Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

The Egyptian Revolution One Year On

2012-01-25T16:11:00.005Z

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy, who is speaking at Marxism 2012
See the live blogs from Tahrir Square here and here - long live the Egyptian Revolution!

Edited to add: For some of the solidarity rallies that took place in Britain, see here while there is a meeting in London with Gigi Ibrahim, an Egyptian Revolutionary Socialist who has, among other things debated the Egyptian Revolution with Henry Kissinger on Newsnight, on Wednesday 1 February

International Socialism # 133

2012-01-13T15:53:00.000Z

The new issue of International Socialism is now online - articles include Charlie Kimber on the 30 November mass strike in Britain, Megan Trudell on 'The Occupy movement and class politics in the US', an interview with Costas Lapavitsas on the Eurozone crisis, plus articles on 'China's capitalism and the crisis', 'The Egyptian workers’ movement and the 25 January Revolution', 'Libya at the crossroads'. The only things I have read so far include an article on 'the Beat Generation' by Through the Scary Door's Adam Marks and a piece by Roland Boer on 'Engels’s contradictions: a reply to Tristram Hunt'. As a blog, Histomat in general was rather overly harsh on Hunt's Engels biography before I had the time to actually read it, and having now read it I think I was a little bit unfair to Hunt - it is actually a good introduction to Engels's life - well as good as it was ever likely to be given it is written by someone who is not a Marxist themselves - so slight apologies to Tristram on that one. Boer's article does in a sophisticated manner address nonetheless some of the issues around the personal and political contradictions in Engels' life that were raised by Hunt but not satisfactorily resolved by him. While I am here, I might as well point people to an interesting recent post by Scott Hamilton on 'the future of blogging' that is not in International Socialism but of doubtless interest to bloggers and those who read blogs nonetheless - see also Scott's fine analysis of the late Christopher Hitchens ...

Restart the pensions fight

2012-01-11T15:45:00.000Z

The class struggle in Britain may not be quite at the level of say Greece or Nigeria, but it is at a particularly critical stage just now - given the Tories attempts to divide up the public sector unions who united and came together in such an impressive fashion with the co-ordinated mass strike on 30 November with a measly new 'pensions offer' seems to be making some headway - those who can should get to London this Saturday for the following meeting:
Unite the Resistance emergency national meeting, 12 noon to 4pm, Saturday 14 January, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, central London

Leo Zeilig on Frantz Fanon

2011-12-23T20:20:00.003Z

Frantz Fanon by David Macey who sadly passed away this year

Leo Zeilig, author of a forthcoming study Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation remembers the life and work of Frantz Fanon one of the greatest anti-colonial revolutionary humanists of the twentieth century, the Caribbean intellectual who went to fight for the Algerian Revolution, and who died fifty years ago this month. Zeilig concludes:

Today revolutionary change has shifted again to North Africa. We should once more return to Fanon for his extraordinary insights into revolutionary change and his insistence on waging a relentless battle against the "caste of profiteers" who seek to control and break our movements...

The 2011 Histomat Awards

2011-12-20T23:32:00.004Z

Firstly, an apology for barely keeping this blog ticking over the last year - in my defence all I can say is that this failure has in part been for good reasons; namely, a slow awakening of the British working class movement amidst a year of riots, resistance and revolution has inevitably meant an intensification of the level of activity (by which I mean offline 'real life' political activity) for any Marxist who takes what Marx said about the point being not simply to interpret the world but to try and change it seriously. Another slight problem, as Andy Zaltzman noted, has been that 2011 has been a relatively difficult year to satirise: 'For satire, as the rogue bastard offspring of news, it's been a year in which jokes have scarcely dried in the notebook before being rendered obsolete by the breakneck speed of More Stuff Happening.'

'It's been a year in which – with riots, revelations of the full grotty extent of the phone-hacking mega-blooper, and the continuing failure of those most responsible for the economic crisis to eat their share of the blame cake – Britain's moral compass has been spinning frenziedly...At the centre of it all, driving the economic vortex that is controlling public life, are "The Markets", a merciless, amoral, almost mythical force, behaving with the irrational self-indulgence of a particularly obstreperous Greek god. Politicians seem resigned to the fact that there is nothing they can do to appease the monster in our midsts, other than pray for mercy and occasionally sacrifice things to it (money, dignity and principles, mostly). All of this has made for rich, if unsettling, material. But perhaps the greatest challenge facing the satirist this year is how to satirise a world that seems so intent on satirising itself.'

During the phone-hacking scandal, for example, I was trying to think of one person in the UK who would be safe from the 'criminal-media nexus' that is News International so I could spoof that - and settled on the Queen - thinking surely the News of the World wouldn't risk daring to try and do over the official head of state - only to find that, yep, they tried to do over even Queenie. I then thought about doing a whole series on the Murdochs as the Corleone's in a new Godfather-esque series, but then even the decline and fall of the Murdoch Empire seemed suddenly old news as the Eurozone imploded and riots erupted. Anyway, there are still certain things that I feel I owe to the readers of this blog - and one of them is the annual Histomat awards...

2011 Histomat International Heroes/Heroines of the Year: The people who fought and died - and continue to fight and die - for democratic rights across the Middle East and North Africa this year - in particular Mohammed Bouazizi, the guy whose self-immolation in Tunisia last December inspired a wave of political revolutions which have themselves inspired millions more...

Runner up: The international Occupy Movement which has grown this year out of the inspiration of Tahrir Square - once again proving in style that at the start of the 21st century, anti-capitalism is definitely an idea whose time has come...and whose popularisation of slogans about the 99% vs the 1% have put the question of class division and injustice at the centre of that movement.

2011 Histomat International Idiot(s) of the Year: Those neo-liberal politicians across the US and Europe who continue to insist against all the evidence that worshipping the free market, enforcing austerity packages and making structural adjustment programmes make any economic sense as a way of getting out of the current capitalist crisis.

Runner up: Anders Brevik, Nazi terrorist and mass murderer.

2011 Histomat National Heroes/Heroines of the Year: Those 2.6 million public sector workers - mainly low-paid women - who struck on November 30 in the biggest strike Britain has seen for decades - delivering the ultimate lie to the idea that the organised working class no longer has relevance or power - even though it is increasingly clear that one one-day strike will not in itself be anywhere near enough to win on the question of defending pensions.

Runner up: PJ Harvey, whose anti-war album Let England Shake deservedly won this years Mercury Prize. I also have a soft spot for the comedian Jonny Marbles, for managing to pie Rupert Murdoch at his parliamentary hearing.

2011 Histomat National Idiot of the Year: David Starkey seemed to have this in the bag until Jeremy Clarkson stole it from him late on. As I think Ed Byrne first noted, Clarkson really deserves be taken out and shot in front of his family as a nice Xmas present to them. Speaking of public executions in Britain - and other 'national idiots' - the Met police have again really excelled themselves this year with the killing of several black people - including Mark Duggan - whose death sparked the riots in August.

Joint Runners up: David Cameron - incidentally also part of the Clarkson/Murdoch/ Tory super rich 'Chipping Norton set' - for his 'active, muscular liberalism' which seems to mean declaring war on workers and Muslims at home and Afghans and Libyans abroad - and also Nick Clegg, for going along with pretty much all of Cameron's shit without so much as a whimper over the last year.

2011 Histomat Socialist Bloggers of the Year: When I wrote about Arthur Ransome and the question of journalists and revolution back in early January, it all seemed a bit abstract. Then the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions exploded, and since then numerous revolutionary journalists have come into their own - but the award has to go once again to the comrades in Egypt for their work in the last year reporting from the frontline of the struggle - a struggle that still continues - and the team behind the MENA Solidarity Network

Runner up: Lenin's Tomb - another sterling year's work.

2011 Histomat Most Incredible Quote of the Year: ''a force of nature, a phenomenon, a great man" - Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove on Rupert Murdoch even after the phone hacking scandal broke

2011 Histomat Most Idiotesque Quote of the Year: ''No riots here, just quiet, ever-deeper misery'' - headline of Nick Cohen's Observer column on August 7th discussing the state of politics in the UK - the day, er, riots erupted.

Christopher Hitchens - A Commissar of the West

2011-12-17T20:31:00.015Z

From International Socialist...
...to Neo-Conservative Warmonger

Flicking through a collection of Leonard Cohen's poetry the other day, one phrase of Cohen's in passing caught my eye - 'Commissar of the West'. I immediately thought of Christopher Hitchens - one of the most militant, passionate and fervent intellectual champions of Western imperial power - who has now passed away. Those with strong stomachs can look at the kind of tributes that have flooded in from the American and British literary and political establishment for 'Hitch' - this by Denis MacShane is typical: "Christopher just swam against every tide," he said. "He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea .... He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell...''

In fact, Hitchens - rather than 'swimming against every tide' as he loved to present himself as doing in 'contrarian' style - after abandoning his youthful revolutionary Marxism was ultimately part of the 'great moving right show' that accompanied the defeat of the radical student, worker and wider liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had first pulled him into politics. He may have evolved from a young eloquent, flamboyant firebrand to an old bigoted reactionary far slower and in a far more interesting fashion than his brother Peter - but ultimately such a shift right was about as cliched a political and intellectual evolution as one can get.* Though it would be crude to reduce matters to economics alone, the material benefits that come from making such a transition for a petit-bourgeois intellectual like Hitchens should not be ignored - and in his case were not insubstantial and quite transparent - particularly after his move to America.

Worse than this, with 9/11 Hitchens consciously decided to use his polemical talents and literary flair in the service of great power and appalling acts of Western state terrorism and violence - a betrayal of the very ideal of the role of the liberal intellectual in society - and became one of those Marx once described as the 'hired prizefighters' of the ruling class and someone whom Voltaire and Orwell would have detested. Another of Hitchens's heroes, the great anti-imperialist writer and historian C.L.R. James, once wrote that 'to come within the orbit of imperialist politics is to be debilitated by the stench, to be drowned in the morass of lies and hypocrisy' - and this was to be fate of Hitchens in the last decade of his life as he descended into racist hysterical ranting in support of the 'war on terror'.

Yet Hitchens was never just another boring Islamophobic megaphone endlessly blaring out state propaganda - because of his superior knowledge of radical politics and revolutionary history he had the skills to help to shape the form that propaganda took. When George Bush attacked what he called 'totalitarian...Islamic fascism', he was drawing on the critique of 'totalitarianism' with a long pedigree and heritage dating back to anti-fascist writers like Orwell in the 1930s - a critique that had been honed by the likes of Hitchens to ensure that 'anti-totalitarianism' no longer included opposition to the totalitarianism of Western state power, multinational corporate power, and imperialism as a system in general. The dedication and seriousness that Hitchens devoted to this task of mutating 'anti-totalitarianism' from something once firmly rooted in an anti-Stalinist left-wing intellectual mileu into something that could be invoked and used by even George W Bush's speechwriters to serve the interests of the most right-wing American administration in recent memory for its 'Project for the New American Century' helps explain the acolades now being bestowed on him. As Alex Callinicos notes in his obituary of Hitchens, 'he died firmly in the embrace of the establishment, a literary celebrity lavished with praise by mainstream non-entities. This is a sorry end for someone who, at his best, could articulate much nobler aspirations'.

* Hitchens's quick wit never completely deserted him - this is what he thought of David Cameron when asked about him in 2010: "He seems content-free to me. Never had a job, except in PR, and it shows. People ask, 'What do you think of him?' and my answer is: 'He doesn't make me think'"...)

Edited to add: See Dave Renton's article 'Christopher in Khaki' and also Ian Birchall's comment below:
It is interesting to compare him with Paul Foot. Both had the same public school/Oxford training, and used the literary and oratorical skills they had acquired from it. But Foot had a solid core of principles which stayed with him to the very end - and which certainly made him less successful, in terms of official recognition, than he otherwise might have been. Hitchens, even in his left-wing phase, was always much more committed to his own career and to staying within the bounds of the mainstream. I knew him when he was a member of the Hornsey International Socialists in 1974, and I have to say I never liked or trusted him very much. That is only a personal reaction, of course, but I always felt the commitment to his personal advancement was greater than his commitment to the socialist cause.
Edited to also add: George Galloway says farewell...

John Molyneux on 2011: A Revolutionary Year

2011-12-10T16:41:00.002Z

2011 will go down in history as a revolutionary year akin to 1848 and 1968: a year in which ordinary people round the world rose up against their governments and ruling elites – their respective 1%s...

Roundtable on the Eurozone crisis

2011-12-08T16:23:00.002Z

BREAKING UP? A ROUTE OUT OF THE EUROZONE CRISIS

Friday 9 December, 2011
Doors open at 6 pm; the panel will begin at 6.30 pm
Brunei Gallery Theatre, SOAS , WC1H 0XG

Join us for a timely and urgently needed discussion over the future of
the eurozone, the possibility of exit, and what it will all mean for
the people of Europe . Bringing together leading economists, political
scientists and financial journalists, the discussion will play a
critical role in setting the terms of the debate for the tumultuous
period that lies ahead.

The panel includes:
- Costas Lapavitsas, professor, department of economics, SOAS, and
lead author of a series of groundbreaking reports on the eurozone
crisis from the Research on Money and Finance network.
- George Irvin professor, department of development studies, SOAS, and
author of 'Super Rich: the Growth of Inequality in Britain and the
United States '.
- Paul Mason, BBC economics editor and author of 'Meltdown: The End of
the Age of Greed'.
- Stathis Kouvelakis, reader in political theory, King's College London.
The panel will be chaired by Seamus Milne, associate editor at The
Guardian.

Please register your participation (see link below or visit the RMF
website) and arrive as early as possible.

Read the latest RMF report on the eurozone crisis: www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org
Register: https://docs.google.com/a/soas.ac.uk/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dDRpWjBGaXNhTmxyb3lLUUFQdnRvcmc6MA

The November 30 Battle Map

2011-11-20T20:28:00.000Z

All Out for N30!
PS. For those of the 3 million plus workers set to strike next week who have never been on strike before, this little guide by Paul McGarr may be of interest...

Lenin T-shirt

2011-11-20T18:21:00.059Z

"For those who desire not simply an aimless skipping from instance to instance, an integral central movement will take us forward towards a great goal" - Lenin, as quoted on the Philosophy Football T-shirt

Soon after Lenin's death in early 1924, his widow Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote an open letter to the Russian people, published in the party daily Pravda:

I have a great request of you. Do not permit your grief for Ilyich [Lenin] to take the form of external reverence for his person. Do not raise memorials to him, palaces named after him, splenderous festivals in commemoration of him. To all this he attached so little importance in his life, all this was so burdensome to him.

It is not then exactly clear what Lenin himself would have made of the fact that the people at Philosophy Football have designed a T-shirt in his honour. Still, it is to be commended that they have finally got around to paying their respects to the person Georg Lukacs once rightly described as merely 'the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx', and that they have done so with a quote which suggests at least something of Lenin's commitment to independent working class politics and ideas about the strategy and tactics necessary for socialist revolution...

MENA Network Solidarity Conference 2011

2011-11-08T14:21:00.000Z

Building solidarity with the workers’ movement in the Middle East:
A conference for trade union members and activists
Sunday 20 Nov 2011
11am–3pm Room G2, main campus, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG

Strikes and protests by organised workers played a key role in the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators earlier this year. Since then we’ve seen the newly-formed independent unions in Egypt organising strikes on a massive scale to realise the revolution’s promise of social justice.

Even Kuwait, with little tradition of workers’ organisation, has been rocked by public sector strikes. From Morocco to Iraq, few countries in the region have been immune from the resurgent workers’ movement.

Yet there have also been setbacks: trade unionists in Bahrain have faced persecution following the crackdown on protest there, while in Egypt workers have been dragged before military courts and strikes are still illegal.

This conference will bring together activists from across the trade union movement to debate how we can build solidarity with those in the Middle East who are fighting for social justice, workers’ rights and genuine democracy.

Conference sessions include:

Workers and the Arab revolutions
Building the independent unions in Egypt
Bahraini trade unionists’ fight for justice
The Tunisian workers’ movement after the revolution
Speakers include:

Mohamed Shafiq, President of the Manshiyet al-Bakri Hospital Union in Cairo and a leading healthworker activist from Egypt
Unjum Mirza, Political Officer, RMT London Transport Region
Dina Makram-Ebeid, Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debt
Anne Alexander, MENA Solidarity Network
Bahraini Activists
Plus speakers from NUT teachers union, PCS civil service workers union, and UCU lecturers unions.

Tickets £5 waged/£3 (cons)

To register please complete the conference booking form and send to: menasolidarity@gmail.com

Click here for a link to our latest campaign.

Two events on the road to November 30

2011-11-06T19:00:00.000Z

Apologies again for neglecting this blog - just to say that readers of Histomat might be interested in two conferences in London in the run up to the November 30 strike - firstly Historical Materialism from 10-13 November - which features speakers from across the world including David Harvey - and secondly the Unite the Resistance National Convention on 19 November which has among its speakers Nikos Fotopoulos (General Secretary of Greek electricians union).

Workers Occupy in London

2011-10-26T14:32:00.002+01:00

Inspired by the occupations in places like Wall Street, last night I finally picked up a copy of Occupy! A Short History of Workers' Occupations by Dave Sherry - an excellent little history of one of the most militant tactics of class struggle yet seen -only to read that, this morning - well:

'Electricians fighting attempts to tear up their terms and conditions marched, blocked roads and construction sites and occupied one site, this morning, Wednesday. In London, some 350 workers and supporters assembled at the Balfour Beatty Blackfriars site and blocked the entrance...'

Perhaps the slogan for November 30 shouldn't be 'All Out...and Stay Out' - but 'All Out..and sit in'? It would certainly enable people to keep warm...

Marcus Garvey on Vladimir Lenin

2011-10-25T14:58:00.000+01:00

'One of Russia's greatest men, one of the world's greatest characters, and probably the greatest man in the world between 1917 and 1924, when he breathed his last and took his flight from this world...We as Negroes mourn for Lenin because Russia promised great hope not only for Negroes but to the weaker people of the world'.
Marcus Garvey, speech in New York, 27 January 1924, quoted in Jacob A Zumoff, 'The African Blood Brotherhood from Caribbean nationalism to Communism', Journal of Caribbean History

International Socialism # 132

2011-10-22T11:21:00.001+01:00

The new issue of International Socialism is now out, and online. People should go peruse the contents for themselves - the journal ranges in topics discussed from the great early 19th century black Caribbean radical Robert Wedderburn to Queer Theory. Yet the heart of the volume I guess is analysis of the latest phase of the deepening economic crisis from Alex Callinicos - and defences of classical Marxist interpretations of that crisis from Guglielmo Carchedi and Joseph Choonara. There is also an examination of the resistance from ordinary people to being made to pay for the crisis - including the indignados movement in Spain dating from 15 May - which remains a key inspiration for the current global anti-capitalist 'occupy' movement with its demands "For real democracy now" and declaration that "We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers".

Closer to home, while the occupy movement has finally hit Britain over the last week or so, the journal has a nice contemporary history of the recent riots which rocked England this summer, an article which ends with SWP founder Tony Cliff's thoughts on the 1981 riots - quoted from Ian Birchall's recent biography. There have been an increasing number of reviews of Birchall's work - see for example John Palmer in Red Pepper, and in this ISJ, Nigel Harris, another former leading member of the group and a former editor of International Socialism, gives his thoughts on the strengths and limitations of Cliff's revolutionary Marxism. There is much to reflect on in Harris's and Palmer's criticisms of Cliff, but one point Harris makes about Cliff's faith in the world working class being problematic for a Marxist in Britain when the class itself apparently 'had decamped to east Asia' with globalisation, seems a little weak. This is not only because Marxists in the IS tradition ranging from Chris Harman to Mike Haynes in this issue have examined in more detail than Cliff was able to the changing nature of the global working class - but also because - as the looming mass strike in Britain on November 30 - the struggles of the organised working class remain of fundamental importance if the slogans of the global occupy movement such as "For real democracy now" and "We are not commodities" are ever going to be turned into reality, and so linking up the movements on the streets with networks of rank and file trade unionists remains the critical task of socialists in the period ahead.

David Harvey on Marx's Method

2011-10-19T13:57:00.001+01:00

The Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Committee, in
conjunction with Historical Materialism, present the 2011 Deutscher
Memorial Lecture:

David Harvey 'History versus Theory: A Commentary on Marx's Method in Capital'

Friday, 11 November 2011
Location: Friends House, 173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ
Time: 1830-2030

At the lecture the winner of the 2011 Deutscher Memorial Prize will be
announced. The following books have been shortlisted:

• Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and
Exploitation, (Brill)
• Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory
(Columbia)
• Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class
Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877
(Brill)
Online pre-booking: £3

On the door price: £5

Due to the high demand for this event, it is suggested that you book
early to avoid disappointment. Please note that although this event
takes place as part of the Historical Materialism conference, the
price is not included in the conference fee due to the very high costs
of hall booking in Central London.

Book online here
All enquiries: alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk

International Brigades 75th anniversary honoured

2011-10-19T13:54:00.001+01:00

Though there were other groups and parties who went to fight fascism in Spain in 1936 after Franco's uprising, for example from the Independent Labour Party in the UK, the International Brigades did most of the 'heavy lifting' - to use that awful phrase which seems to have entered the language of politics recently - in terms of organising volunteers to go. Quite appropriately then, Philosophy Football have honoured their contribution by helping make an educational film and also a special T-shirt (see above)

The New College of Resistance

2011-10-16T19:06:00.000+01:00

Earlier this year, it was announced that a private elite New College of the Humanities was to be launched in London, the inevitable logical result of the marketisation of education that has been steadily underway in the UK. It is therefore a pleasure to announce that in less than two weeks a 'New College of Resistance' will be held in central London on Saturday 29 October - a teach-in to help forge the links between lecturers and students for the coming struggles ahead. The timetable is now online, and to register go to here.

Laying down the law

2011-10-14T11:44:00.004+01:00

‘When we see disruption and disorder around marches and demonstrations that otherwise would be peaceful, very often it is groups that have covered up and go in and create disorder on the fringes of these demonstrations...'
Home Secretary Theresa May yesterday - sadly she was not talking about defending the right to protest in the face of the disorder created by groups of covered up police thugs...

