Book Review: Unhitched by Richard Seymour

 

'As a member of the SWP, buying this book is probably an expellable offence', I joked to the genial old guy behind the counter in Housman's bookshop in London the other day as I handed over money for Unhitched by Richard Seymour - the proprieter of the Lenin's Tomb blog, which seems to be currently devoted to trying to drum up both sales of Unhitched and supporters of the 'SWP Opposition'. The Housmans assistant didn't get the joke, which served for me as a timely reminder that for probably about 99% of the Left in Britain, 'Lenin's Tomb' means, well, the Lenin's Tomb.

Anyway, onto Unhitched, which is really an enlargement on some of the arguments about the late Christopher Hitchens made in Seymour's The Liberal Defence of Murder. In many ways this little book is vintage Seymour doing what he does best - taking down pro-war liberal scum through remorseless detailed analysis of their bullshit. Those wanting a brief summary of the argument can go straight to this fine little piece Seymour wrote for the Guardian recently - Christopher Hitchens: from socialist to neocon. In general, Seymour's Unhitched does what it says on the tin - puts Christopher Hitchens on trial for his crimes - chief of which was acting as an apologist and propagandist for the American Empire. 'This is not a biography but an extended political essay' (pxxi), Seymour writes, indeed 'unabashedly a prosecution' in an imagined 'Trial of Christopher Hitchens' and 'if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result'. (pxxii)

Its appearance is therefore to be welcomed by socialists and democrats more generally - if only to serve as a long overdue and hopefully permanent antidote to the pro-war liberal chorus of sycophancy and sentimentality that still surrounds and stifles any discussion of 'the Hitch'. How did that disgraced former MP Denis Macshane describe Hitchens after his death - oh yes, 'a cross between Voltaire and Orwell'...

As someone who has not read Hitchen's own autobiography, Hitch 22, I personally was hoping for something resembling a bit more of a biography than a long polemical essay when I bought Seymour's book. However, after reading Unhitched I am convinced that for all of Hitchens's brilliance and talent as a literary critic, he is simply not intellectually worthy enough of the attention and the effort necessary for someone to write a decent, critical biography of him - being essentially a charlatan, prone to plagiarism even when he was good, and happy to lie and caricature when he was bad. Hitchens's intellectual and political degeneration - so apparent post September 11th but as Seymour shows, with long roots in Hitchens's past work - perhaps reached its nadir with his writing about the death of Mark Daily, a young American who signed up to fight and die in the 'war on terror' after apparently being inspired by Hitchens's pro-war propaganda. As Seymour notes of Hitchen's subsequent 'maudlin display of his grief and catharsis, in some ways even more stomach lurching than his tribute to the World Trade Center', it 'climaxed in a puddle of self-pity and self-vindication', and Hitchens, having 'fantasised that the Bush administration was the equivalent of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification', was 'shocked to find that they were selling out his just war' and so now 'felt awful - so awful that he shed his tears, took the occasion to vindicate himself once again, and then moved on without ever having to really account for what he had done' (p98).

There is a lot in here - discussions of Hitchens on Orwell, Kipling, Paul Scott, Edward Said as well as the more political material one would expect - and there are plenty of references that readers will want to follow up on, whatever their own particular interests. There is some good historic discussion on previous cases of political shifts to the right from former revolutionaries - and there are some nice quotes from the likes of William Hazlitt and Isaac Deutscher on the situation post the French and Russian revolutions respectively, as former hopes were dashed by the rise of the likes of Napoleon and Stalin. Seymour even has space to aptly quote Norman Geras on the shift that followed the fading hopes that the movements of 1968 would break through:

In the advanced capitalist world from the mid-1960s a generation of intellectuals was radicalized and won for Marxism. Many of them were disappointed in the hopes they formed — some of these wild but let that pass — and for a good while now we have been witnessing a procession of erstwhile Marxists, a sizeable portion of the generational current they shared in creating, in the business of finding their way "out" and away. This exit is always presented, naturally, in the guise of an intellectual advance. Those of us unpersuaded of it cannot but remind its proponents of what they once knew but seem instantly to forget as they make their exit, namely, that the evolution of ideas has a social and material context.

