Paul Mattick 1939
Source: Living Marxism, Volume 4 Number 6, April 1939, p. 192;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
Angelica Balabanoff's memoirs will be of great interest to readers of Living Marxism, not primarily because of the author's interesting life history, or her characterization of a number of famous labor leaders, or her critical attitude towards the Third International, or her rather uninteresting denouncement of despicable figures like Mussolini and Zinoview, but because the book as a whole illustrates well the general insufficiency and the pseudo-proletarian character of the old labor movement. This movement in all its shadings and with all its leaders, Balabanoff not excluded, was thoroughly invested with bourgeois ideologies and far away from real proletarian aspirations and necessities. This comes just as clearly to light in the author's position on various issues, as in the tendencies and policies of the old labor movement from which she deducts the reasons for the present impasse in the labor movement. Although Balabanoff never understood the movement in which she participated, her own naiveté does not prevent the reader, who has freed himself from the ideological sway of the old labor movement, to understand why the pre-war labor movement could end only in Fascism or Bolshevism or in nothing. This movement was neither capitaIistic nor socialistic, and yet it was both; it was an impossibility. It could not act unless it was willing to restrict itself to a compromise solution, to accept some sort of an organized capitalism. And so it did.
However, the results did not please Balabanoff, and in despair she looks for refuge in an ideological return to the past. She hopes for better human material in leadership, she is still able to see the good as well as the bad sides in Lenin, she is still able to appreciate the socialist housing program in Vienna, and she is still ready to sum up today's situation with a few cheerful phrases. These phrases allow her to continue to believe in a new social order. She is not able to conceive of methods and struggles for workers, in contradistinction to those proved as false, which will bring about the new society. However, Balabanoff writes, more than she is aware of herself. She helps by way of a few small illustrations as to the tactics and attitudes of the bolshevik regime to destroy the legends connected with this movement. Her book supports a growing critical attitude towards the teachings and the practice of the old labor movement and in this way helps to develop today a class consciousness which can be called proletarian.