This is the conclusion to chapter 5 of my book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Humanities Press International 1985 and 1993).  Also online is the introduction to chapter 4 The October Revolution: marxism in power, the section of the chapter on  Lysenko and Lysenkoism, and the end of the chapter on the purges and Soviet intellectual life.  Other extracts from chapter 5 are on the Bernal  Haldane and Caudwell, as well as the introduction to the chapter on the formation of the Comintern.

Marxism and the Comintern
 

There were pockets of marxist discussion here and there outside the Comintern, but none of the breakaway communist groups between 1919 and 1943 ever achieved great influence aand there were very few independent marxists around. The previous generation of social democratic theorists were still around, such as the austro-marxists, Kautsky and Krzywicki, though not generating much in the way of new ideas or commanding much enthusiasm. Really the Comintern was at the centre of marxist discussion during the period of its existence, for mixed reasons, perhaps the best and the worst of reasons. T here was definitely far more to it than what was implied in de Man's bitter remark: "The ruminant marxism of the socialists is powerless against the carnivorous marxism of the communists."²⁷² The greater vigour of the communist movement cannot be simply marked down to ferocity.

How to assess the Comintern and the fate of marxist theory within it ? It is a complex matter, for it had its moments both of glory and of shame. But existing accounts of it speak only of the glory or only of the shame. Communists themselves have been singularly reluctant to look fully into the dark recesses.  A quick glance, immediately covered by some formula about distortions occurring during the period of the "cult of personality," is generally as much as can be borne. * But the rest is generally left to the anti-communists, who reduce the whole thing to the dark corners of it.

There is, unfortunately, much to support the worst that can be said about it As other revolutions failed to follow upon the russian one, the Ssviet party came to dominate the Comintern, at first through its prestige as the only party that had successfully carried through a socialist revolution. However, as time went on, this prestige was more and more abused. Soviet domination became more and more institutionalised into the very mode of existence of the Comintern and the other communist parties came to be more and more subordinate to the interests of whatever forces were dominant in the CPSU.

The sharp shifts in policy emanating from Moscow, often reflected far more about the nature of the internal power struggles within the CPSU than about the rhythms of the class struggle in the countries where they had to be unquestioningly applied. Not only the internal but the external affairs of the Soviet Union became the overriding factors, with the Comintern becoming more and more the instrument of soviet foreign policy.

What was almost impossible to understand, and foreign communists simply could not see it, was that the Soviet Union did not feel the same loyalty to them. Many aspects of the relation of the Soviet Union to the Comintern involved an astonishing callousness, even manifest betrayal, towards those whose loyalty they inspired. It should have been possible, if perilous, to be a communist party among communist parties, engaged in class struggle, and simultaneously a government among governments, engaged in high diplomacy, without running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. However, whether it was possible or not, it was not the way of the Soviet Union.

The consequences in France, with resistance to german aggression greatly weakened and with communists left to be identified with treason, were particularly disastrous. If the interests of soviet foreign policy conflicted with the interests of the working class elsewhere, then it was so much the worse for the interests of the working class elsewhere.

Exile to the east: the fate of foreign communists in the Soviet Union

Some of the most tragic episodes, however, concerned the fate of foreign communists and anti-fascists living in the Soviet Union. Fleeing from fascism, some went west and some went east. It was better to have gone west. Communists living under the social order they were pledged to overthrow may not have been greeted with open arms, but they survived.  Communists who sought the warm embrace of the socialist motherland in their time of trouble, who were greeted with open arms, perished in large numbers, executed without trial or even notice of execution.

Many of them disappeared in the purges, partly as a part of the struggle to render the communist movement finally and fully submissive, to replace those with their own revolutionary traditions and a trace of independence of mind with newer and more pliable elements with no independent histories. But it was only partly that, for the atmosphere of irrationality and paranoia that swept over the Soviet Union in the 1930s allowed of no such clear and semi-rational explanation. As the austrian communist, Ernst Fischer, trying to come to terms with it many years later, asked:

"How to understand a game in which the devil cuts the cards ? ²⁷⁶

To look at the hungarian party, for example, the orthodox and obedient Bela Kun perished, whereas his rival Gyorgy Lukacs survived.* The heretical Sandor Varjas was arrested, but so was the orthodox Ladislaus Rudas, who was sending forth a constant stream of hard-hitting, hard-line polemics against all possible deviations.