Hitchens - in the late 1960s and early 1970s of course a member of the International Socialists - himself once revealingly told Decca Aitkenhead,

 'I've done better than I thought I would. I've made more money than I ever thought I would. I've got more readers than I ever thought I would, and more esteem' and now earns 'several hundred thousand dollars a year' – but Aitkenhead noted Hitchens claims his wealth hasn't influenced his opinions at all. Does he think wealth ever affects people's opinions? 'Well, yes, I'm a Marxist, after all.' So why would his own opinions be mysteriously immune to his bank balance? 'Well, because I can't trace any connection...'

Marx's key point about 'social being determining consciousness' is demonstrated well in the case of Christopher Hitchens, and he is well placed in his historical context by Seymour. Ultimately, this is not about one personality - but politics. If I have any criticism, it is that books like this - and the Verso Counterblasts series in general which aims 'to challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital' are essentially a negative critique. They raise a wider issue and a more interesting question which is not really discussed: what is the responsibility of intellectuals at a time of crisis, tumult and war? After all there is a great tradition of revolutionary intellectuals who have managed to play a positive role in the class struggle and revolutionary politics without being pulled to the right, even when confronted by defeats far greater than the defeats of the 1970s and 1980s.

 As well as this piece on the subject by Rick Kuhn, there is an interesting article in the latest issue of International Socialism on 'Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality' by Panagiotis Sotiris that discusses Marx, Gramsci, Bourdieu and Foucault, but concludes by rightly stressing the importance of political organisation for intellectuals.  

Above all we must think of radical left parties, political fronts and organisations as knowledge practices and laboratories of new forms of mass critical intellectuality. In a period of economic and political crisis but also of new possibilities to challenge capitalist rule, questions of political organisation gain new relevance. Thinking of organisation simply in terms of practical or communicative skills for mobilisation, or of electoral fronts and tactics is not enough. It would be better, in order to build today’s parties and united fronts, to revisit Gramsci’s (and Lenin’s) conception of the party as a democratic political and theoretical process that produces knowledge of the conjuncture, organic intellectuals, new worldviews, social and political alternatives, as a potential (counter)hegemonic apparatus. We need forms of organisation that not only enable coordination and networking, democratic discussion and effective campaigning, but also bring together different experiences, combine critical theory with the knowledge coming from the different sites of struggle, and produce both concrete analyses but also mass ideological practices and new forms of radical “common sense”.

This is I think right - but it is perhaps worth also remembering what Marx and Engels - traditional intellectuals themselves who made an immeasurable contribution to the theory and practice of independent revolutionary working class politics - also said on the matter of radical intellectuals and left-wing political parties in 1879:  

It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already clearly stated in the [Communist] Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made: 

First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. Neither the Zukunft [fortnightly Berlin magazine] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [monthly Zurich periodical] has provided anything to advance the movement one step. They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with. 

 Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time.

In 1890, Engels even more forcefully warned of the potential danger of petty-bourgeois intellectuals for a revolutionary workers' organisation, noting such intellectuals should

 understand that their “academic education” — which in any case needs a basic, critical self-review — gives them no officer’s commission with a claim to a corresponding post in the party; that in our party everyone must serve in the ranks; that posts of responsibility in the party will be won not simply by literary talent and theoretical knowledge, even if both of these are present beyond a doubt, but that in addition what is required is a thorough familiarity with the conditions of the party struggle and seasoning in its forms, tested personnel reliability and sound character, and, finally, willing enlistment in the ranks of the fighters;—in short, that they, the “academically educated people,” have far more to learn from the workers, all in all, than the latter have to learn from them.

