intrinsic connection with the ussR,
except inasmuch as it reflected the natural prestige of the organiza­
tional and strategic 'model' associated with the party and revolution
of Lenin, would be transformed into an extension of Soviet politics.
The distinction between the two is evident in the case of the Italian
c:P, because there it took the form of Togliatti's conscious subordin­
ation to the Russian party of a leading cadre formed earlier and
independently from it ; a cadre which, though purged and modified
by the Russians remained essentially intact and with its own ideas
(which it admittedly kept to itself ). It is reasonably clear in the
British CP, where once again the solidification of the party took place
earlier and the nucleus of the party leadership remained unchanged
after I 922-3 . It is not so clear in Germany, because the turnover of
the leading cadre continued to be much greater and was visibly
dominated by Moscow.
This was due partly to the heavy Russian involvement of the KPD
which we have already noted. What happened in Germany mattered
more in Moscow than what happened anywhere else in Europe. The
triumph of the left within the CP after the failure of 1 923 intensified
this involvement. It was not imposed by Moscow. Indeed, if
anything it marked a (last) assertion of the anti-Russian autonomy of
the German party,3 a suspicion which the leadership of Ruth Fischer
and Maslow tried to allay - fatally - by turning itself into the
German faction of Zinoviev. It was thus not merely opposed to the
general and rather moderate course which Stalin and the bulk of the
CPSU were now following, but in addition involved the KPD in the
Russian inner-party struggle - on the wrong side. (No faction of any
significance in Germany favoured Trotsky.) Moreover, the sectar­
ianism of the left was plainly senseless, though it appealed to the rank
3 See Weber, vol. I, p. 30 1 .
 C O NFRONTIN G D EFEAT : THE GERMAN C OMMUNIST PARTY

and file. In a period of stabilization - basically from I 9 2 I , unques­

tionably after I 92 3 - some form of political realism was necessary :
united action with the majority of the organized workers who were in
the SPD, work in trade unions, and in Parliament. Direct Comintern
intervention in I 925 deposed the left leaders. Nothing else could have
done, and this established a sinister precedent. For not merely did it
transfer the centre of gravity of German inner-party discussion to
Moscow, but to a Comintern which was now playing Soviet
politics, and which intervened not so much to change policies as
to choose loyal followers.

But which followers ? The vulgar historiography of the Comintern

neglects this question, assuming merely that they were blind
executants of Moscow's policy. But two tragic peculiarities of KPD
history cannot be so easily written out of the scenario. These were
(a) the zeal with which it carried out the suicidal line of I 9 I 9-33
and (b) the remarkable instability of its top leadership. Neither
were inevitable. For instance, an automatic reflex of discipline led
the British CP in I 939 to reverse its line on the war, to drop the
most important leaders associated with it - Pollitt and Campbell -
and to carry out the new line with unhesitating loyalty. But
everyone who had experien�e of this episode in its history knows
that, but for outside intervention the party would not have altered
its line at this time (though a minority might have hankered after
such a change), that it reverted with almost audible relief to its
old line in I 94 I , and that Pollitt and Campbell in no sense
suffered in the long run for their association with the 'incorrect'
policy of I 939·
The truth was that, although increasing numbers of KPD
functionaries - especially the young and the unskilled, and those
without previous experience in Spartacus or the usPD - were
prepared to support any party line unconditionally, the basic
orientation of the KPD activists was towards the sectarian left. It
had begun as a party of revolution, it stabilized itself as one of
militant and systematic negative 'confrontation'. Its consistent
failure to gain strength in the trade unions reflects this. The
Comintern had deposed the ultra-left leadership of I 924-5 only at
the cost of taking some account of this mood. Thus, as Weber
points out, the ultra-left course was never genuinely disavowed by
the KPD and a return to a similar course under Comintern

49
 R E V O LU T I O NA R I E S

auspices in I 928-9 was welcomed. It meant doing what came

naturally. It is perhaps significant - though this is one of the few
aspects on which Weber is silent - that the Young Communists
seem to have played an altogether subordinate part in the
Comintern's German policy. Elsewhere, one of the commonest
methods by which Moscow filled the party leaderships with loyal
cadres uncommitted to any pre-Comintern ideology, was by the
promotion of recruits from the various YCLS . Whether for this or
other reasons, youth organizations supplied a significant number
of Communist leaders : Rust in Britain, Longo and Secchia in
Italy, a very substantial group in France. Togliatti, indeed, is
reported to have observed during the great left turn of I 929 : 'If
we don't give in, Moscow won't hesitate to fix up a left leadership
with some kid out of the Lenin School. '4 So far as one can see, in
Weimar Germany the Young Communists produced no leaders of
any great significance. They were not required to : there were
enough left sectarians to choose from.
The problem arising out of the instability of the leadership is
twofold : why was the turnover so large ?5 And why did it lead -
as I think most observers must agree - to a progressive lowering of
quality ? The line from Liebknecht and Luxemburg, through Levi and
Meyer, Brandler and Thalheimer, Ruth Fischer and Maslow, to
Thaelmann and his group is a distinctly descending one in terms of
general political ability, though not in courage and devotion. This
is not by any means the case in all other communist parties.
What seems to have happened is that the KPD never succeeded
in developing a coherent body of leaders out of Spartacus (whose
surviving cadres, after the shedding of quasi-syndicalist elements,
tended to be 'right' deviationists) , the ex-Independent Socialists
(who tended to breed 'left' deviationists) , and the post- 1 920
entrants into the party. The struggle for the formation of a leading
group continued until it was merged with 'bolshevization' by
' According to an informant of Tasca, quoted in Spriano, Storia del Partito
Comunista Italiano, vol. 2, p. 228.
6 In the absence of comparably detailed calculations for other CPS it is

impossible to be certain, but it does seem that their turnover was smaller. Thus
in 1 929 only two members of the K P D's political bureau had survived from 1 924
- Thaelmann and Remmele, of whom the latter was subsequently eliminated. In
France five political bureau members sat continuously from 1 926 to 1 932, and
another discontinuously, while three - but for Semard's death, quite certainly
four - were still members in 1945.

50
 C O N F R O N T I N G D E F E A T : T H E G E R MA N C O M M U N I S T P A R T Y

Moscow ; and in this struggle the ablest in all groups tended to be -

eliminated for their prominence, or were unable to establish
themselves as leaders of independent standing in the KPD before
being reduced to Comintern functionaries. 6 This is perhaps the
real tragedy of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Spartacus
provided what the German left lacked : a potentially coherent and
flexible approach to German politics, which did not confuse
revolutionism with leftism. If Rosa Luxemburg was not likely to
provide an alternative to Lenin internationally, within her own
country her prestige might have imposed the Spartacus approach
on the new party. It might have provided that party with a
nucleus of political leadership and strategy.
For at bottom this was the drama of the KPD : it had no policy
for any situation other than one of revolution, because the German
left, one might almost say the German labour movement, had never
had one. The SPD did not practise politics, but merely waited (in
theory) until historic inevitability brought it an electoral major­
ity and hence 'the revolution', while concealing (in practice) a
subaltern acceptance of the status quo by providing its members with
a large collective private world. The German left had spent its time
criticizing the de facto abandonment of revolutionary or any
working-class struggle by the SPD, but had little chance to develop
more than a few buds of an alternative policy, which never bore
fruit. The German CP settled down to the same attitude as the old
SPD, except for its genuinely revolutionary temper : to mobilize, to
confront and to wait. It had not time - though quite a few of the
early KPD leaders might have had the capacity - to develop a
revolutionary politics ; in other words, at the least, something
political to do when there were no actual barricades to be put up.
It lacked that tradition of participation in a going system of radical,
or even bourgeois-reformist, politics, which, with all its dangers,
provided the proletarian left of other countries with strategic or
tactical models for non-insurrectionary periods. When the French
CP, 'bolshevized' in every sense, including a fair proportion of its

e A case in point may be the late Gerhart Eisler, whose policy as a Weimar

leader combined unconditional loyalty to the ussR with opposition to local

ultra-leftism. He was actually instrumental at one point in securing a temporary
suspension of Thaelmann from the leadership, and subsequently disappeared
into Comintern international service, until his return - in various secondary
functions - to the German Democratic Republic.

5I
 RE V O LUTIONARIES

leaders, confronted a problem like fascism, i t would automatically

think of falling back on a familiar political device, the temporary
bloc of the left or the 'people', in defence of the Republic. In fact
there are signs that even during the most insanely sectarian phase of
I928-33, these were the reflexes of PCF leaders, though they were
sti11 stifled by the Comintern. It was not that someone like Maurice
Thorez was less of a good bolshevik than Thaelmann, or even that
he was brighter - though he was ; but that there was a French
tradition of proletarian political action, whereas in Germany there was
not. There they bred fighters of unparalleled bravery and loyalty
and remarkable organizers, but not revolutionary politicians.

Hence the KPD not merely failed in the crucial period of Hitler's rise
to power - the prevailing policy in Moscow would have made it
almost impossible to succeed even if, what is more than doubtful, the
German SPD would have tolerated a common resistance to fascism.
It did not even realize that it was failing, until long after it was too
late, let alone how catastrophically and irrevocably it had failed.
And so it went down to total and final defeat. For the test of its
failure lies not in Hitler's victory, nor even in the rapid, brutal and
effective destruction of the party which was the most persistent, the
bravest, in a sense the only active force of opposition under the Nazi
dictatorship. It lies in thefailure of the KPD to revive after I945, except in
the Russian-occupied zone, where political conditions eliminated its
potential rivals. 7 When Hitler had been defeated, the old SPD, which
had done nothing to prevent his rise and had virtually liquidated
itself peacefully after his triumph, revived as the major mass party of
the West German working class. The KPD still polled about 6 per
cent (I ·4 million votes) in I949, compared to the SPn's 30 per cent,
but by I953 it was down to 2·2 per cent (o·6 million votes)
compared to the sPn ' s 29 per cent, and there is no reason to believe
that it would have done all that much better, had it not been
formally banned by the federal republic. In a word, after I 945 it
lived on rapidly wasting assets. It had failed during the Weimar
Republic to establish itself as a permanent factor in the German
working-class movement.
7 The argument that the KPD under Weimar had its greatest bastions in what is

now the DDR, is not convincing. In actual fact, the greatest preponderance of KPD
over SPD voters in 1 932 was to be found in the Rhine-Ruhr area, where the party
had about twice as much support as its rival.
 C O N F R O N T I N G D E FE A T : T H E G E R M A N C O M M U N I S T P A R T Y

Its failure contrasts not only with its striking mass influence i n the
Weimar days, but also with the record of other - generally smaller -
ap' s in countries where the anti-Russian reflex might have been
expected to weaken them. In Austria, for instance, the Communists
continued to poll a steady 5·5 per cent in the first ten postwar years
(their support before I 93 8 had been negligible) . In Finland, they
never polled less than 20 per cent (perhaps double their interwar
score) . Both these countries had fought wars against the ussR, or lost
territory, or been partly occupied by the Red army. Almost
everywhere in Europe the CPS emerged from the period of anti­
fascism stronger, and - at least for a time - more deeply rooted in
their national working classes than before. In Germany, Hitler had
eliminated them as a mass movement.
Yet one cannot conclude the tragic survey of the Weimar K P D
entirely on this gloomy note. For it did, after all, achieve what the
KPD set out to achieve - a German Socialist Republie, and the fact
that this came into existence through the Red army rather than
through the efforts of the German movement, would have been
perfectly acceptable to the Weimar communists. The German
Democratic Republic must be entered on the balance sheet as much
as the decisive defeat in the western part of the country. For that
republic, which can only be criticized if we also acknowledge its
remarkable achievements in very difficult circumstances, 8 is indeed
the child of the KPD . To this extent the critique of the party must be
qualified. After all, how many other communist parties have
succeeded in actually building new societies ? Yet who ever doubted
that, if someone ever handed power to them on a plate, the great
body of upright, brave, loyal, devoted, able and efficient function­
aries and executives who returned from exile and from the concen­
tration camps to do their duty as communists, would do a competent
job ?
How left-wing parties behave when they are given power is not an
insignificant test : social democratic ones have failed it with great
regularity, starting with the German SPD in 1 9 I 8. But communist
parties have always known that they would pass it. The German
KPD, however, failed other tests, by which revolutionary movements

8 Two of these achievements are worth noting : the genuine settling of accounts

with the Nazi past of the German people, and the quiet refusal to join, except in the
most marginal way, in the show trials, victimizations and executions of communists
which disfigured the other east European regimes in the late Stalin period.

53
 REVOLUTIONARIES

must also be judged. Unlike the French and Italian CPs, it failed to
become an integral part of its working-class movement, though it
had excellent chances of doing so. Its political history proved as
impermanent as the Weimar Republic. It failed to develop any
policy for operating under conditions of even a temporarily stab­
ilized capitalism, and for this reason it went down before Hitler with
the rest of the Weimar Republic. This failure reflected a more
general difficulty which faced all the communist parties or indeed all
revolutionary socialists in developed industrial countries : how to
envisage a transition to socialism in conditions other than the
historically exceptional ones of the years after I 9 I 7. Yet while the
development of other CPS shows some attempt to come to terms with
this problem (in so far as they were not prevented by outside in­
fluence) , that of the KPD does not. While it was a mass force, it did
one thing : it held the red flag high. Its worst enemies cannot accuse
it of any compromise with reformism, any tendency to allow itself to
be absorbed by the system. But confrontation is no policy. In a
period of crisis, as in 1 929-33, it might attract growing support from
those who had nothing to lose - by the spring of 1 932, 85 per cent of
the party membership was unemployed - but numerical support is
not necessarily strength. The 2,500 or so members of the PCI, at the
very same time, represented a more serious force than the 300,000
German communists, the 6,000,000 KPD voters.
'
The history or the KPD is tragic. The great hope of the world in
1 9 1 9, the only significant mass communist party in the west in 1 932,
it is little more than an episode in the history of Western Germany.
Perhaps it failed for German reasons : because of the inability of
the German left to overcome the historic weaknesses of both the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat of that great and ambiguous country.
But other possibilities for its development can be envisaged, without
excessive unrealism. At all events Dr Weber provides us with a
wealth of material for assessing a crucial case of failure in the history
of the left. Others may perhaps learn from this failure. They should
read him with care, and not without compassion.

54
 II

ANA R CHISTS
 7

B O L S H E V I SM AND T H E
ANA R C H I S T S

The libertarian tradition of communism - anarchism - has been

bitterly hostile to the marxist ever since Bakunin, or for that
matter Proudhon. Marx.ism, and even more leninism, have been
equally hostile to anarchism as theory and programme and
contemptuous of it as a political movement. Yet if we investigate
the history of the international communist movement in the period
of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, we
find a curious asymmetry. While the leading spokesmen of anarchism
maintained their hostility to bolshevism with, at best, a moment­
ary wavering during the actual revolution, or at the moment when
the news of October reached them, the attitude of the bolsheviks,
in and outside Russia, was for a time considerably more benevolent
to the anarchists. This is the subject of the present paper.
The theoretical attitude with which bolshevism approached
anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements after 1 9 1 7 , was quite
clear. Marx, Engels and Lenin had all written on the subject, and
in general there seemed to be no ambiguity or mutual inconsistency
about their views, which may be summarized as follows :
(a) There is no difference between the ultimate objects of
marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which
exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to exist.
(b) Marxists believe that this ultimate stage wi11 be separated
from the overthrow of bourgeois power through proletarian rev­
olution, by a more or less protracted interval characterized by the
'dictatorship of the proletariat' and other transitional arrange­
ments, in which state power would play some part. There was
room for some argument about the precise meaning of the classical
57
3-R • *
 REVOLUTIONARIES

marxist writings on these problems of transition, but no ambiguity

at all about the marxist view that the proletarian revolution
would not give rise immediately to communism, and that the state
could not be abolished, but would 'wither away'. On this point
the conflict with anarchist doctrine was total and clearly defined.
(c) In addition to the characteristic readiness of marxists to see
the power of a revolutionary state used for revolutionary purposes,
marxism was actively committed to a firm belief in the superiority
of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially
in the leninist version) , to a belief in the indispensability of
leadership, organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any
movement based on mere 'spontaneity'.
(d) Where participation in the formal processes of politics was
possible, marxists took it for granted that socialist and communist
movements would engage in it as much as in any other activities
which could contribute to advance the overthrow of capitalism.
(e) While some marxists developed critiques of the actual or
potential authoritarian and/or bureaucratic tendencies of parties
based on the classical marxist tradition, none of these critics
abandoned their characteristic lack of sympathy for anarchist
movements, so long as they considered themselves to be marxists.
The record of the political relations between marxist move­
ments and anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ones, appeared equally
unambiguous in 1 g 1 7. In fact, these relations had been con­
siderably more acrimonious in the lifetime of Marx, Engels and
the Second International than they were to be in that of the
Comintern. Marx himself had fought and criticized Proudhon and
Bakunin, and the other way round. The major social democratic
parties had done their best to exclude anarchists, or been obliged
to do so. Unlike the First International, the Second no longer
included them, at all events after the London Congress of 1 896.
Where marxist and anarchist movements coexisted, it was as
rivals, if not as enemies. However, though the marxists were
intensely exasperated by the anarchists in practice revolutionary
marxists, who shared with them an increasing hostility to the
reformism of the Second International, tended to regard them as
revolutionaries, if misguided ones. This was in line with the
theoretical view summarized in ( a) above. At least anarchism and
revolutionary syndicalism might be regarded as a comprehensible
58
 B O LSHEVISM AND THE ANAR CHISTS

reaction against reformism and opportunism. Indeed, i t might be

- and was - argued that reformism and anarcho-syndicalism were
part of the same phenomenon : without the one, the other would
not have gained so much ground. It could further be argued that
the collapse of reformism would also automatically weaken
anarcho-syndicalism.
It is not clear how far these views of the ideologists and political
leaders were shared by the rank-and-file militants and supporters
of the marxist movements. We may suppose that the differences
were often much less clearly felt at this level. It is a well-known
fact that doctrinal, ideological and programmatic distinctions
which are of major importance at one level, are of negligible
importance at another - e.g. that as late as I 91 7 'social democratic'
workers in many Russian towns were barely if at all aware of the
differences between bolsheviks and mensheviks. The historian of
labour movements and their doctrines forgets such facts at his peril.
This general background must be supplemented by a discussion
of the differences between the situation in various parts of the
world, in so far as these affected the relations between communists
and anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists. No comprehensive survey
can be made here, but at least three different types of countries
must be distinguished :
(a) Regions in which anarchism had never been of major
significance in the labour movement, e.g. most of north-western
Europe (except the Netherlands) , and several colonial areas in
which labour and socialist movements had hardly developed
before I 9 I 7.
( b) Regions in which anarchist influence had been significant,
but diminished dramatically, and perhaps decisively, in the period
1 9 1 4-36. These must include part of the Latin world, e.g. France,
Italy and some Latin American countries, as also China, Japan
and - for somewhat different reasons - Russia.
(c) Regions in which anarchist influence remained significant,
if not dominant, until the latter part of the 1 930s. Spain is the
most obvious case.
In regions of the first type relations with movements describing
themselves as anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist were of no signifi­
cance to communist movements. The existence of smaJI numbers
of anarchists, mainly artists and intellectuals, raised no political
59
 REVOLUTIONARIES

problem, and neither did the presence of anarchist political

refugees, immigrant communities in which anarchism might be
influential, and other phenomena marginal to the native labour
movement. This appears to have been the case in, say, Britain and
Germany after the I 87os and 1 88os, when anarchist trends had
played some part, mainly disruptive, in the special circumstances
of extremely small socialist movements or socialist movements
temporarily pressed into semi-illegality as by Bismarck's anti­
socialist law. The struggles between centralized and decentralized
types of movement, between bureaucratic and anti-bureaucratic,
'spontaneous' and 'disciplined' movements were fought out with­
out any special reference (except by academic writers or a few
very erudite marxists) to the anarchists. This was the case in
Britain in the period corresponding to that of revolutionary
syndicalism on the continent. The extent to which communist
parties showed themselves to be aware of anarchism as a political
problem in their countries, remains to be seriously studied by a
systematic analysis of their polemical publications (in so far as these
did not merely echo the preoccupations of the International) , of
their translation and/or re-publication of classical marxist writings
on anarchism, etc. However, it may be suggested with some
confidence that they regarded the problem as negligible, com­
pared to that of reformism, doctrinal schisms within the commun­
ist movement, or certain kinds of petty-bourgeois ideological
trends such as, in Britain, pacifism. It was certainly entirely
possible to be deeply involved in the communist movement in
Germany in the early 1 930s, in Britain in the later 1 930s, without
paying more than the most cursory or academic attention to
anarchism, or indeed without ever having to discuss the subject.
The regions of the second type are in some respects the most
interesting from the point of view of the present discussion. We are
here dealing with countries or areas in which anarchism was an
important, in some periods or sectors a dominant influence in the
trade unions or the political movements of the extreme left.
The crucial historical fact here is the dramatic decline of
anarchist (or anarcho-syndicalist) influence in the decade after
1 9 1 4. In the belligerent countries of Europe this was a neglected
aspect of the general collapse of the prewar left. This is usually
presented primarily as a crisis of social democracy, and with much
justification. At the same time it was also a crisis of the libertarian
60
 B O L SHEVISM AND THE ANARCHISTS

o r anti-bureaucratic revolutionaries i n two ways. First, many of

them (e.g. among 'revolutionary syndicalists') joined the bulk of
marxist social democrats in the rush to the patriotic banners - at
least for a time. Second, those who did not, proved, on the whole,
quite ineffective in their opposition to the war, and even less
effective at the end of the war in their attempts to provide an
alternative libertarian revolutionary movement to the bolsheviks.
To cite only one decisive example. In France (as Professor Kriegel
has shown) , the 'Carnet B' drawn up by the Ministry of the
Interior to include all those 'consideres comme dangereux pour
l'ordre social', i.e. 'les revolutionnaires, les syndicalistes et les
anarchistes', in fact contained mainly anarchists, or rather 'la
factio11 des anarchistes qui milite clans le mouvement syndical' . On
I August I 9 I 4 the Minister of the Interior, Malvy, decided to pay
no attention to the Carnet B, i.e. to leave at liberty the very men
who, in the government's opinion, had convincingly established
their intention to oppose war by all means, and who might
presumably have become the cadres of a working-class anti-war
movement. In fact, few of them had made any concrete
preparations for resistance or sabotage, and none any preparation
likely to worry the authorities. In a word, Malvy decided that the
entire body of men accepted as being the most dangerous
revolutionaries, was negligible. He was, of course, quite correct.
The failure of the syndicalist and libertarian revolutionaries,
further confirmed in I 9 I 8-20, contrasted dramatically with the
success of the Russian bolsheviks. In fact, it sealed the fate of
anarchism as a major independent force on the left outside a few
exceptional countries for the next fifty years. It became hard to
recall that in I 905- I 4 the marxist left had in most countries been
on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of
marxists had been identified with a defacto non-revolutionary social
democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho­
syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of
anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism. Marxism
was henceforth identified with actively revolutionary movements,
and with communist parties and groups, or with social democratic
parties which, like the Austrian, prided themselves on being
markedly left wing. Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism entered
upon a dramatic and uninterrupted decline. In Italy the triumph of
fascism accelerated it, but where, in the France of I 924, let alone of
6I
 REVOLUTIONARIES

I 9 2 9 or I 934 was the anarchist movement which had been the

characteristic form of the revolutionary left in I 9 I 4 ?
The question is not merely rhetorical. The answer is and must
be : largely in the new communist or communist-led movements.
In the absence of adequate research this can not yet be adequately
documented, but the broad facts seem clear. Even some of the
leading figures or well-known activists of the 'bolshevized' com­
munist parties came from the former libertarian movements or
from the militant trade union movements with their libertarian
ambiance : thus in France Monmousseau and probably Duclos.
This is all the more striking, since it was rather unlikely that
leading members of marxist parties would be drawn from former
anarcho-syndicalists, and even less likely that leading figures in the
libertarian movement would opt for leninism.1 It is indeed highly
likely that (as the leader of the Dutch C P , De Groot observes,
perhaps not without some parti pris) that ex-libertarian workers
adapted themselves better to life in the new CPS than ex­
libertarian intellectuals or petty bourgeois. After all, at the level of
the working-class militant, the doctrinal or programmatic differ­
ences which divide ideologists and political leaders so sharply, are
often quite unreal, and may have little significance, unless at this
level - i.e. in the worker's specific locality or trade union -
different organizations or leaders have long-established patterns of
rivalry.
Nothing is more likely, therefore, than that workers previously
adhering to the most militant or revolutionary union in their
locality or occupation should, after its disappearance shift without
much difficulty into the communist union which now represented
militancy or revolutionary attitudes. When old movements disap­
pear, such a transfer is common. The old movement may retain its
mass influence here and there, and the leaders and militants who
have identified themselves with it, may continue to hold it
together on a diminishing scale as best they can, in so far as they do
not retire de jure or de facto into an unreconciled inactivity. Some
of the rank and file may also drop out. But a large proportion
must be expected to transfer to the most suitable alternative, if
1 Of a small random sample of French communist MPs between the wars, the

Dictionnaire des Parlementaires Fran;ais 188g-1940, gives the following indications

about their pre-communist past : Socialist 5 ; 'Sillon', then socialist 1 ; trade
union activity (tendency unknown) 3 ; libertarian 1 ; no pre-communist past I .
 B O LSHEVISM AND THE ANARCHISTS

one i s available. Such transfers have not been investigated ser­

iously, so that we know no more about what happened to
ex-anarcho-syndicalists (and those who had followed their lead)
than we know about ex-members or followers of the Independent
Labour Party in Britain after the 1 930s, or ex-communists in
Western Germany after 1 945.
If a large part of the rank and file of the new communist parties,
and more especially, the new revolutionary trade unions, was
composed of former libertarians, it would be natural to expect this
to have had some effect on them. On the whole there is little sign of
this within the communist parties. To take merely one represen­
tative example, the discussions on 'bolshevizing the Communist
International' in the Enlarged Executive of that organization,
March-April 1 925, which dealt specifically with the problem of
non-communist influences within the communist movement. There
are little more than a half-dozen references to syndicalist and none
to anarchist influence in this document.2 They are confined entirely
to the cases of France, Italy and the United States. As for France,
the loss 'of the larger part of the former leading officials [of social
democratic origins in Germany], and of petty-bourgeois syndicalist
origins in France' is noted (p. 38) . Treint reported that 'our Party
has eliminated all the errors of Trotskyism : all the individualist
quasi-anarchist errors, the errors of the belief in legitimacy, of the
coexistence of diverse factions in the Party. It has also learned to
know the Luxemburgist errors' (p. 99) . The ECCi resolution
recommended, as one of ten points concerning the French party 'in
spite of all former French traditions, establishment of a well­
organized Communist Mass Party' (p. 1 60) . As for Italy, 'the
numerous and diverse origin of the deviations which have arisen in
Italy' are noted, but without reference to any libertarian trends.
Bordiga's similarity to 'Italian syndicalism' is mentioned, though it
is not claimed that he 'identifies himself completely' with this
and other analogous views. The Marxist-Syndicalist faction
(Avanguardia group) is mentioned as one of the reactions against
the opportunism of the Second International, as is its dissolution
'into trade syndicalism' after leaving the party (pp. 1 92-3) . The
recruitment of the CPUSA from two sources - the Socialist Party and
syndicaJist organizations - is mentioned (p. 45) . If we compare
these scattered references to the preoccupation of the International
3 Bolshevising the Communist International, London, 1 925.
 REVOLUTION ARIES

in the same document with a variety of other ideological deviations

and other problems, the relatively minor impact of libertarian­
syndicalist traditions within communism, or at least within the
major communist parties of the middle 1 92os, is evident.
This may to some extent be an illusion, for it is clear that behind
several of the tendencies which troubled the International more
urgently, such traditions may be discerned. The insistence of the
dangers of 'Luxemburgism' with its stress on spontaneity, its
hostility to nationalism and other similar ideas, may well be aimed
at the attitudes of militants formed in the libertarian-syndicalist
school, as also the hostility - by this time no longer a matter of very
serious concern - to electoral abstentionism. Behind 'Bordighism',
we can certainly discern a preoccupation with such tendencies. In
various western parties Trotskyism and other marxist deviations
probably attracted communists of syndicalist origins, uncomfortable
in the 'bolshevized' parties - e.g. Rosmer and Monatte. Yet it is
significant that the Cahiers du Bolchevisme (28 November 1 924) ,
in analyzing the ideological trends within the French CP, make no
allusion to syndicalism. The journal divided the party into '20 per
cent of Jauresism, I O per cent of marxism, 20 per cent of leninism,
20 per cent of Trotskyism, and 3 0 per cent of Confusionism' .
Whatever the actual strength o f ideas and attitudes derived from
the old syndicalist tradition, that tradition itself had ceased to be
significant, except as a component of various left-wing, sectarian or
schismatic versions of marxism.
However, for obvious reasons, anarchist problems preoccupied
the communist movement more in those parts of the world where
before the October revolution the political labour movement had
been almost entirely anarchist and social democratic movements
had been negligible, or where the anarcho-syndicalists maintained
their strength and influence during the 1 92os ; as in large regions of
Latin America. It is not surprising that the Red International of
Labour Unions in the 1 920s was much preoccupied with these
problems in Latin America, or that as late as 1 935 the Communist
International observed that 'the remnants of anarcho-syndicalism
have not yet been completely overcome' in the CP of Brazil (whose
original membership consisted overwhelmingly of former anar­
chists) . Nevertheless, when we consider the significance of anarcho­
syndicalism in this continent, the problems arising from it seem to
have caused the Comintern little real preoccupation after the Great
 B O LSHEVISM AND THE ANARCHISTS

Depression of 1 929-30. Its chief criticism of the local communist

parties in this respect appears to have been that they were unable
to benefit sufficiently from the rapid decline of the anarchist and
anarcho-syndicalist organizations and the growing sympathy for
communism of their members. 3
In a word, the libertarian movements were now regarded as rapidly
declining forces which no longer posed major political problems.
Was this complacency entirely justified ? We may suspect that
the old traditions were stronger than official communist literature
suggests, at any rate within the trade union movements. Thus it is
fairly clear that the transfer of the Cuban tobacco workers' union
from anarcho-syndicalist to communist leadership made no sub­
stantial difference either to its trade union activities or to the
attitude of its members and militants.4 A good deal of research is
needed to discover how far, in former strongholds of anarcho­
syndicalism the subsequent communist trade union movement
showed signs of the survival of old habits and practices.
Spain was virtually the only country in which anarchism
continued to be a major force in the labour movement after the
Great Depression, while at the same time communism was - until
the Civil War - comparatively negligible. The problem of the
communist attitude to Spanish anarchism was of no international
significance before the second republic, and in the period of the
Popular Front and Civil War became too vast and complex for
cursory treatment. I shall therefore omit discussion of it.

3 'The growth of discontent among the masses and of their resistance to the

attacks of the ruling classes and of imperialism have sharpened the process of
disintegration among socialist, anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations. In
the most recent period the recognition of the need for a united front with the
communists has sunk quite deep roots among rather wide strata of their rank and
file. At the same time the tendency for a direct entry into the ranks of the
revolutionary unions and communist parties has grown stronger (especially in
Cuba, Brazil, Paraguay) . After the sixth World Congress there has been a marked
drop in the specific weight of anarcho-syndicalism within the labour movements
of South and Caribbean America. In some countries the best elements of the
anarcho-syndicalist movement have joined the Communist Party, e.g. in
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Cuba [ . ] . In other countries the weakening of
. .

anarcho-syndicalist influence was accompanied by a strengthening of socialist and

reformist organizations (Argentina) , the "national-reformist parties" (Mexico,
Cuba) ' : Die Kommunistische Internationale vor dem 7. Weltkongress, p. 472.
4 I owe this point to Miss Jean Stubbs, who is preparing a doctoral thesis on

the Cuban tobacco workers.

 REV O LU T I O N A R I E S

The fundamental attitude of the bolsheviks towards anarchists

thus was that they were misguided revolutionaries, as distinct from
the social democrats who were pillars of the bourgeoisie. As
Zinoviev put it in 1 920, in discussion with the Italians who were
considerably less well disposed towards their own anarchists : 'In
times of revolution Malatesta is better than d' Aragona. They do
stupid things, but they're revolutionaries. We fought side by side
with the syndicalists and the anarchists against Kerensky and the
Mensheviks. We mobilized thousands of workers in this way. In
times of revolution one needs revolutionaries. We have to ap­
proach them and form a bloc with them in revolutionary periods. '5
This comparatively lenient attitude of the bolsheviks was probably
determined by two factors : the relative insignificance of anarchists
in Russia, and the visible readiness of anarchists and syndicalists
after the October revolution to turn to Moscow, at all events until
it was clear that the terms for union were unacceptable. It was no
doubt reinforced later by the rapid decline of anarchism and
syndicalism, which - outside a small and diminishing number of
countries - made it seem increasingly insignificant as a trend in
the labour movement. 'I have seen and talked to few anarchists in
my life', said Lenin at the Third Congress of the CI (Protokoll,
Hamburg, 1 92 1 , p. 5 1 0.) Anarchism had never been more than a
minor or local problem for the bolsheviks. An official CI annual
for 1 922-3 illustrates this attitude. The appearance of anarchist
groups in 1 905 is mentioned, as is the fact that they lacked all
contact with the mass movement and were 'as good as anni­
hilated' by the victory of reaction. In 1 9 1 7 anarchist groups
appeared in all important centres of the country, but in spite of
various direct action they lacked contact with the masses in most
places and hardly anywhere succeeded in taking over leadership.
'Against the bourgeois government they operated in practice as
the "left", and incidentally disorganized, wing of the Bolsheviks. '
Their struggle lacked independent significance. ' Individuals who
came from the ranks of the anarchists, performed important
services for the revolution ; many anarchists joined the Russian
CP.
'
The October revolution split them into 'sovietist', some of
whom joined the bolsheviks while others remained benevolently
neutral, and 'consequent' anarchists who rejected Soviet power,
0 P. Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, vol. 1 , p. 77.

66
 B O LSHEVISM AND THE ANARCHISTS

split into various and sometimes eccentric factions, and are

insignificant. The various illegal anarchist groups active during
the Kronstadt rising, have almost totally disappeared. 6 Such was
the background against which the leading party of the Comintern
judged the nature of the anarchist and syndicalist problem.
It need hardly be said that neither the bolsheviks nor the
communist parties outside Russia were inclined to compromise
their views in order to draw the libertarians towards them. Angel
Pestana, who represented the Spanish CNT at the Second Congress
of the CI found himself isolated and his views rejected. The Third
Congress, which discussed relations with syndicalists and anar­
chists at greater length, established the distance between them and
the communists even more clearly, under the impact of some
trends within the communist parties and what was believed to be
an increase in anarchist and syndicalist influence in_ Italy after the
occupation of the factories. 7 Lenin intervened on this point,
observing that agreement with anarchists might be possible on
objectives - i.e. the abolition of exploitation and classes - but not
on principles - i.e. 'the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use
of state power during the transitional period'. 8 Nevertheless, the
increasingly sharp critique of anarcho-syndicalist views was com­
bined with a positive attitude towards the movement especially in
France. Even in the Fourth Congress the syndicalists were still, in
France, contrasted to their advantage not only with the social
democrats, but with ex-social democratic communists. 'We have to
look for quite a lot of elements for a Communist Party in the
ranks of the Syndicalists, in the ranks of the best parts of the
Syndicalists. This is strange but true' (Zinoviev) . 9 Not until after
the Fifth Congress - i.e. during the period of 'bolshevization' does
the negative critique of anarcho-syndicalism clearly begin to
prevail over the positive appreciation of the movement - but by
then it is so far merged with the critique of Trotskyism,
Luxemburgism and other intra-communist deviations as to lose its
8 'Jahrbuch fi.ir Wirschaft, Politik und Arbeiterbewegung' (Hamburg) , 1 922-3,

pp. 247, 250, 48 1-2.

7 Decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist International, London, 1 92 1 ,

p. I O .
8 Protokoll, p. 51 o.

9 Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Abridged Report. London, 1 923,

p. 18.
 REVOLUTIONARIES

specific political point.10 By this time, of course, anarchism and

syndicalism were in rapid decline, outside a few special areas.
It is therefore at first sight surprising that anti-anarchist pro­
paganda seems to have developed on a more systematic basis
within the international communist movement in the middle
1 930s. This period saw the publication of the pamphlet, Marx et
Engels contre l' anarchisme, in France ( 1 935) , in the series 'Elements
du communisme', and an obviously polemical History of Anarchism
in Russia, by E. Yaroslavsky (English edition 1 93 7) . It may also
be worth noting the distinctly more negative tone of the references
to anarchism in Stalin's Short History of the CPSU (b) ( 1 938) ,11
compared to the account of the early I 92os, quoted above.
The most obvious reason for this revival of anti-anarchist
sentiment was the situation in Spain, a country which became
increasingly important in international communist strategy from
1 93 1 , and certainly from 1 934. This is evident in the extended
polemics of Lozovsky which are specifically aimed at the Spanish
CNT. 12 However, until the Civil War the anarchist problem in
Spain was considered much less urgent than the social democratic
problem, especially between 1 928 and the turn in Comintern
policy after June-July I 934. The bulk of the references in official
CI documents in this period concentrates, as might be expected, on
the misdeeds of Spanish socialists. During the Civil War the
situation changed, and it is evident that, for instance, Yaros-
1 0 Cf. Manuilsky : 'We think, for instance, that so-called Trotskyism has a

great deal in common with individualistic Proudhonism [. . .] It is not by accident

that Rosmer and Monatte, in their new organ directed against the Communist
Party, resuscitate theoretically the ideas of the old revolutionary syndicalism,
mixed with a defence of Russian Trotskyism' : The Communist International, English
edition, no. 1 0, new series, p. 58.
11 ' As to the Anarchists, a group whose influence was insignificant to start

with, they now definitely disintegrated into minute groups, some of which
merged with criminal elements, thieves and provocateurs, the dregs of society ;
others became expropriators "by conviction", robbing the peasants and small
townsfolk, and appropriating the premises and funds of workers' clubs ; while
others still openly went over to the camp of the counter-revolutionaries, and
devoted themselves to feathering their own nests as menials of the bourgeoisie.
They were all opposed to authority of any kind, particularly and especially to
the revolutionary authority of the workers and peasants, for they knew that a
revolutionary government would not allow them to rob the people and steal
public property', p. 203.
12 A. Lozovsky, Marx and the Trade Unions, London, 1 935 (first edn. 1 933),

pp. 35-6 and especially pp. 146-54.

68
 B O LSHEVISM AND T HE ANARCHISTS

lavsky's book i s aimed primarily a t Spain : 'The workers i n those

countries where they now have to choose between the doctrine of
the anarchists and those of the Communists should know which of
the two roads of revolution to choose. ' 13
However, perh�ps another - though perhaps relatively minor -
element in the revived anti-anarchist polemics should also be noted.
It is evident both from the basic text which is constantly quoted and
reprinted - Stalin's critique of Bukharin's alleged semi-anarchism,
made in 1 929 - and from other references, that anarchizing tenden­
cies are condemned primarily because they 'repudiate the state in
the period of transition from capitalism to socialism' (Stalin) . The
classical critique of anarchism by Marx, Engels and Lenin, tends to
be identified with the defence of the tendencies of state development
in the stalinist period.

To sum up :
The bolshevik hostility to anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism as a
theory, strategy or form of organized movement was clear and
unwavering, and aJI 'deviations' within the communist movement in
this direction were firmly rejected. For practical purposes such
'deviations' or what could be regarded as such, ceased to be of
significance in and outside Russia from the early 1 920s.
The bolshevik attitude to the actual anarchist and anarcho­
syndicalist movements was surprisingly benevolent. It was deter­
mined by three main factors :
(a) the belief that the bulk of anarcho-syndicalist workers were
revolutionaries, and both objective and, given the right circum­
stances, subjective allies of communism against social democracy,
and potential communist ;
(b) the undoubted attraction which the October revolution
exercised on many syndicalists and even anarchists in the years
immediately following 1 9 1 7 ;
( c) the equally unquestioned and increasingly rapid decline of
anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism as a mass movement in all but a
very few of its old centres.
For the reasons mentioned above, the bolsheviks devoted little
attention to the problem of anarchism outside the few areas in which
it retained its strength (and, in so far as the local communist parties
13 Op. cit., p. 1 0 .
69
 REVO LUTIONARIES

were weak, not much even within those areas) after the early 1 920s.
However, the rise to international significance of Spain, and perhaps
also the attempt to give a theoretical legitimation to the stalinist
development of a dictatorial and terrorist state, led to a revival of
anti-anarchist polemics in the period between the Great Slump and
the end of the Spanish Civil War.
( 1 969)
 8

T H E S PAN I S H BA C K G R O U N D

The Iberian peninsula has problems but no solutions, a state of

affairs which is common or even normal in the 'third world', but
extremely rare in Europe. For be!ter or worse most states on our
continent have a stable and potentially permanent economic and
social structure, an established line of development. The problems
of almost all of Europe, serious and even fundamental though they
may be, arise out of the solution of earlier ones. In western and
northern Europe they arose mainly on the basis of successful
capitalist development, in eastern Europe (much of which was in a
situation analogous to Spain until I 945) on the basis of a soviet­
type socialism. In neither case do the basic economic and social
patterns look provisional, as, for instance, the patterns of national
relations within and between states still so often appear to be.
Belgian capitalism or Yugoslav socialism may well change, perhaps
fundamentally ; but both are obviously far less likely to collapse at
slight provocation than the complex ad hoc administrative formulae
for ensuring the coexistence of Flemings and Walloons, or of various
mutually suspicious Balkan nationalities.
Spain is different. Capitalism has persistently failed in that
country and so has social revolution, in spite of its constant
imminence and occasional eruption. The problems of Spain arise
out of the failures, not the successes, of the past. Its political
structure is nothing if not provisional. Even Franco's regime, which
has lasted longer than any other since 1 808 (it has beaten the
record of the Canovas era 1 875-97) , is patently temporary. Its
future is so undetermined that even the restoration of hereditary
monarchy can be seriously considered as a political prospect.
Spain's problems have been obvious to every intelligent observer
since the eighteenth century. A variety of solutions have been
proposed and occasionally applied. The point is that all of them
71
 REVOLUTIONARIES

have failed. Spain has not by any means stood still. By its own
standards the economic and social changes of the nineteenth
century were substantial, and anyone who has watched the
country's evolution in the past fifteen years knows how unrealistic it
is to think of it as essentially the same as in I 936. An Aragonese
pueblo demonstrates this very clearly, if only in the increase of local
tractors from two to thirty-two, of motor vehicles from three to
sixty-eight, of bank branches from nought to six.) Nevertheless the
fundamental economic and social problems of the country remain
unresolved, and the gap between it and more developed (or more
fundamentally transformed) European states remains.
Raymond Carr, whose remarkable book probably supersedes all
,
other histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain for the
time being, 1 formulates the problem as that of the failure of Spanish
liberalism ; that is to say of an essentially capitalist economic
development, a bourgeois-parliamentary political system, and a
culture and intellectual development of the familiar western kind.
It might be equally well, and perhaps more profitably, formulated
as that of the failure of Spanish social revolution. For if, as Carr
admits, liberalism never had serious chances of success, social
revolution was, perhaps for this reason, a much more serious
prospect. Whatever we may think of the upheavals of the
Napoleonic period, the 1 830s (which Carr analyzes with particular
brilliance) , of 1854-6 or I 868-74, there can be no denying that
social revolution actually broke out in 193 1-6, that it did so
without any significant assistance from the international situation,
and that the case is practically unique in western Europe since
1 848.
Yet it failed ; and not only, or even primarily because of the
foreign aid given to its enemies. One would not wish to
underestimate the importance of Italian and German aid or
Anglo-French 'non-intervention' in the Civil War, the greater
single-mindedness of Axis than of Soviet support, or the remarkable
military achievements of the Republic, which Carr rightly
recognizes. It is quite conceivable that, given a different interna­
tional configuration, the Republic could have won. But it is equally
undeniable that the Civil War was a double struggle against armed
counter-revolution and the gigantic, and in the last analysis fatal,
internal weaknesses of revolution. Successful revolutions, from the
1 Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1939, Oxford, 1 966.
 T H E S P AN I S H B A C K G R O U N D

French Jacobins to the Vietnamese, have shown a capacity t o win

against equally long or even longer odds. The Spanish Republic did
not.
There is no great mystery about the failure of Spanish liber­
alism, though so much of the nineteenth-century history of the
country and of its basic social and economic situation is too little
known for excessively confident analysis. 'The changes in the
classic agricultural structure of Spain between 1 750 and 1 850 were
achieved by a rearrangement of the traditional economy, by its
expansion in space, not by any fundamental change' (p. 29) .
(Carr's explanation that poverty of soil and capital resources made
this inevitable, is not entirely convincing. ) What it amounted to
was that Spain maintained a rapidly growing population, not by
industrial and agricultural revolution, but by a vast increase in
the extensive cultivation of cereals, which in time exhausted the
soil and turned inland Spain into an even more impoverished
semi-desert than it already was. Logically, the politics of agricul­
tural inefficiency gave way to those of peasant revolution. 'In the
nineties politicians were bullied by the powerfully organized wheat
interest ; in the twentieth century they were alarmed by the threat
of revolution on the great estates.' The alternative, intensive cash
crops for export (e.g. oranges) was not generally , applicable
without prohibitively costly investment, perhaps not even with it ;
though Carr seems ultra-sceptical of the possibilities of irrigation,
though less so of afforestation. Spanish industry was a marginal
phenomenon, uncompetitive on the world market, and therefore
dependent on the feeble domestic market and (notably in the case
of Catalonia) the relics of the empire. It was liberal Barcelona
which resisted Cuban independence most ferociously, since 60 per
cent of its exports went there. The Catalan and Basque bour­
geoisie were not an adequate basis for Spanish capitalism. As
Vilar has shown, the Catalan businessmen failed to capture the
direction of the national economic policy, and therefore retreated
into the defensive posture of autonomism, which the Republic
eventually conceded to them and the Basques.
Under these circumstances the economic and social basis of
liberalism and its political striking-force, were feeble. As in so
many underdeveloped countries, there were two active forces in
politics : the urban petty-bourgeoisie, standing in the shadow of
the urban plebs, and the army, an institution for furthering the
73
 REVOLUTIONARIES

careers of energetic members of the same stratum, and a militant

trade union for the most powerfully organized sector of the
white-collar unemployed, who had to look to the state because the
economy could not employ them. The 'pronunciamento', a curious
Iberian invention whose rituals became highly traditional,
replaced liberal politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the second half it became 'a speculative business enterprise for
generals' and in the twentieth century it ceased to have any
connection with liberalism.
Revolutions began with a pronunciamento or with what Carr
calls the 'primitive provincial revolution' - plebeian risings spread­
ing from town to town by contagion - or both. The fighting poor
were essential, but perilous. Local notables, not to mention
national ones, retreated from the ever-present danger of social
revolution into the 'committee stage', when local power passed to
juntas of notables with an optional representative or two of the
people, while the national government collapsed. 'The final stage
was the reimposition, by a ministry that "represented" the rev­
olution, of central government control.' Kiernan's monograph
on I 854 describes and explains this process in full detail.2 Of
course in the nineteenth century a proletariat barely existed
outside Barcelona, which consequently became the classical revol­
utionary city of western Europe. The peasantry long remained
politically ineffective, or Carlist, i.e. attached to ultra-reactionary
politicians and hostile on principle to the towns.
Spanish liberalism was thus squeezed into the narrow space of
manoeuvre between the 'primitive revolution', without which
nothing would change, and the need to damp it down almost
immediately. It was not surprising that a vehicle obliged to brake
almost as soon as the foot hit the accelerator, could not get very
far. The best hope of the bourgeois moderates was to put some
regime in power which would allow the forces of capitalist
development to develop ; but they never developed enough. Their
most usual achievement was to find some formula which neu­
tralized social revolution or the ultra-reactionaries for a while by
the combination of at least two .of the three forces of 'official'
politics : the army, the crown and the 'official' parties. As Carr
shows, this was the pattern of Spanish politics : army plus
politicians in the 1 840s, crown plus politicians after 1 875, army
2 V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution of r854 in Spanish History, Oxford, 1 966.

74
 THE S PANISH BACKGROUND

plus crown under Primo de Rivera in the l 92os, and a collapse of

the crown when it alienated the other two, as in 1854, 1 868 and
I 93 l . When there was no crown there had to be an 'ad hoc

military dictatorship' .
Yet Franco i s not simply the successor of Alfonso. For i n the
twentieth century the forces of social revolution grew stronger than
they had been in the nineteenth, because revolution retained its
'primitive' assets while acquiring two new and formidable assets :
peasant revolution and the labour movement. It is their failure
which poses the major problem of Spanish history and may perhaps
throw light on a number of other underdeveloped countries. That
failure was due to the anarchists.
This does not mean that the remarkable ineffectiveness of the
Spanish revolution is due merely to the historic accident that Spain
was colonized by Bakunin more than by Marx. (Even this is not
quite an accident. It is characteristic of the cultural isolation of
underdeveloped countries in the nineteenth century that so often
ideas which were unimportant in the wider world became immensely
influential there, like the philosophy of a certain Krause in Spain, or
the politics of August Comte in Mexico and Brazil.) The facts of
Spanish geography and history are against a nationally coordinated
movement, but countries with at least as much regional and more
national diversity have achieved one, like Yugoslavia.The self­
contained universe of the Spanish pueblo long made national changes
the result of periodic plebiscites by direct action of its municipalities.
But other countries also know the phenomenon of extreme localism,
for instance Italy. All the Spanish revolutions, as Carr shows, had an
archaic house-style, irrespective of the ideological labels they bran­
dished. It is doubtful whether 'Belmonte de los Caballeros' an
Aragonese pueblo, would have behaved differently in 1 93 1-6 had
it been organized by the CNT rather than by the socialist UGT.
Anarchism succeeded so well, because it was content to provide a
mere label for the traditional political habits of revolutionary
Spaniards. Yet political movements are not obliged to accept the
historic characteristics of their environment, though they will be
ineffective if they pay no attention to them. Anarchism was a disaster
because it made no attempt to change the style of primitive Spanish
revolt, and deliberately reinforced it.
It legitimized the traditionai impotence of the poor. It turned
politics, which even in its revolutionary form is a practical activity,
75
 REVOLUTIONARIES

into a form of moral gymnastics, a display of individual or collective

devotion, self-sacrifice, heroism or self-improvement which justified
its failure to achieve any concrete results by the argument that only
revolution was worth fighting for, and its failure in revolution by the
argument that anything which involved organization and discipline
did not deserve the name. Spanish anarchism is a profoundly moving
spectacle for the student of popular religion - it was really a form of
secular millennialism - but not, alas, for the student of politics. It
threw away political chances with a marvellously blind persistence.
The attempts to steer it into a less suicidal course succeeded too late,
though they were enough to defeat the generals' rising in I 936. Even
then, they succeeded incompletely. The noble gunman Durruti, who
symbolized both the ideal of the anarchist militant and conversion to
the organization and discipline of real war, was probably killed by
one of his own purist comrades.
This is not to deny the remarkable achievement of Spanish
anarchism which was to create a working-class movement that
remained genuinely revolutionary. Social democratic and in recent
years even communist trade unions have rarely been able to escape
either schizophrenia or betrayal of their socialist convictions, since
for practical purposes - i.e. when acting as trade union militants or
leaders - they must usually act on the assumption that the capitalist
system is permanent. The CNT did not, though this did not make it a
particularly effective body for trade unionist purposes, and on the
whole it lost ground to the socialist UGT from the trienio bolchevique of
1 9 1 8-20 till after the outbreak of the Civil War, except where the
force of anarchist gunmen and long tradition kept rivals out of the
field, as in Catalonia and Aragon. Still, Spanish workers as well as
peasants remained revolutionary and acted accordingly when the
occasion arose. True, they were not the only ones to retain the reflex
of insurrection. In several other countries workers brought up in the
communist tradition, or in that of maximalist socialism, reacted in a
similiar way when nobody stopped them, and it was not until the
middle 1 930s that this reflex was actively discouraged in the
international communist movement.
Again, neither the Spanish socialists nor the communists can be
acquitted of responsibility for the failure of the Spanish revolution.
The communists were fettered by the extreme sectarianism of the
International's policy in 1 928-34, at the very moment when the fall
of the monarchy in 1 93 1 opened up possibilities of strategies of
 THE SPANISH B AC K GROUND

alliance which they were not permitted (and probably unwilling) to

use until some years later. Whether their weakness would have
allowed them to use these effectively at the time is another matter.
The socialists veered from opportunism to a strategically blind
maximalism after 1 934, which served to strengthen the right
rather than to unite the left. Since they were visibly much more
dangerous to the right than the anarchists (who were never more
than a routine police problem) , both because they were better
organized and because they were in republican governments, the
backlash of reaction was much more serious.
Nevertheless, the anarchists cannot escape major responsibility.
Theirs was the basic tradition of labour in most parts of the
republic which survived the initial military rising, and such deeply
rooted traditions are difficult to change. Moreover, theirs was
potentially stiJl the majority movement of the left in the republic.
They were in no position to 'make' the revolution of which they
dreamed. But when the decision of the Popular Front government
to resist the military rising by all means, including arming the
people, turned a situation of social ferment into · a revolution, they
were its chief initial beneficiaries. There seems little doubt about
the initial preponderance of the anarcho-syndicalists in the armed
militia, and none about their domination of the great process of
'sovietization' (in the original sense of the word) in Catalonia,
Aragon and the Mediterranean coast which (with Madrid) formed
the core of the republic.
The anarchists thus shaped or formulated the revolution which
the generals had risen to prevent, but had in fact provoked. But
the war against the generals remained to be fought, and they were
incapable of fighting it effectively either in the military or political
sense. This was evident to the great majority of foreign observers
and volunteers, especially in Catalonia and Aragon. There it
proved impossible even to get the sixty thousand rifles parading on
the city streets, let alone the available machine-guns and tanks, to
the under-strength and under-equipped units which actually went
to the crucial Aragon front. The inefficacy of the anarchist way of
fighting the war has recently been doubted by a new school of
libertarian historians (including the formidable intellect of Noam
Chomsky) , reluctant to admit that the communists had the only
practical and effective policy for this purpose, and that their
rapidly growing influence reflected this fact. Unfortunately it
77
 REVOLUTIONARIES

can.not be denied. And the war had to be won, because without

this victory the Spanish revolution, however inspiring and perhaps
even workable, would merely turn into yet another episode of
heroic defeat, like the Paris Commune. And this is what actual1y
happened. The communists, whose policy was the one which
could have won the war, gained strength too late and never
satisfactorily overcame the handicap of their original lack of mass
support.3
For the student of politics in general, Spain may merely be a
salutary warning against libertarian gestures (with or without
pistols and dynamite) , and against the sort of people who, like
Ferrer, boasted that 'plutot qu'un revolutionnaire je suis un
revolte' . For the historian, the abnormal strength of anarchism, or
the ineffective 'primitive' revolutionism still needs some explan­
ation. Was it due to the proverbial neglect of the peasantry by the
marxists of western Europe, which left so much of the countryside
to the Bakuninists ? Was it the persistence of small-scale industry
and the pre-industrial sub-proletariat ? These explanations are not
entirely satisfactory. Was it the isolation of Spain, which saved
Spanish libertarianism from the crisis of 1 9 1 4-20 which bank­
rupted it in France and Italy, thus leaving the way open for
communist mass movements ? Was it the curious absence of
intellectuals from the Spanish labour movement, so unusual in
twentieth-century underdeveloped countries ? Intellectuals were
democrats, republicans, cultural populists, perhaps above all anti­
clericals, and active enough in some phases of opposition : but few
of them were socialists and virtually none anarchists. (Their role
seems in any case to have been limited - even educated Spain, as
Carr says rightly, was not a reading nation - and the cafe-table or
Ateneo was not, except in Madrid, a form of nation-wide political
action.) At all events the leadership of Spanish revolutionary
movements suffered from their absence. At present we cannot
answer these questions except by speculation.
We can, however, place the spontaneous revolutionism of Spain
8 They can be criticized not only for lending themselves to the irrelevant

vendettas of Stalin's secret police, but for discouraging not merely the unpopular
or counterproductive excesses of the revolution, but the revolution itself, whose

existence they preferred not to stress in their propaganda. But the basic point is
that they fought to win the war and that without victory the revolution was
dead anyway. Had the republic survived, there might be more point to
criticisms of their policy which, alas, remain academic.
 THE SPANISH B A C K G R O UND

in a wider context, and recent writers like Malefakis4. have begun

to do so. Social revolutions are not made : they occur and
develop. To this extent the metaphors of military organization,
strategy and tactics, which are so often applied to them both by
marxists and their adversaries, can be actively misleading. How­
ever, they cannot succeed without establishing the capacity of a
national army or government, i.e. to exercise effective national
coordination and direction. Where this is totally absent, what
might otherwise have turned into a social revolution may be no
more than a nationwide aggregate of waves of local social unrest
(as in Peru 1 960-3) , or it may collapse into an anarchic era of
mutual massacre (as in Colombia in the years after 1 948) . This is
the crux of the marxist critique of anarchism as a · political
strategy, whether such a belief in the virtues of spontaneous
militancy at all times and places is held by nominal Bakuninists or
by other ideologists. Spontaneity can bring down regimes, or at
least make them unworkable, but can provide no alternative
suitable to any society more advanced than an archaic self­
sufficient peasantry, and even then only on the assumption that
the forces of the state and of modern economic life will simply go
away and leave the self-governing village community in peace.
This is unlikely.
There are various ways in which a revolutionary party or
movement can establish itself as a potentially national regime
before the actual taking of power or during it. The Chinese,
Vietnamese and Yugoslav Communist Parties were able to do so in
the course of a prolonged guerrilla war, from which they emerged as
the state power, but on the evidence of our century this seems to be
exceptional. In Russia a brilliantly led Bolshevik Party succeeded in
establishing itself as the leader of the decisive political force - the
working class in the capital cities and a section of the armed forces
- between February and October 1 9 1 7, and as the only effective
contender for state power, which it then exercised as soon as it had
taken over the national centre of government, defeating -
admittedly with great difficulty and at great cost - the counter­
revolutionary armies and local or regional dissidence which lacked
this coordination. This was essentially the pattern of the successful
4 E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, New Haven and

London, 1 970. This book ought to be required reading for all students of the
Spanish revolution.

