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From International Socialism (1st series), No.4, Spring 1961, p.31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Proofread by Anoma Cartwright (April 2008).
A History of Socialist Thought. Vol. V. Socialism and Fascism. 1931-39
G.D.H. Cole
MacMillan, 1960, 35s.
This book, published after its author’s death, is the final volume in the series on Socialist thought. At least, ostensibly, this volume is about Socialist thought. But the reader should not be misled by the title. Practically all the book is about political events.
Apart from the first and last, which attempt a summing-up of general trends, the book consists of a series of chapters about the history of different countries during the thirties. Inevitably, the history of each has to be told sketchily, particularly since in most of them the author (or authors?) has attempted to give a general history and not confine himself – as he might more usefully have done – to the working-class movement. The result is a kind of Cook’s tour round the world. It is fascinating but the visitor is always wanting to stay longer at each place en route. Thanks to the lucidity and ease of Cole’s style, the sequence of events can be readily followed and the book is very readable. For the English reader it is particularly useful to have a summary of events in countries with whose history most of us are not very familiar – such as the Latin American republics and some of the smaller European countries. But the basic flaw remains in the attempt to deal so extensively with so full a period. Inevitably, depth has to be sacrificed. One very serious omission is the absence from most chapters of any statistics, so the reader has no idea of, for instance, the relative sizes of the followings of different political tendencies. Nor are there any footnotes or bibliographies (except at the end of the chapter on China) to indicate where fuller information might be found to supplement the outline provided by the book. Events are referred to, which there is no time to explain, and snap judgements delivered without adequate supporting arguments. In the introductory chapter, Cole gives an analysis of Fascism, as one of the dominant movements in the period. He rejects the thesis that Fascism was ‘the final throw of capitalism in decline’. He prefers to explain it in political or psychological terms – the desire of the German people to avenge their defeat in the First World War, nationalism and so on – but does not satisfactorily explain why, for example, nationalism took this particular form when, at an earlier period, it had taken a bourgeois democratic form. As regards the parties of the Left, Cole suggests that, in spite of the crimes and mistakes of the Stalinist period, Russia was basically a bastion of Socialism and that Socialists throughout the world had no alternative, in the last resort, but to support her. The potential development of an independent revolutionary leadership of the working-class is not contemplated. Indeed, Trotsky who fought to build such a party is characterized as a ‘dangerous thinker’ (dangerous to whom?) and the Trotskyists as ‘intractable doctrinaires’. If Cole had few illusions about Stalinism, he equally saw through to the inadequacy of Social democracy. Writing as it were in the shadow of the thirties, which saw such tragic defeats for the working class, Cole hardly surprisingly ends on a negative note, reaffirming his belief that Socialism must be based on the widest possible participation in democratic self-government, but not suggesting how this can be achieved, against the bureaucrats of the Left and the Right. But he can scarcely be blamed for that. From his book one can learn some at least of the lessons which history has to teach us and so be armed for future struggles in which the problem of workers’ control will be solved in practice.
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