Farewell to Sartre testifies anew to the immense reserves of mutual respect and comradeship built up over their half a century together and which they now had to draw on to sustain them.
Through the Conversations in the second section of the book, a series of interviews transcribed from tapes, she sought to help Sartre to express himself at a time when blindness had cruelly narrowed his world. The Conversations work best when she abandons stilted interview techniques ('What are your subjective relations to your work as a whole?... Let us talk about the literary and philosophical side of your work...") in favour of real debate. They discuss literature, art, childhood, religion, revolution in no particular order. Sartre is by turns selfmocking. reflective, even mischievous. He returns often to his theme of the need for the 'new intellectual' to become integrated with the life of the masses.
Regrettably, one Conversation about his 'sexual little capers' and his attitude to women strikes a very jarring note. The questions are pointed, challenging to a degree. But the whole exercise turns into one in which they intellectualise together about his sexual experiences and discuss almost clinically some of the young women he has encountered over the years.
Most interesting are Sartre's reflections on the course his life has taken: 'Setting aside this period of wearing away — which I don't grieve over, since it's the common lot - I think l've had a period, from the age of thirty to sixty five, in which I kept a hold on myself and in which I was not very different at the beginning from what I became. A period in which there was indeed a continuity during which I used my freedom properly to do what I intended; in which I was able to be of use and to help spread certain ideas; and in which I did what | wanted -- that is, I wrote, which has been the essence of my life...
With his death came the separation, the desolation for de Beauvoir that she had iong dreaded. Yet the strongest images of Sartre she leaves us with are not of suffering and pain but of an unquenchable spirit who never ceas. ed calling himself into question. Her book is in itself an act of courage, of striving, of questioning. Indeed a fitting farewell. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, a farewell to Sortre, Penguin £4.95.
International, No. 2. January/february 1986
greeted the selection of New Zealander Keri wounding Joe, who reacts with an almost fatal managed when you read the author's details on care and the father to jail ... the book begins to the dustcover. Published by a women's press for some kind of conclusion to collective the book may be, but Keri Hulme tragedy it has unleashed. The author rejects you discover 'has been the recipient of many one escape root - for Joe at least - who literary grants and awards' while the Bone makes a return into his national past where a People itself won the 1984 New Zealand Book dying old man offers him the task of watching Award for Fiction and the Mobil Pegasus over a forgotten Maori religious site for the Far from raising a struggling unknown from to the present. However it soon becomes obscurity, the Booker Prize panel has simply apparent that his return is essential in order The Bone People itself however shows the scenes in the book is when Simon gets a hook identity, exposing as it does the chronic crisis in removes the hook, Keri is paralysed and unable : Stalinism in Europe THE QUESTION of Stalinism is central to an Anyone new to the socialist movement will understanding of twentieth century history, benefit from his lucid account, which mainly and to analysing the reasons for the survival of sticks to Trotskyist orthodoxy. Spriano, the the capitalist world system well beyond the central historian of the Italian Communist Par point where it had become rotten ripe for ty, is a different kettle of fish. While much of socialist revolution. Here are two books which what he says is a searing critique of the history will greatly aid the socialist movement in com. of the Stalinist movement, in a couple of his ing to terms with this problem. Hallas's book is central judgements he tends to justify the orien. a no nonsense primer on the history of the tation which the Communist Parties eventually strangulation by Stalinism. Spriano's book is a Spriano's skills in marshalling a mass of detail precipitates the crisis of the book by murdering pean Communist movement between the Particularly striking are, for example, his ac-
Cosmic Pain
COLIN MEADE
THE SURPRISE with which the literary world the child molester Biny
Hulme's The Bone People as winner of the assault on the boy.
Booker Prize for 1985 looks distinctly stage-
Award for Maori literature. decided to set a British seal of approval on a that product of a developing New Zealand cultural establishment also manifested on the TV in the form of the serial 'Heart of the High Country' and underlined politically by the independen: anti-nuclear policies ot New Zealands's Labour government under David Lange. limits of the formation of a stable New Zealand stuck in his thumb while fishing. human relations which has arisen from the to help in the operation. multiple social dislocations involved in the colonial settler experience.
The book has three central characters woman, man, child - who, despite their formal resemblance to a basic nuclear family unit, are neither blood related nor legally tied to one another. The style of the book three streams of consciousness, one for each of the three main characters - emphasises their separation from each other and from everyone else.
