REVIEWS: Communism and Jacobinism

...In fact, the surrender to Moscow resulted during the Popular Front period in the odd spectacle of the Socialists and their trade union allies consistently opting for more radical domestic policies than the Communists, who frequently outflanked the Socialists on the Right through their closer ties to the Radical party...

...Brower ignores completely this aspect of his subject...

...During his consolidation of power in the mid-twenties, he cultivated ties with Germany in order to break out of the cordon sanitaire, and pushed a United Front line among Western Communists...

...It is testimony to the frozen servility of the PCF to Moscow that virtually everyone became aware of the need for a broad political coalition against fascism before the party's top leadership—and within the PCF leadership, only the antibureaucratic Jacques Doriot, detested by the rest of the leaders for his popularity among the rank and file, advanced the new line before Moscow approved it...

...This was the situation in the early days of June 1936, when Blum took office as the first Socialist Premier of France...

...All this Brower portrays with devastating detail...

...September 2 was also the day Thorez dropped his pose of moderation and publicly appealed to the Paris metal workers to conduct a political strike against Blum's nonintervention policy...

...The inadequate nature of the reforms secured by Blum in those initial, explosive days of his regime, then, was probably a sufficient cause for the demise of his cabinet a year later and for the ultimate dissolution of the Popular Front...

...The "petits," their firms largely untouched by the strike wave, were by no means unhappy to see the financial and industrial magnates humbled...

...Only in 1934, after German hostility and unresponsiveness to Stalin's overtures had become unmistakable, did the Soviet leadership move clearly toward an alternate strategy of collective security: a military alliance with France and other Western powers against Germany The Front Populaire was to serve the CP as a tactical device for the fulfillment of this strategy...

...For, in retrospect, it would appear that the maintenance both of proletarian elan and of the coalition of working class and lower middle class was contingent on drastic controls over large banks and major industries which were bound to be opposed furiously by the hitherto dominant figures of French economic life and hence of the conservative Right...

...Using this motivational framework, Brower does an impressive piece of detective work...

...What Brower does not see clearly is that the rapid decline of the Front Populaire, during and after Leon Blum's year in power, was in good measure the result of the PFC's witless subservience to Moscow...

...The facts, however, do not sustain that presupposition, for the strike wave of September began on August 19, when the Stalinists were still talking up the Front Francais...

...The latter was better served by the "French Front" tactic...

...But in the early stages of cooperation with the Communists, supporters of the Plan were muzzled because the Communists denounced it as "fascist...

...At the time, because of the apparent magnitude of the fascist threat, the Socialists did not put up major resistance...

...The Communists were on an extremely slippery track...

...According to Brower, this tactic had two functions: within the capitalist regimes, internal dissension . . . might weaken the potential for antiSoviet action...

...It is not merely Monday-morning quarterbacking to say that there existed in the midthirties both the opportunity and the body of ideas necessary to carry out successfully such a truly Jacobin reform program (and hence to save the Popular Front and perhaps the Republic), and that one of the principal reasons for its miscarriage was the PCF's subservience to Stalin's foreign policy...

...THERE ARE TWO THEMES in this book: (1) the way Stalin used the French Communist party and its political capital as pawns in his international Realpolitik of the thirties, and (2) the way the French CP (PCF) identified itself with and profited from the patriotic tradition of Jacobin nationalism...

...The French Communist party, by calling for French aid to the Spanish Republic, may thus have been continuing its support of Soviet diplomatic goals...

...Concern over Blum's meeting with Schacht in the late August of 1936 and the Comintern's decision to use the Spanish conflict to maneuver France into a proxy war with Germany certainly account for much of the CPF's militancy on the Spanish issue...

...Blum himself, never very friendly to the "Planistes" and concerned about Communist sabotage from the Right, agreed to ask no more of the magnates than higher wages, a 40-hour week, and paid vacations...

...Furthermore, the banking system had traditionally served as a source of credit only for the large corporations, leaving the mass of the "petits" without any means, apart from their own savings, for financing modernization or expansion...

...He thus passed over a historic opportunity, which would recur in France—and then would be seized— in the early postwar years: the opportunity to impose on the antiquated French economy a program of modernization through government control and structural reorganization, a program fully outlined in the CGT Plan...

...232 BOOKS Stalin, overwhelmingly preoccupied with suppressing internal resistance to his policies, was probably unaware of the danger posed to the Soviet Union by Nazism until some time after Hitler took power...

...The Communist party did not create the fall strike wave...

...Their appeals to the French Right had coincided with a remarkable upsurge of proletarian militancy which, because of the PCF's past record and because of its lesser degree of contamination with the suspect parliamentary system of the Republic, had swelled the party's membership lists and, more important, the unions controlled by the party...

...He notes that the former chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, Krivitsky, had given August 31 as the date for the Russian decision to smuggle arms into Spain and that, on September 2, Krivitsky was ordered to organize this smuggling venture from Western Europe...