79
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

French revolutions between 1 789 and I 848 which rested on the

capture of the capital city combined with the collapse of the old
government and the failure to establish an effective alternative
national centre of counter-revolution. When the provinces failed to
fall into line and an alternative counter-revolutionary government
did establish itself, as in 1 870-1, the commune of Paris was
doomed.
A revolution may establish itself over a longer period of appar­
ently complex and opaque conflict by the combination of a fairly
stable class alliance (under the hegemony of one social force) with
certain strong regional bases of power. Thus the Mexican rev­
olution emerged as a stable regime after ten years of murderous
civil strife, thanks to the alliance of what was to become the
national bourgeoisie with the (subaltern) urban working class,
conquering the country from a stable power-base in the north. 5
Within this framework the necessary concessions were made to the
revolutionary peasant areas and several virtually independent
warlords, a stable national regime being constructed step by step
during the twenty years or so after the Sonora base had established
itself.
The most difficult situation for revolution is probably that in
which it is expected to grow out of reforming politics, rather than
the initial shock of insurrectionary crisis combined with mass
mobilization. The fall of the Spanish monarchy in 1 93 1 was not the
result of social revolution, but rather the public ratification of a
very general shift of opinion among the political classes of Spain
away from the monarchy. The new Republicans might have been
pushed decisively towards the left - more specifically, towards
agrarian revolution - by the pressure of the masses. But at the time
when they were most susceptible to and afraid of it, in 1 93 1 , this
did not occur. The moderate socialists may or may not have
wanted to organize it, but the communists and anarchists who
certainly did, failed in their attempt to do so. One cannot simply
blame them for this failure. There were both avoidable and -
perhaps predominantly - inevitable reasons why ' cNT and com­
munist recruiters in general were so distant from the prevailing
peasant mood that both organizations remained primarily urban
based even so late as 1 936' (Malefakis) . The fact remains that
6 From the days of Obregon until 1 934 the presidents came almost without

exception from the state of Sonora.

80
 THE S P ANISH BACKGROUND

'peasant rebellion became a significant force after 1 933, not in

1 93 1 , when it might have been politically more efficacious'. And
after 1 933 it served to mobilize reaction as effectively as - in the
long run more effectively than - the forces of revolution. The
Spanish revolution was unable to exploit the historical moment
when most successful revolutions establish their hegemony : the
spell of time during which its potential or actual enemies are
demoralized, disorganized and uncertain what to do.
· When it broke out it met a mobilized enemy. Perhaps this was
inevitable. But it also faced the battle for survival, which it proved
incapable of winning. Probably this was not inevitable. And so we
remember it, especially those of us to whose lives it belongs, as a
marvellous dream of what might have been, an epic of heroism, the
Iliad of those who were young in the 1 930s. But unless we think of
revolutions merely as a series of dreams and epics, the time for
analysis must succeed that of heroic memories.
( 1 966)

81
 9

R E F L E C T I O N S O N ANA R C H I SM

The present revival of interest in anarchism is a curious and at first

sight unexpected phenomenon. Even ten years ago it would have
seemed in the highest degree unlikely. At that time anarchism, both
as a movement and as an ideology, looked like a chapter in the
development of the modern revolutionary and labour movements
that had been definitely closed.
As a movement it seemed to belong to the pre-industrial period,
and in any case to the era before the first world war and the October
revolution, except in Spain, where it can hardly be said to have
survived the Civil War of 1 936-9. One might say that it disappeared
with the kings and emperors whom its militants had so often tried to
assassinate. Nothing seemed to be able to halt, or even to slow down,
its rapid and inevitable decline, even in those parts of the world in
which it had once constituted a major political force - in France,
Italy, Latin America. A careful searcher, who knew where to look,
might still discover some anarchists even in the 1 950s, and very many
more ex-anarchists, easily recognizable by such signs as an interest in
the poet Shelley. (It is characteristic that this most romantic school
of revolutionaries has been more loyal than anyone else, including
the literary critics of his own country, to the most revolutionary
among English romantic poets.) When I tried to make contact,
about this time, with activists in the Spanish anarchist underground
in Paris, I was given a rendezvous at a cafe in Montmartre, by the
Place Blanche, and somehow this reminder of a long-lost era of
bohemians, rebels and avant-garde seemed only too characteristic.
As an ideology, anarchism did not decline so dramatically because
it had never had anything like as much success, at least among
intellectuals who are the social stratum most interested in ideas.
There have probably always been eminent figures in the world of
culture who called themselves anarchists (except, curiously enough,
 REFLECTIONS O N ANARCHISM

i n Spain), but most of them seem to have been artists i n the wider -
or like Pissarro and Signac, the narrower - sense of the word. In any
case, anarchism never had an attraction comparable to, say marx­
ism, for intellectuals even before the October revolution. With the
exception of Kropotkin, it is not easy to think of an anarchist theorist
who could be read with real interest by non-anarchists. There
seemed, indeed, no real intellectual room for anarchist theory. The
belief in the libertarian communism of self-governing cooperatives as
the final aim of revolutionaries, it shared with marxism. The old
utopian socialists had thought more deeply and concretely about the
nature of such communities than most anarchists. Even the strongest
point in the anarchists' intellectual armoury, their awareness of the
dangers of dictatorship and bureaucracy implicit in marxism, was
not peculiar to them. This type of critique was made with equal
effect and greater intellectual sophistication both by 'unofficial'
marxists and by opponents of all kinds of socialism.
In brief, the main appeal of anarchism was emotional and not
intellectual. That appeal was not negligible. Everyop.e who has ever
studied, or had anything to do with the real anarchist movement, has
been deeply moved by the idealism, the heroism, the sacrifice, the
saintliness which it so often produced, side by side with the brutality
of the Ukrainian Makhnovshchina or the dedicated gunmen and
church-burners of Spain. The very extremism of the anarchist
rejection of state and organization, the totality of their commitment
to the overthrow of the present society, could not but arouse
admiration ; except perhaps among those who had to be active in
politics by the side of the anarchists, and found them almost
impossible to work with. It is suitable that Spain, the country of Don
Quixote, should have been their last fortress.
The most touching epitaph I have heard on an anarchist terrorist,
killed a few years ago by the police in Catalonia, was spoken by one
of his comrades, without any sense of irony : 'When we were young,
and the Republic was founded, we were knightly but also spiritual.
We have grown older, but not he. He was a guerrillero by instinct.
Yes, He was one of the Quixotes who come out of Spain.'
Admirable, but hopeless, It was almost certainly the monumental
ineffectiveness of anarchism which, for most people of my generation
- the one which came to maturity in the years of the Spanish Civil
War - determined our rejection of it. I still recall in the very earliest
days of that war, the small town of Puigcerda in the Pyrenees, a little
 REVOLUTIONARIES

revolutionary republic, filled with free men and women, guns and an
immensity of discussion. A few trucks stood in the plaza. They were
for the war. When anyone felt like going to fight on the Aragonese
front, he went to the trucks. When a truck was full, it went to the
front. Presumably, when the volunteers wanted to come back, they
came back. The phrase C'est magnifique, mais ce n' est pas la guerre should
have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the
main effect of this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years
before I was prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a
tragic farce.
It was much more than this. And yet, no amount of sympathy can
alter the fact that anarchism as a revolutionary movement has failed,
that it has almost been designed for failure.
As Gerald Brenan, the author of the best book on modern Spain,
has put it : a single strike of (socialist) miners in the Asturias shook
the Spanish government more than seventy years of massive anar­
chist revolutionary activity, which presented little more than a
routine police problem. (Indeed, subsequent research has shown that
in the era of maximum bomb-throwing in Barcelona, there were
probably not a hundred policemen looking after public order in that
city, and their number was not notably reinforced. ) The ineffec­
tiveness of anarchist revolutionary activities could be documented at
length, and for all countries in which this ideology played an
important role in politics. This is not the place for such a documen­
tation. My point is simply to explain why the revival of interest in
anarchism today seems so unexpected, surprising and - if I am to
speak frankly - unjustified.
Unjustified, but not inexplicable. There are two powerful reasons
which explain the vogue for anarchism : the crisis of the world
communist movement after Stalin's death and the rise of revol­
utionary discontent among students and intellectuals, at a time when
objective historical factors in the developed countries do not make
revolution appear very probable.
For most revolutionaries the crisis of communism is essentially that
of the ussR and the regimes founded under its auspices in eastern
Europe ; that is to say of socialist systems as understood in the years
between the October revolution and the fall of Hitler. Two aspects
of these regimes now seemed more vulnerable to the traditional
anarchist critique than before I g45, because the October revolution
was no longer the only successful revolution made by communists,
 REFLECTIONS ON ANARCHISM

the USSR was no longer isolated, weak and threatened with destruc­
tion, and because the two most powerful arguments for the ussR - its
immunity to the economic crisis of 1 929 and its resistance to fascism
- lost their force after 1 945.
Stalinism, that hypertrophy of the bureaucratized dictatorial
state, seemed to justify the Bakuninite argtJment that the dictator­
ship of the proletariat would inevitably become simple dictatorship,
and that socialism could not be constructed on such a basis. At the
same time the removal of the worst excesses of stalinism made it
clear that even without purges and labour camps the kind of
socialism introduced in the USSR was very far from what most
socialists had had in mind before 1 9 1 7, and the major objectives of
that country's policy, rapid economic growth, technological and
scientific development, national security etc., had no special con­
nections with socialism, democracy or freedom. Backward nations
might see in the U S SR a model of how to escape from their
backwardness, and might conclude from its experience and from
their own that the methods of economic development pioneered
and advocated by capitalism did not work in their conditions,
whereas social revolution followed by central planning did, but the
main object was 'development'. Socialism was the means to it and
not the end. Developed nations, which already enjoyed the material
level of production to which the ussR still aspired, and in many
cases far more freedom and cultural variety for their citizens,
could hardly take it as their model, and when they did (as
in Czechoslovakia and the GDR ) the results were distinctly
disappointing.
Here again it seemed reasonable to conclude that this was not
the way to build socialism. Extremist critics - and they became
increasingly numerous - concluded that it was not socialism at all,
however distorted or degenerate. The anarchists were among those
revolutionaries who had always held this view, and their ideas
therefore became more attractive. All the more so as the crucial
argument of the 1 g I 7-45 period, that Soviet Russia however
imperfect, was the only successful revolutionary regime and the
essential basis for the success of revolution elsewhere, sounded much
less convincing in the 1 950s and hardly convincing at all in the
1 960s.
The second and more powerful reason for the vogue of anarchism
has nothing to do with the ussR, except in so far as it was fairly clear
 REVOLUTIONARIES

after I 945 that its government did not encourage revolutionary

seizures of power in other countries. It arose out of the predicament
of revolutionaries in non-revolutionary situations. As in the years
before I 9 I 4, so in the I 95os and early I 96os western capitalism was
stable and looked like remaining stable. The most powerful argu­
ment of classic marxist analysis, the historic inevitability of prolet­
arian revolution, therefore lost its force ; at least in the developed
countries. But if history was not likely to bring revolution nearer,
how would it come about ?
Both before I 9 I 4 and again in our time anarchism provided an
apparent answer. The very primitiveness of its theory became an
asset. Revolution would come because revolutionaries wanted it
with such passion, and undertook acts of revolt constantly, one of
which would, sooner or later, turn out to be the spark which would
set the world on fire. The appeal of this simple belief lay not in its
more sophisticated formulations, though such extreme voluntarism
could be given a philosophical basis (the pre- I 9 I 4 anarchists often
tended to admire Nietzsche as well as Stimer) or founded on social
psychology as with Sorel. (It is a not altogether accidental irony of
history that such theoretical justifications of anarchist irrationalism
were soon to be adapted into theoretical justifications of fascism.)
The strength of the anarchist belief lay in the fact that there seemed
to be no alternative other than to give up the hope of revolution.
Of course neither before I 9 I 4 nor today were anarchists the only
revolutionary voluntarists. All revolutionaries must always believe
in the necessity of taking the initiative, the refusal to wait upon
events to make the revolution for them. At some times - as in
the Kautsky era of social democracy and the comparable era of
postponed hope in the orthodox communist movement of the I 95os
and I 96os - a dose of voluntarism is particularly salutary. Lenin
was accused of Blanquism, just as Guevara and Regis Debray have
been, with somewhat greater justification. At first sight such
non-anarchist versions of the revolt against 'historic inevitability'
seem much the more attractive since they do not deny the
importance of objective factors in the making of revolution, of
organization, discipline, strategy and tactics.
Nevertheless, and paradoxically, the anarchists may today have
an occasional advantage over these more systematic revolutionaries.
It has recently become fairly clear that the analysis on which most
intelligent observers based their assessment of political prospects in
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 REFLECTIONS ON ANARCHISM

the world must be badly deficient. There is no other explanation for

the fact that several of the most dramatic and far-reaching develop­
ments in world politics recently have been not merely unpredicted,
but so unexpected as to appear almost incredible at first sight. The
events of May 1 968 in France are probably the most striking
example. When rational analysis and prediction leads so many
astray, including even 'most marxists, the irrational belief that
anything is possible at any moment may seem to have some
advantages. After all, on 1 May 1 968, not even in Peking or
Havana did anyone seriously expect that within a matter of days
barricades would rise in Paris, soon to be followed by the greatest
general strike in living memory. On the night of g May it was not
only the official communists who opposed the building of bar­
ricades, but a good many of the Trotskyist and Maoist students
also, for the apparently sound reason that if the police really had
orders to fire, the result would be a brief but substantial massacre.
Those who went ahead without hesitation were the anarchists, the
anarchizers, the situationnistes. There are moments when simple
revolutionary or Napoleonic phrases like de l' audace, encore de l' audace
or on s'engage et puis on voit work. This was one of them. One might
even say that this was an occasion when only the blind chicken was
in a position to find the grain of corn.
No doubt, statistically speaking, such moments are bound to be
rare. The failure of Latin American guerrilla movements and the
death of Guevara are reminders that it is not enough to want a
revolution, however passionately, or even to start guerrilla war. No
doubt the limits of anarchism became evident within a few days,
even in Paris. Yet the fact that once or twice pure voluntarism has
produced results cannot be denied. Inevitably it has increased the
appeal of anarchism.
Anarchism is therefore today once again a political force. Prob­
ably it has no mass basis outside the movement of students and
intellectuals and even within the movement it is influential rather as
a persistent current of 'spontaneity' and activism rather than
through the relatively few people who claim to be anarchists. The
question is therefore once again worth asking what is the value of the
anarchist tradition today ?
In terms of ideology, theory and programmes, that value remains
marginal. Anarchism is a critique of the dangers of authoritarianism
and bureaucracy in states, parties and movements, but this is
 REVOLUTIONARIES

primarily a symptom that these dangers are widely recognized. If all

anarchists had disappeared from the face of the earth the discussion
about these problems would go on much as it does. Anarchism also
suggests a solution in terms of direct democracy and small self­
governing groups, but I do not think its own proposals for the
future have so far been either very valuable or very fully thought
out. To mention only two considerations. First, small self-governing
direct democracies are unfortunately not necessarily libertarian.
They may indeed function only because they establish a consensus so
powerful that those who do not share it voluntarily refrain from
expressing their dissent ; alternatively, because those who do not
share the prevailing view leave the community, or are expelled.
There is a good deal of information about the operation of such
small communities, which I have not seen realistically discussed in
anarchist literature. Second, both the nature of the modern social
economy and of modern scientific technology raise problems of
considerable complexity for those who see the future as a world of
self-governing small groups. These may not be insoluble, but
unfortunately they are certainly not solved by the simple call for
the abolition of the state and bureaucracy, nor by the suspicion of
technology and the natural sciences which so often goes with
modern anarchism. 1 It is possible to construct a theoretical model
of libertarian anarchism which will be compatible with modern
scientific technology, but unfortunately it will not be socialist. It will
be much closer to the views of Mr Goldwater and his economic
adviser Professor Milton Friedman of Chicago than to the views of
Kropotkin. For (as Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago in his
pamphlet on the Impossibilities of Anarchism), the extreme ver­
sions of individualist liberalism are logically as anarchist as
Bakunin.
It will be clear that in my view anarchism has no significant
contribution to socialist theory to make, though it is a useful critical
element. If socialists want theories about the present and the future,
1 An illustration of this complexity may be given from the history of anarchism.

I take it from ]. Martinez Alier's valuable study of landless labourers in Andalusia

in 1 964-5. From the author's careful questioning it is clear that the landless
labourers of Cordova, traditionally the mass basis of Spanish rural anarchism,
have not changed their ideas since 1 936 - except in one respect. The social and
economic activities of even the Franco regime have convinced them that the state
cannot simply be rejected, but has some positive functions. This may help to
explain why they no longer seem to be anarchists.

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 REFLECTIONS O N ANARCHISM

they will still have to look elsewhere, to Marx and his followers, and
probably also to the earlier utopian socialists, such as Fourier. To
be more precise : if anarchists want to make a significant contri­
bution they will have to do much more serious thinking than most of
them have recently done.
The contribution of anarchism to revolutionary strategy and
tactics cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that anarchists are as
unlikely to make successful revolutions in the future as they have
been in the past. To adapt a phrase used by Bakunin of the
peasantry : they may be invaluable on the first day of a revolution,
but they are almost certain to be an obstacle on the second day.
Nevertheless, historically their insistence on spontaneity has much
to teach us. For it is the great weakness of revolutionaries brought
up in any of the versions derived from classical marxism, that they
tend to think of revolutions as occurring under conditions which
can be specified in advance, as things which can be, at least in
outline, foreseen, planned and organized. But in practice this is not
so.
Or rather, most of the great revolutions which have occurred and
succeeded, have begun as 'happenings' rather than as planned
productions. Sometimes they have grown rapidly and unexpectedly
out of what fooked. like ordinary mass demonstrations, sometimes
out of resistance to the acts of their enemies, sometimes in other
ways - but rarely if ever did they take the form expected by
organized revolutionary movements, even when these had
predicted the imminent occurrence of revolution. That is why the
test of greatness in revolutionaries has always been their capacity to
discover the new and unexpected characteristics of revolutionary
situations and to adapt their tactics to them. Like the surfer, the
revolutionary does not create the waves on which he rides, but
balances on them. Unlike the surfer - and here serious revolution­
ary theory diverges from anarchist practice - sooner or later he
stops riding on the wave and must control its direction and
movement.
Anarchism has valuable lessons to teach, because it has - in
practice rather than in theory - been unusually sensitive to the
spontaneous elements in mass movements. Any large and disci­
plined movement can order a strike or demonstration to take place,
and if it is sufficiently large and disciplined, it can make a
reasonably impressive showing. Yet there is all the difference
89
4-R • •
 REVOLUTIONARIES

between the CGT's token general strike o f I 3 May I g68 and the ten
millions who occupied their places of work a few days later without
a national directive. The very organizational feebleness of anarchist
and anarchizing movements has forced them to explore the means
of discovering or securing that spontaneous consensus among
militants and masses which produces action. (Admittedly it has also
led them to experiment with ineffective tactics such as individual or
small-group terrorism which can be practised without mobilizing
any masses and for which, incidentally, the organizational defects of
anarchism do not suit anarchists.)
The student movements of the past few years have been like
anarchist movements, at least in their early stages, in so far as they
have consisted not of mass organizations but of small groups of
militants mobilizing the masses of their fellow students from time to
time. They have been obliged to make themselves sensitive to the
mood of these masses, to the times and issues which will permit mass
mobilization.
In the United States, for instance they belong to a primitive kind
of movement, and its weaknesses are evident - a lack of theory; of
agreed strategic perspectives, of quick tactical reaction on a national
scale. At the same time it is doubtful whether any other form of
mobilization could have created, maintained and developed so
powerful a national student movement in the United States in the
1 960s. Quite certainly this could not have been done by the
disciplined small groups of revolutionaries in the old tradition -
communist, Trotskyist or Maoist - who constantly seek to impose
their specific ideas and perspectives on the masses and in doing so
isolate themselves more often than they mobilize them.
These are lessons to be learned not so much from the actual
anarchists of today whose practice is rarely impressive, as from a
study of the historic experience of anarchist movements. They are
particularly valuable in the present situation, in which new revol­
utionary movements have often had to be built on and out of the
ruins of the older ones. For let us not be under any illusions. The
impressive 'new left' of recent years is admirable, but in many
respects it is not only new, but also a regression to an earlier weaker,
less developed form of the socialist movement, unwilling or unable to
benefit from the major achievements of the international working­
class and revolutionary movements in the century between the
Communist Manifesto and the Cold War.
go
 R E F L E C T I ONS ON ANAR C HI S M
Tactics derived from anarchist experience are a reflection o f this
relative primitiveness and weakness, but in such circumstances they
may be the best ones to pursue for a time. The important thing is to
know when the limits of such tactics have been reached. What
happened in France in May I 968 was less like I 91 7 than like I 830 or
1 848. It is inspiring to discover that, in the developed countries
of western Europe, any kind of revolutionary situation, however
momentary, is possible once again. But it would be equally unwise to
forget that I 848 is at the same time the great example of a successful
spontaneous European revolution, and of its rapid and unmitigated
failure.
( 1 969)
 III

MA R X ISM
 IO

K A R L MA R X AND T H E
B R I T I S H L ABO U R M O V EME N T

The Marx Memorial Lecture, which I have the honour to give this
year, commemorates the death of Karl Marx. -This is why it is held
on 15 March. However, we are this year celebrating not only the
85 th anniversary of Marx's death, but the 1 5 oth of his birth, and we
are still within a few months of the centenary of the publication of
the first volume of Capital, his most important theoretical work, and
of the 5oth anniversary of the great October revolution, the most
far-reaching practical result of his labours. There is thus no shortage
of anniversaries in tidy round figures, all connected with Karl Marx,
which we can celebrate simultaneously on this occasion. And yet
there is perhaps an even more suitable reason why tonight is a good
night to remind ourselves of the life and work of the great man - the
man whose name is now so familiar to all that he no longer has to be
described, even on the commemorative plaque which the Greater
London Council has at last put up on the house in Soho where he
lived in poverty and where now the customers of a well-known
restaurant dine in affluence.
It is a reason which Marx, with his sense of the irony of history,
would have appreciated. As we gather here tonight, banks and stock
exchanges are closed, financiers are gathering in Washington to
register the breakdown of the system of international trade and
payments in the capitalist world ; to stave off, if they can, the fall of
the almighty dollar. It is not impossible that this date will go down in
the history books like the date 24 October 1 929, which marks the end
of the period of capitalist stabilization in the 1 92os. It is certain that
the events of the past week prove m.ore vividly than any argument
the essential instability of capitalism ; its failure so far to overcome
the internal contradictions of this system on a world scale. The man
95
 REVOLUTI ONARIES

who devoted his life to demonstrating the internal contradictions of

capitalism, would appreciate the irony of the accident that the crisis
of the dollar should come to a head precisely on the anniversary of
his death.
My subject for tonight, which was fixed long before this, is Marx
and British labour ; that is to say what Marx thought about the
British labour movement and what that movement owes to Marx.
He did not, at least in his later years, think much· of British labour,
and his influence on the movement, though significant, has been less
than he or later marxists would have wished. Hence the subject does
not lend itself to the usual rhetoric, not that a historian is specially
qualified to practise it. It is an occasion for realistic analysis, and I
shall try to be realistic.
What was Marx's opinion of the British working class and its
labour movement ?
Between the time that he became a communist and his death,
British labour passed through two phases : the revolutionary phase
of the Chartist period and the phase of modest reformism which
succeeded it in the 1 850s, 1 860s and 1 870s. In the first phase the
British labour movement led the world in mass organization, in
political class-consciousness, in the development of anti-capitalist
ideologies such as the early forms of socialism, . and in militancy. In
the second phase it still led the world in a special form of organiz­
ation, namely trade unionism and probably also in the narrower
form of class consciousness which simply consists in recognizing the
working class as a separate class, whose members have different (but
not necessarily opposed) interests to other classes. However, it had
abandoned the effort and perhaps even the hope of overthrowing
capitalism, and accepted not only the existence of this system,
seeking merely to improve the condition of its members within it, but
also, and increasingly, it accepted - with certain specific exceptions -
the bourgeois-liberal theories about how much improvement could
be achieved. It was no longer revolutionary, and socialism virtually
disappeared from it.
No doubt this retreat took longer than we sometimes think :
Chartism did not die in 1 848 but remained actiYe.and important for
several years thereafter. No doubt, looking at the mid-Victorian
decades with the wisdom of hindsight, we can observe that the
retreat concealed elements of a new advance. Thanks to the
experience of those decades the revived labour movement of the
96
 K A R L M A R X A N D T H E B R I TI S H L A B O U R M O V E M E N T

1890s and of our own century would be much more firmly and
permanently organized and would consist of a real 'movement'
rather than a succession of waves of militancy. Nevertheless, there
can be no doubt that it was a retreat ; and in any case Marx did not
survive long enough to see the subsequent revival .
Marx and Engels had high hopes o f the British labour movement
in the 1 840s. More than this, their hopes of European revolution
depended to a great extent on changes in the most advanced
capitalist country, and the only one with a conscious movement of
the proletariat on a mass scale. This did not occur. Britain remained
relatively unaffected by the revolution of 1 848. However, for some
time after this Marx and Engels continued to hope for a revival of
both the British and the continental movements. By the early 1 850s it
became clear that a new era of capitalist expansion had opened,
which made this much less likely, and when even the next of the
great world slumps - that of 1 857 - did not in fact lead to a revival of
Chartism, it became clear that they could no longer expect very
much from the British labour movement. Nor in fact did they expect
very much from it, for the remainder of Marx's lifetime, and their
references to it express a growing disappointment. Marx and Engels
were not, of course, the only ones to express this disappointment. If
they deplored the 'lack of mettle of the old Chartists' in the
movement of the 1 860s, so did non-marxist survivors of the heroic
period, like Thomas Cooper. -
Two observations are perhaps worth making in passing at this
point. The first is that this 'apparent bourgeois infection of the
British workers', 1 this 'embourgeoisement of the English proletariat'2
will remind many of us of what has been happening to the British
labour movement in an even more headlong period of capitalist
expansion and prosperity through which we have been living. Marx
and Engels were, of course, careful to avoid the superficiality of the
academic sociologists of the present, who think that 'embourgeoise­
ment' means that workers are turning into modest copies of the
middle class, a sort ofmini-bourgeoisie. They were not, and he knew
they were not. Nor did Marx believe for a moment that the
expansion and prosperity from which many workers undoubtedly
benefited, had created an 'affluent society' from which poverty had
been banished, or was likely to be.
1 Marx to Engels, 1 6 April 1 863.
2 Engels to Marx, 7 October 1 858.

97
 REVO LUTIONARIES

Indeed, some of the most eloquent passages in Capital I (cap. 2 3

section 5 ) deal precisely with the poverty of those years of capitalist
triumph in Britain, as illustrated by the parliamentary inquiries of
that time. Nevertheless, he recognized the adaptation of the labour
movement to the bourgeois system ; but he regarded it as a historical
phase, and indeed, as we know, it was a temporary phase. A social­
ist labour movement in Britain had disappeared ; but it was to
reappear.
The second observation, which also has its relevance for the
present, is that the mid-Victorian decades did not lead Marx to turn
himself into a Fabian or a Bernsteinian revisionist (which is the same
thing as a Fabian in marxist costume) . They led him to alter his
strategic and tactical perspectives. They may have led him to
become pessimistic about the short-term prospects of the working­
class movement in western Europe, especially after I 87 I . But they
neither led him to abandon the belief that the emancipation of the
human race was possible nor that it would be based on the
movement of the proletariat. He was and continued to be a
revolutionary socialist. Not because he overlooked the contrary
tendencies or underestimated their force. He had no illusions
whatever about the British labour movement of the I 86os and I 87os
- but because he did not regard them as historically decisive.
How did Marx explain this change in the character of the Britis h
labour movement ? In general, by the new lease of life which the
economic expansion after I 85 I gave to capitalism - that is to say by
the full development of the capitalist world market in those decades ­
but more specifically by the world domination or world monopoly of
British capitalism. This thesis first appears in the correspondence of
Marx and Engels around I 858 - after the failure of the hopes they
had placed in the I 857 slump - and is repeated at intervals
thereafter ; mostly, it should be noted, in letters by Engels. Con­
sequently, Engels also expected the end of this world monopoly to
bring about a radicalization of the British labour movement, and in
the I 88os Engels did indeed repeatedly observe that both these
things were happening or could be expected to happen.
The best-known passage is probably that in the introduction to
the first English translation of Capital I (written in I 886) , but his
correspondence in those years returns to this argument time and
again, sometimes in order to explain why the revived socialist
movement in Britain was not yet making enough progress, more

98
 K A R L M A RX A N D T H E B R I T I S H L A B O U R M O V E M E N T

often in a spirit of optimism ; for Engels was perhaps more sanguine

in his political expectations than Marx, and perhaps also a shade
more inclined to see economic changes as inevitably bringing about
political results than his comrade. He was, of course, right in
principle. The so-called Great Depression of 1 873-96, did mark the
end of the British world monopoly and also the rebirth of a socialist
labour movement. On the other hand he evidently underestimated
both the capacity of capitalism as a whole to continue its expansion,
and the capacity of British capitalism to safeguard itself against
the social and political consequences of its relative decline by
imperialism abroad and a new type of domestic policy.
Marx himself spent less time - at least after the 1 85os - in
discussing these broad economic perspectives and more time in
considering the political implications of the increasing feebleness of
British labour. His basic view was that :

England, as the metropolis of world capital, as the country which has

hitherto ruled the world market, is for the time being the most important
country for working-class revolution ; moreover, it is the only country in
which the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain
degree of maturity. Hence the most important task of the International is to
accelerate the social revolution in England. 3

But if the British working class had the material requisites for
revolution,4 it lacked the willingness to make a revolution, that is to
say to use its political power to take over power, as it might have
done at any time after the parliamentary reform of 1 867. Perhaps we
should add in passing that this peaceful road to socialism, on the
possibility of which for Britain Marx and Engels insisted at various
times after I 870, 5 was not an alternative to revolution, but simply a
means of 'removing legally such laws and institutions as stand in the
way of working-class development' in bourgeois-democratic coun­
tries ; a possibility which evidently did not exist in non-democratic
constitutions. It would not remove the obstacles which stood in the

8 Marx to Meyer and Vogt, 9 October 1870.

' Marx, Confidential Circular, 1 870 (Werke, vol. 1 6, p. 415) .

5 Marx, Speech after The Hague Congress r872 ( Werke, vol. 1 8, p . 1 60) ; Marx,

Konspekt der Debatten uber das Sozialistengesetz (K. Marx-F. Engels, Brief an A. Behel.,
W. Liebknecht, K. Kautsky und Andre 1, p. 5 1 6) ; F. Engels, Preface to English
translation of Capital I.

99
 REVO LUTIONARIES

way of the working class but which did not happen t o take the form
oflaws and institutions, e.g. the economic power of the bourgeoisie ;
and it might easily turn into violent revolution in consequence of the
insurrection of those with a vested interest in the old status quo ; the
point was that if this happened the bourgeoisie would be rebels
against a legal government, as (to quote Marx's own examples) the
south was against the north in the American Civil War, the
counter-revolutionaries were in the French revolution and - we
might add - in the Spanish Civil War of 1 936-g. Marx's argument
was not concerned with any ideal choice between violence and
non-violence, or gradualism and revolution, but with the realistic use
of such possibilities as were open to the labour movement in any
given situation. Of these, in a bourgeois democracy, Parliament was
clearly a central one.
Yet the British working class was plainly not ready to make use of
any of these possibilities, even the formation of an independent
labour party or independent political behaviour by such individual
workers who happened to get elected to Parliament. Without
waiting for the long-term tendencies of historical development to
change the situation, there were several things to do : and one of
the great merits of Marx's writings is to show that communists can
and must avoid both the error of waiting for history to happen, and
the error of opting for unhistorical methods such as Bakuninite
anarchism and pointless acts of terrorism.
In the first place, it was essential to educate the working class to
political consciousness 'by a continuous agitation against the hostile
attitude shown towards the workers in politics by the ruling classes', 6
i.e. by producing situations which demonstrated this hostility. This
might, of course, imply organizing confrontations with the ruling
class, which would lead it to drop its appearance of sympathy. Thus
Marx welcomed the police brutality during the Reform demon­
strations of 1 866 : ruling-class violence could provide 'a revolution­
ary education'. So long, of course, as it isolated the police, and not
those who fought them. Marx and Engels were scathing about the
Fenian terrorist actions in Clerkenwell, which had the opposite
effect.
In the second place, it was essential to ally with all sections of
non-reformist workers. That is why, as he wrote to Bolte (23
November 1 87 1 ) he worked with the followers ofBronterre O'Brien,
8 Marx to Bolte, 23 November 1 87 1 .

1 00
 K A R L M A R X A N D T H E B RI T I S H L A B O U R M O VE M E N T

relics o f the old socialism o f Chartist days, o n the Council o f the

International :
In spite of the crack-brained ideas, they constitute a counterweight to the
trade unionists. They are more revolutionary . . . less nationalist and quite
immune to any form of bourgeois corruption. But for that, we should have
thrown them out a long time ago.

However, Marx's main recipe for revolutionizing the British

situation was through Ireland ; i.e. by the indirect means of
supporting colonial revolution and in doing so destroying the major
bond which linked the British workers to the British bourgeoisie.
Originally, as Marx admitted, he had expected Ireland to be
liberated through the victory of the British proletariat. 7 From the
late 1 860s he took the opposite view - namely that the revolutions in
the backward and colonial countries would be primary and would
themselves revolutionize the metropolitan ones. (It is interesting that
at much the same time he began to have these hopes for a revolution
in Russia, which sustained him in his later years.) 8 Ireland acted as a
fetter in two ways : by splitting the English working class along
racial lines, and thus by giving the British worker an apparent joint
interest with his rulers in exploiting someone else. This was the sense
of Marx's famous statement that 'a nation which oppresses another
cannot itself be free'. Ireland was thus at one moment the key to
England - more than this to the advance of progress in the world in
general :
If we are to accelerate. the social development of Europe, we must
accelerate the catastrophe of official (j.e. ruling class) England. This requires
a blow in Ireland, which is the weakest point of Britain. lf lreland is lost, the
British 'empire' goes and the class struggle in England, which has up to now
been sleepy and slow, will take more acute forms. But England is the
metropolis of capitalism and landlordism in the entire world.

I have spent some time on the details of Karl Marx's attitud� to

the British labour movement - mainly in the 1 860s and early 1870s
when he was closely involved with it through the International. He
wrote about it in those days not so much as a general historical
analyst, but rather as a political strategist and tactician, considering
concrete political situations. The situation of the 1 860s has passed
away for good, and nobody would claim, least of all Marx himself,
7 Marx to Engels, I O December 1 869.
8 Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, 5 March 1870.

IOI
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

that what he had to say about it in detail applies to any other period.
On the other hand it is always instructive to see a marxist master­
strategist and tactician at work - and we must remember that, as
Engels liked to recall, Marx was a master-tactician in the rare
periods when he had the chance to be.
As it happened, he failed to 're-electrify the British labour
movement', and this failure, as he realized, condemned the
international movement to wait for very much longer, and when
the movement revived, Britain and the British working class no
longer played the potentially central role in it that they might
have done, while Britain was 'the metropolis of capitalism and
landlordism everywhere'. As soon as he realized tha� the strategy
of the I 86os had failed, Marx ceased to concern himself very
much with the British labour movement. However, at this point
we may logically turn to the other half of the question about
Marx and British labour, namely the effect which Marx and his
teaching had upon the labour movement in this country.
Let us first be clear on the limits - on what were probably the
historically inevitable limits of this influence. It was not likely to
produce a revolutionary labour movement in a country which
lacked the experience and tradition of revolution, and any
situations - then or later - which could be even faintly described as
revolutionary or pre-revolutionary. It was not likely to produce a
mass labour movement inspired and organized by marxism,
because when marxism appeared on the scene, a powerful,
well-organized, politically influential labour movement already
existed on a national scale in the form of trade unionism,
consumers' cooperation and Liberal-Labour leaders. Marxism did
not precede the British labour movement. It was not even coeval
with it. It appeared a third of the way through its lifetime to date.
It is no use looking abroad and observing that marxism played or
plays a much larger part in the labour movements of some
countries than in ours, because, since history does not develop
uniformly, we cannot expect the same developments everywhere.
The peculiarity of Britain is that it was the oldest, for a long time
the most successful and dominant, and almost certainly the stablest
capitalist society, and that its bourgeoisie had to come to terms with
a proletarian majority of the population long before any other. The
influence of marxism has been inevitably circumscribed by this
situation.
1 02
 KARL MARX AND THE B RITISH LABOUR M OVEMENT

On the other hand we could expect marxism to play an

important part in the formation of that new - or renewed - stage
of the British worker's class-consciousness, which led them to
abandon confidence in the permanence and viability of capitalism,
and to place their hopes in a new society - socialism. We could
expect it to play an important part in forming the new ideology,
the strategy and tactics of a socialist labour movement. We could
expect it to create nuclei of leadership, political vanguards if you
like - I am using the term in a general sense here and not only in
the specific leninist sense. How large or important these were, how
significant the part they played within the larger movement,
might be uncertain and unpredictable. In other words, we could
have expected marxism to have a significant, but almost certainly
not a decisive influence in shaping the British labour movement of
the twentieth century. This is a pity, but that is another question.
We may perhaps be reconciled to this relatively modest role of
marxism if we look at some continental movements in which the
influence of marxism was initially far greater, so much so that the
entire labour movement took the form of marxist social­
democratic mass parties, but nevertheless these movements were
basically as moderate and reformist as the British, if not more so ;
for instance in Scandinavia.
Now in the two respects which I have singled out, the influence
of Marx was unquestionably great - much greater than is
commonly realized. Ideologists of right-wing labour have searched
desperately for alternative founding fathers of British socialism,
from John Wesley to the Fabians, but their search has been vain.
Methodism in particular, non-conformist protestantism in general,
have undoubtedly coloured a lot of the British labour movement,
and in a few special cases such as the farm labourers and some of
the miners, provided both a framework of organization and a
cadre of leaders, but their contribution to what the movement
thought and tried to achieve - to its socialism - has been minimal.
The contribution of Marx has been capital, if only because Marx's
analysis is the only socialist analysis which has stood the test
of time. The archaic British forms of socialism - Owenism,
O'Brienism, etc. did not revive, though an essentially 'agrarian'
analysis of capitalism long remained influential. Fabianism, in so far
as it had a specific analysis of capitalism (e.g. the specific
economic theory of the Fabian Essays) never got off the ground. It
1 03
 REVOLUTIONARIES
survived and became influential merely as a more 'modern'
formulation of what moderate labour leaders had always done,
namely pursuing piecemeal reforms within the framework of
capitalism.
In so far as the British labour movement developed a theory
about how capitalism worked - about the nature of capitalist
exploitation, the internal contradictions of capitalism, the fluc­
tuations of the capitalist economy such as slumps, the causes of
unemployment, the long-term tendencies of capitalist development
such as mechanization, economic concentration and imperialism,
these were based on the teachings of Marx, or were accepted
in so far as they coincided with them or converged with them.
In so far as the British labour movement developed a programme
for socialism - based on the socialization of the means of pro­
duction, distribution and exchange, and rather later, on plan­
ning, it was once again the basis of a simplified marxism. I am not
claiming that the entire ideology of the movement was so based. It
is clear, for instance, that some very important parts of it, e.g. the
attitude to international questions and peace or war, were based
substantially on an older and powerful liberal-radical tradition.
Nor am I claiming that the ideology of all parts of the movement
was so based. Its right-wing leaders, especially when they got
anywhere near government office, always looked for some alter­
native source of economic inspiration drawn from bourgeois
liberalism - whether in the form of the free-trade orthodoxy of the
Lib-Labs and Philip Snowden, the LSE-type marginalism of the
Early Fabians, or the Keynesian analysis of the Labour Party
ideologists since I 945. But if we go down to the grass roots - to
the men and women who canvassed for elections, who collected
dues and led industrial movements at shop and factory level, and
so on : their theory, and very often their practice, were much the
same as that of the members of officially marxist organizations ;
and the other way round. I do not say that they got this theory
from reading Capital or even Value, Price and Profit, any more than
the sort of sub-Freudianism which is the basis of American
conversations about personal problems is necessarily based on a
reading of Freud. Their theory derived from Marx insofar as they
were socialists, because the basic theory of socialism, at least in the
respects I singled out above, was the one formulated in a marxist
manner ; generally it must be admitted, a very simplified manner.
 KARL MARX AND THE B R I T I S H LABOUR M OVEMENT

I n one way o r another this had become part of their political

lives.
This was natural, because marxism - or at all events some sort of
simplified version of marxism - was the first kind of socialism to
reach Britain during the revival of the I 88os, the one most
persistently propagated by devoted pioneers at a thousand street
corners, and the one most persistently and ubiquitously taught at a
thousand classes run by socialist organizations, labour colleges or
freelance lecturers ; and because it had no real rival as an analysis
of what was wrong with capitalism. It was also natural, because the
marxist organizations formed and still form by far the most
important school for the militants and activists of the labour
movement, and this is in spite of the sectarianism which has often
plagued them. This is perhaps most obvious at the real grass roots
of the British movement, in the unions. From the days of the young
John Burns and Tom Mann, to those of the militants of today,
marxist organizations of one kind or another have provided the
education of the union activists. It has been one of the greatest
historic weaknesses of the old I LP, and of its successor, the
parliamentary Labour left, that it has had and has such feeble roots
in the industrial movements. Conversely, taking account of their
relatively modest size, the marxist organizations - whether SDF,
Socialist Labour Party, the Communist Party, etc. have had a
disproportionately large influence among the union activists. It is
true that many of these changed their political opinions as their
careers advanced, but if we are talking about Marx's influence, we
cannot leave even them out of account.
It would be easy to illustrate the disproportionate influence of
Marx, and of the relatively tiny organizations of marxists, on the
wider labour movement. The marxist organizations themselves
have often underrated it, because they have measured it not against
reality, but against their ideal of a marxist mass labour movement ;
whereas in fact their historical importance has been as groups of
cadres or potential cadres, of leaders and brains rather than of
followers. Their importance has so far lain not so much in
converting vast masses of workers into members of a mass marxist
movement or the acquisition of voters, but in their role within a
great, politically and ideologically heterogeneous but powerful class
movement bound together by class-consciousness and solidarity,
and increasingly also by the anti-capitalism which the marxists
 REVOLUTIONARIES

were the first to find words for when socialism revived in the 1 880s.
Because this movement has so often fallen short of their expec­
tations, they have often been disappointed in it. But that disap­
pointment was also often due to unrealistic expectations. The
General Strike was a magnificent demonstration of the movement's
strength ; but it was not, and was not even faintly within sight of
being, a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.
However, just because the expectations of marxists have so often
been unrealistic, they have sometimes obscured the realistic ones.
Because the lack of success of marxists has so often been due to
factors beyond their or anyone else's control, they have sometimes
overlooked the failures which might have been avoidable. Marx's
own failure in the 1 860s was inevitable. Historians may well
conclude that no conceivable wisdom, tactical brilliance or organiz­
ational effort was likely to bring about the realization of Marx's
strategic hopes at that point ; though this does not mean that they
were not worth pursuing. On the other hand many of the errors of
the British Social Democrats were avoidable, though perhaps
historically likely. That peculiar combination of sectarianism and
opportunism which Lenin recognized in the SDF and which is the
occupational risk of so many marxist organizations operating under
conditions of capitalist stability, is not inevitable.
The SDF ought to have played a much larger part in the trade
union revival of the 1 880s, if it had not dismissed trade unions as
'mere palliatives' ; its own militants were wiser. The British
marxists - with the exception of the S L P failed to grasp, let alone
-

to lead, the great labour unrest of 1 9 1 1 - 1 4, though this was the first
occasion since the Chartists when masses of rank-and-file British
workers not only organized on a large scale, but also demonstrated
strong anti-capitalist sentiments, and even some evidence of that
revolutionary spirit which Marx had called for. They left the
leadership mainly to syndicalists and other members of what we
would today call the 'new left', though of course many of these -
Tom Mann is the best example - had gone through the school of
marxism and were to return to rnarxist organizations. The reason
for this failure was the opposite to 'impossibilist' sectarianism. It
was due to the failure to discern a new phase in the political
consciousness of the workers behind the emotional phrases, the
unorthodox and often rather unimpressive theorizing, the irration­
alism and what a later generation was to call the 'mindless
I 06
 KARL MARX AND THE BRITISH LABOUR M OVEMENT

militancy' of the new movement. As i t happens the war and the

Russian revolution once again saved the British Socialist Party from
some of the results of its errors.
Indeed, in a curious way history has time and again compensated,
at least in part, for the errors of British marxists, both by proving
Marx right and by demonstrating the inadequacy of the alternatives
- whether reformist or revolutionary - which were suggested. It did
so by demonstrating, time and again, the fragility of that capitalist
system whose stability and strength provided the main argument for
both reformists and ultra-revolutionaries. For the reformist argued,
with Bernstein and the Fabians, that there was no point in talking
about revolution when capitalism looked like lasting for as long as
anyone could predict ; the only sensible course was to get used to its
stability and concentrate on improvements within it. On the other
hand the ultra-revolutionaries argued, like so many pre- 1 9 1 4 syndi­
calists, that there was no point in hoping that history would raise the
consciousness of the workers to a new level, because historical
development seemed to produce capitalist permanence. It made
more sense to raise it by the propaganda of action, by inspiring
'myths', by the sheer effort of the revolutionary will.
Both were wrong in their prescriptions, though not entirely wrong
in their critique of the 'sit-back-and-wait-for-history-to-do-the-job­
for-us' determinism of orthodox social democracy. Both were wrong
because in one way or another the instability and the growing
contradictions of capitalism have reasserted themselves periodically :
e.g. in war, in some form or other of economic disruption, in the
growing contradiction between the advanced and the under­
developed countries. The very fact that the ultra-left existed and
became a significant force was a symptom of the acuteness of these
contradictions before 1 9 1 4, and it is so today. And whenever history
once again proved that Marx's analysis of capitalism was a better
guide to reality than Rostow's or Galbraith's, or whoever was in
fashion at the time, men tended to turn again to the marxists in so far
as they were neither too sectarian nor too opportunist ; that is to say
in so far as they avoided the double temptation ofrevolutionaries who
operate for long periods under conditions of stable capitalism.
So we may conclude that Marx's influence on British labour could
not be expected to be as great as his enthusiastic followers would like
it to be. Nevertheless it was, is, and is likely to be, rather greater than
both they and the anti-marxists have often supposed. At the same
1 07
 REVOLUTIONARIES

time it was and is smaller (within the limits of historical realism)

than it might have been but for the errors of British marxists at
crucial stages of the development of the modern labour and socialist
m.wement ; errors both of the 'right' and of the 'left' : errors which
are not confined to any mar.xist organization, great or small. How­
ever, we cannot make Marx himself responsible for them. What
both he and Engels had expected of the British labour movement
after the Chartist era was modest enough. They had simply expected
that it would once again establish itself as an independent political as
well as trade unionist class movement, that it should found its own
political party, and rediscover both the confidence in British workers
as a class and the decisive weight of the working class in the politics of
Britain. They were too realistic to expect more in their lifetime, and
indeed the labour movement did not quite achieve even these modest
objectives before Engels's death.
The British mar.xists would have done well to listen to Engels's
advice, while he was alive, for it was very sound. Nevertheless, even
if they had, within a few years of his death the British labour
movement had come to a point where Engels's opinions about it, and
even less those of Marx who had said so little on the subject after the
early I87os, were no longer of much specific relevance to the
situation. If Marx's theory was to be a guide to action for British
marxists, they would henceforth have to do the work themselves.
They would have to learn the method of Marx, and not only his text,
or that of any of his successors. They would have to make their own
analysis of what was happening in British capitalism and of the
concrete political situations in which the movement found itself.
They would have to work out the best ways to organize, their
perspectives and programmes, and their role in the wider labour
movement. These are still the tasks of those who wish to follow Marx
in Britain, or in any other country.
( I 968)

108
 I I

T H E D I A L O G U E O N MA R X I S M

The purpose of my talk is to start discussion o n the basis of two

questions : why is marxism flourishing today ? and how is it
flourishing today ? You may say that both these b.eg another
question, namely : is it flourishing today ? Well, is it ? The answer
must be yes and no. Marxist socialist movements are on the whole
not particularly successful at the moment, and the international
communist movement is split, and thus greatly weakened.
It may be that this is to some extent offset by the tendency of other
movements, such as those of national and social liberation in many of
the emerging countries, to draw closer to marxism, to learn from it,
perhaps even to accept it as the basis of their theoretical analysis. It
may be that the present phase is temporary. Nevertheless, the
general picture of the international labour movement today by no
means encourages a state of euphoria.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt whatever that the
intellectual appeal of marxism, and I should add the intellectual
vitality of marxism, has increased quite remarkably in the past ten
years or so. This applies inside and outside communist parties, inside
and outside countries of strong marxist labour movements. It
applies, for instance, to some extent among students and other
intellectuals in countries like West Germany and the United States,
in which marxist political organizations are either illegal, or neglig­
ible, or both. If you want a rough measure of it, you can find it in the
number and circulation of various openly marxist books, which is
much greater today, I fancy, than it was say in the 1 930s, even at the
height of the Left Book Club.
You can also find it in the general respect for Marx and marxism
which exists in certain fields of academic work, such as history and
sociology, though this does not mean that Marx, while respected, is
also accepted. I think there can be no doubt that we are at present
mg
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

living through a period when marxism is flourishing, though marxist

labour movements may not always be.
What is strange about this situation is that in the developed
capitalist countries it occurs during a period of unexampled pros­
perity, and what is more, after the major marxist organizations - the
communist parties - were fairly heavily discredited intellectually by
the revelations of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party. The situation during the last major advance of marxism in the
I 930S and I 940S was quite different ; marxism advanced because
capitalism was obviously in crisis, quite possibly, as many thought,
its final crisis, because it was in a political crisis, as shown by the
advance of fascism and war, because communists were the best
anti-fascists, and lastly, because of the direct appeal of the Soviet
Union. And marxism consequently advanced overwhelmingly in the
form of a strengthening of communist parties.
The most popular marxist case against capitalism was that it
would not work ; against liberal bourgeois democracy, that it was
ceasing to exist, being replaced by fascism. I do not say that this was
all of the marxist analysis, but it was certainly the part which struck
home most immediately. None of these three powerful arguments
operate very strongly today in the developed capitalist countries.
Why then did marxism not merely survive, but in many ways
revive in the past ten years ? Clearly the first conclusion is, that its
strength does not depend on such elementary failures of capitalism as
mass unemployment and economic collapse. Of course in countries
where the case against capitalism (in the form of imperialism or
neo-imperialism) remains obvious, where starvation and misery are
widespread, the arguments for marxism are much simpler. But just
because they are not so simple in Britain and France as in Peru and
India, I am in this talk concentrating on the situation in the
advanced capitalist countries.
Yet having established that marxism flourishes today, we must
nevertheless look at the peculiar situation in which its revival is
taking place. Not to beat about the bush, just because it is so entirely
different from that of the I 93os and I 94os, a general trend towards
marxism is combined with a disintegration of the traditional marxist
analysis. In the years immediately after the war attempts were still
being made to maintain the old arguments. Capitalist stability, it
was said, was not going to last. Well, perhaps in the long view this is
true, but it has certainly lasted for the best part of twenty years,
I IO
 THE DIALO GUE O N MARXISM

which few marxists expected. The liberation o f the colonial and

semi-colonial peoples, some argued, was a sham. Well, this is
certainly true in the same sense that mere political independence is
not enough, and can lead to an informal type of economic domin­
ation which we now call 'neo-colonialism'. Nevertheless, it has made
a fundamental difference to the political configuration of most parts
. of the world, which few marxists predicted or were immediately
prepared for.
The advance of socialism, most of us thought, would not neces­
sarily be the unaided work of the communists, but it would certainly
depend on the efforts of a single united worldwide communist
movement organized round the Soviet Union. But for various
reasons this single world communist movement has tended to
develop tensions within it, and even to split, and our regrets do not
alter the facts. Other ways of national and social liberation, perhaps
even of achieving socialism, emerged in some colonial and semi­
colonial countries independently of the communists, or where the
communists were so weak as not to play a major role. Lastly, within
marxism itself the end of stalinism brought a major crisis, and much
rethinking. This is the setting for the 'dialogue on marxism' which is
my subject.
This dialogue therefore takes two major forms : a discussion
between marxist and non-marxists, and a discussion between differ­
ent kinds of marxists, or rather between marxists holding different
views on various theoretical and practical topics, both within
communist parties, between supporters of rival communist parties
(in some rather unfortunate countries) and between communist and
non-communist marxists. None of these forms is new. For instance,
until the first great split within the marxist movements during and
after the first world war and the October revolution, it was accepted
that a constant process of debate was normal within the social
democratic parties.
Even the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party did not
actually split organizationally until just before the first world war,
though we have mistakenly learned to think of bolsheviks and
mensheviks as separate much earlier. And, as we are now remember­
ing, even after the revolution discussion between widely different
viewpoints on ideological and practical matters was accepted as
normal in the Soviet Communist Party and the international
communist movement until, certainly, around I g3 0. Still, for a
III
 REVOLUTION ARIES

generation - say from I 930 to I 956 - the dialogue of marxism

atrophied.
This applies both to the dialogue between marxists and non­
marxists and between different views within marxism. As for the
non-marxists, we were very keen to confront them, to tell them
what marxism was, to expound and propagate it, to polemize
against its adversaries. But we did not believe that there was
anything we could learn from them ourselves. A conversation in
which one partner is expected to listen and the other not, is not a
dialogue. The terms in which we spoke of such confrontations
reflected this. We spoke of the 'battle of ideas', of 'partisanship' in
intellectual discussion, even - at the peak of sectarianism in the
early I 95os - of 'bourgeois' versus 'proletarian' science.1
Increasingly we eliminated all elements other than those of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin or what had been accepted as
orthodox in the Soviet Union : any theories of art other than
'socialist realism', any psychology other than Pavlov's, even at
times any biology other than Lysenko's. Hegel was pushed out of
marxism, as in the Short History of the CPS U, even Einstein roused
suspicions, not to mention 'bourgeois' social science as a whole. The
more unconvincing our own official beliefs were, the less we could
afford a dialogue, and it is interesting that we spoke more often of
the 'defence' of marxism than of its power to penetrate. And of
course this was natural. How could we discuss, say, the history of
the Soviet Union, if we left Trotsky out of it, or thought of him as a
foreign agent ? At most we could write books and reviews proving
to ourselves that we need not listen to those who took a different
view.
After Stalin it became increasingly clear that this would not do,
and for two reasons : first, because it deprived socialism itself of
important tools of research and planning, as notably in economics
and the social sciences. (One of the ironies of the situation was, that
some of the economic ideas which we deprived ourselves of had
actually been developed by marxists in Russia during the I 92os, for

1 A French communist philosopher and critic has written as follows of this

period : 'In our philosophic memory we recall this as the time of the intellectuals
in arms, pursuing error into all its hiding places, as the time when we philosophers
wrote no books, but turned every book into politics, and cut the world - arts,
literature, philosophy, science - with a single blade into the pitiless blor.o; of class
division' (L. Althusser, Pour Marx, Paris, 1 965, p. 1 2 ) .

