Chasing revolution Part two

Chasing revolution: drifting through time, space and Eastern Europe.

Introduction Part two

 

So, where’s this Eastern Europe then?

 

That’s a good question. The Eastern Europe that was the bedfellow of the Soviet Union throughout the post war period was a political entity rather than a geographical one. Made up of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and at times Yugoslavia[1], most aren’t actually in Eastern Europe at all. The first 3 are geographically in central Europe, Bulgaria is in the Balkans and also, along with Romania and most of the former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe. Confused? I was. No wonder cold war propagandists called them the Eastern Bloc, rather than the Central European, Balkans and Southeastern Europe Bloc.

 

At least you only need to look at a map to work out which area of Europe they’re in. The history and politics of the ‘region’ and its constituent countries is even more confusing and complex than trying to plan a route on a map[2]. If you ever wanted to do a case study of the absolute political nature of modern nations, Eastern Europe[3] is the place to begin. Borders, boundaries and whole peoples were moved at the whim of the ruling classes and victorious powers after both world wars with no regard for anything else apart from political reasons[4]. This is a far cry from the mythical bourgeois norm of a nation being a natural and eternal entity but is the brutal reality of capitalist relations.

 

However, when establishment commentators and historians discuss the region, they use catchy phrases to describe the mess caused by imperialist intervention such as ‘ancient and deep rooted enmities’ which explain nothing. The distant past is used as an explanation for present ills, thus excising the main culprits from blame. Typical bourgeois descriptions of Eastern Europe prior to 1989 were equally useless and clichéd. It was usually something like, ‘rows of grim looking Stalinist high rise concrete blocks’ or ‘timeless peasant landscape’. In an attempt to understand the area better, I spent a couple of months reading books on politics, travel guides[5] and history books. Whilst this was better than nothing, it made me realise how difficult it is to understand a country with which you’re not familiar, especially without speaking the language. Growing up in Britain, I’m fairly familiar with at least the basic history, politics and culture of most European states. until you come to Eastern Europe, about which nothing was taught. The mythological Iron Curtain actually suited both sets of ruling classes in the post war period as they both served as a bogeyman for the other.

 

Neither of us liked the idea of going to Eastern Europe without at least a very basic understanding of the political, economic and historic background of each country. In hindsight, this was impossible in a couple of months but there were some people we knew, including some leading SWP members, that all was needed to argue with workers in Eastern Europe was the theory of state capitalism, Chris Harman’s Class struggles in Eastern Europe and an understanding of why a revolutionary party is needed. I found this suggestive of the idea that you can reduce revolutionary politics to something like a syllabus with particular modules for different areas, ignoring the specificity of each country’s working class traditions as well as the nature of its ruling class.

 

All theory is grey, but, ah my friend, the glad golden tree of life is green."

 

Goethe's quote from Faust is always a winner, especially when talking about theory that becomes ossified as gospel, as it all does in the end, if not regularly tested to destruction against reality. Whilst still a regular reader and admirer of Marx, what always irritated me about his Trot, Stalinist etc epigones was the way a vague idea would be elevated to the status of holy writ. To be used forever like a blueprint, with the same result you would get if using a map of rural New Zealand to navigate the streets of Liverpool.

Theory is important but has to be treated carefully and not torn out of context; it needs to be constantly renewed so it explains specific epochs and events. The perfect example of the negative consequences of theory treated as a shibboleth is the attempt by socialists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union and, after the Second World War, the nominally 'communist' states of Eastern Europe. Some of these ideas are easily and promptly disposed of into the dustbin of history; as such is the fate of any theory that ascribes the term 'worker states', whether deformed, degenerated or dessicated to the above regimes. Workers had no control over the societies, therefore they weren't workers states. End of story.

 

Now that the Soviet Union and its Eastern satellites are becoming a distant memory, even for those who grew up in them, it might seem arcane to be arguing over what term should be used to describe it. On one level that is true as it is no longer a matter of how you relate to those states. However, if you want change the world in the future you have to be able to explain the past. This is especially the case when, as with the Soviet Union and its allies, they claimed to be socialist and most people believed them. The events of 1989-1991 are now clearly seen by establishment politicians and historians as the 'downfall of communism', marking the end of popular resistance to capitalism and de facto, the final triumph of the global free market system. (Of course, in time, a new enemy miracously appeared: Islamic terrorism is now the threat to th survival of the west.)

 

So the question of the nature of these states isn't pointless, though not as urgent as it was in 1950, for example. It's also important if you see yourself as a marxist, or in my case, a 'marxist', that you try to use Marx's ‘methodology’ to understand the world as it is and that doesn't mean trying to shoehorn everything into a system where you can say, "well, in the end, base determines superstructure", because it might not...

 

There was a tendency in the SWP, particularly when you joined, to give you a couple of party pamphlets about Russia and encourage you to buy Tony Cliff's 'State capitalism in Russia', the nearest thing they had to a sacred text. When I started reading it, ploughing through pages of statisitcs about Soviet production, I realised immediately that it wasn't the world's most exciting read. He certainly proved that Russia wasn't a workers' state but didn't convince me totally that it was state capitalist. Later IS and SWP writers were more thorough but I still felt that there was something lacking. However, the beauty of Cliff's work was it served an important purpose in resurrecting the idea that only workers can make a revolution and that state owned property is immaterial to who controls society. [6] Something that was important at the time when a high proportion of British industry was owned and controlled by the state.

 

Aside from the bonkers workers’ states viewpoint, the only rational alternative to State Capitalism is the hotchpotch of theories that can be collectively called ‘New Class’. Many of these, especially the work of Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox, around the Journal Critique, are intelligent and comprehensive. Yet, to me, they don’t effectively explain what the dynamic driving the system was. The point is that if you’re going to convince people that they weren’t living under a socialist state, you have to be able to explain to them what it was instead. Or, at the very least, why it wasn’t socialist and why the system worked against workers’ interests.

