The Theory and Practice of Communism, 1931–36

Abstract

Certain crucial assumptions underpinned Strachey’s shifting position in the period from the writing of Revolution by Reason to the publication of A National Policy. Most important was the belief that, at least in the short run, capitalism had been or could be stabilised and its major evils considerably mitigated. Thus Strachey in that period assumed that with the application of appropriate economic policies sufficient vitality could be restored to capitalism to provide the time and political space necessary to effect a relatively gradual and peaceful reformist transition to socialism. However by late 1931, it is quite clear that this assumption had been abandoned. In a parliamentary speech in October of that year Strachey stated emphatically that there was now ‘no possibility of stability’ under capitalism and that ‘all … efforts … to get back to capitalist stability [would] prove absolutely futile ’. ‘There is no firm ground … Neither the export trade nor any other trade in this country will ever revive so long as we have a capitalist system here and in the rest of the world.’¹ This being so, ‘in an era of economic failure and contraction there can be no future for political movements based upon the hypothesis of rapid economic growth and expansion’.²

One clearly feels that had there been any possibility of preserving the bourgeois system, healthy and progressive, Strachey would not have been for changing it but inasmuch as he sees the impossibility of so preserving it and the impossibility of it being progressive he courageously … takes his stand with the class that can alone save civilisation …

Dimitriv Mirsky, The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, 1935

We lived in a miserable and disintegrating world which nothing that was taught in the universities at the time helped us to understand. But Strachey explained and illuminated it all. He took the powerful seductive apparatus of Marxist analysis and in simple convincing language applied it to the contemporary scene. Under his brilliant pen all became clear; most of us became Marxists … we thought we now understood everything.

Rita Hinden, Socialist Commentary, 1956