Taking Marx to the market The radicals of the Sixties and Seventies haven't disappeared at all. They've gone into government Nick Cohen Saturday August 31 2002 The Guardian
In the 1930s, Great Uncle Gabriel did something remarkably stupid, even by the standards of my family: he emigrated to the Soviet Union. His parents had fled Tsarist pogroms a generation before. (Like many Jews who found asylum in the North at the turn of the twentieth century, they may have been conned into parting with the fare to New York only to be abandoned in that helluva town, Hull.) Gabriel and my grandfather, Jack, revolted. They abandoned Judaism and converted to Bolshevism. Gabriel embraced the new religion with such passion he decided to retrace his parents' journey from their point of arrival. He and his wife swapped the slums of Manchester for the paradise of Stalin's Moscow.
My parents raised me on a diet of Solzhenitsyn and dissent which left me with an ineradicable unwillingness to join political parties, or, indeed, any other club which required me to obey its rules. But despite knowing Soviet history, I treated Gabriel as a mock-heroic figure. I've told his story many times as a kind of joke. The falsely deprecating 'remarkably stupid even by the standards of my family' line is always in, as are reflections on the ingratitude of a son who went back to the Russian hell hole his parents had gone to considerable trouble to free him from. I'd end by saying, 'And he lived through it all. He was a foreigner and a Jew to boot. But he survived the show trials of saboteurs in league with foreign spies, the purges of "cosmopolitans" and the starving of millions. He died in his bed, and was buried near the Kremlin. Perhaps in the Kremlin Wall itself.' I was proud of him in a way.
It was only a few years ago that I wondered what Great Uncle Gaby had done to ensure his peaceful death. How many innocent people did he have to denounce to save his skin? How many fatal smears was he obliged to spread? I hoped there were none, while knowing that the odds were against him dying with a clear conscience.
I have close communist friends - communists without a communist party. Everyone calls them 'old Stalinists'. By this we don't mean they're apologists for mass murder, these are our friends, after all, but that they are level-headed men who are good to have around, particularly if trade unionists need advice. If they have a fondness for discipline and orders, then it is a funny quirk.
To me, much about Stalin's Soviet Union was surreal because it was anarchic. Purgers were purged; torturers tortured. All that was constant was Stalin's use of terror to maintain his power. You could faithfully parrot what Stalin was saying, only to find your words used in evidence against you when the line was reversed and history rewritten. 'The past changes so often, you never know what's going to happen yesterday.' And despite the deaths of tens of millions, the crack still has the ironic power to sum up an era. If you're not laughing, try the story, told by Robert Conquest in his Reflections on a Ravaged Century, of A.N. Larionov, first secretary of the Ryazan province. He promised Moscow he would double meat production in a year. He did so by slaughtering all the cows and breeding-bulls. The planners didn't ask how he had come by a meat mountain; all that mattered was that he'd met the target and deserved the Order of Lenin and elevation to the rank of Hero of Socialist Labour. Eventually, someone told Moscow there wasn't a moo to be heard for hundreds of miles. Larionov was exposed and committed suicide. His fate is an absurd tale of waste and the fear of the consequences of spoiling the lie of the glories of the Soviet Union. It is also grimly enjoyable. Or at least I find it so, and must admit that Martin Amis must have people like me in mind when he accuses left-wingers of shrugging off the deaths of 20 million with an unthinking guffaw or knowing smile.
There are two or three literary hacks in London who make a good living by tearing into Amis with venomous regularity. It's the only song they know. I've no wish to join them, but Amis has guaranteed huge amounts of gossipy advance publicity and a critical mauling for building his anti-socialism in one family. In his Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, he tackles Stalin's crime by denouncing his father, Kingsley, for being a communist in his youth, and his friends Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton for being Trotskyists in theirs. For all the justice of many of his accusations, the result is occasionally as dreadful as his title suggests. Amis dumps his wit and range for a plodding parochialism. The nadir is hit when we are told about his baby crying one night. '"The sounds she was making," I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked."' (Poor diddums, and I don't mean the child.)
The obvious line of attack after you've waded through Amis's account of the state of Hitchens's desk at the New Statesman circa 1977, and what Fenton said at a lunch at about the same time, is that he doesn't know what he is talking about. Trotskyists, of all people, faced up to Stalin's murders as Stalin devoted much of his life to murdering Trotskyists. Amis doesn't seem to have heard that Hitchens is loathed by the tryanno-tolerant Left for his dissections of their evasions. (For telling truth to the powerless, if you like.) He adds weight to the charge of ignorance by rashly boasting about the books he hasn't read. Nevertheless he isn't as crass as some of his critics are maintaining. Rather, he accurately sees that the 1960s Left used Trotsky to enjoy the thrill of being revolutionaries without accepting responsibility for the revolution's crimes, which could be conveniently blamed on Stalin. If Lenin had lived or Trotsky had taken over, there would have been fewer graves but the terror and tyranny they practised in power would have continued.
The ignorance is deeper and lies in his account of the laughing voices which provoked his polemic. They came from a leftish audience he heard greet the phrase 'old comrade' with an affectionate murmur of amusement. 'What kind of laughter is it?' he asks. 'It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.'
That's it. Stalinism happened because of idealism. Today's anti-capitalist movement, which he accuses of being the heirs of Sixties Marxism and, slanderously, the Baader-Meinhof gang, is motivated by the same potentially genocidal desire for perfection. What is grimly funny about Amis's condemnation of laughter is that he doesn't appear to know that it is not only Utopianism which makes revolutionaries and reformers but a revulsion against the injustice of their world. He can't allow himself to know because knowledge would force him to examine the injustices which provoked yesterday's Bolshevism and today's protesters; force him to admit that there may be practical reasons for opposition, which aren't always millennial dreaming.
He also doesn't know that many of the Marxists of his radical youth aren't in the anti-capitalist movement but in government. As Peter Oborne pointed out in these pages last week, Blair is surrounded by former Trotskyists and communists. What I and many others from the democratic Left find intolerable about them is their tone of voice. They have replaced faith in global revolution with faith in global capitalism but retained the adoration of the great leader and the Marxisant bark that resistance to the party line is pointless. An old editor got them right when he emerged stunned from an encounter with Blair's friends just before they came to power and cried: 'These people used to go to Moscow and say, "I've seen the future - And It Works!" Now they go to Singapore and cry, "I've seen the future - And Gosh!"'
In our times, the 'old, old idea about the perfect society' isn't found in Marxist-Leninism, but in market theory. It's not as brutal as communism, although if you want to count the corpses of those who die from preventable diseases you can get into millions in no time. As with communism, no amount of contradictory evidence can shake the religion of the pious. In a twisted sense, Blair, Brown, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation are so lost in the failed dogmas of privatisation and inequality they are ridiculous. A small act of resistance is to laugh at them, even though they're not all that funny.