1 12
 THE DIALOGUE O N MARXISM

instance, much of the modern theory of economic development and

the techniques of planning and national accounting.) Second,
because we largely deprived ourselves of marxism as a means of
propaganda. People might well, as during the war in resistance
movements, join communist parties for class reasons or because
there were the best fighters against Hitler. They might then become
marxists, and our very effective methods of education helped them
to do so. But very few people after the I 93os became communists
because of the scientific power of Marx's ideas.
As for the discussion between different kinds of marxists, for a
generation this hardly seemed to arise. Most marxists were com­
munists : in or very close to the communist parties. Those who were
not, were - or seemed - negligible, and indeed were often
unknown, because they represented no important movements. And
we vaguely assumed that those who were no longer communists, or
who had at one time or another parted company with Lenin, had
either ceased to be marxists then, or had somehow never been 'real'
marxists. We begged a lot of questions in this way, but they did not
seem to be important questions. Plekhanov, for instance, was the
father of marxism in Russia and we read some of him with
admiration, as Lenin had dJne. We did not read th9se writings of
his which did not agree with Lenin, because they were not
available, and even had they been (like Kautsky's later writings) ,
w e would - I think understandably - have judged that they must
be wrong, because he himself had been so obviously proven wrong
by history. Conversely, we assumed that all those who wrote under
the auspices of the Communist Party were marxists, which is by no
means inevitable. We were wrong on both counts.
In Britain the impossibility of maintaining this attitude became
obvious after I 956, when a high proportion of marxist intellectuals
left the Communist Party. It was obviously impossible to argue
seriously that, say, Christopher Hill stopped being a marxist
historian at the moment when he stopped holding a party card,
implausible to argue that he had never been a marxist, and
meaningless to argue that he had left the party because at some
stage in the past he had stopped being a marxist without telling
anyone about it including himself. We had to learn to live with the
fact that the marxist intellectuals who were in the Communist
Party were only a part - and not as in the past the overwhelming
majority - of the intellectuals who called themselves marxists.
I I3
 REVOLUTIONARIES

The development of different trends within the communist

movement made the old assumption even less tenable. It is quite
true that a number of ex-communists also became ex-marxists and
indeed anti-marxists in due course, as had always happened, and
this seemed to justify the old attitude. But equally, and especially in
the past ten years, we have found plenty of non-marxists becoming
marxists (or calling themselves marxists) without ever joining, or
wanting to join, the Communist Party. In fact today it is impossible
to make the simple statement on which many of us were brought
up : there is one and only one 'correct' marxism and it is to be
found in Communist Parties.
This does not mean that there is no 'correct' marxism. Only, it
cannot be any longer institutionally defined, and it is by no means as
easy to know what in any instance it is, as we once thought. In saying
that the discussion is open among marxists I am not saying that on
any point it can never conclude, though I think I would say that
discussion on some points (not always the same) must go on
indefinitely, because marxism is a scientific method, and in the
sciences discussion - and discussion between people holding different
views on the basis of science - is the only and permanent method of
progress. Each problem solved simply produces more problems for
further discussion.
But what I am also saying is that, at present, opening questions is
much more important than closing them, even if it were easier to
close them than seems likely just now. I may suspect - and I do
suspect - that a Jot of the people now cal1ing themselves marxist
aren't, and a lot of theories being put forward under marxist auspices
are very far from Marx. But this applies to marxists in communist
parties or in socialist countries just as much as to marxists outside
both. And anyway, we must also ask ourselves which is at present
more important, to define what marxism isn't - which will sooner or
later sort itself out anyway - or to discover, or rediscover what it is.
I think it is the latter, certainly that is the more difficult task.
For much of marxism must be rethought and rediscovered, and
not only by communists. The post-Stalin period has not answered
questions, it has asked them. If I may quote a French communist
intellectual :
Those who impute to Stalin not only his crimes and faults, but also all our
disappointments of all kinds, may well find themselves disconcerted by the
discovery that the end of philosophic dogmatism has not given us back

I 14
 T H E D IA L O GUE O N M A R X I S M

marxist philosophy . • . I t has produced a genuine freedom fo r research, but

also a sort of fever. Some people have rushed to call philosophy what is only
the ideological commentary on their feeling of liberation and on their taste
for freedom. But temperatures go down as surely as stones thrown into the
air. What the end of dogmatism has done is to give us back the right to make
an exact inventory of our intellectual possessions, to name both our wealth
and our poverty, to think out and to formulate in public our problems, and
to set about the rigorous task of real research. 2

Communists increasingly realize that what they learned to believe

and to repeat was not just 'marxism', but marxism as developed by
Lenin, as frozen, simplified and sometimes distorted under Stalin in
the Soviet Union. That 'marxism' is not a body of finished theories
and discoveries, but a process of development ; that Marx's own
thought, for instance, went on developing throughout his life. That
marxism doubtless has potential answers, but often no actual answers
to the specific problems we face, partly because the situation has
changed since Marx and Lenin, partly because neither of them may
actually have said anything about certain problems which existed in
their time, and are important to us.
Non-communist marxists must learn that the errors, oversimplifi­
cations and distortions of the Stalin period, or even of the entire
period of the Communist International, do not mean that no
valuable and important contributions were made to marxism, in
this period and in the international communist movement. There
are no shortcuts to marxism : neither the appeal to Lenin against
Stalin, nor to Marx, nor to the young Marx against the older Marx.
There is only hard, and long, and in the present circumstances
perhaps inconclusive work.
Fortunately all this is widely recognized today and the work is
going on. To mention only the very striking revitalization of theory
within communist parties. This has been most impressive in recent
years, both inside and outside socialist countries, though it has been
held up by the reluctance of older cadres, whose career was identi­
fied with stalinism, to admit the mistakes they were associated with.
(This is particularly marked in the field of the history of the
communist movements themselves. With the exception of the Italian
Communist Party, which has encouraged the frank and self-critical
analysis of its own history and that of the Soviet Union, I can think of
no communist party which has written a scientifically acceptable
9 Ibid�, p. 2 1 .
 REVO LUTIONARIES

history o f itself - certainly neither the French nor the Soviet party -
and several, such as ours, which has shied away from the task of
writing its history at all.)3
There is still in many communist parties a great deal of what
might be called darning holes in socks. For instance, Roger
Garaudy's phrase 'realism without limits' does not face the question
whether the aesthetic theories we used to accept as marxist are valid
or not ; it merely allows us to admire Kafka, or Joyce, or other
people who used to be taboo in the heyday of 'socialist realism' by
pretending that they are 'realists' too in some indefinable sense.
There is even in communist parties, particularly in eastern Europe, a
tendency to go in for simple empiricism and to cover the results by
saying 'of course we are marxists'.
I think, and I have the authority of the late Oscar Lange for
thinking so, that some of the recent innovations in Soviet economic
theory are not - or not yet - marxist, but simply the insertions of bits
of liberal economic theory such as marginal utility analysis into the
great holes left open for so many years by the failure of Soviet
economists to do their job. This is the sort of thing which is rightly
criticized by the Chinese, though I confess that their own solution,
which seems to me to be that of going back to the simple primary­
school marxism of the old days, is in its way just as much an evasion
of the real problems of analysis.
Nevertheless, there is real and lively theoretical activity. For
instance, one of the most promising signs is the revival of discussion of
Marx's so-called Asiatic mode of production which has been going on
since about 1 960 in France, Hungary and the GDR, Britain,
Czechoslovakia, Japan, Egypt and several other countries, and since
1 964 also in the Soviet Union and even - though critically - in
China. For we must remember that this concept of Marx was
abandoned by the international communist movement between 1 928
(when the Chinese criticized it) and the early 1 930s (when it was
banned in the Soviet Union) and has since been beyond the
theoretical pale. 4
What is the nature of this discussion today ? It is, obviously, about

3 I am not underestimating the genuine efforts at self-critical analysis of works

like Palme Dutt's Three Internationals. But they certainly do not go as far as it is
possible and necessary to go today.
4 For a survey of these discussions, see G. Sofri, Il modo di produzione asiatico,

Turin, 1 969.

1 16
 T H E D IA L O G U E O N M A R X I S M

the applicability o f the marxist analysis to the world today ; o r rather,

since it plainly cannot be applied literally in the old form, about the
modifications in the analysis which must be made to fit the world
today.5 And the 'world today' must include the socialist as well as the
non-socialist world. There has been very little marxist analysis of that.
In political terms this means it is about the perspectives for the victory
of socialism in non-socialist countries and of its further development
in socialist ones. This implies, but does not exhaust, the discussion of a
number of more theoretical problems. It is evident that some of these
have no very direct or discernible relevance to immediate or any
other politics, though this was not always recognized. For instance,
whether we finally decide that the history of China at some time in
the past can be analyzed in terms of Marx's 'asiatic mode' or not
will make no difference to the politics of the Chinese Communist
Party now or in the future. But though a distinction between the
theoretical and practical aspects of these debates can be made, in
reality they cannot be sharply separated.
Politically, it seems to me that the major problem in non-socialist
countries is that of how many and what different roads there are to
socialism. Since the October revolution there has been a tendency to
assume that there was basically at any time only one, though with
local variations. The centralized organization of the world com­
munist movement as well as its later domination by the CPSU only
emphasized this rigidity. It still haunts the Soviet-Chinese discussions.
Now two observations must be made, of which one poses fewer prob­
lems for the marxists than the other. The first is that, quite obviously,
the road to socialism cannot be the same in, say, Britain and Brazil, or
its perspectives equally bright or gloomy in Switzerland as in
Colombia. The task ofmarxists is to divide the countries of the world
into realistic groupings and to analyze properly the very different
conditions of progress in each group, without trying to impose any
uniformity (such as 'peaceful transition' or 'insurrection') on all of
them. This is not so difficult in principle, but as it involves j ettisoning
a lot of past analyses and policies, it is not so easy in practice.
Much more difficult is to recognize that ways of progress to
liberation and even socialism may have developed, in which the
6 Anyone who has any doubts on this score should read again so typical a marxist

statement of the 1 930s as John Strachey's Whyyou should be a Socialist, or of the early
I 95os as Palme Dutt's Crisis ef Britain, or for that matter Kuusinen's Fundamentals oJ

Marxism-Leninism.

117
 R E V O .L U T I O N A R I E S

traditional communist parties o r labour movements play only a

subordinate part. I am thinking here of cases such as Cuba, Algeria,
Ghana and perhaps others. Or in more general terms to ask ourselves
whether our ideas of the role of communist parties in the advance to
socialism may not have to be rethought in certain cases. For instance,
as a current discussion in the Italian CP suggests, whether the split
between social democratic and communist parties which arose after
1 9 1 4 is any longer justifiable in certain countries today. In posing
such questions, or rather in stating that they are being posed, I am
not giving or even suggesting any answers. I am merely saying that
such problems are no longer avoidable by closing our eyes to their
existence.
Within the socialist world (and in so far as we think about future
socialism in non-socialist countries) , several problems are also posed,
whether we like it or not, by reality. They are economic problems
such as the best agrarian policy in such countries (given the rather
striking failures of most of them in this field) , or the best ways of
economic planning, allocation of resources and goods, etc. They are
political problems such as the best forms of organizing the insti­
tutions of such countries (given the very striking drawbacks of such
institutions in many of them) . They are problems of bureaucracy, or
freedom of expression, etc. They are also, alas, international prob­
lems, as the difficult relations between different socialist states show
only too clearly ; including above all (as Togliatti pointed out in his
Memorandum) the role of nationalism in socialist countries. Here
again in stating that the problems exist, I am not implying any
answers must not be begged by phrases such as that such things are
due to hangovers from the pre-socialist past, that they are due to
revisionism or dogmatism, or that they would all disappear if things
were 'liberalized'.
All these problems imply theoretical discussion, and in some cases
the willingness to break with long-established attitudes (as Lenin for
one always was) , or to enter entirely new territory. We are not used
to this, so much so that we forget that marxists have done so in the
past. For instance after the October revolution in Russia they had to
enter a territory virtually unsurveyed by Marx, except in a few very
general sentences, namely the problem of economic development in
backward countries. And because they did so, marxism is today a
genuine world movement, for after all, what gives it its most obvious
appeal in the world today is, the analysis of the imperialist phase of
I I8
 THE DIALO GUE ON MARXISM

capitalism, which is very much post-Marx, and the discovery of ways

of turning backward countries into modern ones, which is the major
theoretical discovery of the Soviet marxists in the 1 92os. Moreover,
some of these things also bring us back to the dialogue between
marxists and non-marxists, for they involve learning from the
achievements of non-marxist scientists. It is irrelevant that, if
marxism had not ossified, it would itself have kept abreast and no
doubt ahead of the best achievements of science. In many ways it did
not, and we must now learn as well as teach.
This brings me to my conclusion. We are in a situation in which
marxism is splintered, both politically and theoretically. We must, for
the foreseeable future, learn to live with it. It is no good regretting
the days when it wasn't. We are in a situation where marxism has to
catch up in two ways. It has to liquidate the heritage of the sort of
intellectual ice-age through which it passed (which does not mean
that it should automatically reject everything that was said and done
during that age) , and we have to absorb all that is best in the sciences
since we stopped serious thinking on the subject. I am deliberately
using brutal terms, for they need to be used. We must ask as well as
explain; above all we must ask ourselves. We must be prepared to be
wrong. We must stop pretending to have all the answers, because we
obviously haven't. And more than anything else, we must learn
again to use marxism as a scientific method.
This we have not done. We have persistently done two things
which are incompatible with any scientific method ; and we have
done them not just since the later days of Stalin, but earlier. First we
have known the answers and just confirmed them by research ;
second we have confused theory and political debate. Both are
deadly. We said or instance : 'We know the transition from
feudalism to capitali::im proceeds by revolution everywhere', because
Marx says so, and because if it didn't, then history might not after all
proceed by revolutions but by gradualism and the social democrats
might be right. Therefore our research will show (a) that the
revolution of the 1 640s in Britain was bourgeois ; (b) that before it
Britain was a feudal country ; and (c) that thereafter it was a
capitalist country. I do not say that the conclusions were wrong,
though (b) seems to me to be most doubtful ; but this was no way of
arriving at them. For if it turned out that the facts did not check
with the conclusions, then we simply said, to hell with the facts.
There are historical reasons why we said so, going back to before
1 19
 REVOLUTIONARIES
I 9 I 4, but they do not concern u s a t this moment. And whether o r not
the facts will suit communists or social democrats has nothing to do
with marxism. The fact that the conditions of the British working
class are not absolutely deteriorating throughout history suits liberals
and social democrats but not revolutionaries. We would be fools and
not marxists if for this reason we denied it. Marxism is a tool for
changing the world by knowledge, which we as politicians then use.
It is not a means of scoring debating points in politics. Many of our
most talented older communists have wasted much of their time as
writers of marxist theory by failing to observe this �stinction.
We must go back to marxism as a scientific method. Perhaps the
most promising sign of the present world - and British - situation,
which is otherwise not very promising, is that more and more
marxists are going back to it in this way. And the proof of what can
be achieved is the fact that socialism, based on marxism, has made
most progress in the world even at the period when marxism did its
best to make itself ineffective.
( I 966)

1 20
 12

L E N I N AND THE
' A R I S T O C RA CY O F L AB O U R '

The following brief essay is a contribution to the discussion of Lenin's

thought, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
The subject is one which can be conveniently treated by a British
marxist, since the concept of an 'aristocracy of labour' is one which
Lenin clearly derived from the history of British nineteenth-century
capitalism. His concrete references to the 'aristocracy of labour' as a
stratum of the working class appear to be exclusively drawn from
Britain (though in his study notes on imperialism he also notes
similar phenomena in the 'white' parts of the British Empire) . The
term itself is ahnost certainly derived from a passage by Engels
written in 1 885 and reprinted in the introduction to the 1 892 edition
of the Conditions of the Working Class in I 844 which speaks of the great
English trade unions as forming 'an aristocracy among the working
class'.
The actual phrase may be Engels's, but the concept was familiar
in English politico-social debate, particularly in the 1 880s. It was
generally accepted that the working class in Britain at this period
contained a favoured stratum - a minority but a numerically large
one - which was most usually identified with the 'artisans' (i.e. the
skilled employed craftsmen and workers) and more especially with
those organized in trade unions or other working-class organizations.
This is the sense in which foreign observers also used the term, e.g.
Schulze-Gaevernitz, whom Lenin quotes with approval on this point
in the celebrated eighth chapter of Imperialism. This conventional
identification was not entirely valid, but, like the general use of the
concept of an upper working-class stratum, reflected an evident
social reality. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin 'invented' a
labour aristocracy. It existed only too visibly in the second half of
121
5-R • •
 R EV O L UT I O N A R I E S

nineteenth-century Britain. Moreover, if i t existed anywhere else, it

was clearly much less visible or significant. Lenin assumed that, until
the period of imperialism, it existed nowhere else.
The novelty of Engels's argument lay elsewhere. He held that
this aristocracy of labour was made possible by the industrial
world monopoly of Britain, and would therefore disappear or be
pushed closer to the rest of the proletariat with the ending of this
monopoly. Lenin followed Engels on this point, and indeed in the
years immediately preceding 1 9 1 4, when the British labour
movement was becoming radicalized, tended to stress the second
half of Engels's argument, e.g. in his articles English Debates on a
Liberal Workers' Policy ( 1 9 1 2) , The British Labour Movement in r9r2,
and In England, the Pitiful Results of Opportunism ( 1 9 1 3) . While not
doubting for a moment that the labour aristocracy was the basis of
the opportunism and 'Liberal-Labourism' of the British movement,
he did not appear as yet to emphasize the international im­
plications of the argument. For instance, he did not apparently
use it in his analysis of the social roots of revisionism (see Marxism
anrl Revisionism, 1 908, and Differences in the European Labour Movement,
1 9 1 0) . Here he argued rather that revisionism, like anarcho­
syndicalism, was due to the constant creation on the margins of
developing capitalism, of certain middle strata - small workshops,
domestic workers etc. - which are in turn constantly cast into
the ranks of the proletariat, so that petty-bourgeois tendencies
inevitably infiltrate into proletarian parties.
The line of thought which he derived from his knowledge of the
labour aristocracy was at this stage somewhat different, and it is to
be noted that he maintained it, in part at least, to the end of his
political life. Here it is perhaps relevant to observe that Lenin drew
his knowledge of the phenomenon not only from the writings of
Marx and Engels, who commented frequently on the British labour
movement, and from his personal acquaintance with marxists in
England (which he visited six times between 1 902 and 1 9 1 1 ) , but
also from the fullest and best-informed work on the 'aristocratic'
trade unions of the nineteenth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's
Industrial Democracy. This important book he knew intimately, having
translated it in his Siberian exile. It provided him, incidentally, with
an immediate understanding of the links between the British Fabians
and Bernstein : 'The original source of a number of Bernstein's
contentions and ideas', he wrote on 1 3 September 1 899, to a
122
 ' '
LENIN AND THE ARIST O CRACY O F LABOUR

correspondent, 'is in the latest books written by the Webbs' . Lenin

continued to quote information drawn from the Webbs many years
later, and specifically refers to Industrial Democracy in the course of his
argument in What Is To Be Done ?
Two propositions may be derived in part, or mainly from the
experience of the British labour aristocracy. The first was 'that all
subservience to spontaneity of the labour movement, all belittling of
the role of "the conscious element", of the role of Social Democracy
means, whether one likes it or not, the growth of influence of
bourgeois ideology among the workers' . The second was that a
purely trade unionist struggle 'is necessarily a struggle according to
trade, because conditions of labour differ very much in different
trades, and consequently, the fight to improve these conditions can
on1y be conducted in respect of each trade'. ( What ls To Be Done? The
second argument is supported by direct reference to the Webbs.)
The first of these propositions appears to be based on the view
that, under capitalism, bourgeois ideology is hegemonic, unless
deliberately counteracted by 'the conscious element' . This important
observation leads us far beyond the mere questions of the labour
aristocracy, and we need not pursue it further here. The second
proposition is more closely linked to the aristocracy of labour. It
argues that given the 'law of uneven development' within capitalism
- i.e. the diversity of conditions in different industries, regions, etc. of
the same economy - a purely 'economist' labour movement must
tend to fragment the working class into 'selfish' ('petty bourgeois')
segments each pursuing its own interest, if necessary in alliance with
its own employers, at the expense of the rest. (Lenin several times
quoted the case of the 'Birmingham Alliances' of the 1 890s, attempts
at a joint union-management bloc to maintain prices in various
metal trades ; he derived this information almost certainly also from
the Webbs.) Consequently such a purely 'economist' movement
must tend to disrupt the unity and political consciousness of the
proletariat and to weaken or counteract its revolutionary role.
This argument is a]so very general. We can regard the aristocracy
of labour as a special case of this general mode. It arises when the
economic circumstances of capitalism make it possible to grant
significant concessions to its proletariat, within which certain strata
of workers manage, by means of their special scarcity, skill, strategic
position, organizational strength, etc. to establish notably better
conditions for themselves than the rest. Hence there may be historic
I 23
 REVOLUTIONARIES

situations, as in late-nineteenth-century England, when the aristo­

cracy of labour can almost be identified with the effective trade
union movement as Lenin sometimes came close to suggesting.
But if the argument is in principle more general, there can be no
doubt that what was in Lenin's mind when he used it, was the
aristocracy of labour. Time and again we find him using phrases
such as the following : 'the petty-bourgeois craft spirit which prevails
among this aristocracy of labour' ( The Session of the International
Socialist Bureau,' 1 908) , the English trade unions, insular, aristocratic,
philistinely selfish', 'the English pride themselves on their "prac­
ticalness" and their dislike of general principles ; this is an expression
of the craft spirit in the labour movement' (English Debates on a Liberal
Workers' Policy, 1 9 1 2 ) , and 'this aristocracy of labour . . . isolated
itself from the mass of the proletariat in close, selfish, craft unions'
(Harry Quelch, 1 9 1 3) . Moreover, much later, and in a carefully
considered programmatic statement - in fact in his Draft Theses on the
Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International
( 1 920), the connection is made with the greatest clarity :

The industrial workers cannot fulfil their world-historical mission of

emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if these
workers concern themselves exclusively with their narrow craft, narrow
trade interests, and smugly confine themselves to care and concern for
improving their own, sometimes tolerable, petty-bourgeois conditions. This
is exactly what happens in many advanced countries to the 'labour
aristocracy' which serves as the base of the alleged Socialist parties of the
Second International.

This quotation, combining the earlier and the later ideas of Lenin
about the aristocracy oflabour, leads us naturally from the one to the
other. These later writings are familiar to all marxists. They date in
the main from the period 1 9 1 4-1 7, and form part of Lenin's attempt
to provide a coherent marxist explanation for the outbreak of the
war and especially the simultaneous and traumatic collapse of the
Second International and most of its constituent parties. They are
stated most fully in the famous Chapter 8 of Imperialism, and the
article Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, written a little later
(autumn 1 9 1 6) and complementing it.
The argument of Imperialism is well known though the glosses of
Imperialism and the Split are not so widely known. Broadly speaking it
runs as follows. Thanks to the peculiar position ofBritish capitalism -
1 24
 ' '
LENIN AND THE ARISTO CRACY OF LAB OUR

'vast colonial possessions and monopolist position in the world

markets' - the British working class tended already in the mid­
nineteenth century to be divided into a favoured minority of labour
aristocrats and a much larger lower stratum. The upper stratum
'becomes bourgeois', while at the same time 'a section of the
proletariat allows itself to be led by people who are bought by the
bourgeoisie, or at least are in their pay'. In the epoch of imperialism
what was once a purely British phenomenon is now found in all the
imperialist powers. Hence opportunism, degenerating into social­
chauvinism, characterized all the leading parties of the Second
International. However, 'opportunism cannot now triumph in the
working class movement of any country for decades as it did in
England' because world monopoly has now to be shared between a
number of competing countries. This imperialism, while general­
izing the phenomenon of the aristocracy of labour, also provides the
conditions for its disappearance.
The relatively cursory passages of Imperialism are expanded into a
rather fuller argument in Imperialism and the Split. The existence of a
labour aristocracy is explained by the super-profits of monopoly,
which allows the capitalists 'to devote a part (and not a small one
at that !) to bribe their own workers, to create something like an
alliance between the workers of a given nation and their capitalists
against the other countries'. This 'bribery' operates through trusts,
the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc. (i.e. something like joint
monopolies between a given capitalism and its workers) . The
amount of the potential bribe is substantial - Lenin estimated it as
perhaps one hundred million francs out of a billion - and so, under
certain circumstances, is the stratum which benefits from it. How­
ever, 'the question as to how this little sop is distributed among
labour ministers, "labour representatives" . . . labour members of war
industrial committees, labour officials, workers organized in narrow
craft unions, office employees, etc. etc. is a secondary question'. The
remainder of the argument, with exceptions to be noted below,
amplifies but does not substantially alter, the argument of Imperialism.
It is essential to recall that Lenin's analysis was attempting to
explain a specific historic situation - the collapse of the Second
International - and to buttress specific political conclusions which he
drew from it. He argued first, that since opportunism and social
chauvinism represented only a minority of the proletariat, revolu­
tionaries must 'go down lower and deeper, to the real masses', and
I 25
 RE V O L U T I O N A R I E S

second, that the 'bourgeois labour parties' were now irrevocably sold
to the bourgeoisie, and would neither disappear before the revo­
lution nor in some way 'return' to the revolutionary proletariat,
though they might 'swear by the name of Marx' wherever marxism
was popular among the workers. Hence revolutionaries must reject a
factitious unity between the revolutionary proletarian and the
opportunist philistine trend within the labour movement. In brief,
the international movement had to be split, so that a communist
labour movement could replace a social democratic one.
These conclusions applied to a specific historical situation, but the
analysis supporting them was more general. Since it was part of a
specific political polemic as well as a broader analysis, some of the
ambiguities of Lenin's argument about imperialism and the labour
aristocracy are not to be scrutinized too closely. As we have seen, he
himself pushed certain aspects of it aside as 'secondary'. Never­
theless, the argument is in certain respects unclear or ambiguous.
Most of its difficulties arise out of Lenin's insistence that the
corrupted sector of the working class is and can only be a minority,
or even, as he sometimes suggests polemically, a tiny minority, as
against the masses who are not 'infected with "bourgeois respect­
ability" ' and to whom the marxists must appeal, for 'this is the
essence of marxian tactics' .
In the first place, it is evident that the corrupted minority could
be, even on Lenin's assumptions, a numerically large sector of the
working class and an even larger one of the organized labour
movement. Even ifit only amounted to 20 per cent of the proletariat,
like the labour organizations in late-nineteenth-century England or
in 1 9 1 4 Germany (the illustration is Lenin's) , it could not simply be
written off politically, and Lenin was too realistic to do so. Hence a
certain hesitation in his formulations. It was not the labour aristo­
cracy as such, but only 'a stratum' of it which had deserted
economically to the bourgeoisie (Imperialism and the Split) . It is not
clear which stratum. The only types of workers specifically men­
tioned are the functionaries, politicians, etc. of the reformist labour
movements. These are indeed minorities - tiny minorities - cor­
rupted and sometimes frankly sold to the bourgeoisie, but the
question why they command the support of their followers is not
discussed.
In the second place, the position of the mass of the workers is left in
some ambiguity. It is clear that the mechanism of exploiting a
nz6
 L E N I N A N D T H E ' A R I S T O C R A C Y OF LAB O U R '

monopoly of markets, which Lenin regards as the basis of 'opportun­

ism', functions in ways which cannot confine its benefits to one
stratum only of the working class. There is good reason to suppose
that the 'something like an alliance' between the workers of the given
nation and their capitalists against the other countries (and which
Lenin illustrates by the Webbs' 'Birmingham Alliances') implies
some benefits for all workers, though obviously much larger ones for
the well-organized and strategically strong labour aristocrats among
them. It is indeed true that the world monopoly of nineteenth­
century British capitalism may have provided the lower proletarian
strata with no significant benefits, while it provided the labour
aristocracy with substantial ones. But this was because there was,
under the conditions of competitive, liberal 'laissez-faire' capitalism
and inflation no mechanism other than the market (including the
collective bargaining of the few proletarian groups capable of
applying it) , for distributing the benefits of world monopoly to the
British workers.
But under the conditions of imperialism and monopoly capitalism
this was no longer so. Trusts, price maintenance, 'alliances', etc. did
provide a means of distributing concessions more generally to the
workers affected. Moreover, the role of the state was changing, as
Lenin was aware. 'Lloyd Georgism' (which he discussed most
perceptively in Imperialism and the Split) aimed at 'securing fairly
substantial sops for the obedient workers, in the shape of social
reforms (insurance, etc.) ' . It is evident that such reforms were likely
to benefit the 'non-aristocratic' workers relatively more than the
already comfortably situated 'aristocrats'.
Finally, Lenin's theory of imperialism argues that the 'handful of
the richest, privileged nations' turned into 'parasites on the body of
the rest of mankind', i.e. into collective exploiters, and suggests a
division of the world into 'exploiting' and 'proletarian' nations.
Could the benefits of such a collective exploitation be confined
entirely to a privileged layer of the metropolitan proletariat ? Lenin
was already keenly aware that the original Roman proletariat was a
collectively parasitic class. Writing about the Stuttgart Congress of
the International in November I go7 he observed :
The class of those who own nothing but do not labour either is incapable
of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains
the whole of society, has the power to bring about a successful social
revolution. And now we see that, as the result of a far-reaching colonial

I 27
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

policy the European proletariat has partly reached a situation where i t i s not
its work that maintains the whole of society but that of the people of the
colonies who are practically enslaved . . . In certain countries these circum­
stances create the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat of
one country or another with colonial chauvinism ; of course this may
perhaps be only a temporary phenomenon, but one must nevertheless clearly
recognize the evil and understand its causes . . .

'Marx frequently referred to a very significant saying of Sismondi's

to the effect that the proletarians of the ancient world lived at the
expense of society whereas modern society lives at the expense of the
proletarians' ( l 907) . Nine years later, in the context of a later
discussion, Imperialism and the Split still recalls that the 'Roman
proletariat lived at the expense of society'.
Lenin's analysis of the social roots of reformism is often presented
as if it dealt only with the formation of a labour aristocracy. It is of
course undeniable that Lenin stressed this aspect of his analysis far
more than any other, and for purposes of political argument, almost
to the exclusion of any other. It is also clear that he hesitated to
follow up other parts of his analysis, which seemed to have no
bearing on the political point he was at this time overwhelmingly
concerned to make. However, a close reading of his writings shows
that he did consider other aspects of the problem, and that he was
aware of some of the difficulties of an excessively one-sided 'labour
aristocratic' approach. Today, when it is possible to separate what is
of permanent relevance in Lenin's argument from what reflects the
limits of his information or the requirements of a special political
situation, we are in a position to see his writings in historical
perspective.
If we try to judge his work on the 'aristocracy of labour' in such a
perspective, we may well conclude that his writings of 1 9 1 4-16 are
somewhat less satisfactory than the profound line of thought which
he pursued consistently from What Is To Be Done ? to the Drojt Theses
on the Agrarian Question of l 920. In fact, though much of the analysis
of a 'labour aristocracy' is applicable to the period of imperialism,
the classic nineteenth-century (British) model ofit, which formed the
basis of Lenin's thinking on the subject, was ceasing to provide an
adequate guide to the reformism of, at least, the British labour
movement by 1 9 1 4, though as a stratum of the working class it was
probably at its peak in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
century.
1 28
 L E N I N A N D T H E ' A RI S T O C R A C Y O F L A B O U R '

On the other hand, the more general argument about the dangers
of 'spontaneity' and 'selfish' economism in the trade union move­
ment, though illustrated by the historic example of the late­
nineteenth-century British labour aristocracy, retains all its force. It
is indeed one of the most fundamental and permanently illuminating
contributions of Lenin to marxism.

I 29
 13

R E V I S I O N I SM

The history of ideas is a tempting subject for the intellectual, for after
all it deals with his own trade. It is also an extremely misleading and
confusing one, and never more so than when vested interest,
practical politics or other untheoretical matters are involved. No­
body will understand the split between the eastern and western
churches in terms of theological discussion alone, oi: expect a purely
intellectual history of the debate on cigarettes and lung cancer to
reveal anything except the power of bias and self-delusion. Marx's
famous reminder that it is not men's consciousness that determines
their material existence but the other way round is never more to the
point than where the printed word seems to be the primary reality,
even though in fact, but for certain practical phenomena, it would
not exist or be significant. It was not the intellectual merits of
Keynes's General Theory which defeated Treasury orthodoxy, but the
great depression and its practical consequences.
'Revisionism' in the history of socialist and communist movements
illustrates the dangers of an isolated history of ideas particularly well,
because it has always been almost exclusively an affair of intellec­
tuals. But the number of articles, books and authors which a political
tendency produces is notoriously a poor measure of its practical
importance, except of course among intellectuals. Guild socialism,
an articulate and much described creed, deserves at best a footnote
in the actual history of the British labour movement. Trotskyism in
the Soviet Russia of the 1 920s had more numerous and abler
spokesmen than the 'right-wing deviation', but its actual support
among the party cadres outside the universities was almost certainly
very much less. Conversely, of course, neither the number nor the
nature of the arguments used by theoreticians tells us much about
the actual movements with which they may be associated.
The German Social Democratic Party condemned Bernstein
 R E VI S I O N I S M

almost unanimously, but in fact the policy of its reformist leaders was
if anything more moderate than the one he recommended. The
Hungarian revisionists of 1 956 claimed to return to a purer and more
democratic leninism, but, as Mr W. Griffith rightly points out in one
of the few useful contributions to the subject in the Congress for
Cultural Freedom's symposium Revisionism,1 the actual direction of
events in Hungary during those hectic days was away from any kind
of leninism. In brief, a study of 'revisionism' which is chiefly, as the
present book claims, a set of 'essays in the history of marxist ideas' is
likely to confuse rather than to illuminate.
This is not to deny the interest of the study of ideas as such, though
even in this specialized and rarefied atmosphere we must beware of
the occupational hazard of both the theorists and the heresy-hunters,
that of overestimating the unambiguity and the compelling force of
intellectual concepts. The capacities of the human mind, given
enough incentive, to put ahnost any practical construction on
almost any theory, are easily under-rated. It might seem difficult to
turn orthodox marxism, the specific annunciation of revolution by
the proletariat, into an ideology of gradualism, or of bourgeois
liberalism. But plenty of western social democratic marxists did the
first, by arguing that the time for revolution had not yet arrived
because capitalism had not yet worked itself into its final polariz­
ation, and the Russian 'legal marxists' (who are barely referred to
in this book) did the second, by using Marx's argument that there
was a phase of historical development (namely, now) when liberal
capitalism was progressive and should be encouraged. There were
historical reasons for both these apparently perverse procedures : the
strength of the marxist framework in continental labour movements
which local gradualists (unlike the British Fabians) were loath to
abandon or the absence of any powerful intellectual tradition in
Russia which allowed businessmen to feel self-confident and socially
useful, even for a limited historical space of time. Nevertheless, the
phenomenon of a theory being, without much apparent modifi­
cation, turned into its practical opposite, should warn the enthusias­
tic historian of pure doctrine, as also the believers in post hoc ergo
propter hoc.
It is evidently dangerous to confuse the context of an idea with its
consequences. Thus we know that the 'Hegelian' strain in early
1 Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism, Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas,

London 1 962.
 REVOLUTIO NARIES

marxist analysis ('alienation') has strongly attracted the revisionists

of the I 95os. It enables them to devise a case against capitalism, the
'alienating society' which survives the comforts of the age of
affluence, while at the same time stressing the hum<:tnist aspects of
Marx, his moral passion and concern for freedom. Yet, as Mr Daniel
Bell points out, this argument is relatively new. In the I 930S
'alienation' played a negligible part in, or was absent from, both
orthodox and dissident marxist argument, and the retreat from
Hegel, enshrined in the Short History of the CPS U passed with little
comment. Moreover, the few Hegelian marxists or near-marxists
were either, like Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt group, outside
politics and party struggle or, like Lukacs and Lefebvre, loyal
stalinist communists. Conversely, if unorthodox or 'liberal' and
'gradualist' marxism had any philosophical affiliations it was (as
with Bernstein, the 'legal marxists', and lately with Kolakowski)
Kantian, rather than Hegelian ; a tendency scarcely mentioned in
this book.
Is it therefore likely that what attracted 'revisionists' to the
Hegelian Marx was not so much what they were to find in him in
the I 95os - Lukacs's own deductions from him were far from liberal ­
but the fact that he was defined as heterodox, and that his
champions, exposed to the nagging and thundering of the party
hacks, therefore attracted the critical young. To read 'revisionism'
back into the Marx of I 844 or the Lukacs of I 923 is, to a much
greater extent than either the orthodox or the authors of this
symposium appear to realize, hindsight. It is also to oversimplify the
process by which ideas, some more and some less suitable for the
purpose, are adapted to certain political attitudes, because the
attitude requires the idea rather than the other way round.
Such procedures are not the only ones likely to confuse the reader
of this book who seeks chiefly to discover what 'revisionism' as an
historical phenomenon is about. Though one would not suppose so
from a symposium which ranges impartially over Bernstein and
Trotsky, Bukharin and Otto Bauer, Luxemburg, Plekhanov,
Deborin, Lukacs and Tito, historically 'revisionism' consists of two
relatively brief periods in the doctrinal history of marxism, one
round the turn of the last century, the other since the 1 95os. Both
have certain things in common. Both occurred at times when the
course of events - in particular the strength and prosperity of
capitalism in the western world - appeared to throw grave doubts on
 R E VI S I O N I S M

the predictions of its imminent demise which marxists believed, and

hence on the general analysis on which these were thought to be
based. Both were therefore associated with a 'crisis in marxism' (the
term was coined by T. G. Masaryk in 1 897) , i.e. with attempts to
revise or supplement it, or to look for satisfactory or realistic bases for
socialist action. Both these periods of hesitation proved temporary,
but while they lasted they were chiefly confined to the countries in
which the old-fashioned revolutionary perspectives of marxism had
grown dim or pointless. Those in which they were not remained
largely immune.
As in I 896-1 905 the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians and the
Serbs were the strongest defenders of the old verities of class
struggle and revolutionary forward sweeps, so in the l 95os Asia,
Africa and Latin America remained largely untroubled by the
events which convulsed the communist parties of Europe. It is in
these countries that the Chinese, now the defenders of old truth
against new dilution, have sought or found most of their support
within communist movements.
In both cases, moreover, the trademark 'revisionism' was or ought
to be applied not, as the editor of this volume suggests, to all
unofficial deviations from accepted marxist orthodoxy, but only to
one type : that situated in the political topography of socialism on
the right. This was quite clear in 1 900, when 'revisionism' meant the
marxist Fabianism of Bernstein and was coined to describe it. It
was not so clear in the 1 95os, when orthodox communists leaders
hastened to apply the name, which clearly suggested the abandon­
ment of class struggle, revolution and socialism to all who were fam­
iliar with it, to all dissidents to whom it could be plausibly attached.
Paradoxically in this respect they had much in common with the
present symposium. Nevertheless it is clear in this period also that on
the global issues which divided 'revisionists' from their opponents - the
stability and prospects of capitalism, gradualism versus old-style rev­
olution, the virtues of bourgeois democracy or bourgeois thought,
and the like - the 'revisionists' were those who stood on the right of
the communist spectrum.
Of course they included various degrees of moderation, and it
might well be desirable to confine the name to those who, in theory
or fact, moved from their original leninism to something hard to
distinguish from western social democracy or liberalism, for instance
to Mr Djilas. In practice such a distinction is impossible to maintain
I 33
 REVOLUTIONARIES

clearly, partly because many east European revisionists of this kind

prefer, for obvious reasons, the camouflage of leninist argument,
partly because static distinctions falsify the nature of ideas which are
still in evolution, partly because everyone likes to have some
revisionist on his right wing from whom he can demonstratively
distinguish himself. Nevertheless it has some meaning. Mr Gomulka,
though clearly a right-winger by the standards of classical commun­
ist discussion, was plainly a communist and likely to remain one.
This was not the case with several of the young Polish revisionists of
the Po Prostu circle.
In one respect, of course, the two episodes are unlike. The
revisionism of the I 950S was largely preoccupied with the internal
problems of socialism - especially with stalinism - which did not exist
in 1 900. It therefore became inextricably tangled up with several
traditional debates within the socialist movement such as that
between libertarian and state socialism and with the Soviet con­
troversies of the 1 920s. These had no original connection with
right-wing revisionism. On the contrary, they were often raised by
the utopian or non-utopian left or at all events by those who, like
Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, had impeccable credentials as radical
revolutionists, and vociferous opponents of the original revisionism.
Moreover, in the reaction against stalinism it was natural for
communists to search for precedent and inspiration among non­
stalinist or pre-stalinist marxists, and almost any neglected or
divergent marxist might do. Hence interminable confusion. Thus
stalinist suppression and the soundness of his criticisms of many
Soviet tendencies made Trotsky popular among some revisionists. At
the same time the wing of the communist movement which then
most clearly represented the Trotskyite approach to world revolution
was without doubt the Chinese.
None of these confusions is effectively dissipated by the symposium
of twenty-seven studies, on rather haphazardly chosen subjects,
several already published in one form or another, which Mr Leopold
Labedz has edited. It will give the reader a convenient conspectus of
the work of some relatively undocumented thinkers, some interesting
arguments (e.g. about Lukacs) and some information about writers,
journals or groups of mainly secondary importance in the West.
Except for two lesser chapters on India and Japan, it neglects the
extra-European world entirely. Except for Mr Galli's Italian chap­
ter, it pays little attention to the crises within the western communist
1 34
 REVISIONISM

parties, which are a n obvious part o f the phenomenon o f 'revision­

ism'. Professor Coser in an essay on the United States actually
succeeds in not mentioning the American CP at all, and Mr
Duvignaud, in what is admittedly the most parochial of all the
chapters, leaves us entirely in the dark about the French political
situation - e.g. about the role of the Algerian war in crystallizing
discontent within the CP and omits even such leading dissident
-

marxists as Lucien Goldmann and Serge Mallet.