Two journals, a newsletter and a conference

2011-10-13T15:00:00.000+01:00

Just a quick blog I'm afraid - but readers of Histomat might be interested to note that the latest issues of Socialist Register (on 'The Crisis and the Left') and Race and Class (on 'Black History, Black Struggle') are now online, as is the new issue of the London Socialist Historians Group newsletter - and finally registration is now open for this years Historical Materialism conference in London in November. I wish I could say I was off to occupy the London Stock Exchange, but sadly my life is not quite that exciting...

John Wheatley on Marx's labour theory of value

2011-10-04T16:13:00.002+01:00

Or, extracts from How the Miners are Robbed: The Duke in the Dock: Startling Court Case
(1907) By John Wheatley - online here
[Who produces the wealth and who gains most from its
production? In a pamphlet written in 1907, John Wheatley
described an imaginary court case, with a coal master,
a landowner and several others being charged with "having
conspired together and robbed an old miner, Dick McGonnagle."

The pamphlet, How the Miners Are Robbed, had considerable
impact before the First World War. Its basic class analysis
remains valid for workers today as they are still being robbed.

In the following extracts from the pamphlet, the magistrate
interrogates the witnesses. The first person to enter the
witness box is the Coal master.]

[Magistrate = M, Prisoner = P]

The coal master

M: What is your name?

P: Frederick Michael Thomas Andrew Sucker, sir.

M: You have a great many names.

P: I protest, sir.

M: I did not ask your occupation. I desire to know how you
came to be possessed of so many names?

P: I can't answer your question, sir.

M: Ah! That sounds suspicious. Now will you kindly tell us
how much wealth you possess?

P: (Proudly) One million pounds, sir.

M: You must be an extremely able man. How did you come to have
a million pounds?

P: I made it, sir.

M: Ah! do you plead guilty to manufacturing coin?

P: (Indignantly) No, sir.

M: Then will you please tell us what you mean by saying you
made it?

P: I earned it in business, sir.

M: How long have you been in business?

P: Twenty years, sir.

M: You must be a very capable worker to have earned such a
huge sum in such a short time?

P (indignantly): I don't work, sir.

M: Ah! this is very interesting. You don't work and yet you have
told us that in twenty years you have earned one million pounds?

P: I own a colliery, sir.

M: What is a colliery?

P: A shaft sunk perhaps a hundred fathoms in the earth; also
various buildings and machinery for the production of coal.

M: Did you sink the shaft?

P: No, sir. I got men to do it.

M: Did you manufacture the machinery and erect the buildings?

P: No, sir. I am not a workman. I got others to work.

M: This is an extraordinary case. You say other men erected the
buildings, and manufactured the machinery, and sunk the shaft
and yet you own the colliery? Have the workmen no share in it?

P: No, sir. I am the sole owner.

M: I confess I can't understand. Do you mean to tell me that
those men put a colliery in full working order, and then
handed it over to you without retaining even a share of it
for themselves?

P: Certainly, sir.

M: They must have been very rich and generous, or very
foolish! Were they rich men?

P: Oh no, sir.

M: Had they many collieries?

P: Oh, none at all, sir. They were merely workmen.

M: What you mean by merely workmen?

P: Merely people who work for others.

M: Surely they must be generous people. Don't they require
collieries themselves?

P: They do, sir.

M: And they own no collieries?

P: No, sir; but I allow them to work in mine.

M: That is very kind of you, but of course not nearly so kind
as their act in giving the colliery to you. Do you find you
don't require the whole colliery yourself, that you can allow
others also to use it?

P: Oh, you don't understand sir. I don't work in my colliery. I
allow the workmen to do so.

M: Oh, I see. After those men handed over the colliery to you,
you found you had no use for it, and so returned it to them
to save them erecting another?

P: Oh no, no, sir. The colliery is still mine, but they work
in it.

M: Really, this is very confusing. You own a pit, which you
did not sink, and plant, which you did not manufacture nor
erect. You do not work in this colliery because you do not
want to work. Those who do not want to work own no colliery,
and yet they gave one to you. Did you beg of them to come and
work in your colliery, as you had no use for it?

P: Oh, not at all, sir. They begged me to allow them to work.

M: But why beg leave to use your colliery? Why not make one
for themselves, as they had done for you? But perhaps you make
them some allowance for working in your colliery and keeping
it in order?

P: Oh yes, sir. I pay them according to the amount of coal
they produce.

M: Well, that seems fair. Then I suppose those men will soon
become very rich? They will have the value of the coal they
produce, and the allowance you make to them for keeping your
colliery in order?

P: Oh no, sir. The coal they produce is mine.

M: What! They turn over the product of their labor to you? Don't
they require the value of this coal themselves?

P: Oh yes, sir. But it is my coal, having been produced in
my colliery.

M: My dear sir, you amuse me. Those men sank the pit, put
the colliery in working order, and dug the coal. Where is
your claim?

P: I gave them permission to do these things, sir.

M: You permitted them to sink the pit, and then you took the
pit; you permitted them to erect the plant, and then you took
the plant; you permitted them to dig the coal, and then you
took the coal. Is that it?

P: Yes, sir; but I paid them for doing these things.

M: How did you get money to pay them seeing you do no work?

P: I inherited ten thousand pounds from my father, and I used
some of this until the men produced the coal.

M: How did your father earn that money?

P: In the same way, sir, as I have converted that ten thousand
pounds into a million.

M: How have you done that?

P: By selling the coal.

M: Did the men employ you to sell the coal?

P: Oh no, sir; the coal was mine.

M: Really, your claim seemed so impertinent that I had not
taken it seriously. Did you pay over to the miners the amount
you received for the coal, less your salary?

P: No, sir. I merely paid them the least amount I could get
men to work for.

M: I must say this is puzzling. Why do these men require to
work for you?

P: Because, sir, they can't work without machinery which
costs money. We rich men having the money, and therefore the
machinery, and those men requiring to work or starve, they
must accept our terms.

M: Surely the State could provide all the capital required in
opening up mines; why should the people require to make terms
with you?

P: Oh, quite easily sir, but the State is ruled by Parliament,
which is composed of men like me. They are not such fools as
to injure themselves.

M: I did not think there were such stupid people in the world
as you describe those workingmen to be. How much coal does a
miner produce in a day?

P: About three tons, sir.

M: At what price do you sell this coal?

P: At ten shillings per ton, sir.

M: Now, if you will kindly tell us how much per day the miner
gets for the three tons of coal which you sell at thirty
shillings, we shall be able to judge how you treat him.

P: He receives about five shillings, sir.

M: Are you serious?

P: Oh yes, sir.

M: What becomes of the remainder?

P: A small portion goes to maintaining [the cost of men] and
covering depreciation of machinery. The Duke gets a good slice
as rents and royalties. The remainder is my profit.

M: What are rents and royalties?

P: A sum charged by the Duke for allowing people to use
the land.

M: What! But never mind, I will examine him presently. Is this
how you have come to possess a million pounds and this old
man is in poverty? You have been selling his coal and holding
on to most of his money. Your father robbed his father in like
manner. With the proceeds of that robbery, and the fact that it
left him penniless, you have been enabled to rob this man. Were
it allowed to continue, your son would be richer than you were,
and his son would be as poor as he was. Therefore the power
of your family to make slaves of his family would increase
with each generation. Fortunately, this case may end your
outrageous scheme. Stand down until I have examined the others.

When prisoner Sucker had again taken his place between the
two constables in the dock, a middle-aged man of stout build
and a ruddy, well-fed, well-watered appearance, entered the
witness box to be examined. In answer to the Magistrate's
first question, he said his name was: The Duke of Hamilton.

M: Come, come, I asked your name, not your occupation!

P: That is my title, sir.

M: Your title may be a number when this case is finished. I
must warn you not to trifle with this Court. What is your name?

P: I don't use any name, your honor.

M: Do you work?

P: Oh no, sir.

M: What! Are you too a loafer?

P: No, sir. I don't require to work.

M: No successful robber does. Why don't you require to work?

P: I'm a wealthy man, sir.

M: How did you come to be wealthy seeing you don't work,
and that wealth is the product of labor?

P: I inherited my wealth, sir.

M: Did your father work for it?

P: No, sir; he too was a wealthy man.

M: Did your grandfather, or your great-grandfather, or any of
the family ever do any work?

P: No, sir.

M: How did they get wealth?

P: Oh, just as I get mine, sir.

M: How is that?

P: By allowing people to use my land.

M: How did you get land? Did you create it?

P: Oh no, sir. I believe God created it.

M: Did he create it for your ancestors?

P: I can't say, sir.

M: Surely you must know if He created it specially for your
ancestors, or whether the land was here before your ancestors
got possession of it?

P: It was always there, sir. My family got possession of it
only at the time of Robert the Bruce.

M: What right had they to take possession of the land?

P: It was given to them by Robert the Bruce.

M: But Bruce did not create the land, nor was it his to give
away. He had no right to do so, and you have no moral or legal
claim to it. Don't you work on this land?

P: Oh no, sir. I've already explained I don't require to
work. I allow thousands of others to do so.

M: Why don't they work on their own land?

P: They have none, sir.

M: What! Do you claim all the land in the district?

P: Yes, sir.

M: And must those men use your land or starve?

P: Certainly, sir.

M: I hope you don't act as the other prisoner does with his
machinery. Is your permission granted on condition that they
hand over to you a share of what they produce?

P: Oh yes, sir.

M: Do they do so?

P: Certainly, sir. They must do so or starve.

M: (soliloquizing): I now see the need for an Eternal Hell. What
share of miner's coal do you claim?

P: I usually obtain in Royalty on each man's work a sum equal
to half what he gets for working.

M: That means when a miner produces three tons of coal he
gives you one?

P: Yes, sir.

M: If there be twenty thousand miners working on your land,
each man must give you every third hutch he fills?

P: Yes, sir.

M: So that again assuming you have twenty thousand miners
working on your land, it takes ten thousand of them to earn
as much as you draw?

P: Yes, sir.

M: And these ten thousand men must risk their lives in the
bowels of the earth while you may be enjoying yourself anywhere?

P: Yes, sir.

M: What sort of men are they?

P: Hardheaded, intelligent men, sir. (Loud laughter in Court,
which was instantly suppressed.)

M: Why don't they take over the land themselves, nationalize
it? Then you could no longer rob them of one third of what
they produced?

P: Oh, that would never do, sir. That would be Socialism. They
prefer to continue paying royalty to me.

M: But even to take advantage of their simplicity is a terrible
crime. Are you not ashamed to do so?

P: Certainly not, sir. It is within the law.

M: Who made the laws?

P: The class to which I belong, and they made no mistakes, sir.

M: If they have not, you make one if you think that this Court
will judge your class by the laws they made. Why a community
should permit itself to be infested by characters like you
passes my comprehension. Please take your place in the dock
until I have heard the evidence against you. The first witness
called was the complainer, Dick McGonnagle.

Old Dick's evidence

M: What age are you, Dick?

D: Fifty-two, your honor.

M: Dear me! you look eighty at least!

D: I've had to work very hard, your honor.

M: How long have you worked in the mines?

D: 40 years, your honor.

M: Have you worked regularly?

D: On an average five days a week, your honor.

M: How much coal do you produce each day?

D: About three tons, your honor.

M: Dear me! You should be a very wealthy man. In 40 years you
must have produced something like 30,000 tons?

D: I am not good at figures, your honor.

M: I am told that this coal is sold at ten shillings per ton?

D: I don't know, your honor.

M: Then I suppose you are not aware that the market price of
the coal you have produced would be £15,000?

D: I was not aware of that, your honor.

M: What wages have you received?

D: On an average, 25 shillings a week.

M: Great heavens! That means you have been swindled out of
nearly £12,500! What became of that £12,500 of which you have
been robbed?

D: I don't know, your honor. (Counsel explained that it would
be proved the prisoners divided it amongst them, and even
robbed the old man afterwards of part of the small share he
had received.)

M: Are you still employed in the mines?

D: Yes, your honor.

M: Don't you find it difficult even to walk to the pit?

D: Yes, your honor. I must now leave half an hour earlier than
formerly, as I have to rest for breath at every 100 yards.

M: How do you get to the coalface after descending the pit?

D: A young man wheels me in a hutch, your honor.

M: And dumps you down there to dig your coal?

D: Yes, your honor.

M: And when you have dug it these men steal it from you?

D: Yes, your honor.

M: Have your fellow-workmen ever stolen from you?

D: Only once, your honor. A man "pinched" a hutch of mine,
and he was hunted from the pit. This man called the Duke has
"pinched" every third hutch I have filled for 40 years, and
I think he should be hunted. (After hearing evidence from a
"Socialist" against the prisoners and from a Clergyman in their
defense the Magistrate rose to deliver judgment.) He said he
had no difficulty in finding the prisoners guilty. They had
admitted their guilt. He felt, however, that no punishment
which that Court could condemn them to would be sufficient for
such terrible crimes. He would, therefore, send them to the
Lowest Court for punishment, and ordered that they be taken
there at once.

Court Officer: Where is the Lowest Court, your honor?

Magistrate: I forget exactly. Ask the clergyman.

Towards a mass strike in Britain

2011-10-03T18:57:00.001+01:00

The idea that Britain is somehow an island of tranquility and harmony cut off from the wider turmoil in the Eurozone where they have riots and mass strikes and so on has looking increasingly dodgy a hypothesis ever since students gave the Tory HQ at Millback a 'renovation' last November. Since then we have had one of the biggest demonstrations by trade unions in British history in March, a strike by 750,000 lecturers, teachers and civil servants in June, the summer riots and now a marvellous TUC backed demonstration outside Tory Party conference.

Some of the more repeatable of the angry slogans I heard at Sunday's 30,000 strong Manchester 'March for the Alternative' outside Tory party conference were along the lines of 'We are the working class - we have come to kick your arse!' and 'David Cameron - on your bike! November 30 - General Strike!' They give a sense of the potential tidal wave of rage and anger bubbling beneath the surface of Britain at the moment - and hopefully destined to explode into militancy on 30 November.

In the latest Socialist Review, Mark Thomas looks at the distinct possibility of a mass strike in a few weeks in Britain...it is up to socialists and everyone who wants to save the NHS, defend education and public services and pensions to organise over the next few weeks to make that potential fightback the kind of mass strike that can stop the Tory attacks on the welfare state in their tracks - and begin to build the kind of class confidence that can bring down this financially, politically, intellectually and morally bankrupt Con-Dem government.

Some background reading on mass strikes
Rosa Luxemburg The Mass Strike.
Leon Trotsky On Britain [and the British General Strike of 1926].
Tony Cliff, Patterns of mass strike
Martin Smith, 'Britain's Trade Unions: The shape of things to come'

New Book: An Unfinished Revolution

2011-10-03T18:32:00.000+01:00

NEW TITLE: AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: KARL MARX AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BY ROBIN BLACKBURN
OUT NOW

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of “free labor” and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln’s response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy.

The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men’s Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped spread the demand for an eight-hour day. Blackburn shows how the IWA in America—born out of the Civil War—sought to radicalize Lincoln’s unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war, and it inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades.

In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes articles from the radical New York-based journal WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY, an extract from Thomas Fortune’s classic work on racism BLACK AND WHITE, Frederick Engels on the progress of US labor in the 1880s, and Lucy Parson’s speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.

See also this EVENT:
October 12, 2011
Bishopsgate Institute

'Empire and Resistance': A special meeting with two leading socialist historians of imperialism, Robin Blackburn & Richard Gott

Socialist History Society Public Meeting, supported by the London Socialist Historians Group

For more information and to book: http://www.versobooks.com/events/201-empire-and-resistance-a-special-meeting-with-two-leading-socialist-historians-of-imperialism-robin-blackburn-amp-richard-gott

John Molyneux on J.R.R. Tolkien

2011-10-03T17:36:00.001+01:00

TOLKIEN’S WORLD – a Marxist Analysis
by John Molyneux, author of a number of works including most recently Anarchism: A Marxist Criticism

The writings of J.R.R.Tolkien might seem a somewhat unusual subject for Marxist analysis, and indeed for me. I usually write about visual art or politics rather than literature and when Marxists write about literature they are more likely to focus on issues of method, or on figures from the canon of high culture – Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy etc – or modernism – Kafka, Joyce. Beckett – or with avowed radical politics – Gorky, Brecht, O’Casey, Steinbeck etc. Tolkien fits none of these categories. Indeed he is a writer to whom many Marxists would take an instant dislike, who some would decline to read altogether (as not serious literature) or who, if they did like him, they might be slightly shame -faced about, almost as if they had a private taste for James Bond or Mills and Boon, for if Tolkien is not pulp fiction, he is not quite regarded as high culture either.

Nevertheless there already exists a small body of Marxist writing on Tolkien including several articles in Historical Materialism Volume 10, issue 4 ( Ishay Landa, ‘Slaves of the Ring: Tolkien’s Political Unconscious’, Ben Watson, ‘Fantasy and Judgement: Adorno, Tolkien, Burroughs’, Carl Freedman, ‘A Note on Marxism and Fantasy’). Moreover there is a serious justification for writing seriously about Tolkien; namely, his exceptional popularity and the need to account for that popularity.

This popularity is truly extraordinary. According to Wikipedia, The Lord of the Rings, with 150 million sales world wide, is the second best selling novel of all time (after Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities with 200 million) and the seventh best selling book of any kind (after The Bible, Mao’s Little Red Book, The Qu’ran, the Chinese Dictionary etc). It has sold more than The Da Vinci Code and The Catcher in the Rye combined, five times as many as War and Peace or 1984 or To Kill a Mocking Bird and fifteen times as many as Catch 22. The Hobbit, with 100 million sales, comes in fourth among novels and twelfth of all books. To this must be added the fact that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, with takings of $1,119,110,941, was the third highest grossing film of all time, after Avatar and Titanic, with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers only just behind [see here*]

Popularity on this scale means that the ideological content of this work is a factor of at least some significance in the consciousness of many millions of people, and thus worthy of analysis.

Moreover this popularity bears with it a conundrum. It is clear that Tolkien’s world view is in many respects right wing and reactionary, but if this is the case how come his work is so popular? Is it despite or because of this reactionary outlook? Or what is the relation between Tolkien’s worldview and his audience? Investigating, and hopefully resolving, this puzzle is one of the main aims of this essay. It also throws up a number of interesting points about history, ideology and art.

When I refer to Tolkien’s worldview, I mean not his personal political opinions but his outlook as embodied in his novels. Although the personal opinions undoubtedly influenced the outlook of the novels, it is the latter, not the former, that matters. The latter has influenced many, many millions; the former are known only to a tiny minority. Moreover, that worldview is expressed primarily not in the details of the plot of either The Hobbit or The Lord of The Rings but in the overall vision of Middle Earth as an imagined society.

The Lord of the Rings is not, in my opinion, an allegory. In this I concur with Tolkien who was most insistent on this point in the Forward to the Second Edition (The Fellowship of the Ring, 1974 pp 8-9) Unlike, say, Animal Farm, which is manifestly an allegory for the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin, the story of the war of the rings does not correspond to [still less is it an elaborate code for] the First World War, or The Second World War or any other actual historical episode.**

The real history it most closely resembles is that of the Cold War but we know that it was conceived long before the Cold War began. The plot of The Lord of The Rings therefore, is largely sui generis. The social relations of Middle Earth, however, are not and could not be. It is very easy to imagine futuristic technology – intergalactic spaceships, death stars, transporter beams and the like – and it is relatively easy to imagine strange non-existent creatures – Orcs, Ents, insect people, Cactacae,etc – but it is close to impossible to invent non-existent social relations and the social relations of Middle Earth are readily recognisable.

The World of Middle Earth.

The reason the social relations of Middle Earth are so easily recognised is that they are (with one important exception) essentially feudal. We do not live in a feudal society, but feudalism is the social order that immediately preceded capitalism in Europe, and that existed alongside capitalism in many parts of the world until well into the twentieth century. Moreover, there still survive, even in the twenty first century, hangovers of feudalism such as the British monarchy, aristocracy and the House of Lords. In addition feudal social relations permeate a large part of our classic literature (Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf etc) of our mythology, (the Arthurian legends, Robin Hood etc) and our children’s fairy tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White etc).

According to Marx social relations correspond to a certain level of development of the forces of production (technology, plus labour, plus science). The productive forces of Middle Earth are resolutely medieval. Not only are they pre- industrial, they are pre- early modern – no steam engines or power driven machinery, no printing, no transport more advanced than the ship and the horse (except eagles in extremis), importantly no guns or cannon (the only explosions or fireworks are courtesy of wizardry or sorcery). Actually very little attention is paid to production at all. It is clear that Middle Earth is overwhelmingly rural – Minas Tirith in Gondor is the only real city we encounter in the whole epic – and therefore it is more or less assumed that most people are farmers of some sort and not worthy of much mention.

Middle Earth is a world of Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses, Lords and Ladies. The role of heridity and lineage, of what sociologists call ascribed (as opposed to achieved) status and what in everyday language would be called class, is absolutely overwhelming and completely taken for granted. Almost every single character’s social position and part in the story is determined, in the first instance, by their birth. This applies from the very top to the very bottom, in small matters and large. Why, for example, is Sam Gamgee Frodo’s servant? It is not age – Merry and Pippin are young but from higher families in the Shire social order – it is class. Aragorn, not Boromir or Faramir, is destined to rule Gondor because he is the heir of Isildur, albeit this was 3000 years ago, and has ancestry stretching even further back to Earendil and the Elven kings of the First Age, whereas they are merely sons of a Steward. True, he has to prove himself and win his throne in many battles but his leadership role is predestined. And Aragorn will love and wed Arwen not Eowyn because she is of matching birth – they are repeating the ancient union of Luthien and Beren. Eowyn, who originally loves Aragorn, instead marries Faramir who is of roughly equivalent standing in the Middle Earth hierarchy.

