From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
The name Helen Macfarlane has long been something of a puzzle for historians of Chartism, and it is a great strength of the book that Black goes some way to unravelling the mystery. Leading female Chartists were very rare things in the 1840s – all the nationally-known leaders were men – and one who could both understand the Communist Manifesto in its original German and translate it into English was virtually unique. By a close reading of articles in the Red Republican, Black demonstrates that Helen Macfarlane wrote on a number of occasions for that journal using the pseudonym Howard Morton. This has previously been assumed by historians.
Where Black breaks new ground is in discovering that the Macfarlane family had Scottish origins, and in 1850 were to be found living in Burnley. He has also uncovered the fact that Macfarlane was in Vienna in the Year of Revolutions, 1848, and was therefore exposed to the actuality of the events that Marx and Engels referred to in the Manifesto as well, clearly, as gaining a grounding in the works of Hegel. Black digs up one or two other references to Howard Morton, and places Macfarlane’s presence at a dinner given by the Fraternal Democrats in London on 31 December 1850 at which both Marx and Engels were also present. Black has traced a letter from Marx which shows that a dispute took place between Harney’s wife and Macfarlane. After that, all trace of Macfarlane is lost. It is still not known why she was in Vienna, when and why she returned, or indeed what she did after 1850 and when and where she died. The book provides some tantalising new evidence, and it is to be hoped that future historians will continue the detective work and find out more.
The most recent work which touches on the translation of the Communist Manifesto into English is the Penguin edition with an introduction by revisionist historian Gareth Stedman Jones. He refers to Macfarlane just once, on page 15, and misspells her name, although he does pick up that she wrote under the pseudonym of Howard Morton.
David Black’s treatment is much briefer, but he still manages to make some valuable points that Stedman Jones misses. Firstly, he acknowledges that Macfarlane’s use of the word ‘hobgoblin’ for the more often used ‘spectre’ that Marx and Engels argued was haunting Europe was unfortunate. It suggests an idiosyncrasy to Macfarlane’s translation which is far from the reality. Secondly and most importantly, he draws attention to a number of sections of the Manifesto that did not actually appear in the Red Republican. He quickly dismisses the idea that Macfarlane herself exercised the editorial pencil, and suggests, rather, that Harney, the editor of the paper, deliberately omitted certain parts that he felt might attract the attention of the authorities. The Red Republican itself had already excited their interest, in particular in a search for links between left-wing Chartists and European revolutionaries.
Black also convincingly demonstrates some of the differences between Macfarlane’s translation and the later and now standard work of Samuel Moore, and argues that these were a result of Macfarlane applying a Hegelian logic to her work. Again he is convincing on this. For example, Moore’s translation had Marx and Engels writing: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ By contrast, Helen Macfarlane translated the same German passage as: ‘Everything fixed and stable vanishes, everything holy and venerable is desecrated, and men are forced to look at their mutual relations, at the problem of life, in the soberest, most matter-of-fact way.’ Black argues that while the former is of course better known, the latter is closer to the Hegelian spirit of Marx and Engels’ work.
If these are the two original areas of the book in terms of historical research – and the book would still be an important contribution to our knowledge if it had stopped there – Black’s work on left-wing and late Chartism and on left-wing Hegelian ideas in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s are both interesting pieces of analysis.
There is little historical work on either left-wing Chartism, in the shape of the Fraternal Democrats – founded in 1846 – or on late Chartism after 1848, although in terms of the latter more research is now starting to appear.
Black traces the origins of the Fraternal Democrats in 1846, looks at their relationship with Marx and Engels, and is particularly interesting on the tensions between Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney as leaders of Chartism in the early 1850s. It is in some ways a pity that Black’s analysis here amounts more to tantalising vignettes rather than a full-blown study. He traces the relationship between Marx and Engels, European émigrés to Britain after 1848 and left Chartists, demonstrating that attempts to set up a revolutionary socialist grouping founded on the basis of an analysis of the impact of the defeats of 1848 foundered. Harney, who Marx called ‘Citizen Hiphiphoorah’ for his endless cheering on of European revolutionaries whether left-wing or not, split from Marx and Engels, and also from the other left-wing Chartist leader Ernest Jones. Jones himself was criticised by Marx for failing to understand the depth of the defeat of 1848 and for seeking pretexts for agitation that simply were not there. Marx cautioned against giving up and retiring to bed, but he did emphasise that revolutionary change would now be a matter of decades rather than a year or two. It was a matter of material circumstances rather than simply an exercise in the will of revolutionaries to bring it about.
Black does write more fully about the relationship between Helen Macfarlane and left-wing Hegelianism. He considers in some detail several of her articles – written as Howard Morton – in the Democratic Review and Red Republican, and draws out clearly the Hegelian and early Marxist logic in them. This is an interesting and useful exercise and an extremely valuable counter to those who argue that such advanced ideas were simply not available to the Chartists, who, it is claimed remained stuck with radical but pre-Marxist ideas.
The problem is that Black does not actually advance or develop this argument even if it is implicit in the book. That suggests a number of important unasked and unanswered questions. If Helen Macfarlane was a representative of a left-Hegelian tradition in Britain, what happened to this tradition, and what influence did it have? It is probably very difficult to tell, although Black does suggest that Marx was running a study group for Chartist activists and others interested in such ideas. Likewise since (most) of the Communist Manifesto appeared in English in a leading Chartist paper – the Red Republican – in 1850, what actual impact did this have on the ideas and political strategy of the Chartists? Who actually read it, and what did they think? Again it may be very difficult to tell, but it is possible to argue, although Black does not, that there was a considerable influence on the 1851 Charter and Something More programme of the Chartists that broke with the Six Points of the Charter that were agreed in 1837 in the sense that it argued for social and economic democracy.
John Saville was one of the few historians aside from Black to discuss Macfarlane, and in his introduction to a reprint of the Red Republican he notes that Howard Morton was ‘close to the intellectual position of Marx and Engels, and the articles above the signature provide the most lively and interesting reading in the whole of the Red Republican. Howard Morton had a splendid polemical style, was obviously widely read and widely travelled.’ Saville goes on to argue that Macfarlane’s article on Chartism in 1850 provided the basis for the politics of the Charter and Something More. The article begins: ‘Chartism in 1850 is a different thing from Chartism in 1840. The leaders of the English Proletarians have proved that they are true Democrats … They have progressed from the idea of a simple political reform to the idea of a Social Revolution.’
Indeed Black’s position is far preferable to that of Gareth Stedman Jones, who argues in his 2003 preface to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto that ‘between 1850 and 1870 the Manifesto was remembered by no more than a few hundred German-speaking veterans of the 1848 revolutions’ (p. 16). This suggests that Helen Macfarlane’s partial translation of the Manifesto in the pages of the Red Republican had no impact whatsoever in Britain. I don’t think this is true, and Black’s book points to the reality that it wasn’t. However, further research, perhaps particularly in the Chartist press, is needed to take the argument further.
Lastly, Black argues that Helen Macfarlane was one of those people in history, a ‘rare bird’ as Marx called her, who make an original and distinctive contribution. He compares her to Rosa Luxemburg, and argues that she was in the tradition of all those who associate socialism with freedom, rather than the control societies of Stalinism and social democracy. Well, perhaps. This may be taking things a little too far until some more can be discovered about the life and work of Helen Macfarlane
Nevertheless David Black has written an interesting, useful and readable book. My only significant criticism is that in many parts I would like to have read more. Black raises many issues for socialist historians to put on their research agendas.
The artists who worked on Wobblies are a who’s who of the contemporary underground comic book scene. Josh MacPhee, who provided the artwork for the Big Bill Haywood story, is a well-known graffiti artist based in Chicago. In an interview with www.drawingresistance.org, MacPhee stated:
Today’s labour ‘leaders’ clearly style themselves after John Mitchell, even if they offer up lip service to the rights of working people. This extends to issues of war and peace as well, as labour officials offer support for the latest imperialist adventure of a declining superpower. On 20 March 2003, AFL-CIO boss John Sweeney issued a statement on the war with Iraq that was virtually indistinguishable from a White House press release:
In the early hours of 1 August 1917, six masked men broke into Frank Little’s hotel room and dragged him off to his death. His body was found some hours later hanging from a railroad trestle. It was rumoured that Pinkerton detectives or members of the Butte police were responsible.
Like many members of the IWW, Frank Little came from the ranks of the outcast. He was born in 1879 to a Quaker father and a Cherokee mother. His fellow workers said that he was half White, half Indian and all Wobbly. Other Wobblies came from persecuted immigrant communities like the Italians or the Finns. Unlike the dominant craft unions led by people such as John Mitchell, the IWW also welcomed African-Americans into its ranks. In 1913, Philadelphia longshoremen, who were primarily black as was their leader Ben Fletcher, opted to join the IWW as Local 8 of the Marine Transport Workers Union. A black minister in Philadelphia is reported to have said: ‘The IWW at least protects the coloured man, which is more than I can say for the laws of the country.’
While it is tempting to romanticise the Wobblies, Buhle and Schulman insist on rendering the IWW, warts and all. This makes the IWW more understandable and ironically more sympathetic, especially to people who have done labour or radical organising themselves. It is obvious that people involved in such activities, as opposed to Spiderman, do not have superhuman powers.
For example, despite all the great publicity that attended the Paterson silk workers’ strike of 1913 (including a theatrical production based on the strike mounted by journalist John Reed), the strike did not achieve a victory. As artist and writer Ryan Inzana relates in To Live and Die in Paterson, unity broke down under pressure from the bosses. The IWW was spurned by the workers, and after six months on strike there was no improvement in pay or working conditions.
Although the IWW was extremely successful as an example of standing up to the bosses, it fell apart after the First World War. Its demise was attributable to two main factors. Firstly, repression did have the effect of draining the movement’s energy and finances. Although radicals tend to view repression as a sign of a movement’s strength, at a certain point it can destroy it. This was true of the black liberation movement of the 1960s. A similar dynamic seems to have taken place in the anti-globalisation movement of the more recent past, especially after a young activist was killed in Genoa. Essentially, movements grow through victory, not defeat. Towards the end of its life, the IWW was experiencing fewer and fewer victories.
But the more important factor undoubtedly is the triumph of the Russian Revolution, which convinced working-class radicals that socialist parties based on Marxism were the way to victory. Although the IWW’s anarcho-syndicalism was not specifically opposed to Marxist principles, it tended to shun the political arena and leave questions of conquering state power somewhat abstract. In contrast, the seizure of power in October 1917 was a specific model seemingly adaptable to all countries under all conditions.
As Big Bill Haywood told Max Eastman, just after switching from the IWW to the newly-formed Communist Party: ‘The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tried to grab the whole world, and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.’
With the end of Moscow-based Communism 15 years ago and the implosion of smaller, more radical ‘Marxist-Leninist’ parties, one might wonder if Big Bill Haywood – and the broader movement – was a bit premature. Instead of dumping native-born political traditions like the IWW or Debs’ Socialist Party, it might have made more sense to absorb them. Indeed, before the imposition of a strict hierarchical model from Moscow, many pioneers of American Communism believed that they were simply evolving out of the earlier movement, rather than transplanting something born in Russia.
For example, Charles E. Ruthenberg explained Bolshevism early in 1919 as something that was not ‘strange and new’. It was merely the consequence of the same type of education and organisation that the Socialist movement had been carrying on in the United States. His Socialist–syndicalist background showed in his description of the infant Bolshevik state as a ‘Socialist industrial republic’. His instincts were completely correct.
In the coming showdown with the US ruling class, it will be essential to construct a socialist movement out of native traditions that uses language and symbols immediately recognisable to the American working class. For help in understanding how to develop this approach, we can turn to the IWW, which did capture the hearts and minds of the wretched of the earth. Whatever other flaws, it did succeed mightily in this respect. As such, Buhle and Schulman’s Wobblies will be necessary reading to understand how the IWW did so against all odds.
One such, Aron Lieberman, was appalled by the exploitation and degradation; the immigrants had no political or economic organisation to protect them, and were despised and rejected by the English workers. Lieberman noted the concentration of certain trades: hat-makers, bag-makers, carpenters, watch-makers, sugar factories, metal-working shops and tobacco factories. These were in the narrow, crooked streets of Whitechapel, in the smelly and dirty holes and corners of the workshops working 12 or 14 hours a day for paltry starvation wages. He determined to set up a dual-purpose organisation to spread socialism and to unionise Jewish workers. Lieberman was followed by a number of others with lesser or greater success.
In July 1884, the first socialist newspaper in Yiddish appeared, named Poilishe Yidl, under the sponsorship of Morris Winchevsky and E. Rabbinowitz. However, Rabbinowitz accepted advertisements, both religious and commercial, which were disapproved of by Winchevsky. The crunch came when an advertisement from the local Liberal candidate, Samuel Montagu, was published in the paper. The partnership ended, and Winchevsky founded the Arbeter Fraint (Worker’s Friend), the socialist paper which Rudolf Rocker was eventually to edit.
The propaganda of the Arbeter Fraint made itself felt. Radical organisations allied themselves and grew with the journal. The International Workingman’s Association was formed and opened a club in Berner Street, offering a base for radical and trade union movements. Although the Arbeter Fraint was militantly opposed to religious practice, even those who continued in religious observance found a meeting place in the club.
This secularism raised the ire of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Adler, whose instinct, in any event, was to support the Jewish masters against their sweated workers. He, and the rest of the religious establishment, took any steps available against these anarchists. The anarchists did not help in this matter by holding a ball each Yom Kippur (the day of atonement) and marching to synagogues in order to wave ham sandwiches!
Insofar as Dr Adler and Anglo-Jewry were concerned, these immigrants were required to become Anglicised as quickly as possible as a means of eroding the ‘alien’ question and anti-Semitism. It was during this time that agitation was taking place for an Aliens Bill, which was eventually passed in 1905. The TUC in both 1894 and 1895 had carried a resolution against the admission of ‘pauper aliens’. The English workers viewed the immigrants as rivals for employment and undercutting wages and conditions. It was at this time that an early fascist/racist organisation was formed, the British Brothers League.
Fishman notes that the Anglicisation of Jewish immigrants was achieved with regard to succeeding generations, and he puts this down to the 1870 Education Act. This, he says, cut off in the long term potential recruits to the Jewish labour movement. However, in the meantime, the struggle to organise and win converts to socialism continued.
The 1880s were a time of high unemployment and much unrest, and Fishman writes that the word ‘unemployed’ was first used as a noun in the Oxford Dictionary from the year 1882, and the word ‘unemployment’ in 1888. Marches of the unemployed, in which Jewish radicals participated, organised by the Social Democratic Federation, culminated in Bloody Sunday on 13 November 1887. He refers also to the match girls’ strike as pin-pointing the East End as a pioneering centre for the development of the new unionism. Additionally, Will Thorne and Eleanor Marx had organised the gas-workers, and a victory in wages and conditions was obtained without strike action. A victory parade took place with 12,000 marching from the Embankment to Hyde Park. Within a fortnight the great dock strike had begun. The East End tailors came out on strike, demanding an improvement in wages and conditions, with some success. During a bakers’ strike, Jewish housewives refused to buy bread which lacked a union stamp to show that it came from a bakery which observed trade union conditions.
Fishman writes: ‘This tide of local militancy did not subside at once … Direct action had come to stay.’ (p. 185) By 1914, the Jewish labour movement, primarily under anarchist direction, had reached the peak of its activity. He quotes Rocker as remarking: ‘Who could have foreseen the collapse which followed the beginning of the Great War?’
There is so much in this well-researched book, and onto the stage walk so many well-known names from the labour and socialist movement – William Morris, Henry Hyndman, Peter Kropotkin, Ben Tillett, Robert Blatchford, to name but a few, and all are seen in a different context.
Fishman writes of the cooperation and a united front between all socialist denominations which at that time was not difficult, for the Jewish anarchists accepted economic materialism. Differences would arise later when practical conclusions were drawn from the Marxist conception of history.
Without having experienced it, I was nostalgic for the social life enjoyed by these anarchists – picnics, balls, outings and club life. I was also impressed by the education in the Workers Circles and the wide curriculum including literature and music.
This is a fascinating book bringing together a history of Jewish immigration in the nineteenth century and the work of radicals to involve them in the struggle to improve their conditions. I should add also that it has a good and helpful index.
With that background, it is no wonder that when Norman Harding went to work in the clothing industry he soon became an active and militant trade unionist. He naturally was enthused by Labour’s coming to power in the 1945 election, and he was further radicalised by his experience as a national serviceman in postwar Germany where he witnessed the high- and low-level corruption in the occupation army, and made friends with Germans despite the ban on ‘fraternisation’.
After national service, Harding returned to his job in the Leeds clothing industry where the Communist Party had a strong presence. Right up to 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, the Communist Party could muster 30 delegates, comprising members and supporters from the garment workers’ union, to the Leeds Trades Union Council. He says he was considered by the Communist Party as a contact, although they never actually tried to recruit him directly; instead encouraging him to join the Labour Party – which he did. By 1952, he was a regular reader of Tribune, and was recognised as a Bevanite and an active worker. On one occasion, having taken a day off work to help in the election campaign of a Labour councillor, he found out that the successful councillor had not only taken no time off himself but had even worked overtime during the campaign. Disgusted at such selfishness, Harding dropped out of activity, although retaining his membership of the Labour Party.
However, his activities and militant approach had come to the attention of the very active Leeds branch of the Trotskyist Healy Club, the former minority in the Revolutionary Communist Party that had entered the Labour Party and was publishing Socialist Outlook. Harding joined the Club in the early summer of 1954, and he remained in the Club, which became the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party till its implosion and the expulsion of its leader Gerry Healy in 1985.
Harding’s over 30 years of activity in this movement can be divided into two periods. The first was his time as a local activist in Leeds until the mid-1960s, and then 20 years as a full-time worker at the Centre in London.
The first thing that has to be said about the Healy organisation is that it expected total commitment from its members – as this reviewer can confirm from his own experience. When you joined, you committed your whole life to the movement. Your personal life, family commitment, personal relations were entirely subordinate to the needs of the movement. Harding accepted this and a punishing round of activity – in the Labour Party, in his union, selling papers, attending branch meetings, aggregates and conferences, chasing up contacts, etc. – on top of working full-time in a factory. He rarely came home straight from work. On occasions, he did not see his parents for weeks even though they lived in the same house. They used to leave notes for each other.
This dedication is of course admirable. A movement that aims to change the world, that aims to overthrow global capitalism through bloody struggles and civil wars and revolutions, whose members must face the prospect of imprisonment and torture at the hands of its enemies, needs that kind of commitment. The revolution is not for wimps. Harding and all of us in the movement tried to become like the hard steel-like Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. We believed the terminal crisis of capitalism had arrived, and that we would soon be in the midst of revolution and civil war. But in the mid-1950s when Harding joined, and during most of his membership, Britain and the rest of the capitalist world was in the early years of the prolonged postwar boom, the longest period of full employment and rising living standards capitalism had so far enjoyed. And for years the Healy Club and its later incarnations, the Socialist Labour League and the Workers Revolutionary Party, denied reality, and year after year insisted crisis and revolutionary situations were imminent. There was no time to lose if the revolutionary party was to be built up in time to lead the masses. This was the justification for the hyper-activity that burnt out many militants over the years. Harding must have been dedicated indeed to have soldiered on for so long, especially during the 20 years as a full-time worker at the Centre subject to the unbelievably despotic and manic regime he describes in the latter part of his autobiography.