It is telling for example that Hitchens arrogantly apparently thought himself 'on the brink of becoming a "full-time organiser"' while he was in the International Socialists (p7)- as though his academic education at Oxford gave him some kind of 'officer’s commission with a claim to a corresponding post in the party'. Ian Birchall once drew a useful contrast comparing Christopher Hitchens with Paul Foot (who Seymour sadly doesn't mention in Unhitched), who did stay the course in the IS/SWP despite equal pressures from bourgeois society to break with his commitment to building revolutionary socialist organisation and embrace the mainstream:  

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

As Seymour demonstrates in this volume, Christopher Hitchens was 'a petty bourgeois individualist who esteemed collectivism at least some of the time but never submitted to it himself ... the sociological basis, as it were, for his leftism was the radical intelligentsia'(pxi, xxii). But is Seymour himself really so different from Hitchens in this sense? Though of course one cannot doubt Seymour's principled commitment to the socialist cause, and his politics are no doubt better and sharper than those of even the young Hitchens, as someone whose base is in higher education as a PhD student, Seymour is clearly not immune from the gravitational pull of the 'radical intelligentsia' in the form of 'academic Marxism', to say nothing of the wider pull of petty-bourgeois thinking predominant in the 'blogosphere'/ social media which comes with being a high profile blogger who writes for the likes of The Guardian.  Indeed, arguably Seymour's recent post on Lenin's Tomb defending 'patriarchy' - critically debated here - is perhaps best seen as an example of what Marx and Engels were talking about in 1879 when they criticised 'efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them ... Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it'.

This is not meant as a personal or sectarian attack on Seymour - for no Marxist who works in the environment of higher education and/or who is an aspiring journalist is immune from such pressures. Still less is it meant as an attack on radical intellectuals per se. As Tony Cliff, founder of the SWP once wrote,

 The worst damage that can be done inside a revolutionary party is if there is an attack on the intellectuals inside the party, in the name of a proletarian attitude. As a matter of fact such an attack is not so much on the intellectuals but on the workers in the party. It is an insult to the workers as it assumes the workers are unable to grasp theory.

There of course has to be freedom inside a revolutionary party for members to have debates around, for example, theories of patriarchy. But equally, for socialists to take at face value the contemporary theories fashionable in the capitalist institutions of higher education, add one's own personal spin on them, and then pass what results off as the latest and highest form of thinking in 'Marxist theory' is precisely a method of thinking Marx and Engels (and later revolutionary Marxists) always warned against. To dismiss, for example, the relevance today of the debates that were had between Marxists and 'socialist feminists' during the 1970s and subsequently into the 1980s when the Women's Liberation Movement was at a much higher level of mass struggle than it has reached since, reveals a kind of intellectual elitism and arrogance that is most unworthy of any Marxist, let alone someone who is a member of the SWP.

Seymour wants his study of Hitchens to be seen as a kind of 'cautionary tale' to others - and he is right.  In a sense it is tragic that Hitchens was never able to develop into the outstanding socialist journalist and writer that at his best he showed signs of becoming - and instead became - as Seymour notes, paraphrasing Hazlitt, 'a living and ignominious satire on himself'.  It would be farcical now if Richard Seymour, who founded a blog called 'Lenin's Tomb' precisely to rightly provoke those with essentially petty-bourgeois and individualist prejudices against the most important and outstanding revolutionary Marxist thinker after Marx himself - ever ended up himself succumbing to the kind of hostile pressures he once so detested and still warns us against so eloquently and effectively in Unhitched.


Edited to add: For more on Marxism and intellectuals, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vols I and II (1977/78) and Paul Blackledge, (2007), ‘Marx and Intellectuals’, in David Bates, (ed.) Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics.

