The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir-Dan Duryea’s “Terror Street” (1953)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir-Dan Duryea’s “Terror Street” (1953)

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Terror Street, starring Dan Duryea, Hammer Productions, 1953 

Long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. The classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. I also on infrequent occasions would attend a nighttime showing with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes). But mainly with me and five siblings they went to one of the three, count them three, movie theaters in small town North Adamsville by themselves to get away from our madness while Grandmother Riley tended to us with her no-nonsense regimen.

Yes, who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of the Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over once she spilled too much blood for the stuff of dreams. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum knowing he was doomed and out of luck taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger –happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past. Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted after sending a small time grafter to his doom prime private detective Phillip Marlowe ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expect Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir.

But there were other lesser films that were produced in this country starring the likes of the queen bee of the B-film noir night Gloria Grahame and he-man Glenn Ford. And not just this country but in Great Britain (if that term still applies after empire lost and Scotland and Wales clamoring to go their own ways) where in the 1950s many minor Hollywood stars like Dan Duryea in this film under review Terror Street (in merry olde England released as 36 Hours got work when benighted England took on the film noir world. When an outfit called Hammer Productions produced a tonof such small epics none with the cinematography mood play, diologue or plotline of those classics mentioned above and among the best of them only running neck and neck with those quickly produced Hollywood B classics.        

In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here (and in future Hammer Production vehicles to be reviewed over the coming period) to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Thoughtful American military pilot Bill Rogers, the role played by minor Hollywood star Duryea, snuck out of America by a friendly fugitive military plane on a mission to find out why his good-looking Norwegian-born wife met during the war (you know what war if the film was made in 1953) in holding out against the Nazi scum in England hasn’t written, has flown the coop. 

No question war-time romances were not made in heaven and so that wife, Katie, after seeing Bill off for a long term flight school assignment in America got lonely, got antsy and struck up a bad relationship with a guy who promised her adventure and some much needed dough. Dough earned by being part of an international smuggling operation, mostly diamond. So once she had some serious dough and some serious wanting habits fulfilled like minks and high-end clothes she blew Bill off-headed uptown with the Mayfair swells. Leaving no forwarding address. Yeah, the vagaries of war. But intrepid Bill wasn’t buying that story and through musing up her girlfriend found out where she was hanging her hat. That is when all hell broke loose and maybe Bill should have just shaken it off and moved on.    

But not intrepid Bill. He confronted Katie at those new digs but before he could either make his case or find out why she had cold-shouldered him he got conked on the head by a party or parties unknown. And Katie well Katie got dead, got very dead by a gun found in Katie’s old apartment by Bill but which wound up in his conked-out head hand. The frame is on and Mister Bill is made to fit it. Fit to take the big step-off, to meet his maker (via the bloody hangman) unless he can work out who the hell killed his beloved wife, and why, within 36 hours when he has to catch that fugitive plane back  to America-or else.     

Of course the thing he needed to do immediately was flee that uptown swell apartment so he could avoid the bloody coppers who wanted to make sure he met that maker. Of course as well not being English he needed some help once he made his getaway. In his dashing getaway he found himself in an apartment of a young woman, some Judy who had a heart of gold since she worked the mission racket down on cheap street. He charmed his way into her good graces and she got knee- deep into his plot. Things seem to begin to make sense once Bill got information that dear Katie was shilling for this con artist who was working the international smuggling racket and with a nefarious fence who didn’t care if school kept or not as long as the dough kept rolling in.    

Naturally that Salvation Annie had to be put in danger by Bill’s plan to smoke out this dastardly con man posing as a treasury inspector. But the thing about Salvation Annies is that they don’t wilt so easy and ours doesn’t either. When the deal went down Bill put the rooty-toot-toot to the con man and the fence took some heat from the cops. Our Bill made the 36 hour connection no swear as Annie left him off at the base nice as could be. So you can see no femme like Jane Greer, no smart guy like Eddie Mars with gunsels at his disposal and no dark scenes to make you hope old Bill doesn’t face that hangman’s noose. Now if a fox like Katie had been highlighted well maybe after she led Bill a merry chase we could have had a plotline worth talking about. Sorry Hammer.         

