Marxist Moments

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%.