The general economic and political situation was totally unfavourable to the development of any revolutionary working-class current. Full employment and the general improvement in living standards depoliticised large layers of the working class. Those who were at all politically aware generally accepted the parliamentary and reformist politics of the Labour Party. The revolutionary sloganising, ultra-leftism and sectarianism of the Healy current (as well as of the other Trotskyist organisations) further marginalised the Trotskyists. In addition, the Communist Party with its larger resources and benefiting from its association with the Soviet Union, the land of ‘actually existing socialism’ was, until the Twentieth Congress revelations and the Hungarian uprising, a far greater pole of attraction for socialistically-inclined workers. And, ironically, the reformist and ‘opportunist’ language of the Communist Party, which the Trotskyists so abhorred, was more acceptable to these essentially reformist workers than the ultra-leftism of the Trotskyists. Norman Harding very succinctly expressed the politics of the group he joined, writing: ‘I constantly supported the Russian Revolution and the need to overthrow capitalism and not try to reform it.’ (p. 56) But the trouble was that the majority of workers still believed it was possible to improve their conditions within capitalism, that is, ‘to reform it’.
In fact, despite and in contradiction to their essentially sectarian orientation, Harding and his comrades did engage very effectively in a number of working-class struggles for immediate improvements. Harding was active in the tenants’ movement, campaigning for lower rents and better housing, and he became secretary of the Leeds Tenants’ Association. He is rightly very proud of the part he and his comrades in the Socialist Labour League played in helping organise the tenants in slums in Loscoe, a mining village near Leeds, in a successful campaign to have them demolished and the tenants rehoused. The Leeds branch included a number of talented and hard-working comrades. Harding mentions John and Mary Archer, Jack and Celia Gale, Paula and Ray Bradbury, Lance Lake, among others.
An example of their drive and initiative is given by Harding:
As time went on, the sectarianism and Healy’s paranoia became even more extreme. Harding writes:
It was in the mid-1960s that Harding was plucked by Healy from his involvement in the local working-class movement to work full-time in London in the party’s print shop. He comments that he was not cut out for this work:
He acted almost as a feudal lord. Examples abound in Harding’s memoirs. There was the saga of Healy’s kettle. His personal assistant Aileen Jennings had asked Harding and another comrade to take a vanload of rubbish to the dump. This included an old kettle that was faulty. On their return Harding and his comrade were told that Healy was in a vicious temper because she had thrown it out. He wanted it back so that it could be repaired. They knew what could develop when he was in one of these tempers, so they went back to the dump and waded up to their shins in rubbish until they finally found the kettle. ‘A few days later Aileen bought a new kettle anyway.’ (p. 219) On another occasion, Harding was woken up at four o’clock in the morning by one of the printshop guards. ‘Gerry wants some Perrier water. What can we do?’ Aileen had rung. If none was available, then Harding had to get some transport, find an open-all-night shop and bring it to Healy’s flat.
Harding describes a regime of physical assaults and fear and feudal subservience:
Harding’s account is very much a worm’s eye view – a very vivid personal account of how an active and dedicated member of a Trotskyist organisation in Britain saw things; his experiences and personal contribution. That is its strength, but also its weakness. There is no overall view of the general situation within which his organisation and, indeed, the Trotskyist movement as a whole operated; no assessment of Trotskyism’s influence or lack of it in the labour movement as a whole. One would never know from Harding’s memoirs that the organisation he belonged to was only one of several Trotskyist currents. There is no explanation of what divided Healy’s organisation and its ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’ from the other Fourth Internationalist currents and the other currents and organisations that claimed to be Trotskyist both in Britain and internationally. Of course Harding does not claim to be writing a history of Trotskyism, but only his personal memoirs. But some assessment, however sketchy, of how his activities and those of Healy’s organisation fitted into the overall picture would have been useful.
Missing from Harding’s memoirs is any account of the numerous expulsions and splits that occurred during his membership. The expulsions and exits of Ken Coates, John Daniels, Peter Fryer and Peter Cadogan in 1959–60, the split-off of Brian Behan’s ‘open party faction’, the split with Alan Thornett and the Workers Socialist League to whom Healy lost the bulk of his industrial worker membership. The latter split took place when Harding was working at the Centre.
Harding’s revelations cannot be dismissed as just the outpourings of a bitter disgruntled ex-Trotskyist getting things off his chest. Harding makes it clear, as the title of his book indicates, that he remains a socialist. His experiences of the degeneration of the organisation he joined have not dimmed his vision of a future socialist society. However incredible they are, his revelations only confirm the evidence already in the open. Harding was one of many dedicated socialists whose contribution to the cause was sabotaged, and whose undoubted talent and energies were wasted.
In his summing up, Harding writes:
The other striking thing about Jim was his monumental irreverence. Nobody, in his organisation or in the socialist pantheon, was immune from criticism and indeed mockery. There is a marvellous book review (unfortunately not collected here, but available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins) called Is Almond a Nut?, in which Jim takes on, without any deference whatsoever, the distinguished political scientist Gabriel Almond, whose sub-Freudian analysis argued that Communists were redirecting hostility to their parents into ‘safer’ channels. Jim responds: ‘Now big though my father is, I have never considered him to be in the same class for violence as a capitalist state (not even a small one) and for a soft option I will take on my old Dad any day.’
Jim’s irreverence fitted well with the style of the International Socialists at this time. We were a tiny, marginal group and we knew it – in contrast to the SLL, who were a tiny marginal group who thought they were the vanguard of the proletariat. Whereas Tony Cliff’s humour always had a direct political purpose, Jim’s was generally politically incorrect and often straightforwardly vulgar. To some of the more solemn currents of the left, his attitude might appear frivolous. But Jim knew that, after the Holocaust and Hiroshima, you could either laugh or scream – and that those who laughed tended to keep on fighting longer.
In 1972, Jim was persuaded by Cliff to become National Secretary. He replaced Duncan Hallas, one of the finest socialist propagandists of his generation, but not a particularly good organiser. IS was growing rapidly, but was still rather chaotically organised. Jim’s brief was to introduce some order. Cliff’s talent was to grasp new tendencies, to focus attention on the priorities of the organisation. He needed someone to act as long-stop (if anyone understands this antiquated cricketing metaphor), someone to preserve balance, to maintain an organisational routine and pick up the tasks which were not priorities but were still essential.
It might just have worked. But it didn’t. Jim ran the organisation as he would have run a trade-union office. He was hard-working and dedicated, and issued a stream of branch circulars, all carefully numbered for reference. But he treated it as an office job, rarely travelling out of London. Cliff, meanwhile, toured the country tirelessly, enthused comrades, argued with them, and spent hundreds of hours on the telephone, persuading – and listening. As Roger Protz remarked to me, before the argument became hopelessly polarised, the National Secretary should be a ‘road job’ and not an office job.
These were exciting times. The year of 1972 had seen the victory at Saltley Gates and the government climb-down over the Pentonville Five. Just ahead was the February 1974 election, when a strike brought down an elected government. Cliff believed Jim’s formalism had become an obstacle, and arranged to have him removed.
Not surprisingly, Jim was extremely bitter. He had given up a job as a skilled Post Office engineer, with associated trade-union positions, in order to take a lower wage and work in a rather squalid office. In his resignation speech at the September 1973 National Committee, Jim recounted how he had discussed his doubts about taking the job with Cliff, and Cliff, in the biblical style he sometimes adopted, had responded: ‘You must measure your cloth three times.’ ‘And so I did’, said Jim, ‘but I forgot to measure the fucking tailor.’
Jim briefly formed an alliance with Duncan Hallas, who shared some of his concerns about Cliff’s current line. But Duncan was a pragmatist, and when the leadership made certain adjustments to criticism, he opted to go over to Cliff. For Jim, this seemed like a second betrayal, and bitterness was unassuaged. As he points out, he had been ‘quite fond of Cliff’. This is an understatement. Jim had been close to Cliff personally, as well as greatly admiring his theoretical achievement. If many of his writings from 1974 onwards, collected in this volume, display a tone not dissimilar to that of a divorced spouse, that reflects the enormous disappointment Jim suffered at this time.
I have written before about the 1973–75 split (see my review of Jim’s book More Years for the Locust in Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 1 [1998]) and I don’t want to repeat myself. Factional disputes of this sort can be highly destructive. After the split, I didn’t speak to Jim for over 20 years. Latterly he would occasionally telephone me about historical questions, and while he continued to abuse me roundly in print, in person he was his old jovial self. When Duncan Hallas died, he phoned me twice to discuss the obituary he was writing for the Guardian. He was clearly deeply moved by Duncan’s death; perhaps at last the bitterness was beginning to fade. But it also evoked thoughts of his own mortality – ‘falling off my perch’ as he put it. Within a few weeks he too was dead.
Much of what Jim continued to write about Cliff and the SWP (some of which is collected in this volume) was so marked by that bitterness that it failed to offer what Jim aspired to – a serious critique of his old organisation. John Palmer writes of Jim’s hatred of ‘sectarian Talmudists and timeservers’. Often Jim implies that all those who remained with the IS/SWP fall into this category. Those of us who decided, on balance, to stay with Cliff as the best option going, and who have subsequently made our modest contribution to the socialist cause within this framework, can hardly accept this.
The articles in this slender volume show a powerful brain and a wonderful sense of humour. It is hard to dislike anyone who describes debating with Sean Matgamna as like ‘arguing with warm jelly’. (On a good day Matgamna himself might smile.) There is a wealth of information and entertainment, but two main themes predominate: Trotskyism and trade unionism. On the former, Jim’s position can be summed up as a great, if not uncritical, admiration for Trotsky, combined with a deep contempt for much of what has passed as Trotskyism over the last 60 years. His essay Let Us Praise Leon Trotsky, published in International Socialism at the time of the dispute with Cliff, was written as a covert polemic against what Jim saw as Cliff’s preoccupation with Lenin. It stands as a good introduction to one of the century’s great revolutionaries. In another article, Jim describes the thrill of discovering Trotsky during the crisis of the British Communist Party in 1956, something that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.
The absurdities – and worse – of self-styled Trotskyists are also well represented. The collection opens with a brilliant piece from 1964, Weekend with the Lumpentrots, depicting in Jim’s inimitable style a Young Socialist weekend school disrupted by the sectarian antics of Keep Left. It is hilariously funny – but also rather sad; one wonders if there were any young people for whom this occasion was their first (and if so almost certainly their last) encounter with the revolutionary left. His brief piece on Gerry Healy for the Spectator is quite appropriately savage.
Ten Years for the Locust, his account of the early years of British Trotskyism, is a much more serious piece of work. For those of us who encountered it in the early 1960s, it opened up an area of history that was almost completely unknown, and did so with a judicious balance of respect and criticism. If it has now been superseded by the more scholarly studies of Bornstein and Richardson, it remains a pioneering contribution.
The collection contains several substantial essays on the history of the labour movement, from the foundation of the Communist Party to the Minority Movement. There is a carefully balanced piece on the success and failure of the IWW, and another about breakaway trade unions. The latter was written in response to the Pilkington Glass strike of April 1970, following which workers, disgusted at the undemocratic and ineffective General and Municipal Workers Union, set up a short-lived breakaway. These pieces appeared in International Socialism in the years after 1968, and were directed at a largely new membership who often knew more about Russia, France or Cuba than the labour movement of their own country. They were a valuable contribution to the education of a new generation, and it is good to have them in print again. In particular, Jim repeatedly stresses the need for patience, an important corrective as the exaggerated hopes of 1968 began to fade. Yet if patience is certainly a revolutionary virtue, so is the ability to seize the time.
Personally, I found the second part of the book, containing articles written after Jim’s departure from the International Socialists, less satisfying than the first. As an SWP member I am doubtless prejudiced, but while revolutionaries should always welcome serious and well-founded criticism, I found that all too often the polemic was not sufficiently focused. One of the last pieces Jim wrote for Socialist Worker before his expulsion was an obituary of James P. Cannon (included in this collection), entitled Magnificent Disciple Who Lost His Way. I don’t know if the title was Jim’s own, but it would make a good summing-up of Jim’s own career.
Certainly Jim’s wit was unimpaired. There is a little piece on Glasgow from the Spectator which will amuse many (if they are not Glaswegians). If it appeared in the Spectator today, poor old Boris Johnson would be sent scurrying over the border to apologise. Fortunately even Jim could not find any grounds on which the current state of Glasgow could be blamed on Tony Cliff. There is also a thoughtful and balanced piece entitled Trotskyism in the USA.
But as soon as Jim approaches his old organisation, the heart seems to dominate over the head. At one point, he states that what Tony Cliff thinks is ‘a matter of supreme indifference to me’. It is of course Jim’s absolute right to feel thus, but it does somewhat undermine his status as a commentator on the SWP’s politics. He does not appear to have studied the later writings of Tony Cliff or of other SWP members, nor to have given any close attention to the party’s activities.
The Anti-Nazi League, which undoubtedly had a real impact in blocking the rise of the far right in Britain, is dismissed as the SWP moving ‘from one sensation to another’. Jim attributes to Cliff the view that there are universal principles of Leninist organisation, whereas the whole of Cliff’s four-volume study of Lenin is devoted to the destruction of the myth of the immutable ‘Leninist Party’, and the exposition of the view that Lenin constantly adapted his organisational views to meet the political needs of particular situations. He generously commends the work of Revolutionary History, yet states that this work is ‘anathema to the confirmed sect-dweller’, carefully ignoring the contribution to Revolutionary History made by ‘sect-dwellers’ from the SWP and elsewhere.
Jim is absolutely right to insist that the organised labour movement is a central concern for revolutionaries, and that all socialists must encourage systematic work within the trade union apparatus. But there is a failure to acknowledge the massive changes that have taken place in the British trade-union movement. In the 1974 IS internal document reproduced here, Jim stresses the ‘main emphasis on building among manual workers’. Yet the notion of ‘manual worker’ was already problematic – is a nurse a manual worker? And over the coming decades the traditional areas of manual employment – above all mining – were to be seriously reduced. In Jim’s repeated reassertions of the centrality of the working class, there is no recognition of these changes – or of the work done by SWP writers like Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos in analysing them.
Cliff is belaboured for his alleged assertion that ‘mature shop stewards and lay trade union officials were bent’. (I have never found this claim in Cliff’s writings, and would be grateful to any reader who can give me chapter and verse.) Yet the growth of full-time convenors, etc., in the 1970s was a shift which required serious analysis. In an article urging us to move on from Leninism, Jim calls for ‘new strategies and perspectives’. But he gives us no clue what these are to be.
One article I had not seen before is an internal document from the Workers League in 1977. Jim is replying to four comrades, including Paul Mackney (now General Secretary of NATFHE), who were in favour of merger with the International Marxist Group. I have not seen the document to which Jim is replying, so it is hard to judge the debate fully. But Jim expands on his view that the Trotskyist tradition is ‘bankrupt’, and defends his view of a rank-and-file movement.
The development of rank-and-file groups under the influence of the IS was an interesting development in the 1970s. While there was a model in the 1920s Minority Movement, the whole thing was an experiment, and mistakes were undoubtedly made. In any case, it was soon brought to an end by the downturn in struggle in the late 1970s. Jim accuses the IMG of having no concept of rank-and-file work because they formed an explicitly ‘socialist’ teachers’ organisation. Jim’s claim is that revolutionaries could not directly address the mass of workers with revolutionary ideas, and must find a trade-union intermediary. How the trade-union struggle would spill over into socialism was left rather vague. Now Jim’s ideas are in many ways similar to Cliff’s at the time. But given the particular ideological role of education, his objections seem a little strange. Was he really suggesting that revolutionaries should try to work with teachers who favoured expulsions, taught the glories of the British Empire – but vigorously supported higher pay for themselves?
I will not conclude by praising Jim. Perhaps his old comrade Fred the Communist-spiritualist was right (see Why Did You Join the Party?) and there is an afterlife; if so, I can imagine Jim’s raucous contempt for any attempt to flatter him beyond the grave. If 1975 came round again, I would again support Jim’s expulsion. But Jim was a part of the history – often trivial but sometimes inspiring – of the revolutionary left in the later twentieth century, and he deserves to be remembered. Those who produced this little book have done him – and us – a service.
So I am sorry that Ian found the second half of the book bitter and one-sided whenever it talked of the SWP. In fact in view of what had happened, I think there was extraordinarily little bitterness, entertaining abuse yes, but that was Higgins. But alas, the SWP like every other little tendency prefers not to go over its own history, above all where this contains possibly disgraceful or even stupid elements. (Yes Ian, exactly the same is true of Lutte Ouvrière, for the only people who cannot have a stall at their Fête are the GET or Groupe d’étude trotskyste of Richard Moyon.) Higgins was a dangerous polemicist to have around, but the response to him was of course silence from the SWP publications. But a party is not built by shouting ‘Rah! Rah! We are the Champions!’, and, Ian, no party or group is spotless and without stain. Proud vaunts about the Anti-Nazi League (was there really a threat of Nazism in this country?) count for much less if we remember how it was comrades from the Militant (who later left it) who got the Anti-Poll Tax campaign moving, a real mass movement far more proletarian and less moralistic than the ANL, and that the SWP, despite Ian’s claims, did not at that point have ‘the ability to seize the time’. They followed rather than led that movement, and I emphasise it was a Movement and did not belong to any little sect. The same thing happened at the time of the miners’ strike when the SWP started off on it own sectarian way until jolted into reality – to its credit maybe – but it does not say much for its so-called ‘leadership’.
Arguments in favour of the SWP, or any other tendency on the Trotskyist left, would be far more persuasive if there was a frank admission and discussion of past mistakes, both recent and long ago, with a sharp look at how we could all learn from them. It might even educate younger comrades. Of course, this silly triumphalism is not unique to the SWP, but it is more obvious here as it is the largest tendency on this tight little island. As an example, the little Socialist Appeal Group with a membership of less than 100 boring old codgers in this country has far more people in the Third World than anyone else, and vastly more than the SWP affiliates of the IST. But this is never mentioned before the membership of any rival groups – Pas devant les domestiques! – any more than Grant and Woods explain to their people in Venezuela that they are irrelevant in Britain compared to the SWP. Triumphalism triumphs.
How we miss Jim, who could spot a phoney a mile off, who was not bound by orthodoxy, but whose eye was always on the ball of working-class emancipation. I am delighted if SWPers will learn something from this little book, even if it is something as basic and commonsensical as the idea of transitional politics which runs through so many of these articles.
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Jean-Jacques Marie is well placed to take on the task. Author of a monumental study of Stalin (reviewed in Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no. 3), he is an established scholar of Russian history and a long-standing activist in the Trotskyist movement. His new study of Lenin offers a wealth of information that will be of interest to all those concerned to study the strengths and weaknesses of Bolshevism free from the myths which have so often distorted it. Yet he has only been partially successful.
