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From International Socialism (1st series), No.59, June 1973, pp.22-23.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Fellow-Travellers
David Caute
Weidenfield and Nicolson, £5.75
‘I am for them to the last drop,’ said the American writer Lincoln Steffans in 1926, ‘I am a patriot for Russia; the future is there ... But I don’t want to live there.’ He was staying on the Italian Riviera at the time.
Steffans was typical of large numbers of western intellectuals who slavishly apologised for the Russian regime during the worst years of Stalinism. Individual fellow-travellers came and went, but fellow-travelling as a phenomenon survived the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the anti-semitic purges of Stalin’s last years.
In this admirable book David Caute not only examines the backgrounds and motivations of the fellow-travellers; he also provides an armoury of facts and cogent arguments that can be used to effect against Communist Party members today.
Caute’s thesis, briefly, is as follows: fellow-travelling must be seen as a distorted resurgence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose promise of rationally-directed social pogress had been betrayed by the cruelty, greed, and selfishness of capitalism. To the future fellow-travellers, the October Revolution, in which a mobilised and class-conscious proletariat seized state power, failed to appeal.
It was only when the socialist gains of October had been destroyed, and a new bureaucratic dictatorship wielded power, ruthlessly squeezing the population in order to develop industry, that the Russian system was seen as the hope of the future.
Stalin and the bureaucracy were seen as a benevolent and rational elite, performing a necessary task of ‘social engineering’ in dragging a backward and ignorant population into the twentieth century. The hideous cruelties of collectivisation, the introduction of internal passports and the death penalty for strikers – all were glossed over or ignored.
Trotsky and the perspective of permanent revolution were anathema to the fellow-travellers. ‘Socialism in one country’ suited them perfectly – as long as that country was not their own. Caute calls it ‘commitment at a distance’ – political and emotional, as well as geographical. Many of them enjoyed easy and privileged lives, and they believed the freedoms of western liberal democracy worth preserving.
But they had no patience with the idea that similar freedoms should be enjoyed by the Russian people. They usually scorned the communist parties in their own countries, but hero-worshipped the all-powerful Russian one, and were not ashamed to castigate Trotsky and other Left Oppositionists for breaking party discipline.
There is an important kernel of truth in this analysis; its close affinity with that presented by Hal Draper in The Two Souls of Socialism will be apparent.
However, the range of people Caute groups together under the title fellow-travellers is extremely wide. It includes Hewlett Johnson, Shaw, the Webbs and Strachey; Steffans and Upton Sinclair; Anatole France, Gide and Sartre; Arnold Zweig, Ernst Toller, and Leon Feuchtwanger; Ilya Ehrenburg.
Few of the dozens of individuals Caute discusses fit the abstract theory exactly. The Webbs are among those that came closest to it. They were ‘excellent examples of the type which prefers mankind to people’. Workers’ control and the class struggle were gall and wormwood to them.
In 1926 Mrs Webb denounced the General Strike as ‘the work of a militant minority.’ The same year she wrote: ‘We regard Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy as belonging to one and the same species of government.’
But by 1932, when she and her husband visited Russia, the limited market economy of the new economic policy had given way to the era of collectivisation and the five-year plans, Trotsky was in exile and the cult of Stalin well established. And the Fabian pair hailed the state capitalist system as a new civilisation.
Shaw fully shared the Webbs’ contempt for the working class.’ The more I see of proletarians’ – he remarked to Lady Astor during a visit to a Russian factory – ‘the more I thank God I am not one.’ But he had embraced the communist regime years earlier, in Lenin’s time.
‘To the best of my knowledge, I am a Bolshevik myself,’ he said then, either ignoring or ignorant of Bolshevism’s working-class roots and orientation; He was disappointed when war communism gave way to the NEP, and in the mid-1920s described the Russian leaders as ‘a handful of Russian novices’.
But what of Anna Louise Strong, who lived for many years in Russia? Or Ernst Toller, who took part in the 1919 Munich revolution as a member of the USPD, and spent five years in prison for it? Or Ilya Ehrenburg, for whom fellow-travelling was the price of survival? Or Sartre, who embraced Marxism, and risked assassination for advocating the cause of Algerian independence?
This is a rich and fascinating book, but its central thesis has to be somewhat forced, to hold it together. In reality, such was the polarisation of European politics in this period, that a tremendous diversity of people were attracted, at one time or another, into the Stalinist orbit.
Many must have been genuine socialists who would have opted for an independent Marxist alternative had one been available. But the forces of Trotskyism were miniscule, and in the face of fascist barbarism and against the backdrop of the worst depression in capitalist history, the fellow-travellers chose to drive their misgivings about Stalinism to the back of their minds.
Or even, as in Sartre’s case, to refrain quite consciously and deliberately from making public the facts about such errors as slave labour. It would, Sartre argued privately, be aiding and abetting Right-wing propaganda; suppression of the truth was justified from a world-historical point of view. But Sartre – along with nearly all the remaining fellow-travellers – could not stomach the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution.
The dilemma he then faced was summed up in his remark of 1962: ‘Collaboration with the CP is both necessary and impossible.’
The Marxist Left must ensure that that dilemma never again faces any potential revolutionary.
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