L. B. Moskvin's The Working Class and Its Allies is a book about who the workers may march with, and on whose authority. Its subject is the oldest strategic question in Marxism — the doctrine of class alliances — and its answer is the official Soviet one of its moment: the working class is the "leading force" of every progressive coalition, the peasantry and the "non-proletarian strata" are its allies, and the whole alliance is held together by a party that speaks in the working class's name. The book states that doctrine with unusual clarity, documents it with a mass of contemporary fact, and never once turns it on the state that commissioned it. That refusal is the most revealing thing about it.
Date the text before reading it. The spine says 1980, and for once the spine is close to the truth: this is a genuinely contemporary book, not a reprint in a new jacket. Its latest events are the French National Assembly elections of March 1978, the West German Communists' Mannheim congress of October 1978, and the American farmers' tractor march on Washington in February 1979. Its lodestar is the Conference of the Communist and Workers' Parties of Europe held in East Berlin in June 1976, which it quotes repeatedly, and the 25th Congress of the CPSU of the same year. The author, described on the jacket as a "Soviet historian and expert on international affairs," writes from inside the Academy of Sciences' study of the international working-class movement, and he writes to a brief. The years around 1979 were the crisis of Eurocommunism: the Italian, Spanish and French parties were loudly asserting their independence from Moscow, their acceptance of parliamentary roads and civil liberties, their distance from the Soviet model. Moskvin's book is the CPSU's answer — a theoretical reassertion that whatever national roads the Western parties take, the leading role of the working class (and, as we shall see, of the party that embodies it) is not negotiable. It is a Eurocommunist-era book written to keep Eurocommunism inside doctrinal bounds.
Give the book its due first, because the doctrine is a real one and Moskvin sets it out accurately. The core proposition is that the proletariat cannot emancipate itself alone: it is a minority even in developed countries, and it triumphs only by leading the "scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population." He quotes Lenin to exactly this effect — only the proletariat is in a "position to unite and lead the scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population" — and the citation is genuine, from the First Congress of the Communist International. Around this he builds the classical apparatus: the alliance with the peasantry (Lenin's smychka), in which the proletariat wins the poor peasant, must "neutralise" the middle peasant and "wrest it from the bourgeoisie," and isolates the rich; the winning-over of the urban petty bourgeoisie and the "new middle sections" — engineers, technicians, office workers — thrown up by the scientific-technological revolution; and, in the West, the strategy of "anti-monopoly democracy," a transitional "left bloc" stage between capitalism and socialism.
This is not invented doctrine, and much of the historical narrative is sound. Moskvin's account of the Paris Commune's failure to hold the peasantry, of Lenin's break with the Mensheviks over the leadership of the 1905 revolution, of the Comintern's turn from "class against class" sectarianism to the united front and then the Popular Front at its Seventh Congress in 1935 — all of this is competent, and where he quotes Lenin on the agrarian question he quotes him correctly and to the point: the proletariat "acts in a really socialist manner only when it comes out and acts as the vanguard of all the working and exploited people." A reader who wants to know what the Soviet theory of alliances was, in its own considered words, will find it here, clearly labelled.
The doctrine has a hinge, and Moskvin turns it without appearing to notice. Everywhere in the book the leading role of the working class is quietly restated as the leading role of the party. The move is made most nakedly in a passage Moskvin quotes with approval — Brezhnev, speaking in Belgrade in 1976, naming among the vital matters on which the two states agree "the leading role of the Communist Party (as the vanguard of the working class and all working people)." The parenthesis does all the work. The party leads as the vanguard of the class; therefore the party's leadership simply is the class's leadership; therefore whatever the party does, the working class has done. Elsewhere the same identity is asserted in the author's own voice: the socialist state was "set up by the Soviet people under the guidance of the working class and its vanguard: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." The class acts only through the party, and the party needs no further mandate from the class.
This is the ancient danger the anti-Stalinist tradition named early and precisely. In 1904 the young Trotsky, in Our Political Tasks, warned that in Lenin's method of organisation the party could come to stand in for the class, the Central Committee for the party, and finally a single man for the Central Committee. He was wrong about Lenin's intentions and right about the machine: substitutionism, the replacement of the self-activity of a class by the activity of an apparatus claiming to represent it, is the exact disease of the doctrine Moskvin expounds. And it produces, in his book, a startling asymmetry that no attentive reader can miss.