At first glance the central character of Gandalf may appear not to fit this mould in that his lineage is not spelt out in The Lord of the Rings, and that Saruman not Gandalf is at first cast as the senior wizard; moreover wizards do not seem to have a fixed position in the Middle Earth social order (compare the relatively lowly Radagast). But in The Silmarillion, the prequel to the saga of the Rings, which provides a creation myth for Middle Earth and tells the history of its First Age, this gap is filled. Gandalf, we are told, was originally Olorin and a Maiar . The Maiar were the servants of the Valar, the Lords of Arda (guardians of creation made in the beginning by Iluvatar, the One) in Valinor, beyond the confines of the world. Gandalf is thus of higher lineage even than Elrond or Galadriel, but, interestingly, matches that of his two great foes, the Balrog in Moria ( Balrogs were Maiar perverted by Melkor/Morgoth, the fallen Ainur/Valar and Great Enemy) and Sauron, Morgoth's emissary, just as Frodo's descent and social status matches that of his nemesis Smeagol/Gollum.

At no point in The Lord of The Rings is this hierarchical social structure subject to any form of critique or challenge, either by an individual character or a collective group, or even implicitly by the logic of the narrative. The history of Middle Earth contains no Wat Tylers, John Lilburnes or Tom Paines. On the contrary acceptance of traditional and inherited authority is invariably a sign of ‘good’ character, resistance to it a sign of siding, or potentially siding, with the enemy. For example one of the things that marks Faramir as the ‘good’ brother in contrast to Boromir, is his more or less instant recognition and acceptance of Aragorn as his ruler.

Indeed, in a parallel with the Christian story of Lucifer the fallen archangel, the origin of all evil in Tolkien’s world is the rebellion against authority of Melkor, the Ainur. In The Silmarillion it is told how at the beginning of creation Iluvatar revealed to the Ainur a ‘mighty theme’ of which they were to ‘make in harmony together a Great Music’:

But now Iluvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws. But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. (The Silmarillion, 1977, p.16)

From this act of insubordination flows all the misfortunes of Arda – the temptation of Feanor, the darkening of Valinor, the great war at the end of the First Age, the fall of Numenor, and the rise of Sauron. Thus from first to last Tolkien’s worldview is imbued with a deep seated respect for traditional authority.

To add to this there runs through the whole saga another hallmark of conservatism, namely the belief that things are not what they used to be, that the world is in decline, and that the old days were finer, nobler, more dignified, more heroic than the present. As Elrond puts it when recounting the mustering of the hosts of Gil-galad and Elendil for the assault on Sauron at the end of the Second Age, ‘I remember well the splendour of their banners ... It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, so many great princes and captains were assembled. And yet not so many, nor so fair [ my emphasis], as when Thangorodrim was broken’. (The Fellowship of the Ring, 1974, p.233)
Finally there is a view of fate, predestination and ‘the will of the Gods’ that is not only pre-modern and pre-enlightment but reminiscent of Ancient Greece and the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. When, at the Council of Elrond, Frodo announces that he will undertake the task of taking the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, Elrond says ‘I think this task is appointed for you, Frodo’, and indeed the whole episode has been foretold in lines which came to both Faramir and Boromir in dreams:

Seek for the Sword that was broken:
In Imladris it dwells
There shall be counsels taken
Stronger than Morgul-spells.
There shall be shown a token
That Doom is near at hand,
For Isildur’s Bane shall waken,
And the Halfling forth shall stand.
[The Fellowship of the Ring p.236]

Similarly Smeagol/Gollum is fated ‘to play his part before the end’ – an absolutely crucial part as it turns out – and the various acts of mercy that are shown to him by Gandalf, Aragorn, the Elves of Mirkwood, and Frodo himself all facilitate this predetermined destiny. Predictions and prophesies are scattered throughout the story and they always come true. As in Greek tragedy anyone who attempts to frustrate or avoid their fate merely ends up contributing to its inevitable fulfilment. The centrality of this conception of fate, which turns out ultimately to be the will of God, for Tolkien’s whole vision is made clear by Iluvatar’s response to Melkor’s aforementioned original sin of musical innovation:

Then Iluvatar spoke, and he said: ’Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’[The Silmarillion p.17]

This view of destiny is highly conservative because it both reflects the fact that human beings are not in control of their society or their own lives (in Marxist terms, alienated and dominated by the products of their own labour) and reinforces the idea that that they can never become so.

Racism and Sexism

The world view that I have just analysed was, give or take certain elements, by no means confined to Tolkien but existed as a definite strand on the intellectual wing of British upper and middle class culture; other members of The Inklings (C S Lewis, Hugo Dyson etc) shared it to a degree, as did the likes of T S Eliot and Ezra Pound. And within this outlook there was clearly a tendency towards racism – witness anti-semitism in Eliot and Pound. This is partly because it contained elements, e.g. the emphasis on inherited characteristics and kinship, which leant themselves to racial views, and partly because, as a result particularly of imperialism, racist attitudes were endemic in the upper reaches of British society in Tolkien’s formative years. It is therefore necessary to pose the question of how much racism there is to be found in Tolkien’s work.
The answer, it seems to me, is not simple. On the one hand, the existence of different races with deeply ingrained physical and psychological characteristics is absolutely central to the story from beginning to end. In the course of the saga we meet elves, men, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents and, marginally, trolls, all of whom are speaking peoples. Of these the elves, especially the High Elves or Eldar, who have dwelt in the Undying Lands, are clearly in some sense ‘the highest’ i.e. the most refined, the ‘fairest’ in Tolkien’s words, the most gifted in craft and learned in lore, the most farsighted, literally and figuratively, and, above all, are ‘immortal’ unless slain. They are by no means perfect, capable of both error and ‘sin’ and at various times are seduced by the wiles of Morgoth or Sauron, but, unless I am mistaken, no Elf in the whole history of Arda ever actually joins the ‘dark side’ and fights with the Enemy. Men, by contrast, are mortal, less learned, much more various (with types ranging from Butterbur to Aragorn, Faramir to the Haradrim, and Denethor to the Wild Men of Druadan), more fertile and more numerous, and more morally ambiguous. The Numenorians under Ar- Pharazon attempted to make war on the Valar and the Undying Lands (in the Second Age) and in the War of the Ring large numbers of men, Easterlings, Haradrim etc, fight with Sauron.

Dwarves are called by Tolkien ‘a race apart’: they were created not by Iluvatar but by the Valar Aule. They are shorter than elves or men, mortal but longer lived than most humans, and have definite behavioural and psychological characteristics: love of mountains, caves, mining, jewels, stonework; they are proud and jealous of their rights, sturdy and stiff-necked, and they fight with axes not swords or bows. Hobbits are of unknown origin (they don’t figure in The Silmarillion) but, of course, are small, jolly, tough underneath etc., and the Ents, the shepherds of the Trees, were created at the request of the Valar Yavanna: they are tree- like in appearance and strength and somewhat slow, though by no means stupid. Lastly, and crucially, there are the Orcs who began (probably – Tolkien is not categorical on this) as Elves imprisoned, enslaved and corrupted by Melkor in his first stronghold of Utumno. I say crucially because the Orcs became and remain all bad, utterly and universally evil, without any redeeming or mitigating qualities whatsoever. At no point in the entire narrative do we encounter an Orc who is anything other than a merciless enemy, and consequently at no point do we as readers feel anything for them other than delight in their defeat and slaughter. On the face of it this is outright racism.

And yet it doesn’t feel like it; nor is this a purely personal judgement. I know many people with a visceral hatred of racism who would react with disgust to any manifestation of it, who nonetheless love The Lord of the Rings. And there are reasons for this. There are three main grounds for opposing, indeed hating racism. 1) The biological fact that different human races do not exist, that there is only one human race or species and therefore all racial prejudice, discrimination, and oppression involves not only stupidity but also inherent injustice. It fundamentally violates the humanity of those who are its victims. 2) The social and historical fact that racism, because it denies people’s essential humanity, is associated with, leads to and is used to justify the most appalling treatment of human beings, the worst crimes against humanity (slavery, colonialism, genocide, apartheid and so on).3) The specifically socialist argument that racism is used by ruling classes to divide and rule the oppressed and to provide scapegoats onto whom anger of the oppressed can be diverted.

But if we examine Tolkien’s work in the light of these arguments it can be seen that none of them quite applies. In the real world racism is false and denies our common humanity but in Tolkien’s imaginary world there really are different races. In the real world racism leads to barbaric behaviour, but in Tolkien’s story the narrative, and his disguised authorial voice, consistently opposes any gratuitous cruelty to or maltreatment of the weak, the defeated, or even the enemy. Orcs are consistently killed but the story is such that they are only encountered as enemies in battle. Within the terms of the story they are never imprisoned, enslaved, executed or tortured so the fact that they seen as inherently evil (and within the terms of the story ARE inherently evil) does not lead to any especially barbaric behaviour beyond the barbarism inherent in war. Racism may be a ruling class weapon in the class struggle to which socialists counterpose working class unity, but in Tolkien’s world there is no class struggle – the struggle is between the free peoples and the enemy and in this struggle Tolkien consistently advocates inter-racial unity: Aragorn, by lineage and behaviour, epitomises the unity of elves and men and, together with Gandalf, secures the unity of Rohan and Gondor; the friendship between Legolas and Gimli and Gimli’s adoration of Galadriel overcomes grievances between Elves and Dwarves that stretch back to the slaying of King Thingol in the dispute over the Nauglamir (Necklace of the Dwarves containing a Silmaril) in the Elder Days; the Hobbits (Merry and Pippin) draw Treebeard and the Ents (and the Huorns) into the War, where they play a vital role in defeating the treacherous Saruman.

Unfortunately Tolkien does not get off this hook quite so easily. Three issues remain. The first, and I owe this point to China Mieville, is that Tolkien has, of course, chosen to imagine a world in which ‘races’ with inherent racial characteristics ‘really’ exist and that is a definite political/ideological choice. The second is the way the saga is constructed throughout around a West/East dichotomy in which West is invariably identified with goodness and light and east with darkness and frequently evil. In the uttermost west is located the seat of the gods and the blessed Aman or Undying Realm and other locations are judged more or less fair in terms of their relation to this. In the Lord of the Rings Gondor is west, Mordor is east and the force that marches against Mordor for the final battle on the Field of Cormallen are the ‘Men of the West’ or the ‘Host of the West’ led by the ‘Captains of the West’. Sometimes this has been read as a reflection of the Cold War but we know that the main lines of the story were formulated as early as the First World War. Rather it is imperial ‘orientalism’ (as famously analysed by Edward Said) that is the influence here and this undoubtedly contains serious elements of racism.

The third, linked to the first and second, is the characterisation of the men of the east and south. In the war the Easterlings and Southrons and Corsairs of Umbar (also from the far south) are allies of Sauron. This seems to be taken for granted as part of the natural order of things and not requiring of any particular explanation, nor are we offered any account or detailed description of these peoples. Boromir, in his report to the Council of Elrond, refers to ‘the cruel Haradrim’(The Fellowship of the Ring, p.236), and again in the account of the Siege of Gondor we are told of ‘regiments from the South, Haradrim, cruel and tall’ (The Return of the King, p.90) and then offered this description ‘Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in Scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.’ (The Return of the King, p.121).The element of racist stereotyping here is clear. It is a minor element in the story as a whole but it is there.
Taken together these three points leave Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings guilty of racism but with mitigating circumstances and the mitigation is such that for most readers the racism will not be one of the reasons for the appeal of the book.

The question of sexism is, I think, much more straightforward, as one would expect given the near universality of sexism in the culture and literature preceding the nineteen seventies. I will begin with a quotation about Dwarf women, from Appendix A to The Return of the King:

Dis was the daughter of Thrain II. She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories. It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf- women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that Dwarves ‘grow out of stone’.

It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings. For Dwarves take only one wife or husband each in their lives, and are jealous, as in all matters of their rights. The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third. For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and so will have no other. As for the men, very many do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.

This situation of dwarf-women is only an extreme version of the overall situation of women in The Lord of the Rings – above all they distinguished by their absence. In the whole story there are only three significant female characters – Arwen, Galadriel and Eowyn and of these Arwen remains very shadowy. In addition I can think only of walk-on parts for Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Rose Cotton, Goldberry (Tom Bombadil’s wife), and Ioreth, of whom Lobelia and Ioreth are part comic relief. There are no women members of the Fellowship of the Ring, no Ent Women (though the past existence of Ent wives is acknowledged) and no Orc women. In The Hobbit to the best of my recall there is NO woman character at all. In a way it is extraordinary.

Equally extraordinary in contemporary terms, though less extraordinary in the extremely prudish middle class culture of pre-war England, is the almost complete silence on matters of sex and sexuality. Bilbo and Frodo appear to live their entire lives in celibate bachelorhood (without the least concern). Elrond is at least 4000 years old before he marries and it is then thirty nine years before his sons are born and another 102 years before the birth of Arwen. Aragorn is twenty when he falls in love with Arwen (who is about 2500 and, we are told, a ’maiden’), forty nine when he and Arwen ‘plight their troth’ in Lothlorien, and eighty eight before they are able to marry, until which time we must presume he remains celibate. Now Aragorn has been told that he is due an exceptionally long life span (thrice that of ordinary men) but even so it is something of a tall order. Boromir and Faramir are forty one and thirty six respectively, but both still single, and so on. As Carl Freedman comments, ‘Through three thick volumes, there is, for example, hardly a single important instance of sexual desire’ (Carl Freedman, ‘A Note on Marxism and Fantasy’ op.cit. p.263).

This combination of rarity and absence of sex enables Tolkien to place his main female characters on very high pedestals. Galadriel and Arwen are both wondrously beautiful (‘fair’), dignified, noble and kind. Goldberry, though not developed as a character is clearly cut from the same cloth. Eowyn, from a feminist standpoint the most interesting, is a kind of Joan of Arc figure, until she settles for regal domestic bliss with her second choice, Faramir.

Tolkien’s sexism is of the old fashioned gentlemanly ‘chivalrous’ kind, not the active misogyny found in Ian Fleming or Norman Mailer. There are no wicked women or femme fatales (unless you count Shelob, the female spider) and his very few key characters are certainly not weak or subservient. Galadriel is clearly superior – wiser and stronger – to her husband Celeborn and Eowyn is given one of the most dramatic and heroic moments in the whole of The Lord of the Rings, when, in a straight lift from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, she slays the Lord of the Nazgul:

‘ Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!’ [says the Nazgul as he stands over the fallen Theoden]
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear was like the ring of steel, ‘But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you if you touch him’.
(The Return of the King p.116)

The issue of homophobia does not arise in Tolkien because, of course, there is no such thing as homosexuality in the imaginary world of Middle Earth.

Tolkien’s Appeal

We can now return to the question posed at the beginning of this essay, namely explaining how work based on such a conservative outlook has enjoyed such immense popularity. The question is the more interesting because it does not seem to be popularity on a right wing or conservative basis, in the way that the Bond novels and films appeal mainly to the macho male, or Agatha Christie murder mysteries appeal to middle class nostalgia for the English village and mansion of yesteryear. Rather a major part of Tolkien’s appeal, and what turned him into an international best seller, was to the ‘hippy’ counter culture in America in the sixties.

One obvious and tempting answer is simply to say that the ‘average’ or typical reader is not interested in the kind of social and political issues discussed here but is simply swept along by the good writing and dramatic story line. In a sense this is obviously true and good writing and gripping action are doubtless necessary conditions of the work’s success, but in themselves they are not a sufficient explanation. The affection in which The Lord of the Rings is held by so many involves not just being gripped by the story line but being ‘enchanted’ or ‘inspired’ by its vision and its values, and that ‘vision’ and those ‘values’ cannot be separated from the social relations in which they are embedded – even if the ‘average’ reader is not aware of this in these terms.

So how does a vision of a feudal society imbued with deeply conservative values, which in the real world, in a modern bourgeois democratic society, would have practically zero political support, manage to exercise such an attraction?

First, because what we are presented with is a totally idealised feudal society. The most obvious and fundamental feature of feudalism and medieval society, namely its poverty and hence the poverty of most of its people is simply airbrushed out. Even in contemporary America or Europe there is large scale poverty, never mind Latin America, South Asia or Africa or Europe in the Middle Ages, but not in Middle Earth. Neither in The Shire, nor Rohan, nor Gondor, nor anywhere else, do we encounter ordinary, run of the mill poverty. From time to time we encounter ‘lowly’ or ‘humble’ people, such as Sam Gamgee and his Gaffer, or Beregond in Minas Tirith, but never anyone actually suffering privation. Nor do we find any of the conconcomitants of poverty such as squalor or disease or even grinding hard work. The real Middle Ages had the Black Death and numerous other plagues and famines. I offer a couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia on famine in the Middle Ages ( it matters not whether the details are correct or not for the general picture is abundantly clear):

Famine in the Medieval European context meant that people died of starvation on a massive scale. As brutal as they were, famines were familiar occurrences in Medieval Europe. As an example, localized famines occurred in France during the fourteenth century in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–1317 (the Great Famine), 1330–1334, 1349–1351, 1358–1360, 1371, 1374–1375 and 1390. In England, the most prosperous kingdom affected by the Great Famine, years of famine included 1315–1317, 1321, 1351, and 1369. For most people there was often not enough to eat and life expectancy was relatively short since many children died. According to records of the British Royal family, the best off in society, the average life expectancy in 1276 was 35.28 years. Between 1301 and 1325 during the Great Famine it was 29.84 while between 1348-1375, during the Black Death and subsequent plagues, it went to 17.33.

The height of the famine was reached in 1317 as the wet weather hung on. Finally, in the summer the weather returned to its normal patterns. By now, however, people were so weakened by diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other sicknesses, and so much of the seed stock had been eaten, that it was not until 1325 that the food supply returned to relatively normal conditions and the population began to increase again. Historians debate the toll but it is estimated that 10%-25% of the population of many cities and towns died. While the Black Death (1338–1375) would kill more, for many the Great Famine was worse. While the plague swept through an area in a matter of months, the Great Famine lingered for years, drawing out the suffering of those who would slowly starve to death and face cannibalism, child-murder and rampant crime.[ from here***

Nothing like this ever happens in Middle Earth, not in the 10,000 years of its Three Ages. Average life expectancy in medieval Europe was about 30 – it was so low because of the high infant mortality. Infant mortality was ever the scourge of the poor and it remained high until well into the twentieth century. The infant mortality rate was well over 100 per 1000 births in Victorian Britain and 150 per 1000 worldwide in 1950. Today it is 6.3 per 1000 in the USA, and 2.75 in Sweden but 180 in Angola and 154 in Sierra Leone. No such problem exists in Tolkien world. Nor is there cholera or TB or cancer or heart attacks.

Crucially, also, there is no exploitation or systematic oppression or slavery except where carried out by Morgoth, Sauron or his agents and allies. The extreme moral bi-polarity of Middle Earth (which I think is an important aesthetic weakness) is very useful here. Middle Earth is not a boringly happy utopia, on the contrary it is filled with danger and evil, without Tolkien ever having to deal with any issues of social justice because all injustice and oppression is simply laid at the door of the Enemy.

Another factor in the appeal of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that the entry point into this feudal world and our immediate point of identification throughout the saga is via the Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo in particular, and The Shire (and not as it is in the much less popular Silmarillion, via the One, the Ainur and the Eldar). The Shire, especially The Shire as it is first presented at the start of The Hobbit, exists within a feudal context – wizard and Dwarves turn up at the door, but is not itself feudal. Here is the description of Bag End on page 1 of The Hobbit
:

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats.....No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes, (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the same floor... This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins.

This is not medieval or feudal: it is England, very definitely England, [The name, Bag End, comes from the farmhouse in the tiny Worcestershire village of Dormston, in which Tolkien's aunt lived [see here] somewhere between the early modern period of the Tudors (in terms of its technology and being pre- Cromwell) and the Cotswolds of Cider with Rosie, or even later, in terms of its cosiness. It is worth noting that although The Shire has a Thain (an Anglo-Saxon term), an office held by the chief member of the Took family, ‘the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity’ and ‘...The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire) who was elected every seven years’ (The Fellowship of the Ring, p21, my emphasis). I think this is the only example of such a modern and democratic notion as election in the saga and significantly it is Sam who becomes Mayor when he returns from the War. Tolkien confirms this geographical/ historical location and his nostalgia for it in the Foreword to the Second Edition:

It has been supposed by some that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not....It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender...The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. (The Fellowship of the Ring, p.9)

The Shire, of course, is just as much an idealised image of rural England in the late nineteenth century (or any other time) as Middle Earth is of the middle ages. No enclosures, no hanging poachers, no Poor Laws, no Tolpuddle Martyrs and so on.

But there is a further point and it is the most important. This idealised view of the pre-capitalist, or early capitalist past, can form the basis for a critique of modern industrial capitalism. Marx refers to this in the, not very well known, section of The Communist Manifesto on ‘Feudal Socialism’:

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society....In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history....

Tolkien is not a ‘feudal socialist’ but he does favourably contrast the pre-industrial past with the industrial present. Earlier in the Manifesto Marx writes:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

Tolkien runs this film backwards. From the world of ‘egotistical calculation’ and ‘callous “cash payment”’ , he harks back to the ‘feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”’ and ‘feudal patriarchal idyllic relations’. This is the real key to Tolkien’s mass appeal, including his appeal to Haight-Ashbury hippies. Because IF one abstracts from the poverty, famine, disease, exploitation, oppression etc. then the Middle Ages CAN be held up as a purer, nobler time than the dirty modern world of factories, pollution, profit, money grubbing, vulgar commercial interest, shoddy goods, advertising and extreme alienation, and in some respects it WAS.. In real life, in actual politics, this abstraction is completely impossible, of course, and what one ends with is either tragedy (Pol Pot) or farce (Colonel Blimp, new age Druids) or some mixture of the two ( Mussolini perhaps) but in fantasy, indeed in literature and art, it is perfectly possible.

Nor does this just apply to Tolkien. It is why a romantic anti-capitalist feudalizing tendency, leaning sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right has been a substantial cultural force ever since the Industrial Revolution. Elements of it are present in William Blake (‘England’s green and pleasant land’ versus ‘the dark Satanic mills’) and the Romantic poets generally. It is explicit in the Pre-Raphaelites, and mixed with socialism and Marxism in William Morris (who was a significant influence on Tolkien). In Ireland we find it in Yeats’s invocation of the Celtic Twilight. It is a significant component underlying the brilliant critique (and the disgust tinged with anti-semitism) of T.S. Eliot’s most powerful poetry ( ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Gerontion’, ‘The Hollow Men’ etc) and probably receives its most extreme expression in the poetry, literary criticism and politics of Ezra Pound, which combined affection for Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Chinese, and Troubador poetry with right wing Social Credit economics (against usury and the bankers) and ended up broadcasting for Mussolini in the Second World War.