Some of these omissions are no doubt due to the inevitable
difficulties of editing a symposium, the quickest but also one of the
least satisfactory ways of making a book. Others, however, are due to
the general limitations of the historical approach which this work
appears to represent. We still await the book which will put the
'revisionism' of the 1 950s in its perspective as an historic phen­
omenon. The present collection of essays may feed a temporary
curiosity among amateur 'students of communism' and 'sovieto­
logists', but it is doubtful whether its permanent mark on the
literature of modern communism will be great.
( 1 962)

1 35
 14

T H E PR I N C I PL E O F H O PE

In our age men distrust the western universe and do not expect
much of the future except perhaps Crusoe's luck, a personal island
off the beaten track. To resist the assaults of the large machines
made by and of men, to survive the consequences of collective
human lunacy, are the highest ambitions of Atlantic intellectuals.
Even the dream of the hungry, a continent filled with T-bone steaks
and television quizzes, turns into a reality of ulcers and fatty
degeneration. A modest wariness seems the best posture for man :
lack of passion his least harmful social goal.
Can we, after all, it is argued, hope for anything better than that
the human race will just avoid blowing up its planet, that political
institutions will maintain a gentle order among foolish or sinful
men, with perhaps a little improvement here and there ; that a
tacit truce be established between ideals and realities, individuals
and collectivities ? It is probably no accident that the four major
states of the west were at the end of the 1 950s presided over by
paternal or avuncular images drawn (in Europe at least) from
memories of the last age of stability which our continent recalls,
that before 1 9 1 4.
An entire generation was educated into such emotional middle
age in the affluent but insecure societies of the postwar west, and its
ideologists have been those of despair or scepticism. Fortunately the
education has been ineffective. Already the late products of the
1 95os, works like Mr Daniel Bell's End of Ideology or Professor
Talmon's High Tide of Political Messianism, are oddly out of tune
with the passionate, turbulent, confused but hopeful atmosphere of
that international phenomenon, the intellectual 'new left'. Perhaps
it is time for Ernst Bloch's Das Prinzip Hojfnung.1 The historian of
the future may well see this noble and massive work - all 1 ,657
1 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vols., Frankfurt, 1 959.
 THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

pages of i t testifying to its subject - standing outside the 1 960s as

the arch used to stand outside Euston station : symbolically, though
not functionally, anticipating new departures.
Hope is Professor Bloch's subject and indeed has been so since his
unduly neglected career as a philosopher of men's dreams began
with Geist der Utopie ( 1 9 1 8) and Thomas Munzer als Theologe der
Revolution ( 1 92 1 ) . Hope bore him through the years of American
exile when the present work was written ( 1 938-47) . It appears
before us now in both an East and a West German edition, as
revised in 1 953 and 1 959.
It is a strange, overcrowded, sometimes absurd, but nevertheless
superb work. The British reader may find it well-nigh incredible,
for in our country the old-fashioned philosopher as our grand­
parents knew him is dying out like the bison of the prairies, hunted
down by the mathematical logicians and the definers of askable
questions. The German reader will recognize in him a splendid
specimen of traditional German romantic philosophy, a sort of
marxist Schelling, as one reviewer has with some justice called him.
But even in his native country philosophers such as he are now rare.
No doubt, like several other aspects of traditional German culture,
they found it easier to survive in East Germany under a crust of
doctrinaire marxism than in the Americanized West. At all events
it has struck at least one West German critic as 'irritating' that so
magnificently and archetypically German a phenomenon as
Professor Bloch's philosophy should come from 'beyond the Elbe'.
However, he has remained a somewhat isolated figure since his
transfer to the Federal Republic.
The starting point of Professor Bloch's argument is the empirical
observation that man, in spite of the gloomier litterateurs, is a hoping
animal. To be unsatisfied, to wish to envisage a more general state
when things could be other (i.e. better) than they are, is the most
elementary form of this fundamental human urge. I ts highest form
is Utopia - the construction of perfection which men seek or try to
realize or which at least hangs above them like an intellectual sun.
Such Utopia is not confined to the building of ideal common­
wealths. There are images of desire everywhere : in our dreams of
perfect bodily health and beauty, pushing back sickness, old age
and even death : in those of a society without want. There are the
images of a world transformed by the technical control of nature,
the dream buildings or cities imperfectly reflected in all but the
1 37
 R EV O LU T I O N A R I E S

most modestly functional architecture of real life. The Utopia of a

lost or undiscovered Eden or Eldorado haunted the explorers ; the
dream landscape of perfection - 'a world more adequately fitted
to man' - haunts poetry, opera and painting. There are the
perspectives of absolute wisdom.
But for Professor Bloch Utopia is more even than this wide range
of 'anticipations, images of desire, the contents of hope'. It lies in all
men who strive to 'realize themselves', i.e. to realize here and now the
ideal offull humanity which we know to be latent in ourselves. It lies
in the dream of eternity in this life, as in Faust's longing for the
moment oflife which shall be everlasting : 'Verweile doch, du hist so
schon'. This dream of the present intensified into eternity finds its
expression for Bloch in the art of music. It lies finally in the revolt
against the limits of man's life and fate, in the images of hope against
death, which find a mythical expression in our religions.
But hope, desire of change, Utopia, are not merely fundamental
aspects of human behaviour. They represent reality because for
Professor Bloch they echo the fundamental fact of change in nature,
which is itself thereby oriented towards the future. Life itself, being
in evolution, 'unfinished' and, therefore, changeable and perfectible,
gives man scope for Utopia and is its objective counterpart. There is
for Professor Bloch a materialist-utopian tradition in philosophy
from which he would claim descent : that of the 'Aristotelian left',
which took the master's doctrine of entelechy as its starting point
and developed a concept of self-moving and self-creating matter.
Some late Greeks, the medieval Islamic Aristotelians, an entire body
of heretical Christian thought culminating in Giordano Bruno,
belong to this tradition ; so in spite of his deliberate philosophic
idealism, does Hegel, at least in part. And so, using this tradition to
help turn Hegelianism right side up, does Marx, in whom the
utopian tradition and utopian hope reach their first really adequate
practical and philosophical expression. For in Marx the gap between
the wish and its fulfilment, the present and the future, is at last
closed.
Hope is a fact, but for Professor Bloch also a desirable one. The
object of his work is not merely its study but its propagation : the
philosopher must be not only analyst but enthusiast. To teach men to
hope in the right way and for the right things, to recognize what
hoping implies, is his primary purpose. Consequently it is essential to
criticize what denies, or rather what obscures and diverts hope, for
 T H E P R I N C I P LE O F H O P E

desiderium ('dreaming forwards') is so deeply rooted in man that even

the most pessimistic (indeed, especially the most pessimistic) at­
titudes can be shown to be merely diversions rather than denials of
the utopian urge ; even Angst or the concept of ' nothingness' . Those
who really deny Utopia are those who create a closed and middling
world from which the great avenues opening upon perfection are
hedged off : the bourgeoisie.
For the bourgeois world replaces Utopia by 'adjustment' or escape
- the society without want or unhappiness, by window-shoppinga nd
the New Yorker ad. life ; the anti-philistine life by gangster-romance ;
the undiscovered Eden by holidays in Positano and Chianti bottles as
lampstands. Instead of hope there are lies, instead of truth, a mask.
(For the middle-class ideal of the period before industrialism, as
exemplified in Dutch seventeenth-century painting and Biedermeier
interiors, Professor Bloch has respect and a certain tenderness. It can
hardly be fitted even into his extended concept of Utopia, though
he tries ; de Hooch paints 'those tiny sharp pictures that carry
homesickness within them'. But it had clarity and honesty, and in it
'the corner grocery of happiness was made to look like a genuine
treasure chamber'.) And yet the nature of hope is such that there is
truth even in the lies of capitalism. The desire for a 'happy end',
however commercially exploited, is man's desire for the good life ;
our ever-deceived optimism, superior to unconditional pessimism,
the belief that something can be done about it.
Professor Bloch's attacks against the theories which stand in the
way of the recognition of hope, and especially his contemptuous
dissection of Freudian and even more contemptuous dismissal of
Adlerian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are therefore essential to his
argument. However, though they sometimes coincide with what
used to be marxist orthodoxy, they must not be confused with it. His
critique of the fashions of the west is not indiscriminate : if he rejects
philosophical pragmatism or functionalism in architecture, and
brushes aside D . H. Lawrence (not without some silent sympathy
from some of us) as a 'sentimental penis-poet', he cherishes
Schonberg and respects abstract painting. Moreover, his arguments
are strictly his own, for whatever his conclusions, Professor Bloch's
philosophical provenance is un-marxist, or rather only one-third
marxist.
He is in fact a surviving German 'natural philosopher' of the
Coleridgean era who has turned revolutionary ; a natural rebel
1 39
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

against mechanical rationalism, a natural denizen of that world of

semi-mystical cosmic harmonies, vital principles, living organisms,
evolution, the interplay of polar opposites, and so on, in which
Herder, Schelling or for that matter Goethe, not to mention
Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, moved. (It is highly characteristic of
Professor Bloch's book that Paracelsus should be referred to more
often in it than Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Darwin put together.)
Admittedly marxism has, via Hegel, deeper roots in this tradition
than is commonly allowed. As late as Anti-Duehring Engels still
writes a characteristic passage exalting Kepler above Newton and,
indeed, a specific defence of the positive aspects of 'nature phil­
osophy' . Still, the other two acknowledged components of marxism,
the British and the French, have quite a different pedigree, and
indeed its strength lies in the combination of both the 'classical' and
the 'romantic' traditions of thought, if the term may be used in this
context. But Professor Bloch is almost wholly a 'romantic' .
Hence both the strength and the weakness of his work. His views
about the natural sciences will strike Anglo-Saxon readers as wilfully
absurd, perhaps because we live in an age when the major advances
in science are made by mathematics and a sophisticated neo­
mechanism. But if his critiques may strike scientists as incomprehens­
ible for the same reason as Goethe's rejection of Newton's optics,
neither are the aberrations of fools. On the other han,d Professor
Bloch's approach gives him great penetration into the logic of what
appears to be irrational (such as the world of visionary and symbolic
statement) , a navigational mastery of the oceans of the human heart,
and a deep understanding of men's aspirations. These are the gifts of
the artist, and indeed Professor Bloch is an artist, with a major
writer's psychological insight and a remarkable style, where concise
and gnomic foothills flank sinewy mountain ranges of prose, broken
by cascades of noble rhetoric, and on which the glaciers of wit
sparkle and glow.
But he is not an artist who has strayed into philosophy. He is a
philosopher who also requires the techniques of the artist, for whom
it is equally essential not only, say, to make an acute analysis of the
middle-class preconceptions of Freud but also to express Spinoza's
aspirations metaphorically but not vaguely as 'to see the world as a
crystal, with the sun at its zenith, so that nothing throws a shadow'.
Romanticism has taught Professor Bloch that there are things not
readily expressible, at present in quantities or verifiable propositions,
 THE PRINCIPLE O F H OPE

which nevertheless 'are there' and ought to b e expressed. What i s left

of love when Kinsey has counted its orgasms, sample inquiries have
measured its attitudes, physiologists described its mechanism and
analysts the propositions which can be made about it, is still
meaningful, and not only subjectively to lovers.
Das Prinzip Hojfnung is a long, discursive and sometimes repetitive
book. To attempt any summary of its content beyond the briefest
and driest oversimplification is quite impracticable, for it is a work of
gigantic size and encyclopaedic range. (How many philosophical
books, marxist or otherwise, contain analyses of the relation between
music and medieval scholastic logic, discussions of feminism as a
variant of Utopia, of Don Juan, Don Quixote and Faust as myths,
of Natural Law in the eighteenth century, the evolution of
Rosicrucianism, the history of town planning, yoga, the baroque,
Joachim of Fiore, fun-fairs, Zoroaster, the nature of dancing, tourism
and the symbolism of the alchemists ?) Probably most readers will
enjoy the book mainly for its variety and as the sum of often
profoundly brilliant, sometimes rather peculiar, always stimulating,
parts. Probably few readers will follow the author all the way,
though none will fail to discover in him flashes of dazzling insight or
- embedded in page-long paragraphs like flakes of mica in granite -
the most polished of aphorisms.
However, even the most critically inclined should make the
attempt to follow him to the end of his journey, where man, 'ein
unterdriicktes und verschollenes Wesen', finds that 'the true Genesis
is not at the beginning but at the end', where Blake fuses with Marx,
and alienation ends in man's discovery of his true situation. For it is
not every day that we are reminded, with so much wisdom,
erudition, wit and mastery of language, that hope and the building
of the earthly paradise are man's fate.
( 1 96 1 )
 15

T H E S T R U C T U R E O F C A P I TA L

A few years ago an able and acute observer of marxism could

suggest that the history of its evolution as a theory was virtually at
an end ; or at all events at a standstill. It is plainly not possible to
take such a view today. The cracking of the apparently smooth
and firmly frozen surface of stalinism in the Soviet Union and of
the unified and apparently integrated international communist
movement has not merely produced, or revealed, equivalent
cracks in the systematic compendium of dogma elaborated in the
1 930s, and brilliantly simplified for pedagogic purposes in the Short
History of the CPSU. The thaw of the ice-cap also watered the
numerous plants of heterodoxy, schism or mere unofficial growth
which had survived on the margin of, or under, the giant glacier.
The hundred flowers bloomed, the schools began once again to
contend, in a manner unfamiliar to all except the elderly who
could throw their minds back to the 1 920s or the old who recalled
the days before 1 9 1 4. Marxism, which had apparently aspired to
turn itself - and by force majeure had largely turned itself - into a
closed system, communicating with the outside world chiefly by a
series of operations designed to show that it had no need to do so,
was opened up again.
If we leave aside, as lacking much theoretical interest, the
attempts to retain something like the old orthodoxy unchanged (as
in China or among some groups of sectarians in other countries),
and the moves to accept useful theories and techniques from the
'bourgeois' world without integrating them into the nominally
unmodified marxist system (as happened to some extent in the
Soviet Union) , the marxist re-thinking of the past ten years has,
broadly speaking, followed four paths. First, it has attempted
something like an archaeological operation, by identifying the
strata of theoretical thinking which had gradually accumulated on
 T H E S T R U C T U R E O F C A P I TA L

top of Marx's original thought, and for that matter pursuing the
evolution of the great man's ideas themselves through its various
stages. Second, it has sought to identify and to pursue the various
original theoretical developments made from time to time on the
basis of marxism, but for various reasons officially expelled from,
or never absorbed into, the main corpus of its ideas. Third, it has
attempted to come to terms, where this seemed apposite, with the
various intellectual developments which had taken place outside
marxism, and once again were deliberately extruded from it in the
stalinist period. Last, it has tried to return to an analysis of the
world (i.e. primarily of its social, economic and political develop­
ments) after a long period when the official interpretation had
become increasingly remote from reality.
Among the pre-stalinist currents of marxism, one has long
proved to be particularly fruitful and attractive to the re-thinkers,
the 'central European' strain, to use George Lichtheim's conven­
ient term. Most of the rare communist writers who retained any
reputation as independent minds in the 1 940s and early 1 950s
belonged to this tradition, e.g. George Lukacs, Henri Lefebvre
or, nourished in the Italian rather than German version of
Hegelianism, Gramsci. The central Europeans formed part of
that passionate reaction against the evolutionist positivism and
mechanical determinism to which the theoretical leaders of the
Second International had tended to reduce marxism, and which,
in one form or another, provided the intellectual base for a return
to revolutionary ideology in the year preceding and following the
October revolution. For a brief period after the collapse of
syndicalism (which had absorbed part of this left-wing revulsion
against the Kautskys of the pre- 1 9 1 4 era) virtually all the rebel
currents flowed together into the single cataract of bolshevism.
After Lenin's death they began to diverge again, or rather the
gradual and systematic construction of a single channel of official
theory called 'leninism' forced the rest out of the main stream. Yet
though Lenin's own thought was one of the forms of this re­
assertion of revolutionary theory against 'revisionism' and 'reform­
ism', and by far the most important in practice, it had been by
no means the only one. Luxemburg and Mehring in Germany, the
central-European Hegelians, and others, converged with Lenin in
practice as revolutionaries, but were in no sense leninist in origin
or intellectual procedures.
1 43
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Politically the central European strain was revolutionary, not to

say ultra-left. Socially, it was not so much a collection of
intellectuals - all ideological schools are that - as one of men and
women whose taste ran to agitation, writing and discussion rather
than organization and the (bolshevik) executive life. In theory it
was above all hostile to the Darwinian and positivist versions of
marxism a la Kautsky, and suspicious even of those aspects of the
mature Marx and Engels which might have encouraged determin­
ism rather than voluntarism. Even the young Gramsci in Turin
reacted to the October Revolution by calling for a 'revolt against
Marx's Capital'. Philosophically it tended to stress - against the
more official theorists of social democracy and the revisionists -
the Hegelian origins of Marx and such of his youthful writings as
were then available. The publication of the Fruehschriften by
Landshut and Mayer in I g32 was to provide the central
Europeans with what has turned out to be their basic text, the
I 844 Manuscripts, and their basic operational tool, 'alienation'.
By this time, however, the political situation had changed. The
central Europeans no longer stood on the extreme left of the
movement, a place now occupied by the Trotskyists (though in
the west most of these, as J. P. Netti has pointed out, were in fact
Luxemburgians) . Their passionate voluntarism, their own con­
tempt for bourgeois science and their idealization of proletarian
consciousness had been selectively absorbed into, even exaggerated
by, the official Soviet doctrine. The main advantage the central
Europeans retained was the capacity to combine the passion for
social revolution, even the readiness to accept the Jesuit discipline
of the communist parties, with the interests of mid-twentieth­
century western intellectuals - such as avant-garde culture and
psychoanalysis - and a version of marxist theory which, against
the apparent trend of events in the Soviet Union itself, reaffirmed
the humanist Utopia of Marx. War and resistance brought them
political reinforcements, especially in France, from revolutionary
intellectuals to whom the discovery of German philosophy (in this
instance not mediated by marxism) gave a justification for the
assertion of human liberty, the act of this assertion and struggle,
and therefore the function of the 'engaged' intellectual. Via the
phenomenologists Sartre moved into something like a position as
honorary central European, and eventually into what he at any
rate considered marxism. The collapse of stalinism relieved what
144
 T H E S T R U C TU R E O F C A P I T A L

had become an increasingly intolerable pressure on the central

Europeans within the communist movement - stalinist theory had
shown a diminishing toleration for the Hegelian or pre- 1 848
elements in Marx - and left them as the most obvious ideological
nucleus for critical communist thought. Paradoxically a strain of
ideas which began on the ultra-left ended on the right wing of the
revolutionary movement.
Sooner or later a reaction was to be expected. It has now
emerged under the leadership of Louis Althusser, a philosopher
who has left the shadows of the great Ecole Normale Superieure of
the Rue d'Ulm for the limelight of Parisian intellectual celebrity ;
or at any rate celebrity in the fifth and sixth arrondissements, which is
even harder to achieve. His rise has been curiously sudden. Before
1 965 he was virtually unknown even to the left-wing public, except as
the author of an essay on Montesquieu and a selection from Feuerbach.
In that year no fewer that three volumes came out as the first offer­
ings of a series called ' TMorie' under M. Althusser's direction : a
collection of papers under the title Pour Marx1 and two volumes
essentially recording the papers presented at an intensive seminar
by M. Althusser and his followers called Lire Le Capital. 2 (The
laconic titles are part of the Althusserian trademark.) Their success
has been startling. It is no reflection on the very considerable gifts of
the author - not least his gallic combination of evident intelligence,
lucidity and style - to observe that he has been lucky in the
moment of his emergence. The atmosphere of the Althusserian
Quartier Latin is the one in which every self-respecting left-wing
secondary schoolboy or student is a Maoist or at least a Castroite,
in which Sartre and Henri Lefebvre are ancient monuments and
the self-lacerations of the intellectual ex-communists of 1 956 as
incomprehensible as the 'opportunism' of Waldeck-Rochet and
Roger Garaudy. A new generation of rebels requires a new version
of revolutionary ideology, and M. Althusser is essentially an
ideological hard-liner, challenging the political and intellectual
softening around him. It is typical that, though a member of the
communist party, he should choose as his publisher Franc;ois
Maspero, the mouthpiece of the ultra-left.
1 Louis Althusser, Pour Marx, Paris, 1 960.
2 Louis Althusser, Jacques Ranciere and Pierre Macherey, Lire Le Capital (vol.
1 ) ; Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar and Roger Establet, Lire Le Capital (vol. 2),
Paris, 1 960.

1 45
 REVOLUTIONARIES

This does not make him into a 'neo-stalinist' as his detractors

have suggested. The eloquent and rather moving pages of intellec­
tual autobiography with which Pour Marx opens show no indul­
gence to stalinism, but their target is not so much 'le contagieux et
implacable systeme de gouvernement et de pensee [qui] pro­
voquait ces delires' - the Althusserian prose is in the classic
tradition - but the 'conditions of theoretical void' in which French
communism grew up and which stalinism helped to conceal
behind that 'primacy of politics' which was in any case congenial
to the French. It led those philosophers who were not content to
'confine themselves to commentaries and meagre variations on the
theme of Great Quotations' in sheer intellectual self-defence either
to deny the possibility of any philosophy, or to maintain some sort
of dialogue with their professional colleagues by 'disguising them­
selves - dressing up Marx as Husserl, as Hegel, as the humanist
and ethical Young Marx - at the risk of sooner or later confusing
the mask with the face'. The end of stalinist dogmatism did not
'give us back marxist philosphy in its integrity'. It merely revealed
its absence. Yet - and here M. Althusser leaves a moderately
well-beaten track and at the same time allows himself scope for a
good deal of private innovation - its absence was not due merely
to the defects of the French intellectual left. It was not there
because marxist philosophy, 'founded by Marx in the very act of
founding his theory of history, has still largely to be constructed' ;
M. Althusser's ambitious purpose is to construct it.
In one sense this position has similarities with some tendencies
of thought in the Stalin era, for one of the characteristics of that
period was the systematic assertion of the absolute originality of
Marx : the sharp cut which sundered him from Hegel and his
own Hegelian youth, and from the utopian socialists (Roger
Garaudy was obliged to revise his Sources franfaises du socialisme
scientijique on these grounds in the late 1 940s) . M. Althusser also
talks of the coupure in Marx's evolution, and, while placing it, with
most students, around 1845, seems reluctant to accept anything as
fully ' marxist' before the Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist
Manifesto.3 But of course the stalinist theories had no doubt about
what marxist philosophy was. M. Althusser is just prepared to
3 Althusser has since pushed the frontiers of the 'pre-marxist' Marx steadily

further forward, until little before 1 875 is acceptable as properly non-Hegelian.

Unfortunately this eliminates the bulk of Marx's writings.
 T H E S T R U C TU R E O F C A P I T A L

admit that certain thinkers i n the past began t o ask the crucial
question how, e.g., the purpose of Capital differs from that of
political economy - Lenin, Labriola, Plekhanov, Gramsci and
various Italian scholars following the underestimated Galvano
Della Volpe, the Austro-marxists (who fell into neo-kantianism) ,
and some Soviet commentators (who were incompletely aware of
the implications of their analyses) . But he denies that there is as
yet a satisfactory answer.
For there is none in Marx himself. Just as classical political
economy did not quite see the point of what it observed, and what
Marx formulated for it, so fhat Adam Smith gives, as it were, the
right answer to questions he had not consciously asked, so Marx
himself surpassed his own insight, leaving us to recognize where it
was he was going :
What political economy does not see is not something pre-existing
which it might have seen but did not, but something it has itself produced
in its operation of knowing [connaissance] , and which did not exist before
this operation. It is precisely the production [of knowledge] which is
identical with that object. What political economy does not see is what it
makes : its production of a new answer without question, and at the same
time its production of a new latent question carried within that new
answer (Lire Le Capital 1, pp. 25-6) .

Marx himself suffers from the same weakness, which is the

inevitable concomitant of the process of understanding. He was a
far greater man than Adam Smith, because, while unable to
emerge fully into his own novelty, he reaches out for 'his'
question, formulating it somewhere or other, perhaps in a different
context, searching for the answer 'by multiplying the images
suitable for its presentation'. We, however, can know what he
lacked : 'le concept de l'Efficace d'une structure sur ses effets' (ibid.,
pp. 33-4) . In discovering this lack we can not only begin to grasp
marxist philosophy - the philosophy which Marx founded but did
not construct - but also advance beyond it. For
a science progresses, that is to say lives, only by paying extreme attention
to its points of theoretical fragility. In this respect it holds its life less by
what it knows than by what it does not know ; on the absolute condition
of circumscribing that non-known, and of formulating it rigorously as a
problem.

It will be evident that the core of M. Althusser's analysis is

1 47
 REVOLUTIONARIES

epistemological. The nature of his exercise is the exploration of

Marx's process of understanding and his main method an
intensely detailed critical reading of the works, using all the
resources of linguistic, literary and philosophical discipline. The
first reaction of his own critical readers may well be that the
methods and concepts he applies are not necessarily those emerg­
ing by his own favourite process of epistemological advance, from
Marx himself. To say that 'along other roads contemporary theory
in psychoanalysis, in linguistics, in other disciplines like biology
and perhaps in physics has confronted the problem without
realizing that Marx had "produced" it much earlier', may be
true ; but it is not impossible that the problem has been
discovered in Marx because of the new and considerable vogue for
linguistic 'structuralism' and Freud in France. (Indeed, while
structural-functionalist elements are easily recognized in Marx, it
is by no means so clear what Freud has to contribute to the
understanding of Capital.) But if in fact these are to some extent
insights from the outside ('nous devons ces connaissances boulever­
santes . a quelques hommes : Marx, Nietzsche et Freud') it may
. .

be wondered whether the critical effort is merely confined to

'making manifest what is latent' in Marx.
A second reflection is that the Althusserian type of analysis finds
it difficult, if not impossible, to get outside the formal structure of
Marx's thought. M. Althusser is aware of this characteristic ('at no
point do we set foot on the absolutely uncrossable frontier which
separates the "development" of specification of the concept from
the development and particularity of things') and appears to
justify it by abstract argument ('we have demonstrated that the
validation of a scientific proposition as knowledge in a given
scientific practice was assured by the interplay of particular forms,
which guarantee the presence of scientificity [scientijicite] in the
production of knowledge, in other words by specific forms which
confer the character of - true - knowledge upon an act of know­
ledge') . Yet even if this is true and this method of validation can be
applied as easily to Capital as to mathematical propositions (which
is not obvious) all mathematicians know that a considerable gap
still remains between their demonstrations and such real life
phenomena - for instance, the evolution and operation of the
capitalist system - as may be found to correspond to their discoveries.
One can agree with M. Althusser's profound and persistent dislike
1 48
 THE STRUCTURE O F CAPITAL

of empiricism, and still feel uneasy about his apparent dismissal of

any exterior criterion of practice such as actual historical develop­
ment, past or future ('nous considerons le resultat sans son devenir' ) .
For i n fact Marx did get down t o the difficult problem of the
concrete. Ifhe had not, he would not have written Capital but would
have remained within the sphere of generality which dominates that
marvellous and neglected Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy, which is in many respects the key work of the Althusserian
Marx, as the 1 844 Manuscripts are the key work of the Hegelian­
humanist Marx whom he rejects.
And indeed, as soon as M. Althusser descends from the level
where marxism establishes what history or economics can or
cannot do ('the mathematical formalization of econometrics must
be subordinate to conceptual formalization') and turns to its
actual subject matter, he says little that is new or interesting. He
produces a brilliant critique of the vulgar-marxist views on 'base'
and 'superstructure' and a satisfying formulation of their interac­
tion. But such practical applications of the general principle as are
used to illustrate it are taken from marxists who have used a more
direct and less intellectually self-contained route.
While students like M. Godelier 4 face the concrete problems of
historic periodization raised by Marx, and have, for instance,
taken a leading part in the rediscovery and re-analysis of the
'Asiatic mode of production' which is one of the more interesting
intellectual results of the revival of original thought among
communist intellectuals since Stalin, E.Balibar's long discussion of
historical materialism (Lire Le Capital, vol. 2) remains resolutely on
the heights of what one might call meta-history.
Moreover, M. Althusser's type of approach, valuable though it
is, simplifies away some of Marx's problems - for instance, that of
historic change. It is right to show that the marxian theory of
historical development is not 'evolutionist' or 'historicist' in the
nineteenth-century sense, but rests on a firm 'structuralist' foun­
dation : development is the totality of all combinations, actual or
possible, of the limited number of the different elements of
'production' which analysis defines ; those actually realized in the
. past make up the succession of socio-economic formations. Yet one
might object to this, as to the not dissimilar Levi-Straussian view,
that by itself it does not explain how and why one socio-economic
' Maurice Godelier, Rationalite et irrationalite en economie, Paris, 1 966.

1 49
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

formation changes into another but merely establishes the limits

outside which it is senseless to speak of historic development. And
also that Marx spent an extraordinary amount of his time and
energy trying to answer these questions. M. Althusser's work
demonstrates, if demonstration be still needed, the remarkable
theoretical power of Marx as a thinker, his status and originality
as a 'philosopher' in the· technical sense of the word, and argues
persuasively that he is far from a mere Hegel transposed from
idealism to materialism. Yet even if his reading of Marx is correct,
it is only a partial reading.
This does not diminish the force of his analysis as a tool of
negative criticism. Whatever we may think of the polemical
formulation of his contentions ('from the point of view of theory
marxism is no more an historicism than it is a hwnanism'), the
strength of his objections to the Hegelian and I 844 Manuscripts
interpretation of Marx is substantial, the acuteness of his analysis
of certain weaknesses of the thought of Gramsci (and their
reasons) or of Sartre is impressive, the critique of 'model-building'
including that of Weberian ideal types, is to the point. This is due
to some extent to the personal abilities of the man whom Le Monde
(reporting the special session of the French Communist Party's
Central Committee devoted to the discussion of his and M.
Garaudy's views) calls a 'philosophe de grande qualite', a quality
revealed among other things in the intellectual respect he thinks
he owes to some of those he criticizes. Nevertheless, it is also due
to the thinker and the cause who so evidently inspire his passionate
study.
One reads him with attention, even with excitement. There is
no mystery about his capacity to inspire the intelligent young, and
though it may be feared that the Althusserian school whom he
will certainly gather round him will be more scholastic than
sparkling, the net effect of his irruption into marxist theoretical
debate may be positive. For his procedure is, almost by definition,
that of asking rather than answering questions : of denying that
the right answers have merely to be re-established even by the
closest textual scrutiny of authority, because they have as yet to be
worked out. For M. Althusser the relation between Marx and his
readers is one of activity on both sides, a dialectical confrontation
which, like reality, has no end. It is curious and characteristic that
the philosopher (who has also, as in one essay of Pour Marx,
 THE STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

doubled a s a dramatic critic) chooses the metaphor of theatre -

needless to say that of Brechtian theatre - to describe both Marx's
process of exposing what lies beyond him (the Darstellung of 'ce
mode de presence de la structure clans ses effets, done la causalite
structurale elle-meme') and the readers' relation to him :
C'est alors que nous pouvons nous souvenir de ce terme hautement
symptomatique de la 'Darstellung', le rapprocher de cette 'machinerie', et
le prendre au mot, comme l'existence meme de cette machinerie en ses
effets : la mode d'existence de cette mise-en-scene, de ce theatre qui est a
la fois sa propre scene, son propre texte, ses propres acteurs, ce theatre
dont les spectateurs ne peuvent en etre, d'occasion, spectateurs, que parce
qu'ils en sont d'abord les acteurs forces, pris clans les contraintes d'un
texte et de roles dont ils ne peuvent en etre les auteurs, puisque c'est, par
essence, un theatre sans auteur (Lire le Capital, vol. 2, p. 1 77) .

But the pleasure of reading an intelligent and original thinker

ought not to blind us to his weaknesses. M. Althusser's approach to
Marx is certainly not the most fruitful. As the above discussion has
suggested tactfully, it may even be doubted whether it is very
marxist, since it plainly takes no interest in much that Marx
regarded as fundamental, and - as his subsequent writings, few
though they are, make increasingly clear - is at loggerheads with
some of Marx's most cherished arguments. It demonstrates the
new-found post-stalinist freedom, even within communist parties,
to read and interpret Marx independently. But if this process is to
be taken seriously, it requires genuine textual erudition such as
M. Althusser does not appear to possess. He certainly seems
unaware both in Pour Marx and Lire Le Capital of the famous
Grundrisse, though they have been available in an excellent
German edition since 1 953, and one may even suspect that his
interpretation has preceded his reading of some of the texts with
which he is acquainted. To this extent he still suffers from the
after-effects of the stalinist period, which created a gap between
the older generation of enormously learned Marx-scholars and
both the political activists and the younger neo-marxists.
Moreover the revival of marxism requires a genuine willingness
to see what Marx was trying to do, though this does not imply
agreement with all his propositions. Marxism, which is at once a
method, a body of theoretical thinking, and collection of texts
regarded by its followers as authoritative, has always suffered from
the tendency of marxists to begin by deciding what they think
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Marx ought to have said, and then to look for textual authority
for the chosen views. Such eclecticism has normally been con­
trolled by a serious study of the evolution of Marx's own thought.
M. Althusser's discovery that the merit of Marx lies not so much in
his own writings, but in allowing Althusser to say what he ought
to have said, removes this control. It is to be feared that he will
not be the only theorist to replace the real Marx by one of his
own construction. Whether the Althusserian Marx or other ana­
logous constructs will turn out to be as interesting as the original
is, however, quite another question.
( 1 966)
 KARL K O R S C H

The search for a viable post-stalinist marxism has tended to be at

the same time a search for viable pre-stalinist marxian thinkers.
There is no logical reason why this should be so, but the
psychological motives which lead men (especially young men) to
seek not only truth but also its teachers, are very strong. In any
case we owe to it the rediscovery - one might almost say the
discovery - of several interesting writers. Karl Korsch ( 1 886-196 1 )
is the most recent of these. A number of circumstances conspired
to maintain him in obscurity during his lifetime. Though a com­
munist for the first half of the 1 920s, his writings were not attached
to any 'deviation' of substance, or were in their time lumped with
the heterodoxies of the Lukacs of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein un­
justly, though not without some plausibility. He thus had no chance
of surviving the Stalin era as the guru of any organized body of
marxists, however small. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, to whom
he was drawn, were not a body likely to transmit, or even to under­
stand, a theorist who was nothing if not sophisticated, and who
belonged to a highly developed academic tradition. Hitler's victory
buried his writings of the 1 920s, Hitler's bombs the surviving stock of
his Karl Marx published in London in 1 938 in the Chapman and Hall
series on Modern Sociologists, and which had in any case barely been
noticed in the atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon marxism of those days.
The unexpected revival of interest in marxism among West Ger­
man intellectuals in the 1 96os has restored him to life. Marxismus
und Philosophic ( 1 923-3 1 ) was published in 1 966 with a long intro­
duction by Erich Gerlach and some minor texts of the 1 920s ;1 Karl
Marx, in a full scholarly edition by Goetz Langkau, in 1 967.2
1 Karl Korsch (ed. Erich Gerlach), Marxismus und Philosophie, Frankfurt, 1 966.

(English edition 1 970) .

2 Karl Korsch, Karl Marx, Frankfurt, 1 967.
1 53
6-R • •
 REVOLUTIONARIES

At first sight the interest of Korsch seems to lie in the fact that
he brought to marxism the comparatively rare combination of a
German academic - he achieved the uncomfortable distinction of
a professional chair at the ultra-right-wing university of Jena -
of an active politician, Thuringian minister and Reichstag dep­
uty, and of a passionate revolutionary. However, what is more
important is his membership of that 'central European left' which
was formed, in the years before and during the first world war, as
a theoretical resistance movement to the Kautskyan orthodoxies of
the Second International, and for a more or less short time,
merged with 'bolshevism' after the October revolution. Korsch
shared with most of this remarkably able generation of thinkers
the conviction that German Social Democracy had justified its
political passivity with a version of marxism which, in effect,
turned it into a form of nineteenth-century positivist evolutionism.
The left must turn from the politically misleading determinism of
the natural sciences to philosophy (i.e. to the philosophic Marx of
the I 84os) , if only because marxist orthodoxy had lightly pushed
this aside. The obj ect was not to cJose marxism as a metaphysical
'system', but to open it. It was to oppose the constant - and
hitherto uncompleted - philosophical critique of reality and
ideology (including that of marxism itself) to the sterile certainties
of positivism.
It is a matter of debate how far this return to a marxist
philosophy was achieved at the cost of a systematic 're­
Hegelianization' of Marx, such as was common elsewhere on the
central European left. At all events the convergence between
Korsch and Lukacs proved to be only temporary. For from the
start Korsch seems to have differed from his contemporaries in
some important respects. His original pre-marxist critique of
orthodoxy, developed in London before I g 1 4, had asked not so
much for revolution as for a positive content in socialism, such a::,
he discovered both in syndicalism and, curiously enough, in the
Fabian Society which he had then joined. Syndicalism he saw as
an authentic proletarian conception of socialism, perhaps the
inevitable form of such a conception. The Fabians, he thought,
introduced a voluntarist element into socialism by their insistence
on the socialist education of the people and a 'positive formula for
socialist construction' by their discussions about the control of
industry.
1 54
 KARL KORSCH

Though this line of thought differed from those of other

anti-Kautskyans, it converged with them. All the left-wing rebels
called for activism and planning and rejected historical determin­
ism, all of them denied that Marx's 'man sets himself only such
historical tasks as he can solve' meant that the solution of these
tasks would be as automatic as their solubility. On the other hand
Korsch differed from what we may call the east European wing of
this new left in as much as he concentrated entirely on the
problems of capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.
Indeed, it is arguable that his rediscovery is due to this fact.
For there has never been much difficulty in knowing, or at least in
proposing, what marxists should do in underdeveloped countries.
The problem ever since the later nineteenth century has been to
suggest what they should do in countries of stable industrialism
and no visible revolutionary perspectives. Korsch concentrated on
this problem though unfortunately he had no solution for it.
Korsch's 'western' orientation accounts for the consistent theo­
retical critique of bolshevism which made him, even in his
communist period, far less committed to the Russian (as distinct
from the desired western) revolution than, say, Rosa Luxemburg,
and led him rapidly to abandon any positive judgement of the
Soviet Union. At this point he diverged from his friend and
admirer Bertolt Brecht, and for that matter from many others on
the central European left. For him leninism was as wrong as
Kautskyanism, and for the same reasons. Indeed, he acutely
pointed out that crucial concepts of leninism, such as the view
that socialism enters the proletarian movement through intellec­
tuals, could be derived from Kautsky. Philosophically Korsch's
points against Materialism and Empiriocriticism were well taken. In
concentrating on the defence of 'materialism' (which was not a
serious issue) , Lenin directed his fire against the unreal enemy of
'idealism' and left undisturbed the real danger, a 'materialist
conception coloured by natural science'. This had been the
fundamental current of bourgeois thought in philosophy, the
natural and social sciences, and formed the major model for the
vulgarization of marxism itself. Hence Lenin's perfectly sincere
desire to remain a Hegelian was idle ; he was forced back on to a
simplified, indeed a pre-Hegelian, view of the opposition between
materialism and idealism, which in turn led to an oversimplified
view of what Marx's 'standing the Hegelian dialectic on its feet'
1 55
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

meant, a vulgarization of the concept of the unity of theory and

practice. Ultimately he was led to a position which was to inhibit
the ability of marxism to contribute to the further development of
the empirical sciences of nature and society.
He admitted that Lenin had not so much claimed to practise
philosophy, as to criticize philosophical tendencies which appeared
to him to be noxious for various reasons of party policy. But could
marxists deal with philosophy or any other field of thought
exclusively in terms of its usefulness or harmfulness in politics ?
They could not.
The criticism of Lenin is in many respects just, but Korsch
dismissed the factors which made leninism not merely another
version of Kautskyan theory, but an entirely different historical
phenomenon, a revolutionary theory for the underdeveloped
world. He admitted that it was such a theory, though reluctantly.
He denied that it formed 'an adequate theoretical expression for
the practical needs of the present phase of the class struggle' .
Indeed after his expulsion from the German Communist Party he
increasingly assimilated the Soviet Union to fascism. Both were
aspects of the etatiste and totalitarian counter-revolution which
followed the short-lived upsurge of the revolutionary movement in
1 9 1 7-23 and sought to prevent its recurrence. Historically absurd,
such a view is plausible only on the assumption that bolshevism
was a 'flight from the theoretical and practical demands of the
industrial proletariat', reflecting the situation of the 'backward
east' which still faced the problem of making its bourgeois
revolution. Korsch made this assumption. He observed the revolution­
ary movement of the underdeveloped world and dismissed it as an
irrelevance to the industrial proletariat of the industrial countries.
The difficulty of this position was that it left him without a
revolutionary alternative for the west, once the tide of postwar
rebellion had receded. Indeed, it left him with no concrete
political perspective at all, after the failure of the Spanish
anarcho-syndicalists. There are signs that, like other long-frustrated
and disappointed revolutionaries, Korsch began to feel that the
future was slightly less black after ' 1 956, but since he wrote
nothing of substance in his final years, we need not speculate how
he might have modified his views.
Inevitably, as disillusion increased, the process of 'developing'
marxism turned into one of criticizing it ; or rather of shedding so
 KARL KORSCH

much of i t that i t was doubtful, i n spite of Korsch's disclaimers,

that the remainder could still be properly called marxism. Dialec­
tics, for instance, was not a 'superlogic' to be handled like
ordinary logic - a reasonable point - but the way in which during
a revolutionary era, classes, groups and individuals produced new
ideas, dissolved existing systems of knowledge and 'replaced them
with more flexible systems, or better sti11, with no system at all,
but with the wholly unconfined and free use of thought applied to
the constantly changing process of development'. If we combine .
this with the rejection of most of Marx's actual propositions about
the real world as what Mr Gerlach calls the 'dogmatization of the
result of marxist research which have historically limited validity,
the speculative instead of empirical derivation of development',
not much of the actual corpus of Marx's writings was left. What
remained was a method for an empirical social science, which
derived from Marx chiefly a welcome refusal to identify itself with
the natural sciences, and a proletariat, organized as a party,
which could use this method for its purposes. There was no clear
reason why marxism should be, or tend to become, the form of
consciousness of the proletariat, and in future it would at best be
one of the elements in proletarian theory, if indeed the revolution­
ary movement in its revival could be confined to the proletariat.
Marx himself would be seen 'merely as one among many precur­
sors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the
working class' .
I t would thus seem that i n the period of 'counter-revolution'
Korsch found himself in the very difficulty that he noted in Marx
and Engels after 1 848 : in the absence of realistic revolutionary
perspectives the 'unity of theory and practice' was impossible to
maintain, and there was an inevitable shift from 'practice' to
theoretico-empirical research. However, it is extremely doubtful
whether the Korschian adaptation to this situation, unlike the
marxian one, can be properly described as 'still a comprehensive
theory of social revolution' . I ts practical side is reduced to
platitude and hope. Its theoretical side provides a systematic
bridge from what most Anglo-Saxons would (perhaps wrongly)
call metaphysics to modern scientific method, as in the argument
that Hegel, whose method was not all that different from the
axiomatic procedures of modern natural sciences, could not be
regarded as in conflict with empirical research, and in Korsch's
157
 REVO LUTI ONARIES

exploration of mathematical models in the social sciences, such as

the 'field theory' of his friend Kurt Lewin in psychology, and
perhaps the theory of games. Unquestionably the reminder that
the most committed social science must be subject to the usual
tests of truth is valuable. Whether it has much specific connection
with marxism, except as it were a biographical one, is another
question.
It is relevant to stress this evolution to Korsch's political and
theoretical analysis, because it forms a necessary background to his
writings, and, though fairly explicit in Marxismus und Philosophie
(or rather in the polemical introduction to the second edition of
this work), is far from explicit in Karl Marx, a work which is in
any case not easy of access to the non-specialist. It does not follow
that the extreme position which he expressed in the period around
I 950 - a phase of acute discouragement for more than one
thinker brought up in the marxian tradition - is also that of works
written in the 1 920s or 1 930s. However, these also mark points
along a single line of development. This does not diminish the
interest of these works both for the student of Marx, and for the
student of the ulterior transformations and modifications of
marxist thought. Korsch had an erudite and critical knowledge of
the master's works, an admirable marxist awareness of the historic
changes which underlay his and his followers' theoretical develop­
ments, and a point of view which makes his exposition refreshingly
different from the fashions which have prevailed over the last
generation.
Thus it is useful to remind young men brought up on catch phrases
about 'alienation' or 'sociology' that Marx is above all an economist,
in as much as the 'critique of political economy' increasingly formed
an analytical backbone of his theory, while the other aspects of the
analysis were increasingly reduced to incidental, if penetrating and
brilliant aper;us. This is not epoch-making, but needs saying at a time
when Capital may be seen by some as a treatise of epjstemology or
sociology : 'Marx's materialist science of society is not sociology but
economics.' It is equally useful to subject the historical process of the
'reception' of marxism in late-nineteenth-century Germany and
Europe to a cool, balanced and convincing analysis. Korsch shows
that 'revisionism' was not a rej ection of a formerly predominant
theory and practice ofrevolutionary marxism, but as it were the twin
1 58
 KARL KORSCH

of a formalized marxist orthodoxy which emerged a t the same time,

each a response of revolutionary theory to non-revolutionary
actuality. And so on.
Such observations are helpful, but not world-shaking. And though
Korsch evidently thought otherwise, it is hard to get excited about
the propositions to which he himself attached crucial importance. No
doubt in the 1 92os the application of historical materialism to the
study of marxism itself was unusual, but it is so no longer :

So long as the material basis of existing bourgeois society can only be

attacked and shaken, but not overthrown, by the practical revolutionary
struggle of the proletariat, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat can
only criticize the socially anchored forms of thought of the bourgeois era, but
cannot finally go beyond them.

The recognition that marxism is 'incomplete' is in itself not enough.

Korsch's statement remains on the level ofplatitude, though the kind
of platitude which can stimulate those not habituated to it. It is fair
enough : but where do we go next ? In the last analysis it is his
failure to advance beyond this level which prevents Korsch from
making a major contribution to the development of marxism. He is
well worth reading, because he was both intelligent and learned. He
wrote with some force and lucidity, compared with the habitual
prose-style of central European marxist theorists, though this is
unlikely to emerge from English translations. What he says is often
worth listening to though some of his best insights, such as those
about the essentially proletarian character of syndicalism, antedate
his marxian period and have no necessary connection with it. But in
the end, there is no major reason today why we should have to read
him.
Applying his own criteria, and those of marxism to this failure, we
may perhaps say that it reflects the essential predicament of the
'western' communist current to which Korsch belonged. It was a
political non-starter. To be a social revolutionary between the wars
usually meant in one way or another to choose bolshevism, even in a
heretical form. Until the early 1 920s, and in Spain until the late
1 930s, it might still look as though it could also mean choosing
something like syndicalism, but this was a horse which was already
visibly collapsing under the rider who wished to urge it towards the
goal of successful revolution. There was no other choice for a
revolutionary, though marxism would have permitted various forms
1 59
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

of theoretical adaptation and development which fitted it for

non-revolutionary operation. For emotionally understandable
reasons, Korsch rejected such 'revisionist' adaptations. Since he also
rejected bolshevism, he was left isolated, theoretically and practically
sterile and not a little tragic, an ideological St Simeon on his pillar.
( 1 968)

1 60
 IV

SO L DI E RS AND
G U E R R I L L AS
 17

V I E TNAM A N D T H E D YNAM I C S
O F G U E R R I L LA WA R

Three things have won conventional wars in this century ; greater

reserves of manpower, greater industrial potential and a reasonably
functioning system of civilian administration. The strategy of the
United States in the past two decades has been based on the hope
that the second of these (in which it is supreme) would offset the first,
in which the ussR was believed to have the edge. This theory was
based on faulty arithmetic in the days when the only war envisaged
was one against Russia, for the Warsaw Pact powers have no greater
population than NATO . The West was merely more reluctant to
mobilize its manpower in conventional ways. However, at present
the argument is probably more valid, for some of the Western states
(like France) will almost certainly stay neutral in any world war that
is likely, and China alone has more men than all the Western powers
likely to fight in concert. At all events, whether the arguments were
right or wrong, the. United States has since 1 945 put its money
entirely on the superiority of its industrial power, on its capacity to
throw into a war more machinery and more explosives than anyone
else.
Consequently, it has been badly shaken to discover that a new
method of winning wars has been developed in our time, and that it
more than offsets the organization and industrial power of conven­
tional military operations. That is guerrilla war, and the number of
Goliaths who have been felled by Davids with slingshots is now very
impressive : the Japanese in China, the Germans in wartime
Yugoslavia, the British in Israel, the French in Indo-China and
Algeria. At present the United States itself is undergoing the same
treatment in South Vietnam. Hence the anguished attempts to pit
bombs against small men behind trees, or to discover the gimmick
 REVOLUTIONARIES

(for surely there must b e one ? ) which allows a few thousand

ill-armed peasants to hold at bay the greatest military power on
earth. Hence also the simple refusal to believe that it can be so. If the
United States is baffled it must be due to some other - measurable
and bombable - reason : to the aggressive North Vietnamese, who
actually sympathize with their southern brothers and smuggle
trickles of supplies to them ; to the terrible Chinese who have the
nerve to possess a common border with North Vietnam ; and no
doubt eventually to the Russians. Before common sense flies com­
pletely out of the window, it is therefore worth taking a look at the
nature of modern guerrilla war.
There is nothing new about operations of a guerrilla type. Every
peasant society is familiar with the 'noble' bandit or Robin Hood
who 'takes from the rich to give to the poor' and escapes the clumsy
traps of soldiers and policemen until he is betrayed. For as long as no
peasant will give him away and as long as plenty will tell him about
the movements of his enemies, he really is as immune to hostile
weapons and as invisible to hostile eyes as the legends and songs
about such bandits invariably claim.
Both the reality and the legend are to be found in our age, literally
from China to Peru. Like the military resources of the bandit, those
of the guerrilla are the obvious ones ; elementary armaments
reinforced by a detailed knowledge of difficult and inaccessible
terrain, mobility, physical endurance superior to that of the pur­
suers, but above all a refusal to fight on the enemy's terms, in
concentrated force, and face to face. But the guerrilla's major asset is
non-military and without it he is helpless : he must have the
sympathy and support, active and passive, of the local population.
Any Robin Hood who loses it is dead, and so is any guerrilla. Every
textbook of guerrilla warfare begins by pointing this out, and it is the
one thing that military instruction in 'counterinsurgency' cannot
teach.
The main difference between the ancient, and in most peasant
societies endemic, form of bandit operation and the modern guerrilla
is that the Robin Hood type of social bandit has extremely modest
and limited military objectives (and usually only a very small and
localized force) . The test of a guerrilla group comes when it sets itself
such ambitious tasks as the overthrow of a political regime or the
expulsion of a regular force of occupiers, and especially when it sets
out to do this not in some remote corner of a country (the 'liberated
1 64
 VIETNAM A N D THE D YN A M I C S OF G U E R R I L L A WAR

area') but over an entire national territory. Until the early twentieth
century hardly any guerrilla movements faced this test ; they
operated in extremely inaccessible and marginal regions - mountain
country is the commonest example - or opposed relatively primitive
and inefficient governments native or foreign. Guerrilla actions have
sometimes played an important part in major modern wars, either
alone in exceptionally favourable conditions, as with the Tyrolese
against the French in 1 809, or more usually, as ancillaries to regular
forces - during the Napoleonic wars, for example, or in our century
in Spain and Russia. However, by themselves and for any length of
time, they almost certainly had little more than nuisance value, as in
southern Italy where Napoleon's French were never seriously incon­
venienced by them. That may be one reason why they did not much
preoccupy military thinkers until the twentieth century. Another
reason, which may explain why even revolutionary soldiers did not
think much about them, was that practically all effective guerrillas
were ideologically conservative, even if socially rebellious. Few
peasants had been converted to left-wing political views or followed
left-wing political leaders.
The novelty of modern guerrilla war, therefore, is not so much
military. The guerrillas of today may have at their disposal much
better equipment than did their predecessors, but they are still
invariably much worse armed than their opponents (they derive a
large part of their armament - in the early stages, probably most of it
- from what they can capture, buy or steal from the other side, and
not, as Pentagon folklore holds, from foreign supplies) . Until the
ultimate phase of guerrilla war, when the guerrilla force becomes an
army, and may actually face and defeat its adversaries in open
battle, as Dienbienphu, there is nothing in the purely military pages
of Mao, Vo Nguyen Giap, Che Guevara or other manuals of
guerrilla warfare, which a traditional guerrillero or band leader would
regard as other than simple common sense.
The novelty is political, and it is of two kinds. First, situations are
now more common when the guerrilla force can rely on mass support
in widely different areas of its country. It does so in part by
appealing to the common interest of the poor against the rich, the
oppressed against the government ; and in part by exploiting
nationalism or the hatred of foreign occupiers (often of another
colour) . It is, once again, only the folklore of military experts that
'peasants want only to be left alone' . They don't. When they have no
1 65
 REVOLUTIONARIES

food, they want food ; when they have n o land, they want land ;
when they are cheated by the officials of a remote capital, they want
to get rid of them. But above all they want rights as men and when
ruled by foreigners, to get rid of the foreigners. One ought to add
that an effective guerrilla war is possible only in countries in which
such appeals can be successfully made to a high percentage of the
rural population in a high proportion of the country's territory. One
of the major reasons for the defeat of guerrilla war in Malaya and
Kenya was that these conditions did not obtain : the guerrillas were
drawn almost entirely from among the Chinese or Kikuyu, whereas
the Malays (the rural majority) and the rest of Kenya remained
largely outside the movement.
The second political novelty is the nationalization not only of
support for the guerrillas but of the guerrilla force itself, by means of
parties and movements of national and sometimes international
scope. The partisan unit is no longer a purely local growth ; it is a
body of permanent and mobile cadres around whom the local force is
formed. They link it with other units into a 'guerrilla army' capable
of nationwide strategy and of being transformed into a 'real' army.
They also link it with the non-combatant national movement in
general, and the politically decisive cities in particular. This implies
a fundamental change in the character of such forces : it does not
mean that guerrilla armies are now composed of hard-core revolu­
tionaries infiltrated from outside. However numerous and enthusias­
tic the volunteers, the outside recruitment of guerri11as is limited
partly by technical considerations, partly because many potential
recruits, especially from among city intellectuals and workers, are
simply not qualified ; they lack the sort of experience which only
guerrilla action or peasant life can give. Guerrillas may be started by
a nucleus of cadres, but even a totally infiltrated force such as the
Communist units which maintained themselves for some years after
I 945 in Aragon (Spain) soon had to begin systematically recruiting
among the local population. The bulk of any successful guerrilla
force is always likely to consist oflocal men, or of professional fighters
who were once recruited as local men, and the military advantages of
this are immense, as Che Guevara has pointed out, for the local man
'has his friends, to whom he can make a personal appeal for help : he
knows the terrain and all the things that are likely to happen in the
region ; and he will also have the extra enthusiasm of the man who is
defending his own home'.
I66
 V I E T N A M A N D T H E D Y NAM I C S O F G U E R R I L L A WAR

But if the guerrilla force is an amalgam of outside cadres and local

recruits, it will nevertheles� have been entirely transformed. It will
not only have unprecedented cohesion, discipline and morale,
developed by systematic education (in literacy as well as military
techniques) and political training but unprecedented long-range
mobility. The 'Long March' transferred Mao's Red army from
one end of China to the other, and Tito's partisans achieved similar
migrations after similar defeats. And wherever the guerrilla army
goes, it will apply the essential principles of guerrilla war which are,
almost by definition, inapplicable by orthodox forces : ( a) To pay for
everything supplied by the local population ; ( b) not to rape the local
women ; ( c) to bring land, justice and schools wherever they go ;
and ( d) never to live better than, or otherwise than, the local
�nhabitants.
Such forces, operating as part of a nationwide political movement
and under conditions of popular support, have proved themselves
extraordinarily formidable. At their best they simply cannot be
defeated by orthodox military operations. Even when less successful,
they can be defeated, according to the calculations of British
counter-insurgency experts in Malaya and elsewhere, only by a
minimum of ten men on the ground for every single guerrilla ; that is
to say, in South Vietnam by a minimum of something like a million
Americans and puppet Vietnamese. (In fact, the 8,ooo Malayan
guerrillas immobilized 1 40,000 soldiers and policemen.) As the
United States is now discovering, orthodox military methods are
quite beside the point ; bombs don't work unless there is something
other than paddies to make craters in. The 'official' or foreign forces
soon realize that the only way to fight guerrillas is by attacking their
base, i.e. the civilian population. Various ways of doing this have
been proposed, from the old-fashioned Nazi method of treating all
civilians as potential guerrillas, through more selective massacre and
torture, to the presently popular device of kidnapping entire popu­
lations and concentrating them in fortified village compounds, in the
hope of depriving the guerrillas of their indispensable source of
supplies and intelligence. The American forces, with their usual taste
for solving social problems by technological means, appear to have a
preference for destroying everything over large areas, presumably in
the hope either that all guerrillas in the area will be killed along with
the rest of the human, animal and vegetable life, or that somehow all
those trees and underbrush will be vaporized, leaving the guerrillas
1 67
 REVOLUTIONARIES

standing up and visible, where they can be bombed like real soldiers.
Barry Goldwater's plan to defoliate the Vietnamese forests by
nuclear bombs was no more grotesque than what is actually being
attempted along these lines.
The difficulty with such methods is that they merely confirm the
local population in their support of the guerrillas, and provide the
latter with a constant supply of recruits. Hence the anti-guerrillas
devise plans to cut the ground from under the enemy's feet by
improving the economic and social conditions of the local popu­
lation, rather in the manner of King Frederick William I of Prussia
who is reported to have run after his subjects in Berlin, beating them
with his stick and shouting : 'I want you to love me. ' But it is not
easy to convince people that their conditions are being improved
while their wives and children are being drenched in burning oil,
especially when the people doing the drenching live (by Vietnamese
standards) like princes.
Anti-guerrilla governments are more likely to talk about, say,
giving peasants the land, than actually doing it, but even when they
carry out a series of such reforms they do not necessarily gain the
gratitude of the peasants. Oppressed peoples do not want economic
improvement alone. The most formidable insurrectionary move­
ments (including very notably the Vietnamese) are those that
combine national and social elements. A people who want bread arid
also independence cannot be conciliated merely by a more generous
distribution of bread. The British met the revolutionary agitation of
the Irish under Parnell and Davitt in the 1 88os by a combination of
coercion and economic reform, and not without success - but this did
not forestall the Irish revolutionary movement which threw them out
in I 9 1 6-22 .
Nevertheless, there are limitations to a guerrilla army's ability to
win a war, though it usually has effective means to avoid losing one.
In the first place, guerrilla strategy is by no means applicable
everywhere on a national scale, and that is why it has failed, or
partly failed, in a number of countries, e.g. Malaya and Burma.
Internal divisions and hostilities - racial, religious, etc. - within a
country or a region may limit the guerrilla base to one part of the
people, while automatically providing a potential base for anti­
guerrilla action in another. To take an obvious case ; the Irish
revolution of I 9 1 6-22 , essentially a guerrilla operation, succeeded in
the twenty-six counties but not in Northern Ireland, despite a
I 68
 V I E T N A M A N D T H E D Y N A M I C S O F G U E R R I L LA WAR

common frontier and active or passive help from the south. (The
British government, by the way, never made this sympathy an excuse
to drop bombs on the Shannon barrage in order to force the Dublin
government to cease its aggression against the free world.)
Again, there may be peoples so inexperienced or so lacking in
effective cadres as to allow large-scale and wide-based guerrilla
insurrections to be suppressed, at least for some time. That is perhaps
the case in Angola. Or the geography of a country may facilitate
local guerrilla action, but make coordinated guerrilla warfare
remarkably difficult (as perhaps in some Latin American countries) .
Or a people may be simply too small to win independence by direct
action without major outside aid against a combination of occupying
countries determined to suppress them. This may be the case with
the Kurds, superb and persistent guerrilla fighters of the traditional
kind, but who have never achieved their independence.
Beyond these obstacles which vary from country to country, there
is the problem of cities. However great the support for the movement
in the cities, however urban the origin of its leaders, cities and
especially capital cities are the last place a guerrilla army will
capture or, unless very badly advised, tackle. The Chinese
Communists' road to Shanghai and Canton ran via Yenan. The
Italian and French resistance movements timed their urban insur­
rections (Paris, 1 944 ; Milan and Turin, 1 945 ) for the very last
moments before the arrival of Allied armies, and the Poles who did
not (Warsaw, 1 943) were wiped out. The power of modern industry,
transport and administration can be neutralized for a significant
length of time only where it lies thin on the ground. Small-scale
harassment, such as the cutting of one or two roads and rail tracks,
can disrupt military movement and administration in difficult rural
terrain, but not in the big city. Guerrilla action or its equivalent is
entirely possible in the city - after all, how many bank robbers are
ever caught in London - and there have been some recent examples
of it, for instance in Barcelona in the late 1 940s, and various cities in
Latin America. But it has little more than nuisance value, and
merely serves to create a general atmosphere of lack of confidence in
the efficiency of the regime, or to tie down armed forces and police
which might be better used elsewhere.
Finally, the most crucial limitation of guerrilla warfare is that it
cannot win until it becomes regular warfare, in which case it must
meet its enemies on their strongest ground. It is comparatively easy
1 69
 R E V 0 LU T I 0 N A R I ES

for a widely backed guerrilla movement to eliminate official power

from the countryside, except for the strong points actually physically
occupied by armed forces, and to leave in government or occupation
control no more than the isolated cities and garrisons, linked by a few
main roads or railroads (and that only by daylight) , and by air or
radio. The real problem is to get beyond that point. Textbooks
devote a good deal of attention to this ultimate phase of guerrilla
war, which the Chinese and Vietnamese handled with brilliant
success against Chiang Kai-shek and the French. However, those
successes should not include mistaken generalizations. The real
strength of guerrilla armies lies not in their ability to turn themselves
into regular armies capable of expelling other conventional forces
but in their political strength. The total withdrawal of popular
support may produce the collapse of local governments often - as in
China and Vietnam - heralded by mass desertions to the guerrillas ;
a crucial military success by the guerrillas may bring this collapse
into the open. Fidel Castro's rebel army did not win Havana ; when
it had demonstrated that it could not only hold the Sierra Maestra
but also take the provincial capital of Santiago, the government
apparatus of Batista collapsed.
Foreign occupying forces are likely to be less vulnerable and less
inefficient. However, even they may be convinced that they are in a
war they cannot win, that even their tenuous hold can be maintained
only at quite disproportionate cost. The decision to call off the
wasting game is naturally humiliating, and there are always good
reasons for postponing it, because it will rarely happen that the
foreign forces have been decisively defeated, even in local actions like
Dienbienphu. The Americans are still in Saigon, apparently drink­
ing their bourbon peacefully, except perhaps for an occasional bomb
in a cafe. Their columns still criss-cross the country apparent! y at will,
and their losses are not much greater than those from traffic
accidents at home. Their aircraft are dropping bombs wherever they
like, and there is still somebody who can be called the prime minister
of 'free' Vietnam, though it may be hard to forecast from one day to
the next who he will be.
Thus, it can always be argued that just one more effort will tip the
balance : more troops, more bombs, more massacres and torture,
more 'social missions' . The history of the Algerian war anticipates
the one in Vietnam in this respect. By the time it was over, half a
million Frenchmen were in uniform there (against a total Moslem
 V I E T N A M AND T H E D Y NAM I C S O F G U E R R I L L A WAR

population of nine million, or one soldier to every eighteen inhab­

itants, not counting the pro-French local white population) , and the
army was still asking for more including the destruction of the
French Republic.
It is hard, in such circumstances, to cut one's losses, but there are
occasions when no other decision makes sense. Some governments
may take it earlier than others. The British evacuated Ireland and
Israel well before their military position had become untenable. The
French hung on for nine years in Vietnam and for seven years in
Algeria, but went in the end. For what is the alternative ? The old
style of local or marginal guerrilla actions, like border raiding by
tribesmen, could be isolated or contained by various relatively cheap
devices which did not interfere with the ordinary life of a country or
its occupiers. A few squadrons of aircraft could occasionally bomb
villages (a favourite British device in the Middle East between the
wars) , a military frontier zone could be established (as on the old
north-west frontier of India), and in extreme cases government
tacitly left some remote and disturbed region to its own devices for a
while, merely seeing to it that the trouble did not spread. In a
situation like that of Vietnam today or of Algeria in the later I 95os,
this will simply not work. If a people does not want to be ruled in the
old way any more, there is nothing much that can be done. Of
course, if elections had been held in South Vietnam in I 956, as was
provided by the Geneva agreements, the views of its people might
have been discovered at considerably less cost.
Where does this leave the anti-insurrectionaries ? It would be
foolish to pretend that guerrilla war is an invariable recipe for
successful revolution or that its hopes, as of now, are realistic in more
than a limited number of relatively underdeveloped countries. The
theorists of 'counter-insurgency' can therefore take comfort in the
thought that they need not always lose. But that is not the point.
When, for one reason or another, a guerrilla war has become
genuinely national and nationwide, and has expelled the official
administration from wide stretches of the countryside, the chances of
defeating it are zero. That the Mau Mau were defeated in Kenya is
no help to the Americans in Vietnam ; all the less help when we
remember that Kenya is now independent, and the Mau Mau
regarded as pioneers and heroes of the national struggle. That the
Burmese government has never been overthrown by guerrillas was
no help to the French in Algeria. The problem of President Johnson
171
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

is Vietnam, not the Phillipines, and the situation in Vietnam is lost.