International Socialism # 134

The latest issue of International Socialism leads with an interview with Panos Garganas, editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity, about the latest developments in Greece - a country at the cutting edge of the European class struggle. There is also discussion of contemporary anti-capitalist movements. One debate in the US Occupy movement is clearly about the need for a new 'third party' to challenge the two pro-big business and pro-imperialist parties - though the experience of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in France has sadly not been particularly auspiciously encouraging. In the upcoming French election, the glimmer of hope for the left has come from the campaign waged by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidate of the Left Front - an alliance of former Socialists and the French Communist Party rather than the NPA.
People should peruse the ISJ contents for themselves, as there are plenty of other articles which will be doubtless of interest, ranging from John Newsinger on the decline of the Murdoch empire, Neil Davidson on the politics of Scottish independence, Leo Zeilig on Frantz Fanon, Richard Seymour on Christopher Hitchens, Nicola Ginsburgh on David Roediger, to a review of blogger Scott Hamilton's recent study of EP Thompson - a work which has oddly stirred up a degree of controversy in some quarters. It is worth ending on an optimistic note, with a quote from Mike Davis from a recent New Left Review editorial, the conclusion of which is quoted in full in the round-up of other selected journal articles at the end of ISJ 34:

'Western post-Marxists—living in countries where the absolute or relative size of the manufacturing workforce has shrunk dramatically in the last generation—lazily ruminate on whether or not ‘proletarian agency’ is now obsolete, obliging us to think in terms of ‘multitudes’, horizontal spontaneities, whatever. But this is not a debate in the great industrialising society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America. Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing.) Their full awakening from the bubble may yet determine whether or not a socialist Earth is still possible...'

Christopher Hitchens - A Commissar of the West

From International Socialist...

...to Neo-Conservative Warmonger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the Deluge

If you are feeling in anyway down about, say, the new Lib-Con coalition government in Britain, then either the storming of British Airways Acas Talks by Right to Work demonstrators chanting 'Willie Walsh, who are you? We support the cabin crew!' or the skewering of Christopher Hitchens by Decca Aitkenhead while trying to promote his memoirs may provide some amusing distraction...

Do you think, I ask him, you're a show-off?

"No, I don't. I don't. But obviously I wouldn't be the judge."

Hitchens would be the first to agree he cuts a less dashing figure than the beautiful young firebrand who illuminated the pages of the New Statesman in the 70s. As he dodders round his ex-wife's kitchen in west London, I wonder what that young self would have made of the man he is today.

"Well, I've done better than I thought I would. I've made more money than I ever thought I would. I've got more readers than I ever thought I would, and more esteem." He now earns "several hundred thousand dollars a year" – but claims his wealth hasn't influenced his opinions at all.

Does he think wealth ever affects people's opinions? "Well, yes, I'm a Marxist, after all." So why would his own opinions be mysteriously immune to his bank balance? "Well, because I can't trace any connection."

On Christopher Hitchens and Orwell's Animal Farm

'The most blatant of these [alterations of the historical record in Orwell's Animal Farm] concerns the character of Napoleon. It is clear that Napoleon represents Stalin, just as Old Major is Marx and Snowball is Trotsky. Who then represents Lenin? Since Orwell depicts the Rebellion as led by two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, one is forced to the conclusion that Napoleon also represents Lenin. Thus in Animal Farm the figures of Lenin and Stalin are merged into one character. This is of enormous ideological significance. The dominant orthodoxies both West and East have always insisted, each for its own reasons, on the continuity of Leninism and Stalinism: the former to discredit Marxism and the revolution itself as the inevitable prelude to tyranny, the latter to claim for themselves the heritage of the great revolutionary....If Animal Farm had contained a separate Lenin figure, this would not in itself have resolved the matter (any more than it does in real life), but it would at least have permitted the continuity to have been questioned within the terms of the text. As it is the merger of Lenin and Stalin in Napoleon forecloses on this possibility, and greatly strengthens the impression of a smooth and inevitable degeneration into dictatorship'.
John Molyneux, 'Animal Farm Revisited', International Socialism journal 44, (Autumn 1989).

