A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (63 page)

The hopes of the Jazz Age came crashing down on ‘Black Thursday’, 24 October 1929. On that day the US stock exchange fell by almost a third. Rich speculators who had bet their entire fortunes lost everything, and newspapers reported 11 Wall Street suicides. Large numbers of people lost their life savings. It was the end of an era for all those who had come to believe in ‘money for nothing’.

The crash was an expression of more deep-seated flaws in the system. The German, US and British economies were already beginning to turn down when it occurred.
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Now their output began to plunge, with the US leading the way down. By the end of 1930 their output was lower than it had been in the previous post-war recessions. The new US president, Herbert Hoover, claimed prosperity was ‘just round the corner’, but the slump grew deeper. If 1930 was bad, 1931 and 1932 were worse, with 5,000 local banks in the US and two major banks in Germany and Austria going bust. By the end of 1932 world industrial output had fallen by a third, and that of the US by 46 percent.

There had never been a slump that went so deep or lasted so long. Three years after it started there was still no sign of recovery. In the US and Germany fully one third of the workforce were jobless, and in Britain one fifth. It was not only industrial workers who were hit in Germany and the US. White collar workers, who still regarded themselves as middle class, were thrown on the scrapheap, and farmers were hard-pressed by the banks as prices for their crops slumped.

Just as a war in Europe automatically became a world war, so a slump in the US and Western Europe became a world slump. It devastated Third World countries whose economies had been tailored to produce food and raw materials. Suddenly there was no market for their output. People only recently pulled into the world of money were deprived of access to it, yet they no longer had any other means of obtaining a livelihood.

The crisis did not just hit the exploited classes. It wreaked havoc within the ruling class, as long-established firms went bust. Financiers were terrified of joining the ranks of the bankrupt, and industrialists saw their profits disappear along with their markets. They turned to the state to help see off foreign competition, and there were successive devaluations of national currencies as the capitalists of each country tried to undercut the prices of rivals. Country after country imposed tariffs and quotas, taxing and restricting imports. Even Britain, the bastion of free trade since 1846, opted for such methods. World trade fell to a third of the 1928 figure. But despite the myths spread by some politicians and economists since, it was not the controls on trade which created the slump—which was well underway before they were introduced—but the slump which led to the controls.

The slump tore apart the lives of those who had been impoverished observers of the ‘Golden Twenties’. They were to be found trudging the streets of all the West’s great cities, with gaunt, tired faces and in threadbare coats, on their way to or from soup kitchens. They were also to be found on the peasant holdings of the rest of the world, dreading the loss of their land, worried that the price of their crops would never rise sufficiently to pay rents and taxes, and trying to keep alive on what they could grow themselves. Those who were least ‘advanced’ in capitalist terms—subsistence farmers still barely integrated into the cash economy—survived best. Those who relied on selling their labour power had nothing to fall back on. Even the old escape route of emigration to the Americas was blocked by mass unemployment.

In London, Chicago, Berlin and Paris; in Glasgow, Marseilles and Barcelona; in Calcutta, Shanghai, Rio, Dublin, Cairo and Havana—everywhere there was the same desolation, everywhere a bitterness that could ignite into new hope or turn into crazed despair.

The 1930s was a decade in which the forces of hope and despair fought on the streets of every city. It was a decade when revolution and counter-revolution were at each other’s throats. It ended in a victory for counter-revolution which plunged the world into another war, accompanied by barbarities which put even the slaughter of 1914-18 in the shade.

Russia: the revolution turned upside down

Communism was one beneficiary of the slump in the West and the Third World. The breakdown of capitalism confirmed what revolutionary socialists had been arguing for a decade and half, and those who fought most energetically against the effects of the slump were the Communists. They led the unemployed demonstrations which police baton-charged in New York, Chicago, London, Birkenhead, Berlin and Paris. They fought desperate defensive struggles against wage-cutting in the mines of Fife and South Wales, the fruit fields of California and the car plants of Paris. They faced trial in British-controlled India for organising unions, tried to build peasant guerrilla armies in China, organised in the shanty towns of white-ruled South Africa and risked their lives confronting racism in the American South.

The 1930s is sometimes called the ‘red decade’, because of the appeal Communism had for many intellectuals. Already by 1933 it was drawing people towards it like US novelists John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, James T Farrell, Richard Wright and Dashiell Hammett, Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon, English writers W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, French novelist André Gide and German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Alongside them were a host of lesser known figures, trying to write ‘proletarian’ novels, taking ‘agitprop’ theatre to the masses and expressing themselves in small literary magazines. The swing left among intellectuals was an expression of a much wider mood among people who wanted some alternative to the horrors of the slump, a mood to be found among a minority of workers in factories and dole queues everywhere. Most never joined the Communist parties, but they saw Communism as the alternative even if they could not quite bring themselves to embrace it.

For most people Communism in the 1930s was indistinguishable from the Soviet Union, and meant emulating its revolution elsewhere. Yet by the time of the Wall Street Crash there was virtually nothing of the revolution of 1917 left in Russia.

