Interview with Marxist Theoretician Hans Heinz Holz, 26 October 2007, Dublin

Hans Heinz Holz is a leading German communist philosopher who has been active in the Movement since the end of WW2. He was a keynote speaker at the Communist University of Britain in 2007. His book _The Downfall and Future of Socialism_ is in print. His more recent publication, _Communists Today_, has just been translated into English and will provide a useful resource for Marxist self-education and Club discussion. Only occasionally do I feel truly staggered by the breadth and nuance of a thinker, - Hans Heinz Holz is one of those immense dialectical intellects who writes for Marxist militants.
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http://www.cym.ie/documents/hhh.pdf


For our readers who might not know you would you mind telling us a little
about yourself?
After the 2nd world war I started with being a journalist because it was then absolutely impossible for a Marxist to make a career in the university. I first worked for our party newspapers until the prohibition of the party in 1956 and afterwards as a free lance journalist first in Germany and after 1960 in Switzerland. When the student movement at the end of the 60’s developed there came the demand for Marxism at the university’s and with the support of the student movement and student unions in Germany I was nominated as a professor of philosophy at the University of Malburg and later on at the University of Honing. I stayed 8 years in Malburg and 18 in Honing years teaching philosophy but always engaged and involved with politics, naturally.
After the re-foundation of the Communist Party in Western Germany I was engaged
in politics there. I would say the main point of my work is Marxist theory though in the last 15 years after the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe I have done much
base work in the party with the committee for a new party program.
When did you first get involved in politics?
When I was 16, that was in 1943, we were already in the fascist era in Germany I
formed a little resistance movement in my school. This was not for political reasons
but for moral reasons, against the immorality of the fascist system. I was imprisoned
in 1943 and it was there I met in the same cell a young communist worker. It was he
who introduced me to Marxism, the elementary points of Marxism. That was my first
commitment in politics.
How long did you spend in prison?
Until the end of the war, 2 years.
That must have been extremely hard for a 16 year old?
Yes, well it was a fascist era. Fascism is a very hard thing!
Immediately after the war I began to study the texts of the classic Marxism.
Especially I was influenced by works like ‘State and Revolution’ by Lenin and I would
say also by the Hegel texts of Lenin, and also by the small works of Stalin in
dialectical and historical Marxism. And naturally the text of ‘State and Revolution’
brought in the question of the October Revolution. I immediately understood this was
the change of an era, change of the world going over to a new formation of society.
Then followed an intense study of Marx and Lenin and the question of revolution at
that time was being actualized by the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and the Cuban
Revolution in 1959. Revolution accompanied my life!
What were the challenges that faced building socialism after the October
Revolution?
The special situation of the Russian revolution was that it was not prepared by a development of capitalism. The transition of feudalism to capitalism in the French
Revolution was prepared by 200 years of early capitalism that was not the case in
the Soviet Union. That means the revolution was not just a transition of power but it
had to build that what capitalist society should have built up before. That was one of the situations. The second was, a great part of the population in Russia was still
illiterate and you can’t develop participatory democracy without an educated people.
There was an immense and huge education program for the first decades of the
Soviet Union. This was the first step to build up a socialist democracy it was not
possible to have this social democracy in the first stage and this brought forth
contradictions in the first phase, that socialism could not be build up by the broad
masses but had to be built up by the minority of the working class which was a very
small minority compared to the peasants and also by the party. The party had to be a
leading power in developing ideas but also administratively and that naturally had the
consequence of developing a special form of party bureaucracy. This was not due to
any bad will of persons but was from objective conditions.
What were the achievements of the early soviet state?
First the educational problems, second the social problems that meant a better
provision of medical treatment, the overcoming of unemployment, there was no
unemployment in the Soviet Union and I would stress the development of all cultural
potentiality of man. I was in the soviet union in the 50’s and 60’s and it was
stupendous the the worker in the plants were engaged in cultural activities like the
fine arts, sociology and philosophy that they were really engaged in these subjects
and all this stuff that we have not in western world. And a great freedom in conditions of doing what they did in the plants, the worker in the soviet union and the socialist countries had much more personal rights than any worker here in the western world.
It is a legend that there was no freedom. There were other structures in the decision
making and administration with problems but in daily life the freedom of the worker
was much greater than here.
Why did you write your book ‘Downfall and Future of Socialism’ in 1992?
It appeared in 1991 in German and 1992 in English. It was a situation when all
leftists were depressed by the collapse. I felt it necessary at that moment to say that the defeat did not mean that there was no future for socialism. I needed to say what was the theoretical background, what were the achievements and also the faults which were done so they wont be repeated next time.
You listed 3 main reasons for the collapse they were the immaturity of
economic conditions to begin with, the subsequent development of the corrupt
bureaucracy, and finally the impoverishment of theory. Can you comment on
these 15 years later?
I would say for the checklist of reasons all three reasons are still very decisive
after 15 years of study I would add many more. I think even more than I stressed in
the book the impoverishment of theory was one of the main points because it made