It this, I believe, which explains why Eliot and Pound could write major poetry while being, respectively, an Anglo-Catholic Royalist who thought the rot set in with the murder of Thomas a Beckett, and a real fascist; and why a conservative Catholic Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford could write books that have sold in the tens of millions.

On Evaluating Tolkien

I have not so far offered any aesthetic evaluation of Tolkien as this was not the purpose of the article, but I am aware that such evaluation is one of the main things many readers look for in any such review of literary work. I am also aware that the analysis I have outlined does have evaluative implications; moreover I think it is possible, likely even, that my analysis will be interpreted in unintended ways. On the one hand the diagnosis of Tolkien’s worldview as conservative, reactionary and feudalist with an admixture of racism and sexism will be seen in some quarters as implying a strongly negative judgment on its literary merits. On the other I suspect that my affection for the text, which is considerable, shows through and may be taken as signifying a very high estimation of Tolkien’s literary standing. Since my actual view lies between these poles it seems advisable to conclude with a brief statement of it.

Like Trotsky, who put the matter very clearly in ‘Class and Art’ (L.Trotsky, On Literature and Art, Pathfinder, New York, 1977, pp 63-88), and Marx, judging by his fondness for Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Balzac, I do not think artistic merit or demerit can be read off from the artist’s progressive or reactionary ideology, even where that ideology is strongly embedded in the work. For example the evident fact that Kipling, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Yeats, Faulkner and Celine were right wingers of one sort or another does not make them poor writers or necessarily inferior to say, William Morris, Robert Tressell, George Orwell, W.H.Auden, Upton Sinclair and Edward Upward of the left. I do not even accept that the revolutionary implications of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ make it a greater poem than Keats’ ‘escapist’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. However I am in favour, as in this piece on Tolkien, of bringing out the political implications of work (whether progressive or reactionary), not pretending they don’t exist and I think that sometimes it can be shown that an artist’s political stance substantially affects the quality of their work either positively or negatively. For example, in general terms, a sexist novelist might be likely to have difficulty with creating powerful women characters, and, specifically, T S Eliot’s poetry was damaged by his anti-semitic tendencies. On the other hand Michelangelo’s sympathy with progressive republican forces in Renaissance Italy was a significant factor in the awesome tragic vision of his later years.[See John Molyneux, ‘Michelangelo and human emancipation’, ISJ 128].

In relation to Tolkien I have shown how his conservative ‘feudalism’ lays the basis for his aesthetic appeal, when combined, of course, with his powerful imagination and strong narrative skills.[ Carl Freedman’s condemnation of ‘the tedious flatness of much, though not all, of the prose’, (Carl Freedman, ‘A note on Marxism and Fantasy’, Historical Materialism, Vol 10 Issue 4 p263) does not correspond to my experience of it ]. But at the same time it seriously limits Tolkien’s aesthetic achievement in two ways which are of fundamental importance in modern literature. First it precludes the possibility of linguistic innovation. Much of the greatest modern literature, whether Eliot or Joyce, Kafka or Beckett, Brecht or Ginsburg, Lorca or Pinter has been engaged in forging new ways of using the language, in ‘keeping it up’ in dynamic tension with the evolution of spoken language, the so-called ‘vernacular’ [In the same way that Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Ernst, Miro, Pollock, Warhol and others, participated in the development of our collective means of visual expression]. Tolkien was not, and did not wish to be, part of this.

Second, it is the task of modern literature/art to explore and confront the difficulty – the extreme difficulty – emotionally, morally, psychologically, economically, politically, etc of living in the modern world , a world of intense and complex alienation. Tolkien’s location of his narrative in the idealised feudal past means that he evades this task. He simply does not have to deal with modern social relations in the way that all the writers cited in the previous paragraph, and many others, do. As Freedman rightly says, ‘Middle-earth leaves out most of what makes us real human beings living in a real historical society…the great majority of the actual material interests- economic, political, ideological, sexual – that drive individuals and societies are silently erased’. [Freedman op.cit p.263]. This problem is compounded by the extreme moral bi-polarity of Tolkien’s world, which is clearly derived from his conservative Christianity. From first to last the history of Middle Earth and the wider history of all creation is dominated by a simple struggle between extra-human ‘good’ and ‘evil’. It is true that this struggle goes on WITHIN a number of individuals – Denethor, Boromir, Smeagol/Gollum, Saruman, and Frodo himself are all examples – but it remains enormously oversimplified compared with the ambiguities, nuances, knots, complexities, tangles and so on that characterize real life.

These weaknesses do not render Tolkien’s work unenjoyable or worthless. He is clearly the master of a particular genre of fantasy, which largely shares those weaknesses (though not wholly, as China Mieville’s trilogy set in the alternative present of New Crobuzon shows) but not a master of modern literature as a whole.

John Molyneux
31 October , 2010

Notes:
*I am well aware that citing Wikipedia is academically disapproved of but in this case it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether these figures are exact and I make no claim for their precise accuracy. They are merely indicative of the vast scale of Tolkien’s popularity and for this purpose Wikipedia seems perfectly adequate.

**Ishay Landa, in his aforementioned ‘Slaves of the Ring: Tolkien’s Political Unconscious’, rejects the term allegory but, in effect, argues that Tolkien’s work is an allegory for, or at least a reflection of, ‘ the crisis of capitalist property relations at the beginning of the twentieth century culminating in the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution’ (p.117). Tolkien, he argues, was ‘deeply aware of the calamitous consequences of imperialism, but at the same time was even more alarmed at the prospect of revolution,’ (p.117) . He sees the goblins/orcs (he quotes The Hobbit) as embodying ‘Tolkien’s underlying terror at the prospect of revolution’ (p.120) , but also that ‘The Ring’s essence is that of global expansion, of unlimited monopoly, of the unquenchable thirst for surplus value’ and that ‘the Ring is capitalism, mythically grasped’(p.124). I find this reading forced and unconvincing but a detailed critique of it would take me too far from the main theme of this article.

***Once again I have thought it reasonable and convenient to cite Wikipedia because nothing turns on the accuracy of the specific figures. It is simply an easy way of pointing up well known general conditions.

Manchester Calling

2011-09-24T14:09:00.000+01:00

March and rally against the Tories as they meet for their party conference in Manchester on Sunday 2nd October

Johann Hari: My Part in his Downfall

2011-09-24T13:43:00.000+01:00

Though I have never met the disgraced liberal journalist Johann Hari - see also here, I did have a two minute conversation on the phone with him back ten years ago so I feel it is critical that I share my exclusive insight into Hari with the world.

In October 2001, Hari wrote a distinctly provocative post-9/11 piece in the New Statesman which basically wondered speculatively about the apparent 'affinities' between Al-Qaeda and the anti-capitalist movement, concluding thus:

The anti-globalisation movement has many benign aspirations to enhance participatory democracy and curb corporate power. But it also has some violent and frightening adherents who are capable of the kind of terrorism being visited upon us by Muslim fundamentalists.

The opposition to the west in the 21st century will come from untraceable networks with no leaders and no hierarchies, just a shared interest in attacking American capitalism in the hope that something better will emerge from the ashes.

Hari's argument was, to be kind to him, highly problematic at best and downright insulting to the anti-capitalist movement at worst - and since he had explicitly namechecked one anti-capitalist organisation in his piece which I was a supporter of ('Globalise Resistance') I thought he might like to debate his ideas about 'the anti-capitalist movement post-9/11' at a public meeting to be hosted by our local group of Globalise Resistance. It wasn't difficult getting hold of his number (I imagine it is a bit more difficult tracking him down just now), and he wasn't opposed to the idea of speaking at just such a public meeting in theory - though eventually he claimed he was just too busy (and probably thought himself just a little bit too important to actually have to defend any of his ideas in public) - so this meeting never happened. I don't know whether a two minute conversation with Johann Hari ten years ago challenging him to a public debate about his controversial journalism really counts as playing a part in Hari's eventual 'downfall' (since back then his career was rising inexorably, if inexplicably) but I'd like to think it did - in any case Hari's failure to make time to publicly defend the frankly indefensible aspects of his journalism was more than enough for me personally to find it hard to take him too seriously as a 'public intellectual' after that point...

Commemorating the Battle of Cable Street

2011-09-15T13:54:00.002+01:00

What better way to celebrate the fact that the racist EDL were blocked from marching through East London by mass anti-fascist action at the start of this month than by remembering the 75th anniversary of The Battle of Cable Street which blocked Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists attempt to march through the East End on 4th October 1936? To mark the occasion, Philosophy Football have done what they do best and produced a nice T-shirt.

Edited to add: Colin Sparks, Fighting Fascism: The Lessons from Cable Street (1977).

Stuart Hall on the state of neo-liberalism in Britain

2011-09-14T16:54:00.002+01:00

An interesting piece, though it perhaps ignores some of the contradictions currently ensuring the Coalition government - with its unpopular agenda of cuts and privatisation - is currently incredibly weak. What is perhaps missing in particular is the most profound contradiction, one with the potential to undermine the neo-liberal economic agenda - the growing signs of a rising arc of class struggle in Britain and internationally - which offers the best hope of resisting not only the Tories but also any attempt to make neo-liberalism 'hegemonic'.

Stop the War statement on 9/11 anniversary

2011-09-06T19:57:00.002+01:00

The Stop the War Coalition have issued a statement regarding the tenth anniversary of the terrible terrorist attacks of 9/11 - which you just may have noticed is fast approaching.

I don't really have a lot more to add to that statement, but given pretty much anyone who is anyone has been asked or is giving a statement about what they were doing that fateful day - I may as well add my voice to the chorus. Not of course that I can be as eloquent as Laurie Penny for instance, who we learn 'was in double biology, cutting up potatoes for my GCSE coursework' when the twin towers were hit - nor as insightful as George Galloway, who also in the New Statesman recalls how within 30 minutes he had put pen to paper, writing this article for the Guardian. Incidentally, my favourite post 9/11 Guardian comment piece was 'Samson the Terrorist' by Paul Foot - which amidst the mass of liberalism on offer forcefully and provocatively injected Trotsky's Marxist critique of terrorism into the arguments then raging.

Personally - because, then, you know it is so important to state exactly what one was doing at the precise moment one learned something quite extraordinary was taking place in the US - embarrassingly enough I may as well admit I was doing something quite perfectly bourgeois - playing tennis of all things (perhaps I can cite Geoffrey de Ste Croix, Fred Perry and a few other tennis-playing socialists in my defence here, but it is a pretty weak defence). The muttered under her breath remark of the mother of the person I was playing tennis against while the Twin Towers were still falling was to give a small indication of the wave of latent Islamophobia that was to bubble up out into the open like a cesspit overflowing in the days, weeks, months and years to follow: 'It bet it was some bloody Arabs'.

In response I cited automatically such injustices and instances of Western state terrorism such as the oppression of the Palestinians, the UN slaughter of Iraqis in the Gulf War and then the million odd Iraqi children killed by UN sanctions in Iraq during the 1990s and indeed any number of reasons people in the Middle East might have to hate the West (the failure to understand such imperialist oppression before 9/11 and why young people might have been prepared to turn to terrorism and kill themselves in such a manner is the key thing 9/11 conspiracy theorists consistently fail to understand). However, while I understood that 9/11 did not come from a clear blue sky, given it was the World Trade Centre that had been hit, I have to admit that my initial feelings were to also raise an anti-capitalist argument by way of explanation for such an attack alongside an anti-imperialist one. Before 9/11 the anti-capitalist movement had been on a kind of rising crescendo - and I tended to also cite the massive gap between rich and poor on a global scale and other such obscenities to explain the kind of potential for such targetting of bastions of Western capital as the WTC.

The flood of Islamophobia - whipped up as ever by the capitalist press and racist warmongering politicians - was given respectability and legitimacy the moment it was clear that the threat of war by the US in Afghanistan, on one of the poorest people on the planet, was definitely on the cards. Probably the proudest Socialist Worker sales I ever did were agitating against war in the days following 9/11 - Socialist Worker that week had a defiant frontpage - see here and a lead article - 'Bitter Fruit of US Policy' and I vividly remember an Asian taxi-driver giving us a huge grin and thumbs up as he swung by our stall.

That almost ten years exactly on from 9/11 we have seen exactly where the hatred of Islamophobia leads in the Norwegian Nazi atrocities - will hopefully mean that the 9/11 anniversary will have a slightly more sophisticated and less racist discussion of what 'terrorism' is than it might otherwise have had. However, more critically - as both Mike Davis in his article 'The Embers of September' and Alex Callinicos in his article 'Power Failure' note, the real story of ten years since 9/11 is just how weak US Imperialism is after ten years of bloody war - and now also global economic crisis. As Callinicos notes,

'The “war on terrorism”, which was supposed to entrench US global hegemony, has merely accelerated decline. The global economic and financial crisis is widely seen as the breakdown of Anglo-American free-market capitalism, which the Bush administration had proclaimed the “single sustainable model of national success”. More important, the recent stagnation of the US economy has contrasted sharply with the rapid recovery of China—now the world’s second biggest economy. The crisis has speeded up a realignment of global geopolitical relationships to accommodate Chinese power...Meanwhile, democracy has come to the Middle East—not thanks to either the US or Al Qaida, but through revolutions that overthrew Western client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. The Nato intervention in Libya is a desperate, almost certainly unsuccessful attempt by Washington to regain the initiative. Obama’s determination to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan reflects among other things a recognition that US global strategy must focus on countering China’s rise.'

As Mike Davis observes:

Someday—perhaps sooner than we think—a new Edward Gibbon in China or India will surely sit down to write “The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire”. (Hopefully it will be but one volume in a larger, more progressive oeuvre — “The Renaissance of Asia”, perhaps — and not an obituary for a human future sucked into America's sinking void.)

Lets indeed hope and organise so that the story of the 21st century is one where humanity does indeed forge a genuinely democratic future amidst the barbaric violence of imperial decline - but for that to happen we need to make sure that 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire' leads not simply to just 'the Renaissance of Asia' (with the potential for new empires to replace the ashes of the old) but the Renaissance of Socialism.

Defend the right to protest

2011-08-25T19:50:00.000+01:00

In an unprecedented step, Scotland Yard has applied to the home secretary to ban all marches in five London boroughs for 30 days starting from 2 September.

This means that the English Defence League march in Tower Hamlets, east London, set for 3 September will be banned. But the blanket ban will also cover the counter-demonstration organised by Unite against Fascism and United East End.

The English Defence League still plan to come to Tower Hamlets to hold a static protest. Everyone who opposes racism and fascism should protest about the ban, which denies us our right to stand up to the EDL, and should mobilise to come to Tower Hamlets on Saturday 3 September.

From here.

Tony Cliff on the 1981 riots

2011-08-23T18:47:00.005+01:00

The riots and looting have been fantastic, but they have not gone far enough. Because they have not been organised, the kids have attacked shops when they should have been attacking factories. We must teach them to take the bakery, not just the bread...
Quoted in Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (Bookmarks, 2011) -also reviewed here and here - for more Marxist analysis of the 1981 riots in Britain see here

On Libya and Liberal Interventionism

2011-08-23T17:47:00.002+01:00

Anti-imperialism is in the fabric of the Arab political movements. We cannot separate the fight for democratic freedoms from the struggle to defeat imperialism. What the imperialists want, and there are forces among the Libyan rebels who agree, is to sustain the system with a different face.

But it’s important to see that the fall of Gaddafi might also radicalise other revolutionary struggles. It will have an impact in the Gulf states.
In Libya it’s too early to judge if all the people will welcome Nato with open arms. At the start of revolutions people unite in wide coalitions, but once the dictators fall contradictions will come to the surface.

But the decisive factor is the process in Egypt. It is the most powerful movement in the region and what happens there shapes all the struggles across the region. We are still just at the beginning of the revolutionary process, and these are just the first small steps
Bassem Chit, Lebanese socialist in Beirut

...The model of intervention practised in Libya harks back to NATO's 'good war' in Serbia and implies a departure from the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq. This will undoubtedly give a boost to further interventions elsewhere. The ‘no boots on the ground’ philosophy avoids fatalities among Western soldiers but it clearly highlights NATO's main contribution: its huge destructive power which is shamefully described as ‘surgical’. This revived interventionist model is even more barbaric than its predecessor, promoting the myth that real political change can be achieved through remote-controlled military aggression. The likes of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy are seizing the opportunity to bolster their weak standing at home through this ‘success’, reviving in the process the notion that the West has the moral responsibility to intervene where it sees fit.

The interventionist chatter has intensified since yesterday, with arguments such as ‘this wouldn’t have been possible without NATO intervention’. While I will personally be pleased to see Gaddafi end his despicable reign, the simple answer is we will never know now. We will also never know which shape the Libyan uprising would have taken and whether it would have allowed a different leadership untainted with its association to the old regime to emerge. In short, the right to self-determination has been taken away from the Libyan people, and that is not a small matter. Anyone still convinced of the humanitarian merit of the intervention should closely examine how the events unfolded on the ground in Libya to realise the extent to which this argument has been substantiated through exaggeration and the spreading of convenient myths.

The momentum that the argument for intervention built back in March, largely due to the influence of Britain and France, was enough to overcome US reluctance even in the absence of clear Western interests. By convincing themselves that they are morally obliged to intervene, Western leaders end up acting in an irrational manner and get swept up by their own rhetoric. It is now crucial to confront the insidious logic of liberal interventionism and defend the right to self-determination. While the jubilation we might feel when Gaddafi finally departs might convince us it was ‘worth it’, the reality is it’s misguided to replace one local tyrant with the custodianship of superpowers. Let the lesson of Iraq not be forgotten.
Karl Sharro, another Lebanese socialist - see also Lenin's Tomb for updates.

Prince Harry on the riots

2011-08-19T13:29:00.008+01:00

After the riots - and amidst the brutal state clampdown - has come a tidal wave of commentary on them - some informed and much simply the rehashing of reactionary old mantras. It is interesting then to hear amidst all this the voice of one young person in Britain who, despite his own experience of living in a family all trying to survive on state benefits while suffering unemployment, did not, for some reason, feel the need personally to take to the streets and riot. Yes, Prince Harry of Buckingham Palace Row, London, has now commented at last on the riots, and apparently he found them
'shocking and outrageous'.

Prince Harry himself of course might have never felt the need to riot as such, but he has recently partaken in a quite brutal, violent and criminal act of looting - as part of a wider smash-and-grab raid known as 'Western Imperialism in Afghanistan', so perhaps his attempt at trying to help seize the moral high ground over the riots for the government, police and the ultra-rich 'over-class' in society lacks a certain je ne sais quo.

Peter Petroff and the origins of British Bolshevism

2011-08-19T13:06:00.000+01:00

The now forgotten but once legendary veteran Russian Marxist
Peter Petroff (1884-1947)now has a significant collection of his writings in English up on the Marxists Internet Archive. Ted Crawford has written a short biography of him for the site. Petroff played an important role in the origins of not only Russian Bolshevism but also British Bolshevism. In 1907, he had arrived in Britain as a refugee from Tsarist Russia and worked with John Maclean and other socialists up in Glasgow, learning English and relating to them in turn something of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Imprisoned during the Great War, Petroff maintained links with Trotsky and returned to Russia after the revolution in 1918, joining the Soviet government. By the 1930s, after being sent to Germany as a special envoy and witnessing the disastrous role Stalinism played at the time of the rise of Hitler, he broke with the Communist International. He then escaped from Nazi Germany back to Britain, where he wrote a classic work The Secret of Hitler’s Victory with his German wife, Irma (1891-1968), published in 1934 by Woolf’s Hogarth Press - which provided a Marxist analysis of the resistable rise of Hitler.

Open letter to Cameron on the riots, jobs and education

2011-08-12T17:27:00.001+01:00

Please sign this - cheers

See also this public meeting:
After the riots… Defend our young people, Give them a future
Attending:
Winston Silcott
Paul Gilroy
(author There Ain’t No Black In the Union Jack and After Empire)
Merlin Emmanuel
(Justice for Smiley Culture)
Zita Holbourne
(Co-Chair Black Activists Rising Against Cuts)
Weyman Bennett
Stafford Scott
Gary McFarlane

Public Meeting
All welcome!
Monday 15 August, 7pm
@ North London Community House,
22 Moorefield Rd, N17 6PY
Bus 149, 279, 318, 349, 476
Underground Tottenham Hale, Overground Bruce Grove

Public Meeting: From Riot to Revolution

2011-08-08T14:30:00.002+01:00

A riot is the language of the unheard - Martin Luther King

After the Tottenham riots...
Public Meeting: Justice for Mark Duggan, no to police violence and racism...
FROM RIOT TO REVOLUTION
Speakers include: Gary Mcfarlane, local community activist
- Eyewitnesses to Saturday’s uprising

This Wednesday, 10 August, 7pm, North London Community House, 22 Moorefield Rd, N17 6PY
Bus 149, 279, 318, 349, 476
Underground Tottenham Hale,
Overground Bruce Grove

Hosted by the Socialist Workers Party

Protest at the crackdown in Egypt

2011-08-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

The Egyptian army and police have sent thugs using clubs and an armoured car to smash up the camp of martyrs’ families and their supporters in Tahrir Square - please send urgent messages of solidarity and protest - victory to the Egyptian and Syrian revolutions!

Hackgate: The Movie

2011-07-27T12:35:00.000+01:00

Norwegian Nazi Terrorist admired the EDL

2011-07-23T22:16:00.002+01:00

"I have on some occasions discussed with SIOE [Stop Islamification Of Europe] and EDL [English Defence League] and recommended them to use conscious strategies...I must say I am very impressed with how quickly they have grown but this has to do with smart tactical choice by management. EDL is an example and a Norwegian version is the only way [forward]...”
Anders Behring Breivik

Unite Against Racism and Fascism - Join the National Demonstration against the EDL - Tower Hamlets, London, Saturday 3 September

Protest at Murdoch's Parliament hearing

2011-07-15T12:59:00.000+01:00

Protest at Parliament Tuesday 19 July at 1.30pm. Bring Murdoch masks, banners, flags, whistles etc

Who is this guy?