'For a Marxist, Orwell's depiction of the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution in 'Animal Farm' is rather problematic due, in part, to his apparent conflation of Lenin and Stalin into one character - Napoleon - or rather the absence of a 'Lenin' character altogether. This implies Leninism led to Stalinism in a crude and ahistorical manner.'
'Snowball', 'A quick question about George Orwell', Histomat blog, 22 August 2005.

'There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig...Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).'
Christopher Hitchens, 'Where is the Lenin pig in Animal Farm?', The Guardian, 17 April 2010.

I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions from the above. However, if Hitchens is worried about the omission of a 'Lenin pig' in Animal Farm, it is interesting to note Hitchen's piece contains no discussion of the pig 'Squealer', the intellectual who prostrates his talents by making propaganda on behalf of the ruling class. One might conclude from this that perhaps Hitchens, an intellectual who has of late acted as a hired prizefighter and defender of the likes of Bush, Blair and Obama maybe found discussing the character of Squealer rather too painful a procress...

Against Liberal Imperialist 'Marxism'

It is understandable that a Social Democratic student of imperialism can easily find arguments in his theoretical luggage if he wants switch to the other side. He only has to regard Marxism mechanically and say: ‘Socialism is only possible on the foundations of the highest capitalist development, of imperialist development; therefore, let us first help consolidate these foundations with all our power, let us protect the world power of our own country against foreign imperialism; today we must be imperialists, but socialism remains the ultimate goal’ —in the remote future, because it has surely become apparent that the proletariat is still far too weak for victory.

It is obvious that, with this attitude, the quasi-Marxists do not prepare and promote the realization of socialism, but rather inhibit and delay it. The realization of socialism depends solely on the strength, independence, energy and clarity of purpose of the working class.
Anton Pannekoek, 1915

International Socialism 120

Online now: International Socialism 120
Highlights include: Afghanistan: the case against the “good war” /Jonathan Neale
A crisis for the centre of the system/ Andrew Kliman
Snapshots of union strengths and weaknesses / Chris Harman
Where is the radical left going? /Alex Callinicos
Decyphering The Internationale / Donny Gluckstein
Marxism and ethics / Paul Blackledge
A fiftieth birthday for Marxist theory / Ian Birchall. This last article is a succinct history of the journal, from its founding in 1958 to the present day. An extract:

There are close on 1,000 articles plus editorials, reviews and letters. Obviously the quality is uneven. There are mediocre, boring and obscure articles, and polemics that seemed terribly important at the time but are now of little interest. There are also some historical curiosities of particular interest to students of renegacy. These include youthful efforts by Christopher Hitchens, actually more intelligent and better written than his current output...However, overall a collection of the two series provides a rich store of political analysis and commentary. In comparison with its main rival, New Left Review, which for long periods produced relatively little that was directly relevant to contemporary struggle, International Socialism was always geared to practice, to an interpretation of the current world in the perspective of changing it.

New uses for Christopher Hitchens books

No. 94. Stopping Water Damage From A Leaky Roof

This morning I awoke to the sound of drip...drip...drip. Basically, my bedroom roof was leaking, but I only noticed because the rain water happened to fall down and bounce off the cover of a copy of Christopher Hitchens, For The Sake of Argument; Essays and Minority Reports, (London, Verso, 1994), which a friend had lent me and was conveniently lying around unread on my bedroom floor. If Hitchens's collected essays hadn't been there, perhaps the leak would have gone undetected, leading to untold water damage with who knows what consequences. I wonder if any Histomat readers have by chance found similar uses for old copies of Hitchens's writings...

Brown contracts deadly Vietnam Syndrome

A Doctor Writes:

First he had to worry about Foot and Mouth, but now Gordon Brown seems to have caught the highly contagious 'Vietnam Syndrome', almost certainly off known sufferer George W Bush, who he met last month. This is a very worrying development indeed for British politics, as the disease seems to have infected the likes of apparently previously healthy politicians like David Miliband as well. It is not known if the whole of the Cabinet is now infected or not - though some members like Jack Straw are well known long term sufferers, having contracted the disease off Tony Blair.