an open gate for the infiltration of western ideas, the revisionism as we say. And with the 20th party congress of the Soviet Union, not so much with the moralistic
incrimination of Stalinism that was not the right historical view point, but the decisive thing was Khrushchev made as criteria for the development of the Soviet Union the living standards of the United States. The living standards of the United States is the living standard of a capitalist country with imperialist expansion, and a living standard that only touches half of the population the other half live in poverty. This should not be an aim. It set a target for all those who were still coming out of the old society with its old ideas and America was a symbol for them. This was the decisive break in of a non-socialist idea. This expanded because the theory was so poor. And the theory began to become poor I would say after Stalin. During the period of Stalin’s power there were a lot of intense theoretical discussion in the scientific magazines and it is not true that Stalin was the cause of the impoverishment of theory. It was after him.
Do you think this made way for Gorbachev’s reforms?
It was I would say a straight consequential line from Khrushchev to Gorbachev. At
any moment at this time it had been possible to counter act but it wasn’t done.
You wrote, ‘Whoever would learn from history must reflect upon it, what must
we reflect upon now?
We need to reflect upon the contradictory development of each historical process
and we need to reflect upon the specificity of each contradiction in itself, a
contradiction of Russia. So today we need to reflect upon the specific contradiction
in China and as our Cuban comrade said yesterday we need to reflect upon the
contradiction which are in the development of Cuba. That is the point of reflection so we can learn from history what reasons are for the generation of these contradictions for the solutions of these so we can learn how not to do it again. I think we can realize that there are certain features and constant traits in history. If you read some of the ancient historians, Thucydides, you find very similar structures even in quite other social formations and if you are keeping in mind that history has only a certain range of possibilities because there are anthropological traits that are in mankind than you can learn from history. I think it is a strategy of late capitalism and even of the social democrats to destroy our relation with history, to be anti-historical or ahistorical.
We Marxists have the task to develop the historical understanding.
What do you draw inspiration from today?
I think for me socialism, or better to say communism, is the logical as well as the
historically only alternative to the capitalist system, for reasons of dialectical logic.
I would say one state of time of society can only be overcome by its determinate
negation. It is not that we have capitalism or a utopian idea of society. We have to
ask what are the main characteristics of capitalism? Private property in the
production means and the accumulation of capital profit of surplus an alternative
society must overcome these main traits of capitalism and therefore socialism is the
logical result. The historical reason is within in the capitalist system as a necessary
moment in the system developed the working class and the working class is the only
class which is not part of the profits of the surplus in so far as the working class
and the revolutionary movement of the working class is the historical reason why
communism is the only alternative to capitalist system. But that does not mean that
it comes of itself we can also have the negative chance of barbarism even of the end of humanity. Therefore we must develop the consciousness of the working class. The
working class now has other structures than of the 19th century class therefore we
must analyze these latest developments not on the question of whether there is no
working class but upon the changes within the working class and we must have ideas
of how to mobilize the working class and develop political insight and class
consciousness and therefore the impulse to change society. That is my hope and my
life work. I am 60 years in the communist movement. It is my whole life to work in
this direction to help prepare the minds of men. As Lenin always said, without
consciousness we will have no revolutionary moment. It is an important part of the
movement to develop and spread the theory among the people. It is no only a
question of academic development, but you must have that to have a good
popularization. But the popularization is always necessary that is why I always write
for newspapers and not only am writing academic pieces or books. In my academic
work I have written 3 volumes on the history of dialectics since the renaissance and
3 volumes on aesthetic problems. That is the academic level upon which you elaborate
ideas but then they must be brought and adopted by the masses. That is a large
question for trade unions, the educational work of trade unions.
Would you comment on Venezuela today?
Venezuela is not yet socialism and if you look back to the Cuban revolution it was not socialism in the beginning but it developed out of its internal reasons. I see one danger in the development of Venezuela there is much influence of utopian
socialism, that Marxism for the 21st century, the books of Diderik I don’t know if you have heard of him. Well he is an advisor of Chavez otherwise he would just be an
intellectual. In this function he has a lot of ‘queer’ ideas influenced by American
human rights ideas and if Chavez follows this counsel, he is not the only one, that
might be a dubious thing. I spoke with Cuban comrades who were disquieted by the
influence Diderik has in Latin America.
Who is this Diderik?
He is a German who taught at the University of Mexico. He visited Chavez in jail and
had interviews with him and from then he has had contact with him and know he is
traveling the world propagating his ideas.
In this respect it is absolutely necessary to elaborate theory and strengthen
theoretical discourse.
What about the positives of Venezuela?
I think there are very many positives from the fact that this country resists
US Imperialism and this has huge influence even in the bourgeois leftist circles, for
example in Argentine, Brazil although Lula is a separate question, also in Ecuador in
Bolivia. It is a positive influence and I hope that under the influence of the real
situation in the country Chavez will develop more and more in the socialist direction
and as I understand he has great respect for Fidel Castro and Fidel will be of great
good I think. I admire Castro. He is one of the very great men of the last century.