The main attraction of biography for readers is the way that it studies the interplay of public and private. But there is little private here – Lenin was a peculiarly single-minded individual, lacking the broad cultural perspectives to be found in the writings of Marx, Engels or Trotsky. Many years ago, Tamara Deutscher published a little book (Not by Politics Alone, Allen & Unwin, 1973) subtitled The Other Lenin. Unfortunately the book revealed quite clearly that there was no other Lenin. The revolution was his life. As Marie points out, he had comrades, but not friends. (p. 33)
The brief affair with Inessa Armand is related, though it seems to have been singularly uneventful. Politics intervened here, tragically. When she was taken ill in 1920, Lenin had her sent off to a sanatorium in an area which his officials assured him was safe. In fact cholera was rampant, and poor Armand died of her cure. (pp. 342–3) Doubtless this reinforced Lenin in his zeal against ‘Communist lying’ which preoccupied his last years. Lenin was apparently also capable of mildly sexist mother-in-law jokes: ‘The worst punishment for a bigamist is having two mothers-in-law.’ (p. 58)
Most interestingly, Marie claims that Lenin regretted the fact that he had no children (p. 15), and that in 1912 he attempted to adopt Zinoviev’s son. Zinoviev refused (p. 139). The child was later killed by Stalin; Marie speculates that if the boy had been Lenin’s adoptive son, Stalin might have spared him. But the point should be noted by those ultra-Bolsheviks who argue that committed revolutionaries should not be parents.
Lenin’s appreciation of aesthetic matters was also limited. In 1921, when he was, very reluctantly, having his portrait painted, Lenin commented that art had a certain propaganda value, but when that was exhausted, ‘we shall abolish it as useless’. (p. 388) Marie stresses that he was joking. But it does cast some doubt on the value of compiling collections such as Lenin on Literature and Art.
But Marie’s main aim is a more polemical one, to challenge the ‘dark or rosy legends’ (p. 13) that have accreted around Lenin’s name. Even before Stalinism turned Lenin into a quasi-religious figure whose thought could not be studied critically, Zinoviev had already begun to develop the Lenin cult.
Marie gives many examples of Stalinist falsification. Thus a Russian biography of Lenin tells us that at the January 1912 conference ‘the overwhelming majority of delegates were workers’. In fact there were just 14 full delegates, two of whom were agents provocateurs. (p. 133) Lenin is said to have always been suspicious of the police agent Malinowski, who was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Actually Lenin was rather more gullible than some of his comrades. (p. 134)
Trotskyist myths are also challenged. For obvious reasons, Trotskyists, on the defensive against Stalinism, have always played down to the point of non-existence the differences between Lenin and Trotsky after 1917. As Marie shows, there was in fact considerable friction between the two men.
But Marie also defends Lenin against the virulent attacks of such as Stéphane Courtois, Solzhenitsyn and Volkogonov who seek to make Lenin responsible for the worst excesses of Stalinism, and therefore to show the revolutionary project as evil and dangerous from its very inception. Thus he takes up, and decisively dismisses, the old, old story that Lenin was a paid agent of the Germans when he travelled in the sealed train. (pp. 175–8).
In particular, he challenges the way in which Lenin’s critics, using quotations out of context, seek to depict him as a bloodthirsty brute. As he has little difficulty in demonstrating, the worst brutality was on the side of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. In the bitter conditions of civil war, there was no alternative to the utmost ruthlessness.
But he also points out that Lenin was prone to the use of exaggerated language. Often his demands that people be shot were pure rhetoric; nobody in fact was executed. Lenin often faced a situation when all too many officials were inert or soft, and he was driven to the most frightful exhortations in order to try to get some action out of them. (pp. 269, 320)
A Lenin stripped of myths is clearly a much more interesting figure. After all, if he never made any mistakes, it’s not very easy to learn from him. (‘Don’t invade Poland’ is quite a good motto for any future revolutionary leader.) Rather than the evil conspirator or the serene ‘great leader’, Marie shows us a Lenin who, in 1917 and after, was often unsure of where he was going, and had constantly to revise his perspectives. Since this is the situation most of us are in most of the time, it makes it easier to see Lenin as a ‘companion in struggle’ rather than as a Great Teacher.
Thus Marie shows that Lenin briefly advocated an insurrection in August 1917, before recognising that it would have been a disastrous folly. (p. 192) Or later, although it was Lenin who persuaded the party to accept the New Economic Policy, he was actually a late convert to the idea – in fact, in Marie’s view he should have advocated it much earlier. (p. 373)
A comrade recently put to me the argument that although Lenin was adept at changing his mind when confronted with changed circumstances, often quite rightly, he failed to make any self-criticism of his earlier positions, and thus made it harder for future generations to learn from him. There is some truth in this, but I suspect the basic reason is that Lenin never dreamed that his writings would be turned into scripture by his self-appointed followers.
Marie reveals the contradictions in Lenin’s view of religion. Before 1905, he was particularly keen for the party to work among members of religious sects, believing they provided a fruitful area of activity (pp. 81, 87). But a few years later he broke the agreement that the party press should be philosophically neutral in order to attack the ‘God builders’. In 1921, he intervened to prevent the slogan ‘Denounce religion as a lie’ being used on May Day. (p. 383) Pravda warned comrades not to offend the feelings of religious believers – something that might be noted by the veil-snatching wing of the French left. Yet at the same time he was helping to organise the expropriation of church property. (pp. 404–6) In short there is no ‘Leninist line’ on the question of religion; the argument remains open.
Marie’s work is thus a useful contribution to the development of a genuinely critical approach to Lenin and Bolshevism. Unfortunately, the book has also a number of weaknesses.
Firstly – and this may be the fault of the publisher rather than of Marie himself – it is distinctly unhelpful to anyone who wants to pursue his arguments and discoveries. There is no bibliography; references are given to the fifth Russian edition of the Works, often with no indication of the particular work or letter being cited, making it virtually impossible for non-Russian speakers to check out the arguments. The absence of an index makes it difficult to trace the many minor figures who flit in and out of the narrative; yet a grasp of the evolution of such individuals is vital to an understanding of how Lenin related to his party, his periphery and his opponents.
More seriously, the balance of the material presented is often questionable. It is understandable that Marie is anxious to present new material rather than tell the more familiar bits of the story. But while Lenin was a master of small-group manoeuvres, the real lessons come from the times when he interacted with the mass movement. Thus it is unfortunate that Marie devotes only two or three pages to the daily Pravda of 1912, with much more emphasis on petty disputes than on the experience of mass agitation. (pp. 138–41)
Similarly the account of 1905 is disappointing. The main point Marie makes here is that Lenin made a number of mistakes – delay in returning to Russia, wrongly estimating the rôle of the soviets, seeking unity with the Mensheviks – and that he learned to do better in 1917. (pp. 117–18) Doubtless true, but there is much more positive that could be said, in particular Lenin’s revision of his view of the nature and tasks of the revolutionary party.
Indeed, the account of events after 1917 is unremittingly gloomy. Marie describes in powerful detail the savagery of the civil war, famine, disease and corruption, and the relentless growth of bureaucracy, so that even before Lenin’s last illness his party was being taken over by young members who would prepare the way for Stalinism. In 1920, even the highest food ration was less than it was to be in Stalin’s gulag. (p. 350) Marie even goes so far as to claim that 1917 never actually smashed the state, and that the old state apparatus fused with the new Soviet state. (p. 296)
All this is doubtless true. These were grim years. But the other side of the picture scarcely makes an appearance. The soviets, erratic and short-lived as they were, did leave a vision of democracy that went far beyond that of the parliamentary pigsty. Legal reforms, notably in the area of the family and women’s rights, made a real change. The expansion of education and the new cultural initiatives transformed the lives of thousands. Despite the bungling and triumphalism of Comintern functionaries, the revolution did offer millions of workers throughout the world a new hope. Marie’s picture contrasts sharply with that to be found, say, in the writings of Victor Serge. The suffering and the corruption are all there in Serge, but so too is a powerful sense that despite everything, the whole enterprise was supremely worthwhile.
Indeed, Marie seems positively reluctant to draw political lessons. (There is an interesting, if hypercritical, account of Marie’s book in relation to the politics of his organisation, the Parti des travailleurs, at http://socialisme.free.fr/cps15_lenine.htm, the website of the followers of Stéphane Just, expelled from Pierre Lambert’s PCI in 1984.) Tony Cliff’s Lenin has been criticised for always drawing contemporary lessons from his account of Lenin. But for Cliff the past was always a tool for making the future. Marie has produced an important work of scholarship, but it is only raw material for the biography of Lenin that we need.
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Larkin’s speaking powers (and indeed his whole political approach) cannot be assessed without some discussion of his use of religious imagery. A characteristic quote appears on page 61 in the context of the Board of Trade inquiry into the Lockout, to which Larkin gave evidence. I remember an Irish socialist giving me his version of what Larkin said – he could have said it more than once – as: ‘We are resolved that Christ shall not be crucified a second time on the streets of Dublin.’ (The reference is to the Catholic doctrine of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, hence a conception of ordinary working-class Christians as Jesus reincarnate.)
Newsinger has some very pertinent comments on the Irish Catholic Church in general and on the religiosity of Irish workers in the early twentieth century in particular. As he points out: ‘Whereas, on the Continent, the Catholic Church was allied with the great Catholic landowners and with Catholic governments, in Ireland the great landowners and the government were Protestant. Instead, the Church became a middle-class church.’ (p. 33)
Anti-clericalism, as a result, failed to develop in Ireland, and the Irish working class remained, with the exception of certain pockets of Protestant support, staunchly Catholic. (This comes out in Sean O’Casey’s beautiful play about the 1913 Lockout, Red Roses for Me.) Hence hostility on the part of the Church posed a problem for Larkin and Connolly in their struggle against the Irish employers. Newsinger makes some penetrating observations on how they tried to handle it.
The author also has some very useful comments on the union’s tactics in the Lockout. Solidarity action by the workers in the ‘sister isle’ was the key, as Larkin recognised (see pp. 81–82). It was necessary to prevent importation of goods into the port of Dublin. Financial assistance, although valuable, was insufficient. Hence Larkin’s ‘fiery cross’ campaign in England. This produced a certain amount of sympathetic action from miners and transport workers (pp. 93–94). Larkin, however, was, as it turned out, over-optimistic as to what support he could get from the left-wing TUC leaders, banking on their readiness to initiate official sympathetic action. He was to be tragically deceived. A really powerful unofficial movement, Newsinger argues, could have forced the trade union leaders to countenance strike action in support of the embattled Dublin workers. Such a movement could have come into being through judicious use of local grievances (pp. 97–98). (What is not always emphasised is the fact that the Dublin confrontation was part of a wave of industrial unrest which swept the UK just before the First World War.) As it was, the Special TUC Conference, which convened in December 1913, was deliberately managed so as to condemn Larkin’s attacks on various recalcitrant British trade union leaders (for example, J.H. Thomas), and called for reopening of negotiations with the employers. A particularly treacherous role here was that of Ben Tillett (pp. 100–01), who moved a resolution condemning Larkin’s attacks.
The result was a severe defeat for the ITGWU. Larkin left for the United States in October 1914. (see R.M. Fox, Jim Larkin, International Publishers, 1957, pp. 130–31) Connolly took over the union’s leadership. Newsinger argues that a succession of demoralising events then pushed him along the road to the 1916 Rising:
One other welcome feature of Rebel City is that it contains a number of criticisms of the writings of that prominent Irish Stalinist C. Desmond Greaves. Newsinger asserts that Greaves overestimated the extent of support for the Dublin workers in 1913 on the part of republicans, Irish-Irelanders and the liberal intelligentsia in Ireland; that he engaged in ‘systematic denigration’ of Larkin (p. 110, note 48), claimed in his biography of Connolly (p. 105) that there were no sackings following the employers’ 1913 victory – here there is a slight hiccup: my copy of Greaves’ The Life and Times of James Connolly has 1961 as its publication date and the relevant quotation is on p. 272, whereas in Rebel City (p. 110, note 50) the publication year is given as 1960 and the relevant page number as 338. Page 131, on the other hand, gives the correct publication year, and misrepresents Connolly as a kind of proto-Stalinist over 1916, and on page 162 he overestimates the role of the post-Connolly Irish Labour leaders William O’Brien and Thomas Johnson in 1918.
There are several other memorable observations in the book: for example, on page 10 we learn that ‘James Sexton, who had organised attacks on imported blacklegs in the early 1890s, carried a pistol in Belfast [in 1907] to protect himself from his own members’. We find the poet Rupert Brooke contributing two guineas to the ITGWU strike fund (p. 90). George Bernard Shaw spoke at the Albert Hall in London on 1 November 1913, calling on all ‘respectable citizens to arm themselves in order to put a decisive stop to the proceedings of the police’ (who were beating up strikers), and, last but not least, Yeats, who later, to his disgrace, wrote marching songs for the (fascist) Irish Blueshirts, wrote a letter to the Irish Worker protesting at the anti-union activities of the Dublin bourgeois press and the harassment of strikers organised by the Hibernians, the Catholic counterparts of the Orangemen. (p. 72)
All in all, it is impossible to recommend this book too highly. It illuminates a series of very important events in the history of these islands, and puts the 1913 Lockout and the 1916 Easter Rising in proper historical perspective. As such it serves as a worthy analytical companion to literary treatments of these topics – O’Casey’s plays Red Roses for Me! and The Plough and the Stars, James Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City, and the various poems and ballads of and about 1913 and 1916. Let Donagh MacDonagh’s concluding verse serve as a fit ending for this review:
Rocker writes about the various groups which came together, the oldest of these being the Communist Workers Educational Union, which had been launched in 1840 by German refugees belonging to the Secret Society of the Communist League. Among the members of this educational union were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht. While some anarchists held to Lassalle’s Iron Law of Wages, Rocker and other comrades accepted Marx’s theory of labour power, although Rocker was critical of historical materialism.
As it happened, Rocker was of an age to be conscripted into the German army, and so to find out where he stood he went to the German consulate for a medical examination. However, he was told that he must return to Germany for this. He writes: ‘I realised that the road back to my native land was closed to me forever unless there was a revolution there.’ And so he decided to settle in London, finding work as a bookbinder. Together with his comrades he explored the slum areas – Bethnal Green, Hackney, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and returned from these excursions spiritually and physically exhausted. He writes: ‘It was an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery.’ Rocker discussed the premise believed by many that those who suffer would come to realise the deeper causes of their poverty and concluded that ‘there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise’. He considers both slogans ‘the worse the better’ and ‘all or nothing’ erroneous, the latter leading to radicals opposing any improvement in the lot of the workers.
A visit to Liverpool resulted in Rocker finding his way into the Jewish labour movement. It was quite by chance that he met an acquaintance on the street and was taken to see Moritz Jeger, who ran a small printing shop. Together with Albert Levey, Jeger had issued a newspaper called The Rebel. However, only two issues had been published when the two men found themselves at loggerheads, and Levey left for Hull. Rocker agreed to assist in restarting the group, which had fallen away due to the disagreements between Jeger and Levey. A new journal was started called Das Freie Wort, and Rocker became the editor. However, he had as yet not learned Yiddish, and so Jeger offered to translate his articles from German – which he did very badly! Rocker writes that Jeger ‘made an unholy mess of everything I wrote …’ (p. 48). He must have been relieved when an invitation came to him from London to edit the renewed Arbeter Fraint.
Rocker writes of comrades he met both inside and outside the Jewish labour movement, many of their names known to us today. For instance, Kropotkin was a special friend. Rocker informs the reader of the histories of these comrades, and tells of how they came into the movement, following up their subsequent development. Because Rocker possesses a literary gift, the persons about whom he writes come alive, and we see them clearly through his eyes.
He writes also of Milly Witcop, the two of them partners to the end of their lives, and also of his two sons, Rudolf and Fermin. As ‘Free Love’ was an anarchist principle, Rocker and Milly refused to marry legally, and allowed themselves, while on a visit to the United States, to be deported rather than agree to a legal marriage ceremony. It was believed by anarchists that ‘free love’ would destroy the bourgeois state. It is ironic that today when it is customary for couples to live together without legal marriage, the bourgeois state appears to be stronger than ever!
Both Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals and Rocker’s book cover similar grounds and periods, Rocker’s being largely from personal experience. Both writers include the Houndsditch murders and the Sidney Street siege.
I especially enjoyed Rocker’s account of the International Socialist Congress in London in July 1896. The congress began on Sunday 26 July with a peace march followed by a mass meeting in Hyde Park. As the first marchers entered the park, there was a cloudburst and most of them fled for shelter. The congress proper opened the next day in Queen’s Hall, and the first question was whether the anarchists and representatives of other anti-parliamentarian groups should be admitted. The English trade union leader Ted Leggatt of the Transport Workers Union, an anarchist, cried out in his powerful voice: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ Three members of the French parliament had no mandate, and Bernard Shaw protested that being a member of parliament did not confer the right to attend as a delegate. He was ignored. The chairman, Paul Singer, a member of the German parliament, cut short the discussion and said he would take a vote. Pandemonium broke out. Keir Hardie, the deputy chairman, made himself heard above the chairman’s gong, which sounded like a big church bell, and told Singer that in England meetings were not conducted like that. Delegates who tried to speak on the motion were shouted down. This went on for hours, and most of the third day was wasted. The fourth day saw the expulsion of the anarchists. Rocker puts the blame for this on the German social democrats. Colin Ward in the introduction tells us that it was the experience of the German SPD’s authoritarianism which made Rocker an anarchist.
Rocker and his comrades were elated at news of the 1904–05 revolution in Russia. ‘We were sure that we stood on the threshold of Russian liberation. A number of younger comrades returned to Russia to take part in the revolution.’ Afterwards, when the revolution had been defeated, Rocker puts the blame on the lack of a united leadership and a planned concerted movement. The interest and enthusiasm in London for this revolution had, however, increased interest in the Jewish labour movement. The growth of the Arbeter Fraint led to the opening on 3 February 1906 of a club and institute in Jubilee Street. Every Jewish trade union in the country sent messages of support, and Peter Kropotkin, although ill, spoke at the opening. Other speakers included John Turner, an English anarchist and trade unionist, and Ted Leggatt.
Militancy increased, and in April 1912 1,500 West End tailors came out on strike. Rocker, realising that strike-breaking work was being done in the East End workshops, published a call in the Arbeter Fraint to abolish the sweatshops. Eight thousand people packed the Assembly Hall for a meeting called by the Jewish tailoring trades unions, with another 3,000 standing outside the hall. A decision was taken to strike. The clothing industry in the East End was at a standstill. The London dock strike was in progress at the same time, which brought Jewish and non-Jewish workers together, joint strike meetings being held. Rocker writes that this tailoring strike in the East End spelled the end of the sweatshop system. Additionally, Jewish families in sympathy with the dockers took their children into their homes. This strengthened the friendship between Jewish and non-Jewish workers. The period between 1912 and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the Jewish labour movement reaching its peak.
On 2 December 1914, Rocker was arrested and interned as an enemy alien, first at Olympia, then on the Royal Edward, moored off Southend. It was on this ship that my father first met Rocker. After a time, both Rocker and my father, were transferred to internment in Alexandra Palace. Rocker writes about the poor conditions in these camps, the other internees and the attitudes of the commanders. While in the camps, he was able to lecture to groups of prisoners on literature and social philosophy, for example, Tolstoy as Artist and Social Philosopher. These lectures were well attended in spite of objections from a small group of German patriots.
Milly Witcop was arrested under DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act), and was imprisoned without trial in Holloway gaol, and later, having appeared before an Advisory Committee, in the women’s prison at Aylesbury. Rudolf’s older son was also arrested, but was allowed to join his father at Alexandra Palace. The younger son, Fermin, aged seven, was cared for by relatives and friends.