* Lukas's own arrest in 1941, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may have been connected to the emphasis he had always put on the struggle against fascism. Michael Lowy in his article on "Lukacs and Stalinism" introduces evidence for this explanation. A political autobiography covering the period to April 1941 in the Lukacs archives in Budapest, probably written on order of the NKVD as the basis for his interrogation made no mention of the struggle against fascism, which he had previously insisted to be central to his political commitment (New Lefi Review 91,1975).
 

The Case of the Communist Party of Poland

A special case, a particuarly horrific case, was that of the polish party. It was a party with long and militant revolutionary traditions and a sophisticated intellectual heritage. Like all other parties of the Comintern, it suffered from factional struggle, purges, recantations, expulsions, and from following all the abrupt and enforced twists and turns of Comintern policy. It suffered too from having to operate under conditions of illegality through the whole period of its existence, from the bolshevisation process aimed at liquidating its Luxemburgist heritage, from involvement in the factional disputes of the soviet party, from the "May mistake" in which they supported the Pilsudski putsch, under which they continued to suffer severe police persecution, from abrupt changes in leadership decided in Moscow and handed down from above, from the sectarianism of the "3rd period" that severely isolated and demoralised the party. But through all such trials and tribulations, and despite all its own faults, it was an impressive and heroic party, devoted to the interests of the polish working class and of the communist movement as a whole.

In 1938, by a resolution of the Comintern, the Polish Communist Party was dissolved, on grounds of being a hotbed of trotskyism. It was nothing of the kind. Such trotskyists as had been in the party had long since been expelled. Nevertheless, the party was annihilated. Polish communists, who happened to be in the Soviet Union, were arrested, sent to camps or executed, The fortunate ones, sad to say, were those who were in prison in Poland and not those who escaped to the east.

Not long after the dissolution of the polish party came the dissolution of Poland. In 1939 came the Nazi-Soviet Pact, containing a secret protocol providing for the partition of Poland between the two parties. Soon after, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union "liberated" it from the east. It could be that Stalin had been clearing the ground for this eventuality by eliminating any possible opposition to it among polish communists.

Other factors may have played a part as well, for it came at a time when a whole generation of older communists were being eliminated in any case. Isaac Deutscher made the point that "the psychological profile of even the most orthodox polish communist left much to be desired from the stalinist point of view." ²⁷⁷ Deutscher, although at odds with the party from the time of his expulsion in 1932 (for "exaggerating the dangers of nazism," against the policy of the 3rd period in which social fascists were the main enemy), testified to the slanderous character of the charges against its leaders and regarded the dissolution of the party as an unparalleled crime. * Whatever the precise explanation, it was a cruel and tragic betrayal of the trust that foreign communists placed in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
 
 

That was not the end of it. There was another secret protocol, other consequences, and other betrayals. The other secret protocol enjoined each side to suppress agitation against the other. The result was the Comintern directive turning a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany into an accommodation between communism and fascism and allowing french communist deputies to be put on trial for treason.

Even more sinister were the implications for german communists. In 1938, certainly a part of the overall process of the massive purge, but also possibly once again to prepare the way for the pact, over 800 german communists and anti-fascists, who had sought asylum in the Soviet Union, were arrested and imprisoned, including leaders of the KPD. Eberlein, KPD delegate to the founding congress of the Comintern, held a press conference denying reports in the swiss press that he had been arrested, only to be arrested the next day. Some were actually seized in the House of Political Emigres in Moscow. Some who had been tortured by the Gestapo were tortured again by the NKVD. Their institutions, such as the Liebknecht School and the Thaelmann Club, were closed down.

But worst of all was the almost unbelievable, and certainly unforgivable, fact that after the pact, german, austrian, and hungarian communists and antifascists were handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo. Of these many were jews, who went on to ghetto uprisings, concentration camps, and gas chambers.

Among them were the german physicists Alexander Weissberg and Friedrich Houtermans, who had been working in the Soviet Union. Appeals for their release by Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie, Paul Langevin, P.M.S. Blackett, and J.D. Bernal were to no avail. Appeals fiom Hitler and Ribbentrop obyiously carried greater weight Whatever arguments can.be put forward with regard to the necessity of the non-aggression pact, there can he no justification for the secret protocols with their dire consequences for Comintern policy, for Poland and for communists and anti-fascists in exile.