If left unchecked, Vietnam Syndrome becomes highly dangerous - with severe consequences for the mental health of the patient. In an advanced state of the disease, the patient can become quite, quite unhinged. The classic case here is known among Doctors as the 'Christopher Hitchens', though there are other examples such as the 'Denis Macshane' and the 'Nick Cohen'. When the patient reaches such a state, then unfortunately there is little anyone can do. The afflicted person badly needs to be put out of their misery, and in some situations a quick workers' tribunal followed by a firing squad is probably the kindest thing that can happen. Unfortunately, instead of recieving this admittedly rather extreme form of treatment, in the case of Hitchens, Macshane and Cohen the patients are still cruelly mocked by all and sundry, repeatedly given column inches in national papers in which to fill as best they can.

If the disease is detected in time, a swift treatment known as AITW (Advocating Immediate Troop Withdrawal) can have some impact in stopping the disease from speading, though there is always a danger of relapse. Ideally, vaccination against the disease would be administered widely - the vaccination required is known as EFP (Ethical Foreign Policy). In 1997, Robin Cook tried to administer EFP to the British Labour Party - but the side effects of injecting EFP into the Labour Party at such a late stage in the Party's development were quite devastating - and possibly contributed to Blair going down with full blown Vietnam Syndrome almost immediately. Robin Cook himself tragically also succumbed to Vietnam Syndrome.

Other well-known sufferers in Britain include Johann Hari. It has long been feared by some that in Hari's case, shooting by firing squad may be the kindest thing, though others remain hopeful he might still recover as he has shown signs of apparent recovery in the past. With Hari, the thing is touch and go to be honest whether Vietnam Syndrome will reach Hitchensesque levels or not. What clearly is most unfair in Hari's case is that he remains a newspaper columnist - he should be relieved of this duty as soon as possible if there is to be any chance of stopping the disease developing.

Book Review: Hitchens Is Not Great

When people try to imagine what Hitchens looks like, they invariably think of an old frail man dressed in white and with a white beard

Hitchens Is Not Great: How Imperialism Poisons Everything by G.O'Dot

Famed for his biting polemical satire 'Waiting for', G.O'Dot has now unleashed a tremendously fierce and impassioned attack on neo-conservative apologists for American imperial power and corporate greed, entitled, provocatively, 'Hitchens Is Not Great'. The same contrarian spirit that makes G.O'Dot delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has Hitchens placed in the dock. In this book, G.O'Dot exposes how if Hitchens did not exist, there would be a need to invent him, as imperialism has always needed and found shameless journalists prepared to lie and prostitute their talents in exchange for material reward. 'Hired prizefighters for the capitalist class', Marx called them. Yet their cause is incredibly damaging to humanity. Imperialism, G.O'Dot writes, is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children'. It truly 'poisons everything'.

Water into Whine

Yet G.O'Dot is especially damning when it comes to the question of Hitchens himself. Many have claimed for Hitchens special super-natural powers, particularly when it comes to hard drinking. For example, one believer, George Galloway, has claimed that 'What Mr Hitchens has done is unique in natural history; the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug. I mention 'slug' purposefully, because the one thing a slug does leave behind it is a trial of slime'. This is remarkable stuff, remarkable, but though there are people around who claim to have seen such acts - 'miracles' - they are very thin on the ground and there is still no rational, scientific, reasonable proof of Hitchens' existence as of yet.

False Profits

Others have asked that if it is true that Hitchens exists, and if he is such a kind benign spirit, why does he let so much suffering and destruction at the hands of the American Empire happen without intervening? Indeed, at times it seems as though Hitchens positively glories in the death and misery caused by imperialism - what sort of idol is this? Overall, G.O'Dot's short work, while perhaps a little hastily put together, is both timely and important and highly recommended to readers of Histomat.