The news of the March 1917 revolution in Russia was received with joy. ‘I could hear the bells ringing in the era of peace and brotherhood, the nations gripping hands, all joining in singing the International.’ (p. 202) Even the declaration of war against Germany by the United States in April did not dim Rocker’s hopes. Rocker and Milly, like many of their comrades, applied to go to Russia, and at first it was agreed that they could do go together with their younger son, Fermin, provided that the Russian government, now Bolshevik, would admit them. A note from Russia agreed to admit Rocker, but the British government changed its mind and gave its permission only to Milly and her son. Milly refused to go to Russia without Rocker. And then the separate peace made by Russia with Germany at Brest Litovsk destroyed all hopes of the British government allowing them to go to Russia. No doubt, in the long term this saved their lives.
An agreement between the British and German governments to exchange civilian prisoners saw Rocker bound for Germany via Holland. On arrival, however, he found a sympathetic lieutenant who determined that Rocker was stateless. Therefore he was able to return to Holland.
The introduction by Colin Ward and an epilogue by Sam Dreen tells of Rocker’s subsequent history.
The London Mob ends with an account of one moral panic from the 1780s, a man called ‘the Monster’ assaulted more than 50 London women, cutting them with knives or spikes. The press reported every outrage, and at the end of it Renwick Williams was arrested. Williams’ conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice. His witnesses were stopped from addressing the court. The attacks continued. Why was the press so fascinated by the trial? The failure of the crowd to protect the Monster’s victims may have made individuals feel more vulnerable. As violence became less common, so any instances of it seemed more terrible.
In the first decades of merchant capitalism, we might conclude, the seeds of the present system were there. Crime was already an individual rather than a collective problem. The solution was to be found with the courts, which few people trusted. The only way even to approach them was by paying for the help of a privatised police force. This elegant book draws attention to a number of areas, and encourages us to think carefully about the past. Shoemaker’s image of an increasingly peaceful eighteenth century is a challenge to those socialist historians who have seen crime as taking on greater political significance in the absence of popular revolts. Yet the period of The London Mob is rather narrower in some places than its author admits. The book starts really after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and ends just before the Jacobin uprisings of the 1790s. It is, in other words, a long quiet between two storms. The riots of the eighteenth century, and most famously the Gordon Riots of 1780, were the product of transition. No longer did the old slogans of the 1640s have the same appeal. In a new society of commerce and trade, the ideology of previous revolts seemed nostalgic. But neither had the slogans of the French revolution emerged, nor were sufficient numbers of people employed in factories to organise around the demands of labour. Not surprisingly, then, the riots of 1780 were an odd mixture of the backward looking and the forward: religious attacks on Catholics combined with a class movement against the rich.
Shoemaker shows how the London ‘mob’ took its name. In 1700, the word signified the whole ‘mobile’ population of London walking the city streets. By 1800, ‘the mob’ meant the poor. But ‘the mob’ was always a word used from outside. Like Burke’s sneering ‘swinish multitude’, this is not how the poor saw themselves. At a moment when it is fashionable to describe the oppressed as ‘the new poors’ or the ‘new multitude’, it is worth remembering just how hard nineteenth-century workers had to fight for words of their own, against labels given by the rich, and for a language that resonated with dignity. Their struggle was also for a different style of politics that revolved around labour, and for movements that went further than those (such as the Gordon Riots) of their own recent past. Maybe that is the real lesson of Shoemaker’s book, the mundane character of history in the decades just before the industrial working class was born.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Helen Macfarlane
David Black
Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
Lexington, Lanham 2004, pp. 177
Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
Lexington, Lanham 2004, pp. 177
DAVID Black has written an interesting and useful book on Helen Macfarlane, who will be known to readers of Revolutionary History as the original translator of the Communist Manifesto into English, when it appeared in the Red Republican of George Julian Harney in 1850.
It may be argued that Black has really written several books in one. The first and most distinctive is that which provides the evidence of some important historical detective work on Helen Macfarlane, about whom little has hitherto been known. The second, also of some importance, is a chapter which deals with the specificities of Macfarlane’s translation of the Manifesto. The third is an interesting discussion on the left-wing Chartism of the Fraternal Democrats, and what happened to this current after 1850. The final book within a book is a discussion of the ideas and politics of Left-Hegelianism, of which Black is a partisan. Black ably demonstrates that Macfarlane herself held such views, although he is less convincing on what the historical significance of this might have been.The name Helen Macfarlane has long been something of a puzzle for historians of Chartism, and it is a great strength of the book that Black goes some way to unravelling the mystery. Leading female Chartists were very rare things in the 1840s – all the nationally-known leaders were men – and one who could both understand the Communist Manifesto in its original German and translate it into English was virtually unique. By a close reading of articles in the Red Republican, Black demonstrates that Helen Macfarlane wrote on a number of occasions for that journal using the pseudonym Howard Morton. This has previously been assumed by historians.
Where Black breaks new ground is in discovering that the Macfarlane family had Scottish origins, and in 1850 were to be found living in Burnley. He has also uncovered the fact that Macfarlane was in Vienna in the Year of Revolutions, 1848, and was therefore exposed to the actuality of the events that Marx and Engels referred to in the Manifesto as well, clearly, as gaining a grounding in the works of Hegel. Black digs up one or two other references to Howard Morton, and places Macfarlane’s presence at a dinner given by the Fraternal Democrats in London on 31 December 1850 at which both Marx and Engels were also present. Black has traced a letter from Marx which shows that a dispute took place between Harney’s wife and Macfarlane. After that, all trace of Macfarlane is lost. It is still not known why she was in Vienna, when and why she returned, or indeed what she did after 1850 and when and where she died. The book provides some tantalising new evidence, and it is to be hoped that future historians will continue the detective work and find out more.
The most recent work which touches on the translation of the Communist Manifesto into English is the Penguin edition with an introduction by revisionist historian Gareth Stedman Jones. He refers to Macfarlane just once, on page 15, and misspells her name, although he does pick up that she wrote under the pseudonym of Howard Morton.
David Black’s treatment is much briefer, but he still manages to make some valuable points that Stedman Jones misses. Firstly, he acknowledges that Macfarlane’s use of the word ‘hobgoblin’ for the more often used ‘spectre’ that Marx and Engels argued was haunting Europe was unfortunate. It suggests an idiosyncrasy to Macfarlane’s translation which is far from the reality. Secondly and most importantly, he draws attention to a number of sections of the Manifesto that did not actually appear in the Red Republican. He quickly dismisses the idea that Macfarlane herself exercised the editorial pencil, and suggests, rather, that Harney, the editor of the paper, deliberately omitted certain parts that he felt might attract the attention of the authorities. The Red Republican itself had already excited their interest, in particular in a search for links between left-wing Chartists and European revolutionaries.
Black also convincingly demonstrates some of the differences between Macfarlane’s translation and the later and now standard work of Samuel Moore, and argues that these were a result of Macfarlane applying a Hegelian logic to her work. Again he is convincing on this. For example, Moore’s translation had Marx and Engels writing: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ By contrast, Helen Macfarlane translated the same German passage as: ‘Everything fixed and stable vanishes, everything holy and venerable is desecrated, and men are forced to look at their mutual relations, at the problem of life, in the soberest, most matter-of-fact way.’ Black argues that while the former is of course better known, the latter is closer to the Hegelian spirit of Marx and Engels’ work.
If these are the two original areas of the book in terms of historical research – and the book would still be an important contribution to our knowledge if it had stopped there – Black’s work on left-wing and late Chartism and on left-wing Hegelian ideas in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s are both interesting pieces of analysis.
There is little historical work on either left-wing Chartism, in the shape of the Fraternal Democrats – founded in 1846 – or on late Chartism after 1848, although in terms of the latter more research is now starting to appear.
Black traces the origins of the Fraternal Democrats in 1846, looks at their relationship with Marx and Engels, and is particularly interesting on the tensions between Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney as leaders of Chartism in the early 1850s. It is in some ways a pity that Black’s analysis here amounts more to tantalising vignettes rather than a full-blown study. He traces the relationship between Marx and Engels, European émigrés to Britain after 1848 and left Chartists, demonstrating that attempts to set up a revolutionary socialist grouping founded on the basis of an analysis of the impact of the defeats of 1848 foundered. Harney, who Marx called ‘Citizen Hiphiphoorah’ for his endless cheering on of European revolutionaries whether left-wing or not, split from Marx and Engels, and also from the other left-wing Chartist leader Ernest Jones. Jones himself was criticised by Marx for failing to understand the depth of the defeat of 1848 and for seeking pretexts for agitation that simply were not there. Marx cautioned against giving up and retiring to bed, but he did emphasise that revolutionary change would now be a matter of decades rather than a year or two. It was a matter of material circumstances rather than simply an exercise in the will of revolutionaries to bring it about.
Black does write more fully about the relationship between Helen Macfarlane and left-wing Hegelianism. He considers in some detail several of her articles – written as Howard Morton – in the Democratic Review and Red Republican, and draws out clearly the Hegelian and early Marxist logic in them. This is an interesting and useful exercise and an extremely valuable counter to those who argue that such advanced ideas were simply not available to the Chartists, who, it is claimed remained stuck with radical but pre-Marxist ideas.
The problem is that Black does not actually advance or develop this argument even if it is implicit in the book. That suggests a number of important unasked and unanswered questions. If Helen Macfarlane was a representative of a left-Hegelian tradition in Britain, what happened to this tradition, and what influence did it have? It is probably very difficult to tell, although Black does suggest that Marx was running a study group for Chartist activists and others interested in such ideas. Likewise since (most) of the Communist Manifesto appeared in English in a leading Chartist paper – the Red Republican – in 1850, what actual impact did this have on the ideas and political strategy of the Chartists? Who actually read it, and what did they think? Again it may be very difficult to tell, but it is possible to argue, although Black does not, that there was a considerable influence on the 1851 Charter and Something More programme of the Chartists that broke with the Six Points of the Charter that were agreed in 1837 in the sense that it argued for social and economic democracy.
John Saville was one of the few historians aside from Black to discuss Macfarlane, and in his introduction to a reprint of the Red Republican he notes that Howard Morton was ‘close to the intellectual position of Marx and Engels, and the articles above the signature provide the most lively and interesting reading in the whole of the Red Republican. Howard Morton had a splendid polemical style, was obviously widely read and widely travelled.’ Saville goes on to argue that Macfarlane’s article on Chartism in 1850 provided the basis for the politics of the Charter and Something More. The article begins: ‘Chartism in 1850 is a different thing from Chartism in 1840. The leaders of the English Proletarians have proved that they are true Democrats … They have progressed from the idea of a simple political reform to the idea of a Social Revolution.’
Indeed Black’s position is far preferable to that of Gareth Stedman Jones, who argues in his 2003 preface to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto that ‘between 1850 and 1870 the Manifesto was remembered by no more than a few hundred German-speaking veterans of the 1848 revolutions’ (p. 16). This suggests that Helen Macfarlane’s partial translation of the Manifesto in the pages of the Red Republican had no impact whatsoever in Britain. I don’t think this is true, and Black’s book points to the reality that it wasn’t. However, further research, perhaps particularly in the Chartist press, is needed to take the argument further.
Lastly, Black argues that Helen Macfarlane was one of those people in history, a ‘rare bird’ as Marx called her, who make an original and distinctive contribution. He compares her to Rosa Luxemburg, and argues that she was in the tradition of all those who associate socialism with freedom, rather than the control societies of Stalinism and social democracy. Well, perhaps. This may be taking things a little too far until some more can be discovered about the life and work of Helen Macfarlane
Nevertheless David Black has written an interesting, useful and readable book. My only significant criticism is that in many parts I would like to have read more. Black raises many issues for socialist historians to put on their research agendas.
Keith Flett
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Wobblies
Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman (eds.)
Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World
Verso, London 2005, pp. 305
Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World
Verso, London 2005, pp. 305
WOBBLIES: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World is edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. Buhle is a long-time chronicler of the American radical movement and popular culture. Schulman is an artist on the editorial board of World War 3 Illustrated, which began ‘17 years ago as an anti-war comic book, inspired by the experience of growing up under the shadow of nuclear weapons and by the shock of a second-rate actor’s finger on the button’.
Wobblies is timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the IWW and a travelling exhibition of IWW memorabilia that Buhle helped curate (http://www.wobblyshow.org/). For today’s radicals, the IWW has a powerful mystique since many of the leading figures were martyrs to the cause, including the hobo and folksinger Joe Hill. Hill’s songs have enormous staying power as demonstrated by Billy Bragg’s cover of There is Power in a Union:
There is power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hand of the worker But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand There is power in a Union |
Wobblies tells the story of Joe Hill and many other legendary figures such as Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood through the comic book medium. Buhle’s love for and commitment to this medium is about as long-standing as his ties to the radical movement. In an article entitled The New Scholarship of Comics in the Chronicle of Higher Education for 16 May 2003, Buhle writes:
Mad comics (1952–55) were the most special. The editor and frequent scriptwriter of that early Mad, Harvey Kurtzman, was a hero of my childhood; when I interviewed him, decades later, as to why he had fallen to the depths of scripting a Playboy strip called Little Annie Fanny, he could only say that he had been unable to live up to his own promise. Actually, the moment had passed. Due to the pressure of the Comics Code, EC Comics, Mad’s publisher, turned it into a successful black-and-white magazine that Kurtzman quit after failing to gain a controlling interest. But what a run he’d had!
The influence of Mad comics on later comics artists has been testified to by Robert R, Crumb (of Zap Comix and more), Bill Griffith (of Zippy the Pinhead), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker artist Art Spiegelman, among others. Mad ridiculed, but also interpreted and demystified, the invasion of the childish mind by movies, television, tabloid newspapers – and also comics, both strips and books. I was a little young to enjoy all the original Mads, but several 35-cent Ballantine paperbacks put the best of the early material on the drugstore shelf, albeit with panels squeezed down to size, lines blurred, and in black-and-white rather than the colour originals. No matter. Those were my alternative to schoolbooks and classic novels, because they put the details of popular life under the microscope.
The comic book medium lends itself to the story of the IWW since it is essentially one of the underdog battling powerful evil forces. Whether it is Spiderman or Big Bill Haywood taking on fiendish captains of industry, the artist has a lot to work with.The artists who worked on Wobblies are a who’s who of the contemporary underground comic book scene. Josh MacPhee, who provided the artwork for the Big Bill Haywood story, is a well-known graffiti artist based in Chicago. In an interview with www.drawingresistance.org, MacPhee stated:
There are very few laws I feel shouldn’t be broken. For artists in particular, I think we need to attack all laws that continue to enclose our ‘commons’ and privatise everything and anything, be it space, economy, intellectual property, plants or human DNA. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do any sort of art in what we used to call public space.
In other words, MacPhee has the same attitude toward private property that the Wobblies did. If they chained themselves to a lamppost while making incendiary speeches in pursuit of free speech rights, artists like MacPhee mount the same challenge with a spray can.
One panel from MacPhee’s strip (he wrote the story as well) suggests that much has changed in the labour movement. The contrast between the revolutionary leader of the Western Federation of Miners, Big Bill Haywood, and the reformist leader of the United Mine Workers, John Mitchell, could not be starker. Haywood lost an eye in a mining accident in his first year at work, when he was nine years old. Mitchell, on the other hand, enjoyed socialising with powerful politicians and businessmen.Today’s labour ‘leaders’ clearly style themselves after John Mitchell, even if they offer up lip service to the rights of working people. This extends to issues of war and peace as well, as labour officials offer support for the latest imperialist adventure of a declining superpower. On 20 March 2003, AFL-CIO boss John Sweeney issued a statement on the war with Iraq that was virtually indistinguishable from a White House press release:
The Iraqi regime is a brutal dictatorship that is a threat to its neighbours and its own citizens. We support fully the goal of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. We sincerely hope this conflict will result in a more democratic and prosperous Iraq and a more peaceful and stable region, and that it will be resolved with little loss of life.
If there was anything that defined the IWW, it was its resistance to imperialist war, especially the First World War. The Wobblies were repressed during the war, not just for their political opposition but for their role as strike leaders in crucial war industries. Imperialist warfare abroad always requires class peace at home, even if won at the point of a bayonet. Wobbly picket lines were broken up in Arizona in 1918 on the pretext that copper production was a ‘war utility’. Hindering production would make the offender liable to prosecution under a new Sabotage Act.
Co-editor Nicole Schulman provides the artwork and story for IWW leader Frank Little, who was arguably their most visible anti-war figure. Looking at a full-size pic, we can see Little on a speaker’s platform in Butte, Montana where he is recounting a discussion with Arizona’s governor. After Little had promised a miner’s strike, the governor blustered: ‘Why man, you wouldn’t do that. This country is at war.’ Little replied: ‘Governor, I don’t care what country your country is fighting. I am fighting for the solidarity of labour.’In the early hours of 1 August 1917, six masked men broke into Frank Little’s hotel room and dragged him off to his death. His body was found some hours later hanging from a railroad trestle. It was rumoured that Pinkerton detectives or members of the Butte police were responsible.
Like many members of the IWW, Frank Little came from the ranks of the outcast. He was born in 1879 to a Quaker father and a Cherokee mother. His fellow workers said that he was half White, half Indian and all Wobbly. Other Wobblies came from persecuted immigrant communities like the Italians or the Finns. Unlike the dominant craft unions led by people such as John Mitchell, the IWW also welcomed African-Americans into its ranks. In 1913, Philadelphia longshoremen, who were primarily black as was their leader Ben Fletcher, opted to join the IWW as Local 8 of the Marine Transport Workers Union. A black minister in Philadelphia is reported to have said: ‘The IWW at least protects the coloured man, which is more than I can say for the laws of the country.’
While it is tempting to romanticise the Wobblies, Buhle and Schulman insist on rendering the IWW, warts and all. This makes the IWW more understandable and ironically more sympathetic, especially to people who have done labour or radical organising themselves. It is obvious that people involved in such activities, as opposed to Spiderman, do not have superhuman powers.
For example, despite all the great publicity that attended the Paterson silk workers’ strike of 1913 (including a theatrical production based on the strike mounted by journalist John Reed), the strike did not achieve a victory. As artist and writer Ryan Inzana relates in To Live and Die in Paterson, unity broke down under pressure from the bosses. The IWW was spurned by the workers, and after six months on strike there was no improvement in pay or working conditions.
Although the IWW was extremely successful as an example of standing up to the bosses, it fell apart after the First World War. Its demise was attributable to two main factors. Firstly, repression did have the effect of draining the movement’s energy and finances. Although radicals tend to view repression as a sign of a movement’s strength, at a certain point it can destroy it. This was true of the black liberation movement of the 1960s. A similar dynamic seems to have taken place in the anti-globalisation movement of the more recent past, especially after a young activist was killed in Genoa. Essentially, movements grow through victory, not defeat. Towards the end of its life, the IWW was experiencing fewer and fewer victories.
But the more important factor undoubtedly is the triumph of the Russian Revolution, which convinced working-class radicals that socialist parties based on Marxism were the way to victory. Although the IWW’s anarcho-syndicalism was not specifically opposed to Marxist principles, it tended to shun the political arena and leave questions of conquering state power somewhat abstract. In contrast, the seizure of power in October 1917 was a specific model seemingly adaptable to all countries under all conditions.
As Big Bill Haywood told Max Eastman, just after switching from the IWW to the newly-formed Communist Party: ‘The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tried to grab the whole world, and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.’
With the end of Moscow-based Communism 15 years ago and the implosion of smaller, more radical ‘Marxist-Leninist’ parties, one might wonder if Big Bill Haywood – and the broader movement – was a bit premature. Instead of dumping native-born political traditions like the IWW or Debs’ Socialist Party, it might have made more sense to absorb them. Indeed, before the imposition of a strict hierarchical model from Moscow, many pioneers of American Communism believed that they were simply evolving out of the earlier movement, rather than transplanting something born in Russia.