What remain in such a situation are illusions and terror. The
rationalizations of today's Washington policy were all anticipated in
Algeria. We were told by French official spokesmen that the
ordinary Algerian was on the side of France, or if not actually
pro-French, that he wanted only peace and quiet but was terrorized
by the FLN. We were told, practically once a week, that the situation
had improved, that it was now stabilized, that another month should
see the forces of order regain the initiative, that all they needed was
another few thousand soldiers and another few million francs. We
were told that the rebellion would soon die down, once it was
deprived of its foreign sanctuary and source of supplies. That
sanctuary (Tunisia) was bombed and the border hermetically sealed.
We were told that if only the great centre of Moslem subversion in
Cairo could be eliminated, everything would be all right. The
French therefore made war on Egypt. In the last stages we were told
that there might just conceivably be some people who really wanted
to get rid of the French, but since the FLN obviously did not represent
the Algerian people, but only a gang of ideological infiltrators, it
would be grossly unfair to the Algerians to negotiate with them. We
were told about the minorities which had to be protected against
terror. The only thing we were not told was that France would if
necessary use nuclear weapons, because the French didn't then have
any. What was the result ? Algeria is today governed by the FLN .
The means by which the illusions are to come true is terror, mostly
- in the nature of things - against noncombatants. There is the
old-fashioned terror against civilians by frightened soldiers, demor­
alized by the fact that in this kind of war any civilian may be an
enemy fighter, and culminating in the infamous mass reprisals - the
razing of villages, such as the Nazis' Lidice and Oradour. Intelligent
anti-guerrillas will discourage this� since it is apt to make the local
population totally hostile. Still, such terror and reprisals will happen.
Furthermore, there will be the more selective · torturing of prisoners
for information. In the past there may have been some moral
limitation on such torture, but not, alas, in our time. In fact, we have
so far forgotten the elementary reflexes of humanity that in Vietnam
we photograph torturers and victims and release the pictures to the
press.
A second kind of terror is that which is at the base of all modern
warfare, whose targets nowadays are essentially the civilians rather
 V I E T N A M A N D T H E D Y N A M I C S O F G U E R R I L LA W A R

than the combatants. (Nobody would ever have developed nuclear

weapons for any other purpose.) In orthodox warfare the purpose of
indiscriminate mass destruction is to break the morale of population
and government, and to destroy the industrial and administrative
base on which any orthodox war effort must rest. Neither task is as
easy in guerrilla war, because there are hardly any cities, factories,
communications or other installations to destroy, and nothing like
the vulnerable central administration machine of an advanced state.
On the other hand, more modest success may pay off. If terror
convinces even a single area to withhold support from the guerrillas,
and thus to drive them elsewhere, this is a net gain for the
anti-guerrillas. So the temptation to go on bombing and burning at
random is irresistible, especially for countries like the United States
which could strip the entire surface of South Vietnam of life without
dipping too deeply into its supply of armaments or money.
Lastly, there is that most hopeless and desperate form of terror,
which the United States is at present applying : the threat to extend
the war to other nations unless they can somehow get the guerrillas
to stop. This has no rational justification at all. If the Vietnamese
war were really what the State Department pretends, namely an
'indirect' foreign aggression without 'a spontaneous and local rebel­
lion', then no bombing of North Vietnam would be necessary. The
Vietcong would be of no more importance in history than the
attempts to set up guerrilla warfare in Spain after I g45, which faded
away, leaving few traces except some local newspaper stories and a
few publications by Spanish policemen. Conversely, if the people of
South Vietnam really were on the side of whatever general at present
claims to be their government, or merely wanted to be left in peace,
there would be no more trouble in that country than in neighbouring
Cambodia or Burma, both of which had or still have guerrilla
movements.
But it is clear by now, and should always have been clear, that the
Vietcong will not go away quietly, and no miracle will transform
South Vietnam into a stable anti-communist republic within the
foreseeable future. As most governments in the world know (though
one or two, like the British, are too dependent on Washington to say
so) there can be no military solution in Vietnam without at least a
major conventional land war in the Far East, which would probably
escalate into a world war when, sooner or later, the United States
discovered that it could not win such a conventional war either. And
I 73
 REVOLUTIONARIES

it would be fought by several hundreds of thousands of American

troops, because the allies of the United States, though doubtless
willing to send a token battalion or ambulance unit, are not fools
enough to involve themselves seriously in a conflict of this kind. The
pressure to escalate a little further will mount, and so will the
Pentagon belief in the most suicidal of all the many Vietnamese
illusions - that in the last showdown the North Vietnamese and
Chinese can be terrorized by the prospect of nuclear war into defeat
or withdrawal.
They cannot, for three reasons. First, because (whatever the
computers say) nobody believes that a United States government,
which is genuinely interested in a stable and peaceful world, will
actually start a nuclear war over Vietnam. South Vietnam is a
question of vital importance for Hanoi and Peking, just as Soviet
missiles off Florida were regarded as a vital issue in Washington ;
whereas the Vietcong are merely a matter of saving face for the
United States as Cuban missile bases were of marginal urgency for
Khruschev. The Russians backed down over Cuba because to them
it was not worth any kind of world war, nuclear or conventional. For
the same reason the United States can be expected to back down in
South Vietnam, provided it is interested in world peace, and
provided, presumably, some sort of face-saving formula can be
found.
Second, and on the supposition that the United States really is not
prepared for any realistic settlement in South Vietnam, its nuclear
threat will not work in the long run because North Vietnam, China
(and quite a few other countries) will conclude that nothing is to be
expected from concession except further United States demands.
There is so much talk about 'Munich' in Washington these days that
it is often forgotten how much like Munich the situation must look to
the other side. A government which regards itself as free to bomb a
country with which it is not at war can hardly be surprised if China
and North Vietnam refuse to believe that this is the last concession
they will be asked to make. There are, as the United States
government is aware, situations today in which countries are willing
to face the risks of world war, even nuclear war. For China and North
Vietnam, South Vietnam is one such situation and the Chinese have
already made that clear. It is dangerous daydreaming to think
otherwise.
Third and last, the threat ofnuclear war against China and North
 V I E T N A M AND T H E D Y N A M I C S O F G U E R R I L L A WAR

Vietnam is relatively ineffective, because it is more appropriately a

threat made against industrialized belligerents. It assumes that in
modern warfare there comes a moment when a country or a people
must give up because its back is broken. That is a certain outcome of
nuclear war for small and medium-sized industrial states and a
probable one for large ones (including the United States), but it is not
the nec�ssary outcome for a relatively undeveloped state, especially
one as gigantic as China. It is certainly true that China (without the
ussR) has no chance of defeating the United States. The strength of
its position is that neither can it be defeated in any realistic sense. Its
token nuclear bombs can be destroyed, and so can its industries,
cities and many millions of its 700 million citizens. But all that would
merely put the country back to where it was at the time of the
Korean war. There are simply not enough Americans to conquer
and occupy the country.
It is important for American generals (and for anyone else
calculating war on assumptions derived from industrial societies) to
realize that a nuclear threat will be regarded by the Chinese either as
incredible, or as inevitable but not decisive. It will therefore not
work as a threat, though doubtless the Chinese will not rush lightly
into a major war, especially a nuclear one, even when they believe it
cannot be avoided. As in Korea, they are not likely to enter it until
directly attacked or threatened. The dilemma of American policy
therefore remains. Having three times as many nuclear bombs as the
rest of the world is very impressive, but it will not stop people from
making revolutions of which Mr McGeorge Bundy disapproves.
Nuclear bombs cannot win guerrilla wars such as the Vietnamese are
now fighting, and without such weapons it is improbable that even
conventional wars can be won in that region. (The Korean war was
at best a draw.) Nuclear bombs cannot be used as a threat to win a
little war that is lost, or even a medium-sized war, for though the
populace can be massacred, the enemy cannot be brought to
surrender. If the United States can come to terms with the realities of
south-east Asia, it will find itself very much where it was before - the
most formidable power in the world, whose position and influence
nobody wants to challenge, if only because nobody can, but which,
like all other powers, past and present, must live in a world it does
not altogether like. If it cannot come to such terms, sooner or later it
will blast off those missiles. The risk is that the United States,
suffering from the well-known disease of infant great powers - a
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 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

touch of omnipotence - will slide into nuclear war rather than face
reality.1

1 Though the situation has altered since this article was written, shortly after the

United States decision to escalate the Vietnam war in 1 965, I have preferred to
reprint it unchanged, partly because the general arguments remain valid, but
partly also for the pleasure of recording accurate prediction.
 18

C I V I L I AN S VE R S U S M I L I TA R Y
I N T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U RY
P O L IT I C S

Ever since the French Revolution all modern governments have

faced the problem of the relations between civilian governments
and the military. Most of them have feared a potential military
takeover from time to time, and indeed Napoleon Bonaparte
provided the first modern example of this phenomenon and, for a
very long time, its characteristic brand-name, Bonapartism. Of
course go-vernments had problems with their soldiers before then.
Guards officers were proverbial king-makers, or rather emperor­
assassinators in eighteenth-century Russia, as janissaries had been
in the Ottoman Empire. But, taking central and west European
feudal and absolutist states, the armed forces were rarely separable
from the nobility and gentry which provided their officers. In
extreme cases, no conflict between civilians and military in politics
could arise, because the same people, e.g. feudal nobles and
country gentry, were both. Or rather, conflict might arise, but
only as it were about demarcation lines. It was almost impossible
for the armed (i.e. noble) rebels to conceive of any government
other than that of the legitimate hereditary dynasty, or of someone
who at least pretended to belong to it. They might challenge one
particular member of it, or quarrel with particular arrangements
within the kingdom, but constitutionally they did not set up an
alternative. In fact, as the Meiji Restoration in Japan shows very
well, in the last analysis even the most inactive and nominal
legitimate king or emperor had for this reason amazing reserves of
political power against the most powerful nobles who ruled in his
name, if he chose to exercise them.
 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

But we are not considering traditional aristocratic and absolutist

societies but modern ones, in which the armed forces are a special
sub-department of public power, different in their personnel and
generally in the social recruitment of their officers from other parts
of it, and not necessarily owing the civilian part a traditional,
almost ritual, loyalty. We do sometimes find survivals of the older
relationship, as in nineteenth-century Prussia and imperial
Germany, where the corps of army officers (but not the naval
ones) consisted largely of junkers, who would have found rebellion
against the king, who was the very keystone of their class, hardly
conceivable ; at least as long as he behaved as they thought a king
ought to. In a more attenuated form we find it even in Hitler's
Germany, where the fact of having sworn a personal oath of
loyalty to the chief of state undoubtedly meant much to officers.
But such phenomena are increasingly marginal to modern states,
which have increasingly tended to be republics, where loyalty is
formally due not to a dynasty or even a person, but to a concept
('the people', 'the republic', 'the constitution', etc.), and to
particular groups of individuals such as governments only in so far
as they represent these concepts. It is quite easy to decide that one
is loyal to the republic, people or (if vaguely enough defined)
constitution, whereas the government is not. Plenty of soldiers
have decided in this manner, and in a number of countries,
notably the Iberian and Latin American ones from the early
nineteenth century, soldiers have claimed a permanent right to
make coups by virtue of being the ex-officio guardians of people,
republic, constitution and the basic ideological or other values of
the state.
Now virtually all modern states have taken the view, at least
since Napoleon, that the ideal relation between civilian govern­
ments and the military is the subordination of the latter to the
former. A great deal of thought has been expended in some
countries to ensuring this subordination, and nowhere more so
than in the states deriving most directly from the revolutionary
tradition, those under the government of communist parties. Their
problem was always particularly acute, since revolutionary
governments deriving from insurrection and armed struggle are
vulnerable to the men who wage it. As the debates of the 1 920s in
Soviet Russia bear witness, they were extremely sensitive to the
possible dangers of 'Bonapartism'. Their determination that army
 CIVILIANS VERSUS M I LITARY

must be subservient to party has been unqualified, and even the

Chinese, who during the 'Great Cultural Revolution', appeared
to diverge from this tradition, seemed to return to it in I 97 I .
Until now communist regimes have been remarkably successful in
maintaining civilian supremacy - we need not venture in pro­
phecy - though it may be argued that in concentrating on the
dangers of a military takeover they somewhat neglected another
danger, at least until I 956. This was the risk of a de facto takeover
by the police, open or secret, against which the history of the
French revolution provided no warning example. The term
'police' is here used not of the traditional and relatively modest
apparatus of public order and internal espionage, but of the
phenomenon, for which the nineteenth century provides little
precedent, of large and increasingly powerful parallel centres of
armed force, administration and power, such as the German SS.
Still, by and Jarge communist-governed states have been passion­
ately civilian-minded, as even acknowledged heroes of the nation
like Marshal Zhukov were to discover.
Western parliamentary democracies have not, on the whole,
denied themselves the publicity value of military glory. It was not
only the Weimar Republic which elected its most eminent general
to the presidency. Marshall MacMahon and General de Gaulle in
France, the Duke of Wellington in Britain, and a remarkably long
list of presidential generals in the United States ending (for the
present) with Eisenhower, testify to the political appeal of a highly
decorated uniform. And, incidentally, 'to the self-denial of com­
munist governments. In general, however, the typical western
states - the term is sufficiently understood not to require pedantic
definition - have not had much of a problem of militant takeover.
Soldiers have sometimes been very influential in them, and have
changed governments or provided the conditions under which
governments could change - but - and this is not widely recog­
nized - they rarely governed themselves or regarded themselves
as possible rivals to civilian government, or its controllers.
Their political analogue was rather the civil service, a body of
persons obliged, whatever their private views, to carry out the
wishes of any government which had formal sovereignty and the
responsibility for taking political decisions. This did not mean that
civil services could not drag their feet, indulge in gentle sabotage,
in backstairs lobbying for their policies, or interpret such policies
I 79
 REVOLUTIONARIE S

in ways congenial to them. It meant that formally they were and

are arms of government, not government itself. The late
A.B. Cobban pointed out this analogy for the French army.
Indeed, it is to a great extent true, in spite of the various
interventions of that army in politics, and in spite of the fact that
for long periods the social origins of its officers, their ideology and
their political views (Catholic and Royalist) conflicted almost
head-on with those of their political masters. The first Napoleon
was the great exception - but only until he seized power. After
that he was a normal ruler who happened to go off from time to
time to win battles. The army was no more important in his
regime than in any other which wages war. Napoleon III was not
even a soldier, and his rise to power owes little to the military ; if
they supported him in 1 85 1 it was because he was already the
effective government. The army which raised Marshall Petain to
power was German and not French. As for General de Gaulle he
freed himself of the military conspirators who brought him to
power as soon as he could, and subordinated the army to civilian
control in the usual way, and with little trouble. He called on it
again in 1 968, but evidently (until the present) without reviving
its political ambitions.
Conversely in such countries (France) the attempts of the army
to coerce the politicians were, on the whole, remarkably unsuc­
cessful. When the French army did not accept the existing and
operational government as the legitimate one, whatever it hap­
pened to be - and it changed loyalties without a tremor in 1 830,
1 848, 1 85 1 and 1 870 - it proved itself weaker than the govern­
ment. During the Third Republic, when army confronted civilian
rulers, as during the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises, the civilians
won. I think one can safely say that the threatened refusal of the
British army to operate Irish Home Rule in 1 9 14 was the result
not of its own determination, but of the chicken-livered hesitations
of the liberal government. It did not give firm orders, and an
army established on the principles of obeying such orders, had
none to obey. Truman was never seriously threatened by
Macarthur. In the most extreme case of a self-conscious dissident
army opposing the established government, the revolt of the
Germ,,an army leaders against Hitler, the outcome was clear. The
real way in which armies in western countries have intervened in
government is by playing politics, and the most successful generals
1 80
 C I V I L I A.N S VE R S U S M I L I T A R Y

in this respect were not those who mobilized their support among
brother officers, but in courts or the lobbies of Parliaments.
Indeed, one of the reasons for General de Gaulle's strength was his
rare combination of the gifts of the army commander and the
remarkably subtle, not to say devious, politician. This is a
combination which one and a half centuries have taught any
French general who wishes to get anywhere, but few have been
competent to learn the lessons.
All this suggests that armies are politically neutral, serving any
regime with equal obedience, though not equal loyalty. This is the
situation of many policemen, and some of them have been known
to take pride in their Hobbesian readiness to serve any Leviathan
that is likely to come along, though revolutionaries who find
themselves interrogated under both capitalist and communist
regimes by the same official, have appreciated the virtues of this
political theory less. However, though both are disciplined, hierar­
chical, largely uniformed and armed forces designed to execute
and not to make policy, armed forces and police forces are quite
different in their political behaviour. As for armies, there appear
to be limits to their loyalty. Will they accept social-revolutionary
regimes ? The answer is : probably not, though the subject is as
usual surrounded by myth. (We do not, for instance, know
adequately how many of the armed forces of Spain remained loyal
to the republic in 1 936 - probably more than is commonly
realized - or how large a proportion of tsarist officers loyally
served, or would have loyally served, the Soviet government.)
Since most revolutions are victorious because the armies which
ought to suppress them are no longer reliable instruments of order,
and therefore arise on the (perhaps temporary) ruins of the former
armed forces, few have doubted that armies are fundamentally
against social revolution. Still, they probably are. By and large the
evidence shows that army officers in western countries are socially
conservative, and so, very often, are the ranks of career soldiers, as
distinct from those of conscripts.
That the Reichswehr between the wars was prepared to be loyal
to the Weimar Republic and Hitler, both regimes with which its
generals had no sympathy, does not prove that they would have
been equally loyal to a communist regime. Pretty certainly, they
would not have been. Armies refusing obedience to such social­
revolutionary regimes might well justify their failure on the
181
 REVOLUTIONARIES

grounds that these represented not any kind of order, but disorder
and anarchy, or that they were not real regimes, since their power
and authority was contested (as might well be the case) , but
whatever the reasons, they would be following the inclinations of
their officers. Conversely, social-revolutionary governments have
felt little confidence in the armies of the old regime. Those which
have, like the German social democq1.ts of 1 9 1 8, can by this
criterion alone be safely classified as not really revolutionary.
In developed countries which do not happen to be undergoing
social revolution (and few of them have) armies therefore inter­
vene in politics only under very exceptional conditions, and then -
so far - invariably on the political right. Under what conditions ?
A breakdown of the normal processes of politics normally seems
necessary, the classical example being the conflict between the
formal pattern of the system and political or social realities which
cannot be absorbed into it : a small, oligarchic party system which
threatens to be swamped by mass forces outside it (as seems to
have been the case in Japan in the 1 920s and 1 930s), an organized
block of voters whom the electoral system must admit, but the
dominant party structure refuses to, thus producing permanent
instability. In Argentina, France and Italy, for instance, no stable
government can be based both on free elections, the sovereignty of
the elected assembly, and the exclusion of the Peronists or
Communists respectively from the process of forming governmen­
tal alliances. Military rule (as in Argentina), the imposition (by
military coup) of a new presidential constitution which devalues
the assembly (as in France) , the fear of military coups (as in Italy
since the middle 1 960s) are the consequence. However, one hopes
that the Italian example proves that, while necessary, the break­
down of the political system is not a sufficient cause of military
intervention. On the other hand the injection into such an
endemic crisis of some political issue about which the army, as a
corporate professional or even political interest feels very strongly,
undoubtedly makes the situation much more explosive. A con­
troversial war, for which the army feels it is not getting sufficient
moral support and material resources, may make the temptation
to sweep away the hesitant or traitorous civilians irresistible. Still,
armies might even so prefer to substitute a 'good' or 'efficient'
civilian government for a 'bad' or 'ineffective' one, since in
developed countries they are profoundly imbued with the sense of
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 C I V I L I ANS V E R S U S M I L I T A R Y

being not political 'masters', but a 'service', and in any case

acutely aware of their lack of qualifications for politics. The
Reichswehr in Weimar Germany sought any solution rather than
that of taking over power itself, and thought it had found a
satisfactory one in the strong right-wing Nazi-Nationalist coalition
of 1 93 3 .
The term 'army' in this context refers for practical purposes
exclusively to the officer corps. Among its members the generals
are in theory best capable of action, since their numbers are small,
they generally know each other and can therefore concert policy
more easily, and above all, because they can actually order large
bodies of troops about. In practice they are less likely to act (as
distinct from permitting action) , partly because of the notorious
jealousies and ambitions of senior officers, to which the literature
of military autobiography bears witness, partly because their
personal fortunes are directly dependent on the civilian govern­
ment, i.e. on playing orthodox politics. They have much to gain
within the existing system, and more to lose by abandoning it.
Less eminent officers have more to gain, but find it hard to
concert action outside the limited field of the regiment, the
garrison or the small expeditionary force, though being members
of some old-boy network helps to extend their range. On the
whole, in developed countries coups not organized, or at any rate
covered, by generals, seem unlikely. The most dangerous situation
is likely to be one in which the less senior officers are politically
mobilized and organized, e.g. in secret nationalist societies, and
take the initiative in attempting coups or mutinies, which, even
though abortive, force the generals into showing solidarity with
movements which are in any case more congenial to them than
the discredited civilians. We need hardly discuss the problem of the
special role of certain elite corps and units designed for rapid
action, such as parachutists and commandos. By and large, in
developed countries one may guess that the colonels, halfway
between their seniors and juniors, are likely to be politically the
most dangerous ranks.
As for the rest coups by non-commissioned officers are rare even
in underdeveloped countries with armed forces of any size, and
practically negligible in developed ones. If the rank and file of any
army plays politics, it is no longer military politics. They intervene
in politics because they act as civilians. Their most powerful
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 R E V O LU T I O N A R I E S

weapon is analogous to that of the civilian workers' strike, namely

the refusal to obey orders. At crucial moments this may decide the
fate of governments. The most recent example is perhaps the
refusal of the French conscripts in Algeria to follow their officers
into a putsch against de Gaulle. To this extent conscript armies
have a certain built-in resistance to military coups, but one would
not speculate how far this resistance alone would take them.
Probably not too far.
So much for western and communist countries. However, there
remains the very large part of the world in which military politics
play a much more prominent role, especially in times of crisis.
This comprises the bulk of the so-called 'Third World' or 'under­
developed world', i.e. the Iberian and Latin American states, the
Islamic states, Africa south of the Sahara and large parts of Asia.
The case of Japan belongs more to the 'developed' world, in the
sense that military politics there appear as a temporary interim
rather than as a permanent probability. However, I know too
little about this country to speak with confidence about it.
Throughout this vast area military government has often been
the rule and always implied by the very existence of an army, so
that its elimination has often seemed to require that of the armed
forces themselves.1 This vulnerability to military politics has been
demonstrated more than I 50 years in Latin America, the only
sector of the Third World which has enjoyed political indepen­
dence under republics for so long a period, and became evident
within a few years of the establishment of political independence
in most of the rest of the underdeveloped countries. It is quite easy
to draw up a list of western countries which have never been
under military rule in the past 1 50 years, even though sometimes,
like Britain and Belgium, engaged in major wars. There are very
few countries of the Third World at present under civilian
administration, in which the chances of maintaining it over the
·
next twenty years are as good as even. Admittedly the recent drift
towards military government has been by no means entirely
spontaneous.

1 This is not as impracticable as it might seem. Though only one state (Costa
Rica) has actually abolished the army, Mexico has quietly reduced its armed
forces to something like seventy thousand - for a country of perhaps fifty
millions - with the result that it has not suffered from military coups since the
1 930s.
 C I V I L I A N S V E R S US M I L I T A R Y

Why this is so is a question which cannot be answered simply

by an analysis of the social composition or corporate interests of
the armed forces. Their corporate interests are plainly not neglig­
ible, since military expenditure may receive 20 per cent or more of
an funds expended by their governments in a given year, to cite
one estimate for Latin America in the early 1 960s, and the
pressure to maintain this disproportionate share of budgets clearly
involves armed forces (among whom armies are generally by far
the largest group) in national politics. Their social composition
itself is not adequately illuminating either. The officer corps is
rarely drawn predominantly from a traditional landed aristocracy
and gentry, like the Prussian junkers, or from that sector of it
which has long family connections with the military life. Either
such strata do not exist, or they have been swamped by officers of
different social origin, as in Argentina, where only 23 per cent of
senior army and air force commanders come from 'traditional'
families. Leaving aside the special cases where large sections of the
armed forces are recruited from particular . minority nationalities,
tribes or other groups (such as the 'martial races' which were so
conveniently used by former colonialist governments and have
sometimes survived into independence) , the bulk of officers in the
underdeveloped world can be described in one way or another as
'middle class'. But this classification in itself means very little.
'Middle class' may mean that officers are recruited from the
established strata exercising economic and political power, as in
Argentina, where 73 per cent of army and air force generals come
from the 'comfortable bourgeoisie' .2 In this case their politics,
leaving aside corporate interests and the special patterns of
military life, are likely to be similiar to those of their class, i.e. on
the conservative side. Or, more typically, they may come from the
lower middle class or modest provincial bourgeoisie, in which case
the army is one of the more promising careers for social promotion
open to the sons of this stratum. Officer corps composed largely of
aspiring and rising members of a military middle class, increas­
ingly professionalized and technically trained, are less likely to
identify with an established upper class, where such a one exists.
They may be politically more radical (or 'modernizing') in the
civilian sense (e.g., in the nineteenth century, 'Liberal') , or in
some specific military sense (as in twentieth-century, 'Nasserism') .
2 Jose Luis Imaz, Los Que Mandan, Buenos Aires, 1968, p. 58.

1 85
7-R • •
 REVOLUTIONARIES

There are, of course, also the genuinely self-made military leaders

who have risen from the ranks. They are common in and after
revolutions, and during long periods of political disorder, as in
nineteenth-century Latin America, where the caudillo was
sometimes a grass-roots fighting man who had worked his way up
to the point where he commanded a sufficiently large force to
surround the nearest presidential palace. Today such self-made,
and usually self-promoted chiefs are probably common only in
ex-colonies which, before independence, possessed either no native
armed units specifically associated with the territory of the sub­
sequent independent state, or at least no significant body of native
officers. This is the case in most of sub-Saharan Africa.
Whatever the social composition of such officer corps, the
tendency to military rule reflects not so much their character as
the absence of a stable political structure. Why is it less common
in communist states, some of which were equally 'backward'
before the revolution ? Essentially because genuine social revol­
utions set up both a convincing legitimation of civilian power -
the movement of the masses itself and the organizations (parties,
etc.) which claim to speak in its name - and also because they
immediately set about constructing a machine of government
which reaches down to the grass roots. The army which emerges
from them therefore tends to be not the creator but the creation of
the regime or the party, and it is merely one among several
institutions created by it. More ; it has two primary functions
within it, both of which keep it busy : defence and mass edu­
cation. This does not entirely eliminate the danger. There are
special cases such as Algeria where the 'movement' was not
primary, or rather where the 'army' coexisted with it indepen­
dently for long periods before independence, or in Bolivia, where
the 'movement', which had largely destroyed the old army in the
revolution of 1 952, could not retain control of its own army,
perhaps chiefly because both came to depend largely on the
United States. But on the whole - and this applies to regimes like
the Mexican which, though non-communist, are the outcome of
genuine social revolution - the army is or becomes subordinate to
the party or the civilian organization. 3
3 The Mexican case is particularly interesting because the revolution was

largely dominated by virtually independent insurrectionary generals, who were

only eliminated as a serious political force in the course of perhaps twenty years,

1 86
 CIVILIANS VERSUS MILITARY

Most of the Third World, however, has not achieved political

independence by means of mass movements or social revolutions,
Much of it did not even contain the initial bases for a modern
state, and indeed, as in so much of Africa, the main function of
the new state apparatus was as a mechanism for the production of
a national bourgeoisie or ruling class, which previously barely
existed. In such countries the legitimation of the state is uncertain.
In nineteenth-century Latin America as in mid-twentieth century
Africa it may not even be clear what territory the state should
occupy, its frontiers being determined by historical accident, such
as the administrative divisions of former colonial rule, former
imperial rivalry, or economic accidents such as the distribution of
large estates. Only military power is real, because the least
efficient and experienced of armies is efficient enough to surround
the presidential palace and occupy radio station and airport
without calling upon any other force, and there is rarely
another force to call on, or if there is, the government may
hesitate to call upon it. Even that power is often not very real. As
the failed coups in parts of former British and French Africa show,
a very small European force can often neutralize it. (Con­
versely, many a putsch has been due in recent years to the official
or unofficial encouragement by outside powers.) But broadly
speaking the Third World is putschist, because it has had no
real revolutions, and today more putschist than ever because both
local forces and outside powers wish to avoid revolutions. The
much rarer case where soldiers take over because there is a basis
for revolution, but no adequate civilian force to carry it out, will
be considered below.
Military politics, in advanced countries as in the Third World,
is therefore not a special kind of politics, but something that fills
the vacuum left by the absence of ordinary politics. It may
establish or re-establish ordinary politics when, for one reason or
another, these have broken down. At worst they prevent social
revolution without putting anything in its place except the hope
that sooner or later an alternative solution to it will turn up. This
is the case of so many Latin American military regimes - the

incidentally giving Mexico the benefit of a military budget of less than I per
cent of the country's GDP in the 1 960s - a lower percentage even than that of
Uruguay.
 REVOLUTIONARIES

Argentinian and Brazilian, or of the Polish 'colonels' between the

wars, and the Greek one at present. If the army coups are lucky,
the wheels of the economy will turn, the mills of administration
will grind on, and the successful generals can retire to the sidelines
or sit out their prolonged term as presidents, benefactors or
liberators of their country. If they are less lucky, there may be a
slump in primary commodity prices and the wheels of the
economy stop, i.e. the taxes stop coming in, the debt cannot be
serviced. This has put paid to quite a few military rulers in their
time, as in the mid- 1 95os. If the soldiers are even less lucky, and
there is no economy or institutional apparatus behind them, even
military government will have no stability. It will last until the
next colonel sees his chance to speculate on the big race. The most
backward and dependent countries have had the most persistent
history of short-lived military regimes.
One reason for this rather negative character of military politics
is, that army officers rarely wish to govern themselves, or are
competent at any activity except soldiering, and sometimes not
even at that. The increasing professionalization and technification
of modern armed forces has not substantially changed this. Their
qualification and training as a group are wrong for government. A
glance at the mess the Brazilian officers made after 1 964 when
they actually set about administering or purging the admin­
istration, is sufficient to prove the point. The normal course of
military politics is therefore to decide who is to be the government
and then find some civilians to actually carry it on, reserving the
right to throw them out when they cease to give satisfaction while
perhaps - indeed probably - making the leader of the military
coup president or premier. But there may be situations when a
more positive role is forced upon them.
These are comparatively rare. 'Nasserism' - i.e. military coups
which genuinely function as revolutions, or at least as major
movements of fundamental social reform, must not be confused
with the frequent sympathy of young officers in backward coun­
tries for movements of the left - radical, nationalist, anti­
imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-landlord, etc., or even with their
readiness to make political alliances with various sections of the
left. The view, widely held in the United States in recent decades,
that soldiers are more reliable as well as stable governments of
satellite states from an imperial point of view than civilians, is
1 88
 C I V I L I A N S V E R S U S M I L I TARY

based partly on the belief, taken from western experience, that

they are a conservative group, partly on the belief that foreign
military advisers and training provide not only technical edu­
cation but effective political indoctrination, but chiefly perhaps on
the capacity of imperial states to bribe them with supplies of the
kind of modern equipment and know-how which satisfies the
self-esteem of armed forces. In fact it is far from justified. Some of
the more revolutionary elements in local armed forces have
actually emerged, in Latin America, from among the local
military elite trained (e.g. as counter-insurgent Rangers) by the
North Americans, as in Guatemala in the middle 1 96os. 4 In so far
as the military is a force for 'modernization' and social renovation,
it is pro-western only so long as the western model appears likely to
solve their countries' problems, and this now appears increasingly
unlikely in most countries.
Nevertheless, the converse belief, which relatively weak left-wing
movements have sometimes held (e.g. at times in Brazil and
Venezuela) that the army, or sections of it, can be relied on to bring
them to power, is equally ill-advised. Revolutions are rarely suc­
cessful (unless the result of protracted guerrilla wars) without the
breakdown, abstention or partial support of the armed forces, but
revolutionary movements which rely on army coups to bring them to
power are likely to be disappointed.
We are still left with a few cases of genuinely innovatory soldiers'
regimes - Nasser's Egypt, Peru since 1 960, perhaps Ataturk's
Turkey. We may surmise that they occur in countries in which the
necessity of social revolution is evident, where several of the objective
conditions of it are present, but also where the social bases or
institutions of civilian life are too feeble to carry it out. The armed
forces, being in some cases the only available force with the capacity
to take and carry out decisions, may have to take the place of the
absent civilian forces, even to the point of turning their officers into
administrators. They will of course think of doing so only if the
officer corps consists of young radical or 'modernizing' members of a
discontented middle stratum, and if these contain a sufficiently large
number of literate and technically qualified men. There are even
today armed forces which would be as incompetent to run the affairs
of a modern state (which is different from ruling over those who do)
4 Turcios Lima, the military chief of the CP guerrillas in that country, began
his career as a Ranger officer.

1 89
 R E V O L U T I O NARIE S

as the Ostrogothic warriors were to run those of the Roman Empire.

Still, though the case is rare, armed forces which attempt to function
as revolutionaries are not unknown. It does not follow that civilian
revolutionaries will welcome their efforts. And though the net results
of their efforts may be substantial - it is virtually impossible to think
of Egypt, Peru and Turkey as returning to their respective old
regimes - they are unlikely to be as radical as the results of the
genuine social revolutions. Army radicalism remains a second-best
choice ; acceptable only because it is better to fill a political vacuum
than to leave it. There is, moreover, at present no evidence to show
that it can establish a permanent political solution.
To sum up, military intervention in politics is a symptom of social
or political failure. In the developed countries it is a symptom of the
breakdown - temporary in the most favourable cases - of the normal
process of politics, or a sign that the status quo can no longer contain
disruptive or revolutionary pressures. Ifit were to occur in commun­
ist countries, it would also be a sign of analogous crises, but there is
too little evidence to gauge how well the political structure of such
countries could resist it. In the Third World it is a fairly safe
symptom of an incomplete or aborted revolution.
There are two possible qualifications of this negative judgment. It
is possible in non-revolutionary countries for military intervention to
gain time, allowing an otherwise efficient economy and adminis­
tration to proceed without disruption by political crisis. In under­
developed countries it is possible for the military to replace, at least
temporarily, the revolutionary party or movement. However, if it
does so successfully it must sooner or later cease to be a military force
and form itself or part of itself into a party, a movement, an
administration. Both these cases are rare. In all other cases the
political achievements of the military are negative. It can stop
revolutions and overthrow governments, without putting anything
in their place ; not even - in spite of much talk among technocratic
officers, 'modernization' and 'economic development'. It can estab­
lish order, but contrary to the Brazilian motto which has inspired
many generations, 'order' in this sense is generally incompatible with
'progress'. It may not even outlast the general or the consortium of
officers, which has restored it, for what one conspiracy of officers has
achieved may tempt a succession of others.
The tragedy of the underdeveloped world in the r 95os and r g6os
was that the United States and its allies, when it came to the point,
 C I V I L I A N S V E R S U S M I L I TA R Y

preferred 'order' to 'progress' - Mobutu to Lumumba, Ky or Thieu

to Ho-Chi-Minh, any Latin general to Fidel Castro. It is possible
that the limitations of this policy have now become obvious, though
one can hardly say that it has ceased to tempt governments which
fear communism above all else. But in the meantime a large part of
the globe has been turned into the contemporary equivalent of the
old banana republics of Latin America, and is likely to remain in this
unhappy situation for a considerable time to come.
 19

COUP D ' ETAT

Ever since Machiavelli intelligent observers have exploited one of the

most effective stylistic devices of nonfiction, the contrast between the
official versions and the realities of politics. It is an effective device for
three reasons : because it is easy (all one has to do is use one's eyes) ,
because political reality is notoriously at variance with the moral,
constitutional or legalistic claptrap which surrounds political
actions, and because, more surprisingly, the public can still be
readily shocked by pointing this out. Mr Luttwack is obviously an
intelligent and excellently informed observer.1 One suspects that,
like Machiavelli himself, he enjoys truth not only because it is true
but also because it shocks the naive. He has therefore laid out his
very able little book on the coup d'etat as a manual for potential
putschists.
In a way this is a pity, for it both diverts attention from the real
interest of the work and somewhat biases his argument. Though it
will no doubt be recommended reading in courses organized by the
CIA or other bodies with an interest in the quick and efficient
overthrow of inconvenient governments, it will not tell experts in
the . field - and in many countries these include every army and
police officer from lieutenant upwards - much that they do not
already know and practise, except perhaps to apply some economic
rationality to post-coup repression (see the useful Appendix A) .
Plotters with a literary turn of mind may also benefit from the
author's concise, devastating, and very funny analysis of the different
types of communique announcing that the country is about to be
saved. But on the whole Luttwack's information, which has shock
value in London or Washington, is common knowledge in Buenos
Aires, Damascus, or even Paris, where people's reaction to the
appearance of armoured cars at street corners is based on experience.
1 Edward Luttwack, Coup d' Etat, a Practical Handbook, London, 1 968
 C O U P D 'E T A T

Those who are most likely to make coups patently do not need Mr
Luttwack to tell them how.
Who are they ? Coup d'Etat makes it clear, and its author knows,
that they belong to a rather restricted group, since coups are made
by armed forces and practically never by anyone else. This imposes
both political and technical limitations which exclude most of us. In
spite of Mr Luttwack's suggestion to the contrary, coups are not
politically neutral. Though officers - and therefore coups - can
occasionally favour the left, the circumstances when they do so are
comparatively rare, and not by any means universal even in the
underdeveloped world. Unfortunately the author omits to discuss
these conditions. The general bias of both officers and coups is in the
opposite direction. 'Bonapartism' normally tends to be a political
move to the conservative side, or at best a corporative self-assertion
of the armed forces as a special economic and professional pressure
group within the status quo.
Social revolutionary regimes, keenly aware of this ever since the
days of Napoleon 1, have therefore always (at any rate up to Mao
Tse-tung) been the firmest supporters of civilian revolutions and
civilian supremacy in politics ; even to the point of sacrificing the
powerful publicity value of successful generals, to which presidential
elections in the United States and elsewhere have long borne witness.
The ideal role of the army in classical social revolutions is negative :
it ought at the crucial moment to refuse to obey the old regime and
after that preferably disintegrate. The left which puts its trust in
progressive soldiers (as in Cuba in the days of the young Batista, and
up to 1 964 in Brazil) has been more often than not disappointed.
Even genuinely red armies are traditionally viewed with caution.
When revolutionary regimes need marshals, they have in the past
preferred to put civilian party leaders into uniform.
The technical limitation on prospective organizers of coups is, that
relatively few people are in a position to subvert the required group
of officers. (Noncoms are less promising, and the subversion of
troops produces not coups but revolutions.) About the only civilians
who can do so are already in government - the country's own or that
of some dominant or influential foreign power, or that of some vast
international corporation which can occupy an analogous position in
relation to a poor and backward state. Such people can organize a
coup comparatively simply and rather effectively, and perhaps for
this reason the process is too uninteresting to detain Mr Luttwack,
1 93
 REVOLUTIONARIES

though it has probably produced more actual coups than any other.
Also, of course, it offers little scope for the native self-made coup
leader unless he has first got to the top in his country's politics.
Anyone else who tries must, as the author shows convincingly, be
on such terms of powerful solidarity with his potential recruits as to
be able to rely on their discretion even if they refuse to join him. The
·
best way to get on such terms with them is (a) to be an officer and (b)
to share with the other potential plotters some strong emotional
bond such as belonging to the same family, tribe, sect (generally a
minority sect) , ritual brotherhood, etc. or the comradeship of a
regiment, military academy, club or even of ideology. Of course in
countries with a long tradition of coups all officers will consider plans
for one as potentially successful, and will therefore hesitate to disclose
them. Once, as in the classical Iberian pronunciamento, the tacit
convention has been established that men on the losing side will not
be seriously penalized (after all, they might be on the winning side
some day) , the risks of committing oneself to an uncertain adventure
are further diminished.
Still, the number of those in any country who can set out to plan a
coup with any hope of success is almost as limited as the number of
those who can become important bankers. The rest of us had better
stick to different kinds of political activity.
But if we can dismiss Coup d'Etat as a manual for plotters, we can
appreciate it as a contribution to the study of the structure of
political power. A coup is a game with three players (we omit the
dominant foreign power or corporation which may hold an effective
veto - or the trump cards) . These are the armed forces which can
make it, the politicians and bureaucracy whose readiness to accept it
makes it possible, and the political forces, official or unofficial, which
can check or checkmate it. For the success of a coup depends
essentially on the passivity of the existing state apparatus and the
people. If either or both resist it may still win, but not as a coup. The
Franco regime failed as a military putsch, but won after a civil war.
Mr Luttwack has some very interesting things to say about each of
these three.
He is probably at his best on the professional soldiers, members of
that curious esoteric world which has so little contact with the
civilian world, and works in such different ways. The non­
professional soldier, the conscript or temporary officer, or in most
cases the policeman, however heavily armed, tends to react much
 C O U P D ' ETAT

more like the civilians to whom he will return or among whom he

operates. Separated from the rest of society by a life consisting (in
peacetime) of fancy dress, instruction and practice, games and
boredom, organized on the assumption that their members at all
levels are generally rather stupid and always expendable, held
together by the increasingly anomalous values of bravery, honour,
contempt for and suspicion of civilians, professional armies tend
almost by definition to ideological eccentricity.
As Mr Luttwack rightly reminds us, the politics of officers' corps
are frequently quite different from those of their civilian masters,
generally being both more reactionary and more romantic. They
are, moreover, untrained and unaccustomed to cope with unusual
situations, and therefore naturally seek to assimilate them to usual
ones. As the author does not fail to note, one of the most convenient
mechanisms for explaining away unusual situations is to see them as
just another example of the mess politicians are always making. The
situation of professional officers is indeed paradoxical : it combines
collective power and individual unimportance. After thirty-five
years Germany has not yet quite recovered from the transfer of a few
hundred scientists from German to foreign laboratories and univer­
sities. Yet time and again armies have actually had their effectiveness
improved by the mass emigration, expulsion or other elimination of
their senior officers - so much so that one is tempted to believe that
few wars can be won unless the military leadership is first purged.
But the political power of scientists is negligible, whereas in the right
circumstances a half-dozen colonels can overthrow a government.
Bureaucracies have been more written about, and most of us have
more continuous experience of them. So Mr Luttwack's observations
on this subject will probably bring the pleasure of recognition rather
than that of illumination. Still, two of his points are always worth
remembering. The first is that the only methods that have ever been
discovered for controlling the Parkinsonian tendency of bureau­
cracies, public or private, to grow into infinity, are themselves
bureaucratic. One such method consists of setting up another
department 'which fulfils its instincts by opposing the growth of all
other bureaucratic organizations', a role usually played by the
financial bureaucracy ; another relies on each empire-building
department to do its best to keep its potential rivals in check.
The second observation is that bureaucracies are essentially
Hobbesian institutions, which cannot be relied on to defend existing
1 95
 REVOLUTIONARIES

regimes once they suspect that the victory of a new regime is

probable. This applies to the police as much as to all other parts of
the state apparatus, though with some qualifications. However, Mr
Luttwack fails to note that this does not make them politically
neutral. Neither army nor police opposed any resistance to the
overthrow of fascism in Italy, but as recent events in that country
demonstrate, the persistence of the apparatus of the fascist era makes
the solution of fundamental problems in post-fascist Italy almost
impossible. Marx's observations that revolutions cannot simply 'lay
hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own
purposes', however anxious it may be to be taken over, makes even
more sense today than it did in 1872.
Lastly, Mr Luttwack's comments on political organizations and
movements are original and instructive. Essentially, he argues, we
must distinguish between movements geared for real action and
those which have settled down to symbolic action such as the
organization of voting, the ritual of institutionalized bargaining, or
verbal political conflict. Faced with a coup d' etat the British Labour
Party would be certain, the British Trade Union Congress nearly
certain, to do nothing, though the National Union of Students might
take to the streets, however ineffectively. On the other hand, the
major Italian trade union federation, linked with a communist
party, with a long tradition of political · strikes and, what is more
important, ofliberation from fascism by direct mass action, could not
be relied on to remain passive. Neither could insurrectionary parties,
though of course many once insurrectionary organizations have
either turned into machines (i.e. distributors of favours and jobs) .
Or, like some communist parties, they may have allowed long
political stability to atrophy their capacity for rapid action. Also,
insurrectionary parties have the disadvantages as well as the advan­
tages of centralization : once decapitated, they drastically and very
rapidly lose their effectiveness.
So far as the ' special case of coups d'etat is concerned the
distinction between political movements which move and those
which do not is sufficient. For in the most favourable case a coup can
be defeated by any sign of organized resistance, which immediately
reveals the weaknesses of the bid for power, and may also give time
for the rest of the armed and civilian apparatus to decide that there is
no cause to change sides. In much less favourable cases it may still
confront a weak, uncertain, or patchily established new regime with
1 96
 C O U P D ' ETAT

effective resistance. But the interest of Mr Luttwack's observations is

far wider than this. We are living in a period when various forms of
direct action in politics are once again becoming significant in the
developed countries. In these countries both the official doctrines of
politics and the practical know-how of people in public affairs
exclude the politics of extra-legal power. The old have forgotten that
governments can be overthrown, or dismissed the possibility from
their minds, the young merely believe that they can, but have no
idea how. In these circumstances any work which realistically
discusses the seizure of power as an operation is particularly helpful.
Mr Luttwack's little book should therefore be immensely useful in
bringing up-to-date the political education of all age groups. Stu­
dents of international affairs, ·and especially the Middle East, about
which the author appears to know a great deal, will also appreciate
his remarkably good information. He can be read with pleasure,
both for his dead-pan style and above all because he demonstrates
that big problems can be adequately treated in short books, if the
writer uses words to express thoughts rather than as a substitute for
them.
( 1 968)

1 97
 v

INSUR R E CTIONA RIES

AND R E VOLUTION
 20

H AN N A H A R E N D T O N
REVOLUTION

The phenomenon of social revolution is one with which all of us

have to come to terms in a century which has seen more and
greater revolutions than any other in recorded history. By the very
nature of their impact, however, revolutions are very difficult to
analyze satisfactorily, surrounded as they are and must be by a
cloud of hope and disillusion, of love, hatred and fear, of their own
myths and the myths of counter-propaganda. After all, few histor­
ians of the French Revolution who wrote before the 1 ooth anniver­
sary of its outbreak are now read, and the real historiography of the
Russian Revolution, in spite of some accumulation of preliminary
material, is only just beginning. The scientific study of revolutions
does not mean dispassionate study. It is fairly certain that the major
achievements in this field will be 'committed' - generally to
sympathy with revolutions, if the historiography of the French is
any guide. Committed study is not necessarily mere pamphleteering,
as Mommsen and Rostovzeff demonstrated. Yet it is natural that
in the early stages of . the investigation of social revolutions the
market tends to be swamped by pamphlets, sometimes simple,
sometimes masquerading as serious historical and sociological work,
and therefore demanding serious criticism. Their public is normally
not that of the experts or the serious student. Thus it is perhaps not
without significance that the four encomia printed on the cover of
Miss Hannah Arendt's On Revolution1 come not from historians or
sociologists, but from literary figures. But of course such works may
hold great interest for the specialist nevertheless. The question to be
asked about Miss Arendt's book is whether it does.
The answer, so far as the student of the French and most other
1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York and London, 1963.

201
 REVOLUTIONARIES

modern revolutions is concerned, must be no. I am not able to

judge her contribution to the study of the American revolution,
though I suspect that it is not great. The book therefore stands or
falls not by the author's discoveries or insights into certain specific
historical phenomena, but by the interest of her general ideas and
interpretations. However, since these are not based on an adequate
study of the subject matter they purport to interpret, and indeed
appear almost to exclude such a study by their very method, they
cannot be firmly grounded. She has merits, and they are not
negligible : a lucid style, sometimes carried away by intellectual
rhetoric, but always transparent enough to allow us to recognize
the genuine passion of the writer, a strong intelligence, wide
reading, and the power of occasional piercing insight, though of a
sort better suited, it may seem, to the vague terrain which lies
between literature, psychology and what, for want of a better word,
is best called social prophecy, than to the social sciences as at
present constructed. However, even of her insights it is possible to
say what Lloyd George observed of Lord Kitchener, namely that
their beams occasionally illuminate the horizon, but leave the scene
in darkness between their flashes.
The first difficulty encountered by the historian or sociological
student of revolutions in Miss Arendt is a certain metaphysical and
normative quality of her thought, which goes well with a some­
times quite explicit old-fashioned philosophical idealism. 2 She
does not take her revolutions as they come, but constructs herself
an ideal type, defining her subject matter accordingly, excluding
what does not measure up to her specifications. We may also
observe in passing that she excludes everything outside the classical
zone of western Europe and the north Atlantic, for her book
contains not even a passing reference to - the examples spring to
mind - China or Cuba ; nor could she have made certain
statements if she had given any thought to them.3 Her 'revolution'
is a wholesale political change in which men are conscious of
introducing an entirely new epoch in human history, including (but

11 Cf : 'That there existed men in the Old World to dream of public freedom,

that there were men in the New World who had tasted public happiness - these
were ultimately the facts which caused the movement . . . to develop into a
revolution on either side of the Atlantic' (p. 1 39) .
8 e.g. : 'Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial

stage' (p. 1 1 2 ) . In China ? In Cuba? In Vietnam ? In wartime Yugoslavia ?