A View From The Left-Independence For Catalonia-Now!

A View From The Left-Independence For Catalonia-Now!  

The national question in Catalonia is on the agenda-here is a view from the left concenring a struggle to get that idea right from the leftist perpective of national slef-determination   

The Basque Country and Catalonia

There is a single Basque nation and a single Catalan nation, both of which are divided and oppressed by two capitalist states. The differences in how nationalist sentiments are expressed in the northern and southern provinces of the Basque Country and Catalonia reflect the differences in capitalist development in Spain and France.

In Spain, the Catalans and the republican Basques played a vanguard role in the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. After its defeat, the influx of tens of thousands of refugees reinvigorated national vitality in the northern part of these nations in France. Under Franco, all languages except Castilian were outlawed, and this was embodied in the slogan “one nation, great and free.” The autonomy statutes enacted by the Republic in 1932 were abolished. The Franco regime carried out harsh and punitive repression against oppressed nations, symbolized by the 1937 carpet bombing of the Basque city of Guernica by the Nazis at Franco’s behest. As a result of this repression, after Franco died in 1975 the struggles of the oppressed nations were mainly expressed along national lines, in contrast to those of the 1930s, when the working classes of these same nations fought directly for power.

The Spanish constitution of 1978 maintained the rule of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain, which was restored by the grace and favor of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The restoration of the monarchy was essential to stabilize the central Castilian state and retain the oppressed nations within Spain by force. In order to stabilize the Spanish state, Catalonia and the Basque Country—along with other regions—were granted greater autonomy. This contrasts with “glorious” republican France (“the country of the rights of man”), where to this day the oppressed nations have no linguistic or legal rights. Especially in the Basque Country, the population faces as much repression as in Spain. Due to the historical weakness of the Castilian bourgeoisie relative to the Basque and Catalan bourgeoisies, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and the resulting Franco dictatorship, the motor force of pro-independence movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country comes from the regions forcibly retained within Spain. Thus, the fate of the provinces forcibly retained within France strongly depends on what will happen on the Spanish side of the border. We call for the independence of the Basque Country and Catalonia, in the North and the South. If the Basque or Catalan regions of Spain obtained independence, it is likely that the regions in France would want to join them. If they wanted to remain part of France, we would defend their right to thus exercise their self-determination.

Jan Norden, editor of Workers Vanguard at the time, was centrally responsible for our line in opposition to national liberation struggles in Catalonia and the Basque Country on the Spanish side. For its part, the LTF is centrally responsible for our chauvinist line on the Basque Country and Catalonia on the French side. In the years around Franco’s death, Spain was shaken by significant workers struggles, leading to a social radicalization. While the struggle against national oppression played a central role in these mobilizations, WV, which regularly commented on these events, completely ignored this question. This silence had to be conscious and shows hostility to the fate of nations oppressed by the Spanish state. We launched a vicious polemic in defense of the oppression of Catalonia the first time we commented on this question in 1979.

This conference repudiates the article “Spanish LCR Pays Homage to Catalan Bourgeois Nationalism” (WV No. 233, 8 June 1979). This article is a gross capitulation to Castilian and French chauvinism and is a perversion of Leninism on the national question. We cite a polemic by Lenin against “cultural national autonomy,” and we outrageously use his arguments to oppose regional autonomy and independence, i.e., secession:

“As Leninists have always held, recognizing the right of self-determination is quite distinct from calling for its implementation, i.e., independence. And Spain is one of the most striking examples where communists would struggle doggedly to maintain working-class unity within the framework of the present state.”

This grotesque article is a loyalty oath in defense of the unity of Spain. WV acted as water boys for the bourgeoisie and the monarchy in the struggle against the national liberation of the Catalans and Basques.