 

As members of the SWP, there was another argument that had to be carried forth to the workers of Eastern Europe and that was the necessity of Building the Revolutionary Party, or the tiny embryo thereof. As I’ve said above, this was something I was no longer totally convinced about, especially making the emphasis of such a group, an idea such as State Capitalism. The whole concept seemed to exclude the working class as its own, and society’s, liberator, as well as setting up a barrier between the group and the working class, particularly in a political climate that was still volatile. My time there was the final thing that convinced me that small revolutionary groups were inimical to genuine working class politics. My only consolation was that unlike the Czech Militant organiser, we didn’t have to argue that the working class should enter the remnants of the former ruling class party.

 

Not quite the Five Year plan

 

What planning we did was mostly crammed into September, the month before we left. Planning the route was made easy by reducing it to buying a road map that covered all of Europe and had city maps of Prague, Sebiia, Sofia and Budapest but not Bucharest for some reason. From this we decided which order we were going to visit the countries and how we were going to get to the first, Czechoslovakia. The minor details such as how to get to each particular place were left to the future. (Invariably this entailed a quick look at which routes were the most straightforward, the night before we travelled).

As the main point of the trip was to get into contact with workers who were opposed to the system, advice and lists of potential contacts were provided by the SWP. This involved a couple of trips to the centre for discussion with an able and amiable guy who dealt with international work. He was fairly, but not totally candid about the calibre and usefulness of the various people on the list. As he put it about Hungary, most of the contacts that had been collected there over the years were now in the government. As well as the theory of State Capitalism and the list of contacts, we also had to carry 3 large boxes of books with us. The inevitable State Capitalism in Russia was there of course, as well as Trotsky’s In defence of Marxism amongst many others. Despite a slight scepticism about whether we really needed that many books, we could have taken three times the amount and still not had enough. If nothing, else this was a testimony to the thirst for ideas, whether these were the right ideas is another argument.

Aside from clothes, tools and a variety of personal hygiene products, including tampons,  toothpaste and toilet paper, we actually travelled fairly lightly. This was actually a good move as it meant there wasn’t always loads of stuff to load and unload into the not enormous Ford Fiesta, which is still the newest car I have ever bought at 4 years old. It also meant there was a bit of space in the car to sleep in it or to squeeze another person in which was handy at times.

 

The main problem was we didn’t really know what to expect. It was only a year since the fall of the old regimes and in some of the countries, food and other goods, including petrol, were still very scarce in the shops unless you could afford to shop in the dollar outlets which wasn’t possible for the vast majority of people. 

 

Memories, dreams, reflections

What we remember about an event or a person, is not to be confused with the event or the person. As Benjamin points out, they are not the same experience. What I remember about my childhood now isn't what I remembered about my it, ten, twenty or thirty years ago. Consequently, what I recall about my time in Eastern Europe isn't necessarily what happened but instead how I remember it happened; an approximation of what happened. For me that isn't the real, or the only problem. What I do remember is fairly accurate but the real problem is there are a lot of gaps in my memory. It's not just the details that are missing but the sequence of events is often hard to recall. My memory feels like it’s been subject to one of those  scams where a bank employee siphons off 1p a week from someone else’s account and is only discovered when there’s small change left. This makes it sound like a collection of 1 pence coins at the bottom of a bag covered in fluff. Consequently, as I’m writing each part as I post it, I don’t know if it’s going to be blockbuster or short story length, so we’ll find out together.

 

The trickiest personal thing about writing this is how I how much I write about Sheela as a lot of  it will be reflections on what we did about which she would probably disagree. The trip was a total joint enterprise, with neither of us really  dominant  with the odd exceptions. Due to my then acute shyness, she tended to do the tricky things like booking places to stay or ringing foreign strangers to arrange to meet with them. This I’m sure was irritating to her for which I apologise…I’ll stick to using ‘we’ for factual descriptions, while everything else, except where mentioned, will be my own warped take on things.

 

We had met through the SWP in 1987 and eventually ended up living together in a basement flat which if it had been any damper would have been classed as aquatic. Sharp as a needle and as intransigent as a mule, Sheela was an irritant to student political bureaucrats because though she ticked two of the boxes of oppression, female and Asian, she absolutely hated the rampant opportunism that came with identity politics. She was also happy to question the received wisdom of the party hierarchy when she felt uncomfortable with decisions. Where we differed politically was probably mainly about the importance of the revolutionary party; she thought I was soft on the idea, especially once we were in Eastern Europe.

 

As will become clear in the rest of the series, some of it has the feel of a surrealist dream sequence which given some of the absurdities present in the old Eastern Bloc is hardly surprising but of course, equally bizarre things occurred, and still do, in the west. In hindsight, the trip probably achieved very little in political terms but that's not really the point. Anyway, as the Butthole Surfers said in 'Sweat loaf',

"it's always better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done".

 

 

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[1] At different times, different authorities would include other countries such as Albania, Ukraine and Russia as part of it.

[2] The only thing I have in common with Trotsky is that I, too, am a geographical cretin.

[3] Throughout this series, I’ll use the term, ‘Eastern Europe’ in its political, cold war sense as I’m too lazy to keep changing it.

[4] Of course, this happened at other times as well; most notorious recent example being Yugoslavia after 1991.

[5] There was one hastily written post 1989 travel guide that was actually helpful as well as fairly accurate and its potted history of the states was more informative than most other books.

[6] A lot more could be said about the inadequacies of the SWP’s understanding of the role of workers in a revolutionary organisation but now is not the time.