When Moskvin writes about the working class in the capitalist West, its life is independent self-organisation. He fills chapter after chapter with strikes — the 110-day American miners' strike of 1978, the three-year Fine Tube dispute in Plymouth, the general strikes that put eighteen million Italians into the streets, the occupation of the LIP factory. He celebrates the ten million organised workers of the British Trades Union Congress compelling politicians to reckon with them. He even records, with evident approval, that "so-called 'wildcat' strikes, staged spontaneously without trade union sanction, are becoming more and more common in some countries." Spontaneity, self-organisation, unions independent of the state and sometimes of their own officials — in the West these are the very proof that the working class is the leading force.
Turn to the socialist states, a hundred pages of the same book, and every one of those things vanishes. There are no strikes in the GDR, no wildcat stoppages in Bulgaria, no independent unions in Poland — not because they did not occur but because in Moskvin's frame they cannot be conceived. The working class's "leading role" in the socialist countries is measured instead in seats and posts: so many worker-deputies in the Volkskammer, "90 out of the 460 deputies in the Seym of the Polish People's Republic," "every fourth citizen of the GDR who has the right to vote holds an elective post" in the party, the unions, the youth league, the National Front. "The working class plays the leading role in society and the state," he writes of the GDR — and then defines that leading role entirely as participation in structures the party controls. The independent activity that is the badge of working-class vitality in Manchester is, in Leipzig, simply not part of the picture. The alliance in the East is managed from above, and the one thing forbidden to its leading class is precisely the thing praised in the West: to organise itself, strike, and speak in its own voice against those set over it.
Moskvin did not have to wait long for this to be tested, and the test came in the country whose worker-deputies he had counted. The Working Class and Its Allies went to press in 1980. In August of that year, at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Polish workers — the leading class of a socialist state, by the book's own doctrine — struck, occupied their yards, and on 31 August forced the government to concede the right to form trade unions independent of the party. Within a year Solidarność had close to ten million members, more than the British TUC that Moskvin admired, and it asserted inside a "workers' state" exactly the independence he had reserved for workers under capitalism. The regime's reply, in December 1981, was to declare martial law and intern the union's leaders: the leading class placed under curfew by the party that claimed to embody it. No critic could have devised a sharper refutation than the event supplied on its own. The book's central silence — that the socialist working class might want, and be denied, the self-organisation the book grants the Western one — became, within eighteen months of publication, the largest political fact in Eastern Europe.
The silence around Poland was not an oversight; it was the operating principle, and it has a history the book actively falsifies. Twice Moskvin narrates the moment when the "alliance from above" turned its weapons on workers' independent organisation, and both times he narrates it from the side of the guns.
The first is Czechoslovakia. Moskvin gives a warm account of the Communist assumption of power in February 1948, and then, of 1968, writes only this, quoting Gustáv Husák: "In the summer of 1968, the danger of counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia became so great that it began to threaten the existence of the socialist order," a danger that "could be prevented only by the fraternal international assistance rendered by the Soviet Union and our other allies to the working class and working people of Czechoslovakia." The Prague Spring — a reform movement with deep support in the Czechoslovak working class, culminating after the invasion in workers' resolutions and a clandestine party congress held in a factory — becomes "counter-revolution," and the tanks of five Warsaw Pact armies become "fraternal international assistance" rendered to the workers whose country they occupied. That is not a gap in the record; it is the record inverted.
The second is Spain, and here the method is the more damning for being quiet. Moskvin holds up the Spanish Popular Front of 1936 as a model of the alliance policy, and quotes the Communist leader José Díaz reassuring the small proprietors that "the Anarchists, Socialists and Communists are not persecuting them, and that we all consider them our allies." Not a word follows about May 1937 in Barcelona, when the Communists, having grown strong on Soviet arms, moved against their anarchist and POUM allies, suppressed the party of Andreu Nin, and had Nin himself murdered. The anarchists and the POUM enter Moskvin's book only as friends being reassured; they leave it, unmentioned, as the alliance's victims. A doctrine of alliances that cannot say what happened to these particular allies is telling the reader something about all of them.