For example, Charles E. Ruthenberg explained Bolshevism early in 1919 as something that was not ‘strange and new’. It was merely the consequence of the same type of education and organisation that the Socialist movement had been carrying on in the United States. His Socialist–syndicalist background showed in his description of the infant Bolshevik state as a ‘Socialist industrial republic’. His instincts were completely correct.
In the coming showdown with the US ruling class, it will be essential to construct a socialist movement out of native traditions that uses language and symbols immediately recognisable to the American working class. For help in understanding how to develop this approach, we can turn to the IWW, which did capture the hearts and minds of the wretched of the earth. Whatever other flaws, it did succeed mightily in this respect. As such, Buhle and Schulman’s Wobblies will be necessary reading to understand how the IWW did so against all odds.
Louis Proyect
This review first appeared on the Swans website www.swans.com, and is published here with permission.
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East End Jewish Radicals
William Fishman
East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914
Five Leaves, Nottingham 2004, pp. 318, £14.99
East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914
Five Leaves, Nottingham 2004, pp. 318, £14.99
FISHMAN traces from Russia the Jewish immigration to London’s East End. This came as a result of the policies of Nicholas I, who was intent upon de-Judaising Russia. In a previous century, in 1742, Empress Elizabeth had ordered the expulsion of Jews, so there were comparatively few survivors by 1772. However, the partition of Poland resulted in a vast influx of Jews into Russia ‘to face the worst era of persecution until the German holocaust’.
Between April 1881 and June 1882, 225,000 Jewish families had fled from Russia; the majority setting their sights upon the United States, but a substantial minority sought refuge within the UK. During the century, successive pogroms in Russia resulted in further flows of immigrants, a great many settling in East London. These immigrants, having no experience of the factory system, were forced back into the old trades in small workshops, largely tailoring, where they were used as sweated labour. Fishman writes that ‘the poverty and alienation of the ghetto Jews in London provided fertile soil for the activities of a radical intelligentsia who sought refuge from the Tsarist police. The struggle under the leadership of this élite, poses one of the most fascinating, yet neglected chapters, in British labour history.’ (p. 97)One such, Aron Lieberman, was appalled by the exploitation and degradation; the immigrants had no political or economic organisation to protect them, and were despised and rejected by the English workers. Lieberman noted the concentration of certain trades: hat-makers, bag-makers, carpenters, watch-makers, sugar factories, metal-working shops and tobacco factories. These were in the narrow, crooked streets of Whitechapel, in the smelly and dirty holes and corners of the workshops working 12 or 14 hours a day for paltry starvation wages. He determined to set up a dual-purpose organisation to spread socialism and to unionise Jewish workers. Lieberman was followed by a number of others with lesser or greater success.
In July 1884, the first socialist newspaper in Yiddish appeared, named Poilishe Yidl, under the sponsorship of Morris Winchevsky and E. Rabbinowitz. However, Rabbinowitz accepted advertisements, both religious and commercial, which were disapproved of by Winchevsky. The crunch came when an advertisement from the local Liberal candidate, Samuel Montagu, was published in the paper. The partnership ended, and Winchevsky founded the Arbeter Fraint (Worker’s Friend), the socialist paper which Rudolf Rocker was eventually to edit.
The propaganda of the Arbeter Fraint made itself felt. Radical organisations allied themselves and grew with the journal. The International Workingman’s Association was formed and opened a club in Berner Street, offering a base for radical and trade union movements. Although the Arbeter Fraint was militantly opposed to religious practice, even those who continued in religious observance found a meeting place in the club.
This secularism raised the ire of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Adler, whose instinct, in any event, was to support the Jewish masters against their sweated workers. He, and the rest of the religious establishment, took any steps available against these anarchists. The anarchists did not help in this matter by holding a ball each Yom Kippur (the day of atonement) and marching to synagogues in order to wave ham sandwiches!
Insofar as Dr Adler and Anglo-Jewry were concerned, these immigrants were required to become Anglicised as quickly as possible as a means of eroding the ‘alien’ question and anti-Semitism. It was during this time that agitation was taking place for an Aliens Bill, which was eventually passed in 1905. The TUC in both 1894 and 1895 had carried a resolution against the admission of ‘pauper aliens’. The English workers viewed the immigrants as rivals for employment and undercutting wages and conditions. It was at this time that an early fascist/racist organisation was formed, the British Brothers League.
Fishman notes that the Anglicisation of Jewish immigrants was achieved with regard to succeeding generations, and he puts this down to the 1870 Education Act. This, he says, cut off in the long term potential recruits to the Jewish labour movement. However, in the meantime, the struggle to organise and win converts to socialism continued.
The 1880s were a time of high unemployment and much unrest, and Fishman writes that the word ‘unemployed’ was first used as a noun in the Oxford Dictionary from the year 1882, and the word ‘unemployment’ in 1888. Marches of the unemployed, in which Jewish radicals participated, organised by the Social Democratic Federation, culminated in Bloody Sunday on 13 November 1887. He refers also to the match girls’ strike as pin-pointing the East End as a pioneering centre for the development of the new unionism. Additionally, Will Thorne and Eleanor Marx had organised the gas-workers, and a victory in wages and conditions was obtained without strike action. A victory parade took place with 12,000 marching from the Embankment to Hyde Park. Within a fortnight the great dock strike had begun. The East End tailors came out on strike, demanding an improvement in wages and conditions, with some success. During a bakers’ strike, Jewish housewives refused to buy bread which lacked a union stamp to show that it came from a bakery which observed trade union conditions.
Fishman writes: ‘This tide of local militancy did not subside at once … Direct action had come to stay.’ (p. 185) By 1914, the Jewish labour movement, primarily under anarchist direction, had reached the peak of its activity. He quotes Rocker as remarking: ‘Who could have foreseen the collapse which followed the beginning of the Great War?’
There is so much in this well-researched book, and onto the stage walk so many well-known names from the labour and socialist movement – William Morris, Henry Hyndman, Peter Kropotkin, Ben Tillett, Robert Blatchford, to name but a few, and all are seen in a different context.
Fishman writes of the cooperation and a united front between all socialist denominations which at that time was not difficult, for the Jewish anarchists accepted economic materialism. Differences would arise later when practical conclusions were drawn from the Marxist conception of history.
Without having experienced it, I was nostalgic for the social life enjoyed by these anarchists – picnics, balls, outings and club life. I was also impressed by the education in the Workers Circles and the wide curriculum including literature and music.
This is a fascinating book bringing together a history of Jewish immigration in the nineteenth century and the work of radicals to involve them in the struggle to improve their conditions. I should add also that it has a good and helpful index.
Sheila Lahr
***********
Staying Red
Norman Harding
Staying Red: Why I Remain a Socialist
Index Books, London 2005, pp. 289, £12.99
Staying Red: Why I Remain a Socialist
Index Books, London 2005, pp. 289, £12.99
NORMAN Harding joined the Trotskyist movement in the 1950s as a young man, and served it devotedly for over 30 years. This is a vivid account of his activities and experiences in that movement.
He was born into a working-class family in Leeds in 1929. His father had been an engineer in the 1920 and early 1930s, but had then gone to work on the railways after being made unemployed; his mother worked in a mill. Norman’s family background must have given him an early feeling for working-class and trade union culture. His maternal grandfather was a moulder, a union militant who became secretary of the Leeds moulders’ union, and, according to his relatives, a man of strong working-class principles. Harding recounts that when the workers at his Mum’s mill were refused a wage increase, she discussed the situation with her father. ‘Well Emma’, he said, ‘you will have to stop shop.’ ‘How can I do that?’ ‘Kick belt off pulley’, he told her. ‘Mum went to work the following day’, Harding writes, ‘and got the girls again to put in the request and put a deadline time for the answer. The time arrived and there was no reply from the management. I have the picture of her walking down the weaving shed in her long black dress and white apron with head held high. After kicking off the belt she walked back to her looms. How long it took I don’t know, but the end result was they won their increase.’ Another relative, a great uncle, joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) while working in Canada.With that background, it is no wonder that when Norman Harding went to work in the clothing industry he soon became an active and militant trade unionist. He naturally was enthused by Labour’s coming to power in the 1945 election, and he was further radicalised by his experience as a national serviceman in postwar Germany where he witnessed the high- and low-level corruption in the occupation army, and made friends with Germans despite the ban on ‘fraternisation’.
After national service, Harding returned to his job in the Leeds clothing industry where the Communist Party had a strong presence. Right up to 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, the Communist Party could muster 30 delegates, comprising members and supporters from the garment workers’ union, to the Leeds Trades Union Council. He says he was considered by the Communist Party as a contact, although they never actually tried to recruit him directly; instead encouraging him to join the Labour Party – which he did. By 1952, he was a regular reader of Tribune, and was recognised as a Bevanite and an active worker. On one occasion, having taken a day off work to help in the election campaign of a Labour councillor, he found out that the successful councillor had not only taken no time off himself but had even worked overtime during the campaign. Disgusted at such selfishness, Harding dropped out of activity, although retaining his membership of the Labour Party.
However, his activities and militant approach had come to the attention of the very active Leeds branch of the Trotskyist Healy Club, the former minority in the Revolutionary Communist Party that had entered the Labour Party and was publishing Socialist Outlook. Harding joined the Club in the early summer of 1954, and he remained in the Club, which became the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party till its implosion and the expulsion of its leader Gerry Healy in 1985.
Harding’s over 30 years of activity in this movement can be divided into two periods. The first was his time as a local activist in Leeds until the mid-1960s, and then 20 years as a full-time worker at the Centre in London.
The first thing that has to be said about the Healy organisation is that it expected total commitment from its members – as this reviewer can confirm from his own experience. When you joined, you committed your whole life to the movement. Your personal life, family commitment, personal relations were entirely subordinate to the needs of the movement. Harding accepted this and a punishing round of activity – in the Labour Party, in his union, selling papers, attending branch meetings, aggregates and conferences, chasing up contacts, etc. – on top of working full-time in a factory. He rarely came home straight from work. On occasions, he did not see his parents for weeks even though they lived in the same house. They used to leave notes for each other.
This dedication is of course admirable. A movement that aims to change the world, that aims to overthrow global capitalism through bloody struggles and civil wars and revolutions, whose members must face the prospect of imprisonment and torture at the hands of its enemies, needs that kind of commitment. The revolution is not for wimps. Harding and all of us in the movement tried to become like the hard steel-like Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. We believed the terminal crisis of capitalism had arrived, and that we would soon be in the midst of revolution and civil war. But in the mid-1950s when Harding joined, and during most of his membership, Britain and the rest of the capitalist world was in the early years of the prolonged postwar boom, the longest period of full employment and rising living standards capitalism had so far enjoyed. And for years the Healy Club and its later incarnations, the Socialist Labour League and the Workers Revolutionary Party, denied reality, and year after year insisted crisis and revolutionary situations were imminent. There was no time to lose if the revolutionary party was to be built up in time to lead the masses. This was the justification for the hyper-activity that burnt out many militants over the years. Harding must have been dedicated indeed to have soldiered on for so long, especially during the 20 years as a full-time worker at the Centre subject to the unbelievably despotic and manic regime he describes in the latter part of his autobiography.
The general economic and political situation was totally unfavourable to the development of any revolutionary working-class current. Full employment and the general improvement in living standards depoliticised large layers of the working class. Those who were at all politically aware generally accepted the parliamentary and reformist politics of the Labour Party. The revolutionary sloganising, ultra-leftism and sectarianism of the Healy current (as well as of the other Trotskyist organisations) further marginalised the Trotskyists. In addition, the Communist Party with its larger resources and benefiting from its association with the Soviet Union, the land of ‘actually existing socialism’ was, until the Twentieth Congress revelations and the Hungarian uprising, a far greater pole of attraction for socialistically-inclined workers. And, ironically, the reformist and ‘opportunist’ language of the Communist Party, which the Trotskyists so abhorred, was more acceptable to these essentially reformist workers than the ultra-leftism of the Trotskyists. Norman Harding very succinctly expressed the politics of the group he joined, writing: ‘I constantly supported the Russian Revolution and the need to overthrow capitalism and not try to reform it.’ (p. 56) But the trouble was that the majority of workers still believed it was possible to improve their conditions within capitalism, that is, ‘to reform it’.
In fact, despite and in contradiction to their essentially sectarian orientation, Harding and his comrades did engage very effectively in a number of working-class struggles for immediate improvements. Harding was active in the tenants’ movement, campaigning for lower rents and better housing, and he became secretary of the Leeds Tenants’ Association. He is rightly very proud of the part he and his comrades in the Socialist Labour League played in helping organise the tenants in slums in Loscoe, a mining village near Leeds, in a successful campaign to have them demolished and the tenants rehoused. The Leeds branch included a number of talented and hard-working comrades. Harding mentions John and Mary Archer, Jack and Celia Gale, Paula and Ray Bradbury, Lance Lake, among others.
An example of their drive and initiative is given by Harding:
We were having a branch meeting one Sunday morning in 1966 when Jack Gale raised that he had read a letter in the Saturday issue of the Yorkshire Evening Post from a housewife on an estate in Normanton complaining about the Normanton Council increasing the rent. The letter told us that the protest was already under way and urged others on the estate to support them by refusing to pay their rent. The branch decided that immediately the meeting finished I should go to Normanton, find this woman and then play it by ear … I introduced myself as secretary of the Leeds Tenants’ Association. (pp. 158–9)
Within days a tenants’ association had been formed, a mass meeting of over 1,000 organised and a mass picket staged outside the Normanton Town hall while the Town Council was in session. The Socialist Labour League and the Young Socialists mobilised their members to sell the Newsletter. This was a mining area and committee members of the local National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) were on the Tenants’ Committee, and the NUM branches prepared for industrial action to back the tenants’ campaign. The threat of strike action by the miners resolved the issue. The Council caved in. The rent increase was ended, and all those that had paid the increase got a refund. As Harding explained: ‘A victory and what a victory!’
Harding’s account shows that there were two aspects to the Socialist Labour League’s politics. One aspect was ultra-leftism and frenetic ‘party building’ flowing from a completely erroneous analysis of the objective situation as one of imminent or actual collapse of capitalism and a revolutionary situation. The other was a pragmatic adaptation to reality and the actual level of working-class consciousness and militancy which was one of willingness to struggle for immediate demands on the housing and wages front, and of continued support for a reformist Labour Party. The comrades in the Leeds branch and other areas, who were workers and immersed in the organised labour movement, spontaneously and correctly adapted to and participated in the actual movements going on – when they were left alone by the Centre! Harding remarks: ‘Looking back on it, we all acted in quite the opposite way to what I suspect would have happened had we been in London. The success of the campaign was not going to be judged on how many signed our membership forms.’ (p. 162) In fact, the Centre’s only intervention was not helpful. When London heard of the proposed mass meeting, they instructed the local comrades to get Dave Ashby, the National Secretary of the Young Socialists, who had no connection whatever with the locality or the tenants, on to the platform. Harding comments:
As I remember no one in Leeds had intended to try and do this. I remember feeling uneasy when I made the suggestion that Dave should be invited to speak, but I did loyally carry out the instruction. It was agreed. Looking back, it was a mistake because it gave the right wing and the Communist Party the one and only opening to try and create an atmosphere of mistrust among a few of the activists, although not enough to sabotage the public meeting. (p. 161)
Harding records many other examples of his organisation’s involvement and help to industrial struggles. But this coexisted uneasily side by side with sectarianism and unreality. Harding had not been long in the group when he attended a meeting of the Leeds Trades Council at which a discussion was going on about a campaign on wages launched by the electricians’ union (ETU) when John Archer put his hand up to speak. Harding writes. ‘Our late comrade John Walls whispered. “Oh dear …”’ John Archer then proceeded to give the delegates of the Leeds Trades Council a lecture on Pabloism. Harding was horrified and embarrassed. At the next group meeting, Harding explained why he thought Archer had been wrong to make the contribution he had. He said he was due to move a resolution from his own union branch on the struggle on the docks at the next meetings of the Trades Council and of the Leeds City Labour Party and suggested Archer should not make a contribution on his resolution at either meeting. Harding writes: ‘At the end of the meeting John left more quickly than usual and the other comrades explained to me that no one had ever dared speak to John Archer in such terms before. Apparently in my innocence I had offended him and damaged his ego.’(p. 61) This incident illustrates the other-worldliness and sectarianism that often afflicted even the best of the Healyites. They spent more time and energy attacking other currents close to them over esoteric theoretical disputes completely foreign to the concerns of the workers they were addressing than in dealing with the issues that really engaged them.
Another example cited by Harding, which showed the inability of the Healyites to work together with others on common issues, was the SLL’s participation in an international demonstration in Liege (Belgium) in 1966 opposing the Vietnam war. It was attended by over 2,000 French, Belgium, British and others. The SLL contingent insisted in unfurling a banner celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, knowing that this would divide the demonstrators. Harding writes: ‘This was the first time that I had experienced this kind of disagreement. It appeared to be one of personalities rather than a difference of opinion. In later years I was to understand that Healy was scared of not being in control.’ (p. 137) In fact, throughout the anti-Vietnam war campaigns the SLL refused to engage in any meaningful joint activity with other organisations variously described as ‘petit-bourgeois’, ‘Stalinist’ or ‘opportunist’.As time went on, the sectarianism and Healy’s paranoia became even more extreme. Harding writes:
The miners’ strike of 1984–85 raised questions in the minds of many comrades … Healy did everything in his power to stop the WRP from getting involved with the mass rank-and-file movement that was developing in support of the miners’ strike. He told the members that we had to build our own support groups in mining villages in opposition to the community support groups that he described as middle-class, opportunist and anti-revolutionary. At the same time he pronounced that if the miners were defeated then the way would be opened for fascism. (p. 236)
Harding and some Young Socialists got involved with members of a women’s support group in the Kent coalfield and provided them with a van to take them to the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market where they had contacts among the market workers who loaded the van with food. Harding continues:
The YS members and I were delighted at being able to show our solidarity with the miners in such a way. Arriving back at Clapham we put Healy in the picture. He was furious and sent for Torrance. He ranted on that Covent Garden was ours (a fantasy) and if anyone was going to collect from Covent Garden then it would be the WRP, and we would take it to the miners. When Torrance came in she asked why nothing had been done with regard to setting up a branch of the YS … The YS leaders and I were accused of abandoning our responsibilities as ‘Revolutionary Leaders’. The YS members were dismissed and told to return to the YS office and get on with their work. As for me, he held me responsible for misdirecting these young comrades into middle-class activity. I was sent up to the canteen to write a statement explaining why I had succumbed to bourgeois ideology. I had a good idea of what words he wanted to read, so I did not bother too much. (p. 237) [!!!!!]
I have added the exclamation marks because this incident is so unbelievable. It gives a glimpse into a weird fantasy world. Working with miners’ wives to support a strike is ‘succumbing to bourgeois ideology’! Covent Garden ‘is ours’ – presumably because we have sold a dozen copies of News Line! Even more unbelievable is that a comrade of, by then, 30 years’ standing is asked to write a confession like a naughty schoolboy or errant novice in a catholic seminary – and does it!