...Though supposedly the PCF was the new mass party of the Far Left, whose goal was to overcome the bureaucratization of the Second International by ruthless commitment to revolutionary goals, and though in the thirties it may have been identified with the heroic tradition of French Jacobinism, the link to Moscow served as a functional equivalent of the bureaucratic inertia which had hobbled the European Socialist parties since the turn of the century...

...The Communists decided to end the strikes only in late October, when it became apparent that they were turning many Radicals against the working class and the Front Populaire, and might lead the Radical Congress in Biarritz to formally pull that party out of the Front...

...An additional, most important target for nationalization was the credit system, and especially the Bank of France...

...Even within the Communist party, in the wake of the right-wing riots of February 6, 1934, pressure was generating for a united front with the Socialist party...

...As is now known, the unique historical accomplishment of this revolutionary equivalent of couvade was to permit Hitler to climb into power against fratricidally divided resistance (Nach Hitler uns, was the KPD slogan), while Communists excoriated Social Democrats as "social fascists...

...In the absence of structural reforms to curb the power of French capitalism and increase productivity, the wage increases Blum and the union chiefs negotiated in June were largely wiped out by rising prices in the summer and fall, and many firms, especially the textile manufacturers of northern France, began to harass the new unionists by expulsions of their leaders and by lockouts...

...Besides, while fighting for a social and economic revolution in their own country, the Soviet leaders may have felt that the entire world Communist movement had to mobilize as well...

...By now it should surprise no one that Stalin viewed with extreme skepticism the Comintern's pretensions to being an agency of international revolution (he is said to have called it a gyp joint), and that he used it exclusively as an arm of Soviet foreign policy...

...Suddenly the initiative lay with the Left, and Blum, if he had been bold enough, might have forced the CGT Plan through in a fortnight...

...The events of 1936-38 showed that, while the first and second of these policies may have been compatible, the three together were not and that, by attempting to combine all three goals, the Communists were compelled to follow a policy of faint-hearted reforms which insured the failure of their first two aims as well...

...But if it had been only a question of persuading the French nation to confront fascism in Spain, there would have been no need to abandon the "French Front" idea...

...On the Spanish issue, the two were not incompatible...

...For— contrary to their Jacobin appearance—the closest French revolutionary analogue to the actual strategy and historical role of the French Stalinists in the Popular Front was the Feuillant attempt of 1792 to submerge revolutionary forces and demands in a patriotic front against the reactionary powers of Central Europe...

...The problem, then, was (1) how to hold on to its enlarged and somewhat shaky working-class base while (2) maintaining the alliance with Socialists and Radicals and (3) assuring conservative government bureaucrats and army officers that a military alliance with the Soviet Union against Germany was in the interests of French patriotism...

...The big employers, confronted by union leaders with evidence of their workers' poverty, were themselves appalled and prepared to make major concessions...

...Understanding of the blind and ruinous role played by these Stalinist agents in Jacobin disguise—an understanding only partially found in Brower's book—is thus crucial if we are to grasp fully the internal collapse of the French Left in the last years of the Third Republic...

...The lens through which he scrutinizes the behavior of the PCF and the misfortunes of the Popular Front is exclusively that of Stalin's foreign policy...

...In the next two weeks tens of thousands more struck, primarily in the north, and largely for economic reasons...

...IF ONE IS PREPARED to accept Brower's implicit presupposition that the PCF had become the master of a largely passive working class, his analysis seems conclusive...

...The PCF's sudden encouragement, in September '36, of political strikes against Blum's nonintervention policy cannot, therefore, be explained purely on the basis of Soviet foreign policy, as Brower attempts to do...

...In May 1936 the Popular Front received a solid majority at the polls, and in June, 2 million workers occupied their employers' property in what amounted to a spontaneous semi-insurrectionary general strike...

...According to Bower, for about a year after January 1933, the General Secretary still hoped to maintain the alliance with Germany...

...In a sense, the party had become the captive of its newly acquired working-class base and was forced to accommodate its Spanish policy to proletarian rage...

...in May, he resigned...

...No doubt, this was im235 BOOKS portant...

...in March, he put in charge of his financial program three of the most conservative men in France...

...236...

...The "Plan" proposed nationalization of cartellized "key industries," such as mining, railroads, and electricity, whose high profits, low level of capital reinvestment, and control over raw materials and services blocked the growth of the national economy...

...it merely joined it...

...As a result, the second, more bitter strike wave broke out in September amid growing disaffection from the middle-class entrepreneurs of the Radical-Socialist party, whose firms could not afford even the initial wage increases...

...Given the French revolutionary tradition in general and the CGT Plan in particular, resolution of middleclass fears through a coherent Left social program— a precondition both for the preservation of the Republic and for a strong stand against Nazism—was a real possibility in 1936, and the responsibility for its miscarriage must rest in large measure on the behavior of Brower's "New Jacobins...

...Even the Girondins had more radical goals than the Stalinists...

