Defeated [for re-election to Parliament] in 1931, Strachey began writing and giving lectures, eventually breaking with the Communists with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During the war he served in a succession of posts - air raid warden, public relations officer, radio commentator, and Royal Air Force wing commander. With the war's end, Strachey was returned to Parliament in the June 1945 elections and was appointed undersecretary for air in the new Labour government. In May 1946 he became minister of food and began the rationing of bread. He also carried out an unsuccessful scheme to mechanize the growth of peanuts (groundnuts) in East and Central Africa. After serving as war minister (1950–51), he continued in Parliament as Labour spokesman on defense and commonwealth matters.The Wikipedia entry for him as of this writing seems to be well-sourced.
(I'm still a little cautious about linking to Wikipedia entries; as in this case, I try to verify them when I do. While I'm at it, I'm always a touch embarrassed by using Encyclopædia Britannica as a source. But it has a stodgy kind of credibility, and it also carries many signed articles by leading scholars in the fields being discussed. So there.)
Answers.com has a more detailed biography of Strachey, which includes a discussion of his relationship with Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), which is now best known as the main leader of British fascists via the British Union of Fascists (1932-1940) and the Union Movement (1932-1980). Mosley was a Labour M.P. in the 1920s, which is when Strachey was closely associated with him. Mosley was best man at Strachey's wedding in 1929 to "Esther Murphy, a wealthy heiress and sister of Gerald Murphy, the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night." Answers.com describes his eventual break with Mosley this way:
In early 1931, following a rebuff of the radical Labourites by the party, Mosley decided to form a new political party, which he called the New Party. Strachey resigned from Labour and joined his friend, becoming the New Party's intellectual mainspring.Strachey broke with the Communist Party in 1939, becoming (among other things) a wing commander in the British Air Force (RAF). Elected again in 1945 as a Labour M.P., he became Undersecretary for Air and then Minister of Food in the postwar Labour government.
Strachey did not remain very long in the New Party [a short-lived socialist party founded by Mosley]. He quickly saw that the workers were antithetical to it and that Mosley, after a trip to Italy, was turning toward fascism. This was happening at a time when Strachey was turning toward communism. In the general election of 1931, Strachey lost his seat to the Conservative candidate. Thereafter, he devoted himself to writing and lecturing until the Second World War. He was deemed one of the left's most eloquent interpreters. During this period he wrote The Coming Struggle for Power (1931), The Menace of Fascism (1932), The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis (1935), The Theory and Practice of Socialism (1936) and What Are We to Do? (1938). In late 1931, Strachey divorced his wife and married Celia Simpson, whom he had known for many years.
He returned to the United States in December 1934 for a lecture tour. While on tour, Strachey was arrested in Chicago for advocating the overthrow of capitalism. He immediately gained publicity. After several deportation hearings, the U.S. government dropped its case against him.
Strachey's account which Briffault reviews came from Strachey's Communist period. In 1933, the Comintern (Communist International, directed by Moscow) was still holding onto its position that revolution was immanent as a result of the Great Depression. Briffault writes:
Mr. John Strachey's analysis of Fascism is the clearest and soundest which has appeared. He effectually disposes of the psychological explanations put forward by several able radical writers, which represent the phenomenon as a middle-class delusion, the product of bewilderment, or as a „youth movement“, the fruit of ignorance and of the blank outlook of post-war generations. Those may be factors in the development of Fascism, but, Mr. Strachey insists, it is primarily a definite policy of capitalist power at bay, promoted, supported, and financed by threatened capitalistic interests.The Communist view of fascism (which included German Nazism) was officially leery of looking at the mass basis of movements like Mussolini's or Hitler's. Parliamentary democracy was seen as a false front of what was in fact already a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Fascism was taken to be a more severe form of the dictatorship of capital:
Without such support, neither middle-class pauperisation nor youthful restlessness would have brought about the Fascist coups d'etats in Italy and in Germany, and secured the triumph of Fascist tendencies in all the countries where it represents to-day, overtly or tacitly, the dominant policy. The means of control over the exploited classes which constitutional democracy afforded were adequate so long as capitalist society was safe from serious menace; they are inadequate to resist the forces which are now in revolt against it. The pretenses of constitutional democracy have never been but a disguise for domination by force and economic power. Fascism consists in throwing off that disguise. It is the open declaration of class war, taking the place of the pretence of armed peace.On a factual matter, Hitler and his NSDAP (Nazi Party) did not assume power in a coup. The conservative government brought in Hitler as Chancellor at the end of January, 1933. The at-best-semi-free elections of March 1933 gave the NSDAP a plurality in Parliament. With the Communists expelled, only the Social Democratic Party voted against the Emergency Law by which Hitler assumed dictatorial powers immediately after that election. It was a very complicated process, and it would misleading to say that Hitler and the NSDAP were somehow freely elected to do what they did. But it wasn't a coup d'etat.