The article also asserts that:

“The Basque and Catalan regions, while suffering discrimination (linguistic prohibitions, distribution of state services, repression) at the hand of the Francoist state apparatus, were the most developed regions in the country, containing the core of Spanish industry. Were they to separate, the two largest, best organized, most combative sectors of the proletariat would be subtracted, greatly weakening the workers movement in the rest of Spain and representing a considerable defeat for the European proletarian revolution.” (emphasis in original)

In fact, independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country would have been a step forward for the workers movement in Europe. This is all the more true today, when the breakup of Spain would profoundly destabilize the European Union, a reactionary imperialist bloc.

The problem with the way the LTF has approached the Basque and Catalan questions can be summed up in the following statement by a Basque nationalist: “There is not a Basque problem in France but a French problem in the Pays Basque.... The struggle of the Pays Basque will endure as long as there are Basques” (James E. Jacob, Hills of Conflict: Basque Nationalism in France[Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994]). In 1987, at the same time that the French state was fiercely repressing the Basques, the LTF published an article that mainly attacked their demands for national rights. We wrote: “Indeed, while there is no national question in the French Basque Country, the military siege by [police ministers] Pasqua-Pandraud could well lead to one being created!” (“Gestapo-Style Raid in the Basque Country”). The article continues with a polemic against a “united, socialist Euskadi” and asserts that “self-determination is out of the question for the Basque region.” The forcible assimilation of the Basques in France is presented as a gain of the French Revolution.

These problems were only very partially corrected in 1998, when the LTF recognized the right of self-determination for the Basques in France. The International and the LTF repudiated the former political line, but in a dishonest way that covered up the full scope of the chauvinism of the 1987 article. However, we never reviewed our opposition to independence for the Basque Country nor for any other nation retained in the Hexagon.

When the question of independence for Catalonia was raised in 2014, the LTF decided not to take a position in favor of it. When the recent fight broke out in the International, the LTF did not undertake a review of its approach but instead rushed to produce a draft with a line comparable to the pre-1998 position. In a letter to the LTF, comrade Sacramento asserted:

“Your draft fundamentally equates the nationalism of the oppressed with the nationalism of the oppressors, misquoting Lenin to Salomonically denounce ‘aggressive bourgeois nationalism.’ You chose to emphasize that you are for independence of Basques and Catalans ‘in Spain,’ while somewhere in the next paragraph you barely mention that on the other side of the border we support ‘their right to join an independent Basque Country.’ In this formulation, you don’t mention explicitly their right to secede from France, regardless of what their co-nationals may do on the southern side of the border. And, as always, you found a way to ignore the Catalans in France.”

In 2014, the IEC adopted a line, against initial objections from the LTF, in favor of independence for the Basque Country and Catalonia. This change represented a qualitative improvement in our program. Nevertheless, this was done without making a complete break from the weaknesses of our former methodology: the aspirations of the oppressed for national liberation were still considered to be an obstacle to working-class struggle that we needed to “get off the agenda.” We are for independence—in the here and now—and we consciously fight to lead the struggle for national liberation toward socialist revolution. Our program is for workers republics in Catalonia and in the Basque Country.

To this day, our main argument for independence for the Basque Country and Catalonia has been that this would foster unity with the Castilian working class. In regard to Catalonia, our call for independence was based on an empirical and conjunctural assessment in the context of the 2014 referendum. The Basques and the Catalans have resisted assimilation for hundreds of years, thus expressing their desire to exist as nations. Another weakness in our recent articles is that they fail to explicitly call for the abolition of the monarchy. The fight for independence also means putting an end to this Francoist excrescence. Down with the monarchy!

Artists’ Corner-Frank Stella And The Abstract Expressionist Movement

Artists’ Corner-Frank Stella And The Abstract Expressionist Movement

Thad Lyons comment: I was crazy for abstract art when I was a kid and that genre was fresh with guys like Jackson Pollack breaking through the last vestiges of representational art which dominated Western art for a few precious centuries. Then that movement kind of turned on itself, or maybe better, ran out of steam once one could not tell a piece of art work from the walls which surrounded the picture. Frank Stella put himself front and center of some new energies when he took that basically sound abstract art push away from representational art and brought back form, forms geometric and curvilinear to tell his stories in paint. Not all of it worked, some of it left the viewer bewildered but some of it pushed art forward when things looked tough.     