The woman very nealy almost the author herself is a dried up artist of mixed race descent who emotionally identifies with the 124% Maori blood in her veins. She lives alone in a tower and is estranged from her family for some unexplained reason. She defines her natural self as being a 'loner on the fringes'
Her relative equilibrium is upset one day by the appearance of Simon Gillayley, followed by his adoptive father Joe. Joe is a working class Maori whose much loved wife and first child are dead and who is also at odds with his elaborate family network. He has adopted Simon, racially a pure Aryan who was washed up on shore after a shipwreck. Simon is deaf and dumb for psychological reasons, gets bullied at school. and has a reputation in the locality for being a naughty child.
All three characters erupt at intervals from their respective solitudes through outbursts of violence usually accompanied by heavy drinking (including by the child). Joe beats Simon; Keri at one stage employs her japanese martial arts training on Joe and Simon International, No. 2. January/February 1980
Daniels, and then As the three are torn apart - the child into the rest of his life. Joe rejects this offer and returns another pseudo-solution should be activated . this time by the Power of Love The stage has been set for this through the presentation of the theme of pain. Pain is revealed as the source of the violence, in the sense that violence is a rejection of the burdens which healing the pains of others puts on the characters. One of the most powerful While Joe Specific pain, however, is constantly blurring into abstract, cosmic pain. Thus at one stage the killing of mice stimulates Kerwin to the thought 'You're a morbid subhuman bastard Holmes... where were you when they built Treblinka and Dachau?' One the one hand cosmic pain justifies withdrawal from human relationships and to some extent the violence. On the other if pain is the result of love then cosmic pain is the result of cosmic love; and so a superhuman force of love is unleashed, able to sweep over all the obstacles of class, culture, Keri Hulme The and history as well as the effects of the Stoughton £9.95. PHIL HEARSE Communist International which charts its rise as adopted a revolutionary movement and its eventual more detailed and reflective account of the which damns relationship between the Kremlin and the Euro.
Michael Short Keri Hulme brutalisation that joe has inflicted on Simon and to provide a happy ending in which not only the three main characters but also their families are reconciled.
This ending flatly denies the reality of the body of the book! The world becomes separated into the realm of cosmic forces and that of history, and each can only dream the other (there are a lot of dreams in the book).
And perhaps this reveals one of the reasons why Booker Prize judges were attracted by 'The Bone People'. If historical problems can only be resolved in dreams then novels - - the artefacts from which they make their living -become the privileged site not only of the exposition of real conflicts but also of their resolution.
Bone People Spiral/-odder & 1930s and the death of Stalin in 1953
With Hallas's book we have few arguments.
First, though, it is worth paying tribute to
the course adopted by the Stalinist parties and by the Soviet government
count of the French Popular Front of the 1930s and the gyrations of the Stalinists over the second world war. On France Spriano, covering much of the same material as EH Carr's Twilight of the Comintern, shows that the French CP under Thorez went far to the right of the Bium's Socialists in demanding the inclusion of bourgeois forces in the Popular Front, and in forcing the adoption of most right-wing social chauvinist slogans. All. this shocked left wing militants in the Socialist Party. No one should think that the right wing antics of Marxism Today are anything new: the spectacle of 'communists denouncing socialist militants from the right is a tradition which goes back to the Popular Fronts of the i930s.
Particularly gripping is Spriano's account of the policy adopted by Stalin and imposed on the Comintern during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. To prove his sincerity, Stalin handed 500 German Communist exiles over to the Gestapo. When France was invaded by Germany, the French CP was instructed not to raise any slogans against the German occupation. In 1940 the walls of Paris were covered by CP slogans such as 'The rich must pay!' and "Long live Stalin!' - but not a word about the minor fact that the country was occupied by the Nazis or that thousands of working class militants were languishing in jail, with all democratic rights and liberties suppressed.
All this turned into its opposite when the Soviet Union was invaded. Communist propaganda was then turned towards the most grotesque flattery of the 'democratic' capitalist powers. the virtues of Churchill, Catholicism, Christian Democracy and so on ad nauseam. Not surprisingly, socialist militants of the PSI, in the Italian underground, regarded all this as disgusting. Again, the bizarre spectacie of social democratic militants denouncing 'com. munists' from the left.