2011-07-14T08:54:00.004+01:00

There are not many current Labour MPs who have made great political interventions of late, but yesterday one Gordon Brown, an obscure backbencher, rarely seen in parliament - possibly because he knows that parliament is only the rubber stamp for political decisions taken by those with real power outside it - rose to make a 32 minute long impassioned speech attacking the 'criminal media nexus' of Rupert Murdoch's News International corporation which engaged in 'law breaking on an industrial scale' and 'let the rats out the sewers'. His speech made Ed Miliband's 'leadership' of the Labour Party to date look embarrassing, and by the looks of things this Gordon Brown fellow could perhaps be a future Labour leader in waiting... Indeed - and though his may be going a bit too far based on one speech - this guy Brown looks like he'd make one hell of a prime-minister...

John Pilger on Murdoch's magical hypocrisy

2011-07-12T15:25:00.004+01:00

'In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a new moral purpose in politics", which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life..."

Edited to add:John Pilger and Socialist Worker's report on the latest News International phone-hacking scandal

International Socialism 131 online

2011-06-29T16:50:00.001+01:00

Includes Richard Seymour on the Tories, Anne Alexander on Egypt and an interview with Ian Birchall on writing his biography of Tony Cliff, whose very first book, The Problem of the Middle East (1946) is now online.

The Case for Socialism

2011-06-29T16:46:00.000+01:00

The case for ordinary people taking collective democratic control of the world's wealth and using it to solve people's needs has rarely been better made

Victory to the J30 Strikes

2011-06-29T16:42:00.000+01:00

"If you fight in life, you're not guaranteed to win. But if you never fight, you lose every time."
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union in an interview on the June 30 mass strikes

Guest post: Some Thoughts on Energy in the US

2011-06-29T16:33:00.001+01:00

[Comrade Jeremy has got in touch with a guest post on 'Some Thoughts on Energy' which I am belatedly getting around to putting on my blog - profuse apologies for the delay]

Energy is at the heart of all that we do. In developed countries at least, the routine is pretty quotidian: wake up, take a shower, brush your teeth, cook up a few eggs for breakfast, drive to work—you get the idea. Everything from cooking a meal to generating hot water for your shower requires energy, and often people take this fact for granted. The electricity to charge your cell phone or keep your laptop running isn't cheap—it comes from coal and you pay a fee for it that ultimately contributes to your monthly utility bill. Even if you have the luxury of owning a cellphone and a laptop, and of having hot, clean water, then you have a standard of living that is already higher than many places in the world, so congratulations.
It is a pursuit for this type of prototypical living standard that is driving up the global demand for energy. Within industrializing countries people are beginning to see the dream of a constant supply of electricity and hot water; they're beginning to buy SUVs that they can drive to work. They're purchasing cell phones and laptops and enormous flat-screen TVs, and all of these technologies demand energy. Ph.D. programs everywhere are shifting in how they think about the web of anthropology, climate, sustainability and energy policy, especially since the world's population seems to be increasing almost continuously.
The United States is a paragon example of a highly industrialized country with a similarly high standard of living. Notwithstanding portents about climate change and the effect of greenhouse gases, Americans continue to ravenously consume energy because in many ways, this consumptive nature is actually finely embedded into the culture. Who are you in America if you don't own a fancy car or a large home that proudly demonstrates your achievements? While this might be a gross generalization, buildings do consume more energy than any other part of the United States economy. This isn't surprising, there's a lot of energy-intensive processes that go into creating anything from a garage to a giant museum, not to mention the continuous amount of energy needed to keep those buildings running. China has recently taken the world's number one spot as the largest producer of carbon dioxide because they are rapidly industrializing. In China, like in many other places on the globe, people want flashy cars, nice homes and material possessions. So perhaps the pursuit of luxury isn't just an American interest after all—but we already knew that, didn't we?
Energy policy is roughly defined as the sum total of a nation's legislative and international “opinion” when it comes it comes to energy. This includes things like government subsidies, energy taxes, emissions guidelines and the creation of reformative programs to essentially affect energy change on a mass scale. In the United States more than 30 major energy acts have been passed since 1920, spanning the breadth of opinions on everything from the regulation of natural gas, to nuclear waste legislation to tax credits that incentivize the use of alternative fuels. The most recent of these energy acts, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has essentially restructured the way the United States (from a legislative standpoint, at least) thinks about energy. Analyzing a nation's views on energy, which is so deeply ingrained into everything it does, provides a very strong insight into its general conscience on its own lifestyle.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, in addition to expanding social welfare policy and driving funds towards and education and health care was monumental in its investment in the clean energy economy. While we have yet to see massive, physical implementation of this investment, lots of great things are already happening. On June 8 the Department of Energy announced up to $70 million to further boost geothermal energy development, which according to the U.S. Geological Survey could produce upwards of 30 gigawatts of energy for the U.S. Similarly, at the beginning of June it was also announced that $27 million would be driven to research channels to help reduce the prohibitively high costs of solar energy systems, and millions are being invested in energy-efficient lighting. So while the average layperson might not see the benefits of renewable energy immediately, the industries that are developing this technology are starting to flourish more than ever before.
Obama's plans for a clean energy economy also include infrastructural changes and the development of more efficient transportation, which at the end of the day will ultimately make life easier and more environmentally friendly for Americans. Achieving a nearly-renewable energy economy, however, doesn't just depend on investment in research and development. It depends on an investment in the people. Without a culture that promotes sustainable lifestyles and that recognizes the importance of living green, how do you expect clean energy technology to have maximum impact? It is one thing to have a system of solar panels on your home, and it's another thing to have an entire community promoting the benefits of solar power to the point where everyone in town wants a solar system. If America is going to attempt to push its clean energy ideals on other developing countries, the nation must be practicing what it preaches. It will certainly be interesting to see how the international cards play out in the future.

Marxism final timetable online

2011-06-20T21:54:00.000+01:00

Austerity, resistance, alternatives…

Marxism 2011
30 June – 4 July, Central London

A five day political festival hosted by the SWP

The final timetable for Marxism 2011 is now online. It includes all the practical information you will need to make the most out of the event. Extra meetings and speakers not in the original timetable include:

· Kamal Abu Aita, leading Egyptian trade unionist, speaking at the opening rally.

· Panos Garganas, from Socialist Workers Party (Greece) on Greece and the Eurozone crisis, plus leading activists from Spain on their revolt against austerity.

· Mokhtar Ben Hafsa, Tunisian revolutionary trade unionist on the Tunisian revolution.

Vasily Grossman T-shirt

2011-06-19T13:33:00.001+01:00

War correspondent for the Red Star newspaper, Vasily Grossman became Russia's greatest chronicler of both the horrors of the 1941 Nazi invasion and the eventual victory over Nazism. Never afraid to upset the Soviet authorities his classic account of the USSR's resistance to the Nazi invasion Life and Fate was not only heroic but also told the story of the Ukraine famine, the Gulags and purges, the instances of collaboration between Russian citizens and the Nazis. As a result it was banned by Stalin, though the book was eventually published under Glasnost in 1988 - and now in 2011 Life and Fate is honoured in a special Philosophy Football T-shirt.

Topical Pieces of ''Red Labour'' History

2011-06-13T17:42:00.001+01:00

If the Arab Spring has been described as an 'Arab 1848', it is worth reminding ourselves of events in Britain in that 'year of revolutions' - and where better to do so than to revisit the late great socialist historian and activist Ray Challinor's 1981 article on Peter Murray McDouall - a 'physical force Chartist'. Murray, being both a doctor and a revolutionary was a little bit like the Che Guevara of his day. Another topical piece of 'Red Labour' history is Ray's article tracing 'the origins of "the tension between the leadership and the rank-and-file"' in trade unionism, though a discussion of 19th century miners' leader Alexander MacDonald, written in 1967. As Ray - whose life and work are being marked at a London Socialist Historians Group meeting later this month - concluded:

Yet, at least in studying the coalminers, the tension between the leadership and the rank-and-file is one of the most vital factors in reaching an understanding of how the movement develops. MacDonald and the militants – the lap-dog or the lion? Did one get a lump of sugar through begging like a well-trained poodle or a hunk of meat by showing the lion’s fangs and being prepared for bloody struggles? That was the question.

It is a question that remains all too relevant for trade unionists today in the context of austerity measures taken by government's trying to force working class people to pay for the crisis and reshape society as a whole in the interests of capital... Later this month, on June 30th, it looks as though 700,000 teachers, lecturers and civil servants will strike back in defence of pensions - everyone who wants a society where people come before profit should support those on strike that day, and socialists will need to help build and encourage much more coordinated strike action like this in future...

Leon Trotsky on Frederick Nietzsche

2011-06-13T17:09:00.000+01:00

...We obviously make no claim to an exhaustive critique of the fantastic creations of Frederick Nietzsche, philosopher in poetry and poet in philosophy. This is impossible within the framework of a few newspaper articles. We only wanted to describe in broad strokes the social base which has shown itself to be capable of giving birth to Nietzscheism, not as a philosophical system contained in a certain number of volumes and for the most part explicable by the individual particularities of its author, but rather as a social current attracting particular attention because we are dealing with a current of the present time. It seemed to us to be all the more indispensable to bring Nietzscheism down from the literary and philosophical heights to the purely earthly basis of social relations because a strictly ideological attitude, conditioned by subjective reactions of sympathy or antipathy for the moral and other theses of Nietzsche, results in nothing good...
Leon Trotsky,'On the Philosophy of the Superman' (1900)

New issue of Revolutionary History

2011-06-11T15:29:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of Revolutionary History is now available. This issue, the second volume on the history of the Left in Iran, covers the period from 1941 to 1957, focusing on the Tudeh Party, the only substantial left-wing organisation in Iran in these times.

Episodes investigated include:
* The foundation of the Tudeh Party of Iran in 1941.
* Moscow’s attempt to set up a pro-Soviet autonomous republic in Iranian Azerbaijan in 1945.
* The fake assassination attempt on the Shah and the ensuing banning of the Tudeh Party in 1949.
* The mass campaign to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
* The Tudeh Party’s hostility to Mohammad Mosaddeq and the national- democratic movement.
* The Tudeh Party’s failure to prevent the Anglo-American coup against Mosaddeq in 1953.
* The SAKA, an attempt to build a communist organisation based upon workers’ councils.
* The ideas of Mostafa Sho‘a‘iyan, a maverick Iranian Marxist.
* The continued influence of Stalinism upon the historiography of the Iranian left.
* The course of the Iranian left as reported in documents from the British, Soviet and US official archives.

It has been compiled under the editorship of Cosroe Chaqueri, who has produced a number of pioneering studies on Iran and its left-wing movements, in particular the sole major work on the ill-fated soviet republic on the Caspian coast of Iran, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920-1921: Birth of the Trauma (Pittsburgh University Press, 1995). He is currently preparing two major studies on the Iranian communist movement of the interwar period. He has also compiled over 30 volumes of documents from the labour and left-wing movements of Iran, thus enabling students of Iranian history to read material which might otherwise be forgotten. The first instalment, The Left in Iran, 1905-1940, is still available. A further instalment, covering the period of 1958-1985, is currently being assembled.

Unite the Resistance Rally

2011-06-08T17:33:00.000+01:00

Unite the Resistance meeting in London
Speakers include Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary
Tony Benn,
Kevin Courtney, NUT deputy general secretary
Wednesday 22 June, 6.30pm,
Friends Meeting House,
Euston Road (opposite Euston station).
If your organisation/union branch would like to back the meeting please email unitetheresistance2011@hotmail.co.uk

John Molyneux on the rising tide of revolution

2011-06-08T17:23:00.000+01:00

An examination of this year’s revolutions, their significance and how they compare to patterns of revolt through history...

New work: Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time

2011-06-01T15:43:00.001+01:00

Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time
by Ian Birchall

Hardback £25 9781905192793
Paperback £16.99 9781905192809
Tony Cliff came to political consciousness in the darkest period of the 20th century and spent his life developing revolutionary Marxism against Stalinism. From his early days as a revolutionary in British-occupied Palestine, through years of obscurity and isolation in London and Dublin to the high points of struggle in post-war Britain, Cliff worked to restore lost ideas and traditions, fan flames of resistance and develop our understanding of a system in constant change. Ian Birchall's lovingly crafted book is the culmination of years of work, drawing on interviews with over 100 people who knew Cliff and painstaking research in archives around the country. It is a majestic example of political biography at its best.
Available direct from Bookmarks Bookshop from 30 June 2011, and nationwide from October - see here. Ian will be launching his biography at Marxism 2011, and describes some of his experience of researching Cliff's life here.

Solidarity with Egypt's revolutionary journalists

2011-05-31T09:38:00.000+01:00

Sign this statement - solidarity with Hossam el-Hamalawy and Reem Maged

Fire in Babylon

2011-05-30T14:01:00.000+01:00

Am a bit gutted I seem to have missed this at the cinema, reviews of this documentary about the glory days of West Indian cricket sound incredible and people tell me it is well worth checking out...

David Rovics on Pirates

2011-05-30T13:58:00.001+01:00

See also his defence of the Pirates of Somalia

New study of EP Thompson

2011-05-29T22:26:00.000+01:00

I have just finished reading The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics a highly readable new study by Scott Hamilton of Reading the Maps fame. I can happily and heartily recommend it to readers of Histomat as a fine companion volume to Thompson's The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978). Hamilton's work comes with what now reads as a rather poignant recommendation from the late socialist historian and EP Thompson's partner, Dorothy Thompson, and overall I found it a fascinating introduction to Thompson the thinker and writer - someone who I didn't know before now was given cricket lessons by Nehru while a boy. Personally would have liked a little more on Thompson the great Marxist historian, but I am aware that would have probably meant a different book - and in any case, myself and Hamilton had a little debate about Thompson and Marxist historiography about five years ago - a debate I am not sure either of us feel the compulsion to return to just now. Many congratulations anyway to Scott on the publication of his homage to EPT.

John Pilger on neo-colonialism in Libya

2011-05-29T21:42:00.000+01:00

When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser "destroyed...murdered...I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt." Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven "into the gutter from which they should never have emerged".

The language of colonialism may have been modified, but the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable: a US-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with bribes, and power is shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control...

Libya is the immediate opportunity. The Nato attack, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus "no-fly zone" to "protect civilians", is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the "rescue" of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Gaddafi is a "new Hitler", plotting "genocide" against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo. In Libya, there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the US, French and British, their planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium-tipped missiles and the submarine HMS Triumph firing Tomahawks, in a repeat of the Iraq "shock and awe" that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the victims, including countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media unpeople...

Gaddafi is a Bad Arab. David Cameron's government and its verbose top general want to eliminate this Bad Arab, much as the Obama administration killed a famous Bad Arab in Pakistan recently.

The crown prince of Bahrain, on the other hand, is a Good Arab. On 19 May he was warmly welcomed to Britain by Cameron with a photocall on the steps of 10 Downing Street. In March, the same crown prince slaughtered unarmed protesters in his country and allowed Saudi forces to crush the Bahraini democracy movement. The Obama administration has rewarded Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes on earth, with a $60bn arms deal, the biggest in US history. The Saudis have the most oil. They are the Best Arabs.

The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg standard, is Britain's 46th military "intervention" in the Middle East since 1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain aims to control Africa's oil. Cameron is not Eden, but almost. Same school. Same values. In the media pack, the words colonialism and imperialism are no longer used, so the cynical and the credulous can celebrate state violence in its more palatable form...
Full article here

Owen Hatherley on Marx, Eagleton, Lenin and Lih

2011-05-22T18:37:00.006+01:00

As [Eagleton] acknowledges, our age of no-strings-attached state handouts to banks and punitive cuts to social services has embraced a form of capitalism so grotesque that it resembles the caricatures of the most leaden Soviet satirists. Eagleton presents his book as the fruit of "a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx's thought are mistaken?" In order to demonstrate this, each of the chapters of this erudite yet breezy (occasionally too breezy) tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk, one by one.
From Hatherley's review of Eagleton's Why Marx was Right and Lih's Lenin. Personally I disagree very slightly with Hatherley's conclusion, at the end of his discussion of Lih's biography of Lenin:

Yet what really endures here is the sense that, for Lenin, a revolutionary leader has a duty to lead the working class into revolution, and all the theory in the world won't help if the political and economic conditions are missing. Lenin believed that the first world war offered a real chance to destroy capitalism, and when – in 1919, as revolution briefly engulfed Europe – he seemed to be proved right, he felt vindicated, even relieved. He learned his mistake, and died deeply troubled by it.

Yet Lenin was not 'mistaken' when the world revolution failed to triumph outside of Russia post First World War - the conditions did exist for the successful socialist revolution in Europe - not least in Germany which underwent two revolutionary situations in 1918 and then again in 1923. Lenin knew that making the revolution in Russia was a gamble, but, he wagered, it was right to make that gamble - a gamble after all that was critical to ending the bloodshed of the First World War and, everything taken into account did demonstrate the possibilities for socialist revolution in the 20th century. As Rosa Luxemburg noted,
'Everything that a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness, and consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky, and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which the Social Democracy of the West lacked were represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism.'

LSHG Newsletter online

2011-05-15T17:37:00.001+01:00

The new issue of the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter is now online - highlights include Ian Birchall on Ray Challinor and the 1965 Courtauld Strike in Preston. While I am here, I notice Richard Seymour has a long article on How Can the Left win?, which looks like required reading.

Never say never again

2011-05-10T11:09:00.000+01:00

'Asked on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show whether he could ever envisage joining the Conservatives - and perhaps taking a Tory peerage - Mr Clegg replied in shocked tones:

"Join the Conservatives? No, never. I am not a Conservative - never have been, never will be. Never, never, never. I am a Liberal Democrat to my core. I will be carried out in my coffin as a card-carrying Liberal Democrat."'

Going by his track record, this is probably the clearest indication we have to date that Nick Clegg is indeed intending to join the Conservative Party - and, going by this statement, sooner rather than later. The only possible question to speculate on now is when. One year? Two years? Four years?

Gary Younge on Obama's war in Libya

2011-05-09T12:08:00.000+01:00

...The clearest explanation of the war aims has emanated not from Britain, or indeed Europe, but the White House. While Britain has blundered (William Hague suggested at one point that Muammar Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela) and Nicolas Sarkozy has blustered (starting the bombing without telling his allies), Barack Obama has offered the most lucid justification for military intervention.

The trouble is that at each moment the goals of the intervention not only changes, but also contradict any justification given earlier. Shortly before the no-fly zone was imposed, Obama assured a bipartisan group in Congress that the action would take "days not weeks". More than a week after the bombing had started he told the nation the aim was limited to purely humanitarian ends. "I refuse to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," he said.

He also stood steadfastly against regime change. "If we tried to overthrow Gaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter." Two weeks later, in a joint letter signed by David Cameron and Sarkozy, he brazenly conceded it is about regime change. "It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi in power."

Assassination is now, apparently, the foreign policy du jour. On Sunday, the British defence secretary, Liam Fox, insisted: "Nato does not target individuals." Instead they go for families. Just over a week ago, they killed Gaddafi's son and three of his grandchildren.

So here we are with a conflict that was supposed to last days and was not about regime change that has gone on for six weeks and won't end until the regime has changed. Even as the west prepares to negotiate a truce with the Taliban, Gaddafi's offer of a ceasefire has been rejected summarily. In the name of humanitarianism, the war must be prolonged.

The problem is not mission creep, it's the mission. There are only so many times their governments can reasonably keep doing the same thing and expect different results and there can be only so many times liberal hawks can "trust" their governments to do differently....We've seen from elsewhere that the most successful way to build democracy in the region is by ordinary, local people from below, not by foreign precision bombs from 50,000 feet above...

Full article here - see also Richard Seymour on Imperialism and Revolution in the Middle East in the latest Socialist Review

It's okay Tony, we haven't forgotten about you

2011-05-05T15:49:00.001+01:00

'The operation shows those who commit acts of terror against the innocent will be brought to justice, however long it takes.'
Tony Blair on the killing of Bin Laden

While Blair is of course wrong that the killing of Osama Bin Laden represents justice instead of an act of vengeance, he surely has a point about the necessity of bringing those who commit acts of terror against the innocent to justice for their crimes. Blair may have slipped the mind of the Royal Family recently, but some of us will not forget about Blair's state terrorism so lightly. His day of reckoning will come one day for sure, 'however long it takes'...

Upcoming Marxist conferences in London

2011-05-03T11:29:00.001+01:00

1. Marxism 2011
Ideas to change the world - A five day political festival from
30 June to 4 July in central London hosted by the SWP with eyewitnesses and revolutionaries from Egypt and Tunisia as well as Tariq Ali, Tony Benn, Terry Eagleton, Paul Gilroy, Laurie Penny, Nina Power, Alex Callinicos and many others - full timetable now available to download here

What is Marxism 2011?

Crisis and austerity have exposed the insanity of our global system.
Our rulers have handed trillions of pounds to banks while billions of people across the planet face hunger, poverty, climate catastrophes and war. Despite unprecedented wealth and technology we are told capitalism can provide even less for us than before.

But a world in crisis breeds an ideological crisis. Austerity has generated resistance. Revolution has shaken the Arab world. Students have shaken the Con-Dems. Millions are fighting back, questioning this crazy system and looking for alternatives.

Marxism 2011 will bring thousands of people together from every continent and every arena of struggle to discuss, debate and organise resistance. With over 200 workshops, panels, film showings and rallies it is the biggest event of its kind in Britain and one of the biggest in the world.
Don’t miss Marxism in the year of revolutions.

2. Eighth Annual Historical Materialism Conference

Central London

10–13 November 2011

Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle

The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of collective anticapitalist action in the present.

Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital. In philosophy and political theory, communism is no longer merely a term of condemnation. Likewise, artistic and cultural practices have also registered a notable upturn in the fortunes of activism, critical utopianism and the effort to capture aesthetically the workings of the capitalist system.

The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.