    

From Protest to Resistance: On the 50th Anniversary of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon

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  From Protest to Resistance:

  On the 50th Anniversary of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon

  
  The October 1967 March on the Pentagon was a landmark event in the history of the US peace movement. Not only was it one of the largest gatherings to oppose the Vietnam War up to that time, it was also notable for its escalation of tactics from protest to mass resistance. Over 600 activists were arrested on October 21 in both planned and spontaneous acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, signaling a new strategy for anti-war organizing. Interaction between protestors and soldiers lay the groundwork for both confrontation and engagement.

  
  

  During twenty-four hours in Washington, DC, we will remember and reflect on the significance of that action and the overall impact of the peace movement on ending the Vietnam War, as well as on lessons for today‘s resistance.

  
  

  FRIDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 20 - 5-7 PM

  Gather at the Pentagon for a commemorative vigil on US responsibility for the legacies of war: land mines, unexploded ordnance, Agent Orange, forced relocations of rural people, and on the struggles of veterans.
  
  Featured will be Peter Yarrow of the legendary folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, performers at the 1967 rally at the Lincoln Memorial, draft resisters whose cards were turned into the Justice Department on the same date fifty years ago, and advocates of taking responsibility for war legacies.
   

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21 – ALL DAY

  An all-day gathering at the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, in four sessions:
   

  1) Understanding the Historical Context
  What was happening in Vietnam and in the peace movement; public opinion about the war; in the White House; in the Pentagon; and internationally;

  
  

  2) Recalling the Event
  The many moving parts of the demonstration, from the rally at the Lincoln Memorial and the counterculture's "levitation" of the Pentagon, to the sit in on the steps and detention at Occoquan; what actually took place and who was there; an opportunity to share personal experiences. *

  
  

  3) The Impact of the Pentagon March and the Antiwar Movement
  The effect of the 1967 march and of a multi-faceted peace movement on the war and on US politics, culture and society; the emergence of a GI movement and its relation to civilian activists.

  
  

  4) The PBS Series and Unlearned Lessons

  The 18 hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is creating a new national memory of the war. Did it get the history right and give fair treatment to the role of the anti-war movement of civilians, serving military and veterans? What lessons were conveyed for current and future US military conflicts and opposition to them?

  
  

  Post Gathering Commemorative Walk to Vietnam Veterans Wall

  After the conference, we'll conclude with a walk from the church to the nearby Vietnam Wall and Lincoln Memorial, paying tribute to all who were victims of a tragically unnecessary war.

  
  

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  We hope you will come and help spread the word about this history rich and moving program. Be sure to contact us as soon as possible if you were part of, or strongly affected by, October 21, 1967, so we can incorporate your experience in the commemoration.

  
  

  * Daniel Ellsberg will share his experience by video of beginning the day in the peace march and ending it at his office in the Pentagon watching the occupation of the steps alongside Secretary of Defense McNamara.
   

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  The event is organized by the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC).

  
  

  Co-sponsors for the event include: Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (PISA) of George Washington University, Historians for Peace and Democracy, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars/Critical Asian Studies, Fund for Reconciliation and Development, Veterans For Peace, and The Norman Mailer Society.

  
  

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*On The Anniversary Of The 1949 Chinese Revolution-From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews

*On The Anniversary Of The 1949 Chinese Revolution-From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews

Frank Jackman comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

**********
Arif Dirlih, The Origins of Chinese Communism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989, pp315, £9.95