The picture Harding paints of the internal regime of the SLL/WRP is horrific. I would not believe it if I had not personally witnessed the beginnings of this degeneration up till 1960 when I left the SLL. But if by then the cultism was already bad enough – witness the treatment of people like Ken Coates, John Daniels and Peter Fryer, and the insistence that I formally renounce any reservations, present or future, about the group’s policies before being re-admitted – it had become a thousand times worse during Harding’s time.It was in the mid-1960s that Harding was plucked by Healy from his involvement in the local working-class movement to work full-time in London in the party’s print shop. He comments that he was not cut out for this work:
Machines and I don’t get on well together. But it was pointed out to me that it was my ‘revolutionary duty’ to overcome this. While I was very proud to work full-time for the party it was obviously a great mistake for me to go. It is now very clear that Healy just wanted me out of the area, to train me as one of his circle where he would have control of me. (p. 158)
The regime at the Centre, which Harding now experienced, bore no resemblance to a democratic, egalitarian enterprise where decisions were arrived at after open debate and mutual consultation and people worked together in a spirit of revolutionary camaraderie. Rather it was a regime run autocratically by a petty dictator supported by a clique of privileged bureaucrats.
The fountainhead of the corruption was Healy. Not only did he act autocratically on political matters, suppressing dissent by bureaucratic means, slandering opponents and expulsions – a miniature Stalin – he abused his position as leader for personal gratification. We are talking here not only of the now well-publicised sexual abuse of female comrades.He acted almost as a feudal lord. Examples abound in Harding’s memoirs. There was the saga of Healy’s kettle. His personal assistant Aileen Jennings had asked Harding and another comrade to take a vanload of rubbish to the dump. This included an old kettle that was faulty. On their return Harding and his comrade were told that Healy was in a vicious temper because she had thrown it out. He wanted it back so that it could be repaired. They knew what could develop when he was in one of these tempers, so they went back to the dump and waded up to their shins in rubbish until they finally found the kettle. ‘A few days later Aileen bought a new kettle anyway.’ (p. 219) On another occasion, Harding was woken up at four o’clock in the morning by one of the printshop guards. ‘Gerry wants some Perrier water. What can we do?’ Aileen had rung. If none was available, then Harding had to get some transport, find an open-all-night shop and bring it to Healy’s flat.
Harding describes a regime of physical assaults and fear and feudal subservience:
Whenever things did not appear as Healy thought they should, it would put him into a complete panic and rage. On one of these occasions Comrade Dot [Gibson] was on the receiving end …He kicked her so viciously on her legs that ulcers developed on her shins. I had to take her to hospital to receive treatment over a period of weeks. Dot insisted – and others, including me, agreed – that Healy should not be told of the damage he had done because it would upset him. He had to be protected from this kind of pressure. We had to sneak out secretly to make our trips to the hospital. On another occasion he caused permanent damage when he struck Aileen over the back with a chair. He constantly physically abused comrades … (pp. 219–20)
In addition to Healy’s personal dictatorship, the internal regime was full of class or caste distinctions. The theatrical coterie of the Redgraves and others received privileged treatment both politically and personally. Harding writes: ‘When they were recruited Corin and Vanessa Redgrave and Alex Mitchell were immediately put on the Central and Political Committees. This put them into a position of leadership.’ On one occasion, when Vanessa drove her car into a comrade’s parked moped the repairs to Vanessa’s car were paid for by the party, while the other comrade had to pay for her own repairs. On another occasion when Harding had an accident with one of the party’s vehicles, the cost of the repairs was stopped out of his ‘wages’. Shortly afterwards, Vanessa Redgrave had an accident in her car. Healy solicitously asked her how she was and told her that of course the party would pay for the damage. Obviously one standard for the élite, another for the rank and file. This was further demonstrated when there was a shortage of food in the canteen. The workers in the print shop joined the queue, but were then told that as there might not be enough food to go round they would have to wait until the editorial board members had been served, and if there was any left then they could have some. When they later complained, they were told that some of the newer members on the paper were not fully committed so they had to be treated differently from the committed members. In fact, it is clear from Harding’s comments that it was precisely how he himself rationalised his acceptance of this cosseting of the middle-class recruits and the theatrical coterie.
Harding had a low opinion of the Redgraves. He opines that ‘it seems that the only qualification [for Healy putting them on the Political Committee and in positions of leadership] was that Volume 38 of Lenin’s Collected Works had to fit under their armpits’. He relates an amusing example of Corin Redgrave’s naivety. Canvassing during an election campaign, Corin concluded a couple he had called on ‘were keen and ready to join’. He sent Harding to recruit them:
‘Come in, brother’, they said. ‘I understand that you both want to take part in the struggle for socialism’, I said. The young woman replied: ‘The only place we will find peace and socialism is in the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ‘Hallelujah’, said the couple in unison. They were both Plymouth Brethren! ‘Did you recruit them?’, asked Corin. ‘No’, I replied, ‘But they were keen! They called me brother. I spoke to them for about 10 minutes.’
According to Harding, Vanessa was even worse. Once when canvassing an estate with her, a young woman came to the door, babe in arms, with two more youngsters clinging to her skirts, obviously a woman with a lot of pressure on her. She told them she was having problems with the council regarding repairs and rent. Harding continues:
I asked her if there was a tenants’ organisation on the estate that she could approach for advice and help. At this point Vanessa pushed past me, and started to tell her about the need to change the system. The only way to solve her problems, said Vanessa, was to demand a general strike, and so on. Then out came the membership application form. The young mother was left with ‘Vote for the WRP!’ ringing in her ears … VR told me she severely disagreed with my initial approach and that she was going to raise it at the report-back meeting as an example of how important it was to fight against social democracy. That evening I received a great deal of verbal abuse from Healy, Mike Banda, Mitchell and Co.
Harding continues. ‘The reason why I think it is important to describe the relationship between the WRP’s members and the Redgraves is because it goes a long way in exposing the corrupt and reactionary relationship between the party and this layer of the “leadership”, on a day-to-day basis.’ (pp. 213–14). Harding writes: ‘I felt that none of them could lead a pussycat across a country lane.’ (p. 211)
The whole bizarre set-up imploded in 1985 when Aileen Jennings finally exposed Healy’s sexual abuse of women comrades, and when the membership, including Norman Harding, finally turned against Healy and expelled him. But it was not only Healy’s personal abuse that motivated the revolt. It was also a rejection of the corrupt politics as the membership became aware of them; the corrupt relationship with Third World dictators under the guise of ‘solidarity with the colonial masses’, for example, the fingering of Iraqi communists and Libyan oppositionists to Saddam Hussein’s and Colonel Gaddafi’s police in return for the funding of the WRP with Arab money.Harding’s account is very much a worm’s eye view – a very vivid personal account of how an active and dedicated member of a Trotskyist organisation in Britain saw things; his experiences and personal contribution. That is its strength, but also its weakness. There is no overall view of the general situation within which his organisation and, indeed, the Trotskyist movement as a whole operated; no assessment of Trotskyism’s influence or lack of it in the labour movement as a whole. One would never know from Harding’s memoirs that the organisation he belonged to was only one of several Trotskyist currents. There is no explanation of what divided Healy’s organisation and its ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’ from the other Fourth Internationalist currents and the other currents and organisations that claimed to be Trotskyist both in Britain and internationally. Of course Harding does not claim to be writing a history of Trotskyism, but only his personal memoirs. But some assessment, however sketchy, of how his activities and those of Healy’s organisation fitted into the overall picture would have been useful.
Missing from Harding’s memoirs is any account of the numerous expulsions and splits that occurred during his membership. The expulsions and exits of Ken Coates, John Daniels, Peter Fryer and Peter Cadogan in 1959–60, the split-off of Brian Behan’s ‘open party faction’, the split with Alan Thornett and the Workers Socialist League to whom Healy lost the bulk of his industrial worker membership. The latter split took place when Harding was working at the Centre.
Harding’s revelations cannot be dismissed as just the outpourings of a bitter disgruntled ex-Trotskyist getting things off his chest. Harding makes it clear, as the title of his book indicates, that he remains a socialist. His experiences of the degeneration of the organisation he joined have not dimmed his vision of a future socialist society. However incredible they are, his revelations only confirm the evidence already in the open. Harding was one of many dedicated socialists whose contribution to the cause was sabotaged, and whose undoubted talent and energies were wasted.
In his summing up, Harding writes:
If some get a chance to read this book and by so doing recognise the danger of putting too much trust in self-appointed leaders, it will give me a great deal of pleasure. My life has shown the dangers of putting too much trust in organisations which claim to be the only leadership that will free the masses … We have to move on from this kind of ‘vanguardism’.
The question remains. How could a movement which attracted people dedicated to creating a more just and happier society develop into this weird cult? Like many of us who went through the same experiences, Harding struggled to answer this question. His conclusion is that ‘the principle of building an élite leadership “for” (rather than “of”) the working class – and the corruption and abuse for which that concept provided fertile ground – was the primary cause of the downfall of the WRP’. It is a fact that practically all the far-left groups whose ideology had its roots in the Leninist concept of the élite revolutionary party shared the dogmatism, undemocratic internal regimes, lack of contact with the real world that plagued Healy’s organisation. However none – at least in Britain and to my knowledge – was as bad as Healy’s.
Norman Harding’s memoirs, as well as being the account of the life of a dedicated socialist, provide a valuable addition to our knowledge of the history of movements trying to achieve a better society.
Harry Ratner
************
Ian Birchall
Speak One More Time
(2005)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 9 No. 1, 2005.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Jim Higgins
Speak One More Time: Selected Writings
Socialist Platform, London 2005, pp. 191, £9.50
Speak One More Time: Selected Writings
Socialist Platform, London 2005, pp. 191, £9.50
JIM Higgins (1931–2002) joined the Communist Party as a teenager, and left over Hungary. After a brief spell in the Socialist Labour League, he joined Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review Group in 1959. He was a leading member of the International Socialists throughout the 1960s, and became full-time National Secretary in 1972. Some 18 months later he was removed from his post, and after over two years of internal conflict he and a group of around 150 members were expelled in December 1975; they subsequently formed the short-lived Workers League.
I first met Jim in 1963. I was a postgraduate student, just discovering the microscopic world of the revolutionary left. Jim was a genuine worker intellectual; he had left school at 15, and all his subsequent education had been obtained through voracious reading and experience in left-wing organisations. Yet he had a breadth of knowledge that contrasted sharply with the narrow specialisation I had so often encountered in the academic world. (Such worker intellectuals were even then a rarity; a generation later and it is inconceivable that someone like Jim would not have gone to university. But perhaps the current Labour onslaught on higher education will yet give us another wave of worker intellectuals.)The other striking thing about Jim was his monumental irreverence. Nobody, in his organisation or in the socialist pantheon, was immune from criticism and indeed mockery. There is a marvellous book review (unfortunately not collected here, but available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins) called Is Almond a Nut?, in which Jim takes on, without any deference whatsoever, the distinguished political scientist Gabriel Almond, whose sub-Freudian analysis argued that Communists were redirecting hostility to their parents into ‘safer’ channels. Jim responds: ‘Now big though my father is, I have never considered him to be in the same class for violence as a capitalist state (not even a small one) and for a soft option I will take on my old Dad any day.’
Jim’s irreverence fitted well with the style of the International Socialists at this time. We were a tiny, marginal group and we knew it – in contrast to the SLL, who were a tiny marginal group who thought they were the vanguard of the proletariat. Whereas Tony Cliff’s humour always had a direct political purpose, Jim’s was generally politically incorrect and often straightforwardly vulgar. To some of the more solemn currents of the left, his attitude might appear frivolous. But Jim knew that, after the Holocaust and Hiroshima, you could either laugh or scream – and that those who laughed tended to keep on fighting longer.
In 1972, Jim was persuaded by Cliff to become National Secretary. He replaced Duncan Hallas, one of the finest socialist propagandists of his generation, but not a particularly good organiser. IS was growing rapidly, but was still rather chaotically organised. Jim’s brief was to introduce some order. Cliff’s talent was to grasp new tendencies, to focus attention on the priorities of the organisation. He needed someone to act as long-stop (if anyone understands this antiquated cricketing metaphor), someone to preserve balance, to maintain an organisational routine and pick up the tasks which were not priorities but were still essential.
It might just have worked. But it didn’t. Jim ran the organisation as he would have run a trade-union office. He was hard-working and dedicated, and issued a stream of branch circulars, all carefully numbered for reference. But he treated it as an office job, rarely travelling out of London. Cliff, meanwhile, toured the country tirelessly, enthused comrades, argued with them, and spent hundreds of hours on the telephone, persuading – and listening. As Roger Protz remarked to me, before the argument became hopelessly polarised, the National Secretary should be a ‘road job’ and not an office job.
These were exciting times. The year of 1972 had seen the victory at Saltley Gates and the government climb-down over the Pentonville Five. Just ahead was the February 1974 election, when a strike brought down an elected government. Cliff believed Jim’s formalism had become an obstacle, and arranged to have him removed.
Not surprisingly, Jim was extremely bitter. He had given up a job as a skilled Post Office engineer, with associated trade-union positions, in order to take a lower wage and work in a rather squalid office. In his resignation speech at the September 1973 National Committee, Jim recounted how he had discussed his doubts about taking the job with Cliff, and Cliff, in the biblical style he sometimes adopted, had responded: ‘You must measure your cloth three times.’ ‘And so I did’, said Jim, ‘but I forgot to measure the fucking tailor.’
Jim briefly formed an alliance with Duncan Hallas, who shared some of his concerns about Cliff’s current line. But Duncan was a pragmatist, and when the leadership made certain adjustments to criticism, he opted to go over to Cliff. For Jim, this seemed like a second betrayal, and bitterness was unassuaged. As he points out, he had been ‘quite fond of Cliff’. This is an understatement. Jim had been close to Cliff personally, as well as greatly admiring his theoretical achievement. If many of his writings from 1974 onwards, collected in this volume, display a tone not dissimilar to that of a divorced spouse, that reflects the enormous disappointment Jim suffered at this time.
I have written before about the 1973–75 split (see my review of Jim’s book More Years for the Locust in Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no. 1 [1998]) and I don’t want to repeat myself. Factional disputes of this sort can be highly destructive. After the split, I didn’t speak to Jim for over 20 years. Latterly he would occasionally telephone me about historical questions, and while he continued to abuse me roundly in print, in person he was his old jovial self. When Duncan Hallas died, he phoned me twice to discuss the obituary he was writing for the Guardian. He was clearly deeply moved by Duncan’s death; perhaps at last the bitterness was beginning to fade. But it also evoked thoughts of his own mortality – ‘falling off my perch’ as he put it. Within a few weeks he too was dead.
Much of what Jim continued to write about Cliff and the SWP (some of which is collected in this volume) was so marked by that bitterness that it failed to offer what Jim aspired to – a serious critique of his old organisation. John Palmer writes of Jim’s hatred of ‘sectarian Talmudists and timeservers’. Often Jim implies that all those who remained with the IS/SWP fall into this category. Those of us who decided, on balance, to stay with Cliff as the best option going, and who have subsequently made our modest contribution to the socialist cause within this framework, can hardly accept this.
The articles in this slender volume show a powerful brain and a wonderful sense of humour. It is hard to dislike anyone who describes debating with Sean Matgamna as like ‘arguing with warm jelly’. (On a good day Matgamna himself might smile.) There is a wealth of information and entertainment, but two main themes predominate: Trotskyism and trade unionism. On the former, Jim’s position can be summed up as a great, if not uncritical, admiration for Trotsky, combined with a deep contempt for much of what has passed as Trotskyism over the last 60 years. His essay Let Us Praise Leon Trotsky, published in International Socialism at the time of the dispute with Cliff, was written as a covert polemic against what Jim saw as Cliff’s preoccupation with Lenin. It stands as a good introduction to one of the century’s great revolutionaries. In another article, Jim describes the thrill of discovering Trotsky during the crisis of the British Communist Party in 1956, something that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.
The absurdities – and worse – of self-styled Trotskyists are also well represented. The collection opens with a brilliant piece from 1964, Weekend with the Lumpentrots, depicting in Jim’s inimitable style a Young Socialist weekend school disrupted by the sectarian antics of Keep Left. It is hilariously funny – but also rather sad; one wonders if there were any young people for whom this occasion was their first (and if so almost certainly their last) encounter with the revolutionary left. His brief piece on Gerry Healy for the Spectator is quite appropriately savage.
Ten Years for the Locust, his account of the early years of British Trotskyism, is a much more serious piece of work. For those of us who encountered it in the early 1960s, it opened up an area of history that was almost completely unknown, and did so with a judicious balance of respect and criticism. If it has now been superseded by the more scholarly studies of Bornstein and Richardson, it remains a pioneering contribution.
The collection contains several substantial essays on the history of the labour movement, from the foundation of the Communist Party to the Minority Movement. There is a carefully balanced piece on the success and failure of the IWW, and another about breakaway trade unions. The latter was written in response to the Pilkington Glass strike of April 1970, following which workers, disgusted at the undemocratic and ineffective General and Municipal Workers Union, set up a short-lived breakaway. These pieces appeared in International Socialism in the years after 1968, and were directed at a largely new membership who often knew more about Russia, France or Cuba than the labour movement of their own country. They were a valuable contribution to the education of a new generation, and it is good to have them in print again. In particular, Jim repeatedly stresses the need for patience, an important corrective as the exaggerated hopes of 1968 began to fade. Yet if patience is certainly a revolutionary virtue, so is the ability to seize the time.
Personally, I found the second part of the book, containing articles written after Jim’s departure from the International Socialists, less satisfying than the first. As an SWP member I am doubtless prejudiced, but while revolutionaries should always welcome serious and well-founded criticism, I found that all too often the polemic was not sufficiently focused. One of the last pieces Jim wrote for Socialist Worker before his expulsion was an obituary of James P. Cannon (included in this collection), entitled Magnificent Disciple Who Lost His Way. I don’t know if the title was Jim’s own, but it would make a good summing-up of Jim’s own career.
Certainly Jim’s wit was unimpaired. There is a little piece on Glasgow from the Spectator which will amuse many (if they are not Glaswegians). If it appeared in the Spectator today, poor old Boris Johnson would be sent scurrying over the border to apologise. Fortunately even Jim could not find any grounds on which the current state of Glasgow could be blamed on Tony Cliff. There is also a thoughtful and balanced piece entitled Trotskyism in the USA.
But as soon as Jim approaches his old organisation, the heart seems to dominate over the head. At one point, he states that what Tony Cliff thinks is ‘a matter of supreme indifference to me’. It is of course Jim’s absolute right to feel thus, but it does somewhat undermine his status as a commentator on the SWP’s politics. He does not appear to have studied the later writings of Tony Cliff or of other SWP members, nor to have given any close attention to the party’s activities.
The Anti-Nazi League, which undoubtedly had a real impact in blocking the rise of the far right in Britain, is dismissed as the SWP moving ‘from one sensation to another’. Jim attributes to Cliff the view that there are universal principles of Leninist organisation, whereas the whole of Cliff’s four-volume study of Lenin is devoted to the destruction of the myth of the immutable ‘Leninist Party’, and the exposition of the view that Lenin constantly adapted his organisational views to meet the political needs of particular situations. He generously commends the work of Revolutionary History, yet states that this work is ‘anathema to the confirmed sect-dweller’, carefully ignoring the contribution to Revolutionary History made by ‘sect-dwellers’ from the SWP and elsewhere.