And to the fellow travelling intellectuals in the west, who searched their souls and said that this was simply too much, refusing to parrot the hollow explanations and to abide the hypocritical talk of higher laws of history, the response of the CPUSA was typical:
 

War and the dissolution of the Comintern

In 1941, after the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, communists were free to be anti-fascists again, although in truth the overwhelming majority of them always were. Communists distinguished themselves in their heroic resistance. Indeed, French communists already had, in the year preceding the new shift in Comintern policy. The Polish party was reconstituted and such Polish communists as were left, in spite of all they had endured, reformed themselves and fought courageously in the underground of nazi-occupied Poland.

In 1943, in the midst of Stalin's negotiations with Churchill and Roosevelt, the Comintern was abrupdy dissolved, as it served the interests of Soviet foreign policy to dissociate itself from revolutionary activity in the west.
 

Marxism and the Comintern: balancing the accounts

However, the Comintern must not only be remembered by its official policies, by its intrigues, by its betrayals. It must be remembered too by its brave struggle against the powers of reaction, by the noble commitment of its members to building a new world, by the earnest probing of its theoreticians to work out a new world view.

It is true that much of what was noblest and most creative was often stifled and what was most base was most encouraged, but the fact remains that, through it all and in spite of all the obstacles placed in its way, the Comintern was still able to inspire noble commitment and creative thinking. It is true, too, that the figure of Stalin looms uncommonly large over it all and casts a dark shadow over the history of the Comintern, but the Comintern belonged too to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who believed ardently and worked unflinchingly, who knew nothing of the intigues or the cynical manipulation of their efforts.

The Comintern may have been the instrument for sending hundreds of communists to their death at the hands of other communists, but it was also the context in which communists went generously to die in the international brigades, risked their lives daily in the underground of Hitler's Germany, formed the backbone of the resistance to nazi occupation, refused to speak under torture, or simply carried on thinking, writing, struggling as their circumstances allowed, for a new social order.

The communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who has not been one to shy away from the difficulties, has nevertheless made the point that it is necessary to resist the temptation to dismiss the Comintern en bloc as a failure or as a russian puppet show. Unless certain factors are taken into account, Hobsbawm insists, it is simply impossible to grasp what the Comintern was about, to understand the sense of total devotion that motivated party members. It is vital to recapture a sense of the immense strength that they drew from the consciousness of being soldiers in a single international army, following a single grand strategy of world revolution. This gave the movement a certain immunity against the terrible collapse of its ideals.

About the Soviet Union, only the naive, Hobsbawn explains, believed that it was a workers paradise, but even among the most sophisticated, it enjoyed the sort of general indulgence that the 1960s new left reserved only for Cuba and Vietnam. Moreover, to be separated from it was to be cut off in their eyes from any possibility of effective revolutionary activity. What individuals and groups did break away were notoriously isolated and unsuccessful.²⁷⁹

And what of the development of Marxist theory amidst it all? How to balance the accounts with regard to the conjuncture of politics, philosophy, and science in and through the Comintern ?

There was, to be sure, much counting against both the healthy development of revolutionary theory and the constructive pursuit of revolutionary practice. For some, it was simply more than could be borne. In bitterness and despair, many turned away and told their stories.

Ignatio Silone, the italian communist leader involved in the high politics of the Comintern, told of various incidents that were symbolic of the prevailing atmosphere that reflected and shaped communist thinking.

One took place at a meeting of a special commission of the Comintern executive discussing the ultimatum issued by the british TUC ordering the disbanding of the Communist Party led minority movement under threat of expulsion. The representative of the CPGB gravely explained the dilemma: liquidation or expulsion. A russian communist, however, wondered what all the fuss was about and put forward what seemed to him the obvious solution: declare submission and do exactly the opposite, to which the british communist replied "But that would be a lie." Loud laughter rang through the room and then spread all through Moscow, the like of which had perhaps never been heard before. To Silone, the englishman's short simple sentence outweighed all the long, heavy, oppressive speeches of his years in the Comintern and became a symbol for him.

A second incident involved the return of the french communist Jacques Doriot to Moscow from a special mission in China. He gave his friends an extremely disturbing account of the blunders of the Comintern in the far east. The next day, speaking before a full session of the Comintern executive, he said exactly the opposite. He later confided to Silone with a superior smile, "It was an act of political wisdom."

A third incident involved the demand of the soviet communists that the Comintern endorse a document proclaiming the condemnation of Trotsky without reading it. Any remarks as to the inappropriateness of approving a document unread were met with utter hostility.

