Time the Kissin stopped

We have received for review a copy of a pamphlet issued under the imprimatur of the Fabian Society (that ancient and useless think-tank of the Labour Party) by S. F. Kissin entitled: Communists. All Revisionists Now? The blurb tells us that the author was born in German Danzig (now Polish Gdansk), became a dissident Communist (no explanation of what kind of an animal that might be) when Hitler took power and worked in the anti-Nazi underground before getting to England in ’39 where he served in the army. After the war he became a radio journalist and worked for many years for the BBC. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabians in ’48 and 20 years later left the former because of revulsion over Wilson’s racialist immigration policy.

The pamphlet is concerned with what the author sees as a change in outlook and strategy by the Russian-led Communist parties and in particular with the Communists’ change of mind regarding the imminent collapse of capitalism which was part of their staple diet in the inter-war period and indeed held sway until quite recently. It seems that Communist conferences and intellectual outpourings (including an 800 page volume on the subject by an East German Professor. Can you imagine the stupefying boredom of trying to read that lot? Even the present pamphlet, written in readable prose, would be enough to bore the pants of most readers— not excluding the present writer—but 800 pages of such stuff . . .) have tried to accommodate their former prognostications with the rather unfortunate fact that the dying system of capitalism is clearly no more likely to collapse and disappear now than it ever was. Of course our author seems blissfully unaware (he is a regular reader of the SOCIALIST STANDARD but no doubt knows nothing of our pre-war pamphlets) that there was one party which not only did not subscribe to the fashionable notion that because capitalism was beset by slumps and crises it must soon collapse leaving the field clear for Socialism to take over, but actually went out of its way to issue a pamphlet called Why Capitalism will not Collapse as a counter to this spurious nonsense. Kissin may perhaps be induced by this to wonder why the Socialist Party of Great Britain should be so many decades ahead of the field in this regard. Possibly the beloved Fabians issued a similar pamphlet in those distant days? If so, I for one never heard of it.

The salient fact is that, quite irrespective of the need the author felt for portraying the latest twists and turns of communist theory, the thing that matters is that neither Communists nor Fabians (and, needless to say, Labourites) show the slightest sign of clarity of thought on what capitalism and Socialism are all about. The author himself is clearly as hopelessly confused and woolly in his thinking as the Communists he is at pains to expose. How can it be possible for his pamphlet, despite all the research and labour he has put into it, to give a reader an insight into the real nature of class society when the author himself on numerous occasions compares the capitalist countries of the west with the so-called Communist countries as though he accepts, and wants the reader to accept, that the latter are something other than capitalist? It is true that at other points in the pamphlet he quotes various sources as suggesting that Russia and the rest may after all be only state capitalist and not socialist at all. But all this can achieve is to make confusion worse confounded. It just is not possible to present a clear picture to the reader when the author himself is clearly quite clueless on the basic premise, namely the real differences between capitalism and Socialism. Once you know this, you can’t flounder along as he does. And if you don’t (and he clearly doesn’t) you can only puzzle an unclear reader still more.

Another example of this sort of thing is the constant use of the cliché “Marxist-Leninist”, sometimes as a quote from Communist sources and others apparently off his own bat. What is a reader supposed to derive from this? That Lenin and Marx both stood for the same thing: But that lie is of course just a Communist trick to enable their vicious travesty of Socialism to be clothed with the mantle of Marx and Kissin’s repeated use of it is merely perpetuating a lie. Marx stated clearly enough that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. Lenin said the exact opposite in his notorious work What Is To Be Done?. And when he seized power he put his ideas and not Marx’s into practice. The Russian workers were to be led by an elite for they themselves were not capable of understanding what Socialism was and how to achieve it. And the upshot, as we all know, has been that they have had this elite fastened round their necks and have had to endure an even more vicious form of capitalism than that of their brother workers in the West ever since. But you won’t get this truth from the Communists and you won’t get it from the Fabians either. Kissin has spent his life in the field of working class politics. If only he had spent a few moments of it arriving at what Marx meant by Socialism . . .

One can readily accept that the Communist parties have at last come to the conclusion that capitalism won’t collapse and that Lenin’s ideas on that subject were just high-powered wishful thinking. It is also interesting to have Kissin quoting Communists as being satisfied that it might even be possible to achieve Socialism without bloody violence. It would be too much for us to expect him to mention that this has always been the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s standpoint (for which of course they were always viciously attacked by the Communists in the past). But then why should he pay a tribute to the only Socialist Party on this issue? After all, he v/ould no doubt say, the Labour Party too has usually abhorred violence. But then the Labour party has never advocated Socialism. Well, as we have seen, Kissin, never defining Socialism and never betraying any understanding of the difference between Socialism and capitalism, would not be in a position to understand that Labour was always simply a party that wanted to manage a reformed capitalism. Just like the Tories, in fact. The only difference being that the Tories haven’t got the impudence to call their system Socialism. Come to that, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Labour is trying to drop the pretence of being socialist, too. The term is hardly even mentioned in their manifestos these days. Can it be that the party that has prostituted the name of Socialism is becoming an honest whore in its old age? A likely story! The real reason is that Socialism is not very good for catching the floating vote which the power-seekers need to get their hands on the pork barrel at Westminster. But Kissin still thinks he is a socialist even though his party in 1964 (before it had a chance to prove its racialism) made it quite clear in its manifesto that Socialism was the last thing they wanted to plug. There is no sight more saddening than an intellectual burying his brainy head as deeply into the sand as possible.

One could go on (and on) showing up fallacies, those of the author equally with those of the Communists he is deriding but one aspect must be mentioned in conclusion, if only for laughs. The Communists, it seems, have decided that Lenin was wrong in his ideas about the last phase of capitalism before it went up in smoke. It has been saved, for the nonce, by something called SMC (it sounds like a new anti-biotic but it really stands for State Monopoly Capitalism). This new medicine which is acting as the elixir of life for the should-be-dead capitalism, is simply a dirty trick on the part of the capitalists. They have borrowed from Socialism ! In other words, the capitalists have had the cheek to nationalise industries and generally to have the State interfering in things. But this is precisely what the Communists and the Kissins have always wanted. State interference and State Monopoly were the stuff of socialism. Stuff. And nonsense too, of course. When the capitalists really adopt Socialism we shall know the age of miracles is here. Meanwhile pity the poor Fabians.
L. E. WEIDBERG