Jim is absolutely right to insist that the organised labour movement is a central concern for revolutionaries, and that all socialists must encourage systematic work within the trade union apparatus. But there is a failure to acknowledge the massive changes that have taken place in the British trade-union movement. In the 1974 IS internal document reproduced here, Jim stresses the ‘main emphasis on building among manual workers’. Yet the notion of ‘manual worker’ was already problematic – is a nurse a manual worker? And over the coming decades the traditional areas of manual employment – above all mining – were to be seriously reduced. In Jim’s repeated reassertions of the centrality of the working class, there is no recognition of these changes – or of the work done by SWP writers like Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos in analysing them.
Cliff is belaboured for his alleged assertion that ‘mature shop stewards and lay trade union officials were bent’. (I have never found this claim in Cliff’s writings, and would be grateful to any reader who can give me chapter and verse.) Yet the growth of full-time convenors, etc., in the 1970s was a shift which required serious analysis. In an article urging us to move on from Leninism, Jim calls for ‘new strategies and perspectives’. But he gives us no clue what these are to be.
One article I had not seen before is an internal document from the Workers League in 1977. Jim is replying to four comrades, including Paul Mackney (now General Secretary of NATFHE), who were in favour of merger with the International Marxist Group. I have not seen the document to which Jim is replying, so it is hard to judge the debate fully. But Jim expands on his view that the Trotskyist tradition is ‘bankrupt’, and defends his view of a rank-and-file movement.
The development of rank-and-file groups under the influence of the IS was an interesting development in the 1970s. While there was a model in the 1920s Minority Movement, the whole thing was an experiment, and mistakes were undoubtedly made. In any case, it was soon brought to an end by the downturn in struggle in the late 1970s. Jim accuses the IMG of having no concept of rank-and-file work because they formed an explicitly ‘socialist’ teachers’ organisation. Jim’s claim is that revolutionaries could not directly address the mass of workers with revolutionary ideas, and must find a trade-union intermediary. How the trade-union struggle would spill over into socialism was left rather vague. Now Jim’s ideas are in many ways similar to Cliff’s at the time. But given the particular ideological role of education, his objections seem a little strange. Was he really suggesting that revolutionaries should try to work with teachers who favoured expulsions, taught the glories of the British Empire – but vigorously supported higher pay for themselves?
I will not conclude by praising Jim. Perhaps his old comrade Fred the Communist-spiritualist was right (see Why Did You Join the Party?) and there is an afterlife; if so, I can imagine Jim’s raucous contempt for any attempt to flatter him beyond the grave. If 1975 came round again, I would again support Jim’s expulsion. But Jim was a part of the history – often trivial but sometimes inspiring – of the revolutionary left in the later twentieth century, and he deserves to be remembered. Those who produced this little book have done him – and us – a service.
Ted Crawford adds:
It is, I fear, not only Jim Higgins who too much remembers past faction fights – so does our reviewer Ian Birchall. Not that Ian says anything that is not truthful – he is far too honest a scholar to indulge in anything more than a little suppressio veri with perhaps a tiny hint of suggestio falsi. But it would be quite untrue to say that Jim was removed from the National Secretaryship of IS solely for administrative failings, indeed the way he worked according to Ian sounds remarkably like the role that Cliff requested of him – again according to Ian. No, there was a political struggle and it arose from difference of perspectives. In Jim’s rather exaggerated words: ‘Cliff thought the revolution would occur in three months times, and we thought six months.’ Or, more precisely, both factions had absurdly over-optimistic views of the future, but Cliff was more wildly wrong than Jim. Of course these political differences were reflected in sharp personal antagonisms, they always are in any political fight, but the politics there were – together with, as generally happens, very nasty tactics on the part of the leadership. A further complication was that the situation was an extremely difficult one, the broad political and economic situation was unprecedented (it always is), and the lines in the faction fight were very unclear and confused. What was true, and what decided me to back Jim, was that in the branches we were suddenly told about his removal, there was no advance warning, and the whole struggle had been carried out without any consultation with or knowledge of the membership. It had the air of a coup. (I make no claim to omniscience, for at the time I was as confused as anybody.)
And there was a ruthlessness in Cliff who plucked Jim out of an important trade union job, which might have been justified on the eve of revolution, but clearly not in the circumstances of 1972. True Jim must have shared Cliff’s perspective to a considerable extent to allow it to happen, but, not to beat about the bush, both were very wrong. And if you are a revolutionary you cannot afford to be wrong for, if things do get real, you will swiftly end up dead. We were light years away from a revolutionary situation, so, in Jim’s case, he was faced not with annihilation but with having to start again and make a living which cannot have been totally easy at his age, even for someone of his great talents. Of course, Cliff was never bothered by that vulgar necessity. In retrospect with all the advantages of 20/20 hindsight, we can see that we were coming to the end of the unprecedented 25-year boom, that the world economy for the next 20 years would grow far more slowly but would not suffer a disaster on the scale of the 1930s, and, in the case of Britain, we would see the defeat and consequent emasculation of the organised working class. Apart from the defeat of the class, I remember all the economics of this being accurately foreseen by Michael Kidron at a meeting in Leeds in 1974 or 1975, but this does not seem to have been taken on board by the IS/SWP leadership.So I am sorry that Ian found the second half of the book bitter and one-sided whenever it talked of the SWP. In fact in view of what had happened, I think there was extraordinarily little bitterness, entertaining abuse yes, but that was Higgins. But alas, the SWP like every other little tendency prefers not to go over its own history, above all where this contains possibly disgraceful or even stupid elements. (Yes Ian, exactly the same is true of Lutte Ouvrière, for the only people who cannot have a stall at their Fête are the GET or Groupe d’étude trotskyste of Richard Moyon.) Higgins was a dangerous polemicist to have around, but the response to him was of course silence from the SWP publications. But a party is not built by shouting ‘Rah! Rah! We are the Champions!’, and, Ian, no party or group is spotless and without stain. Proud vaunts about the Anti-Nazi League (was there really a threat of Nazism in this country?) count for much less if we remember how it was comrades from the Militant (who later left it) who got the Anti-Poll Tax campaign moving, a real mass movement far more proletarian and less moralistic than the ANL, and that the SWP, despite Ian’s claims, did not at that point have ‘the ability to seize the time’. They followed rather than led that movement, and I emphasise it was a Movement and did not belong to any little sect. The same thing happened at the time of the miners’ strike when the SWP started off on it own sectarian way until jolted into reality – to its credit maybe – but it does not say much for its so-called ‘leadership’.
Arguments in favour of the SWP, or any other tendency on the Trotskyist left, would be far more persuasive if there was a frank admission and discussion of past mistakes, both recent and long ago, with a sharp look at how we could all learn from them. It might even educate younger comrades. Of course, this silly triumphalism is not unique to the SWP, but it is more obvious here as it is the largest tendency on this tight little island. As an example, the little Socialist Appeal Group with a membership of less than 100 boring old codgers in this country has far more people in the Third World than anyone else, and vastly more than the SWP affiliates of the IST. But this is never mentioned before the membership of any rival groups – Pas devant les domestiques! – any more than Grant and Woods explain to their people in Venezuela that they are irrelevant in Britain compared to the SWP. Triumphalism triumphs.
How we miss Jim, who could spot a phoney a mile off, who was not bound by orthodoxy, but whose eye was always on the ball of working-class emancipation. I am delighted if SWPers will learn something from this little book, even if it is something as basic and commonsensical as the idea of transitional politics which runs through so many of these articles.
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Ian Birchall
Lenin
(2005)
From Revolutionary History, Vol. 9 No. 1, 2005.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Jean-Jacques Marie
Lénine
Balland, Paris 2004, pp. 504, Є25
TO write the biography of Lenin today is no easy task. To the intrinsic difficulties of the task are added the problems of the post-Stalinist era, in which Lenin has been abandoned by most of his erstwhile friends, but become a chosen target for those who wish to use the collapse of Stalinism to vilify the whole revolutionary tradition.Lénine
Balland, Paris 2004, pp. 504, Є25
Jean-Jacques Marie is well placed to take on the task. Author of a monumental study of Stalin (reviewed in Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no. 3), he is an established scholar of Russian history and a long-standing activist in the Trotskyist movement. His new study of Lenin offers a wealth of information that will be of interest to all those concerned to study the strengths and weaknesses of Bolshevism free from the myths which have so often distorted it. Yet he has only been partially successful.
The main attraction of biography for readers is the way that it studies the interplay of public and private. But there is little private here – Lenin was a peculiarly single-minded individual, lacking the broad cultural perspectives to be found in the writings of Marx, Engels or Trotsky. Many years ago, Tamara Deutscher published a little book (Not by Politics Alone, Allen & Unwin, 1973) subtitled The Other Lenin. Unfortunately the book revealed quite clearly that there was no other Lenin. The revolution was his life. As Marie points out, he had comrades, but not friends. (p. 33)
The brief affair with Inessa Armand is related, though it seems to have been singularly uneventful. Politics intervened here, tragically. When she was taken ill in 1920, Lenin had her sent off to a sanatorium in an area which his officials assured him was safe. In fact cholera was rampant, and poor Armand died of her cure. (pp. 342–3) Doubtless this reinforced Lenin in his zeal against ‘Communist lying’ which preoccupied his last years. Lenin was apparently also capable of mildly sexist mother-in-law jokes: ‘The worst punishment for a bigamist is having two mothers-in-law.’ (p. 58)
Most interestingly, Marie claims that Lenin regretted the fact that he had no children (p. 15), and that in 1912 he attempted to adopt Zinoviev’s son. Zinoviev refused (p. 139). The child was later killed by Stalin; Marie speculates that if the boy had been Lenin’s adoptive son, Stalin might have spared him. But the point should be noted by those ultra-Bolsheviks who argue that committed revolutionaries should not be parents.
Lenin’s appreciation of aesthetic matters was also limited. In 1921, when he was, very reluctantly, having his portrait painted, Lenin commented that art had a certain propaganda value, but when that was exhausted, ‘we shall abolish it as useless’. (p. 388) Marie stresses that he was joking. But it does cast some doubt on the value of compiling collections such as Lenin on Literature and Art.
But Marie’s main aim is a more polemical one, to challenge the ‘dark or rosy legends’ (p. 13) that have accreted around Lenin’s name. Even before Stalinism turned Lenin into a quasi-religious figure whose thought could not be studied critically, Zinoviev had already begun to develop the Lenin cult.
Marie gives many examples of Stalinist falsification. Thus a Russian biography of Lenin tells us that at the January 1912 conference ‘the overwhelming majority of delegates were workers’. In fact there were just 14 full delegates, two of whom were agents provocateurs. (p. 133) Lenin is said to have always been suspicious of the police agent Malinowski, who was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Actually Lenin was rather more gullible than some of his comrades. (p. 134)
Trotskyist myths are also challenged. For obvious reasons, Trotskyists, on the defensive against Stalinism, have always played down to the point of non-existence the differences between Lenin and Trotsky after 1917. As Marie shows, there was in fact considerable friction between the two men.
But Marie also defends Lenin against the virulent attacks of such as Stéphane Courtois, Solzhenitsyn and Volkogonov who seek to make Lenin responsible for the worst excesses of Stalinism, and therefore to show the revolutionary project as evil and dangerous from its very inception. Thus he takes up, and decisively dismisses, the old, old story that Lenin was a paid agent of the Germans when he travelled in the sealed train. (pp. 175–8).
In particular, he challenges the way in which Lenin’s critics, using quotations out of context, seek to depict him as a bloodthirsty brute. As he has little difficulty in demonstrating, the worst brutality was on the side of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. In the bitter conditions of civil war, there was no alternative to the utmost ruthlessness.
But he also points out that Lenin was prone to the use of exaggerated language. Often his demands that people be shot were pure rhetoric; nobody in fact was executed. Lenin often faced a situation when all too many officials were inert or soft, and he was driven to the most frightful exhortations in order to try to get some action out of them. (pp. 269, 320)
A Lenin stripped of myths is clearly a much more interesting figure. After all, if he never made any mistakes, it’s not very easy to learn from him. (‘Don’t invade Poland’ is quite a good motto for any future revolutionary leader.) Rather than the evil conspirator or the serene ‘great leader’, Marie shows us a Lenin who, in 1917 and after, was often unsure of where he was going, and had constantly to revise his perspectives. Since this is the situation most of us are in most of the time, it makes it easier to see Lenin as a ‘companion in struggle’ rather than as a Great Teacher.
Thus Marie shows that Lenin briefly advocated an insurrection in August 1917, before recognising that it would have been a disastrous folly. (p. 192) Or later, although it was Lenin who persuaded the party to accept the New Economic Policy, he was actually a late convert to the idea – in fact, in Marie’s view he should have advocated it much earlier. (p. 373)
A comrade recently put to me the argument that although Lenin was adept at changing his mind when confronted with changed circumstances, often quite rightly, he failed to make any self-criticism of his earlier positions, and thus made it harder for future generations to learn from him. There is some truth in this, but I suspect the basic reason is that Lenin never dreamed that his writings would be turned into scripture by his self-appointed followers.
Marie reveals the contradictions in Lenin’s view of religion. Before 1905, he was particularly keen for the party to work among members of religious sects, believing they provided a fruitful area of activity (pp. 81, 87). But a few years later he broke the agreement that the party press should be philosophically neutral in order to attack the ‘God builders’. In 1921, he intervened to prevent the slogan ‘Denounce religion as a lie’ being used on May Day. (p. 383) Pravda warned comrades not to offend the feelings of religious believers – something that might be noted by the veil-snatching wing of the French left. Yet at the same time he was helping to organise the expropriation of church property. (pp. 404–6) In short there is no ‘Leninist line’ on the question of religion; the argument remains open.
Marie’s work is thus a useful contribution to the development of a genuinely critical approach to Lenin and Bolshevism. Unfortunately, the book has also a number of weaknesses.
Firstly – and this may be the fault of the publisher rather than of Marie himself – it is distinctly unhelpful to anyone who wants to pursue his arguments and discoveries. There is no bibliography; references are given to the fifth Russian edition of the Works, often with no indication of the particular work or letter being cited, making it virtually impossible for non-Russian speakers to check out the arguments. The absence of an index makes it difficult to trace the many minor figures who flit in and out of the narrative; yet a grasp of the evolution of such individuals is vital to an understanding of how Lenin related to his party, his periphery and his opponents.
More seriously, the balance of the material presented is often questionable. It is understandable that Marie is anxious to present new material rather than tell the more familiar bits of the story. But while Lenin was a master of small-group manoeuvres, the real lessons come from the times when he interacted with the mass movement. Thus it is unfortunate that Marie devotes only two or three pages to the daily Pravda of 1912, with much more emphasis on petty disputes than on the experience of mass agitation. (pp. 138–41)
Similarly the account of 1905 is disappointing. The main point Marie makes here is that Lenin made a number of mistakes – delay in returning to Russia, wrongly estimating the rôle of the soviets, seeking unity with the Mensheviks – and that he learned to do better in 1917. (pp. 117–18) Doubtless true, but there is much more positive that could be said, in particular Lenin’s revision of his view of the nature and tasks of the revolutionary party.
Indeed, the account of events after 1917 is unremittingly gloomy. Marie describes in powerful detail the savagery of the civil war, famine, disease and corruption, and the relentless growth of bureaucracy, so that even before Lenin’s last illness his party was being taken over by young members who would prepare the way for Stalinism. In 1920, even the highest food ration was less than it was to be in Stalin’s gulag. (p. 350) Marie even goes so far as to claim that 1917 never actually smashed the state, and that the old state apparatus fused with the new Soviet state. (p. 296)
All this is doubtless true. These were grim years. But the other side of the picture scarcely makes an appearance. The soviets, erratic and short-lived as they were, did leave a vision of democracy that went far beyond that of the parliamentary pigsty. Legal reforms, notably in the area of the family and women’s rights, made a real change. The expansion of education and the new cultural initiatives transformed the lives of thousands. Despite the bungling and triumphalism of Comintern functionaries, the revolution did offer millions of workers throughout the world a new hope. Marie’s picture contrasts sharply with that to be found, say, in the writings of Victor Serge. The suffering and the corruption are all there in Serge, but so too is a powerful sense that despite everything, the whole enterprise was supremely worthwhile.
Indeed, Marie seems positively reluctant to draw political lessons. (There is an interesting, if hypercritical, account of Marie’s book in relation to the politics of his organisation, the Parti des travailleurs, at http://socialisme.free.fr/cps15_lenine.htm, the website of the followers of Stéphane Just, expelled from Pierre Lambert’s PCI in 1984.) Tony Cliff’s Lenin has been criticised for always drawing contemporary lessons from his account of Lenin. But for Cliff the past was always a tool for making the future. Marie has produced an important work of scholarship, but it is only raw material for the biography of Lenin that we need.
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Rebel City
John Newsinger
Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement
Merlin Press, London 2004, pp. 182, £14.95
Rebel City: Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement
Merlin Press, London 2004, pp. 182, £14.95
In Dublin City in Nineteen-Thirteen
The boss was boss, the employee the slave; The woman worked and the child was hungry, When Larkin came like a towering wave. |
JOHN Newsinger’s book provides a narrative and an analysis that fits almost exactly the period from 1913 to the 1916 Easter Rising, the very subjects of Donagh MacDonagh’s ballad, whose opening lines appear above. The book’s final chapter deals with the Irish labour movement in the War of Independence and the early years of the Free State, ending with the period from Larkin’s return to Ireland in 1923 to his death in 1947.
The bulk of the book’s first 110 pages deals impressively with the 1913 Lockout. which was a concerted attempt by the employers to smash the recently formed (and, under Larkin, highly successful) Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Newsinger gives detailed evidence of living conditions in the Dublin slum districts, ‘where the degradation of human kind is carried to a point of abjectness beyond that reached in any city of the Western world, save perhaps Naples’ – this from a supporter of the employers, quoted on page 4. Larkin’s rhetoric (delivered both orally and in print) worked a great transformation in working-class attitudes in the city. Newsinger quotes several examples, and correctly explains the ferocity of his language:
His great concern was to raise up the working class from subordination to a recognition of its own power and strength. His abuse of the multitude of oppressors that day after day lorded it over the working class was but the other side of this coin. Raising up the working class required pulling down its enemies, and this was the intention behind his rhetoric of vilification and abuse. (p. 29)
It is also clear that Larkin’s version of trade unionism had some affinity with the late twentieth-century ‘social unionism’ developed in such countries as Brazil and South Africa (on which see Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World, Verso, 1997). Newsinger writes: ‘Larkin completely rejected any narrow economic view of trade unionism as a capitulation to the capitalist class. For him, the ITGWU was the means to build a new world, humane and just, and it was this philosophy that filled the pages of the Irish Worker.’ (p. 31, see also p. 96)
This judgement is only one indication of Newsinger’s excellent use of the newspaper sources of the period. Larkin was obviously a very gifted orator: in the words of one who heard him, his greatest gift was ‘his ability to translate the feelings of his audience into sympathetic speech’. (p. 18) (Trotsky clearly also had this ability: see Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 460.) However, there was possibly something even more valuable that he was able to contribute: in the words of the same memorialist cited by Newsinger: ‘More than any other man, Jim Larkin taught me that socialism does not spread by itself because of its own inner beauty or consistency. It spreads when there is something in it that makes it a response to the needs of the hour.’ (p. 18) (This recalls Marx’s observation in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction to the effect that: ‘Theory will be realised in a people only in so far as it is the realisation of their needs … It is not enough that thought [should] strive to actualise itself; actuality must itself strive towards thought.’Larkin’s speaking powers (and indeed his whole political approach) cannot be assessed without some discussion of his use of religious imagery. A characteristic quote appears on page 61 in the context of the Board of Trade inquiry into the Lockout, to which Larkin gave evidence. I remember an Irish socialist giving me his version of what Larkin said – he could have said it more than once – as: ‘We are resolved that Christ shall not be crucified a second time on the streets of Dublin.’ (The reference is to the Catholic doctrine of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, hence a conception of ordinary working-class Christians as Jesus reincarnate.)