As we have seen, Lenin had already commented before his death in 1924 about the ‘deformations’ and bureaucratisation afflicting the workers’ state. These had grown to a monstrous degree in the mid-1920s. The revolutionary regime had only been able to recover from the physical devastation and extreme hardship of the civil war by making the concessions to internal capitalism which were known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP. There followed a slow rise in the living standards of the mass of the population. But there was also a growing influence of layers of the population hostile to the revolutionary spirit of 1917—petty capitalists, small ‘NEP-men’ traders and well-to-do
kulak
peasants employing others as wage labourers. Industry remained in state hands but was subject to market pressures, and the recovery of industrial production was accompanied by a relatively high level of unemployment. Whereas in 1922 some 65 percent of managing personnel in industry were officially classified as workers, by 1923 only 36 percent were.
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If the regime was still in some way socialist at the time of Lenin’s death this was not because of its social base, but because those who made decisions at the top still had socialist aspirations. As Lenin wrote, ‘The party’s proletarian policy is determined at present not by its rank and file, but by the immense and undivided authority of the tiny sections of what might be called the party’s “old guard”.’
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But as Lenin lay dying the ‘old guard’ was being corroded by the influences eating away at the rest of the party. Lenin’s last political act was to write a testament which argued for Stalin’s removal as party secretary because of his crudely bureaucratic treatment of other party members. The dominant group in the party leadership of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin chose to ignore this testament and keep it secret.
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The circumstances in which they found themselves were increasingly dragging them away from the principles of 1917. They relied on a bureaucratic apparatus to run the country, and the personnel of this apparatus relied, in turn, on making concessions to the better-off peasants, the mass of NEP-men and the new layer of ‘Red’ industrialists. They were more concerned with placating these groups than with the interests of the workers who had made the revolution.

This provoked dissent within the party, and even within the party leadership. Already in 1920-21 a group calling itself the ‘workers’ opposition’ had argued at conferences, in party publications (which were still open to it) and in 250,000 copies of a pamphlet (printed on party presses) that workers were losing out. But it was unable to put forward any practical proposals for dealing with the general impoverishment of the country. In 1923-24 wider opposition arose, with an open letter from 46 old Bolsheviks critical of the bureaucratisation of the party. This ‘Left Opposition’ coalesced around Trotsky, president of the St Petersburg soviet of 1905, organiser of the October insurrection and founder of the Red Army. It argued that the only way forward lay in three connected sets of measures—the expansion of industry so as to increase the social weight of the working class, an increase in workers’ democracy, and an end to bureaucratic tendencies within the party and the state. These alone could preserve the health of the workers’ state until the revolution spread internationally.

There was a torrent of abuse against the opposition such as the party had never known before. For every article putting the Left Opposition’s point of view in the party press there were ten by the leadership denouncing them. There was diatribe after diatribe against ‘Trotskyism’, and Trotsky himself was demoted from the key position of head of the Red Army to a secondary role as minister for science and technology, while Stalin accumulated increasing power in his own hands.

How bureaucratised the party had become was shown in 1926, when Stalin and Bukharin fell out with Zinoviev. The Petrograd district organisation which had until then virtually unanimously backed Zinoviev now just as unanimously denounced him. Zinoviev and his supporters were subject to the same sort of attacks that had previously been directed at Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

It was at this point that Stalin and Bukharin gave expression to the bureaucratic conservatism of much of the party by embracing a completely new doctrine known as ‘socialism in one country’. Previously all the leaders of Bolshevism had been agreed that while workers could establish a state of their own in a single country they could not advance to full socialism on that basis. Overcoming the heritage of 5,000 years of class society would only be possible by utilising all the means of production created by modern industrial capitalism—and these existed on a world scale, not in one country, and certainly not in a backward country like Russia. Eventually the revolution had to spread or die.

Not only had Lenin reiterated this on numerous occasions, but Stalin himself had insisted in his book
Lenin and Leninism
, published in 1924:

Such was the importance Stalin attached to Marxist theory and scientific rigour, however, that in the next edition of the book he simply removed the ‘No’ and the ‘insufficient’!

Stalin and Bukharin represented a ruling group which feared and fought anything that might disturb its position of bureaucratic privilege. Its chief characteristic was inertia and complacency. The idea that Russia could simply ignore the outside world, rely on its resources and, as Bukharin famously put it, ‘build socialism at a snail’s pace’, fitted such a mood. That was why every party functionary involved in daily compromises with industrial managers, better-off peasants or get-rich-quick traders rushed to support Stalin and Bukharin in their attacks on those who tried to remind them of workers’ democracy and world revolution. This enabled the ruling group to resort to ever more repressive measures against the opposition, using police to break up a demonstration in support of the opposition by some Petrograd workers on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution,
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expelling the opposition from the party, exiling them to remote areas and finally deporting Trotsky from the USSR.

Even so, until 1928 the atmosphere in Russia was still very different from that which characterised the 1930s—something that is ignored by many works on Stalin’s
gulag
of concentration camps. The Red terror had been wound down after the civil war. There were only 30,000 prisoners in the camps in 1928 and they were not compelled to work. This was still not a totalitarian regime.

As Michael Reiman has written, on the basis of a study of archives from the period:

But the whole structure defended by Stalin and Bukharin had inbuilt weaknesses which came to a head just as they banished the opposition. Its stability depended on the peasantry continuing to deliver grain to the city, even though the level of output of industrial goods was not high enough to satisfy their needs, and on Western capitalist powers abandoning any dreams of rolling back the revolution by military force. In fact neither condition could last. As some sections of the peasants grew richer they demanded more from the state and took action to get it. And the major capitalist powers, still driven to divide the world between them, had not lost their desire to carve up Russia.