Stalin planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed to Defensive Pact

Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War'

By Nick Holdsworth in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:14AM BST 19 Oct 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3223834/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html
Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.
Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.
"This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he was authorised only to talk, not to make deals.
"Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time," said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. "This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks."
When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain's lack of preparation for the looming conflict.

The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians.
"The detail of Stalin's offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance."
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The declassified archives - which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 - reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938.

"At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on," Gen Sotskov said.
"It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia's surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country."

Stalin's sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. "The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome."

Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 - in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annex the Sudetenland - Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country's military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression.

"Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler's signature on it," Gen Sotksov said.
The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 - five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia - suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.

Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.

The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin's controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency.
"It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming," said Gen Sotskov.

A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.

It was only two years later, following Hitler's Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.

BOOK REVIEW by Andrew Taylor, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization by Lynne Viola

The Best Sons of the Fatherland:Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, Lynne Viola, 1988: New York, Oxford University Press,A BOOK REVIEW By Andrew Taylor



In November 1929 at its Central Committee plenum, the Communist Party of the USSR volunteered to take on and organize collectivization of agriculture. Of 70,000 volunteers, 27,OOO plus were selected, and became known as “the 25,000ers”. In the main they were factory worker-activists, factory committee activists and union committee members. About 80 per cent of them were Communist party members, or in the party's youth organization. Over 50% were under 30 years of age; 8% were women. A strict vetting process was run to eliminate workers from wealthier farmer backgrounds, as well as drunkards, ‘bad characters’, and those with connections to party opposition factions.

After a brief training course the 25,000'ers were sent out amid communist party rallies to the rural areas in order to establish the organized collectivization of agriculture. They were of the most class-conscious layers of the industrial working class prepared to assume tasks as chairs of collective farms and administrators.

Soviet archival records reveal that the old rural officialdom, established in their roles, very often resented the urban volunteers' entry onto their turf, denigrated them, and frequently handed them shovels and pointed to the manure mound. The peasantry was to say the very least ambivalent from the start in their approach to the centre’s exacting grain requisitions, and was often hostile to the urban Party volunteers and their outsider, urban, working class culture. The letters of peasants to relatives show that there was resentment against the valorization of the urban industrial working-class at the expense of the peasantry. We might at this point refer to the long history of Marxian disdain for peasant ‘backwardness’.(“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life..(Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Sec. 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians). In organizing resistance to the post 1928 collectivization policy, the peasants circulated Stalin’s earlier pro-famine, authoritarian, speeches and essays as proof of the unfairness and novelty of the new line on Agriculture.

Lynne Viola notes that documents show the 25,000’ers general attitude towards the peasants was a distinct improvement on that of the average rural officials. But no influx of new organizers is accepted into a bureaucracy without incident, and a few volunteers were murdered with the utmost cruelty. At the close of the collectivization 25,000'er campaign at the end of 1931, fully 18,000 of the volunteers remained in the countryside and had retained leading positions in rural party and administrative structures.

The author states that collectivization was intended "to be a revolution which would undermine the old order, modernize agriculture, institute a reliable method of grain collection, stimulate a cultural revolution, and build a new social and administrative base in the countryside". Today we know modernization was achieved at a stunning human and political cost to the soviet people, but in light of new research from the soviet archives (including letters from 25,000’ers in the countryside back home) the enthusiasm and valor of the 25,000'ers themselves can not be gainsaid.

According to Viola, agricultural collectivization, though at the start a proletarian policy of political education launched by Stalin through the 25,000’ers, became limited in its potential by ad hoc policy responses made in response to immediate crises and widespread peasant resistance. And it is her contention that collectivization came over time to be shaped less by Stalin and the party center than by the often less-than-disciplined or irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimental methods of collective farm leaders left to manage as best they knew how, and the stark realities of a backward countryside and the wealthier and middle peasantry who did massive wrecking by destroying cattle, hoarding, and destruction of reserves.1

According to Viola, the Centre’s response changed following the first wave of the 25,000'ers service in the vanguard of the revolution. In response to continued wrecking, strict repressive measures rather than class political action gave the lie to soviet “control” of agricultural policy.

And the policy of repression that grew with the resistance to collectivization, continued after the collectivization struggle had completed in distortions of Leninist norms and violations of socialist legality.

