Two great but now unjustly
unknown socialist classics:
Out of the
Night by
Jan Valtin
(Richard Krebs 1904-1951)
New York 1941; republished
by Fortress Books, London 1988
Krebs was
a German Spartacist activist from the age of 14 in the period 1918-23, after
which – a sailor – he became a courier and then agent for the Comintern. His
adventures are hair-raising and page-turning. He was assigned the perilous
mission of mobilising the merchant marines of Western countries for strike
actions in the 1920s and 30s. His career included a three-year spell in San
Quentin penitentiary before he tangled with the much nastier Gestapo back in
Germany. Krebs was sent to a Nazi
concentration camp but evaded execution by posing as a double-agent for the
Gestapo while reporting back to the Comintern. Before long both sides where
hunting him down. Krebs escaped to America where he wrote this book in
seclusion. It sold a million copies. To gain US citizenship as an alternative
to deportation and certain death, Krebs joined the US Army and was decorated
for bravery in the Pacific war. He died – in his bed - but of a tragic illness
at the age of 45.
Valtin
may have given up on the Comintern (out of necessity, one might say) but he
never renounced his belief in fighting for the cause of the poor and the
oppressed. In the wider sense he remained a socialist to the end. Out of
the Night (as is the subject of my next review) was badly timed. By the end
of 1941 the United States had joined Stalin’s Russia in a war against the Nazis.
In view of Krebs’ remarks about the Comintern leaders (as well as his
description of its day-to-day running) it would have been impolitic to bring
out further printings, out of deference to the new alliance. It is otherwise
difficult to explain how a book that had already sold a million copies would
not go into more editions and was – quite the contrary - allowed to lapse into
obscurity. In fact Stalin abolished the Comintern in 1943 in his campaign to
get the West to open a Second Front against Hitler’s armies and so draw off Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe forces from the Soviet invasion.
Unputdownable.
Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis
Corey
New York
1934 – available on www.marxist.org/archive/corey
Don’t let
the ‘1934’ put you off; this is a magisterial Marxist account of the history of
US and world capitalism and what it was undergoing in the depths of the Great
Depression of the 1930s, with voluminous
statistics. By a founder-member of the US Communist Party who by the late 1940s
had distanced himself from Marxism in his attempt to save his American
citizenship in these McCarthyite years. (Born of Italian immigrant parents, his
real name was Louis C Fraina, 1892-1953.)
The book
would have been widely seen as an anachronism in the ‘golden age’ of capitalism
from 1945 to about the mid-1970s but its rigorous Marxian analysis comes into
its own and especially since the post-2008 crisis of neoliberalism. Corey shows
why ‘recovery’ eludes a capitalism in decline, but he had not reckoned on the
possibility of a Second World War that effectively delivered America from
Depression. It’s possible he might have foreseen war as early as 1934 but may
have believed revolution might come before anything like that. Marshal Foch had
called the 1918 Armistice one that would last only twenty years; a pity Corey
did not relate to the old marshal’s pessimism. As a typical Communist of his
time Corey extolled Stalin’s Five-Year Plan as the coming of true socialism to
Russia; I doubt if Marx would have made that mistake – one has to disregard
Corey’s remarks on Soviet Russia as the one really dated element in the book.
In 1940, however, Corey renounced Stalin for his atrocities and left the Party.
His
attack on Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration as ‘state capitalism’
was badly timed: NRA was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court only a
year after his magnum opus was
published. Ironically it was too ‘state capitalist’, it seems, for the US
ruling class also.
These
blemishes, however, are outweighed by one of the best works of applied Marxist
analysis ever written. The Left for whom Jeremy Corbyn is the last word in Left
politics would do well to revaluate it in the light of what is going on today:
a real class-war being fought by the 1% against the 99%.