Newsinger has some very pertinent comments on the Irish Catholic Church in general and on the religiosity of Irish workers in the early twentieth century in particular. As he points out: ‘Whereas, on the Continent, the Catholic Church was allied with the great Catholic landowners and with Catholic governments, in Ireland the great landowners and the government were Protestant. Instead, the Church became a middle-class church.’ (p. 33)
Anti-clericalism, as a result, failed to develop in Ireland, and the Irish working class remained, with the exception of certain pockets of Protestant support, staunchly Catholic. (This comes out in Sean O’Casey’s beautiful play about the 1913 Lockout, Red Roses for Me.) Hence hostility on the part of the Church posed a problem for Larkin and Connolly in their struggle against the Irish employers. Newsinger makes some penetrating observations on how they tried to handle it.
The author also has some very useful comments on the union’s tactics in the Lockout. Solidarity action by the workers in the ‘sister isle’ was the key, as Larkin recognised (see pp. 81–82). It was necessary to prevent importation of goods into the port of Dublin. Financial assistance, although valuable, was insufficient. Hence Larkin’s ‘fiery cross’ campaign in England. This produced a certain amount of sympathetic action from miners and transport workers (pp. 93–94). Larkin, however, was, as it turned out, over-optimistic as to what support he could get from the left-wing TUC leaders, banking on their readiness to initiate official sympathetic action. He was to be tragically deceived. A really powerful unofficial movement, Newsinger argues, could have forced the trade union leaders to countenance strike action in support of the embattled Dublin workers. Such a movement could have come into being through judicious use of local grievances (pp. 97–98). (What is not always emphasised is the fact that the Dublin confrontation was part of a wave of industrial unrest which swept the UK just before the First World War.) As it was, the Special TUC Conference, which convened in December 1913, was deliberately managed so as to condemn Larkin’s attacks on various recalcitrant British trade union leaders (for example, J.H. Thomas), and called for reopening of negotiations with the employers. A particularly treacherous role here was that of Ben Tillett (pp. 100–01), who moved a resolution condemning Larkin’s attacks.
The result was a severe defeat for the ITGWU. Larkin left for the United States in October 1914. (see R.M. Fox, Jim Larkin, International Publishers, 1957, pp. 130–31) Connolly took over the union’s leadership. Newsinger argues that a succession of demoralising events then pushed him along the road to the 1916 Rising:
The lockout had ended in a victory for the employers, the Home Rulers had accepted partition, the international working class had proved incapable of stopping the war, and the Irish people, including the great majority of the Volunteers, had rallied to the British Empire. The accumulation of defeats seems to have cut him loose from the politics he had championed since the late 1890s. The amalgam of De Leonism and Syndicalism that he had developed proved unable to cope with the crisis. Confronted with the absence of mass resistance to the war either internationally or in Ireland, Connolly was to become the impassioned advocate of revolutionary action even by a tiny minority, even by the few hundred men and women of the Citizen Army … This is not to say that he abandoned socialism. Indeed, he remained a socialist, but a socialist who had concluded that in the circumstances of the time, a republican insurrection had become a political priority. (p. 128)
This rings true. Newsinger follows up with a consideration of whether or not the Easter Rising had any prospect of success, and concludes that it did not. (p. 138) Here the ‘blood sacrifice’ notion, celebrated by W.B. Yeats in his poem about Pearse and Connolly, The Rose Tree, cannot be shrugged aside – indeed it surfaces, our historian claims, in an issue of The Workers’ Republic, in an article dated 5 February 1916 (quoted on pp. 126–27). It is suggested on page 143 that Sir Roger Casement was heading back to Ireland to urge the Military Council of the IRB to call off the insurrection. As is well known, Connolly observed on Easter Monday 1916: ‘We are going out to be slaughtered.’ (p. 143, see also p. 154, note 28) Whereas if he had been prepared to hang on until 1918, he would have found a much more favourable set of circumstances.
In passing, Newsinger casts doubt on the authenticity of the famous injunction ostensibly given by Connolly to the Citizen Army to ‘hold onto your rifles’ for a fight for a Workers’ Republic: ‘The trouble with this quotation, which is routinely reproduced in numerous books and articles, is that … there is no contemporary evidence that he actually said it.’ (p. 131)One other welcome feature of Rebel City is that it contains a number of criticisms of the writings of that prominent Irish Stalinist C. Desmond Greaves. Newsinger asserts that Greaves overestimated the extent of support for the Dublin workers in 1913 on the part of republicans, Irish-Irelanders and the liberal intelligentsia in Ireland; that he engaged in ‘systematic denigration’ of Larkin (p. 110, note 48), claimed in his biography of Connolly (p. 105) that there were no sackings following the employers’ 1913 victory – here there is a slight hiccup: my copy of Greaves’ The Life and Times of James Connolly has 1961 as its publication date and the relevant quotation is on p. 272, whereas in Rebel City (p. 110, note 50) the publication year is given as 1960 and the relevant page number as 338. Page 131, on the other hand, gives the correct publication year, and misrepresents Connolly as a kind of proto-Stalinist over 1916, and on page 162 he overestimates the role of the post-Connolly Irish Labour leaders William O’Brien and Thomas Johnson in 1918.
There are several other memorable observations in the book: for example, on page 10 we learn that ‘James Sexton, who had organised attacks on imported blacklegs in the early 1890s, carried a pistol in Belfast [in 1907] to protect himself from his own members’. We find the poet Rupert Brooke contributing two guineas to the ITGWU strike fund (p. 90). George Bernard Shaw spoke at the Albert Hall in London on 1 November 1913, calling on all ‘respectable citizens to arm themselves in order to put a decisive stop to the proceedings of the police’ (who were beating up strikers), and, last but not least, Yeats, who later, to his disgrace, wrote marching songs for the (fascist) Irish Blueshirts, wrote a letter to the Irish Worker protesting at the anti-union activities of the Dublin bourgeois press and the harassment of strikers organised by the Hibernians, the Catholic counterparts of the Orangemen. (p. 72)
All in all, it is impossible to recommend this book too highly. It illuminates a series of very important events in the history of these islands, and puts the 1913 Lockout and the 1916 Easter Rising in proper historical perspective. As such it serves as a worthy analytical companion to literary treatments of these topics – O’Casey’s plays Red Roses for Me! and The Plough and the Stars, James Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City, and the various poems and ballads of and about 1913 and 1916. Let Donagh MacDonagh’s concluding verse serve as a fit ending for this review:
They shot MacDermott and Pearse and Plunkett,
They shot MacDonagh and Clarke the brave, And from Kilmainham they took Ceannt’s body To Arbour Hill to a quicklime grave, And, last of all of the seven captains, A dying man, they shot Connolly, The voice of Labour, the voice of Justice, Who gave his life that men might be free. |
Chris Gray
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The London Years
Rudolf Rocker
The London Years
Five Leaves Press, Nottingham 2004, pp. 228, £14.99
The London Years
Five Leaves Press, Nottingham 2004, pp. 228, £14.99
RUDOLF Rocker, born in Mainz on the Rhine in 1875, writes how he, a gentile and raised as a Catholic, came to edit in London the Arbeter Fraint (Worker’s Friend), for which purpose he had to learn Yiddish. This book is an abridgement of The Memoirs of Rudolf Rocker published in German, and translated as The London Years by Joseph Leftwich.
Rocker’s first encounter with Jewish anarchists, refugees from Russia, had been in Paris, where he had attended and also spoken at their meetings. He was especially impressed by the fact that the women joined in the discussions as equals of the men: ‘One could talk to these women and forget that they were women.’ (p. 11) Rocker arrived in London in 1895 on a bleak, foggy morning of which he remarks ‘it was like coming into a world of ghosts’. He had been called to London to discuss how to resume smuggling literature over the German-Belgian frontier, the comrades engaged in this having been arrested. However, nothing came of this, and he returned to Paris. On coming to London for a second visit, Rocker found the German movement flourishing, for persecution on the continent had led to many comrades seeking refuge in London. In this way the movement was strengthened.Rocker writes about the various groups which came together, the oldest of these being the Communist Workers Educational Union, which had been launched in 1840 by German refugees belonging to the Secret Society of the Communist League. Among the members of this educational union were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht. While some anarchists held to Lassalle’s Iron Law of Wages, Rocker and other comrades accepted Marx’s theory of labour power, although Rocker was critical of historical materialism.
As it happened, Rocker was of an age to be conscripted into the German army, and so to find out where he stood he went to the German consulate for a medical examination. However, he was told that he must return to Germany for this. He writes: ‘I realised that the road back to my native land was closed to me forever unless there was a revolution there.’ And so he decided to settle in London, finding work as a bookbinder. Together with his comrades he explored the slum areas – Bethnal Green, Hackney, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and returned from these excursions spiritually and physically exhausted. He writes: ‘It was an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery.’ Rocker discussed the premise believed by many that those who suffer would come to realise the deeper causes of their poverty and concluded that ‘there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise’. He considers both slogans ‘the worse the better’ and ‘all or nothing’ erroneous, the latter leading to radicals opposing any improvement in the lot of the workers.
A visit to Liverpool resulted in Rocker finding his way into the Jewish labour movement. It was quite by chance that he met an acquaintance on the street and was taken to see Moritz Jeger, who ran a small printing shop. Together with Albert Levey, Jeger had issued a newspaper called The Rebel. However, only two issues had been published when the two men found themselves at loggerheads, and Levey left for Hull. Rocker agreed to assist in restarting the group, which had fallen away due to the disagreements between Jeger and Levey. A new journal was started called Das Freie Wort, and Rocker became the editor. However, he had as yet not learned Yiddish, and so Jeger offered to translate his articles from German – which he did very badly! Rocker writes that Jeger ‘made an unholy mess of everything I wrote …’ (p. 48). He must have been relieved when an invitation came to him from London to edit the renewed Arbeter Fraint.
Rocker writes of comrades he met both inside and outside the Jewish labour movement, many of their names known to us today. For instance, Kropotkin was a special friend. Rocker informs the reader of the histories of these comrades, and tells of how they came into the movement, following up their subsequent development. Because Rocker possesses a literary gift, the persons about whom he writes come alive, and we see them clearly through his eyes.
He writes also of Milly Witcop, the two of them partners to the end of their lives, and also of his two sons, Rudolf and Fermin. As ‘Free Love’ was an anarchist principle, Rocker and Milly refused to marry legally, and allowed themselves, while on a visit to the United States, to be deported rather than agree to a legal marriage ceremony. It was believed by anarchists that ‘free love’ would destroy the bourgeois state. It is ironic that today when it is customary for couples to live together without legal marriage, the bourgeois state appears to be stronger than ever!
Both Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals and Rocker’s book cover similar grounds and periods, Rocker’s being largely from personal experience. Both writers include the Houndsditch murders and the Sidney Street siege.
I especially enjoyed Rocker’s account of the International Socialist Congress in London in July 1896. The congress began on Sunday 26 July with a peace march followed by a mass meeting in Hyde Park. As the first marchers entered the park, there was a cloudburst and most of them fled for shelter. The congress proper opened the next day in Queen’s Hall, and the first question was whether the anarchists and representatives of other anti-parliamentarian groups should be admitted. The English trade union leader Ted Leggatt of the Transport Workers Union, an anarchist, cried out in his powerful voice: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ Three members of the French parliament had no mandate, and Bernard Shaw protested that being a member of parliament did not confer the right to attend as a delegate. He was ignored. The chairman, Paul Singer, a member of the German parliament, cut short the discussion and said he would take a vote. Pandemonium broke out. Keir Hardie, the deputy chairman, made himself heard above the chairman’s gong, which sounded like a big church bell, and told Singer that in England meetings were not conducted like that. Delegates who tried to speak on the motion were shouted down. This went on for hours, and most of the third day was wasted. The fourth day saw the expulsion of the anarchists. Rocker puts the blame for this on the German social democrats. Colin Ward in the introduction tells us that it was the experience of the German SPD’s authoritarianism which made Rocker an anarchist.
Rocker and his comrades were elated at news of the 1904–05 revolution in Russia. ‘We were sure that we stood on the threshold of Russian liberation. A number of younger comrades returned to Russia to take part in the revolution.’ Afterwards, when the revolution had been defeated, Rocker puts the blame on the lack of a united leadership and a planned concerted movement. The interest and enthusiasm in London for this revolution had, however, increased interest in the Jewish labour movement. The growth of the Arbeter Fraint led to the opening on 3 February 1906 of a club and institute in Jubilee Street. Every Jewish trade union in the country sent messages of support, and Peter Kropotkin, although ill, spoke at the opening. Other speakers included John Turner, an English anarchist and trade unionist, and Ted Leggatt.
Militancy increased, and in April 1912 1,500 West End tailors came out on strike. Rocker, realising that strike-breaking work was being done in the East End workshops, published a call in the Arbeter Fraint to abolish the sweatshops. Eight thousand people packed the Assembly Hall for a meeting called by the Jewish tailoring trades unions, with another 3,000 standing outside the hall. A decision was taken to strike. The clothing industry in the East End was at a standstill. The London dock strike was in progress at the same time, which brought Jewish and non-Jewish workers together, joint strike meetings being held. Rocker writes that this tailoring strike in the East End spelled the end of the sweatshop system. Additionally, Jewish families in sympathy with the dockers took their children into their homes. This strengthened the friendship between Jewish and non-Jewish workers. The period between 1912 and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the Jewish labour movement reaching its peak.
On 2 December 1914, Rocker was arrested and interned as an enemy alien, first at Olympia, then on the Royal Edward, moored off Southend. It was on this ship that my father first met Rocker. After a time, both Rocker and my father, were transferred to internment in Alexandra Palace. Rocker writes about the poor conditions in these camps, the other internees and the attitudes of the commanders. While in the camps, he was able to lecture to groups of prisoners on literature and social philosophy, for example, Tolstoy as Artist and Social Philosopher. These lectures were well attended in spite of objections from a small group of German patriots.
Milly Witcop was arrested under DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act), and was imprisoned without trial in Holloway gaol, and later, having appeared before an Advisory Committee, in the women’s prison at Aylesbury. Rudolf’s older son was also arrested, but was allowed to join his father at Alexandra Palace. The younger son, Fermin, aged seven, was cared for by relatives and friends.
The news of the March 1917 revolution in Russia was received with joy. ‘I could hear the bells ringing in the era of peace and brotherhood, the nations gripping hands, all joining in singing the International.’ (p. 202) Even the declaration of war against Germany by the United States in April did not dim Rocker’s hopes. Rocker and Milly, like many of their comrades, applied to go to Russia, and at first it was agreed that they could do go together with their younger son, Fermin, provided that the Russian government, now Bolshevik, would admit them. A note from Russia agreed to admit Rocker, but the British government changed its mind and gave its permission only to Milly and her son. Milly refused to go to Russia without Rocker. And then the separate peace made by Russia with Germany at Brest Litovsk destroyed all hopes of the British government allowing them to go to Russia. No doubt, in the long term this saved their lives.
An agreement between the British and German governments to exchange civilian prisoners saw Rocker bound for Germany via Holland. On arrival, however, he found a sympathetic lieutenant who determined that Rocker was stateless. Therefore he was able to return to Holland.
The introduction by Colin Ward and an epilogue by Sam Dreen tells of Rocker’s subsequent history.
Sheila Lahr
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The London Mob
Robert Shoemaker
The London Mob
Hambledon, London 2004, pp. 393, £19.99
The London Mob
Hambledon, London 2004, pp. 393, £19.99
THIS book is a history of popular violence in eighteenth-century London. It uses court records to show how attitudes towards violence have changed. Some of this ground has been covered by other writers. E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class began with the late eighteenth-century records of informers and state spies. Peter Linebaugh’s more recent book The London Hanged studied the victims of hangings at Tyburn. Shoemaker even uses the very same Hogarth print that constituted Linebaugh’s frontispiece for the back cover of his book.
Shoemaker follows the relationship between people and justice. He shows that violence tended to decline through the eighteenth century. There were fewer slanders and insults, fewer drunken fights. Justice, which had been a popular duty, was privatised. Companies of detectives were established. The victims of crime became less confident in raising popular crowds against their assailants. The forms of justice were transformed, from the stocks, the gallows, the duel with pistols and the hue and cry, in the direction of the police, the lawyers and the courts. The nature of radical politics also changed. In the early years of the eighteenth century, protest took the form of demonstrations, with flags, ribbons, bonfires, and the burning of despised symbols, such as the homes of despised politicians. By the end of the century, radicals were to be found more often in rooms discussing political ideas. The number of political riots dropped sharply from the 1740s onwards.The London Mob ends with an account of one moral panic from the 1780s, a man called ‘the Monster’ assaulted more than 50 London women, cutting them with knives or spikes. The press reported every outrage, and at the end of it Renwick Williams was arrested. Williams’ conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice. His witnesses were stopped from addressing the court. The attacks continued. Why was the press so fascinated by the trial? The failure of the crowd to protect the Monster’s victims may have made individuals feel more vulnerable. As violence became less common, so any instances of it seemed more terrible.
In the first decades of merchant capitalism, we might conclude, the seeds of the present system were there. Crime was already an individual rather than a collective problem. The solution was to be found with the courts, which few people trusted. The only way even to approach them was by paying for the help of a privatised police force. This elegant book draws attention to a number of areas, and encourages us to think carefully about the past. Shoemaker’s image of an increasingly peaceful eighteenth century is a challenge to those socialist historians who have seen crime as taking on greater political significance in the absence of popular revolts. Yet the period of The London Mob is rather narrower in some places than its author admits. The book starts really after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and ends just before the Jacobin uprisings of the 1790s. It is, in other words, a long quiet between two storms. The riots of the eighteenth century, and most famously the Gordon Riots of 1780, were the product of transition. No longer did the old slogans of the 1640s have the same appeal. In a new society of commerce and trade, the ideology of previous revolts seemed nostalgic. But neither had the slogans of the French revolution emerged, nor were sufficient numbers of people employed in factories to organise around the demands of labour. Not surprisingly, then, the riots of 1780 were an odd mixture of the backward looking and the forward: religious attacks on Catholics combined with a class movement against the rich.
Shoemaker shows how the London ‘mob’ took its name. In 1700, the word signified the whole ‘mobile’ population of London walking the city streets. By 1800, ‘the mob’ meant the poor. But ‘the mob’ was always a word used from outside. Like Burke’s sneering ‘swinish multitude’, this is not how the poor saw themselves. At a moment when it is fashionable to describe the oppressed as ‘the new poors’ or the ‘new multitude’, it is worth remembering just how hard nineteenth-century workers had to fight for words of their own, against labels given by the rich, and for a language that resonated with dignity. Their struggle was also for a different style of politics that revolved around labour, and for movements that went further than those (such as the Gordon Riots) of their own recent past. Maybe that is the real lesson of Shoemaker’s book, the mundane character of history in the decades just before the industrial working class was born.
David Renton
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