For such a critical theoretical, strategic and organisational reflection to have traction in the present, it must take stock of both the commonalities and the specificities of different struggles for emancipation, as they confront particular strategies of accumulation, political authorities and relations of force. Just as the crisis that began in 2008 is by no means a homogeneous affair, so we cannot simply posit a unity of purpose in contemporary revolutions, struggles around the commons and battles against austerity.

In consideration of the participation of David Harvey, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, at this year's conference, we would particularly wish to emphasise the historical and geographical dimensions of capital, class and struggle. We specifically encourage paper submissions and suggested panel-themes that tackle the global nature of capitalist accumulation, the significance of anticapitalist resistance in the South, and questions of race, migration and ecology as key components of both the contemporary crisis and the struggle to move beyond capitalism.

There will also be a strong presence of workshops on the historiography of the early communist movement, particularly focusing on the first four congresses of the Communist International.

The conference will aim to combine rigorous and grounded investigations of socio-economic realities with focused theoretical reflections on what emancipation means today, and to explore – in light of cultural, historical and ideological analyses – the forms taken by current and coming struggles.

Deadline for registration of abstracts: 1 June 2011

http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/8annual/submit

May Day Greetings

2011-05-01T08:09:00.001+01:00

For details of several May Day 'Marches for the Alternative' to cuts and war in Britain, see here

Some thoughts on monarchy on this historic day

2011-04-29T07:45:00.003+01:00

As something of an authority on the British royal family, you can imagined how busy I have been over the past few days, weeks and months, as an advisor to innumerable number of TV programmes with the interchangeable titles featuring the words 'William and Kate' and 'Royal Romance', and I apologise that this blog has been somewhat neglected. Today I am going to be as busy as ever with appearances on Sky and BBC News and so on, but in order to mark this 'happy and historic day' properly, I thought I would leave you with some fitting quotes to remind us of the wonders of the British royal family - helpfully compiled from here.

'Certainly that people needs be mad or strangely infatuated that build the chief hope of their common happiness or safety on a single person; who, if he happen to be good, can do no more than another man; if he happen to be bad, hath in his hands to do more evil without check than millions of other men.'
John Milton, 1660

'Of the various forms of government that have prevailed in the world, a hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule'. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,(1776-1788)

'This boy [the future Edward VIII] will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over.'
Keir Hardie, 28 June 1894

This romancing about the royal family is, I fear, only a minor symptom of the softening of the brain of socialists enervated by affluence, social prestige and political power'
Beatrice Webb on the 1929 Labour government

'He, too, is going the dictator way, and is pro-German, against Russia, and against too much slipshod democracy. I shouldn't be surprised if he aimed at making himself a mild dictator.'
Chips Channon on Edward VIII, 1936

'It would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown'. Edward VIII as Duke of Windsor to Liberty magazine, 1941

'She would have made a good Queen.'
Adolf Hitler on the Duchess of Windsor, September 1939

[The royal family] often drink a toast at the end of the dinner to Mrs Thatcher. She [the Queen Mother] adores Mrs Thatcher.
Woodrow Wyatt Diaries, 1986

Stuff the Wedding - Fight the Cuts

2011-04-25T19:51:00.003+01:00

Sorry, I just felt I should make some kind of republican statement on this blog against Royal Weddings past and present, if only to suggest that Ed Miliband may have not got it quite right when he says that 'the whole country will be wishing them every happiness'.

Edited to add: Socialist Worker's Royal Wedding Special Issue

Terry Eagleton on The Communist Manifesto

2011-04-17T17:42:00.002+01:00

From a review of Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World

Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)

Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.

Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.

Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.

In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.

Terry Eagleton has a new book out entitled simply Why Marx was right and is speaking at Marxism 2011

Mehdi Hasan on the Tories myths about immigration

2011-04-17T17:07:00.001+01:00

The very first question of the first televised leader's debate in British political history was on the subject of immigration. Last April, in front of a live audience of 9.4 million viewers, toxicologist Gerard Oliver asked Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to outline the "key elements for a fair, workable immigration policy".

So I tire of the lazy argument, advanced by Tory and Labour politicians alike, that "we don't talk about immigration". Announcing his candidacy for the Labour leadership last May, Andy Burnham claimed: "There's still an ambivalence among some in Labour about discussing immigration." Rival candidate Ed Balls said he warned Gordon Brown not to "brush it under the carpet". A year on, "Blue Labour" thinkers are pushing a similar line of thought.

David Cameron has been quick to pounce. "[T]here were Labour ministers who closed down discussion, giving the impression that concerns about immigration were somehow racist," he said this week, adding: "[I]t is untruthful and unfair not to speak about it."

This is nonsense. There is no conspiracy of silence on immigration. We talk of little else. Only two months ago, in Munich, the prime minister demanded that immigrants "speak the language of their new home". On Thursday, he repeated the same message: "We're making sure that anyone studying a degree-level course has a proper grasp of the English language."

In fact, if it were true that we never talk about immigration, why am I constantly bombarded by BBC producers asking me to discuss the subject on their various outlets? Why, indeed, am I writing this piece for the Guardian?

Don't get me wrong. I want to talk about immigration; I like talking about it. As the son of (Indian) immigrants and the husband of an (American) immigrant, there's nothing else I'd rather do.

So here we go. Can we talk about immigration and its economic impact? A government study in 2007 estimated that migrants contributed about £6bn to output growth the previous year. That's equivalent to a 1.5% cut in the basic rate of income tax. Can we talk about this?

Can we talk about how immigrants, contrary to myth and legend, boost wages in the UK? A report for the Low Pay Commission found that between 1997 and 2005, immigration to the UK made a positive contribution to the average wage-increase experienced by non-immigrant workers. In the words of the report's author, Professor Christian Dustmann of UCL's Department of Economics: "Economic theory shows us that immigration can provide a net boost to wages." Is this worth a discussion?
Read the full article here

700,000 workers could strike together in June

2011-04-12T15:09:00.003+01:00

There has never been a more urgent need for a serious fightback by the British working class movement to the current Tory assault being waged on it- and on the back of the glorious demonstration on March 26th it looks like it could at long last be slowly getting underway

Once again on revolutionary discipline

2011-04-12T14:37:00.007+01:00

'A revolutionary party is an instrument for making a revolution. If it is blunted or broken another must be built.'

Such a statement is only half-correct from the standpoint of classical Bolshevism. If a revolutionary party is 'broken' then it is indeed the duty of revolutionaries inside such an organisation to try and join with whatever healthy elements still exist inside that organisation and try and build another such organisation. But how to judge when an allegedly revolutionary organisation is broken? Let us take perhaps the most extreme but also one of the clearest cases from revolutionary history - Leon Trotsky's 1933 break with the Communist International after the rise of Hitler's Nazis to power in Germany and his declaration of the need the need 'To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew'. Trotsky broke with the Communist International as it had been taken over by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and first created and then continued with its disastrous strategy of equivocating the 'social fascist' German Social Democratic Party with Hitler's Nazis, and so failed to build a united front against fascism in the run-up to the fateful year of 1933. In July 1933, after Hitler had come to power, Trotsky noted that:

The Moscow leadership has not only proclaimed as infallible the policy which guaranteed victory to Hitler, but has also prohibited all discussion of what had occurred. And this shameful interdiction was not violated, nor overthrown. No national congresses; no international congress; no discussions at party meetings; no discussion in the press! An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. To say this openly and publicly is our direct duty toward the proletariat and its future. In all our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of departure the historical collapse of the official Communist International.

This is, as I say, an extreme case of a revolutionary party being 'broken' as it had shown no sign of changing course or direction after the rise of fascism to power in a country that hitherto had the strongest working class movement in history. There are other, less extreme examples, of course. As I wrote on this blog just over a year ago, it would be 'absolutely justified' for a revolutionary to leave one's party 'if one's party had made a betrayal of the principles of socialism and the class struggle itself (eg supported an imperialist war/not supported a strike by workers, etc etc)'.

'If the party had made such a betrayal - and showed no signs of correction after one had put the opposing arguments in the democratic forums of the party - then one would have a duty to form a faction within the party to fight for the correct position - and if that did not work - then to resign from the party, form a new revolutionary Marxist grouping and call on the members of your old party to join your new organisation because the old was irredeemably bankrupt and had become 'social-imperialist/class collaborationist/ etc etc'

The failure to break organisationally with the formally 'Marxist' but actually social-imperialist and class-collorationist German Social Democratic Party before the First World War (which the SPD supported) and form a new revolutionary organisation then was perhaps the most serious failing of Rosa Luxemburg, an otherwise outstanding revolutionary, for example.

Yet what if a revolutionary party is not 'broken' but is only 'blunted'? Is it correct for a revolutionary to leave their revolutionary organisation if they think it is 'blunted' as an instrument for making a revolution? Here again, for those who stand in the tradition of classical Bolshevism, matters are very clear - and once again it is worth quoting Trotsky, this time from 1923:

A Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined person; he is a person who in each case and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and independently, not only against his enemies, but inside his own party. Today, perhaps, he will be in the minority in his organization. He will submit, because it is his party. But this does not always signify that he is in the wrong. Perhaps he saw or understood before the others did a new task or the necessity of a turn. He will persistently raise the question a second, a third, a tenth time, if need be. Thereby he will render his party a service, helping it to meet the new task fully armed or to carry out the necessary turn without organic upheavals, without fractional convulsions.

For Trotsky, the Communist International in 1923 was not yet the Communist International in 1933, and while it was perhaps distinctly blunted as a revolutionary instrument - hence the German Communist Party's failure to follow the example of the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 and lead a successful revolution in the 'German October' of 1923 - see Trotsky's The Lessons of October - it was clear that he therefore had a revolutionary duty to try and win the Communist International back for revolutionary politics. As I put it before:

In other words, were one say a revolutionary socialist inside a revolutionary socialist organisation who disagreed with the strategy and tactics of that organisation, one would have a revolutionary duty to persistently raise one's opinion inside of that organisation, even if one was still in a minority. One would critically defend one's independent position within the framework of democratic centralism - within the democratic frameworks of the party - e.g. a national conference - and then 'submit, because it is your party' outside of such times to what was agreed by the majority of the party at that conference - even if one did not agree with the majority. What one does not do, if one is serious about revolutionary politics, is to resign with a whimper from one's revolutionary socialist organisation just because one has lost an argument over strategy and tactics and is in a minority.

The question is one of revolutionary discipline. To quote from Chris Harman's excellent article on 'Party and Class':

"Discipline” means acceptance of the need to relate individual experience to the total theory and practice of the party. As such it is not opposed to, but a necessary prerequisite of the ability to make independent evaluations of concrete situations. That is also why “discipline” for Lenin does not mean hiding differences that exist within the party, but rather exposing them to the full light of day so as to argue them out. Only in this way can the mass of members make scientific evaluations.

Yet what of the argument that allowing such disagreement means the revolutionary party will be 'afflicted by factionalism'? It is true that it is a problem if 'factionalism' and internal arguments over strategy and tactics become preponderant and mean that a revolutionary organisation spends most of its time looking inwards rather than outwards to the wider working class movement. This is, for example, what happened to the International Marxist Group around Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn in Britain during the 1970s. Yet the idea that therefore in order to avoid the danger of 'factionalism' a revolutionary who thinks that their own organisation is 'blunted' would just resign from that organisation without arguing for their position is even more problematic from the perspective of classical Bolshevism. As Tony Cliff noted in the first volume of his biography of Lenin, Building the Party:

'Once while walking, Leo Tolstoy spotted in the distance the figure of a man squatting and gesturing strangely; a madman, he thought – but on drawing nearer he was satisfied that the man was attending to necessary work, sharpening a knife on a stone. Lenin was fond of citing this example.’

In other words, if one thinks a revolutionary party is 'blunt' - and no revolutionary would ever be so complacent to think that there are not areas where a revolutionary party could be 'sharper', then one does not just go and 'build another organisation' - one devotes themselves to 'sharpening' up that organisation. It may look 'mad' or 'factional' to do this to outsiders - but in fact as anyone who has as much as glanced at the Collected Works of Lenin knows, internal disagreement and argument is central to Bolshevism (which is why internal party democracy is so fundamental). All this should not really need stating - but it is worth re-stating here and now quite simply because it is critical if 'Leninism in the 21st century' is to have any meaning whatsoever.

International Socialism #130

2011-04-07T16:34:00.002+01:00

The new issue of International Socialism leads with Alex Callinicos on 'The return of the Arab Revolution' with features on Tunisia and Egypt, but seems to have gone to press before the Libyan Revolution was hijacked by Western imperialism. Speaking of Libya, it seems Tony Blair has answered the question vexing some about whether the war in Libya can be seen as a 'humanitarian intervention' or not. As Blair told Danish TV,

'The thing about Libya is that potentially it is a goldmine of a country – it has got fantastic financial resources, it has got amazing tourist sites...If it opened up its economy and opened up its society and takes that route of reform once they change government, then Libya will be a phenomenally successful country but we need to be there to partner them to do that.'

Blair did however warn that some anti-Gaddafi rebels may not be totally happy about seeing their oil and natural resources asset stripped by neo-liberalism to boost the profit margins of Western multinational capital if they are victorious.

‘I know quite a lot about what makes up the different compositions of the rebel groups – some will be people we would want fully to support, others would have a somewhat different view as to how Libya develops’

Ah, the difficulties of find local allies when waging neo-colonial warfare. Still, I suppose we should be grateful to Blair for being honest for once about what this latest imperialist adventure is all about. Anyway, back to International Socialism journal - which among other things has a detailed analysis of social media and social movements by Jonny Jones, the British student movement, John Riddell on the United Front, and pieces on 'The Tories, Eton and public schools' and 'The London Crowd, 1760-2010' by Dave Renton and Keith Flett respectively, members of the London Socialist Historians Group.

Incidentally, speaking of the London Crowd, it made a glorious return to the streets on March 26th at the TUC demo a couple of weeks ago. I am sorry not to have got round to blogging about that day - but it was a truly great demonstration which was a fantastic response to the myth that the organised working class movement in Britain is somehow defeated and can never rise again. My personal highlight was talking to a Tunisian socialist who had come down from Newcastle with a homemade banner which declared 'It all started with us!'

The American Marxist Christopher Phelps, now based in the UK, despaired of the way the media coverage was hijacked by 'a few hundred anarchists, many dressed in black, [who] trashed businesses and clashed with police on Oxford Street and in Trafalgar Square. The anarchists, calling themselves the black bloc, stole the headlines from the 500,000 other protesters who'd travelled from all over the UK to express the refusal of millions to accept austerity as the consequence of a crisis they did not create.' I sympathise with his despair at the way the media focussed their attention on 'a tiny violent minority', but I think that his critique of anarchists is a little on the 'vulgar Marxist' side. When I popped down to Trafalgar Square, what I saw was basically just young people trying to occupy/liberate Trafalgar Square because they were inspired by the events in Egypt's Tahrir Square. They may have thought their actions alone could help bring about revolutionary change - yet the banner I saw that summed up what I guess most of these school and college students were thinking was 'Give Us Back Our Future You Bastards' - a reference to the grotesquely high levels of youth unemployment currently in the UK and the commodification of higher education by the Con-Dems through tuition fees. If Marxists join with the Tories, Liberals, Labour leaders and the trade union bureaucracy in attacking the 'violence' of anarchists instead of the violence of the state (why doesn't Ed Miliband stop supporting the Con-Dem government casually lobbing £30,000 pound cruise missiles into Libya if he is so concerned about violence?), then Marxism is hardly going to be taken seriously as a revolutionary theory by such young kids.

The arguments about Marxism and autonomism and anarchism are not going to go away anytime soon - but the more pressing question is what next after March 26th? How can we bring down the Con-Dem Government? As my good friend Paddington - who I sadly failed to meet up with on the march itself as it was so huge - noted:

A march or demonstration that is reasonably well-attended can lull you into a false sense of security. I’ve been on plenty which, however well-organised, have hardly set the world on fire and, surrounded by people with the same unshakeable faith, I have come away feeling ever so slightly complacent. We came, we protested, we conquered, we went home with a fuzzy glow.

The fact that Saturday’s march against the Coalition’s cuts was so well-attended – and for half a million people to travel the length and breadth of the country in order to walk uncomfortably slowly in the drizzle is a really extraordinary thing – means such complacency is impossible. I did not go home with a fuzzy glow (though two and a half pints in the Shakespeare at Victoria afterwards did give me a fuzzy head). In fact, we stayed up until late worrying and deliberating about where this protest should go next – such is the massive opposition to the cuts, a general strike is an absolute minimum.

But any such conversation inevitably proceeds from opposing the cuts to opposing the whole structural framework of society. A long and sorry saga tells of how the global economy got into this current mess, but while the politicians and business people still desperately cry “business as usual,” I really think that most people who were marching on Saturday – and many people across the country and the world who did not march – were marching for a new society.

The size and energy and spirit of optimism and unity on the demonstration certainly raised the question 'who governs?' - and a general strike would indeed pose such a question directly. Agitating for such co-ordinated strike action by trade unions in the coming days, weeks and months ahead in the face of the cuts is critical - even while socialists should seize on any other sparks of resistance and manifestations of dissent going in order to try and stop the cuts going through in the meantime. Finally, when it comes to debating what a new society would look like and how to get to it, one of the very best places to have such a debate is among 'the London Crowd' that will be gathered at Marxism 2011 from 30 June - 4 July.

Mike Rosen on Interculturalism

2011-04-03T15:09:00.000+01:00

With David Cameron's words on multiculturalism still reverberating round the gutters, now's a good time to take a second look at the word "culture".

The two main overlapping ways the word is used in everyday conversation are: (a) to cover artistic products we consume - plays, films, books, paintings and the like - and (b) to talk of "the way we do things in our everyday lives" - our kinship relations, what we eat, what kinds of dwellings, rituals, music, gestures we make and, significantly, what language(s), dialect(s) and accent(s) we speak with.

Underlying many discussions about the second usage is the notion that there is a "host" culture which is distinct, unified, ancient, virtuous and desirable and there are "other" cultures which at best are "interesting" or "lively" but should be made to "integrate" or be "assimilated".

As Marxists, we might reshape that and talk of a "dominant" or "hegemonic" culture and of "non-dominant" or "sub-cultures". Either way, this has its problems, because it presents cultures as if they are discrete, self-contained chunks. From the right, there has been an effort to claim some kind of pure English or British "way of life" or "set of values" which is "indigenous". Meanwhile, on our side, we quite rightly celebrate multicultural "diversity" and "minority cultures", claiming this as a form of cultural resistance. I think we have to go further and celebrate "interculturalism" - which is ultimately part of internationalism...

Read the rest of the article from this month's Socialist Review

Homage to Manning Marable

2011-04-02T13:37:00.011+01:00

'At Tuskegee [in 1976], I began to study the major works of Marxism. I gradually became convinced that racism by itself could not account for the oppressed conditions of black people in America and, for that matter, across the globe. Capitalism as an economic system was based on an unequal exchange between the owners of capital and those who worked for a wage. Capitalism as a social system fostered class stratification, extreme concentrations of wealth, and poverty and promoted race hatred as a means to divide workers. This basic analysis seemed to make sense, based on my own experiences growing up inside the United States, in the context of racial discrimination and social inequality. I came to Marxism not out of some abstract love for the white American working class, or out of faith in the power of the international proletariat, or out of respect for the models of Soviet and Chinese Communism, both of which I found equally problematic. I became a socialist because I believed in the struggles of black people, in their history and destiny, and because I believed that to eliminate racism and inequality decisively, a new democratic society would have to be constructed.'
Manning Marable, 'Introduction: Towards an Autobiography of the Politics of Race and Class', Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance and Radicalism (1996)

Tragically, and at the age of only 60, the great black American Marxist intellectual Manning Marable (1950-2011), author of such pioneering works of black history such as How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, has died. This is a very sad loss - one gets a sense of the importance of his prolific writing and commentary on race and class in the US from his staff page at Columbia University, which lists his multiple works of scholarship and other accomplishments, and which culminated in his recent works Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics and a new biographical study of Malcolm X and The Malcolm X Project that he constructed online. To lose such a powerfully acute mind well before his time, and in a period when there are hopeful signs that the American working class is beginning to stir again, remains a terrible blow - my condolences to his friends and comrades. I will endeavour to add tributes and obituaries to this great thinker and activist whose many works will remain a tremendous resource of hope for the many struggles ahead.

Russell Rickford, A Eulogy for Manning Marable
Yuri Prasad on Manning Marable
Marable interviewed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by Kevin Ovenden
Manning Marable on Barack Obama
Marable interviewed in 2009 about Malcolm X

Lessons of Egypt for Iran

2011-03-30T14:03:00.000+01:00

Lessons of Egypt for Iran: A Socialist Worker Forum

07 April · 18:00
School Of Oriental and African Studies, Lecture Hall G2
Thornhaugh Street
London WC1H 0XG

In January 2011 the Egyptian people took to the streets and in just 18
days successfully overthrew the dictator, Hosni Mubarak. In June 2009
a movement for change rocked the Iranian regime but failed ultimately
to remove the leadership. We ask what can Iran learn from Egypt and
how can the movement move forward from here?

With speakers:
Ali Alizadeh - Philosophy lecturer at Middlesex University and a Green
Movement activist
Alex Callinicos - Author of Imperialism & Global Political Economy and Bonfire of Illusions
An Egyptian speaker

New Book: Lah T. Lih's biography of Lenin

2011-03-21T18:38:00.001Z

Lenin - Did the British try to assassinate him?

Lenin by Lars T. Lih

Lenin (1870–1924) was the leader of the communist Bolshevik party and founder of the Soviet Union. A key revolutionary thinker who spent much of his 30-year political career in exile, he went from relative obscurity to world fame in 1917 when the October Revolution made his party responsible for Russia's future.

In this book Lars T. Lih presents a striking new interpretation of Lenin's political outlook. The standard view portrays Lenin as a pessimist with a dismissive view of the revolutionary potential of the workers. This book reveals that beneath the sharp polemics, Lenin was more a romantic enthusiast than a sour pragmatist, one who imposed meaning on the whirlwind of events happening around him by seeing them through the lens of his own heroic scenario of class leadership.

This concise biography is based on wide-ranging new research that puts Lenin into the context both of Russian society and the international socialist movement of the early twentieth century. It also sets the development of Lenin's political outlook firmly within the framework of his family background and personal outlook.