This is a work of most intensive scholar ship, one of the few to provide fresh in formation and insight into the origin and peculiarities of Chinese Communism. The future development in China of both Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be understood without it, and the data it provides can be used for comparison with the emergence of revolutionary movements in other countries during similar stages of radicalisation and industrialisation. The model constructed by the author begins with a loose network of circles of intellectuals with a diffuse and abstract Anarchist/populist ideology concerned mainly with problems of culture, whose limitations are painfully revealed in the defeat of the May Fourth Movement. The growth of a working class, and the impact of the War and the Russian Revolution lead to a turning to ‘Marxism’, whilst at the same time the need for organisation leads to the formation of a Communist Party. Just as Anarchism answered to the needs of the previous movement, Marxism seemed to meet the requirements of the new period. Comintern intervention thus fell on fertile soil, so that the Chinese revolutionaries in effect accepted Marxism without understanding it, and in a version that owed more to Kautsky than it did to Marx or Lenin, at least to begin with.



The book reveals a rich ideological ferment in China before the foundation of the CCP in July 1921. The most widespread ideology among the intelligentsia was Anarchist, in the form of Kropotkin's ‘mutual aid’, and here the author demonstrates that both Cold War and Chinese Stalinist historians have systematically neglected this background which fits so uneasily with their preoccupations (pp.3-4). Even Chinese perception of what had happened in Russia in 1917 came to them largely influenced by Anarchism (pp.25ff.). Yet here it is strange not to find any reference to the standard treatments of the early years of Chinese Anarchism, Robert Scalapino and George Yu’s The Chinese Anarchist Movement (1961) and Albert Meltzer’s The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China (1968). For if official historiography did its best to forget the Anarchist contribution, the Anarchists never did.



Other forms of thought jostled – or rather co-existed ’ with the general Anarchist overlay, and it is remarkable to discover that English Guild Socialism as popularised by G.D.H. Cole also enjoyed a respectable following (pp.129-30, 133-4). A striking parallel with the development of revolutionary ideology in Russia was the emergence of a sort of ‘legal Marxism’ among the left intellectuals of the Guomindang, almost a mirror image of the theories of Peter Struve, and the writer makes clear that in fact it was this group which probably had the clearest perception of what Marxism was, rather than the future leaders of the Communist Party (pp225-34, 267). Even after 1921, apart from what came in from the Comintern, “what there was in the way of independent Marxist literature came not from the Communists but the Marxists in the Guomindang” (p.269). And as in other countries where class antagonisms have not developed sufficiently to pose class questions, feminism also gained considerable support (p.67).



Having accepted Marxism as a by-product of their need for organisation, the early Chinese Communists took it over in its orthodox Second International version. Apart from the appearance of Lenin’s State and Revolution late in 1920, for the first few years Marxist literature in translation was limited to the Communist Manifesto, Wage Labour and Capital, Liebknecht’s biography of Marx, and Kautsky’s Economic Doctrine of Karl Marx and The Class Struggle, and with their Anarchist background it is not surprising that they found what they took to be Marxism’s economic determinism to be repugnant. As the writer comments, “Marxism in China was converted into a political movement too rapidly to allow time to find out about the theory, let alone apply it to the analysis of Chinese society” (pp.97-8), with the result that “the Communists themselves were riot to re-evaluate their assumptions concerning Chinese society until after 1927, when the Party’s policies, first having given it enormous power and prestige, had brought it within a few years to the verge of extinction” (p.l5).



When this re-evaluation began to take place, it is significant that it took the form of a reversion of Chinese Communism to its origins. In the case of Mao Zedong the writer supports Scalapino’s analysis that the strongest influence on him in 1919 was Kropotkin, whose thought he described as “broader and more far-reaching” than that of “the party of Marx” (p.178), and which he continued to support until the end of 1920 (p.206). The May Fourth Movement was, of course, a ‘Cultural Revolution’, and whilst noting that Meisner sees ‘populism’ as a salient feature of Chinese ‘Marxism’ from Li Dazhao to Mao, the writer drops the significant hint that “some have blamed the ‘Anti Party’ activities of the Cultural Revolution upon Anarchism” (p.271). In this way Mao promoted Anarchist-sounding ideas “to serve an authoritarian political structure” and “to undermine the Party” (p272).