And there is the absence that is loudest of all. A book on the worker-peasant alliance in the socialist states, discussing the "people's democracies" of Central Europe at length, says nothing of Hungary in 1956 — of the workers' councils of Budapest, the most authentic organs of proletarian self-rule the Eastern bloc produced, crushed by the same army that in these pages only ever "assists." Between the two of them, 1956 and 1968, the socialist working class twice built exactly the institutions Moskvin praises in the West, and was twice put down. His book records neither event as what it was.
The anti-Stalinist left had answered every part of this before Moskvin wrote it. On the Popular Front — the book's proudest example — Trotsky drew in The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning (December 1937) the distinction the doctrine erases: between the united front, a bloc of working-class organisations that can multiply their strength, and the popular front, a coalition that chains the workers to a section of the bourgeoisie. "The political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," he wrote, "whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat." The Spanish workers were not defeated in spite of the Popular Front but through it; the alliance that was supposed to lead them disarmed them. Moskvin celebrates precisely the mechanism Trotsky identified as fatal, and passes over precisely the outcome that proved him right.
On the substitution of party for class, the standing answer is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this series must be read against. Trotsky's description of what became of the workers' own organisations under the bureaucracy could serve as the caption to Moskvin's chapters on the socialist states. In the USSR, he wrote, there had disappeared "the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries." That is the reality behind Moskvin's worker-deputies and elective posts: forms of participation from which the power to say no has been removed. The unions the book counts in the East are the unions Trotsky described — administrative belts, not fighting organisations — which is why the same author who lauds independent unionism in Britain need never mention its absence in Poland.
On the smychka itself, the reply is to restore Lenin's meaning against its bureaucratic counterfeit. For Lenin the worker-peasant alliance was a real bargain between real, independent social forces — the New Economic Policy was its economic form, a concession wrung by a peasantry that could still, as Trotsky's account of the grain strikes shows, withhold its grain and be answered by negotiation rather than only by force. What the doctrine became under Stalin — and what Moskvin's language of "neutralising" the middle peasant and drawing him to the workers' side quietly assumes — was an alliance in which only one partner retained any independent power, and forced collectivisation was its true monument. Moskvin's book, tellingly, has nothing to say about 1929–33.
The reader should set this volume beside its siblings in the same Progress catalogue, which execute the same identity of party and class in neighbouring fields: Chkhikvadze's The Soviet Form of Popular Government (1972) and Machulsky and Topornin's Socialism and Democracy (1974), which redescribe the monopoly of the party as the fullest democracy, and the two Fundamentals volumes — the Kuusinen-Dutt Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (1963) and the Fundamentals of Political Economy (1980) — where the same substitution is stated as bedrock. Moskvin is not an eccentric; he is a specialist writing one chapter of a single, coordinated doctrine.
None of this makes the book worthless, and the series does the reader no service if it pretends so. Two things in it hold up. The first is the empirical record of the Western class struggle of the 1970s. Moskvin was a diligent compiler, and his chapters on the developed capitalist countries are dense with usable fact — strike chronologies, the wave of peasant-farm bankruptcies across France and West Germany, the changing occupational structure of the "new middle sections," the sociology of engineers and technicians and office workers as the fastest-growing part of wage labour. Stripped of the framing, this is a serviceable data-book on the labour and social movements of the decade.
The second, more surprising, is the chapter on Chile. Writing on the fall of the Popular Unity government, Moskvin is genuinely candid where doctrine might have counselled evasion. He names the "underestimation of the class nature of political institutions," above all the army; he condemns the ultra-left provocations that "provoked clashes with the small and middle entrepreneurs" and drove the middle sections into the opposition just when the revolution needed them; he sees that the social base of Allende's government narrowed at the decisive moment. This is real analysis of a real defeat, and it is the more valuable for coming from a source with every reason to blame only the CIA. It also, quietly, cuts against the book's own optimism: if the class nature of the state and army can undo a peaceful road in Santiago, the reader is entitled to ask the same questions of every "anti-monopoly" transition the book recommends elsewhere — and of the states that call themselves already socialist.
That is the use of a book like this. It is the most authoritative statement we have of what the doctrine of class alliances meant to the state that ruled a third of the world's Communists, set down at the exact moment when the doctrine was about to be tested, in Gdańsk, by the class it claimed to lead — and to fail the test. Read it for the doctrine, and for the fact, and read Poland in the margin.