To put the view Strachey and Briffault were describing another way, this view expected a kind of domino effect in which capitalist countries would relatively quickly adopt fascist rule, parliamentary democracy (aka, "bourgeois democracy") having essentially run its historical course in advanced capitalist countries. A return to parliamentary democracy like that of the Weimar Republic was no longer possible, nor did it make sense for Communist Parties to cooperate with Social Democratic or other "bourgeois" parties in preserving capitalist democracy. The only alternative was to press the socialist revolution forward on more-or-less the lines of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The victory of National Socialism in Germany in 1933 and its rapid success in outlawing and suppressing the other political parties had already given a fatal body blow to this Communist strategy. It would soon be replaced with the strategies of the United Front and the Popular Front, in which Communist Parties were expected to cooperate with Social Democratic and other democratic parties that opposed fascism, despite their disagreements on ultimate ends. This new policy led to the formation of the Popular Front government in France in 1936, in which the French Communist Party provided full parliamentary support to Léon Blum's Socialist Party government, without having Communist cabinet members. Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov gave an official description of the new approach this way in his Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International of 08/02/1935, in words that were effectively a description of why the German Communist Party's (KPD) strategy of fundamental opposition to the Weimar government and refusal to cooperate with the democratic parties that were its primary support (Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party) had been a disaster. It could also be read as an description of why the analysis of fascism such as that in John Strachey's 1933 book missed the boat:
Comrades, the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself -- a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries. All this, however, does not make less important the fact that, before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie [capitalist class] and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory. [italics in original]Continuig with Briffault's review of Strachey's book:
Mr. Strachey shows that Fascism cannot be regarded as an Italian, or German, or Polish phenomenon. Every country where the capitalist regime is menaced by social and intellectual revolt must inevitably, whether it desires it or no, resort to the methods of Fascist violence. England is no exception. In a very interesting chapter, Mr. Strachey, who was lately secretary to Sir Oswald Moseley, analyses the gravitation of English politics towards Fascism, the betrayal of the socialist and labourite parties, the growth of authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism. He gives at the same time an autobiographical account of the evolution of his own mind towards the logic of Communism. The only portion of the book in which Mr. Strachey's realism fails him is that in which he seeks optimistic comfort in the pious hope of a resistance against social trends which he has shown to be inevitable.Obviously, Briffault obviously bought into the essentials of Strachey's analysis, which had effectively already shown itself to be deeply flawed. What Briffault criticizes as Strachey's one lapse of realism in the book - "that in which he seeks optimistic comfort in the pious hope of a resistance against social trends which he has shown to be inevitable" - in fact proved to be very realistic. A Bolshevik-style revolution was not the only option to fascism in the advanced capitalist countries.
The author analyses very ably and thoroughly the claims put forward for the organising success of Fascism in Italy and Germany. Fascism has no economic or social remedies to offer for the breakdown of capitalist society. The only prospect it holds out is that of war.
There is no book more timely, and none better on the timeliest of themes. [my emphasis in bold]
The Frankfurt School itself actually was an independent scholarly body, not committed to the line of any particular party, and already in exile from Hitler Germany in 1934. Two decades after the end of the Cold War and eight decades after the beginning of the Great Depression, it may be hard for many people to envision that a political cooperation like that of the French Popular Front government could take place. Or to imagine that the prospect of a very-soon end of the capitalist system through a revolution was widely understood as a real possibility, and not only by Communists or paranoid reactionaries. The German revolution of 1918-19, in which the Imperial government was replaced with a real parliamentary democracy and Bavaria was ruled by several months by a soviet regime - was closer in time to Germans like those of the Frankfurt School than the Gulf War of 1991 is to us today.
And in 1934, everyone who was paying the slightest attention to European politics was first coming to terms with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 and what the implications of that were likely to be. Since people today are still grappling with that question, and not just as a purely historical matter, emphasizes how wide-ranging the discussion of what it meant would have been in 1934.
Tags: fascism, frankfurt school, national socialism
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