202
 H A N N A H ARE N D T ON RE V O L U T I O N

only, as it were, incidentally) the abolition of poverty and expressed

in terms of a secular ideology. Its subject matter is 'the emergence
of freedom' as defined by the author.
Part of this definition allows her, after a brief bout of shadow­
boxing, to exclude all revolutions and revolutionary movements
before 1 776 from the discussion, though at the pdce of making a
serious study of the actual phenomenon of revolution impossible.
The remainder allows her to proceed to the major part of her
subject, an extended comparison between the American and
French revolutions, to the great advantage of the former. The latter
is taken as the paradigm of all subsequent revolutions, though it
seems that Miss Arendt has in mind chiefly the Russian Revolution
of 1 9 1 7. The 'freedom' which revolutions exist to institute is
essentially a political concept. Though not too clearly defined - it
emerges gradually in the course of the author's discussion - it is
quite distinct from the abolition of poverty (the 'solution of the
social problem') which Miss Arendt regards as the corrupter of
revolution, in whatever form it occurs ; which includes the capi­
talist.4 We may infer that any revolution in which the social and
economic element plays a major role puts itself out of Miss Arendt's
court, which more or less eliminates every revolution that the
student of the subject might desire to investigate. We may further
infer that, with the partial exception of the American revolution
which, as she argues, was lucky enough to break out in a country
without very poor free inhabitants, no revolution was or could have
been able to institute freedom, and even in eighteenth-century
America slavery placed it in an insoluble dilemma. The revolution
could not 'institute freedom' without abolishing slavery, but - on
Miss Arendt's argument - it could not have done so either if it had
abolished it. The basic trouble about revolutions in other words -
her own - is therefore this : 'Though the whole record of past
revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt so solve
the social question with political means leads into terror, and that it
is terror which sends revolutions to their doom, it can hardly be
denied that to avoid this fatal mistake is almost impossible when a
revolution breaks out under conditions of mass poverty.'
The 'freedom' which revolution exists to institute is more than
' 'Since [the United States] was never overwhelmed by poverty, it was "the
fatal passion for sudden riches" rather than necessity that stood in the way of the
founders of the republic' (p. 1 34) .
 R E V O LU T I O NA R I E S

the mere absence of restraints upon the person or guarantees of

'civil liberties', for neither of these (as Miss Arendt rightly observes)
requires any particular form of government, but only the absence of
tyranny and despotism.5 It appears to consist of the right and
possibility of participating actively in the affairs of the common­
wealth - of the joys and rewards of public life, as conceived perhaps
originally in the Greek polis (pp. 1 2 3-4) . However - though here
the author's argument must be reconstructed rather than followed -
'public freedom' in this sense remains a dream, even though the
fathers of the American constitution were wise enough, and
untroubled enough by the poor, to institute a government which
was reasonably secure against despotism and tyranny. The crux of
the genuine revolutionary tradition is that it keeps this dream alive.
It has done so by means of a constant tendency to generate
spontaneous organs capable of realizing public freedom, namely the
local or sectional, elective or direct assemblies and councils (soviets,
Rate) , which have emerged in the course of revolutions only to be
suppressed by the dictatorship of the party. Such councils ought to
have a purely political function. Government and administration
being distinct, the attempt to use them, e.g. for the management of
economic affairs ('workers' control') is undesirable and doomed to
failure, even when it is not part of a plot by the revolutionary party
to 'drive [the councils] away from the political realm and back into
the factories'. I am unable to discover Miss Arendt's views as to
who is to conduct the 'administration of things in the public
interest', such as the economy, or how it is to be conducted.
Miss Arendt's argument tells us much about the kind of govern­
ment which she finds congenial, and even more about her state of
mind. Its merits as a general statement about political ideals are
not at issue here. On the other hand, it is relevant to observe that
the nature of her arguments not merely makes it impossible to use
in the analysis of actual revolutions - at least in terms which have
meaning for the historian or social scientist - but also eliminates the
possibility of meaningful dialogue between her and those interested

6 However, Miss Arendt appears to forget her distinction when she observes

later (p. 1 1 1 ) that 'we also know to our sorrow that freedom has been better
preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how
outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be, than in those in which
revolutions have been victorious'. Here 'freedom' appears to be used in a sense
which she has already rejected. The statement is in any case open to question.
 H A N N A H A R E N D T O N RE V O L UT I O N

i n actual revolutions. I n so fa r as Miss Arendt writes about history ­

about revolutions, as they may be contemporaneously observed,
retrospectively surveyed, or prospectively assessed - her connection
with it is as incidental as that of medieval theologians and
astronomers. Both talked about planets, and both meant, at least in
part, the same celestial bodies, but contact did not go much further.
The historian or sociologist, for instance, will be irritated, as the
author plainly. is not, by a certain lack of interest in mere fact. This
cannot be described as inaccuracy or ignorance, for Miss Arendt is
learned and scholarly enough to be aware of such inadequacies if
she chooses, but rather as a preference for metaphysical construct or
poetic feeling over reality. When she observes 'even as an old man,
in 1 8 7 1 , Marx was still revolutionary enough to welcome enthusias­
tically the Paris Commune, although this outbreak contradicted all
his theories and predictions' (p. 58) , she must be aware that the
first part of the sentence is wrong (Marx was, in fact, fifty-three
years old) , and the second at the very least open to much debate.
Her statement is not really a historical one, but rather, as it were, a
line in an intellectual drama, which it would be as unfair to judge
·
by historical standards as Schiller's Don Carlos. She knows that
Lenin's formula for Russian development -'- 'electrification plus
soviets' - was not intended to eliminate the role of the party or the
building of socialism, as she argues (p. 60) . But her interpretation
gives an additional sharpness to her contention that the future of
the Soviet revolution ought to have lain along the lines of a
politically neutral technology and a grass-roots political system
'outside all parties'. To object 'but this is not what Lenin meant' is
to introduce questions belonging to a different order of discourse
from hers.
And yet, can such questions be entirely left outside ? In so far as
she claims to be discussing not merely the idea of revolution, but
also certain identifiable events and institutions, they cannot. Since
the spontaneous tendency to generate organs such as soviets is
clearly of great moment to Miss Arendt, and provides evidence for
her interpretation, one might for instance have expected her to
show some interest in the actual forms such popular organs take.
In fact, the author is clearly not interested in these. It is even
difficult to discover what precisely she has in mind, for she talks in
the same breath of politically very different organizations. The
ancestors of the soviets (which were assemblies of delegates, mainly
 R E V O L U T I O N ARIE S

from functional groups of people such as factories, regiments, or

villages) , she holds, were either the Paris sections of the French
Revolution (which were essentially direct democracies of all citizens
in public assembly) or the political societies (which were voluntary
bodies of the familiar type) . Possibly sociological analysis might
show these to have been similar, but Miss Arendt refrains from it. 6
Again, it is evidently not 'the historical truth of the matter . . .
that the party and council systems are almost coeval ; both were
unknown prior to the revolutions and both are the consequen,ces of
the modern and revolutionary tenet that all inhabitants of a given
territory are entitled to be admitted to the public, political realm'
(p. 2 75) . Even granted that the second half of the statement is
tenable (so long as we define the public realm in terms which apply
to large modern territorial or nation states, but not to other and
historically more widespread forms of political organization) , the
first half is not. Councils, even in the form of elected delegations,
are so obvious a political device in communities above a certain
size, that they considerably antedate political parties, which ate, at
least in the usual sense of the term, far from obvious institutions.
Councils as revolutionary institutions are familiar long before 1 776,
when Miss Arendt's revolutions begin, as for instance in the
General Soviet of the New Model Army, in the committees of
sixteenth-century France and the Low Countries, or for that matter
in medieval city politics. A 'council system' under this name is
certainly coeval with, or rather posterior to, the political parties of
1 905 Russia, since it was they who recognized the possible impli­
cations of the soviets for the revolutionary government of nations ;
but the idea of decentralized $"overnment by autonomous com­
munal organs, perhaps linked by pyramids of higher delegate
bodies, is for practical reasons extremely ancient.
Nor indeed have councils 'always been primarily political, with
the social and economic claims playing a minor role' (p. 2 78) . They
were not, because Russian workers and peasants did not - and
a If she did not, she might be less certain that soviet delegates 'were not

nominated from above and not supported from below' but 'had selected
themselves' (p 282). In peasant soviets they might have been selected institu­
tionally (as by, say, the automatic nomination of the schoolmaster or the heads of
certain families), just as in British farm-labourers' union locals, the local
railwaymen - independent of farmer and squire - was often the automatic choice
as secretary. It is also certain that local class divisions tended a priori to favour or
inhibit th� selection of delegates.

206
 HANNAH ARENDT O N REVOLUTION

indeed o n Miss Arendt's argument could not7 - make a sharp

distinction between politics and economics. Moreover, the original
Russian workers' councils, like those of the British and German shop
stewards in the first world war or the Trades Councils which
sometimes took over quasi-soviet functions in big strikes, were the
products of trade union and strike organization ; that is, if a
distinction can be made, of activities which were economic rather
than political. 8 In the third place, she is wrong because the
immediate tendency of the effective, that is, urban, soviets in 1 9 1 7
was to turn themselves into organs of administration, in successful
rivalry with municipalities, and as such, quite evidently, to go
beyond the field of political deliberation. Indeed, it was this capacity
of the soviets to become organs of execution as well as of debate
which suggested to political thinkers that they might be the basis for
a new political system. But more than this, the suggestion that such
demands as 'workers' control' are in some sense a deviation from the
spontaneous line of evolution of councils and similar bodies simply
will not bear examination. 'The Mine for the Miners', 'The Factory
for the Workers' - in other words, the demand for cooperative
democractic instead of capitalist production - goes back to the
earliest stages of the labour movement. It has remained an important
element in spontaneous popular thought ever since, a fact which does
not oblige us to consider it as other than utopian. In the history of
grass-roots democracy, cooperation in communal units and its
apotheosis 'the cooperative commonwealth' (which was the earliest
definition of socialism among workers) play a crucial part.
There is thus practically no point at which Miss Arendt's discus­
sion of what she regards as the crucial institution of the revolutionary
tradition touches the actual historical phenomena she purports to
describe, an institution on the basis of which she generalizes. And the
student of revolutions, whether historian, sociologist, or for that
matter analyst of political systems and institutions, will be equally
baffled by the remainder of her book. Her acute mind sometimes
throws light on literature, including the classical literature of politi­
cal theory. She has considerable perception about the psychological

7 Since the poor are, in her view primarily determined by 'necessity' rather than
'freedom', i.e. by economic rather than political motives. Actually this is also
wrong.
8 Miss Arendt is misled by the fact that at the peak of a revolutionary crisis all

organizations discuss politics for much of the time.

 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

motives and mechanisms of individuals - her discussion of Robes­

pierre, for instance, may be read with profit - and she has
occasional flashes of insight, that is to say, she sometimes makes
statements which, while not particularly well-founded on evidence
or argument, strike the reader as true and illuminating. But that is
all. And it is not enough. There are doubtless readers who will find
Miss Arendt's book interesting and profitable. The historical or
sociological student of revolutions is unlikely to be among them.
(1 96 5)

208
 21

THE RUL E S O F VI OLENCE

Of all the vogue words of the late 1 g6os, 'viole�ce' is very nearly
the trendiest and the most meaningless. Everybody talks about it,
nobody thinks about it. As the just-published report of the us
National Commission of the Causes and Prevention of Violence
points out, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published
1 968, contains no entry under this heading.
Both the vogue and the vagueness are significant. For most of the
people likely to read books with such titles as The Age of Violence (as
like as not about symbolist poetry) or Children of Violence (which is
about physically rather tranquil lives) are aware of the world's
violence, but their relation to it is unprecedented and enigmatic.
Most of them, unless they deliberately seek it out, can pass their
adult lives without direct experience of 'behavior designed to inflict
physical injury on people or damage to property' (to use the
American commission's definition) , or even with 'force' defined as
'the actual or threatened use of violence to compel others to do what
they might not otherwise do'.
Physical violence normally impinges on them only in one direct
and three indirect ways. Directly, it is omnipresent in the form of the
traffic accident - casual, unintended, unpredictable and uncontrol­
lable by most of its victims, and about the only peacetime contin­
gency which is likely to bring most people working in homes and
offices into actual contact with bleeding or mangled bodies. Indir­
ectly, it is omnipresent in the mass media and entertainment.
Probably no day passes in which most viewers and readers do not
encounter the image of a corpse, that rarest of sights in real British
life. Even more remotely, we are aware both of the existence in our
time of vast, concretely unimaginable mass destruction for which
convenient symbols are found ('the bomb', 'Auschwitz' and such
like) , and also of the sectors and situations of society in which
 R E V O L UT I O N A R I E S

physical violence is common and, probably increasing. Tranquillity

and violence coexist.
These are curiously unreal experiences, and we therefore find it
very difficult to make sense of violence as a historical or social
phenomenon, as is shown by the extraordinary devaluation of such
terms as �aggression' in popular psycho-sociological small talk, or of
the word 'genocide' in politics. The prevailing ideas of liberalism do
not make it any easier, since they assume an entirely unreal
dichotomy between 'violence' or 'physical force' (bad and back­
ward) and 'non-violence' or 'moral force' (good and the child of
progress) . Of course one sympathizes with this, as with other
pedagogic simplifications, in so far as it discourages people knocking
one another over the head, the avoidance of which all sane and
civilized persons approve. Yet as with that other product of liberal
morality, the proposition that 'force never solves anything', there
comes a point where the encouragement of the good becomes
incompatible with understanding reality - i.e. with providing the
foundations for encouraging the good.
For the point to grasp about violence, as a �ocial phenomenon, is
that it exists only in the plural. There are actions of differing degrees
of violence which imply different qualities of violence. All peasant
movements are manifestations of sheer physical force, but some are
unusually chary of spilling blood, while others develop into mas­
sacres, because their character and objects differ. The English
farm-labourers of the early nineteenth century regarded violence
against property as legitimate, moderate violence against persons as
justifiable under certain circumstances, but systematically refrained
from killing, but under different circumstances (such as affrays
between poachers and gamekeepers) the same men did not hesitate
to fight to kill. It is quite useless, except as a legal excuse for repres­
sion or a debating point about 'never yielding to force', to treat
these various types and degrees of violent action as essentially
indistinguishable. Again, actions of the same degree of violence may
differ sharply in their legitimacy or justification, at least in the minds
of public opinion. The great Calabrian brigand Musolino, when
asked to define the word 'bad' or 'evil' said it meant 'killing
Christians without a very deep reason'.
Genuinely violent societies are always and acutely aware of these
'rules', just because private violence is essential to their everyday
functioning, though we may not be so aware of them, because the
2 10
 THE RULES O F VIOLENCE

normal amount of bloodshed i n such societies may seem to us to b e so

intolerably high. Where, as in the Philippines, the fatal casualties in
every election campaign are counted in hundreds, it seems hardly
relevant that, by Filipino standards, some of them are more open to
condemnation than others. Yet there are rules. In the highlands of
Sardinia they constitute an actual code of customary law, which has
been formally described in legal terms by outside observers.1 For
instance, the theft of a goat is not an 'offence' unless the goat's milk
is used by the family of the thieves, or there is a clear intent to
'offend' or spite the victim. In this case revenge is progressively
more serious, up to death.
However binding the obligation to kill, members of feuding
families engaged in mutual massacre will be genuinely appalled if
by some mischance a bystander or outsider is killed. The situations
in which violence occurs and the nature of that violence, tend to be
clearly denied at least in theory, as in the proverbial Irishman's
question : 'Is this a private fight or can anyone join in ?' So the
actual risk to outsiders, though no doubt higher than in our
societies, is calculable. Probably the only uncontrolled applications
of force are those of social superiors to social inferiors (who have,
almost by definition, no rights against them) and even here there are
probably some rules.
As a matter of fact some such rules of violence are still familiar to
us. Why for instance do abolitionists, who presumably believe in
the undesirability of all executions, base so much of their campaign­
ing on the argument that the death penalty sometimes kills inno­
cent people ? Because for most of us, including probably most
abolitionists, the killing of the 'innocent' evokes a qualitatively
different response from that of the 'guilty'.
One of the major dangers of societies in which direct violence
no longer pla:ys much part in regulating the everyday relations
between peoples and groups, or in which violence has become
depersonalized, is that they lose the sense of such distinctions. In
doing so they also dismantle certain social mechanisms for control­
ling the use of physical force. This did not matter so much in the
days when traditional kinds of violence in social relations, or at
least the more dangerous among them, were diminishing visibly
and fast. But today they may be once more on the increase, while
new forms of social violence are becoming more important.
1 See A. Pigliaru, La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico, Milan, 1 959.

21 1
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Older forms of violence may be increasing, because the estab­

lished systems of maintaining public order, elaborated in the liberal
era, are increasingly strained, and such forms of political violence as
direct physical action, terrorism, etc. are more common than in the
past. The nervousness and disarray of the public authorities, the
revival of private-enterprise security guards and neo-vigilante
movements, are evidence enough. In one respect they have already
led to a certain rediscovery of controlled violence, as in the return
by so many police forces to a curious medievalism - helmets,
shields, armour and all - and the developments of various tempor­
arily disabling gases, rubber bullets, etc., all of which reflect the
sensible view that there are degrees of necessary or desirable
violence within a society, a view which the ancient common law of
England has never abandoned. 2 On the other hand the public
authorities themselves have become accustomed to use certain
horrifying forms of violence, notably torture, which were regarded
until a few decades ago as barbaric, and entirely unsuitable
to civilized societies, while 'respectable' public opinion calls
hysterically for indiscriminate terror.
This is part of a new kind of violence which is today emerging.
Most traditional violence (including the revived types) assumes that
physical force must be used in so far as no other methods are
available or effective, and consequently that violent actions nor­
mally have a specific and identifiable purpose, the use of force
being proportionate to that purpose. But a good deal of contempor­
ary private violence can afford to be and is non-operational, and
public violence is consequently tempted into indiscriminate action.
Private violence does not have to or cannot achieve very much
against the really big and institutionalized wielders of force, whether
or not these hold their violence in reserve. Where it occurs it
therefore tends to turn from action into a substitute for action. The
badges and iron crosses of the Nazi army had a practical purpose,
though one of which we do not approve. The same symbols on the
Hell's Angels and similar groups merely have a motive : the desire of
otherwise weak and helpless young men to compensate for their

2 Between the wars the British Royal Air Force resisted any plans to use it to
maintain public order on the grounds that its weapons were too indiscriminate, and
that it might hence be liable to prosecution under the common law. It did not
apply this argument to the bombing of tribal villages in India and the Middle
East . • •

212
 THE RULES OF VIOLENCE

frustration b y acts and symbols of violence. Some nominally political

forms of violence (such as 'trashing' or some neo-anarchist bombing)
are similarly irration_al, since under most circumstances their poli­
tical effect is either negligible or more usually counter-productive.
Blind lashings-out are not necessarily more dangerous to life and
limb (statistically speaking) than the violence of traditionally 'law­
less' societies, though probably they do more damage to things,
or rather to the companies which insure them. On the other hand
such acts are, perhaps rightly, more frightening, because they are
both more random and cruel, inasmuch as this kind of violence is its
own reward. As the Moors murder case showed, the terrible things
about dreams of Nazi jackboots, which flicker through various
western underworlds and subcultures today, is not simply that they
hark back to Himmler and Eichmann, the bureaucrats of an
apparatus whose purposes happened to be insane. It is that for the
disoriented fringe, for the weak and helpless poor, violence and
cruelty - sometimes in the most socially ineffective and person­
alized sexual form - are the surrogate for private success and social
power.
What is scarifying about modern American big cities is the
combination of revived old and emerging new violence in situations
of social tension and breakdown. And these are the situations with
.
which the conventional wisdom ofliberal ideas are quite incapable of
coping, even conceptually ; hence the tendency to relapse into an
instinctive conservative reaction, which is little more than the mirror
image of the disorder it seeks to control. To take the simplest
example. Liberal toleration and freedom of expression helps to
saturate the atmosphere with those images of blood and torture
which are so incompatible with the liberal ideal of a society based on
consent and moral force.3
We are probably once again moving into an era of violence within
societies, which must not be confused with the growing destruc­
tiveness of conflicts between societies. We had therefore better
understand the social uses of violence, learn once again to distinguish
between different types of violent activity, and above all construct or
reconstruct systematic rules for it. Nothing is more difficult for
8 The argument that these images cannot be proved to affect anyone's action

merely tries to rationalize this contradiction, and cannot stand serious scrutiny.
Neither can the arguments that popular culture has always revelled in images of
violence, or that its images act as a sort of replacement for the real thing.

2 13
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

people brought up in a liberal culture, with its belief that all violence
is worse than non-violence, other things being equal (which they are
not) . Of course it is, but unfortunately such an abstract moral
generalization gives no guidance to the practical problems of
violence in our society. What was once a useful principle of social
amelioration ('settle conflicts peacefully rather than by fighting',
'self-respect does not require bloodshed', etc.) turns into mere
rhetoric and counter-rhetoric. It leaves the growing area of human
life in which violence takes place without any rules, and paradox­
ically, without even any practically applicable moral principles ; as
witness the universal renascence of torture by the forces of the state.
The abolition of torture was one of the relatively few achievements of
liberalism which can be praised without any qualification, yet today
it is once again almost universally practised and condoned by
governments, and propagated by the mass media.
Those who believe that all violence is bad in principle can make
no systematic distinction between different kinds of violence in
practice, or recognize their effects both on those who suffer and on
those who inflict it. They are merely likely to produce, by reaction,
men and women who consider all violence good, whether from a
conservative or a revolutionary point of view, that is to say who
recognize the subjective psychological relief provided by violence
without any reference to its effectiveness. In this respect the reaction­
aries who call for the return of indiscriminate shooting, flogging
and execution are similar to those whose sentiments have been
systematized by Fanon and others, and for whom action with gun
or bomb is ipso facto preferable to non-violent action.4 Liberalism
makes no distinction between the teaching of the milder forms of
judo and the potentially more murderous forms of karate, whereas
Japanese tradition is perfectly aware that these are intended to be
learned only by those who have sufficient judgment and moral
training to use their power to kill responsibly.
There are signs that such distinctions are once again being slowly
4 Rational revolutionaries have always measured violence entirely by its purpose

and likely achievement. When Lenin was told in 1 9 1 6 that the secretary of the
Austrian social democrats had assassinated the Austrian prime minister as a gesture
of protest against the war, he merely wondered why a man in his position had not
taken the less dramatic but more effective step of circulating the party activists with
an anti-war appeal. It was evident to him that a boring but effective non-violent
action was preferable to a romantic but ineffective one. This did not stop him from
recommending armed insurrection when necessary.
 THE RULES OF VIOLENCE

and empirically learned, but i n a general atmosphere of disorien­

tation and hysteria which makes the rational and limited use of
violence difficult. It is time that we put this process of learning on a
more systematic basis by understanding the social uses of violence.
We may think that all violence is worse than non-violence, other
things being equal. But the worst kind is the violence which gets out
of anyone's control.
( 1 969)

215
 22

REVO L U T I O N AND S E X

The late Che Guevara would have been very surprised and acutely
irritated by the discovery that his picture is now on the cover of
Evergreen Review, his personality the subject of an article in Vogue, and
his name the ostensible excuse for some homosexual exhibitionism in
a New York theatre (see Oberserver, 8 May 1 969) . We can leave Vogue
aside. Its business is to tell women what it is fashionable to wear, to
know and to talk about ; its interest in Che Guevara has no more
political implications than the editor's of Who's Who. The other two
jokes, however, reflect a widespread belief that there is some sort of
connection between social revolutionary movements and permis­
siveness in public sexual or other personal behaviour. It is about time
someone pointed out that there are no good grounds for this belief.
In the first place, it ought now to be evident that conventions
about what sexual behaviour is permissible in public have no specific
connection with systems of political rule or social and economic
exploitation. (An exception is the rule of men over women, and the
exploitation of women by men which, at a guess, imply more or less
strict limitations on the public behaviour of the inferior sex.) Sexual
'liberation' has only indirect relations with any other kind of
liberation. Systems of class rule and exploitation may impose strict
conventions of personal (for example, sexual) behaviour in public or
private or they may not. Hindu society was not in any sense more
free or egalitarian than the Welsh nonconformist community,
because the one used temples to demonstrate a vast variety of sexual
activities in the most tempting manner, whereas the other imposed
rigid restrictions on its members, at any rate in theory. All we can
deduce from this particular cultural difference is that pious Hindus
who wanted to vary their sexual routine could learn to do so much
more easily than pious Welshmen.
Indeed, if a rough generalization about the relation between class
216
 REVOLUTION AND SEX

rule and sexual freedom is possible, it is that rulers find it convenient

to encourage sexual permissiveness or laxity among their subjects if
only to keep their minds off their subjection. Nobody ever imposed
sexual puritanism on slaves ; quite the contrary. The sort of societies
in which the poor are strictly kept in their place are quite familiar
with regular institutionalized mass outbursts of free sex, such as
carnivals. In fact, since sex is the cheapest form of enjoyment as well
as the most intense (as the Neapolitans say, bed is the poor man's
grand opera), it is politically very advantageous, other things being
equal, to get them to practise it as much as possible.
In other words, there is no necessary connection between social or
political censorship and moral censorship, though it is often assumed
that there is. To demand the transfer of some kinds of behaviour
from the impermissible to the publicly permitted is a political act
only if it implies changing political relations. Winning the right for
white and black to make love in South Africa would be a political
act, not because it widens the range of what is sexually allowed but
because it attacks racial subjection. Winning the right to publish
Lady Chatterly has no such implications, though it may be welcomed
on other grounds.
This should be abundantly clear from our own experience. Within
the last few years the official or conventional prohibitions on what
can be said, heard, done and shown about sex in public - or for that
matter in private - have been virtually abolished in several western
countries. The beliefthat a narrow sexual morality is an essential bul­
wark of the capitalist system is no longer tenable. Nor, indeed, is the
belief that the fight against such a morality is very urgent. There are
still a few outdated crusaders who may think of themselves as storm­
ing a puritan fortress, but in fact its walls have been virtually razed.
No doubt there are still things that cannot be printed or shown but
they are progressively harder to find and to get indignant about. The
abolition of censorship is a one-dimensional activity, like the move­
ment of women's necklines and skirts, and if that movement goes on
too long in a single direction, the returns in revolutionary satisfaction
of the crusaders diminish sharply. The right of actors to fuck each
other on stage is palpably a less important advance even of personal
liberation than the right of Victorian girls to ride bicycles was. It is
today becoming quite hard even to mobilize those prosecutions of
obscenity on which publishers and producers have so long relied for
free publicity.
217
8-R • •
 R E V O LU T I O NA R I E S

For practical purposes the battle for public sex has been won. Has
this brought social revolution any nearer, or indeed any change
outside the bed, the printed page, and public entertainment (which
may or may not be desirable) ? There is no sign of it. All it has
obviously brought is a lot more public sex in an otherwise unchanged
social order.
But though there is no intrinsic connection between sexual per­
missiveness and social organization, there is, I am bound to note
with a little regret, a persistent affinity between revolution and
puritanism. I can think of no well-established organized revolution­
ary movement or regime which has not developed marked puritani­
cal tendencies. Including marxist ones, whose founders' doctrine was
quite unpuritanical (or in Engels's case actively anti-puritanical) .
Including those in countries like Cuba, whose native tradition is
the opp osite of puritan. Including the most officially anarchist­
libertarian ones. Anyone who believes that the morality of the old
anarchist militants was free and easy does not know what he or she is
talking about. Free love (in which they believed passionately) meant
no drink, no drugs and monogamy without a formal marriage.
The libertarian, or more exactly antinomian, component of
revolutionary movements, though sometimes strong and even domin­
ant at the actual moment of liberation, have never been able
to resist the puritan. The Robespierres always win out over the
Dantons. Those revolutionaries for whom sexual, or for that matter
cultural, libertarianism are really central issues of the revolution, are
sooner or later edged aside by it. Wilhelm Reich, the apostle of the
orgasm, did indeed start out, as the New Left reminds us, as a
revolutionary marxist-cum-freudian and a very able one, to judge
by his Mass Psychology of Fascism (which was subtitled The sexual
economy ofpolitical reaction and proletarian sexual policy) . But can we be
really surprised that such a man ended by concentrating his in­
terest on orgasm rather than organization ? Neither stalinists nor
Trotskyites felt any enthusiasm for the revolutionary surrealists who
hammered at their gates asking to be admitted. Those who survived
in politics did not do so as surrealists.
Why this is so is an important and obscure question, which cannot
be answered here. Whether it is necessarily so is an even more
important question - at all events for revolutionaries who think the
official puritanism of revolutionary regimes excessive and often
beside the point. But that the great revolutions of our century have
218
 REVOLUTION AND S E X

not been devoted to sexual permissiveness can hardly b e denied.

They have advanced sexual freedom (and fundamentally) not by
abolishing sexual prohibitions, but by a major act of social emanci­
pation : the liberation of women from their oppression. And that
revolutionary movements have found personal libertarianism a
nuisance is also beyond question. Among the rebellious young, those
closest to the spirit and ambitions of old-fashioned social revolution,
also tend to be the most hostile to the taking of drugs, advertised
indiscriminate sex, or other styles and symbols of personal dis­
sidence : the Maoists, Trotskyites and communists. The reasons
given are often that 'the workers' neither understand nor sympathize
with such behaviour. Whether or not this is so, it can hardly be
denied that it consumes time and energy and is hardly compatible
with organization and efficiency.
The whole business is really part of a much wider question, What
is the role in revolution or any social change of that cultural rebellion
which is today so visible a part of the 'new left', and in certain
countries such as the United States the predominant aspect of it.
There is no great social revolution which is not combined, at least
peripherally, with such cultural dissidence. Perhaps today in the
west where, 'alienation' rather than poverty is the crucial motive
force of rebellion, no movement which does not also attack the
system of personal relations and private satisfactions can be revohi­
tionary. But, taken by themselves, cultural revolt and cultural
dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces. Politically they
are not very important.
The Russian revolution of 1 9 1 7 reduced the contemporary avant
garde and cultural rebels, many of whom sympathized with it, to
their proper social and political proportions. When the French went
on general strike in May 1 968, the happenings in the Odeon Theatre
and those splendid graffiti ('It is forbidden to forbid', 'When I make
revolution it makes me feel like making love', etc.) could be seen to
be forms of minor literature and theatre, marginal to the main
events. The more prominent such phenomena are, the more confi­
dent can we be that the big things are not happening. Shocking the
bourgeois is, alas, easier than overthrowing him.
( 1 969)

219
 23

C I T I E S AND I N S U R R E C T I O N S

Whatever else a city may be, it is at the same time a place

inhabited by a concentration of poor people and, in most cases,
the locus of political power which affects their lives. Historically,
one of the things city populations have done about this is to
demonstrate, make riots or insurrections, or otherwise exert direct
pressure on the authorities who happen to operate within their
range. It does not much matter to the ordinary townsman that
city power is sometimes only local, whereas at other times it may
also be regional, national or even global. However, it does affect
the calculations both of the authorities and of political movements
designed to overthrow governments, whether or not the cities are
capitals (or what amounts to the same thing, independent city
states) or the headquarters of giant national or international
corporations, for if they are, urban riots and insurrections can
obviously have much wider implications than if the city authority
is purely local.
The subject of this paper is, how the structure of cities has
affected popular movement of this sort, and conversely, what
effect the fear of such movements has had on urban structure. The
first point is of much more general significance than the second.
Popular riot, insurrection or demonstration is an almost universal
urban phenomenon, and as we now know, it occurs even in the
affluent megalopolis of the late-twentieth-century industrial world.
On the other hand the fear of such riot is intermittent. It may be
taken for granted as a fact of urban existence, as in most
pre-industrial cities, or as the kind of unrest which periodically
flares up and subsides without producing any major effect on the
structure of power. It may be underestimated, because there have
not been any riots or insurrections for a long time, or because
there are institutional alternatives to them, such as systems of local
220
 C I TI E S A N D I N S U R R E C T I O N S

government by popular election. There are, after all, few contin­

uously riotous cities. Even Palermo, which probably holds the
European record with twelve insurrections between I 5 I 2 and
I 866, has had very long periods when its populace was relatively
quiet. On the other hand, once the authorities decide to alter the
urban structure because of political nervousness, the results are
likely to be substantial and lasting, like the boulevards of Paris.
The effectiveness of riot or insurrection depends on three aspects
of urban structure : how easily the poor can be mobilized, how
vulnerable the centres of authority are to them, and how easily
they may be suppressed. These are determined ,partly by sociolo­
gical, partly by urbanistic, partly by technological factors, though
the three cannot always be kept apart. For instance, experience
shows that among forms of urban transport tramways, whether in
Calcutta or Barcelona, are unusually convenient for rioters ;
partly because the raising of fares, which tends to affect all the
poor simultaneously, is a very natural precipitant of trouble,
partly because these large and track-bound vehicles, when burned
or overturned, can block streets and disrupt traffic very easily.
Buses do not seem to have played anything like as important a
part in riots, underground railways appear to be entirely ir­
relevant to them (except for transporting rioters) and cars can at
best be used as improvised road blocks or barricades, and, to
judge by recent experience in Paris, not very effective ones. Here
the difference is purely technological.
On the other hand, universities in the centre of cities are
evidently more dangerous centres of potential riot than universities
on the outskirts of towns or behind some green belt, a fact which
is well known to Latin-American governments. Concentrations of
the poor are more dangerous when they occur in or near city
centres, like the twentieth-century black ghettoes in many North
American cities, than when they occur in some relatively remote
suburb, as in nineteenth-century Vienna. Here the difference is
urbanistic and depends on the size of the city and the pattern of
functional specialization within it. However, a centre of potential
student unrest on the outskirts of town, like Nanterre in Paris, is
nevertheless far more likely to create trouble in the central city than
the Algerian shanty towns in the same suburb, because students
are more mobile, their social universe more metropolitan, than
immigrant labourers. Here the difference is primarily sociological.
22 I
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Suppose, then, we construct the ideal city for riot and insurrec­
tion. What will it be like ? It ought to be densely populated and
not too large in area. Essentially it should still be possible to
traverse it on foot, though greater experience of rioting in fully
motorized societies might modify this judgment. It should perhaps
not be divided by a large river, not only because bridges are easily
held by the police, but also because it is a familiar fact of
geography or social psychology that the two banks of a river look
away from each other, as anyone living in south London or on the
Paris left bank can verify.
Its poor ought to be relatively homogeneous socially or racially,
though of course we must remember that in pre-industrial cities or
in the giant sumps of under-employment of the Third World
today, what at first sight looks like a very heterogeneous popu­
lation may have a considerable unity, as witness such familiar
terms in history as 'the labouring poor', 'le menu peuple', or 'the
mob'. It ought to be centripetal, that is to say, its various parts
ought to be naturally oriented towards the central institutions of
the city, the more centralized the better. The medieval city
republic which was the system of flows towards and away from the
main assembly space, which might also be the main ritual centre
(cathedral) , the main market and the location of the government,
was ideally suited to insurrection for this reason. The pattern of
functional specialization and residential segregation ought to be
fairly tight. Thus the pre-industrial pattern of suburbs, which was
based on the exclusion from a sharply defined city of various
undesirables - often necessary to city life - such as non-citizen
immigrants, outcast occupations or groups, etc. did not greatly
disrupt the cohesion of the urban complex : Triana was entangled
with Seville, as Shoreditch was with the City of London.
On the other hand the nineteenth-century pattern of suburbs,
which surrounded an urban core with middle-class residential
suburbs and industrial quarters, generally developing at opposite
ends of town from one another, affects urban cohesion very
substantially. 'East End' and 'West End' are both physically and
spiritually remote from each other. Those who live west of the
Concorde in Paris belong to a different world from those who live
east of the Republique. To go a little farther out, the famous 'red
belt' of working-class suburbs which surround Paris was politically
significant, but had no discernible insurrectionary importance. It
222
 CITIES AND I NSURRE C T I O N S

simply did not belong to Paris any longer, nor indeed did i t form
a whole, except for geographers.1
All these are considerations affecting the mobilization of the city
poor, but not their political effectiveness. This naturally depends
on the ease with which rioters and insurrectionaries can get close
to the authorities, and how easily they can be dispersed. In the
ideal insurrectionary city the authorities - the rich, the aristo­
cracy, the government or local administration - will therefore be
as intermingled with the central concentration of the poor as
possible. The French king will reside in the Palais Royal or
Louvre and not at Versailles, the Austrian emperor in the
Hofburg and not at Schoenbrunn. Preferably the authorities will
be vulnerable. Rulers who brood over a hostile city from some
isolated stronghold, like the fortress-prison of Montjuich over
Barcelona, may intensify popular hostility, but are technically
designed to withstand it. After all, the Bastille could almost
certainly have held out if anyone in July 1 789 had really thought
that it would be attacked. Civic authorities are of course vulner­
able a]most by definition, since their political success depends on
the belief that they represent the citizens and not some outside
government or its agents. Hence perhaps the classical French
tradition by which insurrectionaries make for the city hall rather
than the royal or imperial palace and, as in 1 848 and 1 87 1 ,
proclaim the provisional government there.
Local authorities therefore create relatively few problems for
insurrectionaries (at least until they begin to practise town plan­
ning) . Of course, city development may shift the town hall from a
central to a rather more remote location : nowadays it is a long
way from the outer neighbourhoods of Brooklyn to New York's City
Hall. On the other hand in capital cities the presence of governments,
which tends to make riots effective, is offset by the special charac­
teristics of towns in which princes or other self-important rulers are
resident, and which have a built-in counter-insurgent bias. This
arises both from the needs of state public relations and, perhaps to a
lesser extent, of security.
1 How far such working-class suburbs can be separated from the central city
area and still remain a direct factor in insurrections is an interesting question. In
Barcelona Sans, the great bastion of anarchism, played no important part in the
revolution of 1 936, while in Vienna Floridsdorf, an equally solid bastion of
socialism, could do little more than hold out in isolation when the rest of the
city's insurrections had already been defeated in 1 934.

223
 R E V O L U T I O NARIE S

Broadly speaking, in a civic town the role of the inhabitants in

public activities is that of participants, in princely or government
towns, of an admiring and applauding audience. The wide
straight processional ways with their vistas of palace, cathedral or
government building, the vast square in front of the official
fa�ade, preferably with a suitable balcony from which the mul­
titudes may be blessed or addressed, perhaps the parade ground or
arena : these make up the ceremonial furniture of an imperial
city. Since the Renaissance major western capitals and residences
have been constructed or modified accordingly. The greater the
desire of the ruler to impress or the greater his Jolie de grandeur, the
wider, straighter, more symmetrical his preferred layout. Few less
suitable locations for spontaneous riot can be imagined than New
Delhi, Washington, St Petersburg, or for that matter, the Mall
and Buckingham Palace. It is not merely the division between a
popular east and middle-class and official west which has made
the Champs Elysees the place where the official and military
parade is held on 14 July, whereas the unofficial mass demon­
stration belongs to the triangle Bastille-Republique-Nation.
Such ceremonial sites imply a certain separation between rulers
and subjects, a confrontation between a remote and awful majesty
and pomp on one side, and an applauding public on the other. It
is the urban equivalent of the picture-frame stage ; or better still,
the opera, that characteristic invention of western absolute mon­
archy. Fortunately, for potential rioters, this is or was not the only
relationship between rulers and subjects in capital cities. Often,
indeed, it was the capital city itself which demonstrated the ruler's
greatness, while its inhabitants, including the poorest, enjoyed a
modest share of the benefits of his and its majesty. Rulers and
ruled . lived in a sort of symbiosis. In such circumstances the great
ceremonial routes led through the middle of the towns as in
Edinburgh or Prague. Palaces had no need to cut themselves off
from slums. The Vienna Hofburg, which presents a wide ceremon­
ial space to the outside world, including the .Viennese suburbs, has
barely a yard or two of urban street or square between it and the
older Inner City, to which it visibly belongs.
This kind of town, combining as it did the patterns of civic and
princely cities, was a standing invitation to riot, for he.re palaces and
town houses of great nobles, markets, cathedrals, public squares and
slums were intermingled, the rulers at the mercy of the mob. In
22 4
 CITIES AND INSURRE CTIONS

time of trouble they could withdraw into their country residences,

but that was all. Their only safeguard was to mobilize the
respectable poor against the unrespectable after a successful insur­
rection, e.g. the artisans guilds against the 'mob', or the National
Guard against the propertyless. Their one comfort was the know­
ledge that uncontrolled riot and insurrection rarely lasted long,
and were even more rarely directed against the structure of
established wealth and power. Still this was a substantial comfort.
The King of Naples or the Duchess of Parma, not to mention the
Pope, knew that if their subjects rioted, it was because they were
unduly hungry and as a reminder to prince and nobility to do
their duty, i.e. to provide enough food at fair prices on the
market, enough jobs, handouts and public entertainment for their
excessively modest needs. Their loyalty and piety scarcely
wavered, and indeed when they made genuine revolutions (as in
Naples in I 799) they were more likely to be in defence of Church
and King against foreigners and the godless middle classes . . . .
Hence the crucial importance in the history of urban public
order, of the French Revolution of I 789-99, which established the
modern equation between insurrection and social revolution. Any
government naturally prefers to avoid riot and insurrection, as it
prefers to keep the murder rate down, but in the absence of
genuine revolutionary danger the authorities are not likely to lose
their cool about it. Eighteenth-century England was a notoriously
riotous nation, with a notoriously sketchy apparatus for maintain­
ing public order. Not only smaller cities like Liverpool and
Newcastle, but large parts of London itself might be in the hands
of the riotous populace for days on end. Since nothing was at
stake in such disorders except a certain amount of property, which
a wealthy country could well afford to replace, the general view
among the upper classes was phlegmatic, and even satisfied. Whig
noblemen took pride in the state of liberty which deprived
potential tyrants of the troops with which to suppress their
subjects and the police with which to harry them. It was not until
the French Revolution that a taste for multiplying barracks in
towns developed, and not until the Radicals and Chartists of the
first half of the nineteenth century that the virtues of a police force
outweighed those of English freedom. (Since grass-roots democracy
could not always be relied on, the Metropolitan Police was put
directly under the Home Office, where it still remains. )
225
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

Indeed, three main administrative methods of countering riot

and insurrection suggested themselves : systematic arrangements
for deploying troops, the development of police forces (which
barely existed in the modern form before the nineteenth century),
and the rebuilding of cities in such ways as to minimize the
chances of revolt. The first two of these had no major influence on
the actual shape and structure of cities, though a study of the
building and location of urban barracks in the nineteenth century
might provide some interesting results, and so might a study of the
distribution of police stations in urban neighbourhoods. The third
affected the townscape very fundamentally, as in Paris and
Vienna, cities in which it is known that the needs of counter­
insurgency influenced urban reconstruction after the 1 848 revol­
utions. In Paris the main military aim of this reconstruction seems
to have been to open wide and straight boulevards along which
artillery could fire, and troops advance, while at the same time -
presumably - breaking up the main concentrations of potential
insurgents in the popular quarters. In Vienna the reconstruction
took the form mainly of two wide concentric ring roads, the inner
ring (broadened by a belt of open spaces, parks and widely spaced
public buildings) isolated the old city and palace from the (mainly
middle-class) inner suburbs, the . outer ring isolating both from the
(increasingly working-class) outer suburbs.
Such reconstructions may or may not have made military sense.
We do not know, since the kind of revolutions they were intended
to dominate virtually died out in western Europe after 1 848. (Still,
it is a fact that the main centres of popular resistance and
barricade fighting in the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 , Montmartre­
north-east Paris and the Left Bank, were isolated from each other
and the rest of the town.) However, they certainly affected the
calculations of potential insurrectionaries. In the socialist discus­
sions of the 1 880s the consensus of the military experts among
revolutionaries, led by Engels, was that the old type of uprising
now stood little chance, though there was some argument among
them about the value of new technological devices such as the
then rapidly developing high explosives (dynamite, etc.) . At all
events, barricades which had dominated insurrectionary tactics
from 1830 and 1 87 1 (they had not been seriously used in the great
French Revolution of 1 789-99) , were now less fancied. Conversely,
bombs of one kind or another became the favourite device of
 C ITIES AND INSURRE CTIONS

revolutionaries, though not marxist ones, and not fo r genuinely

insurrectionary purposes.
Urban reconstruction, however, had another and probably
unintended effect on potential rebellions, for the new and wide
avenues provided an ideal location for what became an increas­
ingly important aspect of popular movements, the mass demon­
stration, or rather procession. The more systematic these rings and
cartwheels of boulevards, the more effectively isolated these were
from the surrounding inhabited area, the easier it became to turn
such assemblies into ritual marches rather than preliminaries to
riot. London, which lacked them, has always had difficulty in
avoiding incidental trouble during the concentration, or more
usually the dispersal, of mass meetings held in Trafalgar Square.
It is too near sensitive spots like Downing Street, or symbols of
wealth and power like the Pall Mall clubs, whose windows the
unemployed demonstrators smashed in the I 88os.
One can, of course, make too much of such primarily military
factors in urban renewal. In any case they cannot be sharply
distinguished from other changes in the nineteenth- and twentieth­
century city which sharply diminished its riot potential. Three of
them are particularly relevant.
The first is sheer size, which reduces the city to an adminis­
trative abstraction, and a conglomerate of separate communities
or districts. It became simply too big to riot as a unit. London,
which still lacks so obvious a symbol of civic unity as the figure of
a mayor (the Lord Mayor of the City of London is a ceremonial
figure who has about as much relation to London as a town as has
the Lord Chancellor) , is an excellent example. It ceased to be a
riotous city roughly between the time it grew from a million to
two million inhabitants, i.e. in the first half of the nineteenth
century. London Chartism, for instance, barely existed as a
genuinely metropolitan phenomenon for more than a day or two
on end. Its real strength lay in the 'localities' in which it was
organized, i.e. in communities and neighbourhoods like Lambeth,
Woolwich or Marylebone, whose relations with each other were
at the most loosely federal. Similarly, the radicals and activists
of the late nineteenth century were essentially locally based. Their
most characteristic organization was the Metropolitan Radical
Federation, essentially an alliance of working men's clubs of
purely local importance, in such neighbourhoods as had a
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

tradition of radicalism - Chelsea, Hackney, Clerkenwell, Woolwich,

etc. The familiar London tendency to build low, and therefore to
sprawl, made distances between such centres of trouble too great
for the spontaneous propagation of riots. How much contact
would Battersea or Chelsea (then still a working-class area electing
left-wing MPs) have with the turbulent East End of the 1 889 dock
striker ? How much contact, for that matter, would there be between
Whitechapel and Canning Town ? In the nature of things the shape­
less built-up areas which grew either out of the expansion of a big city
or the merging of larger and smaller growing communities, and for
which artificial names have had to be invented ('conurbation',
'Greater' London, Berlin or Tokyo) were not towns in the old sense,
even when administratively unified from time to time.
The second is the growing pattern of functional segregation in
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city, that is to say, on the
one hand, the development of specialized industrial, business,
government and other centres or open spaces, on the other, the
geographical separation of classes. Here again London was the
pioneer, being a combination of three separate units - the
government centre of Westminster, the merchant city of London,
and the popular Southwark across the river. Up to a point the
growth of this composite metropolis encouraged potential rioters.
The northern and eastern edges of the City of London and
Southwark where the merchant community bordered on districts
of workers, artisans and the · port - all in their way equally
disposed to riot, like the Spitalfield weavers or the Clerkenwell
radicals - formed natural flash-points. These were the areas where
several of the great eighteenth-century riots broke out. Westmin­
ster had its own population of artisans and miscellaneous poor,
whom the proximity of king and Parliament and the accident of
an unusually democratic franchise in this constituency, turned into
a formidable pressure group for several decades of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The area between the City
and Westminster, which was filled by an unusually dense accumu­
lation of slums, inhabited by labourers, immigrants and the
socially marginal (Drury Lane, Covent Garden, St Giles,
Holborn) , added to the ebullience of metropolitan public life.
However, as time went on the pattern simplified itself. The
nineteenth-century City ceased to be residential, and became
increasingly a pure business district, while the port moved down-
22 8
 C I T I E S A N D I N S U R RE C T I O NS

stream, the city middle and lower-middle classes into more or less
remote suburbs, leaving the East End an increasingly homo­
geneous zone of the poor. The northern and western borders of
Westminster became increasingly upper- and middle-class settle­
ments largely designed as such by landowners and speculative
builders, thus pressing the centres Qf artisans, labourers and others
inclined to radicalism and riot (Chelsea, Notting Hill, Paddington,
Marylebone) on to a periphery increasingly remote from the rest
of radical London. The slums between the two cities survived
longest but by the early twentieth century they had also been
broken into small patches by the urban renewal which has given
London some of its gloomiest thoroughfares (Shaftesbury Avenue,
Rosebery Avenue) as well as some of its most pompous ones
(Kingsway, Aldwych) , and an impressive accumulation of
barrack-like tenements purporting to increase the happiness of
the Drury Lane and Saffron Hill proletariat. Covent Garden and
Soho (which elected communist local councillors in 1 945) are
perhaps the last relic of old-fashioned metropolitan turbulence in
the centre of the town. By the late nineteenth century the
potentially riotous London had already been broken up into
peripheral segments of varying size (the huge and amorphous East
End being the largest) , surrounding a non-residential City and
West End and a solid block of middle-class districts, and sur­
rounded in turn by middle- and lower-middle-class outer suburbs.
Such patterns of segregation developed in most large and
growing western cities from the early nineteenth century, though
the parts of their historic centres which were not transformed into
business or institutional districts, sometimes retained traces of their
old structure, which may still be observed in the red-light quarters,
as in Amsterdam. Twentieth-century working-class rehousing and
planning for motor transport further disintegrated the city as a poten­
tial riot centre. (The nineteenth-century planning for railways had,
if anything, the opposite effect, often creating socially mixed and
marginal quarters around the new terminals.) The recent tendency
to shift major urban services such as central markets from the centres
to the outskirts of cities will no doubt disintegrate it further.
Is the urban riot and insurrection therefore doomed to disap­
pear ? Evidently not, for we have in recent years seen a marked
recrudescence of this phenomenon in some of the most modern
cities, though also a decline m some of the more traditional
229
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

centres of such activities. The reasons are mainly social and

political, but it may be worth looking briefly at the characteristics
of modern urbanism which encourage it.
Modern mass transportation is one. Motor transport has so far
contributed chiefly to the mobilization of that normally un-riotous
group, the middle class, though such devices as the motorized
demonstration (Frenchmen and Algerians still remember the
massed horns of reaction hooting Al-ge-rie franfaise) and that
natural device of sabotage and passion, the traffic jam. However,
cars have been used by activists in North American riots, and
disrupt police action when on the move, while forming temporary
barricades when stationary. Moreover, motor transport distributes
the news of riots beyond the immediate area affected since both
private cars and buses have to be extensively re-routed.
Public transport, and especially underground railways, which
are once again being built in several big cities on a large scale, is
more directly relevant. There is no better means of transport for
moving large numbers of potential rioters rapidly over long
distances than trains running at frequent intervals. This is one
reason why the West Berlin students are a rather effective body of
rioters : the underground links the Free University set among the
remote and spectacularly middle-class villas and gardens of Dahlem,
with the town centre.
More important than transport are two other factors : the increase
in the number of buildings worth rioting against or occupying, and
the development in their vicinity of accumulations of potential
rioters. For while it is true that the headquarters of central and
municipal government are increasingly remote from the riotous
quarters, and the rich or noble rarely live in palaces in the town
centres (apartments are both less vulnerable and more anonymous) ,
sensitive institutions of other kinds have multiplied. There are the
communications centres (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) . The
least experienced organizer of a military coup or insurrection knows
all about their importance. There are the gigantic newspaper offices,
fortunately so often concentrated in the older city centres, and
providing admirable incidental material for barricades or cover
against fire in the form of delivery trucks, newsprint and packages
of papers. They were used for street-fighting purposes as long ago
as 1 g 1 g in Berlin, though not very much since. There are, as we
all know now, the universities. Though the general tendency to
 C I T I E S A N D I N S UR R E C T I O N S

move these out of city centres has diminished their riot potential
somewhat, there are enough academic precincts left in the middle
of big towns to satisfy the activists. Besides, the explosion of higher
education has filled the average university to bursting point with
thousands, or even tens of thousands, of marchers or fighters.
There are, above all, the banks and large corporations, symbols
and reality of the power structure, and increasingly concentrated
in those massifs of plate glass and concrete by which the traveller
recognizes the centres of a proper late-twentieth-century city.
Theoretically these should be individually as much the object
of attack by rioters as city halls or capitols, for IBM, Shell or
General Motors carry at least as much weight as most govern­
ments. Banks have long been aware of their vulnerability, and in
some Latin countries - Spain is a good example - their combin­
ation of symbolic architectural opulence and heavy fortification
provides the nearest thing to those town-citadels in which feudal
and feuding noblemen barricaded themselves in the middle ages.
To see them under heavy police guard in times of tension is an
instructive experience, though, in fact, the only champions of
direct action who have been systematically attracted by them are
unpolitical robbers and revolutionary 'expropriators'. But if we
except such politically and economically negligible symbols of the
American way of life as Hilton hotels, and the occasional object of
specialized hostility such as Dow Chemicals, riots have rarely
aimed directly at any of the buildings of large corporations. Nor
are they very vulnerable. It would take more than a few broken
plate-glass windows or even the occupation of a few acres of office
space, to disrupt the smooth operations of a modern oil company.
On the other hand, collectively 'downtown' is vulnerable. The
disruption of traffic, the closing of banks, the office staffs who
cannot or will not turn up for work, the businessmen marooned in
hotels with overloaded switchboards, or who cannot reach their
destinations : all these can interfere very seriously with the
activities of a city. Indeed, this came close to happening during
the 1 967 riots in Detroit. What is more, in cities developing on the
North American pattern it is not unlikely to happen, sooner
or later. For it is well known that the .central areas of town, and
their immediate surroundings, are being filled with the coloured
poor as the comfortable whites move out. The ghettoes lap round the
city centres like dark and turbulent seas. It is this concentration
 R E V O L UT I O N A R I E S

of the most discontented and turbulent in the neighbourhood

of a relatively few unusually sensitive urban centres which gives
the militants of a smallish minority the political importance which
black riots would certainly not have if the 1 o or I 5 per cent of the us
population who are Negroes were more evenly distributed throughout
the whole of that vast and complex country.
Still, even this revival of rioting in western cities is compar­
atively modest. An intelligent and cynical police chief would
probably regard all the troubles in western cities during recent
years as minor disturbances, magnified by the hesitation or
incompetence of the authorities and the effect of excessive pub­
licity. With the exception of the Latin Quarter riots of May 1 968
none of them looked as though they could, or were intended to,
shake governments. Anyone who wishes to judge what a genuine
old-style insurrection of the urban poor, or a serious armed rising,
is and can achieve, must still go to the cities of the under­
developed world : to Naples which rose against the Germans in
1 943, to the Algerian Casbah in 1 956 (excellent movies have been
made about both these insurrections) , to Bogota in 1 948, perhaps
to Caracas, certainly to Santo Domingo in 1 965.
The effectiveness of recent western city riots is due not so much
to the actual activities of the rioters, as to their political context.
In the ghettoes of the United States they have demonstrated that
black people are no longer prepared to accept their fate passively,
and in doing so they have doubtless accelerated the development
of black political consciousness and white fear ; but they have
never looked like a serious immediate threat to even the local
power structure. In Paris they demonstrated the !ability of an
apparently firm and monolithic regime. (The actual fighting
capacity of the insurrectionaries was never in fact tested, though
their heroism is not in question : no more than two or three
people were actually killed, and those almost certainly by acci­
dent.) Elsewhere the demonstrations and riots of students, though
very effective inside the universities, have been little more than a
routine police problem outside them.
But this, of course, may be true of all urban riots, which is why
the study of their relation to different types of towns is a
comparatively unimportant exercise. Georgian Dublin does not
lend itself easily to insurrection, and its population, which does,
has not shown a great inclination to initiate or even to participate
 CITIES AND I N SURRE CTIONS

i n uprisings. The Easter Rising took place there because it was a

capital city, where the major national decisions are supposed to be
made, and though it failed fairly quickly, it played an important
part in the winning of Irish independence, because the nature of
the Irish situation in I 9 I 7-2 I allowed it to. Petrograd, built from
scratch on a gigantic and geometrical plan, is singularly ill-suited
to barricades or street fighting, but the Russian revolution began
and succeeded there. Conversely, the proverbial turbulence of
Barcelona, the older parts of which are almost ideally suited to
riot, rarely even looked like producing revolution. Catalan anar­
chism, with all its bomb throwers, pistoleros, and enthusiasm for
direct action, was until I 93 6 never more than a normal problem
of public order to the authorities, so modest that the historian is
amazed to find how few policemen were actually supposed (rather
inefficiently) to ensure its protection.
Revolutions arise out of political situations, not because some
cities are structurally suited to insurrection. Still, an urban riot or
spontaneous uprising may be the starter which sets the engine of
revolution going. That starter is more likely to function in cities
which encourage or facilitate insurrection. A friend of mine, wh0
happened to have commanded the I 944 insurrection against the
Germans in the Latin Quarter of Paris, walked through the area
on the morning after the Night of the Barricades in I 968, touched
and moved to see that young men who had not been born in I 944
had built several of their barricades in the same places as then.
Or, the historian might add, the same places that had seen
barricades in I 830, I 848, and I 87 1 . It is not every city that lends
itself so naturally to this exercise, or . where, consequently, each
generation of rebels remembers or rediscovers the battlefields of its
predecessors. Thus in May I 9 68 the most serious confrontation
occurred across the barricades of the Rue Gay Lussac and behind
the Rue Souffiot. Almost a century earlier, in the Commune of
I 8 7 I , the heroic Raoul Rigault commanded the barricades in that
very area, was taken - in the same month of May - and killed by
the Versaillais. Not every city is like Paris. Its peculiarity may no
longer be enough to revolutionize France, but the tradition and
the environment are still strong enough to precipitate the nearest
thing to a revolution in a developed western country.
( I 9 6 8)