Spriano in my view makes a couple of errors of judgement which despite all the damning detail, tend to justify Stalinist policy. Significantly they are on questions where he takes issue with Trotsky and Trotskyism and indeed these points will be very familiar to those who have followed these historical debates.
First, while paying tribute to Trotsky's analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany. Spriano argues that Trotsky was wrong on Spain and France in the mid-1930s, and grossly overestimated the possibility of any revolutionary working class victory in these countries. The real choice for the working class, says Spriano, was not fascism or socialism, but fascism or democracy (p125). Certainly this line of argumentation cannot be sustained in relation to Spain where there was indeed a revolu tion following the Francoist coup in 1936.
In the case of France, while nobody can be certain that the 1936 occupation of the fac tories could have resulted in the conquest of working class power, it is certain that the Popular Front, just like the CP in May 1968, demobilised the movement and prevented its maximum development.
Aris Velouchiotis, leader of ELAS the Greek partisan army, denounced by the Greek CP for 'adventurism'.
The point is this: if the real choice facing the working class was democracy or fascism, and there was no hope of any revolutionary breakthrough, then why be so hard on the Popular Front? All you can say is that it did have dreadful rightist, class-collaborationist excesses, but it was right on the central question - that socialist revolution was off the agenda.
Spriano judges it to be 'an old Trotskyist myth' that there was any revolutionary poten tial in the situation in post second world war Europe. That may be so. But is is not a myth that Italy was liberated by the Communist-led Garibaldi brigades; that Mussolini's government was brought down by mass strikes and an uprising; that Paris was liberated by Communist-led resistance brigades before the allies got there:. overthrow of the Third Reich factory commit tees were spontaneously formed all over Ger many; and that in the end the Communist Parties ordered the armed masses to disband, to turn in their guns, and to accept the bourgeois order. Was there no revolutionary potential in this situation?
Again, one canot prove that the conquest of power by the working class in one or several European countries was possible, but one can prove without a shdow of a doubt that the Stalinist line of restoring bourgeois order and legality prevented any such struggle for power.
If Spriano is right and there was no possibility whatever of fighting for socialist revolution, then the disarming of the masses at the behest of the CP leaders can be justified: what ultraleftism to retain armed bands in a non-revolutionary situation!
These points are not mere quibbles, because they go to the heart of post-war or liticia developments. The restoration world capitalism after world war two and the long economic boom which temporarily stablised the capitalist system in the 1950s and 1960s, was only possible because of the crushing defeats which the working class suffered between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the defeat of the post-war revolutionary wave between 1945-9.
This raises the question that we posed at the beginning of this review: the relationship between Stalinism and the survival of capitalism and the imperialist world order. It is often argued in left wing circles that the European working class does not have a revolutionary history, compared with the masses of the 'third world' and the 'East'. This kind of argument is a travesty, even when peddled by the would-be Trotskyists of Socialist Action.
Time and again sections of the European working class movement have taken the road towards socialist revolution, only to be defeated or crushed through the perfidy of their leaderships; and in all the central turning points of 20th century working class history the role of Stalinism has been key - from the role of the KPD in allowing the Nazis to come to power in Germany, to the defeat of the Spanish revolution, to the post-war stablisation in Europe.
As Duncan Hallas explains, the Communist International had hundreds of thousands of sup porters in Europe during its revolutionry phase in the 1920s. There was a revolutionary mass alternative leadership for the working class. The breaking of that continuity, the result of the Stalinisation of the Comintern, is the fun. damental explanation of the temporary stablisation of the bourgeois order in Western Europe in the 'fifties and 'sixties. It is in this sense that one can speak of a 'long detour' in the world revolutionary process.
The central task for Marxists today is to re link the new generations of working class militants with the traditions of the revolu tionary Communist International, a tradition which was only preserved through the long period of bitter defeats by Trotsky and the Fourth International. Two prerequisites for this are a serious study of the political lessons of the Comintern and an unshakeable conviction of the revolutionary potential of the working class, in Europe as much as anywhere else Both these books provide much material for the first prerequisite, and ample evidence of Paolo Spriono Stalin and the European Communists Verso £16.95 Duncan Hallas The Comintern Bookmarks £3.75.
International, No. 2. January/February 1986
Fortnightly review of news and analysis published under the auspices of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, in conjunction with the French language,
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