T. Cliff

Facts

(Autumn 1964)


From Reviews, International Socialism (1st series), No.18, Autumn 1964, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


Was Stalin Really Necessary?
Alec Nove
Allen & Unwin, 35s.

Industrial Progress in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany 1937-1962
Alfred Zauberman
OUP, 50s.

The Soviet Economy, A Collection of Western and Soviet Views
Ed. H.P. Shaffer
Methuen, 50s.

Communism in Rumania 1944-1962
Ghita Ionescu
OUP, 45s.

Alec Nove’s book is a collection of numerous essays which have been published in different journals. It is a work of great value. A central theme is the problem of the irrationalities inherent in the Stalinist economy, and the efforts made by the Kremlin to overcome them. This excellent study bears a somewhat misleading title as only one essay – and this a very unsatisfactory one – deals with the question posed in the title.

Zauberman’s book is much more a collection of uneven monographs than a unified work. It is most interesting when it deals – wit a lot of factual data to support the analysis – with the interrelation between central planning and the market economy. Shaffer’s book is very disappointing. Many of the excerpts are much too short and mutilated. Too many items are included, so that not enough space is devoted to individual subjects. The only redeeming items are two articles on agriculture by Roy Laird and Alec Nove.

Ionescu is too little interested in ideas and has too little sympathy with or understanding of socialism to be of value in appraising Rumanian ‘communism’. It throws very little new light on the most recent differences between Bucharest and Moscow.

 


M. Turov

Inadequate

(Autumn 1964)


From Reviews, International Socialism (1st series), No.18, Autumn 1964, p.32-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


Witnesses to the Russian Revolution
Ed. Roger Pethybridge
Allen & Unwin, 42s.

Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror
Ed. John Keep
Allen & Unwin, 42s.

The first book uses lantern slides which are of very unequal value. The main witnesses are from the counter-revolutionary side. The popular masses hardly appear on the arena. Rasputin, the charlatan, and his assassination, take up a much greater space than the Revolution itself! The whole work is very disappointing.

The second book illustrates quite clearly the distorting nature of Soviet historiography. ‘It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’ the Queen said to Alice in Wonderland. Such a memory was characteristic of Soviet historians under Stalin, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, under Khruschev. Had this been the theme of the book it would have done its job well. However, historiography should show not only what historians think about the past, but give pointers to the life led at present. This the book fails to do. The work also suffers from far too much repetition.

 


R. Tennant

Slaves

(Autumn 1964)


From Reviews, International Socialism (1st series), No.18, Autumn 1964, p.33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


Capitalism and Slavery
Eric Williams
Deutsch, 30s.

Black Cargoes
D.P. Mannix & M. Cowley
Longmans, 30s.

Williams’ book is a very interesting piece of Marxist research. It is an attempt to place in historical perspective the relation between early capitalism and Negro slavery. It shows how the slave trade provided the necessary capital for the industrial revolution in England and how mature industrial capitalism destroyed the slave system. It is a study in the economic history of England and the West Indies. The book is very useful for understanding the process of ‘primitive capital accumulation’ in rising capitalism, incidentally giving short shrift to ‘Liberals’, Stalinists and fellow-travellers in the ‘Third World’.

Black Cargoes is a very colourful descriptive history of the Atlantic slave trade, 1518-1865. It shows quite clearly that capitalism, not only in its death agony – no only in Auschwitz and Hiroshima – but even at its birth, was brutal and brutalising.


Last updated on 10 April 2010