233
 24

MAY 1 9 6 8

Of all the many unexpected events of the late I 96os, a remarkably

bad period for prophets, the movement of May 1 968 in France was
easily the most surprising, and, for left-wing intellectuals, probably
the most exciting. It seemed to demonstrate what practically no
radical over the age of twenty-five, including Mao Tse-tung and
Fidel Castro, believed, namely that revolution in an advanced
industrial country was possible in conditions of peace, prosperity,
and apparent political stability. The revolution did not succeed and,
as we shall see, there is much argument over whether it was ever
more than faintly possible that it should succeed. Nevertheless, the
proudest and most self-confident political regime of Europe was
brought to within half an inch of collapse. There was a day when
almost certainly the majority of de Gaulle's cabinet, and quite
possibly the general himself, expected defeat. This was achieved by a
grass-roots popular movement, without the help of anyone within
the power structure. And it was the students who initiated, inspired,
and at crucial moments actually represented that movement.
Probably no other revolutionary movement contained a higher
percentage of people reading and writing books, and it is therefore
not surprising that the French publishing industry should have
rushed in to supply an apparently unlimited demand. By the end of
I 968 at least fifty-two books about the May events had appeared,
and the flow continues. All of them are rush jobs, some of them no
more than briefarticles, padded out with reprints of old papers, press
interviews, taped speeches, etc.
There is, however, no reason why hasty inquests should not be
valuable when conducted by intelligent people, and the Latin
Quarter of Paris probably contains more of them per square yard
than any other spot on earth. In any case the revolutions and
counter-revolutions of France have in their time stimulated some of
2 34
 MAY 1 968
the most distinguished rush jobs of history, most notably Karl Marx's
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Moreover, French intellectuals
are not merely numerous and articulate, but used to quick · and
copious writing, a faculty trained by years of moonlighting on
reviews and other work for not very generous publishers. Add up the
books, reviews, and the newspaper accounts, headed by those in the
majestic and indispensable Le Monde, and the typical Parisian
revolutionary has probably got through the equivalent of several
thousand pages about his or her experiences ; or at least talks as
though he had.
What can we discover from this mass of literature ? By far the
greater part tries to explain the movement, to analyze its nature and
its possible contributions to social change. A fair proportion tries to
fit it into one or another of the analytical categories of its sympath­
izers - who provide the overwhelming majority of the writers - with
more or less originality and special pleading. This is natural enough.
However, it does not provide us with another Eighteenth Brumaire -

that is to say, with a study of the politics of May 1 968. No doubt the
actual events are so vividly engraved on the minds of most French
intellectuals that they think they know all about them already. It is
no accident that the nearest thing to a coherent analytical narra­
tive of the crisis comes from two British journalists, Seale and
McConville. Though not exceptional, it is competent, sympathetic,
and invaluable to non-Frenchmen if only because it carefully
explains what all the confusing initials of the various ideological
groups in the Latin Quarter stand for.
Nevertheless, if May 1 968 was a revolution which only just failed
to overthrow de Gaulle, the situation which allowed what had been,
a few weeks earlier, a squabbling collection of campus sects to make
the attempt deserves to be analyzed. And so must the reasons for the
failure of these sects. So it may be useful to leave aside the nature and
novelty of the revolutionary forces and try to clarify the less exciting
question of their initial success and comparatively rapid failure.
There were, it is clear, two stages in the mobilization of the
revolutionary forces, both totally unexpected by the government, the
official opposition, even by the unofficial but recognized opposition
of the important left-wing literary intellectuals in Paris. (The
established left-wing intelligentsia played no significant part in the
May events ; Jean-Paul Sartre, with great tact and intuition,
recognized this by effacing himself before Daniel Cohn-Bendit, to
235
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

whom he acted merely as interviewer.) The first stage, roughly

between 3 and I I May, mobilized the students. Thanks to the
government's inattention, complacency, and stupidity, a move­
ment of activists in a suburban campus was transformed into a mass
movement of virtually all students in Paris, enjoying vast public
supp�rt - at this stage 6 I per cent of Parisians were pro-student and
only I 6 per cent definitely hostile - and then into a sort of symbolic
insurrection of the Latin Quarter. The government retreated before
it, and in so doing spread the movement to the provinces and,
especially, to the workers.
The second phase of mobilization, from I4 to 2 7 May, consisted
essentially in the extension of a spontaneous general strike, the
largest in the history of France or perhaps of any other country, and
culminated with the rejection by the strikers of the deal negotiated
on their behalf between the official union leaders and the govern­
ment. Throughout this period, up to 29 May, the popular movement
held the initiative : the government, caught on the wrong foot at the
start, was unable to recover itself, and grew progressively demoral­
ized. The same is true of conservative and moderate opinion, which
was at this time passive, even paralyzed. The situation changed
rapidly when de Gaulle at last took action on 29 May.
The first thing to observe is that only the second phase created
revolutionary possibilities (or, to put it another way, it created the
need for the government to take counter-revolutionary action) . The
student movement by itself was a nuisance, but not a political
danger. The authorities grossly underrated it, but this was largely
because they were thinking about other things, including other
university problems and the bureaucratic in-fighting between vari­
ous government departments, which seemed to them more impor­
tant. Touraine, the author of the most illuminating of the books
published in the immediate aftermath of May, rightly says that what
was wrong with the French system was not that it was too
Napoleonic, but that it was too much like the regime of Louis­
Philippe, whose government was caught equally on the wrong
footing by the riots of I 848, which consequently turned into a
revolution.
Yet, paradoxically, the very lack of importance of the student
movement made it a most effective detonator of the workers'
mobilization. Having underestimated and neglected it, the govern­
�ent tried to disperse it by force. When the students refused to go
236
 MAY 1 968
home, the only choice was between shooting and a public, humili­
ating retreat. But how could they have chosen to shoot ? Massacre is
one of the last resorts of the government in stable industrial societies,
since (unless directed against outsiders of one kind or another) it
destroys the impression of popular consent on which they rest. Once
the velvet glove has been put on the iron fist, it is politically very
risky to take it off. Massacring students, the children of the
respectable middle class, not to mention ministers, is even less
attractive politically than killing workers and peasants. Just because
the students were only a bunch of unarmed kids who did not put the
regime at risk, the government had little choice but to retreat before
them. But in doing so it created the very situation it wished to avoid.
It appeared to show its impotence and gave the students a cheap
victory. The Paris chief of police, an intelligent man, had more or
less told his minister to avoid a bluff which virtually had to be called.
That the students did not believe it to be a bluff does not change the
reality of the situation.
Conversely, the workers' mobilization did put the regime in a
risky position, which is why de Gaulle was finally prepared to use the
ultimate weapon, civil war, by calling on the army. This was not
because insurrection was the serious object of anyone, for neither the
students, who may have wanted it, nor the workers, who certainly
did not, thought or acted in such political terms. It was because the
progressive crumbling of government authority left a void, and
because the only practicable alternative government was a popular
front inevitably dominated by the Communist Party. The revolu­
tionary students may not have considered this a particularly signifi­
cant political change, and most Frenchmen would almost certainly
have accepted it more or less willingly.
Indeed, there was a moment when even those two Hobbesian
institutions, the French police and the army, long accustomed to
assess the moment when old regimes ought to be abandoned and
new ones accepted, allowed it to be understood that they would
not regard a legally constituted popular front government as an
insurrection which they were obliged to combat. It would not in
itself have been revolutionary - except in its coming to power - and
it would not have been regarded as such. On the other hand, it is
hard to think of any other positive political outcome of the crisis
which even revolutionaries could have expected.
But the Popular Front was not ready to occupy the vacuum left by
23 7
 REVO LUTIONARIES

the disintegration of Gaullism. The non-communists in the alliance

dragged their feet, since the crisis demonstrated that they repre­
sented nobody except a few politicians, while the Communist
Party, through its control of the strongest union federation, _ was
for the time being the only civilian force of real significance, and
would therefore have inevitably dominated the new government.
The crisis eliminated the sham politics of electoral calculation and
left visible only the real politics of power. But the Communists in
turn had no means of forcing the date of their shotgun wedding
with the other opposition groups. For they had themselves been
playing the electoral game. They had not mobilized the masses
whose action pushed them to the verge of power, and they had
not thought of using that action to force their allies' hand. On the
contrary, if Philippe Alexandre is to be believed, they seem to have
regarded the strike as something that might stop them from
concentrating on the really important job of keeping their · allies in
line.
De Gaulle, a notoriously brilliant politician, recognized both the
moment when his opponents lost their momentum, and the chance
of regaining his own initiative. With an apparently imminent
communist-led popular front, a conservative regime could at last
play its trump card : the fear of revolution. It was, tactically
speaking, a beautifully judged performance. De Gaulle did not even
have to shoot. Indeed, not the least curious aspect of the entire May
crisis is that the trial of strength was symbolic throughout, rather
like the manoeuvres of the proverbial Chinese generals of ancient
times. Nobody seriously tried to kill anybody. Perhaps five people
in all actually were killed, though a considerable number were
beaten up.
Whatever happened, both Gaullists and revolutionaries united
in blaming the French Communist Party, either for planning
revolution or for sabotaging it. Neither line of argument is very
significant except as an indication of the crucial role of the CP in
May. It was clearly the only civilian organization, and certainly
the only part of the political opposition, which kept both its
influence and its head. This is not really surprising unless we
assume that the workers were revolutionary in the same way as
the students or that they were as disgusted with the CP .
But though the workers were certainly far more advanced than
their leaders, e.g. in their readiness to raise questions of social
 MAY 1 968
control in industry which the General Labour Federation was
simply not thinking about, the divergencies between leaders and
followers in May were potential rather than actual. The political
proposals of the CP almost certainly reflected what most workers
wanted, and quite certainly reflected the traditional mode of
thinking of the French left ('defence of the republic', 'union of all
on the left', 'a popular government', 'down with one-man rule',
etc.) . As for the general strike, the unions had taken it over almost
immediately. Their leaders were negotiating with government and
the bosses, and until they came back with unsatisfactory terms,
there was no reason at all to expect a major revolt against them.
In brief, while the students started their revolt in a spirit of equal
hostility to de Gaulle and the CP (from which most of their leaders
had seceded or been expelled) , the workers did not.
The Communist Party was therefore in a position to act. Its
leadership met daily to assess the situation. It thought it knew
what to do. But what was it doing ? It was certainly not trying to
preserve Gaullism, for reasons of Soviet foreign policy or any
other. As soon as the overthrow of de Gaulle began to look
possible, i.e. between three and four days after the spontaneous
sit-ins started to spread, it formally staked its own and the Popular
Front's immediate claim to power. On the other hand it consis­
tently refused to have anything to do with advocating insurrec­
tion, on the grounds that this would be playing into de Gaulle's
hands.
In this it was correct. The May crisis was not a classical
revolutionary situation, though the conditions for such a situation
might have developed very rapidly as a result of a sudden,
unexpected break in a regime which turned out to be much more
fragile than anyone had anticipated. The forces of government
and its widespread political support were in no sense divided and
disintegrated, but merely disoriented and temporarily paralyzed.
The forces of revolution were weak, except in holding the
initiative. Apart from the students, the organized workers, and
some sympathizers among the college-educated professional strata,
their support consisted not so much in allies as in the readiness of
a large mass of uncommitted or even hostile opinion to give up
hope in Gaullism and accept quietly the only available alter­
native. As the crisis advanced, public opinion in Paris became
much less favourable to Gaullism, somewhat more favourable to
239
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

the old left, but no clear preponderance emerges from the public
opinion surveys. Had the Popular Front come, it would certainly
have won the subsequent election, just as de Gaulle won his - but
victory is a great decider of loyalties.
The best chance of overthrowing Gaullism was therefore to let
it beat itself. At one point - between 2 7 and 29 May - its
credibility would have crumbled so much that even its officials and
followers might have given it up for lost. The worst policy would
have been to give Gaullism the chance of rallying its supporters, the
state apparatus, and the uncommitted against a clearly defined, and
militarily ineffective, minority of workers and students. Unwilling to
expel the striking workers from the factories by force, the army and
police were entirely reliable against an insurrection. They said so.
And, indeed, de Gaulle recovered precisely because he turned the
situation into a defence of 'order' against 'red revolution'. That the
CP was not interested in 'red revolution' is another matter. Its
general strategy was right for anyone, including revolutionaries, who
unexpectedly discovered a chance of overthrowing the regime in
a basically non-revolutionary situation. Assuming, of course, that
they wanted to take power.
The communists' real faults were different. The test of a
revolutionary movement is not its willingness to raise barricades at
every opportunity, but its readiness to recognize when the normal
conditions of routine politics cease to operate, and to adapt its
behaviour accordingly. The French CP failed both these tests, and
in consequence failed not only to overthrow capitalism (which it
did not want to do just then) but to install the Popular Front (which
it certainly did) . As Touraine has sarcastically observed, its real
failure was not as a revolutionary but even as a reformist party. It
consistently trailed behind the masses, failing to recognize the
seriousness of the student movement until the barricades were up,
the readiness of the workers for an unlimited general strike until
the spontaneous · sit-ins forced the hands of its union leaders, taken
by surprise once again when the workers rejected the terms of
trike settlement.
Unlike the non-communist left it was not pushed aside, since it
had both organization and mass support from the grass roots. Like
them, it continued to play the game of routine politics and routine
labour unionism. It exploited a situation not of its own making, but
it neither led nor even understood it, except perhaps as a threat to its
 MAY 1 968
own position within the labour movement by the bitterly hostile
ultra-left. Had the CP recognized the existence and scope of the
popular movement and acted accordingly, it might just have gained
sufficient momentum to force its reluctant allies on the old left into
line. One cannot say much more than this, for the chances of
overthrowing Gaullism, though real for a few days, never amounted
to more than a reasonable possibility. As it was it condemned itself,
during those crucial days of 27 to 29 May, to waiting and issuing
appeals. But at such times waiting is fatal. Those who lose the
initiative lose the game.
The chances of overthrowing the regime were d�minished not only
by the failure of the Communists, but by the character of the mass
movement. It had no political aims itself, though it used political
phraseology. Without profound social and cultural discontents,
ready to emerge at a relatively slight Impetus, there can be no major
social revolutions. But without a certain concentration on specific
targets, however peripheral to their main purpose, the force of such
revolutionary energies is dispersed. A given political or economic
crisis, a given situation, may provide such precise enemies and
objectives automatically ; a war which must be ended, a foreign
occupier who must be expelled, a crack in the political structure
imposing specific and limited options, such as whether or not to
support the Spanish government of 1 936 against the generals'
insurrection. The French situation provided no such automatic
targets of concentration.
On the contrary, the very profundity of the critique of society
implied or formulated by the popular movement left it without
specific targets. Its enemy was 'the system'. To quote Touraine :
'The enemy is no longer a person of a social category, the mon­
arch or the bourgeoisie. He is the totality of the depersonalized,
"rationalized", bureaucratized modes of action of socio-economic
power . . . . ' The enemy is by definition faceless, not even a thing or
an institution, but a programme of human relations, a process of
depersonalization ; not exploitation which implies exploiters, but
alienation. It is typical that most of the students themselves (unlike
the less revolutionary workers) were not bothered about de Gaulle,
except in so far as the real objective, society, was obscured by the
purely political phenomenon of Gaullism. The popular movement
was therefore either sub-political or anti-political. In the long run
this does not diminish its historic importance or influence. In the
 REVOLUTIONARIES

short run it was fatal. As Touraine says, May 1 968 is less important
even in the history ofrevolutions than the Paris Commune. It proved
not that revolutions can succeed in western countries today, but only
that they can break out.
Several of the books about the May events may be briefly dis­
missed. However, Alain Touraine's book is in a class apart. 1 The
author is an industrial sociologist ofmarxist provenance, the teacher
of Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre, the original flash-point of the
student revolt ; he was deeply involved in its early stages. His
analysis reflects all this to some extent. Its value lies not so much in
its originality - where so much has been written, most ideas have
already been suggested and contested somewhere - as in the author's
lucidity and historical sense, his lack of illusions, his knowledge of
labour movements, as well as the incidental contribution of his
having first-hand experience. He has, for instance, written the best
analysis of the general strike, a grossly under-reported and under­
analyzed phenomenon when compared to the quantity of literature
about the Latin Quarter. (We know practically nothing of what
happened in all those plants and offices, which, after all, produced
ten million strikers, most of whom were out of contact with students
and reporters.) For foreign readers he has the additional advantage
of first-hand acquaintance with other parts of the world, notably the
United States and Latin America, which helps to correct the inborn
provincialism of the French.
Touraine's argument is elaborate and complex, but a few of the
points may be noted. What is happening today is the 'great
mutation' from an older bourgeois to a new technocratic society, and
this, as the May movement shows, creates conflict and dissidence not
only at its margins but at its centre. The dividing line of 'class
struggle' it reveals runs down the middle of the 'middle classes',
between the 'techno-bureaucrats' on the one side and the 'profes­
sionals' on the other side. The latter, though in no sense obvious
victims of oppression, represent in the modern technological econ­
omy something like the elite of skilled labour in an earlier industrial
epoch, and for analogous reasons crystallize the new phase of class
consciousness :
The main actor in the May movement was not the working class but the
totality of those whom we may call the professionals . . . and among them the
most active were those most independent of the great organizations for
1 Alain Touraine, Le mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique, Paris, 1969.
 MAY 1 968
which, directly or indirectly, such people work : students, radio and
television people, technicians in planning offices, research workers in both
the private and public sector, teachers, etc.

They and not the old working-class collectivities of miners, longshore­

men, railroads, gave the general strike its specific character. Its core
incidentally lay in the new industries : the Automotive-Electronic­
Chemical complex.
According to Touraine, a new social movement suited to the new
economy is emerging, but it is a curiously contradictory one. In one
sense it is a primitive rebellion of men who depend on older
experiences to cope with a new situation. It may produce a revival of
patterns of militancy or, among the new recruits to the social
movement who have no such militant experience, something anal­
ogous to populist movements in underdeveloped countries, or more
precisely to the labour movement of the early nineteenth century.
Such a movement is important not for the fight it is now carrying on
along old political lines, but for what it reveals of the future : for its
vision rather than its necessarily feeble achievement. For the strength
of that vision, the 'utopian communism' which it created in 1 968 as
the young proletariat created it before 1 848, depends upon its
practical impotence. On the other hand this social movement also
includes or implies an up-to-date kind of reformism, a force which
may serve to modify rigid and obsolescent structures of society - the
educational system, industrial relations, management, government.
The future dilemmas of revolutionaries lie here.
Was this new social movement 'revolutionary' in May - apart from
its 'revolutionary' formulation of a 'counter-utopia' of libertarian
communism to meet the 'dominant Utopia' of the academic sociolo­
gists and political scientists ? In France, Touraine argues, the new
movement produced a genuine revolutionary crisis, though one un­
likely to achieve revolution, because, for historical reasons, the social
struggle, politics, and a 'cultural revolution' against all forms of
manipulation and integration ofindividual behaviourwere combined.
There can be no social movement today which does not combine
these three elements, because of the 'progressive disappearance of the
separation between state and civil society'. But at the same time this
makes the concentration of the struggle, and the development of
effective devices for action, such as parties of the bolshevik type,
increasingly difficult.
In the United States, by contrast - perhaps because of the absence
243
 R E V O LU T I O NA R I E S

ofstate centralization or a tradition of proletarian revolution to focus

it - there has been no such combination of forces. The phenomena of
cultural revolt, which are symptomatic rather than operational, are
the most visible. 'While in France', Touraine writes, 'the social
struggle was at the centre of the movement and the cultural revolt
was, one might almost say, a byproduct of a crisis of social change, in
the United States cultural revolt is central.' This is a symptom of
weakness.
Touraine's purpose is not so much to make judgments or pro­
phecies - and in so far as he does so he will be criticized - as to
establish that the May movement was neither an episode nor a
simple continuation of older social movements. It demonstrated that
'a new period in social history' is beginning or has begun, but also
that the analysis of its character cannot be derived from words of the
revolutionaries of May themselves. He is probably right on both
counts.
( I 96 9)

244
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I N T E L L E C T UA L S A N D T H E
C L A S S S T R U G GL E

The characteristic revolutionary person today is a student or

(generally young) intellectual, the word being understood to mean
anyone who earns or looks forward to earning his living in an
occupation which is chiefly recruited from those who have passed
a certificate of some kind of academic education or its equivalent.
In backward or underdeveloped countries this may include
anyone with secondary or even in some areas primary schooling ;
in developed countries it increasingly tends to mean anyone with a
post-secondary education, but not necessarily those whose edu­
cation, at whatever level, has been primarily vocational, such as
accountants, engineers, business executives and artists. One might
say that the intellectual is a person holding a job for which the
qualification is one which does not teach anything about holding
specific jobs. In this sense the definition used here converges with
the more familiar conception of the intellectual as someone using
his or her intellect in a way which is sometimes defined in a
circular fashion and not often very clearly. However, it is
preferable to stress the occupational aspect. It is not the fact of
thinking, independently or otherwise, which gives intellectuals
certain political characteristics, but a particular social situation in
which they think.
That revolutionary persons are today characteristically intellec­
tuals (which does not mean that intellectuals are characteristically
revolutionaries) , can be verified by analyzing the membership of
the organizations or groups, generally quite small, which today
claim to be committed to revolution in its most literal sense, to
insurrection or the total rejection of the status quo. It would
presumably not be true of countries undergoing revolution or in
2 45
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

revolutionary, insurrectionary and semi-insurrectionary situations,

but it is certainly true not only of developed 'western' countries, but
also of countries in which the situation of the labouring masses is
such that one would expect them to be revolutionary. 1 Even there
we often find, as among the Peruvian guerrillas of the 1 960s or the
Indian Naxalites, that intellectuals predominate. So, though the
following discussion will deal primarily with 'developed' countries,
some of it may also be relevant to others, if perhaps only
marginally.
To say that most revolutionary persons today are intellectuals is
not to say that they will make the revolution. Who will make
revolution, if at all, is a more complicated question, as is the rather
more superficial problem who, other than the advocates of
immediate insurrection or armed struggle who claim a monopoly of
the term, is entitled to call himself revolutionary. For the purpose of
the present paper it is not essential to answer either, since its concern
is not so much with the objective as with the subjective element in
making revolutions. Those who reject or resent any involvement in
the status quo, and indeed any activity not directly and exclusively
designed to 'confront' capitalism with a head-on challenge, are
certainly revolutionaries in the most literal sense, and for the
purposes of my argument it does not matter that others can also
claim to be, perhaps more effectively at times. The point is that most
of these all-out revolutionaries are intellectuals, which raises
interesting problems both about intellectuals and about 'being
revolutionary'.
Of course it may be claimed that intellectuals cannot be
revolutionaries without this subjective consciousness, whereas some
other social strata can. When Marx spoke of the workers as a
revolutionary class, he meant not simply one which 'revolts
against individual conditions of a hitherto existing society', but
'against the very "life-production" hitherto existing, the "whole of
the activity" on which it is based'. He did not imply that this
rejection must be explicit, though he assumed that at a certain
stage of historical development it would become so. For him the
proletariat was such a class because of the nature of its social
existence, . and not (except at a rather lower level of the analysis of
1 Such countries are not necessarily in revolutionary situations, as defined by
Lenin or anyone else. Tsarist Russia cried out for social revolution during a long
period, but was in revolutionary situations only infrequently.
 I N T E L L E C T UA L S A N D T H E C L A S S S T R U G G L E

concrete historical situations) because o f its consciousness of this

aim. 'It cannot abolish its own conditions of life without abolish­
ing all the inhuman conditions of the life of present-day society
which are concentrated in its situation. It is not a matter of what
this or that proletarian or even the whole poletariat imagines at
one time or another to be its goal. It is a matter of what it is, and
what in accordance with this being it will be historically forced to
do. '2 Intellectuals as a stratum are not of this kind. They are
revolutionary only in so far as their members individually feel that
they ought to or must be. So we must begin by considering what
makes people feel this way. Naturally, this discussion cannot be
confined merely to intellectuals.

Why do men and women become revolutionaries ? In the first

instance mostly because they believe that what they want subjec­
tively from life cannot be got without a fundamental change in all
society. There is of course that permanent substratum of idealism,
or if we prefer the term, utopianism, which is part of all human
life and it can become the dominant part for individuals at certain
times, as during adolescence and romantic love, and for societies
at the occasional historical moments which correspond to falling
and being in love, namely the great moments of liberation and
revolution. All men, however cynical, can conceive of a personal
life or society which would not be imperfect. All would agree that
this would be wonderful. Most men at some time of their lives
think that such a life and society are possible, and quite a number
think that we ought to bring them about. During the great
liberations and revolutions most men actually think, briefly or
only momentarily, that perfection is being achieved, that the New
Jerusalem is being built, the earthly paradise within reach. But
most people for most of their adult lives, and most social groups
for most of their history, live at a less exalted level of expectation.
It is when the relatively modest expectations of everyday life
look as though they cannot be achieved without revolutions,
that individuals become revolutionaries. Peace is a modest and
negative objective, but during the first world war it was this
elementary demand which turned ordinary people objectively and
later subjectively into persons dedicated to the immediate over­
throw of society, since peace seemed unrealizable without it. Such
2 The Holy Family, MEGA, 1 /3, pp. 206-7.

2 47
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

an assessment of the situation may be mistaken. For instance, it

may turn out that British workers can, on the whole, enjoy full
employment at a high standard of life for quite a long time
without first overthrowing capitalism, a prospect which looked
hardly credible forty years ago.3 But that is another matter. The
modest expectations of everyday life are not, of course, purely
material. They include all kinds of demands which we make for
ourselves or the communities of which we consider ourselves
members : respect and self-respect, certain rights, just treatment,
and so on. But even these are not utopian demands for a new,
different and perfect life, but envisage the ordinary life we see
around us. The demands which make North American blacks into
revolutionaries are elementary enough,. and most whites can take
their fulfilment for granted.
Here again, what forces people towards conscious revolutionism
is not the ambition of their objective, but the apparent failure of all
alternative ways of attaining it, the closing of all doors against
them. If we are locked out of our house, there are normally several
possibilities of getting back in, though some imply a hopeful
patience. It is only when none of these appear realistic that we
think of battering in the door. However, it is worth observing that
even so we are unlikely to batter in the door unless we feel that it
will give way. Becoming a revolutionary implies not only a measure
of despair, but also some hope. The typical alternation of passivity
and activism among some notoriously oppressed classes or peoples is
thus explained. 4
Commitment to revolution thus depends on a mixture of
motives : the desire for the ordinary life, behind which, waiting to
emerge, is the dream of the'really good life ; the sense of all gates
closing against us, but at the same time the sense of the possibility
of bursting them open ; the sense of urgency, without which appeals
to patience and reform or piecemeal improvement do not lose their
force. Such motives, mixed in different proportions, may arise in a
3 The function of a revolutionary ideology such as socialism in mass move­

ments is to liberate their members from dependence on such fluctuations in their

personal expectations.
4 This may be illustrated from the history of South American Indian peasants

over the past centuries. Inactive whenever the power structure above them
seemed stable and firm, they immediately begin to occupy the communal lands
which they never ceased to claim as their own, whenever it seemed to show signs
of cracking.
 INTE L LE C TUALS AND THE C LASS S T R U G G LE

variety of historic situations, among which we may single out two.

There is the relatively speci�lized case of particular groups within a
society, like the Negroes in the United States, for which the gates
appear to be shut, whereas they are open, or at least capable of
opening, for the rest. There is also the more general and significant
case of societies in crisis, which appear incapable of satisfying the
demands of most of their people, whatever they may do, so that -
with relatively small exceptions - all groups feel disoriented,
frustrated and convinced of the necessity of some fundamental
change, not necessarily of the same kind. Tsarist Russia is a classical
example : a society in whose future few believed. Most developed
countries of the western world normally belonged, for more than a
century after 1 848, to the first type, but it is possible that since the
1 960s several of them may be transferring to the second.
It is worth repeating that I am talking about what makes
revolutionaries, not what makes revolutions. Revolutions can be
made without many revolutionaries in the sense I am using the
word. At the start of the French revolution of 1 789, probably few
were to be found outside the ranks of the marginal literary boMme
and (very much more inactively) of educated middle-class intellec­
tuals. There was discontent, militancy, popular ferment, and in the
context of an economic and political crisis of the regime this
actually led to revolution, whereas otherwise it might have
produced no more than considerable but temporary public dis­
order. But by and large French revolutionaries were made during,
by and in the revolution. They did not initially make it.
Let me briefly make another point. Contrary to a view once
fashionable among American sociologists and political scientists,
people do not normally become revolutionaries because they are
individually alienated or deviant, though revolutionary activities
undoubtedly attract a lunatic fringe and some of them - especially
the less organized and disciplined - may attract personal misfits.
The analysis of the membership of communist parties, and even
more that of their supporters, show clearly that their members are
typically not of this kind, even in quite small parties. It is of course
true that certain kinds of people find it easier or more attractive to
join revolutionary movements than do others ; e.g. the young as
distinct from the old, or people transferred out of their traditional
environment, as by emigration ; or members of some socially
marginal groups. However, these are social categories, not collections
249
9-R • •
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

of maladjusted individuals. Young Jews who became revolutionary

marxists were no more alienated and deviant than other Jews,
whether in Zamosc, Wilna or Brooklyn. (It is, by the way, neither
established nor even very probable that they were more likely to
become revolutionary socialists in emigration than in the old
country.) They simply made one choice of several which, for people
in their position, was normal.

In my lifetime there have been two periods when numerous

intellectuals became revolutionaries, the interwar years and the
years since the late I 950S, and more especially since the middle
I 96os. I would like to look at both, and attempt to contrast and
compare them.
It may be simplest to approach the problem of my own
generation through introspection, or if you prefer, autobiography.
A middle-aged and moderate well-established academic can
hardly claim to be a revolutionary in any realistic sense, but
someone who has regarded himself as a communist for about forty
years has at least a long memory to contribute to the discussion. I
belong, perhaps as one of its youngest surviving members, to a
milieu which is now virtually extinct, the Jewish middle-class
culture of central Europe after the first world war. This milieu lived
under the triple impact of the collapse of the bourgeois world in
I 9 J 4, the October revolution and anti-semitism. For most of my
older Austrian relatives ordinary life had ended with the assassin­
ation in Sarajevo. When they said 'in peacetime' they meant before
I 9 I 4, when the lives of 'people like us' had stretched before them
like a wide straight road, predictable even in its unpredictabilities,
comfortably certain, boring, from birth through the vicissitudes of
school, career, visits to the opera, summer holidays and family life,
to a grave in the Vienna Central Cemetery. After I 9 I 4 there was
nothing but catastrophe and problematic survival. We lived on
borrowed time and knew it. To make long-term plans seemed
senseless for people whose world had already crashed twice within
ten years (first in the war, later in the Great Inflation) . We knew
about the October revolution : I speak here of my Austrian
relatives, though as a second-generation English citizen I stood at a
slight angle to them. It proved that capitalism could and indeed
must end, whether we liked it or not. This, you recall, is the mood
of that notable and very central European work, Schumpeter's
 I N TE L LE C T U A L S AND T H E C L A S S S T R U G G L E

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. We could hardly not know about

anti-semitism, any more than the most assimilated middle-class
blacks can fail to know about racism.
The first political conversation I ever recall took place when I
was six in an Alpine sanatorium, between two Jewish mother-type
ladies. It dealt with Trotsky. ('Say what you like, he's a Jewish
boy called Bronstein'.) The first political event which made an
impact on me as such, at the age of ten, was the great riot of
1 92 7, when the Viennese workers burned down the Palace of
Justice. The second political event I recall as such, at the age of
thirteen, was the German general election of 1 930, when the Nazis
won 1 07 seats. We knew what that meant. Shortly after that we
moved to Berlin, where I stayed until 1 933. Those were the years
of the depression. Marx somewhere says that history repeats itself,
occurring first as tragedy, then as farce, but there is a more
sinister pattern of repetition : first tragedy, then despair. In
1 9 1 8-23 the bottom had fallen out of the world of central Europe.
For a brief period in the middle I 92os it looked as though some
sort of tentative hope was possible, then it fell out again. To
say that those who had nothing to lose, the unemployed, the
disoriented and demoralized middle classes, were desperate, is
insufficient. They were ready for anything. Such were the times in
which I became political.
What could young Jewish intellectuals have become under such
circumstances ? Not liberals of any kind, since the world of
liberalism (which included social democracy) was precisely what
had collapsed. As Jews we were precluded by definition from
supporting parties based on confessional allegiance, or on a
nationalism which excluded Jews, and in both cases on anti­
semitism. We became either communists or some equivalent form
of revolutionary marxists, or if we chose our own version of
blood-and-soil nationalism, Zionists. But even the great bulk of
young intellectual Zionists saw themselves as some sort of revolu­
tionary marxist nationalists. There was virtually no other choice.
We did not make a commitment against bourgeois society and
capitalism, since it patently seemed to be on its last legs. We
simply chose a future rather than no future, which meant revol�
ution. But it meant revolution not in a negative but in a positive
sense : a new world rather than no world. The great October
revolution and Soviet Russia proved to us that such a new world
 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

was possible, perhaps that it was already functioning. 'I have seen
the future and it works', said Lincoln Steffens. If it was to be the
future it had to work, so we thought it did.5
We thus became revolutionaries not so much because of our
own economic problems, though some of us were poor and most of
us faced an uncertain future, but because the old society no longer
seemed viable. It had no perspectives. This was also clear to
young intellectuals in countries in which the social order was not
visibly on the point of collapse, such as Britain. The arguments of
John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, a significant and
very influential product of the slump years, also rested on the
alternative : if not socialism, then barbarism. The triumph of
Hitler seemed to confirm it. (Conversely, Strachey's conversion to
the belief that Keynes had shown capitalism an alternative to
collapse, backed no doubt by the economic recovery of the late
I 93os, turned him back from a revolutionary into a reformist.)
Clearly there were also intellectuals who became revolutionaries
because they were proletarianized, hungry and desperate, as per­
haps in Poland and certainly in our times among the revolu­
tionary petty bourgeoisie of the Bengal cities, but I am not here
concerned with them.
Our motives therefore differed in two crucial respects from those
of workers who also became revolutionaries in our sense during
this period. In the first place, since few of us came from milieux
where marxist or other socialist beliefs had been traditional, our
break was normally sharper. (This is perhaps not so true of
countries like France, where a nominal revolutionism had always
been a youthful bourgeois option.) In the second, the sheer
economic desperation which drove so many of, say, the German
unemployed into the ranks of the Communist Party in I 930-3,
was less decisive. But of course we shared with the workers the sense
that the old system was breaking down, the sense of urgency, and
the belief that the Soviet revolution was the positive alternative.
5 'This realization that all attempts to restore capitalism must be wrecked on

the rocks of this insoluble contradiction, that the class struggle would end with
the common ruin of the contending classes if the revolutionary reconstruction of
all society does not succeed, led many a marxist with a knowledge of economics
into the camp of the bolsheviks ; including myself' (Eugen Varga, Die wirtschafts­
politischen Probleme der proletarischen Diktatur, Vienna, 1 92 1 , p. 1 9) . This autobio­
graphical passage from the well-known communist economist illustrates the force
of the alternative : revolution or ruin, at that time.
 I N T E L L E C T U A L S AND T H E C L A S S S T R U G G L E

Anyone who i s today in his or her early twenties has lived an entire
life in a period when the old system has never looked like breaking
down in this way. On the contrary-until quite recently it has
flourished economically as never before. It is plainly no longer the
kind of liberal capitalism whose death throes we lived through
between the wars, but neither, unfortunately is it socialism, and still
less Soviet socialism. It has adjusted itself to the existence of a larger
and more powerful socialist sector of the world (but one with far
greater internal crises than we anticipated) ; to global political
decolonization ; to living permanently with local wars and under the
shadow of a nuclear catastrophe. However, until the late 1 960s it has
been, by and large, a sensational success economically, technolo­
gically and - let us make no mistake about this - in the provision of
material prosperity (or the hope of it) for the masses. This is the
background for the revolutionaries of the 1 g6os.
This is true even of the revolutionaries in many parts of the Third
World. It is true that the intellectual revolutionaries of those
countries are like those of my generation inasmuch as they confront
problems of mass poverty, oppression and injustice which make any
call for patience and gradualism sound almost obscene, and inas­
much as they are convinced that the present system has so solution
for the problems of their societies. At all events neo-capitalism and
neo-colonialism have not so far solved the problem of underdevelop­
ment, but made it more acute. Nevertheless, if we except some areas
where all hope really seems to be running out, such as Bengal, even
the poor and underdeveloped countries are today not, on the whole,
stagnant or in absolute regression. There may be no hope for them as
societies, but there is plenty of hope for their individual members,
many of whom, including workers, ex-peasant migrants and even
peasants, can now look back on a couple of decades of better living
and better prospects. What makes men choose revolution rather than
inactivity or reform in the Third World is rarely the immediate or
imminent breakdown of the economy or the social order. It is rather
(leaving aside such questions as oppression by foreigners or other
races) the sheer width of the gap between rich and poor, which is
probably growing, and between developed and underdeveloped
countries, combined with the demonstrated failure of reformist
alternatives. The prospect of medium-term or long-term breakdown
also plays a part. Incidentally, the background of change and
expansion affects the local intelligentsia personally, in so far as their
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own individual career prospects are far better than ours were in my
generation. The revolutionism of students in many Third World
countries, e.g. in parts of Latin America, is remarkably short-lived
for this reason. It hardly outlasts graduation.

However, if the Third World in important ways resembles the

interwar world, the flourishing neo-capitalism of the West clearly
does not. The revolutionism of the western New Left is the product
not of capitalist crisis in any economic sense of that word, but of its
opposite. In this sense it is comparable to the rebelliousness and
revolutionism of the years just before the first world war with which,
I have long thought, it has striking affinities. These similarities may
extend even further than appears at first sight. For the rebelliousness
of an apparently flourishing pre- 1 9 1 4 western world soon became the
revolutionism of the crisis of that world. If, as seems likely, we have
once again entered a period of general crisis for capitalism, the
movements of the late 1 960s and early 1 9 70s may seem in retrospect
another prelude, like those of 1 907-14.
What lies behind the revival of revolutionism in the 1 960s is first,
technological and social transformation of unparalleled rapidity and
depth, and second, the discovery that the solution by capitalism of the
problem of material scarcity reveals, perhaps even creates, new
problems (or in marxist terms 'contradictions') which are central to
the system and possibly to all industrial society. It is not easy to
separate the two aspects and most of the new revolutionaries fail to
do so, but both are important. On the one hand we have been living
through a phase of economic expansion, techno-scientific revolution
and the restructuring of the economy which is without precedent,
both in creating material wealth and destroying much of the basis
and equilibrium of the social order. But though in the past twenty
years certain long-range predictions of the mid-nineteenth century
for the first time look as though they might be finally coming true -
that capitalism would destroy the European peasantry, traditional
religion and the old family structure6 - we ought not to forget that
the more modest social earthquakes of the past were, for those who
lived through them, equally without precedent. They adjusted to the
new situation, and in the past twenty years the enormous increase in

6 The crisis of Roman Catholicism is in this respect more significant than that of
Protestantism.

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 I N T E L L E C T U A L S AND T H E C L A S S S T R U G G L E

wealth, combined with various devices fo r social management and

welfare which were either not available or not used in earlier periods,
should have made such adjustment easier. This, at any rate, was
the argument of the anti-ideological ideologists of the American
1 950s.
On the other hand it has become increasingly clear that we are
faced not simply with a problem of human beings adjusting to a
particularly dramatic and rapid change within the framework of a
functioning system - to something like the problem of mass immi­
gration into the United States between the 1 890s and the 1 920s - but
with central flaws in the system. I am not here concerned with what
might be called the macro-economic or macro-political contradic­
tions of the system, which are today being revealed - e.g. the shaky
basis of the capitalist international economy or the widening gap
between 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' world - nor even with
the approaching dangers of an unrestricted technology which is on
the verge of actually destroying the fabric of the habitable globe or of
precipitating demographic cataclysm. The point to note about 'The
Affluent Society' or 'The New Industrial State' (to use the terms of
its most eminent liberal critic) is that until the end of the 1 960s
capitalism functioned splendidly as an economic mechanism ;
probably better than any alternative at that time. What seemed to
'go wrong' in some profound but not easily specifiable sense was the
society based on capitalist abundance, and nowhere more obviously
than in its chief stronghold, the United States. The uneasiness, the
disorientation, the signs of desperation multiplied, to be followed and
reinforced by that ominipresent ripple of violence, of more oriented
riot and rebellion, of mass dropping-out - symptoms of a socially
pathological state, which is what American observers think of when
they compare the mood of their country to that of the Weimar
Republic. Consequently also the fashionable critique of society ceased
for a time to be economic and became sociological : its key terms
were not poverty, exploitation, or even crisis, but 'alienation',
'bureaucratization', etc.
Consequently also the new revolutionism in western countries was
confined almost entirely to intellectuals and other marginal middle­
class strata (e.g. creative artists) , or to the middle-class young who
took the achievements of the affiuent society for granted and
concentrated, quite rightly, on its deficiencies. Leaving aside special
minorities like the blacks, whose discontents were simpler, the
255
 REVO LUTIO NARIE S

characteristic revolutionary was a middle-class adolescent (usually a

student) , and he tended to be distinctly to the left of the labour
movements, socialist or communist. Even when the two movements
appeared to merge, as in France in May I 968 and in Italy in
the 'hot autumn' of 1 969, it was the students who had written off
capitalism, the workers who, however militantly, were still working
within it.
I have suggested that this phase of the late 1 960s may be
temporary, like the years before 1 9 1 4. At the moment it looks as
though the western world has not only entered a new phase of
techno-scientific capitalism (sometimes misleadingly called 'post­
industrial society') , with a new version of the basic contradictions of
capitalism, but more specifically another lengthy period of economic
crisis. The revolutionary movements are likely to take place not
against a background of 'economic miracles' but against one of
economic difficulties. It is too early to assess the amount and kind
of political radicalization this may produce, though worth recalling
that during the last analogous phase the radical right benefited
more than the radical left. 7 So far the most dramatic symptoms of
revolutionary agitation in the industrial countries are still those
which took place at the height of the boom, i.e. in 1 967-9. If one
were to venture a prediction, it would merely be that the combination
of social disintegration and economic breakdown is likely to be more
explosive than anything that occurred between the wars in indus­
trial countries, with the possible exception of Germany. But also,
that social revolution of the traditional sort is by no means its only,
or perhaps even its most likely, outcome.
There is, however, one major difference between the new revolu­
tionism and that of my own generation between the wars. We had,
perhaps mistakenly, hope and a concrete model of the alternative
society : socialism. Today this faith in the great October revolution
and the Soviet Union has largely disappeared - I make this as an
observation of fact, not as a judgment - and nothing has replaced it.
For though the new revolutionaries are looking for possible models
and possible centres of loyalty, neither the small and localized
revolutionary regimes - Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea or
7 A friend, asked by his students, what the political consequences of the great

slump of 1 929 had been, answered : 'First Hitler came to power. Then we lost the
war in Spain. Finally we got the second world war and Hitler ruled most of
Europe.'
 I N T E L L E C T UA L S A N D T H E C LA S S S T R U G G L E

whatever - nor even China, have provided a n equivalent fo r what

the Soviet Union was in my time.8 What has taken the place of our
perspective, is a combination of negative hatred of the existing
society and Utopia. Similarly, that immensely powerful form of
revolutionary movement, the disciplined mass party, has also lost
much of its hold among the new revolutionaries, who appear to
operate either in small sects or in unstructured libertarian groups
closer to the anarchist than the marxist tradition. All this may be
historically inevitable. But it is likely also to produce a much wider
gap than in my youth, between revolutionary ferment and effective
revolutionary action. I make these points without pleasure, and
without the intention of diminishing the new revolutionaries. It is
better to have a revolutionary movement than not to have one.
This is the one we have got for the moment, and we have to do the
best we can with it. The fact remains that it has a great deal to
learn or re-learn.
Let me, finally, turn to the question of the role of intellectuals in
revolutionary movements, in other words to the questions not why
some of them as individuals became revolutionaries, but what their
political orientation is likely to be as a stratum of society and what
part their activity as such is likely to play. I need hardly say that
the two kinds of questions are, or can be, entirely distinct. Marx
and Engels were certainly intellectuals, but the number and
proportion of German intellectuals who were social democrats was
small and probably negligible. My generation of student commun­
ists were a small minority of, I would guess, not more than four to
five hundred at its maximum out of fifty thousand university
students just before the war ; in Oxford and Cambridge even the
broader socialist clubs were a minority, though not a negligible one.
The fact that our tiny minority contained, at times, a remarkably
high proportion of the brightest students is not of course insignifi­
cant, but does not change the fact that the great majority of west
European students before 1 939 were not on the left, let alone
revolµtionary, whereas probably the majority in such countries as
Yugoslavia were.
Moreover, even when we can say that intellectuals as a stratum

8 It may be worth noting that this is the first phase of global revolutionary

socialism since 1 848 which has not so far established an effective international ; for
the internationals of the small left-wing sects are too restricted to fulfil this function.

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are revolutionary (as is often, perhaps generally, the case for young
ones in the Third World) , we cannot automatically assimilate their
attitude or political behaviour to that of other revolutionary forces.
To take an obvious example, students played a leading part in the
1 848 revolutions. What happened to all of these revolutionary
liberals in the Bismarckian era ? Again, students (including second­
ary students) were extremely prominent in the Russian revolution
of 1 905, but, so far as one can tell, not in that of 1 9 1 7 . This is not
inconsistent with the fact that the leadership of the bolsheviks
consisted overwhelmingly of intellectuals, as did that of all other
popular parties of opposition. To give a third, and perhaps quite
local and transitory example. Students as a body in Britain today
probably occupy political positions considerably to the left of
workers as a body. But at this moment, when there is a greater
militancy and readiness for industrial action among the workers
than at any time since the General Strike, student mass political
activity is at a lower ebb than probably at any time in the past
three years. The two groups are evidently not moved in the same
way, in the same direction, by the same forces and motives.
What can we say about intellectuals as a social group in
industrial countries today ? First, that they are today such a social
group, which can no longer be simply subsumed as a special variant
of the middle classes. They are more numerous, since both the
growth of scientific technology and the expansion of the tertiary
sector of the economy (including administration and communi­
cations) require them in much larger numbers than before. They
are technically proletarianized, inasmuch as the bulk of them are
no longer 'free professions' or private entrepreneurs but salaried
employees ; though this is also true of most of the rest of the middle
classes. They are recognizable by specific attitudes, specific con­
sumer demands, specific interests, to which businessmen appeal as
such ; e.g. reading the Guardian rather than the Daily Telegraph, and
being relatively impervious to the sales appeal of status symbols as
against Which-type criteria. Politically, the bulk of this stratum (or
at least certain types of occupations within it) is probably today left
of centre in the western countries, though perhaps no more than
that. In Britain the Guardian-Observer type of professional classes are
on one side of the political divide, the Telegraph-type middle classes
on the other. In France during May 1 968, the front of the class
struggle ran through the centre of the middle classes. In the general
2 58
 I N T E L L E C T UA L S A N D T H E C L A S S S T R U G G L E

strike the research-and-development types, the laboratory and

design departments and the communicators tended to come out
with the workers, often militantly, whereas the administrators,
executives, sales departments, etc. remained on the side of
management.
It has been argued, therefore, that the intellectuals are today part
of a 'new' working class and in a sense the modern equivalent of that
skilled, self-confident, and above all technically indispensable labour
aristocracy of 'intelligent artisans' which was so important in
nineteenth-century Britain. It has been argued further, that being
essentially salaried experts, their economic fortunes as individuals or
as a stratum are not bound up with an economy of private enterprise,
whose defects they are in any case well able to judge. Indeed, it has
been held that since they are at least as intelligent and well educated
as those who take decisions in business, and their work gives them at
least as much of a general perspective on the policies of the enterprise
and the economy, they are less likely to confine th�ir activities to
narrow questions of wages and conditions, more likely to envisage
changes in management and policy.
Such arguments, put forward chiefly by French sociologists like
Alain Touraine and Serge Mallet, have considerable force. How­
ever, they are not arguments for regarding the new 'labour aristo­
cracy' any more than the old as a revolutionary force. They rather
suggest that it is a very effective reformist force, which is revolution­
ary only in so far as we envisage a gradual, peaceful but fundamental
transformation of society. But whether such a transformation is
possible, or if it is, can be regarded as a revolution, is of course a
crucial question. To this question the 'new working class' argument
suggests what is in effect a neo-Fabian answer, dressed up in marxist
terms, which will not be by any means universally acceptable on the
left. In the short run, the best thing is to regard them, like their
ancestors the labour aristocracy, as moderate reformists. Their pro­
fessional interests may perhaps incline them slightly more towards
a democratic socialism than towards capitalism, so long as such
a socialism does not threaten their relatively favourable situation,
and their heart may well often be farther to the left than their
professional interests, for most of them are likely to have passed
through a student phase. But their basic attitude to social change is,
and perhaps must be, that a great deal more can be done within the
existing system than revolutionary persons, including their children,
259
 R E V O L UT I O NA R I E S

imagine. And so far as they themselves are concerned, this is

undoubtedly true.
Apart from marginal groups such as those middle-class equivalents
of the old handloom weavers whose occupations are being made
redundant by technological progress - old-fashioned creative artists,
writers, etc. - the major group among intellectuals which appears to
reject the status quo wholesale is that of the young. These consist
largely of those being educated for intellectual jobs, though it is by
no means clear what the relationship between their rebelliousness
and the educational system is.
Young members of the middle strata have a fairly limited experi­
ence of society, though probably today a rather wider one than
their parents. Most of this experience - and the younger they are the
more of it comes to them in this way - is mediated by the experience
of family, of school or college, and of peer groups of people from
similar backgrounds . (The concept of a general 'youth culture'
uniting an entire age group across social distinctions is either
superficial or commercial or both. Similar costume, hair-styles, forms
of entertainment and social customs do not imply similar political
behaviour, as student militants seeking to mobilize young workers
have often discovered. How far there is in fact a single form of 'youth
culture' rather than a complex of such cultures, still remains an open
question.) It does not follow that the criticisms of the middle-class
young merely reflect a 'generation gap', old or new, a rebellion
against their elders, or discontent, justified or not, with their
educational institutions. It may reflect, as it often has in the past, a
genuine critique of society which is to be taken seriously, however
incoherently it may be formulated.
The most serious organized form of youth revolutionism is that of
the students (which in a number of countries includes secondary
school pupils) . It is therefore important to assess the character and
possibilities of this student revolutionism. Its political functions are,
of course, twofold. It exists both as a movement in its own right, i.e.
as one of a group of people selected on grounds of age and/or
attendance at educational institutions, and as a recruiting ground for
the activists and leaders of the adult political world. The first is at
present the more obvious, but the second has been historically the
more significant. The political significance of the Ecole Normale
Superieure of the Rue d'Ulm at the end of the nineteenth century
lies not in the socialist sympathies and Dreyfusard activities of its
260
 INTE LLE CTUALS AND THE C LASS STRU GGLE

students a t that time, but the subsequent career of some of those

students, e.g. Jaures, Leon Blum and Edouard Herriot. 9
Two general observations can be usefully made about youth/
student movements. The first is the platitudinous but nevertheless
significant one that such movements are by their nature imperman­
ent and discontinuous. Being young or a student is the prelude to
being adult and earning one's living : it is not a career in itself.
Unlike celibacy it is not even a programme which could be carried
out with personal effort. It can be prolonged somewhat, though the
present fashion for regarding anyone past the early twenties as on the
verge of middle age tends to curtail it, but sooner or later it must end.
Hence a political youth or student movement is not comparable to
movements whose members can remain in them all their lives, like
those of workers (most of whom go on being workers until they
retire) , or women and blacks, all of whom belong to their respective
category from birth to death. Since there are always young people
and students, there is always scope for movements based on them.
Since the proportion of both in the population is today high, they are
likely to be at least potentially mass movements. But their turnover
of membership is necessarily r no per cent within a few years, and the
more exclusively such movements define themselves by impermanent
criteria, i.e. by how different they are from adults, the harder it is for
them to maintain continuity of activity, organization, or perhaps
even programme and ideology, as distinct from the continuity of
mood or the fact that each new generation faces similar problems. In
the past this has rarely been significant for the revolutionary youth,
chiefly because their movements have normally regarded themselves
as those of adults, often actually refusing to be classified as youth
movements, and always aiming at adult status.10 The present fashion
for separate 'youth cultures' may have made such movements
potentially larger, but also more fluctuating.
Second, there is the specific historic phenomenon of the past
fifteen years or so, which have seen a probably unpreceden­
ted expansion of higher education in all countries with three

9 This is very much more obvious in many underdeveloped countries, where a

few numerically quite small student bodies, in domestic or even foreign universities,
have provided a ve1y large number of political, including revolutionary, leaders for
the adult political world.
IO The youth sections ofleft-wing parties have, perhaps for this reason, generally

formed relatively small appendages to the much larger adult parties.