Using contemporary photographs, posters and prints, Lih illustrates the emotional and physical features of Lenin's world. A vivid and non-partisan portrait of a key figure in modern history, Lenin will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Lars T. Lih is an independent scholar who has written widely on Soviet history. His books include Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (1990), the English-language edition of The Stalin-Molotov Letters, 1925–1936 (1995) and Lenin Rediscovered: 'What is to be Done?' In Context (2006).

100 Years of Air Strikes

2011-03-21T18:31:00.000Z

The world’s first aerial bombing mission took place 100 years ago, over Libya...

Regime Change Begins At Home

2011-03-20T20:50:00.007Z

To come within the orbit of imperialist politics is to be debilitated by the stench, to be drowned in the morass of lies and hypocrisy...Now, as always, let us stand for independent organisation and independent action. We have to break our own chains. Who is the fool that expects our gaolers to break them?
CLR James, 1935

Sadly, there are one hell of a lot of such fools around at the moment, willing to suspend disbelief and hope against hope that a classic imperialist adventure in Libya can somehow bring liberation, even after the bloody criminal disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars are now clearly to be consigned to the 'memory hole' as if they did not happen or are not still happening. It is as if a tidal wave of forced amnesia has swept over the British political elite and its allies in the corporate media. A Western intervention in the Middle East? Yes, fine, what could possibly go wrong? As the Guardian's Andrew Rawnsley - an ever loyal servant of power - observed of the House of Commons when David Cameron announced the UN was going to war:

After his Commons statement, Conservative MPs saluted their leader. Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne sat on the front bench, nodding approvingly. A Lib Dem member of the cabinet says proudly: "We have taken as forward a position as the Conservatives. We have argued the same way Paddy Ashdown did over Kosovo. To stand aside in this sort of situation would have been unconscionable." Iraq has left deep and still not entirely healed wounds in the Labour party. It would have been less risky for Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, to sit on the sidelines. So they deserve some credit too for putting Labour on the right side when a fascistic dictator threatens slaughter on his own people. Mr Cameron will get a resounding endorsement for his position when MPs vote tomorrow.

The Guardian on Saturday reported just four out of 650 odd MPs supported the Stop the War Coalition's position on this. For all the talk about Gaddaffi as a 'fascistic dictator', it is almost as if we are the ones living in a totalitarian state - yet we are supposed to be the ones bringing 'democracy'. Moreoever, as Robert Fisk notes, 'there is a racist element in all this'.

The Middle East seems to produce these ravers [like Gaddaffi] – as opposed to Europe, which in the past 100 years has only produced Berlusconi, Mussolini, Stalin and the little chap who used to be a corporal in the 16th List Bavarian reserve infantry, but who went really crackers when he got elected in 1933 – but now we are cleaning up the Middle East again and can forget our own colonial past in this sandpit.

For Cameron, an old Etonion brought up on British imperial mythology and legend, this war is a classic means of trying to distract attention away from his failing and unpopular economic agenda of cuts and privatisation at home - in the finest traditions of Margaret Thatcher's 'Falkland's moment'. In trouble at home with lecturer's strikes and looming strikes over public sector pensions, facing a mass demonstration by trade unionists and students in London, what better timing for a war? And just like the British ruling class over a century ago predicted at the outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa that 'it would all be over by Christmas', so Cameron reassures us that this war will be speedy. Yet, just as the bloody Boer War was in reality about securing gold and diamond reserves - so this war is a classic imperialist adventure to do with securing Libya's oil.

The hapless Clegg's Liberal Democrats, in supporting the racist Tory warmonger Cameron, are following more than just the tradition of Paddy Ashdown - they are standing in the dishonourable traditions of the racist warmongering Liberal Lloyd George , who once noted in his diary in 1932 after an attempt by some in the League of Nations to outlaw aerial bombardment, that the British Empire 'reserves the right to bomb niggers'.

And as for Ed Miliband's parliamentary Labour Party - well, what does one expect now from such a party? Despite Ed Miliband's claims to have 'learnt lessons' from Iraq, it is now manifestly clear that he and his party have learnt next to nothing. The silence of the likes of Diane Abbott is thunderous - political power and patriotism before principle it seems is the order of the day. Even some ordinary Labour Party members who on any other day would proudly wave the red flag of socialism are now lining up under the likes of the Stars and Strikes and the Union Jack. So David Osler tells us that 'once in a while there is a more or less accidental coincidence between what the US wants to see happen in a country and the interests of working people that live there. Libya, here and now, is one of those times.'

History here goes out the window. Can he give us any previous examples of such halycon days when 'what the US wants to see happen in a country and the interests of working people that live there' coincided?

Instead Osler tells us that 'the stark fact is that without external support, the forces that have put their lives on the line in the current uprising against Gaddafi face certain defeat, and a reactionary regime will brutally and triumphantly consolidate its rule, perhaps bringing the revolution in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world to a total halt.'

The 'certain defeat' of the Libyan Revolution was far from certain - Gaddaffi's forces would have found it almost impossible to take and hold a city like Benghazi - and would have faced guerrilla war across Libya even if they did - while it is not only Gaddaffi's regime but the US and its allies that have a material interest in 'bringing the revolution in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world to a total halt'. As Tony Blair puts it, the Western ruling class 'cannot be a spectator to the Arab Revolutions' - what he means is that they have to get in there and stop this 'outbreak of democracy' spreading further across the region - which is why Blair is so proud of Cameron for embracing 'the principle of intervention'.

Socialists have to maintain our independence from such imperialist politics - soaked as they are in blood and oil - and stress instead that the No Fly Zone Is No Way to Free Libya - liberation and emancipation can only come from the mass actions of the oppressed and exploited themselves -as the Arab Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have so beautifully demonstrated up to now. For those of us in the West, Regime Change Begins At Home - and in Britain that process of transformation has to begin on March 26th - Turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square!

Edited to add:
Richard Seymour: A Humanitarian Intervention?
Karl Sharro: 'The No-Fly Zone in Libya: Hijacking the Arab Uprisings'

Edited to add:
* Protest on Budget Day. This Wednesday March 23rd Stop the War and CND are participating in a protest outside Downing Street on budget day. We will be demanding David Cameron stops pouring money into yet another futile and destructive foreign war at a time when he is trying to force through the most drastic programme of spending cuts in generations. Welfare not Warfare - protest on Budget Day
Assemble 5pm Trafalgar Square and March to Downing Street.

* Come to the Public Rally - Hands off Libya, Hands off the Middle East. 7pm Wednesday March 30th.
Conway Hall, Red lion Square, London WC1
Speakers include Tony Benn, Lindsey German, Sami Ramadani, and Jeremy Corbyn MP.

Stop the War statement on UN's war on Libya

2011-03-19T10:39:00.002Z

From the Stop the War Coalition

A new war has been declared in the Middle East. With the bloody and failing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan still in place, the USA, Britain and France are now committed to an escalating armed intervention in Libya.

The decision to attack Libya and impose regime change – for that is what the UN resolution means – may have been authorised by the Security Council. But it was instigated by the despots of the Arab League, desperate to secure deeper western involvement in the region to save them from their own peoples. And it will be implemented by the same powers which have wreaked such mayhem throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last ten years and longer.

The imposition of a “no-fly zone”, air attacks on Libyan defences and Gaddaffi’s troops, and naval bombardments will not bring peace to Libya nor a resolution to the conflict there. They will, however, cost more civilian lives and they will set Britain and the world on an escalator of military intervention which risks ending up with an occupation of at least part of Libya.

While few people are admirers of the Gaadaffi regime, the experience of Iraq underlines the dangerous futility of trying to impose “regime change” from without. It also reminds us that genuine democracy and freedom cannot grow from aerial bombardment and foreign occupation. Attacking Libya and sponsoring the Gulf oligarchies’ invasion of Bahrain to prop up the threatened monarchy there – under the noses of the US fifth fleet- are of a piece. They represent a concerted effort by the western powers to first control and then bring to a halt the Arab revolutions, leaving the essentials of imperial power in the Middle East in place.

David Cameron’s decision to place Britain in the vanguard of efforts to topple the Gaddafi regime is dictated by the same considerations which led Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to embrace that same regime – a desire to maintain BP’s profitable access to Libyan oil.

Stop the War believes that there should be no external military intervention in Libya. In supporting the Arab revolutions, we believe that these will be strangled, not supported, by western military action. We call on the British government to keep its hands off the Middle East and demand that it refrain from all involvement in military action in Libya or elsewhere in the region. We urge the anti-war movement to campaign throughout the country to arrest and reverse this slide to war and British participation in it.

ADD YOUR NAME TO ONLINE PETITION HERE

Socialist Worker: Twelve Reasons to Oppose Air Strikes

Fascism and Big Business: The Case of Coca Cola

2011-03-16T11:52:00.002Z

KKK-event-sponsored-by-Northern-Coco-Cola-Co

Given that the Klan often reflected a cross-section of the community, its members were often deeply embedded in the local power structure. In Atlanta, Georgia, the Klan pervaded the political and legal system--Klansmen filled prominent positions in the police, the courts, and the city government. Newspapers sanctioned their activities and important local businesses like Coca-Cola advertised in their publication.
'Making the Invisible Empire Visible:The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s'

The men in white emphatically embraced an emergent consumer culture, made prominent links with business, and never missed a trick on the merchandising front. Robes and paraphernalia were mass-produced in factories, and gimmicky, KKK-themed advertising surrounded the movement at every turn.
Interview with Craig Fox author of a new work 'Everyday Klansfolk: In Search of the Mainstream KKK'

While Coke was storming through Europe in the 1940s supporting American GI's , Coca-Cola GmbH (Germany) was busy collaborating with the Nazi regime. The company advertised in the Nazi press, thus financially supporting it. It built bottling plants in occupied territories. Then in 1941, when Coca-Cola GmbH could no longer get the syrup from America to make Coke, it invented a new drink specifically for the Nazi beverage market, out of the ingredients available to it. That drink was Fanta. Yessiree! Fanta is the drink of Nazis!
Mark Thomas in the New Statesman

Thank goodness Coca-Cola don't back any dodgy people or terrorist organisations today, hey?

Arguments for Revolution in Britain

2011-03-16T11:33:00.000Z

Joseph Choonara, one of the authors of Arguments for Revolution puts the case for 'regime change at home'...

Stop the War Protest at Downing Street

2011-03-10T19:35:00.000Z

HANDS OFF THE MIDDLE EAST - NO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA - TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
Join the day of action this Saturday March 12th – Downing Street 2pm in London - called by Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative

Keith Flett on Britain and the 1848 Revolutions

2011-03-10T19:27:00.001Z

With the inspiring events in the Middle East, comparisons have been made to 1848, a year of democratic revolutions throughout Europe. Those revolutions were mostly defeated over the following two years by a vicious and bloody wave of reaction. But there was unfinished business in Poland and Ireland and political democracy was left firmly and unavoidably on the agenda for the decades to come.

Britain however is often cited as an exception to this.In my view what is known by historians as ‘exceptionalism’ that is the argument that this or that country or movement is somehow unique is nearly always just bad history. As a matter of fact there was no revolution in Britain in 1848 but the underlying trend was actually very similar to the rest of Europe...
Read on here

London protest in solidarity with Zimbabwean socialists

2011-03-10T13:39:00.000Z

From here:

Please join the protest outside the Zimbabwean embassy this Friday 11 March, 12 noon – 1.30pm, Zimbabwe Embassy, 429 Strand, London, WC2R 0JR.

Six socialist activists in Zimbabwe face the death penalty for watching a video about the revolt in Egypt. Munyaradzi Gwisai, Hopewell Gumbo, Antonater Choto, Welcome Zimuto, Eddson Chakuma and Tatenda Mombeyarara are charged with treason. Treason is punishable by death.

Charges against another 39 people who attended the meeting were dropped this week.

A new website has been set up for the Free the Zimbabwean Treason Trialists campaign. Go to www.freethemnow.com

The campaign urgently needs money. Make payments to:

Account: CDL– MINE-LINE Worker Solidarity Fund,
Deposit reference “Zimbabwe Treason Trialists Solidarity Fund”,
NEDBANK, Killarney Branch, Johannesburg.
Branch code: 191 60535,
Current Account number: 100 185 3784,
SWIFT CODE NEDSZAJJ

When you make a donation please email us at zimtreasontrial@gmail.com to tell us who it is from and how much it is

New Film: The Labour Leader's Speech

2011-03-10T12:46:00.010Z

...From the makers of the award-winning The King's Speech...

...Starring Oscar winner Colin Firth as Ed Miliband...

...Charlie Sheen as George Osbourne...

...Teri Hatcher, Rachel Weisz and Scarlett Johansson in Ed Miliband's dreams...

...and Ralph Miliband spinning in his grave

Comes the eagerly awaited... THE LABOUR LEADER'S SPEECH

The incredible story of the quiet man who found himself accidentally becoming leader of the Labour Party instead of his brother and was accordingly expected as the alleged official 'leader of the Opposition' to give voice to the hopes of millions on the TUC backed mass 'march for the alternative' on 26 March in London...will Ed make it to the march? Will he actually speak on the demo?

'I can't wait to hear Ed speak...the excitement and anticipation is unbearable'
Nobody

The Big Society is coming to town

2011-03-10T12:07:00.000Z

On Saturday 26 March in London, the 'Big Society' will be taking over the streets of London in the first national demonstration organised by the trade union movement against the cuts and for alternative solutions to getting out of the deficit crisis - there is even talk of the Big Society staying on the streets and going on strike to bring down the Government. Anyway, to mark the glorious 'coming out' of the Big Society Philosophy Football have done what they do best - produced a T-shirt...

Reasons to Hate the Daily Mail # 94: Hitler-worship

2011-03-06T16:08:00.006Z

[With its notoriously right wing columnists - including now also Nick Cohen - aside, there are lots of well known reasons for democrats, radicals and socialists to despise the Daily Mail - a paper founded in 1896 as its founder Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) stated to help foster 'the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire'. When Lord Northcliffe died in August, 1922, the Daily Mail 'newspaper' was taken over by Lord Rothermere, who in the 1930s famously gave support to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists - writing an infamous article, 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts', in January, 1934, in which he praised Mosley for his 'sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine' - sort of a pre-runner to the Daily Star's recent love-in with the English Defence League. Yet less well known is Lord Rothermere's admiration for Adolf Hitler, who he met several times before his death in 1940 and described as 'a human being of great culture'. For a paper that is so obsessed with the personal lives of the rich and powerful it is odd that there was little on the Daily Mail's own website about this particular relationship - and so I thought I would bring it to wider attention here -hopefully to help cut the sales of the Daily Mail itself but also as it sheds light on the admiration shared by many in the British ruling class for Adolf Hitler and fascism more generally during the 1920s and 1930s - as well as Hitler's own admiration and respect for the white supremacy represented by the British Empire].

Lord Rothermere and Adolf Hitler - The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Lord Rothermere and Adolf Hitler

Lord Rothermere used The Daily Mail to argue for Hitler's policies long before Hitler actually got to power - but abruptly withdrew his support in 1930. Later that year, Rothermere told Hitler that Jewish businessmen had withdrawn advertising from the newspaper and he had been forced to 'toe the line'. Hitler began to leave out anti-Semitic comments from his speeches during elections, but once in power Hitler began to express anti-Semitic ideas again.

In his 1939 book Warnings and Predictions, (only online on a pro-Nazi site so I won't link to it) Rothermere explained what he had first seen in Hitler:

When Herr Hitler took open power in the January of 1933, I realised that his psychology was very different from that of our own statesmen and very different from that of the men who had led the German republic. Here was a man whose life had been hard. In boyhood and youth he had been poor and thwarted. In early manhood he had been a serving soldier performing the most dangerous of front-line tasks, those of a battalion runner. He had been decorated for gallantry, had been wounded and gassed. In the years of later manhood he, with other ex-servicemen, had seen his country thrust down into the very mud of world disrepute. He had suffered from the ineptitude of those charged with the Government of his country. He had been affronted by the spectacle of members of an alien race flourishing in Germany and Austria while his own countrymen were in penury. He had attained power only by the use of force combined with a new application of rhetorical and propagandist powers.

With Hitler in power, Lord Rothermere publically declared his renewed support. Writing in The Daily Mail on 10th July, 1933, he praised Hitler's new regime which had stopped Germany 'rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements' - Jewish people - and urging 'all British young men and women to study closely the progress of the Nazi regime in Germany'. Adolf Hitler in a letter to Lord Rothermere on 7th December, 1933 relayed his thanks to Rothermere for 'the wise and beneficial public support' the Daily Mail had given him so far.

In his book, Lord Rothermere stressed that both himself and Hitler had a mutual hope for a deeper more meaningful relationship between not just themselves but between Britain and Nazi Germany. 'In an interchange of views about the possibility of Anglo-German friendship that I had with him [Hitler] not very long after his coming to power, he [Hitler] wrote:

"I have derived from fate the heavy task of giving back again to a great people and State by every means its natural honour. I see in this one of the most essential preparations for a real and lasting understanding, and I beg you, Lord Rothermere, never to regard my work from any other point of view. The feelings and views of Parliamentary demagogues are liable to rapid and unexpected changes. The world may, however, for what I care, reproach me with what it will. One reproach they certainly cannot level at me: that I have been vacillating in my views and unreliable in my work. If an unknown man with such weaknesses set out to win over a nation in fifteen years he would meet with no success. Herein resides, perhaps, the faith—exaggerated, as many believe—in my own personality. I believe, my dear Lord Rothermere, that in the end my unchanging standpoint, undeviating staunchness and my unalterable determination to render a historically great contribution to the restoration of a good and enduring understanding between both great Germanic peoples will be crowned with success. And believe me that this is the most decisive contribution to the pacification of the world. An Anglo-German understanding would form in Europe a force for peace and reason of 120,000,000 people of the highest type. The historically unique colonial ability and sea-power of England would be united to one of the greatest soldier-races of the world. Were this understanding extended by the joining-up of the American nation, then it would indeed be hard to see who in the world could disturb peace without wilfully and consciously neglecting the interests of the White race.'

However it was only in 1938 that the relationship advanced to a whole new level. In telegram to 'my dear Fuhrer' Adolf Hitler on 1st October, 1938, Lord Rothermere would declare:

My dear Fuhrer everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution to the Czechoslovakian problem. People not so much concerned with territorial readjustment as with dread of another war with its accompanying bloodbath. Frederick the Great was a great popular figure. I salute your excellency's star which rises higher and higher.

As Lord Rothermere explains in his 1939 book about the changed mood in 1938:

'While I have always understood the British antipathy to the use of physical violence, I have equally understood the causes of its use in countries abroad of different circumstances from our own. I understand it there, just as I understand the causes of the violence shown to the rebels in India when the Sepoys were blown from the guns after the massacre of British women and children at Delhi. I deplore the use of concentration camps in Germany and Italy to-day, just as I deplored Kitchener's use of them in Africa at the beginning of the century, but in each case I have understood their evil necessity.

For this reason, and because I knew the man, I felt constrained, when Herr Hitler was being roundly abused by the English Left-wing Press, to tell the British public what I knew of him. In two issues of The Daily Mail in May 1938 I wrote of him what I now gladly put on more permanent record:

"Great numbers of people in England," I wrote, "regard Herr Hitler as an ogre, but I would like to tell them how I have found him. He exudes good-fellowship. He is simple, unaffected and obviously sincere. It is untrue that he habitually addresses private individuals as if they were public meetings.

"He is supremely intelligent. There are only two others I have known to whom I could apply this remark—Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Lloyd George. If you ask Herr Hitler a question, he makes an instant reply full of information and eminent good sense. There is no man living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would sooner take.

"He believes that Germany has a divine mission and that the German people are destined to save Europe from the designs of revolutionary Communism. He has a great sense of the sanctity of the family, to which Communism is antagonistic, and in Germany has stopped the publication of all indecent books, the production of suggestive plays and films, and has thoroughly cleaned up the moral life of the nation.

"Herr Hitler has a great liking for the English people. He regards the English and the Germans as being of one race. This liking he cherishes notwithstanding, as he says, that he has been sorely tried by malicious personal comments and cartoons in the English Press.

"I was talking with Herr Hitler some eighteen months ago when he said, 'Certain English circles in Europe speak of me as an adventurer. My reply is that adventurers made the British Empire.'"

To this I added some details of a conversation I had had with him about relative air strengths, and the following week, in response, as will be seen, to the interest my picture of the man had aroused, I wrote further:

"My remarks about Herr Hitler last week aroused a great deal of interest, apparently, among readers who hitherto have had to form their idea of him from newspaper comments and caricature.

"Herr Hitler is proud to call himself a man of the people, but, notwithstanding, the impression that has remained with me after every meeting with him is that of a great gentleman. He places a guest at his ease immediately. When you have been with him for five minutes, you feel that you have known him for a long time.

"His courtesy is beyond words, and men and women alike are captivated by his ready and disarming smile.

"He is a man of rare culture. His knowledge of music, painting and architecture is profound."

Many people seemed to find difficulty in reconciling the conception of a man of culture with a man of resolute action.

Why this should be so, I do not know. British 'Christian Generals' like Havelock and Gordon had the same mixture of traits. General John Nicholson, one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, was a man of great culture and personal piety, but he was relentless not only with the enemy but with his own colleagues if he esteemed them weak. Almost his dying words when he learnt that his successor in command was showing an unwise softness to the enemy were, "Thank God, I still have strength enough left to shoot him!"

...Whatever means the new regime in Germany found necessary to establish itself, it is undoubtedly true, as I wrote on May 20th 1938 in The Daily Mail that: "Herr Hitler's policy is achievement without bloodshed.''

Were I to make public some of the communications which I have had from Herr Hitler, in a correspondence bridging now several years, it would be apparent that one of his dearest hopes, cherished, as he himself has told me, long before his advent to power in Germany, is that Germany and Britain should stand side by side in amity.

One sentence I may quote, for it is in no way different from some of his public utterances. It is this: "Whatever may happen, I want to assure you at the conclusion of this letter that I firmly believe that a time will come in which England and Germany will be the solid pillars in a worried and unstable world."