Christopher Hitchens on 'imperial beastliness'

In a refreshing review of a book on the history of Algeria, Christopher Hitchens makes a stand against what he calls 'imperial beastliness'.

'Quite properly, the book opens with a chapter on the "colonial prehistory" of the country where he describes very simply how the French empire deliberately scoured and devastated the entire region in order to ensure that the social bases of resistance would be eliminated. In itself, this description of imperial beastliness makes the book worth studying; the French occupation reduced the population by over one half between 1830 and 1852.'

A pity that the review in question was written in 1972, and Hitchens has since lined himself alongside the beasts who run empires. How could Hitchens make such a mistake? The answer seems to be prefigured in this early review of 'Workers’ Self Management in Algeria' by Ian Clegg. As Hitchens puts it, 'Generally speaking, Clegg ignores the conception of a mass workers party informed by Marxist theory. Naturally enough, this leads him into confusion.' I guess once Hitchens abandoned Marxist theory, it was only natural he was going to get himself confused about the nature of imperialism...

The revolutionary betrayed

Radio 4 yesterday had a discussion of Leon Trotsky as part of their Great Lives series. I was at work, and was going to tape it but when I heard the person advocating Trotsky was not a Trotskyist or even a socialist but neo-conservative fuckwit Christopher Hitchens I decided not to bother. This is what I er, 'missed' - from a report of the show in today's Independent:

'Christopher Hitchens chose Trotsky as his hero for the first edition of Great Lives. "I could choose someone furry, but I should pick someone people misunderstand and has the capacity to inspire hatred", he explained. Problem was, he didn't explain much else. The format includes an unbiased expert, in this case Professor Robert Service, who described Trotsky as "an appalling figure", but Hitchens failed to bring a fresh perspective on his hero or his reputation, especially over the Kronstadt mutiny, when a naval garrison who had previously backed the Bolsheviks were bloodily suppressed by Trotsky.
The show dissolved into a wonderfully bad-tempered exchange between Matthew Parris and Hitchens. Parris: "Come on, Christopher, you've chosen him as your great life. I expected you to tell me what a wonderful man he was, and the great things he might have achieved and you're unable to do that and you start talking about committees and party structures." "I'm sorry if I'm wasting your time." "No, I just want you to explain." "You're a greedy Tory. Much of what I say will be wasted on you." "Yes I am and I can explain why". "I know why people are Tories, it doesn't take 45 minutes and it isn't interesting," snapped Hitchens. "I think we're done. I've got to be somewhere at 1pm." The flounce-out-and-slam-door technique.'

Well, quelle surprise. For the real Trotsky, read perhaps Trotsky's My Life, or Isaac Deutscher's biography, reviewed briefly here.

Quick salute

Speaking of Harolds, Histomat would like to salute Harold Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is a worthy winner in his own right - as well as being an outstandingly courageous critic of imperialism. Christopher Hitchens gives a sense of the anger of the rulers of the world to this: 'The award to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket.' That shows how important Pinter is today.

Edited to add: Pilger on Pinter

Dance like a butterfly...

"What Mr Hitchens has done is unique in natural history; the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug. I mention 'slug' purposefully, because the one thing a slug does leave behind it is a trial of slime".

...sting like a bee.

Edited to add: Gary Younge watched the big fight between the indefatigable George Galloway and the popinjay Christopher Hitchens from the ringside here, and says Galloway won 'on points'. I agree.

Christopher Hitchens on finding true love...