It is significant also that Mao’s essay in support of Anarchism bore the title The Great Union of the Popular Masses (p.178), and he had a predecessor in Jiang Kanghu, the founder of China’s first Socialist Party, who rejected the idea of class struggle and was the first in China to use the term ‘New Democracy’ (p.139). When Mao turned once more to these notions in the ’thirties, he was only repeating what he had already said in 1919, that “as for the aristocrats and capitalists, it suffices that they repent and turn towards the good” (p.179).



One of the other directions taken by part of the leadership of the Party was, of course, Trotskyism. Here the author indicates that “now the political animus against Chen Duxiu that has long dominated Chinese historiography has subsided, at least relatively speaking, Chinese scholars admit that Chen Duxiu, not Li Dazhao, was responsible for the founding of the party in 1920-1921” (p.196, cf. also p.151). He shows how Chen, to his credit, was particularly suspicious of the alliance with the Guomindang imposed by Moscow, a policy which was “pushed through the party against the will of some of its older leaders” only “with the aid of younger members who had been persuaded in Moscow” (p.267). In a certain sense, Chen’s conversion to Trotskyism after the 1927 catastrophe also took the form of a reversion to origins, just as with Mao Zedong. The reader would have to be blind not to see in the debate with the ‘legal Marxists’ a groping towards the theory of Permanent Revolution:



The most interesting aspect ... was the upholding of Socialism’s relevance in contemporary China. Most fundamental was the argument that it was meaningless to speak of whether or not capitalism existed in China, since in the age of international capital, no distinction could be made between Chinese and foreign capitalism or capitalists. This argument (again an important Trotskyist argument later on in the decade) was shared by all Communist participants in the debate, including Li Dazhao, who, in his only contribution, insisted that there were no economic boundaries in the contemporary world. There was an accompanying argument, again one that Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu shared. While insisting on the unity of world capitalism, Chen argued that all Chinese held the position of labourers vis-a-vis foreign capital! China could not develop because Chinese capitalists were under the sway of foreign capital; real economic independence could only be achieved, therefore, through a workers' revolution. (p.232)



A significant number of those who held this view were later to side with Trotskyism. Li Ji argued that Marx was only human, that not all his ideas were eternally valid, and that “times had changed since Marx had formulated his historical theory, and new times required new explanations and solutions” (p.233), whilst Liu Renjing, who was the only one at the founding conference of the Communist Party “to hold an unequivocally Bolshevik position” (p.249) “argued for the immediate adoption of the policies of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p.247). In the passing over of this layer to the support of the theory of Permanent Revolution we can see that the evaluation of the crisis of 1927 led back to the original Marxist insights of the first generation of Chinese revolutionaries.



We are now able to examine the ‘tragedy of the Chinese Revolution’ in all its thought forms. As opposed to the first healthy instincts of the founders of Chinese Marxism, “decisions concerning the revolution were made for them by others, who claimed political superiority because they commanded theoretical superiority” (p.98), leading to “rocky relations” (p.197) and mutual mistrust (p.267). Having awakened Chinese Marxism, the Comintern, first of all of Zinoviev, and then of Stalin, stifled it, and a real examination of China in the light of a critical analysis had to wait until after the defeat of 1927, when it was too late to have a positive effect. As the author of this study so succinctly states it, “ideological cliches replaced a burgeoning Marxist inquiry into Chinese society that would not be revived seriously until it became evident in the later 1920s that the revolutionary strategy based on those cliches had failed” (p.l4). The fact that the writer of this book believes that the orthodoxy of the Comintern was Marxism, and that the revolutionary strategy that was appropriate to China was Mao’s peasant ‘Socialism’ does not alter the fundamental validity of this insight.



Serious enquirers should not allow themselves to be put off by this, or by the customary trendy genuflections to Hobsbawm, Kolakowski, Williams and Althusser, any more than they should be upset by the consistent misspelling of Stepniak’s name. These are trivia which in no way interfere with the massive learning and compelling logic in this work. It is by far the finest treatment of its subject in. the English language since the publication of the original edition of Harold Isaacs’ book.









Al Richardson