 R E V O L U T I O NA R I E S

consequences : an acute strain on the institutions rece1vmg all

these new entrants, unprepared for this influx ; a multiplication of
first-generation students, i.e. of people entering an entirely new way
of life for which no family knowledge or tradition has prepared
them ; and also, speaking economically, a potential overproduction
of intellectuals. For various reasons this virtually uncontrolled
expansion is now being slowed down, and the pattern of higher
education more or less radically restructured, not l�ast as a result of
the explosion of student unrest in the later I 96os. This is also likely
to produce various forms of unrest and tension.
The existence of student unrest under these circumstances is not
surprising, though the significant fact about it, at least in the
industrialized capitalist countries and an important sector of the
underdeveloped world, is that it has taken the form of left-wing
social-revolutionary (typically anarchizing or marxisant) move­
ments rather than of radical right-wing movements, such as were
characteristic of the majority of political students in most of
Europe between the wars.11 It is symptomatic of the crisis of both
bourgeois society and the traditional alternatives to it which used
to appeal to the disoriented lower middle class (from whom so
m,any of the new students come and to whom they belong) that
the characteristic form of student activism should be some kind of
ultra-leftism.
This does not, however, guarantee that such student unrest will
either remain a serious and permanent, still less an effective
revolutionary political force. If the bulk of the new mass of
students were to be absorbed into an expanding economy and a
stable society, it probably would not. To take an extreme
example, the bulk of the sixty thousand or so Peruvian university
students (before 1 945 there were only some four thousand of
them) are the first generation of their families, often provincial
Indian or mestizo lower middle class or rich peasants, whose
typical ultra-leftism is to some extent a way of coming to terms
with a new and disorienting form of life. However, since most of
them are still readily absorbed into middle-class jobs, it rarely
outlasts graduation. As a current joke has it, they 'do their
11 It is true that some slogans once characteristic of right-wing movements -

such as nationalist ones - have been largely annexed by the marxist revolution­
ary left, but the hegemony of left-wing ideas in the 1 960s student movements is
neverthe1ess most striking.
 INTELLE CTUALS AND THE C LASS STRUGGLE

compulsory revolutionary service' analogous to compulsory mili­

tary service. It is too early to judge whether they will produce
as large a body of adult political leaders as the small body of the
students of the 1 92os did for the APRA and communist parties, but
it seems unlikely.12
On the other hand a large body of students either facing unem­
ployment or a much less desirable employment than they have been
led to expect from their degree (or other certificate) are likely to form
a permanent discontented mass, readily supporting revolutionary
movements (or those of the radical right) and providing both with
activists. The declassed intellectual or petty bourgeois has formed the
basis of such movements in several countries and at several periods.
Governments are keenly aware of this prospect, especially in a period
of economic difficulties or crises, but the most obvious solution, to cut
down the number of students, is impracticable, partly because the
political demand for the expansion of higher education is very
powerful, partly because the huge student body could not always
easily be absorbed into a stagnant economy. In the United States, for
instance, cutting it down drastically might mean little more than
transferring some hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, from
colleges to an already overstocked labour market. In a sense the
system which maintains vast numbers of young people for a few more
years outside employment is a modern middle-class equivalent of the
Old Poor Law of the early nineteenth century : a concealed system
of outdoor relief. Two solutions appear to commend themselves to
many governments : to sidetrack the bulk of the 'surplus' students
into various institutions in which they can kill time more or less
profitably, reserving the serious business of training the cadres of the
economy which actually require higher scientific, technical, voca­
tional, etc. qualifications for separate establishments ; and to isolate
students from the rest ofthe possibly dissident population. In this latter
task they are not impeded by the bulk of student political activists.
The future of the student movement as a revolutionary force
therefore depends largely on the prospects of the capitalist economy.
If it were to return to the expansion and prosperity of the 1 950s and
1 960s, it would probably turn out to be a temporary phenomenon, or
perhaps its intermittent manifestations would sooner or later become
12 Ou t of the eight secretaries of the (Maoist) student federation of the main
Peruvian university of San Marcos, since 1 960, whose whereabouts could be
established, not a single one continued to be active on the left in 1 9 7 1 .
 RE VOLUTI O NARIES

an accepted part of the social scene, like the non-political forms of

juvenile high spirits - boat race night, Guy Fawkes' day, rag days,
panty-raids, canulars, etc. - in the era of bourgeois stability. If it were
to enter a period of long-term difficulties, it might continue to be, at
least occasionally, an explosive political force as the past few years
have shown - from time to time intervene decisively, if momentarily,
in national politics, as in May 1 968. In either case, if the proportion
of the age group which undergoes some form of higher education is
likely to remain much greater than before the I g6os, students as a
group will continue to be politically more significant and (especially
where the voting age has been lowered to eighteen) more effective
than in the past.

We cannot therefore take it for granted that intellectuals, young or

old, will be a significant revolutionary force in the developed
countries, though we can predict that they will be a significant
political force, very probably more or less on the left. But even if they
were to be revolutionary en masse, they would clearly not be decisive
by themselves. Hence we may conclude this essay with a brief
discussion of the relations between the movements of intellectuals
and those of workers, peasants or other discontented strata.
In most countries the orthodoxy of the left assumes today that the
two converge or even merge, formally or informally, in some sort of
socialist labour movement. In many cases this is probably so. Both
the ·British Labour Party, the United States Democratic Party
(which is socially rather similar in composition) and many socialist
and communist parties elsewhere are in effect alliances of workers
and intellectuals, plus special discontented groups such as national or
other minorities which do not happen to have developed their own
separatist movements. This was not always so. Moreover, there are
today signs of divergence, which should not be underestimated. On
the one hand the ultra-left, largely composed of intellectuals, is often
tempted to secede from the mass working-class parties of its countries
which it blames for being too moderate or reformist. On the other,
the anti-intellectualism of working-class movements, always latent
and sometimes overt, has tended to become more intense. Recent
studies of Labour Party local organization suggest that as the party
branches have increasingly fallen into the hands of devoted militants
from the professional strata, the rank-and-file working-class suppor­
ters and militants have drifted into political inactivity. Whether the
 INTE L L E C T U A L S AND T H E C LA S S S T RU G G L E

one phenomenon i s the cause or consequence of the other, both

reinforce one another. Similarly, relations between students and
workers are poor in most industrialized countries, and may be
deteriorating.
We cannot therefore take it for granted that a radicalization of
workers and students, supposing it were to occur, would automa­
tically produce a single united left movement. It might produce
parallel movements, poorly coordinated or even at loggerheads. For
the truth is that the analogy between the intellectuals and profes­
sionals of today and the 'labour aristocracy' of the past is valid
only up to a point. The old labour aristocrats were manual workers,
the new ones are not. The gap between blue collar and white
collar is wide, and probably growing wider. The old socialist and
labour movements of the developed countries were built on the
hegemony of the manual workers. Some of their leaders might be
intellectuals, and they might attract large numbers of intellectuals,
but on the whole the terms on which these joined were, that they
subordinated themselves to the workers. These terms were realistic,
because on the whole the intellectual and professional stratum was
not socialist, or too small numerically to form a major part of the
labour movement. Today it is large, economically important, active
and effective. Indeed it forms the most rapidly growing sector of the
trade union movement, at least in Britain. There is both more
tension and, from the side of the workers, more resentment.
Where the two wings of the movement converge or merge, as in
France in 1 968 or perhaps in Italy in I 969, its power is immense. But
it can no longer be taken for granted that their confluence is
automatic, nor that it will occur spontaneously. Under what circum­
stances will it occur, if at all ? Can this be predicted ? Can it be
brought about ? These are crucial questions, which can merely be
raised here. What the role of intellectuals in the class struggle is to be
depends largely on the answers. But if such a junction does not take
place, the movement of the intellectuals may settle down as one or
both of two things : as a powerful and effective reformist pressure
group of the new professional strata, ofwhich consumer agitations and
environmentalist campaigns are good examples, and as a fluctuating
radical youth and student movement, oscillating between brief brush
fires and relapses into passivity by the majority, while a small activist
minority indulges in frenzied ultra-left gestures. This is the pattern of
the student movements since the middle I 96os.
 REV O LU T I O NARIES

On the other hand it is also unlikely that the workers will make a
successful revolution without the intellectuals, still less against them.
They may relapse into a narrow movement of those who work with
their hands, militant arid powerful within the limits of 'economism' ,
but incapable of going much beyond the confines o f rank-and-file
activism. Or they may achieve what seems to be the highest point of
'spontaneous' proletarian movements, a sort of syndicalism which
certainly envisages and seeks to build a new society, but is incapable
of achieving its aims. It does not much matter that the isolated
impotence of workers or other masses of the labouring poor is of a
different kind from that of intellectuals, since the working people by
themselves are capable of overthrowing a social order, whereas the
intellectuals by themselves are not. If a human society worthy of the
name is to be built, both need each other.
 I ND E X

Abyssinian War, 37, 40 and n 1 77-g 1 ; coups d'etat, 1 92-7 ; French,

Agrarian Reform and Peasant 237
Revolution in Spain (Malefakis), Asiatic mode of production, Marx's,
79n I 16-1 7, 1 49
Albania, 1 6 Asturias, miners' strike in, 84
Alexandre, Philippe, 238 Atatiirk, Kemal, 1 89
Algeria, 27, u 8, 230 ; role of military Auschwitz concentration camp, 6
in, 1 86 ; Casbah insurrection, 232 Austria, 1 9, 6 1 , 1 47, 223, 250 ; see also
Algerian War, 30, 1 35, 1 63, 1 70-1 , 1 72 Vienna
Alicata, Mario (Italian communist) , 38 Austrian Communist Party, 22, 53
alienation, 1 3 1-2, 1 4 1 , 144, 1 58, 2 1 9, Automotive-Electronic-Chemical
249, 250 complex, 243
Alier, J. Martinez, 88n Avanguardia group, 63
Althusser, L., 1 1 2n, 1 14-1 5, 1 45-52
American Revolution, 202, 203-4 Bakunin, Mikhail, Bakuninists, 46, 57,
anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, vii, 58, 75, 78, 79, 85, 88, 89, 1 00
1 6, 37, 38, 47, 1 22 ; relations between Balibar, Etienne, 1 45n, 1 49
bolsheviks and, 57-70; in Spain, 59, Barbato, Nicola, 3 7
65, 68-9, 71-8 1 , 1 53, 1 56, 1 59, 233 ; Barcelona, 7 3 , 74, 8 4 ; urban
today's revival of interest in, 82-7 ; insurrection and, 22 l, 223 and n,
contribution to socialist theory, 233
87-91 and to revolutionary strategy Barontini, Ilio, 4on
and tactics, 89-g 1 ; sexual morality Bastille, storming of, 223
and, 2 1 8 Batista, Fulgencio, 1 70, 193
Angola, 1 69 Bauer, Otto, 1 32
Aragon (Spain), 75, 76, 77, 1 66 Belgium, 7 1 , 1 84
Aragon, Louis, 28, 29, 30 Bell, Daniel, 1 32, 1 36
d'Aragona, Ludovico, 66 Belloc, Hilaire, 29
Arendt, Hannah, 201-8 'Belmonte de los Caballeros' (Spain),
Argentina, 65n, 1 82 , 1 85, 1 88 75
'aristocracy of labour', 1 2 1-9, 259, 265 Bernstein, Eduard, Bernsteinian
armed forces, army (the military) , in revisionism, 98, w7, 1 22-3, 1 30-1 ,
Spain, 73, 74-5, 1 78 , 1 8 1 ; guerrilla 1 32, 133
warfare and, 1 63-76 ; relations 'Birmingham Alliances', 1 23, 127
between civilian government and, Bismarck, Count Otto von, 60
 REVO LUTIONARIES

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, Blanquism, The British Labour Movement in 1 9 1 2

1 8, 2 1 , 86 (Lenin), 1 2 2
Bloc National (France), 2 7 British Labour Party, 7 , 8 , 1 2, 1 4, 1 04 ;
Bloch, Ernst, 1 32, 1 36-41 parliamentary left-wing, 1 05 ;
Blum, Leon, 2 1 , 261 non-active role of, 1 96 ; relations
Boehme, Jacob, 1 40 between intellectuals and workers in,
Bogota, 232 264-5
Boldrini, Arrigo, 4 1 n British Social Democrats, 1 05, 1 06
Bolivia, 1 86 British Socialist Labour Party (s L P) ,
bolsheviks, bolshevism, 3, 4, 6, 1 3, 1 7, 1 05, 1 06
2 1 , 47, I I I, 1 43, 1 44, 1 55, 1 56, 1 60, British Socialist Party, 1 3
258 ; relations between anarchists Bruno, Giordano, 1 38
and, 5 7-70 ; see also Russian Bukharin Nikolay, 69, 1 32
Revolution, Soviet Union Bulgaria, 1 6, 1 33
Bolte, Friedrich, I oo Bunday, McGeorge, I 75
Bonapartism, 1 77, 1 78, 1 93 bureaucracy, 60, 6 1 , 1 1 8, I 95-6
Bordiga, Amedeo, Bordighism, 63, 64 Burma, guerrillas in, 1 68, I 7 1 , I 73
Borodin, Mikhail, 9 Burns, John, 1 05
Boulanger crisis, 1 80
Brandler, Heinrich (German 'Cahiers du Bolchevisme\ 64
communist), 50 Cambodia, I 73
Brazil, 65n, 75, I 1 7, 1 88, 1 89, 1 90, 1 93 Campbell, ]. R. (British communist),
Brazilian Communist Party, 64, 65n 49
Brecht, Bertolt, 28, I 5 1 , I 55 Canovas del Castillo, Antonio, 7 I
Brenan, Gerald, 84 Capital (Marx), 95, 98, 1 04, I44, 1 47,
Britain, 1 9, 30, u 7, I63, I 87, 248 ; 1 48, I49, 1 58
students and intellectuals in, I I 3, Capitalism, Socialism and DeTrl()cracy
252, 257, 258 ; and anarchists, 60 ; (Schumpeter), 250-I
Spanish Civil War and, 72 ; Marx's Caracas, 232
attitude to and influence on labour Carlists, 74
movement in, 96-108 ; marxist capitalism, 3, 22, 36, 58, I 3 I ;
dialogue in, 1 1 0, 1 13, I I 6, 1 1 9, I2o; subordinate position of Western
labour aristocracy in, I 2 1-g ; labour movement within, I 6-I 7, 54;
Malayan guerrillas defeated by, I66, in Spain, 7 1 , 72, 73, 74, 76 ; stability
1 67 ; Irish revolutionary agitation of, 86, 95-6; British working class
against, I 68-9, I 7I , I8o; Israel and, 96, 97-9, 1 03-8 passim; marxist
evacuated by, 1 7 I ; role of military .case against, 1 IO-I I ; imperialist
in, I 79, I 8o, 1 84 ; see also London phase of, I I 8 ; transition from
British Communist Party, 22, 33, 48, feudalism to, 1 19 ; 'aristocracy of
1 05 ; loyalty to Soviet Union of, 5-6, labour' under, I 2 I-9 ; 'law of uneven
7, 49 ; problems facing historian, development' within, I 2 3 ; revisionist
7-1 0 ; social composition of, 1 1-1 2 ; view of, r 31-2 ; structure of, I 42-52 ;
and revolutionary element in, I 3-I 5 ; Korsch's concentration on problem
Y C L leaders, 50 ; post-1 956 of, 1 55 ; interwar crisis of, 250-2, 2 53 ;
resignation ofmarxist intellectuals and Western techno-scientific, 253,
from, 1 1 3 254-6
British Independent Labour Party 'Carnet B' (France), 6 1
(I L P) , 63, 1 05 Carr, Raymond, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78
 INDEX

Castro, Fidel, Castroites, I 45, I 70, I 6-24; intellectuals and, 25-30; in

I 9 I , 234 Italy, 3 I -42 ; and Germany, 43-54;
Catalonia, 73, 76, 77, 83 ; see also Spain bolshevist-anarchist relations,
Caute, David, 25-30 passim 57-70 ; post-Stalin crisis of, 84;
central European marxist movement, non-communist marxists, I I 3-I4,
-
143-5, I 54, I 55, I 59 I I 5 ; revitalization of theory,
Ceylon, 4 I I 5-I 6 ; centralized organization,
C G T, see General Confederation of I I 7 ; see also individual communist
Labour parties
Chartism, I 4, 96-7, I O I , I06, I08, 225, Communism and the French Intellectual
227 (Caute), 25-30
Chiang Kai-shek, I 70 Communist World Congresses, Fourth,
China, 59 I O ; Sixth, 6 5n
Chinese Communist Party, 79, I I 7 Communist Internationals, see
Chinese Peoples Republic, I 34, 257; Comintern (Third) ; First
revolution, 1 7n ; marxism in, I I 6, International; Second International
I I 7, I 33, I43 ; manpower of, 163 ; Communist Manifesto, 146
Vietnam war and, I 64, I 74; and Comte, Auguste, 75
guerrilla warfare, I 67, I69, I 70 ; U S Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1 3 1
threat of nuclear war against, I 74-5 ; Congress of Livorno ( I 9 2 I ) , 3 2
subordinate role of army in, I 79 Congress o f Tours, 1 8
Chomsky, Noam, 77 conventional war, I 63, 1 73-4 ; see also
C I A, 4, I 92 guerrilla war; nuclear war
Cite Universitaire (Paris) , 26 Cook, A. J., I 4
cities see urban insurrection Cooper, Thomas, 9 7
civilian government, the military v., Coser, Prof., 1 35
I 77-9I Costa Rica, I84n
C N T (Spanish Confederacion Nacional del councils (soviets) , 205-7
Trabajo), 66, 68, 75, 76, 80 Coup d'Etat (Luttwack), I 92-7
Cobban, A. B., 1 80 coups d'etat, vii, I 87-8, I 92-7
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 235-6, 242 C P su, see Soviet Communist Party

Colombia, 79, I I 7 C P U S A, see us Communist Party

Cominform, 32 Crisis of Britain (Dutt) , 1 1 7n
Comintern (Third Communist Cuba, 3, I 93, 2 I8, 256 ; anarchists in,
International) , vii, 4, 5, 6-7, 9, 14, 65 and n ; independence, 73 ; role of
I 7, 2 I , 44, 5 m, 52, 1 1 5, I 24; Italian Communist Party in, I 1 8 ; missile
Communist Party and, 32, 33, 35-6, crisis, I 74
38, 39; Soviet domination of, 23, 35, cultural revolution, in China, 1 79 ; in
48 ; 'Third Period' of, 33 ; German France and us A, 243-4
Communist Party and, 46, 49-50 ; Curiel, Eugenio, 40
anarchists and, 58, 63-4, 66-7, 68--g; Czechoslovakia, 85, I I 6
Spanish policy, 76-7
The Coming Strugglefor Power (Strachey), Darwin, Charles, Darwinism, I 40, 144
252 Davitt, Michael, 168
communism, communists, vii; foreign D n R, see East Germany
parties subordination to U S S R, 3-5 ; Deborin, A. M., 1 32
nationalism v. internationalism, 5-7; Debray, Regis, 86
in Britain, 7-I 5, I I 3 ; in France, Descartes, Rene, 140
 REVO LUTIONARIES

Detroit, 1 967 riots in, 2 3 1 First International, 58, IOI

Dienbienphu, battle of, 1 65, 1 70 first world war, 1 8-19, I 07, 1 1 1 , 1 24,
Differences in the European Labour 247, 250
Movement (Lenin), 122 Fischer, Ruth, 48, 50
Dimitrov, George, 33 FLN (Algerian National Liberation

Djilas, Milovan, 133 Front), 30, 1 72

Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question Fourier, Charles, 89
(Lenin) , 1 24, 1 28 France, 1 35, 1 45, 1 69, 1 87, 252 ;
Dreyfus, Dreyfusards, 30, 1 80, 260-1 intellectuals and students in, 25-30,
Duclos, Jacques, 62 144, 260-1 ; Algerian war, 30, 1 35,
Dutch Communist Party, 62 1 63, 1 70-1 , 1 72, 1 84; anarchists in,
Durruti, Buenaventura, 76 59, 61-2, 63, 64, 67-8, 78, 82 ; and
Dutt, R. Palme, u6n, 1 1 7n Spanish Civil War, 72 ; marxist
Duvignaud, J., 1 35 dialogue in, 1 10, u 4-15, 1 16 ;
Althusser's new approach to
East Germany (German Democratic marxism, 145-52 ; Indo-Chinese War,
Republic), 43, 5 m, 52n, 53, 85, 1 1 6, 1 63, 1 65, 1 70, 1 7 1 ; military-civilian
137 relations in, 1 77, 1 79, 1 80, 1 8 1 , 1 82,
Easter Rising (Dublin), 233 184; see also French Revolutions ;
Ecole Normale Superieure (France), Paris
26, 1 45, 260-1 Franco, Francisco, 41, 75, 1 94
Edinburgh, 224 Frankfurt group, 1 32
Egypt, I 1 6, 1 72, 1 89, 1 90 Frederick William 1, King of Prussia,
Eichmann, Adolf, 2 1 3 1 68
1844 Manuscripts {Marx) , 149, 1 50 Free University (West Berlin), 230
Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte freedom, Hannah Arendt's concept of,
(Marx), 235 203-4
Einstein, Albert, 1 1 2 French Communist Party (P c F) ,
Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight, 1 79 communists, 9, 1 6-30, 3 1 , 1 i 6, 146,
Eisler, Gerhart, 5 1 n 1 50 ; Comintern supported by, 5-6 ;
End of Ideology (Bell) , 1 36 as mass workers' party, 1 7-18, 54 ;
English Debates on a Liberal Workers' evolution of labour movement,
Policy (Lenin), 122 18-20; bolshevization of, 20-1, 51-2,
Engels, Friedrich, 46, 97' 98, 99, IOO, 6 1 ; and problem of non­
I 02, I08, I I 2, 140, 1 44, 1 56, 2 1 8, revolutionary environment, 2 1-2 ;
226, 257; attitude to anarchism, intellectuals and, 25-30; leadership,
57-8 ; 'aristocracy oflabour' concept, 50 and n; non-revolutionary
1 2 1 , 122 political acts by, 52 ; ideological
Establet, Roger, 145n trends within, 64; failure to act in
Evergreen Review, 2 16 May 1968 uprising, 237-41
Fabians, Fabian socialism, 2 1, g8, French Radical Party, 2 1
I 03-4, I 07, 1 22-3, 1 3 1 , 1 33, 1 54 French Revolution ( I 789), 80, IOO, 1 77,
Farron, Frantz, 2 1 4 1 79, 20 1-2, 203, 206, 223, 225, 249
fascism, 23, 3 1 , 33-4, 36-42, 6 1 , 85, 86, French Revolution ( 1 848), 80, 226, 236,
I I O, 1 56, 1 96 258
Fenians, I OO French Socialist Party, 1 9, 2 1
Ferrer, Francisco, 78 Freud, Sigmund, I04, 1 39, 1 40, 1 48
Finnish Communist Party, 3 1 , 53 Friedman, Prof. Milton, 88
 INDEX

Fruehschriften (Landshut and Mayer) , Giap, vo Nguyen, 1 65

1 44 Giuliano (Sicilian bandit) , 3 7
Giustizia e Liberta, 3 4 and n , 37, 39, 40
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 107, 255 Godelier, Maurice, 149
Gallacher, William, 1 4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 40
Galli, Giorgio, 1 34 Goldmann, Lucien, 1 35
Garaudy, Roger, 29, 1 1 6, 145, 1 46, 1 50 Goldwater, Barry, 88, 168
Garibaldi Brigades, 34-5 Gomulka, Wladislaw, 29, 1 34
Gaulle, Gen. Charles de, Gaullism, 1 79, gradualism, see revisionism
180, 1 8 1 ; May 1 968 uprising and, Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 36, 143, 144, 1 47,
234-41 passim 1 50
Geist der Utopie (Bloch) , 1 37 Great Depression, Slump ( 1 929-33),
General Confederation of Labour 16, 64-5, 70, 130, 25 1 , 252, 256
(French CGT), 1 9, go, 239 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 26
General Soviet of the New Model Greece, 1 6, 1 88
Army, 206 Griffith, W., 1 3 1
General Strike (Britain, 1 926) , 1 4, 106, Groot, Paul D e (Dutch communist) ,
258-9 262
General Theory (Keynes), 1 30 Grundisse (Marx) , 1 5 1
Gerlach, Erich, 1 53, 157 Guatemala, 189
German Communist Party ( K P D ) , 7, 9, guerrillas, guerrilla war, 37, 79, 87,
1 9, 3 1 , 41, 42, 43-54, 252 ; founding 246 ; dynamics of, 163-76 ; see also
and early composition of, 44-5 ; urban insurrection
bolshevization of, 46-9 ; and Guesdism, 1 8
leadership, 49-5 1 ; inability to Guevara, 'Che', 86, 87, 1 65, 1 66, 2 1 6
develop political alternatives, 51-2,
53-4; suppressed by Nazis, 52, 53 ; Harry Quelch (Lenin), 1 24
and post- 1 945 failure to revive, 52-3 ; Hegel, Friedrich, Hegelian marxists,
creation of East Germany and, 53 ; 1 1 2, 1 3 1-2, 1 38, 140, 1 43, 1 44, 1 45,
Korsch expelled from, 1 56 146, 149, 1 50, 1 54, 1 55, 1 56
German Democratic Republic, see East Hell's Angels, 2 1 2-13
Germany Henderson, Arthur, 19
German Federal Republic, see West Herder, Johann, 140
Germany Herriot, Edouard, 261
German Independent Socialists, 44, 45, High Tide of Political Messianism
50 (Talmon) , 1 36
German Social Democratic Party Hill, Christopher, 1 1 3
(s P n ) , 49, 5 1 , 52 and n, 53, 1 30-1 , Himmler, Heinrich, 2 1 3
1 54 historical development, determinism,
Germany, 6, 22, 25, 38, 39, 41, 60, 63, marxist theory of, 149-50, 1 55, 1 59
72, 126, 1 63 ; Weimar Republic, 43, history, of communist movements,
47' 50, 5 m, 52 and n, 53, 54, I 79, 3-1 0, 1 1 5-16; Hannah Arendt's
1 83 ; civilian-military relations in, approach to, 204-7
1 78, 1 79, 1 80, 1 8 1 , 1 82, 1 83 ; inter­ History of Anarchism (Yaroslavsky) , 68--9
war intellectuals in, 250-2, 256, 257 History of the Communist Parry of Great
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein Britain (Klugmann) , 8n
(Lukacs), 1 53 Hitler, Adolf, 33, 52, 54, 84, 1 1 3, 1 53,
Ghana, 1 18 1 78, 180, 252, 2560
 REVO LUTIONARIES

Ho-Chin-Minh, 1 9 1 'promotion' of, 3 1-3 ; Comintern

Hooch, Pieter de, 1 39 policy towards, 33, 35-6, 38 ; anti­
hope, Bloch's principle of, 1 36-41 Fascist activities, 33-4, 36-8 ; and
Hungary, 9, I 1 6, 1 3 1 Spanish Civil War, 34-5, 38-9 ;
Husserl, Edmund, 1 46 support by youth for, 38, 50 ; and
second world war, 40-1 ; marxist
Iberian States, 1 78, 1 84; see also Spain dialogue in, 1 1 5, 1 1 8
I L P,see British Independent Labour Italian Socialist Party, 34, 38, 40
Party Italy, anarchists in, 59, 6 1 , 63, 66, 67,
Imaz, Jose Luis, 1 85n 78, 82 ; and Spanish Civil War, 72 ;
imperialism, 5, 1 1 0 ; labour aristocracy localism in, 75 ; and guerrilla action,
and, 1 24-8; see also neo-colonialism 16 5, 169; role of military, 1 82 ; I 969
Imperialism (Lenin), 1 2 1 , 1 24, 125 'hot autumn' in, 256, 265 ; see also
Imperialism and the Split (Lenin), 1 24-5, fascism
1 26, 127, 1 28
In England, the Pitiful Results of Jacobins, 1 8, 73
Opportunism (Lenin), 122 Japan, 59, 1 16, 1 34, 1 63, 1 77, 1 82, 184,
India, 1 1 0, 1 34, 1 7 1 ; Bengal, 252, 253 214
Inda-China, 2 7, 1 63, 1 65, 1 70, 1 7 1 ; see Jaures, Jean, jauresism, 64, 261
also Vietnam Jews, 250-2
Industrial Democracy (Webb), 122-3 Jogiches, Leo, 44
Ingrao, Pietro (Italian communist), 38 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1 7 1-2
Inprecorr, 9 Joyce, James, 1 16
insurrection, vii, 80 ; cities and, I 69, Jung, Carl Gustav, 1 39
220-33 ; intellectuals' commitment
to, 245-6 ; see also May 1 968 uprising Kafka, Franz, 1 1 6
intellectuals and artists, 26, 39, 78, 1 1 3 ; Kanapa, Jean (French communist), 28
French, 25-30, 144, 234-6 ; Kant, Immanuel, 1 32
anarchist, 59, 82-3, 84, 87 ; Karl Marx (Korsch), 1 53, 1 58
commitment to revolution of, Kautsky, Karl, Kautskyism, 86, 1 1 3,
245-50 ; inter-war, 250-2, 256, 257; 1 43, 144, 1 54, 1 55, 1 56
Third World, 253-4; new Western Kendall, Walter, 1 2, 1 3- 1 5
revolutionism, 254-7 ; group role in Kenya, defeat o f guerrillas in , 1 66, 1 7 1
revolutionary movements, 257-60; Kepler, Johannes, 140
and students, 260-4; relations with Kerensky, A. F ., 66
workers and peasants, 264-6 Keynes, J. M., 104, 1 30, 252
International Brigades (Spanish Civil Khrushchev, Nikita, 3, 29, 1 74
War) , 34, 35 Kiernan, V. G., 74
internationalism, see Comintern Kinsey, 141
Introduction to the Critique of Political Klugmann, James, 8-10
Economy (Marx) , I 49 Kolakovski, L., 1 32
Ireland, Marx's view of, 1 0 1 ; Korean War, 1 75
revolutionary agitation in, 1 68-g, Korsch, Karl, 1 53-60
180; and Dublin Easter Rising, 232-3 K P n, see German Communist Party

Islamic States, 1 84 Krause, Karl, 75

Israel, 1 63, 1 7 1 ; see also Jews Kriegel, Annie, 1 7-24 passim, 6 1
Italian Communist Party (P ei), 4, 9, Kronstadt rising, 67
1 7, 26, 28, 30, 3 1 -42, 48, 54, 66, 1 96 ; Kropotkin, P. A., 83, 88
 INDEX

Kurdish guerrillas, 1 6g Lozovsky, A., 68

Kuusinen, Otto, Fundamentals of Lukacs, George, 1 32, 1 34, 143, 153, 154
Marxism-Leninism by, 1 1 7n Lumumba, Patrice, 1g1
Ky, President (of S. Vietnam) , 1g1 Lussu, E., 34n
Luttwack, Edward, 192-7
Labedz, Leopold, 1 3 1 n, 1 34 Luxemburg, Rosa, Luxemburgism, 44,
Labriola, Antoine, 147 45, 50, 5 1 , 63, 64, 67, 1 32, 1 34, 143,
Landshut, R. and Mayer, ]. P., 144 144, 1 55
Lange, Oscar, 1 1 6 Lysenko, T. D., 1 1 2
Langkau, Goetz, 1 53
Latin America, 1 33, 248n, 254; MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 1 80
anarchists in, 5g, 64-5 and n, 82 ; Macherey, Pierre, 145n
and guerrilla movements, 87, 1 6g ; MacMahon, Marshall, 1 7g
military politics in, 1 78, 184-g I Madrid, 77, 78
passim, urban insurrection in, 2 2 1 Makhnovshchina (Ukrainian), 83
Lawrence, D. H . , 1 3g Malatesta, Errico, 66
Lefebvre, Henri, 1 32, 143, 145 Malaya, defeat of guerrillas in, 1 66,
'legal Marxists', 1 3 1 , 1 32 1 67, 1 68
Lenin, V. I., vii, 4, 5, 7, 2 1 , 22, 25, 44, Malefakis, E., 79, 80
46, 48, 5 1 , 66, 67, 86, r n6, 1 1 2, 1 1 3, Mallet, Serge, 1 35, 25g
1 1 5, 1 1 8, 1 43, 147; attitude to Malvy, L. J. (French Minister of
anarchism, 5 7-8 ; aristocracy of Interior), 6 1
labour concept, 1 2 1-g ; Korsch's Mann, Tom, r n5, 106
criticism of, 1 55-6 ; his formula for Mao Tse-tung, 1 65, 1 67, 1 g3, 234
Russian development, 205 ; and Manuilsky, D., 2, 68n
attitude to violence, 2 1 4n Maoism, Maoists, 37, 87, go, 145, 2 1 g,
leninism, 1 8, 57, 58, 64, 1 3 1 , 1 33, 1 34, 263n
1 43, 1 55-6 March on Rome (Mussolini's), 33
Levi, Paul (German communist) , 50 Marx, Karl, vii, 25, 46, 75, mg, 1 1 2,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 14g I 1 4, I 1 5, I 1 6, I 1 8, I 1 g, 1 28, 1 32,
Lewin, Kurt, 1 58 1 38, 141, 1 43, 144, 154, 1 55, 1 56,
litertarian communism, see anarchism 1 g6, 205, 235, 257 ; attitude to
Lichtheim, George, 1 43 anarchism, 5 7-8 ; anniversary of
Lidice, Nazi razing of, 1 72 death of, g5-6 ; British Labour
Liebknecht, Karl, 44, 50 movement and, g6-rn8; 'aristocracy
Lima, Turcios, 1 8gn of labour' and, 1 2 1 , 1 22 ; stalinist
Lire le Capital (Althusser et al.), 145, 1 47, view of, 1 45, 146 ; and Althusser
14g, 1 5 1 analysis, 146-52 ; poljtical economy
Lloyd George, David, 'Lloyd as backbone of his theory, 158 ; his
Georgism', 1 27, 202 definition of revolutionary
Locke, John, 140 proletariat, 246-7
London, urban insurrection and, 222, Marx et Engels contre l'anarchisme, 68
224, 225, 227-g Marxism and Revisionism (Lenin) , 122
London Congress (of Second Marxismus und Philosophie (Korsch) , 1 53,
International, 1 8g6), 58 158
Long March (Mao's), 1 67, 169 marxists, marxism, vii, 4, 1 6, 1 8, 2 1 , 8g;
Longo, Luigi, 34, 35, 36, 50 intellectuals, 25, 10g, 1 1 3 ; anarchists
Louis-Philippe, King, 236 v., 57-70, 83 ; British labour
 REV O L UT I O NA R I E S

marxists-continued Nanterre university (Paris), 22 1 , 242

movement and, 96-108 ; dialogue on, Naples, insurrection in, 225, 232
r n9-20 ; Lenin and the 'aristocracy Napoleon Bonaparte, 1 77, 1 78, 180, 1 93
of labour', 12 1 -g ; revisionism, Napoleon m, 1 80
1 30-5 ; the principle of hope, 1 36-41 ; Napoleonic wars, 165
post-Stalin rethinking, 142-3 ; Nasser, Gen. Gamal Abdel, Nasserism,
central European left, 143-5, 1 54, 1 85, 1 88, 1 89
1 55, 1 59 ; Althusser's approach, national accounting, marxist technique
145-52 ; and Karl Korsch, 1 53-60; of, I 1 3
sexual morality and, 2 1 8 Nationalism Socialism, see Nazis
Marxist-Syndicalists, see Avanguardia National Union of Students (Britain),
group 1 96
Masaryk, T. G., 1 33 nationalism, 5-6, 1 8, 1 9, 22, 39-40, 1 18,
Maslow, A. (German communist) , 48, 1 65-6
50 N A T O, 1 63

Maspero, Fran�ois, 1 45 Naxalites (India), 246

Mass Psychology ofFascism (Reich), 2 1 8 Nazism, Nazis, 6, 1 6, 36, 38, 41, 52,
Materialism and Empiriocriticism (Lenin), 53 and n, 1 72, 1 79, 1 80, 2 1 2, 2 1 3,
1 55 251
Mau Mau (Kenya), 1 7 1 Netherlands, 59
Maximalists (Italy) , 38, 76 neo-colonialism ( neo-imperialism),
May 1 968 uprising (Paris), 87, go, 91, 1 10, 1 1 1 , 253 ; see also imperialism
2 1 9, 232, 233, 234-44, 258, 264, 265 neo-capitalism, 253, 254; see also
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 37 capitalism
Mehring, Franz (German communist), Netti, J. P., 144
143 New Left, go, 1 36, 2 18, 2 1 9, 254
mensheviks, 59, 66, 1 1 1 New Delhi, 224
Metropolitan Radical Federation, New York City, urban insurrection
227-8 and, 223
Mexico, 65n, 75, 80, 184n, 1 86 and n Newton, Isaac, 140
Meyer, Ernst (German communist), Newton, Kenneth, 1 1-12
50 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 86, 148
Mikoyan, Anastas, 29 nonconformist protestantism, 1 03
the military, see armed forces North Korea, 256
Mobutu, Joseph, 191 North Vietnam, 3, 73, 1 64, 1 73, 1 74-5
Mommsen, Theodor, 201 nuclear weapons, war, 1 68, 1 72, 1 73,
Monatte, Pierre, 64, 68n 1 74-6, 253
Le Monde, 150, 235
Monmousseau, Gaston (French O'Brien, Bronterre, O'Brienism, 100-1,
communist), 62 103
monopolies, monopoly capitalism, October Revolution, see Russian
Lenin's theory of, 1 22, 1 25, 127 Revolution
Moors murder case, 2 1 3 On Revolution (Arendt), 201-8
Morocco, 27 opportunism, 59, 1 22, 1 25, 1 26, 127,
Le mouvement de mai ou le communisme 145
utopique (Touraine), 242n Oradour, Nazi razing of, 1 72
Musolino (Calabrian brigand), 2 I O Origins ofFrench Communism (Kriegel),
Mussolini, Benito, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42 17

2 74
 INDEX

Ottoman Empire, 1 77 psychoanalysis, psychology, 1 39, 1 44,

Owenism, 1 03 148, 1 58
public order, urban insurrection and,
pacifism, 1 9, 60 225-6
Palermo, 221 public transport, urban insurrection
Paracelsus, 140 and, 2 2 1 , 230
Paraguay, 65n
Paris, Commune, 78, 80, 205, 226, 242 ; Radek, Karl, 46
May 1968 uprising, 87, 90, 9 1 , 2 19, Radicals (in Britain), 1 1-15, 225, 227-8
232, 233, 234-44, 258, 265 ; urban Ranciere, Jacques, 145n
insurrection and, 1 69, 2 2 1 , 222-3, Red Army, 53
224, 226, 230, 232, 233 ; see also Red International of Labour Unions, 64
France, French Communist Party, reformism, 4, 2 1 , 58-g, 60, 80, 96, 107,
French Revolutions 1 28, 259-60 ; see also revisionism;
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 1 68 social-democrats
Pavlov, Ivan, 1 1 2 Reich, Wilhelm, 2 18
P C F, see French Communist Party Remmele, Hermann (German
P CI, see Italian Communist Party communist), 5on
Pentagon, 1 65 revisionism, 98, 1 07, 122-3, 1 30-5, 143,
Peru, 79, 1 10, 1 64, 189, 190, 246, 262-3 144, 1 58-g, 160
and n Revisionism (Congress of Cultural
Pestana, Angel, 67 Freedom symposium) , 1 3 1 , 1 34-5
Petain, Marshall, 180 The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History
Petrovsky-Bennet, D., 9 (Kiernan), 74n
phenomenologists, 1 44 The Revolutionary Movement in Britain
Philippines, 1 72, 2 1 1 (Kendall), 13n
Piana degli Albanesi, 37 Rigault, Raoul, 233
Pigliaru, A., 21 m Robespierre, Maximilien de, 2 1
Plekhanov, G. V., 1 1 3, 1 32, 1 47 Rochet, Waldeck, 1 45
, Po Prostu circle (Poland), 1 34 Roman Catholic Church, 26, 2 7, 29,
Poland, 1 33, 1 34, 1 69, 188, 252 254n
political economy, 147, 1 58 Rosicrucianism, 141
Pollitt, Harry, 49 Rosmer, A., 64, 68n
popular fronts, 23, 28, 65 ; failure in Rostow, W. W., 107
May 1 968 uprising of, 237-41 Rostovzeff, M., 201
Pour Marx (Althusser), 1 1 2n, 1 45, 146, Royal Air Force, 2 1 2n
1 50, 1 5 1 Russia, 1 77, 246n, 249
Poverty of Philosophy (Marx), 146 Russian Revolution ( 1 905) , 258
Prague, 224 Russian Revolution (October 1 9 1 7),
Primo de Rivera, Gen., 75 3-4, 1 7, 1 8, 19, 22, 45, 57, 64, 66- 7,
Das Prinzip Ho.ffnung (Bloch), 1 36-41 69, 79, 84, 95, 1 0 1 , 1 07, 1 1 7, 1 1 8,
professionals, role in revolutionary and 1 43, 154, 20 1 , 203, 2 1 9, 233, 250,
labour movements, 242-3, 258-9, 251-2, 256, 258
264-5 Russian Social Democratic Labour
pronunciamentos' 7 4; see also coups d'etat Party, 1 1 1
Proudhon, P-J., Proudhonism, 1 8, 2 1 , Rust, William (British communist), 50
57, 58, 68n
Prussia, 1 78, 185 St Petersburg (Petrograd), 224, 233

2 75
 R E V O L U T I O NARIES

San Domingo, 232 South Vietnam, 1 63, 167, 1 70, 1 7 1 , 1 73,

Sardinia, 2 1 1 1 74
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 27, 1 44, 1 45, 1 50, South Wales Miners' Federation, 14
235-6 Soviet Communist Party (cPsu) , 3, 4,
Schelling, Friedrich, 1 37, 140 22n, 23, 48, I I 1 , I 15, I 17; Twentieth
Schonberg, Arnold, 139 Congress, 1 1 0
Schulze-Gaevernitz, G. v., 1 2 1 Soviet Union, 1 3, 1 6, 22, 35, 53, 1 1 5,
Schumpeter, Josef, 250-1 142, 144, 163, 1 64, 25 1 ; relations
S D F, see British Social Democrats with China, 3, 1 1 7 ; foreign
Seale and McConville, 235 communists' loyalty to, 3-7 ; purges,
Secchia, P. (Italian communist), 50 27, 35, 53n; German K P D and, 46-50 ;
Second International ( 1 889-19 14) , 3, anarchists in, 59, 66-7; Spanish
I 7, 58, 63, I 24-5, 143, I 54 ; Civil War, 72 ; post-Stalin crisis of
Stuttgart Conference of, 1 2 7--8 communism, 84-5 ; marxist dialogue
second world war, 5-6, 9� 40, 256n in, 1 1 1 , 1 1 2, u 3, u 6, u 8- 1 9 ;
S E D (German Sozialistische Einheibpartei economic theory of, 1 1 6 ; Korsch's
Deutschlands) , 43 non-commitment to, 1 55, 1 56 ;
La Semaine Sainte (Aragon) , 30 Vietnam War and, 1 64 ; and Cuban
Semard, Pierre (French communist), missile crisis, 1 74 ; role of army in,
5on 1 78-9 ; workers' councils, 205-7 ;
The Session of the International Socialist inter-war revolutionaries' faith in,
Bureau (Lenin) , 1 24 256-7; see also Russian Revolution
Seville, 222 soviets, see councils
sex, revolution and, 2 1 6-19 Spain, 2 7, 41 ; anarchism in, 59, 65,
Shaw, George Bernard, 'Impossibilities 68-9, 71-8 1 , 82, 83-4, 88n, 1 53, 1 56,
of Anarchism' by, 88 1 59 ; guerrilla activity in, 1 65, 1 66,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 82 1 73 ; and role of army, 1 78, 1 8 1
Short History of the CPS U (Stalin), 68, Spain r808-r939 (Carr), 72
1 1 2, 1 32, 142 Spanish Civil War, 3 1 , 34-5, 38--g, 65,
Sismondi, Jean Charles Simonde de, 68, 70, 72-3, 76, 77--8 , 8 1 , 82, 83-4,
1 28 1 00, 1 8 1 , 1 94, 233, 241, 256n
S L P, see British Socialist Labour Party Spanish Communist Party, 3 1
Smith, Adam, 1 47 Spartacus League, 45, 49, 50, 5 1
Snowden, Philip, 1 04 s P n , see German Social Democratic
social-chauvinism, 125 Party
social democracy, social democrats, 4, Spinoza, Baruch, 1 40
5, 1 7, 1 8, 22-3, 25, 33, 44, 45, 58, spontaneity, spontaneous
60-1, 64, 66, 67, 68, 86, 1 06, 1 07, revolutionism, 58, 60, 64, 78-9, 87,
I I I, 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 23, 1 33, 144 89-90, 1 23, 1 29, 236
social organization, sexual Spriano, Paolo, 9, 32-3, 35, 4on, 5on
permissiveness and, 2 1 6-19 Stalin, Josef, 3, 4, 5, 33n, 48, 68, 69,
socialist realism, 1 1 2, 1 1 6 78n, 84, I 1 2, I 14, I 1 5, I 1 9, 1 49
The Sociology ofBritish Communism stalinism, stalinization, 22n, 23, 27, 29,
(Newton), 1 1 -1 2 48, 53n, 85, I I I, I 15, 1 32, 1 34, 1 42,
Sorel, Georges, 86 144-5, 146, 1 53, 2 18
Sourcesfran_faises du socialisme (Garaudy) , Steffens, Lincoln, 252
146 Stil, Andre, 28
South Africa, 2 I 7 Stimer, Max, 86
 INDEX

Storia del Partito Communista Italiano Trotskyism, 4, 63, 64, 67,

(Spriano), gn, 32-3, 35, 5on 68n, 87, go, 1 30, 1 34, 144, 2 1 8, 2 1 9
Strachey, John, 1 1 7n, 252 Truman, Harry S., 180
strikes, 1 4, 1 8, 20, 40, 84, 87, 106, T U C (Britain), 7, 1 g6

258-g; see also May 1g68 uprising Tunisia, 1 72

structuralism, 1 48, 1 4g Turkey, 1 89, 1 go ; see also Ottoman
students, communist membership, 26; Empire
appeal of anarchism to, 84, 87, go;
May 1 g68 uprising, 87, go, g 1 , 2 1 g,
UGT (Spanish Union General del
232, 233, 234-44, 256 ; urban
Trabajadores), 75, 76
insurrection and, 221, 230-1 ;
Unitarians (Italy) , 38
revolutionism of, 260-4; see also
United States, 10g, 186, 248, 255 ;
intellectuals
anarchiSts in, 63 ; and student
Switzerland, 1 1 7
revolutionaries, go, 263 ; superiority
syndicalism, 4, 1 7, 1 g, 20, 2 1, 50, 58-i),
of industrial power, 1 63 ; Vietnam
60, 6 1 , 107, 1 43, 154, 1 5g ; see also
War, 1 63-4, 167-8, 1 70, 1 71-2, 1 73 ;
anarchism ; trade unionism
and threat of nuclear war by, 1 73-6 ;
Syria, 27
Cuban missile crisis, 1 74 ; civilian­
military relations in, 1 79, 1 80 ; Third
Talmon, Prof. Jacob, 1 36
World policy of, 188-g, 1 go-1 ;
Thaelmann, Ernst (German
Revolution in, 202, 203-4; violence
communist), 50 and n, 5 1 n, 52
in, 2og, 2 1 3 ; and negro question, 22 I,
Thalheimer, August (German
231-2, 248, 24g ; urban insurrections
communist), 50
and, 223, 224, 231 ; and cultural
TMorie (ed. Althusser), 145
revolt, 243-4
Thieu, Pres. (of South Vietnam), 1 g 1
us Communist Party, 63, 1 35
Third World, 222 ; military politics in,
us Democratic Party, 264
1 84-9 1 ; intellectual revolutionaries
us National Commission of the Causes
in, 253-4, 258
and Prevention of Violence, 2og
Thomas Munzer als Theologe der
universities, see students
Revolution (Bloch), 137
urban insurrection, 80, 1 6g-70, 220-3 3 ;
Thorez, Maurice, 52
see also May 1g68 uprising
Three Internationals (Dutt), 1 16n
Uruguay, 187n
Tito, Josip Broz, 5, 2g, 1 32, 167
U S P D (Germany), 49
Togliatti, Palmiro, 4, 2g, 33, 34, 35, 48,
utopianism, utopian communism, 8g,
50, 1 1 8
1 37-41, 1 44, 1 46, 207, 243, 247, 25 7
Touraine, Alain, 236, 240, 241, 242-4,
25g
town planning, urban insurrection and, Value, Price and Profit (Marx), 1 04
223, 226, 227-9 Varga, Eugen, 252n
trade unionism, unions, 207; in Britain, Venezuela, 18g
1 4, g6, 102, 106, 1 08, 1 2 1-i); Vidali, Vittorio, 34
German, 4g ; anarchists in, 62-3, 65 ; Vienna, 2 2 1 , 223 and n, 224, 226, 250,
in Spain, 74, 76 ; see also syndicalism 251 ; see also Austria
Treint, Albert (French communist), Vietcong, 1 74, 1 75
63 Vietnam, guerrilla war in, 1 63-75
Trilisser-Moskvin, M. A., 35 passim
Trotsky, Leon, 36, 46, 48, 1 1 2, 1 32, 251 Vietnamese Communist Party, 7g

2 77
 REVO LUTIONARIES

Vilar, Pierre, 73 West Germany (German Federal

violence, rules of, 209-15 Republic), 43, 54, 63, 109, 1 37, 1 53 ,
Vogue, 2 1 6 230
Volpe, Galvano della, 1 47 What Is To Be Done? (Lenin) , 1 23, 1 28
voluntarism, 86, 87, 144, 1 54 Why you should he a socialist (Strachey) ,
1 1 7n
Wurmser, Andre, 28
Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus
(Weber) , 43-4, 46 Yaroslavsky, E., 68--g
Warsaw Pact countries, 1 63 Yezhov, N., 35
Washington, 224 'youth culture', concept of, 260
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 1 22-3, 1 2 7, Yugoslav Communist Party, 30, 79
1 50 Yugoslavia, 16 and n, 7 1 , 75, 1 33, 1 63,
Weber, Hermann, 43-4, 46-7, 48, 1 67, 257
49-50, 54
Webster, Sir C. and Frankland, N., 9 Zhukov, Marshal, 179
Wellington, Duke of, 1 79 'Zimmerwald' current ( 1 9 1 5-1 7), 1 9
Wesley, John, 1 03 Zinoviev, G . Y., 9, 1 0, 46, 48, 66, 67
West Berlin, 230 Zionists, 251
 REVOLUTIONARI E S

'This is a highly readable, lucid and well -written book

from w hi ch a n y student o f contem porary revolutions

can derive a great deal of profit' New Sta tes m a n

' T h i s i s a n u n u s ua l l y rewa r d i n g boo k; a l m os t every

i te m b e a rs w i t ne s s to P r o fe s s o r H ob sb a w m ' s s ha r p

intel ligence and fel icitous style'

Times Litera ry S upplemen t

A d e d i c ated Marxist and d i stinguished h i s torian,

Professor Hobsba wm h a s devoted a l i fetime' s research

to the concept and practice o f revol u ti o n a s a means

f o r s o c i a l c h a n g e . P r e s e n t i n g a c l e a r e x p o s i t i o n of

revolutionary ideals, his important collection of essays

cover a l l a s pects o f revolution, such as the na ture of

a narchism, the h istory of communism, the i nfluence of

Marx a nd Lenin, gueri l l a war and class struggle. Written

with m a sterful assura nce, his essays are crucia l for a

true understanding of twentieth-century h istory.

' Revo l 1 1 t io11 a r ies i s t h a t r a r e k i n d o f b o o k wh ic h wi l l ,

and h o u l d b e read r . t h e g e n e r a l i n te l l e c t u a l i n

a ny . ea ' New Society

PHOE � IX
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