Silone experienced on a number of occasions what he considered to be the utter incapacity of russian communists to be fair in discussing opinions conflicting with theirs. The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling. An adversary in good faith was something inconceivable to them.²⁸⁰

Arthur Koestler, a member of the KPD during the last days of the Weimar Republic and then an associate of Willi Muenzenberg in the organisation of popular front activities in Paris, indicated the way marxist philosophy was sometimes brought to bear in the day to day life of the party. When faced with the sudden, sharp and seemingly arbitrary shifts of Comintern policy, which often involved an abrupt change of slogans from one day to the next with the new ones completely contradicting those of the day before and with.the real reasons for the change concealed, a party member might remark on the contradiction. The reply inevitably was "But you are not thinking dialectically, comrade."

"Gradually," said Koestler, "I learned to distrust any mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of the dialectical interpretation. It was a satisfactory and blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique, you were no longer disturbed by facts." When someone he recruited had a crisis of conscience and wrote a report of their joint activities, Koestler told of his reaction "I could not face reading in black and white the factual record of actions which I insisted on regarding through a haze of dialectical euphemisms.'

Koestler regarded the dialectical tight-rope acts of self-deception, sometimes performed by men of good wIll and intelligence, as more disheartening than the barbarities committed by the simple in spirit. Eventually, he came to see the dialectic as the rationalisation of a pathological species that had completely severed relations with the subconscious. It initiated a way of thinking that made the monstrous acceptable: "the necessary lie, the necessary slander, the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from short-sighted errors, the necessary liquidation of oppositional groups and hostile classes, the necessary sacrifice of a whole generation in the interests of the next."²⁸¹

Another set of incidents and observations stemming from experience within the KPD has come from Rosa Levine-Meyer.  Hers is very much a widow's account, having seen things very much in and through her two husbands, Eugene Levine and Ernst Meyer, both leaders of the K PD. Nevertheless, some interesting stories are told and some valuable perceptions break through.  She told how Karl Radek had justified his cowardice, dissociating himself from his admired friend Rosa Luxemburg during the drive against Luxemburgism, by declaring "It was a historic necessity."  She told how a crushed Gerhard Eisler insisted to her:
 

All of these things infected the prevailing atmosphere in the Comintern: the deliberate deceit, the unconscious self-deception, the high-handed authoritarianism, the degrading servility, justified in terms of a primitive semi-mystical schematisation of History with a capital H, History with people left out, that came to overshadow all perceptions of actual facts an experiences of living persons.

It often began in innocence, posed as sacrifice of some perhaps laudable principle for some supposedly necessary gain in the interests of the class struggle. But the erosion of rationality and morality, the entrenchment of the habit of lying, the destruction of truth and the sheer human degradation outweighed any gains made by such methods.  The end did not justify the means.

Unfortunately, even the best often reasoned as did Lukacs:
 

In any case, the use of the categories of marxist philosophy to override the demands of rationality and morality could not but have a corrosive effect on the development of marxist philosophy. So it did.

Thus, the stale and dreary textbooks of dialectical materialism that gave the impression that philosophical thinking had reached its finished form and was reliably embodied in the decisions of the party leadership. Thus, too, the heresy-hunting preoccupation with revisionism aimed at those who wished to carry on the process of philosophical thinking and thus the fear of what conclusions might be reached by those proceeding in accordance with considerations of rationality and morality.

But there was more to it. Rigidity, cowardice, cruelty, deceit, and corruption of power may have characterised some, particularly some highly placed, and may have coloured much of the high politics of the Comintern. But the men and women who made it a real and living movement were made of finer stuff and acted on very different motives. They were the bearers of the marxist tradition in its most vigorous form during these years.

The power of marxism, with its invitation to think in a whole new way and to work toward a whole new social order, broke through all the rest. The example of the October Revolution, such a gigantic and daring social experiment, and the call of the Comintern to extend it to the far corners of the earth, brought into the communist movement the most inquiring minds inspired by marxism and the most energetic personalities seeking to carry it through in political commitment.

It was not only the movement of Stalin, but the movement of Gramsci, Caudwell, Bernal, Haldane, Guest, Langevin, Solomon, Politzer and others, who sought to bring the most advanced science to bear upon what they considered to be the most coherent and most firmly grounded philosophical world view. Whatever obstacles were placed in its way, marxism developed and extended itself in a most creative and credible way. It also received serious setbacks from which it has never recovered.