On another occasion Herr Hitler said to me, "If to-day I stand for an Anglo-German understanding, this does not date from yesterday or the day before. During the last fifteen years I have spoken in Germany at least 4,000 to 5,000 times before small, large and immense mass audiences. There does not, however, exist a single speech of mine, nor a single line ever written by me, in which I have expressed myself contrary to this opinion against an Anglo-German understanding. On the contrary, I have during all this time fought for it by word and in writing."

Despite the necessity for subordinating nearly everything to the gigantic task of rearming his country, Herr Hitler has a reasoned, as well as a temperamental, aversion from war. Some six years ago he expressed to me the belief that a methodical, scientific examination of European history over the last three hundred years would show that nine-tenths of the blood-sacrifices of the battle-fields was shed entirely in vain—that is to say, in vain measured by the natural interests of the participating nations.

He made no exception in the case of Germany. On the contrary, he insisted that his people in those three hundred years had lost at least twenty to twenty-five million souls, probably even more, in wars which had been essentially profitless to the nation, measured not in terms of a questionable fame but of practical profit.

As I have said earlier, people have accused Herr Hitler of megalomania. That, of course, is always the charge levelled against a man who emerges from the ruck and takes and wields power. It was said of Caesar, it was said of Napoleon, it was said of Rhodes.

That Hitler has a great and even mystic faith in his destiny is true. It would be strange, in the light of his achievements, if he had not...

I know that when the Anglo-German Trade Agreement was reached, Herr Hitler's belief was that it might well pave the way to a wider and better understanding.

In one of his addresses to his own people, Herr Hitler declared that his true wish was to see Germany freed from the necessity of wrangling with her neighbours, that he might pursue his work of rebuilding the nation not only metaphorically but actually.

His plans for the replanning of the great German cities are very dear to his heart. It can never be for-gotten, when one enjoys his personal hospitality, that in the days of his extreme youth, and extreme poverty, his aspirations were purely artistic and architectural. Those aspirations were thwarted by circumstances, but the inner spirit which inspired them has not really changed.

He has in him something of the dual nature of our own General Wolfe, the conqueror of Canada, who, as all schoolboys know, said he would rather have written Grey's 'Elegy' than take Quebec. If ever, by the grace of God, Europe enters upon an era of dependable peace in his life-time, it is quite certain that he will show in sociology the same drive and vision that he has hitherto shown in international and internal politics.

This is a side of his character which is rarely shown to the British public by those who comment upon him. It is, probably, a side completely overlooked by our diplomats in their dealings with him.

In writing thus of Hitler, the man, I have no desire merely to 'glorify' him or to seem to condone some of the acts and measures which he has found necessary during the six years of his autocracy to bring his people from the slough of odium and distress to their old position as a great nation able to bargain on terms of equality with their neighbours. My only desire is to give a sound perspective to the portrait of him in British minds, and to show that the ogre is, as I wrote a year ago, a human being of great culture.

In early 1939 after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia Rothermere wrote 'a very indiscreet letter to the Fuhrer congratulating him on his walk into Prague' and urged Hitler to follow up his coup with the invasion of Romania. In June 1939, with war clouds gathering, Lord Rothermere wrote to Hitler, 'My Dear Fuhrer', again - a final love letter as it were - before war and Lord Rothermere's death signalled the end of their relationship:

"My Dear Führer, I have watched with understanding and interest the progress of your great and superhuman work in regenerating your country...The British people, now like Germany strongly rearmed, regard the German people with admiration as valorous adversaries in the past, but I am sure that there is no problem between our two countries which cannot be settled by consultation and negotiation."

Tony Cliff on the revolutionary roots of International Women's Day

2011-03-06T14:26:00.003Z

This year marks the centenary of International Women's Day, now celebrated across the world on 8 March - and still of critical importance today given the continuing reality of women's oppression. Tony Cliff, author of among other things a 1984 work on Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, once described how International Women's Day originated with the German revolutionary Marxist Clara Zetkin at a 1910 international conference of socialist women in Copenhagen.

'Zetkin proposed the adoption of 8 March as International Women’s Day. (Both the date and the idea were taken from a demonstration of American socialist women in New York on 8 March 1908 in opposition to the bourgeois suffrage movement there.) The proposal was approved with enthusiasm by the conference. Beginning in 1911 and continuing until the outbreak of the war, International Women’s Day demonstrations were organised in practically all the main cities of Europe. (Of course the most important one was the single one which took place during the War – in February 1917 – and launched the first Russian revolution of that date.)'

In a 1981 article on 'Alexandra Kollontai: Russian Marxists and Women Workers' from International Socialism, 14 (Autumn 1981) (not yet online but see here), Cliff described how the day took roots in Russia before the 1917 February Revolution:

An International Women's Day was held on 8 March every year since 1911 in a number of countries. The first time the event was observed in Russia was in 1913. It was not held on 8 March but a little earlier, on 17 February, because of fear of police interference. To commemorate the day a special six-page issue of Pravda was published. It contained articles about women workers, the significance of International Women's Day for the socialist movement, and pictures of leading revolutionary women like Clara Zetkin, Eleanor Marx, and Vera Zasulich.

Celebrations took place in five cities: St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Samara and Tblisi. The largest celebration was in St. Petersburg. It was organised by a group of women textile workers and Bolshevik activists such as KN Samoilova and PF Kudelli, who were part of a special holiday committee set up by the Bolshevik-controlled Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. The main meeting of the day was held in the great Hall of the Kalashnikov Exchange. The Police were there in full force. At the entrance both mounted and regular patrols were stationed. Inside, police occupied the first two rows. Exactly at one o'clock, they closed the doors of the hall and would not allow even those with tickets to enter. Despite this, over one thousand people managed to crowd into the hall. One of the main speakers, a textile worker, Ianchevskaia, summed up the meaning of the assembly thus: 'the women workers' movement is a tributary flowing in the great river of the proletarian movement and giving it strength.'

These words and the general spirit of International Women's Day grated on the nerves of the bourgeois feminist Dr Pokrovskaia. She wrote: 'As we expected, the women workers' day did not protest at all against the subordinate position of wives in relation to their husbands. They spoke primarily of the enslavement of the proletarian woman by capital, and only in passing mentioned domestic subservience... Does personal freedom really have such paltry significance in the eyes of proletarian women that it is not even worth talking about? That is inconceivable! When that same proletarian woman sets up her own women's day, she will give voice to protest against such laws, her resentment of them, and demand t abolition. At the meeting Mme Kudelii was wrong in asserting economic interests are the most important for the woman worker. Personal freedom stands higher. The pet rooster is always full, and the wild eagle is often hungry. All the same, we prefer eagles.'

Her conclusion was simple: all men benefitted from male privilege; women must join together to fight it.

In 1914 it was decided to celebrate International Women's Day with large open meetings in the larger workers' quarters of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately these plans were blocked by the authorities. Ten meetings were requested, but the Government granted only one.

On the 23 February extra detachments of police were on the streets; there a large crowd at the one legal meeting; instead of five speakers there were only two. The others had been arrested on that day, and the police had forbidden substitutes. Many of those present, disappointed and angry, spilled out into the streets, singing revolutionary songs, but they were eventually dispersed by the police, who carried out mass arrests.

Both in 1913 and 1914 deep differences manifested themselves between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks regarding the celebration of International Women's Day. The Mensheviks wanted only women to participate in the celebrations, while the Bolsheviks insisted that International Women's Day should be celebrated not only by working women but the entire working class.

During the war it was far more difficult to celebrate International Women's Day. In 1915 and 1916, despite a government ban, the day was commemorated by small meetings and celebrations.'

However, it was to be International Women's Day in Russia in 1917 that remains the high point, as Cliff noted:

In January 1917 a police report noted that

'the mothers of families, exhausted from endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half-starving and sick children, are very likely closer now to revolution than Messrs Miliukov, Rodichev and Company, and of course, they are more dangerous because they represent that store of inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire.'

It was the women workers of Petrograd who started the revolution of 1917. On 22 February (7 March) a group of women workers met to discuss the organisation of International Women’s Day the following day. V. Kaiurov, the worker-leader of the St Petersburg district committee of the Bolshevik Party, advised them to refrain from hasty action:

'But to my surprise and indignation, on 23 February, at an emergency conference of five persons in the corridor of the Erikson works, we learned from comrade Nikifer Ilyin of the strike in some textile factories and of the arrival of a number of delegates from the women workers, who announced that they were supporting the metal workers. I was extremely indignant about the behaviour of the strikers, both because they had blatantly ignored the decision of the District Committee of the party, and also because they had gone on strike after I had appealed to them only the night before to keep cool and disciplined. With reluctance the Bolsheviks agreed to [spreading the strike] and they were followed by other workers – Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead.'

Not until 25 February did the Bolsheviks come out with their first leaflet calling for a general strike – after 200,000 workers had already downed tools!

The massive wave of strikes and demonstrations was the culmination of years of accumulated anger. As one witness later recounted:

'The working women, driven to desperation by starvation and war, came along like a hurricane that destroys everything in its path with the violence of an elemental force. This revolutionary march of working women, full of the hatred of centuries of oppression, was the spark that set light to the great flame of the February revolution, that revolution which was to shatter Tsarism.'

It was the women workers in the textile industry who elected delegates and sent them round to neighbouring factories with appeals for support. Thus was the revolution detonated. It was, as Trotsky said,

'... a revolution begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisation, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the working class – the women textile workers.'

It was these same women who fraternised with the soldiers, persuading them to disobey the orders of the officers, and to hold fire:

'They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us”. The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd. The barrier is opened, a joyous and grateful “Hurrah!” shakes the air. The soldiers are surrounded. Everywhere arguments, reproaches, appeals – the revolution makes another forward step.'

The newly resurrected Pravda acknowledged the revolution’s debt to women in an editorial:

'Hail the women!
Hail the International!
The women were the first to come out on the streets of Petrograd on their Women’s Day.
The women in Moscow in many cases determined the need of the military; they went to the barracks, and convinced the soldiers to come over to the side of the Revolution.
Hail the women!'

Edited to add: Alexandra Kollantai on International Women's Day

A Black Radical's Notebook

2011-03-05T16:26:00.000Z

Interview with the editor of Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader

Rally to defend multiculturalism

2011-03-05T15:06:00.001Z

Don’t let Cameron divide us!
Weds 9 March
7pm, Friends Meeting House,
Euston Rd (near Euston St)
Hosted by Unite Against Fascism and One Society Many Cultures.
Speakers: Peter Hain MP, Billy Hayes (CWU general secretary), Mehdi Hassan (Journalist), Edie Friedman (Jewish Council for Racial Equality), George Galloway, Dilowar Khan (Executive Director of East London Muslim Centre), Zita Holbourne (TUC Race Relations Committee and BARAC), Jerry Dammers (ex-Specials/ musician), Weyman Bennett (UAF joint secretary), Martin Smith (Love Music Hate Racism), Kanja Sesay (NUS Black Students’ Officer), Sean Vernell (UCU London region), Mike Rosen (broadcaster/poet), Avaes Mohammad (spoken word poet). Chair: Sabby Dhalu (One Society Many Cultures/UAF joint secretary) and Hassan Mahamdallie (author)

Solidarity with Middle East and North African workers network

2011-03-03T19:19:00.000Z

Following the meeting on Tuesday attended by Billy Hayes, Katy Clark MP and many trade unionists, this group has set up a website. This will have regular reports of workers' activity, and it also has six suggestions for solidarity and the founding statement of the group.

For liberation from below in Libya

2011-03-01T20:14:00.003Z

One might have thought that neo-conservatives would be maintaining a decent, respectful silence of late, as their elitist and ultimately racist belief that democracy and liberation from tyranny in the Middle East was only possible though Western military action and 'humanitarian intervention' received - after the criminal disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - the final glorious refutation as the people of the region themselves took to the centre stage of world-history, making their own reality by bringing down dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. As Medhi Hasan noted,

far from retrospectively vindicating the unilateral, aggressive and militarised approach to democratic reform favoured by the Bush administration in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt vividly illustrate the way in which democratic change can come from within, from "people power". The US approach - "bomb, invade, occupy" - has been made irrelevant. The Tunisian and Egyptian protesters were supported by Facebook, Twitter and al-Jazeera, not tanks, planes and "shock and awe".

Yet if one hoped for a period of silence and reflection - just one minute silence for their victims maybe on behalf of the neo-conservatives, one hoped wrong. Take, for example, the British 'History Tsar' Niall Ferguson, currently busily promoting his new book and TV series.

Ferguson's new work Civilization: The West and the Rest, is essentially like all his other books - about narrating the story of money and power in order to make himself money and power. However, this time around he wants to focus on making the rise of Western imperialism seem acceptable to British schoolkids by taking out the nasty bits of exploitation and oppression associated with it. 'It is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it'. For Ferguson, the rise of 'the West' then came about because of something apparently innate about those he calls 'Westerners' and missing from those he calls 'resterners': Basically, 'Western civilisation' magically developed six 'killer apps': competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic, while 'the rest' presumably were some essentially lazy, primitive, backward 'other' - who apparently not only did not help to develop any of these 'killer apps' - but were somehow essentially predisposed not to do so.

Stop me if any of this story sounds in any way familiar. Yep, well done - this racist framework sounds familiar as it was essentially how world history was taught to Ferguson himself when the British Empire was still in full swing, and generations of British schoolkids before him. Yet Ferguson's essentially racist historical philosophy is not only fully in keeping with the 'muscular liberalism' espoused in David Cameron's recent attacks on 'multiculturalism' at home - but also those trying to find intellectual support for the idea of military intervention in Libya and abroad today. For Ferguson, clearly the West has not brought enough death and destruction and carnage to the Middle East in the past - it is clearly high time the West now thought about a new imperial 'civilising mission' as the 40 million or so 'poor, ill-educated young men' of the Arab world are only capable of making 'large-scale and protracted violence'. Indeed, for Ferguson, 'the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East could turn much more violent, with a death toll running into tens or hundreds of thousands. Then they could spark a full-blown war, claiming millions of lives.'

The 'large scale and protracted violence' on display so far in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya has come from the old ruling dictatorships trying to maintain its grip on power using Western arms. Still, I guess its nice for Ferguson to warn of the dangers of a 'full-blown war' in the Middle East which could claim millions of lives - though perhaps such a warning is a bit rich coming from an unrepepentant champion of Bush and Blair's bloody Iraq war.

Rather than the likes of war-mongers like Ferguson giving lessons on winning democracy to heroic Arabs fighting and dying for it in the streets of Tripoli, we should perhaps listen instead to their voices: 'We are against any foreign intervention or military intervention in our internal affairs,' said Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga in Libya’s second city Benghazi last Sunday. 'This revolution will be completed by our people with the liberation of the rest of Libyan territory.'

Edited to add: Stop the War statement on Middle East revolutions

There must be no US or British intervention in Libya: the future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen must be determined by the people of those countries alone.

The uprisings sweeping the Middle East deserve the support of all progressive people. They are directed against autocracies which have denied their people basic rights and the possibility of a decent life.

These autocracies have also, for the most part, depended on the self-interested support of the big powers, the USA and Britain first of all. Western governments have prioritised cheap oil, arms sales and support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians above the rights of the Arab peoples.

The response of the British government to the events of the last month exemplifies this hypocrisy. David Cameron has prioritised arms sales to the region. And the clamour to intervene in Libya has more to do with control of that country’s oil resources than with support for Libya’s people.

The Conservative-Liberal Coalition has followed Tony Blair’s lead in seeing the Middle East entirely through the prism of the interests of BP and British Aerospace. Any British intervention in the region would be directed to furthering those interests, not the freedom or democracy which can only present a challenge to western domination of the region.

Stop the War Coalition is clear that there must be no US or British intervention in Libya or anywhere else in the Middle East under any pretext whatsoever. Such interference over the last century is the root of the region’s troubles, and its continuation will solve none of the difficulties there.

The future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and all the other states facing popular uprisings must be determined by the people of those countries alone. Solidarity with those fighting for their democratic and national freedom is our obligation.

We can best discharge it by demanding that the government at long last takes its hands off the Middle East and its people, leaving them to settle accounts with their own rulers.

Springtime of the Arab Peoples

2011-02-25T18:30:00.001Z

The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire.

...If there is a comparison to be made with Europe it is 1848, when the revolutionary upheavals left only Britain and Spain untouched – even though Queen Victoria, thinking of the Chartists, feared otherwise. Writing to her besieged nephew on the Belgian throne, she expressing sympathy but wondered whether "we will all be slain in our beds". Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown or bejewelled headgear, and has billions stored in foreign banks.

Like Europeans in 1848 the Arab people are fighting against foreign domination (82% of Egyptians, a recent opinion poll revealed, have a "negative view of the US"); against the violation of their democratic rights; against an elite blinded by its own illegitimate wealth – and in favour of economic justice. This is different from the first wave of Arab nationalism, which was concerned principally with driving the remnants of the British empire out of the region...

Tariq Ali: This is an Arab 1848

"The workers... battle-cry must be: 'The Permanent Revolution."
Karl Marx after the 1848 Revolutions

Edited to add:
Tuesday 1 March: Solidarity with workers in Middle East and North Africa: 7pm, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. (Holborn tube) With Billy Hayes, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Katy Clark MP, Wassim Wagdy and others.

Wednesday 2 March: Stop the War Coalition Public Meeting: Where Now for the Egyptian Revolution? Where Now for the Middle East? 7pm, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square London WC1R 4RL

Remembering Rosa

2011-02-25T18:22:00.006Z

Just in time for International Women's Day on 8 March, a series of events in London have been organised to launch The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, part of a new series of her Collected Works.

Edited to add: See this review by Sheila Rowbotham

Day School:Revolution in the 21st century

2011-02-25T18:13:00.000Z

Revolution in the 21st Century
A one day special event hosted by the SWP
Sunday 13 March
11am – 4pm
@The Camden Centre, Judd St, London, WC1H 9LZ

Nearest tubes: King’s Cross and Euston
£10 waged, £5 unwaged
Please book your place today.

From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya to Bahrain mass revolts and revolutions are sweeping the Middle East. They are shattering the idea that ordinary people can’t change the world and threatening the hold of imperialism. After decades of dictatorship mass mobilisations and strikes have brought down tyrants. Who says revolution is impossible in the 21st Century!

The unfolding events raise many questions as well as offering inspirational lessons. How can the revolutionary process continue and deepen? Many people in those countries are now pushing for further change. As well as bringing down tyrants is it possible to completely transform society? And the impact is being felt far beyond the Middle East. In a time of revolution how can Marxist ideas help explain the world as well as offering a way forward.

This special one day event aims to enable discussion and debate regarding these momentous events, as well as providing analysis and a chance to discuss revolutionary theory.

Speakers will include:

Eyewitnesses and revolutionaries from Tunisia and Egypt plus
Alex Callinicos author of The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
Judith Orr, editor of Socialist Worker and eyewitness to the Egyptian Revolution, recently returned from Tahrir Square
Workshops will include:

Permanent Revolution
Palestine
Imperialism and the Middle East
Plus more . . .

Organised in association with Marxism 2011

Solidarity with Zimbabwean Socialists

2011-02-25T18:08:00.000Z

As the Libyan people continue their heroic fight for democracy, out of the spotlight plenty of other dictatorships are now clamping down hard on dissent before the wave of revolution spreads to them - in Zimbabwe for example members of the International Socialist Organisation are currently in detention facing a possible death sentence for treason - and some have been tortured for trying to “organise, strategise and implement the removal of the consitutional government of Zimbabwe...the Egyptian way.”

Rush messages of protest against the arrests

Partners in Crime

2011-02-20T18:52:00.003Z

'Tony Blair has an excellent relationship with my father...For us, he is a personal family friend. I first met him around four years ago at Number 10. Since then I've met him several times in Libya where he stays with my father. He has come to Libya many, many times.'
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Colonel Gaddafi, 2010.

John Maclean on the Monarchy

2011-02-20T17:41:00.001Z

[One hundred years ago, Britain saw not only 'a strike wave spread throughout Britain that saw troops on the streets and a strike committee virtually running a major city' - a wonderful upturn in the class struggle known as the Great Unrest - but also the coronation of George V. In a short article on 'Democracy and the Coming Coronation', the great revolutionary socialist John Maclean penned his thoughts on the role of the monarchy in a modern class society, warned workers not to be distracted from their main aims and objectives by the whole charade and called for a new democratic People's Charter...]

'Our protest against the mockery of the coming monarchical mummery should take the form of a demand for more political freedom for the masses instead of a direct demand for the establishment of a republic...

We Social Democrats, Republicans though we may be, have been essentially responsible for teaching the people that the real political enemy our class is not the king; but the propertied class that, out of the plunder taken from us, is prepared to spend the sum needed to maintain the Royal Family.

The capitalists cheerfully pay out this sum, as the maintenance of Royalty at this critical juncture in the country’s history seems to them necessary as an agency that helps to cover over with superstitious ornament the class war between the capitalists and the workers, and which thus helps to stave off those demands for political equality that would naturally ensue upon the establishment of a republic.

The capitalists cannot afford, then, to dethrone the monarch in this country, especially on account of their supreme control of the political machinery of the land and on account of their fear of the people’s desire for participation in the gentle art of law making and administration. And, on account of their propaganda, the people are conscious that the social inequalities in the land are in no way due to the crowned head...

But the workers are ripe, and over ripe, for the passing into law of a new political People’s Charter...And in our efforts we need place no reliance on the Labour Party... The consciousness now prevalent amongst the masses that their real wages are considerably below those obtained when the Labour organisation came into existence, the further consciousness that the Labour Party has failed to defend the workers, when on strike against reduced wages or oppression, and the fact that the Labour Party has made no real outstanding fight for the workers at all since it began its Parliamentary career, warns us to place no reliance for support on these slippery eels of statesmen whose chief end in life seems to be the destruction of Socialism.

Let us directly appeal to the people, and with our clamour, widespread and prolonged, let us drown the chorus of false praise that will herald the approach of the nearing comic opera. Thus will we make history and perhaps march a stage nearer our goal.

Know Your Enemy

2011-02-17T20:39:00.000Z

A quick reminder about the upcoming London Socialist Historians Group conference on Making the Tories History on 26 February in London. For some preliminary/background reading on the history of the Conservative Party, see Simon Basketter's fairly recent four part online series which starts here