Now I know that the neo-conservative journalist is not the best loved person on the Left at the moment for very good reasons, but I recently saw an old copy of Hiya! lying around at work, and I was surprised to see that there was an exclusive 'heartwarming interview' with Hitchens in it. Histomat readers might well have already read this, but just in case they haven't, I reprint the Hiya! interview in full below:

When Hiya! caught up with Christopher Hitchens in his busy Vanity Fair offices, he was in full flow on the phone, eloquently defending the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. "The commonest liberal and Tory jeer against Tony Blair—that he is George Bush's "poodle"—is self-evidently false...who leaned on Clinton and Albright to intervene in the Balkans?" He sees us enter, motions to us to take a seat, and then, while we are getting ready, finishes off his conversation. We catch broken phrases of typical Hitchensian ire, "the barbaric invasion of the hand-loppers and diamond-dealers...after Sept. 11, 2001, Blair told Bush that he would send ground troops to Afghanistan even if the United States would not." With that he slams the phone down, brushes his hair to one side, and apologies for only being able to spare us a few minutes. His boyish charm is irrepressible.

We cut straight to the big question. Refering to his previous conversation about Tony Blair, we ask is it really true that you have fallen for him? He blushes, and his eyes glaze over. He nods. "I'm for Tony". But what about the fact that Blair is married, with kids? What about the long distance between them? Or, for that matter, what about Hitchen's relationship with George Bush? Is that now over? At the mention of Bush's name, Hitchens suddenly jumps forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming. "There is", he tells us, "a huge mass of media and showbiz and academic liberals who take the very name "George Bush" as permission to bid adieu to common sense." The pain in his voice suggests that this relationship is clearly still an important one for Hitchens, and he has not yet found closure on it. We move back to the topic of Tony Blair. What do you see in him? "He took a bold stand against the establishment and against a sullen public opinion and did so on a major issue of principle."

This major issue is, of course, the Iraq conflict. Hitchens is sometimes regarded as 'the George Orwell of today', so does Blair then represent a sort of Winston Smith type figure, isolated in his fight against tyranny? Hitchens nods, and indicates that he appreciates the parallel. Who are the forces of conservatism that Blair had to stand up to to go to war, we ask? Hitchens pauses. "Anti-Americanism in Britain has long been a conservative rather than a radical trope, and dislike for George Bush is very common among the aristocratic remnant, as well as among those who are nostalgic for the British empire that America supplanted after the war." After the war, "most of the groaning and sniping about the missing WMDs comes from the hard right, which has a hold on the Tory party and more than a hold on the tabloid press."

But what of the British anti-war movement? After all, didn't most of Hitchen's old comrades in the International Socialists [now the Socialist Workers Party] oppose the war? At the mention of the SWP, Hitchens snorts, and mutters "renegade pseudo-Bolsheviks". He tells me that they are now engaged in an electoral coalition with George Galloway and members of the Muslim Association of Britain. "Thus, the most reactionary forces in British society are fused in their admiration of the one-party state and the one-god movement".With only Blair left to defend individual freedom? What does he think of New Labour? "Blair's Britain is a sort of post-Keynesian full-employment and welfarist society. Its government makes at least the right noises about Kyoto, the U.N., Palestine, and the International Criminal Court."

Our time is almost up, and Hitchens signals to us that we have time for one more question. Is there anything he doesn't like about Tony? Hitchens looks a little taken aback by the question, perhaps shocked that anyone could suggest something like that after the London bombings. Then he recovers himself, smiles, and turns on his boyish charm. "There are things to dislike about Tony...his rather sickly piety is one, and his liberal authoritarianism, on matters such as smoking and fox-hunting, is another. I can't forgive him for calling Diana Spencer "the People's Princess," or for seeking the approval of the Fleet Street rags, and he is one of those politicians who seems to think that staying "on message" is an achievement in itself." However, he is absolutely determined to defend the new love of his life when he debates with George Galloway on September 14th. As we leave, Hitchens notes of Blair that "it is absolutely necessary that his right-wing and clerical enemies be humiliated..." It is a touching and humble statement of utter loyalty, and a sure sign that perhaps Christopher Hitchens may well have found true love at last.

All Hitchens quotes from here.