A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  There even seemed hope for the poorest groups in US society. Impoverished white ‘dirt farmers’ from Appalachia and black sharecroppers from the South flooded to look for work in Detroit, Chicago and New York. These were the years of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, when even the Northern ghetto could seem like a beacon of hope to the grandchildren of slaves. There was still immense black bitterness and anger. But it was channelled, in the main, through the movement of Marcus Garvey, who preached a programme of black separation, black capitalism and a ‘return to Africa’ which avoided any direct conflict with the US system. For those who did not look below the surface of events the ‘American Dream’ seemed to be accepted everywhere in one form or another as the number of people buying and selling stocks and shares grew to record proportions.

  The arrival of the new era and the Jazz Age was delayed in Europe. In Germany the crisis of 1923 – when it seemed either socialist revolution or fascist rule was on the agenda – was followed by a brief spell of savage deflation. But then loans from the US (the ‘Dawes Plan’) gave capitalism a new lease of life. Industrial production soared to overtake the level of 1914, and political stability seemed restored. Elections in 1928 returned a Social Democratic coalition government, while Hitler’s Nazis only received just over 2 per cent of the poll and the Communists 10.6 per cent. In the summer of 1928 Hermann Müller, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, could exude confidence: ‘Our economy is sound, our system of social welfare is sound, and you will see that the Communists as well as the Nazis will be absorbed by the traditional parties’. 151

  Britain had gone through a major social crisis two and half years after Germany. The chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, was determined to symbolise the restoration of British power by fixing the value of the pound at its pre-war level against the dollar. The effect was to increase the cost of Britain’s exports and lead to increasing unemployment in core industries. The government set out to mitigate the increased costs by a general cut in wages and an increase in working hours, starting with the mining industry. The miners’ union refused to accept this, and its members were locked out in May 1926. Other union leaders called a general strike in support, only to call it off after nine days, abjectly surrendering despite the effectiveness of the action, and allowing the employers to victimise activists and destroy basic union organisation in industry after industry.

  Once the Ruhr crisis and the general strike in Britain were out of the way, the tone of the new era in the US began to influence mainstream thinking in Europe. The middle classes could benefit from the new range of consumer goods produced by the mass production industries, and it seemed only a matter of time before these spread to sections of workers. And if the US could escape from economic crisis, so could Europe. In Germany Werner Sombart echoed Hansen in stating, ‘There has been a clear tendency in European economic life for antagonistic tendencies to balance each other, to grow less and finally to disappear’. 152 Not to be left out, Eduard Bernstein argued that his prophecies of the peaceful transition of capitalism towards socialism were being fulfilled. It would be absurd to call the Weimar Republic a ‘capitalist republic’, he wrote. ‘The development of cartels and monopolies had brought about an increase in public control, and would lead to their eventual metamorphosis into public corporations’. 153 Even in Britain, where unemployment continued to plague the old industrial areas, the Trades Union Congress celebrated the first anniversary of the miners’ defeat by embarking on a series of talks with major employers, known as the Mond–Turner talks. The aim was to replace conflict by ‘cooperation … to improve the efficiency of industry and raise the workers’ standard of life’. 154 A minority Labour government took office with the support of the Liberals in 1929.

  The belief that capitalism had achieved long-term stability affected the ruling group inside Russia. In 1925 its two increasingly dominant figures, party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, took this belief to justify their new doctrine that socialism could be achieved in one country. Capitalism had stabilised itself, they claimed, making revolution unlikely. 155 Taking up the terminology of the German Social Democrat Hilferding, Bukharin argued that the West had entered a stage of ‘organised capitalism’, which permitted rapid economic expansion and made crises much less likely. 156

  The birth of the new

  If middle-class public opinion and popular culture seemed to recover some of their pre-war optimism in the mid-1920s, the recovery was precarious. A generation of young men in Europe had seen their illusions trampled in the mud of Flanders, and it was not easy to forget this. The atmosphere was closer to cynical self-indulgence than reborn hope.

  This found its reflection in the ‘high art’ – the painting, sculpture, serious music and literature – of the period. Even before the war there had been a minority challenge to the comfortable belief in steady progress. The mechanisation of the world already seemed double-edged – on the one hand displaying an unparalleled power and dynamism, and on the other tearing to shreds any notion of human beings ordering their own lives. Philosophical and cultural currents emerged which questioned any notion of progress and gave a central role to the irrational. These trends were encouraged as developments in theoretical physics (the special theory of relativity in 1905, the general theory of relativity in 1915 and Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ version of quantum physics in the mid-1920s) undermined the old mechanical model of the universe. At the same time the popularity of psychoanalysis seemed to destroy the belief in reason, once so important for Freud himself. 157

  Artists and writers attempted to come to terms with the novelty of the world around them by a revolution in artistic and literary forms. The ‘revolution’ was based on an ingrained ambiguity – on both admiration of and horror at the mechanical world. What came to be known as ‘Modernism’ was born. Characteristically the emphasis was on formalism and mathematical exactness, but also on the discordance of clashing images and sound, and dissolution of the individual and the social into fragmented parts. High culture up until the mid-nineteenth century (the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács argued that 1848 was the key date) had centred on attempts by middle-class heroes and heroines to master the world around them, even if they were often tragically unsuccessful. 158 The high culture of the period after the First World War centred on the reduction of individuals to fragmented playthings of powers beyond their control – as, for example, in Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle , in Berg’s opera Lulu , in T S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’, in Dos Passos’s trilogy USA , in the early plays of Bertolt Brecht and in the paintings of Picasso’s ‘analytical Cubist’ phase.

  Yet the internal fragmentation of works of art and literature which simply reflected the fragmentation around them left the best artists and writers dissatisfied, and they tried with varying degrees of success to fit the pieces into some new pattern which restored a place for humanity in a mechanical world. The difficulty of doing so within a reality which was itself fragmented and dehumanised led many to draw political conclusions. Already by the 1920s Italian ‘Futurists’ had embraced the blind irrationality of fascism and Russian Futurists had embraced the Russian Revolution’s rational attempt to reshape the world. Through much of the decade most Modernists tried to evade a choice between the two through a self-conscious avant-gardism which deliberately cut them off from popular culture, even if borrowing some of its idioms. They may not have shared in the illusions of those years, but they did little to publicly challenge them. However disillusioned with the ‘Golden Twenties’, their Modernism still took its assumptions for granted.

  The world had been through a dozen years of war, revolution and colonial rising. But by 1927 the consensus in international ruling class circles was that the trauma was over. There were not too many dissenters when US President Coolidge declared in December 1928, ‘No Congress of the United States has met with a more pleasant prospect than that which appears at the present time.’ F
ew people had any inkling of the horror to come.

  Chapter 6

  The great slump

  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. 159 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 per cent.

  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 under way 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 demonstrations of the unemployed 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 per cent of managing personnel in industry were officially classified as workers, by 1923 only 36 per cent were. 160

  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”.’ 161 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. 162

  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 m
aking 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.