The author calls the 25,000'ers the cadres of the Stalin revolution, the advanced workers, served in the front lines of the Stalin revolution. The Centre had continuing outbreaks of food shortages in the cities and viewed the “kulaks” or wealthier peasants as the hindrance to socialist construction and the open enemy of the working-class. Shortages and dislocations became famine. And as we know, severe famine led to terrible famine in areas of the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933. Millions are believed to have perished, though estimates vary considerably. Hundreds of thousands who were charged with kulak hoarding and wrecking of the Grain requisitions endured harsh exile to the north or east.

Viola's closely documented study using original documents from the Soviet Archives illustrates the jury is still out on the precise conjunction of factors responsible for the famine. Some other prominent historian-agronomists do not concur in the claim made by many Ukrainian nationalists that the famine was an "act of genocide" and question the whole thesis of a collective persecution of the Ukrainian nation. Professor of History at the University of West Virginia , Mike Tauger and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Steven Wheatcroft, argue that the famine was not a result of a deliberate policy against the Ukrainians, and they bring out agricultural and political documentation to illustrate their contention that the widespread 1932 starvation in Ukraine and western Russian areas was due to a lack of control over the dynamics of collectivization by the central leadership, misguided or misapplied economic policies during collectivization, to severe drought conditions, and to a harvest that turned out to be much smaller than originally anticipated.

This is on one level an academic debate among experts on soviet agricultural and national history. But it is at the same time an impassioned often extremely politicized contended space with an ongoing vigorous global campaign by Ukrainian nationalists, anti-communists, revisionist communists and the crisis-ridden “orange revolution” government of Ukraine (which is pressing a charge of genocide at the UN as one front of its ongoing struggle with Moscow). The head of the Russian State Archive, Vladimir Kozlov, rejects claims of genocide in 1930’s Ukraine. Kozlov claims not a single document exists in the archival materials that would even indirectly suggest that a strategy was adopted against Ukrainians that was different from other regions, never mind a strategy aimed at genocide.

Viola affirms the 25,000ers as enthusiastic idealist workers fighters for Socialism, the best of their generation. She shows that early in the collectivization campaign the Soviet state mobilized working-class activist support for collectivization and also shows from Soviet Archive documentation that, contrary to previous anti-communist claims, the 25,000ers went into the countryside as enthusiastic recruits 2. Her unique social history uses an "on the scene" approach from letters and documents of cadre to offer a new understanding of the process of the USSR agricultural revolution under Stalin.


Second, I suggest to academic readers that they read RW Davies & SG Wheatcroft's book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-33 (NY: Macmillan, 2004)esp p 214; Also see Mark B Tauger's article: "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Slavic Review, 50:1 (1991) esp p 89; and see Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 (Cornell U Press: 2001) esp 273-308

NOTE: None of these scholars are ‘Stalinists’. They are social scientists and historians of Soviet agriculture who do not however support the notion of a conscious conspiracy by Stalin and the CPSU of 1929-31 to create a "Ukrainian Holocaust". Their careful research shows there are intermediate positions.
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1. From 1929 to 1933 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 12.1 million, horses from 34 to 16.6 million, and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 50.2 million.

2.Such an upsurge [pod" em] which we now observe is characteristic only
of large revolutionary overturns. This is not an ordinary upsurge, but a
revolutionary upsurge, especially the upsurge among workers. All
questions of workers' daily life [byt], all questions with which the trade
unions are concerned in relation to wages, etc. are now subsumed by the
question of collectivization. All problems in workers' provisioning, all
questions about inefficiencies, food shortages, high prices, etc., are
subsumed by collectivization. All the attention of the working class is
centered on collectivization. It [the working class] instinctively feels that
the key to all these problems is collectivization and that the sooner this
issue is resolved, the sooner all the remaining problems will be resolved
. . . We presently have a real revolutionary movement in the working
class for collectivization: a real revolutionary socialist campaign to the
countryside for collectivization when workers gladly decline a high
salary and go to the countryside. There are masses of cases of the best
skilled workers refusing high salaries and going to the countryside.

A. A. ANDREEV, speech at the Third Plenum of the North
Caucasus Regional Party Committee, 13 January 1930
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Chapters of Viola text are as follows:

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
by Lynne Viola; Oxford University Press, 1987. 292 pgs.
Introduction
1: Workers to the Countryside: from Revolution to Revolution

2: The Recruitment of the 25,000ers

3: Setting the Campaign in Motion

4: The Drive to Collectivize Soviet Agriculture: Winter 1930

5: The 25,000ers and the Cadres of Collectivization: The Offensive on Rural Officialdom

6: The 25,000ers at Work on the Collective Farms

7: The Denouement of the Campaign
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
A Note on Sources
Index