...Yet Maurice Thorez, frightened by a revolutionary situation that was undermining his effort to win over the economic and political establishment to a collective security agreement with the Soviet Union, begged the workers to return to work...

...Its advocates won over the non-Communist trade unions (CGT) in 1934, and made some progress in the Socialist party at that time...

...Blum, having established the impossible goal of being the caretaker of French capitalism and having failed in June to impose reforms that would have solidified his popular base and curbed his conservative enemies, was whiplashed for the duration of his year in office between blackmail from high finance, demands from the working class which he could not meet, and the wholesale disaffection of the Radical "petits," who were frightened by wage increases which they were largely allowed to evade...

...Ostensibly having supported the Front Populaire as a front against domestic fascism, the PCF showed its real intentions even before the elections of May 1936, when Thorez offered his "outstretched hand" to virtually everyone in France who was not on Hitler's payroll—in Brower's words: to the member of the [fascist] leagues, to the veteran misled by authoritarian leaders, to every "son of the people...

...The renewal of proletarian militancy and a desperate desire to channel it away from the much more explosive and divisive trend toward class warfare were probably the principal factors in the PCF's decision to switch its position on the Spanish issue so drastically...

...In any case, Communists and Radicals jointly blocked socialist and trade union efforts to include parts of the Plan in the Popular Front program...

...the second, however, is far more complex than it appears in Brower's account...

...But in early September, the Communists quietly buried the French Front and began to agitate in the factories for political strikes against Blum's nonintervention policy on the Spanish Civil War...

...Doriot, of course, paid for his prescience with expulsion from the party the very day after a reluctant Thorez finally accepted Comintern orders to approach the Socialists with a United Front program...

...The Plan would thus have released left-wing regimes from the threat of fiscal sabotage, strengthened the vast sector of small firms by the provision of generous credit facilities, and laid the basis for a significant improvement in proletarian working conditions by increasing productivity in heavy industry...

...For the sake of the international "front" against fascism, he had to be pushed into the fight to defend the Spanish Republic...

...The banks had the power to sabotage 234 BOOKS French governments after World War I because short-term loans held by the banks were an indispensable source of government revenue...

...Thus, in Brower's account, began a series of strikes "whose justification was as much political as economic," and which were spurred on by price rises and layoffs...

...The intellectuals of the Socialist party and the Socialist-oriented labor unions (CGT) had developed, as early as 1934, a plan for reorganization and modernization of the French economy which took full account of the needs of the "little men" of the lower middle class—that mass of shopkeepers, small producers, craftsmen, and clerks which had given Hitler his political base in Germany and which in France was represented primarily by the centrist Radical-Socialist party...

...By September 1, thousands of coal miners and textile workers in northern France, among whom Communists influence was almost nonexistent, were on strike...

...Whether this was a carry-over from the Comintern's third period or an anticipation that Radical-party opposition to the Plan would be an obstacle to the broad coalition the PCF was seeking is difficult to ascertain...

...Brower's analysis of this turn from moderation to militancy reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of his approach...

...This election appeal to the adherents of the Far Right, which must have produced considerable bewilderment in an electorate that had only a year before heard the Communists demand "soviets everywhere," was followed in the summer of 1936 by a formal appeal for a "Front Francais," of the Popular Front with the right-wing parties of the Republic...

...For at several mass meetings in August, Communist speakers had no difficulty in presenting the Spanish issue in strictly patriotic terms: ancient fears of Charles V and the Hapsburg encirclement were evoked to show the menace of a Spanish-German coalition, Franco's supporters were compared to the aristocratic intriguers against the French Revolution, and Joan of Arc and the composer of the Marseillaise eclipsed Marx and Lenin in Stalinist iconography...

...Perhaps both the struggle against fascism and resistance to Germany were factors behind the French Communist campaign...

...In 1929, coinciding with the Russian turn from NEP to collectivization and five-year plans for industry, came the new ultra-left tactic of the Comintern's "third period": class against class...

...There was more at stake in the fate of the Front Populaire than the success or failure of Communist moderation, of the Blum regime, or even of collective security...

...But by 1936, fear of the Far Right had galvanized middle-class moderates and workers alike...

...Within the relatively narrow confines of the first problem, Brower's control of historical evidence enables him to do an excellent job...

...By 1934, however, many on the French Left were beginning to fear that a continuation of Communist intransigeance might lead to the same debacle as had occurred in Germany...

...On the left wing of the SP, Marceau Pivert declared that everything was possible...

...Blum's fiscal policy, predicated on gaining the confidence of his worst enemies, jolted along from defeat to disaster: devaluation during the September strike wave further eroded middle-class Radical support, in February, Leon Blum was compelled by the recalcitrance of French finance to announce a "pause" in all social reforms...

...In late August, conversations between Blum and Hjalmar Schacht, the German Minister of Economics, revealed to the Communists that the Socialist Premier did not have ideological strictures against negotiating with the Germans...

...Were Germany and France to find themselves at daggers' points in Spain, further Franco-German contacts would be im233 BOOKS possible...